“Man changes his dialect from century to century.”
_Carlyle._
“Language is a solemn thing I said. It grows out of life—out of its
agonies, and ecstacies, its wants and its weariness. Every language
is a temple in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined....
Foreigners who have talked a strange tongue half their lives return
to the language of their childhood in their dying hours. Gentlemen in
fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by surprise, or in
a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they knew as boys in
homespun, and have not spoken since that time, but it lay there under
all their culture. That is one way you may know the country boys.”....
_Oliver Wendell Holmes._