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        I. THE CLASS APPROACH TO LANGUAGE
        The preceding article (“The Social Basis of Linguistics,” Science and society, I, 18-44), was an attempt to demonstrate the relation between the social-political philosophy of linguists and their work in the study of language. Such a relation was pointed out in the cases of a certain number of linguists whose approach to their subject was determined, consciously or unconsciously, by acceptance of bourgeois liberal democracy, racial or national chauvinism, Christian dualism, neo-Hegelian idealism, and the like. Among the philosophical currents which chiefly affected linguistic studies in the nineteenth century were evolutionism (often of a dogmatic and mechanical kind), Hegelian dialectic, and materialism. It was Hegelian dialectic, as we have seen, which provided many writers with a method for the study of change in language, while keeping it on an ideal plane, and it was materialism which led to a salutary (if often rigid) scepticism, discipline, and orderly method in summarizing the observed results of change. Such studies have generally been done, however, on the basis of implied acceptance of classes in society, especially as found in contemporary bourgeois Europe.
        Such being the case, it is inevitable that a change in the social structure will also affect the work of a linguist profoundly. Even if he has formerly maintained a supreme indifference, ostensibly, to the operation of class forces about him, he can scarcely live through events like the October Revolution, the seizure of power by the working class, and the consequent overwhelming changes in society, without finding himself changed, both as a scholar and a citizen, by the new attitudes and suppositions upon which his daily life is based. In the Soviet Union, the shift to a new type of society is being accomplished on the basis of a clearly enunciated philosophy, dialectical materialism,
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which can be closely related to some of the fundamental problems of linguistics.
        As might be expected, one of the characteristics of Soviet research in language is the constant application of the concept of class struggle to the material being studied. Languages are not studied in a vacuum, but in reference to the social divisions and struggles of those who speak them. An instance of such study from the class angle is a recent book by Zhirmunskii devoted to national languages and social dialects, using European languages for material and illustrations.[1] Students like Henry Cecil Wyld, in his books on the English language, have already, to be sure, pointed out the great significance of social dialects within the same geographical region of a national speech. There are even a number of isolated monographs on the subject. Zhirmunskii carries out this line of inquiry in detail. The history of European dialects is traced in connection. with the rise of modern nations out of early feudal society. There are abundant instances of the relation between “standard” speech and the political-economic character of the ruling class. One of these is the Dictionary of the French Academy (written under the monarchy), with its tabus on provincialisms (a logical result of the politics of centralization following the centrifugal political and linguistic tendencies of early feudalism), and on technical terms derived from the work of artisans. The latter tabu had its effect on the language of poetry. All students of literature know that French classical verse avoided the every-day designation of every-day things; that glaive was used for sabre, pasteur for bouvier or porcher (the latter being too inelegant because too specific), and periphrases like l’acier destructeur and l’humble artisan designated a homely sword or shoemaker. Thus the aloofness of court circles from the producing class was expressed in the very choice of words and in rules of poetic diction. On the other hand, the opposite tendencies of romanticism — devotion to humble speech, interest in local color and local dialects, avoidance of the glittering generalities of classicism — were a logical concomitant of the bourgeois revolution of 1789.[2]
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        The English language presents of course a remarkably clear instance of class division in the Middle Ages, when, after the Norman Conquest, French speech was the most striking characteristic of the dominant aristocracy, while English — the Germanic speech — was characteristic of serfs, peasants, and artisans. The emergence of a unified national language combining elements of both develops parallel with the unification of England as a nation. This class alignment of language in England is so glaring as to have drawn the attention of linguistic historians otherwise little concerned with class issues. The evidence is simple enough to be presented in vocabulary lists. These are the very lists which appear in the usual histories of the English language, such as the recent one by A. Baugh, to indicate that cultural terminology was consistently expressed in Norman French, as opposed to the humbler vocabulary of Middle English. In German too the class dialect of the courtly feudal lords is largely marked by the number of words borrowed from the troubadours and trouvères of France, where chivalric feudalism and its literature were more highly developed than in Germany. Again, though to a less degree than in England, the difference resolves itself into a study of the numerical proportion of loan-words and their meanings.
        More intricate, and at the same time more interesting for us, is the problem of nationalist and international tendencies in the vocabulary of loan-words today. On the one hand, we find an enormous increase in the number of international words connected with technology since the industrial revolution and the development of capitalism. It is no accident that the wave of loans follows the course of machine production, so that it reaches last those countries which were slowest in changing from feudalism to modern capitalism. “Thus the international linguistic tendencies in the epoch of capitalism are manifested not only in the quantitative growth of the international lexicon, but also in the broad development of international semantics. Thanks to this latter, the word forms in many cases express an international ideological content, uniting languages by the mere number of concepts represented, and finally making possible a mutual understanding of peoples who are separated by national and linguistic barriers.”[3] The international elements in cultivated speech are a result
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of the international scope of capitalism. But it is exactly at the time of this wide development, when the drive towards a universal vocabulary is at its height, that the contrary tendency begins to manifest itself. Just as suicidal competition among nations in the economic field causes a reaction towards narrow nationalism in the form of economic autarchy, tariff barriers, boycotts, and so on, there is a linguistic reaction in the form of purism and hostility to foreignisms. Linguistic development then follows clearly the lines of internationalism in its period of acute crisis: there are the same contradictions manifest, and the same countercurrents engendered by extreme tendencies in one direction or the other.
        This is made very clear by Zhirmunskii. His illustrations from the German language are particularly apt. The flood of international words of technical significance which broke in upon Germany in the nineteenth century finally gave rise to a self-conscious purism which substituted Gewinnanteil for dividende, Uraufführung for premiere, Fernsprecher for telephone, and (horrible to relate) tried to introduce Gefühlskunst for Ästhetik. The violence of this linguistic reaction in Germany is no doubt due to the fact that German capitalism entered the field of international competition at a late date, when the struggle was already desperate. Liberals might defend a cosmopolitan vocabulary, but the opposition to it became passionate in the extreme.[4] Here as in the case of the feudal Middle Ages, the evidence used is drawn largely from loan words, to the exclusion of other aspects of language.
        As a matter of fact, the period of linguistic nationalism has not passed away entirely, even in the Soviet Union. Under the Tsarist regime the struggle for the preservation of a national language in countries like Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and the Tartar regions was identical with a struggle for political liberties. The immediacy of the political struggle obscured for the time the underlying facts of the class struggle in those countries. Purism in language became an expression of the opposition to an autocratic absolutist government with an alien official language, on the part of both the native bourgeoisie and the workers. In those minor nations which now remain in the Soviet Union, the work upon native languages has in some instances been carried out in the old spirit of nationalism for its own sake,
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rather than nationalism in culture for the sake of ultimate socialism.
        “The nationalist deviation,” says Zhirmunskii, “is to be observed in the U.S.S.R. in connection with constructive work on languages in the national republics—in the results of the hostile class politics of local nationalists, operating on survivals of social groups defeated by the Revolution. In the Ukraine, for instance, this was expressed, on the one hand, in a conscious deepening of the difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages, under the banner of a struggle against Russianism; on the other hand, in the ‘Ukrainianization’ of foreign terms by means of the formation of a narrowly national scientific terminology, which inevitably suffers from over-simplification and separation from international connections.”[5]
       The practical side of Marxian linguistic work in the Soviet Union has presented a task both delicate and colossal. It involved factors of nationalism as well as class divisions. Above all it had to be carried out on the basis of principles consciously evolved and consciously controlled. We have seen that pre-Soviet scholarship, particularly in the tradition of Hegel and Humboldt, had given a theoretical basis for the treatment of any language as potentially capable of developing any expressions required of it, since “everything spoken forms that which is not yet spoken or prepares the way for it.” Trombetti’s statement assumes the same point of view:
        “Speaking absolutely, there do not exist more perfect and less perfect languages, just as the hand is not more perfect than the foot; all of them are instruments adequate to the needs of those speaking them.”[6]
        It is one of the distinctions of Soviet linguistic field-work that it is carried out as a conscious application of this principle. Not only is it recognized that languages are potentially capable of development to meet new needs, but also — this being a fundamental Marxian approach — that this development need not be haphazard; it is subject to intelligent control by those who understand the forces at work.
        Bringing a “primitive” people into contact with a new language and culture will operate as a powerful stimulus; but the stimulus need not be blindly applied. In the hands of those who understand the dynamic forces involved, there can be a planned control for the purposes of a goal as yet quite invisible beyond the distant horizon. Thus
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the powerful impetus given to national languages by their achievement of an alphabet and literary status is to be directed towards a later period when cultural as well as political nationalism will disappear in a classless society. In the meantime the opposite tendency can be used within limits by those field workers who keep in mind Stalin’s comment at the Sixteenth Party Congress:
        “The period of proletarian dictatorship and construction of socialism in the U.S.S.R. is a period of development of national cultures, socialist in content and national in form. ... In the period of the victory of socialism on a world scale, when socialism is finally strengthened and comes into being, the national languages must inevitably merge in one general language, which, to be sure, will be neither Great Russian, nor German, but something new.”
        For the time being, the establishment of many minor tongues on a literary basis, with printed books and periodicals for the first time in history, has proved once more the truth of the theoretical statement concerning their adequacy for purposes of expression. It is interesting to notice that supposed inherent limitations in the various tongues are surmounted when it is necessary to translate even the most abstract terminology into any of them. The quantitative success in this task may be measured by the imposing statistics which appear from time to time in the periodical Revoliutsia i Natsional’nosti.[7] Some indication of the qualitative success is given by an article in Literatura i Natsional’nosti concerning the translations of Gorky into various minor tongues.[8] Here the author, who is quite aware of the enormous psychological and linguistic import of the mere act of making such a translation, lays down certain general principles in connection with the Kumik version of one text:
        “The translator, resolutely opposing an influx of surplus ‘barbarisms’ which threaten the unity of the national form of the language, must at the same time be possessed of sufficient political tact in order to draw the line between essentially nationalistic purism in language and that single correct relation to the language according to which an intelligent borrowing of international terms will effectively aid the growth and development of the language.”
        So far as native vocabulary is concerned, this principle of conscious choice and “political tact” requires the discovery of a happy
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medium between the literary vocabulary—represented in the ancient oral epics (with their connotations of past modes of thought)—and the colloquial. The translator is at times forced to be a creator of language, if only by periphrasis, when a new abstract term is required. Thus translation, in the frame of contemporary conditions, becomes a far more significant act than the mere mechanical rendering of one vocabulary into another. Speaking of stylistic weaknesses of the Bashkir version of Gorky’s My University Years, the critic complains that such a mechanical operation is too often apparent. He is annoyed particularly at the rendering of Russian k tshortu den’gi (“to the devil with money”) by Bashkir shaitanga aksade. To most of us, ignorant as we are of Bashkir, this literary sin will appear something less than heinous; but we can understand and approve the general principles on which the criticism is made. It is the point of view adopted, even more than the quantitative accomplishment, which must impress sympathetic observers.

        II. DIALECTIC CHANGE

        The phenomenon of change in language interests Soviet scholars particularly, since they approach it from the point of view of a philosophy in which dialectic movement is a cardinal concept. They are particularly sharp in their criticism of work which they consider to be done from a static point of view. A neglect of dialectic processes, they say, has caused scholars to seek for external factors such as conquest or migration and “substrata” whenever confronted with a linguistic transformation. This reproach of narrowness and timidity resulting from a mechanical interpretation of change is levelled at the “Indo-European school” repeatedly: since the great age when the methods and principles of comparative Indo-European were being worked out, and the generic similarities in its branches were being systematically recorded, linguistic research in Western Europe has too often limited itself to the narrow and unimaginative definition of more and more detailed Lautgesetze, so that with an increasing material upon which to generalize, there has been an increasing reluctance to do so.[9]
        The difficulties connected with the study of the phenomenon of
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linguistic change are indicated by Bloomfield’s statement that “the process of linguistic change has never been directly observed; we shall see that such observation, with our present facilities, is inconceivable.”[10] Yet we do know that changes occur; the external factors which bring them about have been thoroughly studied. The members of the Soviet school say that a neglect of other factors is due to a disregard for the possibility of internal dialectic change.[11]
        It is not just to say that western scholars have ignored linguistic change or failed to inquire into its causes other than phonetic modification. A linguist like Sapir, for instance, has discussed “drift” in language at some length, in relation to the general pattern and structure of a language. The internal factors making for change are, he says, “the very slow but powerful unconscious changes in certain directions which seem to be implicit in the phonemic systems and morphologies of the languages themselves.”[12] One cannot quarrel with this statement on the ground that it attributes too little importance to change, but rather because it isolates change from social environment, and comes perilously near to attributing an autonomous life to phonemic systems and morphologies, apart from those who employ them in the act of speaking.
        As an instance of the attempt to apply the principle of dialectic change to a specific language we may quote I. I. Meshtshaninov’s contribution to the Karl Marx Festschrift of 1933.[13] The matter discussed is the shift of grammatical structure by which subject-object relations, as we understand them, are developed out of quite different usage, and the process by which the three grammatical persons, which we assume as a matter of course, are developed. Meshtshaninov finds evidence in contemporary Caucasian languages that a speaker’s awareness of himself as a “first person” came about some time after he was aware of his part in the “third person” of the collective group. Sur-
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vivals of the earlier attitude are to be noticed in an awkward handling of the first personal pronoun, and particularly in the late development of the nominative case as we understand it. “The Udin constructs the sentence The old man harnessed the cart, which he regards as active, in sharp contradiction to its abstract significance…, literally, as By means of the old man, it (or he) harnessed the cart. We find precisely the same thing in the Kiurin language, where an oblique case (usually an ablative-instrumental) is employed in like form also for the expression of the subject-nominative. Father writes a letter is literally expressed By means of the father there is written a letter. Thus active sentences are expressed passively, with the word which we should feel to be the subject put in an oblique case, and the strict subject appears as a he or it whose function is not entirely clear. In sentences involving an instrumental in the strict sense, the result is doubly awkward: it becomes something like By means of eyes, by means of a person, he (or it) sees for the simple statement A person sees with his eyes.
        These grammatical archaisms are extremely important for linguistic history. The question of their significance has been raised more than once. What is the being represented by the pronominal subject, who appears to be the doer of all acts? If the man who actually harnesses the cart is merely a passive instrument by means of whom something impersonal accomplishes the act of harnessing, what or who is that impersonal something? It has already been suggested by others that there is a connection here with the idea of certain primitive tribes that everything they do is really accomplished by the totem of the tribe acting through them.[14] In any event, the time comes when the sentence is actually felt to be personal and active, not impersonal and passive. This realization may be brought about by the difficulty of such locutions as By means of eyes, by means of a person, it sees. The linguistic situation is comparable to the awkwardness felt by those using the archaic English Me thinks, where the general structure of the language would lead us to expect that me is nominative because of its position in the sentence. Only a student of the history of the English language is now clearly aware that the me is dative, as it was
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in the still older Me stands awe of him. Hence in modern speech the Me thinks is avoided as unclear, and—significantly enough—the impersonal Me stands awe of him is changed to the personal I stand in awe of him, thus conforming to the general sentence pattern of English.
        But here, says Meshtshaninov (although he does not use the English sentences as examples), is precisely what we have been looking for: a shift in linguistic structure, an element of motion, due to internal causes. Once the concept of the impersonal doer (totem, collective, spirit, magic power, or what you will) has been weakened, and the immediate actor is finally conceived as the subject of the sentence, we have a tension arising because of the lack of correspondence between the grammatical form of the sentence and the new manner of regarding it. The tension or contradiction is resolved by a transformation of the linguistic structure. If such a dialectic process is possible in matters of subject-object relationship, it may be in others as well.[15]
        It has been admitted by many writers that a period of political and social change would be especially favorable to linguistic transformation. The tension or sense of awkwardness existing in a period of social transformation would be the more likely to find an apt resolution in linguistic change. It may be that a certain tendency in contemporary Russian can be quoted as an illustration of the combination of both conditions. Since the language is a highly inflected one, there has long existed in it the uneconomical necessity to repeat identical semantic signals in phrases involving a series of modifiers. Thus the expression khoroshii, sposobny, skromny tshelovek thrice repeats the information, by each adjectival ending, that the coming noun is a masculine nominative, and tshelovek, by its zero suffix, confirms the fact a fourth time. This situation, precisely parallel to that existent in ancient Latin, might of itself give rise to a certain number of short-cuts in the form of abbreviations to save time; but it was the external events of revolution and following reconstruction which enormously accelerated this tendency. The gigantic undertakings of the new economy created countless new departments, en-
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terprises, government trusts and the like, whose cumbersome titles had to be pronounced by persons pervaded with a new tempo of living. So it was that Narodny Kommissariat dlia inostrannykh Del became Narkomindel by a species of agglutination of the first syllables, and the new noun was declined as a unit; this happened in an endless series of similar cases. The principle here operating, if consistently applied, would go far to change the character of Russian. Even the limited operation of the new principle of word formation illustrates the dialectic development of one type of structure from the awkward hyperdevelopment of its opposite. It is not by any means a parallel to the transformation of an agglutinating into an inflectional language, or the reverse; but it throws light on the processes by which such a change might occur.

         III. "linguistic paleontology” and semantics

        Because of their preoccupation with the social environment of languages, Soviet scholars are especially interested in the study of semantics, notably archaisms in semantics, for the indications they give of earlier social conditions. The phrase “linguistic paleontology” is applied to this special form of semantic study. It is concerned with the etymology of words which signify tools, work, and social relations. One instance may be quoted in illustration.
        In his article “On a certain Expression for feminine Gender in the Zulu and Xosa Languages,” I. L. Snegirev[16] discuss the significance of the suffix— ( k)azi to indicate feminine gender: for instance, in cases such as inkomo, “bull,” and “cow”; ukumkani, “king,” and ukumkanikazi, “queen.” It appears that in this family of languages gender was rather a form of demonstration than an indication of sex. By comparative study, Snegirev establishes an original meaning of “large, great” for the same suffix, so that Zulu umfazi- kazi meant “large, powerful woman.” Both Zulu and Xosa are spoken by tribes in a developed patriarchal society in which, as Snegirev says, suffixes of diminution, not aggrandizement, might rather be developed into typically feminine suffixes. These facts should be regarded in connection with the survivals of earlier mother-right, which are extraordinarily clear among the southern Bantu tribes. If the suffix which once meant large and powerful now means feminine, the change in
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meaning would seem to be connected with the change in society. (Snegirev does not assume, it may be added, that mother-right always preceded patriarchy; merely that it did in this, particular instance.) The theory here advanced unites the morphological, semantic, and social factors involved. Whether or not it is entirely convincing, at least it does not suffer from a violent separation of language from social milieu; and it is not vitiated (as are the theories of Father Schmidt) by a priori assumptions concerning a qualitative difference between men’s thinking and women’s.
        The study of semantic archaisms is one of the matters chiefly stressed by the adherents of the “Japhetic school” of linguists, founded by the late Professor Marr of Leningrad. The term applied to this school and its theories is somewhat misleading. It so happens that Professor Marr had distinguished himself by extensive pioneer work, even before the Revolution, in the investigation of the Caucasian languages, which are sometimes designated by the old-fashioned Biblical term Japhetic (as opposed to Hamitic and Semitic). It was on the basis of investigations in these languages that Marr derived some of his cardinal theories. Thousands of pages of discussion and even polemic have been devoted to them, but the outstanding tenets may be briefly summarized:
        In the first place, the Japhetic school objects emphatically to the division of languages into families. It would rather substitute the concept of “stadia” of development for types of linguistic structure. Types like agglutinating and inflecting are not to be regarded as rigidly separated from one another, but as passing from one to the other by a process of dialectic change. Not only are separate words to be studied for their value to “linguistic paleontology,” but groups of words and the concepts they represent must be so studied. These “semantic clusters” are supposed to help in the interpretation of myth and folklore as well as language. (For instance, the cluster “water- woman-snake” is found to be significant in an imposing number of folktales.) Marr claimed that he had proved the monogenesis of all human speech, and even the four precise syllables from which it originated, by inductive method. These four syllables are sal, ber, yon, and rosh. Primordial speech, constituted ultimately from combinations of these four elements, is envisaged as belonging at first to a priestly group, who used it as an instrument in early class struggles. Speech, closely connected with magic practices, and hence, for primi-
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tive man, with the means of production, was used to keep those who did not possess it in subservience. Speech is still used as an instrument by the ruling class to a far greater extent than is generally realized.[17]
       These theories, advanced with a somewhat vociferous enthusiasm, have been the subject of lively controversy within the Soviet Union and have elicited criticism from without. A sane criticism of the whole school was written by Kuznetsov[18] in a brochure published during the heat of the controversy. Kuznetsov confesses that he is unconvinced by the claim that all speech originated from Marr’s four syllables; moreover, he takes him to task for the theory about the limitation of primitive speech to a priestly caste, since this would mean that the class struggle existed in a preclass society! The work on semantics is admitted to be suggestive and valuable because it brings our attention to pertinent social factors too often neglected; but this same work is criticized in some of its concrete forms as fantastic and unverified. It must be remembered that Marr himself regarded many of his suggestions as tentative: for instance, the association of certain types of language with definite forms of society.
        A similar criticism, with which I find myself in complete accord, has recently been written by a French Marxian, Aurélien Sauvageot, who is a specialist in Oriental languages. After pointing out the formalism and the errors in method of which the school has been guilty, he concludes with the warning: “The failure of Japhetism must not be imputed to Marxism. It would be more just to affirm that if Marr had been more completely and authentically Marxian, he would not have committed the fundamental error which invalidated the course of his thought.“[19] It is unfortunate that the first imperfect attempt to apply Marxian principles to language should have aroused such a storm of premature publicity. In the meantime, as Sauvageot points out, there is sounder and more cautious research being done outside the Japhetic school which more justly merits the term Marxian scholarship.
        Soviet writers, whether adherents of Marr or not, have frequently reproached the “Indo-European school“ with narrow formalism, with
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absorption in the minutiae of linguistic comparisons, at the expense of significant work in semantics and their relation to social structure. It is true enough, to be sure, that in Schrijnen’s Einführung in das Studium der indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft, which is typical of others, almost the entire book is devoted to a detailed study of phonological relations, and only a few pages to questions of semantics. Formalism has indeed been carried so far among certain Indo-Europeanists as to result in a “philological Byzantinism“ (to use the happy phrase of Sauvageot); but it is not accurate to accuse all “bourgeois linguistics“ of the same defects.[20] To do so is to ignore such research as the semantic studies published by the Linguistic Society of America, or Maal og Minne and Wörter und Sachen, or the labors of Finnish folklorists, or those of American anthropologists in the field of Indian languages. If these studies emphasize class aspects and dialectics less than Soviet colleagues might desire, they have at least collected the materials, and they argue no lack of interest in the general subject of semantics.

        IV. CONTINUITY AND OUTLOOK

        Soviet linguistic research did not spring into being, like Minerva, by a sudden and unlineal birth; and the sources on which it has drawn explain to a certain extent the direction it has taken. The debt to Ludwig Noiré, who as we have seen anticipated the study of “linguistic paleontology,“ is acknowledged at length in Deborin’s recent book, The new Doctrine of Language and Dialectic Materialism.[21] The influence of Humboldt is also apparent when problems of dialectic change in language are being discussed. Despite his invincible idealism, Ernst Cassirer is also quoted with approval. He, like Noiré, had emphasized the importance of the tool and communal work in stimulating the processes of speech, and he indicated the function of deixis (the act of pointing out) in the formation of inflectional endings. Brugmann and Hermann Hirt have also surmised that a number of our inflections originally had a spatial significance (meaning this, that, here, and yonder) instead of the abstract meanings of nominative case, comparative degree, or third person, which we now attach to them. This speculation is not without its influence on Soviet research into
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the gestures accompanying sound speech, or “kinetic language,“ as it is called. But whereas Cassirer is content with theoretical speculation, with the etymological connection between weisen and beweisen and between greifen and begreifen, Soviet scholars supplement this with work in the laboratory. Kinetic speech being both an accompaniment to sound speech and yet a contradiction (in the sense of a seeming wasteful duplication) of it, the relation of the two is studied under artificially controlled conditions. A student of Pavlov, S. M. Dobrogaev, reports on the phonetic and semantic results of complete elimination of gesture: a great reduction of fluency of speech, of the size of effective vocabulary, and of clearness of articulation.[22] These studies are as yet in their infancy. They are primarily connected with problems of psychology and biology, but they will no doubt be illuminating also for linguistics.
        Linguistic science has developed late among the disciplines, because of its remoteness from the techniques of economic production. Hence also, no doubt, a certain slowness and error in the applications of the principles of dialectical materialism to it.[23] But even after the necessary reservations have been made, there is great promise to be found in Soviet linguistics. Here one feels oneself on the verge of new and exciting developments. Some of the fundamental problems are being attacked afresh, in close connection with a vast amount of practical field work of primary importance. The theoretical approach to this pioneer research is based on the reasoned conviction that all languages are capable of whatever expression may be demanded of them in the course of their history; that no speech is essentially poor though its present scope may be limited. The concrete material collected and practically used in accordance with this theory supplies in its turn evidence for further theoretical speculation. I do not mean to imply, of course, that this attitude is not characteristic of the best philologists in western countries. But in these troubled times our ears are full of the din of pseudo-science in the service of nationalism and race chauvinism; we too often see linguistics, along with other sciences, used to bolster the claims of national superiority, or to defend imperialist aggression, by making hatred and contempt a required attitude in dealing with other languages and cultures. The Soviet Union,
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on the other hand, offers the heartening spectacle of expanding work, quite free from this attitude of hatred and contempt. The future of linguistic research, we may well believe, lies in the hands of those who respect their subject, even in its most remote, its most differing and alien forms.