The Origin and History of the English Language and of the Early Literature it Embodies Quotes

“We must know words not as abstract grammatical and logical quantities, but as animated and social beings. Roots, inflections, word-book definitions, are products of the decomposition of speech, not speech itself. They are dead remains, stripped of their native attachments and functions, and hence it is that a living Danish scholar, himself a man of rare philological attainment and of keen linguistic perceptions, calls scholastic grammar 'the grave of language.”
― George Perkins Marsh, The Origin and History of the English Language and of the Early Literature it Embodies