Transforming Language

The origins of the English language predate this sentence that you are reading right now because its syntactical structure is governed by certain grammatical rules that were not conjured up by its writer out of thin air but were inherited by him from the community of English-speakers and English-writers. In this sense, therefore, language always goes ahead of the attempt to articulate anything through its canons which remain more or less stable within one historical epoch and which exhibit certain family resemblances to one another across these epochs (and this allows us to speak of Old English, Middle English, and Contemporary English as three distinct versions of the 'same language'). On the other hand, however, language is never quite a strait-jacket within which one is constricted for one uses language not only to 'reflect' reality but also to 'create' it through various linguistic implements such as metaphor, similie, paradox, model, simulation, and parable. It is possible for individuals to draw upon more or less the same repertoire of words and concepts prevalent in a certain language, but to fashion them in strikingly original ways to coin new terms that become widely accepted by its speakers and writers.

In this manner, a living language has no stable resting-points, it is forever in a state of flux as various speakers and writers continue to drink from its flowing stream and then add something of their own into it.