Book Description

Excerpt from The Whole French Language The labours of philologists will then lose something of their importance. A few professional men, 0 eying their calling, will remain depositaries of the dialects of by-gone ages; as we now see antiquarians collect and religiously preserve the wrecks of former societies. To enumerate the facts on which I ground this prevision would be a superfluous digression from my subject. To those men who have bent their thoughts on Unity, I need not say that the unity of weight, of measure, and of language is as inevitable as the unity of mathematical laws. To those who judge with the heart, a guide more infallible than the understanding, I need not say that universal fraternity cannot be completely established on the globe, until it has overthrown the barriers which dialects, more efficient than mountains and seas, have set up between men. As, for the enthusiastic admirers of the past, or those optimists who, contented with the present, are averse to every improvement, I will not attempt to convince them; I should only expose myself to be regarded as a utopist and, besides, the time is not yet come to insist upon the subject. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.