When Towzer has performed his tricks and when Porto has saved the drowning man’s life, they relapse, it is true, into the status of mere dog-but even the zoologist’s dog is of interest to all of us. And yet the cases are not altogether parallel. To return to the philologist and the layman by whom he is judged, it is a precisely parallel indifference to the beauty wrought by the instrument which nettles the judge. Only as a polite visitor, not as a zoologist, is he even mildly interested in Towzer’s sweet parlor tricks, however fully he may recognize the fact that these tricks could never have evolved unless the dog had evolved first. The zoologist examines the dog carefully, then he dissects him in order to examine him still more carefully, and finally, noting resemblances between him and his cousins, the wolf and the fox, and differences between him and his more distant relations like the cat and the bear, he assigns him his place in the evolutionary scheme of animated nature, and has done. He handles languages very much as the zoologist handles dogs. Now it is a notorious fact that the linguist is not necessarily deeply interested in the abiding things that language has done for us.
For the rest, there are excellent translations. Greek is worth studying-if it is-because a few plays and a few passages of verse, written in that curious and extinct vernacular, have still the power to disturb our hearts-if indeed they have. French is worth studying because there are French books which are worth reading. Such minor usefulness as he concedes to them is of a purely instrumental nature. The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is that nothing can well be more useless. The Grammarian and his Language, by Edward Sapir Bible Research > Interpretation > Translation Methods > Language and Thought > Sapir
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