It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.
We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
History provides a sense of where we've been and lessons that can be taken forward.
Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.
The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.
I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things.