In central Australia, where the rivers Murray and Darling meet, there lives a small group of aborigines who were forced to change their word for water nine times in five years, each time because the man had died whose name had been the accepted word for water while he was alive. 1
We find it difficult to imagine such a situation. Australian aborigines, on the other hand, would probably find it difficult to understand why numerous people in Germany started to run after the English word jogging had come into fashion.
Whatever the case, these two examples show that a language has other uses besides the exchange of thoughts or the making of true statements about the world.
Languages are always changing. Twenty generations separate us from Chaucer. If we could board a time machine and visit him in the year 1390, we would have great difficulties in making ourselves understood-even roughly.
With Jane Austen, from whom we are separated by only 180 years, we would not have the same fundamental difficulties of mutual comprehension as with Chaucer, but we would hesitate quite often and ask for the meaning of a word. When Jane Austen described a man as being 'in person and address most truly the gentleman', 2 she was not referring to the 'gentleman's' residence, but rather admiring his bearing and deportment. We would not understand 'on the catch' or 'nuncheon'. 3 If a schoolboy wrote 'It is amazingly' 4 in an essay today, it would be considered a grammatical mistake. To 'lay out a half-guinea' 5 meant, in Jane Austen's time, to spend a halfguinea, but it is no longer expressed in this way.