Excerpt from The Life of Words as the Symbols of IdeasDuring the latter part of last year, the author was asked to deliver in London a short series of lectures in French, on some questions of philology, and the subject he chose was the Life of Words, in so far as they are the symbols of ideas.The work offered to the English public is a trans lation of the manuscript of these lectures, which have not yet been published in French. Due to the result of researches in the French language, the following pages deal almost exclusively with that idiom. It would have been impossible to adapt the work to the English language without re-writing it entirely.Many of the examples will be found repeated in the course of this little treatise. The linguistic facts under consideration present so much complexity that one and the same change of meaning may be studied from many points of view, and it seemed to the author that the best way of demonstrating this complexity was to investigate completely the various aspects of a certain number of examples.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.