"Every human being is, on the one hand, in the power of the language he speaks; he and all his thoughts are its products. He cannot think with complete certainty anything that lies outside his boundaries; the form of his ideas, the manner in which he combines them, and the limits of these combinations are all preordained by the language in which he was born and raised: both his intellect and his imagination are bound by it. On the other hand, every free-thinking, intellectually independent individual shapes the language in his turn. For how else if not by these influences could it have gained and grown from its raw beginnings to its present, more perfect state of development in the sciences and arts? In this sense, then, it is the living force of the individual that causes new forms to emerge from the traceable matter of language, in each case with the initial aim of passing on a fleeting state of consciousness, but leaving behind now a greater, now a fainter, trace in the language that, taken up by others, continues to have an ever broader shaping influence… free utterance must by grasped in two different senses, first in terms of the genius of the language from whose elements it was derived, as an expressive means tied to and determined by this spirit that brought it to life within the speaker; yet it must also be understood in terms of the speaker himself, as an act that can only have emerged out of, and be explained as a product of, his particular being."
-Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Different Methods of Translating (translated by Susan Bernofksy)
