representative, which, founded on the original identity of substantive and adjective, is one of the glories of a completely inflective language; but since we have lost it, we have never thought of missing or regretting it; and no one of us would be easy to convince that, when we say good men, there would be anything gained by giving the word good a different form from that which it has in good man. And yet less, from that which it has in good women. For the distinctions of gender have been extirpated even in our nouns. To us, the name or appellation of a person is masculine or feminine only according as the person is male or female; and of sex in the lower animals we make very small account; while our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were as much under the dominion of that old artificial grammatical distinction of all the objects of thought as masculine, feminine, and neuter, on a basis only in small part coinciding with actual sex, as are the Germans now, or as were the Greeks and Latins of old: it was one of the original and characteristic features of that language from which all these, and most of the other tongues of Europe, are descended. The French has suffered the same loss only partially, having saved the distinction of masculine from feminine, but confounded neuter and masculine together by the obliteration of their respective marks of difference. But also the old scheme of cases in our nouns has become a wreck and a remnant, although the distinctions on which it is founded are just as necessary a part of language as ever. The English has no dative, and no accusative except in a few pronouns (him, them, whom, etc.); the French is still poorer, having not even a possessive; although it makes in a few pronominal words a somewhat evanescent distinction of subject and object. We have also nearly parted with our subjunc

tive, which in German is as rich in forms as is the indicative.

The English is, in truth, of all the languages of its kindred, the one which most remarkably illustrates that mode of linguistic change consisting in the loss of formal grammatical distinction by synthetic means; there is no other known tongue which, from having been so rich in them, has become so poor; none which has so nearly stripped its root-syllables of the apparatus of suffixes with which they were formerly clothed, and left them monosyllabic. All this has come about mainly through the instrumentality of the tendency to ease and abbreviation, a tendency which in this department of its working, especially, makes truly for decay; the conservative force, the strictness of traditional transmission, has not been sufficient to resist its inroads. Much of the loss has been the work of the last few centuries; and there is no difficulty in pointing out causes which have at least quickened it. When men learn a strange language, by a practical process, they are apt especially to make bad work with its endings; if they get the body of the word, its main significant part, intelligibly correct, they will be content to leave the relations to be understood from the connection. This was what helped the decay of the Latin tongue, and its reduction, in the mouths of Italians, Celts, Iberians, and others, into the corrupted and abbreviated shape of the modern Romanic dialects; and the irruption into England of the Frenchspeaking Normans, and their fusion with the Saxonspeaking English, added an appreciable element of force to a tendency which was perhaps already sufficiently marked in the later Anglo-Saxon.

But it is only in degree that the English differs herein from the other languages of its family, and from

those of other families. The tendency to abbreviation for ease, for economy of effort in expression, is a universal and a blind one; destruction lies everywhere in its path. The same process which, by a disguising fusion and integration of elements once independent, makes a word or form, goes straight on to its contraction and mutilation-and in early language as certainly, though not necessarily so rapidly, as in later. There is believed to be hardly anything, if anything at all, earlier in the structure of our language than the first-personal endings, mi in the singular, masi in the plural. Yet these are already economized alterations of something still more primitive; the masi, especially, so changed that the comparative philologists dispute as to its derivation. All that we have left of either of them in English is the solitary m of am (for as-mi). And every language related with ours has something of the same loss to show; and like losses in every other department of inflection and of derivation.

The forms, even of the richest known languages, embody and bring to distinct consciousness only a small part of the infinity of relations which subsist among the objects of thought, and which the mind impliedly recognizes, even when it does not direct attention to them by expression. Not one of those which are expressed, any more than those which have not found embodiment, is absolutely essential to successful speech. When it has attained expression, the mind which contemplates it is not dependent upon its audible sign, but may even be made carelessly secure by this, and, while realizing the idea, permit itself to drop the sign as not indispensable. But we may note for our consolation that, unless a people is undergoing actual degradation in quantity and quality of mental work, it does not

lose what it once possessed in the way of inflectional apparatus without providing some other and on the whole equivalent means of expression. The style of expression may become very much changed, without any real loss of expressiveness. The downfall of the case-system was accompanied by the uprise of the class of prepositions; the loss of pronominal elements in the form of personal endings led only to their more extended use as independent words; the impoverishment of the scheme of moods and tenses was compensated by the introduction of a rich apparatus of auxiliaries, capable of expressing nearly all the old distinctions, along with a host of new ones.

This brings us, however, as we have already been repeatedly brought, to face the remaining department of change of language-namely, the addition of new resources of expression; and to that we now turn.

CHAPTER VII.

GROWTH OF LANGUAGE: PRODUCTION OF NEW WORDS AND FORMS.

Special importance of this mode of linguistic change; objects attained by it. These objects partly gained without external additions; enrichment, definition, multiplication of meaning in old words. Provision of new styles of expression. External additions; borrowing from other languages; its kind and degree; excess of it in English. Invention of new words; onomatopoeia. New words made by combination of old ones; production of forms by this method; its wide reach and importance; internal formative changes really the result of external additions. Differentiation of the form of a word in different uses. Multiplication of the uses of a word by derivative apparatus ; conversion of one part of speech into another.

In our examination of the methods of change or growth in language, we have finally to consider the subject of acquisition of new material, of the means whereby the waste incident to phonetic decay is made up, and -expression for new thought and knowledge provided. These means have been already in part set forth or alluded to; for all the modes of linguistic growth so intertwine and interact that it is impossible to discuss any one of them, however succinctly, without taking more or less account of the others.

This last mode of change, it may be remarked in introduction, constitutes in a higher and more essential