THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 105 



ancient Indo-European language, of which the comparison of the San- 

 skrit, Greek, Latin, Slavic, and Germanic languages has enabled us to 

 restore the important forms, possessed a rich system of declensions. 

 Latin lost a part of its cases, and had of others only vestiges. Old 

 French went a step further, and only kept two cases, the subject and the 

 object cases ; and even this greatly simplified declension disappeared 

 in the fourteenth century, and the French language became wholly 

 analytical, yet not without preserving traces of the two cases of the 

 middle ages in the double forms of some of its words. 



The simplification of declension appears in all modern languages. 

 In Persian there is, properly, no declension. The dative and accusa- 

 tive are expressed by adding prepositions to the noun, the genitive by 

 syntactical arrangement. Modern Greek has lost the forms of the 

 dual number and of the dative case. Among the Semitic languages, 

 current or spoken Arabic has dropped the terminations by which the 

 cases are distinguished in literary Arabic. In vulgar Arabic the cases 

 are distinguished by the position of the words or the use of preposi- 

 tions. The same analytical phenomena may be observed in the con- 

 jugations. In the original Indo-European system, the perfect was 

 formed by the reduplication of the root. Latin formed its perfects by 

 compositions of words in which the auxiliaries were partly disguised 

 as terminations, and in modern languages the analytical process has 

 been further carried out. The same process is going on in the future 

 tenses, which in English have reached the ultimate stage of it. Deca- 

 dence sometimes proceeds by the primary value of a form or a word 

 being forgotten. French affords some curious examples of this. Take 

 the words luette, uvula, and lierre, ivy, which are from the Latin uveta, 

 heeler a. In old French they were written uette, hierre. When the 

 article was prefixed they appeared as Vaette, Vhierre. Then the mean- 

 ing of the article was forgotten or misconceived, and it was written as 

 a part of the words. It then had to be supplied again, and so the 

 French say now la luette, la lierre. This deformation took place natu- 

 rally and without intention. 



I come now to speak of the struggle for existence which is con- 

 stantly going on between languages geographically near to one an- 

 other and between different dialects of the same language. Unless 

 one of the idioms is specially favored in the struggle by political cir- 

 cumstances, it is evident that the one which is most advanced in evo- 

 lution will gain upon those which are less advanced : this fact can be 

 established by many examples. Thus, in the territory which is now 

 France, Latin, introduced into Gaul by a relatively small number of 

 persons, shortly surpassed the Celtic dialects. The French language is 

 wholly Latin, having retained from the Celtic only a few recollections 

 in its vocabulary ; but, when the Germans established themselves in a 

 large part of Gaul, instead of giving their language to the conquered 

 population, they abandoned it in the end and adopted the neo-Latin, 



