104 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



speak of highly complex and synthetic tongiies as " barbarous lan- 

 guages," and the more analytic idioms as " civilized languages." A 

 wider induction, however, appears to lead to a very different conclu- 

 sion. 



There is no doubt that, as a general thing, the less composite and 

 more analytic of two allied languages is likely to be the more recent 

 in its formation ; or, to speak more precisely, if two languages stand 

 to each other in the relation of mother and daughter, as the Anglc- 

 Saxon to the English, the Latin to the Italian, the Greek to the 

 Romaic, the Samoan to the Hawaiian, the daughter tongue is cer- 

 tain to be the simpler and less inflected of the two. But it is equally 

 certain — and indeed these very examples are sufficient to show — that 

 the change of form has nothing whatever to do with any intellectual or 

 social advancement, and that to speak of it as a progress in any sense is 

 wholly to misconceive its nature and origin. In fact it is more 

 properly a degradation and an impoAerishment. The modern lan- 

 guages of southern Europe assumed their present " analytic " form, as 

 it is styled, during the middle ages, at a time when the communities 

 speaking them were certainly, in every point of literary culture and 

 social organization, very far below their predecessors who spoke the 

 highly composite classic tongues. No one will maintain that the ]ire- 

 sent inhabitants of northern Hindostan are intellectually superior to 

 the contemporai'ies of Kalidasa, or that the modern Persians, who 

 speak one of the most analytic of Ai-yan languages, are superior in 

 intelligence to their ancestors of the Zoroastrian era, the speakers of 

 the highly inflected Zend. 



The causes to which all these modern languages OAve their poverty 

 in inflected forms are so well known, historically, that the disposition 

 to ascribe it to intellectual progress is somewhat surprising. Primitive 

 mother-tongues, as has been seen, vary in character, from the bare 

 simplicity of the monosyllabic Chinese and Anamese to the extreme 

 complexity of the Sanscrit and the Algonkin. When the community 

 which speaks one of these original tongues remains in its pristine 

 seat, with no admixture from any foreign source, there seems to be no 

 reason why the language should undergo any material change. 

 Children must continue to learn their speech from their parents ; and 

 grandfather and grandchild must so speak as to be mutually under- 

 stood. There is doubtless a natural inclination for change in the 



