THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 105 



human mind ; but in the case of language tliis inclination is checked 

 by many powerful conservative influences — by authority, affection, 

 <;ustom, and necessity. Accordingly, we see that the Chinese lan- 

 guage has remained substantially the same for more than four thous- 

 and years. The Greek schoolboy of the fourteenth century after 

 •Christ read his Hesiod or his Herodotus far more readily than an 

 English lad of the present day can read the works of Chaucer or of 

 Mandeville Two thousand years in the one case had wrought less 

 change than four hundi-ed have produced in the other. 



The causes which originate the great changes in speech, rendering 

 some languages obsolete, and creating new idioms in their place, are 

 two in number, both powerful in their way, and neither of them 

 having anything directly to do with intellectual advancement. In 

 fact, as has been hinted, the first tendency of both of them would 

 rather be towai'd impoverishment alike in the arts of life and in 

 speech. These causes may be briefly defined as conquest and migra- 

 tion. 



The English language affords the most familiar and the most strik- 

 ing example of the change produced by conquest. The subjugation of 

 the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans reduced their language from a 

 highly inflected tongue to what has been styled (though with some 

 exaggeration) a grammarless speech. The three genders, which were 

 carefully indicated in both noun and adjective, ceased to be distin- 

 guished. AH but one of the five cases were lost. The half-dozen 

 different modes of forming the plural were reduced to one — only a 

 few faint relics of the older forms remaining to show that they had 

 existed. The subjunctive mood, feebly kept alive by grammatical 

 purists, disapj)eared from the common speech. Many of the formative 

 particles — prefixes and suffixes — which abounded in the Anglo-Saxon, 

 and gave it an exuberant life, died out of the language ; and in their 

 place a few incongruous elements were adopted from the speech of the 

 conquerors. In general, however, the grammatical forms which re- 

 mained wei-e relics of the original language. At the same time a vast 

 number of Anglo-Saxon words disappeared entirely, the places of 

 many, though not all, being supplied by words of Latin origin, usually 

 much corrupted and distorted in pronunciation. In short, the Eng- 

 lish speech, as it finally emerged after this great linguistic cataclysm, 

 was a mere jai'gon or " camp language," — a lingua franca, in which 



