214 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



tion, where does unsophisticated usage retain the subjunctive and 

 where is the indicative employed naturally by everybody in England 

 and America? 



This leads up to another consideration. Up to quite recent times, 

 the history of any language was chiefly studied through the means 

 of written literature. But now it is more and more recognized that, 

 indispensable as are written documents for the study of the older 

 periods, they can never give everything, and that they will remain dead 

 until vivified by the help of the study of the language as actually 

 spoken nowadays by living men, women, and children. The study 

 of language should always begin, like charity, at home; everybody 

 should be trained in the investigation of his own, his family's, and his 

 friend's e very-day speech, before going on to deal with dead lan- 

 guages and I take here the word "dead" in its strictest sense, 

 including the language of Carlyle and of Emerson just as well as that 

 of Chaucer or of Cynewulf, for they are all accessible to us through 

 written and printed books only. The tendency towards a living 

 language-study is strong everywhere, and the student of English 

 should keep thoroughly abreast of the best work done in that direc- 

 tion with regard to other languages, German, French, Scandinavian, 

 and so on. This is true of all branches of philology, not only of 

 phonetics, where it has been recognized by everybody in theory 

 if not always in practice, but also of such branches as syntax and 

 semantics, where there is now in many countries a growing tend- 

 ency to take as a basis the observation of the actually spoken 

 language. 



The study of other languages will assist the Anglist in more ways 

 than those enumerated hitherto. Let me finish this lecture by draw- 

 ing attention to one of the most fundamental problems in the evolu- 

 tion of language. English is characterized by its large admixture 

 of foreign words, and the history of the English-speaking race is in 

 a large measure the history of its mixture with alien races. Now, 

 English has gone farther than most cognate languages in simplifying 

 its hereditary flexional system and wearing off most of the old endings. 

 The problem naturally arises: what is the relation, or is there any 

 relation, between these two things, race- or speech-mixture and 

 simplification of structure? 



The general assumption seems to be that foreign influence is the 

 cause of that simplification, and this assumption is always stated in 

 a purely dogmatic manner, no attempt being ever made to prove 

 the assertion. Nor is it possible, so far as I see, either to prove or to 

 disprove it on the strength of English alone, as the direct evidence 

 afforded by contemporary documents is so scarce. The foreign in- 

 fluence to which the breaking down of the old grammatical system 

 is ascribed is nearly always taken to be that due to the Norman 



