ON THE COMPARISON OF ASIATIC LANGUAGES. 211 
Mongolic speech inflexion is little marked, and in Aryan or 
Semitic languages it has proceeded very far. In English 
and in Persian we find a yet further stage of advance, in 
which the old inflexions are discarded as cumbersome, and 
new ageglutinations take their place as being simpler. For 
instance, the word “shepherd” is clearly soluble ito sheep 
and haa but the ovigin of “shearer” is forgotten, though 
the er comes from an old word for “man,” and the compound 
was once understood to mean a “man who shears.” The 
noun cases of the German have been relinquished in 
English, because the prepositions gave a simpler method 
(suflicient i in itself) for the distinction of case, and the verb 
in like manner is for the most part easily aided by auxiliaries, 
and discards the old inflexions of tense and mood, which 
themselves arose from older auxiliary additions. Turkish is 
a language dear to the grammarian for its simplicity, due to 
the regularity with which its case suflixes (taking the place 
of prepositions) and its complete system of auxiliaries (for 
moods and tenses of the verb), are applied to every root ; 
while in German we have an instance of inflections which 
have decayed and lost their original value, and which now 
form impediments rather than aids to speech, from which 
encumbrances the English language has set itself free. 
Such peculiarities, ther efore, denote various stages of growth 
and decay, and of new growth; but they do not fix a 
barrier of complete distinction between the various great 
groups. The differences, in short, are differences of degree, 
and not of kind. Some languages stop short at a certain 
stage, or advance very slow ly. ‘The Egyptian is an instance 
in which inflexion never seems to have developed very com- 
pletely; the Chinese is an instance of a language which has 
greatly decayed. It would seem that when races of one group 
came In contact with races, equally civilised, of another group, 
and remained in intercourse, the result was an advance in 
language ; but that when the civilised race is isolated among 
more savage populations, speaking in archaic and varying 
dialects, the tendency is to decay. This is in our own times 
very remarkable in the degradation of the Dutch language 
in the Transvaal, where for several generations the descend- 
ants of civilised Eur opeans have been isolated among’ native 
tribes, Hottentot and Kaffre. The advance of language 18, 
on the other hand, well marked in the case of the Finnie 
peoples, who have long dwelt in contact with the European 
Aryans. 
