102 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



It is unquestionably true, as Max ^liiller has said, that after this 

 primitive household had been dispersed, no new grammatical form 

 was ever produced, of which the elements were not present in the 

 original speech. Careful reflection will show that this is not merely 

 the proper deduction from all the known premises, but that it is the 

 only reasonable conclusion. Let any person suppose that a language 

 of uninflected I'oots had arisen, and had existed for several genera- 

 tions, until the population speaking it had been somewhat widely 

 ditfused ; and let him then endeavor to imagine how an atcempt to 

 introduce inflected forms — as for example, a future tense, a subjunc- 

 tive mood, or a possessive case — would be received. If the people 

 had been able to make themselves understood without these new- 

 fangled contrivances, why should they take the trouble to adopt 

 them ? There can be no doubt that some of the Latin and German 

 inflections would be very useful in English, and would be highly con- 

 ducive to clearness and force ; but how hopeless would be the attempt 

 to introduce them ! Unless we are willing to suppose that human 

 nature in prehistoric times differed utterly from the human nature of 

 to-day, we must believe that the same difficulty, or rather im[)0ssi- 

 bility, would have been found in those days. 



To this general statement, however, there are certain apparent 

 exceptions, which should be noticed. As will be seen, they simph' 

 confirm the rule, in the shape in which Prof. Max Miiiler has laid it 

 down. A change in the form of inflections not unfrequently takes 

 place. The Anglo Saxon tongue had many ways of forming the 

 plural. It might terminate in s, in u, in a, or in ?i, or it might be 

 indicated by a change in the radical vowel. JVnJ/a, wolf, became 

 widfus; scipa, ship, scipu ; handu, hand, handd ; tunge, tongue, 

 tungan ; hok, book, bek. All these plurals have now in English but 

 one termination, in s. We say wolves, ships, hands, tongues, books. 

 In French and Spanish plurals, a similar change has taken place, 

 from the variety of the Latin forms, to a single termination in s. The 

 rule is, that when, from the habit of speech, the need of an inflection 

 is strongly felt, and it happens that, for any reason, one form disap- 

 pears, another, the simplest, and most convenient, is likely to be 

 adopted, by a sort of common consent, in its place. A striking 

 example is found in the future tense of the Romanic languages. In. 



