106 PKOCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



tlie people of the two foreign nations, now forcibly intermingled, 

 managed to make themselves understood by one another. To speak 

 of this mangled and degraded " pidgin English " as an analytic 

 tongue, and to exalt it as the product of an improved civilization, is 

 simply preposterous. ISTo doubt the strong intellectual powers of the 

 two mingled races speedily made themselves manifest in this new 

 medium of expression, and fashioned it into a language possessing 

 many tine qualities of its own. It has drawn some valuable element* 

 from both the idioms of which it is composed, and may thus be said 

 in certain respects to surpass each of them, especially in the means of 

 discriminating the nicer shades of thought. The highest poetry, elo- 

 quence, and philosophy have found it adequate to their needs. To 

 discuss the question whether the language of Shakespeare and Chatham 

 is superior or inferior to the languages of Cicero and Alfred would 

 be idle. There is no arbiti'ator qualified to decide such a dispute. 

 The question with which we are now concerned is difierent. It is 

 quite clear that the paucity of inflections in the Ei^glish nouns and 

 adjectives is no more an evidence of pi-ogress than their abundance in 

 the German is a proof of mental sluggishness and linguistic stagna- 

 tion. The English Teutons were conquered by a people speaking a 

 different language ; the German Teutons remained indei^endent. The 

 English lost by the conquest many inflections which the Germans 

 i-etained. To maintain that the English speech has reached its present 

 state by a process of analysis is as absui-d as it would be to say that 

 the gardener who trims a shrub for the purpose of converting it into 

 a hedge-plant is analyzing it. The bush was needed for a new pur- 

 pose, and to subserve this purpose it has been forcibly reshaped and 

 made less luxuriant, but more symmetrical, than before. 



The same explanation applies to the Romanic languages, but with a 

 difference. The Normans, when they conquei-ed England, were, like 

 those whom they subdued, a civilized and christianized people. In 

 the mixed speech which arose after the conquest, the influence of the 

 more numerous Saxons prevailed, so far as to secure the adoption of 

 their Teutonic grammar ; but a large mass of vocables was supplied 

 by the language of the conquerors. The heathen and Vjarbarous Gotlis, 

 Vandals, and Franks, after their easy conquest of Roman and Chris- 

 tian Italy, Spain, and Fi'ance, were content to renounce almost 



