354 EMERITUS PROFESSOR J. S. BLACKIE ON 



of view, place it on a lower platform than such self-developed languages as 

 Greek and German. For (1) by the violent disturbance of its growth at an early 

 period of its development, its power of compounding simple words and using its 

 own roots has been so maimed and curtailed, that it is constantly obliged to borrow 

 from all sources, in a fashion often clumsy and inelegant, and without that com- 

 plete assimilation which is necessary to enable borrowed forms to satisfy the 

 demands of a cultivated linguistic taste. (2) The linguistic instinct of the people 

 acts so weakly that any irregularity creeps easily into it, and a subjection to the 

 whims of fashion, that mar its aesthetic effect, and render it very difficult for a 

 stranger to follow its vagaries. This remark applies particularly to the pronun- 

 ciation and accentuation of our tongue. (3) What is worst of all, the immense 

 mass of borrowed materials, taken and constantly being taken into our language 

 from foreign sources, distinct both in space and time from our colloquial cur- 

 rency, issues in the creation of a stratum of language, running parallel to the 

 vulgar English, which only scholars and persons of large foreign culture can 

 readily understand ; thus planting a prickly fence between the learned and the 

 unlearned, in the highest degree unfavourable to the diffusion of scientific 

 knowledge. It is an evil similar in kind, though less in degree, to that under 

 which the whole of Europe suffered before the appearance of Dante in Italy, 

 Shakespeare in England, and Lessing in Germany, viz., that, while social inter- 

 course was carried on in the language of the country, knowledge of every kind 

 was acquired and accumulated and stored in the language of the ancient Romans. 

 XVI. But the phenomena caused by the violent invasion of one language 

 by another are not exhausted either by the complete extinction of the invaded 

 language on the one hand, or by its hybrid mixture with the invading language 

 on the other. It is possible, on the one side, that the language of the invaders, 

 though maintaining its acquired dominion, and remaining in all its constituent 

 elements substantially the same, may, through tlie combined effects of time, 

 change of atmosphere, and action of new circumstances, undergo such extensive 

 modifications as to become, not a new language indeed to the eye of the philologer, 

 but an old language with a new face ; and, on the other side, it is equally possible 

 that the language of the invaded country, partly from its own inherited strength, 

 partly from the intellectual weakness of the invader, may maintain its ground 

 firmly, and yet, as in the previous case, from the influence of time and action of 

 new social forces, become practically to the vulgar eye a new language, while 

 to the scientific eye it is only a modification of the old. Of these two classes of 

 what we may call, not mixed but metamorphic languages, the Romanesque 

 languages — French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian — form familiar examples. 

 To understand their formation we must bear in mind that, as all things in the 

 world, specially all living things, in Heraclitus' phrase, pei irdvTa, are in a 

 constant flux, so specially language, from being a very fluid material, and easily 



