THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. 355 



yielding to slight and accidental influences, when it has once acquired a fixed and 

 what may be called a classical type, can preserve this type only so long as the con- 

 tinuity of political and intellectual forces to which it and the type belong is not 

 broken. The moment this continuity is broken, which acts as a restraining and 

 conservative authority, the loose elements of which every language is composed 

 are set adrift, so to speak, and left to be affected in every possible way by incal- 

 culable and often capricious forces, of which action, continued through genera- 

 tions, a metamorphic type of the original tongue must necessarily be the out- 

 come. The changes thus produced on the old classical type of the language 

 may be classed partly under the head of what Max MOller calls phonetic 

 decay; that is, a smoothing and rubbing down of the language, by a process 

 similar to attrition in the mineralogical world — a process which is always in one 

 sense a corruption, and which often arises from no nobler cause than the 

 laziness or carelessness of the speaker, but which, in the result, according to the 

 degree of its action and the character of the materials acted on, may either be an 

 emasculated enfeeblement or a musical improvement of the original tongue. But 

 these changes are not all processes of decay; along with the decay a process 

 of reconstruction is largely going on, in which the most active element is the 

 coming to the surface and emphatic self-assertion of certain original vital and 

 plastic forces in the popular tongue, which had been over-ridden and suppressed 

 so long as authority and fashion maintained the cultivated type of the language 

 in a position of acknowledged superiority. Add to these elements a very 

 slight sprinkling of strange elements in the metamorphic tongue — such as of 

 Arabic in Spanish, of Teutonic in French and Italian — and we have dis- 

 tinctly before us the conditions under which all metamorphic languages of 

 the two classes represented by French and Italian assume their new type. Both 

 languages are substantially Latin ; but in the one the invading element became 

 subject to the metamorphic action from the downfall of the Roman Empire, and 

 the loss of all linguistic guidance thereon consequent ; while in the latter 

 the language of the invaded survived in a metamorphic shape, partly from the 

 partial and irregular action of the invading powers, but principally from 

 the ecclesiastical and intellectual supremacy which, under the most unfavourable 

 circumstances, the invaded language did not fail to assert. It need scarcely be 

 remarked also that, in proportion as the native Latin form of the language 

 acted with more potency and with less disturbance on its native Italian ground 

 than when transferred to Celtic France, in the same proportion, Italian would be 

 a less corrupted, a more masculine, and a more majestic form of the old Roman 

 tongue than that which is now wielded so dexterously by the brilliant wits and 

 clever writers of the old insula Parisiorum. 



XVII. Under this section, which has led me to talk of phonetic decay, I may 

 put a question which has often occurred to me, but to which I felt I had no 



