Linguistic Discussions, 



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and Michiels to McKeel. Cornelis, another Dutch name, has taken 

 the form of Cornell. But this name Cornell was also sometimes 

 written in the seventeenth century Cornhill as if of English extraction. 

 Kirkpatrick originally was a Scotch name. When some of the mem- 

 bers of the family emigrated to Ireland their name shaded oif into 

 Kilpatrick and Gilpatrick. Members of the same family emigrating to 

 America suffered the name to undergo still further changes, by drop- 

 ping either the first or last portion of the name. So that we have 

 here Kirkes, Patricks, Kirkpatricks, Kilpatricks and Gilpatricks, all 

 claiming descent from the same Scottish ancestor. 



The truth is, the language is never stationary. Like those who use 

 it, it is in a state of progress. In the time of Chaucer and before him 

 what is now the silent e at the end of such words as home and name 

 was pronounced as a second syllable. During the lifetime of this poet 

 it began to be dropped in common speech, thus making one less syl- 

 lable wherever it occurred. Life was too short to tolerate useless 

 excrescences and they were lopped off. Thus have we shorn off one 

 after another the inflectional termination of nouns and adjectives and 

 verbs and find the simple root form answers all our necessities, with 

 the aid of prepositions for the nouns and auxiliaries for the verbs. In 

 the eliminiation of the useless we have far outstripped the French and 

 the German — taking these two as representatives of the Latin and Teu- 

 tonic languages of modern times. For illustrating the absurdities of 

 the law of gender in the German language see the story of the fish- 

 woman in that English classic, "A Tramp Abroad," by Mark Twain. 

 Their declensions of nouns and adjectives are also so peculiar, that 

 scarcely any two writers of a German grammar ever agree upon a 

 common system and a common nomenclature. 



The same criticism applies to the application of gender to inanimate 

 objects in the French language, but the case terminations of the Latin 

 parent tongue have been worn away in the French by the attrition of 

 ages. In that respect it resembles the English of the present. There 

 is no language used by the civilized world so point blank as the En- 

 glish ; none in which an idea may be as easily and fully formulated, 

 without circumlocution or redundancy. And to-day by the use 

 of the English language one can convey a message of a given number 

 of ideas in fewer words than by any of the modern languages of 

 Europe. It is like a strong man stripped to run a race. It is equal to 

 any in precision and flexibility, and there is a future for it far exceed- 

 ing anything of the past. 



