18 



ON THE CLASSIFICATION 



body, so it is with the movements of the mind, and conse- 

 quently with language. 



The natural existence, i.e., the life of languages, differs as 

 to its duration, just as some men die early, others when well 

 stricken in years ; but when once dead no artificial preser- 

 vation can restore life and keep it alive, as is the case with 

 Latin, which after its extinction as a popular tongue, 

 became the learned language of Europe. There is a natural 

 repugnance of the living to the dead, and it is perhaps this 

 feeling which unconsciously but instinctively aggravates the 

 difficulties which render a dead language harder to learn than 

 a living one. The remains of a dead language are naturally 

 limited ; we possess, as it were, some bones of its skeleton, 

 represented by the literature which in a more or less 

 preserved or mutilated state has come down to us, but that 

 is all. It is not enough to decide on its position, its extent 

 and development, though it may be enough to show its worth 

 from the mere classification point of view. The actual legacy 

 bequeathed to us from the whole range of the literature of a 

 language is small, as the written language is only repre- 

 sented to a limited extent and the spoken one hardly at all. 

 If one now considers that men do not speak as they write, 

 just as few persons dress when at home with the same care 

 as they would for public view ; that the majority of authors 

 use when writing expressions which they would avoid as too 

 high-flown or pedantic when speaking; that so-called 

 vulgarisms or slang words are shunned, it is evident that 

 scholars, when studying dead languages, are deprived in 

 their researches of very important elements. They are 

 compelled to judge from the scanty evidence before them, 

 and as the material at their disposal is incomplete, the result 

 of their investigations must also be imperfect. Of the 

 multitude of dead languages how few have left even so 

 much, how many have totally disappeared, not even their 

 names remaining ! Only a few we hope to see rescued from 



