ON ETHNOLOGY. 
277 
The Hebrew began to become unintelligible to the Jews after the Babylo¬ 
nian Captivity, the Latin to the Italians after the settlement of the Germanic 
tribes; the Gothic itself became extinct by the destruction of their empires 
and their mixture with other tribes and nations; and the old Frank language 
caonot be considered as iU direct continuation: but the language of Otfried, 
a thousand years ago, alphabetically fixed and possessing u literature like our 
own, has become unintelligible for the last five centuriw to tlie tlirect descend¬ 
ants of the Carlovingian race, withuut any intervening great catastrophe of the 
nation, or any violent and lasting intrusion of foreign eletnents. The epochs 
of the language are indeed marked by great events, political and national. 
The present German language has been fixed, after a very unsettled state, 
by Luther’s translaliou of the Bible, by the uuiiiU-rrupted series of German 
hymns since the Uefonnation, by the course of regular preaching, reading 
and instructing in that same dialect, and finally by the modern literature of 
Germany'. 
seem therefore to be authorized to draw from the phenomena, observed 
as well in the Romanic as in the Germanic languages, the following con¬ 
clusions 
1. Language changes by the very action of the national mind upon it; 
involving a processor filing down of roots, forms and inflexions, and producing 
new derivative or compound words. There takes place through this same 
agency an unceasing advance of words and expressions from substantiality 
(or materialism) to formalism, or from the natural to tlie metaphorical, from 
the physical to the intellectual, from the concrete to the abstract. 
2. An alphabet and literature fix a tongue as it were by a process of instan¬ 
taneous crystallization of the floating elements of the national consciousness 
of language; but they do not prevent the change of the sjioken dialect. Lan¬ 
guages, artificially preserved in a fixed state (e.g. by religious institutions), 
become obsolete and dead: so the Hebrew, the Zend, the Sanscrit, the old 
Egyptian and Abyssinian. A new popular language U created gradually 
by ail under current, and national events make it a written and national 
language. 
S. The formation of a new language always presupposes the decay of 
another. Such new formations must be both hastened and greatly influenced 
by the violent intrusion of a foreign eJement. This clement cannot substi¬ 
tute a new grammar, unless it abolishes the language (as the Anglo-Saxon 
did the Kymric); but it can produce a/wu’crf Inngmge, the grammai’of which 
isof the native, the words, for the most part, of the foreign stem. The change 
in the natural course b an organic development, the broken and mixed idiom 
shows a less organic structure. The natural feeling and understanding of 
words, as significative, liecomcs as it were dimmer, because the roots often 
disappear, whereas dcrivstions remain, and foreign words are introduced, 
having none but a conventional signification. On the other hand, whenever 
the organic movement of the language has been interrupted by an extraneous 
dement and great national catastrophes, the native elements in the mixed 
language will often keep the ancient form, whereas the native stock, left to 
its own natural development, will use up and loose it. 
Of this phenomenon the Gcriaauic languages offer a most remarkable in¬ 
stance ill the origin and development of the English tongue. By the Con¬ 
quest, the language of the Anglo-Saxon peoidc was driven from the palace, 
the legislation and the tribunals: gradually however the conquering Norman 
minority adopted the language of the country : the Normans could not over¬ 
throw the Saxon foundation of England's idiom, a» the Saxons bad done that 
of the Celto-British. Out of the struggle of the two idioms arose a fliixed 
