Iceland has remained almost the same for seven centuries, whereas on its native soil, and surrounded by local dialects, it has grown into two distinct languages, the Swedish and Danish. In the eleventh century, the languages of Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland are supposed to have been identical, nor can we appeal to foreign conquest, or to the admixture of foreign with native blood, in order to account for the changes which the language underwent in Sweden and Denmark, but not in Iceland.2

We can hardly form an idea of the unbounded resources of dialects. When literary languages have stereotyped one general term, their dialects will supply fifty, though each with its own special shade of meaning. If new combinations of thought are evolved in the progress of society, dialects will readily supply the required names from the store of their so-called superfluous words. There are not only local and provincial, but also class dialects. There is a dialect of shepherds, of sportsmen, of soldiers, of farmers. I suppose there are few persons here present who could tell the exact meaning of a horse's poll, crest, withers, dock, hamstring, cannon, pastern, coronet, arm, jowl, and muzzle. Where the literary language speaks of the young of all sorts of animals, farmers, shepherds, and sportsmen would be ashamed to use so general a term.

"The idiom of nomads," as Grimm says, "contains an abundant wealth of manifold expressions for sword and weapons, and for the different stages in the life of

1 Marsh, Lectures, pp. 133, 368.

2 "There are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of territory (U. S.), than on the comparatively narrow soil of Great Britain." Marsh, p. 667.

their cattle. In a more highly cultivated language these expressions become burthensome and superfluous. But, in a peasant's mouth, the bearing, calving, falling, and killing of almost every animal has its own peculiar term, as the sportsman delights in calling the gait and members of game by different names. The eye of these shepherds, who live in the free air, sees further, their ear hears more sharply, - why should their speech not have gained that living truth and variety?"

Thus Juliana Berners, lady prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell in the fifteenth century, the reputed author of the book of St. Albans, informs us that we must not use names of multitudes promiscuously, but we are to say, "a congregacyon of people, a hoost of men, a felyshyppynge of yomen, and a bevy of ladies; we must speak of a herde of dere, swannys, cranys, or wrenys, a sege of herons or bytourys, a muster of pecockes, a watche of nyghtyngales, a flyghte of doves, a claterynge of choughes, a pryde of lyons, a slewthe of beeres, a gagle of geys, a skulke of foxes, a sculle of frerys, a pontificality of prestys, a bomynable syght of monkes, and a superfluyte of nonnes," and so of other human and brute assemblages. In like manner, in dividing game for the table, the animals were not carved, but "a dere was broken, a gose reryd, chekyn frusshed, a cony unlaced, a crane dysplayed, a curlewe unioynted, a quayle wynggyd, a swanne lyfte, a lambe sholdered, a heron dysmembryd, a pecocke dysfygured, a samon chynyd, a hadoke sydyd, a sole loynyd, and a breme splayed." 1

What, however, I wanted particularly to point out in this lecture is this, that neither of the causes which

1 Marsh, Lectures, pp. 181, 590.

produce the growth, or, according to others, constitute the history of language, is under the control of man. The phonetic decay of language is not the result of mere accident; it is governed by definite laws, as we shall see when we come to consider the principles of comparative grammar. But these laws were not made by man; on the contrary, man had to obey them without knowing of their existence.

In the growth of the modern Romance languages out of Latin, we can perceive not only a general tendency to simplification, not only a natural disposition to avoid the exertion which the pronunciation of certain consonants, and still more, of groups of consonants, entails on the speaker: but we can see distinct laws for each of the Romance dialects, which enable us to say, that in French the Latin patrem would naturally grow into the modern père. The final m is always dropped in the Romance dialects, and it was dropped even in Latin. Thus we get patre instead of patrem. Now, a Latin t between two vowels in such words as pater is invariably suppressed in French. This is a law, and by means of it we can discover at once that catena must become chaine; fata, a later feminine representation of the old neuter fatum, fée; pratum a meadow, pré. From pratum we derive prataria, which in French becomes prairie; from fatum, fataria, the English fairy. Thus every Latin participle in atus, like amatus, loved, must end in French in é. The same law then changed patre (pronounced patere) into paere, or père; it changed matrem into mère, fratrem into frère. These changes take place gradually but irresistibly, and, what is most important, they are completely beyond the reach or control of the free will of man.

Dialectical growth again is still more beyond the control of individuals. For although a poet may knowingly and intentionally invent a new word, its acceptance depends on circumstances which defy individual interference. There are some changes in the grammar which at first sight might seem to be mainly attributable to the caprice of the speaker. Granted, for instance, that the loss of the Latin terminations was the natural result of a more careless pronunciation; granted that the modern sign of the French genitive du is a natural corruption of the Latin de illo, yet the choice of de, instead of any other word, to express the genitive, the choice of illo, instead of any other pronoun, to express the article, might seem to prove that man acted as a free agent in the formation of language. But it is not so. No single individual could deliberately have set to work in order to abolish the old Latin genitive, and to replace it by the periphrastic compound de illo. It was necessary that the inconvenience of having no distinct or distinguishable sign of the genitive should have been felt by the people who spoke a vulgar Latin dialect. It was necessary that the same people should have used the preposition de in such a manner as to lose sight of its original local meaning altogether (for instance, una de multis, in Horace, i. e., one out of many). It was necessary, again, that the same people should have felt the want of an article, and should have used illo in numerous expressions, where it seemed to have lost its original pronominal power. It was necessary that all these conditions should be given, before one individual and after him another, and after him hundreds and thousands and millions, could use

de illo as the exponent of the genitive; and change it into the Italian dello, del, and the French du.

The attempts of single grammarians and purists to improve language are perfectly bootless; and we shall probably hear no more of schemes to prune languages of their irregularities. It is very likely, however, that the gradual disappearance of irregular declensions and conjugations is due, in literary as well as in illiterate languages, to the dialect of children. The language of children is more regular than our own. I have heard children say badder and baddest, instead of worse and worst. Children will say, I gaed, I coomd, I catched; and it is this sense of grammatical justice, this generous feeling of what ought to be, which in the course of centuries has eliminated many so-called irregular forms. Thus the auxiliary verb in Latin was very irregular. If sumus is we are, and sunt, they are, the second person, you are, ought to have been, at least according to the strict logic of children, sutis. This, no doubt, sounds very barbarous to a classical ear accustomed to estis. And we see how French, for instance, has strictly preserved the Latin forms in nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont. But in Spanish we find somos, sois, son; and this sois stands for sutis. We find similar traces of grammatical levelling in the Italian siamo, siete, sono, formed in analogy of regular verbs such as crediamo, credete, credono. The second person, sei, instead of es, is likewise infantine grammar. So are the Wallachian súntemu, we are, súnteti, you are, which owe their origin to the third person plural súnt, they are. And what shall we say of such monsters as essendo, a gerund derived on principles of strict justice from an infinitive essere, like credendo from credere!