CHAPTER XVII

PROGRESS OR DECAY?

§ 1. Linguistic Estimation. § 2. Degeneration? § 3. Appreciation of Modern Tongues. § 4. The Scientific Attitude. § 5. Final Answer. § 6. Sounds. § 7. Shortenings. § 8. Objections. Result. § 9. Verbal Forms. § 10. Synthesis and Analysis. § 11. Verbal Concord.

XVII.--§ 1. Linguistic Estimation.

The common belief of linguists that one form or one expression is just as good as another, provided they are both found in actual use, and that each language is to be considered a perfect vehicle for the thoughts of the nation speaking it, is in some ways the exact counterpart of the conviction of the Manchester school of economics that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only no artificial hindrances are put in the way of free exchange, for demand and supply will regulate everything better than any Government would be able to. Just as economists were blind to the numerous cases in which actual wants, even crying wants, were not satisfied, so also linguists were deaf to those instances which are, however, obvious to whoever has once turned his attention to them, in which the very structure of a language calls forth misunderstandings in everyday conversation, and in which, consequently, a word has to be repeated or modified or expanded or defined in order to call forth the idea intended by the speaker: he took his stick--no, not John’s, but _his own_; or: I mean _you_ in the plural (or, you all, or you girls); no, a _box on the ear_; _un dé à jouer, non pas un dé à coudre_; nein, ich meine _Sie persönlich_ (with very strong stress on _Sie_), etc. Every careful writer in any language has had the experience that on re-reading his manuscript he has discovered that a sentence which he thought perfectly clear when he wrote it lends itself to misunderstanding and has to be put in a different way; sometimes he has to add a clarifying parenthesis, because his language is defective in some respect, as when Edward Carpenter (_Art of Creation_ 171), in speaking of the deification of the Babe, writes: “It is not likely that Man--the human male--left to himself would have done this; but to woman it was natural,” thus avoiding the misunderstanding that he was speaking of the whole species, comprising both sexes. Herbert Spencer writes: “Charles had recently obtained--a post in the Post Office I was about to say, but the cacophony stopped me; and then I was about to say, an office in the Post Office, which is nearly as bad; let me say--a place in the Post Office” (_Autobiogr._ 2. 73--but of course the defect is not really one of sound, as implied by the expression ‘cacophony,’ but one of signification, as both words _post_ and _office_ are ambiguous, and the attempted collocation would therefore puzzle the reader or hearer, because the same word would have to be apprehended in two different senses in close succession). Similar instances might be alleged from any language.

No language is perfect, but if we admit this truth (or truism), we must also admit by implication that it is not unreasonable to investigate the relative value of different languages or of different details in languages. When comparative linguists set themselves against the narrowmindedness of classical scholars who thought Latin and Greek the only worthy objects of study, and emphasized the value of all, even the least literary languages and dialects, they were primarily thinking of their value to the scientist, who finds something of interest in each of them, but they had no idea of comparing the relative value of languages from the point of view of their users--and yet the latter comparison is of much greater importance than the former.

XVII.--§ 2. Degeneration?

People will often use the expressions ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ in connexion with language, but most linguists, when taken to task, will maintain that these expressions as applied to languages should be used without the implication which is commonly attached to them when used of other objects, namely, that there is a progressive tendency towards something better or nearer perfection. They will say that ‘evolution’ means here simply changes going on in languages, without any judgment as to the value of these changes.

But those who do pronounce such a judgment nearly always take the changes as a retrogressive rather than a progressive development: “Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson in the Preface to his Dictionary, and the same lament has been often repeated since his time. This is quite natural: people have always had a tendency to believe in a golden age, that is, in a remote past gloriously different to the miserable present. Why not, then, have the same belief with regard to language, the more so because one cannot fail to notice things in contemporary speech which (superficially at any rate) look like corruptions of the ‘good old’ forms? Everything ‘old’ thus comes to be considered ‘good.’ Lowell and others think they have justified many of the commonly reviled Americanisms if they are able to show them to have existed in England in the sixteenth century, and similar considerations are met with everywhere. The same frame of mind finds support in the usual grammar-school admiration for the two classical languages and their literatures. People were taught to look down upon modern languages as mere dialects or _patois_ and to worship Greek and Latin; the richness and fullness of forms found in those languages came naturally to be considered the very _beau idéal_ of linguistic structure. Bacon gives a classical expression to this view when he declares “ingenia priorum seculorum nostris fuisse multo acutiora et subtiliora” (_De augm. scient._[79]). To men fresh from the ordinary grammar-school training, no language would seem really respectable that had not four or five distinct cases and three genders, or that had less than five tenses and as many moods in its verbs. Accordingly, such poor languages as had either lost much of their original richness in grammatical forms (_e.g._ French, English, or Danish), or had never had any, so far as one knew (_e.g._ Chinese), were naturally looked upon with something of the pity bestowed on relatives in reduced circumstances, or the contempt felt for foreign paupers. It is well known how in West-European languages, in English, German, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, French, etc., obsolete forms were artificially kept alive and preferred to younger forms by most grammarians; but we see exactly the same point of view in such a language as Magyar, where, under the influence of the historical studies of the grammarian Révai, the belief in the excellence of the ‘veneranda antiquitas’ as compared with the corruption of the modern language has been prevalent in schools and in literature. (See Simonyi US 259; cf. on Modern Greek and Telugu above, p. 301.)

Comparative linguists had one more reason for adopting this manner of estimating languages. To what had the great victories won by their science been due? Whence had they got the material for that magnificent edifice which had proved spacious enough to hold Hindus and Persians, Lithuanians and Slavs, Greeks, Romans, Germans and Kelts? Surely it was neither from Modern English nor Modern Danish, but from the oldest stages of each linguistic group. The older a linguistic document was, the more valuable it was to the first generation of comparative linguists. An English form like _had_ was of no great use, but Gothic _habaidedeima_ was easily picked to pieces, and each of its several elements lent itself capitally to comparison with Sanskrit, Lithuanian and Greek. The linguist was chiefly dependent for his material on the old and archaic languages; his interest centred round their fuller forms: what wonder, then, if in his opinion those languages were superior to all others? What wonder if by comparing _had_ and _habaidedeima_ he came to regard the English form as a mutilated and worn-out relic of a splendid original? or if, noting the change from the old to the modern form, he used strong language and spoke of degeneration, corruption, depravation, decline, phonetic decay, etc.?

The view that the modern languages of Europe, Persia and India are far inferior to the old languages, or the one old language, from which they descend, we have already encountered in the historical part of this work, in Bopp, Humboldt, Grimm and their followers. It looms very large in Schleicher, according to whom the history of language is all a Decline and Fall, and in Max Müller, who says that “on the whole, the history of all the Aryan languages is nothing but a gradual process of decay.” Nor is it yet quite extinct.

XVII.--§ 3. Appreciation of Modern Tongues.

Some scholars, however, had an indistinct feeling that this unconditional and wholesale depreciation of modern languages could not contain the whole truth, and I have collected various passages, nearly always of a perfunctory or incidental character, in which these languages are partly rehabilitated. Humboldt (Versch 284) speaks of the modern use of auxiliary verbs and prepositions as a convenience of the intellect which may even in some isolated instances lead to greater definiteness. On Grimm see above, p. 62. Rask (SA 1. 191) says that it is possible that the advantages of simplicity may be greater than those of an elaborate linguistic structure. Madvig turns against the uncritical admiration of the classical languages, but does not go further than saying that the modern analytical languages are just as good as the old synthetic ones, for thoughts can be expressed in both with equal clearness. Kräuter (_Archiv f. neu. spr._ 57. 204) says: “That decay is consistent with clearness and precision is shown by French; that it is not fatal to poetry is seen in the language of Shakespeare.” Osthoff (_Schriftspr. u. Volksmundart_, 1883, 13) protests against a one-sided depreciation of the language of Lessing and Goethe in favour of the language of Wulfila or Otfried, or vice versa: a language possesses an inestimable charm if its phonetic system remains unimpaired and its etymologies are transparent; but pliancy of the material of language and flexibility to express ideas is really no less an advantage; everything depends on the point of view: the student of architecture has one point of view, the people who are to live in the house another.

Among those who thus half-heartedly refused to accept the downhill theory to its full extent must be mentioned Whitney, many passages in whose writings show a certain hesitation to make up his mind on this question. When speaking of the loss of old forms he says that “some of these could well be spared, but others were valuable, and their relinquishment has impaired the power of expression of the language.” To phonetic corruption we owe true grammatical forms, which make the wealth of every inflective language; but it is also destructive of the very edifice which it has helped to build. He speaks of “the legitimate tendency to neglect and eliminate distinctions which are practically unnecessary,” and will not admit “that we can speak our minds any less distinctly than our ancestors could, with all their apparatus of inflexions”; gender is a luxury which any language can well afford to dispense with, but language is impoverished by the obliteration of the subjunctive mood. The giving up of grammatical endings is akin to wastefulness, and the excessive loss in English makes truly for decay (L 31, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, 85; G 51, 105, 104).

XVII.--§ 4. The Scientific Attitude.

Why are all such expressions either of depreciation or of partial appreciation of the modern languages so utterly unsatisfactory? One reason is that they are so vague and dependent on a general feeling of inferiority or the reverse, instead of being based on a detailed comparative estimation of real facts in linguistic structure. If, therefore, we want to arrive at a scientific answer to the question “Decay or progress?” we must examine actual instances of changes, but must take particular care that these instances are not chosen at random, but are typical and characteristic of the total structure of the languages concerned. What is wanted is not a comparison of isolated facts, but the establishment of general laws and tendencies, for only through such can we hope to decide whether or no we are justified in using terms like ‘development’ and ‘evolution’ in linguistic history.

The second reason why the earlier pronouncements quoted above do not satisfy us is that their authors nowhere raise the question of the method by which linguistic value is to be measured, by what standard and what tests the comparative merits of languages or of forms are to be ascertained. Those linguists who looked upon language as a product of nature were by that very fact precluded from establishing a rational basis for determining linguistic values; nor is it possible to find one if we look at things from the one-sided point of view of the linguistic historian. An almost comical instance of this is found when Curtius (_Sprachwiss. u. class. phil._ 39) says that the Greek accusative _póda_ is better than Sanskrit _padam_, because it is possible at once to see that it belongs to the third declension. What is to be taken into account is of course the interests of the speaking community, and if we consistently consider language as a set of human actions with a definite end in view, namely, the communication of thoughts and feelings, then it becomes easy to find tests by which to measure linguistic values, for from that point of view it is evident that THAT LANGUAGE RANKS HIGHEST WHICH GOES FARTHEST IN THE ART OF ACCOMPLISHING MUCH WITH LITTLE MEANS, OR, IN OTHER WORDS, WHICH IS ABLE TO EXPRESS THE GREATEST AMOUNT OF MEANING WITH THE SIMPLEST MECHANISM.

The estimation has to be thoroughly and frankly _anthropocentric_. This may be a defect in other sciences, in which it is a merit on the part of the investigator to be able to abstract himself from human considerations; in linguistics, on the contrary, on account of the very nature of the object of study, one must constantly look to the human interest, and judge everything from that, and from no other, point of view. Otherwise we run the risk of going astray in all directions.

It will be noticed that my formula contains two requirements: it demands a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of effort. Efficiency means expressiveness, and effort means bodily and mental labour, and thus the formula is simply one of modern energetics. But unfortunately we are in possession of no method by which to measure either expressiveness or effort exactly, and in cases of conflict it may be difficult to decide to which of the two sides we are to attach the greater importance, how great a surplus of efficiency is required to counterbalance a surplus of exertion, or inversely. Still, in many cases no doubt can arise, and we are often able to state progress, because there is either a clear gain in efficiency or a diminution of exertion, or both.

There is one objection which is likely to present itself to many of my readers, namely, that natives handle their language without the least exertion or effort (cf. XIV § 6, p. 262). Madvig (1857, 73 ff. = Kl 260 ff.) admits that a simplification in linguistic structure will make the language easier to learn for foreigners, but denies that it means increased ease for the native. Similarly Wechssler (L 149) says that “der begriff der schwierigkeit und unbequemheit für die einheimischen nicht existiert.” I might quote against him his countryman Gabelentz, who expressly says that the difficulties of the German languages are felt by natives, a view that is endorsed by Schuchardt in various places.[80] To my mind there is not the slightest doubt that different languages differ very much in easiness even to native speakers. In the chapters devoted to children we have already seen that the numerous mistakes made by them in every possible way testify to the labour involved in learning one’s own language. This labour must naturally be greater in the case of a highly complicated linguistic structure with many rules and still more exceptions to the rules, than in languages constructed simply and regularly.

Nor is the difficulty of correct speech confined to the first mastering of the language. Even to the native who has spoken the same language from a child, its daily use involves no small amount of exertion. Under ordinary circumstances he is not conscious of any exertion in speaking; but such a want of conscious feeling is no proof that the exertion is absent. And it is a strong argument to the contrary that it is next to impossible for you to speak correctly if you are suffering from excessive mental work; you will constantly make slips in grammar and idiom as well as in pronunciation; you have not the same command of language as under normal conditions. If you have to speak on a difficult and unfamiliar subject, on which you would not like to say anything but what is to the point or strictly justifiable, you will sometimes find that the thoughts themselves claim so much mental energy that there is none left for speaking with elegance, or even with complete regard to grammar: to your own vexation you will have a feeling that your phrases are confused and your language incorrect. A pianist may practise a difficult piece of music so as to have it “at his fingers’ ends”; under ordinary circumstances he will be able to play it quite mechanically, without ever being conscious of effort; but, nevertheless, the effort is there. How great the effort is appears when some day or other the musician is ‘out of humour,’ that is, when his brain is at work on other subjects or is not in its usual working order. At once his execution will be stumbling and faulty.

XVII.--§ 5. Final Answer.

I may here anticipate the results of the following investigation and say that in all those instances in which we are able to examine the history of any language for a sufficient length of time, we find that languages have a progressive tendency. But if languages progress towards greater perfection, it is not in a bee-line, nor are all the changes we witness to be considered steps in the right direction. The only thing I maintain is that _the sum total of these changes, when we compare a remote period with the present time, shows a surplus of progressive over retrogressive or indifferent changes_, so that the structure of modern languages is nearer perfection than that of ancient languages, if we take them as wholes instead of picking out at random some one or other more or less significant detail. And of course it must not be imagined that progress has been achieved through deliberate acts of men conscious that they were improving their mother-tongue. On the contrary, many a step in advance has at first been a slip or even a blunder, and, as in other fields of human activity, good results have only been won after a good deal of bungling and ‘muddling along.’[81] My attitude towards this question is the same as that of Leslie Stephen, who writes in a letter (_Life_ 454): “I have a perhaps unreasonable amount of belief, not in a millennium, but in the world on the whole blundering rather forwards than backwards.”

Schleicher on one occasion used the fine simile: “Our words, as contrasted with Gothic words, are like a statue that has been rolling for a long time in the bed of a river till its beautiful limbs have been worn off, so that now scarcely anything remains but a polished stone cylinder with faint indications of what it once was” (D 34). Let us turn the tables by asking: Suppose, however, that it would be quite out of the question to place the statue on a pedestal to be admired; what if, on the one hand, it was not ornamental enough as a work of art, and if, on the other hand, human well-being was at stake if it was not serviceable in a rolling-mill: which would then be the better--a rugged and unwieldy statue, making difficulties at every rotation, or an even, smooth, easygoing and well-oiled roller?

After these preliminary considerations we may now proceed to a comparative examination of the chief differences between ancient and modern stages of our Western European languages.

XVII.--§ 6. Sounds.

The student who goes through the chapters devoted to sound changes in historical and comparative grammars will have great difficulty in getting at any great lines of development or general tendencies: everything seems just haphazard and fortuitous; a long _i_ is here shortened and there diphthongized or lowered into _e_, etc. The history of sounds is dependent on surroundings in many, though not in all circumstances, but surroundings do not always act in the same way; in short, there seem to be so many conflicting tendencies that no universal or even general rules can be evolved from all these ‘sound laws.’ Still less would it seem possible to state anything about the comparative value of the forms before and after the change, for it does not seem to matter a bit for the speaking community whether it says _stān_ as in Old English or _stone_ as now, and thus in innumerable cases. Nay, from one point of view it may seem that any change militates against the object of language (cf. Wechssler L 28), but this is true only of the very moment when the change sets in while people are accustomed to the old sound (or the old signification), and even then the change is only injurious provided it impedes understanding or renders understanding less easy, which is far from always being the case.

There is one scholar who has asserted the existence of a universal progressive tendency in languages, or, as he calls it, a humanization of language, namely Baudouin de Courtenay (_Vermenschlichung der Sprache_, 1893). He is chiefly thinking of the sound system,[82] and he maintains that there is a tendency towards eliminating the innermost articulations and using instead sounds that are formed nearer to the teeth and lips. Thus some back (postpalatal, velar) consonants become _p_, _b_, while others develop into _s_ sounds; cf. Slav _slovo_ ‘word’ with Lat. _cluo_, etc. Baudouin also mentions the frequent palatalization of back consonants, as in French and Italian _ce_, _ci_, _ge_, _gi_, but as this is due to the influence of the following front vowel, it should not perhaps be mentioned as a universal tendency of human language. It is further said that throat sounds, which play such a great rôle in Semitic languages, have been discarded in most modern languages. But it may be objected that sometimes throat sounds do develop in modern periods, as in the Danish ‘stød’ and in English dialectal _bu’er_ for _butter_, etc. A universal tendency of sounds to move away from the throat cannot be said to be firmly established; but for our purpose it is more important to say that even were it true, the value of such a tendency for the speaking community would not be great enough to justify us in speaking of progress towards a truly ‘human’ language as opposed to the more beastlike language of our primeval ancestors. It is true that Baudouin (p. 25) says that it is possible to articulate in the front and upper part with less effort and with greater precision than in the interior and lower parts of the speaking apparatus, but if this is true with regard to the mouth proper, it cannot be maintained with regard to the vocal chords, where very important effects may be produced in the most precise way by infinitely little exertion. Thus in no single point can I see that Baudouin de Courtenay has made out a strong case for _his_ conception of ‘humanization of language.’

XVII.--§ 7. Shortenings.

But there is another phonetic tendency which is much more universal and infinitely more valuable than the one asserted by Baudouin de Courtenay, namely, the tendency to shorten words. Words get shorter and shorter in consequence of a great many of those changes that we see constantly going on in all languages: vowels in weak syllables are pronounced more and more indistinctly and finally disappear altogether, as when OE. _lufu_, _stānas_, _sende_, through ME. _luve_, _stanes_, _sende_ with pronounced _e_’s, have become our modern monosyllables _love_, _stones_, _send_, or when Latin _bonum_, _homo_, _viginti_ have become Fr. _bon_, _on_, _vingt_, and Lat. _bona_, _hominem_, Fr. _bonne_, _homme_, where the vowel was kept, because it was _a_ or protected by the consonant group, but has now also disappeared in normal pronunciation. Final vowels have been dropped extensively in Danish and German dialects, and so have the _u_’s and _i_’s in Russian, which are now kept in the spelling merely as signs of the quality of the preceding consonant. It would be easy to multiply instances. Nor are the consonants more stable; the dropping of final ones is seen most easily in Modern French, because they are retained in spelling, as in _tout_, _vers_, _champ_, _chant_, etc. In the two last examples two consonants have disappeared, the _m_ and _n_, however, leaving a trace in the nasalized pronunciation of the vowel, as also in _bon_, _nom_, etc. Final _r_ and _l_ often disappear in Fr. words like _quatre_, _simple_, and medial consonants have been dropped in such cases as _côte_ from _coste_, _bête_ from _beste_, _sauf_ [so·f] from _salvo_, etc. We have corresponding omissions in English, where in very old times _n_ was dropped in such cases as _us_, _five_, _other_, while the German forms _uns_, _fünf_, _ander_ have kept the old consonants; in more recent times _l_ was dropped in _half_, _calm_, etc., _gh_ [x] in _light_, _bought_, etc., and _r_ in the prevalent pronunciation of _warm_, _part_, etc. Initial consonants are more firmly fixed in many languages, yet we see them lost in the E. combinations _kn_, _gn_, _wr_, where _k_, _g_, _w_ used to be sounded, e.g. in _know_, _gnaw_, _wrong_. Consonant assimilation means in most cases the same thing as dropping of one consonant, for no trace of the consonant is left, at any rate after the compensating lengthening has been given up, as is often the case, e.g. in E. _cupboard_, _blackguard_ [kʌbəd, blæga·d].

So far we have given instances of what might be called the most regular or constant types of phonetic change leading to shorter forms; but the same result is the natural outcome of a process which occurs more sporadically. This is haplology, by which one sound or one group of sounds is pronounced once only instead of twice, the hearer taking it through a kind of acoustic delusion as belonging both to what precedes and to what follows. Examples are _a goo(d) deal_, _wha(t) to do_, _nex(t) time_, _simp(le)ly_, _England_ from _Englaland_, _eighteen_ from OE. _eahtatiene_, _honesty_ from _honestete_, _Glou(ce)ster_, _Worcester_ [wustə], familiarly _pro(ba)bly_, vulgarly _lib(ra)ry_, _Febr(uar)y_. From other languages may be quoted Fr. _cont(re)rôle_, _ido(lo)lâtre_, _Neu(ve)ville_, Lat. _nu(tri)trix_, _sti(pi)pendium_, It. _qual(che)cosa_, _cosa_ for _che cosa_, etc. (Cf. my LPh 11. 9.)

The accumulation through centuries of such influences results in those instances of seemingly violent contractions with which every student of historical linguistics is familiar. One classical example has already been mentioned above, E. _had_, corresponding to Gothic _habaidedeima_; other examples are _lord_, with its three or four sounds, which was formerly _laverd_, and in Old English _hlāford_; the old Gothonic form of the same word contained indubitably as many as twelve sounds; Latin _augustum_ has in French through _aoust_ become _août_, pronounced [au] or even [u]; Latin _oculum_ has shrunk into four sounds in Italian _occhio_, three in Spanish _ojo_, and two in Fr. _œil_; It. _medesimo_, Sp. _mismo_ and Fr. _même_ represent various stages of the shrinking of Lat. _metipsimum_; cf. also Fr. _ménage_ from _mansion-_ + _-aticum_. Primitive Norse _ne veit ek hvat_ ‘not know I what’ has become Dan. _noget_ ‘something,’ often pronounced [no·ð] or [nɔ·ð].

In all these cases the shortening process has taken centuries, but we have other instances in which it has come about quite suddenly, without any intermediate stages, namely, in those stump-words which we have already considered (Ch. IX § 7; cf. XIV § 12 on corresponding syntactical shortenings).

XVII.--§ 8. Objections. Result.

There cannot therefore be the slightest doubt that the general tendency of all languages is towards shorter and shorter forms: the ancient languages of our family, Sanskrit, Zend, etc., abound in very long words; the further back we go, the greater the number of _sesquipedalia_. It cannot justly be objected that we see sometimes examples of phonetic lengthenings, as in E. _sound_ from ME. _soun_, Fr. _son_, E. _whilst_, _amongst_ from ME. _whiles_, _amonges_; a similar excrescence of _t_ after _s_ is seen in G. _obst_, _pabst_, Swed. _eljest_ and others; after _n_, _t_ is added in G. _jemand_, _niemand_ (two syllables, while there is nothing added to the trisyllabic _jedermann_)--for even if such instances might be multiplied, their number and importance is infinitely smaller than those in the opposite direction. (On the seeming insertion of _d_ in _ndr_, see p. 264, note). In some cases we witness a certain reaction against word forms that are felt to be too short and therefore too indistinct (see Ch. XV § 1, XX § 9), but on the whole such instances are few and far between: the prevailing tendency is towards shorter forms.

Another objection must be dealt with here. It is said that it is only the purely phonetic development that tends to make words shorter, but that in languages as wholes words do not become shorter, because non-phonetic forces counteract the tendency. In modern languages we thus have some analogical formations which are longer than the forms they have supplanted, as when _books_ has one sound more than OE. _bēc_, or when G. _bewegte_ takes the place of _bewog_. Further, we have in modern languages many auxiliary words (prepositions, modal verbs) in places where they were formerly not required. That this objection is not valid if we take the whole of the language into consideration may perhaps be proved statistically if we compute the length of the same long text in various languages: the Gospel of St. Matthew contains in Greek about 39,000 syllables, in Swedish about 35,000, in German 33,000, in Danish 32,500, in English 29,000, and in Chinese only 17,000 (the figures for the Authorized English Version and for Danish are my own calculation; the other figures I take from Tegnér SM 51, Hoops in _Anglia_, _Beiblatt_ 1896, 293, and Sturtevant LCh 175). In comparing these figures it should even be taken into consideration that translations naturally tend to be more long-winded and verbose than the original, so that the real gain in shortness may be greater than indicated.[83]

Next, we come to consider the question whether the tendency towards shorter forms is a valuable asset in the development of languages or the reverse. The answer cannot be doubtful. Take the old example, English _had_ and Gothic _habaidedeima_: the English form is preferable, on the principle that anyone who has to choose between walking one mile and four miles will, other things being equal, prefer the shorter cut. It is true that if we take words to be self-existing natural objects, _habaidedeima_ has the air of a giant and _had_ of a mere pigmy: this valuation lies at the bottom of many utterances even by recent linguistic thinkers, as when Sweet (H 10) speaks of the vanishing of sounds as “a purely destructive change.” But if we adopt the anthropocentric standard which has been explained above, and realize that what we call a word is really and primarily the combined action of human muscles to produce an audible effect, we see that the shortening of a form means a diminution of effort and a saving of time in the communication of our thoughts. If, as it is said, _had_ has suffered from wear and tear in the long course of time, this means that the wear and tear of people now using this form in their speech is less than if they were still encumbered with the old giant _habaidedeima_. Voltaire was certainly very wide of the mark when he wrote: “C’est le propre des barbares d’abréger les mots”--long and clumsy words are rather to be considered as signs of barbarism, and short and nimble ones as signs of advanced culture.

Though I thus hold that the development towards shorter forms of expression is _on the whole_ progressive, i.e. beneficial, I should not like to be too dogmatic on this point and assert that it is _always_ beneficial: shortness may be carried to excess and thus cause obscurity or difficulty of understanding. This may be seen in the telegraphic style as well as in the literary style of some writers too anxious to avoid prolixity (some of Pope’s lines might be quoted in illustration of the classical: brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio). But in the case of the language of a whole community the danger certainly is very small indeed, for there will always be a natural and wholesome reaction against such excessive shortness. There is another misunderstanding I want to guard against when saying that the shortening makes on the whole for progress. It must not be thought that I lay undue stress on this point, which is after all chiefly concerned with a greater or smaller amount of physical or muscular exertion: this should neither be underrated nor overrated; but it will be seen that neither in my former work nor in this does the consideration of this point of mere shortness or length take up more than a fraction of the space allotted to the more psychical sides of the question, to which we shall now turn our attention and to which I attach much more importance.

XVII.--§ 9. Verbal Forms.

We may here recur to Schleicher’s example, E. _had_ and Gothic _habaidedeima_. It is not only in regard to economy of muscular exertion that the former carries the day over the latter. _Had_ corresponds not only to _habaidedeima_, but it unites in one short form everything expressed by the Gothic _habaida_, _habaides_, _habaidedu_, _habaideduts_, _habaidedum_, _habaideduþ_, _habaidedun_, _habaidedjau_, _habaidedeis_, _habaidedi_, _habaidedeiwa_, _habaidedeits_, _habaidedeima_, _habaidedeiþ_, _habaidedeina_--separate forms for two or three persons in three numbers in two distinct moods! It is clear, therefore, that the English form saves a considerable amount of brainwork to all English-speaking people--not only to children, who have fewer forms to learn, but also to adults, who have fewer forms to choose between and to keep distinct whenever they open their mouths to speak. Someone might, perhaps, say that on the other hand English people are obliged always to join personal pronouns to their verbal forms to indicate the person, and that this is a drawback counterbalancing the advantage, so that the net result is six of one and half a dozen of the other. This, however, would be a very superficial objection. For, in the first place, the personal pronouns are the same for all tenses and moods, but the endings are not. Secondly, the possession of endings does not exempt the Goths from having separate personal pronouns; and whenever these are used, as is very often the case in the first and second persons, those parts of the verbal endings which indicate persons are superfluous. They are no less superfluous in those extremely numerous cases in which the subject is either separately expressed by a noun or is understood from the preceding proposition, thus in the vast majority of the cases of the third person. If we compare a few pages of Old English prose with a modern rendering we shall see that in spite of the reduction in the latter of the person-indicating endings, personal pronouns are not required in any great number of sentences in which they were dispensed with in Old English. So that, altogether, the numerous endings of the older languages must be considered uneconomical.

If Gothic, Latin and Greek, etc., burden the memory by the number of their flexional endings, they do so even more by the many irregularities in the formation of these endings. In all the languages of this type, anomaly and flexion invariably go together. The intricacies of verbal flexion in Latin and Greek are well known, and it requires no small amount of mental energy to master the various modes of forming the present stems in Sanskrit--to take only one instance. Many of these irregularities disappear in course of time, chiefly, but not exclusively, through analogical formations, and though it is true that a certain number of new irregularities may come into existence, their number is relatively small when compared with those that have been removed. Now, it is not only the forms themselves that are irregular in the early languages, but also their uses: logical simplicity prevails much more in Modern English syntax than in either Old English or Latin or Greek. But it is hardly necessary to point out that growing regularity in a language means a considerable gain to all those who learn it or speak it.

It has been said, however, by one of the foremost authorities on the history of English, that “in spite of the many changes which this system [i.e. the complicated system of strong verbs] has undergone in detail, it remains just as intricate as it was in Old English” (Bradley, _The Making of English_ 51). It is true that the way in which vowel change is utilized to form tenses is rather complicated in Modern English (_drink_ _drank_, _give_ _gave_, _hold_ _held_, etc.), but otherwise an enormous simplification has taken place. The personal endings have been discarded with the exception of _-s_ in the third person singular of the present (and the obsolete ending _-est_ in the second person, and then this has been regularized, _thou sangest_ having taken the place of _þu sunge_); the change of vowel in _ic sang_, _þu sunge_, _we sungon_ in the indicative and _ic sunge_, _we sungen_ in the subjunctive has been given up, and so has the accompanying change of consonant in many cases. Thus, instead of the following forms, _cēosan_, _cēose_, _cēoseþ_, _cēosaþ_, _cēosen_, _cēas_, _curon_, _cure_, _curen_, _coren_, we have the following modern ones, which are both fewer in number and less irregular: _choose_, _chooses_, _chose_, _chosen_--certainly an advance from a more to a less intricate system (cf. GS § 178).

An extreme, but by no means unique example of the simplification found in modern languages is the English _cut_, which can serve both as present and past tense, both as singular and plural, both in the first, second and third persons, both in the infinitive, in the imperative, in the indicative, in the subjunctive, and as a past (or passive) participle; compare with this the old languages with their separate forms for different tenses, moods, numbers and persons; and remember, moreover, that the identical form, without any inconvenience being occasioned, is also used as a noun (_a cut_), and you will admire the economy of the living tongue. A characteristic feature of the structure of languages in their early stages is that each form contains in itself several minor modifications which are often in the later stages expressed separately by means of auxiliary words. Such a word as Latin _cantavisset_ unites into one inseparable whole the equivalents of six ideas: (1) ‘sing,’ (2) pluperfect, (3) that indefinite modification of the verbal idea which we term subjunctive, (4) active, (5) third person, and (6) singular.

XVII.--§ 10. Synthesis and Analysis.

Such a form, therefore, is much more concrete than the forms found in modern languages, of which sometimes two or more have to be combined to express the composite notion which was rendered formerly by one. Now, it is one of the consequences of this change that it has become easier to express certain minute, but by no means unimportant, shades of thought by laying extra stress on some particular element in the speech-group. Latin _cantaveram_ amalgamates into one indissoluble whole what in E. _I had sung_ is analysed into three components, so that you can at will accentuate the personal element, the time element or the action. Now, it is possible (who can affirm and who can deny it?) that the Romans could, if necessary, make some difference in speech between _cántaveram_ (non saltaveram) ‘I had _sung_,’ and _cantaverám_ (non cantabam), ‘I _had_ sung’; but even then, if it was the personal element which was to be emphasized, an _ego_ had to be added. Even the possibility of laying stress on the temporal element broke down in forms like _scripsi_, _minui_, _sum_, _audiam_, and innumerable others. It seems obvious that the freedom of Latin in this respect must have been inferior to that of English. Moreover, in English, the three elements, ‘I,’ ‘had,’ and ‘sung,’ can in certain cases be arranged in a different order, and other words can be inserted between them in order to modify and qualify the meaning of the sentence. Note also the conciseness of such answers as “Who had sung?” “I had.” “What had you done?” “Sung.” “I believe he has enjoyed himself.” “I know he has.” And contrast the Latin “Cantaveram et saltaveram et luseram et riseram” with the English “I had sung and danced and played and laughed.” What would be the Latin equivalent of “Tom never _did_ and never _will_ beat me”?

In such cases, analysis means suppleness, and synthesis means rigidity; in analytic languages you have the power of kaleidoscopically arranging and rearranging the elements that in synthetic forms like _cantaveram_ are in rigid connexion and lead a Siamese-twin sort of existence. The synthetic forms of Latin verbs remind one of those languages all over the world (North America, South America, Hottentot, etc.) in which such ideas as ‘father’ or ‘mother’ or ‘head’ or ‘eye’ cannot be expressed separately, but only in connexion with an indication of _whose_ father, etc., one is speaking about: in one language the verbal idea (in the finite moods), in the other the nominal idea, is necessarily fused with the personal idea.

XVII.--§ 11. Verbal Concord.

This formal inseparability of subordinate elements is at the root of those rules of concord which play such a large rôle in the older languages of our Aryan family, but which tend to disappear in the more recent stages. By concord we mean the fact that a secondary word (adjective or verb) is made to agree with the primary word (substantive or subject) to which it belongs. Verbal concord, by which a verb is governed in number and person by the subject, has disappeared from spoken Danish, where, for instance, the present tense of the verb meaning ‘to travel’ is uniformly _rejser_ in all persons of both numbers; while the written language till towards the end of the nineteenth century kept up artificially the plural _rejse_, although it had been dead in the spoken language for some three hundred years. The old flexion is an article of luxury, as a modification of the idea belonging properly to the subject is here transferred to the predicate, where it has no business; for when we say ‘mændene rejse’ (die männer reisen), we do not mean to imply that they undertake several journeys (cf. Madvig Kl 28, _Nord. tsk. f. filol._, n.r. 8. 134).

By getting rid of this superfluity, Danish has got the start of the more archaic of its Aryan sister-tongues. Even English, which has in most respects gone farthest in simplifying its flexional system, lags here behind Danish, in that in the present tense of most verbs the third person singular deviates from the other persons by ending in _-s_, and the verb _be_ preserves some other traces of the old concord system, not to speak of the form in _-st_ used with _thou_ in the language of religion and poetry. Small and unimportant as these survivals may seem, still they are in some instances impediments to the free and easy expression of thought. In Danish, for instance, there is not the slightest difficulty in saying ‘enten du eller jeg har uret,’ as _har_ is used both in the first and second persons singular and plural. But when an Englishman tries to render the same simple sentiment he is baffled; ‘either you or I _are_ wrong’ is felt to be incorrect, and so is ‘either you or I _am_ wrong’; he might say ‘either you are wrong, or I,’ but then this manner of putting it, if grammatically admissible (with or without the addition of _am_), is somewhat stiff and awkward; and there is no perfectly natural way out of the difficulty, for Dean Alford’s proposal to say ‘either you or I _is_ wrong’ (_The Queen’s Engl._ 155) is not to be recommended. The advantage of having verbal forms that are no respecters of persons is seen directly in such perfectly natural expressions as ‘either you or I must be wrong,’ or ‘either you or I may be wrong,’ or ‘either you or I began it’--and indirectly from the more or less artificial rules of Latin and Greek grammars on this point; in the following passages the Gordian knot is cut in different ways:

Shakespeare _LLL_ V. 2. 346 Nor God, nor I, _delights_ in perjur’d men | id. _As_ I. 3. 99 Thou and I _am_ one | Tennyson _Poet. W._ 369 For whatsoever knight against us came Or I or he _have_ easily overthrown | Galsworthy _D_ 30 _Am_ I and all women really what they think us? | Shakespeare _H4B_ IV. 2. 121 Heauen, and not wee, _haue_ safely fought to day (Folio, where the Quarto has: God, and not wee, _hath_....)

The same difficulty often appears in relative clauses; Alford (l.c. 152) calls attention to the fact of the Prayer Book reading “Thou art the God that _doeth_ wonders,” whereas the Bible version runs “Thou art the God that _doest_ wonders.” Compare also:

Shakespeare _As_ III. 5. 55 ’Tis not her glasse, but you that _flatters_ her | id. _Meas._ II. 2. 80 It is the law, not I, _condemne_ your brother | Carlyle _Fr. Rev._ 38, There is none but you and I that _has_ the people’s interest at heart (translated from: Il n’y a que vous et moi qui _aimions_ le peuple).

In all such cases the construction in Danish is as easy and natural as it generally is in the English preterit: “It was not her glass, but you that flattered her.” The disadvantage of having verbal forms which enforce the indication of person and number is perhaps seen most strikingly in a French sentence like this from Romain Rolland’s _Jean Christophe_ (7. 221): “Ce mot, naturellement, ce n’est ni toi, ni moi, qui _pouvons_ le dire”--the verb agrees with that which _cannot_ be the subject (we)! For what is meant is really: ‘celui qui peut le dire, ce n’est ni moi ni toi.’

FOOTNOTES:

[79] Quoted here from John Wilkins, _An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language_, 1668, p. 448: Wilkins there subjects Bacon’s saying to a crushing criticism, laying bare a great many radical deficiencies in Latin to bring out the logical advantages of his own artificial ‘philosophical’ language.

[80] Cf. also what Paul says (P 144) about one point in German grammar (strong and weak forms of adjectives): “But the difficulty of the correct maintenance of the distinction is shown in numerous offences made by writers against the rules of grammar”--of course, not only by writers, but by ordinary speakers as well.

[81] It has often been pointed out how Great Britain has ‘blundered’ into creating her world-wide Empire, and Gretton, in _The King’s Government_ (1914), applies the same view to the development of governmental institutions.

[82] In the realm of significations he sees the ‘humanization’ of language exclusively in the development of abstract terms. An important point of disagreement between Baudouin and myself is in regard to morphology, where he sees only ‘oscillations’ in historical times, in which he is unable to discover a continuous movement in any definite direction, while I maintain that languages here manifest a definite progressive tendency.

[83] On the other hand, it is not, perhaps, fair to count the number of _syllables_, as these may vary very considerably, and some languages favour syllables with heavy consonant groups unknown in other tongues. The most rational measure of length would be to count the numbers of distinct (not sounds, but) articulations of separate speech organs--but that task is at any rate beyond _my_ powers.