Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/242

 806 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. the German must be left to the great philologists of that nation. But) generally speaking, it would seem, as if the progress of language, in a more advanced state of civilization, had a ten- dency towards lessening inflections and rendering it more ana- I) tical.* The introduction of the alphabet in Russia and her conver- sion to Christianity belong to the tenth century; and we have translations of the Bible and of various church books, written in the ancient Slavonic, almost immediately after those events took place. They are therefore the true representation of that which till then had been only an oral language. There again we find inflections, less numerous perhaps in the verbs, but more so in the cases of nouns, of which there are seven. These various facts, combined, sustain the opinion, that the grammatical forms, found in polished languages, had their origin at a very remote epoch, and that, having impressed a distinct character upon each, they have not been materially changed by the introduction of writing and by the progress of knowledge. Although the early formation of languages must ever remain a subject of conjecture, we may yet say, that there is nothing inconsistent in that opinion with the manner in which we may rationally suppose that they were formed. After names had been given to visible objects and to most common actions, the foundation being laid in nouns and verbs, the necessity, for an intelligible communication of ideas, of expressing the relations existing between things and actions and the modifications to which they were subject, must have given rise to some expe- dient for that purpose. Since there were several means for effecting the object, the modes resorted to by different people have varied. But whatever mode might be adopted, the neces- sity for such expedient was the same in the earliest stages of society as at this day. Grammatical forms were as necessary, for the most common purposes, and when the knowledge of man and his sphere of ideas were most limited, as in the most the substitution of the principle of position, for that of inflection, is suf- ficiently visible. The most general and conspicuous effect has been the annihilation, save only in the pronouns, of the inflections denoting the case of the noun governed by the verb. As these have been preserved in the Slavonian languages, it may be inferred, that the mixture of idioms has had a great share in producing that effect. May not the changes in the modern Greek be partly ascribed to the influence of the Italian ?
 * In the English, in the French and other languages of Latin origin,