Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/27

5 terms, altogether independent of impressions from single objects; and, lastly, the grammatical forms, by which the actions expressed by verbs are referred to the speaker, and the objects expressed by nouns are placed in the most various relations to one another. The luxuriance of grammatical forms which we perceive in the Greek cannot have been of late introduction, but must be referred to the earliest period of the language; for we find traces of nearly all of them in the cognate tongues, which could not have been the case unless the languages before they diverged had possessed these forms in common: thus the distinction between aorist tenses, which represent an action as a moment, as a single point, and others, which represent it as continuous, like a prolonged line, occurs in Sanscrit as well as in Greek.

In general it may be observed, that in the lapse of ages, from the time that the progress of language can be observed, grammatical forms, such as the signs of cases, moods, and tenses, have never been increased in number, but have been constantly diminishing. The history of the Romance, as well as of the Germanic, languages, shows in the clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has been gradually weakened and impoverished, until at last it preserves only a few fragments of its ancient inflections. The ancient languages, especially the Greek, fortunately still retained the chief part of their grammatical forms at the time of their literary development; thus, for example, little was lost in the progress of the Greek language from Homer to the Athenian orators. Now there is no doubt that this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It is well known that the Chinese language, which is merely a collection of radical words destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas with tolerable precision; and the English, which, from the mode of its formation by a mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its grammatical inflections more completely than any other European language, seems nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be distinguished by its energetic eloquence. All this must be admitted by every unprejudiced inquirer; but yet it cannot be overlooked, that this copiousness of grammatical forms, and the fine shades of meaning which they express, evince a nicety of observation and a faculty of distinguishing, which unquestionably prove that the race of mankind among whom these languages arose was characterized by a remarkable correctness and subtlety of thought. Nor can any modern European, who forms in his mind a lively image of the classical languages in their ancient grammatical luxuriance, and compares them with his mother tongue, conceal from himself that in the ancient languages the words, with their inflections, clothed as it were with muscles and sinews, come forward like living bodies, full of expression and character; while in the modern tongues the words seem shrunk up into mere skeletons. Another advantage which belongs to the fulness of grammatical forms is, that words of