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IV.] demanding representation, the sluggishness of the native processes of word-formation, and the presence of numerous words of classic origin in our familiar speech; all which circumstances have begotten and fostered a habit of resorting more and more for the supply of new needs to the accessible and abundant stores of classical expression. The determining causes are wholly historical. The inaptness for internal development, the aptness to borrow, which distinguish our language from others of Germanic origin, are both mainly traceable to the Norman invasion. In consequence of that event, the Anglo-Saxon was for a time in danger of extinction, or of reduction to the rank of a vulgar patois. Political conditions, severing Anglo-Norman interests from those of the continent, and originating a common English feeling in the whole population, notwithstanding its diverse elements, led to a fusion of Norman-French and Saxon-English, instead of a displacement of the latter by the former: but, when the new tongue came forth, it was found shorn of much of its grammatical power, greatly altered in its forms and modes of construction. The purity and directness of linguistic tradition had been broken up; the conservative influence exercised upon the foundation-language by the cultivated class of its speakers had been for a time destroyed, and popular inaccuracies and corruptions allowed full sway; a mode of speech was learned by considerable masses of a population to whose fathers it was strange and barbarous; the rest had admitted to their daily and familiar use a host of new words on which their old apparatus of inflection sat strangely: and this was the result. So is it likely ever to be, when the intermingling on nearly equal terms of races of diverse speech issues in the elaboration, by mutual accommodation and compromise, of a new mixed dialect which all shall learn and use alike.

We must be careful not to mistake the nature of the obstacle which prevents the liberal increase of our vocabulary by means of combination of old materials. It is wholly subjective, consisting in our habits and preferences. There is hardly a compound formed in German, for example, which would not, if literally translated by an English compound,