Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/190

168 forces came in here and there. Incursions and conquests of German tribes brought an element of Germanic speech into the tongues alike of Spain, France, and Italy. Centuries of Saracen domination engrafted upon the Spanish language a notable store of words of Arabic derivation. When, at length, the dark ages of European history were over, and knowledge and culture were to be taken out of the exclusive custody of the few, and made the wealth and blessing of the many, the Latin was a dead language, much too far removed from popular wants and sympathies to be able to serve the needs of the new nations. Hence the rise in each separate country, at not far from the same time, of a new national tongue, to be the instrument and expression of the national culture. All Romanized Europe was in the condition already described as that of Germany prior to the advancement of the modern German to its present position; a chaos of varying dialects was there; and, in every case, external historical circumstances determined which of them should attain a higher value, and should subject and absorb the rest.

In all this alternate and repeated divergence and convergence of dialects there is evidently nothing which needs to be looked upon as mysterious, or even puzzling. Such has been the history of language from the beginning, and in all parts of the earth. We need only the tendency of individual language to vary, and the effect of community to check, limit, and even reverse this tendency, in order to explain every case that arises: the peculiar conditions of each case must decide whether their joint action shall, on the whole, make for homogeneity or for diversity of speech; and the result, in kind and in degree, will vary according to the sum of the causes which produced it; as the resultant motion, in rate and direction, combines and represents all the forces, however various and conflicting, of whose united action it is the effect.

Thus, as has been already pointed out, when there takes place a fusion of two communities, larger or smaller, of varying speech, no general law can determine what shall be the resulting dialect. When the Romans conquered Gaul, although forming only a minority of the population, they