Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/304

282 produce synthetic combinations have reached their height of activity during the ante-historic period of growth, and have been gradually gained upon later, at varying rates in different communities, by those of another order? We do not in the least feel impelled to doubt the historic reality of the earliest combinations, their parallelism, in character and origin, with those which we see springing up in modern times. That we now say analytically I did love, or deal, or lead is no ground for questioning that our ancestors said compositely I love-did, deal-did, lead-did, and then worked them down into the true synthetic forms I loved, dealt, led. The cause which produced the different nature of the two equivalent expressions I loved and I did love, composed, as they are, of identical elements, was a difference in habit of the language at the periods when they were respectively generated. Any language can do what it is in the habit of doing. We can turn almost any substantive in our vocabulary into a quasi adjective—saying a gold watch, a grass slope, a church mouse, and so on—because, through the intermediate step of loose compounds like goldsmith, grasshopper, churchman, we have acquired the habit of looking upon our substantives as convertible to adjective uses without alteration and without ceremony. Neither the Frenchman nor the German can do the same thing, simply because his speech presents no analogies for such a procedure. We, on the other hand, like the French, have lost the power to form compounds with anything like the facility possessed by the ancient tongue from which ours is descended and by some of its modern representatives, as the German; not because they would not be intelligible if we formed them, but because, under the operation of traceable circumstances in our linguistic history, we have grown out of the habit of so combining our words, and into the habit of merely collocating them, with or without connectives. Now we have only to apply this principle upon a wider scale, and under other conditions of language, in order to find, as I think, a sufficient answer to the question which is engaging our attention. When once, after we know not how long a period of expectation and tentative effort, the formation of words by