Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/305

VII.] synthesis had begun in the primitive Indo-European language, and had been found so fruitful of the means of varied and distinct expression, it became the habit of the language. The more numerous the new forms thus produced, the greater was the facility of producing more, because the material of speech was present to the minds of its speakers as endowed with that capacity of combination and fusion of which the results in every part of its structure were so apparent. But the edifice after a time became, as it were, complete; a sufficient working-apparatus of declensional, conjugational, and derivative endings was elaborated to answer the purposes of an inflective tongue; fewer and rarer additions were called for, as occasional supplements of the scheme, or substitutes for lost forms. Thus began a period in which the formative processes were more and more exclusively an inheritance from the past, less and less of recent acquisition; and as the origin of forms was lost sight of, obscured by the altering processes of phonetic corruption, it became more and more difficult to originate new ones, because fewer analogies of such forms were present to the apprehension of the language-makers, as incentives and guides to their action. On the other hand, the expansion of the whole vocabulary to wealth of resources, to the possession of varied and precise phraseology, furnished a notably increased facility of indicating ideas and relations by descriptive phrases, by groups of independent words. This mode of expression, then, always more or less used along with the other, began to gain ground upon it, and, of course, helped to deaden the vitality of the latter, and to render it yet more incapable of extended action. That tendency to the conscious and reflective use of speech which comes in with the growth of culture especially, and which has already been repeatedly pointed out as one of the main checks upon all the processes of linguistic change, cast its influence in the same direction; since the ability to change the meaning and application of words, even to the degree of reducing them to the expression of formal relations, is a much more fundamental and indefeasible property of speech than the ability to combine and fuse them bodily together. Then, when