Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/116

106 which afterward became French; and the French language is no more Germanic than it is Celtic. Natural selection has caused the disappearance of a considerable number of idioms. Languages which come into conflict are like groups of animals that have to struggle with one another for existence. They must gain upon their competitors, or resign themselves to disappear before them. Just as, in the contest for life and development, the best-armed races finally prevail over those which are less favored, so languages which are best served by their own aptitudes and by external circumstances prevail over those whose evolutive force is less considerable, and over those which historical conditions have less well prepared for the combat. In France, the French, the ancient langue d'oil gradually supplanted the langue d'oc, the Corsican, the Breton, the Flemish, and the Basque. In the British Islands, English eclipsed the Celtic languages, Irish, Scotch, Manx, and Gaelic, and will shortly have supplanted the Cornish. German has overcome a number of Slavic idioms.

Another kind of selection is going on within the language itself with reference to the use of particular forms and words. In reference to this, the study of dialects is of great interest. Dialects should not be regarded as degenerate conditions of literary languages. These languages are simply fortunate dialects, whose rival dialects have been less favored. We are constantly meeting in dialects forms and words which their sister literary languages have not preserved; and this fact gives dialects an important place in the study of the natural history of language.

The fact that some idioms have been lost has been disadvantageous to linguistic studies because intermediate forms have thereby disappeared, the existence of which would have explained many living forms. In this, again, we have presented in language something comparable to what has taken place among animals and plants. Moreover, a linguistic species, once extinct, can never be brought back to life. It has been only a little while since the Tasmanians disappeared, and their language with them. Those people who were the product of a long ethnic evolution can never be brought back; no more can a language like theirs, which was also the product of a long development, be revived. So in the world of animals and plants, the disappearance of a species is always definitive; to bring it back to a new life would require the impossible return of the conditions of every kind which had brought it up to the stage which it had reached at the moment of its extinction.

I should be satisfied if I could believe that this review, perhaps too rapid, has made evident the interesting fact of the life and evolution of languages. To say life of language does not seem sufficient, for that word only gives the idea of a simple state of activity. The word evolution is more rigorously exact. We find ourselves, in fact, in the presence of successive developments of an entirely natural order. The