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LECTURE IV.

Varying rate and kind of linguistic growth, and causes affecting it. Modes of growth of the English language. Influences conservative of linguistic identity. Causes producing dialects; causes maintaining, producing, or extending homogeneity of speech. Illustrations: history of the German language; of the Latin; of the English. The English language in America.

We have, in the last two lectures, occupied ourselves with tracing out and illustrating by typical examples the chief processes of that incessant change, that linguistic growth, which marks a language as living, as undergoing, in the minds and mouths of a community, constant adaptation to their needs, constant adjustment to their preferences and caprices. These processes, as we saw, have to do both with the external form of speech, its spoken and audible body, and with its internal content, its intended and apprehensible meaning. As regards the former, they appeared to be of two general kinds or classes: on the one hand, they partake of the nature of corruption and decay, consisting in the abbreviation and mutilation of existing words, the wearing off of formative elements and consequent loss of forms, the abandonment of old distinctions along with the means of their expression, the dying out of words and phrases from memory and use; on the other hand, they are of the nature of growth, providing for the repair of this waste, and the supply of new additions to the resources of expression, by the putting together of old material into fresh combinations, the elaboration of formative elements out of words possess-