pony, and others—and, in the breaking up of the language into dialects, one of these synonymous appellations is liable to become the prevailing one in one dialect, another in another, to the neglect and loss of all but the one selected. Or, a new name is started in a single dialect, wins currency there, and crowds out of use its predecessors. The German, for instance, has, indeed, our word horse, in the form ross (earlier hros), but employs it more rarely, preferring to use instead pferd, a word of which we know nothing. The modern Romanic tongues, too, say in the same sense caballo, cheval, etc., words coming from the Latin caballus, 'nag,' and they have lost almost altogether the more usual and dignified Latin term equus. Thus, further, the modern French name for 'shoemaker' is cordonnier, literally 'worker in Cordovan leather;' for 'cheese,' fromage, properly 'pressed into a form, moulded;' for 'liver,' foie, originally 'cooked with figs'—that fruit having been, as it seems, at a certain period, the favourite garnish for dishes of liver: while the Latin appellations of these three objects have gone out of use and out of memory. But for the numerals and pronouns our languages have never shown any disposition to create a synonymy; it was, as we may truly say, no easy task for the linguistic faculty to arrive at a suitable sign for the ideas they convey; and, when the sign was once found, it maintained itself thenceforth in use everywhere, without danger of replacement by any other, of later coinage. Hence all the Indo-European nations, however widely they may be separated, and however discordant in manners and civilization, count with the same words, and use the same personal pronouns in individual address—the same, with the exception, of course, of the changes which phonetic corruption has wrought upon their forms.
For reasons not so easily explainable, the Indo-European languages show a hardly less noteworthy general accordance in regard to the terms by which, within the historical period, or down even to the present time, they indicate the degrees of near relationship, such as father, mother, daughter, brother, sister. Formed, as these words were, in the earliest period of history of the common mother-tongue, they have in nearly
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