interjectionally which were once full parts of speech; even a whole phrase being, as it were, reduced to a single pregnantly uttered exclamation: examples are alas! that is, O me lasso, 'oh weary me!' zounds! 'I swear by God's wounds,' dear me! that is, dio mio, 'my God!' and many others.
Such are, compendiously and briefly stated, the steps by which Indo-European language was developed out of monosyllabic weakness into the wealth and fertility of inflective speech. At what rate they went on, how rapid was the growth after its first inception, we know not, and we can hardly hope ever to know. The conditions of that primitive period, and the degree in which they might have been able to quicken the now sluggish processes of word-combination and formation, are so much beyond our ken that even our conjectures respecting them have—at least as yet—too little value to be worth recording. What may have been the numbers of the community which laid the foundation of all the Indo-European tongues, and what its relation to other then existing communities, are also points hitherto involved in the deepest obscurity. But we know that, before the separation, whether simultaneous or successive, of this community into the parts which afterward became founders of the different tongues of Europe and south-western Asia, the principal part of the linguistic development had already taken place—enough for its traces to remain ineffaceable, even to the present day, in the speech of all the modern representatives of the family; the inflective character of Indo-European language, the main distinctions of its parts of speech, its methods of word-formation and inflection, were elaborated and definitely established.
But, though we cannot pretend to fix the length of time required for this process of growth, in terms of centuries or of thousands of years, we can at least see clearly that it must have gone on in a slow and gradual manner, and occupied no brief period. Such is the nature of the forces by which all change in language has been shown to be effected, that anything like a linguistic revolution, a rapid and sweeping modification of linguistic structure, is wholly impossible—and most especially, a revolution of a construct-
