been in later times, upon the whole, a gradual descent and impoverishment.
Here we must pause a little, to consider an objection urged by some linguistic scholars of rank and reputation against the truth of the views we have been defending, as to the primitive monosyllabism of Indo-European language, and its gradual emergence out of that condition—an objection which has more apparent legitimacy and force than any of those hitherto noticed. It is this. In ascending the current of historical development of the languages of our family, say the objectors, instead of approaching a monosyllabic condition, we seem to recede farther and farther from it. The older dialects are more polysyllabic than the later: where our ancestors used long and complicated forms, we are content with brief ones, or we have replaced them with phrases composed of independent words. Thus, to recur once more to a former example, for an earlier lagamasi we say we lie; thus, again, for the Latin fuisset, the French says simply fût, while we express its meaning by four distinct words, he might have been. Modern languages are full of verbal forms of this latter class, which substitute syntactical for substantial combinations. The relations of case, too, formerly signified only by means of declensional endings, have lost by degrees this mode of expression, and have come to be indicated by prepositions, independent words. This is what is well known as the "analytical" tendency in linguistic growth. Our own English tongue exhibits its effects in the highest known degree, having reduced near half the vocabulary it possesses to a monosyllabic form, and got rid of almost all its inflections, so that it expresses grammatical relations chiefly by relational words, auxiliaries and connectives: but it is only an extreme example of the results of a movement generally perceptible in modern speech. If, then, during the period when we can watch their growth step by step, languages have become less synthetic, words less polysyllabic, must we not suppose that it was always so; that human speech began with highly complicated forms, which from the very first have been undergoing reduction to simpler and briefer shape?
