marks of distinction, are neglected and lost: some of these could well be spared, but others were valuable, and their relinquishment has impaired the power of expression of the language; while new forms are created, and new marks of distinction are adopted into general use, and made part and parcel of English speech.
So full and abundant illustration of this department of change in language as might be desired cannot be drawn from facts with which we are all familiar, because, for some time past, the conservative forces have been so powerful in our mother-tongue, and the accuracy of historical transmission so strict, that what is now good English has, in the main, long been such, and is likely long to continue such. Its alteration goes on so slowly that we hardly perceive it in progress, and it is only as we compare the condition of the language at a given time with that which it shows at the distance of a considerable interval, earlier or later, that they come clearly to light. The English is, indeed, among all cultivated tongues, the one which has suffered, under the influences which we have been describing, the most thorough and pervading change of its grammar and vocabulary; but the greater part of this change occurred at a certain definite period, and from the effect of circumstances which are well known. Our English ancestors, between the time of Alfred and that of Chaucer, endured the irruption and conquest of a French-speaking people, the Normans—just as did the Irish, at a later day, that of the English. That the Saxons did not, like the Irish, gradually relinquish their own tongue, and learn to talk French altogether, was owing to their advanced culture and superior independence of character: after a long time of confusion and mutual unintelligibility, as every one knows, the Saxons gave up a part of their vocabulary for that of the Normans, and the Normans a part of theirs, with nearly all their grammar, for those of the Saxons, and our present composite dialect, with its meagre system of grammatical inflections, was the result. The example is an extreme one of the transformation which a language may be made to undergo in the lapse of a few
