only to the delver in philological antiquities. In the meantime national languages will continue to flourish. Within their own bounds, the English peoples will doubtless change and will increase in numbers. But so far as present indications justify inferences, one must say that they will continue to develop as they have been doing for the past three hundred years, and that their language will be as it has been, the peculiar and honorable possession of but one among the independent nations of the earth. XVIII STRUCTURAL CHANGES THE changes which have taken place in the English language in the course of its history are most strikingly and obviously manifested in the formal structure of the language. English is now and always has been an inflectional language. It shares this characteristic of formal structure with all the other languages of the Indo-European family. As in Greek and Latin, as in French and German, the syntactical relations of words in the English sentence are indicated by inflectional endings. The language is constructed by means of parts of speech, each having its distinctive form, and each part of speech having specialized forms for specialized uses. have tense, person, number, voice, and mood. and pronouns have gender, number, and case. tives - but the adjectives in English today have nothing, neither gender, number, nor case. And the nouns do not really have gender and case in the sense that these grammatical characteristics are indicated by inflections. Nor do the parts of speech have distinctive forms, for stone is a noun in hard as stone, an adjective in a stone house, an adverb in stone dead, and a verb in to stone a cat. The verbs The nouns The adjec The truth is that when we speak of English today as an inflectional language, we cannot mean that the language has 1 as many inflections as it once had, or that it has as many inflections as any of the other members of its family, or even that it has as many as it could readily use. English has many less inflections than Greek or Latin, less than 1 French or German. It is one of the least inflected of all the Indo-European languages. Historically and by origin English belongs to the type of inflectional languages, and in its earliest stage as represented in Anglo-Saxon, it is much more inflectional than in Modern English, but changes have taken place during the past thousand years which have been so extensive that they have very considerably altered the structural character of the language. These changes have been progressive and gradual, and changes similar to those which have taken place within the period of the historical records of English may be inferred for still earlier times, when English was in the process of differentiating itself as a special language among its general Germanic and Indo-European sister and cousin languages. In general the effect of all these changes has been to reduce the synthetic structural devices of the language and to increase the analytic. Anglo-Saxon is more synthetic than Modern English. But Latin, which may be taken as more nearly representing the parent Indo-European speech, on the other hand is more synthetic than Anglo-Saxon. What are synthesis and analysis in language? Synthesis in language is a term used to indicate that the several words in the expression of a thought are provided with distinctive marks, with inflections, as signs of the relationships of the words to each other in the formal structure which the expression of the thought takes. These marks of relationship are the basis of the rules of concord or agreement. In a language like Latin, an adjective agrees with its noun in gender, number, and case. In this respect, therefore, Latin is highly synthetic. But in Modern English the adjective varies not at all to indicate gender, number, or case. As the adjective in Modern English bears no formal mark of agreement, its syntax is analytic. It is a completely independent word unit, and any adjective in English may be shifted from one noun to another noun without any change whatever in the form of the adjective. The sentence in a synthetic language has an interlocking structure, each word linked to some other word in such a way that the sentence is jointed and articulated as a whole. It moves therefore and works all together. The analytic sentence is built on an independent unit system, the grammatical connection of the separate parts being inferred from the order of their arrangement and from the logical necessity of the ideas conveyed by them. This change in English from a predominatingly synthetic to an increasingly analytic structure has profoundly affected the whole character of the language. In Modern English the part of speech of a particular word can no longer be discovered from its form. As has just been pointed out, the word stone may be a noun or a verb, an adjective or an adverb. The existing inflections of Modern English are on the whole rare and exceptional survivals. The language has not indeed gone the full length of development in the direction of analysis. A completely analytic language would be one in which no marks of relationship or connection between words existed at all. Chinese may be cited as a language which closely approximates this completely analytic structure. A completely synthetic language would be one in which each of the words in a group of words expressing a thought bore upon it a distinctive mark, or distinctive marks, ་ indicating its connection, logically and grammatically, with other words in the group. But probably no language has ever realized the ideal of a completely synthetic structure. The burden of such a complicated machinery would be unbearable. Anglo-Saxon is more synthetic than Modern English, and Latin is more synthetic than Anglo-Saxon, Greek than Latin, and Sanscrit than Greek. And it is safe to assume that the Indo-European parent speech possessed as elaborate an inflectional system, and was therefore as highly synthetic as any of the branches of the Indo-European family of languages. The probabilities are indeed that if the history of the Indo-European parent speech were traceable from the beginning, the further back toward primitive conditions one passed, the more complicated structurally one would find the language. Elaborateness of structural form is not on the whole characteristic of the language of late and highly developed peoples, but of primitive and rudimentary civilizations. To draw from this statement the inference, however, that analytic structure in language is a mark of high civilization and synthetic structure a mark of low civilization would be going entirely too far. Greek is highly synthetic as compared with English, but as a vehicle of expression, Greek could scarcely be called rudimentary as compared with English. As civilization develops, a development away from synthesis towards analysis is not inherent in it. The Indo-European languages have not been working out an inner destiny towards greater and ever greater simplicity of inflectional form, the ideal being approximately realized in English. On the contrary, if the several branches of the Indo-European family show different degrees of inflectional richness and complexity, |