remarks, that after having been long accustomed to use Spanish, he found the return to German fatiguing to the organs of speech. I think this, however, was from the necessity of employing in pronunciation muscles long disused, and that the sense of weariness was probably confined to those muscles. But let any one equally familiar with two foreign languages, one inflected and one invariable, or one with strong and one with weak inflections, try the experiment of reading aloud an hour in each, and he will find, as a general rule, that the more numerous the weak inflections, the more fatiguing the reading. German and Italian may serve to illustrate the difference, the latter exhausting the voice of the reader much the soonest. It is true that the comparison of these two languages is not in all respects a perfectly fair test of the soundness of the principles I have laid down. The German has terminal inflections to as great an extent as the Italian, but it must be remembered that, in conjunction with these, it very often employs the letter-change in the accented syllable, and this renders it unnecessary to bring the final vowel fully out. The plural of die Hand is die Hände, but the vowel-change in the radical syllable indicates the number with so much certainty, that the e final may be dropped or half-suppressed, without creating any ambiguity. In Italian, the inflected syllable or syllables always terminate the word, and themselves end with a vowel. In the singular number of the verbs, the person, and in nouns and adjectives, both number and gender are usually determined by the final vowel alone, so that in most cases the grammatical category of the word, and of course its relations to the period, depend upon a single vowel, which of course must be very clearly articulated. Again, the final vowel in German inflected words is very commonly the obscure e, while in Italian words it is the clear vowel a, or long o and i, the feminine e being of less frequent occurrence. All these Italian endings make larger demands on the organs of speech than the German terminations. Further, the constant use of the nominative personal pronoun in German which proves that the fatigue I have spoken of does not arise merely from the call upon unused muscles, as might perhaps be the case in reading or declaiming in a foreign tongue, but from the language itself. An English barrister, Dr. Kenealy for instance, will speak many hours, for days in succession, with scarcely any apparent pause.

allows a less emphatic utterance of the signs of person in the verb; its frequent omission in Italian requires the signs to be made more conspicuous. The general result of all these circumstances is that in German, in most cases, the only syllable which requires a very distinct pronunciation is the radical; in Italian, there is another syllable, and that a final vowel, which demands an equally full and precise delivery. Of course, in Italian, both causes of exhaustion, the predominance of open vowels, and the necessity of accentuating and distinctly articulating a greater number of syllables, co-exist, and allowance must be made accordingly in treating the German as a representative of uninflected, the Italian of inflected languages, with reference to facility of utterance. At the same time, I think similar general conclusions will be arrived at by comparing any two speeches, the one inflected, the other uninflected, or the one marked by weak, the other by strong inflections.

LECTURE XVIII.

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS.

IV.

In order to comprehend and appreciate the nature and extent of the change which English has undergone in the transformation from an inflected to a comparatively uninflected structure, we must cast a glance at the grammatical system of the Anglo-Saxon, from which modern English is chiefly derived. The border-land of the Scandinavian and Teutonic races, whence the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England appear to have emigrated, has always been remarkable for the number of its local dialects, and it is very doubtful whether there is anywhere to be found a district of so narrow extent with so great a multitude of tongues, or rather jargons. The Frisic, which may be said as a whole to bear a closer resemblance to English than does any other linguistic group, differs so much in different localities, that the dialects of Frisian parishes, separated only by a narrow arm of the sea, are often quite unintelligible to the inhabitants of each other.* The gen

*It is not always safe to rely on the vocabularies of philologists who collect words to sustain theories, and therefore we may doubt the accuracy of the generalizations of most inquirers into the Frisic patois. If we can depend on the testimony of unprejudiced observers, or of the people themselves, there is no such unity of speech among those who employ what, for want of a better term, or to support particular ethnological views, are collectively called the Frisian dialects, as to entitle them to a unity of designation. According to Kohl, one of the most acute and observant of travellers, and who has been happily characterized as the Herodotus of modern Europe, “The commonest things, which are named almost alike all over Europe, receive quite different names in the different Frisic islands. Thus, in Amrum, father is called Aatj; on the Halligs, Baba or Babe; in Sylt, Foder or Vaar; in many districts on the main land, Täte; in the eastern part of Föhr, Oti or Ahitj. Although these people live within a couple of [German] miles from each other, these words differ more than père, pater, padre, Vater, and father

eral ultimate tendency of this confusion of tongues is undoubtedly towards uniformity, but uniformity must be attained by mutual concessions. Each dialect must sacrifice most of its individual peculiarities before a common speech can be framed out of the whole of them. These peculiarities lie much in inflection. The dialects, it may be predicted, will be harmonized by dropping discordant endings; and if the Frisic shall survive long enough to acquire a character of unity, it will be very nearly what the English would have been without the introduction of so many words of Romance origin.

Such a process as this the Anglo-Saxon actually underwent in England, and accordingly its flectional system, in the earliest examples which have come down to us, is less complete than in either of the Gothic tongues that contributed to its formation. In fact, the different Angle and Saxon dialects employed in England never thoroughly amalgamated, and there was always much irregularity and confusion in orthography and the use of inflections, so that the accidence of the language, in no stage of it, exhibits the precision and uniformity of that of the Icelandic or the Moso-Gothic.

used for the same purpose by the French, Latins, Italians, Germans, and English, who are separated by hundreds of leagues. We find among the Frisians not only primitive Germanic words, but what may be called common European radicals, which different localities seem to have distributed among them."

"Even the names of their districts and islands are totally different in different dialects. For instance, the island called by the Frisians who speak HighGerman, Sylt, is called by the inhabitants Söl, in Föhr Sol, and in Amrum Sal."

"The people of Amrum call the Frisians Frisk, with the vowel short; in the southern districts, the word is Freeske, with a long vowel; elsewhere it is pronounced Fraasche." Kohl. II., Chap. XX.

It appears further, from the same writer, that these numerous dialects are intelligible only to the inhabitants of the narrow localities where they are indigenous, and that their variations are too great to permit the grammars and glossaries which have yet appeared to be regarded as anything more than expositions of the peculiarities of individual patois, and by no means as authorities for the existence of any such general speech as the imaginary Frisic of linguistic theories. The argument for the oneness of these dialects rests chiefly on negatives. It may be said of each of them: it is not Danish nor Dutch, nor Low-German nor High-German, but, at the same time, they all resemble any one of these languages very nearly as much as they do each other. See Lecture ii.

In giving a general sketch of the grammar of our ancient Anglican speech, I shall not notice local or archaic peculiarities of form, and the statements I make may be considered as applicable to the Anglo-Saxon in the best period of its literature, and, with unimportant exceptions, true of all its distinguishable dialects.

In general, then, we may say that the article, noun, adjective, and pronoun were declinable, having different forms for the three genders, for four cases, and for the singular and plural numbers; besides which, the personal pronoun of the first and second persons had a dual, or form exclusively appropriated to the number two. This, in the first person, was wit, we two; in the second, git, you two. The possessive had also a dual. The adjective, as in the other Gothic languages, had two forms of inflection, the one employed when the adjective was used without a determinative, the other when it was preceded by an article or a pronoun agreeing also with the noun. These forms are called, respectively, the indefinite and the definite. Thus, the adjective corresponding to good, used in the definite form singular, or with a determinative, makes the nominative masculine góda, feminine, góde, neuter, góde; the genitive or possessive, gódan, for all the genders. When used without a determinative, the nominative is gód, for the three genders; the genitive or possessive, gódes, for the masculine and neuter, and gódre for the feminine. The adjective was also regularly compared much as in the modern English augmentative form, but not by more and most.

The verbs had four moods: the indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and infinitive, and but two tenses, the present or indefinite, used also as a future, and the past. There were, however, compound tenses in the active voice, and a passive voice formed as in modern English by the aid of other verbs. In English the auxiliaries are generally used simply as indications of time, as, he will sing, which is merely a future of the verb to sing, like the Latin cantabit; he had sung, the Latin cantaverat. In Saxon, on the other hand, the auxiliary usually retained its independent meaning, and was more rarely employed as a mere determinative. Thus willan, corresponding to our will, when used with an infinitive, did not form a future, but always expressed a purpose, as indeed it still often does, and with the remarkable exception of