mu iota interchange
forms of tenses, and the completed paradigm of the verb is often made
up of both. The same nouns may be partly declinable and partly
indeclinable, and in some of their cases may have fallen out of use.
Here are rules with exceptions; they are not however really exceptions,
but contain in themselves indications of other rules. Many of these
interruptions or variations of analogy occur in pronouns or in the verb
of existence of which the forms were too common and therefore too deeply
imbedded in language entirely to drop out. The same verbs in the same
meaning may sometimes take one case, sometimes another. The participle
may also have the character of an adjective, the adverb either of an
adjective or of a preposition. These exceptions are as regular as the
rules, but the causes of them are seldom known to us.

Language, like the animal and vegetable worlds, is everywhere
intersected by the lines of analogy. Like number from which it seems to
be derived, the principle of analogy opens the eyes of men to discern
the similarities and differences of things, and their relations to one
another. At first these are such as lie on the surface only; after
a time they are seen by men to reach farther down into the nature of
things. Gradually in language they arrange themselves into a sort of
imperfect system; groups of personal and case endings are placed side by
side. The fertility of language produces many more than are wanted;
and the superfluous ones are utilized by the assignment to them of new
meanings. The vacuity and the superfluity are thus partially compensated
by each other. It must be remembered that in all the languages which
have a literature, certainly in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, we are not at
the beginning but almost at the end of the linguistic process; we have
reached a time when the verb and the noun are nearly perfected, though
in no language did they completely perfect themselves, because for some
unknown reason the motive powers of languages seem to have ceased when
they were on the eve of completion: they became fixed or crystallized in
an imperfect form either from the influence of writing and literature,
or because no further differentiation of them was required for the
intelligibility of language. So not without admixture and confusion and
displacement and contamination of sounds and the meanings of words, a
lower stage of language passes into a higher. Thus far we can see and no
furthe