in different languages, both from
internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external
to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and
social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life,
they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude,
their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has
arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary,
out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the
materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these
now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus
for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a chief part
of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages,
French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we count the
Provencal and Wallachian; not a few in our own. Still in their own
proper being languages perish and pass away; there are dead records of
what they were in books; not living men who speak them any more. Seeing
then that they thus die, they must have had the germs of a possible
decay and death in them from the beginning.

{Sidenote: _Languages Gain and Lose_}

Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built fabrics as these, the
causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been
actually at work very long before the results began to be visible.
Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some
respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already
unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote
overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and in languages, it
would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and
period is growth and gain, while all after is decay and loss. On the
contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions
is going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are
being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during
which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower,
and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and
gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a
compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more;
when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than
those of life and order. It is fr