om this moment the decline of a
language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point
has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses of a
language, and may esteem them most real, without in the least thereby
implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun. This
may yet be far distant, and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and
diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not
conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the
downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my
intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining.
Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting
with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous
or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English
is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only
different in that it is passing into another stage of its development;
only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the
flower from the bud; having changed its merits, but not having
renounced them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but more of
usefulness; not, perhaps, serving the poet so well, but serving the
historian and philosopher and theologian better than before.

One observation more let me make, before entering on the special details
of my subject. It is this. The losses and diminutions of a language
differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions--namely, that they
are of _two_ kinds, while its gains are only of _one_. Its gains are
only in _words_; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a
new _power_; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a
new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in _powers_--in
words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels
onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of
tenses which it once used; forgets its dual; is content with one
termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a
peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. "In all
languages", as has been well said, "there is a constant tendency to
relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for
every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and
detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion". For
exam