uld employ who did not mean to
speak impurely and vilely.

* * * * *

{Sidenote: _Lost Powers of a Language_}

Thus much in respect of the words, and the character of the words, which
we have lost or let go. Of these, indeed, if a language, as it travels
onwards, loses some, it also acquires others, and probably many more
than it loses; they are leaves on the tree of language, of which if some
fall away, a new succession takes their place. But it is not so, as I
already observed, with the _forms_ or _powers_ of a language, that is,
with the various inflections, moods, duplicate or triplicate formation
of tenses; which the speakers of a language come gradually to perceive
that they can do without, and therefore cease to employ; seeking to
suppress grammatical intricacies, and to obtain grammatical simplicity
and so far as possible a pervading uniformity, sometimes even at the
hazard of letting go what had real worth, and contributed to the more
lively, if not to the clearer, setting forth of the inner thought or
feeling of the mind. Here there is only loss, with no compensating gain;
or, at all events, diminution only, and never addition. In regard of
these inner forces and potencies of a language, there is no creative
energy at work in its later periods, in any, indeed, but quite the
earliest. They are not as the leaves, but may be likened to the stem and
leading branches of a tree, whose shape, mould and direction are
determined at a very early stage of its growth; and which age, or
accident, or violence may diminish, but which can never be multiplied. I
have already slightly referred to a notable example of this, namely, to
the dropping of the dual number in the Greek language. Thus in all the
New Testament it does not once occur, having quite fallen out of the
common dialect in which that is composed. Elsewhere too it has been felt
that the dual was not worth preserving, or at any rate, that no serious
inconvenience would follow on its loss. There is no such number in the
modern German, Danish or Swedish; in the old German and Norse there was.

{Sidenote: _Extinction of Powers_}

How many niceties, delicacies, subtleties of language, _we_, speakers of
the English tongue, in the course of centuries have got rid of; how bare
(whether too bare is another question) we have stripped ourselves; what
simplicity for better or for worse reigns in the present English, as
compared with the ol