d Anglo-Saxon. That had six declensions, our present
English but one; that had three genders, English, if we except one or
two words, has none; that formed the genitive in a variety of ways, we
only in one; and the same fact meets us, wherever we compare the
grammars of the two languages. At the same time, it can scarcely be
repeated too often, that in the estimate of the gain or loss thereupon
ensuing, we must by no means put certainly to loss everything which the
language has dismissed, any more than everything to gain which it has
acquired. It is no real wealth in a language to have needless and
superfluous forms. They are often an embarrassment and an encumbrance to
it rather than a help. The Finnish language has fourteen cases. Without
pretending to know exactly what it is able to effect, I yet feel
confident that it cannot effect more, nor indeed so much, with its
fourteen as the Greek is able to do with its five. It therefore seems to
me that some words of Otfried Mueller, in many ways admirable, do yet
exaggerate the losses consequent on the reduction of the forms of a
language. "It may be observed", he says, "that in the lapse of ages,
from the time that the progress of language can be observed, grammatical
forms, such as the signs of cases, moods and tenses have never been
increased in number, but have been constantly diminishing. The history
of the Romance, as well as of the Germanic, languages shows in the
clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has been
gradually weakened and impoverished, until at last it preserves only a
few fragments of its ancient inflections. Now there is no doubt that
this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a
language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It is well known
that the Chinese language, which is merely a collection of radical words
destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas
with tolerable precision; and the English, which, from the mode of its
formation by a mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its
grammatical inflections more completely than any other European
language, seems, nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be distinguished
by its energetic eloquence. All this must be admitted by every
unprejudiced inquirer; but yet it cannot be overlooked, that this
copiousness of grammatical forms, and the fine shades of meaning which
they express, evince a nicety of observation, and a faculty