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LECTURE IIL THE DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. I Took occasion to observe at the commencement of my last lecture that it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies remain for ever without alteration. As I then undertook for my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own language had made, I shall dedicate the present to a consideration of some of the losses, or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured. It will however be expedient here to offer one or two preliminary observations for the purpose of guarding against possible misapprehensions of my meaning. It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in the end, perish; they run their course; they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude, their 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 great part of the-words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese ; not a few in our own. Still in their own proper being languages perish and pass away; no nations, that is, continue to speak them any more. Seeingthen that they thus die, they must have had the germs of death, the possibilities of decay, in...
