This, then, is the conclusion I arrive at, that as simplification of grammatical structure, abolition of case distinctions, and so forth, always go hand in hand with the development of a fixed word order, this cannot be accidental, but there must exist a relation of cause and effect between the two phenomena. Which, then, is the prius or cause? To my mind undoubtedly the fixed word order, so that the grammatical simplification is the posterius or effect. It is, however, by no means uncommon to find a half-latent conception in people’s minds that the flexional endings were first lost ‘by phonetic decay,’ or ‘through the blind operation of sound laws,’ and that then a fixed word order had to step in to make up for the loss of the previous forms of expression. But if this were true we should have to imagine an intervening period in which the mutual relations of words were indicated in neither way; a period, in fact, in which speech was unintelligible and consequently practically useless. The theory is therefore untenable. It follows that a fixed word order must have come in first: it would come quite gradually as a natural consequence of greater mental development and general maturity, when the speaker’s ideas no longer came into his mind helter-skelter, but in orderly sequence. If before the establishment of some sort of fixed word order any tendency to slur certain final consonants or vowels of grammatical importance had manifested itself, it could not have become universal, as it would have been constantly checked by the necessity that speech should be intelligible, and that therefore those marks which showed the relation of different words should not be obliterated. But when once each word was placed at the exact spot where it properly belonged, then there was no longer anything to forbid the endings being weakened by assimilation, etc., or being finally dropped altogether.
To bring out my view I have been obliged in the preceding paragraph to use expressions that should not be taken too literally; I have spoken as if the changes referred to were made ‘in the lump,’ that is, as if the word order was first settled in every respect, and after that the endings began to be dropped. The real facts are, of course, much more complicated, changes of one kind being interwoven with changes of the other in such a way as to render it difficult, if not impossible, in any particular case to discover which was the prius and which the posterius. We are not able to lay our finger on one spot and say: Here final m or n was dropped, because it was now rendered superfluous as a case-sign on account of the accusative being invariably placed after the verb, or for some other such reason. Nevertheless, the essential truth of my hypothesis seems to me unimpeachable. Look at Latin final s. Cicero (Orat. 48. 161) expressly tells us, what is corroborated by a good many inscriptions, that there existed a strong tendency to drop final s; but the tendency did not prevail. The reason seems obvious; take a page of Latin prose and try the effect of striking out all final s’s, and you will find that it will be extremely difficult to determine the meaning of many passages; a consonant playing so important a part in the endings of nouns and verbs could not be left out without loss in a language possessing so much freedom in regard to word position as Latin. Consequently it was kept, but in course of time word position became more and more subject to laws; and when, centuries later, after the splitting up of Latin into the Romanic languages, the tendency to slur over final s knocked once more at the door, it met no longer with the same resistance: final s disappeared, first in Italian and Rumanian, then in French, where it was kept till about the end of the Middle Ages, and it is now beginning to sound a retreat in Spanish; see on Andalusian Fr. Wulff, Un Chapitre de Phonétique Andalouse, 1889.
The main line of development in historical times has, I take it, been the following: first, a period in which words were placed somewhere or other according to the fancy of the moment, but many of them provided with signs that would show their mutual relations; next, a period with retention of these signs, combined with a growing regularity in word order, and at the same time in many connexions a more copious employment of prepositions; then an increasing indistinctness and finally complete dropping of the endings, word order (and prepositions) being now sufficient to indicate the relations at first shown by endings and similar means.
Viewed in this light, the transition from freedom in word position to greater strictness must be considered a beneficial change, since it has enabled the speakers to do away with more circumstantial and clumsy linguistic means. Schiller says:
Jeden anderen meister erkennt man an dem, was er ausspricht;
Was er weise verschweigt, zeigt mir den meister des stils.
(Every other master is known by what he says, but the master of style by what he is wisely silent on.) What style is to the individual, the general laws of language are to the nation, and we must award the palm to that language which makes it possible “to be wisely silent” about things which in other languages have to be expressed in a troublesome way, and which have often to be expressed over and over again (virorum omnium bonorum veterum, ealra godra ealdra manna). Could any linguistic expedient be more worthy of the genus homo sapiens than using for different purposes, with different significations, two sentences like ‘John beats Henry’ and ‘Henry beats John,’ or the four Danish ones, ‘Jens slaar Henrik—Henrik slaar Jens—slaar Jens Henrik?—slaar Henrik Jens?’ (John beats Henry—H. beats J.—does J. beat H.?—does H. beat J.?), or the Chinese use of či in different places (Ch. XIX § [3])? Cannot this be compared with the ingenious Arabic system of numeration, in which 234 means something entirely different from 324, or 423, or 432, and the ideas of “tens” and “hundreds” are elegantly suggested by the order of the characters, not, as in the Roman system, ponderously expressed?
Now, it should not be forgotten that this system, “where more is meant than meets the ear,” is not only more convenient, but also clearer than flexions, as actually found in existing languages, for word order in those languages which utilize it grammatically is used much more consistently than any endings have ever been in the old Aryan languages. It is not true, as Johannson would have us believe, that the dispensing with old flexional endings was too dearly bought, as it brought about increasing possibilities of misunderstandings; for in the evolution of languages the discarding of old flexions goes hand in hand with the development of simpler and more regular expedients that are rather less liable than the old ones to produce misunderstandings. Johannson writes: “In contrast to Jespersen I do not consider that the masterly expression is the one which is ‘wisely silent,’ and consequently leaves the meaning to be partly guessed at, but the one which is able to impart the meaning of the speaker or writer clearly and perfectly”—but here he seems rather wide of the mark. For, just as in reading the arithmetical symbol 234 we are perfectly sure that two hundred and thirty-four is meant, and not three hundred and forty-two, so in reading and hearing ‘The boy hates the girl’ we cannot have the least doubt who hates whom. After all, there is less guesswork in the grammatical understanding of English than of Latin; cf. the examples given above, Ch. XVIII § 4, p. [343].
The tendency towards a fixed word order is therefore a progressive one, directly as well as indirectly. The substitution of word order for flexions means a victory of spiritual over material agencies.