We may here sum up the results of our comparison of the main features of the grammatical structures of ancient and modern languages belonging to our family of speech. We have found certain traits common to the old stages and certain others characteristic of recent ones, and have thus been enabled to establish some definite tendencies of development and to find out the general direction of change; and we have shown reasons for the conviction that this development has on the whole and in the main been a beneficial one, thus justifying us in speaking about ‘progress in language.’ The points in which the superiority of the modern languages manifested itself were the following:
(1) The forms are generally shorter, thus involving less muscular exertion and requiring less time for their enunciation.
(2) There are not so many of them to burden the memory.
(3) Their formation is much more regular.
(4) Their syntactic use also presents fewer irregularities.
(5) Their more analytic and abstract character facilitates expression by rendering possible a great many combinations and constructions which were formerly impossible or unidiomatic.
(6) The clumsy repetitions known under the name of concord have become superfluous.
(7) A clear and unambiguous understanding is secured through a regular word order.
These several advantages have not been won all at once, and languages differ very much in the velocity with which they have been moving in the direction indicated; thus High German is in many respects behindhand as compared with Low German; European Dutch as compared with African Dutch; Swedish as compared with Danish; and all of them as compared with English; further, among the Romanic languages we see considerable variations in this respect. What is maintained is chiefly that there is a general tendency for languages to develop along the lines here indicated, and that this development may truly, from the anthropocentric point of view, which is the only justifiable one, be termed a progressive evolution.
But is this tendency really general, or even universal, in the world of languages? It will easily be seen that my examples have in the main been taken from comparatively few languages, those with which I myself and presumably most of my readers are most familiar, all of them belonging to the Gothonic and Romanic branches of the Aryan family. Would the same theory hold good with regard to other languages? Without pretending to an intimate knowledge of the history of many languages, I yet dare assert that my conclusions are confirmed by all those languages whose history is accessible to us. Colloquial Irish and Gaelic have in many ways a simpler grammatical structure than the Oldest Irish. Russian has got rid of some of the complications of Old Slavonic, and the same is true, even in a much higher degree, of some of the other Slavonic languages; thus, Bulgarian has greatly simplified its nominal and Serbian its verbal flexions. The grammar of spoken Modern Greek is much less complicated than that of the language of Homer or of Demosthenes. The structure of Modern Persian is nearly as simple as English, though that of Old Persian was highly complicated. In India we witness a constant simplification of grammar from Sanskrit through Prakrit and Pali to the modern languages, Hindi, Hindostani (Urdu), Bengali, etc. Outside the Aryan world we see the same movement: Hebrew is simpler and more regular than Assyrian, and spoken Arabic than the old classical language, Koptic than Old Egyptian. Of most of the other languages we are not in possession of written records from very early times; still, we may affirm that in Turkish there has been an evolution, though rather a slow one, of a similar kind; and, as we shall see in a later chapter, Chinese seems to have moved in the same direction, though the nature of its writing makes the task of penetrating into its history a matter of extreme difficulty. A comparative study of the numerous Bantu languages spoken all over South Africa justifies us in thinking that their evolution has been along the same lines: in some of them the prefixes characterizing various classes of nouns have been reduced in number and in extent (cf. above, § [9]). Of one of them we have a grammar two hundred years old, by Brusciotto à Vetralla (re-edited by H. Grattan Guinness, London, 1882). A comparison of his description with the language now spoken in the same region (Mpongwe) shows that the class signs have dwindled down considerably and the number of the classes has been reduced from 16 to 10. In short, though we can only prove it with regard to a minority of the multitudinous languages spoken on the globe, this minority embraces all the languages known to us for so long a period that we can talk of their history, and we may, therefore, confidently maintain that what may be briefly termed the tendency towards grammatical simplification is a universal fact of linguistic history.