HKB
Pennsylvania in five or six generations, but for the influx of newcomers from Germany, a mongrel speech equally unintelligible to the Anglo-Saxon and to the inhabitants of the European fatherland.
If languages resemble species in having had each their "specific centre" or single area of creation, in which they have been slowly formed, so each of them is alike liable to slow or to sudden extinction. They may die out very gradually in consequence of transmutation, or abruptly by the extermination of the last surviving representatives of the unaltered type. We know in what century the last Dodo perished, and we know that in the seventeenth century the language of the Red Indians of Massachusetts, into which Father Eliot had translated the Bible, and in which Christianity was preached for several generations, ceased to exist, the last individuals by whom it was spoken having at that period died without issue.*
(* Lyell, "Travels in North America" volume 1 page 260 1845.)
But if just before that event the white man had retreated from the continent, or had been swept off by an epidemic, those Indians might soon have repeopled the wilderness, and their copious vocabulary and peculiar forms of expression might have lasted without important modification to this day. The extinction, however, of languages in general is not abrupt, any more than that of species. It will also be evident from what has been said, that a language which has once died out can never be revived, since the same assemblage of conditions can never be restored even among the descendants of the same stock, much less simultaneously among all the rounding nations with whom they may be in contact.
We may compare the persistency of languages, or the tendency of each generation to adopt without change the vocabulary of its predecessor, to the force of inheritance in the organic world, which causes the offspring to resemble its parents. The inventive power which coins new words or modifies old ones, and adapts them to new wants and conditions as often as these arise, answers to the variety-making power in the animate creation.
Progressive improvement in language is a necessary consequence of the progress of the human mind from one generation to another. As civilisation advances, a greater number of terms are required to express abstract ideas, and words previously used in a vague sense, so long as the state of society was rude and barbarous, gradually acquire more precise and definite meanings, in consequence of which several terms must be employed to express ideas and things, which a single word had before signified, though somewhat loosely and imperfectly.
The farther this subdivision of function is carried, the more complete and perfect the language becomes, just as species of higher grade have special organs, such as eyes, lungs, and stomach, for seeing, breathing, and digesting, which in simple organisms are all performed by one and the same part of the body.*
(* See Herbert Spencer's "Psychology" and "Scientific Essays.")
When we had satisfied ourselves that all the existing languages, instead of being primordial creations, or the direct gifts of a supernatural Power, have been slowly elaborated, partly by the modification of pre-existing dialects, partly by borrowing terms at successive periods from numerous foreign sources, and partly by new inventions made some of them deliberately, and some casually and as it were fortuitously--when we have discovered the principal causes of selection, which have guided the adoption or rejection of rival names for the same things and ideas, rival modes of pronouncing the same words and provincial dialects competing one with another--we are still very far from comprehending all the laws which have governed the formation of each language.