[Sidenote: The five stages in the formation of language.]
And now to recapitulate. We have in tracing the growth of language discovered first of all two stages whereby the material of the language was formed: the class of what we have called the meaning or significant words came into being, and out of this was formed the second class of so-called meaningless or auxiliary words. These two stages were in the main passed through before any known language came into existence; for there is no known language which does not contain words of both these classes; albeit the second stage is likewise a process which is still going on, as in the examples chosen, where _even_ and _just_ pass from being adjectives into _even_ and _just_ the adverbs, and the French substantives _pas_ and _point_ take a like change of meaning.
These first two stages passed, there follow three other stages which go to the formation of the grammar of a language: first the stage of merely coupling words together, so as to form fresh words--the _monosyllabic_ state; then the stage in which one part of the additional word has lost its meaning while the root-word remains unchanged--the stage called the _agglutinative_ condition of language; and, finally the stage in which the added portion has become to some extent absorbed into the root-word--which last stage is the _inflected_ condition of a language.
When we have come to this inflexional state, the history of the growth of language comes to an end. It happens indeed, sometimes, that a language which has arrived at the inflected stage may in time come to drop nearly all its inflexions. This has been the case with English and French. Both are descended from languages which had elaborate grammars--the Saxon and the Latin; but both, through an admixture with foreign tongues and from other causes, have come to drop almost all their grammatical forms. We show our grammar only in a few changes in our ordinary verbs--the second and third persons singular, _thou goest_, _he goes_; the past tense and the past participle, _use_, _used_; _buy_, _bought_, etc.; in further variations in our auxiliary verb ‘to be;’ by changes in our pronouns, _I_, _me_, _ye_, _you_, _who_, _whom_, etc.; and by the ‘’s’ and ‘s’ of the possessive case and of the plural, and the comparison of adjectives. The French preserve their grammar to some extent in their pronouns, their adjectives, the plurals of their nouns, and in their verbs. Instances such as these are cases of decay, and do not find any place in the history of the growth of language.