The general law of progress in language could be illustrated equally well from the history of genders as exhibited in various languages. We are here only dealing with Aryan languages, but, merely by way of illustration, it may be mentioned that a primitive African language offers seven "genders," or grammatical categories requiring the same kind of concords as genders. In Europe we pass westward from the three genders of Germany, curving through feminine and masculine France (_place aux dames!_) to monogendric Britain. Only linguistic arbitrary gender is here referred to; this has nothing to do with suffragettes or "defeminization."
Again, take agreement of adjectives. In the ancient world, whether Greek, Latin, Gothic, or Anglo-Saxon, adjectives had to follow nouns through all the mazes of case and number inflection, and had also to agree in gender. In this matter German has gone ahead of French, in that its adjectives do not submit to change of form in order to indicate agreement, when they are used predicatively (e.g. "ein gut_er_ Mann"; "der gut_e_ Mann"; but "der Mann ist gut"). But English has distanced the field, and was alone in at the death of the old concords, which moistened our childhood's dry Latin _with_ tears.
Whatever test be applied, the common tendency towards simplification, from synthesis to analysis, is there; and in its every manifestation English has gone farthest among the great literary languages. It is necessary to add this qualification--"among the great literary languages"--because, in this process of simplification, English has a very curious rival, and possibly a superior, in the _Taal_ of South Africa. The curious thing is that a local dialect should have shown itself so progressive, seeing that the distinctive note of most dialects is conservatism, their chief characteristics being local survivals.[1] It is probable that the advanced degree of simplification attained by the Taal is the result of deliberate and conscious adaptation of their language by the original settlers to the needs of the natives. Just as Englishmen speak Pidgin-English to coolies in the East, so the old trekkers must have removed irregularities and concords from their Dutch, so that the Kaffirs could understand it. If this is so, it is another illustration of the essential feature that an international language must possess. Even the Boer farmers, under the stress of practical necessity, grasped the need of simplification.