013_College lectures; Page 10

Lecture III
"And the first and most important principle
which we have to notice, the one which lies at
the bottom of nearly all phonetic change in
language, is the tendency, already alluded to
and briefly illustrated in our first lecture,
to make the work of utterance easier to the
speaker, to put a more facile in the
stead of a more difficult word in
combination of sounds, and to get rid
altogether of what is unnecessary in
the words we use."
The ancient tongue from which one English
is the remote descendant inflected it's
nouns, substantive and subjective, in their
????, each containing eight cases.
Of the meusers, the Anglo-Saxon had almost
wholly given up me, the dual retaining
only scanty relics of it in the pronouns,