ad of any other pronoun, to express the
article, might seem to prove that man acted as a free agent in the
formation of language. But it is not so. No single individual could
deliberately have set to work in order to abolish the old Latin genitive,
and to replace it by the periphrastic compound _de illo_. It was necessary
that the inconvenience of having no distinct or distinguishable sign of
the genitive should have been felt by the people who spoke a vulgar Latin
dialect. It was necessary that the same people should have used the
preposition _de_ in such a manner as to lose sight of its original local
meaning altogether (for instance, _una de multis_, in Horace, _i.e._, one
out of many). It was necessary, again, that the same people should have
felt the want of an article, and should have used _illo_ in numerous
expressions, where it seemed to have lost its original pronominal power.
It was necessary that all these conditions should be given, before one
individual and after him another, and after him hundreds and thousands and
millions, could use _de illo_ as the exponent of the genitive; and change
it into the Italian _dello_, _del_, and the French _du_.

The attempts of single grammarians and purists to improve language are
perfectly bootless; and we shall probably hear no more of schemes to prune
languages of their irregularities. It is very likely, however, that the
gradual disappearance of irregular declensions and conjugations is due, in
literary as well as in illiterate languages, to the dialect of children.
The language of children is more regular than our own. I have heard
children say _badder_ and _baddest_, instead of _worse_ and _worst_.
Children will say, _I gaed_, _I coomd_, _I catched_; and it is this sense
of grammatical justice, this generous feeling of what ought to be, which
in the course of centuries has eliminated many so-called irregular forms.
Thus the auxiliary verb in Latin was very irregular. If _sumus_ is _we
are_, and _sunt_, _they are_, the second person, _you are_, ought to have
been, at least according to the strict logic of children, _sutis_. This,
no doubt, sounds very barbarous to a classical ear accustomed to _estis_.
And we see how French, for instance, has strictly preserved the Latin
forms in _nous sommes_, _vous etes_, _ils sont_. But in Spanish we find
_somos_, _sois_, _son_; and this _sois_ stands for _sutis_. We find
similar traces of grammatical levelling in the Italian _siamo_