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history of Aryan (Indo-European) languages? For it must be emphasized that for the purposes of this discussion history of language means history of Aryan language.
The Aryan group of languages includes Sanskrit and its descendants in the East, Greek, Latin, all modern Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.), all Germanic lan- guages (English, German, Scandinavian, etc.), all Slav languages (Russian, Polish, etc.)—in fact, all the principal languages of Europe, except Hungarian, Basque, and Finnish. The main tendency of this group of languages has been, technically speaking, to become analytic instead of synthetic—that is, to abandon complex systems of inflection by means of case and verbal endings, and to substitute prepositions and auxiliaries. Thus, taking Latin as the type of old synthetic Aryan language, its declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs present an enormously greater complexity of forms than are employed by English, the most advanced of the modern analytical languages, to express the same grammatical relations. For example:
| Nom. | mensǎ | = | a table. | mensae | = | tables. |
| Acc. | mensam | = | a table. | mensas | = | tables. |
| Gen. | mensae | = | of a table. | mensarum | = | of tables. |
| Dat. | mensae | ={ | to or for a table. | mensis | = | to or for tables. |
| Abl. | mensā | ={ | by, with, or from a table. | mensis | ={ | by, with, or from tables. |
By the time you have learnt these various Latin case endings (-ǎ, -am, -ae, -ae, -ā; -ae, -as, -arum, -is, -is), you have only learnt one out of many types of declension. Passing on to the second Latin type or declension, e.g. dominus=master, you have to learn a whole fresh set of case endings (-us, -um, -i, -o, -o; -i, -os, -orum, -is, -is) to express the same grammatical relations; whereas in English you apply the same set of prepositions to the word master" without change, except for a uniform -s in the plural. As there are a great many types of Latin noun,