As soon as two nations are fused together, a revolution takes place in their respective languages; this is sometimes slow, sometimes sudden, but always inevitable. The languages are changed and, after a certain time, die out as separate entities. The new tongue is a compromise between them, the dominant element being furnished by the speech of the race that has contributed most members to the new people.[120] Thus, from the thirteenth century, the Germanic dialects of France have had to yield ground, not to Latin, but to the _lingua romana_, with the revival of the Gallo-Roman power.[121] Celtic, too, had to retreat before the Italian colonists. It did not yield to Italian civilization; in fact, one might say, that, thanks to the number of those who spoke it, Celtic finally gained a kind of victory. For after the complete fusion of the Gauls, the Romans, and the northern tribes, it was Celtic that laid the foundations of modern French syntax, abolished the strong accentuation of Germanic as well as the sonority of Latin, and introduced its own equable rhythm. The gradual development of French is merely the effect of this patient labour, that went on, without ceasing, under the surface. Again, the reason why modern German has lost the striking forms to be seen in the Gothic of Bishop Ulfilas lies in the presence of a strong Cymric element in the midst of the small Germanic population that was still left to the east of the Rhine,[122] after the great migrations of the sixth and following centuries of our era. The linguistic results of the fusion of two peoples are as individual as the new racial character itself. One may say generally that no language remains pure after it has come into close contact with a different language. Even when their structures are totally unlike each other, the vocabulary at any rate suffers some changes. If the parasitic language has any strength at all, it will certainly attack the other in its rhythmic quality, and even in the unstable parts of its syntax. Thus language is one of the most fragile and delicate forms of property; and we may often see a noble and refined speech being affected by barbarous idioms and passing itself into a kind of relative barbarism. By degrees it will lose its beauty; its vocabulary will be impoverished, and many of its forms obsolete, while it will show an irresistible tendency to become assimilated to its inferior neighbour. This has happened in the case of Wallachian and Rhætian, Kawi and Birman. The two latter have been leavened with Sanscrit elements; but in spite of this noble alliance, they have been declared by competent judges to be inferior to Delaware.[123]