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Again, Grimm[80] has remarked that the more ancient a language is, the more clearly do we find in it the distinction between masculine and feminine inflections. “Nothing,” adds M. Renan, “proves it more strongly than the to-us-inexplicable tendency which led the primitive nations to suppose a sex in all beings, even inanimate ones. A language, formed in our days, would suppress the gender[81] in all cases, except perhaps, those where men and women are concerned.” This peculiarity is doubtless due to the influence of women. In ancient times, the life of woman was far more widely separated than now from that of men; and even in later days, when they were dwarfed in the isolation of the gynæceum, we can easily understand how the peculiarities of their life would have influenced the language they employed. The difference between their idioms and those of men is still very incisive in some African dialects; and the fact that men in speaking to women are obliged to employ particular inflections, proves that those inflections must have been used by the women themselves. It is this which causes the strange difference between Sanskrit and Prâkrit; in the Hindoo dramas, Sanskrit is used by the men, Prâkrit by the women.