the past. No other nation has wrestled like the English, with Man, and Truth and Time, and everything great and difficult; and no language accordingly is so full of all experiences and utterances, human and divine. Like that great world-book, the Bible, which has done so much to exalt and purify it, it has an equipment for its special office, as the bearer of that book to all nations, grand and beautiful, in its adaptations to the wants of universal humanity. Few of the scholars and educators of our land, to their shame be it spoken, seem, although standing within the sphere of its beauties and under the glowing firmament of its literature, to appreciate, in any worthy manner, the glory of their mother-tongue; but which other nations, looking on it from without, admire so greatly, and which, in the eyes of future ages, will appear in the far off distance, radiant with heav-. enly beauty. In ground-forms and the whole element of flexion and the details of a ramified syntax, the English, when compared with the ancient languages, is poor indeed. Our It is certainly quite an interesting, not to say surprising fact, that the English should, in many of its forms, be more like the original Sanscrit than the intermediate languages. Thus compare: * As in Augenbraune, the eyebrows, being found only in composition. words also are much mutilated, especially in the mode of their pronunciation. They appear, everywhere throughout the language, to the eye of a scientific etymologist, bruised and broken, in their aspect. Even our large stock of AngloSaxon words, which as a class are short and compact, are often condensed, when having been originally dissyllabic, into monosyllables in English. And in this country especially, our people, our language and our institutions have been borne through such an unsettled pioneer experience, that a strange, unscholar-like, if not indeed almost universal, indifference prevails, among even our educated men, to exactness and elegance in the niceties of language. The noble old English tongue has assumed, in some large districts of our country, not only in its orthoepy,' but also in its orthography, a distinct American type. There are those even, who undertake to justify these abuses. The influence of such ideas and habits runs up also into the whole style of our higher classical education, as it is generally conducted. Prosody, except in its rudest outlines, is disregarded, and pronounced by teachers, who themselves are ignorant of its nice details, a useless appendage of classical study. Greek accentuation, similarly, is ridiculed by the same pro 1 Witness the double pronunciation in England and America of such words as desultory, leisure, detail, azure, demonstrate, and those words in which 1 occurs in the same syllable after a and before m, as in alms, balm, calm, etc., and also courteous, fealty, either and neither, therefore, fearful, etc. As for changes in orthography all know on what an extensive systematic scale Webster has undertaken to force them upon the language. Happily the resistance to such innovations by him proved too great; and they are gradually losing, most of them, the little ground which, under his great name, they had begun to acquire. * κασσύειν = κατά + σύειν. † ηδύς is for στηδύς. fessional novices, who have not mastered it themselves, and who declare that it cannot be understood, or that, if by long, close study, it should be comprehended by any one, the fruit would not pay for the labor bestowed upon its cultivation. But no men, more than educated Englishmen and Americans, owe it to themselves and their age and their mother-tongue, to preserve in its sacred beauty, unbroken and unspotted, through all time, the temple of their literature and their language. (3.) The Frisic. This is kindred to the Anglo-Saxon and the old Norse, and yet separate from them both. It is found now, as a living language, only in a few scattered districts, in the Netherlands, and it is alive there, only in the lips of men, and not in their books, and so finds shelter only among the rude, uneducated masses. The Dutch has entirely displaced its words, as current coin, by its own, as having a far higher value. (4.) The low Dutch. a. The Netherlandish. These include the Flemish and Dutch languages. The native home of the Flemish language is Belgium. is Belgium. As the French is the Court language of Belgium, and contains in itself great elements of vitality and wonderful tendencies to diffusion, wherever it once obtains a lodgment, the Flemish is, in such unfavorable contact with it, rapidly waning away, and will probably erelong retain only the name of having been once cherished as a household treasure by its own people. Happily, however, for dead languages, like depopulated countries, are full of mournful associations, the Flemish language is a separate language from the Dutch, almost wholly in its orthography alone. As therefore, in their real substantive essence, they are alike and the words of the two languages are themselves the same, its spirit will still survive, when it has resigned its breath, in that fine rich Dutch language, of whose literature and of whose genius as well as of the history of whose people, though so strongly connected with our own, it is no praise to us, that we are so profoundly ignorant. b. The Saxon. This is a modern title of convenience, for describing the staple or material of several kindred diaVOL. X V. No. 57. 11 lects, or rather different forms or stages of the same dialect, called the old Saxon, the middle-low German and the flat German (Plattdeutsch). They receive, in their bare enumeration, all the honor that they deserve. They contain in them nothing that speaks of an heroic past or of a vitalized present. 2. The High German. The etymology of the word German, a name given to the people who bear it by other nations, and not by themselves, is yet a mooted question. Numerous have been the guesses made concerning it. Some have derived it from Kerman in Persia, now Carmania. The German has in it indeed, like the Greek, almost marvellous affinities with the Persian. But, as the Germans did not call themselves by this name, they could not have carried it with them, from the place of their origin. Others have derived it from the Latin germanus (Eng. germain) kindred or cognate a mere accidental resemblance in form, with no historical connection in sense; while others maintain, that it originated in gher (French guerre) war and mann, man; and others still find it in the vernacular Irman or Erman. It is, on the contrary, in all probability, a Celtic word, as Leo has recently suggested, derived from gairmean, a shout or war cry, formed from gair, to cry. The name Deutsch, by which the Germans describe themselves, and to which also the name Teutones is allied, is derived from the Gothic thiudisko (Greek viкôs), from thiuda (ëðvos) a nation, and answers therefore to our word Gentile. 1 Grimm states four points of discrimination, by which the German is separated from other languages: (1.) The Ablant, or change of the vowel, in the conjugation-forms of the verb. (2.) The Lautverschiebung, or change of sounds and letters, from one point to another on the same scale. (3.) The weak conjugation of the verb. (4.) The strong conjugation. 1 So in Homer a great warrior is often described as dyads Bohr, good in shouting. This is an essential part of war with a savage. The High German has had three periods of development, in respect to the styles of its forms: 1. That of the old high German, prevailing from the 7th to the 11th century. 2. That of the middle high German, from the 11th century to Luther's day. 3. The new high German, or what we call the present classic German, born at the Reformation and of it. Luther was its foster-father. Its words took their fixed final form, in his earnest, glowing, scholarly mind, and by his pen were "engraven in the rock forever." In his noble translation of the Scriptures, he not only scattered everywhere the seeds of divine truth, but popularized also the usage of his mother tongue in richer, deeper, stronger forms, than ever before. Throughout all the stages of its historic development, the High German has been full of treasures, which the world has not been willing to forget. It is now, for both aesthetical and philosophical uses, more akin in its inward and subtle affinities to the Greek, than any other living language. In many-sidedness, it is not at all equal to the English. Its connections with the Latin are far less numerous. The Greek element does not prevail so extensively in it; nor have the modern languages impressed their form and influence upon it, as upon the English. So that, while in English almost all words have been first distilled through the alembic of the Greek, Latin, Gothic, German, French, Italian or Spanish mind; in German, with few exceptions, they all claim one common origin, and bear in them the mark of a distinct national individuality. German literature is full of strength and beauty, to a degree even of almost Asiatic luxuriance. The more recent type however of the German mind is that of profound scholarship. The Germans are the self-chosen and world-accepted miners of the realms of science, and obtain the pure ore of knowledge, by willing, patient delving after it, which other nations convert into all the forms of intellectual commerce, for the world's good. VI. The Celtic. This class of languages has not been appreciated until very recently, as one of the great Indo-European family. To Prichard, that fine English investigator into the natural history of man and into ethnology, is due |