much. No language affords a better proof and illustration of this than the German. When the patriotic Germans began to wake up to a consciousness of the enormous encroachments which foreign languages, Latin, French, and Italian, had made on their native tongue, the lodgements which they had therein effected, and the danger which lay so near, that it should cease to be a language at all, but only a mingle-mangle, a variegated patchwork of many tongues, without any unity or inner coherence at all, various societies were instituted among them, at the beginning and during the course of the seventeenth century, for the recovering of what was lost of their own, for the expelling of that which had intruded upon it from abroad; and these with excellent effect.

But more effectual than these learned societies were the efforts of single writers, who in this merited eminently well of their country.* There are numerous words now accepted by the whole nation, in respect of which it is possible to designate the writer who first substituted them for some affected Gallicism or pedantic Latinism. Thus to Lessing his fellow-countrymen owe the substitution of zartgefühl' for 'delicatesse,' of 'empfindsamkeit' for sentimentalität,' of 'wesenheit' for 'essence." Voss (1786) first employed 'alterthümlich' for

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* There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (Opera, vol. vi. part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title, Considérations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue Allemande.

IV.

GERMAN PURISTS.

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167

'antik.' Wieland was the author or reviver of a multitude of excellent words, for some of which he had to do earnest battle at the first; such were 'seligkeit,' anmuth,' entzückung,' 'festlich,' 'entwirren,' with many more. For maskerade,' Campe would have fain substituted larventanz,' for ballet schautanz,' for lauvine' schneesturz;' and Winkelman denkbild' for 'idee.' It was a novelty when Büsching called his great work on geography Erdbeschreibung' instead of 'Geographie;' while 'schnellpost' for 'diligence,' 'zerrbild' for 'carricatur' are also of recent introduction. Of wörterbuch' itself, Jacob Grimm tells us he can find no example dating earlier than

1719.

Some of these reformers, it must be owned, proceeded with more zeal than knowledge, while others did what in them lay to make the whole movement absurd-even as there ever hang on the skirts of a noble movement, be it in literature or politics or higher things yet, those who by extravagance and excess contribute their little all to bring ridicule and contempt upon it. Thus in the reaction against foreign interlopers, and in the zeal to rid the language of them, some would fain have disallowed words consecrated by longest use, and found native substitutes in their room; thus Campe, who in the main did good service here, desired to replace apostel' by 'lehrbote;' or they understood so little what words deserved to be called foreign, that they would fain have gotten rid of 'vater,' 'mutter," wein,' 'fenster,' ' meister,'

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'kelch ;'* the three first belonging to the Gothic dialects by exactly the same right as they do to the Latin and the Greek; while the other three have been naturalized so long that to propose to expel them now is as though, having passed an Alien Act for the banishment of all foreigners, we should proceed to include under that name, and drive from the kingdom, the descendants of the French Protestants who found refuge here at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or even of the Flemings who came over in the time of our Edwards. One notable enthusiast proposed to create an entirely new nomenclature for all the mythological personages of the Greek and Roman pantheons, who, one would think, might have been allowed, if any, to retain their Greek and Latin names. These, however, they were to exchange for equivalent German titles; Cupid was to be 'Lustkind,' Flora 'Bluminne,' Aurora Röthin;' instead of Apollo schoolboys were to speak of 'Singhold;' instead of Pan of ‘Schaflieb;' instead of Jupiter of 'Helfevater,' with other similar absurdities. Let us beware (and the warning extends much further than to the matter in hand) of making a good cause ridiculous by our manner of supporting it, by taking for granted that exaggerations on one side can only be redressed by equal exaggerations upon the other.

* Fuchs, Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwörter im Deutschen, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85–91. Compare Jean Paul, Esthetik, §§ 83-85.

V.

DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 169

LECTURE V.

DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

I OBSERVED in my last lecture but one that it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one another, as do the atoms which at any moment make up our bodies remain for ever without subtraction or addition. As I then undertook for my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own language had made, I shall consider in this lecture and the following some of the losses, or at any rate diminutions, which it has endured. No one who has not given some attention to the subject, would at all imagine the enormous amount of both, of the increments and decrements alike, which in the tract of time it makes. It is of the latter we have now to speak.

It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in the end, perish. They run their course; not all at the same rate, for the tendency to change is different in different languages, both from internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and social decline; but so it is, that, sooner or later, they

have all their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude, their final dissolution. Not indeed that they disappear, leaving no traces behind them, even when this last has arrived. On the contrary, out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into other forms, the materials of which they were composed, more or less surviving still, are organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus, for example, the Latin perishes as a living language; and yet perishes only to live again, though under somewhat different conditions, in the four daughter languages, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we count the Provençal and Wallachian. Still in their own proper being they pass away. There are dead records of what they were in books; not living men who speak them any more. Looking at them from another point of view, it would be correct to say of them not that they have died, but that they have put on immortality; but this is not the light in which we are regarding them now. Seeing then that they thus die, the germs of a possible decay and death must have been laid in them from the beginning.

Nor is this all; but in such strong built fabrics as these, the causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been actually at work very long before the results begin to be visible. Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still re