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GERMAN PURISTS.

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things yet, those who contribute their all to bring ridicule and contempt upon it. Thus in the reaction against foreigners which ensued, and in the zeal to purify the language from them, some went to such extravagant excesses as to desire to get rid of 'Testament,' 'Apostel,' which last Campe would have replaced by "Lehrbote,' with other words like these, consecrated by longest use, and to find native substitutes in their room; or they understood so little what foreign words were, or how to draw the line between them and native, that they would fain have gotten rid of 'vater,' 'mutter,' 'wein,' 'fenster,''meister,' 'kelch ;** the first three of which belong to the German language by just as good a 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 would be as if, having passed an alien act for the banishment of all foreigners, we should proceed to include under that name, and as such drive forth 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 settled among us in the time of our Edwards. One notable enthusiast in this line proposed to create an entirely new nomenclature for all the mythological personages of the Greek and the Roman pantheon, who, one would think, might have been allowed, if any, to retain their Greek and Latin

* Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwörter im Deutschen, von Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85–91.

names. So far however from this, they were to exchange these 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 much else of the same kind. Let us beware (and the warning extends a great deal further than to the matter in hand) of making a good cause ridiculous by our manner of supporting it, of assuming that exaggerations on one side can only be redressed by exaggerations as great upon the

other.

LECTURE III.

DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

I TOOK occasion to observe at the commence

ment of my last lecture 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 one moment make up our bodies remain for ever without alteration. As I then undertook for my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own language had made, I shall dedicate the present to a consideration of some of the losses, or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured. It will however be expedient here to offer one or two preliminary observations for the purpose of guarding against possible misapprehensions of my meaning.

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, &c.), and also from causes external to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life, they

H

have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude, their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary, out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus, for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a great part of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; not a few in our own. Still in their own proper being languages perish and pass away; no nations, that is, continue to speak them any more. Seeing then that they thus die, they must have had the germs of death, the possibilities of decay, in them from the very first.

Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built fabrics as these, the causes which shall thus produce their final dissolution must have been actually at work very long before the results began 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 remote overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and languages, it would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and period is growth and gain, and all after, decay and loss. On the contrary, there are long

III.]

LANGUAGES NOT IMMORTAL.

99

periods during which growth in some directions is going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower, and the flower into the fruit. There is indeed a moment when the growth and gains cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the losses and the decay; when these ever become more, those ever less; when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than of life and order: and from that moment the decline of a language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses, the real losses of a language, without in the least thereby implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun; it may yet be far distant and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my intention. In some respects it is losing, but in others gaining. Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. It is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only different in that it is passing into another stage of its development; only different, as the