1.]

JACOB GRIMM ON ENGLISH.

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in wealth, good sense, and closeness of structure no other of the languages at this day spoken deserves to be compared with it-not even our German, which is torn, even as we are torn, and must first rid itself of many defects, before it can enter boldly into the lists, as a competitor with the English."*

Or who can tell for what great work in hand
The greatness of our style is now ordained ?

What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,
What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained,
What mischief it may powerfully withstand,

And what fair ends may thereby be attained?

* Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache, Berlin, 1832, p. 50.

IT

T is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as living, of others as dead. These epithets are not severally mere synonyms for 'spoken' and 'unspoken,' however we very often esteem them no more. Some languages are living,

or alive, in quite a different and in a much higher sense than this; showing themselves to be so by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition, loss, progress, and decay. A living language is one in which a vital formative energy is still at work; a dead language is one in which this has ceased. A living language is one which is in the course of actual evolution; which is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources, increasing its wealth; which at the same time is casting off useless and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it finds no use, rejecting from itself by a re-active energy the foreign and heterogeneous, which may for a while have been forced upon it. I would not assert that in the process of all this it does not make mistakes; in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions which were not useless, and which it would have been better to retain; its acquisitions

DEAD LANGUAGE AND LIVING.

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are not all gains; it sometimes rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which were most worthy to have lived. So far as it does this its life is not perfectly healthy; there are here signs, however remote, of decay and death approaching; but still it lives, and even these misgrowths and malformations, these errors, are themselves the utterances and evidences of life. A dead language, the Latin for instance, is as incapable of losing as it is of gaining. We may know it better; but it can never be more nor less in itself than it has been for hundreds of years.

Our own is, of course, a living language still; it is therefore gaining and losing; it is a tree in which the vital sap is yet working, ascending from its roots into its branches; and as this works, new leaves are being put forth by it, old are dropping away and dying. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some of the evidences of this its present life. As I took for the subject

my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several elements of our composite English are now found in it, so I shall take for the subject of this, the sources from which the English language has enriched its vocabulary, the periods at which it has made its chief additions, the character of the additions which at different periods it has made, and the motives which induced it to seek them.

I had occasion to mention in that lecture, and indeed I dwelt with some emphasis on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of our language,

is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or mingled as it must freely be allowed to be, it is only such in respect of words, not in respect of construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms. These are all of one piece; and whatever of new has come in has been compelled to conform itself to these. The framework is English; only a part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this filling in, of these its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.

The first great augmentation by foreign words of our Saxon vocabulary was a consequence, although not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the Norman domination which Duke William's victory established in our land. And here let me say in respect of that victory, in contradiction to the sentimental regrets of Thierry and others, and with the fullest acknowledgment of the immediate miseries which it entailed on the Saxon race, that it was really the making of England; a judgment, it is true, but a judgment and mercy in one. God never showed more plainly that He had great things in store for the people which should occupy this English soil, than when He brought hither that aspiring Norman race. At the same time the actual interpenetration of our AngloSaxon with any large amount of French words did not find place till very considerably later than this event, however it was a consequence of it. Some French words we find very soon after; but in the main the two streams of language continued for a long while separate and apart, even as the two

II.]

LANGUAGE OF THE CONQUERED.

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nations remained aloof, a conquering and a conquered, and neither forgetting the fact.

Time however softened the mutual antipathies. The Norman, after a while shut out from France, began more and more to feel that England was his home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme depression which had ensued on his defeat,* became every day a more important element of the new English nation which was gradually forming from the coalition of the two races. His language partook of his elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French

*We may trace, I think, a permanent record of this depression in the fact that a vast number of Teutonic words, which have a noble sense in the kindred language of Germany, and evidently had once such in the Anglo-Saxon, have forfeited this in whole or in part, have been contented to take a lower place, while, in most instances, a word of the Latin moiety of the language has assumed the place which they have vacated. Thus 'tapfer' is valiant, courageous, but 'dapper' is only spruce or smart; 'prächtig,' which means proud, magnificent, has dwindled into 'pretty;' 'taufen,' being to baptize, only appears with us as to 'dip;' 'weinen' is honest weeping in German, it is only 'whining' with us; 'dach' is any roof whatever, but thatch' is only a straw-roof for us; 'baum' is a living tree, while 'beam' is only a piece of dead timber; in 'horn-beam,' one of our trees, 'beam' still keeps its earlier use. 'Haut' is skin, but its English representative is 'hide,' skin, that is, of a beast; 'stuhl,' a seat or chair, is degraded into 'stool;' while 'graben' is no longer to dig, but only 'to grub;' again in 'rasch' there is nothing of the sense of too great haste, of temerity, which in our 'rash' there is. And this list might be very largely increased.