ESSENTIALS OF ENGLISH. CHAPTER I. PAST AND PRESENT. They who will fight custom with grammar are fools.-MONTAIGNE. Every existing form of human speech is a body of arbitrary and conventional signs for thought, handed down by tradition from one generation to another . . the instrument ever adapting itself to the uses which it is to subserve.-WHITNEY. A TRUE conception of the world as it is, requires that it be viewed in the light of the past. The botanist who would know the economy of the developed tree, must revert to the plant and descend to the root. To understand well what English is, it is necessary to study some of its other forms and compare them with our own. We are first to dwell, therefore, for a little time upon the historical circumstances in the midst of which our language expanded to the light, since upon this retrospective survey will hinge much of the meaning of chapters to come. THE ARYAN MOTHERHOOD. When, for example, we compare the English 'mother' with the Greek up, the Latin mater, the German mutter, and the Celtic mathair; when in Sanscrit is found swasri, and in Slavonic sestra, both meaning 'sister,' we are led to suspect the existence of a relationship, as between members of one family. The received opinion is that this parent language was spoken somewhere in Central Asia, and that it spread from thence westward into Europe. Hence the designation Indo-European, to denote collectively its varied offspring. The customary name for this mother-speech is Aryan. Many have been the channels through which the water from the well-head has descended to our own day. Only the principal will here be enumerated. 1. First we have Sanscrit, the sacred tongue of Brahmanism, dead these twenty-five hundred years, but still taught in the schools of the Brahmanic priesthood. In nearly every department it possesses an abundant literature, epic, lyric, dramatic, religious, philosophical. Its earliest records, and, for philology, its most important, are the far-famed Vedas, the Bible of the Hindus. We have not a few words which vary but slightly in their eastern and their western shapes. Thus: 2. In close agreement with this is the Iranic, or old Persian, sometimes called the Zend, because in it is written the sacred book of Zoroaster,― the Zend-Avesta, or Scriptures, of the fire-worshippers. Its oldest monuments are the inscriptions-cut into walls of living rockwhich record imperishably the names and deeds of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. Without enlarging upon its affinity with English, we may notice, in passing, the analogy between yare and 'year,' thri and 'three,' thrisata and 'thirty." These two languages, which alone have maintained themselves at home, and which continued together long after they were separated from the common stock, form the Asiatic branches of our family. The others, with the clans that spoke them, left the cradle of mankind in the East, and in successive waves made their way toward the setting sun. 3. The Celtic may come first of these. It exhibits two distinct and clearly defined branches, the Gaelic, which comprises Irish, Erse, and Manx, all closely allied; the Cymric, which comprises Welsh, Cornish and Armorican. Once occupying a wide territory, its splendor has departed as the sceptre has been wrested from the Celtic race. For centuries it has been heard only in remote and inaccessible corners, separate areas, with no intercommunication,—in the Scotch Highlands, where it will hardly survive the complete taming and civilization of the peasantry; in the wildest parts of Ireland, where it is rapidly fading; in the Isle of Man, where it is of but secondary interest, spoken by scarcely a fourth of the inhabitants; in the rough glens of Cornwall, where it has become extinct within the memory of the present generation; in Brittany of northern France, where it is likely to be crowded out; in the mountains of Wales, where, though passionately fostered, it seems doomed to extinction by a more thorough fusion of the people with the greater community to which they form an adjunct. 4. Next comes the Greek, some of whose varieties are, the Eolic of Sappho, 600 B.C.; the Doric of Pindar and Theocritus, 600-250 B.C.; the Ionic of Homer, Hesiod, and Herodotus, 1000-400 B.C.; the Attic of Eschylus, Plato, and Demosthenes, the language of Athens, gradually gaining the ascendant, and thus becoming, about 300 B.C., the common language of cultivated Greeks everywhere. Out of this last has grown the Romaic, or Modern Greek, differing from the classic far less than might be expected. 5. Then the Latin, the language of mighty Rome, dating from an unknown antiquity, but representing to us, in its familiar classic form, the speech of the learned and educated Romans within a century or two before the Christian era,-Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Cæsar. It is traceable with great accuracy, as it passes into the modern forms, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese; and the extinct Provençal, once current in the south of France. These are frequently styled Romance languages, to commemorate their Roman origin. 6. Of less interest, because of its greater remoteness as well as its inferior historical importance and literary value, is the Slavonic, including the Servian, the Bulgarian, the Bohemian, and the powerful Russian. The last is in our day a literary tongue of considerable moment. Its spirit is aggressive. Holding supreme sway over the East, it is persistently pushing its outposts farther and farther into the West. 7. Last and, for us, most important, is the Teutonic,' whose principal sections and subdivisions are: (1.) Scandinavian, embracing the Swedish, the Danish, the Norwegian, and the Icelandic. This latter, transplanted by the refugees from Norway into that faroff and inhospitable island of volcanoes and ice, may be regarded as the ancestral type. It is usually called Norse, in reference to its geographical position in the North. 1 Popular, national. |