of the British islands; and, small as is the influence npon our present speech of the pure Celtic aboriginal tongue, the corruption of that tongue by the admixture of Latin (or rather the corruption of the Latin by the admixture of Celtic forms) was to be no less completely supplanted by new invasions, and by new languages originating in different and distant regions. It is undoubtedly obvious that a very large part of the modern English vocabulary, and even many forms of English grammar, are to be traced to the Romanz dialect, and therefore must be considered as having arisen from a corrupted Latinity, such as we have been describing as likely to have been employed by Gallic or Celtic tribes imperfectly acquainted with Latin. It would, however, be a fatal mistake to consider that these, or even any part of them, came from any such Romanz dialect or lingua franca ever spoken originally in Britain. They are, and without any exception, not of British growth, but were introduced into the English language after the Norman invasion of the country in 1066.

We have said that the traces existing in the modern English of the aboriginal Celtic are exceeding few and faint: it is, however, proper to except one class of words we allude to the names of places. In the long period of anarchy and bloodshed which intervened between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Saxon hordes in 449, and the gradual foundation in England of the Eight Kingdoms, the country must be conceived to have gone back rather than advanced in the career of civilization. The Saxons, we know, who were during a long period incessantly at war, as the Romans had been before them, with the Picts, the Scots, and the Welsh, strenuously endeavored to obliterate every trace of the ancient language, even from the geography of the regions they had conquered: and it is singular to observe an Anglo-Saxon king, himself the member of a nation not very far removed from its ancient rudeness and ferocity, stigmatising as barbarous the British name of a spot to which he had occasion to allude, as known "barbarico nomine Pendyfig," by the barbarous - this was the British-name of Pendyfig. National hatred is perhaps the longest-lived of all things: and it is curious to observe the mutual dislike and contempt still existing between the Celtic and the Saxon race, and the Irish peasant of the present day expressing, in words which 1300 years have not deprived of their original bitterness, his detestation of the Sassenagh-the Saxon. A moment's inspection of the map of England will show the immense number of places which have retained, in whole or in part, their original Celtic form: we may instance the terminating syllable don with which many of these names conclude, and which is the Celtic dun, signifying a fortified rock. The Irish Kil, which begins so many names of places, is nothing more than a corruption of the Celtic Caille, signifying a forest; and the Caer, frequently found in the beginning of Welsh, Cornish, and Armorican names, and which the

Bretons have so often preserved in the initial syllable Ker (as Kerhoët), is evidently nothing but Caer, the rock or stone.

From what has been suggested, then, upon the subject of the Celtic language, the reader will conclude that, for all practical purposes of analogy or of derivation, it has exerted no appreciable influence on the modern speech of the country. Some few words indeed have been adopted into English from the tongue of the aboriginal possessors of the country, but so few in number, and so unimportant in signification, that it will be found to have borrowed as much from the language of Portugal, nay, even from those of China and Hindostan, as it has derived from the ancient indigenous tongue.

The English language, then, viewed with reference to its component elements, must be considered as a mixture of the Saxon and of the Romanz or corrupted Roman of the middle ages and before we can proceed to investigate the peculiar character, genius, and history of such a composite dialect, it will be essential to establish with some degree of correctness-first, in what proportions these two elements are found in the compound substance under consideration; and second, what were the periods and what were the influences during and through which the process of amalgamation took place.

In examining the relative proportions of two or more elements forming together a new dialect, it would certainly be a very simple and unphilosophical analysis which should consist of simply counting the various vocables in a dictionary and arranging them under the various languages from which they are derived, then striking a balance between them, and assigning as the true origin of the language the dialect to which the greater number should be found to belong. No; we must pay some attention to the nature and significance of the vocables themselves, and also to the degree of primitiveness and antiquity of their meaning; nor must we neglect, in particular, to take into the account the general form and analogies of the composite language viewed as a whole. It is evident that that dialect must be the primitive or radical one from which are derived the greatest number of vocables expressing the simpler ideas and the most universally known objects—such objects and ideas, in short, as cannot but possess equivalents in every human speech, however rude its state or imperfect its development.

Following this important rule, we shall find that all the primary ideas, and all the simpler objects, natural and artificial, are expressed in English by words so evidently of Teutonic origin-nay, so slightly varied from Teutonic forms—that a knowledge of the German will render them instantly intelligible and recognizable. Such for instance, are the words "man," "woman" (wif-man; i. e. female man), "sun," 66 moon," ," "earth;" the names of the simpler colours, as 66 green, "red," "yellow" (note that "purple"--a compound colour-is de rived from the Greek), "brown," &c.; the commoner and simpler

acts of life, "to run," "to fly," "to eat," "to sing," &c. ; the primary and fundamental passions of our nature, and the verbs which express those passions as in activity, "love," "fear," "hate," &c.; the names of the ordinary animals and their cries, as "horse," "hound," "sheep," "to neigh," "to bark," "to bleat," "to low," &c.; the arts and employments, the trades and dignities of life, "to read," "to write," "seamen," "king," "miller," "earl," "queen," &c.; and the most generally known among artificial objects, as "house," "boat," ," "door." It is worthy of remark how universally applicable is this principle of antiquity or primitiveness: thus, those religious objects and ideas which are of the simplest and most obvious character are represented in English by words derived from the Teutonic dialects, while the more complicated and artificial-what we may call the scientific or technic-portion of the religious vocabulary, is almost in every case of Latin or Greek derivation: thus, "God," "fiend," "wicked," "righteous," "hell," "faith," "hope," &c., are all pure Saxon words; while "predestination," "justification," "baptism," &c., will generally be found to come from other sources. So generally, indeed, is this principle observable in the English language, that we may in most cases decide, à priori, whether the equivalent for a given object or idea be a Saxon or a Latin word, by observing whether that object be a primitive and simple or a complex and arti ficial one.

It must not, however, be inferred from this that the Saxon language was a rude and uncultivated mode of speech: such a notion would be in the highest degree unjust and unfounded. Like all the languages of the Teutonic stock, the Anglo-Saxon was distinguished for its singular vigour, expressiveness, and exactness, and in particular for the great facilities it afforded for the formation of compound words.

We may remark that most of the Saxon compound words have ceased to exist in the modern English: in short, the tendency of our remarks is to show, not that the Saxon was incapable of expressing even the most complex and refined ideas, but that, by a curious fatality, those words have generally given place, in the tongue of the present day, to equivalents drawn from the Latin and Greek origins. That this substitution (for which we shall endeavor to assign a reason, of Latin and Greek derivatives for words of Saxon stock has been injurious in some cases to the expressiveness, and in all to the vigour, of the modern idiom, no one can deny who compares the distinctness of the older words, in which all the elements would be known to an English peasant, with the somewhat pedantic and far-fetched equiva lents for instance, how much more picturesque, and, let us add, in telligible, are the words "mildheartedness,' deathsman," 29.66 ling," than the corresponding "mercifulness," "executioner," and "lunatic" !

99 66

moon..

But perhaps the most singular transformation undergone by th Saxon language, in the course of its becoming the basis of the English is the annihilation of all, or nearly all, its inflections. The tongue of our Saxon ancestors was distinguished, like the modern Germanone of the offshoots of the same great parent stock-by a considera ble degree of grammatical complexity; it possessed its declensions, its cases, its numbers, and in particular its genders of substantive and adjective, indicated by terminations, as in almost all the languages ever spoken on the earth.

The whole of this elaborate apparatus has been rejected in our present speech, in the same manner as a great portion of it has been rejected by the Italian, Spanish, and French languages in their process of descent from the Latin. The English language presents, therefore, the singular phenomenon of a dialect derived from two distinct sources, each characterized by peculiarities of inflection, yet itself absolutely or nearly without any traces of the method of infleetion prevalent in either the one or the other of those sources.

Among the singularities of the English pronunciation which place, as it were, upon the threshold of the language so many unexpected obstacles in the way of the foreigner, there are two or three always found peculiar difficulties by all, and particularly by Germans, who discover, in other respects, so many analogies between their language and our own. These are, among others, the sound, or rather the two distinct sounds, of the th. A very little explanation would suffice to render at all events the theoretical part of this difficulty very easy and intelligible to them; for they would then discover that the th which they so bitterly complain of represents the sound of two different and distinct letters in the Saxon alphabet, which were most injudiciously suppressed, their place being supplied by the combination th, which exists in almost all the European languages, but which is pronounced in none of them as in the English. The Saxon letters in question are and p, and are nothing more than 8 and (the Saxon d and t) followed by an aspirate, indicated by the cross line; and which are both most absurdly represented in English by th, the pronunciation of which varies, as in the words "this" and "thin;" to assign the right sound being an effort of memory in the learner. Now the Saxon words in which is found the character are almost invariably observed to exist in German with the simple d, and those containing p, with either d or th; a circumstance tending strongly to prove that it is the Germans who have lost the ancient aspirated sound of the two letters or combinations (for it is of no consequence whether they were anciently written by the Germans with one character or two), and that, consequently, the English alone, of all the Teutonic races, have preserved the true ancient pronunciation in this particular. The same conclusion may be arrived at, we think not unfairly, with reference to the English w, the letter corresponding to which in Ger

man, viz. w, seems to have lost not only its true name, but also, which is of much more importance, even its correct sound.*

If the German pronunciation of w be the correct and original one, either the or the f is a superfluous and think it, therefore, not improbable that in this, as well as in the preunnecessary letter. We ceding instance, it is the English language alone which, in spite of a thousand fluctuations and a thousand caprices in orthography and etymology, has preserved the genuine pronunciation of these very important letters: we say very important, for it is only sufficient to reflect on the immense number of words in German, English, and, in short, all the Teutonic languages into the structure of which enter one or the other of these letters, to be convinced that the th, the d, and the w play a most considerable part.

The pronunciation of every language must obviously depend principally upon the sounds assigned to the various vowels, and consequently the learner, when he finds that in English almost all the vowels have a name and a power totally different from what they bear in all other tongues, is apt to lose all courage, and to despair of using, in the acquisition of English, the most powerful instrument with which he can be armed; namely, the analogy existing between the original and the derived dialects. English vowels a, e, i, and u, have quite different names and sounds He finds, for instance, that the from the same characters in French and German; and his ear, perpetually tantalised by analogies of sound which do not exist, is very apt to become incapable of perceiving those which do. So generally, indeed, is this difficulty experienced, that it may be laid down as an almost universal principle, that in all words derived from a foreign source, and naturalized in the English vocabulary, one of two results is invariably found to take place; viz. either the pronunciation of the original word is changed, or its orthography: in other terms, the word is made to submit either to the pronunciation of the English letters, when its original spelling is retained, or the spelling is altered, so as to make another combination of English letters express the original sound of the word. from languages of the Teutonic stock, these changes of orthography In the case, however, of derivatives ought by no means to be considered as involving such great difficulty as is generally attributed to them; and in a majority of cases they will be found much less capricious than is usually supposed. One considerable portion of the above difficulty arises from the circumstance that there exists in German a much greater number of dipththongal combinations than have been retained, in a written form, in the English; and thus we are frequently obliged to represent such combinations by means of our limited number of vowels, in giving

* The Germans pronounce w as v in English.