LECTURE VI.

SOURCES AND COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH.

I.

THE heterogeneous character of our vocabulary, and the consequent obscurity of its etymology, have been noticed as circumstances which impose upon the student of English an amount of labor not demanded for the attainment of languages whose stock of words is derived, in larger proportion, from obvious and familiar roots. I now propose to give some account of the sources and composition of the English language. According to the views of many able philologists, comparison of grammatical structure is a surer test of radical linguistic affinity, than resemblances between the words which compose vocabularies. I shall not here discuss the soundness of this doctrine, my present object being to display the acquisitions of the Anglican tongue, and to indicate the quarters from which they have been immediately derived, not to point out its ethnological relationships. I shall therefore on this occasion confine myself to the vocabulary, dismissing inquiry into the grammatical character of the language, with the simple remark, that it in general corresponds with that of the

other dialects of the Gothic stock. In struct re, English, though shorn of its inflections, is still substantially AngloSaxon, and it owes much the largest part of its words to the

same source.

There are two modes of estimating the relative amount of words derived from different sources in a given language. The one is to compute the etymological proportions of the entire vocabulary, as exhibited in the fullest dictionaries; the other, to observe the proportions in which words of indigenous and of foreign origin respectively occur in actual speech and in written literature. Both modes of computation must be employed in order to arrive at a just appreciation of the vocabulary; but, for ordinary purposes, the latter method is the most important, because words tend to carry their native syntax with them, and grammatical structure usually accords more nearly with that of the source from which the mass of the words in daily use is taken, than with the idiom of languages whose contributions to the speech are fewer in number and of rarer occurrence. Besides this, all dictionaries contain many words which are employed only in special or exceptional cases, and which may be regarded as foreign denizens not yet entitled to the rights of full citizenship. At the same time, the method in question is a very difficult mode of estimation, because, not to speak of the peculiar diction of individual writers, every subject, every profession, and to some extent, every locality, has its own nomenclature, and it is often impossible to decide how far those special vocabularies can claim to form a part of the general stock.

Upon the whole, we may say that English, as understood and employed by the great majority of those who speak it, or, in other words, that portion of the language which is not

*

restricted to particular callings or places, but is common to all intelligent natives, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the French. Neither its vocabulary nor its structure possesses any important characteristic features which may not be traced directly to one of these sources, although the number of individual words which we have borrowed from other quarters is still very considerable. Archdeacon Trench makes this general estimate of the relative proportions between the different elements of English: "Suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts; of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon, thirty would be Latin, including of course the Latin which has come to us through the French, five would be Greek; we should then have assigned ninety-five parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue, to be divided among all the other languages, from which we have adopted isolated words." This estimate, of course, applies to the total vocabulary, as contained in the completest dictionaries. Sharon Turner gives extracts from fifteen classical English authors, beginning with Shakespeare and ending with Johnson, for the purpose of comparing the proportion of Saxon words used by these authors respectively. These extracts have often been made a basis for estimates of the proportion of English words in actual use derived from foreign sources, but they are by no means sufficiently extensive to furnish a safe criterion. The extracts consist of only a period or two from each author, and few of them extend beyond a hundred words; none of them, I believe, beyond a hundred and fifty. The

* This general statement must be qualified by the admission that certain grammatical forms adopted in Northern England from the Danish colonists passed into the literary dialect, and finally became established modes of speech in English.

results deduced from them are, as would be naturally sup posed, erroneous, but, such as they are, they have been too generally adopted to be passed without notice, and they are given in a note at the foot of the page. In order to arrive

*

*The most convenient and intelligible method of stating the results is by the numerical percentage of words from different sources in the extracts referred to in the text; according to these,—

Shakespeare uses 85 per cent. of Anglo-Saxon, 15 of other words.

A comparison of these results, derived from single paragraphs containing from sixty or seventy to a hundred and fifty words, with those which I have deduced from the examination of different passages from the same and other authors, each extending to several thousand words, will show that conclusions based on data so insignificant in amount as those given by Turner, are entitled to no confidence whatever. The extract from Swift contains ninety words, ten of which, or eleven per cent., Turner marks as foreign, leaving eighty-nine per cent. of AngloSaxon. Now this is a picked sentence, for in the John Bull, as thoroughly English a performance as any of Swift's works, the foreign words are in the proportion of at least fifteen per cent.; in his History of the four last years of Queen Anne, twenty-eight per cent.; in his Political Lying, more than thirty per cent.; and in this latter work, many passages of considerable length may be found, where the words of foreign etymology amount to forty per cent. On the other hand, Ruskin, in his theoretical discussions, often employs twenty-five or even thirty per cent. of Latin derivatives, but in the first six periods of the sixth Exercise in his Elements of Drawing, containing one hundred and eight words, all but two, namely, pale and practice, are Anglo-Saxon. My own comparisons, though embracing more than two hundred times the quantity of literary material examined by Turner, are still insufficient in variety and amount to establish any more precise conclusion than the general one stated in a following page, that

at satisfactory conclusions on this point, more thorough and extensive research is necessary. I have subjected much longer extracts from several authors to a critical examination, and the results I am about to state are in all cases founded, not upon average estimates from the comparison of scattered passages, but upon actual enumeration.* In writers whose style is nearly uniform, I have endeavored to select characteristic portions as a basis for computation; in others, whose range of subject and variety of expression is wide, I have compared their different styles with reference to the effect produced upon them by difference of matter and of purpose. I have been able to examine the total vocabularies only of the Ormulum, the English Bible, Shakespeare, and the poetical works of Milton, because these are the only English books to which I can find complete verbal indexes. In these instances, the comparison of the entire stock of words possessed, and the proportions habitually used by the writers, is full of interest and instruction, and I regret that leisure and means were not afforded for making similar inquiries respecting the vocabularies of a larger number of eminent authors near our own time. In all cases, proper names are excluded from the estimates, but in computing the etymological proportions of the words used in the extracts examined, all other words, of whatever grammatical class, and all repetitions of

the authors of the present day use more Anglo-Saxon words, in proportion to the whole number known to educated men, than writers of corresponding eminence in the last century.

* I have made no attempt to determine the etymological proportions of our entire verbal stock, because I believe no dictionary contains more than twothirds, or at most three-fourths, of the words which make up the English lan guage. Dictionaries are made from books, and for readers of books, and they all omit a vast array of words, chiefly Saxon, which belong to the arts and to the humbler fields of life, and which have not yet found their way into literary cir cles.