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 a few of them extend beyond a hundred words; none of them, I believe, beyond a hundred and fifty. The results deduced from them are, as would be naturally supposed, 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 grammatical forms adopted in Northern England from the Danish colonists passed into the literary dialect, and finally became established modes of speech in English. I have known one American family in which the Danish verb at lakke was in familiar use, and they commonly said it lacks towards ten o'clock,' for it is near ten o'clock,' which is precisely equivalent to the Danish det lakker mod ti. The family could give no explanation of the origin of the phrase. *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. 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 Swift uses 89 per cent. of Anglo-Saxon, 11 of other words. 32 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 Anglo-Saxon. 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, and in discrimination of classes of and character of words, to establish any more precise conclusion than the general one stated in a following page, namely that the authors of the present day uso more Anglo-Saxon words, proportionally, than do 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 language. 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 circles. 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 same words, are counted. Thus, in the passage extending from the end of the period in verse 362 of the sixth book of Paradise Lost, to the end of the period in verse 372, there are seventy-two words. Eight of these are proper names and are rejected, but all the other words are counted, though several of them are repetitions of particles and pronouns. In the comparison of the total vocabularies, every part of speech is counted as a distinct word, but all the inflected forms of a given verb or adjective are treated as composing a single word. Thus, safe, safely, safety, and save, I make four words, but save, saved, and saving, one, as also safe, safer, safest, one. I have made no attempt to assign words not of Anglo-Saxon origin to their respective sources, but it may be assumed in general that Greek words, except the modern scientific compounds, have come to us through the Latin, and both in this case and where they have been formed directly from Greek roots, their orthography is usually conformed to the Latin standard for similar words. Words of original Latin etymology have been, as will be more fully shown in a future lecture, in the great majority of instances, borrowed by us from French, and are still used in forms more in accordance with the French than with the Latin orthography. The proportion, five per cent., allowed by Trench to Greek words, I think too great, as is also that for other miscellaneous etymologies, unless we follow the Celtic school in referring to a Celtic origin all roots common to that and the Gothic dialects. Taking the authors I have examined chronologically, I find, with respect to their total vocabularies, that in that of the Ormulum (which though written probably not far from the year 1225, I consider, in opposition to the opinion of most philologists, as English rather than as semi-Saxon), nearly ninety-seven per cent. of the words are Anglo-Saxon.* In the vocabulary of the Eng 營 With the exception of a very few Latin terms, such as quadriga, vipera, &c., I have observed in the Ormulum no word of foreign etymology which had not been employed by Anglo-Saxon writers, and thus naturalized while Anglo-Saxon was still a living speech. There is a considerable class of Saxon words, some of them very important with reference to the question of the moral culture of the people, the source and etymology of which it is difficult to determine. Law and right, for example, are by many etymologists derived respectively from the Latin lex and rectus. It is said that lagu and lah do not occur in Anglo-Saxon before the reign of Edgar, A.D. 959– 975. But lagu bears the same relation to the Saxon verb lecgan, to lay, to set down, that the German Gesetz does to the verb setzen. The MosoGothic lagjan is the equivalent of lecgan, and though no noun etymologically corresponding to law occurs in the slender remains we possess of that literature, yet a similar word is found in Old-Northern as well as in Swedish and Danish. We have in the eighteenth stanza of the Völo-spá, one of the oldest poems of the Edda, þær lavg lavgdo, they enacted statutes, laid down the law. We cannot well doubt that lavg and lavgdo are related words, and it is not denied that the verb, as well as its cognates in the sister tongues, is of primitive Gothic origin. We find in the Saxon Chronicle MLXXXVII., an expression very similar to that quoted above from the Edda, and in near connection with it the verb settan in the same sense as the Ger. setzen, to appoint or decree : He sætte mycel deorfrið, and he lægde laga þær wið, þat swa hwa swa sloge heort oððe hinde, þat hine man sceolde blendian. * Eac he sætte be pam haran, þat hi mosten freo faran." * I know not why we should question the etymological relationship between lægde and laga, and if these words are connected, there is no reason for going to the Latin for the derivation of law. Jornandes, who wrote in the sixth century, has a word apparently from the same root, and even approximating to our by-law: Nam ethicam eas erudivit, ut barbaricos mores ab eis compesceret; physicam tradens naturaliter propriis legibus vivere fecit, quas usque nunc conscriptas bellagines (Ihre, and some others, read, bilagines) nuncupant.—De Reb. Get. cap. xi. Right is found not only in Anglo-Saxon (riht), but in all the cognate languages, and it is certainly improbable that the Maso-Goths of the fourth century borrowed from the Latin rectus their raihts, right, just, and garaihts, righteous, which, with several derivatives from them, are used by Ulphilas. We are, therefore, entitled to consider law and right, and all their deriva lish Bible, sixty per cent. are native; in that of Shakespeare the proportion is very nearly the same; while of the stock of words employed in the poetical works of Milton, less than thirty-three per cent. are Anglo-Saxon. But when we examine the proportions in which authors actually employ the words at their command, we find that, even in those whose total vocabulary embraces the greatest number of Latin and other foreign vocables, the Anglo-Saxon still largely predominates. Thus : Robert of Gloster, narrative of Conquest, pp. Ninety-six per cent. Eighty-four per cent. tives, as at least primâ facie English and not Latin words. At the same time, it must be remembered that history has taught us almost nothing of the moral and linguistic relations between the Romans and the progenitors of the modern Gothic and Celtic tribes, except that in culture and civilization, as well as in material power, the Latin was the superior race, and that Rome was in a position to exercise an immense moral as well as social influence over those rude populations. With respect, therefore, to the vocabulary of law, of political life, and of intellectual action, we are treading on uncertain ground, when we positively affirm the domestic origin of a Gothic or Celtic root resembling a Latin one, and we can seldom be sure that such words have not passed directly from the latter to the former, instead of descending from a common but remote source. *For the purpose of determining more satisfactorily the true character of the diction of Langland and of Chaucer, I have counted both the different words of foreign derivation and the repetitions of them, in the Passus Decimus-Quartus of Piers Ploughman and in an equal amount of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Exclusive of quotations and proper names, the Passus Decimus-Quartus contains somewhat less than 3,200 words. Of these, including repetitions, 500, or sixteen per cent., are of Latin or French origin, and as there are about 180 repetitions, the number of different foreign words is about 320, or ten per cent. In the first 420 verses of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the number of words is the same, or about 3,200, of which, including repetitions, about 370, or rather less than twelve per cent., are Romance. The repetitions are but 70, and there remain 300, or rather more than nine per cent. of different foreign words. In either point of view, then, Chaucer's vocabulary is more purely Anglo-Saxon than that of Langland. It |