Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/533

Rh L.A.NGUA(n.] the principal branches are represented by Gothic, the Scandinavian languages, English, Frisian, and German. In this Grimm has had many followers, but scarcely anywhere out of Germany; and even there the fact that the name, in this application, besides being incorrect from an historical point of view (as the word has never been used thus by any one of the people to whom it has been applied by Grimm), is also liable to be misunderstood, has caused a growing tendency towards conﬁning it again to its original meaning described above, and using G'c~rmmu'sr:7z, or Germcmic, in the collective sense of the English “Teutonic.” But even in the stricter sense the designation Deutsc/1. is not of very long standing, nor has the word always been a real proper name for a distinct people or tribe. In Bishop Ulﬁlas’s Gothic version of the Bible we ﬁnd the adverb t/zimlis/co (e’6vu<¢I»s), Gal. ii. 14, which is clearly a derivative from tltizzcla (361/os), meaning primarily “after the manner of the people.” German writers of the earlier centuries were therefore as fully justified in calling their own language ch'utisr', or, in a Latinized form, t/aemliscus, t/Lcotiscus, that is, their popular or vernacular language, as were those mediaeval Latin writers of all nations who distinguished their national languages by the name of Iingua vzcI_r/a2-is from Latin, the only literary language fully acknowledged in their time. It was 11ot until the 10th century that another Latinized form frequently used in later times, viz., teutoniczcs, began to be used instead of the older t/Leotiscus, of which the only rivals in former times had been such local names as franciscus (frenl'a'sc) or sa.roni- cus, which were no doubt derived from the names of single tribes, but were often also used iii the same comprehensive sense as t/zeotiscus, without necessarily implying any allusion to dialectal differences between the languages of the tribes they properly belonged to. The last name we have to mention here is the Latin Germcm-us, with its different derivatives in the modern languages, including the English form (r'ermcm. Many attempts have been made to elucidate the origin of this word, but as yet nothing can be taken for certain beyond the fact that it is neither of Latin nor of German origin. Most probably it was a Celtic word, and, according to what Tacitus says i11 his G'ermanz'a (ch. ii.), it was originally the name of a Celtic tribe, from which, by some strange error of the Roman and Greek historians, it has been transferred to the non-Celtic inhabitants of Germany. Accordingly the name has never been used by the Germans themselves except i11 imitation of its use in the works of Latin writers. As to its geographical extension the German language has undergone very great changes in the course of the last two thousand years. At the dawn of history no Germans were to be found to the left of the Ilhine, and even to the right of it Celtic tribes occur in the earliest times. There were Celts also in the south of the present Germany as far north at least as the Danube and the Main ; Bohemia, too, derives its name from an early Celtic population, the Boii. Only the midland and north were inhabited by Germanic nations or tribes, stretching as far east as Poland, _and perhaps covering even parts of the adjoining territories of Russia, where Slavonic and _Finnish tribes were their neighbours. But of these Germanic tribes and their languages some have left no equivalents in our modern German tribes and dialects. Ve have mentioned the Frisian language as not belonging to German in its proper sense, although the Frisians have kept their original residence up to the present day, and have always been in constant connexion and frequent intercourse with their “German” neighbours. Many other tribes have wandered from their seats and colonized other countries. It was as late as the middle of the 5th century that the J utes, Angles, and Saxons began their voyages of conquest to England, where they founded a new people and a new GERMANY. 515 language,‘ leaving their native soil open to Danish invasions. Much earlier the midland tribes had alreadybeen slowly push- ing on to the west and south, and expelling or subduing and assimilating the Celtic owners of the territories they invaded. But what was gained in these parts was counter- balanced by great losses in the north and east. The terri- tories about the lower and middle Elbe, Oder, a11d Vistula, abandoned by the Lombards, the Burgundians, the Goths, and some other Germanic tribes, as well as Bohemia, which for some short time had been in the possession of the German Marcomans, were soon filled up by the immigration of numerous tribes of the great Slavonic family. Without going into details of the facts which are well known to the student of history,‘-’ we may simply state that, since about 500 .'L.D., when the great migration of the nations had come to an end so far as Germany was concerned, no further change of any great importance has taken place in the western and southern parts. In the east the German popu- lation at this time did not go beyond a line that may be drawn from about Kiel to the Bohmerwald, passing near Hamburg, Magdeburg, ._Naumburg, Coburg, and Baireuth. As is well known, it is in later centuries that almost all the eastern districts have been recovered for the German language.3 In the 6th century the remains of the numerous smaller Germanic tribes, mentioned before and during the migration of the nations, had consolidated into seven larger bodies or aggregations of tribes. The Frisians still held the extreme north of Holland and Germany. Their midland and eastern neighbours were then called by the new name of Saxons, borrowed from the Saxons who had left the Continent for England. In the main parts of the N ether- lands and Belgium, along both sides of the Rhine, and across Germany to the Thuringian and Bohemian Forests, the powerful Frankish confederation had established itself, a11d it soon incorporated the smaller and less vigorous tribes of the Hessians and Thuringians, which were sur- rounded by the midland or eastern Franks, the Saxons, and the Slavs. Alsatia, Switzerland, a11d South Germany east- ward to the river Lech were occupied by the Alemannians, while the inhabitants of the remaining districts of the present Bavaria and Austria bore the collective name of Bavarians. The history of the German language cannot be severed from the history of these tribes, for Frisian, Saxon, Frankish (Hessian, Thuringian), Alemannian, and Bavarian are the leading dialects of the Continental branch of the Teutonic family. What Dr J. A. H. Murray has pointed out about the origin of the principal English dialects* may equally well be said of these Continental idioms. Having no specimens of the languages of the Continental tribes for nearly three centuries after their ﬁnal settle- ment, we cannot tell to what extent they originally agreed with or differed from each other, although there must have been some dialectal differences to begin with, which were afterwards increased and multiplied, partly by phonetic changes (most probably resulting from scarcely discern- ible phonetic peculiarities, which, even in the earliest times, must have prevailed in those idioms), and partly by such alterations of the inﬂexional systems as are known to occur frequently in all languages whose character is not merely literary. But, however scanty our means of illustrating the earliest history of these idioms may be, there is no doubt that they were not all of them related to each other in the same 1 See the article ENGLISH LANGUAGE, vol. viii. p. 390 sqq._ _ 9 For fuller particulars see C‘. Zeuss, Die Deulschen u-ml die A ach- barstiinune, Munich, 1837. 3 See G. Vendt, Die .'atL'0nal1'tc’it dcr Be-7:b'lIrerun_q dcr Deugsclzen 0st2na'rke7L 7:0-r elem Bc_r/1'-nne dcr Gernmm'sz'ermz_r/, Gottingen, 18/ S. 4 See Excmsn LANGUAGE, as above, p. 391.