Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/411

Rh ENGLISH LANGUAGE 391 towns. Gildas, writing nearly a century and a half after the renunciation of Houorius, addressed the British princes in that language ; l and the linguistic history of Britain might have been not different from that of Gaul, Spain, and the other provinces of the Western Empire, where a rustic Latin giving birth to a neo-Latinic language finally super seded the native one except in remote and mountainous districts, 2 when the course of events was entirely changed by the Teutonic conquests of the 5th and 6th centuries. The Angles, Saxons, and their allies belonged to the Teu tonic or Gothic branch of the Aryan family, represented in modern times not only by the English and their colonies, but by the populations of Germany, Holland, Denmark, and the Scandinavian peninsula, and found at the dawn of history located between and about the estuaries and lower courses of the Rhine and the Weser, and the adjacent coasts and isles. For more than 1000 years the Teutonic or Gothic stock has been divided into the three branches of the Low German, High German, and Scandinavian, of which the former represents the original stock, the two others being offshoots to the south and north respectively. To it also belonged the Mo230-Gothic, the tongue of certain Germans who, passing down the Danube, invaded the borders of the empire, and obtained settlements in the province of Mcesia, where their language was committed to writing in the 4th century ; its literary remains are of peculiar value as the oldest specimens, by several centuries, of Teutonic speech. To the Low German division also belonged the dialects of the invaders of Britain. As we have no specimens of the language of these tribes for nearly three centuries after their settlement in this island, we cannot tell to what extent they agreed with, and differed from, each other; nor can we be sure whether the dif ferences actually found at a later period, when we have opportunity of comparison, between northern and southern English, were due to original diversity, or to subsequent differentiation. However, as the dialectal differences afterwards discernible corresponded in the main to the areas historically assigned to Angles and Saxons respectively, it may be assumed that there was some difference of dialect to begin with, that of the Saxons being more closely allied to th(i Old Saxon of the Continent, of which Dutch is probably the nearest living representative, and the Angle dialect having more affinity with the Frisian, and through that with the Scandinavian. At the present day the most English or Angli-form dialects of the Continent are those of the North Frisian islands of Amrum and Sylt, on the west coast of Schleswig. It is well known that the greater part of the ancient Frieslancl has been swept away by the encroachments of the North Sea, and the disjecta membra of the Frisian race, pressed by the sea in front and encroaching nationalities behind, are found only in isolated fragments from the Zuyder Zee to the coasts of Denmark. Of the Geatas, E6tas, or &quot; Jutes,&quot; who, according to Baeda, formed the third tribe along with the Angles and Saxons, it is difficult to speak linguistically. In the opinion of the present writer, the speech of Kent has ever been a typically southern or &quot; Saxon &quot; one, and at the present day its popular dialect is identical with that of Sussex, one of the old Saxon kingdoms ; that of the Isle of Wight differs in no respect from that of Hampshire, nor does it show any special connection with that of Kent. Mr Henry Sweet has, however, shown 3 that Kentish as early as the 8th cen- 1 The works of Gildas in the original Latin were edited by Mr Stevenson for the English Historical Society. There is an English trans lation in Six Old English Chronicles in Bohn s Antiquarian Library. 3 As to the continued existence of Latin in Britain, see further in Ithys s Lectures on Welxh Philology, p. 226-7. 3 &quot; Dialects and Prehistoric Forms of English,&quot; Transactions of tht Philological Society for 1S75-C, p. 43. tury differed from West-Saxon in one or two points of vowel pronunciation, and that the distinction was maintained as late as the 14th ; though it cannot be said to have therein approached more closely to the northern dialect, which ought to have been the case had Bteda s &quot;Geatas&quot; been Jutlanders, As it was amongst the Angel-cynn or Engle of Northum- bria that literary culture first flourished, and an Angle or Enrjllsc dialect was the first to be used for vernacular literature, 4 Etiglisc came eventually to be a general name for all forms of the vernacular as opposed to Latin, &amp;lt;tc.; and even when the West-Saxon of Alfred became in its turn the literary or classical form of speech, it was still callei Englisc or English. The origin of the name Anglo-Saxon is disputed, some maintaining very positively that it means a union of Angles and Saxons, others (with better founda tion) that it meant English Saxons, or Saxons of England, as distinguished from Saxons of the Continent Its modern use is mainly due to the little baud of scholars who in the 16th and 17th centuries turned their attention to the long forgotten language of Alfred and ^Ifria which, as it differed so utterly from the English of their own day, they found it convenient to distinguish by a name which was applied to themselves by those who spoke it. 5 To them &quot; Anglo-Saxon &quot; and &quot;English&quot; were separated by a gulf which it was reserved for later scholars to bridge across, and show the historical continuity of the English of all ages. As already hinted, the English language, in the wide sense, presents three main stages of development Old, Middle, and Modern distinguished by their inflexional character istics. The latter can bs best summarized in the words of Mr Henry Sweet, in his History of English Sounds : 6 &quot;Old English is the period oi fall inflexions (name, gifan t caru), Middle English of levelled inflexions (naamc, given, caare), and Modern English of lost inflexions [name, give, care = ndm, ffiv, car). We have besides two periods of transition, one in which nama and name exist side by side, and an other in which final e [with other endings] is beginning to drop.&quot; By lout inflexions it is meant that only very few remain, and these mostly non-syllabic, as the -s in stones, the -ed in loved, the -r in their, as contrasted with the Old English stan-as, luf-otZ-e and luf-od-on, ]&amp;gt;a-ra. Each of these periods may also be divided into two an early and a late ; but from the want of materials this division may be waived in regard to the first. We have thus the follow ing divisions, with the approximate dates, which, however, varied considerably for different dialects and parts of the country : Old English or Anglo-Saxon to 1 1 00 Transition Old English, or &quot; Semi-Saxon&quot;.... 11 00 to 1200 Early Middle English, or &quot;Early English&quot; ...1200 to 1300 Late Middle English 1300 to 1400 Transition Middle English 1400 to 1485 Early Modern English, &quot;Tudor English &quot; ....1485 to 1611 Modern English 1611 onward. Many writers carry the Transition Old English down to 1250, Early Middle English thence to 1350, and Late Middle English 1350 to 1485, absorbing the Second 4 See also Earle s Philology of the English Tongue, p. 25. 5 ^Ethelstan in 934 calls himself in a charter &quot; Ongol-Saxna cyning and Brytrcnwalda eallaes thyses iglandes ; &quot; Eadred in 955 is &quot; Angul- seaxna cyning and casere totiiu* Britannia,&quot; and the name is of frequent occurrence in Latin documents. These facts ought to be remembered in the interest of the scholars of the l^th century, who have been blamed for the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, as if they had invented it. By &quot; Anglo-Saxon &quot; language they meant the language of the people who sometimes at least called themselves &quot;Anglo-Saxons.&quot; Even now the name is practically useful, when we are dealing with the subject per se, as is Old English, on the other hand, when :ve aw treating it historically or in connexion with English as a whole^ 6 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1873-4, p. 62*&amp;gt;