Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/168

146 But even things of the most common use and knowledge come to bear with us designations of learned and artificial make. A certain showy flower, introduced not very long ago by learned intervention to the parterres of the wealthy, but now found in every poor man'’s garden, and almost as familiar as the sun-flower or the rose, is known only by the name dahlia, given it by its botanical describer in honour of an earlier botanist, Dahl. The telegraph, a scientific device, keeps its foreign scientific title, not in our own country only, but all over the globe, although it has become an institution almost as universal and indispensable as the post. A substance over whose discovery and application no small part of our community has gone wild within the past few years, has not retained its honest English appellation of rock oil, or mineral oil, but has accepted from the learned the equivalent Latin name petroleum, and is so called by millions who have no knowledge whatever of the derivation and meaning of the term. The influence of the learned class in the process of English names-giving has been for many centuries a growing one, and has now become greatly predominant; and with it has grown, somewhat unduly, the introduction of classic word and phrase, to supplement, or even to replace, native English expression. There is a pedantically learned style which founds itself on the Latin dictionary rather than the English, and discourses in a manner half unintelligible except to the classically educated: but this is only the foolish exaggeration of a tendency which has become by degrees an integral part of English speech. To draw in like manner upon the resources of any other tongue (as, for instance, upon the German) would be a fault of a very different character—a pure impossibility, an intolerable affectation, because unsupported by anything in the previous usages of our mother-tongue.

We see, then, that the most obvious and striking peculiarity of English linguistic growth, the wholesale importation of foreign terms, is one by which it differs only in degree from other linguistic growth, ancient and modern, and that this degree of difference is explained by the circumstances of the case—the learned character of much of the knowledge