Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/191

IV.] almost totally obliterated the Gaulish speech, putting the Latin in its place, for they brought with them culture and polity, art and science, learning and letters: they made it better worth while for the Celts to learn Latin than to adhere to their own ancient idiom. When, however, the Germanic Franks, a few centuries later, conquered in their turn the now Latinized Gaul, and turned it into a kingdom of France, they adopted the language of their more numerous and more cultivated subjects, only adding a small percentage of Germanic words to its vocabulary, and perhaps contributing an appreciable influence toward hastening the decay, already well in progress, of the Latin grammatical system. The same thing happened once more, when the Scandinavian Northmen, representing another branch of the Germanic family, after extorting from the beaten and trembling monarchs of France the cession of one of her fairest provinces, became the not less formidable and dreaded Normans. Although placed in seemingly favourable circumstances for conserving their linguistic independence, crowded together as they were within comparatively narrow bounds, and making on their own ground, of which they were absolute masters, the majority of the population, they yet could not resist the powerful assimilating influences which pressed them, a horde of uncouth and unlearned barbarians, on every side. Within a wonderfully short time, their Norse tongue had altogether gone out of use, leaving traces only in a few geographical names: along with French manners, French learning, and French polity, they had implicitly adopted also French speech. Hardly was this conversion accomplished, when they set forth to propagate their new linguistic faith in a country occupied by dialects akin with that which they had recently forsworn. The Angles and Saxons, Germanic tribes, had meantime finished the task, only begun by the Romans, of extirpating upon the largest and best part of British ground the old Celtic speech. They had done it in a somewhat different way, by sheer brute force, by destroying, enslaving, or driving out the native population, and filling all but the most inaccessible regions of the island with their own ferocious tribesmen. Hence