Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/192

170 the wholly insignificant remains of Celtic material to be found among the ordinary stores of expression of our English tongue. Christianity and civilization found the invaders in their new home, and an Anglo-Saxon literature grew up, which, had circumstances continued favourable, might have aided national unity of government, institutions, and culture to assimilate the varying dialects of the country, producing a national language not inferior in wealth and polish to our present speech. But they who take the sword shall perish by the sword: upon the Anglo-Saxons were wreaked the woes they had themselves earlier brought upon the Celts. Danish and Norse invasions, during a long period, bitterly vexed and weakened the Saxon state, and it finally sank irrecoverably under the Norman conquest. This time, the collision of two diverse languages, upborne by a nearly equal civilization—the partial superiority of that of the Normans being more than counterbalanced by their inferiority in numbers—under the government of political circumstances already explained, produced a result different from any which we have thus far had occasion to notice—namely, a truly composite language, drawing its material and its strength in so nearly equal part from the two sources that scholars are able to dispute whether the modern English is more Saxon or more French. Into the details of the combination we cannot now stay to enter, but must pass on to note the later dialectic history of the language, merely directing attention to the important and familiarly known fact that its formative apparatus—whether consisting in inflections, affixes of derivation, or connectives and relational words—along with the most common and indispensable part of its vocabulary, remained almost purely Saxon, so that it is to be accounted still a Germanic dialect in structure, although furnished with stores of expression in no small part of Romanic origin.

The fusion of Saxon and Norman elements in English speech did not reach in equal measure all parts of the land or all classes of the people, nor did it by any means wipe out previously existing dialectic differences, thus furnishing a new and strictly homogeneous speech as a starting-point