Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/210

188 have been now so long separated, and their independent changes in the interval have been so great, that free and intelligent communication is no longer possible between those who have learned to speak them: one must have somewhat of instruction in both in order to be able to discover the fact of their relationship.

Not all the Germanic languages, however, are allied with the English in equal degree. The Low-German dialects, as they are called, those which occupy the northern shores and lowlands of the country, stand notably nearer to our tongue than do the dialects of central and southern Germany, the literary High-German and its next of kin. This relation is readily and sufficiently accounted for by the circumstances of the Germanic emigration to Britain: our ancestors came from the shore provinces, and brought with them the forms of speech there prevailing. And there is yet another principal group of Germanic languages, coördinate with the two already mentioned: it occupies the outliers of Germany to the north, namely Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and their remote colony of Iceland. It is usually called the Scandinavian group. We have in our own present speech not a few traces of its peculiar words and usages, imported into England by those fierce Northmen—or Danes, as English history is accustomed to style them-whose incursions during many centuries so harassed the Saxon monarchy.

These three groups or classes of existing dialects, the Low-German, the High-German, and the Scandinavian, with their numerous subdivisions, constitute, then, a well-marked family of related languages; although those who speak them can only to a very limited extent understand one another, the same sentence or paragraph could not be written in any two of them without bringing to light such and so many resemblances as even to a superficial examination would appear sure proof of a genetic connection. It is past question that all the Germanic dialects are descendants and joint representatives of a single tongue, spoken somewhere, at some time in the past, by a single community, and that all the differences now exhibited by them are owing to the