Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/233

VI.] of the character and changes of English speech, interesting and instructive as such a task would be; save so far as they have been and may hereafter be brought in by way of illustration of general linguistic laws, they must be left to more special treatises.

Next of kin with the Anglo-Saxon, or oldest form of English, are the ancient Frisian, of the northern sea-coast of Germany, which had, in the fourteenth century and later, a literature of its own, of juridical content, composed in an idiom of form little less antique than Old High-German, notwithstanding its comparatively modern date—and the Old Saxon, the principal language of northern Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe, represented to us by but a single work, the Heliand or 'Savior,' a poetical life of Christ, probably of the ninth century. Both Saxon and Frisian have been almost wholly crowded out of cultivated use in modern times, as was explained in a former lecture (see p. ), by the overpowering influence of the High German, and their domain has also been encroached upon by other dialects of the same kindred, so that they survive at present only as insignificant popular patois. Nothing but the political independence of Holland has saved its peculiar speech from the same fate: the literary cultivation of the Netherlandish or Dutch can be traced back to the thirteenth century, although dating chiefly from the sixteenth, the era of the country's terrible struggle against the political tyranny of Spain. The Flemish, the closely allied idiom of Flanders, has its own separate records, of about the same antiquity, but is now nearly extinct.

The history of High-German speech was succinctly sketched in connection with our inquiries into the rise and extension of literary dialects. It falls into three periods. The first period is that of the Old High-German (Althochdeutsch), from the eighth to the twelfth century; its monuments are tolerably abundant, but, with trifling exceptions, of Christian origin and religious content: they represent three