Items related to An Introduction to the Study of Early English History
Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. f T1HE chiefest test of the nationality of a people is--their language, and volumes might be written to illustrate this idea. The evidence of language is infallible, unmistakable, and it cannot be rebutted. It is not meant by this that every nation retains its own language intact, or even that each nation is affected by the imposition of a foreign language in the same way. There can be no better illustration, as hone is better known, of the variety of the effect of a foreign tongue, than in the case of the Romans. They imposed their language, which, with its influences on other languages, is far the most important in the whole world in one sense, upon every country of Europe. That is, they governed each country, and unquestionably by laws framed in one tongue, the literary Latin of Rome; whether this tongue was ever a spoken language, in the sense of the word familiar, may be doubted. Great scholars, just as the Catholic priesthood in our day, may have been able to converse in Latin, but in their own homes, and amongst their children and servants, they must have used the lingua rustica of their province. For it is tolerably clear that the Latin of Caesar and Cicero had no provincial home, but was the result of the intercourse of mind with mind--a highly polished intellectual offspring. Dr Marsh says that Latin is derived from a coalescence of many ancient forms of speech, and that the completeness of its inflections shows that the grammar of some one ancient dialect very greatly predominates. Hence it is that the Romans did not seek to impose their tongue upon any nation, although every nation under her bondage was more or less affected by it; we see its effect strikingly illustrated in the languages of the three greatest...
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