THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
The treasures of our tongue, says Dr. Richardson, the lexicographer, are spread over continents, and cultivated among islands in the northern and the southern hemisphere, from “the unformed Occident to the strange shores of unknowing nations in the East.” The sun, indeed, now never sets upon the empire of Great Britain. Not one hour of the twenty-four in which the earth completes her diurnal revolution, not one round of the minute-hand of the dial, is allowed to pass, in which, on some portion of the surface of the globe, the air is not filled with “accents that are ours.” They are heard in the ordinary transactions of life, or in the administration of law, or in the deliberations of the senate-house or council-chamber, or in the offices of private devotion, or in the public observance of the rites and duties of a common faith.
Dr. Richardson’s Dictionary of the English Language, the foremost work of its class, we owe greatly to the judicious energy of Mr. Pickering, the publisher, who laid out two thousand pounds in books, specially for this great labour, before it was commenced. If publishers would imitate Mr. Pickering’s liberality oftener than is done, there would be fewer incomplete and abortive compilations than are yearly issued from the press. Dr. Richardson acknowledges this valuable aid in his Preface, where he justly makes his boast of bringing within the circle of his reading a large number of books which had never been employed for lexicographical purposes before; and Dean Trench acknowledges that the virgin soil which Richardson has tilled has often yielded him large and rich returns.
Of the uselessness of our legions of words to be found in dictionaries, a writer of the day observes:
Dictionary English is something very different not only from common colloquial English, but even from that of ordinary written composition. Instead of about 40,000 words, there is probably no single author in the language from whose works, however voluminous, so many as 10,000 words could be collected. Of the 40,000 words there are certainly many more than one-half that are only employed, if they are ever employed at all, on the rarest occasions. We should any of us be surprised to find, if we counted them, with how small a number of words we manage to express all that we have to say either with our lips or even with the pen. Our common literary English probably hardly extends to 10,000 words, our common spoken English hardly to 5000. And the proportion of native or home-grown words is undoubtedly very much higher in both the 5000 and the 10,000 than it is in the 40,000. Perhaps of the 30,000 words, or thereabouts, standing in the dictionaries, that are very rarely or never used, even in writing, between 20,000 and 25,000 may be free of French or Latin extraction. If we assume 22,500 to be so, that will leave 5000 Teutonic words in common use; and in our literary English, taken at 10,000 words, those that are non-Roman will thus amount to about one-half. Of that half 4000 words may be current in our spoken language, which will therefore be genuine English for four-fifths of its entire extent. It will consist of about 4000 Gothic and 1000 Roman words.[[83]]
The Rev. Dr. D’Orsey has shown, by coloured charts and elaborate tables, the proportion of the Teutonic and Romanic elements in the spoken language of England, and in the writings of our great authors. Thus, out of 100,000 words, at least 60,000 were Teutonic, 30,000 Romanic, and 10,000 from all other sources.
It would be almost impossible to compose a sentence of moderate length consisting solely of words of Latin derivation. But there are many which can be rendered wholly in Anglo-Saxon. It would be easy to make the Lord’s Prayer entirely, as it is in present use almost entirely, Anglo-Saxon. It consists of sixty words, and six of these only have a Latin root. But for each of them, except one, we have an exact Saxon equivalent. For “trespasses” we may substitute “sins;” for “temptation,” “trials;” for “deliver,” “free;” and for “power,” “might.” Dr. Trench proposes for “glory,” “brightness;” but this we think is not a good substitute.
The gradual changes in language are very remarkable. Dean Trench, in one of his popular manuals, observes: “How few aged persons, let them retain the fullest possession of their faculties, are conscious of any difference between the spoken language of their early youth and that of their old age; that words, and ways of using words, are obsolete now which were usual then; that many words are current now which had no existence at that time. And yet it is certain that so it must be. A man may fairly be supposed to remember clearly and well for sixty years back; and it needs less than five of these sixties to bring us to the period of Spenser, and not more than eight to set us in the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a change, how vast a difference in our language, within eight memories! No one, overlooking this whole term, will deny the greatness of the change. For all this, we may be tolerably sure that, had it been possible to interrogate a series of eight persons, such as together had filled up this time, intelligent men, but men whose attention had not been especially roused on this subject, each in his turn would have denied that there had been any change at all during his lifetime. And yet, having regard to the multitude of words which have fallen into disuse during these four or five hundred years, we are sure that there must have been some lives in this chain which saw those words in use at their commencement, and out of use before their close. And so, too, of the multitude of words which have come into being within the limits of each of these lives.”
[83]. Dublin University Magazine.