CHAPTER IX
SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY
The English Vocabulary.—The enormous treasure of English speech contains something like 200,000 words.[33] Most of these were once foreigners to the language. To tell how each came to be English would be like telling the personal romances of all the foreign-born citizens of these United States.
England was once inhabited by Celts, the ancestors of the Scotch, Welsh, and Irish. The Romans under Cæsar possessed the island, and for five hundred years held the country, but they left us, from this period of their occupation, only half a dozen words: the names of the camp (castra), the paved road (strata), the settlement (colonia), the trench (fossa), the harbor (portus), the rampart (vallum). These words remain chiefly in the names of places. A sharp eye sees them in Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester, etc.; Stratford, street, etc.; Lincoln, etc.; Fossway, etc.; Portsmouth, etc.; wall, bailey, bailiff (these three words being derived from vallum).
In the fifth century, however, Teutonic tribes began to cross the sea and invade the land. The Celts were driven north and west into the mountains, and the newcomers stayed permanently. Although these Teutons—the Anglo-Saxons—called the Celts Welsh, that is, strangers, they took up a good many of the strangers’ words. They called many a river of the land Avon, water, as the Celts had done,—there are fourteen Avons to-day,—and they kept many such words as inch, an island (in Inchcape), and kill, a church (in Kildare). Indeed, for centuries the Celts kept on lending words to the English: bargain, bodkin, brogue, clan, crag, dagger, glen, gown, mitten, rogue, whiskey, are familiar examples of these permanent loans.
The Old English language itself was a Germanic dialect. Like Latin and German, it was inflected,—a fact that we see to-day in the presence of such forms as him, the old dative case for he. The inflectional endings nearly all disappeared before Shakespeare’s time. The vocabulary of this Old English has given us most of the words that we use as children. For example, household names—home, friends, father, mother, etc.; names of many emotions—gladness, sorrow, love, hate, fear, etc.; names of most objects in the landscape—tree, bush, stone, hill, woods, stream, sun, moon, etc.; common names of animals—horse, cow, dog, cat, etc.; parts of the body—head, eye, etc. Our household proverbs are in these Anglo-Saxon words. “Fast bind, fast find,” is an example of a thousand similar saws that embody the practical common sense of the people. The loves and hates, the hopes and fears, the wit and rude wisdom of our forefathers, have gone into Saxon words. These are not merely the words of childhood; in hours of deep feeling, in moments when the natural disposition demands expression, the grown man speaks in Saxon. These strong, forcible old words are to be prized and cherished as carefully as are those of less emotional suggestion,—the exact, discriminative Latin words.
In the ninth and tenth centuries the Norse vikings, who sailed everywhere, sailed also to England, and for a time got the upper hand of the Saxons. From 1013 to 1042 there were Scandinavian kings on the English throne. But these Norse were not able to impose much of their own language upon the country. Their settlements were named in Norse, and the word by, a town, remains in hundreds of such places, as Whitby, the white town (from the white cliffs). From these great seamen our Saxon ancestors learned some new nautical dialect—words like bow, bowline, crew, harbor, hawser, lee, stern.
In 1066 the Normans conquered the land. These were Frenchmen whose fathers had been Norse. They brought the French language into their English court, and for two or three hundred years there were two languages in England,—French on the lips of the nobles, Saxon on the lips of the peasants. But the Saxon race was too strong to remain an underling. Gradually it mingled with the Norman race, picking up hundreds, even thousands of French words from the latter, but keeping its own ways of putting words together.