The plan which I have laid down for myself, and to which I shall adhere, in this lecture and in those which will succeed it, is as follows. In this my first lecture I will ask you to consider the language as now it is, to decompose with me some specimens of it, to prove by these means, of what elements it is compact, and what functions in it these elements or component parts severally fulfil; nor shall I leave this subject without asking you to admire the happy marriage in our tongue of the languages of the north and south, an advantage which it alone among all the languages of Europe enjoys. Having thus presented to ourselves the body which we wish to submit to scrutiny, and having become acquainted, however slightly, with its composition, I shall invite you to go back with me, and trace some of the leading changes to which in time past it has been submitted, and through which it has arrived at what it now is; and these changes I shall contemplate under four aspects, dedicating a lecture to each;—changes which have resulted from the birth of new, or the reception of foreign, words;—changes consequent on the rejection or extinction of words or powers once possessed by the language;—changes through the altered meaning of words;—and lastly, as not unworthy of our attention, but often growing out of very deep roots, changes in the orthography of words.
Alterations unobserved
I shall everywhere seek to bring the subject down to our present time, and not merely call your attention to the changes which have been, but to those also which are now being, effected. I shall not account the fact that some are going on, so to speak, before our own eyes, a sufficient ground to excuse me from noticing them, but rather an additional reason for doing this. For indeed changes which are actually proceeding in our own time, and which we are ourselves helping to bring about, are the very ones which we are most likely to fail in observing. There is so much to hide the nature of them, and indeed their very existence, that, except it may be by a very few, they will often pass wholly unobserved. Loud and sudden revolutions attract and compel notice; but silent and gradual, although with issues far vaster in store, run their course, and it is only when their cycle is completed or nearly so, that men perceive what mighty transforming forces have been at work unnoticed in the very midst of themselves.
Thus, to apply what I have just affirmed to this matter of language—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, what vast modifications in our language, within eight memories. No one, contemplating this whole term, will deny the immensity 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 to this subject, each in his turn would have denied that there had been any change worth speaking of, perhaps 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 sprung up in this period, some, nay, a vast number, must have come into being within the limits of each of these lives. It cannot then be superfluous to direct attention to that which is actually going forward in our language. It is indeed that, which of all is most likely to be unobserved by us.
With these preliminary remarks I proceed at once to the special subject of my lecture of to-day. And first, starting from the recognized fact that the English is not a simple but a composite language, made up of several elements, as are the people who speak it, I would suggest to you the profit and instruction which we might derive from seeking to resolve it into its component parts—from taking, that is, any passage of an English author, distributing the words of which it is made up according to the languages from which they are drawn; estimating the relative numbers and proportions, which these languages have severally lent us; as well as the character of the words which they have thrown into the common stock of our tongue.
Proportions in English
Thus, suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts; of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon; thirty would be Latin (including of course the Latin which has come to us through the French); five would be Greek. We should thus have assigned ninety-five parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue, to be divided among all the other languages from which we have adopted isolated words[3]. And yet these are not few; from our wide extended colonial empire we come in contact with half the world; we have picked up words in every quarter, and, the English language possessing a singular power of incorporating foreign elements into itself, have not scrupled to make many of these our own[4].
Oriental Words