LECTURE II. ORIGIN AND COMPOSITION OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE. BEFORE proceeding to the immediate subject of the present lecture, I will offer an explanatory remark upon the nomenclature which, in common with many writers on European philology, I employ. I shall make frequent use of the ethnological epithets, Gothic, Teutonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Romance. Under the term Gothic I include not only the extinct Moso-Gothic nation and language, and the contemporaneous kindred tribes and tongues, but all the later peoples, speeches, and dialects commonly known as Anglo-Saxon, German, Dutch, Flemish, Norse, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic, together with our composite modern English. All these are marked by a strong family likeness, and hence are assumed, though by no means historically proved, to be descended from a common original. With the exception of a few words, chiefly proper names, which occur in the writings of the Greek and Latin historians and geographers, the oldest specimen we possess of any of the Gothic languages is the remnant of a translation of the Scriptures executed by Ulfilas, a bishop of the Moso-Goths, but himself, according to Philostorgius, of Cappadocian descent, who lived on the shores of the Lower Danube, in the fourth century after Christ. The Gothic languages divide themselves into I. The Teutonic or Germanic branch, which consists of -1, the Moso-Gothic; 2, the Anglo-Saxon; 3, the Low-German, or Saxon; 4, the Dutch, or Netherlandish, including the * See Illustrations II. and V. at the end of this lecture. Flemish; 5, the Frisic; and 6, the High-German, to which may be added the Cimbric of the Sette and the Tredici Comuni in Italy, and many Swiss and even Piedmontese patois. II. The Scandinavian branch, which embraces-1, the OldNorthern, or Icelandic, improperly called Runic by many earlier English philologists; 2, the Swedish; 3, the Danish, including the Norse, or Norwegian. III. The English, which, though less than half the words composing its total vocabulary are of Gothic descent, is classed with that family, because in its somewhat mixed grammatical structure the Gothic syntax very greatly predominates, and a majority of the words employed in the ordinary oral intercourse of life, and even in almost any given literary composition, are of Gothic etymology. Perhaps, also, the Scottish should be regarded as a distinct speech, rather than as a mere dialect of English. All these, excepting the Moso-Gothic, and presumably that also, have or had a great number of spoken, and many of them even written, more or less divergent dialects. I am aware that the propriety of this application of the terms Gothic, Teutonic, and Germanic is disputed; but it has long been received, and will be better understood than any new phraseology. Romance formerly meant and is still defined in most dictionaries—the dialects of the Spanish and Italian borders of France; but, in recent criticism, it is a generic term embracing all the modern languages usually regarded as cognate with the Latin, — in a word, the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, or Lemosin†, Provençal, French, the Roumansch of several Swiss *See First Series, Lecture VI., p. 140. The Catalan or Lemosin is often spoken of as a dialect of Spanish. If by Spanish be meant the assemblage of speeches employed in Spain, the expression may be correct; but if the Castilian, the written language of most parts of Spain, be intended, it is no more true that Catalan is a dialect of Spanish than it is that Spanish is a dialect of Catalan. Neither is a derivative or an offshoot of the other. The development and history of each is independent of that of the other, and the Catalan is, in the important point of the construction of periods, quite as near to the French as to the Castilian. communities in its various forms, and the Wallachian. These, also, are subdivided into many local dialects, or patois, several of which, especially in Italy, have been reduced to writing, and may not improperly be said to have their special literatures. We cannot affix a chronological date to the epoch of change from the rustic or provincial Roman to the modern Romance in any language of this family; but, with the exception of single phrases in ancient liturgies, laws, and chronicles, the oldest extant monuments in a Romance dialect are generally considered to be the oaths of Louis le Germanique and of certain French lords, subjects of Charles the Bald, sworn at Strasburg in 842.* -- Many recent inquirers believe that the Continental invaders, of Gothic origin, who reduced Celtic England to subjection a few centuries after Christ, emigrated from a small district in Sleswick now called Angeln, and were all of one race the Angles, that the designation Saxon was not the proper appellation of any of them, but a name ignorantly bestowed upon them by the native Celts, and at last, to some small extent, adopted by themselves. It is hence argued that the proper name of their language is not Saxon, or even Anglo-Saxon, but Angle, or, in the modern form, English. It is farther insisted that the present speech of England is nearly identical with the dialect introduced into the island by the immigrants in question, and consequently, that there is no ground for distinguishing the old and the new by different names, it being sufficient to characterise the successive periods and phases of the Anglican speech by epithets indicative of mere chronological relation, saying, for instance, for Anglo-Saxon, old, or primitive English, - for our present tongue, new, or modern English. I differ from these theorists as to both premises and conclusion. By those who maintain such doctrines, it appears to be assumed that if the evidence upon which it has been hitherto * See Illustration I. at the end of this lecture. believed that the immigration was composed of three different tribes, Jutes, or Jutlanders, Angles, and Saxons, could be overthrown, it would follow that it consisted of Angles alone. This is altogether a non sequitur; and it must not be forgotten that the only historical proof which establishes the participation of a tribe called Angles in the invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries at all is precisely the evidence which is adduced to show that Saxons accompanied or followed them. It must be admitted, indeed, that the extant direct testimony upon the whole subject is open to great objections, and that scarcely any of the narrative accounts of the Germanic conquest of England will stand the test of historical criticism. That the new-comers themselves styled portions of the territory they occupied Essex, Sussex, Wessex, and Middlesex,- that is, the districts of the East Saxons, South Saxons, West Saxons, and Middle Saxons,is undisputed; and it is a violently improbable supposition, that they bestowed on these localities a name mistakenly applied to themselves by the natives, instead of calling them by their own proper and familiar national, or at least tribal, appellation. They also often spoke of themselves, or of portions of themselves, as Saxons, of their language as the Saxon speech, and Alfred's usual royal signature was 'Rex Saxonum,' though, indeed, they more generally called the whole people and the language Angle, or English. Apart from the testimony of the chroniclers--which modern inquirers seem generally and with good reason much inclined to suspect the only proof which identifies the Angles of England with any Continental people is the perhaps accidental coincidence between their name and that of a Germanic, or, as some writers maintain, a Scandinavian tribe, occupying a corner of Sleswick so narrow in extent as hardly to be noticed at all in Continental history. It is equally true that there is no external testimony to show that any nation, known to itself as Saxon while yet resident on Teutonic soil, furnished any contingent to the bodies of invaders. Germanic and Scandi navian history are silent on the whole subject", except in some few passages probably borrowed from Anglo-Saxon authorities; and in the want of trustworthy information from native annalists, we must have recourse to the internal evidence supplied by the language, and to the probabilities deduced from such indirect and fragmentary facts as have come down to us, through other channels, from the dark and remote period of emigration. What then does the character of the language commonly, and, as I think, appropriately, called Anglo-Saxon, when examined in the earliest forms known to us, indicate with respect to the origin of those who spoke it? According to the present views of the ablest linguists, grammatical structure is a much more essential and permanent characteristic of languages than the vocabulary, and is therefore alone to be considered in tracing their history and determining their ethnological affinities. This theory, I think, is carried too far, when it is insisted that no amalgamation of the grammatical characteristics of different speeches is possible; for though languages often receive and assimilate a great amount of foreign material without much change of structure, yet, on the other hand, there are cases of the adoption of more or less of foreign syntax while the vocabulary remains in a good degree the same, and even while the people who employ it continue almost wholly unmixed in blood with other nations. The Armenians, for example, can boast of a purer and more ancient descent than any other Christian people, and they have kept themselves, during the whole period since their conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, almost as distinct in blood and as marked in nationality as the Hebrews. Their language is lineally descended from the old Armenian tongue, its radicals remaining substantially the same, but its grammar is everywhere modified by that of the prevailing idiom of the different countries where, in the wide dispersion of the Armenian people, it is spoken. * It deserves to be specially noticed that the names of neither Angle nor Saxon occur in Beowulf. |