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thought, or the "incarnation of thought," and if thought is the copy of things, then the value of things becomes transferred to language, or, rather, is connate with it. As a matter of fact, so entirely are words the exponents of the thought, and purpose, and character of him who uses them, that they form the ground of judging of character for ourselves in our estimate of each other, and for God in his estimate of us all. "By thy words shalt thou be justified, and by thy words shalt thou be condemned." It is true that there is a dif

ference between words and things as well as an identity. "Things are the sons of God, and words are the daughters of men;" still, practically, they are so wedded to each other that they are one.

Such is the connection between words and things, that a thorough study of language makes the student acquainted both with those minds of which it is the expression and with those objects to which it is applied. A language borrows its character, first, from the minds of those who use it in view of the objects to which it is applied, and, secondly, from the objects with which it is associated. The language of a nation is the accumulation of the experience, the wisdom, and the genius of a nation. "The heart of a people is its mother tongue," and it is only by learning that mother tongue that you can know that heart. It is only while listening to the "thoughts that breathe and the words that burn," from the lips of her poets and her orators, her historians and her dramatists, that you can feel that heart "beating responsive." The great events that have shaped the destiny of that nation, the master-minds who infused their own spirit through the mass of the people, whatever relates to the government, religion, arts, arms, moral sentiment, and social life, you can see distinctly portrayed in the language as you can see them nowhere else, even after that nation is extinct, and the language itself numbered with the dead.

It is, too, only by means of their language that we are able to trace the history and migration of the early inhabitants of the world. The study even of the English language, developing the meaning of names of the prominent objects of nature, which are significant in the Celtic, the solid sub

stratum of Teutonic, the terms of war and government in the Norman-French, the Latin terms in ecclesiastical use, would enable us, in the absence of other histories, to draw inferences in respect to the early condition of England, and even now enables us to verify many of the doubtful statements of written history. Even the names of places would tell us much. When we hear a stream called Wans-beckwater, and know that the three words of which the word is made up each signify "water," the first being Celtic (as in Wansford, Avon), the second German (beck-back), we at once recognize three changes of inhabitants to whom the former name successively lost its significance.-See Donaldson's New Cratylus. In the flow of centuries, words often lose their meaning by being used in new applications. And to disinter that meaning out of the alluvium and drift of ages, and bring it up to the light, affords as much pleasure to the linguist as a disinterred fossil does to the geologist. In digging down from the surface to the original meaning of words applied first to some physical object, and then to a spiritual one, he often meets with this "fossil poetry," which is to him a medal of the nation, or of the race, just as the other is to the geologist a "medal of the creation." The word God means the Deity; but in the original Anglo-Saxon, besides this, it also meant good, or the Good. The word man in English means a human being, but in the Anglo-Saxon original its meaning besides this was sin, or the sinful. The full history of language would be a history of the human race.

The careful study of language can not fail to make the student acquainted with the laws of the human mind. The origin and formation of words, and the structure of sentences, as exhibited in etymology and syntax, taken as a whole, are but a counterpart of those mental phenomena which have been collected and classified by the masters of mental science. The laws of suggestion, of memory, of imagination, of abstraction, of generalization and reasoning, are distinctly exhibited, not merely in the higher specimens of eloquence and poetry, but also in the common forms of language; so that there is truth in the remark, "that we might turn a treatise on the philosophy of mind into one on the philoso

phy of language by merely supposing that every thing said in the former of the thoughts as subjective is said again in the latter of the words as objective."

The study of language is necessary in order to understand the influence which language and opinion have upon each other. The opinion entertained of an object influences the mind in the application of a term to that object, and the terin, when applied, influences the opinion. Call thunder "the bolt of God's wrath," and you excite the emotion of terror, as if it were an instrument of destruction. Call it, like the German peasant, the "dear thunder," das liebe gewitter, and you excite a different emotion. "The good old man is passing along the air," der gute alte fachret. The good old man is God, and his passing along the air is thunder. Here God is pre

"From the

sented to us under the aspect of a benefactor. black cloud he makes bare his red, wrathful hand." Here God is presented to us under the image of a destroyer. When Schiller, in his boyhood, climbed the tree in the thunder-storm, was it not that he might get nearer the good old man? As illustrating the connection between language and opinion, "It is a significant circumstance that no large society of which the language is not Teutonic (Gothic) has ever turned Protestant, and that wherever a language derived from ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails."-Macaulay's England, p. 64.

A language may be studied either for its own sake as an end, or it may be studied for its uses as the means of knowledge. To an Englishman or an American the study of the English language offers a two-fold advantage, in the mental discipline which it furnishes and in the knowledge which it imparts. The discipline he can obtain without the necessity of studying a foreign language, and the knowledge gained is knowledge appropriate to him, as it is embodied in his native tongue. "If language is the outward appearance of the intellect of nations; if their language is their intellect, and their intellect their language," then, by studying the English language, he becomes acquainted with the intellect of the Anglo-Saxon race, while his own intellect is improved by the disciplinal process through which the study must lead him.

CHAPTER II.

THE HISTORICAL ELEMENTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

24. FROM the views already presented of the relationship of different languages, we are prepared to understand the different Historical or Ethnographical elements which enter into the composition of the English language.

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This element came from a race of people called Celts, who were the earliest inhabitants of Great Britain of whom we have any knowledge. They are supposed to have migrated from Asia earlier than any other race, and, after having taken possession of Spain and Gaul, to have passed thence into Great Britain. It is known that Britain was inhabited before the Trojan war, more than twelve hundred years before the Christian era, as tin was then brought from Britain by the Phoenicians. The Celts were distinguished from the Gothic race, as much as the French, their descendants, are now from the Germans and Danes. They had not the light hair, nor the blue eyes, nor the lofty stature and large limbs which are characteristic of those races. They were likewise distinguished from them by their religious belief and practices. They believed in the immortality and transmigration of the soul; they offered human sacrifices in huge baskets of wicker work, containing many individuals, who were burned together; they had a class of men called Druids, as the Gothic races had not, and they venerated the mistletoe.

Of the Celtic stock there are two branches: 1. The Cambrian, or British branch, represented by the present Welsh, and containing, besides that language, the Cornish of Cornwall, and the Armorican of Bas Bretagne. It is supposed that the old British, the ancient language of Gaul, and the Pictish were of this branch. 2. The Erse, or Gaelic branch, repre

sented by the Irish Gaelic, and containing, besides, the Gaelic of the Highlands of Scotland and the Manks of the Isle of Man. In all, here are six dialects, the three former of which are the relics of the language of the ancient Britons, and the latter three of that spoken by the inhabitants of Ireland. Of the two branches it is supposed the Gaelic is the oldest.

The Celtic elements of the present English, few as they are, fall into four classes.

1. Those that are of late introduction, and can not be called original and constituent parts of the language. Such are the words flannel, crowd (a fiddle), from the Cambrian; kerne, an Irish foot soldier; tartan, plaid, from the Gaelic branch.

2. Those that are common to both the Celtic and the Gothic; such as brathair, brother; mathair, mother.

3. Those that have come to us from the Celtic through. the medium of another language; such are Druid and Bard, which come to us through the Latin.

4. Those that have been retained from the original Celtic of the island, forming genuine, original, and constituent elements of our language. a. Proper names, generally of geographical localities; as, The Thames, Kent, &c. b. Common names retained in the provincial dialects of England, but not retained in the current language; as, Gwethall household stuff, and gwlanen=flannel, in Herefordshire. c. Common names retained in the current language; as, basgawa, basket ; botwm, button; bran, bran; crog, crook; darn, darn; grei del, grid or gridiron; mattog, mattock; mop, mop; rhail (fence), rail; syth (glue), size.

The greater part of the names of mountains, lakes, and rivers in both of the British islands are to this day significant and descriptive only in some Celtic language. The appellation of these vast and permanent parts of Nature are commonly observed to continue as unchanged as themselves. Thus certain names given by the Indians to mountains, lakes, and rivers, like Allegany, Huron, Potomac, seem destined to survive, though the race themselves have passed away before the Anglo-Saxon, just as the Celts did in our mother-land.

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