Origins of the English People and of the English Language

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Excerpt from Origins of the English People and of the English Language: Compiled From the Best and Latest AuthoritiesLanguages, like nations, have their periods of growth, maturity, and decay, but while nineteen-twentieths of the vocabulary of a people lives in the literature and speech of the cultured classes only, the remainder has a robust life in the daily usage of the sons of toil, and this limited but more persistent portion of the national speech never fails to include the names of those objects which are the most familiar and the most beloved. Such are, for in stance, the names of nearest relatives, father, mother, brother, of the parts of the body, of two or three of the commoner metals, tools, weapons, cereals, domestic ani mals, of the house, and things found in and near it, of the most striking features in the landscape, the mountain peaks and ranges, the valleys, lakes, and rivers, of the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, the clouds, etc., and as at all times, and in every region of the world, these names have had the same clear and well-defined meanings, their visible forms stand as a sort of material lexicon, explaining not only the more archaic forms of living languages, but even of tongues that have ceased to be vernacular.Many nations have left no written records, and their history would be a blank volume, or nearly so, were it not that in the places where they have sojourned they have left traces of their migrations sufficiently clear to enable us to reconstruct the main outline of their history. The hills, the valleys. And the rivers are, in fact, the only writ ing-tablets on which unlettered nations have been able to inscribe their annals, and these may be read in the names that still cling to the sites, and often contain the records of a class of events as to which -written history is for themost part silent. These appellations, which originally had a descriptive import, referring mostly to the physical features of the land, have even the advantage over the common names of a nation's speech of being less subject to the process of phonetic decay. They seem to be en dowed with a sort of inherent and indestructible vital ity which makes them survive the catastrophes which overthrow empires, and outlive devastations which are fatal to almost everything else. Wars can trample down or extirpate whatever grows upon a soil, excepting only its native plants and the names of those sites upon which man has found a home. Seldom is a people utterly ex terminated, for the proud conqueror has need of some at least of the natives to till the soil anew, and these en slaved outcasts, though they may hand down no memory of the splendid deeds of the nation's heroes, yet retain a most tenacious recollection of the names of the hamlets which their ignoble progenitors inhabited, and near to which their fathers were interred. Geographical nomen clature is, therefore, an important factor in all that con cerns a nation's early history, and it often furnishes most effectual aid in the solution of linguistic problems.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.