CHAPTER XIV THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ANIMALS have a language, both spoken and written; the former rather well developed, the latter rudimentary. When a mother hen looks up at the sky and gives a peculiar squawk, her chickens run to cover; when a dog gnawing a bone growls angrily and the hair rises on his back, it is both a warning and a sign for other dogs to keep away. Human speech probably originated in simple sounds imitating the cries of animals and other natural noises. Written language was at first picture-writing; the picture of an ox, of a house, etc. Gradually these complicated pictures were simplified and some of them reduced to letters, forming an alphabet. The ox was represented by its head alone, then by a few lines showing the horns and the general shape of the face, and finally, perhaps, by the letter A, which got turned upside down. In the same way, the letter B may have been derived from the picture of a house. All letters were capitals at first, because they were cut in straight lines on stone, bone, or wood. When simpler and more rapid methods of writing, on parchment, papyrus, etc. were devised, the small letters originated; these being only an attempt to reproduce the main elements of the capitals in current, connected form. The letter B was easily reproduced in two loops, but the letter A lost its prominent point in the process. The Aryan, or Indo-European, family of languages, to which our language belongs, includes Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Russian, Celtic, Latin, and Teutonic as its main divisions. All of these languages have certain words and forms in common, showing that the people who used them were originally the same race; but that the primitive speech was radically changed after migration from the original home. There were at first three numbers, singular, dual, and plural; and eight cases, each with its characteristic ending. Grammar was difficult in those days so difficult that the evil began early to correct itself and the language has been dropping cases and endings ever since. In the primitive speech, "father" meant "provider," and "sister," "the sweet one;" and these words are found essentially unchanged in all derivatives of the Aryan tongue. Other families of speech, like the Semitic, including Assyrian, Arabic, and Hebrew, and the Turan ian, used by the Hungarians, Turks, etc., show no relationship to the Aryan, which indicates that the chief migrations from the cradle of the human race in Southern Asia to Africa, the Orient, and elsewhere occurred before any very definite form of language had been developed. The Teutonic branch of the Aryan family of languages includes the Gothic, now extinct, the Scandinavian, the German, the Dutch, and the English, which last originated in England as AngloSaxon and underwent many changes before it became the English of modern times. In the year 449 A. D., some Angles, Saxons, and Jutes living about the mouths of the Elbe crossed over to Britain and conquered the Celts. The characters they used were runes, but they soon adopted the Roman alphabet, adding to it two of their letters, both of which are represented in modern English by th. Anglo-Saxon literature is very scanty, consisting chiefly of the epic poem, "Beowulf," some Bible narratives by Caedmon, the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," and translations from the Latin by King Alfred. The language remained essentially the same in form until the Norman Conquest, although considerable additions were made to its vocabulary. A few Celtic names of places, such as avon for “river," ben for "peak," and tre for "village," still persist. Many more Latin words came into use because the church service and the best literature were in Latin. Scandinavian elements were introduced by the Danes, who began raiding the island in 787 and finally succeeded in conquering it, but made no effort to impose their language on the inhabitants. Names of towns ending in -by, -thorp, -toft, and -thwaite are Danish. The defeat at Hastings in 1066 opened the way to the Normans, who were Northmen by blood but French by adoption, and French became the language of the educated classes, with far-reaching effects on the Anglo-Saxon tongue. It was only by weight of numbers that the original speech was saved from complete degradation; and it was not until England and France were separated politically and writers like Langland, Wycliffe, Gower, and Chaucer had established a reputable literature that the triumph of English over French was complete "Ge-wat tha ofer waeg-holm' winde ge-fysed Went then over the sea-wave, wind-impelled, "The elf queen with hir joly compaignye, Chaucer The elf-queen with her jolly company, But it was not the English of Anglo-Saxon times. It had changed under French influence from a synthetic language to an analytic one; it had given up many native words and replaced them with French terms; and it had lost many formative suffixes, and self-explaining compounds such as exist in the German of today. The persistence of dialects was only natural, but the Midland became the language of literature when Chaucer used it. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, releasing and distributing Greek manuscripts; the introduction of printing by Caxton in 1476; the publication of Dr. Johnson's dictionary in 1755; the increasing ease of travel and business communication; the production and wide dissemination of a wonderful literature; and the development of great and worthy nations using this language; the triumph of English |