without sex. More recently we notice the change in the gender of the words, Sun and Moon. Scandinavian mythology and the Prose Edda taught that Mundelfori had two children, a son called Mâni, and a daughter, Sol. Hence the AngloSaxon and Old English as late as the fifteenth century, spoke of the moon as a masculine and made the sun a feminine. The German has these two genders even now. At that period, however, classic authors obtained great authority; the old heathen mythology was revived, and much used in writing and in conversation. There Phoebus and Sol were both gods, whilst Diana and Luna were goddesses, and so sun and moon had to change their gender, and assume that which they have in modern English. Borrowed terms suffer thus in form, accent and gender; can we wonder that their original meaning and beauty also is constantly lost? Azote and oxygen spoke to the Greek, who made the word, of a principle that gave or took away life; to the Englishman, who borrowed it, it is a mere sound without a meaning. A "disease of the lungs " is plain enough; why then supplant it by a "pulmonary complaint?" Clubs, on the other hand, are considered of doubtful utility; but surely it was not necessary to call them "Lyceums," regular wolf's-dens, or quite wise to style a hall an "Athenæum," that is so rarely visited by Minerva. A modest little flower pleases us, when it looks up to us as the day's eye (daisy), but we wonder only at a "chrysanthemum." A Forget-me-not awakens the sweetest associations in our minds; even the Frenchman becomes poetical, when he speaks of them as Yeux de la St. Vierge, but the botanist at once destroys the charm with his "Myosote scor INJURY TO THE VERNACUlar. 255 pioïde," or 66 Mouse-ear like a scorpion!" Even better reason to object to borrowed words have the unlucky ones, who are accused of calling for a "chay," speaking to a "Chinee," or referring to a "claw" of Parliament, as so many regular singulars of "chaise, Chinese, and clause." The injury of borrowing without necessity and discrimination affects, however, not the foreign words only; it extends to the language that receives them, also, by preventing native words from being developed and by causing good old terms to be forgotten. The English has, thus, lost many valuable words, which did their duty and appeared to advantage in the works of Chaucer and Shakspeare. Nothing, in fact, has saved it from being overrun with foreign words, and yet impoverished in its own stock, but the unparalleled assimilative or digestive energy of the idiom. It seizes upon these imported terms, which in the course of its development it has borrowed from a hundred sources, subjects them immediately to all the rules of the vernacular, identifies them with its own native words, and thus obtains by this unsurpassed eclecticism an abundance of forms and a vigor of expression which are ample compensation for an apparent want of originality. For purposes of reference mainly, and with the hope of saving the students of Philology and Ethnology much mechanical labor, the following sketch of the languages of Europe, arranged upon philological principles, has been added to the preceding remarks. That not all the languages of the earth were inclu ded, had its reason, and will, we trust, find its excuse in the imperfect knowledge which we as yet possess of the great majority of these idioms, and the easy access to such special works as treat exclusively of the more important and better known languages. A few words on the Chinese alone have been added in the expectation, that an example of a monosyllabic language might, by contrast, serve to bring out in stronger light and clearer outlines the character of the Indo-European idioms. Most of the material here presented has been obtained from the admirable work of a distinguished German philologist, A. Schleicher, of Bonn. As a valuable aid for the student, the Physical Atlas of Berghaus is strongly recommended. |