and eaten of

the

tree, of

wife,

which

gennan, bhe iduns esse stesmu garrin, esse kawidsmu

I to thee commanded and said, thou not shalt

as tebbei laipinna bhe

Cursed

billai, tu

be the

Perklantits bouse stas

of

ni turri esse

ground for thy laucks

twaise

thou thee on

shalt turei

tou tien no

thou livest:

paggan: sen alkinisquai

it support SO long stan pomaitat ku ilgimai giwassi :

thou taken wast: for thou art earth and shalt

tou

animts assai: beggi tou

asse semme bhe turei

God blessed them wyrikan bhe gannikan, bhe Deiws

them : Be fruitful

signai tennans

and said to and multiply bhe billats prei dins: Seiti weysewingi bhe tulninaiti

replenish the

earth, and make

you and to you wans bhe erpilninaiti stan semmien, bhe tickinnaiti ioumas

CHAPTER III.

ON THE GERMAN LANGUAGES.

THE German family of dialects is divided into two great classes, the Upper and Lower, which are distinguished by the character of their pronunciation, by their relation to different families of languages, and by their local situation. The Upper German is known by its hissing, guttural, and harsh sounds; is spoken in the mountainous regions of the south; and is related to Greek and Persian-whilst the Lower German is more nearly allied to Latin and Sanskrit ; is the language of the lower districts in the north; and is characterised by a soft pronunciation, and a dislike to all harsh combinations of sounds.

The following vow of an Old Low Saxon warrior to devote all his captives in sacrifice to Wodan, exemplifies most of the leading distinctions between the Upper and Lower dialects 1:

' Quoted in Meidinger's Deutschen Volkstamme, p. 210.

Low Germ.

Hilli krotti Wondana! Ik slakte
I slay

Holy great Wodan!

High Germ.-Heilig grosser Wodan! Ich schlachte

ti all Fanka up tinen illiken Artesberka. to thee all captives upon thine holy Asburg. dir alle gefangene auf deinem heiligen Artesberg.

The Lower German division of this family comprises (1) the Old Gothic; (2) the Scandinavian, consisting of Danish, Swedish, Icelandic; (3) the Low German with its various dialects, the Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, AngloSaxon, &c. Concerning the relation of these idioms to other families of languages, native writers have made the following observations. "When I am reading the Gothic of Ulphilas (says Bopp), I could fancy I had Sanskrit before me:" and Fr. Schlegel remarks that "Low German has principally preserved the Sanskrit forms." Arndt states that "the words, which are common to Latin and Sclavonian with German, belong far more to the Lower than to the Upper German dialects." This whole class of the Lower German dialects I have called the Medo-German, as already explained, in contradistinction to the Upper German dialects, which constitute, in the same nomenclature, the Perso-German division. These terms are very convenient, when used in relation to the whole IndoEuropean class; but in discussing the German family exclusively of the rest, the Germans may prefer more local and national names, and I would suggest the use of the terms Gothic and Teutonic. The Goths of Odin were among the earliest Low German settlers in Europe; and Teutones may be very suitably applied to the Upper Germans, on account of its similarity to the High Ger

man national name Teutsche, as contrasted with the Low German Deutsche.

A review of the various German idioms has brought Arndt to the following conclusions:-For very many ages there have existed in Europe two remarkably different German languages, which, for general purposes, may very well be distinguished by the name of the soft and the hard dialects of Germany. The former appears to have spread at a much earlier period, and to a much greater extent into this quarter of the globe, as may be inferred from the situation of the countries in which, to the present day, the Low German and the other soft German dialects prevail. It is reasonable to suppose that this soft dialect had long been native in ancient Germany, and still longer had been in possession of the German north and the banks of the Rhine, when the hard dialect broke in from the east, and dispossessed the Old German idioms (p. 106). This soft dialect evidently reached its present position from the Black Sea; the hard or later German probably entered Europe by Thrace.

That the Lower and Upper dialects of German were originally distinct, and preserved their peculiar characteristics throughout the different stages of their culture, will appear more plainly from the following table, in which the Gothic or Old Low German words vary from the Teutonic or Old High German in the same points, in which the modern Low German words differ from the New High German. In the table, Gothic is placed first, not because it is the oldest, but because the records preserved in it are of greater antiquity than those existing in any other Low German dialect.