A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 | Page 3

speech of one or two thousand words; and it was brought over to this country by the +Jutes+, +Angles+, and +Saxons+ in the year 449. These men left their home on the Continent to find here farms to till and houses to live in; and they drove the inhabitants of the island-- the +Britons+-- ever farther and farther west, until they at length left them in peace in the more mountainous parts of the island-- in the southern and western corners, in Cornwall and in Wales.
6. +The British Language.+-- What language did the Teutonic conquerors, who wrested the lands from the poor Britons, find spoken in this island when they first set foot on it? Not a Teutonic speech at all. They found a language not one word of which they could understand. The island itself was then called +Britain+; and the tongue spoken in it belonged to the Keltic group of languages. Languages belonging to the Keltic group are still spoken in Wales, in Brittany (in France), in the Highlands of Scotland, in the west of Ireland, and in the Isle of Man. A few words-- very few-- from the speech of the Britons, have come into our own English language; and what these are we shall see by-and-by.
7. +The Family to which English belongs.+-- Our English tongue belongs to the +Aryan+ or +Indo-European Family+ of languages. That is to say, the main part or substance of it can be traced back to the race which inhabited the high table-lands that lie to the back of the western end of the great range of the Himalaya, or "Abode of Snow." This Aryan race grew and increased, and spread to the south and west; and from it have sprung languages which are now spoken in India, in Persia, in Greece and Italy, in France and Germany, in Scandinavia, and in Russia. From this Aryan family we are sprung; out of the oldest Aryan speech our own language has grown.
8. +The Group to which English belongs.+-- The Indo-European family of languages consists of several groups. One of these is called the +Teutonic Group+, because it is spoken by the +Teuts+ (or the +Teutonic race+), who are found in Germany, in England and Scotland, in Holland, in parts of Belgium, in Denmark, in Norway and Sweden, in Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. The Teutonic group consists of three branches-- +High German+, +Low German+, and +Scandinavian+. High German is the name given to the kind of German spoken in Upper Germany-- that is, in the table-land which lies south of the river Main, and which rises gradually till it runs into the Alps. +New High German+ is the German of books-- the literary language-- the German that is taught and learned in schools. +Low German+ is the name given to the German dialects spoken in the lowlands-- in the German part of the Great Plain of Europe, and round the mouths of those German rivers that flow into the Baltic and the North Sea. +Scandinavian+ is the name given to the languages spoken in Denmark and in the great Scandinavian Peninsula. Of these three languages, Danish and Norwegian are practically the same-- their literary or book-language is one; while Swedish is very different. Icelandic is the oldest and purest form of Scandinavian. The following is a table of the
GROUP OF TEUTONIC LANGUAGES.
[The table was originally printed in full family-tree form, using the layout below. The full text is here given separately.]
T. ___________|___________ | | | LG HG Sc ____|__ | ___|___ | | | | | | | | | | | Du Fl Fr E O M N I Dk Fe Sv (Nk) (Sw)
TEUTONIC. LOW GERMAN. Dutch. Flemish. Frisian. English. HIGH GERMAN. Old. Middle. New. SCANDINAVIAN. Icelandic Dansk (or Norsk). Ferroic. Svensk (Swedish).
It will be observed, on looking at the above table, that High German is subdivided according to time, but that the other groups are subdivided according to space.
9. +English a Low-German Speech.+-- Our English tongue is the +lowest of all Low-German dialects+. Low German is the German spoken in the lowlands of Germany. As we descend the rivers, we come to the lowest level of all-- the level of the sea. Our English speech, once a mere dialect, came down to that, crossed the German Ocean, and settled in Britain, to which it gave in time the name of Angla-land or England. The Low German spoken in the Netherlands is called +Dutch+; the Low German spoken in Friesland-- a prosperous province of Holland-- is called +Frisian+; and the Low German spoken in Great Britain is called +English+. These three languages are extremely like one another; but the Continental language that is likest the English is the Dutch or Hollandish dialect called Frisian. We even possess a couplet, every word of