English Past and Present | Page 5

composition, I shall

invite you to go back with me, and trace some of the leading changes to
which in time past it has been submitted, and through which it has
arrived at what it now is; and these changes I shall contemplate under
four aspects, dedicating a lecture to each;--changes which have resulted
from the birth of new, or the reception of foreign, words;--changes
consequent on the rejection or extinction of words or powers once
possessed by the language;--changes through the altered meaning of
words;--and lastly, as not unworthy of our attention, but often growing
out of very deep roots, changes in the orthography of words.
{Sidenote: Alterations unobserved}
I shall everywhere seek to bring the subject down to our present time,
and not merely call your attention to the changes which have been, but
to those also which are now being, effected. I shall not account the fact
that some are going on, so to speak, before our own eyes, a sufficient
ground to excuse me from noticing them, but rather an additional
reason for doing this. For indeed changes which are actually proceeding
in our own time, and which we are ourselves helping to bring about, are
the very ones which we are most likely to fail in observing. There is so
much to hide the nature of them, and indeed their very existence, that,
except it may be by a very few, they will often pass wholly unobserved.
Loud and sudden revolutions attract and compel notice; but silent and
gradual, although with issues far vaster in store, run their course, and it
is only when their cycle is completed or nearly so, that men perceive
what mighty transforming forces have been at work unnoticed in the
very midst of themselves.
Thus, to apply what I have just affirmed to this matter of
language--how few aged persons, let them retain the fullest possession
of their faculties, are conscious of any difference between the spoken
language of their early youth, and that of their old age; that words and
ways of using words are obsolete now, which were usual then; that
many words are current now, which had no existence at that time. And
yet it is certain that so it must be. A man may fairly be supposed to
remember clearly and well for sixty years back; and it needs less than
five of these sixties to bring us to the period of Spenser, and not more

than eight to set us in the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a
change, what vast modifications in our language, within eight
memories. No one, contemplating this whole term, will deny the
immensity of the change. For all this, we may be tolerably sure that,
had it been possible to interrogate a series of eight persons, such as
together had filled up this time, intelligent men, but men whose
attention had not been especially roused to this subject, each in his turn
would have denied that there had been any change worth speaking of,
perhaps any change at all, during his lifetime. And yet, having regard to
the multitude of words which have fallen into disuse during these four
or five hundred years, we are sure that there must have been some lives
in this chain which saw those words in use at their commencement, and
out of use before their close. And so too, of the multitude of words
which have sprung up in this period, some, nay, a vast number, must
have come into being within the limits of each of these lives. It cannot
then be superfluous to direct attention to that which is actually going
forward in our language. It is indeed that, which of all is most likely to
be unobserved by us.
* * * * *
With these preliminary remarks I proceed at once to the special subject
of my lecture of to-day. And first, starting from the recognized fact that
the English is not a simple but a composite language, made up of
several elements, as are the people who speak it, I would suggest to you
the profit and instruction which we might derive from seeking to
resolve it into its component parts--from taking, that is, any passage of
an English author, distributing the words of which it is made up
according to the languages from which they are drawn; estimating the
relative numbers and proportions, which these languages have severally
lent us; as well as the character of the words which they have thrown
into the common stock of our tongue.
{Sidenote: Proportions in English}
Thus, suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts;
of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon; thirty
would be Latin (including of course the Latin which has come