English Past and Present | Page 9

and lead me
forth beside the waters of comfort; He shall convert my soul, and bring
me forth in the paths of righteousness for his Name's sake". Here are
forty-five words, and only the three in italics are Latin; and for every
one of these too it would be easy to substitute a word of Saxon origin;
little more, that is, than the proportion of seven in the hundred; while,
still stronger than this, in five verses out of Genesis, containing one
hundred and thirty words, there are only five not Saxon, less, that is,
than four in the hundred.
Shall we therefore conclude that these are the proportions in which the
Anglo-Saxon and Latin elements of the language stand to one another?
If they are so, then my former proposal to express their relations by
sixty and thirty was greatly at fault; and seventy and twenty, or even
eighty and ten, would fall short of adequately representing the real
predominance of the Saxon over the Latin element of the language. But
it is not so; the Anglo-Saxon words by no means outnumber the Latin
in the degree which the analysis of those passages would seem to imply.
It is not that there are so many more Anglo-Saxon words, but that the
words which there are, being words of more primary necessity, do

therefore so much more frequently recur. The proportions which the
analysis of the dictionary that is, of the language at rest, would furnish,
are very different from these which I have just instanced, and which the
analysis of sentences, or of the language in motion, gives. Thus if we
examine the total vocabulary of the English Bible, not more than sixty
per cent. of the words are native; such are the results which the
Concordance gives; but in the actual translation the native words are
from ninety in some passages to ninety-six in others per cent{27}.
{Sidenote: Anglo-Saxon the Base of English}
The notice of this fact will lead us to some very important conclusions
as to the character of the words which the Saxon and the Latin
severally furnish; and principally to this:--that while the English
language is thus compact in the main of these two elements, we must
not for all this regard these two as making, one and the other, exactly
the same kind of contributions to it. On the contrary their contributions
are of very different character. The Anglo-Saxon is not so much, as I
have just called it, one element of the English language, as the
foundation of it, the basis. All its joints, its whole articulation, its
sinews and its ligaments, the great body of articles, pronouns,
conjunctions, prepositions, numerals, auxiliary verbs, all smaller words
which serve to knit together and bind the larger into sentences, these,
not to speak of the grammatical structure of the language, are
exclusively Saxon. The Latin may contribute its tale of bricks, yea, of
goodly and polished hewn stones, to the spiritual building; but the
mortar, with all that holds and binds the different parts of it together,
and constitutes them into a house, is Saxon throughout. I remember
Selden in his Table Talk using another comparison; but to the same
effect: "If you look upon the language spoken in the Saxon time, and
the language spoken now, you will find the difference to be just as if a
man had a cloak which he wore plain in Queen Elizabeth's days, and
since, here has put in a piece of red, and there a piece of blue, and here
a piece of green, and there a piece of orange-tawny. We borrow words
from the French, Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man pleases".
{Sidenote: Composite Languages}

I believe this to be the law which holds good in respect of all composite
languages. However composite they may be, yet they are only so in
regard of their words. There may be a medley in respect of these, some
coming from one quarter, some from another; but there is never a
mixture of grammatical forms and inflections. One or other language
entirely predominates here, and everything has to conform and
subordinate itself to the laws of this ruling and ascendant language. The
Anglo-Saxon is the ruling language in our present English. Thus while
it has thought good to drop its genders, even so the French substantives
which come among us, must also leave theirs behind them; as in like
manner the French verbs must renounce their own conjugations, and
adapt themselves to ours{28}. I believe that a remarkable parallel to
this might be found in the language of Persia, since the conquest of that
country by the Arabs. The ancient Persian religion fell with the
government, but the language remained totally unaffected by the
revolution, in its grammatical structure and