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The Origin and History of the English Language
The Origin and History of the English Language Author:George Perkins Marsh Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTTJKE K AND COMPOSITION OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE, Before proceeding to the immediate subject of the present lecture, I will offer a... more »n explanatory remark upon the nomenclature which, in common with many writers on European philology, I employ. I shall make frequent use of the ethnological epithets, Gothic, Teutonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Romance. Under the term Gothic I include not only the extinct Moeso-Gothic nation and language, and the contemporaneous kindred tribes and tongues, but all the later peoples, speeches, and dialects commonly known as Anglo-Saxon, German, Dutch, Flemish, Norse, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic, together with our composite modern English. All these are marked by a strong family likeness, and hence are assumed, though by no means historically proved, to be descended from a common original. With the exception of a few words, chiefly proper names, which occur in the writings of the Greek and Latin historians and geographers, the oldest specimen we possess of any of the Gothic languages is the remnant of a translation of the Scriptures executed hy Ulfilas, a bishop of the Mceso-Goths, but himself, according to Philostorgius, of Cappadocian descent, who lived on the shores of the Lower Danube, in the fourth century after Christ. The Gothic languages divide themselves into — I. The Teutonic or Germanic branch, which consists of— 1, the Mceso-Gothic; 2, the Anglo-Saxon; 3, the Low-German, or Saxon; 4, the Dutch, or Netherlandish, including tha See Illustrations II. and V. at the end of this lecture. Flemish; 5, the Frisic; and 6, the High-German, to which maybe added the Cimbric of the Sette and the Trcdici Comuiii in Italy, and many Swiss and even Piedmontese patois. II. The Scandinavian branch, which embraces— 1, ...« less