if Gothic had not perished, if the idioms of Scandinavia and of England had not had, owing to isolation and other historical causes, an independent career. This may be assumed from two facts: the dental evolution has taken place even in Flemish and Dutch, where the is de. Even in English the soft aspirate th maintains itself with difficulty; the th of them is often dropped in popular speech. Shakespeare, in the scene of Henry V. where Catherine of France learns English from her waiting-maid, represents th by d, the hand, de hand, &c. The whole scene is curious, but we need only here retain a valuable hint on phonetics.

CHAPTER VII.

TWO ANALYTICAL LANGUAGES.

The Saxons and the Angles-Formation of Anglo-Saxon: Saxon and Anglian texts-Anglian has felt the influence of Danish-Low Latin and rural Latin: formation of French-The Oath of Strasburg, &c.—The Song of Roland-French introduced into England by the Normans and by the Angevins (Plantagenets)-The French vocabulary permeates and disorganises Anglo-Saxon (twelfth to the fifteenth centuries)-Old and Middle English-Two languages in English-The two stages of French: popular and learned French-Lament of the Romanists-Doublets-French words borrowed from Italian, Spanish, German, and English-Greek suffixes-Vitality of derivation in French, of juxtaposition in English-Conclusion.

WE have nearly reached the end of this philosophical review of language. After having connected human speech with the cry of animals, we established the co-existence of monosyllabic, agglutinative, and inflected idioms, and we accepted as probable the succession of three periods, corresponding to these three stages of languages: we regarded inflexion as the fusion of agglutinated syllables. But we have not been guided by any preconceived system, by any prejudice; we have adopted with perfect indifference the order which seems most in accordance with the facts observed. We are not of those who lament the loss of the Sanscrit instrumental, of the Eolian digamma, or of the two cases of Old French. We do not in the least believe in the decadence of language; we see in the thousand phonetic substitutions and modifications

adaptations of speech to the temperament of the various peoples, and to the growing complexity of intellectual needs.

We have a great admiration for the synthetic idioms which mark by varying terminations the relations of one word to another; but we prefer the simplified languages in which the word is even more the willing servant of the thought, in which prepositions and auxiliaries supply with greater subtlety and precision the vanished forms of the declension and conjugation.

Among the European tongues which have attained more or less completely to the analytic state, we will choose two, those which have the greatest interest for us, the one Teutonic, the other Latin, very different and yet inseparable, English and French.

Towards the middle of the fifth century the tribes who spoke the Low German language formed in the south the vanguard of the Teutonic body, and in the north its rearguard. The half-civilised Visigoth of Ataulf and Euric learnt Latin, and forgot their own idiom at Toulouse, at Narbonne, and soon beyond the Pyrenees; but the Scandinavians, the Saxons, the Frisians, and the Dutch, confined towards the east by the Lombards, the Rugii, and the Heruli, on the south by the Alamans, separated by the Franks from the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt, were driven out, partly into the great peninsula of the north, or into Jutland and the Danish isles, partly into the district lying between the Elbe and the Weser, and towards the mouths of the Ems, the Eider, the Rhine, and the Meuse. They were a seafaring people, pirates and adventurers, constantly visiting the British coasts. In 448 a band of this hardy race, Saxons and Jutes, established themselves on the coast of Kent, in the

Isle of Thanet; their chiefs, Hengist and Horsa, who were at first engaged in the service of a British prince to aid him against the incursions of the northern tribes, were not long in establishing a claim to territory. Horsa was killed, but reinforcements of Saxons and Jutes gradually drove the ancient inhabitants, disputing every inch of the ground, as far as the Severn and the Welsh mountains, and in less than a century had conquered all the south of England and the basin of the Thames. Towards 560 the Angles who inhabited the south-east of Schleswig established themselves in great numbers in the neighbourhood of the Humber and on the marches of the Cambrians and the Scots. By 586 the Celtic element was completely expelled, and the little kings of the Heptarchy were eagerly disputing the suzerainty one with another; those of Wessex in the ninth century had succeeded in bringing them all into subjection, when the Teutonic invasion, which had ceased for a space, was renewed with great ferocity. Other Northmen, those who from Friesland, Denmark, and Norway fell upon the Carlovingian empire and took possession of Normandy, founded in the land of the Angles a kingdom of Northumbria. Then, in spite of the victories of Alfred and of Athelstan (871-941), Danish kings, Sweyn and Knut, became masters of England. A lucky rebellion in 1035 re-established for thirty years Saxon autonomy, but the Danes did not readily renounce their pretensions, and at the very time when William the Conqueror disembarked at Pevensey (1066), Harold, the last national king, was occupied in the north in destroying a Danish and Norwegian army.

The Anglo-Saxon language, if we omit a few variations of dialect, was sufficiently strongly constituted in

four centuries (500-900) to reduce to small importance the mixture of the Danish vocabulary, which was, moreover, almost identical with its own; it had only retained a very few traces of Celtic, names of places, for instance, and about fifty words such as kiln, crook, wicket, clan, claymore, &c. This disappearance of Celtic is at first sight surprising; it had survived the four centuries of Roman dominion, and it disappeared before an idiom as little cultivated as itself. The reason is that the Saxon invasion was the substitution of one race for another; the conquered British fled into Armorica, or to the west, into the territory of the Cambrians, Wales, and Cumberland.

The Roman occupation had been intermittent and superficial; when, in 412, the legions withdrew from Britain, Latin went with them. English soil, indeed, retained the ruins of cities and traces of Roman roads, but in primitive Anglo-Saxon there are only three words of Latin origin: coln, Lincoln (Lindi colonia); caestre, castra, and straet, strata. The establishment of Christianity in the seventh century introduced a certain number of terms which have been transmitted by Anglo-Saxon to modern English: ancor (anachoret), apostol, postol, biscop (bishop), aelmæsse (alms), calic, candel, clustor and claustre, discipul, deofol, deacon, engel, mynster, pistol (epistola), predicyan, profost (propositus), purpur, sanct, ymn, culufre (columba), castell, douther (doctor), gigant, meregreot (margarita), pund, plant, ylp (vulpes), yncia (uncia). Latin letters were very little cultivated in the time of the Heptarchy. Bede urged the Archbishop Egbert to have the Lord's Prayer and the Creed translated by the most learned of the clergy or laity of his diocese. In Alfred's time not a single priest understood the mass. The Norman inva