ENGLISH LANGUAGE, which is now spoken by nearly 80 millions of the earth's inhabitants, is in its vocabulary one of the most heterogeneous that ever existed; a fact, the causes of which are to be traced in the history of England (q.v.). Its composition and grammatical character are thus described by M. Muller in his Lectures on the Science of Language (1861). " There is, perhaps, no language so full of words evidently derived from the most distant sources as English. Every country of the globe seems to have brought some of its verbal manufactures to the intellectual market of England. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German—nay, even Hindustani, Malay, and Chinete words—lie mixed together in the English dictionary. On the evidence of words alone, it would be impossible to classify English with any other of the established stocks and stems of human speech. Leaving out of considera tion the smaller ingredients, we find, on comparing the Teutonic with the Latin, or Neo-Latin, or Norman elements in English, that the latter have a decided majority over the home-grown Saxon terms. . .. M. Thomerel, who counted every word in the dic tionaries of Robertson and Webster, has established the fact, that the number of Teu tonic or Saxon words in English amounts to only 13,230 against 29,853 words which can either mediately or immediately be traced to a Latin source. On the evidence of its dictionary, therefore, and treating English as a mixed language, it have to be classified together with French, Italian, and Spanish as one of the Romance- or Neo Latin dialects. Languages, however, though mixed in their dictionary, can never be mixed in their grammar. . . . We may form whole sentences in English consisting entirely of Latin or Romance words; yet whatever there is left of grammar in English bears unmistakable traces of Teutonic workmanship. What may now be called gram mar in English, is little more than the terminations of the genitive singular and nomina tive plural of nouns, the degrees of comparison, and a few of the persons and tenses of the verb. Yet the single s, used as the exponent of the third person singular of the
indicative present, is irrefragable evidence that in a scientific classification of languages, English, though it did not retain a single word of Saxon origin, would have to be classed as Saxon, and as a branch of the great Teutonic stem of the Aryan family of speech." See LANGUAGE.
In tracing the growth of the E. L., the history is usually divided into four leading periods: the Anglo-Saxon period (440 A.D. to 1066 A.D.); the Semi-Saxon period (from 1066 A.D. to 1250 A.D.); the Early English period, comprising the two periods of old and middle English (from 1250 A.D. to 1550 A.D.); and the Modern English period (from 1550 A.D. to the present time). But this nomenclature and these divisions are now impugned by an increasing number of scholars, who affirm, not without reason, that English was always English, and never " Anglo-Saxon ;" that the fact of its being inflected in the period before the Norman conquest, and losing most of its inflections in later times, is no reason at all for speaking of it as if it were two or even three different languages, and that we have no warrant in the usage of the inflected period for calling our forefathers or their speech anything but English. It is certainly very misleading to name the period immediately succeeding the conquest Semi-Saxon, because it induces people to imagine that the so-called " Saxon," that is, the English, element of our language had begun to be mixed up with foreign ingredients, though, in point of fact, its two great monuments, The Chronicle, and Layamon's Brut, are all but absolutely free from such. It is proba ble, therefore, that the old divisions and their designations will before long be aban doned, and they are only retained here out of respect to a usage which has penetrated modern English literature.