ENGLISH LANGUAGE. The English language is a direct development of the Anglo Saxon,. a circumstance which makes it question able whether the latter speech ought to be dis tinguished by a separate name. But although a direct development of the Anglo-Saxon, it is not a development which has been allowed to take place regularly and gradually, as the result merely of internal causes. One important ex ternal influence was brought to bear on the orig inal form of our language, which had the double effect, first, of producing a much more sudden and complete modification of the grammatical structure than could have taken place if the language had grown up independently of for eign influences; and secondly, of giving a composite character to the vocabulary of the language by the introduction of a large number of foreign words. This external influence was the Norman Conquest, in consequence of which a new language,. the Norman-French, came to be spoken in England by those who had made themselves the masters of the country, and who formed, therefore, almost the only class that had leisure and opportunity for literary pursuits. The immediate result of the Norman Conquest (1066) was thus that the language of the Nor mans came to be the chief literary language of England (except where Latin was used), and that the Anglo-Saxon was reduced to a very subordinate place. When the latter language again comes into notice as a written language a great change is seen to have been wrought in it. Before the Conquest it was a very highly inflected, or what is called a synthetic language, that is, one in which the substantives, adjectives, verbs and articles are subject to numerous modifications, each of which expresses a modi fication of the root-meaning of the word, or shows the relation of the word to the other words in the sentence. During the period when Anglo-Saxon ceased to a great extent to be a written language these inflections dropped off ; and when it re-emerges as a written language about the end of the 12th century it is no longer synthetic, but analytic, that is, prepositions and auxiliaries are now used instead of inflectional prefixes and terminations to express the various modifications of the idea contained in any word, and the relations of the words in a sentence to one another. At this period, however, the lan guage still continued to be essentially homoge neous in respect of its vocabulary: the Norman words that occur are so rare that they need not be taken into account. And it was natural that
it should be so, for the Saxon language was still confined to the Saxon inhabitants of the country; and those who wrote in it addressed themselves only to that portion of the commu nity, and accordingly had no occasion to use any word of Norman origin. This state of matters lasted till about the middle of the 13th century, which is the period at which English proper is usually regarded as having begun to be spoken and written. By this time the Normans began to experience the inconvenience of not being acquainted with the language of the people among whom they dwelt, and in learning to speak and write it they very naturally used a large number of Norman words, and these words were adopted by all such writers belong ing to the subject race as wished to make them selves understood by Norman as well as by Saxon readers. A very rapid mixing of the two languages thus took place, and a second im portant change was wrought in the English lan guage. It is no longer homogeneous in its vocabulary, but contains a large admixture of foreign words.
The whole of what precedes may be shortly summarized thus: From 450 to 1066 the lan guage spoken in England was the so-called Anglo-Saxon, a dialect' of Low German, very highly inflected. From 1066 to 1250 two lan guages were spoken in England, Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, by two different sections of the population occupying different political positions. During this period the grammatical structure of the former language began to be broken up, chiefly owing to its being disused for literary purposes; and toward the end of the period we find a few works written in a language resembling the English of our day in grammar, but differing from it by the homo geneousness of its vocabulary. Finally, about 1250 the two languages begin to mingle and form one intelligible to the whole population, Normans as well as Saxons. This is what is usually called English proper. English is thus seen to be a composite language, deriving part of its stock of words from a German source, and part from a Latin source, Norman-French being in the main merely a modified form of Latin.