SAXON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The terms Saxon and Anglo-Saxon are popularly used to designate that dialect of our language which prevailed to the close of the 12th century. • The use of these terms is, however, comparatively modern, and the men who spoke this dialect always called it the English. Several of our manu script chronicles begin thus :—" Britain island is eight hundred miles long, and two hundred miles broad. And there are in the island five languages, 4:n9/ ha, and Brit-Welsh, and Scottish, and Pightish, and Book-Latin," &e. Still we may use these terms with some con venience, and (thus cautioned) without any danger of being misled. We proceed to point out the peculiarities which distinguish the Anglo Saxon from the succeeding dialects of our language.
The Anglo-Saxon, like the Latin and the Greek, often distinguished the cases of its noun, and the conjugations, numbers, and persons of he verb, by a change in the vowel of the final syllable ; in the dialect which succeeded, and which has been called the Old English, all these vowels were confounded, and in our modern dialect they have, for the most part, been lost. Thus the Anglo-Saxon Oh has athas in the nominative nod accusative plural, and (viers in the genitive singular ; the Old English nth has utiles not only for its genitive singular, but also for its nominative and accusative plural ; and in our modern English these three cartes are all represented by the mommoeyllaUleouths. Again, in the Anglo-Saxon, nine wax the dative singular, and Who the genitive plural ; in the Old English, othe represented both dative singular and genitive plural ; and our present dialect, having lost the final vowel, had no nicana left of distinguishing these cases from the nominative (Ate. The third person singular of Wan was brfuth, and the first.
second, and third persons plural Its in the Old English, lama repreaenbel both numbers, and lor'th is the third person singular in the epokem language of time present day.
Wo any " spoken language," becalms our grammarians make cth the 'ending of the third person singular. But in Somersetshire, west of the Turret, where the southern dialect still lingers, they uniformly say he lor'th, he reatrth, At :red', it rain't/i,ke. (Jennings,' Ohs. on the West. Dinh') We have very satisfactory evidence, that in the 16th and 17th centuries this dialect was general throughout the south of England, and we find numerous traces of its peculiarities in the literature of that period. Dolman wrote the following passage, in the 16th cen
tury :— " So, mid the vale, the sreyhonnd seeing alert Ilia fearful foe pursieth, before she ftert'ffi, And where she ttorn'th, he leirn'th her thorn to bears, 'the one prey prirklh, the other safeties feare." Mire. for Nag. 'Listings.
Spenser has mcleth and haeth, and Sackville leap'th. It is probable, that the inflexion used by the translators of the Bible, and which is found in other contemporary works, was merely an old form, taken from the language of books, and adopted chiefly with the view of raising the style. The same observation will apply to tat, the inflexion of the second person singular, and to some other endings, which ere still preserved entire in our grammars, though they have lost their vowel in the 'Token language, for the last two centuries.
It is obvious, that either of the changes above noticed must have brought with it a new language. When, in the 12th century, the vowels of the final syllables were confounded, there was at the same time a confusion of case and number, of tense and person,—in short, of those grammatical forms to which language owes its precision and its clearness. A writer had to seek for new forms of expression before Ile could convey his meaning clearly. As he had lost the means of distinguishing several cases of his noun, he called in the prepositions to his aid, and to show more clearly the " regimen" of his sentence, was obliged to confine within very nan-ow limits the position of his verb,—thus abandoning all that freedom of transposition, which is almost as remarkable in the Anglo-Saxon as in the Greek and Latin. The confusion introduced into his conjugations and tense', he sought to remedy by various devices, which have hitherto been very little investigated, and at last he had recourse to that general use of the auxiliary verbs, which is at present so marked a feature in the language. The new dialect which resulted from these changes kept its ground for nearly two centuries. It exhibits the most striking analogies with the contemporary dialects of Germany and the Netherlands, and the further changes which converted it into our modern English were rapidly working a like revolution in these sister-tongues, when the invention of printing doubled the influence of their written language, and thus preserved them from further corruption.