The treasures of our tongue, says Dr. Richardson, the lexicographer, are
spread over continents, and cultivated among islands in the northern and
the southern hemisphere, from “the unformed Occident to the strange
shores of unknowing nations in the East.” The sun, indeed, now never
sets upon the empire of Great Britain. Not one hour of the twenty-four
in which the earth completes her diurnal revolution, not one round of
the minute-hand of the dial, is allowed to pass, in which, on some
portion of the surface of the globe, the air is not filled with “accents
that are ours.” They are heard in the ordinary transactions of life, or
in the administration of law, or in the deliberations of the
senate-house or council-chamber, or in the offices of private devotion,
or in the public observance of the rites and duties of a common faith.
Dr. Richardson’s _Dictionary of the English Language_, the foremost work
of its class, we owe greatly to the judicious energy of Mr. Pickering,
the publisher, who laid out two thousand pounds in books, specially for
this great labour, before it was commenced. If publishers would imitate
Mr. Pickering’s liberality oftener than is done, there would be fewer
incomplete and abortive compilations than are yearly issued from the
press. Dr. Richardson acknowledges this valuable aid in his Preface,
where he justly makes his boast of bringing within the circle of his
reading a large number of books which had never been employed for
lexicographical purposes before; and Dean Trench acknowledges that the
virgin soil which Richardson has tilled has often yielded him large and
rich returns.
Of the uselessness of our legions of words to be found in dictionaries,
a writer of the day observes:
Dictionary English is something very different not only from common
colloquial English, but even from that of ordinary written
composition. Instead of about 40,000 words, there is probably no
single author in the language from whose works, however voluminous,
so many as 10,000 words could be collected. Of the 40,000 words
there are certainly many more than one-half that are only employed,
if they are ever employed at all, on the rarest occasions. We should
any of us be surprised to find, if we counted them, with how small a
number of words we manage to express all that we have to say either
with our lips or even with the pen. Our common literary English
probably hardly extends to 10,000 words, our common spoken English
hardly to 5000. And the proportion of native or home-grown words is
undoubtedly very much higher in both the 5000 and the 10,000 than it
is in the 40,000. Perhaps of the 30,000 words, or thereabouts,
standing in the dictionaries, that are very rarely or never used,
even in writing, between 20,000 and 25,000 may be free of French or
Latin extraction. If we assume 22,500 to be so, that will leave 5000
Teutonic words in common use; and in our literary English, taken at
10,000 words, those that are non-Roman will thus amount to about
one-half. Of that half 4000 words may be current in our spoken
language, which will therefore be genuine English for four-fifths of
its entire extent. It will consist of about 4000 Gothic and 1000
Roman words.[83]
The Rev. Dr. D’Orsey has shown, by coloured charts and elaborate tables,
the proportion of the Teutonic and Romanic elements in the spoken
language of England, and in the writings of our great authors. Thus, out
of 100,000 words, at least 60,000 were Teutonic, 30,000 Romanic, and
10,000 from all other sources.
It would be almost impossible to compose a sentence of moderate length
consisting solely of words of Latin derivation. But there are many which
can be rendered wholly in Anglo-Saxon. It would be easy to make the
Lord’s Prayer entirely, as it is in present use almost entirely,
Anglo-Saxon. It consists of sixty words, and six of these only have a
Latin root. But for each of them, except one, we have an exact Saxon
equivalent. For “trespasses” we may substitute “sins;” for “temptation,”
“trials;” for “deliver,” “free;” and for “power,” “might.” Dr. Trench
proposes for “glory,” “brightness;” but this we think is not a good
substitute.
The gradual changes in language are very remarkable. Dean Trench, in one
of his popular manuals, observes: “How few aged persons, let them retain
the fullest possession of their faculties, are conscious of any
difference between the spoken language of their early youth and that of
their old age; that words, and ways of using words, are obsolete now
which were usual then; that many words are current now which had no
existence at that time. And yet it is certain that so it must be. A man
may fairly be supposed to remember clearly and well for sixty years
back; and it needs less than five of these sixties to bring us to the
period of Spenser, and not more than eight to set us in the time of
Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a change, how vast a difference in our
language, within eight memories! No one, overlooking this whole term,
will deny the greatness of the change. For all this, we may be tolerably
sure that, had it been possible to interrogate a series of eight
persons, such as together had filled up this time, intelligent men, but
men whose attention had not been especially roused on this subject, each
in his turn would have denied that there had been any change at all
during his lifetime. And yet, having regard to the multitude of words
which have fallen into disuse during these four or five hundred years,
we are sure that there must have been some lives in this chain which saw
those words in use at their commencement, and out of use before their
close. And so, too, of the multitude of words which have come into being
within the limits of each of these lives.”
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Footnote 83:
_Dublin University Magazine._
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