IV.

THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY.

59. The vocabulary of a language is the whole body of words in that language. Hence the English vocabulary consists of all the words in the English language.

The English vocabulary is very extensive, as is shown by the fact that in our great dictionaries there are nearly 100,000 words. But it should be observed that 3000 or 4000 serve all the ordinary purposes of oral and written communication. The Old Testament contains 5642 words, Milton uses about 8000; and Shakespeare, whose vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other English writer, employs no more than 15,000 words.

60. The principal elements of the English vocabulary are words of Anglo-Saxon and of Latin or French-Latin origin.

61. Anglo-Saxon is the earliest form of English. The whole of the grammar of our language, and the most largely used part of its vocabulary, are Anglo-Saxon.

62. The Latin element in the English vocabulary consists of a large number of words of Latin origin, adopted directly into English at various periods.

The principal periods during which Latin words were brought
directly into English are.

I. At the introduction of Christianity into England by the
Latin Catholic missionaries, A.D. 596.

2. At the revival of classical learning in the sixteenth century.
3. By modern writers.

63. The French-Latin element in the English language consists of French words, first largely introduced into English by the Norman - French, who conquered England in the eleventh century A.D.

64. Proportions.-From examination of the dictionary, it

has been found that of every hundred words sixty are of Anglo-Saxon origin, thirty of Latin, and five of Greek, while all the other sources combined furnish the remaining five. This, however, is an inadequate mode of estimating the real proportion of the Anglo-Saxon element in the English vocabulary; the true way of judging is by an examination of the literature.

The constant repetition, in any discourse, of conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliaries, and common adverbs (all of which are of Anglo-Saxon origin) causes this element greatly to preponderate in the pages of even the most Latinized writer. Thus Gibbon (Decline and Fall, chapter liv.) uses 68 per cent., Hallam (Constitutional History, chapter vii.) 70 per cent., and Burke (Nabob of Arcot's Debts) 74 per cent; while Scott (Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto i.), Byron (Prisoner of Chillon), and Dickens (Pickwick Papers, "The Bagman's Story") employ 90 per cent., and Defoe, Bunyan, and the English Bible rise to 93 per cent.

65. English a Composite Language. The great simplicity and perspicuity of words of Anglo-Saxon origin have led some writers, if not to an overvalue of this element, at least to an undervalue of the classical element. This is a one-sided view, and is not justified by the genius of English, which is essentially a composite language. The classical element is of inestimable value, and tends to give our speech that richness and variety which so eminently characterize it.

The following hexameters, by William Wetmore Story, poet and sculptor, present a striking description of the various elements which contribute to the English vocabulary:

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

1. Give me, of every language, first my vigorous English, Stored with imported wealth, rich in its natural mines,

Grand in its rhythmical cadence, simple for household employ

ment,

Worthy the poet's song, fit for the speech of man.

2. Not from one metal alone the perfectest mirror is shapen,
Not from one color is built the rainbow's aerial bridge;
Instruments blending together yield the divinest of music,
Out of myriad of flowers sweetest of honey is drawn.

3. So unto thy close strength is welded and beaten together Iron dug from the North, ductile gold from the South;

So unto thy broad stream the ice-torrents, born in the mountains, Rush, and the rivers pour, brimming with sun from the plains.

4. Thou hast the sharp clean edge and the downright blow of the Saxon,

Thou the majestical march and the stately pomp of the Latin;
Thou the euphonious swell, the rhythmical roll of the Greek;
Thine is the elegant suavity caught from sonorous Italian;
Thine the chivalric obeisance, the courteous grace of the Nor-

man;

Thine the Teutonic German's inborn guttural strength.

5. Raftered by firm-laid consonants, windowed by opening vowels, Thou securely art built, free to the sun and the air;

Over thy feudal battlements trail the wild tendrils of fancy,
Where in the early morn warbled our earliest birds;

Science looks out from thy watch-tower, love whispers in at thy

lattice,

While o'er thy bastions wit flashes its glittering sword.

6. Not by corruption rotted, nor slowly by ages degraded,
Have the sharp consonants gone crumbling away from our words;
Virgin and clean is their edge, like granite blocks chiselled by
Egypt;

Just as when Shakespeare and Milton laid them in glorious verse.

7. Fitted for every use like a great majestical river,
Blending thy various streams, stately thou flowest along,
Bearing the white-wingéd ship of Poesy over thy bosom,
Laden with spices that come out of the tropical isles,

Fancy's pleasuring yacht with its bright and fluttering pennons,
Logic's frigates of war, and the toil-worn barges of trade.

8. How art thou freely obedient unto the poet or speaker, When, in a happy hour, thought into speech he translates!

Caught on the word's sharp angles flash the bright hues of his

fancy;

Grandly the thought rides the words, as a good horseman his

steed.

9. Now, clear, pure, hard, bright, and one by one, like to hailstones,
Short words fall from his lips fast as the first of a shower;
Now in a twofold column, Spondee, Iamb, and Trochee,
Unbroke, firm-set, advance, retreat, trampling along;

Now with a sprightlier springiness, bounding in triplicate syllables,

Dance the elastic Dactylics in musical cadences on;

Now, their voluminous coil intertangling like huge anacondas, Roll overwhelmingly onward the sesquipedalian words.

10. Flexile and free in thy gait and simple in all thy construction, Yielding to every turn, thou bearest thy rider along;

Now like our hackney or draught horse, serving our commonest

uses,

Now bearing grandly the poet, Pegasus-like, to the sky.

II. Thou art not prisoned in fixed rules, thou art no slave to a grammar;

Thou art an eagle uncaged, scorning the perch and the chain. Hadst thou been fettered and formalized, thou hadst been tamer

and weaker;

How could the poor slave walk with thy grand freedom of gait ? Let, then, grammarians rail, and let foreigners sigh for thy sign

posts,

Wandering lost in thy maze, thy wilds of magnificent growth.

12. Call thee incongruous, wild, of rule and of reason defiant; I in thy wildness a grand freedom of character find.

So with irregular outline tower up the sky-piercing mountains, Rearing o'er yawning chasms lofty precipitous steeps;

Spreading o'er ledges unclimbable, meadows and slopes of green

smoothness;

Bearing the flowers in their clefts, losing their peaks in the clouds.

13. Therefore it is that I praise thee and never can cease from re

joicing,

Thinking that good stout English is mine and my ancestor's

tongue;

Give me its varying music, the flow of its free modulation,
I will not covet the full roll of the glorious Greek,
Luscious and feeble Italian, Latin so formal and stately,
French with its nasal lisp, nor German inverted and harsh,
Not while our organ can speak with its many and wonderful
voices.

Play on the soft flute of love, blow the loud trumpet of war,
Sing with the high sesquialtro, or, drawing its full diapason,
Shake all the air with the grand storm of its pedals and stops.

W. W. STORY.