European languages

“ It is a common error in etymology to endeavor the deriving all the radical words of our western European languages from the Latin and Greek; or indeed to derive constantly the primitives of any one language from any particular tongue. When we do this, we seem to forget that all have been subject to alterations; and that the greater and more polite any nation is, the more subject, (partly for improvement, and partly out of a luxurious wantonness) to new model their language. ”

“ And this wider divergence between the order of languages spoken in Northern Europe and the order of languages spoken in Southern Europe, answers to the longer time that has elapsed since their differentiation commenced. Further, these two orders of modern European languages, as well as Latin and Greek and certain extinct and spoken languages of the East, are shown to have traits in common which unite them into one great class known as Aryan languages; radically distinguished from the classes of languages spoken by the other main divisions of the human race. ”

“ Hence you can easily see how much more difficult it is for an Oriental to learn any European language, than a European to learn a second European language. Even amongst the European languages, there are, as you know, many idioms differing one from the other, and consequently difficult to understand. ”

“ Nothing excites the envy of an American travelling in Europe more sharply than to hear Russian men and women speaking European languages fluently and idiomatically. When we learn to speak a foreign tongue, we are always acutely conscious of the transition from English to German, or from German to French, and our hearers are still more so. ”

“ But the structure of such a synthetic language being altogether strange to the chief European nations, and consequently difficult for them to become accustomed to, I have adapted this principle of dismemberment to the spirit of the European languages, in such a manner that anyone learning my tongue from grammar alone, without having previously read this introduction—which is quite unnecessary for the learner—will never perceive that the structure of the language differs in any respect from that of his mother-tongue. ”

“ German, English, Russian, Spanish, and French are available for the purposes of commerce, and for those who read books over nineteen-twentieths of the earth’s surface. The languages of the smaller non-European peoples are disappearing in those places where they have to compete with these greater European tongues, except in so far as they are a medium of domestic intercourse. Arabic, Chinese, and in less degree Persian are the only non-European languages which retain a world importance. English, German, and Spanish are pre-eminently the three leading commercial languages. ”

“ Europe was the home of a type of man physically similar to any average European of our day. This type is the product of long-continued contact between the original human product of Europe, Asia and Africa. The dawn of history finds him speaking Celtic in western [9] central Europe. An immense variety of dialects must then have been spoken on the continent, since intercourse was slight. Their fusion into modern languages has been the work of centuries. ”

“ We may place, side by side, two languages known to be undoubtedly, but also known to be not very closely, allied. Such, for instance, are the German and Greek, the Latin and Russian, the English and Lithuanic, all of which are Indo-European, and all of which, when placed in simple juxta-position, by no means show themselves in any very palpable manner as such. ”

“ People began to write books to be read as well as looked at by ordinary people. With the fourteenth century the real history of the European literatures begins. We find a rapid development of standard Italian, standard English, standard French, standard Spanish, and standard German. [381] These languages became literary languages; they were tried over, polished by use, and made exact and vigorous. They became at last as capable of the burden of philosophical discussion as Greek or Latin. ”

“ The European centralized states had emerged and were assuming the national features which mark them today. The modern languages of Europe were highly developed in their literary treasures and in everyday speech. ”

“ European nationalities and Aryan languages were born in those momentous meetings. The zone of contact extended from the northwestern, lowland fringe of continental Europe to the saucer-shaped land of Polesia. Along the depressed margin of western Europe a heavy flow of Mediterranean men, moving constantly northward, introduced a third element in the racial constituents of French and British populations. Each of the three races contributed a characteristic share of physical and moral traits to the spirit of nationality in Europe. ”

“ No one likes to have his own language travestied. Thus Esperanto, which looks like bad Italian, is on that account less popular among the speakers of Romance languages (except in France) than elsewhere. It is a significant fact that none of the inventors of these languages base them on their native speech.
And then, these languages are not international after all. A really international language ought to be as acceptable to speakers of Arabic, Chinese or Japanese as to a European. Even from a European point of view they are not wholly international. ”

“ In the Middle Ages, however, French, not English, was the most important of the vernacular languages of western Europe. In France a vast literature was produced in the language of the people during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which profoundly affected the books written in Italy, Spain, Germany, and England. ”

“ By the middle of the twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay, Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or Danish in our own day. ”

“ In the first place, it is put on record, on the irrefutable evidence of the modern languages themselves, that there is no nation in Europe which speaks a language of its own so pure as to be free from admixture with foreign elements. All owe their very origin, in fact, to this clash of languages, which was the determining factor in their creation and form. ”

“ It should be remembered that in Europe, for centuries, the people were kept on their own farms or in their own towns. The result of this was that each little village or city has its own peculiar language. It is said that persons who have studied such language matters carefully, after conversing with a man from Europe, can tell within thirty miles where his home used to be in the old country. There are no sharply marked boundaries of languages. The dialects of France shade off into those of Spain on the one hand and into those of the Flemish and the Italian on the other. ”

“ The diversity of languages is not an obstacle. In the Middle Ages, and even during a long part of the Modern Era, Latin was the international tongue; in modern days it was displaced by French, to the extent that France politically and culturally held the leadership of Europe. ”

“ Those German peoples who had continued to live outside of the Roman Empire, or who, during the invasions, had not settled far enough within its bounds to be led, like the Franks in Gaul, to adopt the tongue of those they had conquered, naturally adhered to the language they had always used, namely, the particular Germanic dialect which their forefathers had spoken for untold generations. From the various languages spoken by the German barbarians, modern German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic are derived. ”

“ Yet to be truly a polyglot one must be familiar with not only French and German, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, each difficult of mastery, and the Scandinavian languages, but also Dutch, Flemish, Portuguese, Roumanian, Catalonian, Greek and the many languages allied to Russian, such as Bohemian, Polish, Servian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, etc., and also the non-Aryan tongues of Europe, such as Hungarian and Finnish and the scattered Yiddish. ”

“ The forming of the several nationalities of Europe would have to be traced: the Slavonian, including Russia and Poland; the Teutonic, comprising England, Holland, Germany, and the Scandinavian peoples (viz., Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland) ; the Romanic or Italic nations (viz., Portugal, Spain, Provence, Italy, Wallachia, the Grisons of Switzerland) , which are the nations the basis of whose languages is the rustic or people's Latin of the middle ages. ”

“ To-day the English language is the most widely spread, not merely in Europe, but also in the other continents; the growth of the English nation accounts for it.
To-day the knowledge of languages is widely spread in all nations, and especially among the small nations; men able to speak two languages are more numerous every day, and that renders intimate intercourse among nations possible. ”

“ A Croatian merchant with whom we were talking grew quite eloquent on this subject. ‘A Croat, sir,’ he said, ‘will learn any language under the sun in three months!—a German takes twice the time. Look at me! Besides my native tongue I know German, I know French, I know Serbian, I know Latin, I know Hungarian, and I picked up Italian in a month. To know a dozen languages is quite an ordinary accomplishment in Agram. ”

“ I begin to learn the French tongue, and recommend it to my countrymen, before Hebrew, Greek or Latin, (provided but one of them only are to be attended to) for the trade and commerce of these states in future must inevitably shift its channel from England to France, Spain and Portugal; and therefore the statesman, politician and merchant, need be acquainted with their several languages, particularly the French, which is much in vogue in most parts of Europe. ”

“ In dealing with the varied influences which engage attention in a study of linguistic areas the student is frequently compelled to pause before the importance of economic relations. Inspection of a map of Europe suggests strikingly that zones of linguistic contact were destined by their very location to become meeting-places for men speaking different languages. ”

“ It is with Religions as with Law and Language: each nation, the more high-strung it becomes, the more it differentiates its Law and its Language. In the Middle Ages, up to the twelfth century, there were not fifty languages in Europe. There are now far over a thousand. ”

“ As regards political nationality and the history of civilisation, the evidence of speech is of still greater weight. In many cases of the mixture of nations the language of the dominant civilisation prevails, as where Latin dialects superseded the native tongues in Western Europe, and Germanic languages encroached on Turanian in Finland, on Slavonic in Russia, and on Keltic in the Scotch High lands. In other cases, where one nation has received elements of civilisation from another, language is apt to keep record of the process by adopting foreign words and ideas together. ”

“ Amongst a hundred young men in the philosophy class, not more than two will understand or speak German, and never more than one will speak English. Amongst a hundred French youths speaking German or English you will find that ninety-nine have spent some years in Germany or England; the hundredth is a phenomenon. Besides, it is fashionable to-day in France not to know a word of a foreign tongue. The scientific method is less general than the literary method. It comprises chiefly sciences and modern languages—German, English, Spanish, and Italian. ”

“ In this case each dialect should have a literature of its own and never attain the stage it should have as the literature of a whole nation. There are differences in the dialects among all the European peoples, even far greater than among us ”

“ During the past fifty years learned men of many nations have investigated philology and comparative mythology so thoroughly that they have ascertained beyond the possibility of doubt “that English, together with all the Teutonic dialects of the Continent, belongs to that large family of speech which comprises, besides the Teutonic, Latin, Greek, Slavonic, and Celtic, the Oriental languages of India and Persia.” ”

“ As I was myself acquainted with ten languages, I wished to test the ability of this eminent linguist; and therefore proposed that we should leave Italian for the moment, and amuse ourselves by speaking different other languages. Having spoken in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Dutch, I said at last:—
‘My friend, I have almost run out my stock of modern languages, except some which you probably do not know.’
‘Well,’ said he, ‘the dead languages, Latin and Greek, are matters which every one learns, and which every educated man is familiar with. We shall not mind them. ”

“ France and Germany also have valuable literatures; their languages are easily learnt, and are useful in many practical ways. The case for French and German, as against Latin and Greek, is therefore overwhelming. ”