406 LANGUAGE AND EACE. 



English follows the same order, though poetry or a 

 poetical style may employ a contrary arrangement without 

 fear of obscuring the meaning. This order is found only in 

 the analytic stage of Aryan speech, that is, in its most 

 modern form; while the arrangement which sets the verb 

 at the end becomes more and more universal the farther 

 back we go. Before the Norman Conquest we arranged our 

 words in a sentence just as the Germans do at the present 

 day, viz. : (1) in a subordinate sentence the verb came at 

 the end, and (2) the auxiliary was separated from its verb. 

 Both of these habits have since been changed ; so that now 

 there is a very great contrast between English and German. 



This is of course well known ; but the point is so well 

 put in the following extract from the London Daily Tele- 

 graph of August 1st, 1890, that I have been tempted to 

 transcribe it : " To a person thoroughly versed in both lan- 

 guages, it is difficult to decide which is the funnier — Angli- 

 cised German, or Germanised English. Compound auxiliaries 

 in the infinitive, such as ' to become to be,' and ' to have to 

 shall,' which are perfectly correct and natural in High 

 Dutch, sound strange and comical in the British ear. Yet 

 how else should an average German schoolboy, of from ten 

 to twelve years of age, writing English perforce, terminate 

 the majority of his sentences ? Scarcely less mirthful would 

 be the English boy's German, with verbs well to the front, 

 after our insular manner, instead of lingering jointly and 

 collectively in the rear of each parenthetical phrase, as is 

 their wont when fiowing freely from the pen of a born 

 Teuton. Although the greater number of their root- words — 

 well nigh all the monosyllabic ones, indeed^r-are nearly 

 identical, yet the two languages differ from one another to 

 a positively distracting extent in grammatical construction 

 and verbal arrangement. They are both, moreover, vigor- 



