466 MAY DIE OUT SUDDENLY OR GRADUALLY, cuap. xxiii. 



during which time the old Gothic which they at first spoke 

 became corrupted and considerably modified. In the mean 

 time the natives of Norway, who had enjoj'ed much com- 

 mercial intercoux-se with the rest of Europe, acquired quite a 

 new speech, and looked on the Icelandic as having been 

 stationary, and as representing the pure Gothic original of 

 which their own was an offshoot. 



A German colony in Pennsj'lvania was cut off from 

 frequent communication with Europe for about a quarter of 

 a century, during the wars of the French Revolution between 

 1792 and 1815. So marked had been the effect even of this 

 brief and imperfect isolation, that when Prince Bernhard of 

 Saxe-Weimar travelled among them a few years afler the 

 peace, he found the peasants speaking as they had done in 

 Germany in the preceding century,* and retaining a dialect 

 which at home had already become obsolete. 



Even after the renewal of the German emigration from 

 Europe, when I travelled in 1841 among the same people in 

 the retired valleys of the Alleghanies, I found the newspapers 

 full of terms half English and half German, and many an 

 Anglo-Saxon word which had assumed a Teutonic di'ess, as 

 "fencen," to fence, instead of umzaunen, ''flauer'"'' for flour, 

 instead of mehl, and so on. What with the retention of 

 terms no longer in use in the mother country, and the 

 borrowing of ncAV ones from neighboring states, there might 

 have arisen in Pennsylvania in five or six generations, but 

 for the influx of new-comers from Germany, a mongrel 

 speech equally unintelligible to the Anglo-Saxon and to the 

 inhabitants of the European fiitherlantl. 



If languages resemble species in having had each their 

 "specific centre" or single area of creation, in Avhich they have 

 been slowly formed, so each of them is alike liable to slow or 



* Travels of Prince Benibaril of Suxe-Weimar, in North America, in 1826 

 and 1826, p. 123. 



