DISCOVERY 



47 



of Christianity, due to Latin, i.e. Roman, influence 

 between the filth and the seventh centuries. It was 

 naturally to be found in those parts of Germany which 

 had formerly been under the sway of Rome — i.e. in the 

 South, and in the Rhine districts. But cut off as they 

 were (in the South at least) from Christian intercourse, 

 and encompassed all about with heathen tribes, these 

 Christians had fallen sadly away from the pure faith, 

 and their belief teemed with errors and superstitions. 

 Yet Christianity had flourished long enough in these 

 regions to give rise to a new terminologj', which had 

 thus been in existence for some hundreds of years when 

 the Anglo-Saxon missionaries entered the country. 



We notice, then, in many cases a duel between two 

 expressions, the one German, the other English. Thus 

 the Enghsh found the Latin loan-word kruzi (crux, 

 cnicis) already so firmly estabhshed that their rod 

 (rood) could make no headway. So, too, the High 

 German opjaron (Mod. German opjern), borrowed, as 

 the operation of Grimm's Law shows, at an early period 

 from the Latin opcrari, held its own against the inter- 

 loping Anglo-Saxon offrian (from the Latin oferre), 

 of which only a few instances occur in Old High 

 German ; the O.E. gotspell (gospel) competed for a 

 time with the Latin evangdio, but the latter won the 

 day. In the above-mentioned Tatian translation we 

 find the word sibba with the Anglo-Saxon meaning of 

 "peace," instead of the usual sense of relationship 

 which it has preserved in Modern German ; nor could 

 the adjective odmustig (O.E. ea^mod), which occurs 

 quite commonly in the Rhine-Franconian author 

 Otfrid, displace the Upper-German destnuoii, which 

 has subsisted in the Modem German demittig. 



Occasionally, however, and in some very important 

 and interesting e.xamples, the Anglo-Saxon word com- 

 pletely supersedes the German expression. Thus 

 there were two Germanic words corresponding in 

 meaning to the Latin sancius, both occurring in Gothic 

 as ueihs and hailags. In England the form weoh, 

 with its cognate word zctj (idol), was apparently 

 obnoxious to churchmen on account of its connection 

 with the heathen cult. 



And so the Latin sanctiis was, in an ecclesiastical 

 sense, translated by hdli^, and the adjective corre- 

 sponding to a/j was quietly dropped. In Old High 

 German, on the other hand, the term wih had obtained 

 almost complete mastery over heilac, which was only 

 used in the old meaning of inviolate, intact. The 

 common ecclesiastical phrase was wih, as we know 

 from the earliest glosses for sancius. In a short time, 

 however, under the influence of the Enghsh mission, 

 the O.E. hdli^ completely ousted wih, so that even as 

 early writings as those of Tatian show no trace of it. It 

 has only survived in Modern German in a few formal 

 expressions like Weihnachten [zen wihen nahien: at 



the holy nights), in Weihrauch (sacred smoke, i.e. 

 incense), and in a few Bavarian place-names like 

 Weihenstephan, Weilienzell. 



Similarly the English churchmen translated the 

 Latin spiriliis sancius by hdlij, -^dst. yist, German 

 Geist, was a word common to all the West German 

 dialects, and seems to have had the primitive 

 meaning of " apparition " (cf. our Enghsh ghost). 

 It was certainly in this sense that the word existed 

 in High German, for the phrase already adopted by the 

 South German Christians was -wih alum (Mod. German, 

 Atem). But so thorough was the Anglicising of 

 German ecclesiastical terminology that dcr heilige 

 Geist is stOl to-day the only designation for the third 

 Person of the Trinity, while Alem has ceased to be 

 current with the meaning of " Spirit " since the end of 

 the twelfth century. 



Equally, or even more significant, is the fact that 

 the German name for the greatest Christian festival 

 is of undoubted Anglo-Saxon origin. Whereas all the 

 Germanic peoples denote Easter by variants of the 

 loan-word pascha (Gothic paskia, Middle Low 

 German pasche. Middle Dutch paeschedach, Old Frisian 

 pascha, Old Xorse pdskar, Swedish pask, Danish 

 paaske), the English and Germans (i.e. the High Ger- 

 mans) alone know the festival as Easter or stern. 

 The etymology of the word occupied the attention of no 

 less a person than the Venerable Bede, who, in 725, 

 stated that the Eostur-monath was so named after a 

 feast of the heathen goddess Eostrae, which fell near 

 the time of our own Easter.^ And though this explana- 

 tion has been scouted by some scholars, yet the fact 

 that simOarly Yule (O.E. jeo/) was originally the feast 

 of the winter solstice, and was afterwards Christianised, 

 would seem to support Bede's statement. 



We have seen how the English in the train of Boni- 

 face were numerous and influential enough to change 

 the very language of their converts for all time, and in 

 some very important respects. But the climax is stOl 

 to come. The very name by which the Germans speak 

 of themselves to-day, the word deulsch as a description 

 of the whole German people, is£)t English origin. That 

 deulsch goes back to an adjectival form diutisch, itself 

 derived from deot (A.-S. ]>eod), meaning the people in its 

 totality, is an incontrovertible fact. But it is equally 

 certain that the adjective diutisch does not occur in 

 German until Notker uses it in the first half of the 

 eleventh century. When Otfrid, in the first half of the 

 ninth century, wished to give expression to the notion 

 of his own German tongue in contrast to Latin, he, 

 being a Franconian, used the expression frenkisg. 

 In other words, he had no conception of a German 

 language (or of a German people either for that matter) 



• See Chapter XV of Beda Venerabilis, De tempororum 

 raiione : De mensibus Anglorum. 



