206 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



ible to them, which are now made perfectly clear to us by their 

 similarity with words in cognate languages. How much should we 

 understand now of Beowulf, if we had not Gothic, German, Norse, 

 etc., to compare the words with? And then the forms of the words, 

 their inflections and modifications : our supposed philologists would 

 be at a loss to explain such phenomena as vowel-mutation (umlaut) 

 or to understand the use and formation of the different cases, etc. 

 Similarly, when they saw a great many of the old words disappear 

 and give way to others that were hitherto totally unknown, they 

 would not be in possession of the key we now have in Scandinavian, 

 in French, in Latin and Greek: much of what is now self-evident 

 would under these circumstances strike everybody with amazement, 

 as falling down from heaven without any apparent reason. 



A scientific treatment of the English language must, then, pre- 

 suppose the scientific treatment of a great many other languages as 

 well, and the linguistic historian cannot possibly fulfill his task 

 without a wide outlook to other fields. Not only must he have some 

 acquaintance with the cognate languages, the Arian (or Indo-Euro- 

 pean) family and more especially the Germanic (or Teutonic) branch 

 of it, but the English have in course of time come into contact with 

 so many other nations and have been so willing to learn foreign 

 words from people of every clime, that it is hardly an exaggeration to 

 say that whoever would really and thoroughly fathom the English 

 language would have to study half the languages spoken on the earth. 

 More than to any other branch of science the investigators of 

 English are indebted to Arian and Germanic philology. They have 

 continually to consult such works as Brugmann's and Delbriick's 

 Vergleichende Grammatik und Syntax, Streitberg's Urgermanische 

 Grammatik, Kluge's, Uhlenbeck's, and Franck's etymological dic- 

 tionaries, not to mention the other dictionaries' of German, Dutch, 

 etc., in which etymology plays only a subordinate part; further 

 periodicals like Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Liter- 

 atur, Journal of Germanic Philology, Indogermanische Forschungen, 

 Kuhn's Zeitschrift, it would be an easy thing to lengthen the list. 

 In classes of Old English recourse must continually be had to Verner's 

 law in order to explain the relation between wees (Mod. E. was) and 

 wceron (Mod. were), or between risan (Mod. rise) and rceran (Mod. 

 rear). To understand the rudimentary passive in hatte ("is called," 

 cf. Spenser's hight),vfe must go to Gothic, Sanskrit, and Greek, as 

 indeed we must to comprehend the whole of the inflectional system. 

 The force of the prefix ge- in gehieran, gewinnan, gedon, and innumer- 

 able other verbs is made intelligible by a reference to Latin con- in 

 conficio, etc., and to the different tense aspects (aktionsarten) of 

 Slavonic and other cognate languages. All this is too obvious to call 

 for further comment or illustration. 



