210 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



to be regretted that no specialists have made these several influences 

 subjects of monographs, as the very able chapters devoted to them 

 in Skeat's Principles of English Etymology cannot be said to have 

 ' exhausted the subject. 



I have spoken hitherto of the direct use obtainable from the study 

 of other languages for the history of English. But it is clear that 

 indirectly, too, the scientific study of any subject, and more especially 

 the scientific study of any language, may be of value for the student 

 of English. The wider his outlook and the greater the number of 

 languages he is able to compare with English, the more light will he 

 be able to throw on his special study. His ideas ought not to be 

 narrowed down to one particular type of linguistic structure. A 

 broad horizon is the more necessary because the development of the 

 English idiom has in a great many respects diverged very widely 

 from the structural type characteristic of the older languages of the 

 same family. The grammarian should be on his guard against apply- 

 ing indiscriminately the same categories and the same points of view 

 to all languages, for no language can be rightly measured by the 

 yard of any other language. This, however, is just what has been 

 done to a very great extent, not only with regard to English, but 

 more or less in describing and in judging all languages. Latin gram- 

 mar was studied earlier than, and more extensively than, any other 

 grammar; Latin was considered the language, and any deviation in 

 other languages from its rules was considered a deterioration. Even 

 if this manner of looking at things grammatical has now been largely 

 superseded, because an ever-increasing number of different languages 

 have been scientifically investigated, there still remain not a few 

 survivals of the Latin superstition, which it will be the work of future 

 grammarians to root out completely. Grammatical terminology is still 

 in the main based on Latin grammar. The student of English will 

 find in his grammatical vocabulary expressions for whatever English 

 has in common with Latin, but those grammatical categories and 

 phenomena which are not found in Latin have either no names at 

 all or else each author has his own names. The combination found 

 in "he is reading" is by some called simply the periphrastic conjug- 

 ation, by others the progressive form, or the present continuous, or 

 the descriptive present, or the definite present. Now, of course, 

 names are not everything, and we may have very definite notions 

 without definite names, or, at any rate, without definite names 

 accepted by everybody. Still, the want of a fixed technical nomen- 

 clature is decidedly a drawback. 



But there is another, and much more serious, drawback derived 

 from the preponderance of Latin grammar. It is, in fact, a very 

 difficult thing for anybody that has been from his earliest youth 

 thoroughly drilled in that particular set of grammatical ideas, to 



