On the Approaches to the English Language [pp. 434-456]

448 ON THE APPROACHES TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. [July,
Nanmely, its vocabulary is meagre. The greater part of the work
of IJUlfilas is lost, and what remains must be said to have a very
limited range of ideas and expressions. The four gospels, in volving as they do so much repetition, eked out by fragments of
the epistles, cannot but give a scanty store of words. The
Gothic equivalents for the great mass of Anglo-Saxon words
have simply never reached us, so that we are compelled to re construct them from Old High German and Mlodern German, by
reversing the permutation of consonants and the umlauting of
votels. An additional gain, and one not to be overlooked, will
be the increased understanding thereby acquired of Middle High
German and Modern German. To dwell upon this point would
be irrelevant in the present place. This much, however, may be
said in parenthesis, that the literature of Middle High German,
embracing the Nibelungen-lied, Gudrun, and an endless variety
of epic and lyric poetry, is uncommonly rich and interesting,
and that there is only one way of approaching it, namely through
Old High Germany
Having disposed of the Gothic and Old High German as propedeutics, we now reach the main object of inquiry, AngloSaxon. The grammar of this language should be developed, as
German scholars have done in their text-books, directly
from the Gothic, by showing how such a consonant or such a
vowel of Gothic is represented in Anglo-Saxon, how such a
Gothic declension or conjugation re-appears in its Anglo-Saxon
form. Not only does such a process keep alive the knowledge
of Gothic, but it is the only scientific method and is at the same
time eminently practical. By not conforming to this process,
the most recent American grammar of Anglo-Saxont has failed
of success. Professor March has committed, in our judgment, two
grievous and irremediable faults. In the first place, he has
attempted too much. By interspersing paradigms from all the
Irdo-European languages, odds and ends of general philology,
* NI. H. G. is in the line of direct descent from O. H. G. The differences between the two languages are that the latter has converted all the sonorous inflection vowels of O. H. G. into "colorless" e (e. y. O. H. G. heizin, herzfin, herzonb,
he?rzrn, are all represented in M. H. G. by hee-zel), and further that while O. H. G.
has only the umlaut of a (viz. e) and, to a certain extent, the umlaut of u (viz. iu),
M. H. G. has umlauted every stem-vowel that is capable of undergoing the change.
tA Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language, by Francis A. Miarch,
LL.D., 1869.