Text 2. We cannot know too much. By S. Potter
We cannot know too much about the language we speak every day of our lives. Most of us, it is true, can get along fairly well without knowing very much about our language and without ever taking the trouble to open a volume of "The Oxford English Dictionary." But knowledge is power. The power of rightly chosen words is very great, whether those words are intended to inform, to entertain, or to move. English is rapidly becoming a cosmopolitan means of communication and it is now being studied by numerous well-trained investigators on both sides of the Atlantic. It is highly exhilarating to contemplate the progress made in the study of English since the opening years of this century, when Henry Bradley of Oxford and Otto Jespersen of Copenhagen were writing those admirable introductions which have become classics of their kind: "The Making of English" and "Growth and Structure of the English Language." To men like Bradley and Jespersen we all owe much, both for their tangible contributions to learning and for that new spirit of enterprise and adventure with which they have imbued English studies. That assertion, too often repeated, that Englishmen are not really interested in their own language, is no longer valid. At last we English are showing an awakened interest in our mother tongue as something living and changing and amenable to our corporate will. This we see in many differing spheres: in national and local government, in business and journalism, in film and radio, in school and university.
From Indo-European to Modern English by way of Common Germanic, West Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, Old English and Middle English, our language has shown a gradual process of simplification and of the breaking down of inflexions. The development has been, for the most part, in one direction all the time: from synthesis to analysis. There have been both gain and loss. We need not assume too readily with Jespersen that this analytic process has meant unqualified progress in language or that our forebears of five, four, and three thousand years ago were less gifted linguistically than we. Think what linguistic alertness and precision are required of those speakers who wield an elaborate system of inflexions effectively and faultlessly! The language of twentieth-century London and New York may become a very fine delicate instrument in the hands of accomplished.masters, but its qualities and potentialities are different from those of, let is say, Periclean Greek....
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Classical Greek and Common Germanic were roughly contemporaneous and they were alike descended from parent Indo-European. Without mixing metaphors unduly, it may be said that a family has branches and that branches have divisions. The Indo-European family had eight branches of which Greek and Germanic were two, the other six being Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, Latin, Celtic, and Balto-Slavonic. Germanic (also called Teutonic or Gothonic) later showed three geographical divisions: East Germanic (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic); North Germanic (Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish, and Danish); and West Germanic (German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English).
When Tacitus wrote that well-known description of the Germanic nations and their institutions called "Germania"in the first century after Christ, those nations were still on the move and that tripartite linguistic division into East, North, and West was in progress. Germania extended from Scandinavia in the north to the Ore Mountains in the south and from the Rhine in the west to the Vistula in the east. No Primitive Germanic writing of any kind is extant and the forms of words assumed for that language are just as hypothetical as those postulated for Indo-European. In our search for the earliest of all Germanic recorded forms we must go north to the runic inscriptions of Scandinavia, the most ancient of which, according to Otto von Friesen, date from the third century. In order to find the most ancient literary records, however, we must look to East Germanic, to the Biblical translations of Wulflla (311-83), Bishop of the Visigoths, who, to escape persecution, led his congregation in the year 348 across the Danube into the Roman province of Lower Moesia, now Bulgaria. Bishop Wulfila continued to lead his people in their new home for a third of a century and during that time he translated the greater part of the Bible into Gothic. This translation was used and revised after his death and some parts have survived from each of the Gospels and from the thirteen Pauline epistles, as well as fragments of Ezra and Nehemiah and a few pages of the "Skeireins" or Commentary. -Gothic was still spoken in the seventeenth century in the Crimea, and we know something about this Crimean Gothic because some sixty words of it were noted by a Fleming named Ogier Ghislain van Busbecq, Charles V's envoy from the Low Countries to Constantinople, and published by him in Paris in 1589. It is easy to see why Gothic is valued so highly by the advanced student of English. Wulfila's Bible is the oldest Germanic document, three centuries older than anything in Old English and four centuries older than anything in Old High German. It is the nearest thing to Common Germanic. Without it the 'Anglicist' would be at a yet greater disadvantage than he is already as compared with advanced students of French, Spanish, and Italian who have their Common Italic or Romanic in the form of Latin with its superabundant testimony preserved in the most extensive literature of antiquity.
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