History of the English Language and Literature France and Germany, in Scandinavia, and in Russia. From this Aryan family we are sprung; out of the oldest Aryan speech our own language has grown. 8. The Group to which English belongs.—The Indo-European family of languages consists of several groups. One of these is called the Teutonic Group, because it is spoken by the Teuts (or the Teutonic race), who are found in Germany, in England and Scotland, in Holland, in parts of Belgium, in Denmark, in Norway and Sweden, in Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. The Teutonic group consists of three branches—High German, Low German, and Scandinavian. High 196 German is the name given to the kind of German spoken in Upper Germany—that is, in the table-land which lies south of the river Main, and which rises gradually till it runs into the Alps. New High German is the German of books—the literary language—the German that is taught and learned in schools. Low German is the name given to the German dialects spoken in the lowlands—in the German part of the Great Plain of Europe, and round the mouths of those German rivers that flow into the Baltic and the North Sea. Scandinavian is the name given to the languages spoken in Denmark and in the great Scandinavian Peninsula. Of these three languages, Danish and Norwegian are practically the same—their literary or book-language is one; while Swedish is very different. Icelandic is the oldest and purest form of Scandinavian. The following is a table of the GROUP OF TEUTONIC LANGUAGES.
TEUTONIC.
Low German.
High German.
Scandinavian.
Dutch. Flemish. Frisian. English. Old. Middle. New.Icelandic Dansk Ferroic. Svensk (or (Swedish). Norsk). It will be observed, on looking at the above table, that High German is subdivided according to time, but that the other groups are subdivided according to space. 9. English a Low-German Speech.—Our English tongue is the lowest of all Low-German dialects. Low German is the German spoken in the lowlands of Germany. As we descend the rivers, we come to the lowest level of all—the level of the sea. Our English speech, once a mere dialect, came down to that, crossed the German Ocean, and settled in Britain, to which it gave in time the name of Angla-land or England. The Low German spoken in the Netherlands is called Dutch; the Low German spoken in Friesland—a prosperous province of Holland—is called Frisian; and the Low German spoken in Great Britain is called English. These three languages are extremely like one another; but the Continental language that is likest 197 the English is the Dutch or Hollandish dialect called Frisian. We even possess a couplet, every word of which is both English and Frisian. It runs thus— Good butter and good cheese Is good English and good Fries. 10. Dutch and Welsh—a Contrast.—When the Teuton conquerors came to this country, they called the Britons foreigners, just as the Greeks called all other peoples besides themselves barbarians. By this they did not at first mean that they were uncivilised, but only that they were not Greeks. Now, the Teutonic or Saxon or English name for foreigners was Wealhas, a word afterwards contracted into Welsh. To GROUP OF TEUTONIC LANGUAGES.
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