Specimens of English literature from the 'Ploughmans crede' to the ...

INTRODUCTION.XXVllEnglishman learning a little German soon begins to thinkthat a good many English words appear to be derived ' ' fromthe German. Accustomed to despise his own language, heseems to forget that there is at least an equal chance of theGerman being ' derived ' from the English. As a matter offact, the languages are cognate or allied, and neither languagehas really borrowed much from the other. But itdeserves to be remembered, that the oldest Teutonic remainsare in Low German, not in High German ; that the Englishepic poem of Beowulf ' ' is older than anything extant inHigh German ; and that English ranks above German inthe tables of letter-changes indicated in Grimm's Law.''It follows from this, that to look upon German, so to speak,as a subordinate form of English, is, although an error, anerror of less magnitude than the unphilological and unpatrioticone of looking upon English asa subordinate form ofGerman. German scholars are aware of this. It is reservedfor Englishmen to be unaware, as a rule, of the dignity andimportance of their own magnificent language. The differencebetween the two languages is strikingly illustrated bycomparing the grammatical inflexions. The slowly advancingGerman still retains a large number of these, which English,more progressive, has abandoned whole centuries ago.§ 19. Few words are more frequently misused than theword derived.English certainly contains many words derivedfrom the Latin directly, or through the medium of theFrench; a few, perhaps, derived through the French froma Celtic source; a good many that are derived fromScandinavian sources ; some that are derived, or rather