HKB
of many competing dialects (that of Saxony) a prominent and dominant position in Germany; but the style of Luther has, like that of our English Bible, already become somewhat antiquated.
If the doctrine of gradual transmutation be applicable to languages, all those spoken in historical times must each of them have had a closely allied prototype; and accordingly, whenever we can thoroughly investigate their history, we find in them some internal evidence of successive additions by the invention of new words or the modification of old ones. Proofs also of borrowing are discernible, letters being retained in the spelling of some words which have no longer any meaning as they are now pronounced--no connection with any corresponding sounds. Such redundant or silent letters, once useful in the parent speech, have been aptly compared by Mr. Darwin to rudimentary organs in living beings, which, as he interprets them, have at some former period been more fully developed, having had their proper functions to perform in the organisation of a remote progenitor.
If all known languages are derivative and not primordial creations, they must each of them have been slowly elaborated in a single geographical area. No one of them can have had two birthplaces. If one were carried by a colony to a distant region, it would immediately begin to vary unless frequent intercourse was kept up with the mother country. The descendants of the same stock, if perfectly isolated, would in five or six centuries, perhaps sooner, be quite unable to converse with those who remained at home, or with those who may have migrated to some distant region, where they were shut out from all communication with others speaking the same tongue.
A Norwegian colony which settled in Iceland in the ninth century, maintained its independence for about 400 years, during which time the old Gothic which they at first spoke became corrupted and considerably modified. In the meantime the natives of Norway, who had enjoyed much commercial intercourse with the rest of Europe, acquired quite a new speech, and looked on the Icelandic as having been stationary, and as representing the pure Gothic original of which their own was an offshoot.
A German colony in Pennsylvania was cut off from frequent communication with Europe for about a quarter of a century, during the wars of the French Revolution between 1792 and 1815. So marked had been the effect even of this brief and imperfect isolation, that when Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar travelled among them a few years after the peace, he found the peasants speaking as they had done in Germany in the preceding century,*) and retaining a dialect which at home had already become obsolete.
(* "Travels of Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, in North America, in 1825 and 1826", page 123.)
Even after the renewal of the German emigration from Europe, when I travelled in 1841 among the same people in the retired valleys of the Alleghenies, I found the newspapers full of terms half English and half German, and many an Anglo-Saxon word, which had assumed a Teutonic dress, as "fencen," to fence, instead of umzaunen, "flauer" for flour, instead of mehl, and so on. What with the retention of terms no longer in use in the mother country, and the borrowing of new ones from neighbouring states, there might have arisen in Pennsylvania in five or six generations, but for the influx of newcomers from Germany, a mongrel speech equally unintelligible to the Anglo-Saxon and to the inhabitants of the European fatherland.