The Century Dictionary, Vol. 1: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

William Dwight Whitney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0265988950 ISBN 13: 9780265988954

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2020

Synopsis

Excerpt from The Century Dictionary, Vol. 1: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language

None of these considerations is of the nature of a definite rule that can be used with precision in all cases. On the contrary, the question whether a word shall be included, even in a dictionary so comprehensive as this, must Often be decided by the special circumstances Of the ease.

The sources of the English vocabulary thus presented are extremely various. No other tongue, ancient or modern, has appeared in so many and so different phases; and no other people of high civilization has so completely disregarded the barriers of race and circumstance and adopted into its speech so great a number of unnative words and notions. The making Of the English language began, it may be said, with the introduction of Roman rule and Roman speech among the barbarous Celts of Britain. The Latin language, as the vehicle of civil ization, affected strongly the Celtic, and also the speech of the Teutonic peeples, Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, who in the fifth century obtained a footing on the island. This Teutonic tongue, while assimilating something both of the native Celtic idiom, and of Latin in a Celtic guise, in time became the dominant language. The speech thus formed (called anglo-saxon or, as some new prefer, Old English) was raised almost to classic rank by the labors of Alfred and of the numerous priests and scholars who sought to convey to their countrymen in their native language the treasures of Latin learning and the precepts of the Latin Church. Though uniting in the ninth century with an influx of Scandinavian speech, and in the eleventh century, through the Norman conquest, with the stream which flowed through France from Rome, it remained the chief fountain of English. From these two elements, the Teutonic and the Latin (the latter both in its original form and as modified in the Romance tongues), our language has been constructed; though materials more or less important have been borrowed from almost every known speech.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0265988950
• ISBN 13: 9780265988954
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 944