English owes its supremacy first, to the vigorous vitality of its germ and the clean robustness of its stem; next, to the rich and infinitely varied word-growth, which this trunk supports and nourishes. All languages are more or less composite, but of all languages English is most composite. It has been largely and richly grafted. It is, of all languages, the most complex in substance, and the simplest in structure. This simplicity of structure enables the uneducated man—Bunyan, for example—to use it with correctness and force, while the vast variety of its substance adapts it to all the needs of poet and philosopher. Let us see how such a language came into existence, and what it is.
The people which spoke the English language when it assumed its modern form, had made it. This may seem to be the sort of truth which is triteness; but it is not so. The people which speaks a language generally does make it; but not always, as we shall see. The people who made the English language, and who made England, were of that part of the great Aryan family which had taken possession of the northwestern part of Europe—that which lies around the southern and western part of the Baltic Sea. It is commonly said that the English are a very composite and heterogeneous people. In a narrow sense this is true, but in a large and really significant sense it is quite untrue. In his welcome to the Danish princess Alexandra, when she arrived in England to become Princess of Wales, the poet laureate prettily availed himself of the minor truth, to sing
“Saxon and Dane and Norman are we, But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee, Alexandra!”
The English race is, and for more than five hundred years has been compounded of Saxons (Angles, Saxons and Jutes), Danes and Normans. But these three peoples were of such close kindred that, in Launcelot Gobbo’s phrase, they were “cater cousins.”[A] They were all Goths; the Danes and the Normans were both Scandinavians; and the Saxons, the Angles, and particularly the Jutes, although they were Low German tribes (the term Low German meaning merely inhabitants of the lower parts of Germany near the sea) were, because of their origin, and also of their neighborhood to the others, so like them in blood and in speech that the difference was rather superficial than essential.