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Updated: July 25, 2025
The inherent nature of the case, and the witness of recorded history, join together to prove that language is no certain test of race, and that the scientific philologers are doing good service to accuracy of expression and accuracy of thought by emphatically calling attention to the fact that language is no such test.
"Whoa, January!" ejaculated that ancient functionary as he pulled up Strawberry close to John Short. Why the natives of Essex and especially of Billingsfield habitually address their beasts of burden as "January" is a matter best left to the discrimination of philologers; obedient to the familiar words however, Strawberry stood still in the middle of the road. John could see that Mrs.
But I must leave this question to be settled by philologers and travellers; and I should hardly have dwelt so long upon it except for the curious part played by this word 'Pongo'in the later history of the man-like Apes. The generation which succeeded Battell saw the first of the man-like Apes which was ever brought to Europe, or, at any rate, whose visit found a historian.
Indeed it has always been a grave matter of doubt among philologers, whether the document was even capable of being rendered into English, in conformity with the laws of any language which the human race has ever spoken, since the low Dutch and the Basque dispersed our ambitious ancestors at the building of Babel.
The German philologers are not remarkable for mildness when speaking of each other; and many a one, as Haupt in Berlin, will enrich his vocabulary with ever-varying, new-coined epithets to characterize the ridiculousness, tameness, and stupidity of emendations proposed, and that, too, when speaking of such men as Orelli and Kirchner, his own colleagues in the profession.
Such a phenomenon in language is peculiar to this country. But notwithstanding the fears of the purists and the philologers, it does not threaten the existence of the English language here, nor is it at all likely to affect it permanently even by the addition of one phrase or word. For our use of slang of this kind is the most fleeting of temporary fashions.
But even those who recognize the most fully this merit, must allow that he was ill equipped by any preliminary studies for tracing the past history of words; that in this he errs often and signally; sometimes where the smallest possible amount of knowledge would have preserved him from error; as for instance when he derives the name of the peacock from the peak, or tuft of pointed feathers, on its head! while other derivations proposed or allowed by him and others are so far more absurd than this, that when Swift, in ridicule of the whole band of philologers, suggests that 'ostler' is only a contraction of oat-stealer, and 'breeches' of bear-riches, these etymologies are scarcely more ridiculous than many which have in sober earnest, and by men of no inconsiderable reputation, been proposed.
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