About the Book
Excerpt from The English Journal of Education, With Which Is Incorporated "the Educational Expositor," 1856, Vol. 10: Specially Designed as a Medium of Correspondence Among the Heads of Training Colleges, Parochial Clergymen and All Promoters of Sound Education, Parents, Sponsors, Schoolmasters, Pupil Teachers, Sunday-School Teachers, Etc It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that no changes in the language occurred during this fiery ordeal. As there was a mingling of race, so there was to some extent a mingling of language. If we take a survey of the authors that wrote one or two centuries after the conquest, we find, not the pure Saxon of Alfred and Caedmon, nor yet the Norman parlance of William and his barons, but a mixed language, like the race, predominantly indeed Saxon, but with a large foreign ingredient. This mixed language is our modern English. Its main element is the Saxon. But it has another element, amounting to more than one third of the whole, the introduction of which is to be attributed to the Norman conquest. But who were the Normans, and what was their language? The word Norman, is a corruption of Northman. The N orthmen were the inhabitants of the ancient Scandinavia that is, of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They were, in the ninth and tenth centuries, precisely what the Saxons had been in the fifth century. The Saxons, after their establishment in Great Britain, had been converted to Christianity, had acquired the arts of peace, and become comparatively civilized. The Northmen were still unlettered pagans, whose home was in their ships, and whose whole life was warfare. For the greater part of two centuries, they ravaged all the more civilized countries of Europe bordering upon the coast, until their very name become a terror. Rollo, a leader of one of those adventurous bands, penetrated into the very heart of France, and finally obliged the king to cede to him and his followers an entire province, amounting to no inconsiderable part of the kingdom. This province, thus ceded to the victorious Northmen, or Normans, was thenceforward called Normandy. The cession took place, A. D. 9 12. Rollo and his followers were comparatively few in numbers. They gradually intermarried with their subjects in the province which had been assigned them, and adopted their manners, religion, and language. In less than a century after the advent of Rollo in France, his descend ants in Normandy were, as to language, scarcely distinguishable from other Frenchmen. But the French language is that introduced into the province of Gaul by the Romans; it is, in short, a corrupt form of the Latin language. And the norman-french is the same as other French, only with some northern or Scandinavian words, which the descendants of Rollo doubtless retained, after their settlement in Normandy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
