ENGLISH LANGUAGE
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ENGRAVING
speech of but a few thousand Teutons who landed in England from their homes about the mouths of the Rhine, the Weser and the Elbe. At that day the English language probably had some 2,000 words; at present its vocabulary is variously estimated at from 38,000 to more than 100,000 words. The English-speaking Angles, Saxons and Jutes became the conquerors of the Britons from whose language they adopted a few Celtic terms. Most of these words had reference to domestic occupations, as for example clout, cradle, darn, mop and pillow. English belongs not to the Celtic but to the Teutonic group of the Indo-European family of languages. Owing to the fact that it was originally spoken by the dwellers on the low-lying coastal plains which border upon the North Sea, it is often described as the "Lowest" variety of the Low-German speeches. Even at the present time English is closely akin to the Dutch, the Flemish and, especially, the Frisian dialect.
Before the end of the 6th century the position of the English in Britain had been secured. The Angles gave their name to the language. There however were several dialects in the old English speech; and these dialects endured for several hundreds of years. Old English or Anglo-Saxon was a highly inflected tongue. Nouns and adjectives had several declensions, nouns had five cases, and verbs were distinguished by far more inflexions than is at present the case. The poems of Csed-mon and Cynewulf and the prose of King Alfred illustrate the English of this period. Alliteration was the device employed in poetry in the place of rime. The Anglo-Saxon forms of poetry and prose survived the Norman Conquest, but the opening of the 12th century saw the rise of an important stream of Norman-French influence. The two principal books written in English between 1100 and 1250 are the Ormulum of Orm and the Brut of Laya-mon; and these books, although their forms are still Anglo-Saxon, already contain many French words.
In the Middle-English period, between 1250 and 1500, the old English inflexions gradually but finally disappeared. This was a natural result of the Norman and French intolerance of strange inflexions, but the disappearance of inflexions had begun even before the Conquest. Foreigners were willing to learn English words, Englishmen were forced to learn foreign words; but neither Englishmen nor foreigners found it necessary to retain the endings of the early English grammar. French was the fashionable and literary language during most of this period; but the use of it declined from the middle of the i4th century. In 1362 an act of Parliament permitted the use of the English language in-
stead of Norman-French in the law-courts. In the latter part of this period the English language in the hands of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) touched a literary height hitherto unknown.
During the Tudor period and, above all, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the English language became, as it were, standardized in poetry and prose. Shakespeare and Marlowe in the drama, Spenser and Milton in the epic and Hooker, Bacon and the compilers of the English Bible and Prayer-Book in prose founded a body of classic literature that gave to English a unity of form which had been sadly wanting in the Middle-English period. Meantime many foreign words crept into the English tongue. The revival of learning was responsible for a vast influx of terms borrowed or coined from the Latin and Greek, but principally the Latin.
Modern English has changed comparatively slowly, except by the adoption of new terms to express new ideas or to denominate novel inventions and things. Many of the new terms in Modern English are of a technical or scientific nature. Tennyson and others have attempted to revive good English words that had been for some reason forgotten. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that the English language no longer lends itself to the formation of compound terms after the fashion of German and the oldest English tradition. [It virtually forms compounds still, though the form is not always that of a compound.]
To conclude, English is a composite language. It includes a few Celtic terms and many Latin terms; but the body of the language, including most of its common and familiar works, is of Teutonic origin. Of the Latin terms, a few were introduced during the Roman occupation of Britain, many more through the French and many philosophic and scientific words through the Renaissance movement. Modern scientific terms in English are largely constructed from Greek roots; foreign words have been freely added whenever needed, as in commerce.
Engraving, in the strict sense of the word, is the art of graving or cutting marks or figures upon tablets of any hard substance. Certain forms of the art—as engraving for ornamental purposes upon metal, engraved writing upon tablets, gem-engraving in making signets, cameo-engraving etc.— are very old. But in a more special sense the word engraving is understood to mean the cutting of designs upon metal-plates or blocks of wood for the purpose of printing impressions from them in ink upon paper. Engravings of this sort are divided into engravings upon metal, in which the lines to be printed are sunk in, and engravings on wood, in which the lines to be printed stand out in relief,
