Latin and Greek hybridisms, which are daily coined to suit the exigencies of commerce or science.
Provincialisms are, in fact, when properly looked at, not so much portions of the original foundations of a language, as the very quarry out of which it is hewn. And as if to compensate for much of the harm she has done, America has wrought one great good in preserving many a pregnant Old-English word, which we have been foolish enough to disown.[1] Provincialisms should be far more studied than they are; for they will help us to settle many a difficult point,—where was the boundary of the Anglian and the Frisian; how far on the national character was the influence of the Dane felt? how much, and in what way, did the Norman affect the daily business of life?
Still more important is a country's folk-lore, as showing the higher mental faculties of the race, in those legends and snatches of song, and fragments of popular poetry, which speak the popular feeling, and which not only contain its past history, but foreshadow the future literature of a country; in those proverbs, too, which tell the life and employment of a nation; and those superstitions which give us such an insight into its moral state.
Throughout the West of England still linger some few
- ↑ See Dictionary of Americanisms, by J. E. Bartlett, who does not, however, we think, refer nearly often enough to the mother-country for the sources of many of the phrases and words which he gives. Even the Old-English inflexions, as he remarks, are in some parts of the States still used, showing what vitality, even when transplanted, there is in our language. Boucher, too, notices in the excellent introduction to his Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words, p. ix., that the whine and the drawl of the first Puritan emigrants may still in places be detected.
