25 March 1814

School

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'. Language

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When a word has thus been transplanted and naturalised in a single state, the conception entertained of its import by persons altogether unacquainted with the cluster to which it belonged in the language from which it was borrowed, is always very obscure and imperfect in comparison with that which he has of a word which forms one of a cluster, more or less complete, originally of the growth of his own language, or fully rooted and naturalised in it.

These languages are some of them of a northern, some of them of a southern origin; of the northern, the one principally borrowed from is the German; of the southern, the French. Among ancient languages, those principally borrowed from are the Latin and Greek. The Latin being the language from which the French has borrowed a great part, perhaps the largest part, of it words; hence in the instance of many words of Latin origin, it remains a question whether the word was derived from the Latin immediately, or remotely, through the medium of the French. The Greek being the language of the writers from whom the first crude notions respecting most of the arts and sciences were derived to us; hence the appropriate terms, expressive of the subject-matters and operations belonging to those several branches of art and science, have in a large proportion been borrowed from that language. Even when the subject-matter, instrument, or operation, is itself new, a convenience is found, on several accounts, in taking its name from a foreign language, more especially from the Greek, rather than from our own.

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