again in one and the
same page. Thus, Hickes maintained that nine tenths of the English
dictionary were Saxon, because there were only three words of Latin origin
in the Lord's prayer. Sharon Turner, who extended his observations over a
larger field, came to the conclusion that the relation of Norman to Saxon
was as four to six. Another writer, who estimates the whole number of
English words at 38,000, assigns 23,000 to a Saxon, and 15,000 to a
classical source. On taking, however, a more accurate inventory, and
counting every word in the dictionaries of Robertson and Webster, M.
Thommerel has established the fact that of the sum total of 43,566 words,
29,853 came from classical, 13,230 from Teutonic, and the rest from
miscellaneous sources.(54) On the evidence of its dictionary, therefore,
and treating English as a mixed language, it would have to be classified
together with French, Italian, and Spanish, as one of the Romance or
Neo-Latin dialects. Languages, however, though mixed in their dictionary,
can never be mixed in their grammar. Hervas was told by missionaries that
in the middle of the eighteenth century the Araucans used hardly a single
word which was not Spanish, though they preserved both the grammar and the
syntax of their own native speech.(55) This is the reason why grammar is
made the criterion of the relationship and the base of the classification
in almost all languages; and it follows, therefore, as a matter of course,
that in the classification and in the science of language, it is
impossible to admit the existence of a mixed idiom. We may form whole
sentences in English consisting entirely of Latin or Romance words; yet
whatever there is left of grammar in English bears unmistakable traces of
Teutonic workmanship. What may now be called grammar in English is little
more than the terminations of the genitive singular, and nominative plural
of nouns, the degrees of comparison, and a few of the persons and tenses
of the verb. Yet the single _s_, used as the exponent of the third person
singular of the indicative present, is irrefragable evidence that in a
scientific classification of languages, English, though it did not retain
a single word of Saxon origin, would have to be classed as Saxon, and as a
branch of the great Teutonic stem of the Aryan family of speech. In
ancient and less matured languages, grammar, or the formal part of human
speech, is far more abundantly developed than in English; and it