welfth century, is broken up into endless local
dialects. I quote from Kohl's Travels. "The commonest things," he writes,
"which are named almost alike all over Europe, receive quite different
names in the different Friesian Islands. Thus, in Amrum, _father_ is
called _aatj_; on the Halligs, _baba_ or _babe_; in Sylt, _foder_ or
_vaar_; in many districts on the main-land, _taete_; in the eastern part of
Foehr, _oti_ or _ohitj_. Although these people live within a couple of
German miles from each other, these words differ more than the Italian
_padre_ and the English _father_. Even the names of their districts and
islands are totally different in different dialects. The island of _Sylt_
is called _Soel_, _Sol_, and _Sal_." Each of these dialects, though it
might be made out by a Friesian scholar, is unintelligible except to the
peasants of each narrow district in which it prevails. What is therefore
generally called the Friesian language, and described as such in Friesian
grammars, is in reality but one out of many dialects, though, no doubt,
the most important; and the same holds good with regard to all so-called
literary languages.

It is a mistake to imagine that dialects are everywhere corruptions of the
literary language. Even in England,(39) the local patois have many forms
which are more primitive than the language of Shakespeare, and the
richness of their vocabulary surpasses, on many points, that of the
classical writers of any period. Dialects have always been the feeders
rather than the channels of a literary language; anyhow, they are parallel
streams which existed long before one of them was raised to that temporary
eminence which is the result of literary cultivation.

What Grimm says of the origin of dialects in general applies only to such
as are produced by phonetic corruption. "Dialects," he writes,(40)
"develop themselves progressively, and the more we look backward in the
history of language the smaller is their number, and the less definite
their features. All multiplicity arises gradually from an original unity."
So it seems, indeed, if we build our theories of language exclusively on
the materials supplied by literary idioms, such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,
and Gothic. No doubt these are the royal heads in the history of language.
But as political history ought to be more than a chronicle of royal
dynasties, so the historian of language ought never to lose sight of those
lower and popular strata of