A Frenchman both varies his accents and gesticulates while he speaks much more than an Englishman, and an Italian a great deal more than either. Musical pronunciations and expressive gesture are, to this day, the distinction of Italy, and this combination of sign and its aid, sound, the latter being notes for its music, make the sweetest and most liquid language in existence. The want of a proper name for every object, obliged them to use one name for many objects, and, of course, to express themselves by comparisons, metaphors, allusions and all those substantive forms of speech which render language figurative.

Poetry is more ancient than prose, and here we have a remarkable order of speech, such as "fruit give me." I, therefore, conclude, as the first fundamental principle in the organization and procession of word-signs, that this would be the order in which words should be most commonly arranged at the beginning of language, and accordingly, we find, in fact, that in this order words are arranged in most of the ancient tongues—the Russian, Slavonic, Gaelic, and many others. In the Latin the arrangement which most commonly obtains is to place first in the sentence that word which expresses the principal object, together with its circumstance, and afterward the person or thing which acts upon it.

I desire to impress most particularly upon the reader the value of signs and sounds in the language, for he would be a fool, indeed, who would not mark the significance of a tone or a gesture.

The word-signs in the English language number thirty-eight thousands. This includes, of course, not only the radical words, but all the derivatives, except the preterites and participles of verbs, to which must be added some few terms which, though set down in your dictionary, are either obsolete or have never ceased to be considered foreign. They have been introduced into your Noah Webster, "unabridged," together with many thousands of conjunctive and scientific words, for the sole purpose of making a big book and claiming that there are one hundred thousand word-signs in the English language. Of the thirty-eight thousands about twenty-three thousands are of Anglo-Saxon origin. The majority of the remainder, in what exact proportion I cannot say, are Latin and Greek, but the largest share is Latin. The names of the greater part of the objects of sense, in other words, the terms which occur most frequently in discourse, or which recall the most vivid conceptions, in the English vocabulary, are Anglo-Saxon. The names of the most striking objects in visible nature, of the chief agencies at work and of the changes which pass over it, are Anglo-Saxon.

This language has given names to the heavenly bodies, namely, the sun, the moon and the stars, to three out of every four elements, namely, earth, fire and water; to three out of every four seasons, namely, spring, summer and winter, and, indeed, to all the natural divisions of time, except one, as day, night, morning, evening, twilight, noon, midday, midnight, sunrise, sunset, some of which are among the most poetical terms in the language.

To the same language we are indebted for the names of light, heat, cold, frost, rain, snow, hail, sleet, thunder, lightning, as well as almost all those objects which form the component parts of the beautiful and external scenery as seen in land, hill and dale, wood and stream. It is from this language you derive the word most expressive of the earliest and dearest connections and the strongest and most powerful feelings of nature, and which are, consequently, invested with your oldest and most complicated associations. In this language we find the names of father, mother, husband, wife, brother, sister, son, daughter, child, home, kindred, friends. It has furnished the greater part of those metonymies and other figurative expressions by which is represented to the imagination, and that in a single word the reciprocal duties and enjoyments of hospitality, friendship or love. Such are hearth, roof and fireside. The chief emotions of which we are susceptible, as love, hope, fear, sorrow, shame, and what is of more consequence to the orator and the poet, as well as in common life, the outward signs by which emotion is indicated, are almost all Anglo-Saxon. Such are tear, smile, blush, to laugh, to weep, to sigh, to groan.

Most of those objects about which the practical reason of man is employed in common life receive their names from the Anglo-Saxon.