Word: philologist
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...Romance offers us this feature, and is therefore of no little importance in the history of speech. Its study is, so to speak, the A B C of the philologist. It offers a criterion, a test, for other and more difficult studies, and is a living type on which we may build our theories. Its application is practical enough. The habit of comparison and inquiry which it forms finds daily exercise, and cannot be too highly cultivated; and in our age, when a man of culture cannot exist without the knowledge of at least two languages besides...
...water, where he was received by John Bull as a new phenomenon of American life. Meanwhile, the critics were as kind as they could have been if bribed; they occupied themselves more harmlessly than ever before or since, - they sorted his words, and with most gratifying results. One eminent philologist discovered that in a certain poem ninety-five per cent of the words was of Anglo-Saxon origin, three and a half was Western slang, while but one and a half per cent was Latin or Greek! He was proclaimed the people's poet, and, for a time, all went...