Horne Tooke by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Horne Tooke was pre-eminently a ready-witted man. He had that clearness / which is founded on shallowness. He doubted nothing; and, therefore, gave / you all that he himself knew, or meant, with great completeness. His voice / was very fine, and his tones exquisitely discriminating. His mind had no / progression or developement. All that is worth any thing (and that is but / little) in the Diversions of Purley is contained in a short pamphlet-letter / which he addressed to Mr. Dunning; then it was enlarged to an octavo, hut / there was not a foot of progression beyond the pamphlet; at last, a quarto / volume, 1 believe, came out; and yet, verily, excepting newspaper lampoons / and political insinuations, there was no addition to the argument of the / pamphlet, It shows a base and unpoetical mind to convert so beautiful, so / divine, a subject as language into the vehicle or make-weight of political / squibs. All that is true in Horne Tooke's book is taken from Lennep, who / gave it for so much as it was worth, and never pretended to make a system / of it. Tooke affects to explain the origin and whole philosophy of language / by what is, in fact, only a mere accident of the history of one language, / or one or two languages. His abuse of Harris is most shallow and unfair. / Harris, in the Hermes, was dealing -- not very profoundly, it is true, -- with / the philosophy of language, the moral, physical, and metaphysical causes / and conditions of it, &c. Horne Tooke, in writing about the formation of / words only, thought he was explaining the philosophy of language, which is / a very different thing. In point of fact, he was very shallow in the Gothic / dialects.

I must say, all that _decantata fabula_ about the genders of the / sun and moon in German seems to me great stuff. Originally, I apprehend, in / the _Platt-Deutsch_ of the north of Germany there were only two definite / articles -- _die_ for masculine and feminine, and _das_ for neuter. Then it / was _die sonne_, in a masculine sense, as we say with the same word as / article, _the_ sun. Luther, in constructing the _Hoch-Deutsch_ (for really / his miraculous and providential translation of the Bible was the / fundamental act of construction of the literary German), took for his / distinct masculine article the _der_ of the _Ober-Deutsch_, and thus / constituted the three articles of the present High German, _der, die, das_. / Naturally, therefore, it would then have been, _der sonne_; but here the / analogy of the Greek grammar prevailed, and as _sonne_ had the arbitrary / feminine termination of the Greek, it was left with its old article _die_, / which, originally including masculine and feminine both, had grown to / designate the feminine only. To the best of my recollection, the / Minnesingers and all the old poets always use the sun as masculine; and, / since Luther's time, the poets feel the awkwardness of the classical gender / affixed to the sun so much, that they more commonly introduce Phoebus or / some other synonyme instead. I must acknowledge my doubts, whether, upon / more accurate investigation, it can be shown that there ever was a nation / that considered the sun in itself, and apart from language, as the feminine / power. The moon does not so clearly demand a feminine as the sun does a / masculine sex: it might be considered negatively or neuter; -- yet if the / reception of its light from the sun were known, that would have been a good / reason for making her feminine, as being the recipient body.