^ p^> .^-f T^'f-,
GROWTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE '
BY
OTTO JESPERSEN, ph. d.
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN,
AUTHOR OF "PROGRESS IN LANGUAGE",
'LEHRBUCH DER phonetik", "PHONETISCHE streitfragen"
"HOW TO TEACH A FOREIGN LANGUAGE", ETC.
LEIPZIG PUBLISHED BY B. G. TEUBNER
LONDON
DAVID NUTT
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PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 30, 1905
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BY B. G. TEUBNER LEIPZIG.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED BY B. G. TEUBNER, LEIPZIG.
Preface.
The scope and plan of this volume have been set forth in the introductory paragraph. I have endeavoured to write at once popularly and so as to be of some profit to the expert philologist. In some cases I have advanced new views without having space enough to give all my reasons for deviating from commonly accepted theories, but I hope to find an opportunity in future works of a more learned character to argue out the most debatable points.
I owe more than I can say to numerous predecessors in the fields of my investigations, most of all to the authors of the New EiigUsh Dictionary. The dates given for the first and last appearance of a word are nearly always taken from that splendid monument of English scholarship, and it is hardly necessary to warn the reader not to take these dates toeliterally. When I say, for instance, \h2it fenester was in use from 1290 to 1548, I do not mean to say that, the word was actually heard for the first and for the last time in those two years, but only that no earlier or later quotations have been discovered by the painstaking authors of that dictionary.
I have departed from a common practice in retaining the spelling of all authors quoted. I see no reason why in so many English editions of Shakespeare the spelling is modernized while in quotations from other Elizabethan authors the old spelling is followed. Quotations from Shakespeare are here regularly given in the spelling of
IV Preface.
the First Folio (1623). The only points where, for the convenience of modern readers, I regulate the old usage, is with regard to capital letters and u, v,*i,j^ printing, for instance, us and love instead of vs and loue. — To avoid misunderstandings, I must here expressly state, that by Old English (O. E.) I always understand the language before 11 50, still often termed Anglo-Saxon. After apologizing for some inconsistencies in the use of italic letters and other typographical details, it remains for me to thank three friends for their kind assistance. Mr. A. E. Hayes of London and Dr. Lane Cooper of Cornell University have read through parts of my manuscript and have corrected my English style in several places. Professor G. C. Moore Smith of Sheffield University not only has rendered me the same service for other parts of the book, but has also assisted me during the proof-reading, and I owe him a special debt of gratitude for making me omit or soften down a few rather rash assertions and for giving me in many ways the benefit of his great knowledge of English language and English literature.
Gentofte (Copenhagen), August 1905.
O.J.
Chapter I. Preliminary Sketch.
I. It will be my endeavour in this volume to character- ize the chief peculiarities of the English language, and to explain ^he growth and significance of those features in its structure which have been of permanent impor- tance. The older stages of the language, interesting as their study is, will be considered only in so far as they throw light either directly or by way of contrast on the main characteristics of present-day English, and an attempt will be made to connect the teachings of linguistic his- tory with the chief events in the general history of the English people so as to show their mutual bearings on each other and the relation of language to national character. The knowledge that the latter conception is a very difficult one to deal with scientifically, as it may easily tempt one into hasty generalizations, should make us wary, but not deter us from grappling with problems which are really both interesting and important. — My plan will be, first to give a rapid sketch of the lang- uage of our own days, so as to show how it strikes a foreigner — a foreigner who has devoted much time to the study of English, but who feels that in spite of all his efforts he is only able to look at it as a foreigner o.'^^cs, and not exactly as a native would — and then sun the following chapters to enter more deeply into the on jtory of the language in order to describe its first
Jespersen, the English language. I
2 I. Preliminary Sketch.
shape, to trace the various foreign influences it has undergone, and to give an account of its own inner growth.
2. It is, of course, impossible to characterize a language in one formula; languages, like men, are too composite to have their w'hole essence summed up in one short expression. Nevertheless, there is one ex- pression that continually comes to my mind whenever 1 think of the English language and compare it with others :
/it seems to me positively and expressly fnasculine, it is / the language of a grown-up man and has very little Xchildish or feminine about it. A great many things go together to produce and to confirm that ixnpress'ion, things phonetical, grammatical, and lexical, words and turns that are found, and words and turns that are not found, in the language. In dealing with the English language one is often reminded of the cha- racteristic English hand-writing; just as an English lady will nearly always write in a manner that in any other country would only be found in a man's hand, in the same manner the language is more manly than any other language I know.
3. First I shall mention the sound system. The English consgjiant§_jaie_well defined ; voiced and voice- less consonants stand over agamst each other in neat symmetry, and they are, as a rule, clearly and precisely pronounced. You have none of those indistinct or half- slurred consonants that abound in Danish, for instance (such as those in ha^fe, ha^e, lij^lig) where you hardly know whether it is a consonant or a vowel-glide that meets the ear. The only thing that might be compared to this in English, is the r after a vowel, but then this has really given up definitely all pretensions to th^^j^rV of a consonant, and is (in the pronunciat \xi ! South of England) either frankly a vowel { \C\^
Sound system. 3
or else nothing at all (in harty etc.). Each English con- sonant belongs distinctly to its own type, a / is a /, and a /: is a /(', and there an end. There is much less modification of a consonant by the surrounding vowels than in some other languages, thus none of that palata- lization of consonants which gives an insinuating grace to such languages as Russian. The vowel sounds, too, are comparatively independent of their surroundings, and in this respect the language now has deviated widely from the character of Old English and has become more clear-cut and distinct in its phonetic structure, although, to be sure, the diphthongization of most long vowels (in ale^ ivhole ^ eel, who, phonetically eil, houl, i|l, huw) counteracts in some degree this impression of neatnej^^ and evenness.
4. Besides these characteristics, the full nature of which cannot, perhaps, be made intelligible to any but those familiar with phonetic research, but which are still felt more or less instinctively by everybody hearing the language spoken, there are other traits whose im- portance can with greater ease be made evident to anybody possessed of a normal ear.
5. To bring out clearly one of these points I select at random, by way of contrast, a passage from the language of Hawaii: "I kona hiki ana aku ilaila ua hookipa ia mai la oia me ke aloha pumehana loa." Thus it goes on, no single word ends in a consonant, and a group of two or more consonants is never found. Can any one be in doubt that even if such a language sound pleasantly and be full of music and harmony, the total impression is childlike and effeminate? You do not expect much vigour or energy in a people speaking such a language; it seems adapted only to inhabitants of sunny regions where the soil requires scarcely any labour on the part of man to yield him everything he wants,
I*
4 I. Preliminary Sketch.
and where life therefore does not bear the stamp of a hard struggle against nature and against fellow-creatures. In a lesser degree we find the same phonetic structure in such languages as Italian and Spanish; but how different are our Germanic tongues. English has no lack of words ending in two or more consonants, — I am speaking, of course, of the pronunciation, not of the I spelling — age, hence ^ wealth, tent, tempt, tempts, months, helped, feasts, etc. etc. and thus requires, as well as presup- )Oses, no little energy on the part of the speakers. That many suchlike consonant groups do not tend to render the language beautiful, one is bound readily to concede; /however, it cannot be pretended that their number in j English is great enough to make the language harsh or V^oiigh. While the fifteenth century greatly increased the number of consonant groups by making the e mute in monthes, helped, etc., the following centuries, on the con- trary, alleviated such groups as -ght in night, thought Iwhere the "back-open" consonant as German ch is still /spoken in Scotch) and the initial kn~, gn- in know, \gnaw, etc. Note also the disappearance of / in al??is,, folk, etc., and of r in ha?'d, court, etc.; the final con- sonant groups have also been simplified in co!?ib and the other words in "mb (whereas b has been retained in timber) and in the exactly parallel group -ng, for in- stance in strong, where now only one consonant is heard after the vowel, a consonant partaking of the nature of n and of ^, but identical with neither of them; formerly it was followed by a real g, which has been retained in stronger. ^ 6. In the first ten stanzas of Tennyson's " Locksley Hall ," three hundred syllables, we have only thirty-three words ending in two consonants, and two ending in three, certainly no excessive number, especially if we take into account the nature of the groups, which are nearly all of the easiest kind (-dz: comrades, Pleiads;
Endings. ^
-mz: gleams, comes; -nz : robin's, man's, turns; -ns: distance, science; -^s: overlooks; -)(s: gets, thoughts; -kts: tracts, cataracts; -zd: reposed, closed; -st: rest, West» breast, crest; -Jt: burnish'd; -nd: sound, around, moor- V land, behind, land; -nt: want, casement, went, present; -Id: old, world; -It: result; -If: himself; -pt: dipt). Thus, we may perhaps characterize English, phonetically speak- ing, as posaessiiig_male _en^rgyj_Jml^noL_talLa]^^ The accentual system points in the same direction, as will be seen below (26 — 28).
7. The Italians have a pointed proverb: **Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi." If briefness^cimeise^. ness and terseness are characteristic of the style of roen^'while women as a rule are not so great economi- zers of speech, Enghsh is more masculine than most languages. We see this in a great many ways. In grammar it has got rid of a great many superfluities found in earlier English as well as in most cognate languages, reducing endings, etc., to the shortest forms possible and often doing away with endings altogether. Where German has, for instance, alle diejenigen ivildeih Here, die dort leheti^ so that the plural idea is expressed/ in each word separately (apart, of course, from the ad- verb), English has all the wild animals that live there, where all, the article, the adjective, and the relative pronoun are all of them incapable of receiving any mark of the plural number; the sense is expressed with the \ greatest clearness imaginable, and all the unstressed \ endings -e and -en, which make most German sentences! so drawling, are avoided. .-^-""'^
8. Rimes based on correspondence in the last syl- lable only of each line (as bet, set; laid, shade) are termed male rimes as opposed to feminine rimes, where one strong and one weak syllable in one line correspond to the other line (as better, setter; lady, shady). It is
6 I. Preliminary Sketch. ' .
true that these names, which originated in France, were not at first meant to express any parallelism with the characteristics of the two sexes, but arose merely from / the grammatical fact that the weak -e_ was the ending'^ of the feminine gender (grande, etc.). But the designa- tions are not entirely devoid of symbolic significance; there is really more of abrupt force in a word that ends with a strongly stressed syllable, than in a word where the maximum of force is followed by a weak ending. " Thanks " is harsher and less polite than the two-syl- labled '' thank you ".; English has undoubtedly gained tflTTorce, what it has possibly lost in elegance, by red- ucing so many words of two syllables to monosyllables, ^f-^thad not been for the great number of long foreign, especially Latin, words, English would have approached , the state of such monosyllabic languages as Chinese.cy Now one of the best, if not the best, of Chinese scholars, G. V. d. Gabelentz, somewhere remarks that an idea of the condensed power of the monosyllabism found inl j oy Chinese may be gathered from Luther's advice tol a preacher *' Geh rasch 'nauf, thu's maul auf, hor bald auf." He might with equal justice have reminded us of many English sentences. " First come first sert'^ [' is much more vigorous than the French *' premier venij, premier moulu " or " le premier venu engrene," -^e German "wer zuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst" and especial- ly than the Danish " den der kommer ferrst til mjerlle, far fgrrst malet. " Compare also " no cure, no pay, " '* haste makes waste, and waste makes want," " live and learn," "Love no man: trust no man: speak ill of no man to his face; nor well of any man behind his back" (Ben Jonson), "to meet, to know, to love, and then to part" (Coleridge), "Then none were for the party; Then all were for the state; Then the great man help'd the poor, And the poor man loved the great " (Macaulay).
^/ Monosyllabism. • y
Qjjfe^will be noticed, however, — and tile quotations just given eerve to exemplify this , too — triat it is not every collocation of words of one syllable that produces an effect of strength, for a great many of the short words most frequently employed are not stressed at all and therefore impress the ear in nearly the same way as prefixes and suffixes do. There is nothing parti- cularly vigorous in the following passage from a modem novel: "It was as if one had met part of one's self one had lost for a long time", and in fact most people hearing it read aloud would fail to notice that it con- sisted of nothing but one-syllable words. Such sentences are not at all rare in colloquial prose, and even in poetry they are found oftener than in most languages, for instance: —
And there a while it bode; and if a man Could touch or see it, he was heal'd at once, By faith, of all his ills.
(Tennyson, The Holy Grail.) But then, the weakness resulting from many small con- necting words is to some extent compensated in Eng-
lish--by--4he-T=^bse»ce^^^or3iII3^5^i^^ good
many cases where other languages think it indispensal»le, e. g. 'Merry Old England,' 'Heaven and Earth;' 'hfe is short;' 'dinner is ready;' 'school is over;' '1 saw him at church,' and this peculiarity delivers the language from a number of those short 'empty words,' whicn7 when accumulated cannot fail to make the style some-j
X fi what weak and prolix.
^ ^ 10. Business-like shortness is also seen in sucji^con —
vement abbreviations of sentences as abound in En-
ghsh, for mstance, 'While fighting in Germany he w^as taken prisoner' (= while he w^as fighting). 'He would not answer when spoken to.' 'To be left till called for.' 'Once at home, he forgot his fears.' 'We had no idea
8 I. Preliminary Sketch.
what to do.' 'Did they run? Yes, I made them'
(= made them run). 'Shall you play tennis to-day?
Yes, we are going to. I should like to, but I can't'.
'Dinner over, he left the house.' /'$uch expressions re-
/ mind one of the abbreviations used in telegrams; they
I are syntactical correspondencies to the morphological
1 shortenings that are also of such frequent occurrence in
/ English: cah for cabriolet, bus for omnibus, photo for photo-
L.^aph, phone for telephone, and innumerable others.
II. This cannot be separated from a certain sobri- ety in expression. As an Englishman does not like to use noofe wofcis' or more syllables than are strictly Ife^ cessary, so he does not like to say more than he can stand to. He dislikes strong or hyperbolical expressions of approval or admiration; "that isn't half bad" or "she is rather good-looking" are often the highest praises you can screw out of him, and they not seldom express the same warmth of feeling that makes a Frenchman "S"^ ejaculate his "charmant" or "ravissante" or "adoralDfeJ^ German kolossal or pyramidalisch can often be correctly" rendered by English great or biggish, and where a Frenchman uses his adverbs extremement or infinimenty an Englishman says only very or rather or pretty. ' Quelle horreur!' is 'That's rather a nuisance'. 'Je suis ravi de vous voir' is 'Glad to see you,' etc. An Englishman does not like to commit himself by being too enthusias- tic or too distressed, and his language accordingly grows! ^ber, too sober perhaps, and even barren when the.] \' object is to express emotions. There is in this trait ~ar' t^^ curious mixture of something praiseworthy, the desire to \^^ '' be strictly true without exaggerating anything or promis- "" ing more than you can keep, and on the other hand
'of something blameworthy, the idea that it is affectedT]
A 0 or childish and effeminate, to give vent to one's feel- j
^ ings, and the fear of appearing ridiculous by showing i
Sobriety. q
strong emotions. But this trait is certainly found more frequently in men than in women, so I may be allowed to add this feature of the English language to the signs of masculinity I have collected.
12. Those who use many strong words to express their likes or dislikes will generally also make an ex- tensive use of another linguistic appliance, namely violent movements, in the intonation. Their voices will now suddenly rise to a very high pitch and then as suddenly fall to low tones. An excessive use of this emotional tonic accent is characteristic of many savage nations; in Europe it is found much more in Italy than in the North. ! In each nation it seems as if it were more employed^ by women than by men. Now, it has often been ob- served that the English speak in a more monotonous way than most other nations, so that an extremely slight rising or lowering of the tone indicates what in other \ languages would require a much greater interval. " Les^^ Anglais parlent extremement bas," says H. Taine (Notes sur r Angleterre , p. 66). " Une societ6 italienne, dans laquelle je me suis fourvoy^ par hasard, m'a positivement 6tourdi; je m'6tai^ habitu6 a ce ton modere des voix anglaises." Even English ladies are in this respect more restrained than many men belonging to other nations:
" She had the low voice of your English dames. Unused, it seems, to need rise half a note To catch attention"
(Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh p. Qi).^
13. If we turn to other provinces of the language we shall find our impression strengthened and deepened.
It is worth observing, for instance, howfew_i3iminu- ^\ ^'YflS^ *^^ l^^nguage has and how sparingly it uses them.
I Cf. my Lehrbuch der Phonetik, p. 226; Fonetik 'Dan. ed.) p. 588.
lO I- Preliminary Sketch.
English in this respect forms a strong contrast to Italian with its -ino^ (ragazzino, fratellino, originally a double diminutive), -iyia (donnina), -etto (giovinetto), -etta (oretta), -^//£^-£^^j^.asinello, storiella) and other endings, German with its 'cheji und -lein, especially South German with its eternal -d^x Dwtch with its -je. In Dutch every child is a kindje, and every girl a meisje; every tree may be called a boouipje , every cup of coffee or tea a kopje, every rabbit a konijntje, every foot a voeije, every key a sleuteltje etc, etc. The continual recurrence of these endings without any apparent necessity cannot but pro- duce the impression that the speakers are innocents childish, genial beings with no great business capacities^ or seriousness in life. But in English there are very Tew "of these fondling endings; -let is in the lirst place a comparatively medefH-ending, very few of the words in. which it is used go back more than a hundred years; and then its extensive use inmodern times is chiefly due to the naturalists who want it to express in a short and precise manner certain small organs (budlet Darwin; bladelet ToddT^onelet Dana"; bulblet Gray; leaflet, fruitlet, featherlet, etc.) — an employment of the dimu- nutive which is as far removed as possible from the terms of endearment found in other languages. The endings -kin and -ling (princekin, princeling) are not very frequently^~-Hsed--aiTd"'generally express contempt or derision. Then, of course, there is_j^j%__-zV (Billy, Dicky, auntie, birdie, etc.) which corresponds exactly to the fondling suffixes of other languages; but its application in English is restricted to the nursery and it is hardly ever used by grown-up people except in speaking to children. Besides , thig^nrHrT^ j.s more ^rptch than ^lish, and the Scotch with all their deadly earnestness, especially in religious matters, are, perhaps, greater children than the English.
Word-order. II
14. The hnQi'np^^-ljIcg, viVile _Qn^mies of the English language also manifest themselves insucB" things_as_word- order. Words in EngHsh do not play at hide-anct- seek, as they often do in Latin, for instance, or in German, where ideas that by right belong together are widely sundered in obedience to caprice or, more often, to a rigorous grammatical rule. In English an auxiliary verb does not stand far from its main verb, and a nega- tive will be found in the immediate neighbourhood of the \vord it negaHv^ f^enerally the verh ('auxiliarv'i. An adjective^ji^arlv alvvaj:g_stands before its noun; the only really important exception is when there are qualifications | added to it which draw it after the noun so that the whole complex ser\'es the purpose of a relatiyfi_£:Jause :| " a man every way prosperous and talented " (Tennyson), *' an interruption too brief and isolated to attract more notice" (Stevenson). And the same regularity is found in modern English word-order in other respects as well. A few years ago I made my pupils calculate statistically various points in regard to word -order in different languages. 1 give here only the percentage in some modern authors oT" s'entences in which the.
ceded thft verb ar^d the_Ja_tfer in its turn j) receded its \ object (as in *M saw him" as against "Him I saw, but { not her" or "Whom did you see?"): —
Shelley, prose 89, poetry 8,5.
Byron, prose 93, poetry 81.
Macaulay, prose 82.
Carlyle, prose 87.
Tennyson, poetry 88.
Dickens, prose 91.
Swinburne, poetry 83.
Pinero, prose 97. For the sake of comparison I mention that one^ Danish prose writer (J. P. Jacobsen) had 82, a Danish j
12 ' I. Preliminary Sketch.
/poet (Drachmann) 6i, Goethe (poetry) 30, a modern /German prose writer (Tovote) 31, Anatole France 66, / Gabriele d'Annunzio 49 per cent of the same word-order, j'hat English has not always had the same regularity, /^ shown by the figure for Beowulf being 16, and for I King Alfred's prose 40. Even if I concede that our statistics did not embrace a sufficient number of extracts to. give fully reliable results, still it is indisputable that English shows more regularity and less caprice in that respecT "tBan "Tnost ' 'D"f~^roKably alT^ 'Cr)gnate- languages, without however, attainingtIie"ligfdlt7~1bTrud in Chinese, where the percentage in question would be 100 (or very near it). English has not deprived itself of the expedient of inverting the ordinary order of the members of a sentence when emphasis requires it, but it makes a more sparing use of it than German and the Scandinavian languages, and in most cases it will be found that these languages emphasize without any real necessity, especially in a great many every-day phrases: daer har jeg ikke vaeret, dort bin ich nicht gewesen, I haven't been there; det kan jeg ikke, das kann ich nicht, I can't do that. How superfluous the emphasis is, is best shown by the usual phrase, det veed jeg ikke, das weiB ich nicht, where the Englishman does not even find it necessary to state the object at all: I don't know. Note also that in English the subject precedes the verb after most intro- ducing adverbs: now he comes; there he goes, while German and Danish have, and English had till a few centuries ago, the inverted order: jetzt kommt er, da geht sie; nu kommer han, daer gar hun; now comes he, there goes she. Thus order and consistency signalize the modern stage of tlie English language.
15. No language is logical in every respect, and we must not expect usage to be guided always by strictly logical principles. It was a frequent error with the older
Logic. 1 3
schools of grammar that whenever the actual grammar of a language did not seem conformable to the rules of abstract logic they blamed the language and wanted to correct it. Without falling into that error we may, how- .. ever, compare different languages and judge them by ^ the standard of logic, and here again I think that, a^axt frgr" rhir^eg^ whirb ^ag^l^^^ described as pure^j^plie;! ; , logic, there is perhaps no language in the civilized world/ " that stands ^sohigh as English. Look aF the use of the tenses; the difference between the-^ast_.^£_^;az£^_and^Jhe composite perfect .Jie__has seen is carrie^d trough "^tfes,^ great-consistency as compared with the similarly formed )\ tenses_in_J)aaishrTro1r'fo speak of German, so that one J of the most constant faults committed by English-speaking/ Germans is the wrong use of these forms (" Were you in Berlin?" for "Have you been in (or to) BerHn?", "In 1 8 1 5 Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo " for *'was defeated"). And then the comparatively recent development of the extended (or " progressive ") tenses has furnished the language~wrth the wonderfully pre^Ttsc and logically valuable distinction between *' I write " and " I am writing ", " I wrote " and " I was writing. " French^ has something similar in the distinction between le passe I defini (j'ecrivis) and I'imparfait (j'ecrivais), but on thej one hand the former tends to disappear, or rather has already disappeared in the spcKen language, at any rate in Paris and in the northern part of the country, so that fai ecrit takes its place jind the distinction between "I wrote" and "I have .ritten" is abandoned; on the other hand the distincti*. : applies only to the past while \ in English it is carried, through all tenses. Furthermore, \ the distinction as mr.de in English is superior to the similar one found in che Slavonic languages, in that it is m^dejmifbrmlj^^in^ ill verbs and in all tenses'lJy'mBaiis of ttie-^sam6__deYice {'27?i -in^), while the Slavonic languages
i^ I. Preliminary Sketch.
employ a much more complicated system of prepositions and derivative endings, which has almost to be learned separately for each new verb or group of verbs.
i6. In praising the logic of the English language we
I must not lose sight of the fact that in most cases where, so to speak, the logic of facts or of the exterior Vorld is at war with the logic of grammar, English is free -|^ from the narrow-minded pedantry which in most languages sacrifices' the former to the latter^ or makes people shy of saying or writing things which are not " strictly grammatical. " This is particularly clear with regard to number. Fainily and f^er^x^^aj^e, grammatically speaking, of the singtilar number ; but in reahty they indicate a plurality. Most languages can treat such words only as singulars, but in English one is free to add a verb in singular if the idea of unity is essential, and then to refer to this unit as //, or else to put the verb in the plural and use the pronoun //lej^, if the idea of plurality is predominant. It is clear that this liberty of choice is often greatly advantageous. Thus we find sentences like these, **As the clergy are or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation" (Miss Austen), or '• the whole race of man (sing.) proclaim it lawful to drink wine" (De Quincey), or "the club all know that he is a disappointed man" (the same). In "there are no end of people here that I don't know" (George Eliot) 710 end takes the verb in the plural because it is equivalent to " many, " and w^hen Shelley writes in one of his letters " the Quarterly are going to review me " he is thinking of the Quarterly (Review) as a whole staff of writers. Inversely, there is in English a' freedom paralleled no- where else oQ^pre^^iag-g^amniaTically "a "tinffcy -c-enskting of several parts, of saying, for instance,^~**t ^6 not thinly I e ver " speirir-BT-more "deltghTFul th"ree~\7eeks " (Ch. Darwin), "for a quiet twenty minutes," " anotner United States,"
Freedom from pedantry. I ^
cf. also "a fortnight" (originally a fourteen-night) ; " three^ years is but short" (Shakespeare), "sixpence was offered him" (Ch. Darwin), "ten minutes is heaps of .time" (E. F. Benson), etc. etc. '
17. A great many other phenomena in English show the same freedom from pedantry, as when passive con- r- structions such as "he was taken no notice of" are allow- ed, or when adverbs or prepositional comptees may be^ used attributively as jnj* his then residence, " " an almost reconciliation " (Thackeray), " men invite their out-ColTeg^ friends" (Steadman), "smoking his before-breakfast pipe" \ (Co. Doyle), "in his threadbare, out-at-elbow shooting- jacket " (G. du Maurier), or when even whole phrases or sentences may be turned into a kind of adjective, as in " with a quite at home kind of air " (Smedley), " in the pretty diamond-cut-diamond scene between Pallas and Ulysses " (Ruskin), " a Uttle man with a puffy Say-nothing to -me-, - or -FU- contradict -you sort of countenance" (Dickens), " With an 1-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe aib\ (Lowell), "Rose is simply self-willed; a * she will' or 'she won't' sort of Httle person" (Meredith). Although such combinations as the last-mentioned are only founci>^ in more or less jocular style, they show the possibilities of the language, and some expressio^is of a similar order belong permanently to the language, for instance, '_a^ would-be artist,' 'a stay-at-home man,' 'a. turn-up collar.' Such things — and they might be easily multiplied — are inconceivable in such a language as French where every- thing is condemned that d^.es not conform to a definite set of rules laid down 1, grammarians. The French language is Hke the stiff French garden of Louis XIV, while the English is likj an English park, which is laid oui seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to Valk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing
1 6 I- Preliminary Sketch.
rigorous regulations. The English language would fot have been what it is if the English had not been for centuries great respecters of the liberties of each individual and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself.
I i8. This is seen, too, in the vocabulary. In spite of the efforts of several authors of high standing, the English have never suffered an Academy to be instituted among them like the French or Italian Academies, which had as one of their chief tasks the regulation of the voca- bulary so that every word not found in their Dictionaries was blamed as unworthy of literary use or distinction. In England every writer is, and has always been, free to take his words where he chooses, whether from the^- ordinary stock of everyday words, from native dialects, from old authors, or from other languages, dead or living. The consequence has been that English dictionaries comprise a larger number of words than those of any other nation, and that they present a variegated picture of words from the four quarters of the globe. Now, it seems to be characteristic of the two sexes in their re- lation to language that women move in narrower circles of the vocabulary, in which they attain to perfect mastery so that the flow of words is always natural and, above all, never needs to stop, while men know more words and always want to be more precise in choosing the exact word with which to render their idea, the con- sequence being often less fluency and more hesitation. /"Ir^as been statistically shown that a comparatively greater / number of stammerers and stutterers are found among t men (boys) than among won\en (girls). Teachers of foreign languages have many occasions to admire the case with which female students express themselves in another language after so short a t'me of study that most men would be able to say only few words hesitatingly
\'ocabulary. I n
and falteringly, but if they are put to the test of trans- lating a difficult piece either from or into the foreign language, the men will generally prove superior to the women. With regard to their native language the same dift'erence is found, though it is perhaps not so easy to observe. At any rate our assertion is corroborated by an observation made by every student of languages that novels written by ladies are much easier to read and contain much fewer difficult words than those written by men. All this seems to justify us in setting down the enormous richness of the English vocabulary to the same masculinity of the English nation which we have now encountered in so many various fields.
To sum up: The English language is a methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency and is opposed to any attempt to narrow-in life by police regulations and strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon. As the language is, so also is the nation,
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within. (Tennyson.)
Jespersen, the English language.
Chapter 11. The Beginnings.
20. The existence of the English language as a separate idiom began when Germanic tribes had occupied all the lowlands of Great Britain^^and when accordingly the invasions from the continent were discontinued, so that the settlers in their new homes were cut off from that steady intercourse with their continental relations which is an imperative condition of linguistic unity. The historical records of EngHsh do not go so far back as this, for the oldest written texts in the English language (in "AnglQ^axon") date from about 700 and are thus removed by about three centuries from the beginnings of the language. And yet comparative philology is able to tell us something about the manner in which the ancestors of these settlers spoke centuries before that period, and to sketch the prehistoric development of what was to become the language of King Alfred, tf Chancer and of Shakespeare.
21. The dialects spoken by the settlers in England belonged to the great Germanic (or Teutonic) branch of the most important of all linguistic families, termed by many philologists the Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic) and by others, and to my mind more appropriately, Arian (Aryan). The^sArian family ^comprises a great variety of languages, including, besides some languages of less importance, Sanskrit with Prakrit and many living languages
Primitive Arian. lo
of India; Iranian with Modern Persian; Greek; Latin with the modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French etc.); Celtic, two divisions of which still survive, one in Welsh and Armorican or Breton, the other in the closely connected Irish and Scotch-Gaelic, besides the nearly extinct Manx; Baltic (Lithuanian and Lettic) and Slavonic (Russian, Czech, Polish, etc.). Among the extinct Germanic languages Ulfila's Gothic was the most important; the li^•ing are High German, Dutch, Low Gernaan, Frisian// English, | Danish, Swedish, Islorwegian, and Icelandic. ^The iirsti five are generally grouped together as West- Germanic, while the four last-mentioned or Scandinavian languages constitute with Gothic the East- Germanic group, a grouping which does not, how- ever, account for the really much more complex rela- tionship between these languages.
22. The Arian language, which was in course of time differentiated into all these languages, or as the same fact is generally expressed in a metaphor of dubious value, was the parent- language from which all these languages have descended, must by no means be ima- gined as a language characterized by a simple and regular structure. On the contrary it musj have been, grammatically and lexically, extremely complicated and full of irregularities. Its grammar was highly inflectional, the relations between the ideas being expressed by means of endings which were more intimately fused together with the chief element of the word than in such aggl^^ tinative languages as Hungarian (Magyar). Nouns andj ver^s — were—kept distinct, and where the same sense-| modifications were expressed in both, such as plurality,! it was by means of totally different endings. In factV the indication of number — the threefold division into singular, dual, and plural — was inseparable from the case -endings in the nouns and from the person -endings
20 n. The Beginnings.
as well as signs of mood and tense in the verbs: one cannot point to distinct parts of such a Latin form as est (cafitat) or sunt (cant ant) or fuissem (cantavissem) and say, this element means singular (or plural), this one means indicative (or subjunctive) and that one indicates what tense the whole form belongs to. There were ejdit cases, but they did not, for the greater part, indic^tr^ ouch clear, concrete, outward relations as the Finnic (local) cases do; the consequence was a com- paratively great number of clashings and overlappings, in form as well as in function. Each noun- belonged to one of three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter; but this division by no means corresponded with logical consistency to the natural division into living beings of one sex, living beings of the other sex, and everything je. "■• Nor did the moods and tenses of the verb agree /very closely with any definite logical categories, the idea of time being, moreover, mixed up with that of "tense- aspect" (in German ''aktionsart"), i. e distinctions according "aiT^ction was viewed as momentary or protracted \Ox iterated, etc. In the nominal as well as in the verbal mft^tions the endings varied with the character of the stem they were added to, and very often the accent was shifted from one syllable to another according to seem- ingly arbitrary rules, just as in modern Russian. In a great many cases, too, one form was taken from one word and another from a totally different one, a pheno- menon (called by Osthoff "suppletivwesen") which we have in a few instances in modern English [good, hette?- ; gorweniT 'eiXT^. — An itiea of the phonetic system-^ f^the old Arian language may best be gathered from Greel?, which has preserved the old system with great fidelity on the whole, especially the vowels. But of course, no one of the historically transmitted languages, not even one of" the oldest, can give more than an approximate
Germanic. 2 1
idea of the common Arian language distant from us by so many thousand years, and scholars have now learnt more prudence than at the time when Schleicher was bold enough to print a fable in what he believed to be a fairly accurate representation of primitive Arian.
23. In historical times we find Arian split up into a variety of languages, each with its own peculiarities, in sounds, in grammar, and in" voTratruferv. So different were these languages that the Greeks had no idea of any similarity or relationship between their own tongue and that of their Persian enemies; nor did the Romans suspect that the Gauls and Germans they fought spoke languages of the same stock as their own. Whenever the Germanic languages are alluded to, it is always in expressions like these, "a Roman tongue can hardly pronounce such names" or (after giving the names of some Gennanic tribes) "the names sound like a noisy war- trumpet, and the ferocity of these barbarians adds horror even to the words themselves." Julian the Apostate compares the singing of Germanic popular ballads to the croaking and shrill screeching of birds. ^ Much of this, of course, must be put down to the ordinary Greek and Roman contempt for foreigners generally; nor can it be wondered at that they did not recognise in these languages congeners of their o\yn, for the similarities had been considerably blurred by a great many impor- tant changes in sound and in structure, so that it is only the patient research of the nineteenth century that has enabled us to identify words in separate languages which are now so dissimilar as not to strike the casual observer as in any way related. What contributed, perhaps, more than anything else to make Germanic words look strange, were two great phonetic changes affecting large
I Kluge, Paul's GrundriB I 354.
22 II. The Beginnings.
parts of Jjie_. vocabulary, the consonant -shi/t^ and the sTfess-shtft.
24. The consonant -shift must not be imagined as having taken place at one moment; on the contrary it must have taken centuries, and modern research has begun to point out the various stages in this develop- ment. This is not the pfoper place to deal with detailed explanations of this important change, as we must hurry on to more modern times; suffice it then to give a few examples to show how it affected the whole look of the language. Any p was chan^d to^, ^- thus we have father corresponding to pater and similar forms in the cognate languages; any / was made into th [[)], as in three, — compare Latin tres', any k became h, — as corfiu = horn. ^ And as similarly any b or d or ^, any ^^ dh, ^h was shifted, you will understand that there were comparatively few words that were not altered past
1 In English books this change ("die erste Lautver- j schiebung") is often called Grimm's law, because the 2d edi- tion of the first volume of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grafnmatik (1822) made it generally known. But in his first edition (1819) Grimm did not yet know the law; between the two editions he had read the Danish scholar Rasmus Rask's Utidej'segelse om det gamle nordiske sp7Vgs opr'mdelse (written 1814, printed 18 18), where the sound -correspondences are clearly set forth on p. 169. Grimm saw the enormous importance of the dis- covery and formulated the law in a more abstract manner than Rask. As part of the law had been seen more or less clearly by a few earlier philologists, and as Grimm's manner of stating it has been considerably modified by recent investi- gations, the law should not be named after any one man. At any rate it is perfectly absurd to extend the name of "Grimm's law" to any similar phonetic change, as is sometimes done ("Grimm's Law in South -Africa").
2 Latin words are here chosen for convenience only as representing these old consonants with great fidelity; but of course it must not be supposed that the English words named come from the Latin.
Sound changes. 2^
recognition; still such there were, for instance ??ms^ now \ mouse, which contained none of the consonants susceptible ,-^ of the shifting in question.
25. The second change affected the general character of the language even more thoroughly. Where pre- viously the stress was sometimes on the first syllable of the word, sometimes on the second, or on the third, etc., without any seeming reason and without any regard to the intrinsic importance of that syllable, a complete revo-, lution simplified matters so that the stress rules may be stated in a couple of lines : /nearly all words were stressed on the first syllable; J the chief exceptions occurred only where the word was a verb beginning with one out of a definite num^r of^refixes, such as those we have~in modern English dege/, forget, overthrow, abide etc. Verner has shown that this shifting of the place of the accent toot place later than the Germanic consonant -shift, and we shall now inquire into the relative importance of the two.
26. The coi^sonant- shift is important to the modern philologist, in so far as it is to him the clearest and least ambiguous criterion of the Germanic languages: word' with a shifted consonant Is "Germanic, and a wo: with an unsMftrnt coiTsonant in any of the"Germanie_^ languages must be a loan- word j whereas the shifted stress is no such certain criterion, cniefl\- because many words had already the stress on the first syllable. But if we\ ask about the intrinsic importance of the two changes, that is, if we try to look at matters from the point of view of the language itself, or rather the speakers, we/ shall see that the second change is really the more im-/ portant one. It does not matter much whether a certain • number of words begin with a /> or with a/^ but it does matter, or at an}- rate it may matter, very much whether ^^, the language has a rational system of accentuation or' not; and I have no hesitation in saying that the old
2 4 II. The Beginnings.
stress- shift has left its indelible mark on the structure of the language and has influenced it more than any other phonetic change.^ The significance of the stress shift will, perhaps, appear most clearly if we compare hvo sets of words in modern English. The original Arian stress system is still found in numerous words taken in recent times from the classical languages, thus family, fdmiliai-, famili^arity or ^photograph, photographer, photo-- ^ graphic.^ The shifted Germanic system is shown in such groups as ^love, Uover, ^loving, ^lovingly, ^lovely, Hove- luiess, loveless, Hovelessness, or Hung, kingdom, Hingship, Singly, Hingless, etc. As it is characteristic of all Arian languages that suffixes play a much greater role than prefixes, ^tniiat derivation is generally by endings, it follows that where the Germanic stress system has been carried through, the syllable that is most important has ■also the strongest stress, and that the relatively insigni- ficajnTrobdifications of the chief idea which are indicated by formative syllables are also accentually subordinate. This is, accordingly, a perfectly logical system, correspond- ing to the most important rule observed in sentence stress, viz. that the stressed words are generally the most important ones. As, moreover, want of stress tends everywhere to obscure vowel- sounds, languages with moveable accent are exposed to the danger that related words, or different forms of the same word, are made more different than they would else have been, and their connection is more obscured than is strictly necessary; j compare, for instance, the two sounds in the first syllable / oi family [ae]^ 2.-^^ familiar [9], or the different treatment
1 Except perhaps the disappearance of so many weak ,?'s about 1400.
2 I indicate stress by means of a short vertical stroke 1 im- mediately before the beginning of the strong syllable.
3 A list of the phonetic symbols used in this book will be found on the last page.
Accent. 25
of the vowels in photograph, photographer and photographic. The phonetic clearness inherent in the consistent stress system is certainly a linguistic advantage, and the obscuration of the connection between related words is to~be^ considered a drawback in most if not, perhaps, in all cases. The language of our forefathers seems therefore to have gained considerably by replacing the movable stress by a fixed one.
27. The question naturally arises : why was the accent shjftedLan Jiiia_HLa.y2 Two possible answers present them- selves. The change jnay have been either a purely mechanical process, by which the first syllable was, stresseH~~w"rtHout~any regard to signification, or else it ^ may hav^ been a psychological process, by which the V root syllable became stressed because it was the most important part of the wore]/ As in the vast majority of cases Th"e^fdot syllable is the first, the question must be decided from those cases where the two things are not identical. Kluge^ infers from the treatment of reduplicated forms" ot the perfect corresponding to Lcftin cecidi, peperci, etc. that the shifti,ug_was a purely -meehani- cal process;, for it was not the most important syllable thaF was stressed in Gothic haihait ^called', rairo^ ^reflected', lailot 'let' (read ai as short e) , while the vowel of the root syllable actually disappears in the Old English forms'of these words hehty reprd, leort. But it may be objected to thi^ view that the reduplicated syllable was in some measure the bearer of the root signification, as it had enough', left of the root to' remind the hearer of if, and in pro-j nouncing it thb speaker had before him part* at least of the significant elements. The first syllable of a redupli- cated perfect must to him have been of a far greater importance than one? of those prefixes which served only
I Paul's Grundrifi I 2 389.
26 II- The Beginnings.
to modify to a small extent the principal idea expressed in the root syllable. The fact that the reduplicated syllable attracted the accent therefore speaks less strongly in favour of the mechanical explanation than does the want of stress on the verbal prefixes in the opposite direction, so that the case seems to me strongest for the psycho- logical theory. In other words, we have here a case of mhie -stressing ;l[^2i\. part of the word which is of great- est value to the speaker and which therefore he especi- ally wants the hearer to notice, is pronounced with the strongest stress.^
28. We find the same principle of value -stressing everywhere, even in those languages whose traditional stress rests or may rest on other syllables than the root — this word is here used not in the sense of the ety- mologically original part of the word, but in the sense of what is to the actual instinct of the speaker in- trinsically the most significant element /— but in these languages it plays only the part of causing now and then a deviation from the traditional stress whereas in Germanic it has become habitual to stress the root syllable^, and this leads to other consequences of some interest. In those languages where the traditional stress rests now on one, now on another syllable, and where the stress syllable~~r§~liot always the most significant one, the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables is generally less than in the Germanic languages; there is a nicer and subtler play of accent, which we may observe in French, perhaps, better than elsewhere. In nous chantons the last syllable is stressed, but chan- is stronger than for- in Eng. we /o?'get, because its psychological
1 See my Fonetik, Copenh. 1899, p. 557 and 560; Leh7- buch d. Phonetik, Leipz. 1904, p. 209 fi".
2 Fonetik, p. 554; Lehrbuch d. Phon., p. 207.
Accent.
27
value is greater. Where a contrast is to be expressed it will most often be associated with one of the tradi- tionally unstressed syllables, and the result is that the contrast is brought vividly before the mind with much less force than is necessary in English; in noiis chantoiis, et 71011S ne dansojis pas you need not even make chan and dmi stronger, at any rate not much stronger than the endings, while in English we sing, hit ive donH da?ice, the-, syllables smg and dajtce must be spoken with an enor- ! mous force, because they are in themselves strongly/ stressed even when no contrast is to be pointed out. A still better example is French c^est im acteur et non pas tin aiiteur and English lie is an actor, and not an author; the Frenchman produces the intended effect by a slight tap, so to speak, on the two initial syllables of the contrasted words, while an Englishman hammers or knocks ibe corresponding syllables into the head of the hearer. The French system is more elegant, more artistic; the Ger- manic system is heavier or more clumsy, perhaps, id such cases as those just mentioned, but on the whole, it must be said to be more rational, more logical, as anl exact correspondence between the inner and the outer! world is established, if the most significant element/ receives the strongest phonetic expression. We shall see in later sections how this Germanic stress -principle has been instrumental in bringing about important changes in other respects than those considered here. But what has been said here seems to me to indicate a certain connection between language and national character; for has it not always been considered a prominent feature of the Germanic peoples (English, Scandinavians, Germans)^ that they say their say bluntly without much consi- j dering the artistic effect, and that they emphasize what I is essential without always having due regard to nu-1 ances or accessory notions? and does not the stressT
2 8 II- The Beginnings.
system we have been considering present the very same aspect?
29. We do not know in what^jcentiiry the stress was shifted^, but the shifting certainly took place centuries before the immigration of the English into Great Britain. To a similar remote period we must refer several other great changes affecting equally all the Germanic languages. One of the most important is the simplification of the tense system in the verb, no Germanic language having more than two tenses, a present and a past. As many of the old endings gradually wore off, they were not in themselves a clear enough indication of the differ- ences of tense, and the gradation (ablaut) of the root vowel, which had at first been only an incidental conse- quence of differences of accentuation, was felt more and more as the real indicator of tense (see below). But neither gradation nor the remaining endings were fit to make patterns for the formation of tenses in new verbs; consequently, we see very few additions to the old stock of ^strong' verbs, and a new type of verbs, ^weak verbs', is constantly gaining ground. Whatever 'fiiS)^> have been the origin of the dental ending used in the past tense of these verbs, it is very extensively used in all Germanic languages and is, indeed, one of the "characteristic features of their inflectional system. It has become the 'regular' mode of forming the preterite,
I Nothing can be concluded from the existence at the time of Tacitus of such series of alliterating names for mem- bers of the same family as Segestes Segimerus Segimundus, etc. (Kluge, Paul's GrundriB ^357, 388) for alliteration does not necessarily imply that the syllable has the chief stress of the word; cf. the French formulas messe et 7ndti?ies, Florient et Florette, Basans et Basilie, monts et merveilles, qui vivra verra, a tort et a travers (Nyrop, Grammaire historique I 2448).
Loan-words. 2Q
that is, the one resorted to whenever .new verbs are called into existence.
30. To this early period, while the English were still living on the Continent with their Gennanic brethren, belong the first class of loan-words. No J(j|.]7g"^^— ^— entirely^ pjire; we meet with no nation that has not a.dopted some loan-words, so we must suppose that the forefathers of the old Germanic tribes adopted words\ from a great many other nations wdth whom they came into contact; and scholars have attempted to point out very old loan-words from various sources. Some of these, however, are doubtful, and none of them are im- portant enough to arrest our attention before we arrive at the period .when Latin_.infliieiice.-began to be felt in the Germanic world, that is, about the beginning of our Christian era. But before we look at these borrowings in detail, let us first consider for a moment the general lesson that may be derived from the study of yvords taken over from one language into another.
31. Loan-words have been called the milestones of philology, because in a great many instances they per- mit us to fix approximatively the dates of linguistic changes. But they might with just as much right be termed some of the milestones of general history, because they show us the course of civilisation and the wander- ings of inventions and institutions, and in many cases give us valuable information as to the inner life of nations when dry annals tell us nothing but the dates \ of the deaths of kings and bishops. When in two languages w^e find no trace of the exchange of loan- words one way or the other we are safe to infer that >; the two nations have had nothing to do with each , "" other. But if they have been in contact, the number
^O II- The Beginnings.
of the loan-words and still more the qn?^.]if.^v of the loan-
ftds, if rightly interpreted, will inform us of their recip- :al relations, they will show us which of them has en the more fertile in ideas and on what domains of man activity each has been superior to the other. If other sources of information were closed, we should still have no hesitation in inferring from such loan-words ia-our modern North -European languages as pia7iOy I soprano, opera, libretto, tempo, adagio and numerous others ; that Italian music has played a great role all over Europe. Similar instances might easily be multiplied, and in many ways the study of language brings home to us the fact that when a nation produces something that its neighbours think worthy of imitation these will take over not only the thing but also the name. This will be the general rule, though exceptions may occur, espe- cially when a language possesses a native word that will lend itself without any special effort to the new thing imported from abroad. But if a native word is not ready to hand it is easier to adopt the ready-made word used in the other country, nay this foreign word is very often imported even in cases where it would seem to oifer no great difficulty to coin an adequate expression by means of native word-material. As, on thp^other hand, there is generally nothing to induce
a to use words from foreign languages for things one ust as well at home, loan-words are nearly always 'cal words belonging to one special branch of know- ^ 5 or industry, and may be grouped so as to show what each nation has learnt from each of the others. It will be my object to go through the different strata of loans in English with special regard to their significance in relation to the history of civilisation.
32. Whatj, thenj._were the principal words that the barbarians learnt from Rome in this period which may
Latin -words. :> I
be called the pagan or pre-Christian period?^ One of the earliest, no doubt, was wine (Lat. vhrnm), and a few other words connected withr*lKe cultivation of the vine and the drinking of wine such as Lat. calicem OE. calk (Germ. keleJi) J_a cup \ It is worth noting, too, that the chief type of Roman merchants that the Germanic people dealt with, were the caupoties Svine-dealers, keep- ers of wine -shops or public -houses'; ior the word Ger- man kaufen , OE. ceapian ^to buy' is derived from it, as is also cheap, the "^Id rfleanmg of which was ^bargain, p;ice'. "(Cf.^ Cheapside). Another word of commercfal significance is monger (fishmonger, ironmonger, coster- monger), OE. man g ere from an extinct verb mangian^ derived from Lat. mango ^retailer'. Lat. motieta, potid6\\ aricl ««nS~loo^ere adopted as commercial terms: OE. 7?iynelJ coin, coinage', now jninl; OE. pu?i(/, now pound; OE. j-nce, now mc/i; the sound- changes point to v^y early borrowing. Other words from the Latin connected with commerce and travel are: 7ni7e, anchor, piint (OE. punt from Lat. ponto); a great many names for vessels or receptacles of various kinds; I take some from Po- gatscher's list^ and add the modem fonns if the word is still living: cist (chest), hinn (bin), by den, hytt, cylle, omher or amber (amber), disc (dish), sciitel, ore, (^Jel (kettle), mortere (mortar), earc (ark), etc. This makes us suspect a complete revolution in the art of cooking food, an impression which is strengthened by such Latin loan-words as cook (OE. coc from coq^ius), kitchen (OE. cycene from coquind) and mill (OE. mylen from molind), as well as names for a great many plants and fruits whic
1 See especially Kluge, Paul's GrundriB, p. 327 ff.; Pogat- scher, Lautlehre der griech., lat. u. roman. Lehnworte im alt- englischen (Strassb. 1888). I give the words in their modern English forms, wherever possible.
2 1. c. 122. Cf also Kluge, p. 331.
2 2 II- The Beginnings.
/had not previously been cultivated in the north of Europe, such as pear^ OE. cirs ^cherry', persoc ^ peach' (the modern forms are later adoptions from the French), plum (OE. plume, from pftmus), pea (OE. pise from pistwi), cole {cauly-k^l^r-^cotch kailjjhgm. Lat. caulis), OE. ?j(£p, found in the second syllable of mod. turnip, from napus, beet (root), mint, pepper, etc. As military words, though not wanting, were not taken over in such great numbers as one might expect, we have now gone through the prin- cipal categories of early loans from the Latin language, from which conclusions as to the state of civilisation may be drawn. In comparing them with later loan- words from^he same source we are struck by their con- crete--cliaracter. It was not Roman philosophy or the higher mental culture that impressed our Germanic fore- fathers; they were not yet ripe for that influence, but in their barbaric simplicity they needed and adopted a great many purely practical and material things, espe- ^~^T*aUy such as might sweeten everyday life. It is hardly necessary to say that these words were learnt in a purely oral manner, as shown in many cases by their forms; and this, too, is a distinctive feature of the old- e.pr Latin loans as opposed to later strata of loan- words. They were also shorL-w^tfd&r- mostly of one or two syllables, so that it would seem that the Germanic tongues^ and minds could not yet manage such long yords' as form the bulk of later loans. These early words were easy to pronounce and to remember, being of the same general type as most of the—indigenous words, and therefore they very soon came to be regard- ed as part and parcel of the native language, indispen- sable as the things themselves which they symbolized.
Chapter III.
Old English.
33. We now come to the first of those important historical events which have materially influenced the English language, namely ther settlement of Britain by Germanic tribes. The other events of paramount im- portance, ^which we shall have to deal with in succes- sion, are tTie Scandinavian invasion, "^the Norman con- '. ^ quest,^nd the revival of leajrning^. ' A future historian will certainly add the spreading of the English language in America, Australia, and South Africa.^ But none of these can compare in significance with *TEe first con- quest of England by the EngKsh,<an event which was, perhaps, fraught wi h greater consequences for the future of the world in general than anything else in history^ The more is the pity that we know so very little "ertfier of the people who came over or of the state of things the)- found in the country they invaded. We do not know exactly ivhen the invasion began ; the date usually given is 449, but Bede, on whose authority this date rests, wrote~about three hundred years later, and much may have been forgotten in so long a period. Many considerations seem to make it more advisable to give a rather earlier date ; ^ however , as we must imagine
I R. Thurneysen, Wann sind die Germanen nach Eng- land gekommen? in Eng. Studien 22, 163.
Jespersen, the English language. 3
34 ni. Old English.
that the iavaders did not come all at once, but that the settlement took up a comparatively long period during which new hordes were continually arriving, the question of date is of no great consequence, and we are probably on the safe side if we say that after a long series of Germanic invasions the country was prac- tically in their power in the latter half of the fifth century.
34. W/io were the invaders, and where did they j come from? This, too, has been a point of controversy. I According to Bede, the invaders belonged to the three i tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; and linguistic his- tory corroborates his statement in so far as we have really three dialects, or groups of dialects: the Anglian dialects in the North with two subdivisions, Northumbrian and Mercian, the Saxon dialects in the greater part of the South, the most important of which was the dialect of Wessex (West-Saxon), and the Kentish dialect, Kent having been, according to tradition, settled by the Jutes. But when Bede points out the district now called Angel (German Angeln) in South Jutland (Slesvig) as the home lof the Anglians, and identifies the Jutes with Jhe in- ! habitants of Jutland, considerable doubt has been raised of late years. ^ It is not necessary here to enter on tb1s^.^debatable ground; suffice it to say that neither tb:^ language of the Anglians nor that of the Kentish peo^g is Danish or shows any signs of closer relationship \f^y Danish than West- Saxon, so that if the settlers CcWg from Angel and other parts of Jutland, these districts caj?us • d-
I See especially A. Erdmann, Uber die heimat u. P" namen der Angeln. Upsala 1890. — H. Moller, Anzeiger . .^ deutsches Altertum XXII, I29ff. — G. Schiitte, Var Anglerne Tyskere, in S0nderjydske aarbjerger 1900, — O. Bremer, in Paul's Grundrifi I 2 115 ff., where other references will be found.
L<
The invaders. 2 c
then have been inhabited by the same Danish population that has lived there as far back as ascertained history reaches. The continental language that shows the great- | est similarity to English, is Frisian, and it is interesting \ to note that Frisian has some points in common with Kentish and some wdth Anglian, some even with the northernmost division of the Anglian dialect, points in which these OE. dialects differ from literary West-Saxon. Kentish resembles more particularly West Frisian, and Anglian East Frisian^, facts which justify us in look- ing upon the Frisians as the neighbours and relatives of the English before their emigration from the continent. We may therefore speak of an Anglo-Frisian language, forming in some respects a connecting link between German Saxon (Low German) on the one hand and Scandinavian, especially Danish, on the other.
35. What language or what languages did the sett- lers find on their arrival in Britain? The original popu- lation was Celtic; but what about the Roman conquest? The Romans had been masters of the country for cen- turies; had they not succeeded in making the native population learn Latin as they had succeeded in Spain and Gaul? A few years ago Pogatscher^ took up th^ view that they had succeeded, and that the Angles and\ ^Saxons found a Brito-Roman dialect in full vigour- Po- \ the^scher endorsed Wright's view that "if the Angles and ]^no'^ons had never come, we should have been now a^ give^ple talking a Neo -Latin tongue, closely resembling^ restj^i^cti- " But this view was very strongly attacked by Lotlr^T
ma}
con I W. Heuser, Altfriesisches lesebuch 1903 p. i — 5, and ...Jogermanische Forschungen, Anzeiger XIV 29.
2 Zur Lautlehre der . . , Lehnworte im Altenglischen 1888.
3 Les mots latins dans les langues brittoniques. Paris 1892.
3*
36 ni. Old English.
and Pogatscher, in a subsequent article^ had to withdraw his previous theory, if not completely, yet to a great extent, so that he no longer maintains that Latin ever was the national language of Britain, though he does not go the length of saying with Loth that the Latin language disappeared from Britain when the Roman troops were withdrawn. The possibility is left that while people in the country spoke Celtic, the "In- habitants of the towns spoke Latniorthat some— of them did. However this may be, the fact remains that the English found on their arrival a population speaking a different language from their own. Did that, /then, affect their own language, and in what manner ^v^nd to what extent?
36. In his "Student's History of England" p. 31 Gardiner says "So far as British words have ent5e^ I into the English language at all, they have been words such as gown or curd, which are likely to have been] used by women, or words such as ca7't or pony, which are likely to have been used by agricultural labourers; and the evidence of language may therefore be adduced in favour of the view that many women and many agii- cultural labourers were spared by the conquerors. 't~flere, then, we seem to have a Celtic influence from which an important historical inference can be drawn. Un- fortunately, however, not a single word of those adduced can prove anything of the kind. For gown is not an old Celtic word, but was taken over from French in th_e^j^4th century (mediaeval Latin gunnd)\ curd, too, dates t)nly from the 14th century, whereas if it had been in- troduced from Celtic in the old period we should cer-
// I Angelsachsen und Romanen. Engi. Studien XIX 329 — 352 (1894). See also MacGillivray, The Influence of Christianity on the A'ocabulary of Old English p. XI.
Celtic words. 37
tainly find it in older texts; "it is not certain what re- lation (if any) the Celtic words hold to the English" (N. E. D). Cart is an Old Norse word; it is found in Celtic languages, but is there "palpably a foreign word" (N. E. D.) introduced from English; and pony^, finally, is Lowland Scotch powney from Old French poulenet *a Httle colt', a diminutive of poulain ^a colt'. Similarly, most of the other words of alleged Celtic origin are either Germanic or French words which the Celts have borrowed from English, or else they have not been used in England more than a century or two; in neither of these cases do they teach us anything with regard to the relations between the two nationalities fifteen hundred years ago.^ The net result of modern investigation seems to be that not more than half a dozen words did pass over into English from the Celtic aborigi^iie**— * How may we account for this very small number of loans? Sweet ^ says the reason was that 'the Britons themselves were toTaT^eat extent Romanized', a theur/"
1 Skeat, Notes on English Etymology 224.
2 Curse, OE. cursian, is often referred to Ir. cursagaim, but 'no word of similar form and sense is known in Celtic' (N. E. D.) Cradle, OE. cradol, seems to be a diminutive] of an old Germanic word meaning 'basket' (O. H. G. chratto). See also hog in N. E. D. Windisch, in the article quoted below, p. 38, thinks that the Germanic tun in English took over the meaning of Celtic dunum (Latin *arx') on account oi the numerous old Celtic names of places in -dunum; [but in OE. tun had more frequently the meaning of 'enclosure, yard' (cf. Dutch tuin), 'enclosed land round a dwelling', 'a single dwelling house or farm' (cf. Old Norse \tun\ still in Devon- shire and Scotland) ; it was . only gradually that the word ac- quired its modern meaning of village or town, long after the in- fluence of the Celts must have disappeared. — Slogan, pibroch, clan etc., are modern; but bannock and dry 'magician' are really old loans from Celtic.
3 New English Grammar § 607.
38 in. Old English.
which we seem bound to abandon now (see above). Are we to account for it, as Lindelof doesS from the unscrup_ulojis_ character of the conquest, the English having killed all lhose"~"Bfifmre"nA^'o' did not run away into the mountainous districts? The supposition of whole- sale slaughter is not, however, necessary, for a thorough consideration of the general conditions under which borrowings from one language by another take place will give us a clue to the mystery.- And as the whole history of the English language may be described from one point of view as one chain of borrowings, it will be as well at the outset to give a little thought to this general question.
37. The whole theory of Windisch about mixed lan- guages turns upon this formula:.^ it is not the foreign language a nation learns which is made into a mixed language, but its own native language becomes mixed under the influence of the foreign language. When we try to learn and talk a foreign language we do not intermix it with words taken from our own language; our endeavour will always be to speak the other language as purely as possible, generally we are painfully conscious of every native word that we use in the middle of phrases framed in the other tongue. But what we thus avoid in speaking a foreign language we very often do in our own. One of Windisch's illustrations
1 Grunddragen af Engelska sprakets historiska Ijud- och formlara (Helsingfors 1895 P- 47) — ^'^^ excellent little book.
2 See especially Windisch, Zur Theorie der Mischsprachen und Lehnworter. Berichte iiber die \'erhdl. d sachs. Gesellsch. d. Wissensch. XLIX. 1897 p. loi ff. — G. Hempl, Language- Rivalry and Speech -Differentiation in the Case of Race-Mix- ture. Trans, of the Amer. Philol. Association XXIX. 1898 p. 30 ff.
Mixed languages. 3g
is taken from Gennany in the eighteenth century. It was then the height of fashion to imitate everything French, and Frederick the Great prided himself on speak- ing and writing good French. In his French writings on(: finds not a single German word, but whenever he wrote, German, French words and phrases in the middle of German^ sentences abounded, for French was considered more;, refined, more distingue. • Similarly, in the last remains of Cornish, the extinct Celtic language of Cornwall, numer- ous English loan-words occur, but the English did not mix any Cornish words with their own language, and the inhabitants of Cornwall themselves, whose native language was Cornish, would naturally avoid Cornish words when talking English, because in the first place English was considered the superior tongue, the language of culture and civilisation, and second, the English would not understand Cornish words. Similarly in Hie Brittany of to-day, people will interlard their Breton talk with French words, while their French is pure, without any Breton words. We now see why so few Cekic^ words were taken over into ^gjish. ^ There was na- thing to induce the ruling classes to learn the language \ of the inferior natives; it could never be fashionable for them to show an acquaintance with that despised tongue by using now and then a Celtic word. On the ] other hand the Celt would have to learn the language, of his masters, and learn it well; he could not think of addressing his superiors in his own unintelligible gibberish, and if the first generation did not learn good English, the second or third would, while the influence they themselves exercised on English would be infinitesi- mal. — There can be no doubt that this theory of Windisch's is in the main correct, though we shall, per-
I And so few Gallic words into French.
40 ni- Old English.
haps, later on see instances where it holds good only with some qualification. At any rate we need look for no other explanation of the fewness of Celtic words in Enghsh.
38. Abaut,6oo A. D. England was christianized, and the conversion had~lar^reaclung finguistic consequences. ■We'~"have no literary remains of the pre-Christian period, but in the great epic of Beowulf we see a strange mix- ture of pagan and Christian elements. It took a long time thoroughly to assimilate the new doctrine, and, in fact, much of the- old heathendom survives to this day in the shape of numerous superstitions. On the other haiid we must not suppose that people were wholly un- acquainted with .Christianity before they were actually converted, and linguistic evidence points to their know- ing, and having had names for, the most striking Christ- ian phenomena centuries before they became Christians Ihemsel^s.J One of the earliest loan-words belonging /to this sphere is church, OE. cirice, cyrice, ultimately from ' Greek kuriakon ^ (house) of the Lord' or rather the plu- ^ral kuriakd. It has been well remarked that "it is by no means necessary that there should have been a single kirika in Germany itself; from 313 onwards, Christian churches with their sacred vessels and ornaments were well-known objects of pillage to the German invaders of I the Empire: if the first with which these made acquain- Uance, wherever situated, were called kuriakd, it would be isjuiie sufficient to account for their familiarity with theword.''-^
I See the full and able article church in the N. E. D. We need not suppose, as is often done, that the word passed through Gothic, where the word is not found in the literature that has come down to us.
Christianity. 4 1
They knew this word so well that when they became Christians they did not adopt the word universally used in the Latin church and in the Romance languages {ec- clesia, eglise, chiesa, etc.), and the English even extend- ed the signification of the word church from the build- ing to the congregation, the whole body of Christians. 3fi?ister, OE. mynste?- from mbndsterium, belongs also ~to the''pfe-Christian period. Other words of very early adop- tion were devil from diabolus, Greek didbolos, and angel, OE. engel^ from angeliis, Greek dggelos. But the great bulk of specifically Christian terms did not enter the/ language till after the conversion.
39. The nunjber of new ideas and things introduced with Christianity was very eoimdeiabler-^nd it is inter- esting to note how the English manfaged to express them in their language.^ In the first place they adopt- ed a ^grs,:^Lj'niiXiy:SQimQii A^Qrcis together with Jhe ideas. Such words are apostle OE. apostol, disciple OE. discipul, which has been more of an ecclesiastical word in English than in other languages, where it has the wider Latin sense of 'pupil' or 'scholar', while in English it is more or less limited to the' twelve Disciples of Jesus or to similar applications. Further, the names of the whole scale of dignitaries of the church, from the Pope, OE. .papa, downwards through archbishop OE. ercehiscop, bishop OE. biscopj to priest OE. preost; so also ??iofik OE. ?jiunuc, mm OE. ntmna with provost OE. prafost (praepo- situs) and profost (propositus), abbot OE. abbod (d from
1 See below, § 86, on the relation between the OE. and the modern forms.
2 See especially H. S. MacGillivray, The Influence of Christianity on the Vocabulary of Old English (Halle 1902). I arrange his material from other points of view and must oftfen pass the limits of his book, of which only one half has appeared.
Ci
42 in. Old English.
the Romance form) and the feminine OE. abhudisse. Here belong also such obsolete words as sacerd Spriest', canonic 'canon', decan *dean', ayicor or a7ic7-a ^hermit' (Latin anachoreta). To these names of persons must be added not a few names of things, such as shrine OE. serin (scrinium), cowl OE. cugele (cucuUa), pall OY.. pcell or pell (pallium); regol or reogol '(monastic) rule', capital ^chapter', 7nc^sse ^mass', and offrian, in Old English only used in the sense of ^sacrificing, bringing an offering'; the modern usage in 'he offered his friend a seat and a cigar' is later and from the French.
40. It is worth noting that most of these loans were short words that tallied perfectly well with the native words and were easily inflected and treated in every respect like these; the composition of the longest of them, ercebiscop, was felt quite naturally as a native one. Such long words as discipul or capitul, or as exorcista and acolitus, which are also found, never became popular words ; and anachoreta only became popular when it had been shortened to the conwemQiii ancor.
41. The chief interest in this chapter of linguistic history does not, however, to my mind concern those words that were adopted, but those that were not. It is not astonishing that the English should have learned some Latin words connected with the new faith, but it IS astonishing, especially in the light of what later gene- rations did, that they should have utilized the resources of their own language to so great an exte^it as was agtually the case. This was done in three wayp^jjy forming new words from the foreign loans by means of native affixes, bW'modifying the sense of existing English words, and finally by- framing new words from native stems.
/|\\ At that period the English were not shy of affixing
Miative endings to foreign words; thus we have a great
many words in -had (mod. -hood): preosthad 'priesthood'.
Native words. aj
clerichadj^sacerdhad^ hiscophad 'episcopate', etc.; also such compounds as hiscopse^l ^episcopal ^^€~r^scopscir 'diocese', and with the same ending profosiscir 'provostship' and the interesting scriftscir ^parish, confessor's district' from serif t '■ confessor ', a derivative of scrifan {shrive) which is the Latin scrihere with its signification curiously changed. Note also such words as cristendom 'Christendom, Christian- ity' (also cristnes) and cristnian 'christen' or rather 'pre- pare a candidate for baptism'^ and hiscopian 'confirm' with the noun hiscepimg 'confirmation'.
42. Existing native w^ords were largely turned to account to express Christian ideas, the sense only being more or less modified. Foremost among these must be mentioned the word God. Other words belonging to the same class and surviving to this day are sin OE synn, tithe OE teoiia, the old ordinal for 'tenth'; easier OE eastron was the name of an old pagan spring festival, called after Austro, a goddess of spring.- Most ^f'me native words adapted to Christian usage have since be^ superseded by terms taken from Latin or French. Where we now say saint from the French, the old word was halig (mod. holy), preserved in Ali-hai lows -day and Ail- halloiv-e'en', the Latin sajict was very rarely used. Scan^. from the verb scieran 'shear, cut' has been supplanted^ by tofisure, had b}' order, hadian by consecrate and ordain, gesomnung by congregation, ^egttung by service, witega by prophet, ^roivere (from ^roivian *to suffer') by martyr, Jtro- werhad or ^roivtmg by martyrdom, niwctimen mann ('new- come man') by novice, hrycg-hrcegel (from hrycg 'back' and hrcBgel 'dress') by dossal, and ealdor by prior. Com-
1 "Cristnian signifies primarily the 'prima signatio' of the catechumens as distinguished from the baptism proper." Mac Gillivray p. 21.
2 Connected with Sanscrit usra and Latin aurora and, therefore, originally a dawn -goddess.
44 ni. Old English.
pounds of the last -mentioned Old English word were also applied to things connected with the new religion, thus teobing -ealdor^ deaxi' (chief of ten monks). Ealdor-^ ?nann, the native term for a sort of viceroy or lord- lieutenant, was used to denote the Jewish High-Priests as well as the Pharisees. OE htisl, mod. housel ^the Eucharist'^, was an old pagan word for sacrifice or offering; an older form is seen in Gothic htinsl. The OE word for ^altar', weofod, is an interesting heathen survival, for it goes back to a compound wigheod 'idol- table', and it was probably only because phonetic development had obscured its connection with ivig 'idol' that it was wed to remain in use as a Christian technical term. 43. This second class is not always easily distinguished bm the third or those words that had not previously existed but were now framed out of existing native speech -material to express fdeas foreign to the pagan world. Word- composition and other formative processes were resorted to, and in some instances the new terms were simply fitted together from translations of the com- ponent parts of the Greek or Latin word they were in- tended to render, .as when Greek etm^gclwfi was render- ed god-spell (good -spell, afterwards with shortening of the firsK-iiOwel godspell, which was often taken to be the 'speir or message of God), mod. gospel; thence godspellere where now the foreign word evangelist is used. Heathen, OE. hcBben, according to the generally accepted theory, is derived from hcE^ 'heath' in close imitation of Latin paganus from pagus 'a country district'.^ Cf. a_lso ^rynnes or ]>rmes^ three - ness^Vfor trinity, ^"^^^ —
1 Still used in the nineteentlT^^tTrtiiry, e. g. by Tennyson, as an archaism.
2 Another ingenious explanation connects the word through Gothic with Armenian het(h)anos 'heathen', which is borrow- ed from Greek ethnos\ see Torp and Bugge, Indogerm, Forsch. V 178.
New terms. /j_^
44. But in most cases we have no such literal ren- 'dering of a foreign term, but excellent words devised exactly as if the framers of them had never heard of any foreign expression for the same conception — as, per- haps, indeed, they had not in some instances. Some of these display not a little ingenuity. The scribes anj Pharisees of the New Testament were called hoc eras (froi hoc book) and simder-halgati (from sundoj- ^apart, asundei separate'); in the north the latter were also called cb\ larwas ^teachers of the Law' or celdo ^elders'. A patriarch\ was called heahfcBder 'high -father' or eald-fceder 'old-father ; the three Magi were called tungol-witegan from iungol 'star', and witega 'wise man'. For chaplain we have handpreost or hiredpreost {hired 'family') ; for acolyte different word expressive of his several functions: husl^egn {htisl Eucharist, ^egn servant), taporherend (bearer of taper) and wccxherend (bearer of wax); instead of ercehiscop 'arch- bishop' we sometimes find heahhiscop and ealdorhiscop. For .'heymit' ansetla and ivestemetla {an 'one', westen 'desert') were used. 'Magic art' was called scincrcpft {scin 'phan- tom'); 'magician' scincrcB/tigaox scinl(£ca,scinnere, 'phantom' or 'superstition', scinlac. For the disciples of Christ we find, beside discipul mentioned above, no less than ten different English renderings (cniht, folgere, gingra, hiere- mon, Iseringman, leornere, leorning- cniht, leorningman, -underfyeodda^ []egn).^ To 'baptize' was expressed by ■dyppan 'dip' (cf. German iaiifeji, Dan. derbe) or more often hy fulwkui {horn /u/-7('i7ian 'to consecrate completely'); 'baptism' hy ftihviht or, the last syllable being phonetic- ally obscured, fiilluhi, and John the Baptist was called Johannes se fulluhtere. We have another instance of . dis- guised composition in ondettan 'to confess' and ojidettere 'confessor' (and -|- hatan).
I MacGillivray p. 44, who, besides, mentions four words pecial to the Northumbrians.
46 ni. Olc^ English.
45. The power and boldness of these numerous na- tive formations can, perhaps, best be appreciated if we 1^ through the principal compounds of God: godbot patonement made to the church', godcund or godcundlic *'divine, religious, sacred', godcundnes ^divinity, sacred office', godferht 'pious', godgield 'idol', godgieldlic 'of idols', godgimm 'divine gem', godhad 'divine nature', god- maegen 'divinity', godscyld 'impiety', godscyldig 'impious', godsibb 'sponsor', godsibbraeden'sponsorial obligations', god- spell (cf., however, § 43), godspelbodung 'gospel-preaching', godspellere 'evangelist', godspelHan 'preach the gospel', godspellisc 'evangelical', godspeltraht 'gospel- commentary', ' godsprsece 'oracle', godsunu 'godson', god{)rymm 'divine \ majesty', godwraec 'impious' godwrsecnes 'impiety'. Such j a list as this, with the modern translations, shows the |^„.gtfjt^ between the old system of nomenclature, where very thing was native and, therefore, easily understood by even the most uneducated, and the modern system, where with few exceptions classical roots serve to express even simple ideas ; observe that although gospel has been ained, the easy secondary words derived from it have given way to learned formations. Nor was it only relig- ious terms that were devised in this way; for Christian- ity brought with it also some acquaintance with the higher intellectual achievements in other domains, and we fipd such scientific terms as IcEce-craft 'leech- craft' for medicine, tungol-cB ('star -law') for astronomy, efnniht for equinox, sun-stede and sungihte for solstice, sunfolgend (sun- follower) for heliotrope, tid 'tide' and gemet 'measure' for tense and mood in grammar, foresetnes for preposition etc., in short a number of scientific expressions of native origin, such as is equalled among the Germanic languages iii^ Icelandic only.
46. If now we ask, why did not the Anglo-Saxons adopt more-_p/ the ready-made Latin or Greek words,
Why not foqpign words? ^7
it is easy to see that the conditions here are quite different from those mentioned above when we asked a similar question with regard to Celtic. Th^sra^we had a real race-mixture, where people speaking two different languages were living in actual contact in the sanjg country. Here we have no Latin -speaking nation or community in actual intercourse with the English; and though we must suppose that there was a certain mouth to-mouth influence from missionaries which might familiar- ize part of the English nation with some of the specifi- cally Christian words, these were certainly at first intro- duced in far greaternumber through the medium of writing, exactly as is the case with Latin and Greek importation in recent times. Why, then, do we see such a differ- ence between the practice of that remote period and our own time? One of the reasons seems obviously to be that people then did not know so much Latin as they learnt later, so that these learned words, if intro- duced, would not have been understood. We have it on King Alfred's authority that in' the time immediately preceding his own reign "there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their (Latin) rituals in English, or translate a letter from Latin intd^| English, and I believe that there were not many beyond the Humber. There were so few of them that I cannot remember a single one south of the Thames when I came to the throne and there was also a great multi- tude of God's servants, but they had very little know- ledge of the books, for they could not understand any thing of them, because they were not written in their language."^ And even in the previous period which Alfred regrets, when "the sacred orders were zealous/
I King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. Preface (Sweet's translation).
4 8 III. Old English.
in teaching and learning", and when, as we know from Bede and other sources^, Latin and Greek studies were pursued successfully in England, we may be sure that the percentage of those who would have understood the learned words, had they been adopted into English, was not large. There was, therefore, good reason for devis- ing as many popular words as possible. However, the manner in which our question was put was not, perhaps, quite fair, for we seemed to presuppose as the natural state of things for a. nation to adopt as many foreign terms as its linguistic digestion would admit, so that it would be matter for surprise if a language had fewer foreign elements than Modern English. But on the contrary, iti /~is~rather the natural thing for a language to utilize its ^- — cujoi resources before drawing on other languages. The Anglo-Saxon principle of adopting only such words as ^ere easily assimilated with the native vocabulary, for the most part names of concrete things, and of turning to the greatest possible account native words and roots, especially for abstract notions, — that principle may be takeri as a symptom of a healthful condition of a language and a nation; witness Greek, where we have the most flourishing and vigorous growth of abstract and other scientifically serviceable terms on a native basis that the wo-rld has ever seen, and where the highest development of intellectual and artistic activity went hand in hand with the most extensive creation of indigenous words while there were extremely few importations from abroad. It is not, then, the Old EngHsh system of utilizing the vernacular stock of words, but the modern system of neglecting the native and borrowing from a foreign voca- bulary that has to be accounted for as something out of
I See T. N. Toller, Outlines of the History of the English Language. Cambridge 1900, p. 68 ft.
Handbook. ^g
the natural state of things. A particular case in point will illustrate this better than long explanations.
47. To express the idea of a small book that is^ always ready at hand, the Greeks had devised the word egkheiridion froni en 4n', kheir 'hand' and the suffix -idioti denoting smallness; the Romans similarly employed their adjective manualis 'pertaining to maims, the hand' with liber 'book' understood. What could be more natural then, than for the Anglo-Saxons to frame according to the genius of their own language the compound ligndlm^ This naturally would be especially applied to the one kind of handy books that the clergy were in particular need of, the book containing the occasional and minor public offices of the Roman church. Similar compounds were used, and are used, as a matter of course, in the other cognate languages, — German handbuch, Danish hand- bog, etc. But in the Middle English period, handboc^waiS disused^ the French (Latin) manual taking its place, and in the sixteenth century the Greek word (enc/iir/d/on) too was introduced into the English language. And so accustomed had the nation grown to preferring strange and exotic words that when in the nineteenth century handbook made its re -appearance it was treated as an unwelcome intruder. The oldest example of the new use in the NED. is from 18 14, when an anonymous book was published with the title "A Handbook for modelling wax flowers." In 1833 Nicolas in the preface to a historical work wrote "What the Germans would term and which, if our language admitted of the expression, would have been the fittest title for it, ' The Handbook of History ' ", — but he dared not use that title himself. Three years later Murray the publisher ventured to call his guide-book "A Hand -Book for Travellers on the Continent", but reviewers as late as 1843 apologized for copying this coined word. In 1838 Rogers speaks of
Jespersen, the English language. 4
50 ni. Old English.
the word as a tasteless innovation, and Trench in his ''English Past and Present" (1854; 3''^ ed. 1856 p. 71) says, "we might have been satisfied with 'manual', and not put together that very ugly and very unnecessary word 'handbook', which is scarcely, I should suppose, ten or fifteen years old." Of late years, the word seems to have found more favour, but I cannot help thinking that state of language a very unnatural one where such a very simple, intelligible, and expressive word has to fight its way instead of being at once admitted to the jry best society. 48. The Old English language, then, _was_jd£h_. in pnggjhilitieSj arid its speakers were fortunate enough to jK)ssess a language that might with very little exertion on their part be made to express everything that human speech can be called upon to express. There can be no doubt that if the language had been left to itself, it would easily have remedied the defects that it cer- tainly had, for its resources were abundantly sufficient to provide natural and expressive terms even for such a new world of concrete things and abstract ideas as Christianity meant to the Anglo-Saxons. It is true that we often find Old English prose clumsy and unwieldy, but that is more the fault of the~nterSti»e-ilian of the language itself. A good^ prose "styre is everywhere a late acquirementT'a^d the work of whole generations of good authors is needed to bring about the easy flow of written prose, Neither, perhaps, were the subjects treated of in t^ extant Old EngHsh prose Hterature those most suitable for the development of the highest literary qualities. But if we look at such a closely connected language as Old Norse, we find in that language a rapid progress to a narrative prose style which is even now justly admired in its numerous sagas; and I do not see so great a diff"erence between the two languages as would justify
Prose and Poetry. c I
a scepticism with regard to the perfectibility of Old English in the same direction. And, indeed, we have positive proof in a few passages that the language had no mean power as a literary medium; I am thinking of Alfred's report of the two Scandinavian travellers Ohthere and Wulfstan, who visited him — the Fridtjof Nansen and Sven Hedin of those days — , of a few passages in the Saxon Chronicle, and especially of some pages of the I homilies of Wulfstan, where we find an impassioned { prose of real merit.
49. On the other hand, we have a^ycry^rich unci characteristic OH English-Noetic _literat«re, ranging from powerful pictures of battl^s-an4 -of fights with mythical monsters to^ligious poerns^JdyUie-t^esefifttions of an ideal country and sad accounts of moods of melanchotf: it is not here the place to dwell upon the literary merit of these poems, as we are only concerned with the language. But to anyone who has taken the trouble — and it is^>i trouble — to familiarize himself with that poetry, there is 1 a singular charm in the language it is clothed in, so j strangely different from modern poetic style. The move- ment is slow and leisurely; the measure of the verse does not_,JjiyiteIiiF~To" liurfy^ on^ rapJiUx,. but to linger deliberately on each line and. pause before..\Y.e go on to the^next. Nor are the poet's thoughts too light-footed; he likes to tell us the same JbJQg two or three times. Where a singIe~^?~^vould suffice he prefers to give arS couple of such descriptions as 'the brave prince, theC bright hero, noble in war, eager and spirited' etc., de^ scriptions which add no new trait to the mental picture, but which, nevertheless, impress us artistically and work upon our emotions, very much like repetitions and varia- tions in music. These effects are chiefly produced by heaping synonym on synonym, and the wealth of syno- nymous terms founci In Old English poetry is really
52 HI. Old English. .
astonishing, especially in certain domains, which had for centuries been the^io€k' subjects „ of poetryJ For ' hero ' /r^pfincre^ "we find in Beowulf alone~at least fHirty=se¥en 3rds (ae^eling. aescwiga. aglaeca. beadorinc. beaggyfa. bealdor. beorn. brego. brytta. byrnwiga. ceorl. cniht. cyning. dryhten. ealdor. eorl. e^elweard. fengel. frea. freca. fruma. haele^. hlaford. hyse. leod. mecg. nii^. oretta. rseswa. rinc. scota. secg. {Degn. {)engel. {)eoden. wer. wiga).^ For ' battle ' or 'fight' we have in Beowulf at least twelve synonyms (bea3irr~g«^. hea^o. hild. lindplega. ni^. orleg. raes. sacu. geslyht. gewinn. wig). Beowulf has seventeen expressions for the ' sea ' (brim, flod. gar- secg. hsef. hea^u? holm, holmwylm. hronrad. lagu. mere, merestraet. sae. seglrad. stream, wsed. waeg. y{) or the plural y^e), to which should be added thirteen more from other poems (flodweg. fliodwielm. flot. flotweg. holm- weg. hronmere. mereflod. merestream. saeflod. saeholm. saestream. sseweg. y{)mere). For 'ship' or 'boat' we have in Beowulf eleven words"^(bal. bl'tiutingi— ceol. fser. flota. naca. saebai. saegenga. ssewudu. scip. sundwudu) and in other poems at least sixteen more words (brim- hengest. brim{)isa. brimwudu. cnearr. flodwudu. flotscip. holmmaern. holmmaegen. merebat. merehengest. mere{)yssa. S3eflota. saehengest. saemearh. y{)bord. y{)hengest. y{)hof. y{)Hd. y{)Uda).
50. How are_we to .a.ccount for^.this wealth of syno- m^rp^ We~may subtract, iif we like, such compound words as are only variations of the same comparison, as when a ship is called a sea-horse, and then diff"erent words for sea (sae, mere, y|)) are combined with the words hengest ' stallion ' and mearh ' mare '; but even if this class is not counted, the number of synonyms is
I To which might be added, for instance, guma, maga, wrecca, etc.
Synonyms. 53
great enough to call for an explanation. A language always has many terms for those things that interes people in their daily doings; thus Sweet says: "if w open an Arabic dictionary at random, we may expec to find something about a camel: *a young camel', 'a old camel ', ' a strong camel ', * to feed a camel on th' fifth day ', ' to feel a camel's hump to ascertain its fat-' ness', all these being not only simple words, .but root- words".^ And when we read that the Araucanians ^ Chile) distinguished nicely in their languages betweem a great many shades of hunger, our compassion is ejj cited, as Gabelentz remarks.^ In the case of the A^lo- Saxons, however, we are not, perhaps, justified in drawing from the great number of words connected with the sea the conclusion that they were a sea-faring nation, but rather, as these words are chiefly poetical and used in prose, that the nation had been seafaring, but had given up that life while reminiscenses of it were still living in their imagination.
51. In many cases we are now unable to see any difference in signification between two or more words, but in the majority of these instances we may assume that even if, perhaps, no difference was made by the Anglo-Saxons of the historical times, their ancestors dixl not use them indiscriminately. It is characteristic o primitive peoples that their languages are highly special ized, so that where we are contented with one genejpfc word they have several specific terms. The aborigines of Tasmania had a name for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree, etc., but they had no equivalent for the expression ' a tree '. The Mohicans have words for cutting various objects, but none to convey cutting simply.
1 Sweet, The Practical Study of Language, 1899, p. 163.
2 Gabelentz, Sprachwissenschaft 463.
54 ni. Old English.
The Zulus have such words as ' red cow ', ' white cow ', 'brown cow', etc., but none for 'cow' generally. In Cherokee, instead of one word for 'washing' we find different words, according to what is washed, 'I wash myself, — my head, — the head of somebody else, — my face, — the face of somebody else, — my hands or feet, — my clothes, — dishes, — a child, etc'
52. Very little has been done hitherto to investigate the exact shades of meaning in Old English, but I have little doubt that when we now render a number of words indiscriminately by 'sword', they meant originally distinct kinds of swords, and so in other cases as well. With regard to washing, we find something corresponding, though in a lesser degree, to the exuberance of Cherokee, for we have two words, ivacsan {wascan) and pzvean, and if we go^ through all the examples given in Bos worth- Toller's Dictionary, we find that the latter word is always applied to the washing of persons (hands, feet, etc.), never to inanimate objects, while wascan is used especially of the washing of clothes, but also of sheep, of 'the inwards' (of the victim, Leviticus I, 9 and 13^). Observe also that wascan was originally only used in the present tense (as Kluge infers from -sk-), and we see a clear instance of that restriction in the use of words which is
■ so common in the old stages of the language, but which so often appears unnatural to us.
53. The old poetic language on the whole showed a great many ^divergences from everyday prose, in th'e choice of wards, in the^yord-fonnsT^aftd also in the
1 Cf. Jespersen, Progress in Language, London 1894, p. 250:-
2 In a late text (R. Ben. 59, 7) we find the contrast ag<Se7' ge fata [jivean, ge wcEterclcC^as wascan, which does not agree exactly with the distinction made above. — Curiously enough, in Old Norse, vaska is in the Sagas used only of washing the head with some kind of soap.
Language of poetry. ^^
construction of the sentences. This should not surprise us, for we find the same' thing everywhere, and the difference between the dictions of poetry and of prose is perhaps greater in old or more primitive languages than in those most highly developed. In Englisl certainly the distance between poetical and pros< language was much greater in this first period than has ever been since. The poetical language seems, have been to a certain extent identical all over England- regardless of dialect differences shown in prose writings^ King Alfred's prose is always distinctly West Saxon, when he breaks out occasionally into poetry, he uses . such forms as the preterite heht, instead of het, the only form found in his prose. We have sucb more or less artificial poetic dialects, which agree with no one of the actually spoken dialects, in Homeric Greek and else- \ where, for example in the Old Saxon Heliand according! to H. CoUitz.^ The hypothesis of a poetical language ofn this kind, absorbing forms and words from the different! j parts of the country where poetry was composed at all,]/ seems to me to offer a better explanation of the facta than the current theory according to which the bulk o(l Old English poetry was written at first in Northumbrians dialect and later translated into West-Saxon with some of the old Anglian forms kept inadvertently — and trans|] lated to such an extent that no trace of the originals should hive been preserved. The very few and small pieces extant in old Northumbrian dialect are easily accounted for, even if we accept the theory of a poetical koine or standard language prevailing in the time when Old English poetry flourished. But the whole question should be taken up by a more competent hand than mine.
I The Home of the Heliand; Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XVI, p. 123 ff. See also Bauer's Waldeckisches Worterbuch, 1901, p. 91* ff.
5 6 in. Old English.
54. The external.. .form of Old English poetry was in the main the' same as that of Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German poetry; besides definite rules of stress and quantity, which were more regular than might at first appear, but which were not. so strict as those of classical poetry, the chief words of each line were tied together by alliteration, that is, they began with the same sound, or, in the case of sp, st, sc, with the same sound group. The effect is peculiar, and may be ap- preciated in such a passage as this:
Him {)a ellenrof andswarode, wlanc Wedera leod, word sefter sprsec, heard under helme: 'We synt Higelaces beod-geneatas, Beowulf is min nama. Wille ic a-secgan suna Halfdenes, maerum |)eodne min aerende, aldre {)inum gif he us geunnan wile, {)3et we hine swa godne gretan moton.' Wulfgar ma[:elode, {)aet waes Wendla leod, wses his mod-sefa manegum gecy^ed, wig ond wisdom, ' Ic {)ses wine Deniga, frean Scildinga, frinan wille, beaga bryttan, swa {)U bena eart, {)eoden maerne ymb {)inne si^/
55. Very rarely, combined^ witb..^alliteration we find a sort . of rhyme or assonance. In the prose of the last period of Old English the same artistic means were often resorted to to heighten the effect, and we find in Wulf- stan's homilies such passages as the following where all tricks of phonetic harmony are brought into play: "in mordre and on mane, in susle and on sare, in wean and on wyrmslitum betweonan deadum and deoflum, in bryne and on biternesse, in bealewe and on bradum
I Beowulf 340 ff.
Alliteration. ^ n
ligge, in yrm{)um and on earfe^um, on swvltewale and sarum sorgiim, in fyrenum bryne and on fulnesse, in to^a gristbitum and in tintegrum " or again " {)aer is ece ece and {)8er is sorgimg and sargung, and a singal heof; ^jer is benda bite and dynta dyne, {)3er is wyrma slite and ealra waedla gripe, [:aer is warning and granung, J)aer is yrm^a gehwylc and ealra deofla gefjring".^
56. Nor has this love of alliterative word-combinations ever left the language; we find it very often in modem poetry, where however it is always subordinate to end- rhyme, and we find it in such stock phrases as — : it can neither 7//ake nor war me, as ^usy as ^ees (Chaucer,\ E 2422), /art and /arcel, /aint and /eeble, ^^ucks ana f/rakes (sometimes: play dick- duck -drake; Stevens'on, ]\Ierry Men 277), what ain't wissed ain't wourned (Pinero, ^lagistrate 5), as />old as ^rass, _/ree and yi^anke (Caxton, Reynard 41), <^arnes are blessings (Shakesp., All's I. 3. 28), as rool as a rucumber, as j/ill as (a) ^-/one (Chaucer, E 121, as any stoon E 171, he stode stone style, Malory 145), over j-/ile and j-/one (Chaucer B 1988), from /op to /oe (from the top to toe, Shakesp. R3 III. i. 155), wight and wain, /uss and ylime, wanners wakyth wan, care X'illed a cat, rack and ruin, wature and nurture (Shakesp. Tp. IV. i. 189; English Men of Science, their Nature and Nurture, the title of a book by F. Galton), etc. etc., even to Thackeray's ''faint fashionable fiddle- faddle and feeble court slipslop ". Alliteration sometimes- modifies the meaning of a word, as when we apply chick to human offspring only in * no chick or child ', or when we say ' a /abour of /ove ', without giving to labour the shade of meaning which it generally has as different
I Wulfstan, Homilies, ed. by Napier, p. 187, 209. It is worthv of note that these poetical flights occur in descriptions
of hell.
58 in. Old English.
from ivork. The word foe, too, which is generally used in poetry or archaic prose only, is often used in ordinary prose for the sake of alliteration in connection with yriend (" Was it an irruption of a friend or a foe? " Meredith, Egoist 439; "The Danes of Ireland had changed from foes to friends". Green, Short Hist. 107). Indeed alliterations come so natural to English people, that Tennyson says that " when I spout my lines first, they come out so alliteratively that I have sometimes no end of trouble to get rid of the alliteration ".^ I take up the thread of my narrative after this short digression.
I Life, by his Son, Tauchn. ed. II. 285. Cf. what the Danish poet and metricist E. v. d. Recke says to the same effect, Principerne for den danske verskunst 1881, p. 112, and see also the amusing note by De Quincey, Opium -Eater p. 95 (Macmillan's Library of Eng. Classics): "Some people are irri- tated, or even fancy themselves insulted, by overt acts of alliteration, as many people are by puns. On their account let me say, that, althgugh there are here eight separate f's in less than half a sentence, this is to be held as pure accident. In fact, at one time there were nine f's in the original cast of the sentence, until I, in pity of the affronted people, substituted female agent iox female friend!'
Chapter IV.
The Scandinavians.
57. The Old English language, as we have seen, was essentially self-sufficing; its foreign elements were few and did not interfere with the character of the lan- guage as a whole, ^ut we sljall now consider three very important factors in the development of the lan- guage, three superstructures, as it were, that came to be erected on the Anglo-Saxon foundation, each of them modifying the character of the language, and each pre- paring the ground for its successor.!. A _ScandinaviaJi element,*^a French element, and anL,atJn__sleinent now enter largely into the texture of the English language, and as each element is characteristically diflferent from the others, we shall treat them separately. First, then, the Scandinavian element,^
I The chief works on these loan-words, most of them treating nearly exclusively phonetic questions, are: Erik Bjork- man, Scajidinavian Loa?i- Words in Middle Efiglish (Halle I 1900 II 1902 . an excellent book; Erik Brate, Nordische Lehn. ivorter im Orrmulum (Beitrage zur Gesch. d. deutschen Sprache X, Halle 1884 ; Arnold Wall, A Contribution towards the Study of the Scandifiavian Element in the English Dia- lects (Anglia XX, Halle 1898); G. T. Hom, Scandinavian Influence on Southern Lowlaiid Scotch New York, 1900^. The dialectal material of the two last-mentioned treatises is neces- sarily to a great extent of a doubtful character. See also Kluge in Paul's Grundrifi d..germ. PhiloL 2^ ed. p. 931 ff. (Strafiburg 1899), Skeat, Principles of English Etyinology
5o IV. The Scandinavians.
58. The English had resided for about four centuries in the country called after them, and during that time they had had no enemies from abroad. The only wars they had been engaged in were internal struggles between kingdoms belonging to, but not yet feeling themselves as one and the same nation. The Danes were to them not deadly enemies but a brave nation from over the sea, that they felt to be of a kindred race with them- selves. The peaceful relations between the two nations may have been more intimate than is now generally supposed. An important discovery, made in 1902 by two American scholars^, seems to throw fresh light on the subject by showing that an interesting, but hitherto mysterious Old English poem which is generally ascrib- ed to the eighth century is a translation of a lost Scan- dinavian poem dealing with an incident in what was i later to become the Volsunga Saga. This proves a literary intercourse between England and Scandinavia previous to the Viking ages, and therefore accords very well with the fact that the old Danish legends about King Hroth- gar and his beautiful hall Heorot were preserved in England, even more faithfully than by the Danes them- selves. Had the poet of Beowulf been able to foresee all that his countrymen w^ere destined to suffer at the hands of the Danes, he would have chosen another subject for his great epic, and we should have missed the earliest noble outcome of the sympathy so often
p. 453 ff. (Oxford 1887), and some other works mentioned be- low. I have excluded doubtful material; but a few of the words I give as Scandinavian, have been considered as native by other writers^ In most cases I have been convinced by the reasons given by Bjorkman.
I W. W. Lawrence, The First Riddle of Cy?iewul/; W. H. Schofield, Signy's Lament. (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. XVII. Baltimore 1902.)
Vikings. 6 1
displayed by Englishmen for the fortunes of Denmark. But as it is, in Beowulf no coming events cast their shadow before, and the English nation seems to have been taken entirely by surprise when in 7Q3 aPanish fleet appeared at Lindisfarne and the long series of in- roads began, in which 'J^anes-'-andJlheathens'' became synonyms for murderers and plunderers. At first the strangers came in small troops and disappeared as soon as they had filled their boats with gold and other valu- ables; but from the middle of the ninth century, "the character of the attack wholly changed. The petty squadrons which had till now harassed the coast of Britain made way for larger hosts than had as yet fallen on any country in the west; while raid and foray were replaced by the regular campaign of armies who march- ed to conquer, and whose aim was to settle on the land they won t. ^ Battles were fought with various success, but on the whole the Scandinavians proved the stronger race and made good their footing in their new country. In the pj^^f^ r^f W<^rlrr|o]-f^ (^7^)> King Alfred, the noblest and staunchest defender of his native soil, was fain to leave them about two-thirds of what we now call England; all Northumbria, all East Anglia and the half of Central England made out the district called the J^anelaw.
5g. Still, the relations between the two races were not altogether hostile. King Alfred effected not only the repulse of the Danes; he also gave us the first geographical description of the countries that the fierce invaders came from, in the passage already referred to (§ 48). Under the year 959, one of the chroniclers says of the Northumbrian king that he was' widely revered
I J. R. Green, A Short History of the Eiigl. People, Illustr. ed. p. 87.
52 IV. The Scandinavians.
on account of his piety, but in one respect he was blamed: "he loved foreign vices too much and gave heathen (t. e. Danish) customs a firm footing in this country, alluring mischievous foreigners to come to this land." And in the only extant private letter in Old English^ the unknown correspondent tells his brother Edward that "it is a shame for all of you to give up the English customs of your fathers and to prefer the customs of heathen men, who grudge you your very life; you show thereby that you despise your race and your forefathers with these bad habits, when you dress shame- fully in Danish wise with bared neck and blinded eyes (with hair falling over the eyes?)." We see, then, that the English were ready to learn from, as well as to fight with the Danes. It is a small, but significant fact that in the glorious patriotic war -poem written shortly after the battle of Maldon (993) which it celebrates, we find for the first time one of the most important Scan- dinavian loan-words, to_call\ this shows how early the linguistic influence of the Danes began to be felt.
60. A great number of Scandinavian families settled in England never to return, espejcially in Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire, but also in Yorkshire, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, etc. Numerous names of places, ending in -hy^ -thorp (-torp), -beck, -dale, -thwaite etc., bear witness to the preponderance of the invaders in great parts of England, as do also many names of per- sons found in English sources from about 1000 A. d.^ But these foreigners were not felt by the natives to be for- eigners in the same manner as the English themselves had been looked upon as foreigners by the Celts. As
1 Edited by Kluge, Engl. Studien VIII, 62.
2 wSee the list in Bjorkman p. 24 ff". Cf. also Steenstrup in Danmarks Riges Historie I 412.
Danish settlements. 63
Green has it^, "when the wild burst of the storm was over, land, people, government reappeared unchanged. England still remained England; the conquerors sank quietly into the mass of those around them; and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ. The secret of this difference between the two invasions was that the battle was no longer between men of different races. It was no longer a fight between Briton and German, between Englishman and Welshman. The life of these northern folk was in the main the life of the earlier Englishmen. Their customs, their religion, their social order were the same; they were in fact kinsmen bringing back to an England that had forgotten its origins the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers. Nowhere over Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the combatants men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the fusion of the northmen with their foes was nowhere so peaceful and so complete." — It should be remembered, too, that it was a Dane, King Knut, who achieved what every English ruler had failed to achieve, the union of the whole of England into one peaceful realm,
61. King Knut was a Dane, and in the Saxon Chro- nicle the invaders were always called Danes, but from other sources we know that there were Norwegians too among the settlers. Attempts have been made to de- cide by linguistic tests which of the two nations had the greater influence in England ^ a question beset
1 J. R. Green, A Short History of the E. People, Illustr. ed. p. 84.
2 Brate thought the loan-words exclusively Danish; Kluge, Wall, and Bjorkman consider some of them Danish, others Norwegian, though in details they arrive at different results. See especially Bjorkman, Zur dialektischen proveiiienz der 7wrdischen lehiiworter ini Englischen, Sprakvetensk. sallskapets forhandlingar 1898 — 1901, Upsala, and his larger work, p. 281 ff.
5 I IV. The Scandinavians.
with considerable difficulties and which need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that some words, such as ME. boun, Mod. hound 'ready (to go to)' husk, boon, addle, point rather to a Norwegian origin, while others, such as -hy in place-names, die (?), hooth, droivn, ME. sum ^as', agree better with Danish forms. In the great majority of cases, however, the Danish and Norwegian forms were at that time either completely or nearly identical, so that no decision as to the special homeland of the Eng- lish loans is warranted. In the present work I there- fore leave the question open, quoting Danish or ON (Old Norse, practically = Old Icelandic) forms according as it is most convenient in each case, meaning simply Scandinavian.^
62. In order rightly to estimate the Scandinavian influence it is very important to remember how great the similarity was between Old English and Old Norse. To those who know only modern English and modern Danish, this resemblance is greatly obscured, first en account of the dissimilarities that are unavoidable when two nations live for nearly one thousand years with very little intercommunication, and when there is, accordingly, nothing to counterbalance the natural tendency towards differentiation, and secondly on account of each nation having been in the meantime subject to a powerful foreign influence, English from French, and Danish from Low German. But even now we can see the essential conformity between the two languages, which in those times was so much greater as each stood so much nearer to the common source. An enonnous number
I Bjorkman's final words are: "These facts would seem to point to the conclusion that a considerable number o£j Danes were found everywhere in the Scandinavian settlements, while the existence in great numbers of Norwegians was con-«| fined to certain definite districts. "
'*^y
Similarities. 5^
of words were then identical in the two languages, so that we should now have been utterly unable to tell which language they had come from, if we had had no English literature before the invasion; nouns such as man, wife, father, mother, folk, house, thing, life, sorrow, winter, summer, verbs like will, can, meet, come, bring, hear, see, think, smile, ride, stand, still, sit, set, adjectives and adverbs like full, wise, well, better, best, mine and thine, over and under, etc. etc. The conse- quence was that an Englishman would have no great difficulty in understanding a viking, nay we have posi- tive evidence that Norse people looked upon the En- glish language as one with their own. In many cases, however, the words were already so dissimilar that it offers no difficulty to distinguish them, for instance, when they contained an original ai, which in OE. had become long a (OE. ^ra// = ON. sveinjt), oi an, which in OE. had become ea (OE. leas = ON. lauss, louss), • or sk, which in English became s/i (OE. scyr/e, now"^ s/i/r/ = ON. skyr/a). z*^^
63. But there are, of course, many words to which no such reliable criteria apply, and the difficulty in de- ciding the origin of words is further compHcated by the fact that the English would often modify a word, when adopting it, according to some more or less vague feel- ing of the English sound that corresponded generally to this or that Scandinavian sound. Just as the name of the English king ^E^elred Eadgares sunu is mentioned in the Norse saga of Gunnlaugr Ormstunga, as A^alra^r Jatgeirsson, in the same manner s/ny/ is an Anglicized form of Norse skip/a'^) ON. hru^laup 'wedding' was modified into hrydlop (cf. OE. hryd 'bride'; a consistent Anglicizing would be brydhleap); ttbetide is unchanged in
I In ME. forms with sk are also found; Bjorkman p. 126.
Jespersen, the English language. 3
56 IV. The Scandinavians.
Orrms ti^etinde, but was generally changed into tidhigie)^ cf. OE. tid and the common Eng. ending -ing\ ON. Itjonusta 'service' appears as '^eonest, ^enest, and ^eg7iest\ ON. words with the negative prefix u are made into English un-, e. g. unti??ia, tinbain (ON. ubeinn), unrad or unrcEd^ ; cf. also wcEpnagetcBc below, and others.
64. Sometimes the Scandinavians gave a fresh lease of life to obsolescent or obsolete native words. The preposition ////, for instance, is found only once or twice in OE. texts belonging to the pre-Scandinavian period, but after that time it begins to be exceedingly common in the North, from whence it spreads southward; it was used as in Danish with regard both to time and space and it is still so used in Scotch. Similarly dale (OE. dcel) ** appears to have been reinforced from Norse [dat], for it is in the North that the word is a living geographi- cal name" (NED.), and ham, Scotch bairn (OE. bearri) would probably have disappeared in the North, as it did in the South, if it had not been strengthened by the Scandinavian word. The verb blend, too, seems to owe its vitality (as well as its vowel) to Old Norse, for blandan was very rare in Old English.
65. We also see in England a phenomenon, which, I think, is parallelled nowhere else to such an extent, namely the existence side by side for a long time, some- times for centuries, of two slightly differing forms for the same word, one the original English form and the other Scandinavian. In the following the first form is the native one, the form after the dash the imported one.
66. In some cases both forms survive in standard speech; they have then, as a rule, developed slightly different meanings: whole (formerly hool) ■ — hale\ bolh
I Though the Scand. form is also found in a few in- stances; oulist 'listless', oumautin 'swoon'.
Parallel forms. 57
were united in the old phrase *'hail and hooV / ?io — ?ia}'; the latter is now used only to add an amplifying remark ("it is enough, nay too much"), but formerly it was used to answer a question, though it was not so strong a negative as no ("Is it true? Nay." "Is it not true. No'') /rear — raise j from — fro^ now used only in "to and fro " / shirt — skirt j shot — scot j shriek — screak, screech j edge
— ^gS ^^' (^o ^gS o^> *^o incite'). OE. leas survives only in the suffix -less (nameless, etc.), while the Scand. loose has entirely supplanted it as an independent w^ord.
67. In other cases, the Scandinavian form survives in dialects only, while the other belongs to the literary language: dew — dag 'dew, thin rain; vb. to drizzle'/ true — trigg ' faithful, neat, tidy ' / leap — loup I neat — nowt ' cattle ' / church — kirk ^ / churn — kirn ^ / chest — kist ^ / ??iouth
— mun j yard — garth ^a. small piece of enclosed ground'. All these dialectal forms belong to Scotland or the North of England.
68. As a rule, however, one of the forms has in course of time been completely crowded out by the other. The surviving form is often the native form, as in the following instances : goat — g^yl^ I heathen — hey then, hai^en I loath — laith / grey — gra, gro /few — f'^i/oj as hies) — ask /fish — fisk j naked — naken /yarn — gam j bench
— ben?ik / star — sterne / worse — werre. Similarly the Scand. thethen, hethen, hwethen are generally supposed to have been discarded in favour of the native forms, OE. ^a?ion, heonan, hicanon , to which was added an adverbial s: thence, hence, whence, though these modern forms may equally well be due to the Scandinavian ones, whose vowels they keep ; for the loss of th cf. sijice from sithence {sithens, OE. sippan -}- s).
I These ^-words are, however, subject to some doubt.
53 IV. The Scandinavians.
69. We now come to those instances in which the intruder succeeded in ousting the legitimate heir, and shall begin with egg. Caxton in a well-known passage gives us a graphic description of the struggle between this form and the native ey\
And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used and spoken whan I was borne. For we englysshe men ben borne under the domynacyon of the mone, whiche is never stedfaste, but ever waverynge, wexynge one season, and waneth & dyscreaseth another season. And that comyn en- glysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyse, for to have say led over the see into zelande. And for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them And one of theym named sheffelde, ^ a mercer, cam in-to an hows and axed for mete; and specyally he axyd after eggys. And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren. Certaynly it is harde to playse every man, by cause of dyversite & chaunge of langage.^
Very soon after this was 'written, the old English forms <?j', eyren finally went out of use.
70. Among other word-pairs similarly fated may be
1 Probably a north-country man.
2 Caxton's Eneydos, p. 2 — 3, (E. E. T. S. Extra Se- ries 57.)
Native ^vords discarded. 69
mentioned: OE. a, ME. ^'eyer' — ay (both were found together in the frequent phrase 'for ay and 06' j tho (cf. those) — they I theighy thah, theh and other forms — though j szvon — swam (boatswain , etc.) / ibirde — bir^h / eie — awe j ^unresdcpj — Thursday j in (on) ^e lifte — on lofte, now aloftj sivuster — sister j chetel — kettle] and finally not a few words with English y over against Scand. g: yete — get jy erne 'care, heed' — gom(e), dialectal gauf/i 'sense, wit, tact'/ ye/de — ^w/Zo' 'fraternity, association' /^/z'^ or yeve — gwe / yift — gift. In this last -mentioned word gift, not only is the initial sound due to Scandinavian, but also the modern meaning, for the Old English word meant 'the price paid by a suitor in consideration of receiving a woman to wife' and in the plural 'marriage, wedding'. No subtler linguistic influence can be imagined that this, where a word has been modified both with regard to pronunciation and meaning, and curiously enough has by that process been brought nearer to the verb from which it was originally derived {give).
71. In some words the old native form has survived, but has adopted the signification attached in Scandinavian to the corresponding word; thus dream in OE. meant 'joy', but in ME. the modern meaning of 'dream' is taken over from ON. drauinr, Dan. drdm\ analogous cases are bread (OE. bread 'fragment'), bloom (OE. bloma 'mass of metal'). In one word, this same process of sense-shifting has historical significance; the OE. eorl meant vaguely a 'nobleman' or more loosely 'a brave warrior' or 'man' generally; but under Knut it took over the meaning of the Norse jarl 'an under- king' or governor of one of the great divisions of the realm, thus paving the way for the present signification of earl as one of the grades in the (French) scale of rank. OE. freoyid meant only 'friend', whereas O^. frcpjidi, V)2.w. frcEnde means 'kinsman', but in Orrm and other ME. texts the word sometimes has the
yo VI. The Scandinavians.
Scand. meaning^ and so it has to this day in Scotch (see many instances in J. Wright's Dialect Dictionary, e. g. "We are near friends, but we dont speak"); the Scotch proverb "Friends agree best at a distance" corresponds to the Danish "Fraende er frsende vaerst". OE.^ dwellan or divelian meant only *to lead astray, lead into error, thwart' or intr. *to go astray'^; the intransi- tive meanings, 'to tarry, abide, remain in a place', which correspond with the Scandinavian meanings, are not found till the beginning of the 13 th century. OE. ploh is found only with the meaning of 'a measure of land' (still in Scotch pleuch), but in ME. it came to mean the implement plough (OE. sulh) as in ON. plogr. OE. holm meant 'ocean', but the modern word owes its signi- fication of 'islet, flat ground by a river' to Scandina- vian holm.
"jl. These were cases of native words conforming to foreign speech habits; in other instances the Scandina- vians were able to place words at the disposal of the English which agreed so well with other native words as to be readily associated with them, nay which were felt to be fitter expressions for the ideas than the Old English words and therefore survived. Death (deaj)) and dead are OE. words, but the corresponding verbs were steorfan and sweltan; now it is obvious that Danish dje^ya (now dir) was more easily associated with the noun and the adjective than the old verbs, and accordingly it was soon adopted {deyen, now die), while sweltan was discarded and the other verb acquired the more special signification
1 Saxon Chron. 1135, which is given in the NED. as an instance of this meaning, appears to me to be doubtful.
2 Dwelode, in ^Ifric, Homilies i. 384, is wrongly trans- lated by Thorpe 'continued', so that Kluge is wrong as giving this passage as the earliest instance of the modern meaning; it means 'wandered, went astray'.
Ready associations. y I
of starving. ScEfe, Mod. E. seat, was adopted because it was at once associated with the verbs to sit and to set. The most important importation of this kind was that of the pronominal forms they, them and their, which entered readily into the system of English pronouns beginning with the same sound {the, that, this) and were felt to be more distinct than the old native forms which they sup- planted. Indeed these were liable to constant confusion with some forms of the singular number {he, him, her) after the vowels had become obscured, so that he and hie, him and heom, her {hire) and heora could no longer be kept easily apart. We thus find the obscured form, which was written a (or 'a), in use for 'he' till the be- ginning of the 1 6 th century (compare the dialectal use, for instance in Tennyson's ''But Parson a cooms an' a goas"), and in use for 'she' and for 'they' till the end of the 14 th century. Such a «tate of things would naturally cause a great number of ambiguities; but although the //^- forms must consequently be reckoned a great advantage to the language, it took a long time before the old forms were finally displaced, nay, the dative hem still survives in the form 'em ("take 'em"), which is now by people ignorant of the history of the language taken to be a shortened them\ her 'their' is the only form for the possessive of the plural found in Chaucer (who says they in the nominative) and there are two or three instances in Shakespeare. One more Scandinavian pronoun is same, which was speedily associated with the native adverb satne. (swa same ^'similarly'). Other words similarly connected with the native stock are ivant (adj. and vb.), which reminded the English of their own wan 'wanting', wana 'want' and ivanian Svane, lessen', and ///, which must have appeared like a stunted form of evil, especially to a Scotchman who had made his own devil into deil and even into ein.
y2 IV. The Scandinavians.
73. If now we try to find out by means of the loan- word test (see above, § 31) what were the spheres of human knowledge or activity in which the Scandinavians were able to teach the English, the first thing that strikes us is that the very earliest stratum of loanwords ^, words which by the way were soon to disappear again from the lang- uage^, relate to war and more particularly to the navy: orrest 'battle', fylcian 'to collect, marshal', //J 'fleet', harda^ cnear, scegp different sorts of warships, /la 'rowlock'. This agrees perfectly well with what the Saxon Chronicle relates about the English being inferior to the heathen in ship-building, until King Alfred undertook to construct a new kind of warships.^
74. Next, we find a great many Scandinavian law- terms; they have been examined by Professor Steenstrup in his well-known work on "Danelag".* He has there been able, in an astonishing number of cases, to show conclusively that the vikings modified the legal ideas of the Anglo-Saxons, and .that numerous new law-terms sprang up at the time of the Scandinavian settlements which had previously been utterly unknown. Most of them were simply the Danish or Norse words, others were Anglicizings, as when ON. vapnatak was made into wcrpnagetcEc (later wapefiiake) or when ON. heimsokn appears as hamsocn 'house-breaking or the fine for that offence', or saklauss as sacleas 'innocent'. The most important of these juridical imports is the word law itself, known in England from the loth century in the form lagii, which must have been the exact Scandinavian form, as it is
1 See Bjorkman, p. 5.
2 They were naturally supplanted by French words, see below.
3 Therefore, I cannot believe that ON. bat is a loan from OE. bat (boat), although it is difficult to account for the vowel by any other theory.
4 Copenhagen 1882 ( — Normanncrne IV).
Legal terms. 7^
the direct fore-runner of the ON. form log, ODan. logh. ^ By-law is now felt to be a compound of the preposition hydLiidlaw, but originally />rwas the Danish by^iov^n, village' (found in Derby, Whitby, etc.), and the Danish genitive- ending is preserved in the other English form hyrlaw. Other words belonging to this class are nihing 'criminal, wretch', thriding 'third part', preserved in the mutilated form riding'^, rape (ON. hreppr , hrappr, a division in Sussex), carlman 'man' as opposed to woman, honda or htmda 'peasant', lysing 'freedman', ^rcell, Mod. thrall, vial 'suit, agreement', wi]jennal 'counter-plea, defence', seht 'agreement', ste/nan 'summon', crajian now crave, landcop or anglicized lajidceap and lahcop or lahceap (for the signi- fication see Steenstrup p. 192 ff.); i-an 'robbery'; ififatigen- ^eof later infangthicf 'jurisdiction over a thief apprehended within the manor'. It will be seen that with the excep- tion of laii\ bylaw, thrall and crave — the least juridical of them all — these Danish law-terms have disappeared 1 from the language as a simple consequence of the Nor- man conquerors taking into their own hands the courts of justice and legal affairs generally. Steenstrup's re- search, which is largely based on linguistic facts, may be thus summarized. The Scandinavian settlers re-organized 1 the administration of the realm and based it on a uni- form and equable division of the country ; taxes were im- \ posed and collected after the Scandinavian pattern; in- stead of the lenient criminal law of former times, a virile \ and powerful law was introduced which was better capable
1 The OE. word was ce or aiu, which meant 'marriage' as well and was restricted to that sense in late OE., until it was displaced by the French word.
2 North-thridifjg-''hemg heard as Xorth-riding\ in the case of the two other ridings of Yorkshire, East-thriding and West- thriding, the M-sound was assimilated to the preceding /, the result in all three cases being the same misdivision of the word.
J A IV. The Scandinavians.
of intimidating fierce and violent natures. More stress was laid on personal honour, as when a sharp line was drawn between stealthy or clandestine crimes and op«n crimes attributable to obstinacy or Tindictiveness. Com- merce, too, was regulated so as to secure trade. ^
75. Apart from these legal words it would be very difficult to point out any single group of words be- longing to the same sphere from which a superiority of any description might be concluded. Window is borrow- ed from vindauga (^wind-eye'); but we dare not infer that the northern settlers taught the English anything in architecture, for the word stands quite alone; besides OE. had another word for 'window', which is also based on the eye-shape of the windows in the old wooden houses: eag^yrel 'eye-hole' (cf. nos])}'rel nostril).^ Nor does the borrowing of steak, ME. steyke from ON. steik prove any superior xooking on the part of the vikings. But it is possible that the Scandinavian knives (ME. knifhom. Scand. knif) were better than or at any rate different from those of other nations, for the word was introduced into French {canif) as well as into English.
76. If, then, we go through the lists of loan-words, looking out for words from which conclusions as to the state of culture of the two nations might be drawn, we shall be doomed to disappointment, for they all seem to denote objects and actions of the most commonplace description and certainly do not represent any new set of ideas hitherto unknown to the people adopting them.
I
1 Steenstrup, Danelag p. 391 fF. ,f
2 Most European languages use the Lat. fenestra (G. fenster, Dutch venster, Welsh ffenestef), which was also impor- . ted from French into English 2iS fenester, in use from 1290 to 1548. Slavonic languages have okno, derived from oko 'eye'. On the eye -shape of old windows see R. Meringer, Indogerm. Forschungen XVI 1904, p. 125.
Commonplace words. 7^
We find such ever^^'day nouns as htisba?id, fellow, sky, skull, skin, zving, haven, roof, skill, gaie'^ , etc. Among the adjectives adopted from Scand. we find meek, iem^ scant, loose, odd^, ivrong , ill, ugly, rotUn. The impression produced perhaps by this Hst that only unpleasant ad- jectives came into English from Scandinavia, is easily shown to be wrong, for happy and seemly too are derived from Danish roots, not to speak of star, which was com- mon in Middle English for 'great', and dialectal ad- jectives like glegg 'clear-sighted, clever', heppen 'neat, tidy', gain 'direct, suitable, handy', (Sc. the gainest way, ON. hinn gegnsta veg, Dan. den genneste vej). The only thing common to the adjectives, then, is seen to be / their extreme commonplaceness, and the same impression is confirmed by the verbs, as for instance, thrive, die, cast, hit, take, call, want, scare, scrape, scream, scrub, scowl, skulk, bask, drown, ransack, gape, guess (doubtful), etc. To these must be added numerous words preserved only in dialects (north country and Scotch) such as lathe 'barn' Dan. lade, hoast 'cough' Dan. hoste, ^ 'move' Dan. flytte, gar 'make, do' Dan. gore, lait 'search for' Dan. lede, red up 'to tidy' Dan. rydde op, keek in 'peep in', ket 'carrion, horseflesh, tainted flesh, rubbish', originally 'flesh, meat as Dan. kjerd, etc., all of them words belonging to the same famfliar sphere, and having nothing about them that might be called technical or indicative of a higher culture. The same is true of that large class of words which have been mentioned above (§ 65 — 72), where the Scandinavians did not properly bring the word itself, but modified either the form or the signification of a
1 Gate 'way, road, street', frequent in some northern towns in the names of streets, frequent also in ME. adverbial phrases algate, anofhergathe's] corrupted into ajiotherguess), etc. In- the sense 'manner of going' it is now spelt gait.
2 Cf. North-Jutland dialect (\'endsysser oj 'odd 'number}'.
-5 IV. The Scandinavians.
native word; among them we have seen such everyday words as get^ gi'^'^-, sister^ loose, birth, aive, bread, dream, etc.^ It is precisely the most indispensable elements of the language that have undergone the strongest Scandi- navian influence, and this is raised into certainty when we discover that a certain number of those grammatical words, the small coin of language, which Chinese gram- marians term 'empty words', and which are nowhere else transferred from one language to another, have been taken over from Danish into English: pronouns Hke they, them, their, the same and probably both; a modal verb like Scotch maun, mun (ON. munu, Dan. mon, monne)', comparatives like 7ninne 'lesser', min 'less', helder 'rather'; pronominal adverbs like hethen, thethen, whethen 'hence, thence, whence', samen 'together'; conjunctions like though, oc 'and', sum, which for a long time seemed likely to displace the native siva (so) after a comparison, until it was itself displaced by eallsiva^as', prepositions like yr^* and //// (see above § 64).^ '
77. It is obvious that all these non- technical words can show us nothing about mental or industrial superiority; they do not bear witness as to the currents of civili- zation; what was denoted by them cannot have been new to the English; we have here no new ideas, only new names. Does that mean, then, that the loan-word test which we are able to apply elsewhere, fails in this one case, and that linguistic facts can tell us nothing
1 It is noticeable, too, that the native word heaven has been more and more restricted to the figurative and religious acceptation, while the Danish sky is used exclusively of the visible firmament; sky originally meant cloud.
2 Another preposition, umbe, was probably to a large extent due to Scandinavian, the native form being yt?ibe, embe; but perhaps in some texts u in umbe may represent the vowel [y].
Intimate fusion. n-j
about the reciprocal relations of the two races? No; on the contrary, the snggestiveness of these loans leaves nothing to be desired, they are historically significant enough. If the English loan-words in this period extend to spheres where other languages do not borrow, if the Scandinavian and the English languages were woven more intimately together, 'the reason must be a more in- timate fusion of the two nations than is seen anywhere else. They fought like brothers and afterwards settled down peaceably, like brothers, side by side. The num- bers of the Danish and Norwegian settlers must have been considerable, else they would have disappeared without leaving such traces in the language.
78. It might at the first blush seem reasonable to think that what was going on among Scandinavian sett- lers in England was parallel to what we see going on now in the United States. But there is really no great similarity between the two cases. The language of Scandinavian and other settlers in America is often a curious mixture, but it is very important to notice that it is Danish or Norwegian, sprinkled with English words: "han har fencet sin farm og venter en god krop" he has fenced his farm and expects a good crop; "lad os krosse streeten" let us cross the street, „tag det trae" take that tray; "hun suede ham i courten for 25000 daler" etc. But this is toto aelo different from the English language of the middle ages. And if we do not take into account those districts where Scandinavians constitute the immense majority of the population and keep up their old speech as pure as circumstances will permit, the children or at any rate the children's child- ren of the immigrants speak English, and very pure English too without any Danish admixture. The English language of America has no loan-words worth mentioning from the languages of the thousands and thousands of
-•8 VI. The Scandinavians.
Germans, Scandinavians, French, Poles and others that have settled there. Nor are the reasons far to seek.^ The immigrants come in small groups and find their predecessors half, or more than half, Americanized; those belonging to the same country cannot, accordingly, main- tain their nationality collectively; they come in order to gain a Hvelihood, generally • in subordinate positions^ where it is important to each of them separately to bel as little difi'erent as possible from his new surroundings,] in garb, in manners, and in language. The faults each- individual commits in talking English, therefore, can' have no consequences of lasting importance, and at any rate his children are in most respects situated like the children of the natives and learn the same language in essentially the same manner. In old times, of course, many a Dane in England would speak his mother-tongue with a large admixture of English, but that has no signi- ficance in linguistic history, for in course of time the descendants of the immigrants would no longer learn Scandinavian as their mother-tongue, but English. But that which is important, is the fact of the English them- selves intermingling their own native speech with Scan- dinavian elements. Now the manner in which this is done shows us that the" culture or civilization of the Scandinavian settlers cannot have been of a higher order than that of the English, for then we should have seen in the loan-words special groups of technical terms indic- ative of this superiority. Neither can their state of cul- ture have been much inferior to that of the English, for
I See G. Hempl's valuable paper on Language -Rivalry and Speech-Differentiation in the case of Race Mixture. (Trans- act, of the Amer. Philol- Association, XXIX, 1898, p. 35). Hempl's very short mention of the Scandinavians in England, is, perhaps, the least satisfactory portion of his paper; none of his classes apply to our case.
Speech mixture. jg
in that case they would have adopted the language of the natives without appreciably influencing it. This is what happened with the Goths in Spain, with the Franks in France and with the Danes in Normandy, in all of which cases the Germanic tongues were absorbed into the Romance languages.^ It is tme that the Scandina- vians were, for a short time at least, the rulers of Eng- land, and we have found in the juridical loan-words linguistic corroboration of this fact; but the great majority of the settlers did not belong to the ruling class. Their social standing must have been, on the whole, slightly superior to the average of the English, but the difference cannot have been great, for the bulk of Scandinavian words are of a purely democratic character. This is clearly brought out by a comparison with the French words introduced in the following centuries, for here language confirms what history tells us, that the French represent the rich, the ruling, the refined, the aristocrat- ic element in the English nation. How different is the impression made by the Scandinavian loan-words. They are homely expressions for things and actions of every- day importance; their character is utterly democratic.
I It is instructive to contrast the old speech-mixture in England with what has been going on for the last two cen- turies in the Shetland Islands. Here the old Norwegian dialect ("Norn") has perished as a consequence of the natives consi- dering it more genteel to speak English (Scotch). All common words of their speech now are English, but they have retained a certain number of Norn words, all of them technical, deno- ting different species of fish, fishing implements, small parts of the boat or of the house and its primitive furniture, those signs in clouds, etc., from which the weather was forecast at sea, technicalities of sheep rearing, nicknames for things which appear to them ludicrous or ridiculous, etc. — all of them significant of the language of a subjugated and poor popu- lation. (J. Jakobsen, Det norr^ne sprog pa Shetland, K0ben- havn 1897.)
gQ IV. The Scandinavians.
The difference is also shown by so many of the French words having never penetrated into the speech of the people, so that they have been known and used only by the 'upper ten', while the Scandinavian ones are used by high and low alike; their shortness too agrees with the monosyllabic character of the native stock of words, consequently they are far less felt as foreign elements than many French words; in fact, in many statistical calculations of the proportion of native to imported words in English, Scandinavian words have been more or less inadvertently reckoned to the native ele- ments. Just as it is impossible to speak or write in English about higher intellectual or emotional subjects or about fashionable mundane matters without drawing largely upon the French (and Latin) elements, in the same manner Scandinavian words will crop up together wdth the Anglo-Saxon ones in any conversation on the thousand nothings of daily life or on the five or six things of paramount importance to high and low alike. An Eng- lishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinav- ian words; they ■ are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare. To this element of his language an Englishman might apply what Wordsworth says of the daisy:
Thou unassuming common-place Of Nature, with that homely face, And yet with something of a grace Which Love makes for thee! —
K
79. The form in which the words were borrowed occasions very few remarks. Those nouns which in Scand. had the nominative ending -r, did not keep it, the kernel only of the w^ord (== accus.) being taken over. In one instance the Norse genitive ending appears
I
Grammar. 8 1
in English; the Norse phrase a nd//ar pe/i 'in the middle of the night' (^^/ means 'power, strength') was Anglicized into on nighter tale (Cursor Mundi), or hi nighter tale i (Havelock, Chaucer etc.). The -t in neuters of adjec- ^\ lives, that distinctive Scandinavian trait, is found in scant^y \ want and {a)thwart. Most Norse verbs were inflected ^ / weakly in English, as might be expected {e. g. die, which • / in Old Scand. was a strong verb), but there is one note- worthy exception, take, that kept its Scand. strong in- I flection, ON. taka tok taken. There are a few interesting words with the Scand. passive voice in -sk (from the reflexive pronoun sik): bask- and husk^, but in English they are treated like active forms. The shortness of the j-/'-forms may have led to their being taken over as in- separable wholes, for ON. oblask and ^rivask lost the reflexive ending in English addle 'acquire, earn' and thrive. 80. As the Danes and the English could understand one another without much difficulty it would be natural that many niceties of grammar should be sacrificed, the intelligibility of either tongue coming to depend mainly on its mere vocabulary.^ So when we find that the wearing away and levelling of grammatical forms in the regions in which the Danes chiefly settled was a couple of centuries in advance of the same process in the more southern parts of the country, the conclusion does not seem unwarrantable that this is due to the settlers who did not care to learn English correctly in every minute
1 . Properly skammt, neuter of skammr 'short' ; the derived verb skemta, Dan. skemte 'joke' is found in ME. skemten.
2. ON. bdiSa-sk 'bathe oneself rather than baka-sk 'bake oneself.
3. ON. bua-sk 'prepare oneself.
4. Jespersen, P^vgress in Latiguage, p. 173. Compare the ex- planation of the similar simplification of Dutch in South Africa given by H.Meyer, Die Sprache der Bui-en. (Gottingen 1901, p. 16.)
Jespersen, The English language. 6
82 IV. The Scandinavians.
particular and who certainly needed no such accuracy in order to make themselves understood.
80 a. With regard to syntax our want of adequate early texts in Scandinavia as well as in North England makes it impossible for us to state anything very definite; but the nature of those loans which we are able to verify, warrants the conclusion that the intimate fusion of the two languages must certainly have influenced syntactical relations, and when we find in later times numerous striking correspondences between English and Danish, it seems probable that some at least of them date from the viking settlements. It is true, for instance, that rela- tive clauses without any pronoun are found in very rare instances in Old English; but they do not become common till the Middle English period, when they abound; the use of these clauses is subject to the same restrictions in both languages, so that in ninety out of a hundred instances where an Englishman leaves out the relative pronoun, a Dane would be able to do likewise, and vice versa; the preposition in both languages comes last in the clause. The rules for the omission or retention of the conjunction that are nearly identical. The use of will and shall in Middle EngHsh corresponds pretty nearly with Scandinavian; if in Old English an auxiliary was used to express futurity, it was generally sceal, just as in modern Dutch {zal)\ ivile was rare. In Modern English the older rules have been greatly modified, but in many cases where English commentators on Shakespeare note divergences from modern usage, a Dane would have used the same verb as Shakespeare. Fiurness, in his note to the sentence "Besides it should appear" (Merch. III. 2. 289 = 275 Globe ed.) writes: "It is not easy to
define this 'should' The Elizabethan use of should
is to me always difficult to analyse. Compare Stephano's question about CaHban: 'Where the devil should he learn
Syntax. 83
our language?'" Now, a Dane would say *det skulde synes', and 'Hvor Fanden skulde han laere vort sprog?' Abbott (Shakesp. Grammar § 319) says "There is a diffi- culty in the expression 'perchance I will'; but, from its constant recurrence, it would seem to be a regular idiom" ; a Dane, in the three quotations given, would say vil. And similarly in other instances. "He could have done it" agrees with "han kunde have gjort det" as against "er hatte es tun konnen" (and French "il aurait pu le faire"), and the Scotch idiom "He wad na wrang'd the vera Deil" (Burns), „ye wad thought Sir Arthur had a pleasure in it" (Scott) where an Englishman cannot omit have, has an exact parallel in Danish "vilde gjort", etc. Other points in syntax might perhaps be ascribed to / Scandinavian influence, such as the universal position of the genitive case before its noun (where Old English like German placed it very often after it), the use of a/ preposition governing a dependent clause (he talked of how people had injured him; where German must say davo?t, wie, and Dutch er van hoe), etc.; but in these deli- cate matters it is not safe to assert too much, as in fact, many similarities may have been independently developed in both languages.
Chapter V.
The French.
8i. If with regard to the Scandinavian invasion histo- rical documents were so scarce that the linguistic evi- dence drawn from the number and character of the loan-words was a very important supplement to our histo- rical knowledge of the circumstances, the same cannot be said of the Norman Conquest. The Normans, much more than the Danes, were felt as an alien race; their occupation of the country attracted much more notice and lasted much longer; they became the ruling class and as such were much more spoken of in contemporary literature and in historical records than the comparatively obscure Scandinavian element; and finally, they repre- sented a higher culture than the natives and had a literature of their own, in which numerous direct state- ments and indirect hints tell us about their doings and their relations with the native population. No wonder, therefore, that historians should have given much more attention to this fuller material and to all the interesting problems connected with the Norman conquest than to the race-mixture attending the Scandinavian immigrations. This is true in respect not only of political and social history, but also of the language, in which the Norman- French element is so conspicuous, and so easily acces- sible to the student that it has been very often treated from various points of view. And yet,, there is still
The rulers of England. 85
much work for future investigators to do. In accordance with the general plan of my work, I shall in this chapter deal chiefly with what has been of permanent importance to the future of the English language, and endeavour to characterize the influence exercized by French as con- trasted with that exercized by other languages with which English has come into contact.
82. The Normans became masters of England, and they remained masters for a sufficiently long time to leave a deep impress on the language. The conquerors were numerous and powerful, but the linguistic influence would have been far less if they had not continued for centuries in actual contact and constant intercourse with the French of France, of whom many were induced by later kings to settle in England. We need only go through a list of French loan-words in English to be firmly convinced of the fact that the immigrants formed the upper classes of the English society after the con- quest, so many of the words are distinctly aristocratic. It is true that they left the old words king and queen intact, but apart from these nearly all words relating to government and to the highest administation are French; see, for m?,\.^x\ce^ crown, state, government and to govern, reign, realm (O Fr. realme. Mod. Fr. royaume), sovereign, country, power; minister, chancellor, council (and counsel), ^authority, parliament, exchequer. People and nation, too, were political words; the corresponding OE. J^eod is not found later than the thirteenth century. Feudalism was imported from France, and with it were introduced a number of words, such as fief, feudal, vassal, liege, and the names of the various steps in the scale of rank: prince, peer, duke with duchess, marquis, viscoimt , bar on (paronet). It is, perhaps, surprising that lord and lady should have remained in esteem, and that earl should have been retained, count being chiefly used in speak-
86 V. The French.
ing of foreigners, but the earl's wife was designated by the French word countess, and court is French, as well as the adjectives relating to court life, such as courteous, noble, fine and refined. Honour and glo7y belong to the French, and so does heraldry, while nearly all English expressions relating to that difficult science are of French origin, some of them curiously distorted.
83. The upper classes, as a matter of course, took into their hands the management of military matters; and although in some cases it was a long time before the old native terms were finally displaced {here and fird, for instance, were used till the fifteenth century when army began to be common), we have a host of French military words, many of them of very early intro- duction. Such are war (ME. werre, Old North Fr. werre, Central French guerre) and peace, battle, Sarins, armour, i)uckler, hauberk, ?nail (chain-mail; O Fr. maille 'mesh of a net '), lance, liart, i:utlass, "banner, ensign, ussault, siege, etc. Further officer, tolonel, 'saptain and "^Jiieftain, lieutenant, sergeant, soldier, troops, dragoon, vessel, naiy and -admiral (orig. amiral in English as in French, ultimately an Arabic word). Some words which are now used very exten- sively outside the military sphere, were without any doubt at first purely military, such as challenge, enhny, danger, escape (scape), >spy (spy), did, prison, hdrdy^ gallant, 77iarch, force, company, gttard, etc.
84. Another natural consequence • of the power of the Norman upper classes is that most of the terms per- taining: to the law are of French origin^ such as justice, just, judge ; jury, court (we have seen the word already in another sense), suit, sue, plaintiff and defendant^ a plea, plead, to summon, cause, assize, session, attorney, fee, accuse, crime, guile, felony, traitor, damage, dower, heritage, pro^ perty, real estate, tenure, penalty, demesne, injury, privilege. Some of these are now hardly to be called technical
Military and legal words. 87
juridical words, and there are others which belong still more to the ordinary vocabulary of every -day life, but which were undoubtedly at first introduced by lawyers at the time when procedure was conducted entirely in French^; for instance, case, marry, marriage, oust, prove, false (perhaps also fault), heir, probably also male and female, while defend and priso?t are common to the juridical and the military worlds. Petty (Fr. petit) was, I suspect, introduced by the jurists in such combinations as petty Jury, petty larceny, petty constable, petty sessions, petty averages, petty treason (still often spelt petit treason), etc., before it was used commonly. Similarly puis?ie is still the juridical spelling showing the origin (in law it means *■ younger or inferior in rank ', but originally * later born '), while in ordinary language it has adopted the spelling puny, as if the -y had been the usual adjective ending. 85. Besides, there are a good many words that have never become common property, but have been known to jurists only, such as mainour (to be taken with the mainour, to be caught in the very act of stealing, from Fr. manoeuvre), jeofail (* an oversight ', the acknowledge- ment of an error in pleading, from je faille), cestui que trust, cestui (a) que vie and other phrases equally shrouded in mystery to the man in the street. Larceny has been almost exclusively the property of lawyers, so that it has not ousted theft from general use; such words as thief and steal were of course too popular to be displanted by French juridical terms, though burglar is probably of French origin. It is also worth observing how many of the phrases in which the adjective is invariably placed
I. From 1362 English was established as the official lang- uage spoken in the courts of justice, yet the curious mongrel language known as ' Law French ' continued in use there for centuries; Cromwell tried to break its power, but it was not finally abolished till an act of parliament of 1731.
gg V. The French.
after its noun, are law terms, taken over bodily from the French, e. g. heir male, issue male, fee siinple, proof demonstrative , malice prepense (or, Englished, malice afore- thought)^, letters patent (formerly also with the adjective inflected, letters patents, Shakesp. R2 II i. 202), attorney general (and other combinations of general, all of which are official, though some of them are not juridical).
86. As ecclesiastical matters were also chiefly under the control of the higher classes, we find a great many French words connected with the church, such as religion, service, trinity, saviour, virgin, angel (O Fr. angele, now Fr. ange; the OE. word engel was taken direct from Latin, see § 38), saint, relic, abbey, cloister, friar (ME. frere as in French), clergy, parish, baptism, sacrifice, orison, homily, altar, iniracle, preach, pray, prayer, sermon, psalter (ME. sauter), y^«j/ (* religious anniversary'). Words like rule, iBs^on, save, tempt', blame, order, nature, which now belong to the common language and have very extensive ranges of signification, were probably at first purely ecclesiasti- cal words. As the clergy were, moreover, teachers of morality as well as of religion they introduced the whole gamut of words pertaining to moral ideas from virtue to vice', duty, conscience, grace, charity, cruel, chaste, covet, desire, lechery, fool (one of the oldest meanings is 'sensual'), jealous, pity, discipline, mercy, and others.
87. To these words, taken from different domains, may be added other words of more general meaning, which are highly significant as to the relations between the Normans and the English, such as sir and madam, master and mistress with their contrast servant (and the verb to serve), further, command and obey, order, rent, rich
I . Cf. also lords spiritual and lords temporal; the body politic.
Masters and servants. 8q
and poor with the nouns riches and poverty; ?noney, interest^ cash, rent, etc.
88. It is a remark that was first made by John Wallis^ and that has been very often repeated, espec- ially since Sir Walter Scott made it popular in "Ivanhoe", that while the names of several animals in their lifetime are English {ox, coiv, calf, sheep, swine, boar, deer) they appear qn^ the table with French names {beef, veal, muiton, pork, bacon, brawn, venison). This is generally explained from the masters leaving the care of the living animals to the lower classes, while they did not leave much of the meat to be eaten by them. But it may with just as much right be contended that the use of the French words here is due to the superiority of the French cuisine, which is shown by a great many other words as well, such as sauce, boil, fry, roast, toast, pasty, pastry, soup, sausage, jelly, dainty; while the humbler breakfast is Eng- lish, the more sumptuous meals, dinner and supper, as well as feasts generally, are French.
8g. We see on the whole that the masters knew how to enjoy life and secure the best things to them- selves ; note also such words as joy and pleasure, delight, ease and comfort; Jioivers and fruits may be mentioned in the same category^ And if we go through the differ- ent objects or pastimes that make life enjoyable to people having plenty of leisure (this word, too, is French) we shall find an exceedingly large number of French words. The chase^ of course was one of :he favourite pastimes, and though the native hunt was never displaced, yet we find many French terms relating to the chase, such as brace and couple, leash, falcon, quarry, warren.
1. Grammatica linguae Anglicanae 1653.
2. It is the Central French form of the word that was taken over in a North French dialectal form as catch (Latin captiare).
qo ^ . The French.
scent, track. The general term sport, too, is of course a French word; it is a shortened form of desport {disport). Cards and dice are French words, and so are a great many words relating to different games (partner, suit, trump), some of the most interesting being the numerals used by card and dice players: ace, deuce, tray, cater, cinque, size; cf. Chaucer's "Sevene is my chaunce, and thyn is cynk and treye" (C 653).
90. The French led the fashion in the middle ages, just as they do to some extent even now, so we expect to find a great many French words relating to dress; in fact, in going through Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where in introducing his gallery of figures he seldom omits to mention their dress, one will see that in nearly all cases where etymologists have been able to trace the special names of particular gar- ments to their sources these are French. And of course, such general terms as apparel, dress, costume, and garment are derived from the same language.
91. The French were the teachers of the English in mosi things, xelating to art; not only such words as art, beauty, colour, image, design, figure-;, ornament, to paint, but also the greater number of the more special words of technical significance are French; from architecture may be mentioned, by way of specimens: arch, toiver, pillar, vault, porch, column, aisle, choir, r credos, transept, chapel, cloister (the last of which belong here as well as to our § 86), not to mention palace, castle, manor, inansion, etc. If we go through the names of the various kinds of artisans, etc., we cannot fail to be struck with the dif- ference between the more homely or more elementary occupations which have stuck to their old native names (such as baker, miller, smith, weaver, saddler, shoemaker, wheelwright, fisherman, shepherd and others), on the one hand, and on the other those which brought their prac/-
Dress, art, phrases. 01
tioners into more immediate contact with the upper classes, or in which fashion perhaps played a greater part; these latter have French names, for instance, tailor, butcher, mason, painter, carpenter and joiner (note also such words as furniture, chair, table etc.).
92. I am afraid I have tired the reader a little with all these long lists of words. My purpose in giving them was to give abundant linguistic evidence for the fact that the French were the rich, the powerful, and the refined classes. It was quite natural that the lower classes should soon begin to imitate such of the expressions of the rich as they could catch the meaning of. They would adopt interjections and exclamations like alas, certes, sure, adieu; and perhaps verray (later very) was at first introduced as an exclamation. Whole phrases were adopted: in the Ancrene Riwle (about 1225) we find (p. 268) Deuleset (Dieu le salt) in two manuscripts while a third has Crist hit ivat; and three hundred years later, we find "As good is a becke (= a wink), as is a dewe vow garde'' (Bale, Three Lawes i. 1470). As John of Salisbury (Johannes Sarisberiensi>) says ex- pressly in the twelfth century \ ic was the fashion to interlard one's speech with French words; they were thought modish, and that will account for the fact that many non-technical words too were taken over, such as air, age (juridical?) arrive (military?), beast, change, cheer, cover, cry, debt (juridical?), feeble, large, letter, manner, matter, nurse and notirish, place, point, price, reason, turn, use, and a great many other everyday words of very extensive employment.
93. If, then, the English adopted so many French words because it was the fashion in every respect to imitate their 'betters', we are allowed to see in this
I. Quoted by D. Behrens, Paul's Grundrifi I- 963.
Q2 V. The French.
adoption of non-technical words an outcome of the same trait of their character as that which in its exaggerated form has in modern times been termed snobbism or toadyism, and which has made large sections of the English people more interested in the births, deaths and especially marriages of dukes and marquises than in anything else outside their own small personal sphere. 94. But when we trace this feature of snobbishness back to the first few centuries after the Norman conquest, we must not forget that there were great differences, so that some people would affect many French words and others would stick as far as possible to the native stock of words. We see this difference in the literary works tliat have come down to us. In Layamon's "Brut", written very early in the thirteenth century and amounting in all to more than 56,000 short lines, the number of words of Anglo-French origin is only about 150.^ The "Orr- mulum", which was written perhaps twenty years later, contains more than 20,000 lines, yet even Kluge, who criticizes the view that this very tedious work contains no French words, has not been able to find in it more than twenty odd words of French origin.^ But in the contemporary prose work "Ancrene Riwle", we find on 200 pages about 500 French words. A couple of cen- turies later, it would be a much harder task to count the French words in any author, as so many words had already become part and parcel of the English language; but even then there were considerable differences be- tween authors. Chaucer undoubtedly employs a far greater number of French words than most other writers.
1. Skeat, Principles of English Etymology, II (1891) p. 8; Morris, Historical Outl. of Engl. Accidence (1885) p. 338.
2. Kluge, Das franzosische Element im Orrmulum, Eng- lische Studien, XXII p. 179.
Date of adoption. g^
of his time. Nor would it be fair to ascribe all these borrowings to what I have nientioned as snobbism; the greater a writer's familiarity with French culture and literature, the greater would be his temptation to intro- duce French words for everything above the common- places of daily life.
95. The following table shows the strength of the influx of French words at different periods; it comprises one thousand words (the first hundred French words in the New English Dictionary for each of the first nine letters and the first 50 for J and /) and gives the half-century to which the earliest quotation in that Dictionary be- longs.^
Before 1050 2
1051 — 1 100 2
I loi — 1 150 I
1151 — 1200 15
1201 — 1250 64
1251 — 1300 127
1300— 1350 120
1 35 1 — 1400 180
1401 — 1450 70
1451— 1500 76
1501 — 1550 84
1551 — 1600 91
1601 — 1650 69
1651 — 1700 34
1701 — 1750 24
1 75 1 — 1800 16
1801— 1850 2^
1 85 1 — 1900 2
* 1 000
I. I have followed the authority of the same Dictionary also in regard to the question of the origin of the words,
QA V. The French.
The list shows conclusively that the linguistic in- fluence did not begin immediately after the conquest, and that it was strongest in the years 1251^ — 1400, to which nearly half of the borrowings belong (42.7 p. c). Further it will be seen that the common assumption that the age of Dryden was particularly apt to intro- duce new words from French is very far from being correct.
96. In a well-known passage, Robert of Gloucester (ab. 1300) speaks about the relation of the two lan- guages in England: "Thus, he says, England came into Normandy's hand; and the Normans at that time {l>o; it is important not to overlook this word) could speak only their own language, and spoke French just as they did at home, and had their children taught in the same manner, so that people of rank in this country who came of their blood all stick to the same language that they received of them, for if a man knows no French people will think little of him. But the lower classes stilP stick to English and to their own language. I imagine there are in all the world no countries that do not keep their own language except England alone. But it is well known that it is the best thing to know both languages, for the more a man knows the more is he
reckoning thus as French some words which I should, per- haps, myself have called Latin. Derivative words that have certainly or probably arisen in English (e. g. daintily, dama- geable) have been excluded, as also those perfectly unimpor- tant words for which the N. E. D. gives less than five quo- tations. Most of them cannot really be said to have ever be- longed to the English language.
I. yu^e 'yet'; sometimes curiously mistranslated: hold to their own £-oorf speech.
How was French learnt? 0 =
worth." This passage raises the question: How did common people manage to learn so many foreign words? — and how far did they assimilate them?
97. In a few cases the process of assimilation was facilitated by the fact that a French word happened to resemble an old native one; this was sometimes the natural consequence of French having in some previous period borrowed the corresponding word from some Ger- manic dialect. Thus no one can tell exactly how much modem rich owes to OE. rice 'powerful, rich' and how much to French riche\ the noun (Fr. and ME.) richesse (now riches) supplanted the early ME. richedom. The old native verb choose was supplemented with the noun choice from Fr. choix. OE. hergian and OFr. herier, harier, run together in Mod. E. harry, OE. hege and Fr. haie run together in hay 'hedge, fence'. It is difficult to separate two main^s, one of which is OE. incBgen ' strength , might ' and the other OFr. fnaine (Latin inagnus\ the root of both words is ultimately the same), cf. main sea and maiji force. The modern gain (noun and verb) was borrowed in the fifteenth century from French {gain, gaain] gagner gaaignier, cf. It. guadagnare, a Germanic loan), but it curiously coincided with an earlier noun gain (also spelt gein, geyn, gayfie, etc., oldest form ga^henn), which meant 'advantage, use, avail, bene- fit, remedy' and a verb gain {gay?ie, ge^^nenn) 'to be suitable or useful, avail, serve', both from Old Norse. When French isle (now ile) was adopted, it could not fail to remind the English of their old iegland. Hand and eventually it corrupted the spelling of the latter into is^ land. Neveu (now spelled 7iepheiv) recalled OE. nefa^ meyieye (rnenye, Fr. maisnie 'retinue, troop') recalled inany (OE. menigeo), and lake, the old lacu 'stream, river.' ^
I. This is still the meaning of lake in some dialects.
96
V. The French.
The two words rest have been confounded to some extent. In grammar, too there were some corresponden- ces, as when nouns had the voiceless and the correspond- ing verbs the voiced consonants; French us — user, now use sb. pronounced [ju"s], vb. [ju'z] just as Eng. house sb. [haus], vb. [hauz]; French grief — griever , Eng. grief — grieve just as half — halve. Note also the for- mation of nouns in -er {baker, etc.) which is hardly distinguishable from French formations in words like carpenter (Fr. -ier), interpreter (ME. interpretour, Fr. -eur), etc. But on the whole such more or less accidental similarities between the two languages were few in number and could not materially assist the English population in learning the new words that were flooding their language.
98. A greater assistance may perhaps have been deriv- ed from a habit which may have been common in con- versational speech, and which was at any rate not un- common in writing, that of using a French word- side by side with its native synonym, the latter serving more or less openly as an interpretation of the former for the benefit of those who were not yet familiar with the more refined expression. Thus in the Ancrene Riwle (ab. 1225): cherit6 {)et is luve (p. 8) | in desperaunce, {)et is, in unhope & in unbileave forte beon iboruwen (p. 8) | Understonde^ {)et two manere temptaciuns — two kunne
vondunges beo^ (p. 180) | pacience, {)et is {)olemodness
(ibid.) I lecherie, Jet is, golness (p. 1 98) | ignoraunce, J:et is unwisdom & unwotenesse (p. 278). I quote from Behrens's collection of similar collocations^ the following instances that prove conclusively that the native word was then better known than the imported one: bigamie
I. Franz. Studien V. 2 p. 8. Cf. also "of whiche tribe, that is to seye, kynrede, Jesu Crist was born" (Maundeville 67).
Tautolog)'. Q7
is unkinde [unnatural] {)ing, on engleis tale twiewifing (Genesis & Exod. 449) | twelfe iferan, ]pe Freinsce heo cleopeden dusze pers (Layamon I. i. 69) | {3at craft: to lokie in J)an lufte, {je craft his ihote [is called] astronomic in o{)er kunnes speche [in a speech of a different kind] (ib. II. 2. 598). It is well worth observing that in all these cases the French words are perfectly familiar to a modern reader, while he will probably require an explanation of the native words that served then to interpret the others. In Chaucer we find similar double expressions, but they are now introduced for a totally different purpose; the reader is evidently supposed to be equally familiar with both, and the writer uses them to heighten or strengthen the effect of the style ^; for instance: He coude songes make and wel en(/}'/e (A 95) ^= Therto he coude endjie and 7?iake a thing (A 325) | /m're and /e/is/v (A 124 and 273) \s7vinken with his handes and lahoure (A 1 86) | Of studie took he most cure and most«^^^(? (A 303) I Pqynaunt 2ind sharp (A 352) j At sessiouns ther was he lord and sire (A 355).^ In Caxton this has be(iome quite a mannerism, see, e. g. I shal so awreke and avenge this trespace (Reynard 56, cf. p. 116 advenge and wreke it) | in honour and worship (ib. p. 56) | olde and auncyent doctours (p. 62) \fehlest and wekesi (p. 64) 1 1 toke a glasse or a mirrour (p. 83) | Now ye shal here of the mirrour\ the glas (p. 84) | good ne proffyt (p. 86) i
* 1 This use of two expressions for the same idea is ex- tremely common in the middle ages and the beginning of the modern period, and it is not confined to those cases where one was a native and the other an imported word; see Kellner, Engl. Studien XX p. 11 ff. (1895); Greenough and Kittredge, Words and their Ways, p. 113 fT. ; so also in Danish, see Vilh. Andersen in Dania p. 86 ff. ^1890) and Danske Studier 1893, P- 7 ff.
2 Cf. also, Curteys he was, lowly, and servisable (A 99); Curteys he was, and lowly of servyse (A 250).
Jespersen, The English language. 7
98
V. The French.
fowle and dishonestly (p. <^a^\prouffyt and /orde/e (p. 103). It will be observed that with the exception of the last word, the language has preserved in all cases both the synonyms that Caxton uses side by side, so that we may consider the English vocabulary as settled, m that respect^ towards ihe end of the fifteenth century.
99. Many of the French words, such as cry, clainiy state, poo7- , change, and, indeed, most of the words enumerated above, (§ 82 — 92), and one might say, nearly all the words taken over before 1350 and not a few of those of later importation, have become part and parcel of the English language, so that they appear to everybody just as English as the pre-Conquest stock of native words. But a great many others have never become so popular. There are a great many gradations between words of everyday use and such as are not at all understood by the common people, and to the latter class may sometimes belong words which literary people would think familiar to everybody. Hyde Clark relates an anecdote of a clergyman who blamed a brother preacher for using the word felicity, *T do not think all your hearers understood it; I should say happiness'' "I can hardly think," said the other, "that any one does not know what felicity means, and we will ask this ploughman near us. Come hither, my man! you have been at church and heard the sermon; you heard me speak oi felicity, do you know what it means?" "Ees, sir!" "Well, what does felicity mean?" "Summut in the inside of a pig, but I can't say altogether what."^ — Note also the way in which Touchstone addresses the rustic in As You Like It (V. 1.52) "Therefore, you Clowne, abandon , — which is in the vulgar leave, — the societie
I A Grammar of the English Tongue. 4 th ed, London 1879, p. 61.
Synonyms. qq
— which in the boorish is companie, — of this female,
— which in the comnaon is woman ; which together is, abandon the society of this Female, or, Clowne, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, dyest."
100. From what precedes we are now in a position to understand some at least of the differences that have developed in course of time in those cases where two synonyms have survived, one of them native, the other French. The former always is nearer the nation's heart than the latter, it has the strongest associations with everything primitive, fundamental, popular, while the French word is often more formal, more polite, more refinecPand has a less strong hold on the emotional side of life. A cottage is finer than a hut, and fine people often live in a cottage, at any rate in summer. "The word bill was too vulgar and familiar to be applied to a hawk, which had only a heak (the French term, whereas hill is the A. S. bile). 'Ye shall say, this hauke has a large beke^ or a short beke and call it not bille \ Book of St. Alban's, fol. a 6, back".^ — To dress means to adorn, deck, etc., and thus generally presupposes a finer garment than the old to clothe, the wider signification of which it seems, however, to be more and more appropriating to itself. Amity means 'friendly relations, especially of a public character between states or individuals', and thus lacks the warmth oi friendship. The difference between help and aid is thus indicated in the Funk-Wagnalls Dictionary: ^'■Help expresses greater dependence and deeper need than aid. In extremity we say "God help me!" rather than "God aid me!" In time of danger we cry ''help! helpT rather than ''aid! aid!'^ To aid is to second another's own exertions. We can speak of helping the helpless, but not of aiding them. Help includes
Skeat, The Works of G. Chaucer vol. Ill p. 261,
7*
joo ^ • The French.
aid, but aid may fall short of the meaning of /lelp.'' All this amounts to the same thing as saying that /le/p is the natural expression, belonging to the indispensable stock of words and therefore possessing more copious and profounder associations than the more literary and accordingly colder word aid. Folk has to a great extent been superseded by people, chiefly, I suppose, on account of the political and social employment of the word; Shakespeare rarely uses folk (4 times) and folks (ten times), and the word is evidently a low-class word with him; it is rare in the Authorized Version, and Milton never uses it; but in recent usage folk seems to have been gaining ground, partly, perhaps, from antiquarian and dialectal causes. Hearty and cordial made their appearance in the language at the same time (the oldest quotations 1380 and 1386, NED.), but where they signify the same thing their force is not the same, for "a hearty welcome" is warmer than "a cordial welcome", and hearty has many applications that cordial has not (heartfelt, sincere; vigorous: a hearty slap on the back; abundant: a hearty meal, etc.). Saint smacks of the official re- cognition by the Catholic Church, while holy refers much more to the mind. Matin{s) is used only with reference to church service, while morning is the ordinary word. Compare also darling with favourite, lonely with solitary, indeed with in fact, to give or to hand with to present or to deliver, love with charity, etc.
loi. In some cases the only real difference that can be indicated between the native and the French synonyms 'is that the former is more colloquial and the latter more literary, e. g. begin — commence, hide — conceal, feed — nourish, hinder — prevent, look for — search for, inner and outer — interior and exterior, and many others. In a few cases, however, the native word is more literary. Valley is the everyday word, and dale has only lately been introduced
Colloquial and literary. lOi
into the standard language from the dialects of the hilly northern counties. Action has practically supplanted deed in ordinary language, so that the latter can be reserved for more dignified speech.
102. In spite of the intimate contact between French and English it sometimes happens that French words which have been introduced into other Germanic languages and belong to their everyday vocabulary are not found in English or are there much more felt to be foreign intruders than in German or Danish. This is true for instance of frtseur, manchette , replique , of ge7ie and the verb gtner (the NED. has no instances of it, but a few are found in the Stanford Diet.). Serviette is rarer than napkin. Atelier is not common; it occurs in Thackeray's The Newcomes p. 242, where immediately after\vards the familiar word studio is used: did English artists go more to Italy and less to Paris to learn their craft than their Scandinavian and German confreres? To the same class belong the following words, which, when found in English books, are generally pointed out as strangers by italic letters: naive, bizarre, and motifs — the last word an interesting recent doublet of motive.
103. As the grammatical systems of the two languages were very different, a few remarks must be made here about the form in which French words were adopted. Substantives and adjectives were nearly always taken over in the accusative case, which differed in most words from the nominative in having no s. The latter ending is, however, found in a few words, such as fitz (Fitzher- bert, ^ic. ; in French, too, the nominative fils has ousted the old ace. //; fitz is an Anglo-Norman spelling), fierce (O Fr. nom. fiers^ ace. fier), and Jarnes.^) In the plural.
I But Chaucer has by seint Jame (rhyming with name, 1443). As imilar vacillation is found in the name Steven
J 02 ^^- ihe French.
Old French had a nominative without any ending and an accusative in -s, and English popular instinct naturally associated the latter form with the common English plural ending in -es. In course of time those words which had for a long time, in English as in French, formed their plural without any ending (e. g. cas) were made to conform with the general rule (sg. case,
I pi. cases)} — French adjectives had the ^ added . to them just like French nouns, and we find a few adjectives
'with the plural s, as in the goddes celestials (Chaucer); letters patents survived as a fixed group till the time of Shakespeare (§ 85). But the general rule was to treat French adjectives exactly like English ones.
104. As to the verbs, the rule is that the stem of the French present plural served as basis for the English form; thus {Je survis), nous su?-vivo7is, vous survivez, ils survivent became survive, (Je resous), resolvons, etc., became resolve, O Fr. i^je desjeun), nous disnons, etc., became dine ; thus is explained the frequent ending -isli, in punish,
finish, etc. English hound (to leap), accordingly, cannot be the French bondir, which would have yielded hondish, but is an English formation from the noun hound, which is the French hond. I think that levy is similarly formed on the noun levy, which is Fr. levee; but in sally the y represents the / which made the Fr. // mouillL Where the French infinitive was imported it was generally in a
Stephen, where now the j-less form has prevailed, but where formerly the Fr. nom. was also found (seynt stevyns, Malory 104). — Where the PVench inflection was irregular, owing to Latin stress shifting, etc., the accusative was adopted, in emperor {-our, O Fr. nom. emperere), companion (O Fr. nom. compain), neveu, nephew (O Fr. nom. nies) and others, but the nom. is kept in sire (O Fr. ace. seigno?-), mayor (O Fr. 7naire, ace. majeurj. I Note invoice, trace (part of a horse's harness), and quince, where the French plural ending now forms part of the English singular; cf Fr. €nvo\ trait, coign.
Grammar. 103
substantival function, as in dimier^ remainder, attainder, rejoinder, cf. the verbs dine, remain, attain, rejoin; so also the law terms merger, user, and mistiomer. Still we have a few verbs in which the ending -er can hardly be an}thing else but the French infinitive ending: render (which is thereby kept distinct from rend), surrender, tender (where the doublet tend also exists), and perhaps hroider (embroider). There is a curious parallel to the Norse bask and htisli {jg) in saunter, where the French reflective pronoun has become fixed as an inseparable element of the word, from s'auntrer, another form for s'aventurer ' to adventure oneself.
105. French words have, as a matter of course, parti- cipated in all the sound changes that have taken place in English since their adoption. Thus words with the long [i] sound have had it diphthongized into [ai], e. g. fine, ^ price, lion. The long [u], written ou, has similarly become [au], e. g. O Fr. espouse (Mod. Fr. epouse), M. E. spouse, pronounced [spu'zo], now pron. [spauz], Fr. tour. Mod. E. tower. Compare also the treatment of the vowels in grace, change, beast (OFr. beste), ease (Fr. aise), etc. Such changes of loan-words are seen everywhere: they are brought about gradually and in- sensibly. But there is another change which has often been supposed to have come about in a different manner. A great many words are now stressed on the first syllable which in French were stressed on the final syllable, and this is often ascribed to the inability of the English to imitate the French accentuation. All English words, it is said, had the stress on the first syllable, and this habit was unconsciously extended to foreign words on their first adoption into the language. We see this manner of treating foreign words in Icelandic at the present day. But the explanation does not hold good in our case. English had a few words with unstressed first syllable [be-, for-,
I04 V. The French.
etc., see above, § 25), and as a matter of fact, French words in English were for centuries accented in the French manner, as shown conclusively by Middle EngHsh poetry. It was only gradually that more and more words had their accent shifted on to its present place. The causes of this shifting were the same as are else- where at work in the same direction.^ In many words the first syllable was felt as psychologically the most important one, as in punish, finish, matter, manner, royal, army and other words ending with meaningless or form- ative syllables. The initial syllable very often received the accent of contrast. In modern speech we stress the otherwise unstressed syllables to bring out a contrast clearly, as in " not o/>pose but j-w/pose " or " If on the one hand speech gives ^orpression to ideas, on the other hand it receives ///^pressions from them " (Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, p. 238), and in the same manner we must imagine that in those days when real, formal, object, subject and a hundred similar words were normally stressed on the last syllable, they were so often contrasted with each other that the modern accentuation became gradually the habitual one. This will explain the accent oi January, February, cavalry, infantry, primary, orient and other words. An even more powerful principle is rhythm, which tends to avoid two consecutive strong syllables; compare modern go doivn ^stairs, but the ^down- stairs room, St. PauVs church^yard, but the Churchyard wall. Chaucer stresses many words in the French manner, except when they precede a stressed syllable, in which case the accent is shifted, thus coCyn (cousin), but \osyn ^myn; in feliciUe parfit , but a ^verray ^parfit ^ gentil ^knight; seCre (secret), but in Cecre ivyse, etc. An in-
I See my Fonetik , Copenhagen 1899, especially p. 559, 567, 576; Lehrbuch der Phonetik, Leipzig 1904, p. 210, 214, 216.
Accent; hybrids. 105
structive illustration is found in such a line as this (Cant. Tales D i486):
In 'divers 'art and in di'vers fi'gures.
These principles — value -stressing, contrast, rhythm — will explain all or most of the instances in which Eng- lish has shifted the French stress; but it is evident that it took a very long time before the new shapes of the words which arose at first only occasionally through their influence were powerful enough finally to supplant the older forms. ^
106. Not long after the intrusion of the first French words we begin to see the first traces of a phenomenon which was to rise to very great proportions and which must now be termed one of the most prominent features of the language, namely hybridism. Strictly speaking, we have a hybrid (a composite word formed of elements from diff"erent languages) as soon as an English inflection- al ending is added to a French word, as in the genitive the Duke's childreji or the superlative noblest, etc., and from such instances we rise by insensible gradations to others, in which the fusion is more surprising. From the very first we find verbal nouns in -ing or -ung formed from French verbs (indeed, they are found at a time when they could not be formed from every native verb, § 200), e. g. prechinge ; rhvlwige (Ancrene Riwle) ; scornunge and seruuinge (Layamon); spusinge (Owl & N.). Other instances of English endings added to French words are faintness (from the end of the fourteenth century), close- ness (half a century later), secretness (Chaucer secreenesse B 773), simpleness (Shakespeare and others), maienalness
I In recent borrowings the accent is not shifted, cf machine,
intrigue, where the retention of the French /-sound is another
y sign that the words are of comparatively modern introduction.
2o6 ^ • The French.
{Ruskin), ahnonnalness (Benson), etc. Further, a great -many adjectives in -ly (courtly, princely, etc.) and, of course, innumerable adverbs with the same ending (faintly, easily, nobly); adjectives in -ful (beautiful, dutiful, power- ful, artful) and -/^J-J (artless, colourless); nouns in -ship {courtship, companionship) and -dom (dukedom, martyr- dom) and so forth.
107- While hybrid words of this kind are found in comparatively great numbers in most languages, hybrids of the other kind, i. e. composed of a native stem and a foreign ending, are in most languages much rarer than in English. These formations presuppose the occurrence in numerous adopted words of the same ending in such a way that the process is perfectly transparent. Here are to be mentioned the numerous hybrids in -ess (shep- herdess, goddess; WycHffe has dwelleresse; in a recent volume I have found " seeress and prophetess "), in -ment (endearment and enlightenment are found from- the 17 th century, but bewilderment not before the 19th; wonder- ment, frequent in Thackeray; oddment, R. KipHng, hut- ment), in -age (mileage, acreage, leakage, shrinkage, wrappage, breakage, cleavage, roughage, shortage, etc.); in -ance (hindrance, used in the fifteenth century in the meaning ' injury '; in the signification now usual it is found as early as 1526, and perhaps we may infer from its occurring neither in the Bible, nor in Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, that it was felt to be a bastard, though Locke, Cowper, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tenny- son admit it; forbearance, originally a legal term; further- ance); in -ous (murderous; thunderous; slumberous is used by Keats and Carlyle); in -ry (fishery, bakery, etc.; gossipry, Mrs. Browning; Irishry; forgettery jocularly after memory); in -ty (oddity, womanity half- jocularly after humanity) : in -J}' (fishify, Shakespeare ; snuggify, Ch. Lamb ; Torify, Ch. Darwin; scarify, Fielding; tipsify, Thackeray;
Hybridism. I07
funkify; speechify^ with the corresponding nouns in "ficaiion (uglification, Shelley).^
io8. One oi the most fertile English derivative endings is -able, which has been used in a great number of words besides those French ones which were taken over ready made (such as agreeable, movable). In compara- tively few cases it is added to substantives (serviceable, companionable, marriageable, peaceable, seasonable). Its proper sphere of usefulness is in forming adjectives from verbs, rarely in an active sense (suitable = that suits, unshrinkable), but generally in a passive sense (bearable = that can or may be borne). Thus we have now drinkable, eatable, steerable (balloons), weavable, under- standable, findable, forgiveable, and hundreds of others, so that everybody has a feeling that he is free to form a new adjective of this kind as soon as there is any necessity for, or convenience in, using it, just fts he feels no hesitation in adding -ing to any verb, new or old. And of course, no one ever objects to these ad- jectives (or the corresponding nouns in -ability) because they are hybrids or bastards, any more than one would object to forms like acting or rememberirig on the same score.
109. These adjectives have now become so indis- pensable that the want is even felt of forming them from composite verbal expressions, such as get at. But though get-at-able and come-at-able (and do-without-able?) are pretty frequently heard in conversation, most people shrink from writing or printing them. Sterne has come-at-ability, Smiles get -at- ability , and George Eliot in a letter knock-upable .
1 Cf. also "Daphne — before she was happily treeified", Lowell, Fable for Critics.
2 See below on hvbrids with Latin and Greek endings (§ 123).
Io8 V. The French.
Tennyson, too, writes in a jocular letter, "thinking of you as no longer the comeatable runupableto, smokeable- with J. S. of old." Note here the place of the prepos- ition in the last two adjectives, and compare "enough to make the house unliveable in for a month" (The Idler, May 1892, 366) and "the husband being fairly good-natured and livable-with" (Bernard Shaw, Ibsenism 41). It is obvious that these adjectives are too clumsy to be ever extensively used in serious writings. But there is another way out of the difficulty which is really much more conformable to the genius of the language, namely to leave out the preposition in all those cases where there can be no doubt of the preposition under- stood. Unaccountable (= that cannot be accounted for) has long been accepted by everybody; I have found it, for instance, in Congreve, Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, De Quincey, Miss Austen, Dickens and Hawthorne. /«- dispensable has been — well, indispensable for two cen- turies and a half. Laughable is used by Shakespeare, Dryden, Carlyle, Thackeray, etc. Dependable and independ- able are, perhaps rarer, but disposable and available are in general use.^ All this being granted, it is difficult to see why reliable should be the most abused word of the English language. It is certainly formed in accor- dance with the fundamental laws of the language; it is short and unambiguous, and what more should be need- ed? Those who measure a word by its age will be glad to hear that Miss Mabel Peacock has found it in a letter, bearing the date of 1624, from the pen of the
■^ \< I Miss Austen writes, "There will be work for five sum-
y,^( ^ mers before the place is liveable" (Mansf. Park 216) = the
\y^ above-mentioned liveable-in, Cf. below gazee and others in
-ee (§ III). The principle of formation is the same as in
waiter 'he who waits on people', caller 'he who calls 07t
some one'.
Reliable. lOg
Rev. Richard Moiintagii, who eventually became a bish- op. And those who do not like using a word unless it has been accepted by great writers will find a formid- able array of the best names in Fitzedward Hall's list^ of authors who have used the word.^ It is curious to note that the word which is always extolled at the ex- pense of reliable as an older and nobler word, namely trustworthy, is really much younger: at any rate, I have not been able to trace it further back than the beginning of the nineteenth century; besides, any impartial judge will find its sound less agreeable to the ear on account of the consonant group — stw — and the heavy second syllable.
no. Fitzedward Hall in speaking about the recent word aggressive^ says, "It is not at all certain whether the French agressif suggested aggressive, or was suggest- ed by it. They may have appeared independently of each other." The same remark applies to a great many other formations on a French or Latin basis; even if the several components of a word are Romance, it by no means follows that the word was first used by a Frenchman. On the • contrary , the greater facility and the greater boldness in forming new words and turns
1 On English Adjectives in -able, with special reference to reliable. London 1877. Fitzedvv. Hall reverted to the sub- ject on several other occasions.
2 Coleridge, Sir Robert Peel, John Stuart Mill, Abp. Long- ley, Samuel Wilberforce, Dickens, Charles Reade, Walter Bage- hot, Anthony Trollope, R. A. Proctor, Harriet Martineau, Car- dinal Newman, Gladstone, James Martineau, S. Baring-Gould, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Sir Monier Williams, Leslie Stephen, H. Maudsley, W. Noel Saintsbury, Henry Sweet, Robinson Ellis, Thomas Arnold. In America, Washington Irving, Daniel Webster, Edw. Everett, G. P. Marsh; I leave out, rather arbi- trarily I fear, sixteen of the names given by Fitzedw. Hall.
3 Modern English 314.
no V. The French.
of expression which characterizes English generally in contradistinction to French, would in many cases speak in favour of the assumption that an innovation is due to an English mind. This I take to be true with regard to dalliance, which is so frequent in ME. {dalyaunce, etc.) while it has not been recorded in French at all. The wide chasm between the most typical English meaning of sensible (a sensible man, a sensible proposal) and those meanings which it shares with French sensible and Lat. sensibilis, probably shows that in the former meaning the word was an independent English formation. Duration as used by Chaucer may be a French word; it then went out of the language, and when it reappeared after the time of Shakespeare, it may just as well have been re-formed in England as borrowed; duratio does not seem to have existed in Latin. Intensitas is not a Latin word, and intensity is older than intensite.
III. In not a feW' cases, the English soil has proved more fertilizing than the French soil from which words were transplanted. In French, for instance, ynutin has very few derivatives [mutiner, viutinerie), while in English we have mutine sb., mutine vb. (Shakespeare), mutinous, mutinously, mutinousfiess, mutiny sb., mutiny vb., ?nutineer sb., fnutineer vb., mutinize, of which it is true that mutine and mutinize are now extinct. We see the same thing in such a recent borrowing as clique, which stands alone in French while in English two centuries have provided us with cliquedom, cliqueless, cliquery, cliquomania, cliquomaniac , clique, vb., cliquish, cliquishness, cliquism, cliquy or cliquey. From due we have duty, to which no French correspon- dent word has been found in France itself, although duete, duity, dewete are found in Anglo-French writers; in English duty is found from the 13 th century, and we have moreover dtiteous, dutiable, dutied, dutiful, dutifully, dutifulness, dutiless, none of which appear to be older
English formations. 1 1 j
than the i6th century. Aim, the noun as well as the verb, is now among the most useful and indispen- sable words in the English vocabulary and it has some derivatives, such as aimer, aim/ul, and aimless, but in French the two verbs from which it originates, esmer <^ Lat. aestimare, and aasmer, <( Lat. adaestimare, have tot- ally disappeared. Note also the differentiations of the words strayige and estrange;'^ of entry (<( Fr. entree) and entrance, while in French entrance has been given up; and that of guaranty and guarantee, not to speak of warrant and warranty. The extent to which foreign speech-materials have been turned to account is really^ astonishing, as is seen, perhaps, most clearly in the ex- tensive use of the derivative ending -ee. This was ori- ginally the French participial ending -<? used in a very few cases such as apele, E. appellee as opposed to apelor, E. appellor, nominee, etc. and then gradually extended in legal use to words in which such a formation would be- prohibited in French by formal as well as syntactical reasons: vendee is the man to whom something is sold. (Fhomme a qui on a vendw quelquechose), cf. also re- feree, lessee, trustee, etc. Now, these formations are no longer restricted to juridical language, and there seems- to be a growing disposition to turn this ending to account as a very convenient manner of forming passive nouns; Goldsmith and Richardson have lovee, Sterne
speaks of "the mortgager and mortgagee the jester
and jestee"; further the gazee (De Quincey) == the one gazed at, staree (Edgeworth), cursee and laughee (Carlyle), flirtee, flog gee, wisliee , bargainee, heatee, knockee, Jokee, bio- graphee, mes77ieree, examinee, callee (our callee = the man we call on), etc. etc. Such a word as trusteeship is
I Compare also the juridical estray and the ordinary stray ^. estate and state.
I J 2 V. The French.
eminently characteristic of the composite character of the language: Scandinavian trust -(- a French ending used in a manner unparalleled in French -j- an old Eng- lish ending.
112. French influence has not been restricted to one particular period (see § 95), and it is interesting to compare the forms of old loan-words with those of recent ones, in which we can recognise traces of the changes the French language has undergone since mediaeval times. Where a ch in an originally French word is pro- nounced as in change^ chaunt, etc. (with the sound-group tj), the loan is an old one; where it is sounded as in champagne (with simple J), we have a recent loan. Chief is thus shown to belong to the first period, while its doublet chef (== chef de cuisine) is much more modern. It is curious that two petnames should now be spelled in the same way Char-lie, although they are distinct in pronunciation: the masculine is derived from the old loan Cha?'les and has, therefore, the sound [tJ], the feminine is from the recent loan Charlotte with [J], Simi- larly g as in giant and j as in jaundice [pronounced d^] are indicative of old loans, while the pronunciation [^] is only found in modern adoptions, such as rouge. Sometimes, however, recent loans are made to conform to the old practice; jaunty, gentle and genteel represent three layers of borrowing from the same word but they have all of them the same initial sound. Other instances of the same French word appearing in more than one shape according to its age in English are saloon and salon, suit and suite, rout 'big party, defeat' and route (the diphthong in the former word is an English development of the long [u] § 105), quart, pronounced [kwD't], and quart pronounced [ka-t] 'a sequence of four cards in piquet', cf. also quart e or carte in fencing.
113. In some cases, we witness a curious re-shaping
• Early and recent loans. 1 1 ^
of an early French loan-word, by which it is made more like the form into which the French has meanwhile de- veloped. This, of course, can only be explained by the un- interrupted contact between the two nations. Chaucer had viage just as Old French, but now the word is voyage\ leal has given way to loyal; the ViOwxi fl ante and the verb floyteji are now made into flute like mod. Fr. flute} Sim- ilarly the signification of ME. douten like that of OFr. douter was *to fear' (cf. redoubt), but now in both lang- uages this signification has disappeared. Danger was at first adopted in the Old French sense of 'dominion, power', but the present meaning was developed in France before it came to England. The many parallelisms in the ■employment of cheer and Fr. chere could not very well have arisen independently in both languages at once. This continued contact constitutes a well-marked contrast be- tween the French and the Scandinavian influence, which i>eems to have been broken ofl:' somewhat abruptly after the Norman conquest.
I Cf. below the Latinizing of many French words § ii6.
Jesi'eksen, the English language
Chapter VI.
Latin and Greek.
114. Although Latin has been read and written in England from the Old English period till our own days, so that there has been an uninterrupted possibility of Latin influence on the English language, yet we may with comparative ease separate the latest stratum of loans from the two strata that we have already considered. It embodies especially abstract or scientific words, adopted exclusively through the medium of writing and never attaining to the same degree of popularity as words belonging to the older strata. The words adopted are not all of Latin origin, there are perhaps more Greek than Latin elements in them, if we count the words in a big dictionary. Still the more important words are Latin, and most of the Greek words have entered our language through Latin ^ or have, at any rate, been Latinized in spelling and endings before being used in English, so that we have no occasion here to deal separately with the two stocks. The great historical event, without which this influence would never have assumed such gigantic dimensions, was the revival of learning. Through Italy and France the Renaissance came to be felt in England as early as the fourteenth century, and since then the invasion of classical terms has never stopped, although the multitude of new words, introduced was greater, perhaps, in the fourteenth, the
The Renaissance. lie
sixteenth and the nineteenth than in the intervening centuries. The same influence is conspicuous in all European languages, but in English it has been stronger than in any other language, French perhaps excepted. This fact cannot, I think, be principally due to any greater zeal for classical learning on the part of the English than of other nations. The reason seems rather to be, that the natural power of resistance possessed by a Germanic tongue against these alien intruders had been already broken in the case of the English language by the wholesale importation of French words. They paved the way for the Latin words which resembled them in so many respects, and they had already created in English minds that predilection for foreign words which made them shrink from consciously coining new words out of native material. If French words were more distinguis than English ones, Latin words were still more so, for did not the French themselves go to Latin to enrich their own vocabulary? The first thing notice- able about this class of La'.in importa'.ions is, there- » fore, that it cannot be definitely separated from the / French loans.
115. A great many words may with equal right be ascribed to French and to Latin, since their English form would be the same in both cases and the first users would probably know both languages. This is especially the case with those words which in French are not popular continua'ions of spoken Latin words, but later borrowings from literary Latin, mois savants, as Brachet termed them in contradistinction to mofs popu~ hires. As examples of words that may have been taken from either language, I shall mention only grave, gravity, consolation, solid, infidel, infernal, position.
116. A curious consequence of the Latin influence during and after the Renaissance was that quite a number
8*
1 1 5 VI. Latin and Greek.
of French words were remodelled into closer resemblance with their Latin originals. Chaucer uses descrivg (rhyming with on lyve 'alive' H. 121), but in the i6th century the form describe makes its appearance. Per/et and parfet (Fr. perfait , par/ait) were the normal English forms for centuries. Milton writes perfeted (Areop. 10); but the c was introduced from the Latin, at first in spelling only, but afterwards in pronunciation as well.^ Similarly verdit has given way to verdict. Where Chaucer had peynture as in French (peinture), picture is now the established form. The Latin prefix ad is now seen in advice and adventure, while Middle English had avis {avys) and aventure] the latter form is still retained in the phrase at aventure, where however, a has been apprehended as the indefinite article (at a venture), and another remnant of the old form is disguised in saunter (Fr. s'aventurer *to adventure oneself).- Avril (avrille) has been Latinized into April; and a modern reader does not easily recog- nize his February in ME. feouerele or feouerrere'^ (u = v, €f. fevriei-). In debt and doubt, which used to be deite and doute as in French, the spelling only has been affected; compare also victuals for vittles (Fr. vitailles, cf. hattle from bataille). Similarly banker ota (cf. Italian), hanqueroute , banlirout (Shakesp.) had to give way to hanlirupt\ the oldest example of the /-form in the NED. dates from 1533. The form langage was used for centuries, before it became language by a curious cross- ing of French and Latin forms. Egal was for more than two centuries the commoner form; equal, now the only recognized form, was apparently a mor^ learned form
1 Bacon writes {Ne-iu Atlantis 15): all nations have enterknowledge one of another. In recent similar words inter- im always used.
2 Juliana p. 78, 79.
Remodelling of French words. 1 1 7
and was used for instance in Chaucer's Astrolabe^ w^hile in his poems he writes egal\ Shakespeare generally has equal, but egal is found a few times in some of the old editions of his plays. Tennyson tries to re-introduce egaliiy by the side of equality, not as an ordinary word, however, but as applied to France specially ("That cursed France with her egalities!" Aylmer's Field). French and Latin forms coexist, more or less differentiat- ed^ in complaisance and complacence {complacen'y), genie (rare) and genius, base and basis (Greek). Certainty (Ft.) and certitude (Lat.) are often used indiscriminately, but there is now a tendency to restrict the latter to merely subjective certainty, as in Cardinal Newman's **my argu- ment is: that certitude was a habit of mind, that certainty was a quality of propositions; that probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty, might suffice for a mental certitude^' etc. ^ — Note also the curious difference made between critic with stress on the first syllable, adjective^ and nomen agentis (from Lat., or Greek direct? or through French?) and critique with stress on the second syllable, nomen actionis (late borrowing from Fr.); Pope uses criticl^'d as a participle (stress on the first), while a verb critique with stress on the last syllable is found in recent use; criticize, which since Milton has been the usual verb, is a pseudo-Greek formation.
117. Intricate relations between French and Latin are sometimes shown in derivatives: colour is from French, as is evident from the vowel in the first syllable [a]; but in discoloration the second syllable is sometimes made [kol] as from Latin, and sometimes [kAl] as from French. Compare also example from French, exemplajy from Latin.
1 Apologia pro Vita sua. New impression, London 1900, p. 20.
2 With the by -form critical.
1 1 8 VI. Latin and Greek.
Machme with inachinist and machinery are from the French, witness the pronunciation [mo'/i-n]; but machhiate and machination are taken direct from Latin and accordingly pronounced [msekineit, mseki'neijbn] ; so these two groups which ought by nature to belong together are kept apart, and no one knows whether the adjective machifial should go with one or the other group, some dictionaries pronouncing [mg'ji'nal] and others ['maekinal] — a sug- gestive symptom of the highly artificial state of the language!
ii8. It would be idle to attempt to indicate the number of Latin and Greek words in the English language, as each new treatise on a scientific subject adds to their number. But it is interesting to see what proportion of the Latin vocabulary has passed into English. Pro- fessors J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge have counted the words beginning w^ith A in Harper's Latin Dictionary, excluding proper names, doublets, parts of verbs, and adverbs in -e and -ter. "Of the three thousand words there catalogued, one hundred and fifty -four (or about one in twenty) have been adopted bodily into our language in some Latin form, and a little over five hundred have some English representative taken, or supposed to be taken, through the French. Thus we have in the English vocabulary about one in four or five of all the words found in the Latin lexicon under A. There is no reason to suppose that this proportion would not hold good approximately for the whole alphabet."^
iig. It must not be imagined that all the Latin words as used in English conform exactly with the rules of Latin pronunciation or with the exact classical meanings. "My instructor, says Fitzedward HalH, took me to task
1 Words and their Ways, 1902, p. 106.
2 Fitzedward Hall, Two Trifles. Printed for the Author
Deviations from Latin. 1 1 q
for saying ^doctrinal. 'Where an English word is from Latin or Greek, you should always remember the stress in the original, and the quantity of the vowels there.' I replied: 'If others, in their solicitude .to pro^pagate refinement, choose to be ir^rltated or Excited, because of what they take to be my genuine ig^iiorance in ora^tory, they should at least be sure that their discomposure is not grahiitoiisy — Among words used in English with a different signification from the classical one, may be mentioned enormous (Latin enormis 'irregular', in English formerly also enorm and enormious)^ item (Latin itern 'also', used to introduce each article in a list, except the first), ponder (Lat. ponderare 'to weigh, examine, judge', transi- tive) premises ('adjuncts of a building', originally things set forth or mentioned in the beginning), climax (Greek klimax 'a ladder or gradation'; in the popular sense of culminating point it is found in Emerson, Dean Stanley, John Morley, Mss Mitford and other writers of repute), bathos (Greek bathos 'depth'; in the sense of 'ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace' it is due to Pope; the adjective bathetic, which is not formed on a correct Greek analogy, was first used by Coleridge). It should be remembered, however, that when once a certain pronunciation or signification has been finnly established in a language, the word fulfils its purpose in spite of ever so many might-have-beens, and that, at any rate, correctness in one language should not be measured by the yard of another language. Transpire is perfectly legitimate in the sense 'to be emitted through the pores of the skin' and in the derived sense 'to become known, to become public gradually' although there is no Latin verb transpirare in either of these senses; if, therefore, the
1895. I have changed his symbol for stress, indicating here as elsewhere the beginning of the strong syllable by a prefixed '.
120 VI- Latin and Greek.
modern journalistic use of the verb in the sense of 'happen' ('a terrible murder has again transpired in WhitechapeF) is objectionable, it is not on account of any deviation from Latin usage, but because it has arisen through a vulgar misunderstanding of the English signification of an English word. Stuart Mill exaggerates the danger of such innovations, when he writes: "Vul- \garisms, which creep in nobody knows how, are daily depriving the English language of valuable modes of jexpressing thought. To take a present instance: the
verb transpi?-e Of late a practice has commenced
of employing this word, for the sake of finery, as a mere synonym of io happen: "the events which have transpired in the Crimea," meaning the incidents of the war. This vile specimen of bad English is already seen in the despatches of noblemen and viceroys: and the time is apparently not far distant when nobody will understand
the word if used in its proper sense The use of
"aggravating" for "provoking", in my boyhood a vulgarism of the nursery, has crept into almost all newspapers, and into many books; and when writers on criminal law speak of aggravating and extenuating circumstances, their meaning, it is probable, is already misunderstood."* Let me add two small notes to Mill's remarks. First, that aggravate in the sense of 'exasperate, provoke' is exemplified in the NED. from Cotgrave (i6i i), T. Herbert (1634), Richardson (1748) — thus some time before Mill heard it in his nursery — and Thackeray (1848). And secondly, that the verb which Mill uses to explain it, provoke, is here used in a specifically EngUsh sense which is nearly as far removed from the classical signi- fication as that of aggravate is. But we shall presently
I Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, People's edition, 1886, p. 451-
Ideas and words. I2i
see that the English have taken even greater liberties with the classical languages.
120. When the influx of classical words began, it had its raison d'etre in the new^ w^orld of old, but for- gotten ideas, then first revealed to medieval Europe. In- stead of their narrow circle of everyday monotonousness, people began to suspect new vistas, in art as well as in science, and classical literature became a fruitful source of information and inspiration. No wonder then, that scores and hundreds of words should be adopted together with the ideas they stood for, and should seem to the adopters indispensable means of enriching a lang- uage w^hich to them appeared poor and infertile as compared with the rich storehouses of Latin and Greek* But as times w^ore on, the ideas derived from classical authors w^ere no longer sufficient for the civilized w^orld, and, just as it will happen with children outgrowing their garments, the modern mind outgrew classicism, without anybody noticing exactly when or how. New ideas and new habits of life developed and demanded linguistic expression, and now the curious thing happened that classical studies had so leavened the minds of the edu- cated classes that even when they passed the bounds of the ancient w^orld they drew upon the Latin and Greek vocabulary in preference to their own native stock of words.
121. This is seen very extensively in the nomencla- ture of modern science, in which hundreds of chemical, botanical, biological and other terms have been framed from Latin and Greek roots, most of them compound words and some extremely long compounds. It is cer- tainly superfluous here to give instances of such forma- tions, as a glance at any page of a comprehensive dic- tionary will supply a sufficient number of them, and as one needs only a smattering of science to be acquaint-
J 22 ^ I- Latin and Greek.
■ed with technical words from Latin and Greek that would have struck Demosthenes and Cicero as bold, many of them even as indefensible or incomprehensible innovations. It is not, perhaps, so well known that quite a number of words that belong to the vocabulary of ord- inary life and that are generally supposed to have the best-ascertained classical pedigree, have really been coined in recent times more or less exactly on classical analogies. Some of them have arisen independently in several European countries. Such modern coinages are, for instance, eventual with eventuality, immoral, fragmental and frag?nenta?y, primal, annexation, fixation and affixation, climatic. There are scores of modern formations in 'is7u^, e. g. absenteeism, alienism^ classicism, colloquialism, favouritism, individualism, manjierism, realism, not to speak of those made from proper names, such as Sivinhurnism, Zolaism, etc. Among the innumerable words of recent formation in -ist may be mentioned dentist, economist, florist, jurist, oculist, copyist (formerly copist2i^ m. some continental languages), deter minist, economm, ventriloquist, individualist, plagiarist, positivist, socialist, terrorist, nihilist, tourist. For calculist the only author quoted in the NED. is Carlyle. Scientist has often been branded as an "ig- noble Americanism" or "a cheap and vulgar product of trans-Atlantic slang", but Fitzedw. Hall has pointed out that it was fabricated and advocated, in 1840, together with physicist, by Dr. Whewell. Whoever objects to such words as scientist on the plea that they are not correct Latin formations, would have to blot out of his vocabu- lary such well-established words as suicide, telegram, hot- any , sociology, tractarian, vegetarian, facsimile and ortho- pedic, but then, happily, people are not consistent.
I See Fitzedw. Hall, Modern English, p. 311. His lists have also been utilized in the rest of this paragraph.
Innovations. 123
122. Authors sometimes coin quasi- classic words without finding anybody to pass them on, as when Mil- ton writes "our inquisitiij-iejit Bishops" (Areop. 13). Cole- ridge speaks of logodcedaly, Thackeray of a lady's "z7- duous mansion" (Newc. 794), Dickens oi'-^voctilar exclam- ations" (Oliv. Twist); Tennyson writes in a letter (Life I. 254) ''you range no higher in my andrometer;'' Bulwer- Lytton says "a cat the most viparious [meaning evident- ly 'tenacious of Hfe'] is limited to nine lives"; and Mrs. j Humphrey Ward "his air of oldfashioned punctiliuni.^'^X I have here on purpose mixed correct and incorrect forms, jocular and serious words, because my point was to illustrate the love found in most English writers of everything Latin or Greek, however unusual or fanciful. Sometimes jocular "classicisms" survive and are adopted into everybody's language, such as omnium gatherujn, (whence Thackeray's bold heading of a chapter 'Snob- bium Gatherum'), circumbendibus (Goldsmith, Coleridge) and ta?idem, which originated in a University pun on the two senses of English 'at length'.
123. Hybrids, in which one of the component part was French and the other native English, have been mention- ed above (§ io6f.). Here we shall give some examples of the corresponding phenomenon with Latin and Greek elements, some of which may, however, have been im- ported through French. The ending -ation is found in starvation, backwardation, and others; note also the Ame- rican thiinderation ("It was an accident, sir." "Accident the thunderation", Opie Read, Tootl]pick Tales, Chicago 1892, p. 35). fohnsoniana, Miltoniana, etc., are quite modern; the ending ana alone is now also used as a
I Dictionaries recognize punctilio, a curious transformation of Spanish puntillo; there is a late Latin punctilluni, but not with the meaning of 'punctiliousness'.
12 A VI. Latin and Greek.
detached noun. In -I'sf we have fightist and ivalkisty the latter perhaps more American than British, but both interesting as denoting a professional fighter or walk- er and therefore distinguished by the more learned ending. Compare also turfite and the numerous words in -ite derived from proper names : Irvingife, Riiskinite^ etc. The same ending is frequently used in mineralogy and chemistry, one of the latest addiions to these formations
-J being fumelessite = smokeless gunpowder. Hybrids in -ism (cf. § I2i) abound; heathenism has been used by Bacon, Milton, Addison, Freeman and others; witticism was first used by Dryden, who asks pardon for this new word; block-headism is found in Ruskin; further funny ism, free-lovism, etc.; u'eis?n is preferable to the curious we- gotism, which may be classed with the jocular drinfiitite on the analogy of appetite. Giriicide, after suicide, is another jocular formation (Smedley, Frank Fairlegh I iqo, not in NED.). To the same sphere belong Byron's iveatherolog}' and some words in -ocracy, such as lando- cracy, shopocracy, barristerocracy, squattocracy and G. Mere- dith's snipocracy (Evan Harrington 174, from sjiip as a nickname for a tailor). On the other hand squirearchy (with squir ear chic al) seems to have quite established it- self in serious language. Among verbal formations must be mentioned those in -ize: he ivomanized his language (]\Ieredith, Egoist :^2), Londonizing (ibd. 80), sober ize, etc.
sj Adjectives are formed in -ative: talliative, babblative, and soothative, of which only the first is recognized; in -aceous: gossipaceous (Darwin j Life and Letters I 375), in -arious: burglarious (Stevenson, Dynamiter 130), and -iacal: dand- iacal (Carlyle, Sartor 188). Even if many of these words are 'nonce-words', Jt cannot be denied that the process is genuinely English and perfectly legitimate — within reasonable limits at any rate.
124. Some Latin and Greek prepositions have in re-
Hybrids.
125
cent times been extensively used to form new words. Ex-^ as in ex-khig , ex-head-??iaster, etc.^, seems first to have been used in French, but it is now common to most or all Germanic languages as well; in English this formation did not become popular till little more than a century ago. Atifi-: the anti-taxation movement; an anti- foreign party; *'Mr. Anti-slavery Clarkson" (De Quincey, Opium-Eater 197); "chairs unpleasant to sit in — anti- caller chairs they might be named" (H. Spencer, Facts and Comments 85). Co-: "a friend of mine, co-god- father to Dickens's child with me" (Tennyson, Life II 144); "Wallace, the co - formulator of the Darwinian theor}-" (Clodd, Pioneers of Evolution 68). De-, espe- cially with verbs in -ize: de-anglicize, de-democratize, de- provincialize, denationalize; less frequently as in de-te- nant, de-miracle (Tennyson). Inter-', intermingle, inter- mix, intennarriage, interbreed, inter-communicate, inter- dependence, etc. International was coined by Bentham in 1780; it marks linguistically the first beginning of the era when relations between nations came to be con- sidered like relations between citizens, capable of peace- ful arrangement according to right rather than according to might. A great many other similar adjectives have since been formed: intercollegiate, interracial, interparlia- mentary, etc. Where no adjective existed, the substan- tive is used unchanged, but the combination is virtually an adjective: interstate affairs; an inter-island steamer; *' international, inter-club, inter-team, inter-college or in- ter-school contests" (quoted in NED.). Pre-', the pre- Darwinian explanations; pre-nuptial friendships (Pinero, Second Mrs. Tanqueray, p. 6, what is called on p. 8 'ante-nuptial acquaintance'); "in the pre-railroad, pre- telegraphic period" (G. Eliot); the pre-railway city; the
I "A pair of ex-white satin shoes" (Thackeray^
126 VI. Latin and Greek.
pre-board school; a bunch of pre -Johannesburg Trans- vaals; the pre -mechanical civilized state (all these are quotations from H. G. Wells); in your pre-smoking days (Barrie). Pio-'. the pro -Boers; pro -foreign proclivities; a pro -Belgian, or rather pro -King Leopold speaker. As any number of such derivatives or compounds can be formed with the greatest facility, the utility and con- venience of these certainly not classical expedients cannot be reasonably denied, though it may be questioned whether it would not have been better to utilize English prepositions for the same purposes, as is done with after- (an after-dinner speech) and sometimes with before- (''the before Alfred remains of our language", Sweet; "smoking his before-breakfast pipe", Conan Doyle). A few words must be added on re- which is used in a similar manner in any number of free compounds, such as rebirth^ and especially verbs: re- organize, re -sterilize, re -submit, re -pocket, re -leather, re -case etc. Here re- is always strongly stressed and pronounced with a long vowel [i-], and by that means these recent words are in the spoken language easily distinguished from the older set of r<?- words, where re is either weakly stressed or else pronounced with short [e]. We have therefore such pairs as recollect = to remember, and re-collect = to collect again; he recovered the lost umbrella and had it re-covered; reforrn and re-form (reformation and re -for- mation), recreate and re- create , remark and re-inark, resign and re-sign, resound and re-sound, resort and ;< - sort. In the written language the distinction is not always observed.
125. Latin has influenced English not only in vocabulary, but also in style and syntax. The absolute participle was introduced at a very early period in imitation of the Latin construction.^ It is comparatively rare in Old
I Morgan Callaway, The Absolute Participle in Anglo-
Syntax. 1 27
English, where it occurs especially in close translations from Latin. In the first period of Middle English it is equally rare, but in the second period it becomes a httle more frequent. Chaucer seems to have used it chiefly in imitation of the Italian construction, but this Italian influence died out with him, and French influence did very little to increase the frequency of the con- struction. In the beginning of the Modern English period the absolute participle, though occurring more often than formerly "had not become thoroughly natural- ized. It limited itself to certain favorite authors where the classical element largely predominated, and was used but sparingly by authors whose style was essentially English." (Ross, p. 38.) Butafter- Tii60y^when EngHsli prose style developed a new phase, which was saturated with classical elements, the construction rapidly gained ground and was finally fixed and naturalized in the language. The extensive use of the accusative with the, infinitive is another permanent feature of English syntax: which is largely due to Latin influence. But there are' some other Latin idioms which authors tried to imitate^ but which have always been felt as unnatural, so that now they have been dropped, for instance who for he who or those who as in "sleeping found by whom they dread"" (Milton, P. L. i. 1333), further such interrogative and relative constructions as those found in the following quotations. "To do what service am I sent for hither?"" (Shakesp., R2 IV. i. 176) and "a right noble and
pious lord, who had he not sacrific'd his life
we had not now mist and bewayl'd a worthy patron" (Milton, Areop. 51).
126. Latin grammar was the only grammar taught in those days, and the only grammar found worthy of
Saxon. Baltimore 1889. — Charles Hunter Ross, The Absolute. Participle in Middle and Modem English, Baltimore 1893.
128 ^"I- Latin and Greek.
study and imitation. "That highly disciplined syntax which Milton favoured from the first, and to which he tended more and more, was in fact, the classical syntax, or, to be more exact, an adaptation of the syntax of the Latin tongue," says D. Masson^, and when he adds
"It could hardly fail to be so Even now, questions
in English syntax are often settled best practically, if a settlement is wanted, by a reference to Latin con- struction", he expresses a totally erroneous conception which has been, and is, unfortunately too common, although very little linguistic culture would seem to be needed to expose its fallacy. 'Nowhere, perhaps, has this misconception been more strongly expressed than in Dryden's preface to "Troilus and Cressida", where he writes: "How barbarously we yet write and speak your Lordship knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in ray own English. For I am often put to a stand in con- sidering whether what I write be the idiom of the tongue, or false grammar and nonsense couched beneath that specious name of Anglicism, and have no other way to clear my doubts but by translating my English into Latin, and thereby trying what sense the words will bear in a more stable language." I am afraid that Dryden would never have become the famous writer he is, had he employed this practice as often as he would have us imagine. But it was certainly in deference to Latin syntax that in the later editions of his Essay on Dramatic Poesy he changed such phrases as "I cannot think so contemptibly of the agig L'ftve in" to **the age in which I live"; he speaks somewhere- of the preposition at the end of the sentence as a common fault with Ben Jonson "and which I have but lately observed in my
1 Poetical Works of Milton, 1890, vol. Ill, p. 74 — 5.
2 I quote this second-hand, see J. Earle, English Prose 267; Hales, Notes to Milton's Areopagitica, p. 103.
Syntax and style. I2Q
own writings." The construction Dryden here reprehends is not a 'fault' and is not confined to Ben Jonson, but is a genuine English idiom of long standing in the language and found very frequently in all writers of natural prose and verse. The omission of the relative* pronoun, which Dr. Johnson terms 'a colloquial barbarism, and which is found only seven_jor^ight times in all the writings of Milton, and (according to Thum) only t^wi^g in the whole of jMacaulay's History, abounds in the writings of such authors as Shakespeare, Bunyan, Swift, Fielding, Goldsmith, Sterne, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Ruskin, etc., etc. In Addison's well-known "Humble Petition of Who and Which" ^ these two pronouns complain of the injury done to them by the recent extension of the use of that. "We are des- cended of ancient Families, and kept up our Dignity and Honour many Years till the Jacksprat that supplanted us." Addison here turns all historical truth topsy-turvy, for that is much older as a relative pronoun than either who or which ; but the real reason of his predilection for the latter two was certainly their conformance to Latin relative pronouns, and there can be no doubt that his article, assisted by English grammars and teaching given in schoolrooms, has contributed very much to restricting the use of that as a relative pronoun — in writing at least. Addison himself, when editing the Spectator in book- form, corrected many a natural that to a less natural who or which,
127. As to the more general effect of classical studies on English style, I am very much inclined to think that Darwin and Huxley are right as against most schoolmasters. "Ch. Darwin had the strongest disbelief in the common idea that a classical scholar must write
I The Spectator, no. 78, May 30, 171 1.
Jespersen, the English language.
I^O VI. Latin and Greek.
good English; indeed he thought that the contrary was the case."^ Huxley wrote to the Times, Aug. 5, 1890^: "My impression has been that the Genius of the English language is widely different from that of Latin; and that the worst and the most debased kinds of English style are those which ape Latinity. I know of no purer English prose than that of John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe; I doubt if the music of Keats's verse has ever been surpassed; it has not been my fortune to hear any orator who approached the powerful simplicity, the limpid sincerity, of the speech of John Bright. Yet Latin literature and these masters of English had little to do with one another." As "in diesem bund der dritte" might be mentioned Herbert Spencer who expressed himself strongly to the same effect in his last book.^
128. To return to the vocabulary. We may now con- sider the question: Is the Latin element on the whole beneficial to the English tongue or would it have been better if the free adoption of words from the classical languages had been kept within much narrower limits? A perfectly impartial decision is not easy, but it is hoped that the following may be considered a fair state- ment of the most important pros and cons. The first advantage that strikes the observer is the enormous addition to the English vocabulary. If the English boast that their language is richer than any other, and that their dictionaries contain a far greater number of words than German and French ones, the chief reason is, of course, the greater number of foreign and especially of French and Latin words adopted. "I trade," says
i Life and Letters of Ch. Darwin, 1887, I p. 155.
2 Quoted by J. Earle, English Prose, 487.
3 Facts and Comments, 1902, p. 70.
Wealth of words. I 9 j
Dryden, "both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language."
129. But this wealth of words has its seamy side too. The real psychological wealth is wealth of ideas, not of mere names. "We have more words than notions, half a dozen words for the same thing", says Selden (Table Talk LXXVI). Words are not material things that can be heaped up like money or stores of food and clothes, from which you may at any time take what you want. A word to be yours must be learnt by you, and possessing it means reproducing it. Both the process of learning and that of reproducing it involve labour on your part. Some words are easy to handle, and others difficult. The number of words at your disposal in a given language is, therefore, not the only thing of importance; their quality, too, is to be considered, and especially the ease with which they can be associated with the ideas they are to symbolize and with other words. Now many of the Latin words are deficient in that respect, and this entails other drawbacks to speakers of English, as will presently appear.
130. It will be argued in favour of the classical ele- ments that many of them fill up gaps in the native stock of words, so that they serve to express ideas which would have been nameless but for them. To this it may be objected that the resources of the original language should not be underrated. In most, perhaps in all cases, it would have been possible to find an adequate ex- pression in the vernacular or to coin one. The tendency to such economy in Old English and the ease with which felicitous terms for new ideas were then framed by means of native speech-material, have been mentioned above. But little by little English speakers lost the habit of looking first to their own language and utilizing it to the utmost before going abroad for new expressions.
9*
1^2 VI. Latin and Greek.
People who had had their whole education in Latin and had thought all their best thoughts in that language to an extent which is not easy for us moderns to realize, often found it easier to write on abstract or learned subjects in Latin than in their own vernacular, and M^hen they tried to write on these things in English, Latin words would constantly come first to their minds. Mental laziness and regard to their own momentary convenience therefore led them to retain the Latin word and give it only an English termination. Little did they care for the convenience of their readers, if they should happen to be ignorant of the classics, or for that of unborn generations, whom they forced by their disregard for their own language to carry on the burden of committing to memory words and expressions which were really foreign to their idiom. If they have not actually dried up the natural sources of speech — for these run on as fresh as ever — yet they have accustomed their countrymen to cross the stream in search of water, to borrow an expressive Danish locution.
131. There is one class of words which seems to be rather sparingly represented in the native vocabulary, so that classical formations are extremely often resorted to, namely the adjectives. It is, in fact, surprising how many pairs we have of native nouns and foreign ad- jectives, e. g. mouth: oral\ nose: nasal; eye: ocular; mind: mental; son: filial; ox: bovine; worm: vermicular; house: domestic; the middle ages: medieval; book: literary; moon: lunar; sun: solar; star: stellar; town: urban; man: human, virile, etc., etc. In the same category we may class such pairs as money: monetary, pecuniary; letter: episto- lary; school: scholastic, as the nouns, though originally foreign, are now for all practical purposes to be con- sidered native. We may note here English proper names and their Latinized adjectives, e. g. Dorset: Dorsetian;
Adjectives. i ^ -j
Oxford: Oxonian\ Cambridge: Cantahi-igian\ Gladstone: Gladstonian. Lancaster has even two adjectives, Lan- castrian (in medieval history) and Lancastrian (schools, Joseph Lancaster, i 77 i — 1838). It cannot be pretended that all these adjectives are used on account of any real deficiency in the English language, as it has quite a number of endings by which to turn substantives into adjectives: -en (silken), -y (flowery), -ish (giriish), -ly (fatherly), -like (fishlike), -some (burdensome), -ful (sinful), and these might easily have been utilized still more than they actually have been. In point of fact, we possess not a few native adjectives by the side of more learned ones, ^. ^. fatherly, paternal', motherly', maternal', brotherly, fraternal (but only sisterly, as sororal is so rare as to be left out of account); further watery, aquatic or aqueous', heavenly, celestial', earthy, earthly, earthen', terrestrial', timely, temporal', daily, diurfial; fishlilie: pis c if or m', truthful: vera- cious] etc. In some cases the meanings of these have become more or less differentiated, the English words having often lost an abstract sense which they formerly had and which there seemed really to be no gain in giving up. If the word sanguinary is now extensively used it is due to the curious twisting of the meaning of bloody in vulgar speech (cf. 244). Kingly, royal, and regal have now slightly diff'erent applications, but as royal in French, kongelig in Danish, and koniglich in German cover them all, English might have been content with one word instead of three.
-^' 132. Besides, in a great many cases it is really contrary to the genius of the language to use an ad- jective at all. Where Romance and Slavonic languages very often prefer a combination of a noun and an ad- jective the Germanic languages combine the two ideas into a compound noun. Birthday is much more English than 7iatal day (which is used, for instance, in Words-
I J A VI. Latin and Greek.
worth's 75th Sonnet), and eyeball than ocular globe, but physiologists think it more dignified to speak of the gustatory nerve than of the taste nerve and will even say mejital nerve (Lat. mentum 'chin') instead of chin nerve in spite of the unavoidable confusion with the famihaf adjective mental. Mere position before another noun is really the most English way of turning a noun into an adjective, e. g. the London market, a Wessex man, York- shire pudding, a strong Edinburgh accent, a Japan table, Venice glasses, the Chaucer Society, the Droeshout picture, a Gladstone bag, imitation Astrachan, "Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion kill'd" (Tennyson).^ It is worth noting that the EngHsh adjective corresponding to family is not familiar, which has been somewhat estranged from its kindred, but family: family reasons, family affairs, family questions, etc. The unnaturalness of forming Latin adjectives is, perhaps, also shown by the vacillation often found between different endings. Which is correct, feuda- tary ox feudatory? Is there any difference between y^.?/^/, festive, and festival? From labyrinth no less than six ad- jectives have been found: labyrinthal, labyrinthean , laby- rinthian, labyrinthic , labyrinthical and labyrinthine. Many adjectives are quite superfluous; Shakespeare never used either autumnal, hibernal, vernal, or estival, and he probably never missed them. Instead of hodiernal and hesternal we have luckily other expressions (to-day's post; the questions of the day; yesterday's news). Most of us can certainly do without gressorial (birds), avuncular (a favourite with Thackeray: "Clive, in the avuncular gig"; "the avuncular banking house"; "the avuncular quarrel", all from The Newcomes) , osculatory (processes = kissing ; ib.), lachrymatory (he is great in the 1. line; ib.),
I Shakespeare did not scruple to write "the Carthage queen", "Rome gates", "Tiber banks", even "through faire Verona streets", Cf. below, § 210.
Synonyms. I ^ c
aquiline ("What! am I an eagle too? I have no aquiline pretensions at all", ib.)^ — and a great many simi- larly purposeless adjectives.
133. More than in anything else the richness of the English language manifests itself in its great number of synonyms, whether we take this word in its strict sense of words of exactly the same meaning or in the looser sense of words with nearly the same meaning. It is evident that the latter class must be the most valuable as it allows speakers to express subtle shades of thought. Juvenile does not signify the same thing as youthful, pon- derous as weighty, portion as share, miserable as wretched. Sometimes the Latin word is used in a more limited, special or precise sense than the English, as is seen by a comparison of identical and same, science and knowledge, sentence and saying, latent or occult and hidden. Breath can hardly now be called a synonym of spirit ("The spirit does not mean the breath", Tennyson), and simi- larly edif', which is still used by Spenser in the con- crete sense of 'building up', is now used exclusively with a spiritual signification, which its former synonym build can never have. Homicide is the learned, abstract, colourless word, while inurder denotes only one kind of manslaughter, and killing is the everyday word with a much vaguer signification (being applicable also to ani- mals) ; there is a very appositejq notation from Coleridge in the NED.: "(He) is acquitted of murder — the act was manslaughter only, or it was -justifiable homicide". The learned word magnitude is more specialized than greatness or size (which is indeed now thorougly English, but is a very recent development of assize in a curiously modified sense.) The Latin masculine is more abstract than
^ Thus used in a different manner from the familiar aqui- line nose.
1^6 VI. Latin and Greek.
the English manlv, which generally implies an emotional element of praise, the French male has not exactly the same import as either, and the Latin virile represents a fourth shade, while for the other sex we have femijii?ie, womanly and womanish, the differences between which are not parallel to those between the first series of synonyms.
134. These examples will suffice to illustrate the syn- onymic relations between classical and other words. It will be seen that it is not always easy to draw a line or to determine exactly the different shades of meaning attached to each word; indeed, a comparison of the definitions given in various essays on synonyms and in dictionaries, and especially a comparison of these de- finitions with the use as actually found in various writ- ers, will show that it is in many cases a hopeless task to assign definite spheres of signification to these words. Sometimes the only real difference is that one term is preferred in certain collocations- and another in others. Still, it is indubitable that very often the existence of a double or triple assortment of expressions will allow a writer to express his thoughts with the greatest pre- cision imaginable. But on the other hand, only those whose thoughts are accurate and well disciplined attain to the highest degree of linguistic precision, and the use in speech and writing of the same set of words by loose and inexact thinkers will always tend to blur out any sharp lines of demarcation that may exist between such synonymous terms as do not belong to their every-day stock of language.
135. However, even where there is no real difference in the value of two words or where the difference is momentarily disregarded, their existence may not be en- tirely worthless, as it enables an author to avoid a tri- vial repetition of the same word, and variety of expres- sions is generally considered one of the felicities of
Synonyms. I^y
style. We very often see English authors use a native and a borrowed word side by side with the only appa- rent purpose of varying the expression without the idea being in the least different. Thus ^' of blind /brgef/'uhiess and dark oblivion'' (Shakespeare, in Buckingham's strongly- rhetorical speech, R 3 III. 7. 129). A perfectly natural variation of three expressions is seen in: "the Bushman story is just the sort of story we expect from Bushmen, whereas the Hesiodic story is not at all the AvW of tale we look for from Greeks". (A. Lang, Custom and Myth 54). Further examples: "I went upstairs with my candle directly. It appeared to my childish fancy, as
I ascended to the bedroom " "He asked me if it
would suit my convenience to have the light put out\ and on my answering 'yes', instantly extinguished it". "The phantom slo\v!y approached. When it came near him, Scrooge bent down"; "they are exactly unlike. They are utterly dissimilar in all respects" (all these from Dickens). "I could not repress a half smile as he said this; a similar demi-manifestation of feeling appeared at the same moment on Hunsden's lips." This kind of variation evidently does not always lead to the highest excellence of style. I quote from Minto^ Samuel John- son's comparison between punch and conversation: "The spirit, volatile and fiery, is the proper emblem of vivacity and wit; the acidity of the lemon will very aptly figure pungency of raillery and acrimony of censure; sugar is the natural representative of luscious adulation and gentle complaisance; and water is the proper hieroglyphic of easy prattle, innocent and tasteless." This is not far from Mr. Micawber's piling up of words ("to the best of my knowledge, information, and beUef to wit.
^ Manual of English Prose Literature, 3d ed. 1896, p. 418.
>38
VI. Latin and Greek.
in manner following, that is to say"), which gives Dickens the occasion for the following outburst:
"In the taking of legal oaths, for instance, deponents seem to enjo}' themselves mightily when they come to several good words in succession, for the expression of one idea; as, that they utterly detest, abominate, and abjure, or so forth; and the old anathemas were made relishing on the same principle. We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannize over them too ; we are fond of having a large superfluous establish- ment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meanings of our liveries on state occasions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so the meaning or necessity of our words is a second- ary consideration if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from main- taining too large a retinue of words." [David Coppe?-- fieldj p. 702).
136. No doubt many of the synonymous terms intro- duced from Latin and Greek had best been let alone. No one would have missed pharos by the side of lighthouse, or nigritude by the side of blackness. The native words cold, cool, chill, chilly, icy, frosty might have seemed sufficient for all purposes, without any necessity for importing frigid, gelid, and algid, which, as a matter of fact, are neither found in Shakespeare nor the Authorized Version of the Bible nor in the poetical works of Milton, Pope, Cowper, and Shelley.
137. Apart from the advantage to poets of having constantly the choice between several words of a different
Big words. 13Q
number of syllables and often also with different ac- cents, poets will often find the sonorous Latin words better for their purposes than the short native ones. In some kinds of prose writing too, they are felt to height- en the tone, and add dignity, even majesty, to the structure of the sentence. The chief reason of this seems to be that the long word takes up more time. Instead of hurrying the reader or listener on to the next idea, it allows his mind to dwell for a longer time upon the same idea; it gives time for his reflection to be deeper and especially for his emotion to be stronger. This seems to me more important than the two other reasons given by H. Spencer (Essays, II, p. 14) that "a volu- minous, mouth-filling epithet is, by its very size, sugges- tive of largeness or strength" and that '*a word of sev- eral syllables admits of more emphatic articulation (?); and as emphatic articulation is a sign of emotion, the unusual impressiveness of the thing named is implied by it." Let me quote here also a quaint passage from Howell (New English Grammar, 1662, p. 40) who looks at the same thing from the speaker's point of view: "The Spanish abound and delight in words of many syllables, and where the English expresseth himself in one syllable, he doth in 5 or 6, as thoughts pensamientos, fray levantamiento &c, which is held a part of wisdom, for while they speak they take time to consider of the matter."
138. It is often said that the classical elements are commendable on the score of international intelligibility, and it is certain that many of them, even of those formed during the last century on more or less exact Latin and Greek analogy, are used in many other civil- ized countries as well as in England. The utility ..of this is evident in our days of easy communication be- tween the nations; but on the whole its utility should
I^O ^I- Latin and Greek.
not be valued beyond measure. If the thing to be nam- ed is one of everyday importance, national convenience should certainly be considered before international ease; therefore to wire and a ivire are preferable to telegraph and telegram,^ Scientific nomenclature is to a great extent universal, and there is no reason why each nation should have its own name for foraminifera or monocotyle- dones. But so much of science is now becoming more and more the property of everybody and influences daily life so deeply that the endeavour should rather be to have popular than learned names for whatever in science is not intended exclusively for the speciahst. Sleeplessness is a better name than insomnia, and foreign- ers who know English enough to read a medical treatise in it will be no more perplexed by the word than an Englishman reading German is by Schlaflosigkeit. Foreign phoneticians have had no difficulty in understanding Melville Bell's excellent nomenclature and have even to a great extent adopted the English terms o^ front, mixed, hack, etc. in preference to the more cumbersome palatal, gutturopalatal, and guttural. It is a pity that half-vowel (Googe 1577) and half-vowelish (Ben Jonson) should have been superseded by semi-vowel and semi-vow el-like. Among English words that have been in recent times adopted by many foreign languages may be mentioned chequ£, hex (in a bank), trust, film (in photography), sport, jockey, sulky, gig, handicap, dock, ivaterproof tender, coke (German and Danish Jwks or sometimes with Pseudo- English spelling coaks), so that even to obtain internation- al currency a word need not have a learned appear- ance or be derived from Greek and Latin roots. Be- sides, many of the latter class are not quite so inter-
^ And why not use wireless as a verb too? "Admiral N. has wirelessed that a Russian man-of-war is in sight," etc.
Internationality. 1 4 1
national as might be supposed, as their EngHsh signi- fications are unknown on the continent [pathos, physics, concu?-rent, eventual, injury)', sometimes, also, the ending is different, as in principle (Fr. principe, etc.), individual (Fr. individu, German individ), chemistry (chimie, chemie), botany (botanique), fanaticism (fanatisme).
139. It is possible to point out a certain number of inherent deficiencies which affect parts of the vocabulary borrowed from the classical language. Mention has al- ready been made (§ 26) of the stress-shifting which is so contrary to the general spirit of Germanic tongues and which obscures the relation between connected words, especially in a language where unstressed syllables are generally pronounced wdth such indistinct vowel sounds as in English. Compare, for instance, solid and solidity, pathos and pathetic, pathology' and pathologic, pacify and pacific (note that the first two syllables of pacification, where the strongest stress is on the fourth syllable, va- cillate between the two corresponding pronunciations). The incongruity is especially disagreeable when native names are distorted by means of a learned derivative ending, as when Milton has the stress shifted on to the second syllable and the vowel changed (in two different ways) in Miltonic and Miltonian', cf. also Baconian, Dickens- ian, Taylorian, Spenserian, Ca?iadian, Dorsetian, etc.
140. Another drawback is shown in the relation be- tween ejnit and immit, emerge and immerge. While in Latin emitto and immitto, emergo and inmiergo were easily kept apart, because the vowels were distinct and double consonants were rigorously pronounced double and so kept apart from single ones, the natural English pronun- ciation will confound them, just as immediate and emotion begin with the same two sounds. Now, as the meaning of e- is the exact opposite of in-, the two pairs do not agree well in the same language. The same is true of
1^2 VI. Latin and Greek.
illision 2ind elision, ilhmon and elusion} A still greater drawback arises from the two meanings of initial in, which is sometimes the negative prefix and sometimes the preposition. According to dictionaries invertihle means (i) capable of being inverted, (2) incapable of being changed; investigable similarly (i) "that may be investigated, (2) incapable of being investigated, and infusible (i) that may be infused or poured in, (2) in- capable of being fused or melted. Importable, which is now only used as derived from zV/z/cr/ (capable of being imported) had formerly also the meaning 'unbearable', and improvable similarly had the meaning of 'incapable of being proved' though it only retains that of 'capable of being improved'. Inexistence means (i) the fact or condition of existing in something, and (2), rarely, the fact or condition of not existing. What Shakespeare in one passage (Temp. II. 1.37) expresses in accordance with modern usage by the word uninhabitable he elsewhere calls inhabitable (Even to the frozen ridges of the Alpes, Or any other ground inhabitable, R2 I. i I. 65), and the ambiguity of the latter word has now led to *the curious result that the positive adjective corresponding to inhabit is habitable and the negative uninhabitable. The first syllable of inebriety is the preposition in-, so that it means the same thing as ebriety 'drunkenness', but Th. Hook mis- took it for the negative prefix and so, subtracting in-, made ebriety mean 'sobriety'.^ Illustrious is used in Shakespeare's Cymb. I. 6. 109 as the negative oi lustrous, while elsewhere it has the exactly opposite signification. Fortunately this ambig- uity is limited to a comparative small portion of the vocabulary.^
^ Illiterate spellers will often write illicit for elicit, enu^ne- rable for innumerable, etc. Many words have had, and some still have, two spellings, with en- (em-) from the French, and with in- {i?7i-) from the Latin.
2 See quotation in Davies, Supplementary English Glossary 1 88 1 .
^ If invaluable means generally 'very valuable' and some- times 'valueless', the case is obviously different from the above.
Want of harmony. 14^
141. Loan-words do not necessarily make a language inharmonious. In Finnish, for instance, in spite of numerous loans from a variety of languages, the prevailing impression is one of unity, apart perhaps from some of the most recent Swedish words. The foreign elements have been so assimilated in sound and inflection as to be recognizable as foreign only to the eye of a philologist. The same may be said of the pre-Conquest borrowings from Latin into English, of the Scandinavian and of the most important among the French loans, nay even of a great many recent loans from exotic languages. Wine and fea, bacon and eggs, orange and sugar , plunder and war, prison and judge — all are not only indispensable, but harmonious elements of English. But while most people are astonished on first hearing that such words have not always belonged to their language, no philo- logical training is required to discover that phenomenon or diphtheria or intellectual or latitudinariaji are out of harmony with the real core or central part of the language. Every one must feel the incongruity of such sets of words as father — paternal — parricide or of the abnormal plurals which break the beautiful regularity of nearly all English suhsta.nti\es ^ phenomena, nuclei, larvcB, chrysalides, indices, etc. The occasional occurrence of such blundering plurals as animalculcB and igtwrami is an unconscious protest against the prevalent pedantry of schoolmasters in this respect ^
I "He may also see giraffes, lions or rhinoceros. The mention of this last word reminds me of a problem, which has tormented me all the time that 1 have been in East Africa, namely, what is the plural of rhinoceros? The conversational abbreviations, "rhino," "rhinos," seem beneath the dignity of literature, and to use the sporting idiom by which the singular is always put for the plural is merely to avoid the difficulty. Liddell and Scott seem to authorise "rhinocerotes" which is pedantic, but "rhinoceroses" is not euphonious." Sir Charles Eliot, The East Africa Pro- tectorate (1905) p. 266.
jAA M. Latin and Greek.
142. The unnatural state into which the language has been thrown by the wholesale adoption of learned words is further manifested by the fact that not a few of them have no fixed pronunciation; they are, in fact, eye- words that do not really exist in the language. Educated people freely write them and understand them when they see them written, but are more or less puzzled when they have to pronounce them. Dr. Murray relates how he was once present at a meeting of a learned society, where in the course of discussion he heard the word gaseous systematically pronounced in six different ways by as many eminent physicists. (NED., Preface.) Diairihist is by Murray and the Century Dictionary stressed on the first, by Webster on the second syllable, and the same hesitation is found with phlogiston, pholades, phonotypy, photochromy, and many similar words. This is, however, beaten by two so well-known words as hegemony and phthisis, for each of which dictionaries record no less than nine possible pronunciations without being able to tell us which of these is the prevalent or preferable one. I doubt very much whether analogous waverings can be found in any other language.
143. The worst thing, however, that can be said against the words that are occupying us here is their difficulty and the undemocratic character which is a natural outcome of their difficulty. A great many of them will never be used or understood by anybody that has not had a classical education.^ There are usually no associations of ideas between them and the ordinarv
I Sometimes they are not even understood by the erudite themselves. Gestic in Goldsmith's "skill'd in gestic lore" (Trav- eller 253) is taken in all dictionaries as meaning 'legendary, historical' as if from gest, OFr. geste 'story, romance' ; but the context shows conclusively that 'pertaining to bodily movement, esp. dancing' (NED.) must be the meaning; cf. Lat, gestus 'gesture'. Aristarchy has been wrongly interpreted in most dictionaries (see Fitzedw. Hall, Modern English 143).
Malapropisms. I^e
stock of words, and no likenesses in root or in the formative elements to assist the memory. We have here none of those invisible threads that knit words together in the human mind. Their great number in the language is therefore apt to form or rather to accentuate class divisions, so that a man's culture is largely judged of by the extent to which he is able correctly to handle these hard words in speech and in writing — certainly not the highest imaginable standard of a man's worth. No literature in the world abounds as English does in characters made ridiculous to the reader by the manner in which they misapply or distort 'big' words. Shakespeare's Dogberry and Mrs. Quickly, Fielding's Mrs. Slipslop, Smollett's Winifred Jenkins, Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, Dickens's Weller senior, Shillaber's Mrs. Partington, and footmen and labourers innumerable made fun of in novels and comedies might all of them appear in court as witnesses for the plaintiff in a law-suit brought against the educated classes of England for wilfully making the language more complicated than necessary and thereby hindering the spread of education among all classes of the population. 144. Different authors vary very greatly with regard to the extent to which they make use of these 'choice words, and measured phrases above the reach of ordinary men'. So much is said on this head in easily accessible textbooks on literature that I need not repeat it here. Unfortunately the statistical calculations given there of the percentage of native and of foreign words in dififerent writers are not quite to the point, for while they generally include Scandinavian loans among native words, they reckon together all words of classical origin, although such popular words as cry or croivn have evidently quite a different standing in the language from learned words like auditory or hymenoptera. The culmination with regard to the use of learned words in ordinary Uterary style was
Jespersen, the English language. ID
146
VI. Latin and Greek.
reached in the time of Dr. Samuel Johnson. I can find no better example to illustrate the effect of extreme 'Johnsonese' than the following:
"The proverbial oracles of our parsimonious ancestors have informed us, that the fatal waste of our fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together. Of the same kind is the prodigality of hfe; he that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground."^
145. In his Essay on Madame D'Arblay Macaulay gives some delightful samples of this style as developed by that ardent admirer of Dr. Johnson. Sheridan refused to permit his lovely wife to sing in public, and was warmly' praised on this account by Johnson. "The last of men," says Madame D'Arblay, "was Doctor Johnson to have abet'ed squandering the delicacy of integrity by nullifying the labours of talent." An offence punishable with imprisonment is, in this language, an offence "which produces incarceration." To be starved to death is "to sink from inanition into nonentity." Sir Isaac Newton is "the developer of the skies in their embodied move- ments," and Mrs. Thrale, when a party of clever people sat silent, is said to have been "provoked by the dulness of a taciturnity that, in the midst of such renowned interloculors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused by a death the most barren of all human faculties." (Macaulay, Essays, Tauchn. ed. V. p. 65.)
I Minto (Manual of Engl. Prose Lit. 422) translates this as follows: 'Take care of the pennies,' says the thrifty old proverb, 'and the pounds will take care of themselves.' In like manner we might say, 'Take care of the minutes, and the years will take care of themselves.'
Johnsonese. 147
146. In the nineteenth century a most happy reaction set in in favor of "Saxon" words and natural ex- pressions; and it is highly significant that Tennyson, for instance, prides himself on having in the "Idylls of the King" used Latin words more sparingly than any other poet. But still the malady lingers on. Even such a master of Saxon English as Charles Lamb begins his "Chapter on Ears" in the following way: "I have no ear. Mistake me not, reader, — nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architectur- ally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capi- tal. Better my mother had never borne me. I am, I think, rather dehcately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envt the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those labyrinthine inlets — those indispensable side- intelHgencers." O. W. Holmes, in his "Our Hundred Days in Europe" avoids the simple expression "a shaving machine" and "beard", and writes instead "a reaping machine which gathered the capillary harvest of the past
twenty-four hours in short, a lawn-mower for the
masculine growth of which the proprietor wishes to rid his countenance."
147. Of course, the authors of these two samples aim in them at a certain humorous effect, and very often similar circumlocutions are consciously resorted to in conversation to obtain a ludicrous effect, as 'he amputated his mahogany' (cut his stick, went off), *to agitate the communicator' (ring the bell), 'are your corporeal functions in a condition of solubiHty?', 'a sanguinary nasal pro- tuberance', 'the Recent Incision' (the New Cut, a street in London), 'the Grove of the EvangeUst' (St. John's Wood in London), etc. When Mr. Bob Sawyer asked "I say, old boy, where do you hang out?" Mr. Pickwick replied
148
VI. Latin and Greek.
that he was at present suspended at the George and Vulture. (Dickens, Pickw. II 13). Punch gives somewhere the following paraphrases of well-known proverbs: " Ini- quitous intercourses contaminate proper habits. In the absence of the feline race, the mice give themselves up to various pastimes. Casualties will take place in the most excellently conducted family circles. More con- fectioners than are absolutely necessary are apt to ruin the potage." (Quoted in Fitzgerald's Miscellanies, p. 166). Some Latin and Greek words will scarcely ever be used except in jocular or ironical speech, such as fumigation (odour, tobacco-smoking), sapient (wise), histrion (actor), a virgin aunt (maiden aunt), hylactism (barking), edacious (greedy), the genus Homo (mankind), etc.
148. But how many words are there not which belong virtually to the same class, but are used in dead earnest by people who know that many big words are found in the best authors and who want to show off their education by avoiding plain everyday expressions and couching their thoughts in a would-be refined style? When Canning wrote the inscription graven on Pitt's monument in the London Guildhall, an Alderman felt much disgust at the grand phrase, "he died poor", and wished to sub- stitute "he expired in indigent circumstances." Mr. Kington Oliphant, who relates this (The New English II 2^2)^ justly remarks, "Could the difference between the schol- arlike and the vulgar be more happily marked?" James Russell Lowell, in the Introduction to the Second Series of his Biglow Papers, has a list of what he calls the old and the new styles of newspaper writing, which I find so characteristic that I cannot forbear reprinting it, though it is perhaps superfluous after the illustrations of the same "tendency already given: —
Old Style. New Style.
Was hanged. Was launched into eternity.
Journalese.
149
Old Style. When the halter was put round his neck.
A great crowd came to see.
Great fire.
The fire spread.
House burned.
The fire was got under.
Man fell.
A horse and wagon ran against.
The frightened horse. Sent for the doctor.
The mayor of the city in a short speech welcomed.
I shall say a few words.
Began his answer. Asked him to dine.
New Style.
When the fatal noose was adjusted about the neck of the unfortunate victim of his own unbridled passions.
A vast concourse was as- sembled to witness.
Disastrous conflagration.
The conflagration extended its devastating career.
Edifice consumed.
The progress of the devour- ing element was arrested.
Individual was precipitated.
A valuable horse attached to a vehicle driven by J. S., in the employment of J. B., collided with.
The infuriated animal.
Called into requisition the services of the family physician.
The chief magistrate of the metropolis, in well chosen and eloquent language, frequently interrupted by the plaudits of the surging multitude, officially ten- dered the hospitalities.
I shall, with your permission, beg leave to offer some brief observations.
Commenced his rejoinder.
Tendered him a banquet.
ICQ VI. Latin and Greek.
Old Style. New Style.
A bystander advised. One of those omnipresent
characters who, as if in pursuance of some pre- vious arrangement, are certain to be encountered in the vicinity when an accident occurs, ventured the suggestion.
He died. He deceased, he passed
out of existence, his spirit quitted its earthly habit- ation, winged its way to eternity, shook off its burden, etc.
149. I do not deny that somewhat parallel instances of stilted language might be culled from the daily press of most other nations, but nowhere else are they found in such plenty as in EngHsh, and no other language lends itself by its very structure to such vile stylistic tricks as English does. Is not even such a simple thing as a child's carriage (kinderwagen, barnevogn, voiture de beb6) here termed a pera??ibu/afor? ' Kn^^'id not little Thomas Babington Macaulay, when four years old, reply to a lady who took pity on him after he had spilt some hot coffee over his legs, "Thank you, madam, the agony is abated"? And does not a language which possesses, besides the natural expression for each thing, two or three sonorous equivalents, tempt a writer into what Lecky hits off so well when he says of Gladstone: "He seemed sometimes to be labouring to show with how many words a simple thought could be expressed or obscured"? (Democracy and Liberty I p. XXL)
150. To sum up: the classical words adopted since the Renaissance have enriched the English language very
Summing-up. icj
considerably and have especially increased its number of synonyms. But it is not every "enrichment" that is an advantage, and this one comprises much that is really superfluous, or worse than superfluous, and has, more- over, stunted the growth of native formations. The inter- national currency of many words is not a full compen- sation for their want of harmony with the central part of the language and for the undemocratic character they give to the vocabulary. While the composite character of the language gives variety and to some extent precision to the style of the greatest masters, on the other hand it encourages an inflated turgidity of style. Without siding completely with Milton's teacher Alexander Gill, who says that classical studies have done the English language more harm than ever the cruelties of the Danes or the devastations of the Normans*, we shall probably be near the truth if we recognize in the latest influence from the classical languages 'something between a hindrance and a help.'
I Ad Latina venio. Et si uspiam querelae locus, hie est; quod otium, quod literae, maiorem cladem sermoni Anglico intulerint quam ulla Danorum saevitia, uUa Normannorum vastitas unquam inflixerit. Logonomia Anglica 162 1 (Jiriczek's reprint, Strassburg 1903, p. 43.)
Chapter VII. Various Sources.
151. Although English has borrowed a great many words from other languages than those mentioned in the preceding chapters, these borrowings need not occupy us long here. For only Scandinavian, French, and Latin have left a mark on English deep enough to modify its character and to change its structure, and numerous as are the words it has borrowed from Dutch, Italian, Span- ish, German, etc., the English language would remain the same in every essential respect even were they all to disappear to-morrow. Many of the words taken over from other languages are indeed extremely interesting from many points of view, and the student who should go through the lists given by Skeat^ with a view to arranging them in groups according to their signification would be able to draw many important inferences with regard to England's commercial and other relations with many nations. Attention has already been called to the musical terms derived from Italian (§ 31), and a similar list of terms of architecture and art in general taken from the same language (<?. g. colonnade, cornice, corri- dor, grotto, niche, parapet, pilaster, profile; miniature, fresco; improvisatore, motto) could be made the basis of an interesting chapter in a history of European civilization. A considerable number of military words (<?. g. alarm
I In his Ety7nological Dictionary and Principles of English Etymology .
Foreign words. I=^
or alarum, cartridge, corporal, cuirass, pistol, sentinel) carry us back to wars between Italy and France; and still other lessons in military history might be learnt from the existence in English of two synonyms, plunder, a German word introduced in the middle of the seventeenth century by soldiers who had served under Gustavus Adolphus, and loot, a Hindi word learnt by English soldiers in India about a hundred years ago. But it would lead us too far if we were to give many such instances.
152. There is, of course, nothing peculiarly English in the adoption of such words as iJiaccaroni and lava from Italian, steppe and verst from Russian, caravaji and dervish from Persian, hussar and shako from Hungarian, hey and caftan from Turkish, harem and mufti from Arabic, bamboo and orang-outajig from Malay, chocolate and tomato from Mexican, moccassin and tomahawli from other American languages. As a matter of fact, all these words now belong to the whole of the civilized world; like such classical or pseudo-classical words as nationality^ telegram, and civilization they bear witness to the sameness of modern culture everywhere: the same products and to a great extent the same ideas are now known all over the globe and many of them have in many languages ident- ical names.
153. And yet, English differs from most other languages in that it is more inclined than they are to swallow foreign words raw, so to speak, instead of preferring to translate the foreign expression into some native equi- valent. Thus English has taken over the German word kindergarten unchanged, while for the same institution Danish has the literal translation bornehave and Norwegian harnehave.
154. An interesting contrast may be seen between the behaviour in this respect of the Dutch and the English
I CA VII. Various soiirces.
in South Africa. The former, finding there a great many- natural objets which were new to them, designated them either by means of existing Dutch words whose meanings were, accordingly, more or less modified, or else by coining new words, generally compounds. Thus s/oof ' ditch ' was applied to the peculiar dry rivers of that country, veM 'field' to the open pasturages, and kopje 'a little head or cup' to the hills, etc.; diff"erent kinds of animals were called roodehok ('red -buck'), steenbok (* stone-buck ') , springbok (' hop-buck ') , springhaas (' hop- hare'), /^«r/<?(^(?<?j/ (' hart-beast ') ; a certain bird was called slangvreter (' serpent-eater ') , a certain large shrub spek- boom ('bacon -tree'), etc. The English, on the other hand, instead of imitating this principle, have simply taken over all these names into their own language, where they now figure^ together with some other South African Dutch words, among which may be mentioned trek and spoor, in the special significations of ' colonial migration ' and ' track of wild animal ', while the Dutch words are much less specialized {trekken * to draw, pull, travel, move '; spoor ' trace, track, rail '). These examples of borrowings might easily be multiplied from other do- mains, and we may say of the English what Moth says of Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel that " they have been at a great feast of languages, and stolne the scraps " (Love's L. L. V. I. 39). It will therefore be natural to inquire into the cause of this linguistic omnivorousness.
155. It would, of course, ^e irrational to ascribe the phenomenon to a greater natural gift for learning lang- uages, for in the first place, the English are not usually credited with such a gift, and secondly the best linguists
I Roodebok often spelt in accordance with the actual Dutch pronunciation rooibok, rooyebok. Sloot often appears in the un-Dutch spelling sluit.
South Africa. jec
are generally inclined to keep their own language pure rather than adulterate it with scraps of other languages. Consequently, we should be nearer the truth if we were to give as a reason the linguistic incapacity of the average Englishman. As a traveller and a colonizer, however, he is thrown into contact with people of a great many different nations and thus cannot help seeing numerous things and institutions unknown in England. R. L. Steven- son says somewhere about the typical John Bull, that "his is a domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick about the life of others".^ And perhaps the loan-words we are considering, testify to nothing but the most superficial curiosity about the life of othfer nations and would not have been adopted if John Bull had really in his heart cared any more than this for the foreigners he meets. He is content to pick up a few scattered fragments of their speech — just enough to impart a certain local colouring to his narratives and political discussions, but he goes no further.
156. A rather different attitude towards foreign words seems to have been taken in former times. On the one hand, some foreign place-names of obvious etymology were translated; the Black Forest is one of these trans- lations which has been retained, while now the Sieberi" gebirge and the Riesengebirge are terms more commonly used than the Seven Mountains and the Giant Mountaim. On the other hand, the title signior was in the times of Shakespeare used very frequently in speaking about others than Italians, while now such titles are only applied to natives of the country the titles are borrowed from. It is, indeed, a characteristic feature that foreigners are men- tioned in England as Signor Manfredini, Herr Schultze,
I Memories and Portraits, p. 3.
I c() VII, Various sources.
Fraulein Adler, etc., who in France would be simply Monsieur or Mademoiselle So-and-so. This may be interpreted as a sign of a great respect for or deference to foreigners, and perhaps that is true in the case of foreign musicians or teachers of languages, but in other cases, the use of foreign titles may be an outcome of a certain unwillingness to recognize them as entitled to the same standing as natives, and a consequent inclina- tion to mark them off as un-English.
157. The tendency to adopt words from other languages is due, then, probably to a variety of causes. Foremost among these I think it is right to place the linguistic laziness mentioned in § 130 and fostered especially by the preference for words from the classical languages. That the borrowing is not occasioned by an inherent deficiency in the language itself, is shown by the ease with which new terras actually are framed whenever the need of them is really felt, especially by uneducated people who are not tempted to go outside their own language to express their thoughts. Interesting examples of this natural inventiveness may be found in Mr. Edward E. Morris's "Austral English, A dictionary of Australasian words, phrases and usages ". As Mr. Morris says in his preface, "Those who, speaking the tongue of Shake- speare, of Milton, and of Dr. Johnson, came to various parts of Australasia, found a Flora and a Fauna waiting to be named in English. New birds, beasts and fishes, new trees, bushes and flowers, had to receive names for general use. It is probably not too much to say that there never was an instance in history when so many new names were needed, and that there never will be such an occasion again, for never did settlers come, nor can they ever again come, upon Flora and Fauna so completely different from anything seen by them before". The gaps were filled partly by adopting words from the
Australia. I e y
aboriginal languages, e. g. kangaroo, wombat, partly by applying English words to objects bearing a real or fancied resemblance to the objects denoted by them in England, e. g. 7?iagpie, oak, beech, but partly also by new English formations. Accordingly, in turning over the leaves of Mr. Morris's Dictionary we come across numerous names of birds like friar-bird, frogsmouth, honey-eater, grou7id-lark, forty-spot^, of fishes like long-fin, trumpeter, of plants like sugar-grass, hedge-laurel, ironheari, thousand-jacket. Most of these show that "the settler must have had an imagin- ation. Whip -bird, or Coach- whip, from the sound of the note, Lyre-bird from the appearance of the out- spread tail, are admirable names." (Morris, /. <:.) It certainly seems a pity that book-learned people when wanting to enrich their mother tongue have not, as a rule, drawn from the same source or shown the same talent for picturesque and "telling" designations.
158. A great many words are now-a-days coined by tradespeople to designate new articles of merchandise. Very little regard is generally paid to correctness of formation, the only essential being a name which is good for advertizing purposes. Sometimes a mere arbi- trary collection of sounds or letters is chosen, as in the case of kodak, and sometimes the inventor contents him- self with some vague resemblance to some other word, which may assist the buyer to remember the name. In one single number of one of the illustrated magazines
I One story of a curious change of meaning must be re- counted in Mr. Morris's words: "The settler heard a bird laugh in what he thought an extremely ridiculous manner, its opening notes suggesting a donkey's bray — he called it the 'laughing jackass'. His descendants have dropped the adjective, and it has come to pass that the word 'jackass' denotes to an Australian something quite different from its meaning to other speakers of our English tongue".
158
VII. X'arious sources.
I find the following trade names. I add the probabfe source of any name for which I have been able to ima- gine one — : Larola , luxette [luxe] , koko , Diano [makes women beautiful: Diana], melodeon [a musical instrument: melody], hath-eucryl [soap, one of the ingredients is eiic~ alyptus], oktis, trilene [tablets to cure fat people, try? or Latin /r/ as in tricolour? -j- lean], vapo-cresolene [cresolene vaporized], harleiie [hair], stenotyper [sort of typewriter for stenography], datura, antexerna [anti -[~ eczema], mene, Vive [a photographic camera, cf. vivid], kals [under- clothing, cf. cale^on], nonalton [a tonic, which may be indicated by the ending], onomosto, haydal, zviticamis [a tonic: wine, caro?], vinolia [vinum, oleum], hovril [bos, vril, an electric fluid in Lytton's novel The Coming Race, or according to others from the name of the manu- facturer].-^ As the list dates from January igoo, a great many of the names will probably be extinct before my book sees the light. Others may live and even pass into common use outside the sphere for which they were originally invented ; this is the case with kodak.
159. It once occurred to M. Leon Mead to ask a great number of the best known American authors and men of science what words, if any, they had ever coined. The answers he received are very curious^. A great many of his correspondents distinctly repudiated the idea of having ever done such a thing as to coin a word, some explicitly declaring that they looked upon the coining of words as a crime to be classed with the coining of false money, others saying simply that they had always
1 Sometimes these trade names are half-disguised by fan- cy spellings, the Phiteesi boot, Stickphast, Uneeda cigar [= you need a cigar] in England, Uneeda biscuit in America.
2 Leon Mead, Word-Coinage. New York, Thomas Y. Cro- well & Co. 1902.
Coined words.
159
found the language of Shakespeare - or some other o-reat author they chose to mention — sufficient to ex- press all their thoughts. On the other hand, some per- sons seemed to be proud of their coinages and sent Mr. Mead lists of them or regretted not being able to remember them. When we examine these coined words, we find that by far the greater number of them are framed on classical lines, for instance lyrojiym, metro- poliarchy , cynophiles, feminology, societology, monopolian^ hippopcean, to hermetize oneself, and deanthropomorphization ; I leave out a great many that seem still more ugly and unnecessary. Only rarely do we come across some word formed by a specifically English process, such as densen ("As the spring comes on and the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new design for a Grecian urn," Th. W. Higginson), viewpoint and ivatchpoint (Fawcett), which are, however, only translations from German. Professor Van Dyke says that there was once a little river that could not be described by any other adjective than ivaterfally, and a bird whose song seemed to him wild-flowery. The proof-reader objected to both of these words, but Dr. Van Dyke withstood him. This latter remark is highly characteristic of the attitude taken by most professional champions of correctness of language towards anything a little out of the common, however justifiable the innovation may be. Very few people have the courage to say, as Mr. Edgar Fawcett says (p. 82): "I think every writer ought to have on his con- science the coining of at least five good [monosyllables] each year". It may be doubted indeed if the result would always be "good" words, if authors sat down consciously to fulfil the duty here prescribed to them, for the secret of the thing is that most new words which have come to be approved were framed without their originators being aware at the moment that they were creat-
l5o VI^- Various sources.
ing anything. There is an interesting passage on p. 80 of the book mentioned: "He [A. T. Mahan] used once by chance the word eventless — Mull, weary, eventless month'. The word slipped without premeditation off his pen. He immediately thought it without authority and found it not in Worcester. Nevertheless he stuck to it" as briefer, stronger and much more significant than the ^stupid' uneventful. Now, if people better real- ized the necessary shortcomings and deficiencies of dictionaries, they would not go to them as authorities with regard to such questions'^. A word may have been used scores of times without finding its way into any dictionary, — and a word may be an excellent one even if it has never been used before by any human being. If at its first appearance it is just as intelligible as if it had been in constant use for centuries, why should the first occurrence be more faulty than the three- thousandth?
160. As already hinted, the chief enrichment of the language has taken place through those regular processes which are so familiar that any new word formed by means of them seems at once an old acquaintance. The whole history of English word-formation may be summed up thus — that some formative adjuncts have been gradually discarded, especially those that presented some difficulty of application, while others have been continu- ally gaining ground, because they have admitted of being added to all or nearly all words without occasion- ing any change in the kernel of the word. Among the former I shall mention -en to denote female beings (cf. German -iri). In Old English this had already be-
I As a matter of fact, Bradley in the N. E. D. quotes Mad. D'Arblay (1815), Morris (1868), Stanley (1878) and Sherer(i88o) for eventless, Post (1888) for eventlessly, and Howells (1872) for eventlessness.
Word-formation. 1 5 1
come very impracticable because sound changes had occurred which obscured the connection between related words. Corresponding to the masculine ])egn, peow, zuea//i, scea/c, fox we find the feminine ])ig?ien, p/ezven, wie/en, sdelcen, fyxen. It seems clear that new generations would find some difficulties in forming new feminines on such indistinct analogies, so we cannot wonder that the ending ceased to be productive. Of the words mentioned, fyxen is the only one surviving, and every trace of its connection with fox is now lost, both the form vixen and the meaning being now too far from the origin.
i6i. A much more brilliant destiny was reserved for the Old English ending -is£. At first it was added only to nouns iridicating natians, whose vowel it changed by mutation; thus Englisc, now English, from Angle, etc. In some adjectives, however, no mutation was possible, e. g. Irish, and by analogy the vowel of the primitive word was soon introduced into some of the adjectives, £. g. Scottish (earlier Scyttisc), Danish (earlier Denisc). The ending was extended first to words whose meaning was cognate to these national names, heathe?iish, OY.. folds c or peodisc ^national' (from folc or {)eod 'people'); then gradu- ally came childish, churlish etc. Each century added new extensions, foolish and feverish, for instance, date from the fourteenth, and boyish and girlish from the sixteenth century, until now -ish can be added to nearly any noun and adjective (swinish, bookish, greenish, big- gish, etc.), nay even to whole phrases. Among recent nonce-formations recorded in the NED. may be men- tioned "an I-dont-know-howishness", "a clean-cravatish formality of manners*', "Miss Martineauish".
162. We shall see in a later section (§ 200) that the ■ending -ing has still more noticeably broken the bounds of its originally narrow sphere of application. Another
Jespersen, the English language. I I
1 62 VII. Various sources.
case in point is the verbal suffix -en. It is now possible to form a verb from any adjective fulfilling certain phonet- ic conditions by adding -e7i (harden, weaken, sweeten, sharpen, lessen). But this suffix was not used very much before 1500, indeed most of the verbs formed in -en belong to the last three centuries. Another exten- sively used ending is -^r. Old English had various methods of forming nouns to denote agents; from the verb hunta?i ^hunt' it had the noun htmta 'hunter'; from heodan 'announce', hoda 'messenger, herald'; from wealdan 'rule', wealda\ from her an 'bear', hora\ from sce])])an 'in- jure', sced^a\ from weorcan 'work', ivyrhta 'wright' (in wheelwright, etc.), though some of these were used in compounds only; some nouns were formed in -end: rcedend, scieppend, and others in -ere\ blawere, blot ere, etc. But it seems as if there were many verbs from which it was impossible to form any agent-noun at all, and the reader will have noticed that even the formation in a presented some difficulties as the vowel was modified according to complicated rules. When the want of new nouns was felt, it was, therefore, more and more the ending -ere that was resorted to. But the curious thing is that the function of this ending was at first to make nouns, not from verbs, but from other nouns, thus OE. hocere 'scribe' from hoc 'book', compare modern halter ^ tinner, Londoner y New Englander, first-nighter. As, how- ever, such a word as fisher, OE. fiscere, which is derived from the noun a fish, OE. fisc, might just as well be analyzed as derived from the corresponding verb to fish, OE. fiscian, it became usual to form new agent- denoting nouns in -er from verbs, and in some cases these supplanted older formations (OE. hunta, now hunter). N'ow we do not hesitate to make new words in er from any verb, <?. g. a snorer , a sitter, a telephoner, a total ahstainer, etc. Combinations with an adverb (a diner-outy
Suffixes. 163
a looker-oil) go back to Chaucer (A somnour is a renner up and down With mandements for fornicacioun, D 1284), but do not seem to be very frequent before the Eliza- bethan period. Note also the extensive use of the suffix to denote instruments and things, as in slipper, rubber, typewriier, slee])er (American = sleeping car). Other much-used suffixes for nouns are: -ness (goodness, truth- fulness), -dovi (Christendom, boredom, "Swelldom", Thacke- ray), -ship (ownership, companionship, horsemanship), for adjectives: -ly (lordly, cowardly), -y (fiery, churchy, creepy), -less (powerless, dauntless), -ful (powerful, fanciful), and -ed (blue-eyed, goodnatured, renowned, conceited, talented; "broad-breasted; level-browed, like the horizon; — thighed and shouldered like the billows; — footed like their steal- ing foam", Ruskin). Prefixes of wide application are mis-, tin-, and be- and others. By means of these form- atives the English vocabulary has been and is constantly being enriched with thousands and thousands of useful new words.
163. There is one manner of deriving verbs from nouns and vice versa which is specifically English and which is of the greatest value on account of the ease with which it is managed, namely that of making them exactly like one another. In Old English there were a certain number of verbs and nouns of the same " root ", but distinguished by the endings. Thus " I love " through the three persons singular ran lufie liifast lufd^, plural lufia^; the infinitive was liifian, the subjunctive lufie, pi. liifien, and the imperative was hifa, pi. lufid^} The noun "love" on the other hand was liifu, in the other cases hife, plural hifa or liife, hifum, lufena or lufa. Similarly ' to sleep ' was slccpan , pres. slcepe skepest slapie)^, slcBpap, subjunctive slcepe, slcBpen, imperative slcEp,
I We need here only regard the present of the verbs.
164
VII. Various sources.
skepa^, while the noun had the forms sleep, slcEpe, and slcepes in the singular, and slcEpas, slcepum, slcBpa in the plural. If we were to give the corresponding forms used in the subsequent centuries, we should witness a gradual simplification which had as a further consequence the mutual approximation of the verbal and nominal forms. The -m is changed into -n, all the vowels of
\ the weak syllables are levelled to one uniform e^ the plural forms of the verbs in -^ give way to forms in -n, and all the final n''& eventually disappear, while in the nouns s is gradually extended so that it becomes the
. only genitive and almost the only plural ending. The second person singular of the verbs retains its distinctive -st, but towards the end of the Middle English period thou already begins to be less used, and the polite ye, you, which becomes more and more universal, claims no distinctive ending in the verb. In the fifteenth century, the e of the endings which had hitherto been pronounced,
\^ ceased to be sounded, and somewhat later s became the ordinary ending of the third person singular instead of M. These changes brought about the modern scheme: — noun: love loves — sleep sleeps, verb: love loves — sleep sleeps, where we have perfect identity of the two parts of speech, only with the curious cross-relation between them that .? is the ending of the plural in the nouns and of the singular (third person) in the verbs — an accident which might almost be taken as a device for getting an ^^ into all indicative sentences containing no pronoun (the lover lovej-; the lover.? love) and for showing by the place of the J which of the two numbers is intended.
164. As a great many native nouns and verbs had thus come to be identical in form {e. g. blossom, care, deal, drink, ebb, end, fathom, fight, fish, fire), and as the same -thin^ happened with numerous originally Freijch
Nouns and verbs. 1 65
words {e. g. accord, O. Fr. acord and acorder, account, arm, blame, cause, change, charge, charm, claim, combat, comfort, copy, cost, couch), it was quite natural that the speech-instinct should take it as a matter of course that whenever the need of a verb arose, the corresponding noun might be used unchanged, and vice versa. Among the innumerable nouns from which verbs have been formed in this manner, we may mention a few: ape, awe, cook, husband, silence, time, worship. Nearly every word for the different parts of the body has given rise to a homonym verb though it is true that some of them are rarely used: to eye, to nose (you shall nose him as you go up the staires, Hamlet), to lip (= kiss, Shakesp.), to beard, to tongue and to brain (such stuffe as mad- men tongue and braine not; Shakesp. Cymbeline), to jaw (= boast, etc.), to ear (rare, = give ear to), to chin (American = to chatter), to arm (= put one's arm round), to shoulder (arms), to elbow (one's way through the crowd), to hand, to fist (fisting each others throat, Shakesp.), to breast (= to oppose), to body (forth), to skin, to stomach, to limb (they limb themselves, Milton), to knee (= to kneel, Shakesp;), to foot, to toe (= reach with the toes), to tail. It would be possible in a similar way to go through a great many other categories of words; everywhere we should see the same facility of forming new verbs from nouns.
165. The process is also very often resorted to for * nonce-words' in speaking and in writing. Thus, a common form of retort is exemplified by the following quotations : " Trinkets ! a bauble for Lydia ! ... So this was the history of his trinkets I I'll bauble him!" (Sheridan, Rivals V. 2). "I was explaining the Golden Bull to his Royal Highness." "I'll Golden Bull you, you rascal!" roared the Majesty of Russia (Macaulay, Biographical Ess.). " Such a savage as that, as has just come home
1 56 VII. Various sources.
from South Africa. Diamonds indeed! I'd diajnojid him^^ (Trollope, Old Man's Love)' — and in a somewhat different manner: "My gracious Uncle. — Tut, tut, Grace me no Grace, nor Uncle me no Uncle" (Shakesp., R 2, cf. also Romeo III. 5. 143). *'I heartily wish I could, but — " *' Nay, but me no buts — I have set my heart upon it " (Scott, Antiq. ch. XI). ''Advance and take thy prize. The diamond; but he answered. Diamond me No diamonds! For God's love, a little air! Prize me no prizes, for my prize is death" (Tennyson, Lancelot and Elaine).
166. A still more characteristic peculiarity of the English language is the corresponding freedom with which a form which was originally a verb is used unchanged as a noun. This was not possible till the disappearance of the final -e which was found in most yerbal forms, and accordingly we see an ever increasing number of these formations from about 1500. I shall giye some examples in chronological order, adding the date of the earliest quotation for the noun in the N. E. D.: glance 1503, bend 1529, cut 1530, fetch 1530, hearsay 1532, blemish 1535, gaze 1542, reach 1542, drain 1552, gather 1555, burn 1563, lend 1575, disHke 1577, frown 1581, dissent 1585, fawn (a servile cringe) 1590, dismay 1.590, embrace 1592, hatch 1597, dip 1599, dress (personal attire) 1606, flutter 1641, divide 1642, build 1667 (but before the 19th century apparently used by Pepys only), harass 1667, haul 1670, dive 1700, go 1727 (many of the most frequent applications date from the nineteenth century), hobble 1727, lean (the act or con- dition of leaning) 1776, bid 1788, hang 1797, dig 18 19, find 1825 (in the sense of that which is found, 1847), crave 1830, kill (the act of killing) 1852, (a killed ani- mal) 1878. It will be seen that the sixteenth century is very fertile in these nouns, which is only a natural
Verbs and nouns. 157
consequence of the phonological reason given above. As, however, some of the verb-nouns found in Elizabethan authors have in modern times disappeared or become rare, some grammarians have inferred that we have here a phenomenon peculiar to that period and due to the general exuberance of the Renaissance which made people more free with their language than they have since been. A glance at our list will show that this is a wrong view; indeed, we use a great many formations of this kind which were unknown to Shakespeare; he had only the noun a visitation^ where we sa\' a 7'isif, nor did he know our ivorries, our kicks, and moves, etc., etc. 167. In some cases a noun is formed in this manner in spite of there being already another noun derived from the same verb; thus a move has nearly the same meaning as removal, movement or motion (from which latter a new verb to motion is formed) ; a resolve and resolution, a laugh and laughter are nearly the same thing (though an exhibit is only one of the things found at an exhibitioti). Hence we get a lively competition started between these nouns and the nouns in -ing\ meet (especially in the sporting world) and meeting, shoot and shooting, read (in the afternoon I like a rest and a read) and reading^, row (let us go out for a row) and reiving (he goes in for rowing), smoke and smoking, mend and mending, feel (there was a soft feel of autumn in the air. Hall Caine) and feeling. The build of a house and the make of a machine are different from the building of the house and the making of the machine. The sit of a coat may sometimes be spoilt at one sitting, and we speak of dressing, not of dress, in
I Darwin says in one of his letters: " I have just finished, after several reads, your paper"; this implies that he did not read it from beginning to end at one sitting; if he had written " after several readings " he would have implied that he had read it through several tunes.
1 58 VII. Various sources.
connection with a salad, etc. The enormous development -M of these convenient differentiations belongs to the most ; recent period of the language. Compared with the sets j of synonyms mentioned above (§ 133: one word borrow- ed from Latin, etc.) this class of synonyms wdll show a decided superiority, because here small differences in sense are expressed by small differences in sound, and because all these words are formed in the most regular and easy manner; consequently there is the least possible strain put on the memory.
168. In early English a noun and the verb corre- sponding to it were often similar, although not exactly alike, some historical reason causing a difference in either the vowel or the final consonant or both. In such pairs of words as the following the old relation is kept unchanged: a hye, to /ive; a ca//, to calve; a grief, to grieve; a cloth, to clothe; a house, to house; a use, to use — in all these the noun has the voiceless and the verb the voiced consonant. The same alternation has been imitated in a few words which had originally the same consonant in the noun as in the verb; thus belie/, proof, and excuse (with voiceless s) have supplanted the older nouns in -ve and voiced -se , and inversely the verb grease has now voiced s [z] where it had formerly a voiceless s. But in a far greater number of words the tendency to have nouns und verbs of exactly the same, sound has prevailed, so that we have to knife, to roof, to scarf (Shakesp.), to elf (id.), to roof^ and with voice- less s to loose, to race, to ice, to promise, while the nouns repose, cruise (at sea), reprieve, owe their voiced consonants to the corresponding verbs. In this way we get some interesting doublets. Besides the old noun hath and verb hathe we have the recent verb to hath (will you bath baby to-day?) and the noun bathe (I walked into the sea by myself and had a very decent bathe, Tennyson).
Consonants different. 169
Besides glass (noun) and glaze (verb) we have now also glass as a verb and glaze as a noun; so also in the case of grass and graze, price and prize (where praise verb and noun should be mentioned as etymologically the same word). 169. The same forces are at work in the smaller class of words, in which the distinction between the noun and the verb is made by the alternation of ch and k, as in speech — speak. Side by side with the old hatch we have a new noun a hake, besides the noun stitch and the verb stick we have now also a verb to stitch (a book, etc.) and the rare noun a stick (the act of sticking); besides the old noun stench we have a new one from the verb stink. The modern word ache (in toothache, etc.) is a curious cross of the old noun, whose spelling has been kept, and the old verb, whose pronunciation (with k) has prevailed. Baret (1573) says expressly, ^^Ake is the verb of this substantive ache, ch being turned into k'\ In the Shakespeare folio of 1623 the noun is always spelt with ch and the verb with k\ the verb rhymes with hrake and sake. The noun was thus sounded like the name of the letter h', and Hart (An Orthographic, 1569, p. 35) says expressly "We abuse the name of h, calling it ache, which sounde serveth very well to expresse a headache, or some bone ache." Indeed, the identity in sound of the noun and the name of the letter gave rise to one of the stock puns of the time; see for instance Shakespeare (Ado III. 4. 56): "by my troth I am exceeding ill, hey ho. — For a hauke, a horse, or a husband? — For the letter that begins them all, H," and a poem by Heywood "It is worst among letters in the crosse row, For if thou finde him other [= either] in thine elbow,-
In thine arme, or leg Where ever vou find ache,
thou shalt not like him."
170. Numerous nouns and verbs have the same consonants, but a difference in the vowels, due either to
I^O VII- Various sources.
gradation or mutation. But here, too, the creative powers of language may be observed. Where in old times there was only a noun hit and a verb to hite, we have now in addition not only a verb to hit (a horse, to put the bit into its mouth) as in Carlyle's "the accursed hag 'dyspepsia' had got me bitted and bridled" and in Coleridge's witty remark (quoted in the N.E.D.) "It is not women and Frenchmen only that would rather have their tongues bitten than bitted", — but also a noun hite in various meanings, e. g. in "his bite is as dangerous as the cobra's" (KipHng) and "she took a bite out of the apple" (Anth. Hope). From the noun seat (see above, §72) we have the new verb to seat (to place on a seat), while the verb to sit has given birth to the noun sit (cf. § 167). No longer content with the old sale as the noun corresponding to sell, in slang we have the new noun a (fearful) sell (an imposition); cf. also the Ameri- can substantive tell (according to their tell, see Farmer and Henley). As knot (n.) was to knit (v.), so was coss to kiss, but while of the former pair both forms have survived and have given rise to a new verb to knot and a new noun a knit (he has a permanent knit of the brow, N.E.D.), from the latter the (?-form has disappeared, the noun being now formed from the verb: a kiss. We have the old hrood (n.) and hreed (v.), and the new hrood (v.) and breed (n.); a new verb to blood exists by the side of the old to bleed, and a new noun feed by the side of the old food. It is obvious that the language has been enriched by acquiring all these newly formed words; but it should also be admitted that there has been a positive gain in ease and simplicity in all those cases where there was no occasion for turning the existing phonetic difference to account by creating new verbs or nouns in new significations, and where, accordingly, one of the phonetic forms has simply disappeared, as when
Vowels different. 1 7 I
the old verbs sniwati, scry dan, sivierman have given way to the new S7iow, shroud, sivarm, which are like the nouns, or when the noun sivat, swot (he swette blodes swot, Ancrene Riwle) has been discarded in favour of siveat, which has the same vowel as the verb. So far from the older school of philologists being right when they maintained that the formal distinction be- tween verbs and nouns was characteristic of the highest stage of linguistic development^, we see that the steadily continued approximation of the two classes of words has been in English a great aid to linguistic progress.
171. Among the other points of interest presented by the formations occupying us here- I may mention the curious oscillation found in some instances between noun and verb. Smoke is first a noun (the smoke from the chimney), then a verb (the chimney smokes, he smokes a pipe); then a new noun is formed from the verb in the last sense (let us have a smoke). Similarly gossip (a) noun: godfather, intimate friend, idle talker, (b) verb : to talk idly, (c) new noun: idle talk; dart (a) a weapon, (b) to throw (a dart), to move rapidly (like a dart), (c) a sudden motion; brtish (a) an instrument, (b) to use that instrument, (c) the action of using it: your hat wants a brush; sail (a) a piece of canvas, (b) to sail, (c) a sailing excursion; wire (a) a metallic thread, (b) to telegraph, (c) a telegram; so also cable] in vulgar language a verb is formed to jaiv and from that a second noun a jaw ("what speech do you mean?" "Why that grand jaw that you sputtered forth just now about reputation," F. C. PhiUps). Some- times the starting point is a verb, e. g. frame (a) to
1 See especially Aug. Schleicher, Die unterscheidung von nomen und verbum, 1865.
2 Note the shifting of the accent in co?iduct, to conduct; an object, to object, etc.
1^2 VII. Various sources.
form, (b) noun: a fabric, a border for a picture, etc., (c) verb: to set in a frame; and sometimes an ad- jective, e. g. faint (a) weak, (b) to become weak, (c) a fainting fit.
172. To those who might see in the obliteration of the old distinctive marks of the different parts of speech a danger of ambiguity, I would answer that this danger is more imaginary than real. I open at random a modern novel (The Christian, by Hall Caine) and count on one page (173) 34 nouns which can be used as infinitives without any change, and 38 verbs the infinitives of which are used unchanges as nouns ^, while only 22 nouns and 9 verbs cannot be thus used. As some of the ambiguous nouns and verbs occur more than once, and as the same page contains adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions^ which can be used as nouns (adjectives) or verbs, or both, the theoretical possibilities of mistakes arising from confusion of parts of speech would seem to be very numerous. And yet no one reading that page would feel the slightest hesitation about understanding every word correctly, as either the ending or the context shows at once whether a verb is meant or not. Even such an extreme case as this line, which is actually found in a modern song, "Her eyes like angels watch them still" is not obscure, although her might be both accusative and possessive, eyes both noun and verb, like adjective, con-
J
1 Answer, brother, reply, father, room, key, haste, gate, time, head, pavement, man, waste, truth, thunder, clap, storey, bed, book, night, face, point, shame, whUe, eye, top, hook, finger, bell, land, lamp, taper, shelf, church, — whisper, wait, return, go, keep, call, look, leave, reproach, do, pass, come, cry, open, sing, fall, hurry, reach, snatch, lie, regard, creep, lend, say, try, steal, hold, swell, wonder, interest, see, choke, shake, place, escape, ring, take, light. (I have not counted auxiliary verbs.)
2 Back, down, still, out, home, except, like, while, straight.
Parts of speech. 17^
junction, and verb, ivatch noun and verb, and still adjective and adverb. A modern Englishman, realizing the great advantage his language possesses in its power of making words serve in new functions, might make Shakespeare's lines his own in an different sense:
"So all my best is dressing old words new. Spending again what has been spent before^." 173. Having thus considered the modes of forming new words by adding something to existing words and by adding to them nothing at all, we shall end this chapter by some remarks on the formation of new words by subtracting something from old ones. ^ Such 'back- formations', as they are very conveniently termed by Dr. Murray, owe their origin to one part of a word being mistaken for some derivative suffix (or, more rarely, prefix). The adverbs sid(e)ling, groveling and darkling were originally formed by means of the adverbial ending 'ling, but in such phrases as he walks sideling, he lies groveling, etc., they looked exactly like participles in -ing, and the consequence was that the new verbs to sidle, to grovel, and to darkle were derived from them by the subtraction of -ing. The Banting cure was named after one Mr. Banting; the occasional verb to bant is, accordingly, a back-formation. The ending -y is often subtracted; from greedy is thus formed the noun greedi (about 1600), from lazy and cosy the two verbs laze and; cose (Kingsley), and from jeopardy (French jeu parti) the verb jeopard. The old adjective corresponding to difjiculty was difficile as in French, but about 1600 the adjective difjicult (= the noun minus y) makes its appearance. Puppy from French poupee was thought to be formed by
1 Sonnet 76.
2 Otto Jespersen, Om subtraktionsdannelser, sasrligt pa dansk ogengelsk, m Fes tsk rift til Vilh. Thomsen. Copenhagen 1894. On the subtraction oi s, as if it were a plural sign, see below, § 188.
174
VII. Various sources.
means of the petting suffix j', and thus pup was created; similarly cad may be from caddv , caddie ^Yx. cadet (a youngster) and pet from petty == Fr. petit, the transition in meaning from 'little' to 'favourite' being easily accounted for. Several verbs originate from nouns in -er {-ar, -or), which were not originally 'agent nouns'; butcher is the French boucher, derived from bouc 'a buck, goat' with no corresponding verb, but in English it has given rise to the rare verb to butch and to the noun a butch- knife. Similarly harbinger, rover, pedlar, burglar, haivfier , and probably beggar, call into existence the verbs to harbinge (Whitman), rove, peddle, burgle, haivk, and beg', and the Latin words editor, donator, vivisector, the un-Latin verbs to edit, donate (American), vivisect (Meredith), etc. which look as if they came from Latin participles.^ Some of these back-formations have been more successful than others in being generally recognized in Standard English.
174. It is not usual in Germanic languages to form compounds with a verb as the second, and an object, an adverb, etc. as the first, part. Hence, when we find such verbs as to houselieep (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Kipling, Merriman), the explanation must be that -er has been subtracted from the perfectly legitimate noun a housekeeper (or -ing from housekeeping). The oldest examples I know of this formation are to partake (parttake) and to conycatch (Shakesp.); others are to hutkeep, common in Australia, to soothsay (rare), to thoughtread (Why don't they thought- read each other? H. G. Wells), to typewrite (I could typewrite if I had a machine, id., also in B. Shaw's Candida), to merry make (you merrymake together, Du Maurier). The verbs to henpeck and to sunburn are similarly abstracted from the participles henpecked and
I Cf. however, my paper quoted above, p. 173.
Back-formations. lyc
sunhiinit\ and Browning even says "moonstrike him!" (Pippa Passes) for "let him be moonstruck."
175. We have seen (§ 7 ff.) that monosyllabism is! one of the most characteristic features of modern Enghsh,' and this chapter has shown us some of the morphological processes by which the original stock of monosyllables has been in course of time considerably increased. It may not, therefore, be out of place here briefly to give an account of some of the other modes by which such short words have been developed. Some are simply longer words which have been shortened by regular phonetic development (cf. love § 163); e. g. eight O.E. eahta, dear O.E. deore, fowl O.E. fugol, hawk O.E. ha/oCy lord O.E. hlaford, not and nought O.E. nawiht, pence O.E. pejiingas, ant O.E. cemette, etc. Miss before the names of unmarried ladies is a somewhat irregular shortening of "missis" (mistress); though found here and there in the seventeenth century, Miss was not recognized in the middle of the eighteenth century (cf. Fielding's Mrs. Bridgit, Mrs. Honour, etc.).
176. This leads us to the numerous popular clippings of long foreign words, of which rarely the middle (as in Tench ^the House of Detention^ and teck detective') or the end (as in bus 'omnibus', baccer, baccy 'tobacco', phone 'telephone'), but more often the beginning only subsists. Some of the short forms have never passed beyond slang, such as sov 'sovereign', pub 'public-house', cotifab 'confabu- lation', pop 'popular concert', vet 'veterinary surgeon', Jap 'Japanese', guv 'Governor', Mods 'Moderations', an Oxford examination, matric 'matriculation', prep 'pre- paration' and impot or impo 'imposition' in schoolboys* slang, sup 'supernumerary', props 'properties' in theatrical slang, perks 'perquisites', comp 'compositor', caps 'capital letters', etc. etc. Some are perhaps now in a fair way to become recognized in ordinary speech, such as
1 7 5 VII. Various sources.
exam ^examination', and hike ^bicycle'; and some words have become so firmly established as to make the full words pass completely into oblivion, e. g. cab (cabriolet), fad (fadaise), navvy (navigator) and mob (mobile vulgus).
177, A last group of English monosyllables comprises a certain number of words the etymology of which has hitherto baffled all the endeavours of philologists. At a certain moment such a word suddenly comes into the language, nobody knowing from where, so that we must feel really inclined to think of a creation ex nihilo. I am not particularly thinking of words denoting sounds or movements in a more or less onomatopoetic way, for their origin is psychologically easy to account for, but of such words as the following, some of which belong now to the most indispensable speech material: bad^ , big'^, lad and lass, all appearing towards the end of the thirteenth century; fit adjective and// substantive, probably two mutually independent words, the adjective dating from 1440, the substantive in the now current sense from 1547; dad ^father', y?/;;//), crease ^fold, wrinkle', gloat, and bet from the sixteenth century; job, fun (and punT), blight, chum and hump from the seventeenth century; fuss, ja?n verb and substantive, and hoax from the eight- eenth, and slu?n perhaps from the nineteenth century. Anyone who has watched small children carefully must have noticed that they sometimes create some such word without any apparent reason; sometimes they stick to it only for f^^daV or two as the name of some plaything, etc. , and then forget it; but sometimes a funny sound takes
1 See Zupitza's attempt at an explanation in the NED., which does not account for the origin of bceddel.
2 The best explanation is Bjorkman's, see Scand. Loan- Words p. 157 and 259; but even he does not claim to have solved the mystery completely.
Words of uncertain origin, I 7 7
lastingly their fancy and may even be adopted by their playmates or parents as a real word. Without pre- tending that such is the origin of all the words just mentioned I yet venture to throw out the suggestion that some of them may be due to children's playful in- ventiveness.
Jespersen, the English language.
Chapter VIIL
Grammar.
178. The preceding chapter has already brought us near to our present province or rather has crossed its boundary, for word - formation is rightly considered one of the main divisions of grammar. In the other divisions a survey of the historical development shows us the same general tendency as word -formation does (§ 160), the tendency, as we might call it, from chaos towards cosmos. Where the old language had a great many endings,, most of them with very vague meanings and applications. Modern English has but few, and their sphere of signi- fication is more definite. The number of irregularities and anomalies, so considerable in Old English, has been greatly reduced so that now the vast majority of words are inflected regularly. It may be objected that most of the old strong^ verbs are still strong, and that this means irregularity in the formation of the tenses: shake shook shaken is just as irregular as Old English scacan scoc scacen. But it must be rememb- ered, first, that there is a complete disappearance of a great many of those details of inflection, which made every Old English paradigm much more complicated than its modern successor, such as distinctions of persons and numbers, and nearly all differences between the infinitive, the im- perative, the indicative, and the conjunctive, — secondly that the number of distinct vowels has been reduced in many verbs; compare thus beran bire^ beer bcBron boren with bea?' bears bore bore born, feohtan [fieht) feaht fuhton
Simplification. I y q
fohteti with fight [fights) fought fought fought, hindan hand hundeyi with hind hound hound, herstan harst hurston horsteyi with hurst hurst hurst hurst, ■ — and thirdly that the consonant change found in many verbs (ceas curon, snajo snidon, teah tugon) has been abolished altogether except in the single case of was were. The greatest change towards simplicity and regularity is seen in the adjectives, where one form now represents the eleven different forms used by the contemporaries of Alfred.
179. It would take up too much space here to ex- pound in detail the whole process of grammatical devel- opment and simpHfication. It has taken place not suddenly and from one cause, but gradually and from a variety of causes. Even such a seemingly small step as that by which the inflection with nominative ye, accusative and dative you has given way to the modern use of you in all cases, has been the result of the activity of many moving forces.^ Nor must it be imagined that the development has in every minute particular made for progress ; nothing has been gained, for instance, by the modern creation of mine and thine as absolute possessive pronouns by the side of my and thy. ^ Sometimes the ways by which new grammatical expressions are won are rather round- about, and it is only when we compare the entire ling- uistic structure of some remote period with the structure in modern times that we observe that the gain in clear- ness and simplicity has really been enormous. 1 shall select a few points of grammar, which seem to me illus- trative of the processes of change in general, and (as regards some of them) of the progressive tendency I have mentioned. The first point is the development of \- the ^--endins^ in nouns (where it is' now the usual mark
1 Progress in Language, chapter VII.
2 lb. p. 68.
12*
j8o VIII. Grammar.
of the genitive case and of the plural number) and in verbs (where it indicates the third person singular of the present tense); as the latter ending has prevailed in competition with the //^-ending, the history of th in the formation of ordinal numerals will next be considered. Then the wonderful enrichment of the language due to the extended use of the zw^-ending will be considered, and finally some other points will be treated with the greatest briefness possible.
i8o. (I. The j-ending in nouns): In Old English the genitive was formed in es in most masculines and neu- ters, but beside this a variety of other endings were in use with the different stems, in -^, in -re, in -an\ some words had no separate ending in the genitive, and some formed a mutation-genitive {boc ^book', gen. hec). Be- sides the genitive of the plural never ended in -s, but in -a or -ra or -na [-ena, -ana). With regard to syntax, the genitive case filled a variety of functions, possessive, subjective, objective, partitive, definitive, descriptive, etc. It was used not only to connect two substantives, but also after a great number of verbs and adjectives (re- joice at, fear, long for, remember, fill, empty, weary, deprive of, etc.); it sometimes stood before and some- times after the governing word. In short, the rules for the formation as well as for the employment of that case were complicated to a very high degree. But gradually a greater regularity and simplicity prevailed in accidence as well as in syntax; the j-ending was extended to more and more nouns and to the plural as well as the singular number, and now it is the only genitive ending used in the language, though in the plural it is in the great majority of cases hidden away behind the s used to denote the plural number {kings', cf. men's).
The genitive. 1 8 1
^ The position of the genitive is now always immediately
I before the governing word, and this in connection with the regularity of the formation of the case has been in-
( strumental in bringing about the modern group -genitive, where the s is tacked on to the end of a word-group with no regard to the logic of the older grammar: ^he King of England's power (formerly "the kinges power of England"), the bride and bridegroo?n^s return, etc.-^
i8i. As for the use of the genitive, it has been in various ways encroached upon by the combination with of. First, its use is now in ordinary prose almost re- stricted to personal beings, and even such phrases as "society's hard-drilled soldiery" (Meredith), where society is personified, are felt as poetical; still more so, of course, "thou knowst not golds effect" (Sh.) or "setting out upon life's journey" (Stevenson). But in some set phrases the genitive is still established, e. g. out of harn^s way; he is at his wits' (or wifs) end; so also in the stock quotation from Hamlet, in my mind's eye, etc.
f Then to indicate measure, etc. : at a boat's length from the ship, and especially time: an hour's walk, a good night's rest, yesterday's post; and this is even extended to such prepositional combination as to-days adventures, iO'TnorroTi^s papers.
182. Secondly, the genitive (of names of persons) is now chiefly used possessively, though this word must be taken in a very wide sense, including such cases as "Shelley's works," "Gainsborough's pictures," "Tom's ene- my", "Tom's death," etc. The subjective genitive, too, is in great vigour, for instance in "the King's arrival," "the Duke's invitation," "the Duke's inviting him," "Mrs. Poyser's repulse of the squire" (G. EHot). Still there is, in quite
I See the detailed historical account of the group-genitive. Progress in Language p. 279—318.
I §2 VIII. Grammar.
recent times, a tendenc}' towards expressing the subject by means of the preposition by, just as in the passive voice, for instance in "the accidental discovery by Miss Knag of some correspondence" (Dickens); "the appropriation by a settled community of lands on the other side of an ocean" (Seeley), "the massacre of Christians by Chi- nese."— "Forster's Life of Dickens" is the same thing as "Dickens's Life, by Forster". The objective genitive was formerly much more common than now, the ambiguity of the genitive being probably the reason of its decline. Still, we find, for instance "his expulsion from power by the Tories" (Thackeray), "What was thy pity's recompence?" (Byron). "England's wrongs" generally means the wrongs done to England; thus also "my cosens wrongs" in Shakespeare's R2 IL 3. 141, but "your foule wrongs" (in the same play, IIL i. 15) means the wrongs committed by you. In "my sceptre's awe" (ib. I. i. 118) we have an objective, but in "thy free awe pays homage to us" (Hamlet IV. 3. 63) a subjective genitive. But on the whole such obscurity will occur less frequently in English than in other languages, where the genitive is more freely used. 183. Now, 0/ has so far prevailed that there are very few cases where a genitive cannot be replaced by it, and it is even used to supplant a possessive pronoun in such stock phrases as "not for the death of me" (cf. Chaucer's " the blood of me," LGW. 848). (9/" is required in a great many-cases, such as "I come here at the instance of your colleague. Dr. H. J. Henry Jekyll" (Stevenson), and it is often employed to avoid tacking on the j to too long a series of words, as in "Will Wimble's is the case of many a younger brother of a great family" (Addison) or "the wife of a clergyman of the Church of England" (Thacke- ray), where most Englishmen will resent the iteration of ofs less than they do the repeated s'es in Mrs. Brown- ing's "all the hoofs Of King Saul's father's asses".
(9/"- phrases. 183
Eveii long strings of prepositions are tolerated, as in ^^on the occasion of the coming of age of one of the youngest sons of a wealthy member of Parliament", or ^^ Swift's visit to London in 1707 had for its object the obtaining for the Irish Church of the surrender by the Crown of the First- Fruits and Twentieths" (Aitken) or "that sublime conception of the Holy Father of a spiritual kingdom on earth under the sovereignty of the Vicar of Jesus Christ himself" (Hall Caine). I suppose that very few readers of the original books have found anything heavy or cumbersome in these passages, even if they may here, where their attention is drawn to the grammatical construction.
f 184. Speaking of the genitive, we ought also to 'mention the curious use in phrases like "a friend of my brother's". This began in the fourteenth century with such instances as "an officere of the prefectes" (Chaucer G 368), where officers is readily supplied {== one of the prefect's officers) and "if that any neighe- bor of mine (= any of my neighbours) Wol nat in chirche to my wyf enclyne" (id. B 3091); compare also "ne no-thing of hise- thinges is out of my power" (id. I 879). In the course of a few centuries, the con- struction became more and more frequent, so that it has now long been one of the fixtures of the English language. The partitive sense is still conceivable in such phrases as "an olde religious unckle of mine" (Sh., As III. 3. 362) == one of my uncles, though it will be seen that is impossible to analyze it as being equal to "one of my old religious uncles". The feeling of the parti- tive origin of the construction must, indeed, soon have been lost, and the construction was employed chiefly to avoid the juxtaposition of two pronouns, "this hat of mine, that ring of yours" being preferred to "this my hat, that your ring", or of a pronoun and a genitive, as in
184 VIII. Grammar.
"any ring of Jane's", where "any Jane's ring" or "Jane's any ring" would be impossible; compare also "I make it a rule of mine", "this is no fault of Frank's", etc. In all such cases the construction was found so convenient that it is no wonder that it should soon be extended analogically where no partitive sense is logically possible, as in " nor shall [we] ever see That face of hers againe "" (Shakespeare, Lear I. i. 267), "that flattering tongue of yours" (As IV. i. 188), "Time hath not yet so dried this bloud of mine" (Ado IV. i. 195), " If I had such a tyre, this face of mine Were full as lovely as is this of hers" (Gent. IV. 4. 190), "this uneasy heart of ours" (Wordsworth), "that poor old mother of his", etc. When we now say, "he has a house of his own", no one ever thinks of this as meaning "he has one of his own houses", so that the meaning of the idiom has changed completely — a phenom- enon of very frequent occurrence in the history of all languages.
185. In the nominative plujal the Old English de- clensions present the same motley spectacle as the genitive singular. Most masculines have the ending as, but some have e (Engle, etc.), some a (suna, etc.) and a great many an (guman, etc); some nouns have no ending at all, and most of these change the vowel of the kernel (fet, etc.), while a few have the plural exactly like the singular (hettend). Feminine words formed their plural in a (giefa), in e (bene), in an (tungan) or without any- ending (sweostor; with mutation bee). Neuters had either no ending (word) or else u (hofu) or an (eagan). From the oldest period the ending as (later es, s) has been continually gaining ground, first among those masculines that belonged to other declensional classes, later on also in the other genders. The ««- ending, which was common to a very great number of substantives from the very beginnings
Plural. 185
also showed great powers of expansion and at one time seemed as likely as (e)s to become the universal plural ending. But finally {e)s carried the day, probably because it was the most distinctive ending.^ In the beginning of the modern period eyen, shoon, and hosen, housen, peasen still existed, but they were doomed to destruction, and now oxen is the only real plural in n surviving, for children as well as the biblical kine and brethren are too irregular to count as plurals made by the addition of n. The mutation plural has survived in some words whose l ' signification causes the plural to occur more frequently than, or at least as frequently as, the singular: geese ^ teeth, feet, mice, lice, men and women. In all other words the analogy of the plurals in s was too strong for the old form to be preserved.
I 186. Instead of the ending -ses we often find singly s ; in some cases this may be the continued use of the French plural form without any ending {cas sg. and pi.), as in sense (their sense are shut, Sh.), corpse (pi. Sh.) etc. In Coriolanus III. i . 118 voyce and voyces occur, both of them to be read as one syllable: "Why shall the people give One that speakcs thus, their voyce? — He give my reasons, More worthier than their voyces. They know f.the come." But when Shakespeare xa^^'s, princess e, balance, ox merchandize as plurals (Tp. I. 2 173; Merch. IV. i. 255; Ant. II. 5. 104), the forms admit of no other explanation than that of haplology (pronouncing the same sound , . I once instead of twice). Thus also in the genitive case: U "his mistresse eye-brow" (As II. 7. 149), "your High- ness' pleasure", etc. Now it is more usual to ^i^i^ the full form mistress's, etc., yet in Pears' soap the juxtaposition of three /es is avoided by means of the apostrophized form. The genitive of the plural is now always haplo-
I Progress in Language, p. 178 ff.
1 36 VIII. Grammar.
logized: "the Poets' Corner", except in some dialects: " other folks's children " (George Eliot) , " the bairns's clease" (Murray, Dial, of Scotl. 164). Wallis (1653) expressly states that the gen. pi. in the Lords' House (by him written Lord's) stands instead of the Lords's House (duo s in unum coincidunt). A phenomenon of the same' order is the omission of the genitive sign before a word beginning with j, now chiefly before sake', for fashion sake, etc.
187. Sometimes an s belonging to the stem of the word is taken by the popular instinct to be a plural ending. Thus in alms, (ME. almesse, el??iesse , pi. al- inesses ; OE. cBlmesse from Gr. eleemosuue) ; it is sig- nificant that the word is very often found in connections where it is impossible from the context to discover whether a singular or a plural is intended (ask alms, give alms, etc.). In the Authorized Version the word) occurs eleven times, but eight of these are ambiguous,! two are clearly singular (asked an almes, gave much almes) and one is probably plural (Thy praiers and thine almes are come up). Nowadays the association between the s of the alms and the plural ending has become so firm that an alms is said and written very rarely indeed, though it is found in Tennyson's Enoch Arden. Riches is another case in point; Chaucer still lays the stress on the second syllable {richesse as in French) and uses the plural richesses) but as subsequently the final e disap- peared, and as the word occurred very often in such a way that the context does not show its number (" Thou bearst thy heavie riches but a journie", Sh. Meas. III. 1. 27; thus in fourteen out of the 24 places where Shakespeare uses it), it is no wonder that the form was generally conceived as a plural, thus "riches are a power" (Ruskin). The singular use (the riches of the ship is come on shore, Sh. 0th. II. i. 83,
Back - formations. I g 7
too much riches, R 2 III. 4. 60) is now wholly obsolete.
188. A further step__i& taken in those words that lose the s originally Jbelonging to their stem, because it is mistakenly apprehended as the sign of plural.^ Latin pisum became in OE. pise, in ME. pese, pi. pesen\ Butler (1633) still gives peas as sg. and peasen as pi., but he adds, "the singular is most used for the plural: as . . a peck of peas; though the Londoners seem to make it a regular plural, calling a peas a pea'\ In compounds like peaseblossoin, peaseporridge and pease -soup (Swift, Ch. Lamb) the old form was preser\'ed long after pea had become the recognized singular. Similarly a cherry was evolved from a form in s (French cerise) , a riddle from riddles', an eaves (OE. efes, of. Got. ubizwa, ON. iips) is often made afi eave, and vulgarly a pony shay is said for ^
chaise', compare also Bret Harte's "heathen Chinee'' andj't.^^o the parallel forms a Portuguee, a Maltee. An interesting case in point is Yankee, according to the highly probable explanation recently set forth by H. Logeman. The term was originally applied to the inhabitants of the Dutch colonies in North America (New Amsterdam, now New York, etc.). Now Jan Kees is a nickname still applied in Flanders to people from Holland proper. Jaii of course is the common Dutch name corresponding to English John, and Kees may be either the usual pet- form of the name Cornelis, another Christian name typical of the Dutch, or else a dialectal variation of kaas ' cheese ' in allusion to that typically Dutch product, or — what is most probable — a combination of both. Jankees in English pronunciation became Yankees, where the s was taken as the plural ending and eventually disappeared,
I Cf the other back-formations mentioned above, § 173. Other instances will be found in the paper there quoted.
1 88 VIII. Grammar.
and Yankee became the designation of any inhabitant of New England and even sometimes of the whole of the United States.
,. i8g. We have a different class of back-formations in those cases in which the s that is subtracted is really the plural ending, while one part of the word is retained Iwhich is logically consistent with the plural idea only. It is easily conceivable that most people ignorant of the fact that the first syllable of cinque -^orts means 'five', have no hesitation in speaking of Hastings as a cinque-port\ but it is more difficult to see how the signi- fication of the numeral in ninepins should be forgotten, and yet sometimes each of the " pins " used in that play is called a ninepin and Gosse writes " the author sets up his four ninepins".
190. In some words the s of the plural has become fixed, as if it belonged to the singular, thus vo. means. As is shown by the pun in Shakespeare's Romeo " no sudden meane of death, though nere so meane" the old form was still understood in his time, but the modern form too is used by him {py that meanes, Merch. ; a means, Wint.) Similarly: too much pains ^ an honourable amends, a shambles, an innings, etc., sometimes a scissors, a tweezers, a^^anp^ieks, a golf,-4mksj, etc., where the logical idea of a single action or thing has proved stronger than the original grammar, y^
. 191. It is not, however, till a new plural has been formed on such a form that the transformation "from plural to singular has been completed. This phenomenon, which might be termed plural raised to the second power, will naturally occur with greater facility when the original singular is not in use or when the manner of forming the plural is no longer perspicuous. Thus OE. broc formed its plural brec (cf. gos ges goose geese), but ^'oc became obsolete, and brec, breech was free to become
Double plurals. l8g
\ a singular and to form a new plural breeches. Similarly j inmictsy quinces^ bodices and a few others have a double plural ending; but then the unusual sound of the first ending (voiceless s, where the ordinary ending is voiced, as in joysy sins) facilitated the forgetting of the original function of the j (written -ce). Bodice is really nothing but a by-form of bodies. The old pronunciation of bellows and gallows had also a voiceless s, which helps to explain the vulgar plurals be I Ionises and galloivses. But in the occasional plural mewses (from a meivs, orig. a mue) the new ending has been added in spite of the first s being voiced. These plurals raised to the second power, to which must be added sixpences, threepences, etc., are particularly interesting because there really are cases where the want is felt of expressing the plural of something which is in itself plural, either formally or logically; cf. many [pairs of) scissors. Generally one plural ending only is used \ but occasionally the logically correct double ending is resorted to, especially among uneducated persons; Thackeray makes his flunkey write: "there was 8 sets of chamberses" (Yellowplush Papers, p. 39), and a London schoolboy^ once wrote: "cats have clawses" (one cat has claws!) and again "cats have g liveses" (each cat has nine lives!). Dr. Murray^ mentions a double plural sometimes formed in Scotch dialect from such words as schuin (one person's shoes), y^// *feet' and kye 'cows', schuins meaning more than one pair of shoes, and. he ingeniously suggests that this may illustrate such plurals as children, brethren, kine] the original plurals
1 " Then ensued one of the most lively ten minutes that I can remember " (Conan Doyle) , plural of " one ten minutes ".
2 Very Original English, ed. by Barker (London 1889), p. 71.
3 Dialect of the Southern Countries of Scotland (London 1873) p. 161.
I go
VIII. Grammar.
were childer , hr ether , ky (still preserved in the northern dialect), which may have " come to be used collectively for the offspring or members of a single family, the herd of a single owner, so that a second plural inflection became necessary to express the brethren and children of many families, the tiy-en of many owners ... In modern English we restrict brothers, which replaces br ether, to those of one family, using brethren for those who call each other brother, SSxov.^ of different families."
192. Most of the words that make their plural like the singular are old neuters, the j- ending belonging originally to masculines only and having gradually only been extended to the other two genders; thus swine, deer, sheep. But as the unchanged plurals were used chiefly in a collective sense, a difference sprang up between a collective plural (unchanged) and an individual plural (in -s), as seen most clearly in Shakespeare's *' Shee hath more haire then wit, and more faults then hairs^' (Gent. III. I. 362) and Milton's "which thou from Heaven Feigndst at thy birth was giv'n thee in thy hair. Where strength can least abide, though all thy hairs Were bristles" (Sams. Ag. 11 36). This difference was transferred to some old masculines, like fish, /oiul] and a great many names of particular fishes and birds, especially those generally hunted and used for food, are now often unchanged in the plural {snipe, plover, trout, salmon, etc.), though with a great deal of vacillation. It is also noticeable that 7?iuch fruit = jnany fruits and much coal == many coals. When we say "four hundred men", but " hundreds of men ", " two dozen collars ", but " doze?is of collars" and similarly with couple, pair, score and some other words, we have an approach to the rule prevailing in many languages, e. g. Magyar, where the plural ending is not added after a numeral, because that suffices in itself to show that a plural is intended.
Third singular. ig
193. (II) We proceed to thal^yerbal ending which is now identical in form with the ordinary genitival and plural ending in the nouns, namelx_jL4he loves, etc.). In Old-English -th ({)) was used in the ending of the third person singular and in all persons in the plural of the present indicative, but the vowel before it varied, so that we have for instance
infinitive jd sg. pL
sprecan spricf) sprecaf)
bindan binder, bint bindaf)
nerian nere{) neriaf)
lufian lufaf) lufiaj).
But in the Northumbrian^ dialect of the tenth cen- tury s was substituted to {) (sin^lar_,^/»if<?j, plural bindas), and as all unstressed vowels were soon after levelled, the two forms became identical (bitides). As in the same dialect the second person singular too ended in s (as against the -st of the South), all persons sounded alike except the first singular. But the development was not to stop there. In Old English a difference is made in the plural, according as the verb precedes we or ge ('ye') or not {bijide we, hinde ge, but we bindap, ge bindap). This is the germ of the more radical difference now carried through consistently in the Scotch dialect, where the s is only added when the verb is not accompanied by its proper pronoun, — but in that case it is used in all persons. Dr. Murray gives the following sentences among others^:
I Dial, of the Southern Countries of Scotland, 1873, p. 212, where quotations from the earlier literature are also given.
JQ2 VIII. Grammar.
aa cum fyrst — yt's mey at cums fyrst.
wey gang theare — huz tweae quheyles gangs theare.
they cum an' teake them — the burds cums an' packs them.
{I come first; it is I that come first; we go there; we two sometimes go there; they come and take them; the birds come and pick them).
In the other parts of the country the development was diff"erent. In the Midland dialect the_-£«of the subjunctive and of the past tense was transferred to the present of the indicative, so that we have the following forms in the standard language
1/j.th century i6th cent.
I falle I fall
he falleth he fall(e)th
we fallen (falle) we fall.
This is the only dialect in which the third person singular is kept clearly distinct from the other persons. In the South of England, finally, the th was pre- ' served in the plural, and was even extended to the first person singular. Old people in the hilly parts of Somersetshire and Devonshire still say not only [i wo'kjD] *he walks', but also Pei zej), ai ze{)] 'they say, I say'. In most cases, however, do is used, which is made [da] without any th through the whole singular as well as plural. '
194. But the northern j'es wandered southward. A solitary precursor is found in Chaucer, who writes once telles instead of the usual telleth for the sake of the rhyme (:elles, Duchesse 73).^ A century later Caxton
1 Elworthy, Grammar of the Dialect of West Somerset, p. 191 ff.
2 In the Reves Tale the j-forms are used to characterize the North of England dialect of the two students {^gas for Chaucer's ordinary gooth, etc.)
Th and s. ig-^
-used the ///-ending (eth, ith, yth) exclusively, and this remained the usual practice till late in the i6th century, when s was first introduced by the poets. In Marlowe J- is by far the commoner ending, except after hissing consonants (passeth, opposeth, pitcheth, presageth, etc., Tamburlaine 68, 845, 1415, 1622). Spenser prefers s in poetry. In the first four cantos of the Faerie Qiieeiie I have counted 94 /es as against 24 M's (besides 8 has^ 18 hath^ 15 does, and 31 doth). But in his prose th pre- dominates even much more than s does in his poetry. In the introductory letter to Sir W. Raleigh there is only one j- (it needs), but many M's; and in his book on " the Present State of Ireland " all the third persons singular end in th, except a small number of phrases {nie seems, several times, but // seemeth; what boots it; how €0ffies it, and perhaps a few more) that seem to be characteristic of a more colloquial tone than the rest of the book. Shakespeare's practice is not easy to as- certain. In a great many passages the folio of 1623 has th where the earlier quartos have s. In the prose parts of his dramas s prevails^, and the rule may be laid down that th belongs more to the solemn or dignified speeches than to everyday talk, although this is by no means carried through everywhere. In Macbeth I. 7. 29ff. Lady Macbeth is more matter-of-fact than her husband (Lady: He has almost supt .... Macb.: Hath he ask'd
for me? Lady: Know you not he ha's. Macb He
Jiath honour'd me of late ....), but when his more solemn mood seizes her, she too puts on the buskin {Was the hope drunke, Wherein you drest your selfe? -
I Franz, Shakespeare-Grammatik, p. 2: In Much Ado (Q 1600) th is not found at all in the prose parts and only twice in the poetical parts; the Merry Wives, which is chiefly in prose, has only one th.
Jfspersen, the English language. 1 3
IQ1 VIII. Grammar.
Hath it slept since?). — Where Mercutio mocks Romeo's love-sickness (II. i. 15), he has the line: He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not, but in his famous description of Queen Mab (I. 4. 53 ff.) he has 18 verbs in s and only two in th, hath and driveth, of which the latter is used for the sake of the metre.
195. Contemporary prose has nearly exclusively th\ the ^-ending is not at all found in the Authorized Version of 1 6 1 1 , nor in Bacon's Atlantis (though in his Essays there are some /es), and the conclusion with regard to Elizabethan usage as a whole seems to be that the \/iorsQj^.s was a colloquialism and as such was allowed in poetry and especially in the drama. This s must, however, be considered a poetical licence wherever it occurs in that period. But in the first half of the seventeenth century j must have been the ending uni- versally used in ordinary conversation, and w-e have evidence that it was even usual to read s where the book had th, for Rich. Hodges (1643) gives in his list of words pronounced alike though spelt differently among others boughs boweth bowze; clause claweth claws; courses courseth corpses; choose cheweth^, and in 1649 ^^ says " howsoever wee write them thus, leadeth it, maketh it, noteth it, we say lead's it, make's it, note's it." The only exceptions seem to have been hath and doth, where the frequency of occurrence protected the old forms from being modified analogically^, so that they were prevalent till about the middle of the eighteenth century.
C~Iilton, with the exceptions just mentioned, always rites j; in his prose as well as in his poetry, and so does Pope. No difference was then felt to be neces- sary between even the most elevated poetry and ordinary
1 See Ellis, Early English Pronunciation, IV, 10 18.
2 This applies, partially at least, to saith as well.
Th and s. 105
conversation in that respect. But it is well worth noting that Swift, in the Introduction to his *' Polite Conversation ", where he affects a quasi scientific tone, writes hath and doth, while in the conversations them- selves has and does are the forms constantly used. ^
ig6. At church, however, people went on hearing the M-forms, although even there the /es began to creep in.^ And it must certainly be ascribed to influence from biblical language that the M-forms began again to be used by poets towards the end of the eighteenth century ; at first this was apparently done rather sparingly, but nineteenth century poets employ th to a greater ex-i tent. This revival of the old form affords the advantage' from the poet's point of view of adding at discretion a syllable, as in Wordsworth's
In gratitude to God, Who feeds our hearts
For His own service; knoweih, loveth us (Prelude 1 3. 276)
or in Byron's
Whate'er she loveth, so she loves thee not.
What can it profit thee? (Heaven and Earth I sc. 2).
Sometimes the M-form comes more handy for the rhyme (as when saith rhymes with death), and sometimes the following sound may have induced a poet to prefer one or the other ending, as in
Coleridge hath the sway,
And Wordsworth has supporters, two or three ^
1 In the Journal to Stella all verbs have s, except hath, which is, however, less common than has.
2 See the Spectator, no. 147 (Morley's ed. p. 217) "a set of readers [of prayers at church] who affect, forsooth, a certain gentleman-like familiarity of tone, and mend the language as they go on, crying instead of pardoneth and absolveth, par- dons and absolves."
3 Do?i Juan XI. 69.
13*
k
96
VIII. Grammar.
but in a great many cases individual fancy only decides which form is chosen. In prose, too, the //i-foim. begins to make its re-appearance in the nineteenth century, not only in biblical quotations, etc., but often with the sole view of imparting a more solemn tone to the style, as in Thackeray's " Not always do/k the writer kno,w whither the divine Muse leadeth him. " Some recent novelists affect this archaic trick usque ad nauseam.
197. The nineteenth century has even gone so far as to create a double-form in one verb, making a dis- tinction between doth [pronounced dAJDJ as an auxili- ary verb and doeth [pronunced du*i{)] as an independent one. The early printers used the two forms indiscrimi- nately, or rather preferred doth where doeth would make the line appear too closely packed, and doeth where there was room enough. Thus in the Authorized Ver- sion of 161 1 we find "a henne doeth gather her brood under her wings" (Luke XIII. 34) and "he that doth the will of my father" (Matth. VII. 21), where recent use would have reversed the order of the forms, but in " whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them" (Matth. VII. 24) the old printer happens to be in accordance with the rule of our own days. When the M-form was really living, doeth was certainly always pronounced in one syllable (thus in Shakespeare). I give a few examples of the modern differentiation.^ J. R. Lowell writes (My Love, Poems 1849, I 129 = Poetical Works in one volume p. 6) "■ She doeth little kindnesses . . . Her life doth rightly harmonize . . . And yet doth ever flow aright." Rider Haggard has both forms in the same sentence (She 199) "Man doeth this and
I Which has not been noticed in Murray's Dictionary, though he mentions the corresponding difference between dost and doest as 'in late use'.
Doeth. IQ7
doeth that, but he knows not to what ends his sense doth prompt him"; cf. also Tennyson's The Captain'. ''He that only rules by terror, Doeth grievous wrong."
198. To sum up. If the s of the third person singular comes from the North, this is true of the outer form only; the 'inner form', to use the expression of some German philologists, is the Midland one, that is to say, s is used in those cases only where the Midland dialects had th, and is not extended according to the northern rules. In vulgar English of the last two centuries s hasj been used in the first person singular: / wishes', says /, etc. The oldest instance I have noted is from the Rehearsal ( 1 6 7 1 ) : ^' I makes ' em both speak fresh " (Arber's reprint, p. 53). But it will be seen that this is in direct opposition to the northern usage where the s is never found by the side of the personal pronoun.^
199. (III. The ending th in ordinals). While the cardinal nuinerals^ show very little change during the
, whole life of the language except what is a consequence of ordinary phonetic development^, the ordinals have
/ been much more changed so that their formation is now completely regular, with the exception of the first three. First has ousted the old forma (corresponding to Latin primus), and the French second has been called in to relieve <?M<?r of one of its significations, so that a useful
1 I leave out of consideration the occasional Shakespearian s in the plural of the verb as too dubious to be treated in a work of this character.
2 Note that in Old and Middle English the cardinals had an -e when used absolutely {fif men ; they were Jive), and that it is this form that has prevailed. If the old conjoint form , had survived, five, and twelve would have ended in /, and sevefi, 7iine, ten and eleven would have had no -«.
Iq8 VIII. Grammar.
distinction has been created between the definite and the indefinite numeral, the want of which is often felt in those languages (Danish, German, etc.) which like Old English use the same word for both. As for the numbers from 4 upwards, the regularization has affected both the stem and the ending of the numeral. In Old En- glish the n had disappeared from seo/oba, nigoba and teoba (feowerteoba, etc.), but now it has been analogically re- introduced: seventh, ninth, tenth [fourteenth, etc.), the only survival of the older forms being tithe, which is now a substantive differentiated from the numeral, as seen particularly clearly in the phrase " a tenth part of the tithe" (Auth. Version, Num. 18. 26). In twelfth 2ind. fifth we have the insignificant anomaly of f (which in the former is often mute) instead of v, and the consonant- group in the latter has shortened the vowel, but elsewhere there is complete correspondence between each cardinal and its ordinal. As for the ending, it used according to a well-known phonetic rule to be -ta (later -te, t) after voiceless open consonants, thus fifta fift, sixta sixt, twefta twelft', and these are still the only forms in Shakespeare (Henry the Fift, etc.)^ and Milton. The regular forms in th evidently were used in writing before they became prevalent in speaking, for Schade in 1765 laid down the rule that th was to be pronounced / in twefth and fifth. Eighth, which would be more adequately written eightth, is also a modern form; the old editions of Shakespeare have eight. The formation in -th, which is now beautifully regular, has also been extended in recent times to a few substantives: the hundredth, thousandth, millionth, and dozenth.
I Twelfth Night is in the folio of 1623 called Twelfe Night and similarly we have twelfe day, where the middle consonant of a difficult group has been discarded, just as in the thousand part (As IV. i . 46).
Numerals. Ing, igg
\>^f 200. (IV) The history of the forms in ing^ is certainly one of the most interesting examples of the growth from 'a very small beginning of something very important in the economy of the language. The 'ing', as I shall for shortness call the form with that ending, began as a pure noun ^, restricted as to the number of words from which it might be formed and restricted as to its syntactical functions. It seems to have been originally possible to form it only from nouns, cf. modern words like schooling, shirting, stabling', as some of the nouns from which ings were derived, had corresponding weak verbs, the ings came to be looked upon as derived from these verbs, and new ings were made from other weak verbs. (Also from French verbs, cf. above § io6.) But it was a long time before ings were made from strong verbs; a few
V occur in the very last decades of the Old English period, but most of them did not creep into existence till the twelfth or thirteenth century or even later, and it is not, I perhaps, till the beginning of the fifteenth century that the formation had taken such a firm root in the language that an ing could be formed unhesitatingly from any verb whatever (apart from the auxiliaries can, 7/iaj', shall, need, etc., which have no ings).
201. With regard to its syntactical use the old ing was a noun and was restricted to the functions it shared
. with all other nouns. While keeping all its substantival
I qualities, it has since gradually acquired most of the functions belonging to a verb. It was, and is, inflected like a noun; now the genitive case is rare and scarcely occurs d(Jtside of such phrases as " reading for reading's sake"; but the plural is common: his comings and
I The Old English ending was ung as well as ing.
^t
200 VIII. Grammar.
goings; feelings, drawings, leavings, weddings, etc. Like [any other noun it can have the definite or indefinite article and an adjective before it: a beginning, the beginning, a good beginning, etc., so also a genitive: Tom's savings. It can enter into a compound noun either as the first or as the second part: a walking-stick; sight-seeing. The ing can be used in a_&eatence in every posMgn_ occupied by an ordinary noun. It is the subject and the predicative nominative in " compliment- ing is lying", the object in "I hate lying"; it is governed by an adjective in "worth knowing", and governed by a preposition in " before answering ", etc. But we shall now see how several of the peculiar functions of verbs are extended to the ing. The coalescence in form of the verbal noun and of the present participle is, of course, one of the chief factors of this development.
202. When the ing was a pure noun the object of the action it indicated could be expressed in one of three ways: it might be put in the genitive case (" sio feding fara sceapa", the feeding of the sheep, Alfred), or it might form the first part of a compound (blood- letting) or — the usual construction in Middle English — it might be added after of (in magnifying of his name, Chaucer). The first of these constructions has died out; the last is in our days especially frequent after the article (since the telling of those little fibs, Thackeray). j But from the fourteenth century we find a growing tendency to treat the ing like a form of the verb and, accordingly, to put the object in the accusajtivfi^jcase Chaucer's words " in getinge of your richesses and in usinge hem" (B 2813) show both constructions in juxta- position; so also *' Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of olde sacke, and unbuttoning thee after supper " (Henry IV, A. I. 2. 2). Chaucer's "In Hftinge up his hevy dronken cors" (H 67) shows a double deviation from the old
:/
/
Ing.
20I
substantival construction, for an ordinarx noun jianaot in this way be-iJQllowed b^an adierb, and in the old language the adverb was joined to the ing in a different way (up -lifting, in -coming, down -going). In course of , time it became more and more usual to join any kind ^ of adverbs to the ing, e. g. ''a man shal not wyth ones [once] over redyng fynde the ryght understandyng " (Caxton), " he proposed our immediately drinking a bottle together" (Fielding), "nothing distinguishes great men from inferior men more than their alivays, whether in life or in art, knowing the ways things are going" (Ruskin).
203. A noun does not admit of any indication of r v time; his movejiient may correspond in meaning to "he moves (is moving)", "he moved (was moving)", or "he will move." Similarly the ing had originally, and to a great extent still has, no reference to time: "on account of his coming " may be equal to " because he comes " or "because he came" or "he will come", according to the connection in which it occurs. " I intend seeing the king" refers to the future, "I remember seeing the king" to the past, or rather the ing as such implies neither of these tenses. But since the end of the sixteenth century the ing has still further approximated to the character of a verb by developing a composite perfect. Shakespeare, who uses the new tense in a few places, e. g, Gent. I. 3. 16 ("To let him spend his time no more at home; Which would be great impeachment to his age. In having knowne no travaile in his youth") does not always use it where it would be used now; for in " Give orders to my ser\'ants that they take No note at all of our being absent hence " being corresponds in meaning to hazing been, as shown by the context (Merch. of Ven. V. 120). — Like other nouns the ing was also at first incapable of expressing the verbal distinction between the active and the passive voice.
202 VIII. Grammar.
The simple ing is still often neutral in this respect, and in some connections assumes a passive meaning, as in **it wants mending", "the story lost much in the telling". This is extremely frequent in old authors, e. g. "Use everie man after his desart, and who should scape whipping" (Hamlet II. 2. 554), "Shall we . . . excuse his throwing into the water?" (Wiv. III. 3. 206 = his being, or having been, thrown), " An instrument of this your calling backe" (Oth. IV. 2. 45). But about 1600 a new form came into existence, as the old one would often appear ambiguous, and it was felt convenient to be able to distinguish between "foxes enjoy hunting" and "foxes\ enjoy being hunted". The new passive is rare in Shakespeare ("I spoke ... of being taken by the in- solent foe", Oth. I. 3. 136), but has now for a long time been firmly established in the language.
204. The last step in this long development of a form at first purely substantival to one partly substantival and partly verbal in function was taken about two hundred years ago. The subject of the ing, like that of any verbal noun (for instance Ccesar's conquests. Pope's imitations of Horace) is for the most part put in the genitive case — nearly always when it is a personal pronoun (in spite of his saying so), and generally when it indicates ,a person (in spite of John's saying so). But a variety of circumstances led to the adoption in many instances of a new construction, which is wrongly taken by most grammarians as containing the present participle and not the 'gerund'. I shall give elsewhere my reasons for not
tccepting that view and here content myself with quoting few instances of the new construction out of several iiundreds which I have collected : " When we talk of sthis man or that woman being no longer the same jperson" (Thackeray), "besides the fact of those three (being there , the drawbridge is kept up " (Anth. Hope),
Ing. Gender. 203
"When I think of this being the last, time of seeing you" (Miss Austen), "the possibihty of such an effect being wrought by such a cause" (Dickens), "he insisted upon the Chamber carrying out his poHcy " (Lecky), "I have not the least objection in life to a rogue being hung " (Thackeray ; here evidently no participle), " no man ever heard of opium leading into delirium tremens " (De Quincey), " the suffering arises simpl/^om pedpte-* not understanding this truism" (Ruskin). These ex- amples will show that the construction is especially use- ful in those cases where from some reason or other it is impossible to use the genitive case, but that it is also found where no such reason could be adduced. Let me sum up by saying that when an Englishman now says " There is some probability of the place having never been inspected by the police" he deviates in four points from the constructions of the ing that would have been possible to one of his ancestors six hundred years ago: place is in the crude form, not in the genitive; the adverb; the perfect; and the passive. Thanks to these extensions the ing has clearly become a most valuable means of expressing tersely and neatly relations that must else have been indicated by clumsy dependent clauses.
205. (V. Disappearance of the old word -gender). Anyone a~cqrrainted with the intricacies of gender in modern German will feel how much EngUsh gained when inanimate objects ceased to be referred to ^ne or other of the three gender-classes. The distinction has been kept up only in the pronouns, and there it has been made more rational, since he is now applied only to male, and she only to female, living beings, whereas in Old English he was used in speaking of a
204 VIII. Grammar.
great many things that had nothing masculine in their actual nature (e. g. horn, ende ' end ', ebba ' ebb ', daeg * day ') and the feminine pronoun (heo) in regard to many which in their nature were not feminine (e. g. sorh 'sorrow', glof 'glove', plume 'plum', pipe). The dis- tinction between animate and inanimate is therefore much more accentuated than it used to be, and this has led to some other changes, of which the two most impor- tant are the creation (about 1600) of the form its (be- fore that time his was neuter as well as masculine) and the restriction of the relative pronoun which to things: its old use alike for persons and things is seen in " Our father which art in Heaven ".
206. (VI) A notable feature of the history of the English language is the building up of a rich system of . tenses on the basis of the few possessed by Old Eng- ' lish, where the present was also a sort of vague future, and where the simple past was often employed as a kind of pluperfect, especially when supported by CBr ' ere, before '. The use of have as an auxiliary for the perfect (have) and pluperfect (had) began in the i Old English period, but it" was then only found with transitive verbs, and the real perfect-signification had j" scarcely yet been completely evolved from the original ' meaning of the connection : ic hcehbe ])One fisc gefajigenne meant at first ' I have the fish (as) caught ' (note the accusative ending in the participle). By and by a dis- tinction was made between ' I had mended the table ' and ' I had the table mended ', ' he had left nothing ' and ' he had nothing left'. In Middle English have came to be used in the perfect of intransitive verbs as well as transitive; / have been does not seem to occur earlier than 1200. With such verbs as go and come, I am
Tenses. 205
! was used in the perfect for several centuries, and / have ^ gone and / have come are recent formations. The use of will and shall as signs of the future gradually devel- oped from the original meaning of * will ' and * obligation '. The periphrastic tenses / am readings I was reading, I have been reading, I shall be reading, etc. were not fully- developed even in Shakespeare's time and seem to have little, if anything, to do with the Old English he wcbs feohtejide 'he used to fight'; the modern forms are aph- etic for / a?n a-reading, where a represents the prepo- sition on and the form in ing is not the participle, but the noun. The extension of the construction to the[ passive (the house is being built) is an innovation dat-' ing from the end of the eighteenth century. According to Fitzedward Hall the oldest example known is found in a letter from Southey (1795). Before that time the phrase was the house is building, i. e. is a-buildittg ' is in construction', and the new phrase had to fight its w^ay against much violent opposition in the nineteenth cen- tury before it was universally recognized as good Eng- lish. — While the number of tenses has been increased, the number of moods has tended to diminish, the sub- junctive having now very little vital power left. Most of its forms have become indistinguishable from those of the indicative, but the loss is not a serious one, for the thought is just as clearly expressed in " if he died ", where died may be either indicative or subjunctive, as in " if he were dead ", where the verb has a distinctively subjunctive form. The verbal system has undergone one more important change by the extensive use of do as an auxiliary, especially in negative and interrogative sen- j[ tences. This use was not regularized in the modern way till the eighteenth century.
206
VIII. Grammar.
/ 207. (VII) The- regularizatiqn of the word order (cf. § 14) has been very useful in bringing about clear- ness in sentence-construction, and has at the same time facilitated many of the simplifications which have taken place in the form system and which would otherwise have been attended by numerous ambiguities.^
208. (VIII) The pronominal system has been rein- forcedj2)L-SQme_^ew__a of old material. W/io
and^jij^U^ originally interrogative pronouns only, are" now used also as relatives. Se/f has entered into the compounds myself^ himself, etc., and has developed a plural, ourselves^ themselves^ which was new in the be- ginning of the sixteenth century. With regard to the use of these j^^-forms it may be remarked that their frequency first increased and then in certain cases de- creased again: he dressed him became he dressed himself ;and this is now giving way to he dressed. One has come to serve several purposes; as an indefinite pro- noun (in " one never can tell ") it dates from the fif- teenth century, and as a prop-word (" a little one ", *' the little ones ") the full modern usage goes back only to the sixteenth century.
209. (IX) New conjunctions have come into existence; such as supposing (supposing he comes, what am I to do?),! provided (I have no objection, provided the benefit is mutual), in case (have it ready, in case she should send for it, Swift), for fear (they were obliged to drive very fast, for fear they should be too late, Dickens), grant that (Grant that one has good food ... is that all the
I Cf. Progress in Language p. 89 ff.
Innovations.
207
pay one ought to have for one's work? Ruskin), like (through which they put their heads, like the Guachos do through their cloaks, Darwin), directly (Oh! yes, yes, said Kate, directly the whole figure of the singular visitor appeared, Dickens), once (once that decision was taken his imagination became riotous, H. G. Wells; once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good, R. L. Stevenson, Virg. Puerisque 34). It is evident that all these new conjunctions serve to vary the modes of joining sentences together and express nuances that the old if, when, etc., cannot render in so vivid a way; but I am bound to admit that a great many Englishmen object to some of them, especially lik^^ and once^
210. (X) The manner in which compound nouns_.are_, built up has been modified. In compounds of the old
/type the close combination of both nouns is shown by the accentual subordination of the second element, cf. housekeeper , godson, footstep, leapyear', and very often one part, or both, may be phonetically changed, sometimes even past recognition, cf. postman, waistcoat, husband, [hussy "y >>v*va ■ (= housewife). But in recent times a new type has sprung up in which the second part is not thus accentually subordinated to the first, but is stressed at least nearly as much as, and sometimes even more than the first component. Examples are snow ball, tooth brush, lead (w^c*> pencil, headmaster. Each part thus is more independent of the other than in the old type, and as an adjective is now just as uninflected as a noun forming the first part of a compound, the combinations adjective -[- noun
. and noun -|- noun are felt to be nearly equivalent. This
■fas in recent times led to some curious consequences, ome examples of which may be here given. We see
2o8 VIII. Grammar.
coordination with a true adjective in *' the sepulcher Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jawes" (Hamlet), *• with thin and rainbow wings" (Tennyson), and still more in ^^ home and foreign affairs", "on some Cumber- land or other affair" (Carlyle), and in "a school Latin dictionary", "an evening radical paper". The use of the prop -word one is interesting: "This umbrella, said Mr. L., producing a fat green cotton one" (Dickens), " most of the mountain flowers being lovelier than the lowland ones" (Ruskin). So is the use of a qualifying adverb in "from a too exclusively London standpoint", " in purely Government work " (I.ecky), " the most everyday occurrences " (Dobson). Thus nouns in composition are assuming more and more of the properties of the ad- jectives, and some, as a matter of fact, have already ! become adjectives so completely that they are recog- nized as such by all grammarians: bridal (originally brid-ealu 'bride- ale') and dainty (Old French daintie 'a delicacy', from Latin dignitatem), both assisted by their seemingly adjectival endings, further cheapo chiefs choice^ etc.
211. (XI) There are some important innovations in the syntax of the infinitive. Such sentences as "I don't know^what is worse than for such wicked strumpets to lay their sins at honest men's doors" (Fielding) would be sought in vain before the eighteenth century, though the way was paved* for them in Shakespearian sentences like " For us to levy power Proportionate to th'enemy, is all impossible ". The noun (pronoun) with for was originally in the closest connection with the adjective in " it is im- possible for us I to levy " , but by a natural shifting this ^ came to be apprehended as " it is impossible j for us to levy", so that for us was felt to be the subject of the
Infinitive. 20Q
infinitive, and this manner of indicating the subject is now often employed where the original construction is excluded. Thus, " What I like best, is for a nobleman to marry a miller's daughter. And what I like next best, is for a poor fellow to run away with a rich girl " (Thackeray), "it is of great use to healthy women for them to cycle". Another recent innovation is the use of to as what might be called a pro -infinitive instead of the clumsy to do so: "Will you play". "Yes, I intend to ". " I am going to ". This is one among several indications that the linguistic instinct now takes \to to belong to the preceding verb rather than to the /infinitive, a fact which explains the phenomenon usually mistermed ' the split infinitive '. This name is bad because we have many infinitives without to, as "I made him go ". 7(9 therefore is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling "the good man " a split nominative. Although examples of ran adverb_b£byefiiL-/^ and_the_infiriitiye,j3.acur as early ^"^ as the fourteenth century, they do not become very y u^ frequent till the lattejLj3alf„of.Jhe nineteenth cenjtiii)'. (^^, In some cases they decidedly contribute to the clearness pjwoo. of the sentence by showing at once what word is qualified by the adverb. Thackeray's and Seeley'SN sentences " she only wanted a pipe in her mouth \ . considerably to resemble the late Field Marshal " and ^^ " the poverty of the nation did not allow them success- j fully to compete with the other nations" are not very / happily built up, for the reader at the first glance iy inclined to connect the adverb with what precedes. The sentences would have been clearer if the authors had ventured to place to before the adverb, as Burns does in "Who dar'd to nobly stem tyrannic pride", and Carlyle in "new Emissaries are trained, with new
Jespersen, the English language, 1 4
2IO VIII. Grammar.
tactics, to, if possible, entrap him, and hoodwink and handcuff him".
212. This rapid sketch of grammatical changes, though necessarily giving only a fraction of the material on which it is based, has yet, I hope, been sufficiently full to show that such changes are continually going on and that it would be a gross error to suppose that any deviation from the established rules of grammar is necessarily a corruption. Those teachers who know least of the age, origin, and development of the rules they follow, are generally the most apt to think that whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil, while he who has patiently studied the history of the past and trained himself to hear the linguistic grass grow in the present age will generally be more inclined to see in the processes of human speech a wise natural selection, through which while nearly all innovations of questionable value disappear pretty soon, the fittest survive and make human speech ever more varied and flexible and yet ever more easy and convenient to the speakers. There is no reason to suppose that this development has come to a stop with the close of the nineteenth century: let us hope that in the future the more and more almighty schoolmaster may not nip too many beneficial changes in the bud.
Chapter IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
213. In this chapter I shall endeavour to characterize the language of the greatest master of English poetry and make some observations in regard to his influence on the English language as well as in regard to poetic and archaic language generally. But it must be distinctly understood that I shall concern myself with language and not with literary style. It is true that the two things cannot be completely kept apart, but as far as possible I shall deal only with what are really philological as opposed to literary problems.
214. Shakespeare's vocabulary is often stated to be the richest ever employed by any single man. It has been calculated to comprise 21,000 words ("rough calculation, found in Mrs. Clarke's Concordance . . . without counting inflected forms as distinct words", Craik), or, according to others 24,000 or 15,000. In order to appreciate what that means we must look a little at the various statements which have been given of the number of words used by other authors and by ordinary beings, educated and not educated. Unfortunately these statements are in many cases given and repeated without any indication of the manner in which they have been arrived at. ^
I Max Miiller, Wissenschaft der Sprache I 360 and Lectures on the Science of Language 6th ed. I 309. Elze, William Shakespeare, Halle 1876, 449. Wundt, Volkerpsychologie,
14*
212
IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry,
Milton's vocabulary is said to comprise 7000 or 8000 words, that of the Iliad and Odyssey taken together 9000, that of the Old Testament 5642 and that of the New Testament 4800.
215. Max Miiller says that a farm -labourer uses only 300 words, and Wood that " the average man uses about five hundred words " (adding "it is appalling to think how pitiably we have degenerated from the copiousness of our ancestors"). But both figures are obviously wrong. One two-year-old girl had 489 and another 1121 words (see Wundt), while Mrs. Winfield S. Hall's boy used in his 17 th mouth 2^2 different words and, when six years old, 2688 words — at least, for it is probable that the mother and her assistants who noted down every word they heard the child use, even so, did not get hold of its whole vocabulary. Now, are we really to believe, with Wundt, that the linguistic range of a grown-up man, however humble, is considerably smaller than that of a two -year- old child of educated parents or is only one- seventh of that of a six -year -old boy! Any one going through the lists given by Mrs. Hall will feel quite certain that no labourer contents himself with so scanty a vocabulary. Schoolbooks for teaching foreign languages often include some 700 words in the first year's course; yet on how few subjects of everyday occurrence are our
Sprache II, Leipz. 1900, 308. Wood, Journal of Germanic Philology I 294. Craik, Engl. Language and Literature 264. Emerson, History of the Engl. Language, 1894, 114. Le Maitre Phonetique 1888, 47. Smedberg, Svenska landsmalen XI, 9 (57) 1896. Marius Kristensen, Aarbog for dansk kulturhistorie 1897. Babbitt, Common Sense in Teaching Modern Languages, New York 1895, 11. Sweet, History of Language, 1900, 139. Weise, Unsere Muttersprache, 1897,205. Dewischeit, Shakespeare- Jahrbuch XXXIV (1898) 190. Mrs. Winfield S. Hall, Child Study, Monthly, March 1897 and Journal of Childhood and Adolescence, January 1902.
How many words ? 2 1 3
pupils able to converse after one year's teaching. Sweet also contradicts the statement about 300 words, saying, " When we find a missionary in Tierra del Fuego compiling a dictionary of 30,000 words in the Yaagan language — that is, a hundred times as many — we cannot give any credence to this statement, especially if we consider the number of names of different parts of a waggon or a plough, and all the words required in connection even with a single agricultural operation, together with names of birds, plants, and other natural objects". Smedberg, who has investigated the vocabulary of Swedish peasants and who emphasizes its richness in technical terms, arrives at the result that 26,000 is probably too small a figure, and the Danish dialectologist Kristensen completely endorses this view. Professor E. S. Holden tested himself by a reference to all the words in Webster's Dictionary, and found that his own vocabulary comprised 33,456 words. And E. H. Babbitt writes: "I tried to get at the vocabulary of adults and made experiments, chiefly with my students, to see how many English words each knew . . . My plan was to take a considerable number of pages from the dictionary at random, count the number of words on those pages which the subject of the experiment could define without any context, and work out a proportion to get an approximation of the entire number of words in the dictionary known. The results were surprising for two reasons. In the size of the vocabulary of such students the outside variations were less than 20 per cent., and their vocabulary was much larger than I had expected to find. The majority reported a little below 60,000 words".
216. These statements are easily reconciled with the ascription of 20,000 words to Shakespeare. For it must be remembered that in the case of each of us there is a great difference between the words known (especially
2 14 IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
those of which he has a reading knowledge) and the words actually used in conversation. And then, there must always be a great many words which a man will use readily in conversation, but which will never occur in his writings, simply because the subjects on which a man addresses the public are generally much less varied than those he has to talk about every day. ' How many authors have occasion to use in their books even the most familiar names of garden tools or conmion dishes or kitchen implements? When Milton as a poet uses only 8,000 against Shakespeare's 20,000 words, this is a natural consequence of the narrower range of his sub- jects, and it is easy to prove that his vocabulary really contained many more than the 8,000 words found in a Concordance to his poetical works. We have only to take any page of his prose writings, and we shall meet with a great many words not in the Concordance. ^
217. The greatness of Shakespeare's mind is therefore not shown by the fact that he was acquainted with 20,000 words, but by the fact that he wrote about so great a variety of subjects and touched upon so many human facts and relations that he needed this number
1 Inversely, many authors will use some (learned or abstract) words in writing which they do not use in conversation; their number, however, is rarely great.
2 Thus, on p. 30 of Areopagitica I find the following 21 words, which are not in Bradshaw's Concordance: churchman, competency, utterly, mercenary, pretender, ingenuous, evidently, tutor, examiner, seism, ferular, fescu [festu?], imprimatur, grammar, pedagogue, cursory, temporize, extemporize, licencer, commonwealth, foreiner. And p. 50 adds 18 more words to the list: writing, commons, valorous, rarify, enfranchise, founder, formal), slavish, oppressive, reinforce, abrogate, mercilesse, noble (n.), Danegelt, immunity, newnes, unsut- ablenes, customary.
Range of subjects. 215
of words. ^ His remarkable familiarity with technical expressions in many different spheres has often been noticed, but there are other facts with regard to his use of words that have not been remarked, or not sufficient- ly remarked. His reticence about religious matters, which has given rise to the most divergent theories of his religious belief, is shown strikingly in the fact that such words as Bible, Holy Ghost, and Trifiity do not occur at all in his writings, while Jesus (Jesu), Christ and Ou'istmas are found only in some of his earUest plays; Saviour occurs only once (in Hamlet), and Creator only in two of the dubious plays (H6C and Troilus).^ 218. Of far greater importance is his use of lan- guage to individualize the characters in his plays. In this he shows a much finer and subtler art than some modern novelists who make the same person continually use the same stock phrase or phrases. Even where he resorts to the same tricks as other authors he varies them more; Mrs. Quickly and Dogberry do not misapply words from the classical languages in the same way. The everyday speech of the artisans in A Midsummer Night's Dream is comic in a different manner from the diction they use in their comedy, which serves Shake- speare to ridicule some linguistic artifices employed in good faith by many of his contemporaries (alliteration, bombast). Shakespeare is not entirely exempt from the fashionable affectation of his days known as Euphuism,
1 I have amused myself with making up the following sentences of words not used by Shakespeare though found in the language of that time : In Shakespeare we find no blunders, although decejtcy and delicacy have disappeared; energy and enthusiasm are not in existence, and we see no elegant express- ions nor any gleams of genius, etc.
2 The act against profane language on the stage (see be- low, § 244) is not sufficient to explain this reticence.
2 1 6 IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
but it must be noticed that he is superior to its worst aberrations and he satirizes them, not only in Love's Labour's Lost, but also in many other places. Euphuistic expressions are generally put in the mouth of some sub- ordinate character who has nothing to do except to announce some trifling incident, relate a little of the circumstances that lead up to the action of the play, deliver a message from a king, etc. It is not impro- bable that the company possessed some actor who knew how to make small parts funny by imitating fashionable affectation, and we can imagine that it was he who acted Osric in LLa??il€t, and by his vocabulary and appear- ance exposed himself to the scoffs of the Danish prince, the Captain in Twelfth Night I, sc. 2, the Second Gent- leman in Othello II, sc. i, the first Lord in As You Like Lt II, sc. 2 (" They found the bed untreasur'd of their mistris"). But the messenger from Antony m. Julius CcEsar (III. I. 122) speaks in a totally different strain and gives us a sort of foretaste of Antony's eloquence. And how different again — I am speaking here of subordinate parts only — are the gardeners in Richard the Second (III, sc. 4) with their characteristic application of botan- ical similes to politics and vice versa. And thus one might go on, for no author has shown greater skill in adapting language to character.
219. A modern reader, however, is sure to miss many of the nuances that were felt instinctively by the poet's contemporaries. A great many words have now another value than they had then; in some cases it is only a slightly different colouring, but in others the diversity is greater, and only a close study of Elizabethan usage can bring out the exact value of each word. A bonnet then meant a man's cap or hat; Lear walks unbonneted. To charm always implied magic power, to make invul- nerable by witchcraft, to call forth by spells etc. ; " charm-
Value of words. 2 17
ing words " were magic words and not simply delightful words as in our days. Notorious might be used in a good sense as 'well-known'; censure, too, was a colour- less word (" And your name is great In mouthes of wisest censure" 0th. II. 3. 193). The same is true of succeed and success, which now imply what Shakespeare iveral times calls 'good success', whereas he also knows bad success'; cf. " the effects he writes of succeede unhappily" Lear I. 2. 157. Companion was often used in a bad sense, like fellow now, and inversely sheer, which is now used with such words as * folly, nonsense ', lad kept the original meaning of ' pure ', as in " thou jheere, immaculate, and silver fountaine" (R 2 V. 3. 61). Politician seems always to imply intriguing or scheming, md remorse generally means pity or sympathy. Accommo- iate evidently did not belong to ordinary language, but ras considered affected; occupy and activity were at least lalf-vulgar, while on the other hand_zm^ (vb.) was then ^free from its present trivial or ludicrous associations ("Untill my eielids will no longer wag", Hamlet V. i. 290, see Dowden's note to this passage). Assassination (only Macbeth I. 7. 2) w'ould then call up the memory of the " Assasines, a company of most desperat and dangerous men among the Mahometans " (KnoUes, Hist. Turks 1 603) or " That bloudy sect of Sarazens, called Assassini, who, without feare of torments, undertake . . . the murther of any eminent Prince, impugning their irreligion " (Speed, 1 6 1 1 , quoted N. E. D.)
220. Even adverbs might then have another colouring from their present signification. Now-a-days was a vul- gar word; it is used by no one in Shakespeare except Bottom, the grave-digger in Hamlet, and a fisherman in Pericles. The adverb eke, in the nineteenth century a poetic word, seems to have been a comic expression; it occurs only three times in Shakespeare (twice in the
2 1 8 IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
Merry Wives, used by Pistol and the Host, once by Flute in Mids. N. Dr.)\ Milton and Pope avoid the word. The synonym also is worth noticing. Shakespeare uses it only 2 2 times, and nearly always puts it in the mouth of vulgar or affected persons (Dogberry twice in Ado, the Clown once in Wint., the Second Lord in As IL sc. 2, the Second Lord in Tim. IlL sc. 6, the affected Captain in Tw. I. sc. 2; the knight in Lear L 4. 66 may belong here too; further Pistol twice in grandiloquent speeches, H 4 B IL 4. 171 and V. 3. 145, and two of Shakespeare's Welshmen, Evans three times, and Fluellen twice). It is used twice in solemn and official speeches (H 5 L 2. 77, where Canterbury expounds lex Salica, and IV. 6. 10), and it is, therefore, highly characteristic that Falstaff uses the word twice in his Euphuistic impersonation of the king (H 4 A IL 4. 440 and 459) and twice in similar speeches in the Merry Wives (V. i. 24 and V. 5. 7).^ 221. Shylock is one of Shakespeare's most interesting
I The only passages not accounted for above are Gent. in, 2. 25, where the metre is wrong, Hamlet V. 2. 402, where the folios have always instead of also, and Cass. II. i. 329. — Shakespeare's sparing use of also would in itself suffice to disprove the Baconian theory if any proof were needed beyond the evidence of history and of psychology. For in Bacon, also's abound, and I have counted on four successive small pages of Moore Smith's edition of the New Atlantis 22 in- stances, exactly as many as are found in the whole of Shake- speare. Might and mought seem to be nearly equally frequent in Bacon, but mought is found only once in Shakespeare, in the third part of Henry VI, a play which many competent judges are inclined not to ascribe to Shakespeare at all. At any rate, this one instance in one of his earliest works weighs nothing as against the thousands of times might is found. Shakespeare uses among and amo7igst indiscriminately, Bacon seems to use amongst exclusively. Shakespeare has scarcely as well as scarce, but Bacon has only scarce ; Bacon frequently employs the conjunction whereas, which is not found at all in the undoubtedly genuine Shakespearian plays, etc.
Shylock. 2 1 9
creations, even from the point of view of language. Al- though Sidney Lee has shown that there were Jews in England in those times and that, consequently, Shake- speare need not have gone outside his own country in order to see models for Shylock, the number of Jews cannot have been sufficient for his hearers to be very familiar with the Jewish type, and no Anglo-Jewish dia- lect or mode of speech had developed which Shake- speare could put into Shylock's mouth and so make him at once recognizable for what he was. I have not, indeed, been able to discover a single trait in Shylock's language that can be called distinctly Jewish. And yet Shakespeare has succeeded in creating for Shylock a language different from that of anybody else. Shylock has his Old Testament at his fingers' ends, he defends his own way of making money breed by a reference to Jacob's thrift in breeding parti-coloured lambs, he swears by Jacob's staff" and by our holy sabbath, and he calls Lancelot "that foole of Hagars off"-spring ". ^ We have an interesting bit of Jewish figurative language in "my houses eares, I meane my casements" (IL 5. 34). Shylock uses some biblical words which do not occur elsewhere in Shakespeare: pilled (The skilful shepheard pil'd me certain wands, cf. Genesis XXX. 37), synagogue^ Nazarite, and publican. But more often Shylock is char- acterized by being made to use words or constructions a little diff"erent from the accepted use of Shakespeare's time. ^ He dislikes the word- interest and prefers calling it advantage or thrift (my well-worne thrift, which he cals interrest, L 3. 52), and instead of usury he says usance. Furness quotes Wylson On Usurye 1572, p. 32
1 Contrast with this trait the fondness for classical allus- ions found in Marlowe's Barrabas.
2 He says Abram, but Abraham is the only form found in the rest of Shakespeare's works.
2 20 IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
" usurie and double usurie, the merchants termyng it usance and double usance, by a more cleulie name" — this word thus ranks in the same category as dashed or d-d for damned', instead of pronouncing an objectionable word in full one begins as if one were about to pro- nounce it and then shunts off on another track (see other examples below, § 244). Shylock uses the plural moneys, which is very rare in Shakespeare, he says an equal pound for * exact ', rheuju (rume) for ' saliva ', estimable for 'valuable', fulsome for 'rank' (the only instance of ^that signification discovered by the editors of the N. E. D.); he alone uses the words eaneling and misbeliever and the rare verb to bane. His syntax is peculiar: we trifle time; rend out, where Shakespeare has elsewhere only re?id\ I have no mind 0/ feasting forth to-night (always mind to) ; and so following, where afid so forth is the reg- ular Shakespearian phrase. I have counted some forty such deviations from Shakespeare's ordinary language and cannot dismiss the thought that Shakespeare made Shylock's language pecuHar on purpose, just as he makes Caliban and the witches in Macbeth use certain words and expressions used by none other of his characters in order to stamp them as beings out of the common sort. 222. Shakespeare's vocabulary was not the same in all periods of his life. I have counted between two and three hundred words which he used in his youth, but not later, while the number of words peculiar to his last period is much smaller. Sarrazin^ mentions as charac- teristic of his first period a predilection for picturesque adjectives that appeal immediately to the outward senses (bright, brittle, fragrant, pitchy, snow-white), while his later plays are said to contain more adjectives of psycho- logical importance. But even apart from the fact that
I Shakespeare -Jahrbuch XXXIII, 122.
Periods in his life. 2 2 1
some of the adjectives instanced are really found in later plays {bright in Caes., Ant., 0th., Cymb., Wint. T., etc.), this statement would account for only a small part of the divergencies. Probably no single explanation can account for them all, not even that of the natural buoyancy of youth and the comparative austerity of a later age. It is noteworthy that in some instances he ridicules in later plays words used quite seriously in earlier ones. Thus beautify, which is found in Lucrece, Henry VI B, Titus Andr., Two Gentlemen, and Romeo, is severely criticized by Polonius when he hears it in Hamlet's letter: " That's an ill phrase, a vilde phrase, beautified is a vilde phrase ". Similarly cranny, which Shakespeare used in Lucrece (twice) and in the Comedy of Errors, is not found in any play written later than Mids N. D., where Shake- speare takes leave of the word by turning it to ridicule in the mouth of Bottom and in the artisans' comedy. The fate oi foe man, aggravate, and homicide is nearly the same. Perhaps some of the words avoided in later Hfe were provincialisms (thus possibly pebblestone, shore in the sense of 'bank of a river', wood 'mad', forefather 'an- cestor ' , the pronunciation of fuarriage and of Henry in three syllables). In the first period Shakespeare used perverse with the unusual signification * cold , unfriendly, averse to love ', later he avoids the word altogether. In such instances he may have been criticized by his con- temporaries (we know from the Poetaster how severe Ben Jonson was in these matters), and that may have made him avoid the objectionable words altogether.
223. One of the most characteristic features of Shake- speare's use of the English language is , his boldness. His boldness of metaphor has often been pointed out in books of literary criticism, and the boldness of his sentence structure, especially in his last period, is so obvious that no instances need be adduced here. He
2 22 IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
does not always care for grammatical parallelism, witness such a sentence as ** A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisedom And ever three parts coward'" (Haml. IV. 4. 42). He does not always place the words where they would seem properly to belong, as in " we send, To know what willing ransome he wall give" for "what ransom he will willingly give" (H 5 III. 5. 63), " dismist me Thus with his speechlesse hand " (Cor. V. I. 68), "the whole eare of Denmarke Is by a forged processe of my death Rankly abus'd " (the ear of all Denmark, Haml. I. 5. 36), "lovers absent howres " (the hours when lovers are absent, 0th. III. 4, 174) etc. He is not afraid of writing " wanted lesse impudence " for " had less impudence " or " wanted impudence more " (Wint. III. 2. 57) and "a begger without lesse quality" (Cymb. I. 4. 2-^, nor of mixing his negatives as he does in many other passages.-^ Al. Schmidt, who collects many instances of such negligence, rightly remarks: " Had he taken the pains of revising and preparing his plays for the press, he would perhaps have corrected all the quoted passages. But he did not write them to be read and dwelt on by the eye, but to be heard by a sympathetic audience. And much that would blemish the language of a logician, may well become a dramatic poet or an orator".^ There is an excellent paper by C. Alphonso Smith in the Englische Studien, vol. XXX, on " The Chief Difference between the First and Second Folios of Shakespeare ", in which he shows I that "the supreme syntactic value of Shakespeare's work as represented in the First Folio is that it shows us the English language unfettered by bookish impositions.
1 Besides using such double negatives as were regular in all the older periods of the language {nor never, etc.)
2 Shakespeare-Lexicon, p. 1420.
Boldness of expression 223
Shakespeare's syntax was that of the speaker, not that of the essayist; for the drama represents the unstudied utterance of people under all kinds and degrees of emotion, ennui, pain, and passion. Its syntax, to be truly representative, must be familiar, conversational, spontaneous; not studied and formal." But ^* the Second Folio is of unique service and significance in its attempts to render more ** correct " and bookish the unfettered syntax of the First. The First Folio is to the Second as spoken language is to written language". The 'bad grammar' of the First Folio (1623) may not always be due to Shakespeare himself, but at any rate we have in that edition more of his own language than in the 'correctness' of the Second Folio (1632).
224. Shakespeare's boldness with regard to language is less conspicuous, though no less real, in the instances I shall now mention. In turning over the pages of the New English Dictionary, where every pains has been taken to ascertain the earliest occurrence of each word and of each signification, one is struck by the frequency with which Shakespeare's name is found affixed to the earliest quotation for words or meanings. In many cases this is no doubt due to the fact that Shakespeare's vocabulary has been registered with greater care in Concordances and in Al. Schmidt's invaluable Shakespeare- Lexicon than that of any other author, so that his words cannot escape notice, while the same words may occur unnoticed in the pages of many an earlier author. But even if future research may somewhat reduce the number of these words, the fact will remain that Shakespeare was in no way afraid of adopting into his immortal pages a great many words which were new in his times, whether absolutely new or new only to the written language, while living colloquially on the lips of the people. My list includes the following words: aslant as a
2 24 ^^' Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
preposition, assassination (see above), barefaced, beguile in two of the significations now most current (win the attention by wiHng means, and charm away), the pkiral brothers (found also in Layamon's Brut, but seemingly not between that and Shakespeare's Titus Andron. and Marlowe's Tamburlaine), call 'to pay a short visit', courtship, dwindle, enthrone (earlier, enthronize), eventful, excellent in the current sense 'extremely good', fount ' spring ', yr^//^/, get intransitive with an adjective, 'become' (only in "get clear"), I have got for 'I have', hint, hurry, indistinguishable, laughable, leap-frog, loggerhead and loggerheaded, lonely (but Sydney has loneliness some years before Shakespeare began writing), lower verb. Further the following verbs (formed from nouns that are found before Shakespeare's time) : bound, hand, jade, and nouns (formed from already existing verbs): dawn, dress, hatch, import, indent. Among other words which were certainly or probably new when Shakespeare used them, may be mentioned acceptance, gull 'dupe', rely, scarcely, and summit. I shall give below {§ 228) a list of words and expressions the existence of which in the English language is due to Shakespeare. The words here given would probably have found their way into the language even had Shakespeare never written a line, though he may have accelerated the date of their acceptance. But at any rate they show that he was exempt from that narrowness which often makes authors shy of using new or colloquial words in the higher literary style. Let me add another remark apropos of a list of hard words needing an explanation which is found in Cockeram's Dictionarie (1623). Dr Murray writes^: *' We are surprised to find among these hard words abandon^ abhorre, abrupt, absurd, action^ activitie, and actresse,
I The Evolution of English Lexicography. Romanes Lecture, Oxford and London 1900, p. 29.
Poetic diction. 225
explained as 'a woman doer', for the stage actress had not yet appeared". Now, with the exception of the last one, all these words are found in Shakespeare's plays. 225. Closely connected with this trait in Shakespeare's language is the proximity of his poetical diction to his ordinary prose. He uses very few 'poetical' words or forms. He does not rely for bis highest flights on the use of words and grammatical forms not used elsewhere, but knows how to achieve the finest effects of imagination without stepping outside his ordinary vocabulary and grammar. It must be remembered that when he uses thou and thee^ "'tis, e'en, ne'er, however, viim eyes^ etc., or when he construes negative and interrogative verbs without do, all these things which are now parts of the con- ventional language of poetry, were everyday colloquialisms in the Elizabethan period. There are, it is true, certain words and forms which he never uses except in poetry, but their number is extremely small. I do not know of any besides host *anny', vale, sire, and morn. As for the synonym morrow, apart from its use in the sense of 'next day' and in the salutation good morroiv, which was then colloquial, it occurs only four times, and only in rime. There are some verb forms which only occur in rime, but the number of occasions on which Shakespeare was thus led to deviate from his usual grammar is very small: hegmi (past tense) 8 times, flee once (the usual present is fly), gat once (in the probably spurious Pericles), sain once, sang once, shore participle once, stroiv?i once (the usual form is strewed), swore participle once — fifteen instances in all, to which must be added eleven instances of the plural eye7i. Rhythmical reasons seem to make do more frequent in Shakespeare's verse than in his prose ^, and rhythm and
I W. Franz, Shakespeare - Grammatik , 1900, 320. His statistics might be more comprehensive.
Jespersen, the English language. I 5
2 26 IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
rime sometimes make him place a preposition after instead of before the noun [e. g. go the fools among. ^) All these things are rare enough to justify the statement that a peculiar poetical diction is practically non-existent in Shakespeare.
226. In the Old English period the language of poetry differed, as we have seen (cf. § 53), very con- siderably from the language of ordinary prose. The old poetical language was completely forgotten a few centuries after the Norman Conquest, and a new one did not develop in the Middle English period, though there were certain conventional tricks used by many poets, such as those ridiculed in Chaucer's Sir Thopas. Chaucer himself had not two distinct forms of language, one for verse and the other for prose, apart from those unavoidable smaller changes which rhythm and rime are always apt to bring about. We have now seen that the same is true of Shakespeare; but in the nineteenth century we find a great many words and forms of words which are scarcely ever used outside of poetry. This, then, is not a survival of an old state of things, but a comparatively recent phenomenon, whose causes are well worth in- vestigating. At first it- might be thought that the regard for sonority and beauty of sound would be the chief, or one of the chief agents in the creation of a special poetical dialect. But very often poetical forms are, on the contrary, less euphonious than everyday forms; compare for example break^st thou with do you break. Those who imagine that gat sounds better than got will scarcely -admit that spat or gnat sounds better than spot or not', non-phonetic associations are often more powerful than the mere sounds.
227. More frequently it is the desire to leave the
Franz, p. 270.
Language of poetry. 2 27
beaten track that leads to the preference of certain words in poetry. Words that are too well known and too often used do not call up such vivid images as words less familiar. This is one of the reasons which impeL poets to use archaic words; they are 'new' just on! account of their being old, and yet they are not sol utterly unknown as to be unintelligible. Besides they will often call up the memory of some old or venerable work in which the reader has met with them before, and thus they at once secure the reader's sympathy. If, then, the poetical language of the jfeineteenth century contains a great many archaisms, the question naturally presents itself, from what author or authors do most of them proceed? And many people who know the pre- eminent position of Shakespeare in EngHsh literature will probably be surprised to hear that his is not the greatest influence on English poetic diction.
228. Among words and phrases due to reminiscences of Shakespeare may be mentioned the following: autre (Keats, Meredith), atomy in the sense 'atom, tiny being', beetle (the dreadfull summit of the cliffe. That beetles o'er his base into the sea), it beggars all description, broad-blown, character)' (Keats, Browning), roz^w of vantage (coign is another spelling of coin 'comer'), cudgel one's brain{s), daff the world aside, eager 'cold' (a nipping and an eager ayre), eld (superstitious eld), nine farrow, fitful (Lifes fitfull iewer), forcible feeble, a foregone conclusion, for getive (Falstaff; " of uncertain formation and meaning. Commonly taken as a derivation oi forge v., and hence used by \vriters of the 19th c. for: apt at forging, inventive, creative" N.E.D.), 0. forthright (rare), gaingiving (Coleridge), gouts of blood, gravelblind, head and front ("A Shaksperian phrase, orig. app. denoting 'summit, height, highest extent or pitch'; sometimes used by modem wTiters in other senses ". N.E.D) , lush (in the sense ' luxuriant in growth '),
15*
2 28 IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
in my mind's eye, the pink (of perfection, in Shakespeare only "I am the very pinck of curtesie"; George Eliot ^ has " Her kitchen always looked the pink of cleanliness "), silken dalliance, single blessedness, that way madness lies ("Too kind! Insipidity lay that way", Mrs. Humphrey Ward), weird. The last word is interesting; originally it is a noun and means * destiny, fate ' ; the three weird sisters means the fate sisters or Norns. Shakespeare found this expression in Holinshed and used it in speaking of the witches in Macbeth, and only there. From that play it entered into the ordinary language, but without being properly understood. It is now used as an adjective and generally taken to mean 'mystic, mysterious, unearthly'. Another word that is often misunderstood is bourne from Hamlet (The undiscovered countrey, from whose borne No traveller returnes); it means 'limit', but Keats andt others use it in the sense 'realm, domain' (In water,] fiery realm, and airy bourne; quoted N.E.D.). There are two things worth noting in this list. First, that it includes so many words of vague or indefinite meaning, which were not perhaps even clearly understood by the author himself. This explains the fact that some of them have apparently been used in modern times in a different sense from that intended by Shakespeare. Second, that the re-employment of these words nearly always dates from the nineteenth century and that the present currency of some of them is due just as much to Sir Walter Scott or Keats as to the original author. To cudgel one's braim is now more of a literary phrase than when Shakespeare) put it in the mouth of the gravedigger (Hamlet V. i. 63), evidently meaning it to be a rude or vulgar expression. Inversely, single blessedness is now generally used with an ironical or humorous tinge which it certainly had not^ in Shakespeare (Mids. I. i. 78).
229. It must be noted also that none of the words'
Shakespeare and Spenser. 2 2Q
thus traceable to Shakespeare belong now to what might be called the technical language of poetry. Modern archaizing poetry owes its vocabulary more to Edmund Spenser than to any other poet. Pope and his con- temporaries made a very sparing use of archaisms, but when poets in the middle of the eighteenth century turned from his rationaHstic and matter-of- fact poetry and were eager to take their romantic flight away from everyday realities, Spenser became the poet of their heart, and they adopted a great many of his words which had long been forgotten. Their success was so great that many words which they had to explain to their readers are now perfectly familiar to every educated man and woman. Gilbert West, in his work "On the Abuse of Travelling, in imitation of Spenser" (1739) had to explain in footnotes such words as sooth, guise, hardiment. Elfin, prowess, wend, hight, dight, paramours, behests, caitiffs^. William Thompson, in his "Hymn to May" (1740?) explains certes surely, certainly, ne nor, erst formerly, long ago, U7ida€d undazzled, sheen brightness, shining, been are, dispredden spread, meed prize, ne recks nor is concerned, affray affright, featly nimbly, defftly finely, glemie a country borough, eld old age, lusty-head vigour, algate ever, harrow destroy, carl clown, perdie an old word for asserting anything, livelood liveliness, albe altho', scant scarcely, bedight adorned.
230. In later times, Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Tennyson, William Morris, and Swinburne must be mentioned as those poets who have contributed most to the revival of old words. Coleridge in the first edition of the Ancient Mariner used so many archaisms in spelling, etc., that he had afterwards to reduce the number in order to
I W. L. Phelps, Beginnings of the Romantic Movement, p. 63.
230 IX. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
make his poem more palatable to the reading public. Sometimes pseudo-a.n.tique formations have been intro- duced; am'g/i, for instance, which is frequent in Morris, is not an old word, and idlesse is a false formation after the legitimate old noblesse and hu?nblesse (0. Fr. noblesse, humblesse). But on the whole, many good words have been recovered from oblivion, and some of them will doubtless find their way into the language of ordinary conversation, while others will continue their life in the regions of higher poetry and eloquence. On the other hand, many pages in the works of Shake- speare, of Shelley, and of Tennyson show us that it is possible for a poet to reach the highest flights of elo- quent poetry without resorting to many of the conven- tionally poetical terms.
231. As for the technical grammar of modern poetry, the influence of Shakespeare is not very strong, in fact not so strong as that of the Authorized Version of the Bible. The revival of th in the third person singular was due to the Bible, as we have seen above (§ 196)^ Gat is a frequent form in the Bible, while Shakespeare's ordinary past of the verb to get is got] the solitary instance oi gat (see § 225) only serves to confirm the rule^. The past tense of cleave ' to sever ' in Shakespeare is clove or cleft; clave does not occur in his writings at aU, but
1 When modern clergymen in reading the Bible pronounce loved, danced, etc., they are reproducing a language about two hundred years earlier than the Authorized Version.
2 Gat is the only form of this verb admitted by some modern poets, who avoid get and got altogether. Shakespeare uses the verb hundreds of times. Milton makes a very sparing use of the verb (which he inflects get got got, never gat in the past or gotten in the participle) ; all the forms of the verb only occur 19 times in his poetical works, while, for instance, give occurs 168 times and receive y^t times. The verb is rare in Pope loo. Why is this verb tabooed in this way?
Grammar of poetry. 231
is the only biblical past of this verb. Brake is the only preterite of break found in the Bible; in Shakespeare brake is rarer than broke \ Milton and Pope have only broke', Tennyson, Morris, and Swinburne prefer brake.
232. But on the whole, modern poets do not take their grammar from any one old author or book, but are apt to use any deviation from the ordinary grammar they can lay hold of anywhere. And thus it has come to pass in the nineteenth century that while the languages of other civilized nations have the same grammar for poetry as for prose, although retaining here and there a few archaic forms of verbs, etc., in English a wide gulf sepa- rates the grammar of poetry from that of ordinary life. The pronoun for the second person is in prose jou for both cases in both numbers, while in many works of poetry it is thou and thee for the singular, ye for the plural (with here and there a rare you) ; the poetical possessives thy and thifie never occur in everyday speech. The usual distinction between 7?iy and mine does not always obtain in poetry where it is thought refined to write iJime ears, etc. For they sat down the poetical form is they sate them down] for it's poets write *tis, and for zvhatever either whatso or whatsoever (or whatever), for does not mend they often write mends not, etc. Sometimes they gain the advantage of having at will one syllable more or less than common people: taketh for takes, thou takes t for you take, moved for moved, der for over, etc.; compare also morn for mortwig. But in other cases the only thing gained is the impression, produced by un- common forms, that we are in a sphere different from or raised above ordinary realities. As a matter of course, this impression is weakened in proportion as the devia- tions become the common property of any rimer, when a reaction will probably set in in favour of more natural forms. The history of some of the poetical forms is
2^2 IV. Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
rather curious: /lowe'e/-, e'er, o'er, e'en were at first vulgar or familiar forms, used in daily talk. Then poets began to spell these words in the abbreviated fashion whenever they wanted their readers to pronounce them in that way, while prose writers, unconcerned about the pronun- ciation given to their words, retained the full forms in spelling. The next step was that the short forms were branded as vulgar by schoolmasters with so great a success that they disappeared from ordinary conversation while they were still retained in poetry. And now they are distinctly poetic and as such above the reach of common mortals.
233. Among the elements of ordinary language, some can be traced back to individual authors. Besides those already mentioned I shall cite only a few. Sur- round originally meant to overflow (Fr. sur-onder, Lat. super-undare) ; but according to Skeat, both the modern signification, which implies an erroneous reference to round, and the currency of the word are due to Milton. The soft impeachment is one of Mrs. Malaprop's ex- pressions (in Sheridans's Rivals, act V, sc. 3). Henchman was made generally known by Scott, and to croon by Burns. Burke originated the expression " the Great Un- washed ". A certain number of proper names in works of literature have been popular enough to pass into ord- inary language as appelatives ^, as for instance pander or pandar from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Abigail ' a servant-girl ' from Beaumont and Fletcher's Scornful Lady, Mrs. Grundy as a personification of middle- class ideas of propriety from Morton's Speed the Plough, Paul Pry *a meddlesome busy-body' from Poole's comedy of
I Aronstein, Englische Studien XXV, p. 245 ff,, Josef Rei- nius, On Transferred Appellations of Human Beings, Goteborg 1903, p. 44 ft:
Rime and rhythm, 233
that name, Sarah Gamp ' sick nurse of the old-fashioned type' and 'big umbrella' from Dickens's Martin Chuzz- lewitj Pecksniff ' hypocrite ' from the same novel, Sherlock Holmes * acute detective ' from Conan Doyle's stories.
234. Ordinary language sometimes makes use of- the same instruments as poetry. Above (§ 56) we have seen a number of alliterative formulas; here I shall give some instances of riming locutions: highivays and byways, town and gow?i, it will neither make nor break me (of. the alliterative make . . . ?nar), fairly and squarely, toiling and moiling, as snug as a bug in a rug (Kipling), rough and gruff, " I mean to take that girl — stiatch or catch " (Meredith), 7?ioans and groans'^. Compare also such popular words as handy-dandy, hanky-panky, namby-pamby, hurly-burly, hurdy-gurdy, hugger-mugger, hocus pocus, hoity toity or highly tighty, higgledy-piggledy or higglety-pigglety, hickery -pickery. Hotchpot (from French hocher 'shake to- gether ' and pot) was made hotchpotch for the sake of the rime; then the final tch was changed into dge (cf. knowledge from knowleche): ^hotchpodge, and the rime was re-established : hodgepodge.
235. Rhythm undoubtedly plays a great part in ord- inary language, apart from poetry and artistic (or arti- ficial) prose. It may not always be easy to demonstrate this; but in combinations of a monosyllable and a di- syllable by means of atid the practice is always to place the short word first, because the rhythm then becomes the regular 'aa 'aa instead of 'aaa 'a ('before the a denotes the strongly stressed syllable). Thus we say "bread and butter", not "butter and bread"; further: bread and water, milk and water, cup and saucer, wind
I As Old English has manan ' moan ', the modem verb may have derived its vowel from the frequent collocation with groan, OE. granian. Square may owe one of its significations to the collocation with fait.
2 34 ^^" Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry.
and weather, head and shoulders^ by fits and snatches, from top to bottom, rough and ready, rough and tumble, free and easy, dark and dreary, high and mighty, up and doing ^. It is probable that rhythm has also played a great part in determining the order of words in other fixed groups of greater complexity.
I Compare also such titles of books as Songs and Poems, Men and Women, Past and Present, French and English, Night and Morning. In some instances, rhythm is obviously not the only reason for the order, but in all I think it has been at least a concurrent cause.
Chapter X. Conclusion.
236. In the preceding chapters we have considered the early vicissitudes of the English language, the various foreign influences brought from time to time to bear on it, its inner growth, lexical and grammatical, and the linguistic tendencies of its poets. It now remains to look at a few things which have contributed towards shaping the language, but which could find no convenient place in any of the preceding chapters, and then to say something about the spread and probable future of the language.
237. Aristocratic and democratic tendencies in a nation often show themselves in its speech; indeed, we have already regarded the adoption of French and Latin words from that point of view. It is often said, on the Continent at least, that the typical Englishman's self- assertion is shown by the fact that his is the only language in which the pronoun of the first person is written with a capital letter, while in some other languages it is the second person that is honoured by this distinction, especially the pronoun of courtesy (Germain Sie^ often also Dii, Danish De and in former times Du, Italian Ella, Lei, Spanish V. or Vd., Finnish Te). Weise goes so far as to say that " the Englishman, who as the ruler of the seas looks down in contempt on the rest of Europe, writes in his language nothing but the beloved /
236 X. Conclusion.
with a big letter".^ But this is Httle short of cakmmy. If self-assertion had been the real cause, why should not me also be written Me'^ The reason for writing / is a much more innocent one, viz. the orthographic habit in the middle ages of using a " long i " (that is, j or I), whenever the letter was isolated or formed the last letter of a group; the numeral one was written j or I (and three, iij, etc.) just as much as the pronoun. Thus no sociological inference can be drawn from this peculiarity. 238. On the other hand, the habit of addressing a single person by means of a plural pronoun was decidedly in its origin an outcome of an aristocratic tendency towards class- distinction. The habit originated with the Roman Emperors, who desired to be addressed as beings worth more than a single ordinary man; and French courtesy in the middle ages propagated it throughout Europe. In England as elsewhere this plural pronoun {jyou, ye) was long confined to respectful address. Superior persons or strangers were addressed as you\ thou thus becoming the mark either of the inferiority of the person spoken to, or of familiarity or even intimacy or affection between the two interlocutors. English is the only language that has got rid of this useless distinction. The Quakers (the Society of Friends) objected to the habit as obscuring the equality of all human beings; they therefore thou!d (or rather ihee^d) everybody. But the same democratic levelling that they wanted to effect in this way, was achieved a century and a half later in society at large, though in a roundabout manner, when the pronoun you was gradually extended to lower classes and thus lost more and more of its previous character of deference. Thoti then for some time was reserved for religious and literary use as well as for foul abuse, until
I Charakteristik der lateinischen Sprache. 1899, p. 21.
Thou and you. 2'\1
finally the latter use was discontinued also and you became the only form used in ordinary conversation.
239. Apart from the not very significant survival of thou, English has thus attained the only manner of address worthy of a nation that respects the elementary rights of each individual. People who express regret at not having a pronoun of endearment and who insist how pretty it is in other languages when, for instance, two lovers pass from vous to the more familiar ///, should consider that no other language has really a pronoun exclusively for the most intimate relations. Where the two forms of address do survive, thou is very often, most often perhaps, used without real affection, nay very frequently in contempt or frank abuse. Besides, it is often painful to have to choose between the two forms, as people may be offended, sometimes by the too familiar, and sometimes by the too distant mode. Some of the unpleasant feeling of Helmer towards Krogstad in Ibsen's Dukkehjem ('*A Doll's House" or "Nora") must be lost to an English audience because occasioned by the latter using an old schoolfellow's privilege of thou-vc\^ Helmer. In some languages the pronoun of respect has been the cause of ambiguity, in German and Danish by the identity in form of Sie [De) with the plural of the third person, in Italian and Portuguese by the identity with the singular (feminine) of the third person. When all the artificialities of the modes of address in different nations are taken into account — the Lei, Ella, vol and tu of the Italians, the vossa viej'ce ('your grace', to shopkeepers) and voce (shortened form of the same, to people of a lower grade) of the Portuguese (who in addressing equals or superiors use the third person singular of the verb without any pronoun or noun) , the gij, jij, je and U of the Dutch, not to mention the eternal use of titles as pronouns in German and, still more, in Swedish ('What does Mr.
238
X. Conclusion.
Doctor want?' 'The gracious Miss is probably aware', etc.) — the English may be justly proud of having avoided all such mannerisms and ridiculous extravagances, though the simple Old English way of using thou in addressing one person and ye in addressing more than one would have been still better.
240. Religion has had no small influence on the English language. The Bible has been studied and quoted in England more than in any other Christian country, and a great many Biblical phrases have passed into the ordinary language as household words. The style of the Authorized Version has been greatly admired by many of the best judges of English style, who — with some exaggeration — recommend an early familiarity with and a constant study of the English bible (and of that great imitator of Biblical simplicity and earnestness, John Bunyan) as the best training in the English language.^
I See the long series of quotations given in Albert S. Cook's little book "The Bible and English Prose Style" (Boston, 1892). On the other hand, Fitzedward Hall says, "To Dr. Newman, and to the myriads who think as he does about our English Bible, one would be allowed to whisper, that the poor "Turks" of the Prayer Book talk exactly in their own fashion, and for reasons strictly analogous to theirs, about the purity of diction, and what not, of "the Blessed Koran" .... Ever since the Reformation, the ruling language of English religion has been, with rare exception, an affair either of studied antiquarianism or of nauseous pedantry. Simplicity, and little more, was aimed at, originally; and it sufficed for times of real earnestness. But the very quaintness of phrase which King James countersigned has attained to be canonized, till a hath, or a thou, delivered with conventional unction, now well nigh inspires a sensation of solemnity in its hearer, and a persuasion of the sanctanimity of its utterer". (Modem English, p. 16 — 17.)
The Bible. 23Q
Tennyson found that parts of The Book of the Revelation were finer in English than in Greek, and he said that " the Bible ought to be read, were it only for the sake of the grand English in which it is written, an education in itself".' The rhythmical character of the Authorized Version is seen, for instance, in the well-known passage (Job III. 17) "There the wicked cease from troubling: and there the wearie be at rest", which Tennyson was able to use as the last line of his " May Queen " with scarcely any alteration: "And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest".
241. C. Stoffel has collected quite a number of scriptural phrases and allusions used in Modern English^, such as " Tell it not in Gath ", " the powers that be ", "olive branches" (children), "strain at {or out) a gnat", "to spoil the Egyptians", "he may run that readeth it", "take up his parable", "wash one's hands of" something, "a still small voice", "thy speech bewrayeth thee". Some which Stoffel does not mention may find their place here. The modern word a helpmate is a corruption of the two words in Gen. II. 18: "I will make him an helpe meet for him" {meet 'suitable'); the slang word a rib * a wife ' is from Genesis , too , and so is the ex- pression "the lesser lights". "A howling wilderness" is from Deuteron. XXXII. 10. "My heart was still hot within me; then spake I with my tongue" (used, for instance, in Charlotte Bronte's "The Professor", p. 161) is from Psalms XXXIX. 3, and "many inventions" from Ecclesiastes VII. 29. From the New Testament may be mentioned "to kill the fatted calf" (while the phrase prodigal so?i is not found in the Bible itself), " whited sepulchres", "of the earth, earthy", and "to comprehend
1 Life and Letters, II. 41 and 71.
2 Studies in English, Written and Spoken, 1894, p. 125.
2AO X. Conclusion.
with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth and height".
242. The scriptural "holy of holies", which contains a Hebrew manner of expressing the superlative \ has given rise to a great many similar phrases in English, such as "in my heart of hearts" (Shakesp. Hamlet, III. 2. 78; Wordsw. Prelude XIV. 281), "the place of all places" (Miss Austen, Mansf. P. 71), "I remember you a buck of bucks" (Thackeray, Newc. 100), "every lad has a friend of friends, a crony of cronies, whom he cherishes in his heart of hearts" (ib. 148), "the evil of evils in our present politics" (Lecky, Democr. and Lib. I. 21), "the woman is a horror of horrors" (H. James, Two Magics 60), " that mystery of mysteries, the beginning of things" (Sully, Study of Childh. 71), "she is a modern of the moderns" (Mrs. H. Ward, Eleanor 265), "love like yours is the pearl of pearls, and he who wins it is prince of princes" (Hall Caine, Christian 443), "chemistry had been the study of studies for T. Sandys" (Barrie, Tommy and Grizel 6). Compare also " I am sorrowful to my tail's tail" (Kipling, Sec. Jungle B. 160).
243. Some scriptural proper names have often been used as appellatives, such as Jezehel and Rahah\ when a driver is called 2^. jehu in slang, the allusion is to 2 Kings IX. 20, where Jehu's furious driving is mentioned". There is an American slang expression " to give a person
Jessie" meaning, *to beat him soundly', which is not ex- plained in the Dictionaries (quotations may be found in Bartlett and in Farmer and Henley). Is it not in allusion to the rod mentioned in Is a. II. i? ("There
1 Cf. I Timothy VI. 15 "the King of kings, and Lord of lords".
2 YoY jora?n or joru7n ' drinking bowl ' andy<?r;7 see N.E.D., where 2 Sam. VIII. 10, and Stoffel, Studies in Engl. 138, where I King XIV. 10 is quoted.
Biblical phrases and oaths. 24 1
shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse.") The N. E. D. has the spelling jesse with the meaning * a ge- nealogical tree representing the genealogy of Christ . . . a decoration for a wall^ window, vestment, etc., or in the form of a large branched candlestick '.
244. The influence of Puritans, though not strong enough to proscribe such words as Chrisff?ias, for which they wanted to substitute Christtide in order to avoid the Catholic mass, was yet strong enough to modify the custom of swearing. In Catholic times all sorts of fantastic oaths were fashionable:
Hir othes been so grete and so dampnable. That it is grisly for to here hem swere; Our blissed lordes body they to-tere; Hem thoughte Jewes rente him noght ynough. ^
This practice was continued after the Reformation, and all sorts of alterations were made in the name of God in order to soften down the oaths: gog^ cocke^ gosse, gom, Goug/i, Gad etc. Similarly instead of (the) Lord people would say something like Law, Lawks, Losh, etc. Sometimes only the first sound was left out (Odd's life- lings, Shakesp. Tw. V. 187), more often only the geni- tive ending survived: 'Sblood (God's blood), 'snails, 'slight, 'slid, 'zounds (God's wounds). The final sound of the nominative is kept in 'drot it (God rot it), which was later made drat it (or with a playful corruption rahhit it). Many of these disguised oaths were extremely popular, and some survive to this day. Goodness gracious me, which defies all grammatical analysis, is one among numerous compromises between the inclination to swear and the fear of swearing; note also Rosalind's words: " By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend
I Chaucer C. T., C. 472 fif., also see Skeat's note to this passage, Chaucer's Works V p. 275.
Jespersen, the English language. 1 6
2A2 X. Conclusion.
mee, and by all pretty oathes that are not dangerous ". (As IV. I. 192.)
245. The Puritans caused a law to be enacted in 1606 by which profane language was prohibited on the stage (3 James I. chap. 21), and consequently words like 'zounds were changed or omitted in Shakespearian plays^ as we see from a comparison of the foHo of 1623 and the earlier quartos; Heaven or Jove was substituted for God, and 'fo^-e me {afore me) or trust me for [a)/ore God; " God give thee the spirit of persuasion " (H 4 A I. 2. 170) was changed to " Maist thou have the spirit of perswasion", etc. But in ordinary Hfe people went on swearing, and from the comedies of the Restoration period a rich harvest may be reaped of all sorts of curious oaths. By little and little, however, the Puritan spirit conquered, and now there can be little doubt that the English swear less than other European nations and that when they do swear the expressions are more inno- cent than elsewhere. Even the usual terms for oaths, — "profane language" and "expletives" — point to a greater purity in this respect. Where a French or Ger- man or Scandinavian lady will express surprise or a little fright by exclaiming (My) God!, an Englishwoman will say Dear me\ or Oh my\ or Good gracious \ Note also euphemisms like "deuce" for devil and "the other place" or "a very uncomfortable place" for helP. Among tabooed words in EngHsh one finds a great number which in other countries would be considered quite innocent, and the English have shown a really astonishing inventiveness in " apologies " for strong words of every kind. Damn is now considered ex- tremely objectionable, and even such a mild sub- stitute for it as confound is scarcely allowed in polite
I Compare also "I will see yon further"
Profane language. 243
society-^. In Bernard Shaw's Candida Morell is provoked into exclaiming "Confound your impudence!", where- upon his vulgar father-in-law retorts, "Is that becomin language for a clorgyman?" and Morell replies, "No, sir, it is not becoming language for a clergyman. I should have said damn your impudence: thats what St. Paul or any honest priest would have said to you". Other substitutes for damned are hanged, someihinged (much rarer) ^ and a few that originate in the manner in which the objectionable word is — not printed: dashed (a — or ' dash ' being put instead of it) , blanked (from the same manner), deed (from the abbreviation d — d; sometimes the verb is printed to D). Dariied must be explained as a purely phonetical development of damned, which is not without analogies, while danged, which oc- curs in Tennyson, is a curious blending of damned and hanged^. Thus we have here a whole family of words with an initial d, allowing the speaker to begin as if he were going to say the prohibited word, and then to turn off into more innocent channels. The same is the case with the (5/- words. Blessed by a process which is found in other similar cases* came to mean the opposite of the original meaning and became a synonym of cursed; blamed had the same signification ^ Instead of these strong expressions people began to use other ad-
1 In the original sense it has often to be accompanied by together to avoid misunderstanding.
2 Cf. the similar use of something in " Where the so- mething are you coming to?" (Pett Ridge, Lost Proper- ty 167).
3 "I'm doomed! " Corp muttered to himself, pronouncing it in another way. (Barrie, Tommy and Grizel, p. 122). This shows another way of disguising the word in print.
4 Cf. silly, French benet, etc.
5 There exists also a word blarned, a blending of blamed and damned (darned).
16*
244 ■^' Conclusion.
jectives, shunting off after pronouncing hi- into some innocent word like bloody, which soon became a great favourite with the vulgar and therefore a horror to ears polite, or blooming, which has had the same unhappy- fate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Few authors would now venture to term their heroines " bloom- ing young girls " as George EHot does repeatedly in " Middlemarch ". Similarly Shakespeare's expression " the bloody book of law " is completely spoilt to modern readers, and lexicographers now have to render Old English blodig and the corresponding words in foreign languages by 'bleeding', 'bloodstained', 'sanguin- ary ' or ' ensanguined ' ; but even sanguinary is often made a substitute for ' bloody' in reporting vulgar speech. r 246. This is the usual destiny of euphemisms; in
r^^ ^rder to avoid the real name of what is thought in- ' decent or improper people use some innocent word.
But when that becomes habitual in this sense it becomes '^just as objectionable as the word it has ousted and now is rejected in its turn. Privy is the regular English de- velopment of French prive\ but when it came to be used as a noun for ' a privy place ' and in the phrase 'the privy parts', it had to be supplanted in the original sense by private, except in ' Privy Council ', ' Privy Seal ' and • Privy Purse ', where its official dignity kept it alive. The plural parts was an ordinary expression for ' talents, mental ability ', until the use of the word in veiled language made it impossible ^
247. I do not know whether American and especially Boston ladies are really as prudish as they are reported
I Cf. from America "He -biddy. — A male fowl. A pro- duct of prudery and squeamishness ". Farmer, Americanisms p. 293. Cf. also Storm, Engl. Philologie, p. 887 (roosterswain).
Prudery. 245
to be, speaking of the Ihnhs of a piano and of their own benders instead of legs or saying waist instead of hody^. But when to alter is said in the Southern States instead of to geld^ and when ox is commonly used in America for hull (jocosely even gejttleman cow^)j'*, the same tend- ency may be observed on this side the Atlantic too. At least Mr. F. T. Elworthy, who knows the ways of Somer- set peasants better than anybody else, says that the plain old English names for the male animals are going out of use: "It has, perhaps, been taught or implied that such names as Bull, StalHon, Boar, Cock, Ram are indelicate; at any rate, we must no longer call a spade a spade, but there is a very distinct tendency to fine them down, by a weakening process, so that at last the generic word for the animal has commonly got to be used to express the entire male" (Elworthy, Fresh Words and Phrases in the Somersetshire Dialect, p. 6^). I am afraid we have here alighted on a trait which does not bear out my description (in the introductory chapter) of English as a masculine language. However, it is possible that the tendency here mentioned may be a passing one only and that common sense will prevail — as it has prevailed in the case of trousers^ which word is now certainly less proscribed than it was fifty years ago. Perhaps the very absurdity of the taboo, which
1 See Thackeray, Virginians, quoted by Hoppe, Supple- mentlexicon, s. v. leg; Bartlett's and Farmer's Dictionaries of Americanisms, etc. Cf. also Opie Read, A Kentucky Colonel, p. II "He was so delicate of expression that he always said limb when he meant leg ".
2 " One sometimes sees a ' lady-dog ' offered for sale in England, but ' male -sheep ', 'male-hogs', 'gentlemen-turkeys', and ' gentlemen-game-chickens ' belong to the natural history of refined Boston only. " T. Baron Russell, Current Ameri- canisms 16.
3 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1898.
246
X. Conclusion.
made people invent no end of comic names (inexpressibles, inexplicables, indescribables , ineffables, unmentionables, unwhisperables, my mustn't -mention -em, sit-upons, sine qua nons, etc.) has been the reason of the re-instatement of the good old word. Prudery is an exaggeration, but purity is a virtue, and there can be no doubt that the speech of the average Englishman is less tainted with indecencies of various kinds than that of the average continental. —
248. This volume has in so far been one-sided as it has dealt chiefly with Standard English and has left out of account nearly everything that is not generally accepted as such, apart from here and there a nonce -formation or a bold expression which is not recognized as good English though interesting as showing the possibilities of the language and perhaps in some cases deserving popularity just as well as many things that nobody finds fault with. The question how one form of English came to be taken as standard in preference to dialects, has been deliberately omitted as well as all the problems connected with that pseudo- historical and anti- educ- ational abomination, the English spelling. Perhaps I shall some day work up my notes on these subjects and on provincialisms, cockneyisms and vulgarisms, cant, slang, American and Colonial English, Pidgin -English and Negro-English, etc., into the form of a companion volume to this book, under the title, say, of ** Varieties of English". This, however must be left for the future; at present I shall conclude with a few remarks on what might be called the Expansion of English.
249. Only two or three centuries ago, English was spoken by so few people that no one could dream of its ever becoming a world language. In 1582 Richard Mulcaster wrote, ''The English tongue is of small reach.
Expansion of English. 247
stretching no further than this island of ours, nay not there over all". "In one of Florio's Anglo-Italian dialogues, an. Italian in England, asked to give his opinion of the language, replied that it was worthless beyond Dover. Ancillon regretted that the English authors chose to write in English as no one abroad could read them. Even such as learned English by necessity speedily forgot it. As late as 17 18, Le Clerc deplored the small number of scholars on the Continent able to read English".-^ Compare what Portia replies to Nerissa's question about Fauconbridge, the young baron of Eng- land (Merch. I. 2. 72): "You know I say nothing to him, for hee understands not me, nor I him: he hath neither Latine, French, nor Italian, and you will come into the Court and sweare that I have a poore pennie-worth in the English. Hee is a proper mans picture, but alas, who can converse with a dumbe show?" In 1714 Veneroni published an Imperial Dictionary of the four chief languages of Europe, that is, Italian, French, German and Latin ^. Now, no one would overlook English in making even the shortest possible list of the chief languages, because in political, social, and literary importance it is second to none and because it is the mother-tongue of a greater number of human beings than any of its competitors.
250. It would be unreasonable to suppose, as is sometimes done, that the cause of the enormous pro- pagation of the English language is to be sought in its intrinsic merits. When two languages compete, the
1 Ch. Bastide, Huguenot Thought in England. Journal of Comparative Literature I (1903) p. 45-
2 Veneroni, Das kayserliche Spruch- und Worterbuch, darinnen die 4 europaischen Hauptsprachen, als nemlich: das Italianische, das Frantzosische, das Teutsche und das Lateinische erklart werden.
248
X. Conclusion.
victory does not fall to the most perfect language as such. Nor is it always the nation whose culture is superior that makes the nation of inferior culture adopt its language: in some parts of Switzerland German is gaining ground at the expense of French, and in others French is supplanting German, yet no one can suppose that the superiority of the two nations is reversed in two adjacent districts. It sometimes happens in a district of mixed nationalities that the population which is in- tellectually superior give up their own language because they can learn their neighbours' tongue while these are too dull to learn anything but their own: this is said by some to be the reason why in Posen and adjacent districts Polish is gaining ground over German, a fact which others ascribe to the greater fertility of the Poles. A great many social problems are involved in the general question of rivalry of languages^, and it would be an interesting, but difficult task to examine in detail all the different reasons that have in so many regions of the world determined the victory of English over other languages, European and non- European. Political as- cendancy would probably be found in most cases to have been the most powerful influence.
251. However that may be, the fact remains that no other European language has spread over such vast regions during the last few centuries, as shown by the following figures, which represent the number of millions of people speaking each of the languages enumerated^:
1 Some excellent remarks may be found in H. Morf, Deutsche und Romanen in der Schweiz (Ziirich 1901). See also Will's dissertation, quoted below,
2 See Lewis Carnac, quoted by R. M. Meyer, Indogermani- sche Forschungen XII, 84; E. Hasse, Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften , " Kolonien und Kolonialpolitik " ; Otto
Rivalry of languages. 240
Year English German Russian French Spanish Italian 1500 4(5) 10 3 10(12) 8V2 9V2
1600 6, 10 3 14 8V2 9V2
1700 8V2 10 3(15) 20 8V2 972(11)
1800 20(40) 30(33) 25(31) 27(31) 26 14(15)
1900 116(123) 75(80) 70(85) 45(52) 44(58) 34(54)
Whatever a remote future may have in store, one need not be a great prophet to predict that in the near future the number of English- speaking people will increase considerably. The curse of Babel is beginning to lose its sting, and it must be a source of gratification to mankind that the tongue spoken by two of the greatest powers of the world is so noble, so rich, so pliant, so expressive, and so interesting as the language whose growth and structure I have been here endeavouring to characterize.
Will, Die Tauglichkeit und die Aussichten der englischen Sprache als Weltsprache, Breslau 1903. The numbers given are necessarily approximative only, especially for the older periods. Where my authorities disagree, I have given the lowest and in parenthesis the highest figure.
Phonetic Symbols.
(Alphabet of the Association Phonetique Internationale >j 1 stands before the stressed syllable. • indicates length of the preceding vowel.
|
[a-] |
as |
in |
«lms. |
[a] |
as in hut. |
|
[ai] |
as |
in |
zee. |
[U-] |
as in French ep^z/se. |
|
[au] |
as |
in |
\\ouse. |
[uw] |
as in wh^; practically |
|
[ae] |
as |
in |
h«t. |
= [u-]. |
|
|
[ei] |
as |
in |
h«te. |
[y] |
as in French vu. |
|
[9] |
as |
in |
(2bout, coXoux. |
[W |
as in tKxn. |
|
[i-] |
as |
in |
French d/se. |
[9] |
as in tK\s. |
|
[ij] |
as |
in |
\iea\.\ practically |
as in jeal. as in ^eal. |
|
|
[ou] |
as |
in |
so. |
[J] |
as in sK\vl ; [tj] as in cKvs\ |
|
[0] |
as |
in |
h^t. |
[3] |
as in vij-/on ; [ds] as in^n |
|
\?'\ |
as |
in |
h^ll. |
Abbreviations.
O.E. = Old- Enghsh (*' Anglo-Saxon ").
M.E. = Middle English. Mod.E. = Modern English.
O.Fr. = Old French.
O.N. = Old Norse. O.H.G. = Old High German.
N.E.D, = A New EngHsh Dictionary, by Murray, Bradley, and Craigie.
The titles of Shakespeare's plays are abbreviated as in Al. Schmidt's Shakespeare -Lexicon, thus KAo = Much Ado about Nothing , Gent. = The two Gentlemen of Verona, H4A = First Part of Henry the Fowth, Hml. = Ha^nlet, R2 = Richard the Second, Tp. = Tempest, Tw. = Twelfth Night, Wiv. =^ The Merry Wives of Windsor, etc. Acts scenes, and lines as in the Globe edition.
Index.
References are to the number of the sections. Onlj- the more important words used as examples are included.
a pronoun 72.
abbreviations 10, 176.
Abigail 233.
-able, 108, 109,
abstract terms 114 ff.
academies 18.
accent, see stress and tone.
accidence 178 ff.
-aceous 123.
ache 169.
accoimnodate 219.
accusative with infinitive 125.
actio?!, deed, 10 1.
activity 219.
Addison, on who and which
126. adjectives, place 85, — Latin
and English 131 fT., in -ish
161. adventui'c 116. adverbs turned into adjectives
17- advice 116.
Africa, Dutch and English 1 154. agent- nouns 162. aggravate 119. aggressive 1 1 o. aid, help 100. aim III. Alfred 46, 48, 53, 58, 59.
alliteration 54, 56.
alms 187.
also in Shakespeare and Bacon
220. am (reading) 206. ambiguity 140, 172. America, speech -mixture 78,
prudery 247. ana, 123. anchor 32. Ancrene Riwle, French words
in, 94. angel 38, 86. Angles 34. Anglicizing of Scandinavian
words 63. Anglo-Saxon, see Old English. anti- 124. April 116. aquiline 132. archaisms 229. Arian family of languages 21,
character of primitive Arian
22. -arious 123. aristocratic tendencies 82 ff.,
93. 130, 237.^ art, words relating to, 91. article, definite 9. Aryan, see Arian.
Phonetic Symbols.
(Alphabet of the Associatio7i Phonetigue Inter?taiio?iale.) ' stands before the stressed syllable. • indicates length of the preceding vowel.
|
[a-] |
as in |
alms. |
[a] |
as in hz^t. |
|
[ai] |
as in |
/ce. |
[U-] |
as in French ep^z^se. |
|
[au] |
as in |
hous^. |
[uw] |
as in wh^; practically |
|
M |
as in |
hat. |
= [u-]. |
|
|
[ei] |
as in |
hatt. |
[y] |
as in French vu. |
|
[3] |
as in |
ahont, colour. |
[[>] |
as in Min. |
|
[i-] |
as in |
French d/se. |
[9] |
as in this. |
|
[ij] |
as in |
heat\ practically |
[s] [z] |
as in jeal. as in s-eal. |
|
[ou] |
as in |
s^. |
[;] |
as in shin ; [tj] as in <;>^in. |
|
[0] |
as in |
h^t. |
[3] |
as in vij-/on;[d3]asin^n. |
|
[3-] |
as in |
haW. |
Abbreviations.
O.E. = Old- Enghsh (" Anglo-Saxon ").
M.E. = Middle English. Mod.E. = Modern English.
O.Fr. = Old French.
O.N. = Old Norse. O.H.G. = Old High German.
N.E.D. = A New EngHsh Dictionary, by Murray, Bradley, and Craigie.
The titles of Shakespeare's plays are abbreviated as in Al. Schmidt's Shakespeare -Lexicon, thus K^o = Much Ado about Nothing , Gent. = The two Gentlemen of Verona, H4A = First Part of He7iry the Fourth, Hml. = Hamlet, R2 = Richard the Second, Tp. = Tempest, Tw. == Twelfth Night, Wiv. = The Merry Wives of Windsor, etc. Acts scenes, and lines as in the Globe edition.
Index.
References are to the number of the sections. Only the more important words used as examples are included.
a pronoun 72. abbreviations 10, 176. Abigail 233. -able, 108, 109. abstract terms 114 ff. academies 18.
accent, see stress and tone, accidence 178 fif. -aceous 123. ache 169. acconunodate 219. accusative with infinitive 125. actio7i, deed, loi. activity 219.
Addison, on who and which 126.
adjectives , place
Latin
and English 131 ff., in -ish
161. adventu7'e 116. adverbs turned into adjectives
17. advice 116.
Africa, Dutch and English 1 154. agent -nouns 162. aggravate 119. aggressive no. aid, help 100. aim III. Alfred 46, 48, 53, 58, 59.
alliteration 54, 56.
alms 187.
also in Shakespeare and Bacon
220. am (reading) 206. ambiguity 140, 172. America, speech -mixture 78,
prudery 247. ana, 123. anchor 32. Ancrene Riwle, French words
in, 94. angel 38, 86. Angles 34. Anglicizing of Scandinavian
words 63. Anglo-Saxon, see Old EngHsh. anti- 124. April 116. aquiline 132. archaisms 229. Arian family of languages 21,
character of primitive Arian
22. -arious 123. aristocratic tendencies 82 ff.,
93, 130, 237.^ art, words relating to, article, definite 9. Aryan, see Arian.
91,
252
Index.
|
assassination 219. |
^2/J-/^ 61. |
|
|
-ation 123. |
^^^^/-^/^ 173. |
|
|
-ative 123. |
^2^/^/^ 173. |
|
|
Australasia 157. |
-^/ 60, 61, 74. |
|
|
authors, expressions due to |
in- |
by 'law 74. |
|
dividual authors 233. |
||
|
avuncular 132. |
cab 176. |
|
|
a2ue 70. |
<r«fl^ 173. |
|
|
ay 70. |
<:«// 59. cart 36. |
|
|
back-formations 173, 188, i |
89. |
Caxton 69, 98. |
|
Baconian theory 220 (p. 2 |
18). |
Celts 21, in England 35, Celtic |
|
bairn 64. |
words in English 36 ff. |
|
|
bankrupt 116. |
censure 219. |
|
|
Banting 173. |
certainty, certitude 116. |
|
|
bath, bathe 168. |
ch 112. y cheap 32, 210. "V |
|
|
bathos 119. |
||
|
^^^/ 32. |
Charlie 112. |
|
|
beg 173. |
^^«r;/? 219. |
|
|
Bell's phonetic nomenclature |
Chaucer 94, 98, 226. |
|
|
138. |
cheer 112. |
|
|
Beowulf 49, 54. |
chick 56. |
|
|
Bible, influence 196, 231, 240 fif. |
children 191. |
|
|
birth 70. |
children's words 177. |
|
|
bit, bite 170. |
choose, choice 97. |
|
|
blend 64. |
Christianity, influence on |
|
|
blessed 245. |
language 38 ff. |
|
|
^/(9^^ 131, 245. |
church 38. |
|
|
/^/6'<?;;z 71. |
classical studies, effect on style |
|
|
blooming 245. |
1 27 ; see also Latin and Greek. |
|
|
bo7inet 219. |
cleave 231. |
|
|
^<y^//; 61. |
climax 119. |
|
|
bound 61, 104. |
clippings of long words 10, |
|
|
bourne 228. |
176 (173). |
|
|
bread 71. |
clothe, dress 100. |
|
|
breeches 191. |
CO- 124. |
|
|
^r^^«^ 170. |
coined words 158 f. |
|
|
brethren 191. |
cold, synonyms 136. |
|
|
^r/fl'.?/ 210. |
colour and derivatives 117. |
|
|
Britons, see Celts. |
companion 219. |
|
|
/^n?^^ 170. |
compounds, instead of adject- |
|
|
brother 191, 224. |
ives 132, verbs 174, nouns |
|
|
<5n^j-^ 171. |
210. |
Index.
253
conciseness 10.
co7ifound 245.
conjunctions 209.
consonants 3, groups 5, 6,
shift 24, 26, in nouns and
verbs 168 f. continuous forms 206. cook 32.
cordial, hearty 100. cose 173
cottage, hut 100. cowl 39. crave 74.
critic, critique, criticize 116. crooti 233. cuisine 88. ^z^rj<? 36. Cynewulf's First Riddle 58.
dainty 210.
dale 64, loi.
dalliance no.
damn and substitutes 245.
Danes, Danelaw 58, 61, cf,
Scandinavians. danger 112.
D'Arblay, Madame 145. darkle 173. ^<2r/ 171.
Darwin, on classical studies 127. de- 124. debt 116.
democratic tendencies 237. describe 116. <3?i?z/// 38. dialects, differences in verbal
inflection 193. Dickens on a large retinue of
words 135. die 61, 72. differentiations 66, 84, 100,
III, 112, 116, 167, 179. difficult 173.
diminutives 13.
disciple 39.
dish 32.
do 206, 225, 226; doeth, doth
197. doubt 112, 116. drat it 244. dream 71.
dress, words relating to, 90. dress, dressing 167. djvwn 51. Dryden, French words 95,
syntax 126. duration no.
Dutch in South Africa 154. duty III. dwell 71.
e- and /«- (/w-) confounded 140.
earl 71.
Easter 42.
ecclesiastical terms, Latin 38 ff.,
French 86. -ed, suffix 162. edge 66. ^^^/ 133.
-<?^ III. _
egg 66, 69. eke 220. '^w 72. -^«, nouns in, 160, verbs in
162, plural of nouns 185,
of verbs 193, endings, worn off, 7. English, masculinity of 2 ff., a
world language 248 ff. enormous 119. equal 116. ■er 97, 162. etymology' oipup, cad, pet 173,
unknown, of many short
words 176. euphemisms 244 ff.
254
Index.
euphony 3 ff. , 226.
Euphuism 218,
ex- 124.
example, exemplary 117.
exhibit, exhibition 167.
expansion of English 249 ff.
eye -words 142.
/ alternating with v 168.
fad 176.
faint 171.
family , familiar 132.
feed 170.
feel, feeling 167.
felicity 99,
feminine nouns, formation of, 160.
feudalism 82.
fierce 103.
fitz 103.
fiute 112.
y^^ 56.
folk, people 100.
y^<?<^ 170.
for with an infinitive 211.
foreign titles 156.
frame 171.
French 81 ff., rulers of England 82, spheres of signification 82 ff. , number of words in early authors 94, date of adoption 95 , French and native words 97 f. , not popularly understood 99, synonyms 100, forms 103, sounds 105, hybrids 106 ff., independant formations on English soil no ff., old and recent loans 112, French and Latin 114 ff.
friend 71.
fro, from 66.
future 81, 206.
g, pronunciation 112.
gain 76, 97.
gait 76.
games, terms of, 89.
gate 76.
gender 205.
genitive case, Scandinavian 80,
position 81, endings 180 ff. Germanic, pre -historic 20 ff.,
how considered by Romans
23, invasion of England 33 ff.,
in Romance countries 78. gerund 200 ff., see ing. gestic 143 note. get 70, 231, get clear 224,
I have got 224, gat 231. get-at-able 109. gift 70.
Gill, on Latin influence 150. give 70.
glass, glaze 168. God 42, compounds 45, in
oaths 245. gospel 43, 45. gossip 171. gown 36. grammar, simplification of '80,
160, 163, 178 ff. greed 173. Gr'eek 114 ff. r\ Grimm's Law 24.1 group - genitive \%b. gravel 173. Grundy, Mrs. 233.
hale 66.
hallow 42.
handbook 47.
haplology 186.
harbinge 173.
harmony of language 141.
harry 97.
have auxiliary 206.
Index.
255
hawk 173.
heathen 43.
heaveji 76 note.
hegemony 142.
helpmate 241.
hence 68.
henchman 233.
henpeck 174.
//^r 72. ,
heraldry 82.
hodgepodge 234.
^<?/w 71.
7/6'/)^, j-«//?/ 100.
hojnicide 133.
house keep 174.
house I 42.
humorous appHcation of learn- ed words 122, 147.
Huxley on the genius of Eng- lish and Latin 127.
hybridity 41, 106, 107, 123.
hyperbolical expressions 1 1 .
/, the pronoun 237.
-iacal 123.
-ie 13.
iinpeachment 233.
z>?-, causes ambiguity 140.
i7ich 32.
indispensable 109.
Indo-European, see Arian.
i?i/angthie/ 74.
infinitives, French 104, syntax 211.
ing 106, 200 ff., as a noun 201, with an object 202, with adverbs 201, tense and voice 203, with a subject 204.
inhabitable 140.
insomnia, sleeplessness 138.
intensity no.
inter- 124.
international 124.
international words 138.
intonation 12.
inverted word -order 14.
invoice 103 note.
■ish, in verbs 104, in adjectives
161. island, isle 97. -ism, -ist 122 f. Italian loan words 31, 151. ■ite 123. item 119. its 205. -ize 123.
jackass in Australia 157 note.
James 103.
jaunty 112.
jaw 171.
y^z/ 243,
y^.f.f^ 243.
Jezebel 243.
jocular classicisms 122, 147.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel 126, 135,
144. Jutes 34.
-kin 13.
kindergarten 153.
kine 191.
kingly, royal, regal 131,
kirk 67.
kiss 170.
kitchen 32.
/^;?2/^ 75.
Knut 60, 61.
kodak 158.
labour 56.
labyrinth, adjectives from 132.
/«/^^ 97.
language 1 1 6.
Latin, earliest loan-words 32, spoken in England 35, in- fluence in modern times 114 fif., French and Latin 115 ff.,
256
Index.
number of words 118, de- viations from Latin usage 119 ff., hybrids 123, style and syntax 125 ff., benefits and disadvantages 128 ff.
laugh, laughter 167.
laughable 109.
law 74.
laze 173.
Layamon, French words in 94.
learned words 121, 131, 132, 138, 144, plurals 141.
legal words Scandinavian 74, French 84 f.
-less 66.
-let 13.
levy 104.
like 209.
-ling 173.
loan-words in general 30 f., 37, I54ff., technical 31, 32, 38 ff., 'j^i ff., 82 ff., 121, 151 ff., non- technical 76 ff., 92 ff., 128 ff.
logic in grammar 15.
long words, psychological effect of 137-
loose 66.
loot 151.
Lowell, on newspaper writing 148.
machine and derivatives 117.
magnitude 133.
main 97.
Malapropisms 143.
male animals 247.
manly and synonyms 133.
manslaughter 133.
many 97.
matin, morning 100.
meaning of Shakespearian
words 219 f. means 188.
men and women, linguistically
different, 7, 11, 12, 18. ' Micawber's style 135. mile 32. military words , Scandinavian
73, PYench 83, others 151. mill 32. Milton, syntax 126, vocabulary
214, 216, surround 233. mi7ie 179. mint 32. Miss 175.
mixed languages 37, 78. mob 176.
monosyllabism , force of 8, 9. monosyllables from various
sources 175 ff. mo7iger 32. mortar 32.
move, movement, motion 167. murder 133.
musical terms, Italian 31. mutation, plurals 186, verbs 170. mutin, derivatives in.
National character i, 2, 5, 10, II, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18,28, 50,73,92,93, 148, 155, 237 ff., 240 f., 244 ff.
native words as contrasted to loan-words 41 ff.
navy 176.
nay 66.
nephew 97.
neuter, Scandinavian 79, Eng- lish 205.
new words from unknown sources 177.
no 66.
nominative. Old French 103.
Norman, see French.
Norse, see Scandinavian.
Norwegians6i , cf. Scandinavian.
Index.
257
notorious 219.
nouns in -e? 162, and verbs
163 ff. , from verbs 166,
becoming adjectives 210. now -a- days 220. number, concord 16, formation
of plural 141, 185 flf. number of words 128 ff. , in
individual vocabularies 2 1 4 ff. numerals 199.
oaths 244 f.
obscuration of vowels 26, 139.
occupy 219.
-ocracy 123.
odd 76.
^181, 183, of his 184, holy of holies 242.
offer 39.
Old English (Anglo - Saxon) , relations to other Germanic languages 34, dialects 34, 53, loans from Celtic 36, influence of Christianity 38 ff. , loans from Latin and Greek 38 ff., native formations 41 ff., literary capacities 48, poetry 49 ff., synonyms 49, seafaring terms 49, 50, prose 48, 55.
-ology 123.
once 209.
one 208.
Orrmulum, French words 94.
participle, absolute 125, cf. ing and passive.
pander 233.
parts 246.
passive, English 17, Scandin- avian 79, of ing 203, is being built 206.
Paul Pry 233.
pea, pease 32, 188.
Jespersen, the English language.
pear 32.
Pecksniff 233.
pedantry, absence of, 16, 17.
peddle 173.
pepper 32.
perfect 116.
perfect 206.
periphrastic tenses 15, 206.
pet 173.
petty 84.
phrases used attributively 17,
French 92. phthisis 142. picture 116. place-names, Scandinavian 60.
translated 156. plough 71. plunder 151. plural, learned formations 141,
ordinary 185 ff., raised to a
second power 191, unchanged
192, of verbs 193. poetry, Old English 49, its form
54, language of poetry distinct
from prose language 53,
225 ff political words, French 82. politician 219. ponder 119. pony 36. pre- 124. premises 119. prepositions, Latin and Greek
124, place 126. privy 246. pro- 124. profane language. Act against
245. progress in word -formation
160, in grammar 178 ff. progressive tenses 15, 206. pronouns, Scandinavian 72, 76,
English 126, 205, 208, 237 ff. 17
258
Index.
pronunciation of learned words
142. proper names, adjectives from,
131, 139- prose. Old English 48, 55, cf.
poetry. provoke 119. prudery 245 ff.
pseudo-antique formations 230. pun ct ilium 122. puisne, puny 84. pup ij^f Puritanism 244 ff.
quart 112.
quasi -classical words 121, 122.
quince 103 note.
raise 66.
re- 124.
rear 66.
reduplicated perfects 27.
relative pronoun, omission 81,
126, who, which, that 126,
which 205. reliable 109. remodelling of F^rench words
113, 116. remorse 219. Renaissance 114. resolution, resolve 167. retort 165. rhinoceros 141, rhythm 235. rich 97. riches 187. richness of the English language
128 ff. 7'iding 74.
rimes, male and female 8. riming locutions 234. Robert of Gloucester 96. rout, route 112. rove 173.
S in French nominatives 103, voiceless in nouns, voiced in verbs 168, in genitives 180 ff., in plurals 185 ff., s for ses 186; in verbs
193 ff.
sail 171.
salon, saloon 112.
same 72.
Sarah Gamp 233.
Saxons 34.
Scandinavian 57 ff. , similarity with English 62, Anglicizing 63, parallel forms 65 ff., influence on meaning 71, Scandinavian words readily associated with native words 72, spheres of signification 73 ff., mihtary words 73, legal terms 74, commonplace words 76, Scandinavian in U. S. 78, forms of loan-words
79, influence on grammar
80, 81.
scientific nomenclature 114, 121, 138.
scientist 121.
scriptural phrases 241.
seat 71, 170.
self 208.
sell 170.
sensible no.
sentences, abbreviated 10, used attributively 17.
sex and language 7, 11, 12, 18.
Shakespeare 213 ff., range of vocabulary 214 ff., religious views 217, individual char- acters 218, Euphuism 218, meanings different from modern 219, Shylock 221, periods in Shakespeare's life 222, provincialisms 222,
Index.
259
boldness of language 223, the First and Second Folios 223, use of new words 224, poetic diction 225, words . and phrases due to him 228.
shall 81, 206.
sheer 219.
Sherlock Holmes 233.
Shetland 78 (note p. 79).
Shylock's language 221.
sidle 173.
simplification of grammar^ 80, 160, 163, 178 ff.
sister 70.
sit 170.
size 133.
sky 76 note.
slang 176, 243, 244 ft'.
smoke 171.
sobriety 1 1 .
sounds 3, 26, 139, sound-changes in French words 105, 112.
specializing in primitive voca- bularies 51 ft".
Spencer, Herbert, on classical studies 127, on long words
137- Spenser, influence on poetic
style 229. split infinitive 211. sport 89. squirearchy 123. stick, stitch 169. stress, French and English
contrasted 28, in French
words 105, in Latin and
Greek 139. stress-shift, Germanic 25—28. strong verbs 29, 178. style, Old English 48, 49,
Latin 127, use of synonyms
98, 135, Johnsonese 144 ff.,
journalese 148.
[ subjunctive 206. \ succeed, success 219. I suffixes 160 ff\ j surround 233. syllable construction 5. synonyms in Old English 49 ff., j heaven, sky 76 note, collo- I cated 98, 135, French and native 100, Latin and native 133 ff. , 7nove, inotion, feel, feeling, etc. 167. Syntax 14, 15, 16, 17, Scandin- avian 81, Latin 125 f., geni- tive 180 ft"., plural 187, 190 f., j ing 200 ff. , verbs 206, 211, I pronouns 208, conjunctions I 209, compounds 210, Shy- lock's 221, Shakespeare's 223.
take 79.
telegraphic style 10. ; Tennyson, prefers Saxon words ! ^46.
\ tense -system 15, 22, 29, 206. I th voiceless in nouns, voiced i in verbs 168, in third singular
193 ff., in ordinals 199. \ that , omission 81 , relative pronoun 126.
thence 68.
they, them, their 70, 72. I thou 232, 237 f. 1 thoughtread 174. I thrall 74. ! tithe 42, 199. I though 70. i Thursday 70.
//// 64. , tidings 63.
I /<? as a pro -infinitive 211. j tone 12. 1 town 36.
17*
26o
Index.
trace 103 note, trades, names of, 91. tradespeople's coinages 158. transpire 119. trousers 247. trusteeship 1 1 1 . trustworthy 109. typewrite 174.
unaccountable 109, undemocratic character of clas- sical words 143. uninhabitable 140. usance 221.
value -stressing 26 ff., 105. venture 116.
verbal noun 200 ff., see ing. verbs, strong 29, 178, weak
29, form of French 104, in
-en 162, relation to nouns
163 ff. verdict 116. victuals 116. vocabulary, fulness of, 18,
128 ff., individual 214 ff. voiced and voiceless consonants
in verbs and nouns 97. vowel -differences between
nouns and verbs 170.
vowel - sounds
139. voyage
obscured 26.
112.
wag 219. »■
want 72.
wapentake 74.
wash 52.
weak verbs 29.
weird 228.
whence 68.
which 126, 205, 208.
who 208, for he who 125,
Humble Petition of who and
which 126. whole 66. will 81, 206. window 75. 'Zf^/y?!? 32.
w/V,^, wireless 138, 171. women, language of, 7, 11,
12, 18. word -formation 158 ff., regular
processes 160 ff, word -order 14, 207, adjectives
after nouns 85. Wulfstan 48, 55.
-y 13- Yankee 188.
you i7(), 232, 237 f. References are to sections, not to pages.
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