The making of English

Ex Liferw
C. K. OGDEN

THE MAKING OF ENGLISH

THE

MAKING OF ENGLISH

BY

HENRY BRADLEY

Hox. M.A. OXON., HON. PH.D. HEIDELBERG

SOMETIME PRESIDENT OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1904

All rights reserved

Copyright in the United States
of America, 1904.

GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THK UNIVERSITY PUESS
BY ROBRKT MACLKHOSE AND CO.

PREFACE

THIS little work was announced as in preparation
some years ago, but illness compelled me to lay
it aside when only a few pages had been written,
and since then my health has seldom permitted
me to attempt any work in addition to my daily
task as one of the editors of the Oxford English
Dictionary. Some of the faults of this volume
may be due to the desultory manner in which it
has been composed ; but, on the other hand, the
length of time that has elapsed since it was first
planned has given me opportunity for more care-
ful consideration of difficult points.

The object of the book is to give to educated
readers unversed in philology some notion of the
causes that have produced the excellences and
defects of modern English as an instrument of
expression. With the history of the language I
have attempted to deal only so far as it bears
on this special problem. The subject, even as
thus restricted, is one which it is not easy to

vi PREFACE

treat briefly. I have, however, resisted the temp-
tation to enlarge the volume beyond the limits
originally intended, because I believe that for
the purpose which I have in view a small book
is more likely to be useful than a large one.

My thanks are due to my friends Professor
Napier, Mr. W. A. Craigie, and Mr. C. T. Onions,
for their kindness in reading the proofs, and
suggesting valuable corrections and improvements.

HENRY BRADLEY.
OXFORD, January, 1904.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY - i

§ i. THE LIKENESS OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH i

§ 2. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GERMAN AND

ENGLISH - 4

§ 3. CHARACTERISTICS OF OLD ENGLISH - - 7
§ 4. OBJECT OF THIS BOOK - - 14

CHAPTER II.

THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR - 16

§ i. SIMPLIFICATION OF ACCIDENCE - - 17

§ 2. NEW GRAMMATICAL MATERIAL - 53

§ 3. PROFIT AND Loss - - 74

CHAPTER III.

WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN

TONGUES - 80

viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER IV.

PAGE

WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH in

§ i. COMPOSITION - m

§2. DERIVATION- ... I28

^§3. ROOT-CREATION - - 154

CHAPTER V.

CHANGES OF MEANING - - 160

CHAPTER VI.

SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 215

INDEX 24l

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.

§ 1. The Likeness of German and English.

Ax Englishman who begins to learn German
cannot fail to be struck by the resemblance which
that language presents to his native tongue. Of
the words which occur in his first lessons because
they are those most commonly used in every-day
conversation, a very large proportion are recog-
nisably identical, in spite of considerable differences
of pronunciation, with their English synonyms.
The following examples will suffice to illustrate
the remarkable degree of similarity between the
vocabularies of the two languages : Vater father,
Mutter mother, Bruder brother, Schwester sister,
Haus house, Feld field, Gras grass, Korn corn,
Land land, Stein stone, Kuh cow, Kalb calf, Ochse
ox, singen to sing, horen to hear, haben to have,
gehen to go, brechen to break, bringen to bring,

2 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

gut good, wohl well, grim green, hart hard, blind
blind, ich I, ivir we, selbst self, hier here, unter
under, bei by, vor be-fore. At a very early stage
of his progress, the learner will find himself able
to compile a list of some hundreds of German
words which have an obvious likeness to the
English words with which they agree in meaning.
In addition to these resemblances which lie on
the surface, there are many others which can
only be perceived by the help of a knowledge of
the general laws of correspondence between
German and English sounds. A few of these
general laws may be mentioned by way of illus-
tration. An English / is usually represented in
German by z, tz, or ss ; an English th by d ; an
English / by pf or f\ an English d by / ; and
an English v in the middle of a word by b.
There are similar laws, too complicated to
be stated here, relating to the correspondence
of the vowels. By the study of these laws, and
of the facts that are known about the history
of the two languages, scholars have been
enabled to prove the fundamental identity of a
vast number of English words with German
words which are very different from them in
sound and spelling, and often also in meaning.
Thus, for example, Ba.um, a tree, is the same

I.] INTRODUCTORY 3

\vord as the English ' beam ' ; Zaun, a hedge, is
our ' town ' (which originally meant a place sur-
rounded by a hedge, a farm enclosure) ; Zeit, time,
is our ' tide ' ; drehen, to turn, wind, is our ' throw,5
and the derivative Draht, wire, is our ' thread ' ;
Iragen, to carry, is our ' draw ' ; and so on.

But it is not merely in their stock of words
that English and German have a great deal in
common. In their grammar, also, they resemble
each other to a very remarkable extent. Our
way of forming the genitive by adding s is
paralleled in many German words : ' the king'j
house' is in German ' des Konigj Haus.'
The syllables -er and -est are used in both
languages to form the comparatives and super-
latives of adjectives. In the conjugation of the
verbs the similarity is equally striking. ' I hear,'
' I heard,' ' I have heard ' are in German ich kore,
ich horte, ich habe gehort ; ' I see,' ' I saw,' ' I have
seen ' are ich sehe, ich sah, ich habe gesehen ; ' I
sing,' ' I sang,' ' I have sung ' are ich singe, ich
sang, ich habe gesungen ; ' I bring,' ' I brought/ ' I
have brought ' are ich bringe, ich brachtey ich
habe gebracht. Our ' thou singest ' is in German
du singst.

The explanation of these facts is not that
English is derived from German or German

4 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

from English, but that both have descended,
with gradual divergent changes, from a pre-
historic language which scholars have called
Primitive Germanic or Primitive Teutonic. Low
German or Plattdeutsch, the dialect spoken
(now only by the common people) in ' Low ' or
Northern Germany, is much more like English
than literary High German is ; and Dutch and
Frisian resemble Low German. The Scandinavian
languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Ice-
landic, are also of Germanic (or Teutonic) origin ;
and so is Gothic, a dead language known to us
chiefly from a translation of portions of the Bible
made in the fourth century.

§ 2. Differences between German and English.

But while modern English and modern
German have so many conspicuous traces of
their original kinship, the points of contrast
between the two languages are equally striking
and significant.

In the first place, the grammar, or rather the
accidence, of German is enormously more com-
plicated than that of English. The German
noun has three genders, which in many instances
have no relation to the sex of the object sig-

I.] INTRODUCTORY 5

nified, or to the meaning or form of the word.
Kopf, head, is masculine, though the synonymous
Haupt is neuter ; Hand is feminine, but Fusz,
foot, is masculine, and Bein, leg, is neuter ; Weib,
woman, and Madchen, girl, are neuter. The
foreign student of English has no such diffi-
culties to encounter. Properly speaking, we
have no ' genders ' at all : we say ' he,' ' she,'
or ' it ' according to the sex, or absence of
sex, of the object to which we refer. English
nouns have only one case-ending, the s of
the genitive ; and practically only one mode
of forming the plural, as the few exceptions
can be learned in half-an-hour. German nouns
have four cases, and are divided into several
declensions each with its own set of inflexions
for case and number. The English adjective
is not inflected at all ; the one form good cor-
responds to the six German forms gut, guter,
gute, gutes, gutem, guten, the choice of which
depends partly on the gender, number, and
case of the noun which is qualified, and partly
on other grammatical relations. In conjugating
an English verb, such as sing, we meet with
only eight distinct forms, sing, singest, sings,
singeth, sang, sangest, singing, sung ; and even
of these, three are practically obsolete. In the

6 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

conjugation of the German verb singen the
number of distinct forms is sixteen.

In addition to these differences in the gramma-
tical systems of the two languages, there are
others no less noteworthy which relate to the
character of their vocabulary.

We have already pointed out that of the
English words which occur in familiar conver-
sation, the great majority are found to exist
also in German, with certain regular variations
of form due to the difference in the sound-
systems of the two languages. If, however,
instead of confining our attention to that part
of the language that serves the needs of
everyday life, we were to examine the whole
English vocabulary as it is exhibited in a
dictionary, we should find that by far the
greater number of the words have no formal
equivalents in German, being for the most
part derived from foreign languages, chiefly
French, Latin, and Greek. It is true that
many of these non-Germanic words are very
rarely used ; still, if we take at random a page
from an English book which treats of history,
politics, philosophy, or literary criticism, the
majority of the nouns, adjectives, and verbs are
usually of foreign etymology. An ordinary

I.] INTRODUCTORY 7

page of German, on the other hand, contains
very few words that are not derived from
native roots. German, in fact, is, comparatively
speaking, an unmixed language ; modern Eng-
lish, so far as its vocabulary is concerned, is a
mixed language, in which the native Germanic
elements are outnumbered by those derived from
foreign tongues.

§ 3. Characteristics of Old English.

The differences between German and English,
so far as they have been described above} are
entirely due to the gradual changes that have
taken place in English during the last thousand
years. The ancient form of our language — the
kind of English that was written by King
Alfred in the ninth century — had every one of
those general characteristics which we have
mentioned as distinguishing modern German
from modern English.

Before proceeding to the illustration of this
statement, let us briefly explain the meaning of
certain terms which we shall have to use. By

1 This limitation is very important. It must not be imagined
that German has not altered greatly during the last thousand years,
or that English and German did not already differ widely from
each other a thousand years ago.

8 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

' Old English ' we mean the language (by some
persons called ' Anglo-Saxon ') spoken by Eng-
lishmen down to about 1150; 'Middle English'
is the language spoken between about 1150 and
about 1500; and 'Modern English' means the
English of the last four centuries. The reader
must not, however, suppose, as young learners
sometimes do, that in 1 150 or in 1500 one kind
of English was superseded by another. The
English language has been undergoing constant
change ever since it was a language, and it is
changing still. For purposes of study it has
been found useful to divide its history into three
periods ; and if this is done at all, it is necessary
to specify some approximate dates as the points
of "division. The dates 1150 and 1500 have
been chosen because the one is the middle and
the other the end of a century of the common
reckoning ; and they are also convenient, because
about those years the process of change was
going on somewhat more rapidly than usual, so
that if we compare a book written a quarter of
a century before the end of a period with one
written a quarter of a century after it, we can
see clearly that the language has entered on a
new stage of development.

In considering the characteristics of Old

i.] INTRODUCTORY 9

English, we will refer especially to the southern
dialect as it was written by King Alfred just
before 900. In the first place, Alfred's English
had all the grammatical complexity which exists
in modern German, and indeed a little more.
It had the same irrational system of genders :
hand was feminine, fot (foot) was masculine,
while mtKgden (maiden) and wlf (wife, woman)
were neuter. The Old English nouns had five
cases, and the system of declensions was intri-
cate to a degree which modern German does
not nearly rival. Some nouns made their geni-
tive singular in -es, others in -e, others in -a,
and others in -an • and in a few nouns the
genitive had the same form as the nominative.
The endings which marked the nominative
plural were -as, -a, -u, -e, -an ; moreover, many
plural nominatives coincided in form with the
singular, and others were formed (like our modern
teeth and mice) by change of vowel. The adjec-
tives had an elaborate set of inflexions, which
have now utterly disappeared, so that the soli-
tary Modern English form glad represents eleven
distinct forms in Old English: glted, gltedre,
glxdne, gltedra, gladu, glades, gladum, glade,
gladena, glada, gladan. In the conjugation of
the verbs there were twice as many different

10 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

forms as there are in Modern English. The
persons of the plural, for instance, differed in
form from those of the singular : where we now
say ' I sing, we sing, I sang, we sangl the Old
English forms were, ' ic singe, we singath, ic
sang) we sungon' The subjunctive mood, of
which there are only a few traces left in modern
English, occupied as prominent a place in
Old English grammar as it does in Modern
German.

Further, Old English differed from Modern
English in being — like Modern German, but in
a greater degree — comparatively free from words
of foreign origin. It had, indeed, incorporated a
certain number of Latin words, chiefly relating
either to the institutions and ritual of the Church,
or to things connected with Roman civilization.
But these formed only a very small proportion
of the entire vocabulary. Even for the technical
terms of Christian theology, the Old English
writers preferred, instead of adopting the Latin
words that lay ready to their hand, to invent
new equivalents, formed from native words by
composition and derivation.

After what has been said, the reader will not
be surprised to be told that a page, even of Old
English prose, not to speak of the poetry, has

I.]

INTRODUCTORY

ii

quite the aspect of a foreign language. The
following specimen is taken from a sermon by
who died about A.D. 1025 :

They who do not believe
refuse through their own
choice, not through fate,
because fate is nothing but a
false notion ; nor does any-
thing truly come to pass by
fate, but all things are
ordered by the judgment of
God, who said by his pro-
phet, ' I try the hearts of
men, and their reins, and
give to every one according
to his conduct, and accord-
ing to his own device.' Let
no man impute his evil deeds
to God, but let him impute
them first to the devil, who
deceived mankind, and to
Adam's transgression ; but
chiefly to himself, in that
evil is pleasure to him and
good pleases him not.

Tha the ne gelyfath thurh
agenne eyre hi scoriath, na
thurh gewyrd ; lor-than-the
gewyrd nis nan thing buton
leas wena : ne nan thing
sothllce be gewyrde ne
gewyrth, ac ealle thing thurh
Codes ddm beoth geende-
byrde, se the cwasth thurh
his wltegan, 'Ic afandige
manna heortan, and heora
lendena, and aelcum sylle
sefter his faerelde, and setter
his agenre afundennysse.'
Ne talige nan man his yfelan
dSda to Code, ac talige Srest
t5 tham deofle, the mancyn
besvvac, and to Adames
forgajgednysse ; ac theah
swlthost to him sylfum, thaet
him yfel gellcath, and ne
llcath god.

It is impossible here to give any complete
rules for Old English pronunciation ; but some
approximate notion of the sounds of the language
may be obtained by reading the above passage
according to the following directions. Pronounce
y and y like the German u or the French u
(short and long), & like a in ' hat,' se like e in

12 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

' there,' and the other vowels like the italic letters
in the words father (a not marked is the same
sound but shorter), bed, v<?in, pzn, machfne, h<?t,
stone, put, rule. ; pronounce h when not beginning
a syllable like the German ch, and f in gelyfath,
yfel, deofle, sylfum, as v. Sound c as k, except
in sothllce and ic, in which the letter was
pronounced as ch in ' church ' ; sc should be pro-
nounced sh. The g in dgen, God, wltegan, god,
may be pronounced (though not quite correctly)
as in the modern ' good ' ; in the other words
in the extract it happens to have the less
usual sound of y in ' young.' All other letters
are to be pronounced as in modern English,
and final e is always to be sounded.

Tt may be useful to append a few remarks on some of the
words occurring in the extract. Tha is the plural nominative
of the demonstrative pronoun corresponding to our that ;
the nominative singular is se (masc.), seo (fern.), thott (neut.) ;
the word serves also as the definite article. The is an
indeclinable relative, standing for ' who,' ' whom,' ' which.'
In ge-lyf-ath the middle syllable is the same as the second
syllable in 'believe'; the verb ge-lyf-an corresponds to the
German g-laub-en. Ne, not, is in Old English put before
the verb. With thurh, through, compare the German durch.
Agenne is accusative masculine singular of agen own ; com-
pare the German eigen. Cyre, choice, is a masc. noun
related to the verb ceosan to choose ; the corresponding
German word is Kur. Hi, they, is the plural of he. Scoriath
is the present tense plural of scorian, to refuse, a verb not

I.] INTRODUCTORY 13

preserved in modern English or German. Nd, here used
for 'not,' is the modern provincial 'no' in 'that's no true.'
Ge-ivyrd, fate, is the word which in later English became
'weird.' For-than-the, because, is literally ' for-that-that.'
Nis ( = ne is) nan thing, ' is none thing ' ; in Old English
two negatives did not 'make an affirmative,' but were
combined for emphasis as in Greek. Leas, false, lying ;
compare 'leasing,' falsehood, in the English Bible. Wena,
opinion ; connected with ivenan, to ' ween,' think. Sothllce,
' soothly,' truly ; compare ' forsooth,' ' in good sooth.'
Geivyrth, 3rd person sing, of ge-iveorthan to take place,
akin to the German werden to become. Ac, but ; not
found in modern English or German. Ealle thing, all
things ; the word thing had the nom. plural like the
singular. Cw&th, .the same word as 'quoth.' Wttega, pro-
phet ; the word existed also in old German, and was
corrupted into Weissager (as if it meant 'wise-sayer').
Afandige, from dfandian, to try. Manna, genitive plural of
mann. Heora, genitive plural of he. AZlcum, dative masc.
sing, of xlc, now ' each.' Sylle, give, is the modern ' sell ' ;
the word has changed its meaning. Fxrelde, dative of
fsereld, behaviour ; connected with the verb ' to fare.'
A-funden-nyss (dative -nysse),is from afunden = Ger. erfun-
den, invented, with the ending -nyss, now -ness ; the word
is fern., so that 'agen-re' (own) corresponds to the German
' eigen-^r.' Talige, from talian, to impute, count ; compare
'tale.' ^Erest, first = Ger. erst. Mancyn, mankind ; the last
part of the compound is our 'kin.' Be-swac, past tense of
be-swican, to deceive. Theah is related to the modern Eng-
lish ' though ' and the German doch. Swlthost, superlative of
swithe, strongly, very. To him sylfum : note the ending
-m of the dative singular. Ge-licath, Itcath, are identical
with the modern verb ' to like,' the former having the prefix
ge-, frequently occurring in Old English and German verbs.

14 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

§ 4. Object of this Book.

The reader who has studied the foregoing
pages with attention will have obtained a fairly
correct notion of the general character of the
language spoken by our ancestors a thousand or
nine hundred years ago. The transformation of
the English of King Alfred and Abbot .^Elfric
into the widely different language which we
speak to-day has, as we have already said, been
the result of gradual changes. We do not pro-
pose in this little volume to treat of these changes
in their chronological sequence — to show, for
instance, in what respects the English of Chaucer
differs from that of Alfred, the English of Shaks-
pere from that of Chaucer, and the English of
the nineteenth century from that of the sixteenth.
Information of this kind must be sought for in
regular histories of the English language. Our
purpose is merely to give some idea of the causes
by which the more remarkable changes in the
language were brought about, and to estimate
the effect which these changes have had on its
fitness as an instrument for the expression of
thought.

One class of changes in English, though from
some points of view immensely important, will

I.] INTRODUCTORY 15

be left almost entirely out of the present discus-
sion. We refer to the alteration in pronunciation,
which has been so great, that, even if the language
had in all other respects continued the same,
a speech delivered in the English of the tenth
century would have been unintelligible to a
hearer of to-day. Striking as the changes in
pronunciation are, they have had no direct effect
on the character of the language as a means of
expression. Our meaning is neither better nor
worse conveyed because, for instance, stone, wine,
foot, feet, are no longer pronounced like the Old
English stan, win, fot, fet. Still, there are some
changes in pronunciation which have affected the
expressive capacities of English indirectly, by
causing other changes, or by obscuring the con-
nexion of related words or forms ; and these will
need to be mentioned in order to explain the
results which they have ultimately produced.

CHAPTER II.

THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR.

GREAT as are the differences between the grammar
of Old English and that of Modern English,
the one has been developed gradually out .of the
other. We propose now to inquire into the
causes to which this development has been due.
The questions which have to be answered are two.
First, why has the English language got rid of
nearly all the multitude of grammatical forms
which it once possessed ? Secondly, what new
grammatical machinery has the language acquired
during the last thousand years, and how was this
new machinery obtained ? These two questions
cannot be kept entirely separate, because each of
the processes referred to — the disappearance of
the older inflexions, and the development of new
means of expressing grammatical relations — has
by turns been the cause and the effect of the

CH. ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 17

other. In some cases the dying out of the ancient
forms created a need which had to be supplied
by the invention of new modes of expression ;
in other cases the old inflexions were dropped
because they had become superfluous, owing to
the growth of other and more efficient means
of indicating the functions of words in the
sentence. Nevertheless, it will conduce to lucidity
to discuss the two questions, as far as possible,
apart from each other.

§ 1. Simplification of Accidence.

The progressive reduction of the number of
inflexional forms is a phenomenon not at all
peculiar to English. On the contrary, most of
the inflected languages of which the history is
known have, to a greater or less extent, under-
gone the same kind of change. For example,
although Modern High German is, as we have
shown, much more complicated in its accidence
than Modern English, it is much less so than the
Old High German of a thousand years ago ;
the grammar of Old High German is simpler
than that of Primitive Germanic, which was
spoken at the beginning of the Christian era ;
and Primitive Germanic itself had retained only

i8 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

a comparatively small remnant of the profusion
of inflexional forms possessed by the Primitive
Indo-Germanic tongue, from which it was de-
scended in common with Sanskrit, Greek, and
Latin. We may note in passing that peasant
German has lost much more of its original
grammar than has the German spoken by edu-
cated people. This fact teaches us that culture
is one of the influences which retard the process
of simplification. But it should be remembered
that culture may exist without books : there have
been peoples in which there was little or no
reading and writing, but in which nevertheless
the arts of poetry and oratory were highly
developed, and traditional correctness of speech
.was sedulously cultivated.

It is not wonderful that the tendency to
simplification of accidence should be widely
prevalent. Indeed, on a superficial view, we
might naturally wonder that this tendency is not
more conspicuously operative than is in fact the
case. For even one's mother tongue obviously
must require to be learnt ; and nobody learns
his mother tongue so perfectly as never to make
any grammatical mistake. In a language with
a great variety of conjugations and declensions,
mistakes of grammar mostly consist in assimi-

II.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 19

lating the inflexion of the less common words
to the more familiar types. We might therefore
expect that, between forgetfulness and the instinct
for consistency, the rarer conjugations and de-
clensions would always rapidly drop out of use,
and that all inflexional languages would in a
few generations approach perceptibly nearer to
the ideal state in which the same grammatical
relation should always be denoted by the same
change in the form of a word.

But in all matters of language the influence
of tradition is extremely powerful. The mistakes
or intentional innovations in grammar made by
individuals are for the most part condemned by
the community at large, and only few of them
come to affect the general language. Probably
most English children have sometimes said
' mouses ' or ' speaked,' but these regularized
forms do not appear in the speech of even
illiterate adults. So the tendency to grammatical
simplification in languages is usually slow in its
working, unless it happens to be stimulated by
some special cause.

Among the causes which hasten the progress
of languages towards grammatical simplicity,
there are two that require particular notice.
There are (i) phonetic change; and (2) the

20 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

mixture of peoples speaking different languages,
or different dialects of the same language.

PHONETIC CHANGE.

When we study the history of any language,
we. always discover that, at some period or other,
certain of its elementary sounds — certain ' letters,'
as we might call them, of its spoken alphabet —
have undergone an alteration in pronunciation.
The changes to which we here refer are un-
conscious and unintentional, and are so very
gradual that it would need an acute and attentive
ear to discern any difference between the sound
of a word as uttered by young men and by old
men living at one time. But when, as is often
the case, the pronunciation of a vowel or consonant
becomes in each successive generation a little
more unlike what it was at first, the total amount
of change may in time be very great. If we
could compare (by means of a phonograph or
otherwise) the present pronunciation of some
language with its pronunciation a few centuries
ago, we might find, for instance, that all the
a's had turned into o's, or all the d*s into /'s,
or vice versa. More commonly, we should find
that a particular vowel or consonant had changed

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 21

into a certain other vowel or consonant whenever
it occurred In the same part of a word (beginning,
middle, or end) ; or whenever it came in an
accented syllable ; or whenever it came next to
a certain other sound, or to any sound of a
certain class ; and that under other conditions
it had either undergone a different kind of change,
or else had remained unaltered.

The term ' phonetic change ' is conventionally
restricted to that kind of unconscious alteration
of sounds which has just been described. If we
study any particular language as it is spoken
to-day, and ascertain what sound in it represents
each of the sounds of some older form of the
language under each of the varieties of condition
under which it occurred, we shall obtain a body
of rules which are called the phonetic laws of
the present stage of the language. It is often
said that the phonetic laws applicable to one and
the same dialect and date have no exceptions
whatever. Whether this is absolutely true or
not, it is so nearly true that whenever we meet
with a seeming exception we shall be pretty safe
in believing that there has been at work some
other process than ' phonetic change ' in the
sense above explained. For instance, it is not a
case of phonetic change that we say ' I broke/

22 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

where pur ancestors said ' I brake.' What has
happened is not that a has changed into o, but
that the old past tense has been superseded by
a new one, imitated from the participle broken.
Again, an apparent exception to a phonetic law
may be due to the fact that one dialect has
borrowed a form from another dialect in which
the course of phonetic change had been different.

Why a particular phonetic change should take
place in one language, dialect, or period and not
in another is a question on which we cannot
here enter. For our present purpose, it is enough
to note the fact that the same original sound may
develop quite differently in two dialects of the
same language, and that a sound may continue
fbr many centuries unaltered, and then enter on
a course of rapid change.

The results of phonetic change, so far as they
affect the history of grammar, are of three kinds :

1. Confluent development. Sometimes two origi-
nally different sounds come to be represented in
a later stage of the language by a single sound.

Thus the Old English a and d (in certain positions) have
yielded the Modern English d, so that hal (whole) and/07#
(foal) now form a perfect rime.

2. Divergent development. One and the same
original sound may, owing to difference of con-

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 23

ditions, yield two or more distinct sounds in the
later language.

Thus in Old English ic Zxde, I lead, and ic Ixdde, I led,
had the same vowel ; but because in one word the vowel
was followed by a single and in the other by a double d,
their modern forms have different vowels.

3. Dropping of sounds. In some cases the
phonetic law relating to a particular vowel or
consonant is that, when it occurs under certain
conditions, it will neither remain unchanged nor
change into anything else, but will vanish
altoether.

Thus, an Old French /, if it comes at the end of a word,
becomes silent in Modern French. Again, every short
vowel which ended a word (of more than one syllable) in
Old English has long ago dropped off, so that all the
words which a thousand years ago were disyllables with
short vowel endings are now monosyllables.

Now supposing that in any language the
sounds which happen to be subject to these three
kinds of phonetic change are those which are
used in the inflexional endings, it is obvious that
the result must be a considerable upsetting of
the grammatical system. The effect, however, is
not immediately to produce simplification. On
the contrary, the tendency of ' divergent develop-
ment ' is to increase the number of declensions
and conjugations, because the same original

24 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

termination becomes different in different words.
The effect of ' confluent development ' and ' drop-
ping of sounds ' is to make the inflexional
system less efficient for its purpose by confound-
ing different cases, persons, tenses, etc., under
the same form. It is owing to changes of this
sort jn prehistoric times that the Latin language
has the awkward defect of having only one
form (Musae) for the genitive and dative singular
and the nominative and vocative plural of cer-
tain nouns. The same cause, also, accounts for
the inconvenient peculiarity of Old English gram-
mar, in having a large number of nouns with
their nominative singular and nominative plural
alike. This example is instructive, because it
shows the fallacy of the notion sometimes main-
tained, that phonetic change does not destroy
inflexions till they have already become useless.
In what may be called' prehistoric continental
English, the plural ending of many neuter nouns
was H. There came a time when it became a
phonetic law that a final $ always dropped off
when it followed a heavy syllable, but remained
after a light syllable. Hence in Old English as
we know it the plural of sdp (ship) was scipu,
but the plural of hus (house) was hits, just like
the singular. In this instance phonetic change

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 25

produced two different effects : it made two
declensions out of one, and it deprived a great
many words of a useful inflexional distinction.

We thus see that the direct result of phonetic
change on the grammar of a language is chiefly 1
for evil : it makes it more complicated and less
lucid. But when these inconveniences become
too great to be endured, they provoke a re-
action. The speakers of the language find out
how to express needful grammatical distinctions
by other than inflexional means ; or else they
generalize the use of those inflexional forms that
have happened to escape decay, applying them
to other words than those to which they origi-
nally belonged. In this way phonetic change
leads indirectly to that kind of simplification
which we shall find exemplified in the history
of the English language.

MIXTURE OF PEOPLES.

The second condition which we mentioned as
favouring grammatical simplification was the
mixture of peoples speaking different languages
or dialects.

1 Not exclusively so ; for it may hasten the disappearance of in-
convenient forms which traditional inertia might otherwise have
retained after better modes of expression had come into existence.

26 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Let it be imagined that an island inhabited
by people speaking a highly inflected language
receives a large accession of foreigners to its
population. To make the case as simple as
possible, let. it be further imagined that there is
no subsequent communication with the out-
sio^e world, and that nobody on the island can
read or write. What may be expected to happen?
It is a matter of general experience that a
person who tries to learn a foreign language
entirely by conversation finds the vocabulary
easier to acquire than the grammar. And it is
wonderful how well, for the common purposes of
intercourse, one can often get on in a foreign
country by using the bare stems of words, with-
out any grammar at all. Many Englishmen of
• the uneducated class have lived for years in
Germany, and managed to make themselves fairly
well understood, without ever troubling themselves
with the terminations of adjectives or articles, or
the different ways of forming the plural in nouns.
In our imaginary island the foreigners will soon
pick up a stock of words ; if the island language
is like the Germanic ones, in which the main
stress is never on the inflexional syllables, their
task will be much easier. The grammatical
endings will be learnt more slowly, and only the

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 27

most striking will be learnt at all. The natives
will soon manage to understand .the broken
jargon of the new comers, and to adopt it in
conversation with them, avoiding the use of those
inflexions which they discover to be puzzling to
their hearers. But if they acquire the habit of
using a simplified grammar in their dealings with
foreigners, they will not entirely escape using it
in their intercourse with each other. If there is
intermarriage and absorption of the strangers in
the native population, the language of the island
must in a few generations be deprived of a con-
siderable number of its inflexional forms.

Let us now consider a somewhat different case.
Suppose that the two peoples that live together
and blend into one, instead of speaking widely
distinct languages, speak dialects not too far apart
to allow of a good deal of mutual understanding
from the first, or at any rate as soon as the ear
has been accustomed to the constant differences
of pronunciation. The two dialects, let us suppose,
have a large common vocabulary, with marked
differences in inflexion — a very frequent case,
because phonetic change is apt to cause greater
divergences in the unstressed endings than iri the
stressed stems of words. The result will be much
the same as when peoples speaking distinct

28 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

languages are mingled ; indeed there are reasons
for thinking that the change will be even more
rapid and decisive. For one thing, the blending
of the two peoples is likely to take place more
quickly. Then, as the speakers of neither dialect
will be disposed to take the other as their model
of correct speech, two different sets of inflexional
forms will for a time be current in the same
district, and there will arise a hesitation and
uncertainty about the grammatical endings that
will tend to render them indistinct in pronuncia-
tion, and hence not worth preserving.

We see, therefore, that the simplification of the
inflexional machinery of a language is powerfully
stimulated by the absorption of large bodies of
foreigners into the population and by the mixture
of different dialects. It has now to be shown
how far these causes were actually in operation
during the formative period of the English
language.

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who settled in
Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, though
speaking substantially the same language, brought
with them their peculiarities of dialect. They
established themselves independently in different
parts of the country ; and, in consequence of local
separation, their original divergences of speech

II.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 29

gradually became wider, so that in three or four
centuries the kinds of English spoken in Wessex,
Mercia, Kent, and Northumbria, had become
markedly different ; and each of these dialectal
areas doubtless included several minor varieties of
local speech. In the main, the Old English dialects
seem to have differed but little in their vocabu-
lary, and the diversity of pronunciation, though
considerable, was not sufficient often to disguise
the identity of the words. Except for the
grammatical differences, a Kentishman and a
Northumbrian of the eighth century would pro-
bably find it easier to understand each other's
speech than their rustic descendants do at the
present day. The increase of population, and
the establishment of political unity over larger
and larger areas during the succeeding centuries,
necessarily resulted in the formation of mixed
dialects, and this contributed to the decay of the
inflexional system of the language.

A further impulse in the same direction was
given by the conquests and settlements of the
Danes and Northmen, which fill so large a space
in the annals of England from the ninth to the
eleventh century. The vast importance of those
events is perhaps not adequately appreciated
by ordinary readers of history. What we are

3o THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

accustomed to regard as the history of England
during these centuries is really little more than
the history of English England ; the larger portion
of England which was under Scandinavian rule
had no chroniclers. Of the Danish dynasty
which reigned at York we know hardly more
than the names of the kings ; and the history of
Danish East Anglia and Mercia is even more
obscure. It is only by the indirect evidence of
place-names and modern dialects that we learn
that in some districts of England the population
must at one time have been far more largely
Scandinavian than English, and that important
Scandinavian settlements existed in almost every
county north of the Thames. In the year 1017
Cnut of Denmark conquered the throne of Eng-
land, and his strong rule gave to the country
a degree of political unity such as it had never
had before. Under the succeeding kings, even
under the Englishman Edward the Confessor, the
highest official posts in the kingdom continued to
be held by men of Danish origin. The result of
these new conditions was the extension of Scandi-
navian influence to those parts of the country
which had previously been most purely English.
The language spoken by the Danes and North-
men was an older form of that in which the

II.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 31

Icelandic sagas were written. It was so nearly
like Old English that a Scandinavian settler in
England would very soon learn to understand the
speech of his neighbours, so far as the mere word-
stems were concerned. After a little experience
of English habits of pronunciation, he would be
able to recognise most of the words as identical
with those of his native tongue. The grammati-
cal inflexions, however, would be more puzzling,
many of them being quite dissimilar in the two
languages. Under such conditions there must
have arisen mixed dialects, mainly English, but
containing many Danish words, and characterized
by the dropping or confused use of some of the
terminations distinctive of cases, genders, and
persons. We possess, in fact, one short speci-
men of Old English as it was written by a Dane.
This is an inscription found at Aldborough in
Yorkshire, which has been read as follows : Ulf
let arluran cyrice for hanum and for Gunware
sdula, i.e. ' Ulf caused a church to be built for
himself and for the soul of Gunwaru.' Probably
the sentence is more correct Old English than
Ulf habitually spoke ; but he has made the
mistake of putting the Danish pronoun hanum
instead of the English him. It is a pity that we
have no more actual examples to show what

32 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Danish-English was like in the eleventh century.
But since we know for a fact that those districts
in which the Danes had settled are precisely those
in which English grammar became simplified
most rapidly, there can be no doubt that the
Scandinavian admixture in the population was
on^of the causes that contributed to bring about
the disuse of the Old English inflexions.

After the Scandinavian settlements, the next
great event that affected the development of the
English language was the Norman Conquest. It
is not likely that the great political change of
A.D. 1066 had any marked immediate effect on
the actual speech of the people. It is, however,
certain that the grammar of the literary language
began to show very striking changes early in the
twelfth century. The ending -an of the southern
dialect came to be written -en, and all the
inflexional endings consisting in vowels were
reduced to a uniform -e. The explanation is, no
doubt, that the indistinctness in the pronunciation
of the endings, which had gradually invaded the
popular language, now manifested itself in writing.
When the monasteries, the homes of the literary
class, were filled with foreign monks, the superiors
in education of their native brethren, the ver-
nacular culture could not but surfer. The tradi-

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 33

tional orthography ceased to be maintained, and
there was less and less solicitude for traditional
correctness of expression on the part of the
writers. Hence, in all probability, the alteration
in the language between 1066 and 1 150 appears
from the literary remains more rapid than it
actually was.1

While, however, the apparent immediate effect
of the Conquest on the English language is partly
an illusion, there is no doubt that that event did
introduce a new influence which operated with
great, and for two centuries constantly increasing,
effect. Under the Norman and Angevin kings
there was a great influx of Frenchmen into the
country. The language of the court and the
nobility was French ; amongst the middle classes
every one who aspired to social consideration
endeavoured to become fluent in the fashionable
language. In the grammar-schools boys were,
even down to the fourteenth century, taught their
Latin through the medium of French. The
writing and reading of English, apparently, almost

1 The probability of this view is confirmed by a study of Domes-
day Book. This record, compiled in 1086, contains thousands of
English names of persons and places, written phonetically by
Norman scribes. The forms exhibit the changes above referred to
with a uniformity that does not appear in the spelling of native
writers until about a century later.

C

34 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

entirely ceased to be a part of regular school
teaching, for many of the extant early Middle
English manuscripts were written by persons who
evidently had never learnt to spell their native
language, but rendered the words phonetically
according to the French values of the letters. In
the- thirteenth century it would seem that a very
considerable portion of the population of England
must have been bilingual. How far-reaching the
effect of the foreign influence was at this period
may be seen from the large number of Old
French words that have found their way into our
rustic dialects.

From what has already been said, it will be
evident that the natural tendency of this con-
dition of things would be to promote the disuse
of the traditional inflexional system of English.
It is impossible to determine to what extent the
actual change which took place in this direction
is to be ascribed to the use of a foreign language
by the side of the vernacular, because we have no
means of measuring the efficiency of the other
powerful causes which were working to the same
result. But that the change, at least in the
southern part of the kingdom, was materially
accelerated by this agency there seems to be no
reasonable doubt.

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 35

It is now time to turn from generalities to the
consideration of some specific instances of the
simplification which has taken place in English
accidence. We will begin with the declension of
substantives.

Old English had many declensions of sub-
stantives— how many we can hardly say, because
it is not the custom to denote them by num-
bers as is done in Latin and Greek grammar,
and scholars might find it difficult to decide what
amount of variation should be regarded as con-
stituting a separate ' declension.' However, there
was one declension which formed its genitive
singular in -es and its nominative (and accusative)
plural in -as ; and there were other declensions
in which -ay -an, -e appear as endings for the
genitive singular, and -a, -an, -e, -u for the
nominative plural ; and yet others in which the
genitive singular or the nominative plural, or both,
were like the nominative singular, or different from
it in only the vowel of the root syllable. Out
of all these the -es and -as declension is the only
one that remains in general use. Except for a
few irregular plurals, all modern English sub-
stantives are declined with the endings (written
-s and -es or -s] which descend from the Old
English -es and -as.

36 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Now this is obviously an instance of the
famous principle of ' survival of the fittest.' For
amongst the Old English case-endings -es was the
only one that never meant anything else than a
genitive singular, and -as was the only one
that never meant anything else than a
nominative or accusative plural. Thus, Jianan
stood for the genitive, dative, and accusative
singular and the nominative and accusative plural
of hana, a cock ; gife might be either genitive,
dative, or accusative singular, and gifa either
nominative, accusative, or genitive plural, of
gifu a gift ; and so forth.

It is a popular error to suppose that it was
in consequence of the Norman Conquest that
tfre -es and -as declension came to supersede
all the rest. In fact the change began much
earlier ; and it began in the northern dialect.
For this there were special reasons.

We have just seen that the noun-declension
of southern Old English (from which our ex-
amples were taken) was full of ambiguities ; the
reason being that the inherited Germanic case-
endings, originally distinct, had undergone
phonetic change to such an extent that many of
them had come to coincide in form. In the
northern dialect the state of things was still

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 37

worse, because in that dialect the termination -an
regularly dropped its nasal ; and further, the
mixture of different local varieties of speech had
led to a general indistinctness and uncertainty
in the pronunciation of those vowels which served
as case-endings, so that in some words the
terminations -a, -«, -e, -ot and -u seem to be used
indiscriminately in the same text. As an instance
of the greater imperfection of the noun-declension
in Northumbrian as compared with southern Old
English, we may refer to the word ' eye.' In the
southern dialect the nominative and accusative
singular were eage, the genitive and dative
singular and the nominative and accusative plural
were eagan. But in the northern dialect ego is
found for all these cases.

In the Durham Gospels, written about the
middle of the tenth century, we may see how
this state of confusion had already begun to be
remedied. The old declensions still survived ;
but when there was need for greater distinctness
of expression than the old forms afforded, the
endings -es for the genitive and -as for the plural
nominative were substituted for those of other
declensions. Accordingly, many of the substan-
tives which in West Saxon (i.e. southern Old
English) belong to other declensions have in the

38 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Durham Book occasionally, though not exclusively,
the -es and -as forms. On the opposite page
is a table showing a few comparative specimens
of the inflexion in the two dialects, the new forms
being indicated by italics.

It is true that in the Northumbrian dialect of
the- tenth century the substitution of -es and -as
for the other equivalent terminations had merely
begun. But a change which constituted so
great an improvement in distinctness of expression
could not fail to go on. Before three centuries
had passed, it had extended itself to nearly all
substantives. The increased intercourse between
the different parts of the country, which was the
result of the political unification of England, led
tor the introduction of these northern forms, re-
commended by their superior clearness, into the
grammar of the midland dialects, from which our
modern literary English is descended. To some
extent, however, the advantage which the language
had gained by the reduction of its many de-
clensions to one was lost by the effect of phonetic
change. The tendency to increase the propor-
tionate stress on the body of the word, and
consequently to obscure the pronunciation of the
endings, caused the original -es and -as to be
pronounced alike. Hence in Middle English

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR

39

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NORTHU:

Gen. Sing.

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moder, moderes

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widives

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40 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

kinges, for example, stood for both the genitive
singular and the nominative plural of king.

In southern Old English, the system of noun-
inflexion, though somewhat better than that of
the northern dialect, was still, as we have seen, so
imperfect that most of its forms were inadequate
to indicate with certainty the case and number of
a word. ' It became still more defective when — as
happened in the twelfth century — all the vowels
of the inflexional endings came to be represented
by one indistinct sound, represented by the letter
e, and when, moreover, many monosyllabic nomina-
tives became disyllabic by the addition of a final
-e due to assimilation to other cases. The defects
•of the system were obviated to some extent by
applying the suffix -en, which was inherited in
words like sterren from sterre star, to form the
genitive and the plural of words in which the
regular case-endings were ambiguous. There was,
in fact, a definite movement in early southern
Middle English towards making -en the regular
plural ending of nouns. We find in the
thirteenth century such forms as trewen, trees
(where Old English had treowti), schoon, shoes
(Old English sceos\ lauibren, lambs, calveren,
calves, cyren, eggs (Old English lambru, cealfru,
%gru}. This tendency was arrested in the four-

n.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 41

teenth century by the spread of the -es forms
from the midland dialects. But the rustic speech
of the south-western counties has still a few
plurals like housen (Old English hus] ; and modern
standard English says children (Old English
cildru, did, modern northern and north midland
dialects childer\ and in more or less old-fashioned
diction also brethren (Old English brother, brothru,
Old Norse brwthr) and kine (Old English cy,
modern Scotch and northern dialects kye}. It is
somewhat curious that although, as we have seen,
the original -n as a plural ending had already
been lost in the Northumbrian dialect of the tenth
century, the modern Scotch plurals of ox and eye
are ousen and een ; and it is still more curious
that in Scotch and in most provincial dialects the
plural of shoe is shoon, though in all varieties of
Old English it was seeds. The anomaly, however,
like other anomalies in language, is capable of
explanation. The genitive plural of oxa in Old
Northumbrian was oxna, and that of ego (eye) was
egna. The need for making a formal difference
between singular and plural in these words was
supplied by transferring the n from the genitive
to the nominative plural. As for the word shoe, it
ended in a vowel ; and as most other monosyllabic
nouns with vowel endings made the genitive

42 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

plural in -na, this word was assimilated in de-
clension to the words which it resembled in form.

It may at first sight appear strange, seeing
that the Middle English -es has come so near to
being the universal plural ending, that the pro-
cess has not been carried out to its limit, and
that we have still our half-score of ' irregular
pfurals.' But the desire for uniformity has had
a very small share in the evolution of English
grammar. The changes that have taken place,
where they are not due to the operation of
phonetic law, have mostly been produced either
by the attempt to avoid ambiguity, or by the
disposition to save time or trouble in speaking.
Now the plurals men, teeth, geese, mice, lice, oxen,
are unambiguous in form ; if we were to sub-
stitute the ' regular ' forms, they would to the
ear be identical with the genitives, man's, tooth's,
goose's, and so on. Moreover, the irregular
plurals are all either shorter or easier to pro-
nounce than the regular forms would be. There
were thus two good reasons for not assimilating
the declension of these words to the prevailing
type. It is true that a few of the plurals
anciently formed by vowel-change have not
survived : for instance, where Old English had
bdC) bee, we now say book, books. But if bcc

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 43

had come down into modern English, it would
by phonetic law have become beech?- which
would have had the double disadvantage of not
showing its relationship to the singular, and of
coinciding in form with a quite different word.

There remain to be noticed two or three
points in the history of the simplification in the
declension of substantives. For the genitive
plural the Old English endings were, according
to the declension, -a and -ena. The latter, as
the more distinct and unambiguous, had already
in Old English begun to encroach on the territory
of the former ; and in early Middle English this
movement was continued, -ene (two syllables)
being in monosyllabic nouns generally preferred
to -e. Thus we have kingene king for ' king of
kings.' With longer words this ending was too
unwieldy, and speakers seem early to have fallen
into the habit of using the plural nominative
form (at first in disyllabic nouns, afterwards in
others) as a genitive. Thus the one form king-es,
which already had three functions, expressing the
genitive singular and the nominative and accus-
ative plural, came to stand for the genitive
plural as well. Ambiguity was for a time

1 Because the same cause that turned 5 into e had also altered
the pronunciation of the c.

44 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH . [CHAP.

prevented by the inflexion of the accompanying
article or adjective. But in the end these parts
of speech lost their case-endings, and the result
was that a form like horses had nothing to show
whether it stood for a genitive singular or a
nominative, accusative, or genitive plural. This
remains as a real defect in modern spoken Eng-
lish, though in writing we obviate it by a device
of recent origin, using horses for the nominative
(and accusative) plural, horse's for the genitive
singular, and horses' for the genitive plural.
This weakness in our system of inflexions would
have been seriously inconvenient, if it had not
been for the introduction of the practice of using
the preposition of instead of the genitive in-
flexion— an innovation respecting which we shall
afterwards have to speak.

Besides the genitive, Old English had two
other inflected cases, the accusative and the
dative. But phonetic change had already made
such havoc with the original Germanic endings
that even in southern Old English the
accusative and nominative were always alike
in the plural, and very frequently, perhaps
most frequently, in the singular also. In the
northern dialect the formal difference between
the cases, in substantives, had almost dis-

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 45

appeared. When a case-distinction has become
a mere occasional irregularity, the speakers of
the language have learnt to do without it, and
have no motive for resisting the influences that
tend to abolish it. The fact that the articles
and adjectives were inflected rendered the accus-
ative ending of substantives less necessary ; and
with the growing habit of placing the parts of
a sentence in one uniform order, the subject and
object could be quite well distinguished without
the aid of inflexions. Hence the accusative, as
an inflected case of substantives, disappeared
early in Middle English. The dative lasted
longer ; in fact we have some faint traces of it
still. In Old English the dative singular ended
in -e or (rarely) in -a, and in one large class of
words in -an ; in Middle English these endings
became -e and -en. The ending of the dative
plural was -um, but this was weakened in late
Old English into -on and -an, becoming -en in
Middle English.1 As the case of the indirect
object the dative did not survive long in Middle
English, but when governed by prepositions it re-
tained its endings down to the fourteenth century.
In the latter part of that century — for instance,

1 The same change has occuried in German, where -en or -n is
now the universal ending of the dative plural

46 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

in the writings of Chaucer — the dative endings
rarely appear except in phrases that had become
adverbs, such as on live, which has in modern
English been shortened to ' alive.' The reason
why alive has a v, while life has an ft is that
the Old English f between vowels was pro-
nounced v. Hence, while the Old English nomi-
native llf is represented in modern English by
' life,' its dative life is represented by the last
syllable of ' alive.' There is one dative plural
surviving in modern English, the adverb whilom.
Here the Old English form -um still remains,
not even having undergone the Middle English
alteration to -en ; an instance of the important
fact that some peculiarity in the meaning of a
word will occasionally cause it to be exempted
from the normal effect of phonetic change.

The case-inflexion of pronouns is more per-
manent than that of nouns. As any personal
pronoun is far more frequent in use than any
individual noun, the use of the case-distinction in
pronouns is more a matter of fixed habit. But
already in Old English the dative and accusative
had become alike for the pronouns of the first and
second persons in both numbers ; and in Middle
English these two cases became confused together
also in the third person. A fact not very easy to

n.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 47

account for is that it was the dative and not the
accusative form that finally prevailed.1 Our
modern ' objectives,' him, her, 'em, represent the
Old English datives him, hire, heom. The Old
English masculine accusative hine survives only
in the 'un (' I see 'un ') of the south-western
dialects.

We now come to what is the most remarkable,
and one of the most beneficial, of all the changes
which the English language has undergone — the
substitution of ' natural ' for ' grammatical ' gender.
It is not easy for us English people to under-
stand what a wonderful change this really was.
We are apt to look on it as the most natural
thing in the world that ' gender ' should corre-
spond to sex : that masculine and feminine nouns
should be those denoting males and females
respectively, and that neuter nouns should be
those which denote objects which are not re-
garded as possessing sex.2 And yet this state

1 The explanation may perhaps be that pronouns referring to
persons occurred more frequently in the case of the indirect object
than in that of the direct object. The ' objective ' case of the neuter
it (Old English hit) is it, from the accusative, not him from the
dative.

2 In absolute strictness, we ought to say that in modern English
the masculine and feminine genders are restricted to nouns denoting
persons, or things in which we see some analogy to personality,
while the neuter gender applies to designations of things not

48 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

of things cannot be so very natural ; for the fact
is that English is the only language, among
those that are at all generally known, in which
it exists. In Sanskrit, Greek, Latin (and its
descendants, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese),
German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Welsh, Irish,
Russian, and innumerable other languages, gender
(at least with regard to names of inanimate
things), is a mere useless classification of nouns ;
that is to say, it expresses no distinctions in
thought. So it was in all dialects of English,
so far as we know, as late as the year 1000.
But two centuries later, the ' Ormulum,' a metrical
harmony of the Gospels written in the East
Midland dialect, shows that gender had come
to be entirely dependent on meaning. Instead
of being a useless complication in the grammar,
it had become a valuable means of expression.
This unique and momentous change, completed,
so far as one dialect is concerned, in a space of

regarded as personal. A personified abstraction is regarded im-
aginatively as male or female, and is spoken of as ' he ' or ' she '
accordingly ; so, too, with certain material objects, as the sun,
the moon, a ship. On the other hand, a baby, or an animal,
may be called 'it' instead of 'he' or 'she,' when not distinctly
regarded as a personal being. In the latter case, the absence of
a common-gender pronoun causes us to avail ourselves of the
liberty of using the neuter gender more frequently than we other-
wise should.

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 49

two centuries, evidently requires to be accounted
for. It is closely connected with another change
of which we find evidence in the same text.
The disuse of inflexion, which we have seen to
be a natural consequence of the admixture of
a foreign element in the population, had in the
Danish part of England gone so far that the
adjective had ceased to mark gender or case
by difference of termination ; and the article
the was used indeclinably just as in modern
English. Hence the gender of a noun had no
other effect on the sentence than that of de-
termining the choice of the pronoun referring
to it As the inflexional reminders no longer
existed, the traditional gender of the nouns was
easily forgotten, and the pronouns he, she, and
it came to be used with strict reference to the
meaning of the nouns for which they were
substitutes.

The East Midland dialect, as has been already
said, is the ancestor of our modern literary English.
The southern dialects kept up the old unmeaning
genders, and the inflexion of the adjective and
article, to some extent down to the fourteenth
century. Perhaps the final disappearance of
' grammatical ' gender, for which there were many
causes, was promoted by the extensive use of

50 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the French language in England ; at any rate
instances have been found in Early Middle
English in which the gender of nouns is assimi-
lated to that of their French synonyms. The
uncertainty thus arising would naturally strengthen
the tendency to adopt the significant gender of
the East Midland dialect

In the writings of Chaucer, which extend to
the end of the fourteenth century, the adjective,
though no longer inflected for gender and case,
still retains some traces of its grammatical
endings. The plural was marked by a final e ;
and an adjective also took a final e when
preceded by an article or other defining word.

But in the following century these endings
quickly disappeared, in obedience to a tendency
which is the most conspicuous feature in the
later development of English grammar, the
tendency to reduce the number of syllables in
words wherever it was possible. The movement
towards monosyllabism continued even into the
nineteenth century. Within the memory of living
persons it was still usual in the reading of the
Bible or the Liturgy to make two syllables of
such words as loved and changed, which are
now pronounced in one syllable. The shortening
tendency has so widely prevailed that every short

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 51

vowel that ended a word in Old English has
dropped off. In Chaucer's English the various
forms of the verb ' to love ' were all disyllables :
(to) loven or (to] love, (/) love, (we) loven, (/)
lovede, (we) toveden. In modern English the
only parts of the verb that are not monosyllables
are loving, and the archaic loves t, loveth, lovedst.
Although our grammar is almost entirely of East
Midland origin, the form loveth which belonged to
that dialect has been displaced by the northern
form loves, which had the recommendation of
being more easily contracted into a mono-
syllable.

As we have already remarked, the simplifica-
tion of English grammar has not been in any
considerable degree due to the desire for uni-
formity. If such a desire had been characteristic
of the English mind, we should certainly have
got rid of the complicated system of strong
verbs : but in spite of the many changes which
that system has undergone in detail, it remains
just as intricate as it was in Old English. One
reason is that the strong preterites gave, shook,
came, rode, and the like, are easier to pronounce
than gived, shaked, corned, rided. The instinct
for regularity has been too feeble to overcome
the resistance of tradition when supported by

52 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the preference for the phonetically easier form.
It is true that a few verbs that were strong in
Old English are now 'regular'; but there are
quite as many instances of the contrary change.
In the modern dug and stuck (formerly digged,
sticked), we have actually a new strong con-
jugation. The modern forms, it may be noted,
are easier to pronounce than the old ones.

There is, however, one point in the conjugation
of verbs which does exhibit the influence of the
tendency to uniformity. In Old English most of
the strong preterites had different vowels in the
singular and plural, as in ic sang, we sungon.
This was the case also in Middle English ; but
the fact that in modern English the weak preterite
has the same form for singular and plural has
led to the disappearance of the distinction in the
strong verbs also ; we use sang in both cases.
The second person singular had in Old English
strong verbs the same vowel as the plural, and
had an ending different from that of the weak
verbs : thu sunge, thu lufodest. In modern English
the old form has been superseded by sangest, after
the analogy of the weak verbs.

The only feature in the simplification of English
accidence that remains to be mentioned is the
disappearance of the subjunctive mood. In Old

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 53

English the subjunctive played as important a
part as in modern German, and was used in much
the same way. Its inflexion differed in several
respects from that of the indicative. The only
formal trace of the old subjunctive still remain-
ing, except the use of be and were, is the omission
of the final s in the third person singular of
verbs. And even this is rapidly dropping out
of use, its only remaining function being to
emphasize the uncertainty of a supposition. Per-
haps in another generation the subjunctive forms
will have ceased to exist except in the single
instance of were, which serves a useful function,
although we manage to dispense with a corre-
sponding form in other verbs.

§ 2. New Grammatical Material.

The disappearance of the Old English inflexions
is only half the story of the . development of
English grammar. A considerable amount of
new grammatical material has been introduced,
to serve the needs of expression in cases where
the old machinery has become inefficient through
phonetic change and other causes, or where it
was from the beginning inadequate for its
purpose.

54 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

We have now to see from what sources this
new material was derived, and what were the
necessities which led to its adoption.

It is not very often that a language enriches
its grammatical system by adoption from other
tongues ; but owing to the peculiar circumstances
of -English its history presents a few examples of
this rare phenomenon. In Old English the per-
sonal pronouns of the third person were as follows:

SINGULAR. PLURAL.

Masculine. Feminine. Neuter.

Nominative

he

heo, hie, hi

hit

hie, hi

Accusative

hine

hie, hi

hit

hie, hi

Genitive

his

hire

his

heora

Dative

him

hire

him

heom

It will be seen from this table that the words
' he/ ' she/ and ' they ' were very nearly alike ;
and in the process of phonetic change they came
to be represented in southern Middle English by
the one form he} In the same way, the single
form here came to stand both for ' her ' (genitive
and dative) and for ' their.' This ambiguity of
forms was a defect which the language had no
means of remedying from its own resources. But
it so happened that in the parts of England

1 In the dialects of the south-western counties he is still used for
the feminine as well as for the masculine pronoun. "He is their
mother" is one of the many examples quoted in the English Dialect
Dictionary.

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 55

which were largely inhabited by Danes the native
pronouns were supplanted by the Scandinavian
pronouns which are represented by the modern
she?- they, them, their. These forms, recommended
by their superior clearness, gradually made their
way from their original home in the north and
the north-east midlands into the dialects of the
rest of England. Their progress, however, was
not very rapid : Chaucer uses she, but his her
serves for the genitive, dative, and accusative of
the feminine singular and the genitive plural.
This is much the same state of things as exists
in modern German, where ihr Haus may be
either ' her house ' or ' their house ' (Ihr Haus,
written with a capital /, but pronounced in the
same way, is ' your house '), and ihr may also
mean ' to her ' and ' you.' Perhaps the want of
distinction between the pronouns did not often
occasion any actual misunderstanding, but clearly
the introduction of the Danish forms was a real
improvement.

In some other points English has found means
to improve its pronouns without calling in foreign

1 The origin of this pronoun is unexplained, but the fact that
they, them, then represent Scandinavian demonstrative pronouns
favours the hypothesis that she is connected in some obscure way
with the Old Norse feminine demonstratives sit and sid, which had
often the function of personal pronouns.

56 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

aid. One defect of the Old English pronominal
system was that his was both masculine and
neuter. While gender was merely ' grammatical '
this did not greatly matter. But when gender
became significant, people began to feel that the
use of his referring to inanimate things involved
a sort of personification. We see traces of
this feeling in the English Bible of 1611, where
his is the ordinary genitive of it (or, as for
this date it is perhaps more correct to say, the
corresponding possessive pronoun), but her is
sometimes used where it was felt that a male
personification would be very inappropriate. Still
earlier (in 1534), we find Tindale writing: "If
salt have loste hyr saltnes, what shall be seasoned
ther with ? " In North West Midland writings we
find it (Jiif] used as a possessive pronoun as early
as the fourteenth century, and this use is still
common in dialects. The first writer, so far as is
known, to append the regular possessive ending
to it was the foreigner, Florio, who uses its in
1598, and several times in his later works.
Shakspere has one or two examples of the
possessive it (" Go to it grandam, and it grandam
shall give it a plum "), and in those plays which
exist only in editions published after his death its
occurs a few times. The Bible of 1611 has no

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 57

it s ; in one passage (Lev. xxv. 5) we read "that
groweth of // own accord," but in the modern
editions its has been substituted. The use of its
became general in the seventeenth century, but
for a long time there seems to have been a feeling
that the older his or her was more dignified.

Another beneficial change in English pronouns
was due to the accident that — in accordance with
the tendency towards shortening, of which we
have before spoken — the final n in unemphatic
monosyllables was often dropped. (Examples
may be seen in the indefinite article a, which is
an unemphatic form of the numeral one, and in
t, d for in and 0#.) It was this circumstance
that produced the difference between the forms
of the same pronoun in ' This is my book ' and
'This book is mine' It is true that the full
forms mine and thine long continued to be used
before a noun beginning with a vowel or k, as
in mine arm, mine host, which we still retain in
poetry and in rhetorical use ; but in the main
my and thy were the forms for the attributive
possessive, and mine and thine for the absolute
possessive. The ending of mine and thine was
imitated in hern, hisn, ourn, yourn, and theirn
(some of which go back to the fourteenth cen-
tury), but these forms survive only as vulgarisms.

58 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

In educated English, however, the want of an
' absolute ' possessive has been supplied, except
in the case of his, by tacking on the ending of
possessive nouns to the ordinary possessive pro-
noun. We say ' this house is yours' just as
we say ' this house is John's' Perhaps it would
have been better if the literary language had
accepted hisn, but from some cause it did not
do so.

It cannot be said that the prevalence of the
French language in England down to the four-
teenth century has left many traces in modern
English grammar. We get from French the so-
called feminine ending -ess, which we now add
quite freely to native English words ; but this
does not strictly belong to grammar, any more
than does our adoption of many other foreign
suffixes, such as -ment and -ize. However, as
the adoption of -ess has been mentioned, we may
call attention to the curious fact that this ending
has never been used in English for what one
might have thought its most natural purpose,
the formation of names of female animals. The
few words that we have of this kind, like tigress,
lioness, are not of English origin, but were adopted
from Old French. In spite of the analogy of
these substantives, it seems always to have been

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 59

felt that the ending was appropriate only to
designations of persons.

Probably it is in some degree owing to French
influence that our language was able to develop
one useful piece of grammatical machinery —
namely, an additional mode of expressing the
notion of the genitive case. We can still say
' David's son,' as our ancestors a thousand years
ago said Dauldes sunu (or, less frequently, se sunu
Dauldes} ; but we can also express the same
meaning by saying ' the son of David,' which
corresponds to the French le fils de David. In
Old English of was mainly used where we should
now use ' from ' or ' out of The same sense
also belongs to the French de. There are in
Old English a few special instances in which of
has a genitival sense (as in se cyning of Norwegan,
the king of Norway), but the use of the preposition
as a regular sign of the genitive first appears in
the twelfth century. We do not know whether,
apart from French influence, the English language
would not have evolved this convenient device
for obviating the ambiguities arising from the
decay of the old inflexions ; but imitation of
French idiom certainly helped it to attain general
currency. The many nouns adopted from French
naturally formed their genitive after the French

60 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

pattern ; and the new form was also applied to
those nouns which had lost their distinctive
genitive inflexions. Ultimately it came to be
admissible in the case of all substantives. If the
inflected genitive had been driven out of use by
the ' phrasal ' genitive the result would have been
a weakening of the language — a distinct loss of
condensation and energy. Fortunately this did
not happen ; the form in -s was retained, but
its use was restricted to instances in which it
was convenient that the genitive should precede
the governing noun instead of following it. In
this way there was developed a difference in
meaning and emphasis between the inflected
and the phrasal genitive, and the fact that
modern English possesses both enables us to
express shades of meaning which cannot be ren-
dered with equal precision either in French or
Latin. For example, if we substitute the ex-
pression ' England's history ' for the more usual
' the history of England/ we indicate that the
name of the country is used with some approach
to personification. Even where the signification
of the two forms is identical, there is a distinction
of emphasis or feeling which it is not easy for
a foreigner to apprehend.

The rule that the genitive in 's must be

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 61

followed immediately (or only with the inter-
vention of an adjective, or an adjective qualified
by an adverb) by the governing substantive, has
given rise in modern English to the practice of
treating the 'j virtually as a separable word (a
' postposition,' as we might call it), and attach-
ing it to a whole descriptive phrase expressing a
single idea, as in ' the Duke of Devonshire's
estates.' Colloquially, this practice is sometimes
carried to quite grotesque extremes. We hear
occasionally such sentences as ' That was the
man I met at Birmingham's idea.' Here the
intonation of oral speech, which cannot be re-
produced in writing, shows that the phrase
'the-man-I-met-at-Birmingham ' is for the nonce
converted into a word, which can take the in-
flexional 's like any ordinary substantive. The
' group-genitive,' as it is called, is a useful addi-
tion to the resources of the language, as it is
more direct and forcible than the synonymous
form with of. The need for a ' group-plural,'
formed in a similar way, is sometimes felt. Such
a formation is, for obvious reasons, inadmissible
in writing, except in such simple cases as ' the
Miss Smiths,' 'the two Dr. Johnsons'; but in
conversation it would be possible, without causing
much surprise, to speak of ' a whole gallery of

62 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

John the Baptists,' or (referring to tavern signs)
of ' the innumerable King's Armses and Duke of
Wellingtons.'

A grammatical innovation, of somewhat ques-
tionable value, which is due to French influence,
is the polite substitution of the plural for the
singular in the second person. The origin of this
custom is to be found in the official Latin of the
later Roman Empire, in which a great person of
state was addressed with ' you ' instead of ' thou,'
just as, in formal documents, he wrote ' we '
instead of ' I.' The use of the plural 'you,' as
a mark of respect, passed into all the Romanic
languages, and from them into German, Dutch,
and Scandinavian. It is a well-known fact that
forms of politeness originally used only in address-
ing superiors have in all languages a tendency
to become more and more widely applied ; and
hence in Europe generally the singular ' thou '
has, except in religious language and in diction
more or less poetical, come to be used only in
speaking to intimate friends or inferiors. In
England, during the last two centuries, the use of
thou, so far as ordinary language is concerned, has
become obsolete ; it is only among the speakers
of some northern dialects that it continues to be
employed even by parents to their children, or by

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 63

brothers and sisters to each other. Our language
has thus lost whatever advantage it had gained
by having a polite as well as a familiar form of
address ; and unfortunately the form that has
survived is ambiguous. There is a translation of
the New Testament into modern English in
which you is everywhere substituted for thou,
except in addresses to the Deity. It is a signi-
ficant fact that in one place the translator has
felt obliged to inform his readers by a footnote
that in the original the pronoun changes from the
plural to the singular. The English language is,
in respect of clearness, decidedly the worse for
the change which has abolished the formal dis-
tinction of number in the second person of the
pronoun and the verb.

One highly important feature of English gram-
mar which has been developed since Old English
days is what has been called the attributive use
of the substantive, which may be exemplified by
such expressions as ' a silk hat,' ' the London
County Council,' 'the Shakspere Tercentenary,'
'Church of England principles,' ' a House of Com-
mons debate,' ' the Marriage Law Amendment
Act,' ' the half-past two train,' * the London,
Brighton, and South Coast Railway,' ' the High-
street front of the Town Hall,' 'my lawyer

64 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

cousin.' No other European language has any-
thing exactly parallel to this usage. In German,
it is true, many of the English attributive com-
binations could be rendered by compound nouns,
which in that language may be formed very
freely ; but others must be translated by substi-
tuting an adjective for the attributive noun, and
others again by a circumlocution of some kind.
The difference between one of these English
expressions and the German compound which
corresponds to it is not merely that the latter is
written as one word and the former is written
with spaces between its parts. In speaking
English we feel that the elements of such a
combination are as much distinct words as are
the adjective and the following substantive, or the
genitive noun and the noun which governs it.
The English noun used attributively might be
described grammatically in various ways. We
might say that the noun was in a case expressing
a relation somewhat similar to that expressed by
the genitive, but wider. Or we might say that it
was a new part of speech, halfway between the
substantive and the adjective. As English adjec-
tives have no inflexions, there is no formal
criterion by which we can distinguish an attri-
butive substantive from an adjective ; and in fact

n.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 65

many substantives, from being often used attri-
butively, come to be really adjectives.. The germ
from which the attributive use of substantives
has been developed is the compound noun. In
Old English, as in German, Greek, and other
languages, two substantives could be put together
to form one word. The accent of the word was
placed on the first element, which served to limit
the sense of the second element to a special
application. English has still many compounds
of this sort, such as bookcase, coach-house, wdterpot;
and indeed we can form new words of this kind
very freely. Now very often it happens that the
first element of such a combination has (as used
in this position) a sense in which it is nearly
equivalent to an adjective or to a noun in the
genitive. In such cases the two elements of a
compound came in Middle English l to be appre-
hended as separate words, and each of them was
pronounced with its independent accent. In this
way it was that English grammar was enriched
by the creation of the attributive noun. It

1 It is difficult to fix the period at which this development began ;
it would be a great mistake to suppose that when a combination of
substantives is in Middle English wiitten as two words that affords
any proof that the two were not apprehended as forming a com-
pound. In Middle English, as in Old English, a genuine compound
was very often written with the parts separated.

E

66 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

often makes a noteworthy difference to the sense
whether an attributive combination is taken as
two words or as one. If we hear of ' the school-
house' we think of a house which is used as a
school ; on the other hand, ' the school house '
(with two accents) suggests a house which belongs
to the school. The development of the attributive
construction has greatly increased the flexibility
and compactness of the language. As will be
seen from some of the examples given above, we
can use a whole complex phrase attributively as if
it -were a single substantive.

Yet another means by which English has added
to its resources of expression during the last
thousand years is the extended use of auxiliaries
in-the conjugation of the verb. The Old English
verb was very deficient in contrivances for in-
dicating distinctions of tense. It had only two
regular tenses, a present, which served also as
future, and a past. A beginning had, however,
been made towards supplementing this inadequate
system by using certain verbs as auxiliaries,
though these were employed only when the need
for precise expression was especially urgent. If
it was necessary unambiguously to designate an
event as future, recourse was had to a figure of
speech, much in the same way as a person who

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 67

did not know how to form the future tense in
some foreign tongue might say ' the sun is in
debt to rise at six,' or ' coal intends to be cheaper.'
The verbs which in Old English expressed the
notion of debt or obligation and that of wish or
intention were respectively sceal (our ' shall ') and
wile (' will ') ; and the figurative use of these verbs
resulted in their being employed as mere signs of
the future tense. When it was desired to express,
more definitely than could be done by the simple
past tense, the sense of what we call the perfect1
or the pluperfect, the device employed was that
of combining the present or past of the verb * to
have ' with the passive participle. It is easy to
see how this contrivance was suggested. If I say
' I have a letter written,' where have is used in its
primary sense, the sentence expresses the same
fact as ' I have written a letter,' though it expresses
something else in addition, viz., that the letter is
still in my possession. From being used in cases
of this kind, the combination of have with a

1 The use of the perfect tense is to indicate that a fact relating to
the past K viewed as an element in the present condition or character
of the subject, or as a portion of a history that extends to the present
moment. Thus we can say 'England has had many able rulers,'
but if we substitute ' Assyria ' for ' England ' the tense must be
changed. It is allowable to say ' Aristotle has treated this subject
in his Ethics,' just as we say 'Aristotle says so and so'; but we
cannot say ' Aristotle has written the Ethics. '

68 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

participle naturally came to serve as a mere com-
pound tense, as in ' he haefth anne man ofsl<zgennel
literally, ' he has a man killed.' Here the parti-
ciple agrees like an adjective with the object
noun, but in later Old English it was made in-
declinable. The practice of putting the object
after the participle did not become general till the
fourteenth century.

The perfect and pluperfect of intransitive verbs
could be expressed in Old English by the verb
to be and the participle, as we still do in sentences
like ' Babylon is fallen,' ' the work is finished.'
The latter form is ambiguous in the modern
language, but it was not so in Old English,
because the present and past of the passive were
expressed by the auxiliary weorthan, literally ' to
become' (equivalent to the German werden)\ which
in later English was unfortunately lost.

In these auxiliary verbs Old English possessed
an instrument of expression which admitted of
being greatly developed. It was only necessary
to conjugate each auxiliary through all its simple
and compound tenses to produce a system capable
of rendering almost every shade of meaning which
is conveyed by the verbal inflexions of any
language. The actual development, however, was
gradual and slow ; the abundant material which

II.]. THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 69

lay ready to hand was brought into use by
degrees, in response to the growing need for
accuracy of expression which was produced by
the increased use of the language for literary
composition. We have not space to discuss in
detail the history of the English system of verbal
conjugation, but some few of its more remarkable
features may be briefly pointed out.

One point that is especially worthy of notice
is that the development of the functions of the
verbal forms, in the direction of increase of clear-
ness, has continued till very recent times, many
changes of great value having taken place during
the last three centuries.

We may consider in the first place the develop-
ment of the auxiliary uses of the verb to be.
Although the form ' I am speaking ' came into
use very early in Middle English1 (the correspond-
ing form of the past tense having existed already
in Old English), it was not till the seventeenth
century was well advanced that it became the
regular expression for the true present as dis-
tinguished from the present of habit. Such a
sentence as ' thy mother and thy sisters seek
thee ' was normal English when the Bible was

. 1 There are one or two examples of it in Old English writings :
e.g. in /Elfric's translation of Joshua x. 25.

70 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

translated ; nowadays, in natural prose speech, we
can only say 'are seeking.' The analogous passive
forms, as in ' the house is being built,' ' he was
being taught to ride,' were hardly known till near
the end of the eighteenth century, and long
afterwards they were condemned by sticklers for
grammatical correctness. Yet the innovation was
clearly needed : the older mode of speech, as in
' the house is building,' or even the fuller form
used in the seventeenth century, ' the house is
a-building/ could not be employed in all contexts
without inconvenience. In such expressions as ' I
have been working hard,' ' it has often been said,'
' if you were to do such a thing,' we have instances
of- the manner in which, by following out the
analogy of older forms, the language has found
means for representing shades of signification
which had previously no accurate expression.

Another auxiliary which has acquired its most
important function in quite modern times is the
verb to do. In Old English, it was already
possible to say ' I do speak,' ' he did answer ' in-
stead of the simple ' I speak,' ' he answered.' But
down to the seventeenth century there is no very
clear difference in meaning between the two forms.
When, for instance, we read in the Bible of 161 1,
' and they did eat, and were all filled,' it is not

II.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 71

easy to see any reason, except the very good one
that it improves the rhythm of the sentence, why
the verb should be 'did eat ' and not ' ate.' The
words do and did, however, like any other auxiliary,
admitted of being pronounced with strong stress,
so as to emphasize the tense or the affirmative
character of the sentence, or to give to the state-
ment an exclamatory tone which intensifies the
sense of the verb. This emphatic use of the
auxiliary is obviously valuable, and it has gained
in force and clearness from the fact that (during
the last three centuries) the unemphatic do and
did, in affirmative sentences, have become obsolete.
In negative and interrogative sentences, on the
other hand, the compound tenses formed with do
and did have since Shakspere's time quite super-
seded the simple present and past, except in the
case of a very few verbs, such as do, have} and
be. We can no longer say, in plain prose, ' I
went not away,' ' Heard you the voice ? ' The

1 With regard to this verb there has been developed a convenient
distinction in usage which seems to be in danger of being lost.
The use of the auxiliary do is correct English only when have
expresses something occasional or habitual, not when the object is a
permanent possession or attribute. It is permissible to say 'Do
you have breakfast at eight?' or 'We do not have many visitors';
but not ' Does she have blue eyes ? ' or ' He did not have a good
character.' Many American writers violate this rule, and the
faulty use appears to be gaining ground in England.

)* THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

explanation of the change perhaps is that owing
to the more frequent use of compound tenses it
became unusual for the particle not or the subject
of an interrogative sentence to follow any verb
but an auxiliary, so that the instances in which
this occurred were apt to sound unnatural.

The history of shall and will is another illus-
tration of the continuous struggle of language
towards clearness of expression. Our future
auxiliaries are not very well suited to their
purpose, because their meaning, as we have
already mentioned, includes something besides
the idea of future time. Intrinsically, therefore,
they are inferior to the colourless and unequivocal
German auxiliary werden. When we wish to
express simple futurity, we are obliged to choose
between two forms, one of which implies obliga-
tion, and the other will or intention. For many
centuries the language was feeling its way to a
rule for the employment of these forms, such
that their excess of meaning should occasion
the -smallest amount of ambiguity. It is only
in recent times that the problem has been solved :
as is well known, the English Bible often has
shall where we now feel that will would be
more appropriate. The present rule, though
Scotchmen and Irishmen still find it difficult to

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 73

master, rests on a very intelligible principle.
Future events are divided into two classes, those
which depend on the present volition of the
speaker, and those which do not. In the former
case we say ' I will,' and ' you or he shall ' ; in
the latter case we say ' I shall,' and ' you or he
will.' There are many exceptions, each with its
own special reason ; but in the main the rule
is correct. Some ambiguity in the use of will
still remains possible, because such a statement
as ' he will do it ' may either express mere
futurity or may mean that the person is deter-
mined to act in the manner indicated. The
sense of shall^ however, has become quite un-
equivocal, and perhaps we may say that the
language has at length succeeded in making
the best possible use of its inherited means of
expressing future time.

Much more might be said respecting the
gradual enrichment of the English verbal con-
jugation. Owing very largely to the develop-
ments of the last three centuries, modern English
is able to render with perfect precision almost
every distinction in thought which is expressed
by the modification of the verb in any language.
It may, however, be remarked that the increased
precision of modern English, though it is a great

74 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

gain for the purposes of matter-of-fact statement,
is sometimes the reverse of an advantage for the
language of emotion and contemplation. Hence
we find that our poetry, and our higher literature
in general, often returns to the less developed
grammar of the Elizabethan age.

§ 3. Profit and Loss.

In the foregoing pages we have described, and
tried to account for, the more important of the
changes in the grammatical structure of English
that have taken place since the days of King
Alfred. We have now to ask how far the results
of these changes have been good, and how far
they have been evil, in their influence on the
efficiency of the language as an instrument of
expression.

It has been maintained by some scholars that
in the evolution of language everything happens
for the best, and that English in particular has
lost nothing, at least so far as its grammar is
concerned, that would have been worth keeping.
But this extreme optimistic view can hardly be
sustained. There can be no doubt that in
writing modern English special care and in-
genuity are often required to avoid falling into

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 75

ambiguities. Every unpractised writer of English
frequently finds it necessary to alter a sentence
which accurately expresses his meaning, because
he perceives that the reader might for a moment
be in doubt whether a particular word should
be taken as a noun or a verb, or whether, if it
is a verb, it is meant for the infinitive or the
present tense. And if we venture on those
inversions of the normal order of words which
when skilfully used contribute so much to force
and beauty of expression, we have further to
take care that the subject of the sentence is
not mistaken for the object. Much of our
poetry is obscure on a first reading, not because
the diction is affected or allusive, but because
the structure of the language has compelled the
poet to choose between the claims of lucidity
and those of emphasis or grace. There are
passages in many English poets which are
puzzling even to native readers, but which if
rendered literally into Latin or German would
appear quite simple and straightforward. Of
course it is possible to write as lucidly in English
as in any other language ; but in order to do
so we must use constant watchfulness, and must
sometimes reject the most obvious form of ex-
pression for one that is more artificial. In

76 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

colloquial English, again, there are some abbre-
viations which sometimes occasion inconvenience
by their doubtful meaning: thus he's may be either
' he is ' or ' he has,' and I'd may be either ' I had '
or ' I would.' It is true that no known language
is so perfect as not to have its own liability to
ambiguity1 ; and in this respect Old English was
already greatly inferior to Greek or even to Latin.
Still, when the fullest allowance is made for this
fact, it remains unquestionable that the loss of the
Old English inflexions has not been unattended
with disadvantage.

On the other hand, modern English, viewed
with reference to its grammar, has certain merits
in which it is scarcely rivalled by any other
tongue. We have already pointed out the great
value of some of the additions which the language
has made to its grammatical resources during the
last thousand years. But it is not merely by
the acquisition of new machinery that English
has gained in efficiency as a means of expression.
The disappearance of superfluous inflexions, and
the reduction of those which remain to mere con-
sonantal suffixes which in most instances do not

1 For instance, in Latin (partly on account of the impairment of
its inflexional system through phonetic change) there is an extra-
ordinary abundance of forms which, apart from their context, would
admit of two or more different interpretations.

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 77

add a syllable, have greatly increased the capacity
of the language for vigorous condensation. There
are very few languages in which it is possible,
as it is in English, to write whole pages almost
exclusively in words of one syllable. Of course
we are not compelled to do this : our language
is quite as capable as any other of the variety
of rhythm which is imparted by the use of
words of differing length. But we cannot read
any of our modern poets without seeing how
much of force and impressiveness is often gained
by the absence of syllables which denote mere
grammatical relations that are irrelevant to the
intended emotional effect. In modern English
the grammar does not, as it does in purely in-
flexional languages,1 obtrude itself on the atten-
tion where it is not wanted.

While English has thus the peculiar advantage
of a noiseless grammatical machinery, it has
another advantage of an opposite kind in its
power of emphasizing certain grammatical rela-
tions by placing the sentence-accent on the
auxiliary. It is usually difficult to render in

1As a somewhat extreme instance, we may cite the Latin
duorum bonorum virorum, where the main portions of the words,
du-, ton-, and vir-, are actually unaccented, the stress falling on
the endings which tautologically express three times over the
notion of the genitive plural.

78 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

another language the precise effect of the stressed
auxiliary in such phrases as ' I did live there,'
or ' if he should do such a thing.' The exten-
sive use which is made of variation in sentence-
accent for expressing distinctions of meaning gives
a large scope for that elliptic brevity which is so
striking a characteristic of spoken English. One
remarkable example of the national love of con-
ciseness of speech is our habit of omitting the
principal verb in compound tenses where it can
be supplied by the hearer from what has gone
before, as in ' Yes, I do,' ' it certainly will not.'
By means of this idiom we can under certain
circumstances substitute a monosyllable for any
tense of any verb.

•The ' making of English grammar ' is now pro-
bably a finished process. While it is certain that
the vocabulary of English will in future undergo
great changes — while many new words will be
formed or adopted, and many old words will
disappear or change their meaning — there is
reason for believing that the grammar will re-
main for centuries very nearly what it is now.
The ground for this belief lies partly in the
spread of education. Literary culture perhaps on
the whole conduces to tolerance of certain kinds
of innovation in vocabulary, but with regard to

ii.] THE MAKING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR 79

grammar its tendency is strongly conservative.
Another reason is that simplification of accidence
has nearly attained its utmost conceivable limit,
and that the few further steps in this direction
that remain possible would involve practical in-
convenience. For instance, our irregular verbs and
irregular plurals of nouns are, as we have seen,
for the most part shorter or more easily pro-
nounceable than the regular inflexions that might
be substituted. Perhaps if the influence of edu-
cation did not stand in the way, the language
might lose the distinctive s of the third person
singular of the present tense, which is dropped
in some forms of vulgar speech ; but as things
are this is very unlikely to happen. We can-
not assert that the evolution of new gramma-
tical material — for instance, of new auxiliary verbs
— is altogether impossible, but the modern con-
servative instinct would render the acceptance of
such novelties very difficult. On the whole, it
is probable that the history of English grammar
will for a very long time have few changes to
record later than the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER III.
WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES.

THE changes in grammatical structure, which
were the subject of the preceding chapters, are
only a part of the changes by which Old English
has been transformed into Modern English. The
changes in vocabulary are equally important.
Although we still use many of the old words —
chiefly, it is true, very much altered in pronun-
ciation and spelling — yet a very considerable
proportion of them have become obsolete ; and
many thousands of new words have been intro-
duced. Of those new words which have been
formed in English itself we shall have to speak
later ; in the present chapter we shall treat of
those which have been adopted from foreign
languages.

The adoption of foreign words into the English
language began before the English came to this

[in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 81

island. The Germanic people, of which the
Angles and Saxons formed part, had- long before
this event been in contact with the civilization
of Rome ; and several Latin words, denoting
objects belonging to that civilization, or foreign
articles of use or luxury, had already found their
way into the language of all or many of the
Germanic nations. The Latin strata, a paved
road, survives in English as street, and in Ger-
man as Strasse. Other words of Latin origin,
which were learnt by the English people while
still dwelling on the continent, and which remain
in the modern language, are wine, butter, pepper,
cheese, silk, alum, pound, inch, mile, mint (from
Latin moneta, money).

When the English were settled in Britain,
they learned a few more Latin words from the
Romanized people of the towns. The Latin
castra, for instance, became, under the form
ceaster, the Old English word for a Roman
fortified town, and it survives in the place-name
Chester, and in the ending of many other names
such as Winchester, Doncaster, Leicester, and
Exeter.

In the sixth and seventh centuries, the people
of England were converted to Roman Christianity,
and one of the results of their conversion was that

F

82 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

they adopted a considerable number of Latin
words, chiefly signifying things connected with
religion or the services of the church. Among
those which are still part of the language are
bishop, candle, creed, font, mass, monk, priest.
Altogether, there have been counted about four
hundred Latin words which had become English
before the Norman Conquest ; but many of these
were not at all in common use, and only a few
of them survive in modern English.

It might, perhaps, be naturally expected that
Old English would contain many words taken
from the language of the Celtic Britons. The
older books on English philology contain a long
list of words supposed to be derived from this
source. Modern investigation, however, has shown
that the number of Celtic words which are found
in English before the twelfth century is less than
a dozen ; and of these several (such as dry, a
wizard, the same word as druid, bratt, a cloak,
luh, an arm of the sea, a lougJi) appear from their
form to have been learnt not from the Britons,
but from the Irishmen who accompanied the
missionaries from lona to Northumbria ; while
dun, a hill, a ' down,' though of Celtic origin, was
probably brought by the English from the con-
tinent. Perhaps binn, a manger, and dunn, dun

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 83

(-coloured) and one or two more words, may really
have been adopted from the British language, but
these are all the Old English words for which
this origin is at all probable. It must be con-
fessed that this result is somewhat puzzling, as
there is evidence to prove that the British
population was not entirely massacred or driven
westward by the English conquerors. The phys-
ical characteristics of modern Englishmen in
many parts of the country show that they must
be partly descended from the pre-English in-
habitants ; and in Old English writings wealh,
Welshman, was one of the ordinary words for
' slave.' It must be remarked, also, that the
British names of rivers and of cities have in many
cases been preserved to modern times. Still,
however surprising the fact may be, it remains
certain that the English language owes practically
nothing to the language of the ancient Britons.

To the Danes and Northmen the English
vocabulary owes a great deal. If we did not
otherwise know that England had once been
under Scandinavian rule, we might have inferred
the fact from the presence in our language of
many Danish words with what may be called
political meanings, such as law, outlaw, grith
(legal security), hustings, wapentake, riding (in

84 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

' the three Ridings of Yorkshire ' — the Old Norse
thritkjtingr, third part). The Old English word
eorl (earl), which originally meant merely a man
of noble birth, came to be used in its Scandi-
navian sense of ruler of a district. Other words
of Scandinavian origin are awe, call, crave, fellow,
get, hit, husband, knife, leg, loft, loose, low, odd,
root, same, scant, skin, scrip, take, Thursday, thrall,
want, wrong. The word cross of course comes
ultimately from Latin, but its form is due to the
Northmen, who had learnt it from the Christians
of Ireland. Some of our common words, which
existed in Old English, have been assimilated to
the kindred Scandinavian synonyms : thus sister
descends not from the Old English sweostor, but
from the Old Norse syster ; and the Middle
English yive or yeve (which regularly repre-
sented the Old English gifan^} has been super-
seded by the form give (Old Norse, gifa). In
the dialects of the North of England, of East
Anglia, and of some of the midland counties,
there are scores of words of Danish origin.

We have now seen how far the English lan-
guage had been enriched from foreign tongues

1 The Old English g before i and e was pronounced as y, and
is represented by y in Modern English.

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 85

before the end of the eleventh century. After all,
the amount of what it had gained in this way was
not very great in comparison with the whole
extent of its vocabulary. With all the Latin,
Celtic, and Scandinavian words that it had ac-
quired, the general character of the language in
noo was essentially what it had been five
centuries before.

The new conditions brought about by the
Norman Conquest, however, opened the door for
a far more abundant influx of foreign words. It
was not only that the tongue of the new rulers, as
we have already seen, came to be used by large
numbers of Englishmen in the intercourse of daily
life, so that much of its colloquial vocabulary was
adopted into the native language.. The know-
ledge of French gave access to the rich literature
of the continent ; from the thirteenth to the
fifteenth century a large portion of the literature
of England consisted of translations of French
romance, and the native poetry was powerfully
influenced by French models. Under these
circumstances it was natural that the English
literary dialect should receive a large accession
of French words, many of which gradually
found their way into the vocabulary of familiar
speech.

86 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

There was yet another way in which the
Norman Conquest contributed to the transforma-
tion of English from a purely Germanic language
to one with a mixed vocabulary. The higher
literary culture of the foreign clergy, who under
Norman and Angevin rule were introduced into
the English monasteries, soon made itself felt in
the extended use of Latin for works of history
and theology. In process of time many Latin
chronicles and books of devotion were translated
into English, and the translators, writing for
readers who were not altogether without learning
often found it easier to adopt words from the
learned language than to render them by native
equivalents.

It is important to understand that the French
words which were brought into English represent
two different dialects. The form of the French
language which obtained currency in England as
the immediate consequence of the Norman Con-
quest was the northern dialect — the speech of
Normandy and Picardy. But with the accession
of the Angevin dynasty in the middle of the
twelfth century the dialect of Central France
became the language of the court and of fashion-
able society. The two dialects differed consider-
ably in pronunciation : for instance, Northern

m.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 87

French had k where Central French had ch, and
ch where Central French had s ; • in words of
Germanic and Celtic etymology the original w
remained unaltered, while in Central French it
became gu, and ultimately^; and in many words
where Northern French had g the Central dialect
changed it into j. One consequence of the two-
fold character of the French spoken in England
was that very often one and the same French
word was adopted into English twice over, in two
different forms and with meanings more or less
different. Thus we have in modern English the
words catch, warden, launch, wage, which came
from Norman French, and alongside them we
have chase, guardian, lance, gage, which represent
the same wcrds as pronounced in the French
dialect afterwards introduced. In this way the
dialectal diversities in the language of the con-
querors have contributed to increase the copious-
ness of the English vocabulary. There are a few
cases in which a word was at first made English in
its Norman form, and afterwards assimilated to the
pronunciation of Central French : thus ' charity '
was cariteth in the English of about 1150, but a
century later it appears as charitee. It may be
mentioned as a curious fact, that while the
spelling gaol is derived from Northern French,

$8 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the word is always pronounced, and sometimes
written (jaif) with the j which is a mark of the
Central dialect.

It is interesting and instructive to observe what
kinds of objects or ideas are chiefly denoted by
the words that came in from French during
the two centuries that followed the Conquest.
Readers of Ivanhoe will remember the acute
remark which Scott puts into the mouth of
Wamba the jester, that while the living animals
— OX) sheep) calf, swine, deer — continued to bear
their native names, the flesh of those animals as
used for food was denoted by French words,
beef) mutton ) veal, pork, bacon, venison. The point
of the thing is, of course, that the ' Saxon ' serf
had^the care of the animals when alive, but when
killed they were eaten by his ' French ' superiors.
We may perhaps find a similar significance
in the French origin of master, servant, butler,
buttery, bottle, dinner, supper, banquet. It is only
what we should have expected that we find
French words abundant among our terms relating
to law, government, and property. Examples are
court, assize, judge, jury, justice, prison, gaol, par-
liament, bill, act, council, tax, custom, royal, prince,
county, city, mayor, manor, chattel, money, rent, all
words that came in before the end of the thirteenth

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 89

century. The system of gradation of titular rank
was of continental origin, and the individual titles
are mostly French, as duke, marquis, viscount,
baron. There is one notable exception ; the
foreign count (Old French conte) was not adopted,
because the native earl had come to have nearly
the same meaning ; but it had not been the
English custom to give to ladies titles corre-
sponding to those of their lords, and hence for
the wife of an earl the French title countess had
to be used. The Old English word cniht
(knight) kept its place, possibly because it was
shorter than the French synonym chevalier.

It was natural, too, that many of the terms
relating to military matters should be adopted
from the tongue of the conquerors. War itself
is a Norman French word, and among the other
French words belonging to the same department
which became English before the end of the
thirteenth century are battle, assault, siege, standard,
banner, gonfanon, arms, armour, harness, glaive,
lance, arbalest, hauberk, mangonel, fortress, tower.

In industrial civilization the French-speaking
strangers were no doubt greatly superior to the
native population, and it is probably for this
reason that nearly all the commonest designations
of classes of tradesmen and artisans are of French

90 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

origin. The smith, the baker, the skinner, and a
few more, kept their Old English titles ; but the
butcher, the barber, the chandler, the carpenter,
the cutler, the draper, the grocer, the mason, the
tailor, are all called by French names. The
shoemaker is an exception, but there was a time
when he preferred to call himself a cordwainer or
a corviser.

It is curious to note that all the current terms
of family relationship outside the immediate circle
of the household have been adopted from French.
Uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, and cousin, very soon
displaced their native equivalents. Grandsire and
Grandame, which appear in the thirteenth cen-
tury, are words taken directly from the French
spoken in England. They do not appear to
have been used on the Continent ; and indeed
the substitution of the respectful titles sire (the
same word as sir) and dame for ' father ' and
' mother ' appears to have been peculiar to the
French of England. In the fifteenth century the
half-English grandfather and grandmother came
into use ; but it was not until the Elizabethan
times that the use of the prefix was extended
(in a manner unknown to French) by the forma-
tion of words like grandson and granddaughter.
Father-in-law, mother-in-law, etc., are formed of

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 91

English elements, but they are literal translations
of Old French designations. The words sire and
dame (now dam\ which, as we have just seen,
were originally applied to parents as terms of
respect, have suffered a strange descent in dignity
of use, being now employed (except for the poetic
use of sire] only with reference to animals.

The only definite class of objects for which
the native names have remained without any
French mixture (so far as colloquial use is con-
cerned) is that consisting of the external parts
of the body. Even here there is one noteworthy
exception. The French word face, which first
appears as English late in the thirteenth century,
found admission into the vocabulary of familiar
speech, perhaps all the more readily because it
was shorter or more easily pronounced than the
native synonyms, onlete, onsene, and wlite.

The literary, as distinguished from the col-
loquial, adoption of French words, began in the
twelfth century, and has continued down to the
present time. The English writers of the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries were able to
assume on the part of their readers at least a
moderate acquaintance with literary French.
Hence they felt themselves at liberty to introduce
a French word whenever they pleased. The

92 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

poets availed themselves of this liberty very
freely ; it was an easy resource for meeting the
necessities of rhyme and metre, and especially
the very exacting demands of the laws of
alliterative verse. The innumerable words brought
into the language in this way are naturally of
the most varied character with regard to meaning.
Many of them, which supplied no permanent
need of the language, have long been obsolete,
but the greater number still survive. The French
importations by prose writers during this period
are less abundant, and consist largely of terms
of science and theology, in which the native
language was poor.

The French literary vocabulary, from an early
period, contained a very large proportion of
learned words taken from Latin, with the endings
dropped or altered in accordance with the habits
of French pronunciation. Words of this kind,
when adopted into English, served as a pattern
after which Latin words could be anglicized.
An English writer who introduced a Latin word
into his composition usually gave it the same
form in which it would have been adopted into
French. It is therefore often difficult or im-
possible to determine whether an English word
of Latin origin came into English immediately

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 93

from Latin or through the medium of French.
Even when we have proved that the word was
used earlier in French than in English, the
question is not settled, because it may have
been independently borrowed in the two lan-
guages ; indeed, it is certain that this often did
happen.

The custom of adopting Latin words at second-
hand— through French — paved the way to the
extensive introduction of words directly from
Latin. This is the reason why the Latin
element is so very much larger in the English
vocabulary than in that of any other Germanic
language — German, Dutch, or Scandinavian.
Germany and. Holland have certainly not been
less, but probably much more, devoted to classical
scholarship than England has ; but their lan-
guages were not, in their middle stages, saturated
with French loan-words, and consequently they
were led to find expression for new ideas by
development of their native resources, instead of
drawing on the stores of the Latin vocabulary.

The Latin element in modern English is so
great that there would be no difficulty in writing
hundreds of consecutive pages in which the pro-
portion of words of native English and French
etymology, excluding particles, pronouns, and

94 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

auxiliary and substantive verbs, would not exceed
five per cent, of the whole.1 What would be the
result of an etymological census of all the words
in a complete modern dictionary it is impossible
to say, because the laborious and unprofitable task
has never been performed ; but it is probable
that,^ if compounds and derivatives of English
formation were left out of account, the words
taken from Latin would far outnumber those
from all other sources. And the Latin portion
of the vocabulary is still constantly receiving
additions. The greater part of modern English
literature has been written by men who were
classically educated, and for readers who were
presumed to have more or less knowledge of
Latin. Probably there are very few of our
scholarly writers who are not responsible for the
introduction of some new word of Latin deri-
vation. It has come to be felt that the whole
Latin vocabulary, or at least that portion of it
which is represented in familiar classical passages,
is potentially English, and when a new word is
wanted it is often easier, and more in accord-

1 In this statement it is assumed that all the words of Latin
origin which conform to the accepted rules for anglicizing Latin
words are to be counted as Latin and not as French, even
though as a matter of history they may have been adopted
through French,

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 95

ance with our literary habits, to anglicize a
Latin word, or to form a compound from Latin
elements, than to invent a native English com-
pound or derivative which will answer the pur-
pose. So much is this the case, that probably
the authors of many of these coinages would be
greatly surprised to learn that the words had
never been used before, or even that they were
not to be found in the ordinary dictionaries.
And the classically-educated reader, when he
meets with a word of Latin etymology which
he at once recognises as a good and useful ex-
pression of a certain meaning, does not ordin-
arily note that he has not been accustomed to
meet with it in English. Our literary vocabu-
lary abounds with words which owe their mental
effect not to any English traditions, but to the
reader's knowledge of the Latin etymology.
Sometimes, even, a word depends for its
precise force on its suggestion of a particular
classical passage. For example the adjective
esurient, which literally means only ' hungry,' is
often used with an implication which is intel-
ligible only to readers who remember the
Graeculus esuriens of Juvenal — the ' hungry
Greekling' who will shrink from no task that
will bring him a little money.

96 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

i The English method of adopting Latin words is
in some respects peculiar. While in French, as
a general rule, Latin adjectives are adopted by
simply dropping the inflexional ending of the
accusative, there is in English a curious aversion
to doing this except in the case of words having
distinctly adjectival endings. In other cases we
ordinarily append a suffix, ultimately of Latin
origin, either -ous, -al, or -an. This practice
began -in French, but in English it has been ex-
tended much farther. The Latin continuum,
caelestem, erroneum, which in French have become
continu, celeste, errant, are in English continuous,
celestial, erroneous ; the Latin veracent becomes
veracious (not verace] ; and caeruleus becomes
cerulean. A Latin adjective anglicized, as sub-
stantives usually are, by merely leaving out the
ending, would strike every one as un-English,
unless it had one of the familiar endings of
adjectives. In the anglicizing of Latin verbs, one
usual mode is that of dropping the inflexions
of the present indicative ; but where the verb
has a short root syllable this mostly results in
the production of forms which somehow are felt
to be unsatisfactory. If the verb dlvido had not
become English at an early period, no one would
now think of adopting it in the form divide. In

III.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 97

many instances of this kind we can fall back
on the old practice of forming the- English verb
from the passive participle, as in revise, direct,
inspect, meditate, expedite ; but where the participle
happens to end in -ttus this resource is not in
accordance with modern custom. Hence the
general statement that any Latin word may
be adopted into English if it supplies a want is
in practice limited by the fact that there are
many verbs (such as destyio, for instance) which
do not admit of being anglicized according to
the recognised methods.

The revival of Greek learning in Western
Europe, the effects of which began to be felt in
this country soon after the commencement of the
sixteenth century, opened up a new source from
which the English vocabulary could be enriched.
Long before this time the language contained a
certain number of Greek words, such as geography,
theology, logic, which had come in through the
medium of Latin. In most cases the immediate
source was French ; and nearly all these latinized
Greek words had been adopted into all the liter-
ary languages of Europe. In the sixteenth and
to a great extent in the seventeenth century Latin
was still the ordinary vehicle of the literature of

98 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

science and philosophy, and the new technical
terms of Greek etymology were generally
used in modern Latin before they found their
way into the vernacular tongues. It therefore
became a general European convention that when
a new word was adopted from Greek into English
or any other modern language, it must be treated
as if it had passed through a Latin channel. The
Greek k, aiy ei, oi, ou, u, were transliterated, after
Latin example, by c, IB, i, a>, u,y, and the aspirated
initial r by rh. In the main, these rules are still
adhered to, though there are some exceptions
among modern scientific words. 'Greek adjectives,
it may be remarked, are usually anglicized, like
Latin adjectives, by the addition of the suffix -ous,
-an^or -al: thus autonomos, diaphancs, are repre-
sented by autonomous, diaphanous.

Although the study of Greek has been for cen-
turies an essential part of the higher education of
Englishmen, the language would not have contri-
buted very greatly to the English vocabulary, if
it had not happened to be peculiarly well fitted
to supply the need for precise technical terms of
science. It possesses an unlimited power of form-
ing compound words, and it has also a singularly
complete and regular system of suffixes, by means
of which a whole group of derivatives of obvious

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 99

and precise meaning can be produced from any
verb or noun. Thus the verb zeteo, I inquire,
has the derivatives, zetema, an object of inquiry,
zetesis, the process of inquiry, zetetes, an inquirer,
zetetikos, able or disposed to inquire ; and the
meaning of all these words is obvious when
that of the primary verb is known. In the
hands of the long succession of thinkers which
culminated in Plato and Aristotle, the capacities
of the language for the expression of accurate
distinctions had been cultivated to the highest
point. In all the departments of science that
were known to the ancient world, the Greek
technical vocabulary is marvellous in its lucidity
and precision. It is therefore not wonderful that
the greater part of it has been adopted into all
the modern European languages. So well adapted
is the structure of the Greek language for the
formation of scientific terms, that when a word
is wanted to denote some conception peculiar to
modern science, the most convenient way of
obtaining it usually is to frame a new Greek
compound or derivative, such as Aristotle himself
might have framed if he had found it needful to
express the meaning.

The wonderful development of the physical
sciences during the last two hundred years has

ioo THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

created a necessity for the invention of a multi-
tude of new terms ; and hence an etymological
census of the words in our recent large dictionaries
would show a surprisingly1 great proportion of
Greek derivatives — a proportion which is con-
stantly increasing. In addition to the scientific
terms the recently-coined words of Greek ety-
mology include many names of processes or
instruments of modern invention, such as photo-
graphy', lithography, ophthalmoscope, stereotype, tele-
phone, cinematograph. It is to be noted that the
modern scientific and technical words from this
source are mostly of international currency. The
custom of forming compounds from Greek ele-
ments prevails in all civilized countries of Europe
and ^America, and if a useful term of this kind
is introduced in any one country — whether in
England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, or
Spain — it is usually adopted with great prompti-
tude into the languages of all the rest.

Nearly all the words that English owes to the
Greek language, indirectly as well as directly, were
originally scientific or technical, though many of
those of older date (adopted through mediaeval

1 At least if our anticipations are based on knowledge of the
etymological composition of the vocabulary of every-day speech,
or even of that of ordinary literature.

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 101

Latin and French), such as fancy, idea, ecstasy,
pathos, sympathy, have long taken their place in
the popular vocabulary. Now and then, though
not very often, a Greek word of other than tech-
nical character is employed in anglicized form in
order to evoke in the reader's mind a recollection
of its use by some classic author. The use of
such a word as apolaustic, for example, implies
that the writer who uses it is addressing readers
who are able to understand an allusion to the
Ethics of Aristotle. There are, too, a few Greek
words, such as kudos, nous, hubris, which have
been adopted, without the customary latinization
of form, in university slang, and have thence
acquired a certain degree of general currency.

During the four centuries that have elapsed
since 1500, the intercourse between England and
the remoter nations of Europe has become more
extensive and intimate than in earlier times, and
the literatures of those nations, made accessible
through the printing press, have come to be
studied in this country. At the same time, the
progress of discovery and colonization, in which
England has borne so great a part, has made
known to our countrymen the languages, customs,
and products of the most distant regions of the

102 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

earth. Hence it has come to pass that the
modern English vocabulary includes words derived
from every civilized language of Europe, and from
innumerable languages of Asia, Africa, America,
and Australia.

A great deal of history is enshrined in the
many, words that English has adopted from other
tongues. The presence in our dictionaries of
such terms as aria, basso, cantabile, da capo,
fantasia, finale, gamut, intermezzo, legato, maestoso,
oboe, opera, piano, pizzicato prima donna, rallentando,
staccato, tremolo, and aquatinta, busto, chiaroscuro,
dado, facciata, fresco, graffito, impasto, intaglio,
mezzotint, morbidezza, ovolo, rilievo, replica, studio,
terra cotta (to mention only a few out of many)
would be sufficient to inform us, if we did not
know already, that the Italians have been our
teachers in music and the fine arts. Less generally
known are the obligations of English artistic
culture to the Netherlands, which are shown by
such words as landscape, sketch, easel, and maul-
stick. That the Dutch were once our masters in
nautical matters may be learned from the terms
aloof, avast, boom, dock, hull, skipper, orlop, flyboat,
euphroe, rover, and many others. There was a
period when the ' Englishman Italianate,' whom
Ascham so much detested, was a personage very

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 103

commonly met with, and when Italy set the
fashion for England in literary taste as well as in
dress and social customs ; there was another
period in which the Spaniards Gongora and
Guevara were looked on as the writers most
deserving of admiring imitation. It is therefore
not wonderful that the English of the books
written during these periods contains many words
adopted from Italian and Spanish. Some of these
did not take root in the language, but others are
still in current use, as attitude, cicerone, fiasco,
influenza, isolate, motto, stanza, umbrella, from
Italian, and ambuscade, desperado, disembogue, dis-
patch, grandee, negro, peccadillo, punctilio, renegade,
from Spanish. Amongst the very few words that
English owes to High German are bismuth, blende,
cobalt, gneiss, greywacke, quartz, shale, zinc, which
remind us that it was in Germany that mineralogy
first attained the rank of a science.

The English words taken from the other lan-
guages of Europe, and from languages of more
distant parts of the world, are chiefly names of
foreign products, or terms connected with the
customs of foreign peoples. From Portuguese we
have auto-da-fe, albatross, cocoa, dodo, verandah ;
from modern Greek, valonia ; from Russian,
drosky, knout, verst, steppe \ from Turkish, caftan,

104 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

coffee, effendi, horde ; from modern Scandinavian
tongues, eider, geysir, kraken, sloyd, tungsten. The
many languages of our Indian Empire are abun-
dantly represented in our English dictionaries.
The number of Malay words in English is sur-
prisingly large, and though most of them are
probably known to few people, the list includes
the Tamiliar gingham, gong, gutta-percha, lory,
orang-outan, amuck, ketchup. China has given us
tea, and the names of the various kinds of tea ; a
good many other Chinese words figure in our
larger dictionaries, though they cannot be said to
have become really English. From Japan, besides
the terms relating to the art and the institutions
of that country, we have rickshaw, which seems
likely to become naturalized in -an application un-
known in its native land. The Polynesian dialects
yield two words that are in everyday use, taboo
and tattoo. The languages of the New World
have contributed some hundreds of words ; and
although many of these, such as squaw and wig-
wam, are used only in speaking of the peoples to
whose tongues they belong, there are not a few
(e.g. tobacco, potato, toboggan, moccasin, pemmicari)
which we never think of regarding as foreign.

The increase of the English vocabulary by
additions from foreign sources has been so

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 105

enormous that the words of native etymology
bear a very small proportion to the whole
number of words given in our modern dictionaries.
It is true that not a quarter of the words in the
dictionaries are really familiar to the mass of
well-educated readers. But even if we take the
actual vocabulary of modern novels or newspaper
articles, it still remains true that the words of
Old English origin are far outnumbered by those
derived from other tongues.

It has often been contended that the influx
of foreign words into English has enfeebled
instead of strengthening the language, and that
it would have been better if, instead of taking
over words from French and Latin, our country-
men had, like the Germans, supplied the
need for new words by forming compounds and
derivatives from the words belonging to the
native stock. The advocates of this view
have, no doubt, some facts on their side. It is
a real defect in English that such words as
mind and mental, eye and ocular, sun and solar,
moon and lunar, bone and ossify, have no formal
relation corresponding to their relation in mean-
ing. And we shall see in a subsequent chapter
(p. 119) that our language has suffered some

io6 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

injury in the partial loss of its capacity for
forming compound words. On the whole, how-
ever, the effect of the etymological diversity of
the vocabulary has been to provide the language
with an unequalled profusion of approximate
synonyms expressing subtle shades of difference
in meaning and in tone of feeling. The dis-
tinction between such pairs of words as paternal
and fatherly, fraternity and brotherhood, celestial
and heavenly, fortune and luck, felicity and
happiness, royal and kingly, is very real to an
Englishman who knows his own language, but
is not easy to render in any other tongue.

It is true, as a general rule, that when there
are two words expressing approximately the same
notion, one of them being of native and the
other of French or Latin etymology, the native
word is the one that has the fuller emphasis,
and the greater richness of emotional suggestion.
This fact, however, by no means justifies the
rule which some writers have laid down and
tried to carry out in practice, that ' Anglo-Saxon '
words should be substituted for those of Latin
etymology wherever it is possible to do so.
Over-emphasis, force of diction in excess of the
strength of the feeling that is to be rendered,
is a falsity in style no less blameworthy than

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 107

the opposite vice of inadequate expression. It
must be remembered, also, that the peculiar
depth of meaning of our native English words
is largely due to the existence of the less
vigorous synonyms of Latin origin, which enables
us to reserve the nobler words for noble uses.
If we accustom ourselves to use strong words
where no emphasis is needed, and words fraught
with beautiful suggestion when our matter is
trivial, we shall be merely contributing to the
debasement of our native language. The cry for
' Saxon English ' sometimes means nothing more
than a demand for plain and unaffected diction,
and a condemnation of the idle taste for " words
of learned length and thundering sound," which
has prevailed at some periods of our literature.
So far, it is worthy of all respect ; but the
pedantry that would bid us reject the word fittest
for our purpose because it is not of native origin
ought to be strenuously resisted.

It is not uncommon to meet with sneers at
the pedantry of English men of science in fram-
ing their technical words from Greek and Latin,
when they might express their meaning by
words taken from the vocabulary of common
life. There is no doubt that it is foolish to
use technical terms when scientific precision is

lo8 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

unnecessary, and where the meaning may be as
well expressed in words intelligible to the un-
learned. But, on the other hand, every science
needs its special vocabulary of terms that can
be definitely limited to one precise meaning.
It would have been possible to construct a
vocabulary for modern science consisting of
popular words taken in arbitrarily restricted
senses, and of compounds formed out of native
English elements. In German, indeed, this kind
of thing has been done to a very considerable
extent But it is often a positive disadvantage
that a scientific word should suggest too obtru-
sively its etymological meaning. A term which
is taken from a foreign language, or formed
out of foreign elements, can be rigidly confined
to the meaning expressed in its definition ; a
term of native formation cannot be so easily
divested of misleading popular associations. If,
for example, the English founders of the science
of geology had chosen to call it ' earth-lore,'
every one would have felt that the word ought
to have a far wider meaning than that which
was assigned to it. The Greek compound, which
etymologically means just the same thing, has
been without difficulty restricted to one only of
the many possible applications of its literal

in.] WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES 109

sense. Sometimes also a scientific term embodies
in its etymology a notion which the progress of
discovery shows to have been erroneous or im-
perfect : thus the name oxygen, formed by the
French chemists from Greek elements, literally
implies that the element so called is the dis-
tinctive constituent of acids. If our chemists,
instead of adopting the word as it stands, had
framed a native compound of corresponding
meaning (as the Germans have done in their
Sauerstojf), the retention of the name would
have had the inconvenient result of suggesting
to beginners in chemistry an erroneous notion.
As it is, we can continue to speak of ' oxygen '
without thinking of its etymology, while if we
do happen to know the literal sense we may
learn from it an interesting fact in the
history of science. There is some ground
for the complaint that the student who is
ignorant of Greek and Latin may find the
existing terminology of modern science a
severe burden on his memory. But this disad-
vantage, though real, is far smaller than those
that would result from any thoroughgoing attempt
to introduce vernacular equivalents for the terms
of classical derivation. It is, however, much to
be desired that men of science would take

i io THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CH. in.]

greater pains to fashion their new words in
accordance with correct philological principles.

Against the sentimental purism that regards
mixture in language as a sin which no gain in
expressive power can atone for, it would be vain
to attempt to argue. But if we are content to
estimate the worth of a language by its effi-
ciency in fulfilling the purposes for which
language exists, we cannot reasonably deny that
English has been immeasurably improved by its
incorporation of alien elements. The slender
vocabulary of Old English might, no doubt,
have attained a great degree of copiousness
purely by development of its native resources,
without foreign aid ; but, so far as we can see,
the subtlety and varied force characteristic of
modern English could never have been acquired
by this means. It is true that our language is
a difficult instrument to use with full effect, on
account of its richness in those seeming
synonyms which ignorant or careless writers
employ without discrimination ; but in skilled
hands it is capable of a degree of precision and
energy which can be equalled in few languages
either ancient or modern.

CHAPTER IV.
WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH.

THE English language has augmented its resources
not only by the adoption of words from other
tongues, but also by the making of new words.
There are three possible ways in which a new word
can be made : ( i ) by Composition, which means the
joining together of two existing words to form a
compound ; (2) by Derivation, which means the
making of a new word out of an old one, usually
by the addition of some prefix or suffix which is
not itself a word, but is significant in combina-
tion ; and (3) by Root-creation, which is the
invention of an entirely new word, usually either
imitative of some inarticulate noise, or suggested
by some instinctive feeling of expressiveness.

§ 1. Composition.

A compound word is a word formed by joining
two or more words to express a meaning that

H2 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

could be rendered by a phrase of which the
simple words form part. Some languages have
no compound words at all ; and those which
have them do not all form them after the same
manner. The principles of English word-com-
pounding are, to a great extent, inherited from
the primitive Indo-Germanic language. In those
kinds of compounds that most frequently occur,
the last element expresses a general meaning, which
the prefixed element renders less general. Thus
an apple-tree is a tree, but only a particular kind
of tree. In the original Indo-Germanic language
the prefixed element in a compound of this sort
was not, properly speaking, a word, but a word-
stem : that is to say, a word deprived of those
grammatical characters — case, number, gender,
mood, tense, person, etc., which it would possess
if it occurred separately in a sentence.1 It has
still this character, so far as meaning is concerned,
in those English compounds that are formed on
the inherited pattern. Thus apple- in apple-tree is
neither singular nor plural, neither nominative,

1This comes out clearly in such a language as Greek, which has
preserved the primitive Indo-Germanic system of inflexions. Thus
oikodespoles is Greek for ' master of a house ' ; but while despotes,
'master,' is a real word, oiko-, 'house,' is only a stem. To make
it into a word, capable of being used in a sentence, we must add the
endings that mark case and number, as in oikos, nom. sing., oikon,,
ace. sing., oikou^ gen. sing., oikoi, nonx. pi., oikous, ace. plural.

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 113

accusative, nor genitive. Hence the phrase for
which such a compound is the condensed expres-
sion admits of great variety of form ; the former of
the two words may occur in it in any case or in
either number ; and the meaning of the compound
varies accordingly. A tree-frog is a frog that lives
in trees ; a tree-fern is a fern that is a tree ; a
tree-fruit is the fruit produced by a tree. As a
general rule, our knowledge of the things denoted
by the simple words guides us at once to a
correct understanding of the meaning of the com-
pound. This, however, is not always the case.
A house-boat might very well mean a sort of boat
usually kept in a boat-house, or a boat that
belongs to a house, or that supplies the needs of
houses. It is only custom that has decided that
the compound word shall mean a boat that serves
as a house. The general meaning of this class
of compounds might be expressed by saying that
the noun which is formed of the two nouns A and
B means ' a B which has some sort of relation to
an A or to A's in general.'

The compounds formed by prefixing one noun
to another, however, constitute only one out of
the many classes of compounds which exist in
English. There are compounds of adjective and
noun, as blackbird, hotbed ; of adverb and noun, as

H

ii4 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

downfall', of noun and adjective, as grass-green,
purse-proud, penny-wise ; of adjective or adverb
and adjective, as dark-blue, ever-young', and of noun
or adjective and verb, as wiredraw, whitewash ;
and the very many compounds of adverb and.
verb, such as overcome, inlay, outlive, upturn. In all
these cases the literal meaning of the compound is
that of the last element, only limited or specialized.
There are other compounds to which this descrip-
tion is not applicable. We have, for instance,
adjectives like barefoot (having the feet bare) ;
nouns like redstart (a bird which has a red ' start '
or tail) ; and adjectives like long-haired, five-leaved,
lion-hearted, which are derivatives formed from
combinations of two words. From the fifteenth
century onwards many compound nouns and
adjectives have been formed in imitation of French,
in which the first element is a verb-stem (in the
original examples it was the imperative of a verb)
and the second element is a noun denoting the
object of the action, as in breakfast, breakneck,
kill-joy, makeshift, save-all, scapegrace, scarecrow,
spendthrift, tosspot, turnkey. We have also many
nouns and adjectives compounded with a verb-
stem and an adverb, as break-up, come-down,
knock-out, run-away.

Some of the types of compounds enumerated

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 115

above are formed on patterns which have
come down by tradition from times before the
English or even the Germanic language had any
existence, when the elements that were joined in
composition were not words but mere word-stems;
while others were originally what are called by
grammarians 'improper' or 'spurious' compounds.
An improper compound is a phrase consisting
of words in regular syntactical relation, which
has come to be regarded as a single word. Such,
in modern English, are father-in-law ', man-of-
war, jews'-harp. Words like tradesman and
gownsman may be regarded as improper com-
pounds, because they are at any rate imitated
from phrases in which the first word was a noun
in the genitive case.

From the point of view of the modern language,
in which the loss of inflexions has obscured the
difference between words and word-stems, and in
which the attributive use of the noun is an
ordinary part of syntax, the distinction of ' proper'
and ' improper ' compounds is only partially valid ;
but historically it is of considerable importance.

As any page of an ' Anglo-Saxon ' dictionary
will show, compound words were abundant in
Old English; and in every succeeding age of
the language a multitude of new compounds have

ii6 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

come into existence. And yet, if we take a page
of modern German and place beside it a good
translation into English, we shall not fail to
perceive that the compound words are very
much more numerous in the German original
than in the English rendering. Another note-
worthy fact is that a great number of compounds,
once generally used, are now obsolete, although
the simple words composing them are still
universally familiar. It may be worth while to
inquire why this has happened.

Although word-composition, in those lan-
guages which freely admit it, is one of the
readiest means of supplying the need for new
words, compounds are often somewhat awkward
in actual use. A compound word is a descrip-
tion, often an imperfect description ; and when
an object of perception or thought is familiar
to us, we desire that its name shall suggest the
thing to our minds directly, and not through
the intervention of irrelevant ideas. Accordingly,
a compound word for a simple notion gives a
certain sense of inconvenience, unless we are
able to forget its literal meaning. It is true
that we frequently succeed in doing this : we
use multitudes of compound words without
mentally analysing them at all. In such cases

iv.] WORD- MAKING IX ENGLISH 117

the compound often undergoes processes of
phonetic change which a distinct consciousness
of its etymological meaning would not have
allowed to take place. Thus the Old English
godspel, literally 'good tidings' (which early
became godspel, through misreading the first
element as ' God ' instead of ' good '), is now
gospel ; the late Old English husbonda, a com-
pound of hus house and bonda dweller, cul-
tivator, is now not housebond but husband; the
poetical designation day's eye is now daisy, a
word which we never think of as containing
two elements ; holy day has become holiday ;
Christ's mass is now Christmas, with an altered
pronunciation which quite disguises the first
word. This process is especially observable in
place-names, where, even more than in ordinary
compound words, the original descriptive meaning
is a palpable irrelevance. Very few names of
English places are now intelligible to persons
unlearned in etymology, even when the separate
words of which they are composed are still
familiar in everyday speech. The Old English
stdn survives as ' stone,' and tun as ' town ' ;
but the place-name Stdntun is now not ' Stone-
town ' but ' Stanton.' Pedridan-tTin, the ' town '
or farm enclosure on the river Pedride, is now

uS THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Petherton, though the name of the river has
come to be pronounced ' Parret.'

A consideration of these and similar examples
will show that compound words have often the
disadvantage that their etymological meaning
has to be forgotten before they can become
quite „ satisfactory instruments of expression. It
would appear that the English are, from what-
ever cause, more conscious of this inconvenience
than are the speakers of some other languages.
At any rate, although many new compounds
have been formed in every period of the
language, a large proportion of them have been
short-lived or of very limited currency : the
general tendency has been to replace them by
other- words. In the Middle English period
this tendency was fostered by the circumstance
that the two fashionable languages, French and
Latin, make very little use of composition ;
and the common practice of adopting words
from these languages made it easy to find
substitutes for the native compounds. The Old
English names for arts and sciences — such as
Itececrxft (leechcraft) for medicine, scopcrxft for
poetry, tungolcrseft for astronomy, rlmcrseft for
arithmetic — disappeared early from the language,
their places being taken by words adopted

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 119

through French from Latin, or through French
and Latin from Greek. The fourteenth century
monk who wrote ayenbite (of inwyf} for ' remorse
(of conscience) ' did not succeed in inducing any
other writer to use his new word : the Latin-
French synonym was felt to be better for its
purpose. Even now, a well-established compound
is often partly superseded by a simple word or a
derivative : for example, we use the word steamer
more frequently than steamboat or steamship.

The habit of freely adopting foreign words,
which has been produced by the conditions under
which the English language has been developed,
has had the good effect of relieving us from the
necessity of having recourse to composition in
cases where a compound, as such, is less suitable
for our purpose than a simple word. But, on the
other hand, our language has lost something of its
capacity for forming compounds even where they
would be useful. When Carlyle, imitating the
German Schadenfreude, speaks of " a mischief-joy,
which is often a justice-joy," we somehow feel that
these formations are alien to the genius of the
language, though if it were not for this the words
would have been welcome additions to our voca-
bulary. It would seem un-English to say that a
person was rank-proud, though the apparently

120 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

analogous purse-proud has long been a recognised
word ; and country-love or virtue-love for ' love of
country,' ' love of virtue,' would be equally in-
admissible. And yet not only does modern
English possess an enormous number of com-
pounds, but new ones are continually introduced ;
and, what is still more remarkable, many of these
additions to our language, when we first hear
them, do not seem in the slightest degree novel.
Probably nobody has ever used or ever will use
the word purple-eared ; but if the meaning ever
needs to be expressed no one will say that the
word is not English. It is not easy to say
definitely what kinds of compounds are rejected
by the instinct of the language and what kinds
are freely admitted. In general, the new com-
pounds that find ready acceptance are those
which belong to some particular type or pattern
which is exemplified in a large number of common
words. One such type is that of the so-called
' parasynthetic ' formation, like blue-eyed, long-
haired, swallow-tailed. English idiom leaves us
almost as free to invent new compounds of the
type of blue-eyed as to invent new phrases of
the type of with blue eyes. When one or both the
elements happen to be very commonly used in
combinations of this kind, the compound adjective,

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 121

whether we have met with it before or not, is
quite as natural a mode of expression as the
equivalent phrase. But when this is not the case,
the ' parasynthetic ' adjective, though still allow-
able, strikes us as somewhat artificial, and a
composition in which such words occur very
frequently is apt to sound affected.

There are several other types of composition
which are so familiar to us from the multitude of
existing specimens that we can employ them
almost without restriction to form new words.
For instance, we seldom hesitate to make, when-
ever we feel the need of it, a new compound on
the pattern of coach-house, hair-brush, water-jug,
where the first element indicates the particular use
to which the object designated is adapted. It
may be remarked that the composition of long
polysyllables is generally avoided as ungraceful :
and, further, that most of the words derived from
French and Latin appear somewhat unfrequently
in compounds, probably because in the periods
when word-composition was most frequent they
were still felt to be more or less exotic.

With reference to the formation of compound
verbs, modern English is somewhat peculiar in
its usages. Perhaps the reader may be familiar
with the practice of modern German in dealing

122 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

with what are called separable prefixes. In the
German dictionaries we find a verb aufgeben,
compounded of the adverb auf ' up ' and the verb
geben ' to give.' In the infinitive this is written
as one word, the adverbial part coming first. So
it is, under certain conditions, in the indicative
andv subjunctive ; but ' I give it up ' is ordinarily
rendered in German by ich gebe es auf, where
the two elements are treated as separate words,
the adverb coming last, with the object-pronoun
between it and the verb. Now combinations of
this sort may, from one point of view, be regarded
as phrases rather than as compounds ; the adverb
and the verb are really separate words. The
idiom of the language requires that under some
conditions the adverb shall precede the verb
and that under other conditions it shall follow
it ; and in the former case custom has ordered
that the two words shall be written as one. In
Old English the position of the adverb was
similarly variable (though the rules for its position
were not so strict as in German) ; but in modern
English prose we must always put the adverb
last. In poetry, indeed, there are exceptions.
Browning writes :

" Then a beam of fun outbroke
On the bearded mouth that spoke."

iv.] WORD-MAKING IX ENGLISH 123

But outbroke is merely poetical : in plain prose
we must say ' broke out.' We can, if we please,
call give up, break out, set up, put through, and
such like, ' compound verbs ' ; and in a certain
sense the appellation is quite justifiable. If we
adopt this nomenclature the number of compound
verbs in English is beyond all calculation, and
in fact we are continually inventing new ones.
In its power of expressing fine distinctions of
meaning by this method English vies with Greek
and German, and has a great advantage over
the Romanic languages, which' have hardly any
compound verbs at all.

But alongside these ' virtual compounds,'
English has a considerable number of verbs
formed with prefixed adverbs, such as overtake,
upset, understand. In most cases their meaning
is not obvious from their composition, and it is
usually quite different from that of the com-
bination of the verb with the following adverb.
' To overtake a person ' does not mean the same
as ' to take a person over ' ; 'to upset a thing '
happens to have a meaning quite opposite to
that of ' to set a thing up.' Compounds of this
class originated in an older stage of the language :
the principle of composition which they represent
has almost died out, so that as a rule we cannot

124 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

form any new words on the same pattern. We
can, it is true, with some degree of freedom,
prefix over and under, with the sense ' too much,'
' too little,' to verbs ; but in general the modern
feeling of the language resists the introduction
of compounds of this kind, and very few of
them have come in since the sixteenth century.
It is equally foreign to the spirit of the modern
language to add to the number of those com-
pound nouns or adjectives which are formed
by prefixing an adverb to a verb-stem, a verbal
noun, or a participle, such as outbreak, outfit,
income, downfall, downsitting, uprising, onlooker,
outfit, forthcoming, downtrodden. The method of
formation of these words is a relic of the time
when in a verbal phrase the adverb could precede
the verb — when, for instance, it was as natural
to say ' to out break ' as 'to break out ' ; but
new compounds of the kind could be easily
formed down to the seventeenth century. They
are fairly abundant, and admirably expressive ;
but we have almost x entirely ceased to form

1 A word of this formation which has recently gained some currency
in journalistic use is upkeep, meaning '(cost of) keeping-up.' It
appears to have been imported from the Scottish dialect, in which
this mode of composition has been more generally used than
in standard English. From the same source we have obtained
outcome (brought into literary English by Carlyle) and uptake.

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 125

new words on the same pattern. Although we
perhaps more frequently say ' to fit up ' than ' to
fit out/ it would seem very eccentric to speak
of an upfit, or an upfitter; and we should not
think of using downbroken as a parallel to down-
trodden. Cyclists talk of ' lighting-up time,' not
of ' uplighting time,' which would be quite un-
idiomatic. Indeed many such compounds that
were once current are now gone out of general
use. The translators of our Bible could write
' My downsitting and mine uprising ' ; but in
natural modern English the equivalent expression
would be ' my sitting down and my rising up.'
Not long ago a very able foreign scholar, writing
a grammatical treatise in English, puzzled his
readers by using the word down-toners as a name
for the class of adverbs which (like rather, some-
what} ' tone down ' the force of the words to
which they are prefixed. No doubt, if the
phrase ' to tone down ' had existed in the
sixteenth century, a writer of that period could
have spoken of a ' down-toner ' without any risk
of not being understood. But in this respect
the language has undergone a change, which
may be a change for the worse, but which it
would be vain to try to resist.

The composition of an agent-noun with a

126 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

following adverb, which was foreign to English in
its earliest stages, has been fairly common from
the fourteenth century onwards. Chaucer has
" holdere up of Troye " ; Lydgate speaks of
Nimrod as "fynder up of false religions";
Shakspere has "the finder-out of this secret";
the Bible of 1611 has "a setter-forth of
strange gods " ; later examples of this mode
of formation are cutter-out, hanger-on, filler-in,
Jitter-up.

The English of poetry and of impassioned
writing differs considerably in its principles of
word-composition from the English of ordinary
prose. Most of the compounds that are in
ordinary use are too lifeless, too unsuggestive, or
too trivial in association to be freely employed in
poetry, while, on the other hand, our poets have
generally assumed great liberty in the invention
of compounds which in prose would be quite
inadmissible. In this respect, however, there are
great differences between poets, even those who
are most nearly equal in rank. While Shakspere
abounds with splendid audacities such as "proud-
pied April," " a heaven-kissing hill," "the world-
without-end hour," Spenser's inventions of this
kind are comparatively few, though the exceeding
felicity of some of them (as " self-consuming care,''

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 127

" silver-dropping tears ") causes them to make an
impression that has led many to suppose that
they are peculiarly characteristic of his style.
" Rosy-fingered Morn," which occurs in Spenser, is
a literal rendering of Homer's rhododaktulos Eos.
The translators of Homer, from Chapman down-
wards, have naturally been led to imitate the
compound epithets of the original ; and, partly
through this channel, and partly owing to the
classical learning of our poets, the copious word-
composition of Greek has had great influence on
the diction of English poetry. Of the greater
poets of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth is
the most sparing in the use of compounds, and
this characteristic may be accounted for by his
love of simplicity and naturalness of expression,
and his aversion to the production of poetic effect
by any other means than the direct appeal of
thought and feeling to the mind of the reader.
There is generally little in common between
Wordsworth and Byron ; yet Byron's rhetorical
fervour is little more favourable to the use of
this means of expression than is the simplicity of
the other poet. He employs but few compounds,
and hardly ever any that were not already
current. On the other hand, Shelley, Keats,
Tennyson, and Browning are all, for different

128 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

reasons founded in their diversities of poetic
temperament, remarkable for their fertility in
the invention of novel compounds. It would be
highly interesting to consider how the differences
of spirit and feeling in these poets reveal them-
selves in the different ways in which they employ
this- method of enriching their vocabulary ; but
the matter belongs rather to the domain of the
literary critic than to that of the student of
language.

§ 2. Derivation.

Old English was considerably less rich than
Modern English in methods of making new
words by derivation. It is true that a large
portion of the Old English vocabulary consists
of words derived from other words that existed
in the language. But very many of these de-
rivatives had been already formed before the
English came over from the continent, and the
processes, by which they were made had become
obsolete before the date of the earliest Old
English literature. Perhaps this statement may
need a little illustration to make it clear to
readers unacquainted with philology. Every-
body can see that the word laughter is derived
from the verb laugh ; and yet we should never

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 129

think of forming a new substantive by the same
process from any other verb. One of Mr. F. R.
Stockton's personages, indeed speaks of a dog
" bursting into barkter" but nobody would seri-
ously propose to coin a new word of this kind.
The ending -ter is no longer ' a living suffix,'
and, in fact, it had ceased to be such before
Old English existed as a separate language.
Many other suffixes which appear in Old Eng-
lish derivatives were, in like manner, never used
in the formation of new words.

There is in English a large class of deriva-
tive verbs which, if there were no other evidence
but that afforded by Old English itself, we
should have to regard as formed from other Old
English words, either nouns, adjectives, or verbs,
by altering their vowel. Thus we find a noun
talu, tale (in both senses, ' number ' and ' story ')
and a verb tellan, to tell (again in both senses,
' to count ' and ' to narrate ') ; a noun satu, sale,
and a verb sellan, to sell. Tynan, to enclose, is
derived from tun, enclosure ; bledan, to bleed, from
blod, blood ; bl&can, to bleach, from bide, white
or pale ; fiellan, to fell, cause to fall, from/eattan,
to fall. A comparison of these words with their
equivalents in the other Germanic languages

teaches us that the true account of their origin

i

1 30 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

is as follows : By the addition of a suffix -jo
(pronounced yo) to the stem of the substantive
adjective, or verb a new verb-stem was formed,
to which the endings of mood, tense, and
person were appended. The earlier forms of
the verbs above mentioned were taljan, sal/an,
tunjan, blodjan, blaikjan, falljan. In prehistoric
Old English the j in this position always pro-
duced an alteration in the vowel of the preced-
ing syllable (unless that vowel was z), and
caused the preceding consonant to be length-
ened or doubled if the vowel before it was
short. Hence taljan became first tell/an and
then tellan, blodjan became bledan ; and so with
the rest. But all this had already taken place
before Old English became a written language ;
and when it had taken place there was an end
to the possibility of forming any new ' verbs of
making or causing' by the process which had
previously been so easy. All the verbs appar-
ently formed by vowel change that existed in
Old English were inherited from prehistoric
times. Perhaps we might have expected that
new derivatives would have been formed by vowel-
change, in imitation of those which already
existed (for instance, a verb gedan, to make good,
might have been formed from god, imitating the

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 131

relation between col cool and celan to cool) ; but,
so far as we know, nothing of the sort ever
happened. The Old English language, at the
earliest period at which it is known to us, had
already lost one of the most useful of the means
for word-making which it originally possessed.

Almost all those modes of derivation which
were actually current in Old English have con-
tinued in constant use down to the present
time. Only a few of the most important of
them need be mentioned here. In Old English,
a verb could be formed from a noun by attach-
ing the conjugational endings to the stem of the
noun : thus, from wilcuma, a welcome guest, was
formed the verb wilcumian to welcome (ic wil-
cumige I welcome, ic wilcumode I welcomed).
'In later English, through the dropping away of
final syllables, the infinitive, the imperative, and
the plural and the first person singular of the
present indicative of the derived verb have the
same form as the primary noun, so that what
takes place seems to be not the making of a
new word but the using of a noun as a verb.
Hence the operation has become, in modern
English, so easy that we perform it almost un-
consciously. In colloquial language, we can
make new verbs with extraordinary freedom,

132 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

not only from nouns, but even from phrases.
" He ' my-dear-fellow'-ed me all the day," for
instance, is quite permissible conversational
English. Conversely, in modern English, we
have an almost unlimited number of nouns
which are merely verbs used substantively to
denote an act. We can speak of ' a wash,' ' a
shave,' ' a think,' ' a tumble down,' ' a dig in
the ribs.' Occasionally it happens that a noun
in this way gives rise to a verb, which in its
turn gives rise to another noun, all three words
being exactly alike in sound and spelling.
Thus, in the following examples: (i) 'The
smoke of a pipe,' (2) ' To smoke a pipe,' (3)
' To have a smokel the noun of ( i ) is not,
strictly speaking, the same word as the noun of
(3). It is true that in cases like this our
dictionaries usually treat the secondary noun as
merely a special sense of the primary noun ;
and, indeed, very often this treatment is un-
avoidable, because the difference of meaning
between the two is so slight that in some con-
texts it disappears altogether. Still, it ought not
to be forgotten that from the historical point of
view the two nouns are really distinct : if Eng-
lish had retained its original grammatical system
this would probably have been shown by a dif-

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 133

ference of termination, gender, or declension.
Sometimes an Old English substantive and the
verb derived from it have both survived, but,
owing to the kind of sound-change which we
have named ' divergent development,' the two
have little or no resemblance in sound. Under
these circumstances, the noun and the verb are
no longer distinctly recognised as correlated in
meaning, and the modern language has supplied
the need for a closely-connected pair of words
by turning the noun into a verb and vice versa.
For example, the verb bathe is, as its spelling still
shows, a derivative of bath ; but in pronunciation
the two have nothing in common but the initial b.
Hence, we now speak of ' a bathe,' which does not
mean quite the same as ' a bath ' ; and, on the
other hand, the noun bath has given rise to a verb
' to bathl which differs in meaning from ' to bathe'
The following words of modern origin may
serve to illustrate the freedom with which we
can still form new derivatives by means of suffixes
inherited from Old English : cleverness, cleverly,
gentleman/j>, roguish, thinker, noisy, horsemanj///)>.
The English reader will be able at once to re-
collect many other words formed with each of
these suffixes, and will perceive also that he
might, without seeming at all eccentric in so

134 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

doing, venture to use any one of them to form
quite new words. Similarly, we can prefix the
Old English negative particle un- to almost any
descriptive adjective. There is another prefix un-
(of different origin) which we can prefix quite
freely to verbs to express a reversal of the action,
as in unfasten, uncover ; and the list of verbs
formed with be- (like befog, bemuddle) is almost
interminable.

There are one or two Old English suffixes for
which the later language has discovered new uses.
The ending -isc (now -isJi] was in Old English
chiefly used to form adjectives from names of
places or peoples, as in Englisc English, Lundenisc
Londonish. It was also appended in a few
instances to common nouns to form adjectives
of quality, as in folcisc popular (from folc, ( folk,'
people), cildisc childish. The suffix -ish is still a
living formative in both these uses. But about
1400 it began to be attached to names of colour,
to form adjectives denoting a colour approaching
that expressed by the simple word, as in bluish,
blackish. On the analogy of the adjectives thus
formed it afterwards became common to add -ish
to any sort of descriptive adjective, in order to
express a slight degree of the quality which they
indicate. It was thenceforth possible, instead of

IV.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 135

saying ' somewhat good ' or ' somewhat bad,' to
express the idea by the single word goodish or
baddish. To the characteristic English love of
brevity this innovation was welcome ; and in
modern English we can append the suffix to any
adjective denoting a quality that admits of
degrees.

The ending -ly, representing the Old English
-lice, forming adverbs of manner from adjectives,
became in Middle English much more common,
because the final -e, which in Old English was the
ordinary adverbial suffix, ceased to be pronounced,
so that the adjective and its related adverb
became identical in form. Early in the sixteenth
century, the need was felt for adverbs to indicate
position in a numbered series ; that is to say, for
single words with such meanings as ' in the first,
second, or third place.' The need was supplied
by the addition of the adverbial ending -ly to the
ordinal numeral, as in firstly, secondly, thirdly,
fourthly, which were unknown to the older lan-
guage.

Since the close of the Old English period, the
vocabulary of our language has been enriched
by a multitude of new derivatives formed with
the prefixes and suffixes that already existed

136 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

in Old English ; and there can be no doubt that
the formation of new words by this means will
continue in the future. But the native machinery
of derivation, though very little of it has become
obsolete, has not been found sufficient for the
necessities of the language, and has been largely
supplemented by additions obtained from other
languages. The adoption of foreign formative
machinery has been rendered possible by the fact
that many Latin and French primitive words have
been taken into the English language along with
their derivatives, formed with French or Latin
suffixes. When such pairs of words as derive and
derivation, esteem and estimation, laud and lauda-
tion^ condemn and condemnation, had found their
way, into the English vocabulary, it was natural
that the suffix -ation should be recognised by
English speakers as an allowable means of
making ' nouns of action ' out of verbs. This
particular suffix supplied a real want, because the
only native means of forming nouns of action
was the suffix -ing, which was not quite definite
enough in meaning. It is true that this foreign
suffix has not been very extensively attached to
native words ; as a rule, it has been felt to be
more in accordance with fitness to adopt French
or Latin nouns of action ready made. Still, such

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 137

words as botheration, starvation, fairation, flirta-
tion, backwardation, show that -ation has to some
extent been regarded as an English formative.
Another foreign suffix, -ative, though very common
in words of Latin derivation, has been appended
to a native verb only in one instance, viz. talkative.
Such formations as unwalkative have been em-
ployed jocularly, but have never taken root in the
language.

In some instances the attempt to naturalize
a foreign suffix has failed because there was no
real need to be supplied. Wyclifs everlastingtee
(suggested by eternitee from eterne) did not find
acceptance ; the suffix -tee (now -ty} is confined
to words either taken from French or Latin, or at
least formed from French or Latin words. The
native -ness answered all purposes, and the intro-
duction of a foreign synonym was not required.

It was otherwise with many other French
suffixes, such as -age, -al (as used in withdrawal,
upheaval, betrothal], -ment, -able, which had
nothing corresponding to them in English, and
which have been used to form great numbers of
words that the language could badly afford to
do without The endings -ize, -ist, -ism, -ite,
originally Greek, have been very extensively used
in the formation of English derivatives.

138 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Old English, in comparison with most other
Indo-Germanic languages, was remarkably poor
in diminutive endings, and those which did exist
were sparingly used. One of them was -incel, as
in tunincel a little ' town ' or homestead ; but this
did not survive into Middle English. The ending
-ling can hardly be said to have had a diminutive
force in Old English, but it was frequently so used
in Old Norse, as in gteslingr, which was adopted
into English as gosling (dialectally gesling}.
The Norse suffix has in Modern English
become quite common as a means of forming
diminutive nouns. We have kingling, princeling,
squireling, and many similar words. In the
fourteenth century the Dutch or Flemish diminu-
tive ending -kin (identical with the German -cheri)
came into English use, chiefly from nicknames
like Willekin, little William, Jankin, little John.
The fashion of forming such nicknames from
Christian names became exceedingly popular, and
has left abundant traces in modern surnames like
Jenkins, Atkins, Dawkins, Wilkins. In imitation
of these proper names, the suffix was afterwards
attached to ordinary substantives, and in modern
English we can, at least in jocular speech, add
-kin to almost any noun to form a diminutive.
Even more common than -kin, and more dignified

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 139

in use, is -let, which we have adopted from French,
and have appended to many native words, as in
cloudlet, streamlet, brooklet, leaflet, ringlet, booklet.

There are two or three foreign prefixes that
have been so completely taken into English that
we use them almost or quite as freely as we do
those of native origin. The most useful of these
is the Latin re-, again. No dictionary will ever
contain all the words formed with this prefix that
have been used by English writers ; the com-
pounds of re- with verbs and nouns of action are
as innumerable as those of un- with adjectives.
In Middle English again- was often used as a
prefix, but the words so formed have become
obsolete : the English love of brevity has caused
the native prefix to be supplanted by the foreigner.
The Latin and French dis- comes next in fre-
quency of use. Although Lydgate, writing about
1430, uses the word distrust, it was not until a
hundred years later that it became a common
practice to attach this prefix to native words.
In 1659 a grammarian writes that dis-, like un-
and re-, " may be prefixed at pleasure." Perhaps
this statement was even at that time somewhat
exaggerated, and it would certainly be far from
correct now. Of the multitude of words beginning
with this prefix coined in the sixteenth and seven-

I40 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

teenth centuries the greater part are obsolete
(though many are still current, amongst them
being such familiar words as dislike, distaste, dis-
praise], and since 1 700 very few new ones have
come into use. The prefix, however, is still felt
to be quite English : no one would find any diffi-
culty in understanding such a word as dislove,
though it has perhaps never been used for cen-
turies. Writers of the nineteenth century have
used the verbs disgod, dishero, and the nouns
dishealth, discharity ; but formations of this kind
have now an appearance of being affected. The
French en- or em- has been used to form several
English derivatives, as endear, embody, embog,
enliven, ensnare, entangle. In recent times the
Greek anti-, against, has become thoroughly
naturalized. Words like anti-slavery, anti-vac-
cinator, anti-income-tax, anti-corn-law, anti-radical,
are intelligible to every one, and their number is
constantly increasing. Perhaps these formations
should be placed rather under the head of com-
bination than under that of derivation, though as
the preposition anti has no separate existence in
English this is a debatable question. There are
other foreign elements which have in the same
manner come into use as prefixes in the forma-
tion of English words, such as the Latin pro in

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 141

pro-Russian, pro-Boer ; post in post-Norman, post-
date ; ante in antedate, anteroom (imitating ante-
chamber, which is French) ; prw in pre-Roman,
pre-Conquest; co- in co-mate; sub in sub-let; ex
in ex-king ; inter in interlock, interleave ; non in
non-conductor, nonconformist, non-existence, non-
natural,

From these examples, to which many more
might be added, it will be seen that the
English language has not only very greatly
enriched its vocabulary by direct borrowing
from other tongues, but has also largely availed
itself of foreign aid to increase its power of
forming new words. There is very little in the
borrowed machinery of suffixes and prefixes
that can fairly be called superfluous. Almost
without exception, it has been adopted, not out
of foolish affectation, but because it supplied
the means of expressing necessary meanings
with a degree either of precision or of brevity
to which the native resources of the language
were inadequate.

According to the definition which we gave of
Derivation, ' the making of a new word out of
an old one,' it includes two processes which
have not hitherto been mentioned, but which

142 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

have had a considerable share in the formation
of the English vocabulary. These are Back-
formation and Shortening.

BACK-FORMATION.

There are many words in English which have
a fallacious appearance of containing some well-
known derivative suffix. It has not unfrequently
happened that a word of this kind has been
popularly supposed to imply the existence of a
primary word from which it has been derived
in the usual way. The result of this supposition
is the unconscious creation of a new word,
which is made out of the old one by depriving
it of what is thought to be its suffix, or some-
times by the substitution of a different suffix.
According to some eminent scholars, the verb
to beg has been in this way formed from beggar,
which is thought to be adopted from the old
French begar, a member of the religious order
called Beghards, who supported themselves, like
the friars, by begging. This etymology is dis-
puted ; but there are many other instances of the
process which are not open to question. The
noun butcher is really from the French bouchcr, and
the ending is not etymologically identical with

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 143

the common English suffix of agent-nouns ; but in
many dialects people have come to use the verb
to butch, and to speak of ' the butching business.'
Other dialectal back-formations are buttle, to
pour out liquor, from butler, and cuttle, to make
knives, from cutler. The noun pedlar is older
than the verb to peddle or the adjective ped-
dling, and broker than the verb to broke (now
obsolete) and the verbal noun broking. Grovel-
ling was originally an adverb, meaning ' face
downwards ' ; it was formed out of the old
phrase on grufe (which had the same meaning)
by adding the suffix -ling, which occurs in
many other adverbs, now mostly obsolete, such
as backling, backwards, headling, head-first. But
grovelling was misunderstood as a present par-
ticiple, and the verb grovel was formed from it,
Similarly the verbs sidle and darkle have been
formed out of the old adverbs sideling and
darkling. Probably the modern verb nestle is
not, as is commonly said, the same as the Old
English nestlian to build a nest, but has been
evolved from nestling, an inhabitant of a nest,
used adjectively as in 'nestling brood.' Many
of the words that have been formed by this
process are so happily expressive that the mis-
understanding that has given rise to them must

144 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

be accounted a fortunate accident. It is to be
hoped, however, that the adjective swashbuckling
(formed from swashbuckler •, literally one who
' swashes ' or flourishes his buckler), which has
been used by many recent writers, will not
obtain general currency. Proper names ending
in -ing have often given occasion to humourists
to treat them as verbal substantives, and to
evolve verbs from them. Some years ago there
was much talk about the ' Banting method ' of
reducing corpulence, invented by a gentleman
named Banting, and a verb to bant was for a
time widely used. Still more recently, the
uproarious rejoicings that hailed the news of
the relief of the town of Mafeking, besieged
by, the Boers in 1900, suggested to some
facetious journalist the formation of a verb to
maffick (meaning to indulge in noisy demonstra-
tions of patriotic joy), which is still common in
newspapers, and has found a place in some
dictionaries.

An excellent illustration of the working of this
process is seen in the origin of the verb edit. The
Latin editor, literally ' one who gives out,' from
the verb edere to give out, was after the invention
of printing often employed in a special sense as
denoting the person who ' gives to the world,' a,

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 145

book or other literary work of which he is not the
author. In this sense it has passed into English
and other modern languages. But under modern
conditions there are two different classes of
persons concerned in the production of a book, to
either of whom the word might be applied in its
literal meaning with equal propriety. The ' giver-
out' of a book — for instance, of a classical text
which has never before been printed — may mean
what we now call the ' publisher,' the man who
bears the expense of printing it, and makes the
arrangements for its circulation among the public,
or it may mean the scholar who puts the text into
order for publication, and provides it with such
illustrative matter as it is deemed to require. In
early times these two functions were often united
in the same person, but they are now ordinarily
divided. Now while in French ' editor ' (editeur)
has come to mean ' publisher/ in English it has
become restricted to the other of its possible
applications. When we use it we no longer think
of its literal sense : the prominent function of an
' editor ' is not that of issuing a literary work to
the public, but that of bringing it into the form in
which it is to appear. Although editor is not a
word of English formation, it has an ending which
coincides in form with that of English agent-nouns,

146 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

so that it has naturally suggested the coinage of a
verb ' to edit,' meaning ' to prepare for publication
as an editor does,' i.e. to put into such a form as is
thought suitable for the public to read. When we
say, usually with unfavourable meaning, that a
war correspondent's telegrams have been ' edited,'
we .mean that they have undergone alterations or
excisions in accordance with the press censor's
notion of the amount of information which ought
to be given to the public at home. Similarly, we
may say that the composition of an illiterate or
foolish person requires a great deal of 'editing' in
order to be suitable for publication. If instead of
adopting the Latin word, we had rendered it by
some such equivalent as outgiver (corresponding to
the German Herausgeber^ which is used quite in
the English sense of editor), there would have been
no opportunity for the ' back-formation ' of a verb
with a meaning so remote from the primary sense
of the substantive.

Under the head of ' back-formation ' we may
not inappropriately refer to those instances in
which an ending common to a group of words has
been treated as a separate word, denoting the
genus of which the things signified by the various
terms are species. The process is exemplified in
Bishop Warburton's definition " Orthodoxy is my

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 147

doxy, and heterodoxy is another man's doxy."
As it happens, doxy has not come into general use
as a synonym for ' mode of belief ' ; but we do
speak, colloquially, of isms and ologies ; and 'vert
(usually written with apostrophe) is, more or less
jocularly, used to designate a person who, from
opposite points of view, would be described as a
' twzvert ' or as a 'pervert' The now common
word cycle, meaning either a 'focycle' or a ' tri-
cycle,' is another example in point. Although it
may suit the convenience of lexicographers to
treat this word in the same article with the older
word cycle (as in Tennyson's "a cycle of Cathay"),
it is really an independent formation, which would
have come into existence even if the other word
of the same form had never been English.

SHORTENING.

The substitution, in hurried, careless, jocular
or vulgar speech, of a part of a word for the
whole, is common in most languages, and is
especially congenial to the English fondness for
brevity of utterance. It does not, by itself,
constitute a mode of word-formation : the vulgar
taters and bacca io* potatoes and tobacco, cannot be
called new words, any more than any other mis-

148 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

pronunciations can be so called. But when, as
very often happens, the original word and its
shortened form come both to be generally used
by the same speakers with different meanings, or
even only with a difference in the implied tone of
feeling, a real addition has been made to the
vocabulary of the language, and the lexicographer
is bound to recognise the shortened form as a
distinct word. Shortening, in such cases, is in the
strictest sense, a kind of derivation ; and it is a
process which has contributed not a little to
increase the English store of words.

Even when the abbreviated form expresses
precisely the same meaning as the original form,
the two must often be reckoned as separate words,
because the longer form is reserved for more
dignified or more serious use. Omnibus and bus
are synonymous in the sense that they denote the
same objects ; but they are not absolute synonyms,
because the one is more familiar in tone than the
other ; the two are used on different occasions.
The same thing may be said of photograph and
photo^ or bicycle and bike, though here the ab-
breviated forms are not universally accepted by
educated people as legitimate. Sometimes what
was at first only a jocular abbreviation has ousted
the longer form from general use, as in the case of

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 149

wig for periwig, which was originally an altered
pronunciation of peruke.

But very frequently a word which has teen
formed by shortening undergoes a sense-develop-
ment of its own, in which the original word does
not share. Even if anybody is pedantic enough
to deny that bus is a distinct word from omnibus,
he cannot refuse to admit that cab is a real word,
though it was originally a shortened pronunciation
of cabriolet. A cab and a cabriolet are not the
same kind of vehicle at all. So too Miss, the
title given to an unmarried woman, and Mrs.
(pronounced Missis] are now quite different in
meaning from each other, and from mistress, from
which both are derived by shortening. There
was a time when gent was used by educated
people as a familiar abbreviation for gentleman,
without any depreciatory implication. But in
this use it was gradually discarded from the
speech of the upper classes, and came to be a
contemptuous designation for the vulgar pretenders
to gentility in whose vocabulary it still survived.
Cit is a similar abbreviation for citizen or city man,
though its use was contemptuous from the be-
ginning.

Some words that originated as playful abbrevi-
ations of other words are now used without any

150 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

consciousness of their origin. Extra, in such
phrases as ' an extra allowance,' is not the Latin
word, but an abbreviation of extraordinary. An
extra, meaning an edition of a newspaper out of
the usual course, was at one time called ' an
extraordinary' Phiz does not, to most people
who use it, call up any recollection of physiognomy ;
and only students of etymology know that chap is
a shortening of chapman, properly meaning
' trader.'

In the Middle English and early Modern
English periods it was very common, in the hurry
of pronunciation, to drop an initial vowel which
immediately preceded the stressed syllable of a
word. In this way many words beginning with
a vowel came to have an alternative form from
which the first syllable was omitted ; and almost
in every case in which both forms have survived
a difference of meaning has been developed.
Assize and size are so different in sense that
no one could think of them as the same word,
and yet the one is only a shortened pronunciation
of the other. The standard magnitude of an
article of commerce was settled by an ' assize ' or
sitting of some constituted authority. Hence the
standard or authorized magnitude of anything was
called its assize or size, and afterwards the latter

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 151

form came to mean magnitude in general. Tend,
as in the phrase ' to tend the sick/ was origin-
ally the same word as attend', but the two verbs
are no longer synonymous. Alone, which stands
for an earlier all one, was in the Elizabethan
period shortened into lone when used as an
adjective. The Middle-English phrase on live,
equivalent to ' in life,' was commonly pronounced
alive, and this, by shortening, afterwards yielded
the adjective live. Mend was originally the
same word as amend. The shorter form, as
usual, serves for the trivial occasions of ordinary
life, while the longer form is of more dignified
application. We speak of mending a stocking,
but of amending an Act of Parliament Some-
times other prefixes than those consisting only
of a vowel were dropped in the same way. The
verb to vie is shortened from envie — not the same
word as the modern envy, but adopted from the
French envier, which comes from the Latin
invitare to challenge ; so that vie and invite are
in ultimate etymology the same. Fence is defence
without its prefix ; and fend, from which fender
is derived, is short for defend. Several words
that originally began with dis- or des- now begin
with s. Stain is a shorter form of distain, which
is the Old French desteindre, to take out the dye

152 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

of anything, from the prefix des-, dis-, and teindre
to dye. Despite, from the Old French despit,
the Latin despectus, a looking down, despising,
has become spite. No word now sounds more
thoroughly English than sport, which has, indeed,
been adopted from English into foreign languages ;
yet it is a shortening of disport, which is a word
of French origin. To ' disport oneself is, literally
interpreted, ' to carry oneself in a different direc-
tion ' from that of one's ordinary business ; and
hence disport and sport came to mean amusement
or pastime.

Besides the new words that owe their origin
to shortening in pronunciation, there are others
which have arisen out of abbreviations used in
writing. Sometimes the mere initials of a phrase
come to be treated as a word, the written letters
being represented in pronunciation by their names.
Thus we speak of ' a question of £ s. d. (el ess
dee) ' ; or, again, of ' an M.P. (em pee\' or ' a
D.C.L. (dee cee et)' meaning a person who is
entitled to write those initials after his name.
Sometimes, again, a word or phrase as abbreviated
in writing happens to yield a pronounceable
sequence of letters, and takes its place in the
language as a word. This occurs most fre^
quently with Latin phrases. Many of the

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 153

shortened forms are vulgar or jocular, as infra
dig, incog, nem. con., 'the pros and cons! But
per cent, cent pet cent, from the Latin (centum)
per centum, are part of the ordinary English
vocabulary. The most curious instance of the
formation of a word by this process is culprit.
Its origin is to be found in the strange corrupt
Norman French once used in our courts of
justice. When a prisoner had pleaded 'not guilty,'
the reply made on behalf of the Crown was
' culpable ; prest.' This meant ' (he is) guilty,
(and we are) ready (to prove it).' In the reports
of criminal cases the phrase was commonly
abbreviated cut. prest, and afterwards corruptly
cut. prit. Then in some way, not very clearly
understood, it seems to have come about that
the clerks of the Crown, modelling their pro-
cedure on the pattern set in the written reports,
fell into the practice of using the syllables cut
prit as an oral formula ; and as this formula
was followed by the question, ' How will you be
tried ? ' addressed to the prisoner, it was popularly
apprehended to mean ' guilty man.' The custom
survived in the courts down to the eighteenth
century ; but when culprit became a current
word with a new sense, it was probably felt
that there was an injustice in addressing a

154 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

prisoner by a term which presumed his guilt,
and the use of the formula was discontinued

§ 3. Root-Creation.

Perhaps few, even among professed students
of language, are aware how large a portion of
the English vocabulary has, in the ordinary sense
of the word, no etymology at all. We do not
mean merely that there are many words the
origin of which is and will always remain un-
known because of the imperfection of our means
of discovery. This is no doubt quite true. But
there are also many words which were neither
inherited from Old English, nor adopted from
any foreign language, nor formed out of any
older English or foreign words by any process
of composition or derivation. It is to instances
of this kind that the name of ' root-creation '
may be fitly applied.

One of the principal forms of root-creation is
that which is known by the name of Onomato-
poeia. The word is Greek, and literally means
' name-making.' It was used by the Greeks to
express the fact (common in their own as in
other languages) that a noise, or the object
producing it, sometimes makes its own name :

IV.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 155

that is to say, is denoted by a word formed in
imitation of the sound.

The number of ' echoic ' words (as they have
been called by Dr. Murray) which have arisen
in Middle and Modern English is very con-
siderable. We may mention as examples bang,
boo, boom, cackle, cheep, fizz, gibber, giggle, hiss,
hum, mumble, pop, quack, rumble, simmer, sizzle,
titter, twitter, whirr, whiz, whip-poor-will, and the
reduplicated words bow-wow, ding-dong, -flip-flop
hee-haw, ping-pong, pom-pom, rub-a-dub, tick-tack.

It is possible that some of the words in the
first part of this list may go back to Old English ;
words of this kind are much more common in
speech than in literature, and we are certainly
far from knowing the whole of the Old English
vocabulary. However, even if they are much
older than they can be proved to be, there is
no doubt that they are imitative in origin.

The imitation of inarticulate by articulate
sounds can never be accurate. Perhaps one or
two birds do really ' make their names ' ; though
even in the case of the cuckoo it is not quite
certain that we actually hear the two consonants.
But the cries of birds and animals, produced by
organs having more or less similarity to our own,
may be regarded as in some measure articulate.

156 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

In general the rendering of noises into the sounds
of human speech involves some play of fancy,
like that which is exercised when we see faces in
the fire, or landscapes in the clouds. The resem-
blance which an imitative word is felt to bear to
the inarticulate noise which it names consists not
so much in similarity of 'impression on the ear as
in similarity of mental suggestion. For instance,
it is not at all literally true that a gun, or a
heavy body impinging on a door, ' says bang!
But the sequence of three sounds of which the
word consists is of such a nature that it can
easily be uttered with force, so as to suggest the
startling effect of a sudden violent noise, while
the final consonant admits of being prolonged to
express the notion of a continued resonance. In
this instance and in many others, the so-called
' imitative ' word represents an inarticulate noise
not so much by way of an echo as symbolically.
That is to say, the elements composing the sound
of the word combine to produce a mental effect
which we recognise as analogous to that produced
by the noise.

In much the same way, the sound of a word
may suggest ' symbolically ' a particular kind of
movement or a particular shape of an object.
We often feel that a word has a peculiar natural

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 157

fitness for expressing its meaning, though it is
not always possible to tell why we have this
feeling, and the reasons, when we can trace
them, are different in different cases. Sometimes
the notion of natural fitness is an illusion, due to
the fact that the word obscurely reminds us of
the sound of several other words which happen to
have meanings somewhat similar to that which
it expresses. But quite often the sound of a
word has a real intrinsic significance. For
instance, a word with long vowels, which we
naturally utter slowly, suggests the idea of slow
movement. A repetition of the same consonant
suggests a repetition of movement, slow if the
vowels be long, and rapid if the vowels be short.
The vowels that are produced by the passage of
the breath through a narrow opening, such as ee
or £, are suited to convey the notion of something
slender or slight, while a full vowel such as oo
suggests a massive object. A syllable ending in
a stopped consonant, especially an unvoiced one
like /, t, k, preceded by a short vowel, affords a
natural expression for the idea of some quick and
abrupt action. Sequences of consonants which
are harsh to the ear, or involve difficult muscular
effort in utterance, are felt to be appropriate In
words descriptive of harsh or violent movement.

158 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

It would be possible to say a great deal more
about the inherent symbolism of sounds ; but it
is not necessaiy here to pursue the subject in
further detail. The point that needs to be re-
marked is that this phonetic symbolism (which
probably had a large share in the primary origin
of human language) has led to a very large
amount of root-creation in Middle and Modern
English. It is worthy of note that many of the
words that have in this way been invented as
instinctive descriptions of action or form occur
in groups of two or three, in which the consonants
are alike, while the vowel is varied to express
differences of mental effect. Thus we have bleb,
blob, blub-cheeked, all denoting something inflated.
The initial bl was perhaps suggested by the verb
bloiff^ the pronunciation of the syllables involves
an inflation of the cheeks which is symbolical
of the notion common to the three words, and
the different degrees of fullness in the vowels are
obviously significant of differences of size in the
object denoted. Other instances in which the
notion expressed by the consonantal skeleton is
modified by difference in the vowel are jiggle,
j°ggle > flipi flaP-> fl°P >' chip, chap, chop ; fimble,
f amble, fumble ; flash, flush.

Among the many words that owe their origin

iv.] WORD-MAKING IN ENGLISH 159

to a sense of the intrinsic expressiveness of par-
ticular combinations of sounds are bob, brob,
bunch, dab, dodder, fiddle-faddle, fidge, fidget,
flabbergast, fudge, hug, hugger-mugger, hump, jog,
see-saw, squander, squelch, throb, thump, thwack,
twiddle, wobble. Some of these, it is true, may
in a certain sense be said to have an etymology ;
but their actual meaning is not due to the
word, native or foreign, that may have suggested
their formation in the first instance, but to the
impression which is made by their mere sound.
Many excellent examples of intentional root-
creation may be found among the invented words
(not intended to be permanent additions to the
language) in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland,
Through the Looking-glass, and The Hunting of
the Snark. These clever coinages derive their
effect partly from their suggestion of obscure
reminiscences of existing words, and partly from
real phonetic expressiveness. Two of them,
galumphing and the verb to chortle, have come
into pretty general use, and have found their
way into our dictionaries.

CHAPTER V.
CHANGES OF MEANING.

IN our discussion of the changes which the
English language has undergone, we have
hitherto spoken only of those which relate to its
grammatical structure, and those which consist
in the addition of new words to its vocabu-
lary. We have yet to speak of another class
of -changes, not less important, though less con-
spicuous, than these : the changes, that is to say,
which have taken place in the meaning of words.
The gradual change of signification in words
is a universal feature of human language ; and
it is not difficult to see why it is so. Even
the richest vocabulary must, in the nature of
things, be inadequate to represent the inexhaus-
tible variety of possible distinctions in thought.
.We can meet the continually occurring neces-
sities of expression only by using words in

CH. v.j CHANGES OF MEANING 161

temporary deviations from their ordinary senses.
The dullest and most prosaic persons do this,
of necessity and often unconsciously ; those who
have wit and imagination do it more freely and
more effectively. Very often these novelties of
meaning do not survive the temporary occasion
which gave them birth ; but when a new appli-
cation of a word happens to supply a generally
felt want it becomes a permanent part of the
language, and may in its turn, by a repetition of
the same process, give rise to other senses still
more remote from the original meaning. Some-
times the primary sense remains in use along
with the senses derived from it ; sometimes
it dies out, so that the word has exchanged
its old meaning for a number of new ones.

It is owing to such progressive changes that
so many of our words now bear two or more
senses that are altogether dissimilar, and some-
times even contradictory. If, for instance, we
turn to an ordinary dictionary for the senses of
the adjective fast, we find that one of them is
' immovable, and another is ' rapid in motion.'
It would be obviously absurd to suppose that
from the beginning one and the same word
can have expressed two notions so entirely
opposite. If we had no evidence to the contrary,

162 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

we might guess that two originally distinct
words had, in consequence of sound-change,
come to be pronounced alike. There are many
apparently similar cases in which this explana-
tion would be the true one ; but in the case of
fast it is the meaning and not the sound that
has altered, and the alteration is quite easy to
account for. The primary sense of fast is ' firm,
immovable.' But the notion of firmness, which
appears in the expression ' to stand fast,' was
developed, by an easy transition, into that of
strength and unwavering persistence in move-
ment. Hence it became possible to speak of
'running fast.' The adverb in this connexion
originally meant ' without slackening ' ; but when
it had acquired this meaning, it was natural that
it should pass into the modern sense ' rapidly.'
A later development of this sense is exemplified
when we speak of ' living too fast.' ' A fast
liver' and 'a loose liver' are expressions practically
equivalent, although originally, and still in other
connexions, the two adjectives are exactly oppo-
site in sense.

The adjective fine affords another instance of
a development that has issued in senses that
appear mutually contradictory. It sometimes
means ' slender ' or ' small,' as in 'a fine

CHANGES OF MEANING

163

needle,' 'fine grains,' and sometimes it means
the very opposite. A character in a modern
novel says : " He is not a fine child, for he
is remarkably small ; but he is a very pretty
one." The original sense of the word is
'highly finished.' As the result of high finish
is often to render the object worked upon
delicate or slender, the adjective came in cer-
tain applications to denote these qualities, even
when they are not the result of any process of
elaboration. On the other hand, the notion of
high finish naturally passed into that of beauty.
Hence the word was used as a general expression
of admiration ; and in cases where large growth
is a quality to be admired it practically assumes
the sense of ' large.'

These curious phenomena might, perhaps, be
paralleled in other languages ; and even in
English it is seldom that the development of
senses has given rise to absolutely contradictory
meanings for the same word. But the same
causes which, as we have seen, have produced
an exceptionally large amount of change in
the grammar and in the vocabulary of English,
have had a similar effect in the department of
signification. Although we continue to use some
thousands of words that already existed in Old

i64 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

English, there are comparatively few of them
which now mean neither more or less than
they did a thousand years ago. When we
compare modern English with modern German,
we find that very often the Germans continue
to use a word in its oldest sense, while in our
language its meaning is something strangely
different. We will give a few examples.

The adjective sad had in Old English the
sense of the corresponding German satt, satiated,
full to repletion, having had all that one wants
of anything. This continued to be the mean-
ing of the word down to the fourteenth century.
" Selden am I sad that semli for to se "
(seldom do I have my fill of beholding that
fair one), says a poet of the days of Edward
II. But a person who has satisfied his desire
for pleasure has lost his restlessness and excita-
bility ; he has become calm and serious, and
more likely to attend steadily to the business
of life. Hence in Chaucer's writings we find
the word sq/d has acquired the senses of 'calm,'
' serious,' ' trustworthy.' In Shakspere it often
means ' serious ' as opposed to trifling or merry.
" A jest with a sad brow," " in good sadness,"
are well-known examples of this use. But
already in Shakspere there are many instances,

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 165

such as " your sad heart tires in a mile-a," in
which the' sense of sad has been developed
through its use as the opposite of 'merry'; and in
the seventeenth century the word became restricted
in its present meaning of ' mournful.' The
midland and northern dialects of English show
a curious side-development of the meaning of
this word. By analogy with its use in describ-
ing persons who were serious and not easily
moved, it has come to be applied to material
substances in the sense of solid or compact.
In Yorkshire, ' sad bread ' is bread that has not
' risen ' properly, and is therefore not light or
spongy, as good bread ought to' be. The
derived verb ' to sad down ' means to press
something down, so as to make it more com-
pact ; and hence the ironmonger's trade name
for a smoothing-iron is sad-iron.

The original sense of glad has been preserved
unaltered by the German equivalent glatt, which
means ' smooth.' In Old English (as also in
Old Norse) this meaning had already ceased to
be current ; but the word was still used for
' shining ' or * bright,' as applied, for instance, to
gold, silver, jewels, and light. This was obviously
quite a natural development from its primitive
sense, for we make things shine by rubbing' them

166 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

smooth. It was equally natural that the sense
of * bright ' should pass into that of ' cheerful ' or
'joyous,' as it did already in Old English.
The word has now quite lost its old physical
applications, and, so far as plain prose is con-
cerned, its figurative meaning has undergone
some narrowing. Poets and rhetorical writers
carr still speak of ' a glad spirit,' ' a glad
landscape ' ; but in ordinary talk we express
this notion by other words, such as joyous,
joyful^ cheerful^ happy > while glad is used only to
characterize the state of feeling pleasure for
some specified cause.

The German Zaun still retains its original
sense of something that encloses, though the
meaning is now confined to the special application
' hedge.' In Old English tun (which is the older
form of Zaun) meant a piece of ground enclosed by
a fence, and specifically a farm with the buildings
upon it. The Old English farm-houses, sur-
rounded by the cottages of the labourers, developed
gradually into villages, and some of these, in
process of time, grew into still larger collections
of habitations. Thus the word tun (in modern
English town} has gradually changed its meaning.
From being applied to a single farm, it came
to denote a collection of houses (the many place-

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 167

names ending in -ton remain as evidence of this
stage in its history), and finally (when it had been
superseded in its humbler applications by the
French word village] it survived only as the
designation of an assemblage of dwellings larger
and more important than a village. But, as
readers of Waverley will remember, the Scottish
dialect has retained toun in the ancient sense as
applied to a farm-house and its appurtenances.

Again, we still find in modern German the
original senses, or nearly so, of the verbs write
and read) which in English are used only in
senses very remote from their primitive use.
Write is the same word as the German reiszen,
to jear. In the early Germanic tongue it meant
not only ' to tear,' but ' to scratch ' ; and in pre-
historic Old English it was specifically applied to
the act of scratching ' runes ' on a piece of wood
or stone, and afterwards it was extended to include
the action — identical in purpose though not in
form — of marking a piece of parchment or other
material with signs that corresponded to spoken
words. This use of the word became so im-
portant that its original sense was quite forgotten,
and does not occur at all in Old English litera-
ture. A word was needed to describe the action
of interpreting the meaning of written characters ;

168 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

and our ancestors supplied the want by using the
verb read (in Old English rwdari), which meant,
like its modern German equivalent rathen, to guess
a riddle. The noun riddle (in Old English rTedels]
is a derivative of this word. To the early English a
piece of writing was, we see, a mystery which only
the wise could solve. The new sense of the word
did jiot, as in the case of write, at once drive out
the older one : indeed ' to read a riddle ' still
occurs in literature, though it is no longer used in
ordinary speech. The German rathen, by the
way, means not only to guess, but to advise. In
poetry, and in the Scottish dialect, rede still has
this meaning, but we now regard it as a different
word from read, and distinguish the two by an
arbitrary variation in spelling.

The English tide is the same word as the
German Zeit, and in Old English it had the same
meaning, namely ' time.'1 But in Middle English
its application was restricted, so that it meant
chiefly the time of the periodical rise or fall of the
sea ; and afterwards it was used to supply the
want of a name for these phenomena themselves.
As the older sense was sufficiently expressed by
the synonym time, the word could be set free for
its new purpose.

1 Preserved in Christmastide, Shrovetide, Whitsuntide,

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 169

There are many other instances in which Ger-
man has retained the primary sense of a word,
while English has exchanged it for one that is
widely different. And even when the two lan-
guages agree in using a word in its original
meaning, it will commonly be found that in
English it has acquired a number of additional
senses which in German it has not. There is, it
is true, no lack of examples of an opposite kind * ;
indeed very few German words have lasted a
thousand years without gaining new meanings or
losing old ones. But it may perhaps be said that
there has been in English a far greater abundance
than in German of those extreme changes by
which a word comes to express a variety of
notions that seem to have nothing whatever in
common ; and such changes have been hardly less
frequent in the part of the vocabulary adopted
from French and Latin than in that which is
inherited from Old English.

The changes of signification in English words
would of themselves furnish material for a large
volume. In one brief chapter it is impossible to
treat the subject systematically, even in outline.

For instance, the English clean and foul have their original
Germanic senses; but in German klein has come to mean 'little,'
andya«/ 'idle.' rr £+

170 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

We shall therefore attempt nothing more than to
call attention, in a somewhat desultory manner,
to a few out of the many causes that have been
operative in the development of new meanings,
and in the disappearance of meanings that were
formerly current. Additional illustrations of the
principles set forth may be found on almost every
page of the Oxford English Dictionary, a work
which attempts to trace the history of every word
in the language from its earliest appearance.

When we wish to express some notion for
which we know no exact word, our easiest
resource commonly is to use the word that
stands for whatever other idea strikes us as
most like that which we have in our mind.
This process accounts for a very great pro-
portion of the new meanings that words acquire.
The nature of the likeness perceived or fancied
differs in different cases. If it is a material
thing that we wish to find a name for, the
resemblance that helps us may be in form or
appearance, as when we speak of the eye of a
needle ; or in some physical quality, as when
the hard kernel of certain fruits is called a stone ;
or in relative position, as when the top and
bottom of a page are called the head and foot ;

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 171

or in use or function, as when the index of a
clock-dial is called a hand, because it serves to
point to something. Sometimes two or more of
these kinds of resemblance are combined : the
ear of a pitcher is something like a human ear
both in form and in position ; in some English
dialects the index of a clock is called not hand
but finger, because it resembles a finger in form
as well as function. Thousands of English
substantives have in this way been provided
with new senses. The word chest in Old English,
and until the sixteenth century, meant merely a
box ; it has since become the name for that
part of the body which contains the lungs and
heart. A needle, as its etymology indicates
(compare the German nahen, to sew), is primarily
a tool for sewing ; but we now apply the word
to many things, such as the magnetized bar of
a compass, which resemble a sewing needle in
shape. The name of horse has been given to
various mechanical contrivances which, like the
animal, are used to carry or support something.
The key with which we wind up a watch is
so called, not because it resembles in shape or
purpose the instrument with which we lock or
unlock a door, but because in using it we turn
it round as we turn a key in the lock. Nearly

172 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

all the words denoting parts of the body
have, as our dictionaries show, acquired a host
of additional senses, because they have been
applied to things that were thought to resemble
in one way or other the organs or members to
which the names originally belonged.

^he foregoing illustrations have been confined
to instances in which the name of one material
thing has been transferred to another material
thing that has been thought to resemble it. But
the perception of resemblance, as a source of
new signification of words, has been far more
widely operative than these examples indicate.
We are constantly finding that some immaterial
object has a sort of likeness, not always clearly
definable, to some other object, either material
or immaterial, and so we use the name of the
one to signify the other. Among qualities, con-
ditions, and actions, we perceive similarities, either
in themselves, or in their results, or in the
feelings with which we regard them ; and the
words that express them, whether nouns, ad-
jectives, or verbs, often acquire new meanings
in consequence. When we speak of the book
of nature, the key to a mystery, the light of
knowledge ; when we describe a sound, a person's
manner, or the conditions of one's life, as rough

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 173

or smooth ; when we say that time flies, that
anger burns, that commerce flourishes : we are
using words in senses which we well know not
to be their original senses, but which we feel
to be justified by resemblances that are in-
stinctively perceived, though many words might
be needed to explain wherein they consist. In
English, as in all other languages, this habit of
metaphorical expression has played a large part
in the development of the signification of words.
It is hardly necessary to dwell on the well-
known fact that most of the words that are
now used to describe mental states or qualities
have obtained these meanings through meta-
phorical use, their earlier sense having been
purely physical. This is, indeed, the ordinary
course of development in all languages. But
the history of the English language affords
examples also of the contrary process. In Old
English, the adjective keen could be used only
of persons. It had the same sense as the
German ktihn, daring, bold, though it also had
the meaning of 'wise' or 'clever.' In the thirteenth
century the word that expressed the attribute
of the warrior was applied to his sword. The
physical sense, ' sharp, cutting,' rapidly became
prominent, and the original meaning fell out of

174 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

use. Although we can now speak of a keen
thinker or fighter, these applications of the
word are not inherited from Old English, but
are metaphorical uses of the physical sense.
The opposite of keen, as applied to a blade, is
dull ; and when we speak of ' a dull wit,' ' a
dull brain,' we perhaps always have in our
minds more or less the notion of a blunted
edge. But in early Middle English dull could
only be said of persons or their qualities. It
is related to the Old English dol, foolish (cor-
responding etymologically to the German toll,
mad), and it expressed primarily want of intel-
lect or animation. It was not until the fifteenth
century that it could be used of the edge of
a knife ; and the application to colour or light
is of equally late development.

The motive for using words in new senses is
not always that there is any difficulty in ex-
pressing the required meaning without such an
expedient. It is very often merely a desire for
freshness and vivacity of expression. Few
people are content always to say things in the
most obvious way : an accustomed word some-
times seems to lose its force through familiar-
ity, and the substitution of a picturesque or
ludicrous metaphor enlivens the dulness of

v.J CHANGES OF MEANING 175

ordinary straightforward speech. This impulse
accounts for the growth of what we call slang.
The substitution of nut for 'head' is a typical
instance of it In some languages a large
number of words originally slang have displaced
their more respectable synonyms. For example,
in vulgar Latin testa (pot or shell) was used instead
of caput (head), and this is the reason why the
Italian and French words for head are testa
and tete. Although the serious vocabulary of
English has not been so much influenced by
slang as that of some other tongues, there are
some instances in which the older words ex-
pressing certain meanings have been superseded
by jocular perversions of the use of other words.
In particular, there has been a curious tendency
to grow dissatisfied with the tameness of the
verbs denoting violent actions, such as throw-
ing or dealing blows, and to substitute more
emphatic synonyms. The Old English word
for ' to throw ' was iveorpan, identical with the
German werfen. The Germans have been con-
tent to keep the old verb in use ; but in
English it was superseded by cast (adopted
from Old Norse), and this in its turn by
throw (corresponding to the German dreheri),
which properly meant to twist or wrench. In

1 76 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

many rustic dialects throw has gone the way
of its earlier synonyms : the usual words in
East Derbyshire, for instance, are swat and
hurl (pronounced oil}. The notion of striking
was expressed by the verb now pronounced
slay, which survives only in a narrowed and
developed meaning, and even in this meaning
is confined to literature. Here, again, German
has kept the old word (schlagen}, while English
has rejected it for more vigorous synonyms.
In the Bible of 1611 the common verb in
this sense is smite, which in Old English meant
to smear or rub over. Its later use may be
compared with the Elizabethan use of anoint
for to cudgel, and perhaps with the modern
slang wipe for a blow. But smite is now
obsolete in ordinary language ; the regular word
is strike, the Old English sense of which was,
like that of the equivalent German streichen, to
stroke, wipe, rub gently. In colloquial use strike
itself is to a great extent superseded by hit,
which originally meant to meet with or light
upon, and then ' not to miss ' the mark aimed
at. Although we still use the Old English
beat with reference to the infliction of corporal
chastisement, the more popular synonym is
thrash, a lively metaphor taken from the

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING

177

language of the farm. In most provincial dia-
lects there is an ample store of verbs for
expressing this meaning, mostly figurative in
their origin.

When the resemblances that have caused a
word to acquire several new senses happen to
be all of the same kind, the meaning of the
word is often widened or generalized. That is
to say, the word obtains a sense in which it is
descriptive of all the various things to which it
has been applied, and of all other things that
share their common properties. This does not
always happen. There is no general sense of
horse in which the word is applicable both to a
racehorse and to a clothes-horse. In order that
a widening of sense should occur, it is neces-
sary that the common features of the several
things denoted should be such as to form an
important part of the description of each of
them. A good instance of the process is
afforded by the word pipe, which originally meant
a simple musical instrument, and afterwards
(already in Old English) was applied to other
things resembling this in shape. It thus became
a general name for a hollow cylindrical body.
We are now apt to regard this as its proper
meaning, and to think that the shepherd's

M

i;8 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

' pipe ' was so called because of its tubular form.
Sometimes the widening of the sense of a word is
progressive. Box in early use meant a small re-
ceptacle (originally one made of boxwood, but
this limitation had already been dropped in Old
English), furnished with a lid, and intended to
contain drugs, ointments, jewels, or money. The
sense grew gradually wider, as the word was
used to denote other things bearing a close
resemblance in form and use to those which
were previously designated by it ; but down to
the end of the seventeenth century the word
continued to be regarded as appropriate only to
objects of comparatively small size. After 1700
this restriction disappeared, so that, e.g., a chest
for holding clothes could be called a box. The
notion corresponding to the word is now so
general that it is equally applicable to what
would formerly have been called a box, and to
what would formerly have been called a chest.
It is to be remarked that the word has many
modern applications, which, though connected with
the older senses by similarity, have not brought
about any generalization of sense. While we
regard a pill-box, a band-box, and a box for
clothes as objects belonging to one class, we
have no notion of a wider class which compre-

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING

179

hends these together with a box in a stable, a
box in a theatre, a signalman's box, and a
shooting-box.

Generalization of meaning takes place in verbs
as well as in substantives, and some of the Eng-
lish examples are very remarkable. The verb
bend is derived from the Germanic word which
in English has the two forms band and bond.
It meant originally to 'string' a bow, to strain
it by pulling the string, in preparation for dis-
charging the arrow. The result of this process
being to give curvature to the wood, to 'bend
a bow ' was apprehended as meaning to curve
or arch it by force ; and then people spoke of
'bending' other things than bows, first in the
sense of forcing them into an arched shape, and
afterwards in the widened sense of bringing
them by effort out of a straight form. The
word has some other applications which do not
historically belong to this generalized sense,
though some of them are now thought of as
derived from it. For instance, when we speak
of * bending one's powers to a task,' we are using
what was originally a metaphor taken from the
action of bending a bow. Again, the verb carry
is an adoption of an Old French word which,
in accordance with etymology, meant to convey

180 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

something in a wheeled vehicle. In English it
was applied to signify other modes of convey-
ance, perhaps at first by way of joke, as when
nowadays people speak of ' carting ' some object
from one room to another. In the end, the verb
became the most general expression for the act
of removing a thing from one place to another
by lifting it from the ground. In this sense it
has to a great extent superseded the older verb
to bear.

While generalization of meaning is one of the
most common features in the history of words,
there occur quite as many instances of the con-
trary process, whereby a word of wide meaning
acquires a narrower sense, in which it is applicable
only to some of the objects which it previously
ctenoted. The reason why this process of special-
ization, as it is called, is so frequent is easy to
explain. Even when we use a term in a very
wide sense, we are seldom thinking of the whole
class of things which it designates. The word
animal, for instance, may indeed be used quite
indeterminately, as when we are making a state-
ment about all animals, or putting a supposed
case in which it does not matter what species
of animal is meant. But, far more frequently,
we say ' this animal ' when we know that we

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 181

might as well say 'this horse' or 'this cow,'
just as we often use the verb to go when we
might as well speak more definitely of walking
or riding. If we have to mention some living
creature of which we do not know the name, we
can only call it an animal, though we know that
the idea in our minds is more definite than that
which this word implies. Now when a word of
wide meaning happens to be very- frequently
applied to some one out of the many classes of
objects which come under its general definition,
the usual consequence is that the word, when
used in particular circumstances, suggests the
notion only of the limited class. Perhaps the
general sense does not go out of use ; but a
new specific sense has been developed alongside
of it.

The two contrary processes, of generalization
and specialization, are very often illustrated in the
history of one and the same word. We have
seen how the word pipe, meaning originally a
certain instrument of music, developed the general
sense of ' a thing of tubular shape.' When the
smoking of tobacco was introduced, people said
that the smoke was drawn through a pipe. So far
there was no specialization of meaning ; and if
the English had adopted some foreign name for

1 82 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the smoker's instrument there might have been no
specialization, though we should still call the
thing a ' pipe ' when we were thinking particularly
of its shape. Nor would the word have been
specialized if it had always been convenient to
speak of ' a tobacco-pipe ' or ' a pipe for smok-
ing ' ; but since in most cases the reference was
clear enough without this troublesome precision,
the simple word has acquired a specific sense, in
which it is used quite without any mental re-
ference to the wider meaning.

It is natural that the development of specific
meanings, where the more general sense survives,
should sometimes lead to inconvenient ambi-
guities, and in such cases a specialized use has
often become obsolete, being superseded by the
more frequent employment of some term that has
no other than the restricted meaning. To go,
which has properly about as wide a sense as any
verb can possibly have, had in early English also
a limited sense. Even so late as the end of the
seventeenth century, Bunyan writes : " I am re-
solved to run when I can, to go when I cannot
run, and to creep when I cannot go " ; but this
was already somewhat old-fashioned English.
Earlier, such expressions as ' neither to ride nor
go ' were common. The German gehen still

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 183

retains the narrower as well as the wider sense,
but in modern English the narrower sense is
expressed by walk.

Some general terms have acquired many dif-
ferent specific meanings, which do not cause
confusion only because the circumstances in which
they are used are different The name of a
material often becomes the name of several
different articles made of the material. This
does not always happen : there is no utensil
commonly called a gold, a silver, or a wood; but
a glass may mean either a drinking vessel, a
mirror, a telescope, or a barometer, and there are
many other different applications of the word ;
an iron may be an instrument for smoothing
linen, a tool for branding, a harpoon, or a kind
of golf-club ; a copper may be a copper coin, a
mug for ale, or a large caldron (and, by trans-
ference of application, now often one made of
iron). It does not appear that in such cases
there has always been an intermediate general
sense ' thing made of the material,' for many
specific applications are missing which on that
supposition we should have expected to find.
Iron does not, like the synonyms in French and
German, mean specifically a horseshoe, nor is
glass ordinarily used for a glass bottle. We may

184 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

therefore regard most of the special applications
above mentioned as having been produced by the
omission of the defining prefix in compounds :
thus glass in the senses above referred to is a
shortening of drinking-glass, looking-glass, spy-
glass, and weather-glass.

The changes of meaning hitherto discussed
consist for the most part in the use of a word to
stand for something resembling that which it
previously signified. Even the processes of
generalization and specialization may be said to
come under this head. But besides the perception
of resemblance, there are other causes that have
had much to do with the development of new
senses of words. One of these lies in the fact
that most of the objects (whether material or
immaterial) which words denote are complex ;
that is to say, they consist of several parts.
When we think of any complex thing, we seldom
have in our consciousness the idea of all its com-
ponent parts ; when we use its name, we virtually
mean, not the whole object, but only so much of
it as happens to be important for our mental
point of view at the moment. And sometimes,
when we are thinking of a definite individual
thing, the possible mental points of view are very

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 185

numerous, so that there is a great variety of
partial conceptions any one of which is liable to
be substituted for the total conception of the
object. For instance, if a man says " that book,"
pointing to a volume lying on the table, there are
at least half a dozen different things that he may
mean. He may say "That book weighs half a
pound " ; and then the ' book ' that he is think-
ing of consists of a number of sheets of paper and
a leather or cloth cover. If he says " That book
was unbound when I bought it," he is identifying
the 'book' with the sheets of paper apart from the
binding ; but if he says " That book is the
handsomest volume I have got," he may be refer-
ring to the binding only. If he says " I was just
reading that book," the essential part of the
' book ' is neither the paper nor the binding, but
the black marks on the paper. Further, he may
say " I had read that book before, but in another
edition " ; and then the ' book ' is identified with a
certain immaterial constituent of it, which may
be defined as consisting of a particular series of
words. And, lastly, if he says " I have read that
book in several different languages," the ' book '
means for him yet another immaterial part of the
whole, viz. a certain product of mental labour,
which retains its identity even when the series

i86 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

of words in which it is embodied is totally
changed.

Now it would not be true to say that in these
six examples of its use the word book has six
different senses, in the lexicographer's acceptation
of the term. The word denotes the same complex
unity throughout, though the several statements
macle relate to different parts of this. But the
illustration shows how the idea of any complex
whole is liable on occasion to become virtually
coincident with the idea of one or other of its
parts ; and in this characteristic of human thought
we have the explanation of one of the processes
by which new senses of words are developed.
We continually find, in studying the history of a
language, that a word which at first denoted some
simple object has come to mean the compound
object of which it is a part, and that a word which
at first stood for a compound object has come to
stand for one of the component portions. Very
often, a word has first acquired an inclusive sense,
in which it means the thing which it originally
denoted together with other things commonly
accompanying this ; and afterwards it has been
appropriated to the accompaniments themselves.

For example, the word board, in its specialized
application to a table, has acquired two very

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 187

divergent ' inclusive senses,' and each of these has
given rise to another sense from which the original
notion has disappeared. On the one hand, board
was used for the table with the food upon it ; and
hence it has come to denote the food alone, as
when we speak of ' paying for one's board.' On
the other hand, the word was applied to a table
together with the persons who habitually sit
around it to deliberate ; a board of guardians of
the poor, or a board of directors, is a number of
persons jointly entrusted with certain deliberative
functions. So too, in English as in many other
languages, the word house has been taken to mean
a building together with the persons inhabiting or
occupying it, and hence it was successively used
for a family consisting of parents and children,
and for a wider unity of which a family is a part,
consisting of persons connected by common
descent, as when we speak of the houses of
York and Lancaster. By a similar transference
of meaning ' the House of Lords ' and ' the House
of Commons' are used for the members respec-
tively of the upper and of the lower branch of the
English legislature. The etymological sense of
world is ' an age or generation of men.' Through
the inclusive sense ' man and his dwelling-place,'
the word has become capable of being applied to

188 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the earth itself, and hence by generalization of
meaning, we can speak of ' uninhabited worlds ' in
space, or of the ' worlds ' into which human souls
pass after death.

The development of new senses through
inclusive use takes place no less frequently
with verbs than with substantives. In Old
English the verb wear (weriari} meant simply
'to be clothed with/ 'to have on.'1 But the
action of ' wearing ' a garment, in this sense
of the verb, will in time have the result of
making it unfit for use. It will become thread-
bare, or it will be rubbed into holes. Hence,
in Middle English, the verb obtained an inclusive
sense, in which it denoted the action together
with its consequence. Still later, it was often
used with reference to the consequence only ;
and this meaning was afterwards generalized,
so as to be applied to other objects than gar-
ments. In the Bible of 1 6 1 1 we read, " The
waters wear the stones " ; and we can now speak
of 'a face, worn by trouble.' The twofold
meaning of the word may sometimes give rise
to ambiguity. ' A dress that is much worn '
may mean either a style of dress that is fashion-
able, or an individual garment that is the worse

1 It also had the sense ' to clothe.'

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 189

for wear. When the verb is used intransitively,
it may even have quite contradictory senses.
We may say ' I want a cloth that will wear,'
and ' I want a cloth that will not wear/ the
two statements meaning exactly the same thing.

The original meaning of the verb cry is to
utter a loud noise. But it was applied specially
to noisy weeping ; and in modern colloquial use
the notion of making a noise may be dropped,
so that we can say that a person is ' crying '
who is shedding tears silently.

The history of the senses of the verb drive
exhibits more than one instance of the process
of which we are speaking. The primary sense
of the word is exemplified when we speak of
driving a flock of sheep : and it is with a very
similar notion that a coachman is said to drive
the horses. But the coachman's action includes
not only the urging of the horses forward, but
also the regulating and directing of the course
of the vehicle drawn by them. The verb has
come to be used for the whole action, of which
the literal 'driving' is the least prominent part
When we say that a man drives a railway engine,
we mean that he regulates the course of the
engine, as the coachman does that of the carriage;
but in the literal sense of the word he ' drives '

igo THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

nothing at all. It is a still further remove from
the original meaning when the man in charge
of a stationary engine is said to drive it. Again,
the person who as coachman drives a carnage
is travelling in it himself. The verb as applied
to him has therefore an ' inclusive meaning ' ;
and in modern use this may sometimes drop
what was its primary element, so that drive
comes to mean ' to travel in a carriage drawn
by horses,' even if somebody else holds the
reins. Here, as in a former instance, the develop-
ment of meanings has resulted in ambiguity.
' He drives his own carriage ' sometimes means
* he has a carriage of his own/ and sometimes
'he acts as his own coachman.'

in many cases a word has obtained a special
shade of meaning through the accidental pro-
minence of some particular association in which
it frequently occurs. The verb to harbour, for
instance, formerly meant generally ' to receive
as a guest,' ' to give shelter to/ ' to entertain ' ;
but, owing to its frequent occurrence in the
proclamations which denounced penalties against
the harbouring of criminals, it has come to be
restricted to denote the sheltering of persons or
things that ought not to be sheltered. In the

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING

191

figurative sense, we speak of harbouiing evil
thoughts, but not of harbouring good thoughts.
Not long ago, an advertisement was quoted in
the papers, in which a community of Italian
monks appealed to English charity for sub-
scriptions to their hospital on the ground that
" they harbour all kinds of diseases." The
expression was unfortunate, but in English of
an earlier period it would have had no sinister
meaning. The word doctor, literally ' teacher,'
was given as a title to persons who had received
from a University the attestation of their com-
petence to teach some branch of learning ; but,
as the doctor of medicine was the kind of
' doctor ' best known to people in general, the
title was popularly regarded as belonging in an
especial sense to the physician. Subsequently,
in accordance with the common tendency to
extend downwards the range of application of
honorific titles, it came to be applied to any
practitioner of the healing art, whether having
a University degree or not.

It is similarly owing to the frequency of one
particular association that fellow, which originally
meant a business partner, and then generally a
companion or comrade, has obtained the bad
sense which it has in Pope's well-known line,

192 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

" Worth makes the man, and want of it the
fellow." In the fourteenth century, fellow was a
condescending form of address (like the French
mon ami) to a servant or other person of inferior
station. We read in the poem of William of
Palerne how " the Emperor called to him the
cowherd, and courteously said, Now tell me,
fellow, sawest thou ever the Emperor ? " In the
sixteenth century it was still customary to call
a servant ' fellow ' ; and although this was no
longer a mark of polite condescension, it did not
imply any rudeness or bullying, as we are apt
to imagine when we meet with it in the Eliza-
bethan dramatists. But the frequency of this
application rendered it unfitting to use the
word vocatively to an equal in the sense of
* comrade.' To say ' fellow ' to one not greatly
inferior was naturally regarded as a gross
insult, and hence it is that the word is now
used to signify a person for whom one has no
respect.

A very curious example of the way in which
words originally of wide meaning have been
restricted in their application may be seen in
the history of the verb to stink and the related
substantive stench. In Old English these words
could just as appropriately be used to describe

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING

193

a delightful odour as a disagreeable one. It
could be said that a rose stinks sweetly, or that
a precious ointment was valued for its stench.
When the ' five wits ' or senses are enumerated by
Old English writers, stench is the name for the
sense of smell. But it seems to be a fact that
unpleasant odours make a stronger impression,
and are more frequently remarked upon, than
those which are pleasing ; and hence in Middle
English these words came to be applied only
to offensive sensations. In Old High German
the verb (stinkati) had the same breadth of
meaning as in Old English, but in modern
German it means just the same as in modern
English. It is noteworthy that while we have
a special verb to express an unpleasant odour,
there is no verb, either in English or German,
to express the contrary meaning. It is true
that English has adopted from Latin the adjective
fragrant and the substantive fragrance, but these
are rather literary than popular words. The
substantive scent (derived from the French sentir,
originally ' to feel or perceive,' but also used in
the special sense 'to smell') is chiefly, but not
exclusively, used in a favourable sense. The
origin of the word smell, which has superseded
stink and stench in their older neutral meaning,

N

194 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

is obscure ; it is found, both as noun and verb,
as early as the twelfth century.

In some instances it has happened that one
of the older words of the language has been
almost entirely superseded by a synonym either
of later growth or introduced from some foreign
tongue, but has survived in one or two restricted
applications. Thus the Latin spirit has taken
the place of the native ghost in general use ;
but there are two noteworthy and very diverse
applications in which the older word has
remained current. One of these is the theo-
logical use. Formularies of religious instruc-
tion and ritual are never easily modified
in diction, because the sentiment of reverence
attaches itself to the traditional wording. The
designation ' Holy Ghost ' occurred in the
baptismal formula and in the Creed, which
from an early date were familiar in the ver-
nacular to every Christian. Although it is now
permissible to speak of the ' Holy Spirit,' the
older expression still retains the special solem-
nity that belongs to the traditional terms of
ritual ; and at one time the substitution of
the Latin synonym would probably have
seemed almost irreverent. Yet it is only with
the accompanying adjective that the word Ghost

V.] CHANGES OF MEANING 195

can be applied to the Divine Spirit. To say
' the Ghost of God,' or ' God's Ghost,' as was
freely done in early English, would be utterly
shocking, because every one now feels that the
proper sense of ghost is ' the apparition of a dead
person.' This use of the word was, for obvious
reasons, the one that was most deeply rooted
in the popular consciousness. The foreign
synonym might displace the vernacular word so
far as it represented ideas that were familiar
only to cultivated people ; in the sense in
which it was used every day by the multitude
it was not so easy to supersede it.

The history of the word lord is, on the
whole, closely parallel to that of ghost. It is a
contracted pronunciation of the Old English
hldfweard^- or hldford, which literally translated
is ' bread-keeper.' The word originally meant
the head of a household in relation to the
servants and dependents, who were called his
' bread-eaters ' ; 2 and in Old English it had
come to be the most general term for one
who bears rule over others. In Middle English

1 This full form occurs only in one passage ; in the usual form
hlaford the w was elided in haste of pronunciation, as in the
modern pennort/i for pennyworth.

2 In Old English klaf-setan : the word hlaf, bread, is the same
as the modern loaf.

196 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the French word master was introduced, and
by degrees it took the place of lord in this
wide sense. It is true that the Bible trans-
lators of 1 6 1 i still use lord, and not master, as
the regular correlative to servant, and in poetry
or elevated language the word can still have
its original meaning ; but so far as the diction
of ^common life is concerned, that sense has
been obsolete for many centuries. In fact lord,
like ghost, is a native word that has been
ousted from its place by a foreign synonym ;
but, like that word, it continues to be used in
certain special applications, one of them being
religious. In the Old English service-books,
hldford was adopted as the translation of the
Latin Dominus, as applied to God and Christ,1
and this use of the word had so prominent a
place in the ordinary language of devotion
that it could never be superseded. But besides
its religious sense, lord had another specific
application. A man of high rank was called
' my lord,' not only by his own ' bread-eaters,' but
as a customary mark of respect by his inferiors
in station generally. As the word master more

1 There was another word, dryhten, which was also used
as a rendering of Dominus in this use. It survived into the
fifteenth century as Drighlin, but afterwards fell into disuse.

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 197

and more took the place of lord in its original
use, lord became more and more definitely
restricted to its use as a designation of ele-
vated station, and was employed as a prefix
to the names or territorial appellations of barons
and nobles of higher grades. Hence, in modern
times, when we hear of ' a lord,' unless there
is something in the context to indicate some
other meaning, we always understand the reference
to be to one of those persons whose ordinary
appellation has the prefix ' Lord ' as indicating
his rank. In Scotland, where the Old English
hlaford came (in accordance with the phonetic
laws of the northern dialect) to be pronounced
not lord but laird, the word has retained a
meaning nearer to its original sense, being
applied to any owner of landed property. But
as early as the fourteenth century, the English
form lord was in Scotland adopted in the
special meanings that had grown up in the
southern kingdom — viz., as a title of the Deity,
and as the designation for a nobleman.

Another Old English word that has undergone
alteration of meaning through the introduction of
a foreign synonym is fcond, in modern English
fiend. This is a substantive formed from the
present participle of the verb feon, to hate. In

198 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Old English, and down to the middle of the
fourteenth century, it was used, as the equivalent
Feind still is in German, as the contrary of friend.
In early Middle English the word enemy was
adopted from French, and the native synonym
gradually ceased to be used, except in the parti-
cular application which was common in sermons
and religious discourse — viz., with reference to the
unseen enemies of the souls of men. In the end,
the original meaning of the word was quite
forgotten, and it became simply equivalent to
devil. A circumstance which seems somewhat
curious is that, although the word owes its pre-
servation to its having belonged at one time to
the vocabulary of religious literature and speech,
it has ceased to belong to this special vocabulary
at "all. It is not found in the English Bible
or in the Prayer-book, and is not at all frequent
in sermons or other religious books. Its most
prominent modern use is as a term of opprobrium
for human beings whose exceeding wickedness
suggests comparison with that of devils.

In the history of the synonymous adjectives
dizzy and giddy, we have another instance in
which a foreign word has usurped the ordinary
sense of its native equivalents, but has allowed
them to survive in one of their less frequent

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 199

special applications. In Old English dysig (now
dizzy} was the usual word for ' foolish ' ; it was
also used substantively, so that Id dysega in the
Gospels is the equivalent of "thou fool" in the
modern version. Gydig (giddy) had the same
sense. The etymology of these words, by the
way, is extremely curious : the prehistoric meaning
of both seems to have been ' possessed by a god.'1
Gydig is a derivative of god ; and dysig is from
the Indo-Germanic root dhwes- represented in the
Greek theos (from dhwesos] a god. However, in
Old English the original meaning of these
adjectives had already become obsolete, and they
no longer denoted a 'divine madness,' but only
commonplace want of sense. But early in the
Middle English period the French word fol (a
slang use of the Latin follis, a windbag) was
introduced, and this word, in the modern form foolt
still continues in use. It was originally used as an
adjective as well as a substantive, and before the
fourteenth century it had quite superseded both the
native synonyms in their principal sense. But
both dysig and gydig had been occasionally used
to describe the physical condition in which ' one's
head swims ' ; and when the more prominent

1 As Greek scholars will perceive, this is the etymological sense of
enthusiastic.

200 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

senses of the words had been driven out by their
French synonym, this transferred application
remained unaffected. In modern use, dizzy and
giddy are identical in their literal meaning ; but
we can now speak figuratively of ' giddy conduct,'
so that the word has, in a roundabout way, under-
gone a sort of reversion to its Old English sense.

Again, the native English stool, like the equiva-
lent German Stuhl, originally meant any kind of
seat for one person, and might even be applied to
a king's throne. It acquired its present restricted
meaning because the French word chair had been
adopted to denote the more luxurious articles of
furniture which were in use among the Norman
conquerors.

Once more, deer had in Old English the wide
sense of the German Thier \ but in Middle
English this meaning was expressed by the
French word beast, and afterwards the Latin
animal passed from scientific into popular use.
The native word continued to have its original
sense down to the thirteenth century ; about
1 200 Ormin says " Lamb is soffte and stille
deor," and still later we find the word applied to
the lion. But even already in the thirteenth
century it was becoming the specific name of the
animal that was chiefly pursued in the chase. The

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 201

older sense survived only in the expression ' small
deer ' for rats and mice, which in Shakspere's use
is an echo from the old poem of Sir Bevis.
If Caxton in 1481 once uses deer for 'beast,'
that is only because he had lived so long at
Bruges that he was more familiar with Flemish
than with his native tongue.

•&1

A very large number of English words have
undergone a peculiar kind of change of meaning
which consists in the addition of what has been
called an ' emotional connotation ' to their primary
sense. That is to say, a word that originally
served as a mere statement of fact comes to be
used to express the speaker's feeling with regard
to the fact. Noteworthy instances of this process
are the adjectives enormous^ extraordinary ', and
extravagant. In their etymological sense, these
words merely express the fact that something
passes the ordinary or prescribed limits ; and
in the English of former times they often occur
in this matter-of-fact use. Thus ' an enormous
appetite ' formerly meant only what we should
now call an abnormal appetite ; ' an extraordinary
occurrence' was one not in the ordinary course
of things ; ' extravagant behaviour ' was behaviour
which did not conform to the accepted rules of

202 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

propriety. But if we now employ these words,
we mean to indicate not only that what is
referred to is unusual or abnormal, but that it
is so in such a degree as to excite our wonder,
indignation, or contempt. In some cases, such
as those just mentioned, the acquisition of an
emotional sense has been helped by something
in the sound of the word ; the long Latin
derivatives, especially when they contain a syllable
that admits readily of being either drawled out,
or pronounced with exceptional force, seem to
be peculiarly liable to develop emotional senses.
But the same thing has happened with many
short words of native English origin. Great and
large, for instance, mean to the understanding
very much the same thing; but the former is
an "emotional word, and the latter is not. If I
say ' I found a large table in my room,' I am
simply stating a fact ; but if I say ' I found a
great table in my room,' I am expressing my
surprise or annoyance. The emotional sense of
the word has come into the language since the
time when our villages received their names.
To our modern apprehension it seems comical
that a small village should be called ' Great
Tew,' because it is larger than the neighbouring
'Little Tew.' If we had the villages to name

V.] CHANGES OF MEANING 20 j

for the first time nowadays, we should probably
say ' Greater ' and ' Lesser ' ; the comparative of
great does not share the emotional quality of
the positive. In some of their applications, little
and small are so absolutely synonymous that
we can use them indiscriminately ; but if any
emotion is associated with the designation we
must choose little. ' A small boy,' though a
modernism, is now as good English as ' a little
boy ' ; yef a foreigner who should exclaim com-
passionately ' Poor small boy ! ' would be very
likely to excite laughter. We talk of ' a nice
little house,' ' a charming little picture ' ; the
substitution of small for little in these expressions
would be grotesque.

Another word that has undergone this kind
of change of meaning is grievous, which nowadays
implies sympathy on the part of the person
speaking, but which had certainly no such impli-
cation in the days when offenders were sentenced
to be ' grievously whipped.'

When a word has acquired an emotional
colouring foreign to its original use, it is necessary
to provide a synonym that can be employed in
a plain matter-of-fact way ; and if no such
synonym happens already to exist in the lan-
guage, it is often obtained by altering the sense

204 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

of some current word. The history of the words
large and small is a good example of this. In
Old French large originally meant liberal in
giving, or prodigal in expenditure. This sense
came into English : ' a large man ' meant a
generous man ' ; fool-large is an old word for
' foolishly generous ' or ' extravagant.' The word
developed in Old French the additional sense
of ' ample in dimensions,' and afterwards came
to mean ' broad ' as opposed to long, a sense
which remains in modern French. In the English
of the fourteenth century we find large used in
these ways. When great had acquired its emo-
tional sense, and an unemotional synonym was
needed, the want was supplied by changing the
meaning of large. The usual opposite of large,
in the sense of broad, was small, which originally
meant narrow or slender, as the German scJimal
still does. When large came to be synonymous
with gre-at, the customary opposition of ' large
and small ' still remained, so that small now
means the same as little.

Of the words used to designate unpleasant
qualities, or to express the feelings excited by
them, many have come to have a much stronger
emotional meaning than that which they originally
had. In early English foul and its derivative filth

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 205

could be used (as dirt and dirty may now) with-
out indicating any strong feeling of repulsion. In
fact dirt was at one time a more emphatic word
than filth. The verb to loathe was originally
not much stronger than the modern dislike ; the
cognate adjective loath or loth still expresses nothing
more than mere reluctance. But one of the most
prominent applications of the verb was to express
the distaste for food felt by a sick person ; and
as this is often attended with an actual sense of
nausea, the verb came to denote such an intense
repugnance as is felt for something physically
revolting — something that ' turns one's stomach.'
The derived adjective loathsome has shared in this
development of meaning ; in early use it was
much less forcible than it is in modern English.
While distaste, disrelish, dislike, have not become
more emphatic than they were when first used, the
originally synonymous disgust is now far stronger
in meaning. It first appears in the French
dictionary of Cotgrave ( 1 6 1 1 ), who renders des-
aimer by " to fall into dislike or disgust of."
We have already noted that stink and stench
passed in Middle English from their original
neutral sense to one expressive of unpleasant
sensation ; the intensity of meaning which
they have acquired in modern use exemplifies

206 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the general tendency of which we are now
speaking.

It is worth while to remark that in some
instances words have undergone changes of mean-
ing because in their literary use they have been
popularly misunderstood. In the seventeenth
century ingenuity had still its proper meaning of
' ingenuousness ' or candour. Locke, for instance,
could speak of an opponent's mode of argument
as " more creditable to his acuteness than to his
ingenuity," which to modern ears sounds like a
distinction without a difference. But long before
Locke's time the adjectives ingenious and ingenuous
had become confused in popular use; even some
very learned writers (or at least their printers for
them) occasionally fell into the mistake of substitut-
ing the one for the other. Hence the noun in-
genuity was often ignorantly or carelessly misused
for ' ingeniousness ' or ' ingeniosity,' and as these
latter are both awkward words, while a noun
answering to ingenious was more frequently wanted
than one answering to ingenuous, the wrong sense
ended by expelling the right one from the lan-
guage. This is one of the many examples which
show how powerless the regard for correctness
becomes when it conflicts with the claims of con-

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING

207

venience of expression. Another very similar
instance is that of the word preposterous, which
literally means only ' placed in reversed order/
'put cart before the horse.' If a letter written
to-day is delivered before one written yesterday,
their arrival is, in the original sense of the
adjective, ' preposterous.' But the word must
often have been used in contexts in which its
exact meaning was not apparent, and so unlearned
people imagined that it meant something like
' outrageously absurd.' There is something in the
sound of the word that fits it to receive an
' emotional connotation,' and it caught the popular
fancy as an appropriate expression for con-
temptuous astonishment. The mistaken sense is
now so firmly established that it would be mere
pedantry to ignore it. Emergency is another word
that is often used in a sense wrongly inferred
from its contextual applications. Etymologically
it means ' something that comes to the surface.'
A case of emergency is a condition of things that
comes up unexpectedly, so that it cannot be
provided for by ordinary means. But when
people speak of ' a case of great emergency/ it
is evident that they apprehend the word to mean
much the same thing as urgency ; and probably
the resemblance to the latter word has had some

208 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

share in producing the distortion of meaning. In
bad modern * newspaper English ' the verb trans-
pire is used for ' to happen or take place,' and
this sense has even found its way into recent
dictionaries. Literally, to transpire is ' to breathe
through ' ; and a circumstance may correctly and
expressively be said ' to have transpired,' in the
sense of having become known in spite of efforts
made to keep it secret. It is through ignorant
misapprehension of sentences in which the word
was thus correctly used that it has come to bear
a perverted meaning. As this blunder, unlike
some others of the kind, does not supply any need
of the language, it may be hoped that the mis-
application of. the word will not be permanent.

The current popular use of premises in the
sense of ' a house with the outbuildings and
the land belonging to it ' is a striking example
of the development of a new meaning through
misunderstanding. In legal documents the word
is used in its proper sense — ' things premised or
stated beforehand.' Just as the premises of an
argument are the propositions laid down at
starting, so in a lease or a deed the premises
are the things specified at the beginning as the
subject to which the following stipulations have
reference. In the body of such a document, it

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 209

is usual to employ the expression ' the pre-
mises' in order to avoid the inconvenience of
repeatedly enumerating the various objects of
which the occupation or ownership is trans-
ferred. As thus used, this expression is no
more definite in meaning than ' the aforesaid '
or ' the beforementioned ' ; but the thing to
which it refers happens to be very frequently
a house with its appurtenances, and hence it
has been popularly apprehended as a name for
this. On tavern signs we read that mine host
is " licensed to sell ale and beer to be drunk
on the premises " ; in police reports a vagrant
is said to be charged with " being on certain
premises for an unlawful purpose." In the
announcement " This house and premises to be
sold," the word has undergone a further
development of meaning, which the dictionaries
have not yet recognised.

Sometimes, though not very often, a word
has been so commonly employed in ironical
language that its original meaning has been
actually reversed. Although every Latin scholar
knows that egregious is properly an epithet of
praise, nobody would now feel complimented by
being referred to as 'that egregious person.'

o

210 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Similarly, the adjective sapient, literally meaning
'wise,' can now hardly be used otherwise than
in mockery. Here, however, the recollection of
the proper sense of the word remains to give
point to its contemptuous use. An instance in
which a sense originally ironical has caused the
favourable sense to be forgotten is afforded by
silly (Old English s&lig\ which once meant
' blessed,' or ' happy,' like the equivalent German
selig. In Middle English it was often used
satirically in a tone of mock envy or admira-
tion, and hence acquired the disparaging sense
which it now has.

It has been several times pointed out in this
chapter that the senses derived from a single
primary notion may be so diverse that it is
only by a reference to the history of their
development that any connexion between them
can be discovered. This fact suggests the
question what constitutes the identity of a word.
Regarded purely from the point of view of
modern English, fast meaning ' immovable ' and
fast meaning ' rapid in motion ' are quite as
much distinct words as light in ' a light
weight' and light in 'a light colour'; indeed
there is rather more similarity of sense in the

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 211

latter pair than in the former. If, however, we
look at the matter from the historical point of
view, we must say that there is only one
adjective fast, which has acquired two meanings,
but that the spelling light represents two
distinct adjectives, which once differed in form
as well as in meaning, but have come to be
pronounced alike through phonetic change. It
is, in the abstract, quite as legitimate to take
one point of view as the other : to say that the
adjective fast is always the same word, or to say
that there are two adjectives written and pro-
nounced alike. But in practice it is more con-
venient to decide the question of identity by the
test of origin than by that of signification, because
the most widely divergent senses of a word that is
historically one are usually connected by a chain
of intermediate meanings.

This question, however, is of little importance
except to lexicographers. A matter of more
general concern is that development of meaning,
while it has benefited the English language in
so many obvious ways, has unfortunately added
very largely to the number of instances in which
the same group of sounds stands for radically
different notions. From any point of view but
that of the lover of puns, these ' homophones '

212 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

are an unmixed nuisance. Our modern un-
phonetic spelling, bad as it is in most respects,
has the merit of saving written English from a
good many of the ambiguities of the spoken
tongue. Most of the distinctions that exist in
spelling and not in pronunciation are between
words that are historically different, and when
this is so the various spellings usually represent
obsolete varieties of pronunciation. But in a few
cases, the written language has been improved
by the establishment of an arbitrary difference in
spelling between what were originally senses of
the same word. We have seen already that read
and rede represent divergent uses of one and the
same Old English verb ; an old-fashioned spelling
has been retained to denote the old-fashioned
sense, while the ordinary sense is expressed by
a spelling in accordance with modern analogies.
The verb travail or travel originally meant
' to labour,' and one of its specialized applications
was in the sense of making a toilsome journey.
This special use became generalized afresh in
a new direction, so that the word now means
simply to journey, however easily or pleasantly.
But the Bible and other old books have preserved
for us the memory of the original sense, so that
it still occurs as an archaism ; and as in the

v.] CHANGES OF MEANING 213

instance of rede, we render the old-fashioned
meaning by an old-fashioned spelling. Burrow
and borough are probably in origin the same
word ; their senses, different as they are, have
been developed from the Old English sense
' stronghold/ In the sense of ' town,' which
occurred very frequently in writing, an early
spelling with gh became permanently fixed ; in
the sense ' hole made by an animal,' the word
was seldom written, so that its spelling was
uninfluenced by tradition, and represents a later
pronunciation.1

Most people will be surprised to be told that
there is no such word as flour in Dr. Johnson's
Dictionary of 1/55, and that he gives 'the
edible part of corn, meal ' as one of the senses
of flower. Historically Dr. Johnson was quite
right : the term ' flower of wheat,' which occurs
about 1 200, was only an instance of the still
common figurative use of flower to denote ' the
finest part ' of anything. The original spelling
of the word was flour, which continued to be
occasionally used in all senses down to about
1700, though flower, introduced in the fifteenth
century, was latterly the prevailing form. Early
in the eighteenth century some writers began

1 Com pare thorough and furrow.

214 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP, v.]

to avail themselves of the existence of the two
spellings as a means of distinguishing the different
meanings. The generally current form was
naturally retained for the sense which was most
common in literature, and with which it was
therefore chiefly associated ; the rarer spelling
was left for the other use. Johnson was some-
what behind the times in not recognising a useful
distinction which had been for some years
established ; but lexicography usually lags a
little after usage. Flower and flour are now
unquestionably two words, and in careful speech
most people make a difference in pronunciation
which is based on the artificial difference of
spelling.

CHAPTER VI.

SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH.

IT is a truth often overlooked, but not unim-
portant, that every addition to the resources of
a language must in the first instance have been
due to an act (though not necessarily a volun-
tary or conscious act) of some one person. A
complete history of the Making of English
would therefore include the names of the
Makers, and would tell us what particular
circumstances suggested the introduction of each
new word or grammatical form, and of each
new sense or construction of a word.

Of course no such complete history could
possibly be written. We shall never know any-
thing about the myriads of obscure persons
who have contributed to the development of
the English tongue. And even if it were
possible to discover the author of every new

216 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

feature that has been introduced into the
language since the earliest times, and the exact
conditions under which it arose, the information
would in all probability only very rarely have
even the slightest interest or value.

But there are some Makers of English of
whose personality we do know something :
namely, the authors of literary works that are
still in existence. The investigation of the
extent of their influence on the language has

o o

a double interest. It not only gratifies our
natural curiosity about the origin of the mechan-
ism of English speech, but it also contributes
in some small degree to our knowledge of the
mental character of the writers, and thus
enables us to attain a more complete under-
standing of their works.

Now there are two ways in which an author
may contribute to the enrichment of the
language in which he writes. He may do so
directly by the introduction of new words or
new applications of words, or indirectly by the
effect of his popularity in giving to existing
forms of expression a wider currency and a
new value. If a popular writer happens to
employ some comparatively rare word in a
striking connexion, it will very likely come into

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 217

the common vocabulary of the multitude, and
then undergo a development in sense which
would have been impossible if the word had
continued to be confined to purely literary use.
Moreover, when a passage of a poet or prose-
writer becomes widely familiar as a quotation,
the words of which it consists are apt to be
used by later generations with a recollection of
their particular context, and so to become
either specialized or enriched in meaning.

In this chapter we shall give some samples
of what certain literary Makers of English
have done for the language. It is compara-
tively seldom that a word can be proved to
have been used for the first time by a par-
ticular author ; but it can often be shown that
a writer has brought a word into general use,
or that a current sense of a word is derived
from a literary allusion. Of course it is not
always the greatest writers whose works are in
this indirect way most powerful in their effect
on the language ; literary excellence counts for
less in this matter than popularity, and the
ability to write passages that lend themselves
to quotation.

It is important to point out that a great
part of the work done by individual writers in

218 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the improvement of the language is of too
subtle a nature to admit of being analysed or
accurately estimated. A literary language has
to meet requirements which do not arise in
ordinary speech. The structure of sentences
which suffices for the needs of oral intercourse
is inadequate for written composition, where
the thought to be expressed is continuous and
complex, and where the aids to intelligibility
furnished by intonation and gesture are wanting.
As the art of literary composition advances, and
the tasks to which it addresses itself become
more ambitious, there is a constantly increasing
need of devices for exhibiting more clearly the
connexion of thought. The particles used for
linking one sentence to another become more
precise in their force, and new turns of ex-
pression, new syntactical constructions, alien to
the language of conversation, are continually
being introduced. Now every one of these
improvements in a language is an invention of
some one person ; but it is obviously impos-
sible, in most cases, to trace them to their
authors. And hence it follows that, although
we may be able to say what new words or
meanings, or what phraseological combinations,
are due to the influence of a particular writer,

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 219

the effect of his works on the language may
be far more important than it can be proved
to be.

Among the works that have contributed to
the formation of modern English an important
place must be given to the translations of the
Bible, from those of Tindale and Coverdale in
the early sixteenth century to the ' Authorized
Version' of 1611. The effort to find accurate
expression for the thoughts of the sacred writers
called forth abundance of ingenuity in the
invention of new combinations of words ; and
the fact that the Bible has for centuries been
the most widely read and most frequently quoted
of books has made it the most fruitful source
of allusive changes of meaning. The translations
made before the invention of printing, especially
that of Purvey in 1388, introduced many
novelties of expression, but their circulation was
too restricted for them to affect the general
language as did the later versions. Besides, the
translations from Tindale onward were not made,
like those of earlier times, from the Vulgate,
but from the Hebrew and Greek, or, at least,
from Luther's German or from modern Latin
versions directly based on the original texts.
For rendering the expressions of the Latin Bible

220 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

Wyclif and Purvey could avail themselves of the
vocabulary that had been developed in English
religious literature during the two centuries before
they wrote. The recourse to the originals re-
vealed new shades of meaning for which the
traditional language of piety seemed inadequate,
and the translators strove, often with felicitous
success, to supply the new needs. To Coverdale
we owe the beautiful combinations lovingkindness
and tender mercy ; Tindale gave us long-suffering
and peacemaker. This last is identical in etymo-
logical meaning with the pacificus of the Vulgate ;
but the Latin word had become current in the sense
of ' peaceable,' so that its literal meaning was
obscured. Wyclif and Purvey render Beati padfici
by 'blessid be pesible men.' But when the six-
teerith century translator found himself confronted
with the Greek eirenopoioi, the invention of an equi-
valent English compound was naturally suggested.
It will be a surprise to most people to learn
that such a familiar and, as we should think,
indispensable word as beautiful is not known
to have been used by any writer before Tindale.
He certainly did not invent it, but there is no doubt
that by introducing it into the People's Book
he helped to bring it into general use. Another
innovation of Tindale's has left a lasting mark

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 221

on the language. By Wyclif and Purvey, the
Latin word presbyter, designating an order of
ministers in the Christian Church, had been
rendered by its anglicized form priest. But in
their translations priest stood also for another
Latin word, sacerdos, which denoted the sacrificing
ministers of the Old Testament This was quite
natural, because according to the view of the
whole Christian world at the time, the priest
or presbyter and the bishop were the successors
in function of the sacrificing ministers of the
Jews, and in Church Latin the word sacerdos
was applied to both. When, however, the New
Testament came to be translated into English
from the Greek original, it was seen that the
title presbuteros was the comparative of the
adjective presbus, ' old.' Tindale retained priest
as the translation of the Greek hiereus (the
sacerdos of the Vulgate), but he thought that
presbuteros ought to be translated by an English
word of the same literal meaning. It cost him
much thought to discover the right equivalent.
In the first edition of his New Testament he
used senior, a rendering which, in his controversy
with Sir Thomas More, he admitted to be un-
English and unsatisfactory. In his second edition
he substituted elder, and in this he has been

222 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

followed by all succeeding translators except
those of the Rhemish (Roman Catholic) version.
Thus Tindale's New Testament is the source
of the ecclesiastical sense of elder ; and the fact
that in the English Bible priest never occurs
as the designation of a Christian minister has
had a remarkable effect on the popular accepta-
tion- of the word. Although the second order
of the Anglican clergy are officially called
' priests,' it is only in certain northern districts
that the people commonly apply the title to
their parish clergyman. To the great majority
of Englishmen the word suggests primarily either
a Roman Catholic clergyman, or a minister of
Jewish or heathen worship. Another noteworthy
innovation of Tindale's is his clever rendering
of tiischrokerdes by ' greedy of filthy lucre.' The
substantive lucre, being known to most people
chiefly as associated with the familiar and ener-
getic adjective, has acquired a sinister sense
which does not belong to it etymologically, and
from which the corresponding adjective lucrative
has remained free. Perhaps the most admirable
product of Tindale's talent for word-making is
scapegoat, which, though suggested' by a mis-
interpretation of a Hebrew proper name, is a
singularly felicitous expression of the intended

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 223

meaning, and in figurative use has proved a
valuable addition to the language.

The Bible translators after Tindale and Cover-
dale seem to have done but little in the invention
of words and phrases that have become part of
the language. But the indirect effect of the
English Bible on the English vocabulary has
been progressive down to recent times. Many
words that were already somewhat old-fashioned
in 1611, and would in the natural course of
things soon have become obsolete, have been
preserved from extinction because of their occur-
rence in familiar passages of Scripture, though
they now belong only to elevated literary diction.
Such are apparel and raiment for ' dress ' or
' clothes ' ; quick for ' living ' ; damsel for ' young
woman ' ; travail for ' labour.' The retention of
firmament (the Vulgate firmamentum} in the
first chapter of Genesis has given rise to the
use of the word as a poetical synonym for * sky.'
While phrases used with conscious allusion to
Scriptural incidents occur in all European
languages, they are much more frequent in
English than in the languages of Roman Catholic
countries, where the Bible is directly familiar
only to the learned. We can speak, without fear
of not being understood, of 'Gallio-like' behaviour,

224 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

' a perfect Babel ' (not always with capital B),
' a painted Jezebel,' ' a Naboth's vineyard,' ' the
Benjamin of the family,' ' the shibboleth of a
party,' ' Pharisee and publican,' ' the worship of
mammon,' ' a leviathan ship.' Our dictionaries
explain various senses of Golgotha, which are
founded on playful references to the rendering
attached to the word in the English Bible, ' the
place of a skull.' The appellation of ' the Prodigal
Son'1 is current in allusive use elsewhere than in
England, but only in English is there a substan-
tive prodigal in the sense of one who has caused
grief to his parents by abandoning his home.

Many Bible phrases, for the most part literal
renderings of Hebrew or Greek, have assumed
the character of English idioms, and are often
used with little or no consciousness of their origin.
Such are ' to cast pearls before swine,' ' a labour
of love,' ' a howling wilderness,' ' the shadow
of death,' 'the eleventh hour,' 'to hope against
hope' (a loose version of Rom. iv. 1 8). Like most
other books that have been widely popular, the

1This is not, strictly speaking, a Bible phrase, being derived from
the Latin of early commentators ; but it occurs in the heading of
Luke xv. in the English Bible. The expression ' a good Samaritan-,'
which is current also in French, is similarly of mediaeval and not of
Biblical origin. ' To kill the fatted calf is an allusion familiar
throughout Europe ; the wording under which it has become
proverbial in English was first employed by Tindale. •

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 225

English Bible has sometimes given rise to phrases
and uses of words through misunderstanding.
The current application of the phrase ' to see
eye to eye,' for ' to be of one mind,' has no
warrant in the original context. We sometimes
meet with the expression ' line of things ' for a
person's special department of activity or study-
The passage on which this is founded is : " And
not to boast in another man's line of things
made ready to our hand" (2 Cor. x. 16), where
the intended meaning would have been clearer
if commas had been inserted after the words
' boast ' and ' line.' The common saying : ' He
that runs may read ' is a misquotation of " That
he may run that readeth it " (Hab. ii. 2) which
has a wholly different meaning. A striking
instance of word-making through misunderstanding
is helpmeet. In the Bible of 1611 the Hebrew
words of Gen. ii. 1 8 were literally rendered " an
help meet [z>. fit, suitable] for him." Readers
mistook the two words help meet for a compound ;
and so help meet became current as a synonym
for one's ' partner in life.' People have been
known to suppose that it meant " one who helps
to ' make ends meet ' " ; but commonly when
the word has been analysed at all, the second
element has been imagined to be synonymous

226 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

with mate, or perhaps an incorrect form of it.
This notion suggested the formation of helpmate,
which is a very good and correctly-made com-
pound, though it did originate in a blunder.

It might well be expected that in any notice
of the literary Makers of English a large place
must be given to Chaucer. And indeed there
can be no doubt that his writings had a powerful
influence on the language ; but it is singularly
difficult to prove this by definite examples. It
would be easy to give lists of words and ex-
pressions which are used by Chaucer, and, so
far as we know, not by any earlier writer. We
cannot doubt that a large proportion of these
were really brought into literary use by him ;
a poet with so much of new thought to express,
and so solicitous for fulness .of expression, could
not but avail himself of the resources which his
knowledge of foreign tongues supplied for the
enrichment of his native language ; and he must
often have found new and felicitous applications
for words already current. Yet in individual
instances we can seldom feel sure that in the
use of this or that word he had not some English
example before him. Further, when we see how
much nearly all later English poets have learned

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 227

from Chaucer, it seems certain that there must
be a great deal of the modern poetic vocabulary
which owes its currency to his example. But
here, again, it is hard to find particular instances
that are not open to doubt. Hardly any of his
phrases — except " After the scole of Stratford-
atte-Bowe " — can be said to have become part
of the language in the sense in which this can
be said of scores of phrases of the English
Bible. For these reasons the share of Chaucer
in the making of English must be passed over
as not admitting of detailed illustration.

Spenser's influence on literary English is, if not
really greater, at least more easy to trace than that
of the poet whom he acknowledged as his master.
While Chaucer was content to write in the language
of his own time, and perhaps never consciously
invented a new word or used an old one in a new
meaning, Spenser deliberately framed for his own
use an artificial dialect, the words and forms of which
were partly drawn from the language of an older
time and from provincial speech, and partly invented
by himself. Ben Jonson's often quoted saying
that " Spenser writ no language " is in a certain
sense quite correct Yet the choice of this
peculiar diction was no mere affectation, nor was

228 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

it due to any pedantic fondness for philological
curiosities. Any one who justly appreciates
Spenser's poetry must feel that his language,
' pseudo-archaic ' as it may be called, was the
only fitting vehicle for his tone of thought and
feeling. It is true that by far the greater number
of the words which he invented or revived have
now become obsolete. But the literary vocabulary
of the present day retains not a few traces of his
influence. The familiar word braggadocio is an
allusion to the proper name of the vainglorious
knight in the Faerie Queene. The phrase " squire
of dames" comes from the same poemr though
probably few of those who use it have any
suspicion of its source. The adjective blatant
appears first in Spenser, and it is not easy to
guess its derivation ; but it is now universally
understood. Another word that seems to have
been invented by Spenser is elfin. Dr. Murray
has traced the singular history of derring-do,
which was taken from Spenser by Sir Walter
Scott, and through his use of it has become one of
the favourite words of modern chivalric romance.
It originated from a passage in which Chaucer
says that Troilus was second to no man in
" dorring do \i.e. in daring to do] that longeth to
a knight." The passage was paraphrased by Lyd-

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 229

gate in his Troy-book, and in the early editions of
that work the word dorring was misprinted as
derrynge. Not unnaturally, Spens"er mistook der-
rynge doe for a substantive (meaning, as his friend
E.K. says in his ' gloss ' to the Shepherd's Calendar,
" manhood and chevalrie "), and employs it very
frequently. The blunder has enriched the English
language with a happily expressive word. Another
of Spenser's debts to Lydgate is gride, which E.K.
explains by " to pierce." Possibly it may have
arisen from a scribal error for girde, to smite. In
imitation of Spenser the word has been used by
many subsequent poets, who have found something
in its sound that seemed fitted to express the
passage of a cutting weapon through flesh and
bones. Shelley and Tennyson have adopted it
to convey the notion of harsh or grating move-
ment.

We now come to the greatest name in our
literature. Unrivalled in so many other ways,
Shakspere has no equal with regard to the extent
and profundity of his influence on the English
language. The greatness of this influence does
not consist in the number of new words which he
added to the literary vocabulary, though we have
already had something to say of the abundance

230 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

and felicity of the compounds which he invented,
but in the multitude of phrases derived from his
writings which have entered into the texture of the
diction of literature and daily conversation. We
might call them "household words," without re-
membering that it is from himself that we have
learned this expression. It would be possible to
fill whole pages with the enumeration of the
Shaksperian allusions which are in every-day use.
' Caviare to the general,' ' men in buckram,'
' coign of vantage,' ' a tower of strength/ ' full of
sound and fury,' ' a Daniel come to judgment,'
' yeoman service,' ' the sere and yellow leaf,'
' hoist with his own petard/ ' to eat the leek/
' curled darlings/ ' to the manner born/ ' moving
accidents/ ' a Triton among the minnows/ ' one's
poufid of flesh/ ' to wear one's heart upon one's
sleeve/ ' Sir Oracle/ ' to gild refined gold/
' metal more attractive ' — all these phrases, and
hundreds of others from the same source, may
now fairly be regarded as idioms of the English
language. If the reader thinks that this is saying
too much, let him ask himself whether any man
could be rightly acknowledged to be thoroughly
master of modern literary English who was
ignorant of the customary import and application
of these expressions.

Vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 231

One Shaksperian phrase, " to out- Herod Herod,"
has not only become current in its original form,
tut has become the model after which a large
number of other expressions have been framed.
Among the many examples that might be quoted
from eminent writers are " to out-Bentley Bentley,"
" to out-Milton Milton," " to out-Darwin Darwin."
Shakspere seems in truth to have had a curious
fondness for the invention of compound verbs with
out-, expressing the notion of surpassing or exceed-
ing. All the words of this kind that exist in
modern English appear to have been either framed
by him, or by later writers in imitation of his
example.

It would be easy to give a somewhat long list of
words, such as control (as a noun), credent, dwindle,
homekeeping, illume, lonely, orb (in the sense of
' globe '), which were used by Shakspere, and have
not yet been found in any earlier writer. But
such an enumeration would probably give a
greatly exaggerated impression of the extent of
Shakspere's contributions to the vocabulary of
English. The literature of his age has not been
examined with sufficient minuteness to justify in
any instance the assertion that a new word was
first brought into literary use by him. Yet the
fact that it is in his works that we so often find

232 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the earliest known examples of words that are now
current is at any rate instructive, as showing the
keenness of his perception of the needs of the
language.

When we turn from Shakspere to Milton, we
find striking evidence of the truth of what we
have already remarked, that there is no constant
relation between a writer's literary greatness, or
even the greatness of his fame, and the extent of
his influence on the language in which his works
are written. For, both in the estimation of the
multitude and in the judgment of critics, Milton's
right to rank as second of English poets is hardly
questioned ; and yet, while Shakspere has con-
tributed innumerable phrases to the common
treasury of English diction, the Miltonic expres-
sions that have really become part of the lan-
guage are extremely few. There are, of course,
many passages of Milton that are very familiar as
quotations ; but there are not many of his com-
binations of words which we commonly use, as we
do scores of those that are found in Shakspere or
the Bible, without a distinct consciousness of their
origin. There are some few from Paradise Lost :
" to hide one's diminished head," " darkness
visible," " the human face divine," " barbaric pearl

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 233

and gold," " that bad eminence." From // Pen-
seroso we have " a dim religious light " ; the
companion poem has furnished one phrase,
" the light fantastic toe," which few who use
it ever think of associating with the grave
Puritan poet. " Men of light and leading " is
Burke's adaptation (brought into popular vogue
by Disraeli) of an expression occurring in one of
Milton's little-read controversial pamphlets. Per-
haps, in estimating the debt which the English
language owes to Milton, we ought to take into
account the abundant material which his works
afford for effective literary allusion. " Ithuriel's
spear," " the last infirmity of noble minds,"
" writ large," the often misquoted " fresh woods
and pastures new," are examples of the many
echoes of Miltonic poetry which abound in
subsequent literature. Of new words and senses
of words brought into literary use by Milton
it is not possible to find any considerable
number. Gloom, in its modern sense of ' dark-
ness,' may probably be his invention. Scottish
writers had used the word for ' a scowl or frown,'
and gloomy (derived perhaps from the verb to
gloom} had been current since the end of the
sixteenth century. Shakspere's " gloomy woods "
may have suggested to Milton the formation of

234 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

the substantive, which occurs nine times in his
poems, but is otherwise unknown before the
eighteenth century. Pandemonium, invented by
Milton as the proper name of the capital city of
Hell, the general place of assembly of the devils,
is now freely used without any allusion to its
literary source. That Milton had a genuine
faculty for word-making, even though he chose to
exercise it sparingly, is sufficiently proved by his
invention of anarch to describe Satan as the
essential spirit of anarchy. Three later poets,
Pope, Byron, and Shelley, have availed themselves
of this Miltonic word, and have used it with
striking effect.

There are several words of Latin origin, e.g.
horrent, impassive, irresponsible, which, so far as
is" known, occur first in Milton's works, and
which it is possible that he may really have
introduced. This, however, is a matter of little
or no importance in relation to the estimation
of the amount of Milton's share in the making
of the language. In the middle of the seven-
teenth century words of this kind were, to
repeat an expression which we have already
used, potentially English ; that is to say, the
right of forming them at will, by anglicizing
the form of Latin words or by attaching a Latin

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 235

prefix or suffix to a word derived from that
language, was in practice generally assumed and
conceded. If Milton had not used these words,
some other writer of the period would almost
certainly have done so ; and they may quite
possibly have been employed by several writers,
without any consciousness either of innovation
or of following a precedent.

There are other writers, besides those we
have mentioned, whose influence on the vocabu-
lary and phraseology of literary English has
been of great importance. We cannot, how-
ever, attempt to give here any account of their
respective contributions, because the preliminary
investigations on which such an account must
be based have not yet been made. Among
the authors who deserve special attention on
account of the effect which their works have
had on the language — either because of their
boldness in the introduction of new words and
senses of words, and the extent to which their
innovations have found acceptance, or because
their writings have afforded abundant material
for literary allusion — may be mentioned Lyd-
gate, Malory, and Caxton in the fifteenth
century ; Sir Thomas More and Lyly in the

236 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

sixteenth century ; Bacon, Philemon Holland,
and Sir Thomas Browne in the seventeenth
century ; and Pope and Dr. Johnson in the
eighteenth century. Coming down to later
times, we may mention Sir Walter Scott,
whose writings brought into general use many
words which he found in older authors or in
Scottish use, such as raid, glamour, gramarye.
The works of Carlyle present an almost unex-
ampled abundance of new compounds and
derivatives, largely formed in imitation of Ger-
man ; and although comparatively few of those
have won general acceptance, yet his influence
has been effective in promoting a freer use of
native English formatives than was tolerated in
the early part of the nineteenth century. Some
few words of his native Scottish dialect, also,
such as outcome, have become familiar English
from their occurrence in his writings.

The proper names of fiction and the drama
have not unfrequently obtained a degree of
currency in allusive use which entitles them to
a place in the history of the English language.
Bunyan's 'Vanity Fair' and 'The Slough of
Despond,' and Defoe's ' Man Friday,' are virtually
part of the English vocabulary, though they

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 237

may not quite come within the province of the
lexicographer. Swift's Gulliver's Travels has given
us the words Lilliputian, Brobdingnagian, and
Yahoo, the first of which, at any rate, is familiar
to all educated English people. Malapropism,
from the name of Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan's
play of The Rivals, is the recognised appella-
tion for a species of blunder which is very
commonly met with. The names of certain
characters in Dickens's novels have given rise
to derivatives in general use : every one knows
what is meant when we speak of ' Pecksniffian
morality,' or of taking a word ' in a Pick-
wickian sense ' ; and gamp, as a jocular word
for ' umbrella,' may very likely survive when
the allusion to Mrs. Gamp has ceased to be
generally intelligible. The proverbial use of
the names of personages in plays has often
remained current long after the works from
which they are taken have been forgotten.
Few persons have read, or even heard of,
Rowe's Fair Penitent, Mrs. Centlivre's A Bold
Stroke for a Wife, or Morton's Speed the
Plough, but everybody knows the expressions ' a
gay Lothario ' and ' the real Simon Pure,' and
' Mrs. Grundy ' is constantly referred to as the
personification of the tyranny of social opinion,

238 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP.

It is not unlikely that the future historian
of the English language may find that its
development in the nineteenth century has
been less powerfully affected by the really
great writers of the period than by authors of
inferior rank, both British and American, who
have had the knack of inventing new turns
of expression which commended themselves to
general imitation. There never was a time
when a clever novelty in combination of words,
or an ingenious perversion of the accepted
meaning of a word, had so good a chance of
becoming a permanent possession of the language,
as now. In no former age was there such an
abundance of writing of a designedly ephemeral
character, intended merely for the amusement
jof an idle moment. The modern taste in style
demands incessant variety of expression ; the
same thing must never, if it can be avoided, be
denoted in consecutive sentences by the same
word : and so those who are engaged in supplying
the popular demand for ' reading matter ' eagerly
adopt from each other their new devices for
escaping monotony of diction. When we con-
sider that the literature which is for all time
is read by comparatively few, while the literature
which is for the passing moment is read by all,

vi.] SOME MAKERS OF ENGLISH 239

we may easily be tempted to think that the
future of literary English is in the hands of
writers of defective culture and little seriousness
of purpose, and that the language must suffer
grave injury in the loss of its laboriously won
capacities for precision, and in the debasement
of words of noble import by unworthy use.
While these apprehensions are not wholly un-
founded, there is much to be said on the other
side. Even the much-decried ' newspaper English'
has, in its better forms, some merits of its own.
Writers whose work must be read rapidly if
it is to be read at all have a strong motive for
endeavouring not to be obscure ; and the results
of this endeavour may be seen in the recent
development of many subtle contrivances of
sentence-structure, serving to prevent the reader
from feeling even a momentary hesitation in
apprehending the intended construction.1 We
may rest assured that wherever worthy thought
and feeling exist, they will somehow fashion for
themselves a worthy medium of expression ; and
unless the English-speaking peoples have entered
on a course of intellectual decline, there is no

1 One good instance of this is afforded by the frequency with
which expressions like 'the fact that,' 'the circumstance that,'
are no\v employed where formerly a clause would have stood
alone as the subject of a sentence,

240 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH [CHAP. vi.

reason to fear that their language will on the
whole suffer deterioration. In the daily-increasing
multitude of new forms of expression, even
though it may be largely due to the unwholesome
appetite for novelty, there must be not a little
that will be found to answer to real needs, and
will survive and be developed, while what is
valueless will perish as it deserves. It is there-
fore perhaps not an unfounded hope that the
future history of the language will be a history
of progress, and that our posterity will speak
a better English — better in its greater fitness
for the uses for which language exists — than
the English of to-day.

INDEX

-able, 137

Accusative, 45

Adjectives, inflexions of, 5, 9,

49, 50
-age, 137
-al, 96, 98, 137
alive, 46, 151
alone, 151
Ambiguities, 35, 44, 75, 76,

I 88, 190
-an, 96, 98
ante-, prefix, 141
anti-, prefix, 140
apolaustic, 101
-ation, 136
-ative, 137

Attributive nouns, 63
Auxiliary verbs, 66-73
ayenbite, 119

Back-formation, 142
Bacon, Francis, 236
bant, 144
bath, bathe, 133
fe, auxiliary, 68, 69
be-, prefix, 134
beautiful, 220
179

Bible, English, 56, 72, 219-226

borough, 213

for, 178

braggadocio, 228

brethren, 41

Brevity, English love of, 78, 139,

147

Brobdingnagian, 237
Browne, Sir T., 236
Browning, 122, 127
burrow, 213
bus, 148
Byron, 127, 234

cab, 149

Carlyle, 119, 124, 236

carry, 178

Caxton, 20 1, 235

Celtic words in English, 82

chair, 200

chap, 150

Chapman, Thomas, 127

Chaucer, 50, 51, 55, 226

-chester, 81

children, 41

Chinese words in English, 104

Christmas, 117

«V, 149

242

INDEX

CD-, prefix, 141
Composition, 111-128
Compound words, 65, 1 1 1
Confluent development, 22
Coverdale, 219, 220
cry, 189
culprit, 153
cycle, 147

daisy, 117

dam, 91

Danish influence on English, 29,

31, 83, 84
Danish-English (in nth century),

31

Dative, 45, 47
Declension of nouns, 35-46

,, of adjectives, 9, 49, 50
deer, 200

Derivation, in, 128-154
derring-do, 228
Dickens, 237
dis-, prefix, 139
Divergent development, 22, 24
dizzy, 198
do, auxiliary, 71
Domesday Book, 33
drive, 189

Dropping of sounds, 23
dug, strong preterite, 52
dull, 174
dun, 82

Durham Gospels, 37
Dutch language, 4 ; words in

English, 1 02

edit, 144
een, 41
egregious, 209

elder, 221

elfin, 228

emergency, 207

Emotional connotation, 2OI

en-, prefix, 140

enormous, 201

-es, plural ending, 35

-ess, feminine ending, 58

ex-, prefix, 141

extra, 150

extraordinary, 201

extravagant, 201

yt, 37, 41

face, 91
fast, 161, 210
father-in-law, 90, 115
fellow, 191
jKnce, 151
fund, fender, 151
fiend, 197
yf/^, 204
yfwe, 162

Fine arts, terms of, 102
firmament, 223
flour, fiower, 213

199

/, 169, 205
French influence on English, 33,

58, 85-92, 136
Future tense, 67, 72

gamp, 237

gaol, 87

Gender, 5, 9, 47-50

Generalization of meaning, 177-

180

Genitive, 59, 60, 61
gent, 149

INDEX

German, compared with English,

1-7, 55, 64, 121, 162-9
German words in English, 103
Germanic, Primitive, 4, 17
ghost, 194
giddy, 198
glad, 165
glass, 183, 184
gloom, 233
go, 182
Golgotha, 224
gospel, 117

grandfather, grandmother, 90
grander e, grandame, 90
great, 202

Greek words in English, 97-101
£»Tcfe, 229
grievous, 203
Group-genitive, 6 1
grovel, 143

harbour, 190

^attf, auxiliary, 67

/fo, as feminine pronoun, 54

helpmate, 226

helpmeet, 225

AZ.T, as neuter possessive, 56

hit, i~6

holiday, 117

Holland, Philemon, 236

house, 187

housen, 41

hubris, IOI

husband, 117

Inclusive senses, 186-190

*'«">?, 153

Indo-Germanic language, 18, 112

infra dig, 153

ingemiity, 206

inter-, prefix, 141

Irony, a cause of changes of

meaning, 209
-ish, 134
ism, 147

Italian words in English, 102, 103
its, 56

Japanese words in English, 104
jews' -harp, 115
Johnson, Dr., 213, 236

keen, 173
-kin, 138
kine, 41
kudos, 101

204

Latin words in English, 8l, 86, 92
law, 83
Law, terms of, 88

-£', 139
lilliputian, 237

-#«f, *38
little, 203
//W, adj., 151
loathe, 205
/W, 195

lovingkindness, 22O
Low German language, 4
lucre, 222

-(P, '35

Lydgate, 229, 235
Lyly, 235

maffick, 144

malapropism, 237

Malay words in English, 104

Malory, 235

244

INDEX

Meaning, changes of, 160

mend, 151

-ment, 137

Middle English, meaning of the

term, 8

Military terms, 89
Milton, 232-235
miss, 149
Misunderstanding, a cause of

changes of meaning, 206
Mixture of peoples, 19, 25-28
More, Sir Thomas, 235
Music, terms of, 102

nem. con., 153

nestle, 143

Newspaper English, 208, 239

non-, prefix, 141

Norman Conquest, 32

Northumbrian dialect, 37, 38

nous, 101

°f> 44, 59

Old English, meaning of the
t£fm, 8 ; dialects of, 28 ; in-
flexions of, 9, 24, 35, 36-40,
43; pronunciation of, n, 12;
specimen of, II

Old High German, 17

ologyy J47

Onomatopoeia, 152-156
' Ormulum,' the, 48
-ous, 96, 98
outbreak, 122
outcome, 236
oxen, 41
oxygen, 108

pandemonium, 234
Farasynthetic derivatives, 1 20

peacemaker, 220
percent, 153
Perfect tense, 67
Periods of the English language, 8
phiz, 150

Phonetic change, 20-25, 117
Phonetic laws, 21
Phrasal genitive, 60
pipe, 177, 181
Place-names, 117
Plattdeutsch language, 4
Plural, endings of, 40
Plurals, irregular, 42
Poetry, diction of, 127
Pope, 234, 236

Portuguese words in English, 103
post-, prefix, 141
pre-, prefix, 141
Prefixes, 139; dropped, 150
premises, 2Ob
preposterous, 207
priest, 221
pro-, prefix, 140
prodigal, 224
Pronouns, 46, 54-58
Pronunciation of Old English,

II, 12

pros and cons, 153.

re-, prefix, 139

read, re.de, 1 68, 212

Relationship(family),termsof, 91

Religion, terms of, 82

Root-creation, 154

Russian words in English, 103

-s, ending of plural, 35
-'s, -s', genitival endings, 35
sad, 164
sapient, 210

INDEX

245

Scandinavian languages, 4; words

in English, 83, 104
scapegoat, 222

Science, terms of, too, 107-109
Scott, Sir Walter, 236
Shakspere, 56, 126, 229
shall, auxiliary, 57, 72

*ke, 55
shoon, 41

Shortening, a mode of word-
formation, 147
silly, 210

Simplification of Accidence, 17
sire, 91
size, 150
Slang, 175
slay, 176

small, 204

smell, 192

smite, 176

Spanish words in English, 103

Specialization of meaning, 180

Spelling, 34, 212

Spenser, 126, 127, 227

spite, 152

sport, 152

stain, 151

stench, stink, 192, 205

stool, 200

strike, 176

Strong verbs, 63

sub-, prefix, 141

Subjunctive, 53

Substantives, inflexion of, 35-46

Suffixes, 133

Swift, Jonathan, 237
Symbolism, phonetic, 156-159

tend, 151
Tennyson, 127, 147

tfay, 55

thou, 62

thrash, 176

throw, 175

tide, 1 68

Tindale, 56, 219

Titles of nobility, 89

town, 1 66

Trades, designations of, 90

Tradition, influence of, 19

transpire, 208

travail, travel, 212

Turkish words in English, 103

un-, prefix, 134
upkeep, 124
uptake, 124

Verbs, conjugation of, 5, 66-73
vie, 151

•wear, 188

West Saxon, 37, 39

•whilom, 47

wig, 149

•will, auxiliary, 1 1 2

Word-stems, 112

Wordsworth, 127

write, 167

Wyclif, 220

yahoo, 237
you, 62, 63

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