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(delwedd E6001) (tudalen i)
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Clarendon
Press Series
THE PHILOLOGY OF THE ENGLISH TONGUE
BY JOHN EARLE, M.A. Professor of
Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford
THIRD EDITION. NEWLY REVISED AND IMPROVED
Oxford AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MDCCCLXXIX
(All Rights Reserved)
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(delwedd E6002) (tudalen ii)
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MACMILLAN
AND CO.
PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
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(delwedd E6003) (tudalen iii)
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PREFACE
TO THE FIRST EDITION.
Philology may be described as a science of language based upon the comparison of languages. It is the
aim of Philology to order the study of
language upon principles indicated by language itself, so that each part and
function shall have its true and
natural place assigned to it, according to the order, relation, and proportion dictated by the nature of
language. What the nature of language
is, can be ascertained only by a wide comparison of languages taken at
various stages of development. Such a
work is to be performed, not by any one man, but by the co-operation of many : and many have now
been co-operating for three quarters
of a century past, and sending in from every
land their contributions towards it.
In this newly gotten knowledge of human language there is matter for educational use. The relations
of language to culture are so intimate
tliat what betters our knowledge of the one
should improve the process of the other. It is an open question, in what way the lessons of language may
best be converted to the purpose of
education, but there is one fault which might at least be somewhat mended : — our knowledge of
language has been too broken and
divided : we have most of us known one language best vernacularly, and another best
grammatically. Something would be
gained if our cultivation of language could be rather more centred upon the mother tongue, so
that our vernacular and our
philological acquirements might more effectually support one another. The lessons of philology would
be taught more thoroughly, as well as
more conveniently, if the materials for the
instruction were supplied by the mother tongue. The effect of philological study is to quicken the
perception of analogy between
languages; and this advantage would be more immediate in its
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(delwedd E6004) (tudalen iv)
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IV
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
returns if our philology were more based on the mother tongue. Nothing would put the learner so readily or
so implicitly in possession of all the
essence of philological gains ; nothing would
be of such good practical avail whenever the knowledge of our language was needed to bear upon the
acquisition of another. Were the
English language studied philologically, the faculty of acquiring other languages would be more
generally an English faculty. .
There are two chief ways of entering upon a scientific study. One is by the way of Principles, and the
other is by the way of Elements. If
the learner approaches Philology by the way of principles, it is necessary that the
principles should be familiarised to him by the aid of examples and
illustrations drawn from various
languages. Each of the methods excels in its own peculiar way ; and the
excellence of this method is, that the subject is presented with the greatest fullness and
totality of effect — as a mountain is
most imposing to the view on its most precipitous side. But it has this great drawback, —
that the learner can ill judge of the
examples ; he must take them on authority ; and so far forth as the instruction is based on
facts which are not within the
cognisance of the learner, the teaching is unscientific.
The other method is by the examination of a single language ; and here the course of treatment follows
the order of natural growth,
introducing the principles in an occasional and incidental manner, just as they happen to be called
for in the course of the
investigation. If the object-language be the learner's own vernacular, this course will be something
like climbing a mountain by the side where the slope is easiest. "When
this path is chosen, the complete and
compact view of principles as a whole
will be deferred until such time as the learner shall have reached them severally by means of facts which lie
within his own experience. It is upon this, which may be called the
Elementary method, that the present
manual has been constructed ; the aim
of which has been to find a path through most familiar ground up to philological principles.
It was assumed at starting that the English language would furnish examples of all that is most
typical in human speech, and
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(delwedd E6005) (tudalen v)
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PREFACE
TO THE SECOND AND THIRD EDITIONS. V
it has been the reward of the labourer in this instance that his anticipation of the fecundity of his
material has been most abundantly and
even unexpectedly verified.
The excellent verbal Index is the work of H. N. Harvey, Esq., of the Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton
; and while it is the most valuable
addition that this handbook could have received, it is by me still more highly esteemed as a
new token of an old friendship.
Whatley Rectory, July, 1871.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
In this Edition I have freely altered wherever I thought I could improve; but this has not occasioned
a single change in matter of
principle, or in the general plan of arrangement. Notwithstanding many
variations of detail, this Edition is essentially one with the First.
The most considerable additions are in the Phonology of the First and Second Chapters, and in the
Particle-Composition of the Eleventh.
The division into paragraphs has made it necessary to reconstruct the Index
anew, and for this work I am again indebted to the same unwearied friend as before.
SwANSwicK, April 21, 1873.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Any one who has considered the extensive range and the manifold complexities of the English
language, will not marvel if a
describer of it has still found room for improvement, even in a Third Edition. Apt illustrations
cannot always be caught when required,
they must be waited for. Some such have been
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(delwedd E6006) (tudalen vi)
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VI PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
secured in the interval since the Second Edition, and have taken their place in the text. Also many little
points of arrangement and proportion
have received their due attention. Diminutives are treated more fully. Some remarks upon
Adjectives of Vogue, incidentally
sprinkled, have been collected into one place. But these improvements never alter the plan,
and often they do but fill it out. Not
only is the original framework left intact; —
it is lifted into higher relief. Such is plainly the eiFect where the number of verbal examples has been increased.
For the consequent expansion of the
Word-Index, I have again to record my
hearty thanks as twice before.
Some petty changes are for economy of space and compactness of view. When an
English word is mated with a remoter
word unlabelled, that word is generdly of the language which gives note to the Section. Thus, in 'main
maegen,* p. 299, the heading indicates
that the unlabelled maegen is Saxon. If this is not perfectly carried out, the exceptions
are such as to cause no uncertainty. '
The oft-repeated names, Chaucer, Shakspeare,
Spenser, Milton, Tennyson, are frequently indicated by abbreviations
which speak for themselves.
In the Verbal Index some further progress has been made in distinguishing classes of words by
diversities of type. The Index of
Subjects has been considerably enlarged, and I hope it will be found serviceable for occasions of
reference. But at the same time I wish
to say that the book was cast as a whole, and that as a whole it is commended to the student's
attention ; — because an adequate
notion of the English language is not to be acquired from this or that interesting particular,
nor from any number of such ; but only
from a resolute endeavour to apprehend the language in its living unity, as
well in the rich and almost; endless
variety of its parts and functions, as also in the admirable freedom
and simplicity of its action.
Maltby, July 2, 1879.
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(delwedd E6007) (tudalen vii)
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CONTENTS.
PAGE
Historic Sketch of the Rise and Form/^tion op the English
Language i
§ I. External Relations 2
§ 2. Domestic Relations 18
§ 3k Influence of the Church on the Language . . 23
§ 4. Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon .... 31
§ 5. Effects of the Norman Conquest ... 40
§ 6. Literature of the Transition. First Period . 44
§ 7. Triumph of French 54
§ 8. Literature of the Transition. Second Period . 58
§ p. King's English 69
§ 10. Bilingualism of Eling's English .... 83
§ II. Conclusion 90
Chapter I. On the English Alphabet 99
Chapter IL Spelling and Pronunciation 143
§ Appendix on Spelling-Reform . .178
Chapter IIL Of Interjections 186
§ I. Natural Interjections . . . .189
§ 2. Historical Interjections . . .196
Chapter IV. Of the Parts of Speech 204
Chapter V. Of Presentive and Symbolic Words, and of Inflections 218
Chapter VI. The Verbal Group 254
1. Strong Verbs 261
2. Mixed Verbs 279
3. Weak Verbs 287
4. Verb-Making 290
viii
CONTENTS.
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(delwedd E6008) (tudalen viii)
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PAGE
Chapter VII.
The Noun Group
• 295
I. Of th6 Substantive . .
. 296
2. Of the Adjective
. 362
3. Of the Adverb
• 403
(I) The Flat Adverb .
• 405
(2) The Flexional Adverb .
• 409
(3) The Phrasal Adverb .
. 417
§ The Numerals
. 426
Chapter VIII.
The Pronoun Group
• 433
I. Substantival Pronouns .
. 436
2. Adjectival Pronouns
• 453
3. Adverbial Pronouns
. 467
Chapter IX.
The Link -Word Group .
. 485
I. Of Prepositions
. . 485
2. Of Conjunctions
. 496
Chapter X.
Of Syntax
. 511
I. Flat or CoUocative Sjmtax
. 512
2. Syntax of Flexion .
• 527
•
3. Syntax by S)rmbolic Words
• 544
Chapter XI.
Of Compounds ....
. 562
I. Compounds of the First Order
. . 566
2. Compounds of the Second Order
• 577
3. Compounds of the Third Order
. 581
A General Conclusion .
. . 584
Chapter XII.
Of Prosody, or the Musical Element in
Spi
sech . 585
I. Of Sound as an Illustrative Agenc
y . 588
2. Of Sound as a Formative Agency
. 605
3. Of Sound as an Instinctive Obj<
;ct of
Attraction ....
. 611
§ Conclusion on the Origin of I^n
guage 634
Index of Letters and Words
. 641
Index op Names and Subjects ....
•
. 690
li
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(delwedd E6009) (tudalen 001)
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HISTORIC
SKETCH
OF THE RISE AND FORMATION
OF THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
\ 1. The Philology of a language includes all that is meant by its Grammar, and yet it is at the same
time a distinct study. This difference
hinges upon the point of view from
which the language is contemplated. In grammar the view is confined to the particular language,
while in philology the language is
considered in regard to its external relations. In grammar we seek rules for the regulation
of domestic usage : in philology we
seek principles to explain the habits
of speech. Further, the rules of grammar are justified by reference to the logical sense : the
laws of philology have to be
established by external comparison and induction. Thus grammar is a local and internal study
of language : philology is outward and
(in its tendency) universal.
This outward look of philology takes two principal directions. In the first
place it will lead us to enquire into
the earlier habits of the particular language, that we may be able to trace by what process of
development it
B
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(delwedd E6010) (tudalen 002)
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2, THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
reached its present condition. This is the historical aspect of philology. In the second place, it will
lead us to seek further historical
knowledge with a view to the comparison
of our language with other languages, in order that we may be able to discover principles of
development and structure, and base
the framework of our particular language as far as possible upon lines which are common to
many languages, with the ultimate aim
of seeking that which is universal and
essential to all.
The position which our language assumes in the comparative scheme, is
remarkable and peculiar. Starting as
one of the purest and least mixed of languages, it has come to be the most composite in the world. And
the particular greatness of the
English language is inseparable from this
characteristic. Languages there may be which surpass ours in this or that quality, but there is none
which unites in itself so many great
qualities, none in which functions so
diverse and various harmonidusly cooperate, none which displays so full a compass of the powers
and faculties of human speech.
The details of this statement will occupy the twelve chapters below: — but first I will
endeavour to indicate the historical
events which prepared for the English language its remarkable career; and this calls for
an Introductory discourse.
§ 1. External Relations,
2. The English is one of the languages of the great IndoEuropean (or Aryan)
family, the members of which have been
traced across the double continent of Asia and Europe through the Sanskrit, Persian, Greek,
Latin, Slavonic, Gothic, and Keltic
languages. In order to illustrate the right of our
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(delwedd E6011) (tudalen 003)
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MXTERNAL
RELATIONS. 3
English language to a place in this series, it will suflSce to exhibit a few proofs of definite
relationship between our language on
the one hand, and the classical languages of
Greece and Italy on the other. The readiest illustration of this is to be found in the Transition of
Consonants. When the same words appear
under altered forms in diflferent members
of the same family of languages, the diversity of form is found to have a regular method and analogy.
Such an analogy has been established
between the varying consonants which
hold analogous positions in cognate languages, and their variation has been reduced to rule by
the German philologer Jacob Grimm. He
has founded the law of Consonantal Transition, or consonantal equivalents.
A few easy examples will put the reader in possession of the nature of this law. When a Welshman
speaks English in Shakspeare he often
substitutes p for b, as Fluellen in
Henry K, v. i : * Pragging knave, Pistoll, which you and yoiu-self and all the world know to be no
petter than a fellow, looke you now,
of no merits : hee is come to me, and
prings me pread and sault yesterday, looke you, and bid me eate my leeke,' &c. The Welsh parson.
Sir Hugh Evans, in Merry Wives, puts t
for d : * It were a goot motion ' — * The
tevil and his tarn ' — and * worts * for words, as : ^
* Evans. Pauca verba ; (Sir /okn) good worts.
F^TAFFE. Good worts? good cabidge.'
Likewise f for v : * It is that ferry person for all the orld' ; and 'fidelicet* for 'videlicet' — *I most
fehemently desire you,' &c.
3. This familiar illustration has lost none of its force since the time of Shakspeare. A recent traveller
in North Wales saw a railway truck at
Conway on which some Welsh porter had
chalked ' Chester goots.' This variation, at which we
B 2
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(delwedd E6012) (tudalen 004)
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4 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
smile as a provincial peculiarity, ofifers the best clue to a universal law of phonetic transition. It is
not confined to one country or to one
family of languages.
The Semitic family, which is the great contrast to the Indo-European, follows the same path in the
phonetic variations of its dialects.
Between the Hebrew and Chaldee there is a well-marked interchange of z and d; while a third
dialect, the Phoenician, seems to have put a t for z (ts). The Hebrew pronoun for this is zeh; but in Chaldee it
becomes DAA and DEN and di : the
Hebrew word for male is zakar ; but in
Chaldee it appears as dekar: the Hebrew verb to sacrifice is zavach ; but in Chaldee it is
devach : the Hebrew verb for being
timid is zachal ; but in Chaldee it is
DECHAL. If we compare Hebrew with the third dialect we get T for z. The Hebrew word for rock is
zoor or tsoor, after which a famous
Phoenician city seated on a rock was
called ZoR, as it is always called in the Old Testament ; but this word sounded in Greek ears from
Phoenician mouths so as to cause them
to write it Tv^oy, Tyrus^ whence we have
the name Tyre. It is to this sort of play upon the gamut or scale of consonants, a play which is
kept up between kindred dialects, that
Grimm, when he had reduced it to a
law, gave the name of Lauiverschiebungy or Consonantal Transition, reciprocity of consonants.
As, on the one hand, we find this reciprocity where we find cognate dialects ; so, on the
other, if we can establish the fact that there is or has been such a
consonantal reciprocity between two
languages, we have obtained the
strongest proof of their relationship. There are traces of this kind between the English on the one
hand and the Classical languages on
the other.
4. We suppose the reader is familiar with the twofold
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(delwedd E6013) (tudalen 005)
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EXTERNAL
RELATIONS. 5
division of the mute consonants into lip, tooth, and throat consonants in the one direction, and into
thin, middle, and aspirate consonants
in the other direction. If not, he should
learn this little table by heart, before he proceeds a step further. Learn it by rote, both ways, both
horizontally and vertically.
Lip
Tooth
Throat
(Labial).
Tkin p Medial b Aspirate f
(Dental).
t
d
]?=8=th
(Guttural).
c=k
g
h (Saxon).
Tenues
MedicB AspiratcB
By means of this classification of the mutes we are
able to shew traces of a law of transition having existed
between English and the Classical languages. We find
instances of words, for example, which begin with a thin
consonant in Greek or Latin or both, and the same word
is found in English or its cognate dialects beginning with
an aspirate. Thus, if the Latin or Greek word begins with
p, the English word begins with f. Examples: injp and
fre : irp6, irpSiros, primus, compared with the Saxon words
fruma, /rem ; with the modern preposition /romf which is
of the same root and original sense with /or, /ore, forth :
fr^Xof, pullus, with foal, filly : pellis with /ell : irv^, pugnuSy
with fist : Trarrip, pater, with /ather : Ttkim with five, German
/un/\ irovi, pes, vf\\h/oot\ pecus withy^^^: pasco vf\\h/eed:
piscis vn\}ci.fish : ttXcico) with^aji;.
6. If the Classical word begins with an aspirate, the English word begins with a medial : for
example, the Greek * or Latin f is
found responsive to the English b. Thus,
4>rr/^s,/agus, and beech ; <^va),y«/, and be ; <l>paTpia,
/rater, and brother; <l>€pa,
/ero, and bear. The Greek e by the same
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6 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
rule responds to the English d ; as in ^p and deer ; Ovydrrip and daughter ; ^upo and door.
If the Greek or Latin has the medial, the English should have the thin : that is to say, a Classic A
or d should correspond to our English t. So it does in daicpu, and tear :
dvo, duo, and two : hkKa, decern, and
ten : dcfia>, domus, and timhran,
the Saxon verb for building : dhdpou, dpvs, and /r^f^ : dingua, archaic Latin for lingua, and torque.
These, and all such illustrations, may
be summarised for convenience sake in the
following mnemonic formula: —
T A M
% m %
where the Roman letters of the Latin word tam placed over the Gothic letters of the German word ?tmt
are intended to bracket together the
initial letters of Thins, Medials, and
Aspirates, so as to represent the order of transition.
In the use of this scheme, we will suppose the student to be enquiring after the Greek and Latin
analogues to the English word kind.
This word begins with a Tenuis or thin
consonant, and thus directs us to the letter x in the Gothic word Amt. Over this t we find in the
Latin word an M, and by this we are
taught that the Medial of k, which is
G (see Table, 4), will be the corresponding initial in Greek and Latin. Thus we are directed to
y^v and gigno as the analogues of kin
and kind. The same process will lead
from knee to yow and genu, from ken and know to
6. These examples will satisfy the reader that here we have traces of a regular law, and that our
language is of one and the same strain
with the Greek and Latin — that is to
say, it is one of the Indo-European family.
A succession of small divergences which run upon stated
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(delwedd E6015) (tudalen 007)
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EXTERNAL
RELATIONS. 7
lines of variation — lines having a determinate relation to one another, and constituting an orbit in which
the transitional movement revolves : —
this is a phenomenon worthy of our
contemplation. It is the simplest example of a &ct which in other shapes will meet us again, namely,
that the beauty of philology springs
out of that variety over unity which
makes all nature beautiful, and all study of nature profoundly attractive.
It will be easy to discover a great number of examples which He outside the above analogy. One
important cause of unconformability is
the introduction of foreign words.
This applies to all Gothic words beginning with p, which are foreigners and not subject to
this law. There is also a certain
amount of accidental disturbance. Casualties
happen to words as to all mortal products : and in the course of time their forms get defaced. The German
language offers many examples of this.
If I want to understand the
consonantal analogies which existed between English and German, I should prefer as a general rule
to go to the oldest form of Gwinan,
because a conventional orthography, among
other causes, has in German led to a disfigurement of many of the forms. The tendency of words to get
disguised, is therefore one reason why
these analogies do not hold more
completely than they do. In process of time new principles of word-forming are admitted, new words and
new forms overgrow and supersede the
old ; even the old words conform more or less to the new fashions, and become
changed in their appearance, so that
the traces of old kindred are
obliterated.
7. But if such a relation as that which is condensed in the above mnemonic is clearly established as
existing between the Classical
languages on the one hand, and the Gothic on
the other, much more distinctly and largely may it be
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(delwedd E6016) (tudalen 008)
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8 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE,
shewn that a like relation exists internally between the two main subdivisions of the Gothic family.
These two parts arethe High Dutch and
the Low Dutch. The Modern or New High
Dutch is what we now call * German/ the great
literary language of Central Europe, inaugurated by Luther in his translation of the Bible. Behind
this great modern speech we have two
receding stages of its earlier forms,
the Middle High Dutch or the language of the Epic of the Nibelungen, and the Old High Dutch or
the language of the Scripture
paraphrasts Otfrid and Notker. The
Alt-Hoch-Deutsch goes back to the tenth century; the Mittel-Hoch-Deutsch goes back to the
thirteenth; and the Neu-Hoch-Deutsch
dates from the Reformation of the
sixteenth century. This is the High Dutch division of the Gothic languages.
Round about these, in a broken curve, are found the representatives of the Low Dutch family.
Their earliest literary traces go back
to the fourth century, and appear in
the villages of Dacia, in lands which slope to the Danube ; where the country is by foreigners called
Wallachia. It is from this region that
we have the Moesogothic Gospels and
other relics of the planting of Christianity. But the greatest body of the Low Dutch is to
the north and west of Germany. Along
the shores of the Baltic, and far
inland, where High Dutch is established in the educated ranks, the mass of
the folk speak Low Dutch, which
locally passes by the name of Platt-Deutsch. The kingdom of the Netherlands, where it is a
truly national speech, the speech of
all ranks of the community — the
kingdom of Belgium, where, under the name of Flemish, it is striving for recognition, and has
gained a place in literature through
the pen of Hendrik Conscience — the
old district of the Hanseatic cities, the Lower Elbe,
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(delwedd E6017) (tudalen 009)
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EXTERNAL
RELATIONS. 9
Hamburgh, Ltibeck, Bremen, — all this is Nieder-Deutsch, Low Dutch.
8. To this family belongs the English language in respect of that which is the oldest and most
material part of it. It has received
so many additions from other sources, and
has worked them up with so much individuality of effect, as to have in fact produced a new language,
and a language which, from external
circumstances, seems likely to become
the parent of a new strain of languages. But all the outgrowth and
exuberance of the English language clusters
round a Low Dutch centre.
It would be a departure from the general way of philologers to include under the
term of Low Dutch the languages of
Scandinavia. The latter have very strong individualising features of their own, such as the
post-positive article, and a form for
the passive verb. The post-positive article is highly curious. In modern Danish or Swedish
the indefinite article a or an is represented by en for masculine and feminine, and ef for neuter. Thus en skov
signifies a wood (shaw) and ei irce
signifies a tree. But if you want to say
the wood, the tree, you suffix these syllables to the nouns, and then they have the effect of the
definite article ; skoven, the wood ;
trceet, the tree ; Juletrceet, the Christmas tree.
9. The possession of a form for the passive is hardly less remarkable, when we consider that the
Gothic languages in general make the
passive, as we do in English, by the aid
of the verb to be. Active to love, passive to be loved. But the Scandinavian dialects just add an s to
the active, and that makes it passive.
This j is a relic of an old reflexive
pronoun, so that it is most like the French habit of getting a sort of a passive by prefixing the
reflexive pronoun se. Thus in French
marier is to marry (active), of parents who
marry their children ; but if you have to express to marry
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(delwedd E6018) (tudalen 010)
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10 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
in the sense of to get married or to be married, you say se marier. Examples of the Danish passive form
: —
Active. Passive.
at give, to give at gives, to he given
at elske, to love at elskes, to be loved
at finde, to find at findes, A) he found
at fsae, to get at faaes, to he gotten
at drive, to drive at drives, to he driven
There is only one other language of this great family that has preserved any traces of a passive verb,
and that is the Moesogothic. Here the
form was more elaborate than in the
Scandinavian dialects, but it was already far gone towards dissolution at the date of the extant
writings. But though such features as
a passive form, and a post-positive article,
have a strong characterising effect, they do not take languages out of those lines of
classification which separate the High
from the Low Dutch. Between the Icelandic, or, to speak more generally, the Northern
(Norraena) speech on the one side, and
the Moesogothic on the other, we may
describe the position of the Low Dutch half of the Gothic family.
10. The cycle of letter-change which has been described above as taking place externally between
the Classic tongues on the one hand
and the Gothic on the other, will be
found, upon a comparison of High with Low Dutch, to repeat itself also internally. The very
same mnemonic which there proved a
true guide, will substantially hold good
also here. The consonantal variations between the High Dutch on the one hand, and the Low Dutch on
the other, may be symbolised by
writing the German word famt over the
English word iame^ thus —
fa m t t a me
EXTERNAL RELATIONS.
II
In this mnemonic, the final e of fame is there merely to make an English word of it, in order to
indicate that the S3nnbols, t, a, m,
in this place, are doing duty for the English
group, that is, the Low Dutch group, in the comparison; while the letters fa, tn, t, which form a
German word, represent the High Dutch
side of the comparison. The
combination of fa is useful as a reminder that in High Dutch the sibilant f or g is the substitute
for an aspirated dental (such as our
/^) which that language does not
possess.
The action of this law is most readily exhibited with the dentals, because in these we can employ
modem German as the representative of
High Dutch. The first group illustrates
the law that where the Low Dutch has a tenuis, the High Dutch has an aspirate (or the sibilant
which supplies their want of a dental
aspirate), and this law is represented by the
formula
N.H.D. or German.
3e^tt
3tel
3t«ttttfr
Bunben
3tel^m
3eu(j
3unge
3al^n
3wei
3a^rf
3etc]^cn
Serrm
®?t
T
(ESOGOTHIC.
English.
Taihiin
Ten
Til
TiJl
Timr
Timber
Tindan
Tinder
Tiuhan
Teen (A.S.)
Tatd
Toy
Tuggo
Tongue
Tunthtus
Tooth
Tval
Two
Tagr
Tear
Taikns
Token
Tairan
Tear
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12
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
The second group shews that where the Low Dutch has an aspirate the High Dutch has a medial,
and this is represented by the formula
«ro
A
N.H.D.
or German.
MCESOGOTHIC.
English.
JDrei
Threis
Three
S)a«
Thata
That
JDu, 2)ic^
Thu, Thuk
Thou, Thee
JDcnfen
Thagkjan
Think
SDod^
Thuh
Though
JDulben
Thulan
Thole
JDctt
Thaim
Them
2)urd^
Thairh
Through
JDurjl
Thaurstei
Thirst
2)ann
Than
Then
2)anf
Thagks
Thank
2)urfen
Thaurban
pearfan (A.S.)
The third formula represents the law that where the Low Dutch has a medial the High Dutch has a
tenuis :
% M
2:a9
Dags
Day
Xeil
Dails
Deal
%oX
Dal
Dale
%QXA
Daubs
Deaf
Xod^ter
Dauhtar
Daughter
^ufen
Daupjan
Dip
%ex
Daur
Door
Xob
Dauthus
Death
%Qi
Deds
Deed
Xragen
Dragen
Drag
Xreiben
Dreiban
Drive
Xrinfen
Driglsjan
Drink
Xeig
Daigs
Dough
EXTERNAL RELATIONS.
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13
11. But when we apply the scheme to the labials and gutturals, we can no longer take modem
German as a representative of High Dutch. In the letters of these organs
it has admitted so much of Low Dutch,
that we are obliged to seek examples
from the pure Old High Dutch of the
Prankish Empire. Both in the labials and in the gutturals, our medial corresponds to High German
tenuis, as represented by the mnemonic formula.
M
0. H. German.
MffiSOGOTHIC.
English.
$re^n
Brika.n
Break
$ruotar
Bro})ar
Brother
$etan
Bairan
Bear
^a6t
Gaats
Guest
^ot
Gu^
God
By the above lists it is made plain that the Moesogothic sides with the English or Low Dutch, as
against the German or High Dutch.
12. Thus far the examples are all based on initial letters : it will be well to shew like analogies in
the middle and end of words. The
comparison shall be confined to English and
German, as being that which will be most generally useful
and convenient The mnemonic \ \ > continues to
( t a me J
mark the path of the Lautverschiebung between High and
Low Dutch.
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14
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
®a-
a^^
X
T
A
Me
e« it
drbe
earth
$8ctt
bed
«oo« lot
Bcibe
both
S3rot
bread
guf« foot
fileb
leo«(A.S.)
«(ut
blood
grof« great
^etbe
heath
gut
good
^af^ hate
aiJibber
wether
laut
loud
^cip hot
«auB
leaf
ai^ut
wood
lauf leap
ScBctt
life
Drt
ord (A.S.)
J&auf heap
(Streben
strife
(Reiter
rider
Gaffer water
8icbe
love
eeite
side
0leffel nettle
8teB
lief
mcxt
word
3»alj malt
^abid^t
havoc
mt
edge
$er^ heart
@ib
oath
^tcp)ptl stubble
snctj net
^ip)pt
crib
^itge heat
•
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13.
This evidence for the affinities of our language would be far less perfect than it is, but for the
material which has been supplied by
means of Christianity. To this cause we trace
the preservation of the oldest literary records of our family of languages. In the fourth century
Scripture was translated into
Moesogothic : in the seventh century Anglo-Saxon began to be cultivated by means of Christianity,
and during five centuries were
produced those writings which have
partly survived. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the spread of Christianity northwards caused
the Norsk Sagas to be committed to
writing. Literary culture has been transplanted from the old into the midst
of the young and rising peoples of the
world, and hence it has come to pass that
among the nations which have sprung into existence since Christianity, a better record of their
primitive language has been preserved.
Hence the striking fact that we can trace
the written history of our English language within this island for the space of twelve hundred years.
Christianity was the cause of its
early cultivation ; and this has made it possible
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EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 5
for us to follow back the traces of our language into a far higher relative antiquity than that in
which the languages of Greece and Rome
first begin to emerge into historic view.
14. This has been very generally the case with the Christian nations of the
world. Their literature begins with their
conversion; and but for that event it would have been long delayed. The rude tribes of the distant
islands have now, by means of the
missionaries, the best books of the world
translated into their own tongues; and this at a stage of their existence in which they could not
of themselves produce a written
record. How carefully the Moesogothic
language was considered and adapted to the expression of Scripture, becomes manifest to the
philological student, when he examines
those precious relics of the fourth century which bear the name of Ulphilas. Here we often
meet the very words with which we are
so familiar in our English Bible, but
linked together by a flexional structure that finds no parallel short of Sanskrit. This is the
oldest book we can go back to, as
written in a language like our own. It
has therefore a national interest for us ; but apart from this, it has a nobility and grandeur all
its own, being one of the finest
specimens of ancient language. It is
by this, and this alone, that we are able' to realise to how high a pitch of inflection the speech of
our own race was once carried.
Inflections which in German, or even in
Anglo-Saxon, are but fragmentarily preserved, like relics of an expiring fashion, are there seen
standing forth in all their archaic
rigidity and polysyllabicity.
16. In the subjoined Lord's Prayer the English is a litde distorted to make it a verbal guide to the
Moesogothic words : —
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l6 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
THE LORD'S PRAYER.
From the Mcesooothic Version of Ulphilas ; made about a.d. 565.
Aivaggelyo thairh Matthaiu. Gospel
through Matthew,
Atta unsar thu in himinain Father our
thou in heaven
Veilmai namo thein Be-hallowed name
thine
Kvimai thiudinassus theins Come
kingdom thine
Vairthai vi]ja theins. svd in himlTia yah ana airthai Be-done will thine as in heaven yea on
earth
Hlaif unsarana thana sinteinan gif una himma daga Loaf our the continuous give us this day.
Yah aflet uns thatei sknlans siyaima
Vea off-let us that-which owing we4>e
Svasve yah veis afletam thaim skulam unsaraim
So-as yea we offAet those debtors ours
Yah ni briggais uns in fraistubnyai
Vea not bring us in temptation
Ak lausei uns af thamma ubilin But
loose us of the evil
ITnte theina ist thiudangardi For
thine is kingdom
Yah mahts Yah vulthus Fea might Yea
glory
In aivins. Amen. In eternity. Amen,
16. The Low Dutch family of languages falls into two natural divisions, the Southern or Teutonic
Platt-Deutsch, and the Northern or
Scandinavian. It was at the point of
junction between these halves — at the neck of the Danish
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EXTERNAL
RELATIONS. 1 7
peninsula, along the banks of the Elbe, and along the southwest coasts of the
Baltic — that our continental progenitors
lived and spoke.
17. The Saxons were a border people, and spoke a Low Dutch strongly impregnated with
Scandinavian associations. But the
more we go back into the elder forms on either side, the more does it seem to come out clear,
that our mother tongue is, in
fundamentals, to be identified with the P/a/fDeutsche the dialect of the
Hanseatic cities, the dialect which
has been erected into a national language in that which we call the Dutch, as spoken in the kingdom of
the Netherlands. The people of Bremen
call their dialect Nieder Sdchisch, i. e.
Lowland Saxon ; and the genuine original * Saxony' of European history was in this part, namely,
the middle and lower biet of the Elbe.
The name of * Saxon* has always
adhered to our nation, though we have seemed almost as if we had been willing to divest ourselves
of it. We have called our country
England, and our language English : yet
our neighbours west and north, the Welsh and the Gael, have still called us Saxons, and our language
Saxonish. It has become the literary
habit of recent times to use the term
* Saxon' as a distinction for the early period of our history and language and literature, and to reserve
the term
* English' for the later period. There is some degree of literary impropriety in this, because the
Saxons called their own language
Englisc. On this ground some critics insist
that we should let the word English stand for the whole extent of our insular history, which they
would divide into Old English, Middle
English, and New English. But on the
whole, the terms already in use seem bolder, and more distinct. They enable us to distinguish
between Saxon and Anglian; and they
also comprise the united nation under
Uie compound term Anglo-Saxon. As expressive of the
c
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1 8
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
dominant power, it is not very irregular to call the whole nation briefly Saxon.
§ 2. Domestic relations.
18. We have no contemporary account of the Saxon colonisation. The story which Bseda gives
us in the eighth century, is, that
there were people from three tribes, Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes. The latter were said to be still distinguishable in
Kent and the Isle of Wight; but, except in this statement, we have lost all trace of the
Jutes. The Angles and Saxons long
stood apart and distinct from one another ;
they had each a corner of their own. The Anglians occupied the north
and east of England, and the Saxons the
south and west. The line of Watling Street, running from London to Chester, may be taken as the
boundary line between these races,
whom we shall sometimes speak ol
separately, and sometimes combine, according to prevalent usage, either under the joint name of
Anglo-Saxons, oi under the dominant
name of Saxons.
When the Anglo-Saxons began to make themselves masters of this island, they found here a
population which is known in history
as the British race. This people spoke the language which is now represented by the Welsh. It
was an ancieni Keltic dialect somewhat
tinctured with Latin. The BritonJ had
been in subjection to Roman dominion for a space o between three and four centuries. This
would naturally hav( left a trace upon
their language. And hence we find tha
of the words which the Saxons learnt from the Britons some are undoubted Latin, others are
doubtful whether the] should be called
Latin or Keltic. Of the first class are thosi
elements of local nomenclature, -Chester^ from castrum^ i fortified place — Saxon form, ce aster :
street^ from strata^ i. e
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DOMESTIC
RELATIONS. , 1 9
*via strata' = a causeway — Saxon form, street. Port, a word derived from the Latin porfa, a gate,
signified in Saxon times just *a town,
a market-town:' this is the sense of it in
such a compound as Newport Pagnell. Wall, Saxon weall, is through the same filtered process a
descendant of the Latin vallum, 2l
rampart: mt'le, Saxon mil, from the Latin
*mz'lia passuum/ a thousand paces, has lived through all the ages to our day, and we are the only people
of Western Europe who still make use
of this Roman measure of distance. The
French keep to their leagtte {It'eue), the
measure which they had in use before the Romans troubled them, the old Keltic leuga. In Saxon poetry
we find the old highways called by the
suggestive name of milpa^as, the
mile-paths. Carcern, a prison, is the Latin career, with the Saxon word ern, a building, mingled into
the last syllable : TiGOL, a tile, is
the Roman tegula. At this time, too, we
must have received the names of many plants and fruits, as PYRiGE, the pear, Latin pyrus,
19. Many of the words which pertain to the personal and social comforts of life, were in this
manner learnt at secondhand from Roman culture : as disc, a dish ; from his
handing of which a royal ofificer all
through the Saxon period bore the tide
of disc-J?egn, dish-thane.
When we consider that there was much originally in common between the Latin
and the Keltic, it is no matter of
surprise that after so long a period we should find it difficult to sift out with absolute distinctness the
words which are due to the British.
The most certain are those names of rivers
and mountains, and some elements in the names of ancient towns, which have been handed on from
Keltic times to ours. Thus the
river-name Avon is unquestionably British,
and it is the common word for river in Wales to this day. So again with regard to that large class of
river-names which
C 2
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(delwedd E6028) (tudalen 020)
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20 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
are merely variations of the one name Isca — Usk, Ux, Wis(in Wisbech), The
Wash, Axe, Exe, Esk (in the Lothians),
Ouse: — all these are but many forms of one Keltic word, ut'sg, water ; which is found in usquehagh, the
Irish for eau-de-vie^ and in the word
whiskey. There are however, on our map,
a great many names of rivers and cities and mountains, of which, though so precise an account cannot
be rendered, it is generally concluded
that they are British — because they
run back historically into the time when British was prevalent — because they are not Saxon — ^because, in
short, they cannot otherwise be
accounted for. Such are, Thames,
Tamar, Frome, Derwent, Trent, Tweed, Severn, and the bulk of our river-names.
20. In like manner of the oldest town- names, and some names of districts. The first syllable in
FFi'wchester appears, through the
Latin form of Venta^ to have been the same as
the Welsh gweni, a plain or open country. The first syllable in MancYiQ^itT is probably the old Keltic
man, place; just as it probably is in
the archaic name for Bath, Ak^-manchester. Fork is so called from the Keltic
river-name Eure ; from an elder form
of which came the old Latin form of the
city -name Ebur-acum. But often where the sense cannot be so plainly traced, we acquiesce in the
opinion that names are British,
because their place in history seems to require it. Such are, for instance, Keni^ London^
Gloucester.
We will add a few words that have a fair Keltic reputation, basket, bran, breeches, clout, crag, crock,
down, den, hog, manor , paddock, park,
wicket. The word moor, for wild or waste land, I imagine to be Keltic, but
naturalised by the Saxons on the
continent before the immigration.
It is very probable that a few Keltic words are still living on among us in the popular names of wild
plants. The cockle of our corn-fields
has been with great reason attributed
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DOMESTIC
RELATIONS. 21
to the Britons. The Saxon form is coccel, but the word is not found in the kindred dialects. This is
the more re* markable, because most of
the tree and plant names are common to
us with the German, Dutch, Danish, &c. The words alder, apple, ash, aspen, beam, bean,
beech, bere, birch, bloom, blossom,
bramble, clover, corn, elm, flax, grass, holt, leek, lime, moss, nightshade, oak, radish,
reed, root, rye, shaw, thistle, thorn,
tree, way bread, weed, wheat, wood, wormwood,
wort, yarrow, yew, — are more or less common to the cognate languages. This is not the case with
cockle, and therefore it may perhaps
be British. Another plant-name, which is probably British, is willow. This
may well be traced to the Welsh helig
as its nearer relative, without interfering with the more distant claims of saugh, sallow,
salix. Whin also, and furze, have
perhaps a right here. With strong probability also may we add to this
botanical list the terms hisk^ haw,
and more particularly cod, a word that merits
a special remark. In Anglo-Saxon times it meant a bag, a purse or wallet \ Thence it was applied
to the seedbags of plants, as pease-cod. This seems to be the Welsh cwd. The puff-ball is in Welsh cwdy-mivg,
bag of smoke. Owen Pughe quotes this
Welsh adage : — * Egor dy gwd pan
gaech borchell'; i.e. *Open thy bag when canst get a pig!* — an expression which for
picturesqueness must be allowed the
palm over our English proverb * Never say no to a good offer.' What establishes the British
origin of this word is the large connection
it has in Welsh, and its appearance also in Brittany. Thus in Welsh there is
the diminutive form cydyn, a little
pouch, and the verb cuddio, to hide, with
many allied words ; in Breton there is kSd, pocket.
' See a spirited passage in the Saxon Chronicle of Peterborough, a.d. i
131, and my note there.
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22 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
The compound cock-boat \s probably a bilingual compound of which the first part is the Welsh avch,
a boat, a wore which has several
derivatives in Welsh.
Bard is unquestionably British, and so is gletiy and \\\it\f\^t flannel ) but
then these made their entry later, and dc
not belong to the present subject, which is the immediate influence of the British on the Saxon,
21. We can never expect to know with anything like precision what were the
relations of the British and Saxor
languages to each other and to the Latin language, until eacfc has been studied comparatively to a degree
of exactness beyond anything which has
yet been attempted. All 'the Gothic
dialects must be taken into comparison on the one hand, and all the Keltic dialects on the
other. The interesting question for us
is — Haw far the British population at largi
was Romanised ? Some think that habits of speaking Latin were almost universal, and they
appeal to the rude inscribed stones of
the earlier centuries which are found in
Wales, and which are in a Latin base enough to be attributed to
illiterate stonemasons. These stones are called in evidence to shew that a knowledge of
Latin was diffused through the whole
community. On this view, which receives support also from the number of Latin
words in Welsh, the arrival of the
Saxons prevented this island from
becoming the home of a Romanesque people like the French or Spanish.
22. The British language as now spoken in Wales is called, by those who speak it, Cymraeg; but
the AngloSaxons called it Wylscy and the people who spoke it th&y called WalaSy which we have modernised into
Wales and Welsh. So the Germans of the
continent called the Italians and
their language SBelfd^. At various points on. the frontiers of our race, we find them giving
this name to the
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INFLUENCE
OF THE CHURCH ON THE LANGUAGE.
2^
conterminous Romance-speaking people. This is the most probable account of the names Wallachia^
the Walloons in Belgium, and the
Canton Wallis in Switzerland. Oa this
principle we called the Romanised Britons, and the Germans called the Italians, by the same
name — Welsh. In Acts X. I, where we
read ' Cornelius, a centurion of the band
called the Italian band,* Luther's version has * Cornelius, ein Hauptmann von der Schaar, die da heisst die
Welsche.' The French, who were such
unwelcome visitors and settlers in this
country in the reign of Edward the Confessor, are called by the contemporary annalist * f>a welisce
men.' When Edward himself came from
the life of an exile in France, he was said
by the chronicler to have come ' hider to lande of weallande.* It is the same word which forms the last
syllable in Cornwall, for the Kelts who dwelt there were by the Saxons named the Walas of Kernyw.
The word was weal or wealh^ feminine wylen ; and it is an illustration of the servile condition to
which the old inhabitants were
reduced, that the words wealk and zuylen came to signify male and female slave.
§ 3. hifluence of the Church on the Language,
23. About the year a.d. 6oo, Christianity began to be received by the Saxons. The Jutish kingdom
of Kent was the first that received
the Gospel, and the Church was supreme
in Kent before Northumbria began to be converted. Yet the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria gained
afterwards the leading position as a
Christian nation in Saxondom ; and
being distinguished for learning and literature as well as for zeal, this people exerted a permanent
influence on the national language.
Intimately connected with this is the
political supremacy which the northern kingdom enjoyed
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24 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
in this island for a hundred years. It is evident that there was great and substantial progress in
religion, civilisation, and learning ;
of which fact the permanent memorial is the name and works of Baeda, who died in 735, after
having seen the decline of the
greatness of his people.
Canterbury was the metropolis of Christianity, but the kingdom of Northumbria was its most
powerful seat. It was the attachment
of this northern Church to the Roman
interest that effectually put a stop to the progress of the Scotian discipline in this island. The
power of this Anglian nation and the
admiration she excited in her
neighbours, caused them to emulate her example, to read her books, to form their language after
hers, and to call it ENGLisc. The Angles
first produced a cultivated bookspeech, and they had the natural reward of
inventors and pioneers, that of setting
a name to their product. Of all the
losses which are deplored by the investigator of the English language, perhaps there is none
greater than this, that the whole
Anglian vernacular literature should
have perished in the ravages of the Danes upon the Northhumbrian
monasteries. Of the existence of such a native literature there is no room for doubt.
Baeda tells us of such ; and he
himself was occupied on a translation when he died. Thus the obscure name of Angle emerged into
celebrity, and furnished us with the
comprehensive names of English and
England, which have continued to designate our country, tongue, and nation. The name of England is
confined by geographic limits; but the
name of English has widened with the
growing area of the countries, colonies and dependencies that are peopled or
governed by the children of our
tongue.
24. The extant works of Baeda are all in Latin, but they afford occasional glimpses of information
about the spoken
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INFLUENCE
OF THE CHURCH ON THE LANGUAGE.
25
Englisc of his day. As for example, in the Epistle to Ecgberhi^ he advises that prelate to make
all his flock leam by heart the Creed
and the Lord's Prayer. In Latin, if they
understand it, by all means, says he, — but in their own tongue if they do not know Latin. Which, he adds,
is not only the case with laity, but
with clerks likewise and monks. And markedly
insisting on his theme, as if even then the battle of the vernacular had to be fought, he goes on
to give his reasons why he had often
given copies of translations to folk that
were no scholars, and many of them priests too.
One of his most interesting chapters is that in which he gives the traditional story of the
vernacular poet Caedmon, who by divine
inspiration was gifted with the power of song, for the express purpose of rendering the
Scripture narratives into popular
verse. The extant poems of the Creation and
Fall and Redemption, which are preserved in archaic Saxon verse, are attributed to this Caedmon ; and
it is possible that they may be his
work, having undergone in the process
of copying a partial modification. We gather from the account in Baeda, that the practice of
making ballads was in a high state of
activity, and also that vernacular poetry was
used as a vehicle of popular instruction in the seventh century in Northumbria. And it is
interesting to reflect that in all our
island there is no district which to this day has an equal reputation for lyric poetry, whether
we think of the mediaeval ballads, or
of Burns, or of the Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border.
26. It was in the monastery of Whitby, under the famous government of the abbess Hilda, that the
first sacred poet of our race devoted
his life to the vocation to which he had been
mysteriously called. If something of the legendary hangs over his personal history, this only shews
how strongly his poetry had stirred
the imagination of his people. A nation
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26 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
that could believe their poet to be divinely called, was the nation to produce poets, and to elevate the
genius of their language. Such was the
Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, and
here it was that our language first received high cultivation.
It is remarkable that, while the peoples of the southern and western and south-eastern parts of the
kingdom continually called themselves Saxons (witness such local names as Wessex, Essex, Sussex, Middlesex), yet
they never appear in any of their
extant literature to call their language Seaxisc, but always Englisc^ The explanation of this
must be sought, as I have already
indicated, in that early leadership
which was enjoyed by the kingdom of Northumbria in the seventh and eighth centuries. The
office of bretwalda, a kind of
elective chieftainship of all Britain, was held by several Northumbrian kings in
succession. How high this title must
have sounded in the ears of cotemporaries
may be imagined from the fact that it is after the same model as their name for the Almighty. The
latter was ALWALDA, the All-wielding.
So Bretwalda was the wielder of
Britain, or the Emperor of all the States in Britain.
26. The culture of Northumbria overlived the term of its political supremacy. For a century and a
half the northern part of the island
was distinguished by the growth of a native
Christian literature, and of Christian art. Two names there are prominently associated with this
Northumbrian school, which mark the
extremities of the brightest part of its duration. The first is Benedict
Biscop, an Anglian by birth, who made
five visits to Rome, and founded the monastery ol
^ Yet we find the Latin equivalent of Seaicisc, as in Asser's Life of
Alfred, where the vernacular is called
Saxonica lingua. Asser however was a Welshman. Also in Cod. Dipl. 241, * in
commune silfa q' nos saxonice in gemennisse dicimus.' Also 833, 867.
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INFLUENCE
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37
Wearmouth in 672. The other was Alcuin, by whose aid Charlemagne laid the foundations of
learning in his vast dominions. Alcuin
died in 805.
This new vernacular literature of Northumbria perished in the ravages of the Danes, and not enough
remains to give an intimation of what
is lost. Meantime, the old mythic
songs still held their own in the south, where no strong growth of Christian literature appeared to
contest the ground against them. But
even these could not escape without
some colouring from the new religion and its sacred literature, and we
may assign the eighth century as the time when the Beowulf received those last superficial
touches which still arrest the
reader*s eye as masking or softening the heathendom of the poem. Alfred was a
lover of this old national poetry.
With the mention of Alfred's name, we enter upon a comparatively modem era of
the language, and quit the obscurity
of the pre-Danish period. Wessex, or the country of the West Saxons, becomes the arena of our
narrative henceforth, and the Anglian
does not claim notice again until the fourteenth century, when that dialect
had shaped itself into a new and
distinct national language for the kingdom of Scotland. Barbour in his poem of the Brtice
determined the character of modern
Scottish, and cast it in a permanent mould, just as his contemporary Chaucer did for our
English language. Again, in the
eighteenth century there was a brilliant revival of the Anglian dialect, out
of which came the poetry of Allan
Ramsay and of Robert Bums, and the dialogues
in * brad Scots,' which so charmingly diversify the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It is odd that this
language, which is Anglian tinged with
Norsk, should have received the Keltic
name of * Scotch ' from the Scotian dynasty which mounted the Anglian throne; and that in taking a
modern name
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28 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
from its northern neighbours it should have furnished a geographical parallel to the adoption of
the name of * English ' by the West
Saxons.
27. Wessex had not been entirely destitute of Christian learning during the period of Northumbrian
pre-eminence. Aldhelm is the first
great name in southern literature. He
died in a.d. 709. He translated the Psalms of David into his native tongue, and composed popular
hymns to drive out the old pagan
songs. But though we can point to Aldhelm,
and one or two other names of cultivated men in Wessex, they are exceptions to the general rudeness
of that kingdom before Alfred's time.
Wessex had been distinguished for its
military rather than for its literary successes. Learning had resided northward. But in the ninth century
a great revolution occurred. Northumbria and Mercia fell into the hands of the heathen Danes, and culture was
obliterated in those parts which had
hitherto been most enlightened. It was
Alfred's first care, after he had won the security of his kingdom, to plant learning. We have it in
his own words, that at his accession
there were few south of Humber who
could understand their ritual, or translate a letter from Latin into Englisc ; * and,' he adds, ' I ween
there were not many beyond Humber
either ' — pointing to the heathen darkness
in which the north was then shrouded.
This famous passage occurs in a circular preface, addressed to the several bishops, and serving as an
irjtroduction to Alfred's version of
Gregory's Cura Pasioralts. I quote it in
the original, with Mr. Henry Sweet's translation : —
DEOS BOC SCEAL to WIOOORA CEASTRE. this book is for WORCESTER.
Alfred kyning hate's grctanWacrferC King Alfred bids greet bishop
biscep his wordum luflice and freond- Warferthwith his words lovingly and
lice ; and 9e cyOan hate ISxt me com with friendship ; and I let it be known
swiOe oft 6n gemynd, hwelce wiotan to thee that it has very often come into
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INFLUENCE
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29
iu wanron giond Angelcynn, sBgt»er ge my mind, what wise men there for-
godcundra hada ge woruidcundra ; and merly were throughout England, both
ha geszliglica tida t$a waeroa giond of sacred and secular orders ; and
Angelcynn ; and hn t$a kyningas 0e how happy times there were then
"$006 6nwald haefdon iSxs folces on throughout England; and how the
"Sam dagum Gode and his xrend- kings who had power over the nation
wrecnm hersumedon ; and hie aeg^er in those days obeyed God and his
gehiorasibbe ge hiora siodo ge hiora ministers; and they preserved peace,
onweald innanbordes gehioldon, and morality, and order at home, and at
eac lit hiora eCel gerymdon ; and hu the same time enlarged their territory
him "Sa speow aegf^er ge mid wige ge abroad ; and how they prospered
both
mid wisdome ; and eac 9a godcundan with war and with wisdom ; and also
hadas hu giorne hie waeron aeg'Ser the sacred orders how zealous they
ge ymb lare ge ymb liornunga, ge were both in teaching and learning,
) mb ealle iSz t^iowotdomas 9e hie and] in all the services they owed to
Gode scoldon; and hu man utan- God; and how foreigners came to
hordes wisdom and lare hieder 5n this land in search of wisdom and
lond sohte, and hu we hie nu sceoldon instruction, and how we should now
ute begietan gif we hie habban sceol- have to get them from abroad if we
doQ. SwaB claene hio waes o'Sfeallenu were to have them. So general was
on Angelcynne ©act swi'Se feawa its decay in England that there were
wacron behionan Humbre t5e hiora very few on this side of the Humber
Seninga cut$en understondan • 6n who could understand their rituals in
Englisc, oCCe furSum an aerendgewrit English, or translate a letter from
6f Lzdene on Engh'sc areccean ; and Lcuin into English ; and I believe
ic wene tJset noht monige begiondan that there were not many beyond the
Humbre naeren. Swae feawa hiora Humber. There were so few of them
waeron "Saet ic furtSum anne anlepne tlmt I cannot remember a single one
ne maeg ge'Sencean besu&an Temese south of the Thames when I came to
8a t^a ic to rice feng. Gode aeU the throne. Thanks be to God Al-
mihtegum sie tSonc t^aet we nu senigne mighty that we have any teachers
on stal habbaO lareowa. among us now.
28, Alfred inaugurated a new era for his country. With him, that is to say, in the last quarter of
the ninth century, Saxon literature
starts up almost full-grown. It seems as if
it grew up suddenly, and reached perfection at a bound without preparation or antecedents. It has
been too much the habit to suppose
that this phenomenon is suflBciently
accounted for by the introduction of scholars from other countries who helped to translate the most
esteemed books into Saxon. So the
reign of Alfred is apt to get paralleled
with those rude tribes among whom our missionaries introduce a
translated literature at the same time with the arts of
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30 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
reading and writing. It has not been sufficiently considered that such translations are dependent on the
previous exercise of the native
tongue, and that foreign help can only bring up a wild language to eloquence by very slow
degrees. There is a vague idea among
us that our language was then in its
infancy, and that its compass was almost as narrow as the few necessary ideas of .savage life. A modern
Italian, turning over a Latin book,
might think it looked very barbarous ;
and perhaps even some moderate scholars have never appreciated to how great a power the Latin
tongue had attained long before the
Augustan era. Great languages are not
built in a day. The fact is that Wessex inherited a cultivated language from the north, and
that when they called their
translations Englisc and not Seaxisc, they acknowledged that debt. The
cultivated Anglian dialect became the
literary medium of hitherto uncultured Wessex ; just as the dialect of the Latian cities set the
form of the imperial language of Rome,
and that language was called Latin.
29. Of this literary Englisc the Lord's Prayer offers the readiest illustration.
THE LORD'S PRAYER.
Matt. VI.
Faeder ure, ]>u J^e eart on heofenum
Father our, thou that art in heaven
Si ]>in nama gehalgod Be thy name
hallowed
Tobecume thin rice Come thy kingdom
Geweor]}e ]>in willa on eor})an, swaswa on heofenum Be-done thy vnll on earthy sohis in heaven
Urae daeghwamlican hlaf syle us to dxg
Our daily loaf give u& to day
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CHARACTERISTICS
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And forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgifaj? urum gyltendum And forgive us our debts, so-as we forgive
our debtors
And ne gelsede |>u us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfle And not lead thou us into temptation^ but
loose us of evil
So]}lice. Soothly {Amen),
The period of West- Saxon leadership extends from Alfred to the Conquest, about a.d. 880 to a.d.
1066. These figures represent also the
interval at which Saxon literature was
strongest ; but its duration exceeds these limits at either end. We have poetry, laws, and annals before
880, and we have large and important
continuations of Saxon Chronicles
after 1066. Perhaps the most natural date to adopt as the close of Saxon literature would be a.d.
1154, the year of King Stephen's death,
the last year that is chronicled in
Saxon.
§ 4. Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon,
30. The Saxon differed from modern English most conspicuously in being what
is called an inflected language. An
inflected language is one that joins words together, and makes them into sentences, not so much by
means of small secondary and auxiliary
words, but rather by means of changes
made in the main words themselves. If we look at a page of modem English, we see not only
substantives, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs, the great words of conspicuous importance, but also a sprinkling of
little interpreters among the greater
words ; and the relations of the great words to one another are expressed by the little
ones that fill the spaces between
them. Such are the pronouns, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. In more general terms it
may be said
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32 THE
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that the essence of an inflected language is, to express by modifications of form that which an uninflected
language expresses by arrangement of
words. So that in the inflected
language more is expressed by single words than in the noninflected.
Take as an example these words of the Preacher, and see how differently they are
constructed in English and in Latin :
—
Eccles. iii,
Tempus nascendi, et tempos mo- A time io be born, and a time to riendi ; tempus plantandi, et tempus die ;
a time to plant, and a time to
evellendi quod plantatum est. pluck vp that which is planted.
Tempus occidendi, et tempus sa- A time to kill, and a time to heal ; nandi; tempus destruendi, et tempus a time
to break down, and a time to
aedificandi. build up,
Tempus flendi, et tempus ridendi ; A time to weep, and a time to tempus plangendi, et tempus saltandi. laugh
; a time to mourn, and a time
to dance,
Tempus spargendi lapides, et tem- A time to cast away stones, and pus colligendi. a time to gather stones
together.
There are no words in the Latin answering to the words which are italicised in the English version
— a, to^ be, up, that^ away, together
— yet the very sense of the passage
depends upon them in English, often to such a degree that if one of these were to be changed, the
sense would be completely overturned.
The Latin has no words corresponding to these symbols, but it has an
equivalent of another kind. The
terminations of the Latin words undergo
changes which, are expressive of all these modifications of sense ; and these changes of form are
called Inflections,
31, The following piece may serve to illustrate the Saxon inflections : —
Upahafent/m eagwrn on ))a heah- With uplifted eyes to the height
nys5tf and a]>enedt/m earmvm ongan and with outstretched arms &he be-
gebiddan mid ]>aera wclera styrung- gan to pray with stirrings of the lips
um on stilnes5«. in stillness.
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CHARACTERISTICS
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Here we observe in the first place, that terminations in the elder speech are replaced by
prepositions in the younger. '
\Jipsh3,fenum e2igum' is * wM uplifted eyes/ and ' 2]>enedum t^nnum* is 'wM outstretched arms'; and the
infinitive termination of the verb *
gebidda« ' is in English represented
by the preposition /o.
We observe however in the second place, that on the Saxon side also there are prepositions
among the inflections. The phrases *
on j?a heahnysj^,' ' mtd . . . stynngumy* ^ on stilnesj^,' are at once phrasal and
inflectional. This indicates a new growth in the language : the inflections
are no longer what once they were,
self-suflScient. Prepositions are
brought to their aid, and very soon the whole weight of the fimction falls on the preposition. The
inflection then lives on as a familiar
heirloom in the language, an ancient fashion,
ornamental rather than necessary. At the first great shake which such a language gets, after it is
well furnished with prepositions,
there will most likely be a great shedding of
inflections. And so it happened to our language after the shock of the Conquest, as will be told in
its place.
We should not pass on without observing, that this condition of a language,
in which it is provided with a double
mechanism for the purposes of syntax, is one eminently favourable to expression, being precisely
that of the ancient Greek and of the
modern German. The old flexions serve
to convey feeling, sentiment, association, much of that which is aesthetic in literature; the
prepositions and other intermediaries seek to satisfy the demands of the
intellect for clear and unambiguous
statement. The excellence of Saxon as
a field of study is greatly enhanced by the circumstance that two eras live on side by side in that
language : the one in the old poetry,
which is almost entirely flexional ; the other mixed of flexion and phrase, in the prose
and later poetry.
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34 THE
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Sharon Turner has some sentences on this head, which, though not exact, are worth quoting: —
Another prevailing feature of the Anglo-Saxon poetry was the omission of the little particles of
speech, those abbreviations of language which are the invention [?] of
man in the more cultivated ages of
society, and which contribute to
express our meaning more discriminatingly, and to make it more clearly understood. The prose and
poetry of Alfred's translation of
Boethius will enable us to illustrate this remark. Where the prose says, Thu the on tham ecan
setle ricsast. Thou who on the eternal
seat reignest ; the poetry of the same
passage has Thu on heahsetle ecan ricsast. Thou on high-seat-eternal reignest : omitting the
explaining and connecting particles, ^ke and /kam Thus, the phrase
in Alfred's prose *So doth the moon with his pale light, that the bright stars he obscures in the
heavens,' is put by him in his poetry
thus : —
With pale light Bright stars Moon lesseneth.
History of the Anglo-Saxons^ bk. xii. c. i.
32. But it is not in the scheme of its grammar alone that human speech is subject to change : this
liability extends to the vocabulary
also. There is a constant movement in
human language, though that movement is neither uniform in all languages, nor is it evenly
distributed in its action within the
limits of any one given language. It might
almost be imagined as if there were a pivot somewhere in the motion, and as if the elemental parts
were more or less moveable in
proportion as they lay farther from or nearer
to that pole or pivot of revolution. Accordingly, we see words like man, word, thing, can, smith,
heap, on, with, an, which seem like
permanent fixtures through the ages, and
at first sight we might think that they had suffered no change within the horizon of our observation. They
s«"e found in
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CHARACTERISTICS
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35
our oldest extant writings spelt just as we now spell them, and for this very reason it is the more
necessary to call attention to the
change that has really passed over them.
There are others, on the contrary, which have long been obsolete and forgotten, for which new words
have been long ago substituted.
Sometimes a whole series of substitutions
successively superseding each other have occupied the place of an old Saxon word. The Saxon wiiodlice
was in the middle ages represented by
verily^ and in modern times by
certainly. The verb gehyrsumian passed away, and instead of it we find the expression to he buxom, and
this yielded to the modem verb to
obey. One might construct a table of words
which have succeeded one another in the successive eras of our language, the new sometimes superseding
the old, and sometimes, even oftener,
Hving along peaceably by its side; —
Gothic.
R0MANESQJ7£.
Classic.
begianing
commencing
incipient
forgiye
pardon
condone
hap
chance
accident
ingoing
entrance
adit, ingress
kind
sort
species
law
rule
canon
look
mien
expression
mouth
embouchure
sBStuary
outgoing
issue
exit, egress
reckon
count
calculate
rewth
pity
compassion
stow
place
locality
tdl
number
enumerate
twit
rebuke
reprehend
wealth
riches
opulence
wonder
marvel
admiration
wreak
revenge
retaliate
And this is a great store for supplying the materials of amplification and variation in diction.
Thus :
So that no certaiue end could euer be attained, unlesse the actions
whereby it is attained were regular,
that is to say, made suteable, iit, and correspondent vnto their end, by some
Canon, rule, or lawe. — R. Hooker, Of
Ae Lawt, &c. L a.
D 2
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36 THE
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The words which have thus succeeded one another do not always cover equal areas : the elder word
is usually the more comprehensive, and
the later words are apt to be more
specific, as in the following instance : —
" class " order office
hAd •{ degree
I estate (^ rank
section
condition
profession
position
denomination
interest
33. In such transitions the change is conspicuous, and requires little comment; but in the other
set mentioned above it requires some
attention to seize the alteration
which has taken place. Man spells in old Saxon as in modem English, but yet it has altered in
grammatical habit, in application, and
in convertible use.
In grammatical habit it has altered ; for in Saxon it had a genitive mannes, a dative men, an
(archaic) accusative mannan, a plural
men, a genitive plural manna, and a
dative plural mannnm. Of these it has lost the whole, except the formation of the simple plural.
In application it has altered ; for in Saxon times man was as applicable to women as to men, whereas
now it is limited to one sex.
In convertible use it has suffered greatly ; for the Saxon speech enjoyed the possession of this word
as a pronoun, just as German now. In
German, man fagt (man says) is
equivalent to our expression fAey say or tf is said, German spelling distinguishes between the
substantive and the pronoun by giving the former a double n at the close, in
addition to the distinction of the initial capital, which in German belongs to substantives: thus, substantive
S^ann, pronoun man. In Saxon (towards
the close of the period) the
distinction of the n is sometimes seen, with a preference of
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CHARACTERISTICS
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the vowel a for the substantive, and for the pronoun. The following is of the eleventh century : —
Mrest mon sceal God lufian . . . First, we must love God , , . we
Ne sceal mon mann slean . . . ac must not slay man . . . but every
aelcne mann mon sceal S weor]rian. man we must aye respect; and no
and ne sceal nan manu don oSrum man should do to another that he
yxt he nelle yxt him mon do. would not to himself were done.
Our language is at present singularly embarrassed for want of this most useful pronoun. At one
time we have to put a we, at another
time a j/ou, at another time a ^hey, at
other times one or somebody ; and it often happens that none of these will serve, and we must have
recourse to the passive verb, as in
the close of the quotation. There are probably few English speakers or writers who have
not felt the awkwardness resulting
from our loss of this most regrettable
old pronoun. No other of the great languages labours under a like inability. So far about the
word man, which is an example of the
slowest-moving of words, which has not
altered in its spelling, and which is yet seen to have undergone alterations of another kind. The
other instances shall be more lightly
touched on.
34. Thing. This word had to itself a large symbolic function which is now partitioned: 'On mang
)>isum J?ingum,' Among these things
; * Ic seah sellic f>ing singan on
recede,' I saw a strange thing singing on the hall. But in Saxon it covered a greater variety of
ground than it does now : * Me weartS
Grendles J?ing undyrne cutS,' The matter
of Grendel was made known to me ; * Beadohilde ne waes hyxQ broSra deaS on sefan swa sar, swa hyre
sylfre f>ing,' Her brother's death
was not so sore on Beadohild's heart as
was her own concern ; * For his J^ingum,' On his account,
35. Smith. This word is now applied only to handicraftsmen in metals. But in
early literature it had its metaphorical
applications. Not only do we read of the armourer by the
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38 THE
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name of waepna smitS, the weapon-smith ; but we have the promoter of laughter called hleahtor smitS,
laughter-smith; we have the teacher
called Idr smitS, lore-smith ; we have
the warrior called wig smitS, war-smith.
36. Heap is now only applied to inert matter, but in Saxon to a crowd of men : as, * Hengestes
heap/ Hengest's troop (Beowulf, 1091)
; * j^egna heap,' an assembly of thanes;
' preosta heap,' a gathering of priests. In Norfolk may still be heard such a sentence as this : ' There
was a heap of folks in church to-day.'
Can. This verb was used in Saxon in a manner very like its present employment. But when we
examine into it, we find the sense
attached to it was not, as now, that of
possibility, but of knowledge and skill. When a boy in his French exercises comes to the sentence *Can
you swim?' he is directed to render it
into French by * Savez vous nager ? '
that is ' Know you to swim ? ' There is something strange to us in this ; and yet * Can you
swim ? ' meant exactly the same ; for
in Saxon, cunnan is to know : ' Ic can,*
I know ; * Jju canst,' thou knowest. It had, moreover, a use in Saxon which it has now lost, but which
it has retained in German, where
fcnncn, to know, is the proper word for
speaking of acquaintance with persons. So in Saxon :
* Canst f)u J?one preost }>e is gehaten Eadsige?' Knowest thou the priest that is called Eadsige?
37. On is a common preposition in Saxon, but its area of incidence is diflferent. We often find
that an AngloSaxon ON cannot be rendered by the same preposition in modern English, e. g. * pone J?e he geseah
on }>3ere cyrcan,* Whom he saw in the
church ; * LandferS se ofersaewisca hit
gesette on Leden,' Landferth from over the sea put it into Latin ; * Swa swa we on bocum reda8,' As we
read in books;
* Sum mann on Winceastre,' A man ai Winchester. In certain
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CHARACTERISTICS
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cases where ^is now used, as, 'bishop of Winchester/ * abbot of Abingdon/ we find on in the Saxon
formula : * biscop on Winceastre,' *
abbot on Abbandune/ There are, however, instances in which this preposition
needs not to be otherwise rendered in
modem English, e. g. * Eode him }>a ham hal on his fotum, se }>e aer was geboren on
baere to cyrcan ' : He went off then
home whole on his feet, he who before was
borne on bier to church.
One of the least changed is the preposition to. This will mostly stand in an English translation out
of Saxon : ' And se halga him cwaef)
to, ponne ]>u cymst to Winceastre,' And
the saint said to him, When thou comest to Winchester : ' Se mann weartS }>a gebroht to his bedde/
The man was then brought to his bed.
38. With in Saxon meant against, and we have still a relic of that sense in our compound verb
withstand, which means to stand
against, to oppose. We have all but lost
the old preposition which stood where the ordinary with now stands. It was mid, and it still keeps
its old place in the German mit We
have not utterly lost the last vestiges
of it, for it does reappear now and then in poetry in a sort of disguise, as if it were not its own old
self, but a maimed form of a compound
of itself, amtd; and so it gets printed
like this — ^mt'd.
An is a word in Saxon and also in modern English, and it is the same identical word in the two
languages. But in the former it
represents the first numeral, which we now call WON and write one ; in the latter it is the
indefinite article.
By such examples we see that words which in their visible form remain unaltered, may yet have become
greatly changed in regard to their
place and office in the language.
39. Such were some of the features of the Saxon speech, as well as we can illustrate them by a
reference to modern
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40 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
English. Speaking relatively to the times, it was not a rude language, but probably the most disciplined
of all the vernaculars of western Europe, and certainly the most
cultivated of all the dialects of the
Gothic barbarians. Its grammar was
regulated, its orthography mature and almost fixed. It was capable, not of poetry alone, but of
eloquent prose also, and it was equal
to the task of translating the Latin authors,
which were the literary models of the day. The extant Anglo-Saxon books are but as a few
scattered splinters of the old
Anglo-Saxon literature. Even if we had no other proof of the fact, the capability to which
the language had arrived would alone
be sufficient to assure us that it must
have been diligently and largely cultivated. To this pitch of development it had reached, fiist by
inheriting the relics of the
Romano-British civilisation, and afterwards by four centuries and a half of Christian culture
under the presiding influence of Latin
as the language of religion and of
higher education. Latin happily did not then what it has since done in many lands ; it did not
operate to exclude the native tongue
and to cast it into the shade, but to the
beneficent end of regulating, fostering, and developing it.
§ 5. Effects of the Norman Conqttest,
40. Such was the state of our language when its insular security was disturbed by the Norman
invasion. Great and speedy was the
effect of the Conquest in ruining the
ancient grammar, which rested almost entirely on literary culture. The leading men in the state
having no interest in the vernacular,
its cultivation fell immediately into neglect. The chief of the Saxon clergy deposed or
removed, who should now keep up that
supply of religious Saxon literature,
of the copiousness of which we may judge even in our day
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EFFECTS
OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 4I
by the considerable remains that have outlived hostility and neglect ? Now that the Saxon landowners
were dispossessed, who should
patronise the Saxon minstrel and welcome the
man of song in the halls of mirth ?
The shock of the Conquest gave a deathblow to Saxon literature. There is but one of the
Chroniclers that goes on to any length
after the Conquest ; and one of them stops
short exactly at a.d. 1066, as if that sad year had bereft his task of all further interest We have Saxon
poetry up to that date or very near to
it, but we have none for some
generations after it. The English language continued to be spoken by the masses who could speak no
other ; and here and there a secluded
student continued to write in it. But
its honours and emoluments were gone, and a gloomy period of depression lay before the Saxon language
as before the Saxon people. It is not
too much to say that the Norman
Conquest entailed the dissolution of the old cultivated language of
the Saxons, the literary Englisc. The inflectionsystem could not live through
this trying period. Just as we
accumulate superfluities about us in prosperity but in adversity we get rid of them as
enciunbrances, and we like to travel
light when we have only our own legs to carry us — just so it happened to the Englisc
language. For now all these sounding
terminations that made so handsome a
figure in Saxon courts — the -an, the -um, the -era and the -ena, the -iGENNE and -igendum, — all these,
superfluous as bells on idle horses,
were laid aside when the nation had lost its
old political life and its pride of nationality, and had received leaders and teachers who spoke a foreign
tongue.
41. Nor was this the only effect of the introduction of a new language into the country. A vast
change was made in the vocabulary. The
Normans had learnt by their sojourn in
France to speak French, and this foreign
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42 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
language they brought with them to England. Sometimes this language is spoken
of as the Norman or Norman- French. In
a well-known volume of lectures on the
Study of Words (the author of which is now Archbishop of Dublin) the relations between this
intrasive * Norman' and the native
speech are given with much felicity of
illustration. I have the pleasure of inserting the following passage with the permission of the author :
—
We might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an
analysis of our present language, a
mustering of its words in groups, and
a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally
contributed to it. Thus we should
confidently conclude that the Norman was the
ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence,
with one remarkable exception (to be adduced presently), descend to us from them — sovereign, sceptre, throne,
realm, royalty, homage, prince, duke,
count, {earl indeed is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his countess from the Norman,)
chancellor, treasurer, palace, castle,
hall, dome, and a multitude more. At
the same time the one remarkable exception of king would make us, even did we know nothing of
the actual facts, suspect that the
chieftain of this ruling race came in
not upon a new title, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line of
its succession ; that the true
continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but
survived, in due time to assert itself
anew.
And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all articles of luxury, all having
to do with the chase, with chivalry,
with personal adornment, is Norman throughout; with the broad basis of the
language, and therefore of the life,
it is otherwise. The great features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and
fire, all the prime social relations,
father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter,
— these are Saxon. Palace and castle may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe
far dearer
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EFFECTS
OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 43
names, the house, the roq/l the home, the hearth. His * board ' too, and often probably it was no more, has
a more hospitable sound than the ' table ' of his lord. His sturdy arms turn the soil; he is the boor, the hind,
the churl \ or if his Norman master
has a name for him, it is one which on his
lips becomes more and more a title of opprobrium and contempt, the 'villain/
The instruments used in cultivating
the earth, the flail, the plough, the sickle, the spade, are expressed
in his language; so too the main products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats^ here\ and no
less the names of domestic animals.
Concerning these last it is curious to
observe that the names of almost all animals, so long as they are alive, are thus Saxon, but when dressed
and prepared for food become Norman —
a fact indeed which we might have
expected beforehand; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and feeding
them, but only that they might appear
on the table of his Norman lord. Thus
ox, steer, cow^ are Saxon, but beef Norman ; calf is Saxon, but veal Norman ; sheep is Saxon,
but mutton Norman ; so it is severally
with swine and pork, deer and venison,
fowl and pullet.
Putting all this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been indicated here,
we should certainly gather, that while
there are manifest tokens preserved in our
language of the Saxon having been for a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable
elements of AngloSaxon life, however overlaid for a while, had still made
good their claim to be the solid
groundwork of the after nation as of
the after language ; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic records, and the present
social condition of England, consent
in bearing witness. — Study of Words, 12th
ed., 1867, pp. 98-100.
42. This duplicate system of words in English was the result of a long period during which the
country was in a bilingual condition.
The language of the consumer was one,
and that of the producer another. In the market the seller and the buyer must have spoken different
languages, both languages being
familiar in sound to either party : just as on
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44 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
the frontier of the English and Welsh in the present day large numbers of people have a practical
acquaintance with both languages,
while they can talk in one only. This it is which has brought down upon the rustic Welsh the
unjust imputation of saying JDtm Saesoneg out of churlishness. They may understand the enquiry, and yet they may
not possess English enough to make
answer with. A frontier between
English and French must have existed in the Norman period in every town ^and district of England. It
was a bilingual condition which lasted
down to the middle of the fourteenth
century, when a mixed English language broke forth and took the lead. During three centuries, the
native language was cast into the
shade by the foreign speech of the conquerors.
All that time French was getting more and
more widely known and spoken; and it never covered so wide an area in this island as it did at
the moment when the native speech
upreared her head again to assert a permanent
supremacy. As the waters of a river are often shallowest there where they cover the widest area, so
the French language had then the
feeblest hold in this country, when it
was most widely cultivated and most generally affected.
§ 6. The Literature of the Transition. First Period,
43. Saxon had never ceased to be the speech of the body of the people. The Conquest could not
alter this fact What the Conquest did
was to destroy the cultivated Englisc,
which depended for its propagation upon literature and literary men. This once extinct, there was
no central or standard language. The
French language in some respects
suppHed the place of a standard language, as the medium of intercourse between persons in the best
ranks of society. The native speech,
bereft of its central standard, fell abroad
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION. 45
again. It fell back into that divided condition, in which each speaker and each writer is guided by
the dialect of his own locality,
undisciplined by any central standard of
propriety. Our language became dialectic. And hence it comes to pass that of the authors whose
books are preserved from the year a.d.
iioo to 1350, no two of them are uniform
in dialect ; each speaks a tongue of its own. We can divide this large tract of time into two parts,
corresponding vaguely to the
culmination and decline of the French fashion. It must be understood here, and wherever
figures are given to distinguish
periods in the history of language, that it is intended for the convenience of writer and
reader, for distinctness of arrangement, and as an aid to the memor}% rather than as a rigid limit. For in such
things the two bordering forms so
shade off and blend into one another,
that they are not to be rigidly outlined any more than the primary colours in the rainbow.
44. For convenience sake, we may divide the * Transition ' into two parts, and add a third era for the
infancy of the national language : —
Transition. Broken Saxon (Latin
documentary period) from 1 100 to 1 2 15
Early English (French documentary period) . 12 15 to 1350 First national English 1350 to 1550
Of the first division of this period, the grand landmarks are two poems, namely Layamon's Bruf, and
the Ormulum ; Layamon representing the
dialect of the south and west, and Onn
that of the east and north.
The Brut of Layamon, a work which embodies in a poetic form the legends of British history, and
which exceeds 30,000 lines, was
edited, with an English translation, by Sir Frederic
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46 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Madden, in 1847. Besides discussions on the language and the date, which is assigned to 1205, ^^^
leading passages for beauty or
importance are indicated in a way which gives
the reader an immediate command of the contents of this voluminous work. Such a poem as this was
not the work of any one year, or even
of a few years. It must be regarded as the life-long hobby of Layamon the
priest, who lived at Areley Kings, on
the west bank of the Severn, opposite Stourport, and who there served the
church, being the chaplain and inmate
of * the good knight ' of the parish. His
language runs back and claims a near relationship to that of the close of the latest Saxon Chronicle :
and this connection rests not on local
but rather on literary affinity.
46. For it is easier to describe Layamon by his literary than by his local affinities. * He is the
last writer who retains an echo of the
literary Englisc. Though he wrote for
popular use, yet the scholar is apparent; he had conned the old native literature enough to give a
tinge to his diction, and to preserve
a little of the ancient grammar. Among the
more observable features of his language are the following : — Infinitives in /', />, or^ ; the use of
v for/*; the use of u for / or y in
such words as dude, did ; hudde, hid ; hulk, hill ; puUe, pit. What adds greatly to the
philological interest of the Brut is this,
that a later text is extant, a text which
bears the evident stamp of Northern English. It has been printed parallel with the elder text. One
of the most salient characters of the
northern dialect was its avoidance of
the old sc initial, which had become sh. The northern dialect in such cases wrote simply s. The
northern form for shall was sail, as
indeed it continues to be to the present
day. So among the tribes of Israel at the time of the Judges, it was a peculiarity of the tongue of the
Ephraimites that they could not frame
to pronounce sh, but said Sibboleth
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION.
47
instead of Shibboleth. This is so distinct a feature of our northern dialect that it is worth while to
collect some examples of this contrast
in the two texts : —
FmsT Text.
Second Text*.
Scaft, shaft
Scarpe, sharp
ScaeSe, thealh
Seal, scalt, scullen, scuIleS, sJiall
Saft
Sarpe
Seajw
Sal, salt, soUen, soHe}»
Sceldes, shields
Seldes
Sceort, short
Scuten, they shot
Scereo, scar ; fhear, shore
Sort
Soten Seren, sar
Scean, shone
Son
Scip, ship Scame, shame
Sip
Same
Sculderen, shoulders
Soldre
Scunede, shunned
Sonede
The wall of Severus, which was made against the Picts, is called in the elder text sad wall, that
is, wall of separation, S^cibesSBall; and in the later or northern text it
is stdwai.
46. Our first quotation presents the two texts side by side, with the editor's translation appended : —
Elder Text.
\» cleopede ArSur,
aetSelest kingen:
Whar beo )e mine Bnittes,
balde mine )>aines;
)>e daei him forfS ^eonge'S,
\>is folc us a^ein stonde'S.
iette we beom to glideu
scanpe gares ino^e,
& techen heom to riden
))ene wan touward Romen.
^fne )an woide
ye ArOor iseide,
he sprong fofS an stede,
swa Sparc de9 of fnre.
Him weore fiiliende ,
fifti Jnisende.
Line 23495.
Younger Text.
))o cleopede Arthur,
boldest of kinges :
Ware beo je mine Bruttus,
bolde mine cnihtes;
))e dai him fotp go)),
))is folk vs a^en stonde]).
lete we to ham glide
sarpe gares inowe,
and teche )am to ride
))ane wei toward Rome.
Efne )nn worde
))at Arthur )>o saide,
hii spronge for]) vppen stedes,
ase spare do)) of fure.
Him were fol^ende
fiftie )>ousend.
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48
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Then called Arthur, noblest \holdest'] of kings: ' Where be ye, my
Britons, my bold thanes [knights'] f
The day it forth goeth ; this folk against us
standeth. Cause we to glide to them sharp darts enow, and teach them
to ride the way towards Rome ! * Even
with the words that Arthur [then] said
he \they'] sprang forth on steed [upon steeds'], as spark doth of
fire. Fifty thousand were following
him,
47. In the second specimen, which is from the elder text, /A has been substituted for ]> and S, to
accommodate the unpractised reader.
THE PASSING OF ARTHUR.
Line
Tha nas ther na mare,
i than fehte to laue,
of twa hundred thusend monnen,
tha ther leien to-hawen ;
buten Arthur the king one,
and of his cnihtes tweien.
Arthur wes forwunded
wunderliche swithe.
Ther to him com a cnaue,
the wes of his cunne;
he wes Cadores sune,
the eorles of Cornwaile.
Constantin hehte the cnaue ;
he wes than kinge deore.
Arthur him lokede on,
ther he lai on folden,
and thas word seide,
mid sorhfulle heorte.
Constantin thu art wilcume,
thu weore Cadores sune :
ich the bitache here,
mine kiiieriche:
and wite mine Bnittes,
a to thines h*fes :
and hald heom alle tha la^en,
tha habbeoth istonden a mine da^en ;
and alle tha la3en gode,
tha bi Vtheres dajen stode.
And ich wulle uaren to Aualun,
to uairest aire maidene;
to Argante there quene,
aluen swithe sceone :
and heo seal mine wunden,
makien alle isiinde.
28582.
T%en was there no more
in that fight left alive,
out of 200,000 men,
that there lay cut to pieces;
but Arthur the King only
and two of his knights,
Arthur was wounded
dangerously much.
There to him came a youth
who was of his kin ;
he was son of Cador,
the earl of Cornwall,
Constantin hight the youth;
to the king he was dear.
Arthur looked upon him,
where he lay on the ground,
and these words said,
with sorrowful heart,
Constantine thou art welcome,
thou wert Cador* s son :
I here commit to thee,
my kingdom:
and guide thou my Britons
aye to thy life*s cost:
and assure them all the laws,
that have stood in my days:
and all the laws so good,
that by Uther*s days stood.
And I will fare to Avalon,
to the fairest of all maidens ;
to Argante the queen,
elf exceeding sheen :
and she shcdl my wounds,
make all sound,
tITERATVRE OF THE TRANSITION.
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49
al hal me makien, raid halewei^e
drenchen. And seothe ich cumen
wuUe to mine kineriche: and wunien mid Bnitten, mid muchelere wunne. ^fne than worden, ther com of se wenden, that wes an sceort bat lithen, sceouen mid vthen: and twa wimmen therinne, wunderliche idihte: and heo nomen Arthur anan, and aneouste hine uereden, and softe hine adun leiden, and forth gunnen hine lithen.
Tha wes hit iwurthen, that Merh'n
seide whilen; that weore unimete
care, of Arthures forth fare.
Bruttes ileueth 5ete, that he beo on
h'ue, and wunnie in Aualun mid fairest aire aluen : and lokieth euere Bruttes jete, whan Arthur cume lithen.
all whole me mahe^ iinth healing
drinks. And sith return I will, to my hingdom : and dwell with Britons, with mickle joy.
Even with these words, there came from
sea-ward wending, that was a short
boat sailing, moving with the waves: and two women therein, of marvellous aspect : and they took Arthur anon, and quickly bore him off, and softly him down laid, and forth with him to sea they gan to move away.
Then was it come to pass what Merlin
said whilome; that there should be
much curious care, when Arthur out of
life should fare.
Britons believe yet, that he be
alive, and dwelling in Avalon, with the fairest of all elves : still look the Britons for the day of Arthur's coming o^er the sea.
48. A third specimen shall be taken from near the close of this voluminous work, where the elder
text only is preserved.
A BRITISH VIEW OF ATHELSTAN'S REIGN.
Line 31981,
pa tiden comen sone,
to CadwaiSlader kinge
into Brutaine,
)>er )>ar he wunede
mid Alaine kinge,
])e wes of his cunne.
Me dude him to understonde
of al ]>isse londe ;
hu At^elstan her com Y\iStn,
ut of Sexlonden;
and hu he al Angle lond,
sette on his agere hond ;
The tidings came soon
to Cadwalader king
into Brifanny,
where he was dwelling
with Alan the king,
who was of his kin.
Men did him to understand
all about this land;
how Athelstan had here embarked,
coming out of Saxon parts ;
and how he all England
set on his own hand;
E
50
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
and hu he sette moting, & hu he
sette busting; and hu he sette
sciren, and makede fritS of deoren
; & hu he sette halimot, & hu he sette hundred; and ])a nomen of j^an tunen, on Sexisce runen: and Sexis he gan kennen, ]7a nomen of ]^an monnen : and al me him talde, ]7a tiden of ])isse londe. Wa wes Cadwaladere, ])at he wes on Hue.
and how he set mote-ting, and how he
set hus-ting; and how he set
shires, and made law for game ; and how he set synod and how he set hundred; and the names of the towns in Saxon runes! and in Saxish gan he ken, the names of [British] men : and so they told him all the tidings of this land ! Wo was to Cadwalader, that lie was alive.
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49.
The Ormulum may be proximately dated at a.d. 12 15. This is a versified narrative of the
Gospels, addressed by Ormin or Orm to his
brother Walter, and after his own name
called by the author * Ormulum ' ; by which designation it is commonly known.
Ice ])att tiss Ennglish hafe sett
Ennglisshe men to lare, Ice wass
\>zt\>xt I cristnedd wass
Orrmin bi name nemmedd.
• . . •
piss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum
FoTTpi ]?att Orrm itt wroghte.
/ that this English have set
English men to lore, I was there-where
I christened was
Ormin by name named.
.... This book is named Ormulum
Because that Orm it wrought.
In this poem we find for the first time the word * English ' in the mature form. Layamon has the forms
englisc, englis, cenglis, anglisce ;
but Orm has enngUss^ and still more
frequently the fully developed form ennglissh. The author is lavish of his consonants.
50. This is a constant feature of the Ormulum. For Orm was one of Nature's philologers, and a
spellingreformer. He carefully puts the double consonant after the short vowel. Had his orthography been
generally adopted, we should have had
in English not only the mm and nn with
which German is studded, but many other
double consonants which we do not now possess. How
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION.
51
great a study Orm had made of this subject we are not left to gather from observation of his
spelling, for he has emphatically
called attention to it in the opening of his
work.
HOW TO SPELL.
And whase wilenn shall )7iss boc
cflFt o]>err si|>e writenn himm
bidde ice j^at he*t write rihht
swa summ )>iss boc him tseche])])
and tatt he loke well |>att he
an bocstaff write twiggess eggwhaer
Jwet itt uppo ))iss boc
iss writen o ])att wise, loke well
|>att he*t write swa,
for he ne magg nohht elless on
Ennglissh writenn rihht te word,
]>att wite he well to soj^e.
And whoso thall pttrpose to make
another copy of this book^ I beg him
to write it exactly as this book
directeth; and that he look well
that he write a letter twice wherever
upon this book it is written in that
wise. Let him look carefully that
he write it so, for else he cannot
write it correctly in English — that
know he well for certain !
61. There is another point of orthography which is (almost) peculiar to this author. When
words beginning with Jf follow words
ending in d or /, he generally (with but
a few, and those definite exceptions) alters the initial J> to /. Where (for example) he has the three words
J^a// and J^a// 2LndJ>e succeeding
one another continuously, he writes,
noX. patt pati pCy but pati tatt te. One important exception to this rule is where the word ending with the
</ or / is severed from the word
beginning with / by a metrical pause ; in that case the change does not take place, as —
1 agg affter pe Goddspell stannt ]^att
tatt te Goddspell mene]?]).
and aye after the Gospel standeth thai
which the Gospel meaneth.
Here the stannt does not change the initial of the next word, because of the metrical division that
separates them. Other examples of
these peculiarities may be seen in the following extract.
£ 2
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^2 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
CHARACTER OF A GOOD MONK.
Forr himm birr]> beon full dene mann,
and all wi])]7utenn ahhte, Buttan
)7att mann himm findenn shall
unnorne mete and wxde. And tser iss
all ])att eor)>lig J^ing
]7att minnstremann hm\> aghenn
Wij7)>utenn cnif and shaB))e and camb
and nedle, gifF he't georneJ>]?.
And all ]>iss shall mann findenn himm
and wel himm birr)) itt genienn; For
birr)) himm nowwJ)err don })aeroff,
ne gifenn itt ne sellenn. And himm
birr)) aefre standenn inn
to lofenn Godd and wurr))en. And agg
himm birr]) beon firessh )>aBrto
bi daggess and by nihhtess; And tat
iss harrd and Strang and tor
and hefig lif to ledenn. And for)>i
birr]) wel clawwstremann
onnfangenn mikell mede, Att hiss
Drihhtin Allwaeidennd Godd,
forr whamm he mikell swinnke)))). And
all hiss herrte and all hiss lusst
birr]) agg beon towarrd heoffne, And
himm birr)) geornenn agg ]>att an
hiss Drihhtin wel to cwemenn, Wi))])
daggsang and wi)))) uhhtennsang
wi))]) messess and wi])]) beness, &c.
Translation.
For he ought to he a very pure man
and altogether without property.
Except that he shall be found in
simple meat and clothes. And that is
all the earthly thing
that minster-man should own, Except a
knife and sheath and comb
and needle, if he want it. And all
this shall they find for him,
and it is his duty to take care of it.
For he may neither do with it,
neither give it nor sell. And he must
ever stand in (vigorously)
to praise and worship God, And aye
must he be fresh thereto
by daytime and by nights ; And that 's
a hard and stiff' and rough
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION, 53
and heavy life to lead. And therefore
well may cloistered man
receive a michle meed At the hand of
his Lord Allwielding God,
for whom he mickle slaveth. And all
his heart and his desire
ought aye be toward heaven; And he
should yearn for that alone,
his Master well to serve, . With
day-time chant and chant at prime,
with masses and with prayers, &c.
The poems of Layamon and Orm may be regarded as appertaining to the old Saxon literature.
Layamon and Orm both cling to the old
in different ways : Layamon in his
poelic form, Orm in his diction. Both also bear traces, in different ways, of the earlier processes
of that great change which the French
was now working in the English
language. The long story of the Brut is told in hnes which affect the ancient style ; but the style is
chaotic, and abounds in accidental
decorations, like a thing constructed out of ruins. In the Orniulum the regularity is
perfect, but it is the regularity of
the new style of versification, learnt from foreign teachers. The iambic measure sits admirably
on the ancient diction : for Orm, new
as he is in his metre, is old in his
grammar and vocabulary. The works differ as the men differed: the one, a secular priest, has
the country taste for an irregular
poetry with alliteration and every other
reverberatory charm; the other, a true monk, carries his regularity into everything — arrangement,
metre, orthography. He is an
English-speaking Dane, but educated in a monastery that has already been
ruled by a succession of French
abbots.
From these two authors, as from some half-severed promontory, we look across
the water studded with islands, to
where the continent of the modern English language rears its abrupt front in the writings of
Chaucer.
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54 THE
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§ 7. The triumph of French.
52. In the two great works which have occupied us during the preceding pages, the Englisc has made
its latest stand against the growing
ascendancy of the French. We now
approach the time when for a century and a half French held a recognised position as the language
of education, of society, of business,
and of administration. Long bef6re
1250 we get traces of the documentary use of French, and long after 1350 it was continued. Trevisa
says it was a new thing in 1385 for
children to construe into English in the
grammar schools, where they had been used to do their construing into French. If we ask what
manner of French it was, we must point
to that now spoken by the peasants of
Normandy, and perhaps still more to the French dialect which has been preserved in the Channel
Islands. A bold relic of our use of
French as the language of public business
still survives in the formula le roi le veult or la reine LE VEULT, by which the royal assent to
bills is announced in Parliament. In
the utterance of this puissant sentence it
is considered correct to groU the r after the manner of the peasants of Normandy.
One particular class of words shall be noticed in this place as the result of the French rule in
England. This is a group of words
which will serve to depict the times that
stamped them on our speech. They are the utterance of the violent and selfish passions.
53. Almost all the sinister and ill-favoured words which were in the English language at the time of
Shakspeare, owed their origin to this
unhappy era. The malignant passions
were let loose, as if without control of reason or of religion ; men hotly pursued, after the objects of
their ambition, covet-
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THE
TRIUMPH OF FRENCH. 55
ousness, or other passions, till they grew insensible to every feeling of tenderness and humanity; they
regarded one another in no other light
but as obstructives or auxiliaries in
their own path. Such a state of society supplied the nascent English with a mass of opprobrious
epithets which have lasted, with few
occasional additions, till the present
day. Of these words a few may be cited by way of example. And first I will instance the word Juggler,
This word has two senses. It is,
first, a person who makes a livelihood by
amusing tricks. Secondly, it has the moral sense of an impostor or deceiver. Both these senses
date from the French period of our
history.
To jape is to jest coarsely ; a japer is a low buffoon ; japery is buffoonery; and jape-worthy is
ignominiously ridiculous.
'Yo jangle is to prate or babble ; a jangler is a man-prater, and 2LJangleress'i& a woman-prater.
Bote lapers and langlers. ludasses children.
Piers Plovnttan^ 35.
64* Ravin is plunder; raveners are plunderers; and although this family of words is extinct,
with the single exception of ravenous as applied to a beast of prey, yet they are still generally known from the English
Bible of 161 1.
Ribald and ribaldry are of the progeny of this prolific period. Ribald was almost a class-name in
the feudal system. One of the ways,
and almost the only way, in which a
man of low birth who had no inclination to the religious life of the monastery could rise into some
sort of importance and consideration,
was by entering the service of a powerful
baron. He lived in coarse abundance at the castle of his patron, and was ready to perform any
service of whatever nature. He was a
rollicking sort of a bravo or swash-
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56 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
buckler. He was his patron's parasite, bull-dog, and tool. Such was the ndald, and it is not to be
wondered at that the word rapidly
became a synonym for everything ruffianly
and brutal ; and having passed into an epithet, went to swell the already overgrown list of vituperations.
Such are a few of the words with which our language was endowed, in its first rude contact with the
French language. Though we find nearer
our own times, namely, in the reign of
Charles the Second, some accordance of tone with the early feudal period, yet neither in that
nor in any other age was there
produced such a strain of injurious words, calculated for nothing else but to
enable a man to fling indignities at
his fellow.
The same period is stigmatised by another bad characteristic, and that is,
the facility with which it disparaged good
and respectable words.
55. Vi'llan was simply a French class-name, by which a humble order of men was designated ; ceorl
was a Saxon name of like import : both
of these became disparaged at the time
we speak of into the injurious sense of villain and churL
The furious and violent life of that period had every need of relief and relaxation. This was found in
the abandonment of revelry and in the counter-stimulant of the gamingtable.
The very word revelry ^ with its cognates to revel, revelling, revellers, are productions of
this period. The rage for gambling
which distinguished the habits of our NormanFrench rulers is aptly
commemorated in the fact that up to
the present day the English terms for games of chance are of French extraction. Dice were seen in
every hall, and were then called by
the same name as now. Cards, though a later
invention, namely, of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century, are still
appropriately designated by a French
name.
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THE
TRIUMPH OF FRENCH. 57
66. The fashion Of counting by acej deuce, /rey, quart, cink, stz, is French — not modern French, but of
the feudal age. We find it in Chaucer,
precisely as at present : —
Seven is my chance, and thin is cink and treye.
Canterbury Tales, 12,587.
Chance itself is one of those gaming terms, and so is hazard, which was the prominent word in the
phraseology of gambling, and accordingly
very odious to the moralist of that
day. In the list of vices hasardery comes in next to gluttony, as being that which beset men
next after the temptations of the
table.
And now that I have spoken of glotonie.
Now wol I you defenden hasardrie.
Hasard is veray moder of lesinges,
And of deceite, and cursed forsweringes. It is repreve, and contrary of honour, For to ben hold a common hasardour.
Canterbury Tales, 12,522.
It is a comfort to observe that even a word may outlive a bad reputation. The word hazard, though
still a gambling term in the last
century, has now little association with
disorderly excitement and the thirst for sudden wealth ; it suggests to our minds some laudable
adventure, or elevates the thought to
some of those exalted aims for which men
have hazarded their lives. Another word may be cited, which belonged originally to the same
ill-conditioned strain, but which time
has purified and converted into a picturesque
word, no longer a disgrace but an ornament to the language. This {^jeopardy, at first a mere excited
and interjectional cry, Jeu perdu I
game lost I or else, jeu parti I drawn game ! — but now a wholesome rhetorical word.
It would hardly be fair however to omit mention of the feet that other classes of words were also
gained at this
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58 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
period. Some theological and moral terms of the first quality, such as charity, faiih^ grace, mercy,
peace, belong here; and so also a
variety of commercial, legal, heraldic,
and political words, as advocate, alliance, arrearage, chattels, custom, demise, devise, domain, fief,
fealty, homage, liege, loyalty, manor,
meynie, moiety, personalty, pursuit, pursuivant, realty, rent, seisin, serjeant, sovereign, treafy,
trover, vouchsafe.
§ 8. Literature of the Transition. Second Period,
57. In this period, which may be rudely defined by the dates 1 250-1350, we see strong efforts
after a native literature; but desultory and without any centre of their own
they hover provincially around the
privileged and authoritative languages
of French and Latin. They have not among
themselves a common or even a leading form of speech. This period has been richly illustrated by
the publications of the Early English
Text Society.
The first example of the new group is the beautiful poem of Genesis and Exodus, Here the word shall
is thus declined: sing, sal, salt] pi.
sulen. Also srud for the Saxon scrud,
modern shroud; and suuen as a participle of the verb which we now write shove. This speaks for its
Anglian character. The date is about
a.d. 1250. As a specimen of the language,
we may quote the selling of Joseph : —
8e chapmen skiuden here fare, TTie chapmen hastened their depariure,
in to Kgipte Itdden 9at ware; into Egypt led that chattel;
wi'S Putifar "Se kinges stiward, with Potipkar the king's stewardt
he maden switSe bigetel forward; they made very profitable bargain;
so michel fe iSox is hem told; so much money there is them told;
he bauen him bogt, he hauen sold, these have him bought, and those
have sold.
Here the form he represents the Saxon hi, and is equiva-
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION. 59
lent to our modem pronoun fkey. The -n form of the present tense in hauen is a token of midland
locality.
Worth quoting also is the butler's narrative of his dream to Joseph in the prison : —
Me drempte ic stod at a wintre, / dreamt I stood at a vine-tree
t$at adde waxen buges ^re. that had waxen boughs three.
Orest it blomede and si^en bar Erst it bloomed and then it bare
8e beries ripe, wnr?J ic war: the berries ripe, as I was ware:
0e kinges kuppe ic hadde on bond, the hinges cup I had in hand,
Ce beries "Sorinne me Chugte ic the berries therein me-thought I
wrong, wrung,
•and bar it drinken to Pharaon, And bare it to drink to Pharaoh
me drempte, als ic was wune to don. (7 dreamed) as I was wont to do.
At the end of his version of Genesis, the poet speaks of himself and of his work : —
God schilde hise sowle fro belle bale God shield his soul from hell-bale t$e made it 8us on Engel tale! that made it
thus in English tale I
68. The most facetious of the productions of this period is the poem entitled The Owl and the
Nightingale. Its locality is
established by internal evidence, as having been written at or near Portesham in
Dorsetshire. It is a singular
combination of archaic English with ripe wit and mature versification. The forms of words and even
the turns of expression recall Mr.
Barnes's Poems in the Dorset Dialect,
A prominent feature is the frequent use of v where we writey*; as vo for foe, vlize flies, vairer
fairer, vram from, vor for; but so
forvorp for *so far forth'; warevore
wherefore. The old sc becomes sch, as schaltUy schule^ scholde, schonde^ schame^ schake^S,
schende^ schuniet shunneth, scharp.
The subject is a bitter altercation between the Owl and the Nightingale, such as might naturally be
supposed to arise out of the
neighbourhood of two creatures not only
unlike in their tastes and habits but unequally endowed
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6o
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
with gifts and accomplishments. The following picture of the Owl's attitude as she listens to the
Nightingale's Song, will afford some
taste of the humour as well as of the
diction : —
J?os word a5af Jje ui^tingale, And
after ])are longe tale. He songe so
lude and so scharpe, Ri3t so me grulde
schille harpe. pes hule luste
]>iderward, And hold hire e3en o]>erward, And sat tosuoUe and ibol^e, Also ho hadde on frogge isuol^e.
TViese words returned the nightingale,
And after that there long tale,
He sang so loud and so sharps
As if one trilled a shilly harp.
This owl she listened thitherward.
And held her eyen otherward;
And sat all swollen and out- blown
As if she had swallowed a frog.
This poem is one of the most genuine and original idylls of any age or of any language, and the
Englishman who wants an inducement to
master the dialects of the thirteenth century, may assure himself of a pleasure when he is
able to appreciate this exquisite
pastoral. Its date may be somewhere about
A.D. 1280.
69. The student of English will observe with particular interest the series of translations from
the French fomances which began in the
thirteenth century. This was a courtly
literature, which was originally written in the courtly French ; and the copious translation of this
literature is the first sign of the
returning tide of the native language. Of these we will first mention The Lay of Havelok the
Dane, which is in a .midland dialect,
but almost as free from strong provincial
marks as it is from French words. It uses the sh, as will be seen from the following quotation, in which
it is told how Grimsby was founded by
Grim : —
In Humber Grim bigan to lende, In
Lindcseye, rith at the north ende,
Ther sat is ship up on the sond,
But Grim it drou up to the lond.
And there he made a lite cote,
To him and to hise flote.
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION, 6 1
Bigan he there for to erthe A litel
hus to maken of erthe. And for that
Grim that place aute. The stede of Grim
the name laute, So that Grimesbi
calleth alle That ther-offe speken
alle, And so shulen men callen it ay, Bituene this and domesday.
In Number Grim began to land, in Lindsey, right at the north end : there sate his ship up on the sandy and Grim it
drew up to the land. And there he made
a little hut^ for himself and for his crew. In order to dwell there, he began to make of earth a little house. And
forasmuch as Grim owned that
house-place; the homestead caught from Grim its name, so that all who
speak of it call it Grimsby ; and so
shall they call it always between this and
Doomsday.
As this poem is associated with Lincolnshire, we might expect to find many Danish words in it. But
the number of those that can be
clearly distinguished as such, is small.
Unless it be the verb to call, there is no example in the quotation above. It can hardly be doubted
that the Danish population which
occupied so much of the Anglian districts
must have considerably modified our language. Their influence would probably have been greater,
but for the cruel harrying of the
North by William the Conqueror. The
affinity of the Danish with the Anglian would make it easy for the languages to blend, and the
same cause renders it difficult for us
to distinguish the Danish contributions.
The following short list contains those which I can offer with most confidence as words which
have come in through Danish agency.
For those who may wish to examine the
grounds of this selection the Icelandic forms
are added ^
' Any one who has occasion to institute comparisons between English and Scandinavian, will do well to consult A
List of English Words the Etymology ^
which is illustrated by Comparison with Icelandic. Prepared in the form of an Appendix to Cleasby and Vigfussons
Icelandic-English Dictionary, By the
Rev. Walter W. Skeat, M.A. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1876.
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62
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
ale (ol) anger (angr) call (kalla) cast (kasta) cow V. (kiiga) crop (kroppa) dream
(draumr) dwell
(dvelja) earl (jarl)
egg V' (cffgja) fellow (felag)
flat (flatr)
flay (fld)
flit (flytja)
foster (f6str)
gain (gagn)
gust (gustr)
hair (bar) hansel (handsal) hap (happ)
heel (hxll) hit (hitta) husband (husb6ndi) hustings (husj^ing) ill (illr)
irk (yrkja) kid (ki») knife (knifr) law (lag)
meek (mjukr) ransack
(rannsaka) score (skor) scrap (skrap) scrape (skrapa)
shallow (skjalgr) skill (skil) skin (skinn) sky (sky)
slit (slita) slouch
(slokr) sneak (snikja) spoil (spilla) swain (sveinn) take (taka)
thrall Oraell) thrift
(^rif) tiding (tidindi) ugly (ugligr) want (vanr)
wont (vanr) wile {v6\)
60. The three works already noticed are in remarkabl] pure EngKsh. The old inflections are nearly
all gone, am so far the language has
suflfered alteration, but the vocabulary
remains almost unmixed with French. But in the Romanc of King Alexander, the feature which claims
our attention i; the working in of
French words with the English. Thii
poem was the general favourite before the Romaunt of th< Rose superseded it. The French original *
Rouman d' Alix andre' had been
composed about the year 1184. It consist
of 20,000 long twelve-syllable lines, a measure which thence forward became famous in literature, and
took the name o ' Alexandrine/ after
this romance. It was Spenser who gav<
the Alexandrine metre an acknowledged place in Englisl poetry.
But the English version with which alone we are her€ concerned, was made late in the thirteenth
century, in a lai tetrameter. Unlike
the poem of Havelok, a great proportior
of the French words of the original are embodied in this English translation. The two languages do
not yet appeal blended together, but
only mechanically mixed. The follow-
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION. 63
ing lines will illustrate this crude mixture of French with English : —
1 . That us telleth the maistres saunz faile,
2. Hy ne ben no more verreyment,
3. And to have horses auenaunt. To hem
stalworth and asperaunt,
4. Toppe and rugge, and croupe and cors
Is semhlahel to an hors.
61. Now we come to a great original work. The
rhyming Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester is a fine specimen of
west-country English, which touches the dialect of The Owl and Nightingale at many points : —
the infinitives ending in -1 or -y^ or
-/>, as conseili to counsel; he wolde
msieini he would sustain ; he ne let no^t clupie al is folc, he let not call all his folk; due William
uorbed alle his to robby, duke William
forbad all his (men) to rob; hoseli to
housel; )?is noble due William him let crouny king, this noble duke William made them crown him
king.
In other points this dialect differs strongly from the Dorset, as exhibited in the Owl and
Nightingale. The latter has the
initial h very constant in such words as Ich hahbe I have, pu havest thou hast, ho hadde she had
; whereas in Robert of Gloucester it
is adde. He writes is for his, ire for
hire (her), om for home. The Dorset, on the other hand, retains the h in hit it; writes the owl
down as a *hule' and a^houle'; never
fails in sh, but rather strengthens it by the
spelling sch, as scharpe, schild, schal^ schame) whereas the Gloucester dialect eludes the h in such
instances, and writes w, as ssolde
should, ssipes ships, ssriue shrive, ssire
shire, bissopes bishops; and even Engliss English, Frenss French.
62. The following line offers a good illustration both of
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64 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
this feature, and also of the metre of this Chronicle, which is not very equable or regular, but of which
the ideal seems to be the
fourteen-syllable ballad-metre : —
Hou longe ssoUe hor lujjer heued above hor ssoldren be?
How long-'a shall their hated heads
Above their shoulders be?
Perhaps this ss may have been a difference of orthography rather than of pronunciation: which is made
probable by the substitution of the ss
for ck where we must suppose a French
pronunciation of the ch, which is about the same as our sk sound. Thus, in the long piece
presently to be quoted, we have
Michaelmas written Mtsselmasse.
The Commencement of Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, as printed by Hearne, Date about 1300.
Engelond ys a wel god lond, ich wene of eche lond best,
Yset in the ende of the world, as al in the West.
The see goth hym al a boute, he stont as an yle.
Here fon heo durre the lasse doute, but hit be thorw gyle
Of folc of the selue lond, as me hath yseye wyle.
From South to North he is long eighte hondred myle;
And foure hondred myle brod from Est to West to wende,
Amydde tho lond as yt be, and noght as by the on ende.
Plente me may in Engelond of all gods yse,
Bute folc yt forgulte other yeres the worse be.
For Engelond ys ful ynow of fruyt and of tren.
Of wodes and of parkes, that joye yt ys to sen;
Of foules and of bestes, of wylde and tame al so ;
Of salt fysch and eche fresch, and fayre ryueres ther to ;
Of Welles swete and colde ynow, of lesen and of mede;
Of seluer or and of gold, of tyn and of lede ;
Of stel, of yrn, and of bras ; of god com gret won ;
Of whjrte and of wolle god, betere ne may be non.
England is a very good land, I ween of every land (the) best ; set in
the end of the worlds as in the utter
west. Hie sea goeth it all about; it
standeth as an isle. Their foes they need the less fear, except it be
through guile of folk of the same
land, as has been seen sometime. From south
to north it is eight hundred mile long ; and four hundred mile broad to
go from east to west, that is, through
the middle of the country and not as by the
one end. Plenty of all goods men may in England see, unless the people
are
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION. 65
ft
«i fault or the years are had. For England is full enough of fruit and
of trees; of woods and of parks, that
joy it is to see; of fowls and of beasts,
vnldand tame alike; of salt jfish and eke Jresh^ and fair rivers
thereto; of wells sweet and cold enow^
of pastures and of meads; of silver ore and of gold, of tin and of lead; of steel, of
iron, and of brass; of good com great
store'; of wheat and of good wool, better may be none,
63. The most famous and oftest quoted piece of Robert of Gloucester is that wherein he sums up
the consequences of the Battle of
Hastings. It contains the clearest and best
statement of the bilingual state of the population in his own time, that is, before a.d. 1300.
Bituene Misselmasse and Sein Luc, a Sein Calixtes day,
As vel in j>u]ke ^ere in a Saterday,
In "pe ^er of grace, as it vel also,
A ^usend and sixe *) sixti, ]7is bataile was ido.
Dpc Willaro was ]fo old nyne ") ]>ritti jer,
T on T Jwitti jer he was of Normandie due er.
po )>is bataile was ydo, due Willam let bringe
Vaire his folc, that was aslawe, an er]>e pom alle plnge,
AUe J)at wolde leue he Jef, ))at is fon aner])e brojte.
Haraldes moder uor hire sone wel ^erae him biso^te
Bi messagers, "j largeliche him bed of ire j>inge,
To granti hire hire sones bodi anerj)e vor to bringe.
Willam hit sende hire vaire inou, wij/oute eny J)ing ]>are uore :
So ]>at it was jjoru hire wi]> gret honour ybore
To \>e hous of Waltham, T ibro^t anerj)e pere,
In pe holi rode chirche, ]>at he let himsulf rere,
An hous of religion, of canons ywis.
Hit was ])er vaire an erJTe ibro^t, as it ^ut is.
Willam ]>is noble due, po he adde ido al ]^is,
|Jen wey he nom to Londone, he T alle his,
As king and prince of londe, vr'ip nobleye ynou.
Ajen him vfip uair procession ])at folc of toune drou,
"J vnderueng him vaire inou, as king of ])is lond.
)7us com lo Engelond, in to Normandies bond.
"j pe Normans ne cou]>e speke ]>o, bote hor owe speche,
'} speke French as hii dude at om ") hor children dude also teche.
So psLt heiemen of ])is lond, pat of hor blod come,
Holde)> alle ]>u]ke speche that hii of horn nome.
Vor bote a man conne Frenss, me tel]) of him lute,
Ac lowe men holdef) to Engliss *] to hor owe speche ^ute.
Ich wene ]>er ne be]^ in al pe world contreyes none,
pat ne |ioIde]> ta hor owe speche bote Englond one.
Ac wel me wot uor to conne bo))e well it is,
Vor pe more ])at a man can, the more wur])e he is.
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66 THE
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-■
It will hardly be necessary to translate the whole of this passage for the reader. We will modernise a
specimen to serve as a guide to the
rest. The last ten lines shall be
selected as recording the linguistic condition of the country.
And the Normans could not then speak any speech but their own; and they spoke French as they did at home, and
had their children taught the same. So
that the high men of this land, that came of their blood, all retain the same speech which they brought from
their home. For unless a man know
French, people regard him little : but the low men hold to English,
and to their own speech still. I ween
there be no countries in all the world that
do not hold to their own speech, except England only. But undoubtedly
it is well to know both ; for the more
a man knows, the more worth he is.
64. These examples will perhaps suffice to give an idea of the dissevered and dialectic condition
of the native language from the
twelfth to the fourteenth century. During this long interval the reigning language was French,
and this fashion, like all fashions,
went on spreading and embracing a wider
area, and ever growing thinner as it spread, till in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was
become an acknowledged subject of derision. Already, before 1200,. the
famous Abbot Sampson, of Bury St.
Edmunds, was thought to have said a
good and memorable thing when he gave as his
reason for preferring one man to a farm rather than another, that his man could not speak French. The
French which was spoken in this
country had acquired an insular character;
it was full of Anglicisms and English words, and in fact must often have been little more than deformed
English. Even well-educated persons,
such as Chaucer's gentle and ladylike Prioress, spoke a French which, as the
poet informs us, was utterly unlike *
French of Paris.' What then must have
been the French of the homely upland fellows Trevisa tells of : — ' and oplondysch men wol lykne
hamsylf to gentil men, and fondej?
with great bysynes for to speke Freynsch, for to be more ytold of?
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LITERATURE
OF THE TRANSITION. 6y
65. In Piers Plowman we have the dykers and del vers doing a bad day's work, and singing scraps
of French songs for pastime : —
Dykers and Delvers that don here werk ille,
And driveth forth the longe day, with 'Deu vous saue, dam Emme/
Prologue, 103.
We might almost imagine, that now for the second time in history it was on a. turn of the balance
whether /Britain should bear a nation
of the Romanesque or of the Gothic
type. But all the while the native tongue was growing more and more in use; and at length, in the
middle of the fourteenth century, we
reach the end of its suppression and
obscurity. Trevisa fixes on the great plague of 1349 as an epoch after which a change was observable
in regard to the popular rage for
speaking French. He says: *This was
moche used tofore the grete deth, but sith it is somdele chaunged.' But the most important date is
1362, when the English language was
re-installed in its natural rights, and
became again the language of the Courts of Law.
66. In the specimens of English which have now passed before us, we are struck with their
diversity and the absence of any signs
of convergency to a common type. The only
feature which they agree in with a sort of growing consent, is in the dropping of the old inflections
and the severance connection with the
Anglo-Saxon accidence. Among the most
tenacious of these inflections was the genitive plural of substantives in -ena and of adjectives
in -ra. This -ena drooped into the
more languid ene; and the -ra appeared
as -er or -r, as in /het'r, alter ^ alderliefesL
Throughout the whole of this period there is such a tendency to variety and
dialectic subdivision, that it has been
found hard to say how many dialects there were in the country. Higden, writing in the fourteenth
century, said
F 2
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68 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
there were three, the Northern, the Southern, and the Midland. This division
is substantial and useful, and it is
conveniently represented by three well-marked forms of the present tense indicative, viz. -e/k, -en,
and -es. The -n of the Midland dialect
may be seen at 67. This form is restricted
and comparatively obscure. The -eth is Southern, the -es Northern (86). The -eth was universal in
Saxon literature, the -es is universal
now. The turning-point is seen in
Shakspeare, who uses them both according to convenience, though the -es is usual with him, except in
the case of hath and doth. The triumph
of the Northern • dialect in this particular has contributed much to English
sibilation.
Much of the peculiar English quoted in this section survives now only in the provincial
dialects. And here we take occasion to
remark, that the dialects offer peculiar
advantages for philological discipline. In the first place, they are an entertaining study. There is a
charm about them which makes itself
generally felt, and which often turns even
the indifferent into an observer*; — besides the additional recommendation, that they are to be sought
chiefly in the pleasantest places of
the land. And secondly, their fragmentary condition, which to the grammatical
view discredits them, is so far from
being a drawback, that it is a circumstance highly favourable to the formation
of a philological habit of mind. It is
the organic completeness of a language
that recommends it for grammatical study, but the philological
interest is totally different. In every language, however perfect, philology
sees a mass of relics, which can be
mentally completed and satisfactorily understood only by reference to other languages. It is not
easy at first to see the most perfect
languages in this light; nor is it by any
means desirable that the student should do so, until after the time that by grammatical study he has
comprehended some-
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THE
KING'S ENGLISH. 69
what of their perfections. But when we regard our homely dialects, the dilapidation is patent, and
we naturally think of reconstruction
by sounder specimens ; and in this thought
b'es the germ of the philological idea.
§ 9. The King's English,
67. We have a phenomenon to account for. In the midst of this Babel of dialects there suddenly
appeared a standard English language.
It appeared at once in full vigour, and was
acknowledged on all hands without dispute. The study of the previous age does not make us
acquainted with a general process of
convergency towards this result, but rather indicates that each locality was getting
confirmed in its own peculiar habits
of speech, and that the divergence was growing wider. Now there appeared a
mature form of English which was
generally received.
The two writers of the fourteenth century who most powerfully display this language are
Chaucer and Gower. Piers Plowman is in
a dialect ; even Wiclifs Bible Version
may be said to be in a dialect : but Chaucer and Gower write in a speech which is thenceforward
recognised as The English Language,
and which before their time is hardly
found. This seems to admit of but one explanation. It must have been simply the language that had
formed itself in the court about the
person of the monarch. Chaucer and
Gower differ from the other chief writers of their time in this particular, which they have in common
between themselves, that they were
both conversant with court life, and moved in
the highest regions of English society. They wrote in fact King's English, This advantage, joined to
the excellence of the works
themselves, procured for these two writers, but more especially for Chaucer, the preference
over all that had written in English.
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70 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
68. An admiring foreigner (I think it was M. Montalembert), among other
compliments to the virtues of this nation,
observed, as a proof of our loyalty and our attachment to the monarchy, that we even call our roads
*the Queen's Highways,' and our
language *the Queen's English'! No
Englishman would wish to dim the beauty of the sentiment here attributed to us, nor need we think it
is disparaged though a matter-of-fact
origin can be assigned to each of
these expressions. Of the term 'King's Highway' the origin is historically known. When there
were many jurisdictions in this country, which were practically
independent of the crown, the tracts
in which jurisdiction might be uncertain, such as the border-lands of the
shires and the highways, appertained to the royal jurisdiction. That is to
say, a crime committed on the highway
was as if committed in the King's own
personal domain, and fell to his courts to judge. The highways were emphatically under the
King's Peace, and hence they came to
be (for a very solid and substantial
reason, at a time when travellers sorely needed to have their security guaranteed) spoken of as the
King's Highways.* Of the origin of the
term * King's English' we have not any
direct testimony of this kind ; but it seems that it may be constructively shewn, at least as a
probability, that it was originally
the term to designate the style of the royal or governmental proclamations, charters, and
other legal writings, by contrast with
the various dialects of the provinces^.
69. From about the middle of the thirteenth century, it had become usual to employ French in the
most select documents, instead of Latin, which had been the documentary
* Omnes herestrete omnino regis sunt. Laws of Henry III.
^ As a small collateral illustration and confirmation of this view, it
may not be amiss to observe that the
style of penmanship in which such documents were then written has always been
known as * Court Hand.'
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THE
king's ENGLISH. 7 1
language from the time of the Conquest. Hallam tells us that *all letters, even of a private
nature, were written in Latin till the
beginning of the reign of Edward I (soon after 1270), when a sudden change brought in the
use of French.* But neither of these
strange languages were suitable for
edicts and proclamations addressed to the body of the people, and we may suppose that the
vernacular was generally employed for
this purpose, although few examples
have survived. The earliest extant piece of this class is of the reign of Henry III, at the moment of
the triumph of the barons : — and in
the employment of the English language at
this crisis we may see ' the anxiety of the barons to explain their conduct to the people at large, by
the use of the best medium of
information/
Proclamation in the name of Henry III, sent to the several Counties of England, October 18, 1258.
\ Henr', ]mi3 Godes fultume. King on Engleneloande, Lhoauerd on Yrloand, Duk on Norm* on Aquitain' and eorl on
Aniow, send igretinge to alle hise
hokle, ilaerde and ilacwede on Huntendon' 8chir\
pxt witen $e wel alle ])SBt we willen and unnen ))SBt. \xX vre raedesmen alle o]>er \t moare dsel of heom, ])aBt
beo]> ichosen )mn us and ])ur^ ]>aet
loandes folk on vre kuneriche. habbe)? idon and schulle don. in ])e worj^nesse of Code and on vre treow))e, for ))e freme
of Jje loande ))ur5 ))e besi5te of )an
toforen iseide redesmen. beo stedefsest and ilestlnde in alle ]>inge a
buten acnde.
And we hoaten alle vre treowe, in ))e treowjje ])2et heo vs ojen. ))aBt
heo stedefaestliche healden and
swerien to healden and to werien ]7e isetnesses ])aBt b^n imakede and beou to makien, ])ur^ ]7an
to foren iseide raedesmen o])er yar^
))e moare dael of heom, alswo alse hit is biforen iseid.
And \x,\ xhc o\tx helpe {'set for to done, bi ])an ilche o))e a^enes alle
men. Ri^t for to done and to foangen.
And noan ne nime of loande ne of e^te.
wherj)ur5 )>is besigte muje beon ilet o))er iwersed on onie wise.
And jif oni o)>er onie cumen her
on3enes, we willen and hoaten J>aBt alle vre treowe heom healden deadliche ifoan.
And for ))aBt we willen ))«t J)is beo stedefaest and lestinde. we senden
jew ]ris writ open, iseined wij) vre
seel, to halden a manges jew ine herd. Witnesse vs seloen act Lunden', ]7ane
ejteten]7e day. on )7e monj>e of Octobr' in ]>e two and fowerti3|>e ^eare of vre
cruninge.
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72 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
And ))is wes idon aetforcii vre isworene redesmen, Bonefoc' Archebischop on Kant*bur\ Walt* of Cantelow. Bischop on
Wirechestr'. Sim' of Muntfort. Eorl on
Leirchestr*. Ric* of Clar* eorl on Glowchestr* and on Hartford. Rog* Bigod. eorl on Notthfolk and marescal
on Engleneloand*. Perres of Sativeye.
Will* of fFort. eorl on Aubem*. Job* of Plesseiz eorl on Warewik. Job'
Geffrees sune. Perres of Muntefort. Ric* of Grey. Rog* of Mortemer. James of Aldithel and aetfoten
o]>Ten ino^e.
IT And al on ]>o ilche worden is isend in to aeurihce ojjre shcire ouer
al ]>flBre kunericbe on
Engleneloande. And ek in tel Irelonde.
Here we remark that in 1258 the lettef p (called * Thorn ') was still in common use. There is one
solitary instance of the Roman /^ in
the above document, and that is in a family
name; by which we tnay suppose that the fh was already recognised as more fashionable. The
following is the modem English of this
unique proclamation.
IT Henry, through God^s help, King in England , Lord in Ireland, Duke in N'ormandy, in Aquitain, and Earl in Anjou,
sends greeting to all his subjects,
learned and lay, in Huntingdotishire.
This know ye well ail, that we will and grant that that which our
counsel' lors all or the more part of
them, that be chosen through us and through the iandts folk in our kingdom, have done and
shall do, in the reverence of God and
in loyalty to us, for the good of the land, through the care of these aforesaid counsellers, be stedfast and
lasting in all things aye without end.
And we enjoin all our lieges, in the allegiance that they us owe, that
they stedfastly hdld, and swear to
hold and maintain the ordinances that be
made and shall be made through the aforesaid counsellors, or through
the ritore part of them, in manner as
it is before said.
And that each help the other so to do, by the same oath, against all men
: Right for to do and to accept. And
none is to take land or money, wherethrough this provision may be let or
damaged in any wise. And if any person
or per^ns come here-against, wi will and enjoin that all our lieges them hold deadly foes.
And, for that we will thtit this be stedfast and lasting, we send you
this writ open, signed fi)ith our
seal, to hold amongst you in hoard (store). Witness ourselves at London, the
eighteenth day in the month of October, in the two and fortieth year of our crowning.
And this was done in the presence <^ our sworn counsellors, Boniface,
Arch' bishop of Canterbury; Walter of
Cantelow, Bishop of Worcester ; Simon of
Montfort, earl of Leicester ; Richard of Clare, earl of Gloucester and
Hertford: Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and Marshal of England; Piers of Savoy; William of Fort, earl of Albemarle;
John of Plesseiz, earl of
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THE
king's ENGLISH. 73
Warwick; John Gefferson; Piers of Montfort; Richard of Grey ; Roger of Mortimer; James of Aldiihel, — and in
the presence of many others,
\ And all in the like words is sent in to every other shire over all the
kingdom of England; and also into Ireland,
70. This is not a specimen of *King*s English/ nor of any type of English that ever had a living
existence.. It is to English something
like what the Hindustani of one of our
Indian interpreters might be to the spoken language of the natives — good enough to be understood of
the people, and clumsy enough to
betray the hand of the stranger. It is
a piece of official English of the day, composed by the clerk to whom it appertained, off notes or an
original draft, which (in either case)
were couched in French. The strength of the
composition consists in set and established phrases, which had long been in use for like purposes, and
which betray themselves by their
flavour of anachronism here. Such 2xty
fultume, willm and unnen, iseinesses, on in places where it was no longer usual, and other less palpable
anachronisms, among which we should probably reckon the use of the word ?iord.
That this proceeds from the pen of one whose sphere was more or less outside the people, appears
from the overcharged rudeness and broadness of many of the forms, ninning on the verge of caricature. Such
are, loande, Lhoauerdy moarey hoaien, /oangen, CBurihce, share, tel.
The proportion of French words is so small, compared to the literary habits of the date, that it
is plain they have been studiously
excluded, even with a needless excess of
scruple; for a vast number of French words must before now have become quite popular. Besides
iseined and cruninge the translator
might perhaps have safely ventured on
the word purveance (providence, provision, care), which is what he had imder his eye or in his mind
when he in two
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74 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
places employed the uncouth native word hesigte — a word which probably is nowhere else found. This
is not a specimen of any living and growing dialect of English. It is a piece of desk and dictionary work. It is
a crude and laboured translation from
a French copy.
71. This is not indeed * King's English,' but it may well stand as a monument of the necessity which
produced * King's English.' It marks
the attempt to find among the strife
of languages and the Babel of dialects a central and popular medium of communication. The need
was at length supplied by the example
and usage of the court. If we look
forward for a moment to the end of this period, when a standard language was established, we may
see what manner of English was in use
in the royal family at that time. The
following letter from Henry Prince of Wales (afterwards Henry V) to his father, is one of the
earliest letters written in English,
and it shews us the progress of the English language at its centre : —
Henry Prince of Wales to his father Henry IV,
A.D. 1402.
My soverain lord and fader, I Recomande me to yowr good and gracieux lordship, as humbly as I can, desiring to
heere as good tydingges of yow and
yowr hye estat, as ever did liege man of his soverain lord. And, Sir,
I trust to God that ye shal have now a
companie comyng with my brother of
Bedford that ye shal like wel, in good feith, as hit is do me wite.
*> Neverthelatter my brothers mainy [^company] have I seyn, which is right
a tal meyny. And so schal ye se of
thaym that be of yowr other Captaines
leding, of which I sende yow al the names in a rolle, be [by] the
berer of this. Also so. Sir, blessid
be God of the good and gracieux tydingges that ye have liked to send me word of be [by"]
Herford your messager, which were the
gladdist that ever I my^t here, next yowr wel fare, be my trouth : and
Sir with Goddes grace I shal sende al
thise ladies as ye have comandid me, in al
hast beseching yow of yowr lordship that I myjt wite how that ye
wolde that my cosine of York shuld
reule her, whether she shuld be barbid
or not, as I have wreten to yow my soverain lord afore this tyme.
And, Sir, as touching Tiptot, he shal
be delivered in al hast, for ther lakkith
no thing but shipping which with Goddes grace shal be so ordeined for
that
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THE
KING^S ENGLISH. 75
he shal not tary. Also Sir, blessid be God, yowr gret ship the Grace
Dieu is even as redy, and is the
fairest that ever man saugh, I trowe in good
feith ; and this same day th* Erie of Devenshir my cosin maad his
moustre [mtts/er] in her, and al
others have her \their\ moustre the same tyme that rfial go to )>e see. And Sir I trowe ye
have on [one] comying toward yow as
glad as any man can be, as far as he shewith, that is the King of Scotts
: for be thanketh God that he shal
mowe shewe be experience th' entente of
bis goodwill be the suffirance of your good lordship. My soverain lord
more can I not write to yowr hynesse
at this time ; but ))*• ever I beseche yow of
your good and gracieux lordship as, be my trouth, my witting willingly
I shal never deserve the contrary,
that woot God, to whom I pray to send yow al
Ji* yowr hert desireth to his plaisance. Writen in yowr tovn of
Hampton, the xiiij*** day of May. —
Yowr trewe and humble liege man and sone, H. G.
72. Between these two pieces, namely, that of a.d. 1258 and that of a.d. 1402, a period of 140
years had elapsed; but even this
period, which represents four generations of
men, would not suflSce to allow for the transition of the one into the other in the way of lineal
descent. In fact they are not on the
same track. The one is an artificial conglomerate of confused provincialisms, the other a
living and breathing utterance of *
King's English.'
73. But it is in the writings of Chaucer and Gower that we have for the first time a full display
of King's English. These two names
have been coupled together all through
the whole course of English literature. Skelton, the poet laureate of Henry VII, joins the two names
together. So does our Hterary king,
James I. So have all writers who have
had occasion to speak of the fourteenth century, down to the present day. Indeed, Chaucer himself
may be said to have associated Gower's
name permanently with his own literary
and poetical fame, in the terms with which he addressed his Trqylus and
Creseide to Gower and Strode, and
asked their revision of his book : —
O moral Gower, this boke I directe To
the, and to the philosophical Strode,
To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte. Of youre benignites and zeles good.
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*]6
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Thus these two names have grown together, and their connection is soldered by
habit and tradition. One is apt to
imagine, previous to a study of their works, that they were a par nobile fratrum^ brothers and equals
in poetry and genius, and that they
had contributed equally, or nearly so,
towards the making of English literature. But this is very far from being the case. That which
united them at first, and which
continues to be the sole ground of
coupling their names together, is just this, — that they wrote in the same general strain and in the same
language. By this is meant, first,
that they were both versed in the
learning then most prized, and delivered what they had to say in the terms then most admired ; and
secondly, that both wrote the English
of the court. If affinity of genius had
been the basis of classification, the author of Piers Plowman had more right to rank with Chaucer than the
prosaic Gower. But Chaucer and Gower
are united inasmuch as they both wrote
the particular form of English which became
more and more established as the standard form of the national language, and their books were
classics of the best society down to
the opening of a new era under Elizabeth.
74. And now the question naturally rises, What was this new language? what was it that
distinguished the King's English from
the various forms of provincial English of
which examples have been given in the group of writers noticed above, or from Piers Plowman and
other provincial contemporaries of Chaucer?
In answer to this it may be said, that
it is no more possible to convey the idea of a language by description than of a piece of
music. The writings must be looked
into by all who desire to realise the
distinctions here to be pointed out. The best course for the student is to master a particular
piece, and Chaucer's Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales is the piece which unites
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THE
KING^S ENGLISH, 77
a greater variety of interest in proportion to its extent, than any production of the fourteenth century.
The leading characteristics of the King's English — the characteristics by which it is
distinguished from the provincial dialects — are only to be understood by a
consideration of the vast amount of French which it had absorbed. It is a familiar sound to hear Chaucer
called the well of English undefiled.
But this expression never had any other
meaning than that Chaucer's language was free from those foreign materials which got into the
English of some centuries later. Compare Chaucer with the provincial
English writers of his own day, and he
will be found highly Frenchified in
comparison with them. Words which are so thoroughly naturalised that they now pass muster as '
English undefiled/ will often turn out
to be French of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. Who would suspect such a word as blemish of being French ? and yet it is so. It is from
the old French adjective hlesme^ which
meant sallow, wan, discoloured ; and
its old verb bksmtr, which meant as much as the modern French verbs iacher and salir, to spot and
to soil. Then there is the very
Saxon-looking word with its w initial, to warishy meaning to recover from sickness. Sometimes
it assumes the form warsh, and then it
looks still more indigenous; as when
it is said that the first sight of his lady in the morning cured him of his sorrow: —
; That when I saugh her first a morwe
I was warshed of al my sorwe.
The Dethe of Blanche, 110^,
Richardson, in his Dictionary, has provided this word with a Saxon derivation, by connecting it with
being ware or wary^ and so taking care
of oneself. But it is simply the
French verb guerir. These are only two of a whole class of French verbs which have put on the
homely termination
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78
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
'ish ; such as to banishy embellish, flourish, nourish, punish, burnish, furnish, perish finish, from the
French verbs nourrir, fleurir,
embellir, bannir, punir, finir, p/rir, fournir, burnir (now brunir). From obe'ir we now
have obey, but in Wiclif it is obeish.
Such words were made subject to the
usages of English grammar, as if they had been true natives. In Chaucer the verb banish takes the Saxon
prefix y- and suffix 'ed\ —
And Brutus hath by hire chaste bloode yswore,
That Tarquyn shuld ybanyshed be therefore.
Legende of Goode Women.
The diflference of look between the French initial gu and the English initial w often masks a
French word. Thus warden is from the
French guardien. In Chaucer the French
word gateau (a cake), anciently gastel, takes
the form of wasteL
76. A large number of Romanesque words are thoroughly imbedded into our speech. The following is
a list of French and Latin words foimd
in the poetry of Chaucer and in use to
this day. The spelling has been modernized.
abominable
air
assay
abridge
alas
assemble
absent
allege
assent
abundant
alliance
assize
accept
ally
astony
accident
amend
attain
accord
amiable
audience
acquaint
anguish
auditor
add
apparel
authentic
advance
appear
authority
advantage
appease
avaunt
adversity
appetite
azure
advocate
argument
bachelor
adventure
array
balance
adverse
art
banish
advice
artificial
baptise
affection
ascendant
barren
THE king's ENGLISH.
79
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battle
conmiend
crime
beast
commission
crown
beauty
common
cruel
benign
company
cruelty
benignity
compass
curate
besiege
compassion
cure
bible
complain
curious
blame
complexion
custom
blanch
comprehend
dainties
blanc-mange
conceit
damn
boast
conclude
dance
boU
conclusion
danger
bounty
condition
debate
caitiff
confound
debonair
cape
confusion
deceit
carpenter
conjecture
declare
carriage
conjoin
defence
carry
conquest
degree
case
conscience
deUght
castle
conserve
demand
cattle
consider
depart
cause
constable
derive
cease
constrain
descend
certain
contagion
describe
certes
content
description
celestial
contrary
desert
chain
convert
deserve
chamber
convey
desire
champion
cook
despair
chance
cope
despise
change
cordial
despite
charge
coronation
destiny
charity
correct
destruction
charm
counsel
determinate
chase
countenance
devise
chaste
counterfeit
devotion
chastity
countess
devour
cheer
country
diet
chief
courage
difference
chivalry
course
digestible
chivalrous
court
dignity
circuit
courtesy
diligence
circumstance
courteous
diligent
city
cousin
discern
clear
covenant
discord
cloister
cover
discover
collation
coverchief
discreet
comfort
creator
discretion
command
creature
disdain
commandment
credence
dislodge
8o
THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
disport
firmament
innocent
distress
flower
instrument
divers
folly
intellect
divinity
fool
intent
division
force
ivory
doctor
forest
jailor
double
form
jangle
doubt
fortune
jeopardy
dress
fortunate
jewel
duration
frailty
jocund
ease
fraternity
join
easy
fruit
jolly
easily
gay
journey
effect
general
joy
element
gentle
judge
eloquence
geometry
judgment
embrace
glorious
justice
emperor
gluttony
labour
emprise
govern
language
enchantment
governance
large
endite
grace
largess
endure
grant
latitude
engender
grieve
legend
ensample
guide
leisure
envenom
guile
letter
envy
gullet
liberty
equity
harbour
licentiate
errant
harness
lily
escape
haste
lineage
eschew
haunt
luxury
estate
heritage
madam
eternal
honest
magic
excellence
honesty
magnanimity
exchange
honour
magnificence
excuse
horrible
majesty
execution
host
malady
experience
hour
malice
expert
humanity
manner
expound
humble
mansion
face
humility
mantle
faculty
humour
marriage
foil
idol
martyr
faith
image
marvellous
false
imagine
mass
fame
incense
master
feast
incline
matter
feUcity
increase
measure
felony
infernal
measureable
fierce
iniquity
meat
figure
innocence
mediation
THE king's ENGLISH.
8i
melody
pahit
pourtray
memory
pair
powder
menace
pale
practiser
mercenary
pamper
praise
merchant
parlemeiit
pray
mercy
parochial
prayer
merit
part
preach
message
party
preface
minister
pass
prefect
miracle
passion
presence
mirror
patent
present vb.
mischief
patience
pride
mistress
patient
prince
moist
patron
princess
monster
peace
principal
moral
penance
prison
mortal
people
privily
mover
peradventure
privity
name
perfect
privy
nativity
perpetnally
prize
natural
persevere
proceed
nature
perseverance
process
necessary
person
proffer
necessity
perverse
profit
nicety
pestileiu:e
progression
noble
philosopher
promise
note
philosophy
prosperity
notify
physician
prove
nourish
piteous
prudent
nurse
pittance
publish
obey
pity
purchase
obstacle
place
pure
obstinate
plain
. purge
offence
planet
purpose
offend
pleasance
purvey
ofiice
pleasant
quaint
officer
please
quantity
opinion
plenteous
quart
oppress
plenty
question
oppression
poignant
quit
ordain
point
rancour
order
pomp
ransom
ordinance
poor
reason
organ
pope
receive
original
port
recommend
orison
possible
record
ornament
possibility
redress
ostler
pouch
refuse
pace
pound
region
pain
pourtraiture G
rehearse
8a
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THE
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release
sermon
suppose
remedy
servant
surety
remember
serve
suspicious
remembrance
service
table
remission
session
talent
renown
siege
taste
rent
sign
taveru
repent
similitude
tempest
repentance
simple
tempt
report
sir
tender
reporter
sire
tent
request
skirmish
term
require
sober
theatre
resort
sojourn
tormentor
respite
solace
tower
restore
solemn
traitress
reverence
solemnity
translate
reverent
sort
translation
riches
sound subst.
travail
robe
sounding
treason
rose
sovereignty
tributary
rote
space
turn
route
special
tyranny
royally
spend
tyrant
royalty
spicery
usage
rude
spouse
vain
rule
squire
vanish
sacrifice
stable €ulj.
vanity
saint
stately
vary
salvation
stature
very
sanctuary
statute
vice
sanguine
story
victory
sapience
strait
victual
sauce
study
village
save
subject
villany
savour
substance
violence
scarcity
subtilly
virgin
school
subtilty
virginity
scholar
subtle
virtue
science.
succession
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virtuous
season
sudden
visit
second
suffer
vital
secure
suffice
voice
sentence
superfluity
vouchsafe
sergeant
supper
76. These words are still in our language ; and beyoi these there are many French words in
Chaucer which ha
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THE
BILINGUALISM OF KING's ENGLISH. 83
since been disused, or so much altered as to be of questionable
identification. But the general permanence of Chaucer's French words may reasonably be esteemed a
proof that he is in no sense the
author of this particular combination
of the two languages ; that he adopted and did not invent the mixture.
The proportion of French was very much more considerable than is generally
admitted. Sometimes we meet with lines
which are almost wholly French : —
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Was
verray felicitee parfite, Prol. 340.
He was a verray perfit practisour. Prol. 424.
He was a verray par fit gentil knight. Prol, 72.
And sikerly she was of great desport.
And ful plesaunt and amyahle of port ;
And peyned hire to countrefete chiere
Of Courts and been estatlich of manere ;
And to been holden digne of reuerence, Prol, 137.
§ 10. The Bilingualism 0/ King*s English.
77. But we have proofs of more intimate association with the French language than this amounts to.
The dualism of our elder phraseology
has been already noticed. It is a very
expressive feature in regard to the early relations of English with French. Words run much in
couples, the one being English and the
other French; and it is plain that the
habit was caused by the bilingual state of the population. Thus: —
act and deed.
aid and abet.
baile and borowe. 316.
captive and thrall.
head and chief.
head and front.
G 2
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84 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
uncouthe and strange. Chaucer s Dreme, yo\, vi. p. 57; ed. BelL
nature and kind. Ibid. p. 55>
disese and wo. Ibid. p. 102.
mirth and jollity.
meres and bounds.
huntynge and veneryc. Canterbury Tales, 2308.
steedes and palfreys. Ibid. 2495.
stedfast and stable. Ballade to King Richard.
prest and boun. T. Occleve, in Skeat's Specimetis, p. 20.
watch and ward. Faery Queene, ii. 9< 25.
ways and means.
It is not an unfrequent thing in Chaucer for a line to contain a single fact bilingually repeated
: —
He was a well good wriht a carpentere. Prol. 614. By forward and by composicioun. Id. 850.
78. Sometimes this feature might escape notice from the alteration that has taken place in the
meaning of words. In the following
quotation from the Prologue, there are two
of these diglottisms in a single line : —
A knyght ther was and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme jiat he first bigan
To ryden out, he loued chiualrye,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye.
The last line contains four nouns to express two ideas. * Trouthe ' zs * honour/ and * fredom ' t's
' curteisye.' The formula ' I plight
thee my troth' is equal to saying * I pledge
thee my honour,' only the former is a more solemn way of saying it — the word /ro/k having been
reserved for more impressive use. The
word /reedom employed in the sense of
gentlemanlike manners, politeness, as the equivalent of courtesy, is to be found by a study of our
early poetry.
These examples may sufifice to shew that this prevalent
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THE
BILINGUALISM OF KlNG^S ENGLISH. 85
conpling of words, one English with one French, is no mere accident or rhetorical exuberance. It
sprang first out of the mutual
necessity felt by two races of people and two
classes of society to make themselves intelligible the one to the other. It is, in fact, a putting of
colloquial formulae to do the duty of
a French-English and English-French
vocabulary.
79. At length this ripens into a figure and form of eloquence. Force is given to a statement by
saying it in the two languages,
provided it can be done gracefully and
melodiously. When Spenser has occasion to represent that Cambello, though taken by surprise, is
nevertheless quite ready to fight, he
sets this military virtue in relief by saying
it in both English and French. The word pres/ means ready ; it is the modem French pre/ : —
He lightly lq)t out of his place of rest,
And rushing forth into the empty field, Against Cambello fiercely him addrest: Who, him affronting soone, to fight was
readie prest.
The Faery Queene, iv. 3. 32.
The two languages became yokefellows in a still more intimate manner. From combination it is but
a step to composition. Compounds of
the most close and permanent kind were
formed bilingually. Some of them exist in the
present English. Such a compound is buii-end^ where the first part is boutj the French word for
end. In besiege we have be- a Saxon
adverb meaning 'around,' linked to a
French verb stkger, to sit ; and the compound means * to sit around' a place. The old word which this
hybrid supplanted was bestiiatiy from which we still retain the verb to heset. So in like manner the genuine Saxon
bewray was superseded by the hybrid
betray, A somewhat different case is
that of the word gentleman, where a French compound
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86 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
gentilhomme is half translated, and so the word has been permanently fixed in a bilingual condition,
80. But there is a blending of a yet more intimate kind between the two languages. Sometimes an
English word was retained in the language
as the mere representative ol some
French word. It was divorced from its old sense, and made to take a sense from some French word
of contiguous idea. A good example
offers in the Prologue : —
And thogh )?at he weere worthy he was wys,
And of his poort as meke as is a mayde : Ne neuere yet no vileynye ne sayde In al his lyf vnto no manere wight : He was a verray perfit gentil knyght.
The first line means that although the knight was valiant, yet was he modest, gentle,
well-disciplined, sober-mindedj as the
lines following explain. The word wys or wisi
here does duty for the French sage^ of which it is enough tc say that French mothers at the present day,
when they tel a child to be good, say
Sois sage. It would be a bald
rendering of this maternal admonition if it were verballj Englished Be wise. Equally far is the use
of the word wist in that passage of
Chaucer both from the old Saxon sense
and our modem use. We now use the word just as oui early ancestors did, before it had received
the Frenct colouring which has since
faded out.
81. In this way of representation much in our language is French in spirit though the words are
made of Saxor material. The relative
pronouns are a strong example. W( have
now two relative pronouns neuter, namely, that anc which. The Saxon had only that] and there
was no othei use of which but as an
interrogative. At this period, ir imitation
of the French que and lequely the interrogativi which assumed the function of a relative,
and in Chaucer w< often meet with
these two in cumulation, thus —
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THE
BILINGUALISM OF KING'S ENGLISH. 87
which that
I wil yow telle a tale which that I
Lemed at Padowe of a worthy clerk.
The Clerk of Oxenfordes Prologe,
And in like manner the relative uses of who, what, when, where, whence, why, are all of them
thinly-disguised imitations of the
French. In Chaucer ther is still the usual conjunction, instead of where as we should now write : —
This constable was no thing lord of this place Of which I speke, ther he Custance
fond. But kepte it strongly, many
wintres space, Vnder Alia, l^ng of Northumberlond.
The Man of Lowes Tale, 576.
82. As a result of these intimate blendings, it happened that words and phrases were produced of
which it is impossible* to say definitely that they are either French or English. No ingenuity has as yet been able
to uncoil the fabric of certain expressions
which at this epoch make their
appearance. For example, ' He gave five shillings to boot ' —what is the origin of this familiar and
thoroughly English expression to boot}
We know of a * boot ' or ' bote ' which is
native English from the Saxon verb beian, to mend or better a thing. The fishermen of Yarmouth have
sometimes astonished the learned and
curious who have conversed with them,
by talking of beating their nets (so it sounds) when they mean mending them. In Saxon times box
was the legal and most current word
for amends of any kind. It passed into
ecclesiastical diction in the term d^d-bot, deedbettering, a word- that was
succeeded by the term penance. Then
bote was used later for material to mend with. It was for centuries, and perhaps still is in some
parts, a set phrase in leases of land,
that though the tenant might not fell
limber, yet he might have wood to mend his plough and
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(delwedd E6096) (tudalen 088)
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88 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE:
make his fire, piow-do/e and fire-bote. It might appear as if little more need be urged for the purpose
of shewing that this is also the word
in the expression * to boot/ And yet,
when we come to examine authorities, there is great reason to hesitate before excluding the French
language from a share in the
production of this expression. There are two
contemporary verbs, houter and bouire, with meanings not widely diverse from each other, in the
sense oi putting to^ push, support,
prop. Hence we have abut and buttress. The
old grammarian Palsgrave seems to imply this French deri^ vation when he says : * To boote in corsyng
[horse-dealing], or chaunging one
thyng for another, gyue money or some
other thynge above the thyng. What wyll you boote bytwene my horse and yours ? Mettre ou bouter
davantaige/
83. Some words, whose form is perfectly English to look at, are nothing but French words in a Saxon
mask. The word business has not, as
far as I know, been suspected, yet I
offer it without hesitation as an example. The adjective busy existed in Saxon, and although the
-ness derivative from it is not found,
yet it would seem so agreeable to rule and
analogy as to pass without challenge. We say gaod-ness, wicked' nesSy wily - ness, worthy - ness ;
why not busy-ness ? And yet the word
appears to be nothing but the French
besogne or, as it was in early grammar oftenest written, besoingnes,
Qompare the modem French, Faites votre bes(^ne. Do your duty. It is possible that the word
busy may have had that sort of share
in the production of the great English
word business which may be called the ushering of the word. When natives seize upon the words of
strangers and adopt them, their
selection is decided in most cases by some
affinity of sense and sound with a word of their own. A very superficial connection will suffice
for this, or else we could not admit
busy even to this inferior share in the
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THE
BILINGUALISM OF KING^S ENGLISH. 89
production of the word business. For ' a man of business ' means, and has always meant, something very
different from a man who is busy. Let
us hear an independent and competent
witness on the signification of this, which is now one of the most characteristic words of our
nation : —
The dictionary definition of Business shows how large a part of practical life arranges itself
under this head. It is * Employment;
an affair; serious engagement; something
to be transacted; something required to be done.' Every human being has duties to be performed, and
therefore has need of cultivating the
capacity of doing them ; whether the
sphere is the management of a household, the conduct of a trade or profession, or the government of
a nation. Attention, application, accuracy, method, punctuality, and
dispatch, are the principal qualities required for the efficient conduct of busmess of any sort. — Samuel
Smiles, Self-Help^ chap. viii.
So that the use of this word to the present day corresponds truly to that of
the French word besogne, in which it
seems to have originated.
84. We will close this section with a notice of certain traits which our English poetic diction has
inherited from the bilingual period.
There is what may be called the
ambidextral adjective; where two adjectives are given to one substantive, one being placed before
and the other after it. At first the
prepositive adjective was Saxon and
the postpositive one Romanesque; but this was soon forgotten, while
the ambidextral habit was retained. Thus
Chaucer : —
I say the wofiil day fatal is come.
, The Man ofLawes Tale, 261.
In the following short quotation from Wordsworth we have two examples : —
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90 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service
high.
Tht Prelude, init.
In one of the best-known pieces of the Christian Year we find—
By some soft touch invisible. Morning,
A more general efiFect is the enlarged choice of words. A great number of common ideas being now
expressed in duplicate, we have often
adopted the one for every-day use, and
reserved the other for the poetic diction. Thus we have taken colour as the common word, and
exalted the Saxon hue to a more select
position.
God, by His bow, vouchsafes to wtite
This truth in Heaven above; As every
lovely hue is Light,
So every grace is Love.
John Keble, Christian Year, Quinqtiagesima.
And from the same source the rhetoric of our prose is enriched by variation : —
We colour our ocular vision with the hues of the imagination. — John Henry Newman, Essays, Reformation of the
Eleventh Century, p. 252.
§ 11. Conclusion,
85. The French language has not only left indelible traces on the English, but has imparted to
it some of its leading
characteristics.
It is not merely that there are many English words of which the derivation cannot be clearly
specified, owing to the intimate
blending of the French and English languages at the time when such words were stamped with
their present form and signification.
The Romanesque influence has penetrated deeper than to the causing of a
little etymological perplexity. It has
modified the vocalisation^ it has soflened
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CONCLUSION.
91
the obstinacy of the consonants, it has given to the whole language a new complexion.
The focus of this blending was the court. The court was the centre which was the point of
meeting for the two nationalities,
even while it hardly knew of any literature
but the French. The court was also the seminary that produced our first national poet. This
added greatly to the natural advantages
which a court possesses for making its
fashion of speech pass current through the nation. Supposing — and the
supposition is not an unreasonable one —
that in the struggles of the thirteenth century a great poet had risen among the popular and country
party, the complexion of the English language would in all likelihood
have been far different from what it
now is. Such a poet, whether he were
or were not of courtly breeding, would naturally have selected the phraseology of the
country and have avoided that of the
court. And be it remembered, the
language of the country was at that time quite as fit for a poet's use, as was that of the court. It
is true that a court has its own
peculiar facilities for setting the fashion of speech, but still it is not necessary that
the form of a nation's language should
be dictated from the highest places of the
land The Tuscan form of modern Italian was decided by the poetry of Dante, at a time when
Florence and Tuscany lay in
comparative obscurity ; and when more apparent influence was exercised by
Venice, or Naples, or Sicily. But in
our country it did so happenrthat the first author whose works gained universal and national acceptance
was a courtier.. This is a thing to be
well attended to in the history of the
English language. For its whole nature is a
monitoent of the great historical fact that a French court had been planted in an English land. The
landsfolk tried to learn some French,
and the court had need to know some
i
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92 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
English; and the language that was at length developed expresses the tenacity of either side and
the compromise of the two. This
unconscious unstudied compromise gradually
worked itself out at the royal court; and the result was that form of speech which became generally
recognised and respected as the King's
English.
86. In the northern part of the island another centre was established at the royal court of Scotland.
Here we may mark the centralising
effect of a seat of government upon a
national language. The original dialect of the south of Scotland was the same with that of the
northern counties of England, at least
as far south as the Trent. This was
the great * Anglian ' region. The student of language may still observe great traces of affinity
between the idioms to the north and
those on the south of the Scottish border.
Peculiar words, such as datrUj bonny, are among the more superficial points of similarity. But we
will select one that is more deeply
bedded in the thought of the language.
There is in Yorkshire, and perhaps over the north of England generally, a use of the conjunction
while which is very different from
that of Queen's English. In our
southron speech while is equivalent to during, but in the northern dialects it means untiL A
Yorkshireman will tell his boy, * You
stay here while I return/ At Maltby there
lived, some years ago, a retired druggist, highly respected at the time, and well remembered since. The
boys' Sunday school was confided to
his management ; and he had a way of
appealing to them when they were disorderly which is still quoted by those who often heard it
: * Now, boys, I can't do nothing
while you are quiet.'
If we look into the early Scottish literature we find that this use of while is the established one.
Thus Dunbar : —
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CONCLUSION.
93
Be divers wayis and operati'ouns Men
maks in court their solistatiouns. Sam
be service and diligence ; Sum be
continual residence ; On substance sum
men dois abyde, Quhill fortoun do for
them provide.
That is, ' Some men live on their own means while, i. e. until, fortune provides for them.' The same poet
has 'quhill domisday ' for * until
doomsday.'
The following examples are from Buchanan's version of the famous letters of Queen Mary, reprinted
by Hugh Campbell, 1824 : —
You left somebody this day in sadness, that will never be merry while he see you again.
I wrought this day while it was two hours upon this bracelet (i. e. till it was two o'clock).
He prayed me to remain with him while another morning.
Which was the occasion that while dinner time I held purpose to nobody (i. e. that until dinner time I conversed
with nobody).
In Shakspeare, where we find almost everything, we also discxjver this usage. In one instance it is
in the mouth of a Scotchman : —
While then, God be with you. Macbeth, iii. i. 43.
(Pope corrected this reading, and changed the while to //*//.) In another instance the speaker is a lady
of lUyria : —
He shall conceale it. Whiles you are
willing it shall come to note.
Twelfe Night, iv. 3. 29.
87. The dialects of our northern counties were anciently united in one and the same Anglian
state-language with that which we now
call Scottish. The severance which has
since taken place, has been due to the division of that which was once an integral territory,
consequent upon the establishment of a
northern and a southern court in this
island. The old uniformity and identity has been broken up,
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94 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
and the political border has long since become, in grea measure, a linguistic border also. On the
other side of tha border is a rustic
dialect and a national literature which ma
picture to our eyes and ears, with some approach to proba bility, what our English language might by
this time hav( been, if it had been
preserved equally free from Romanesque
influence. In our own southern land, the growth and ex pansion of the King's English has so preyed
upon the vital: of the Saxon dialects
which constitute in fact the moulc and
the soil out of which the King's English has growr robust, that nothing but a few poor relics
are left to then of their own, and it
is no longer possible to institute a
comparison between them and the national speech. When, in a season of unusual heat, the potato
crop has ripened in the middle of the
summer, and produced a second generation
of tubers, the new potatoes and the old cling to the same haulm, but those of later growth have left
the earlier crop effete and worthless.
Even so it is with the dialects — all
their goodness is gone into the King's English, and little remains but their venerable forms. Such
power and beauty as they still possess
they cannot get credit for careni quia
vate sacro, because they want a poet to present them at their full advantage. Where, in some
remoter county, a poet has appeared to
adorn his local dialect, we find ourselves surprised at the effect produced
out of materials that we might else
have deemed contemptible. A splendid
example of this is furnished by the poems of Mr. Barnes in the Dorset dialect. Unless a southern
fondness misleads us, he has affiliated to our language a second Doric, and won a more than alliterative right to
be quoted along with Burns.
88. The great characteristic which distinguishes all the dialects from King's English is this — That
they are com-
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(delwedd E6103) (tudalen 095)
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CONCLUSION.
95
paratively unaltered by French influence. In Scottish and provincial glossaries there is too great a
readiness to trace words back to
French sources. When a great provincial
word like the adjective 5onny or honnie is referred to the French adjective for good, masculine hon,
feminine bonne, an example is seen of
over-proneness to French derivations. This word is in popular use from the
Fens to the Highlands, and widely
spread over the central parts of the
island. It occurs in Shakspeare, and is familiarly known in the old ballads and romances.
It seems never to have borne the sense of good. If it had at one time meant good, that sense, or
something like it, would have lingered
somewhere. But there are no relics of
such a meaning. Its sense is one and the same
everywhere, north and south. It is that of being joyous, smart, gay, fair to look upon, equally in
the person and in the attire.
Uniformity of sense over a wide area is
evidence that the word must have borne the present sense at the time of its distribution over that
area. This sort of argument is not
applicable to a modern national expression; but to an old provincial one it
is. The reason of this difference is
obvious. Where there is a central
literature, there is a constant provision for the maintenance of
uniformity, even though words are changing
their sense. But if a word is used by dispersed groups of people, and that word undergoes change
of sense, such change will not be
uniform, because there is no standard.
The uniformity then which holds in the use of
^«V is, to say the least, a strong ground of presumption that the
sense is a well-preserved sense and, so to
say, the original sense of that word. It is true we have no surviving instance of a Saxon honig, but
it may be reasonably surmised that the
word was already in Saxon
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(delwedd E6104) (tudalen 096)
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g6 THE
RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
times spread just as it is now, only in the form of donig. We have the substantive which would
naturally form such an adjective. Not
the gay attire of a damsel of romance,
but something which by analogy may be compared, is called in Saxon done, to be pronounced as
two syllables. The rings and chains
and barbaric trappings which adorned
the figure-heads of the ships of the eleventh century are called in one of the Saxon chronicles done;
and this is translated by Florence of
Worcester with the Latin orna^ tura,
ornament, decoration. When Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter, gave to his cathedral many
ornamented objects, they were all
described in his memorandum, which is extant,
as gebonede or y-bonme-d. Roods, books, shrines, candlesticks, and
other objects, are described as geboned, which seems here to imply fine ornamented
decoration, probably goldsmith's and
silversmith's work. Here, then, is a suflScient root for the derivation of
our bonnie, and one which will far
better satisfy the requirements of the case.
89. But it is not by wresting a few native words from the French category that we are to succeed
in establishing the comparative
'purity' of the Scottish- Anglian and of
our provincial dialects, as compared with the Queen's English. The real characterising
distinction of the latter is not that
it took in more French words, or even that
in many words it blepded French and English features together till they were undistinguishable ;
but, that the soundj the rhythm, the
modulation, the music of the language
was one entirely new. Every Englishman knows
that it is comparatively easy to understand the dialects in print, but often quite impossible in
conversation. The main cause of this
is the unfamiliar tone and rhythm. The
English language is one which has from long
mixture with the French obtained, not indeed the French
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(delwedd E6105) (tudalen 097)
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CONCLUSION.
97
intonation, but a new one of its own ; and herein will probably be found the essential
characteristic which sets our English
apart from its old relatives as a new and distinct variety of the old Gothic stock, and one
from which the world may see a new
family of languages ultimately engendered. To this result a long train of
conditions contributed; and we are
able in some measure to trace the causes from
the time when the Roman colonisation infected the Keltic speech of the island, and prepared the
mould into which the Saxon immigration
was to be received. But all other causes
recede into insignificance, compared with the long rule of French-speaking masters in this island. If
we want to describe the transition
from the Saxon state-language of the eleventh
century to the Court-English of the fourteenth, and to reduce the description to its simplest terms, it
comes in fact just to this : — 7i5a/ a
French family settled in England^ and edited
the English language.
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(delwedd E6106) (tudalen 098)
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CHAPTER
I.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
90. Alphabetic writing appears to have been an outgrowth of that
picture-writing which is still in use among
savages ; and of which there is a poetical description in the Song of Hiawatha, Canto xiv. At first the
writing was altogether pictorial — that is to say, the thing pictured was
the thing meant, either simply or
symbolically. When Charles Kckens was
at Harrisburgh (Pennsylvania) in 1842, he saw
a number of treaties which had been made with the Indians, and their signatures were rough drawings of
the creatures or weapons they were
emblematically called after. This
picture-writing is commonly spoken of as hieroglyphic.
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(delwedd E6107) (tudalen 099)
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Next,
the thing pictured stood for the soimd of its name,
wherever that sound was required, whether to speak of that
very thing or of some other thing with like-sounding name.
This is the state of Chinese writing. It is as if (to adopt
Mr. Tylor's illustration) a drawing of a pear were made to
do duty for the words pare, pear, and pair, with signs to
guide the reader which sense he was to attach to the sound.
This tends towards the formation of a syllabarium, which is
a set of phonetic characters, not of vowels and consonants
but of syllables : and this is the completion of the second or
syllabic stage of writing.
H2
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(delwedd E6108) (tudalen 100)
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100 /.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
The third stage is what we call the Alphabetic system. Here each figure represents only a
consonant or a vowel. Some national
methods of writing have failed to arrive at
this, and have remained stationary midway. Others, as the ancient Egyptian, having gone through all
the stages, retain something of each,
and present a mixture of all, not having
become purely alphabetic.
91. That simplification which resulted in the production of an Alphabet was much promoted by the
transference of the writing-system
from one race to another. In fresh
hands it would undergo a new test of applicability, and many old hieroglyphic relics would-be
purged away. Thus the Chinese
hieroglyphic has led to syllabaries among the
Japanese, and to an alphabet among the Coreans : and Ewald says that the art of writing which
the Israelites certainly practised
when they left Egypt, was a genuine
product of the reciprocal action of Egyptian and Semitic culture. It seems to be now quite
established that Egypt was the
birthplace of the Semitic art of writing, which is only the archaic form of the European; and
the legend justly pointed to Phoenicia
as the quarter from which the alphabet
passed into Greece.
Purely alphabetic as modern European writing is, there are still some visible traces of its
pictorial origin. The first four Roman
numerals, I, II, III, IIII, for instance, are
pictorial of that which is alphabetically expressed by the words one J two, three, znd /bur. We may
imagine that they represent so many
fingers, or sticks, or notches, or strokes.
It has been also supposed that the numeral V may have originated in a rude drawing of the open
h^nd with the thumb stretched out and
the fingers close together. Again,
when we read in our almanacs * © "before clock 4 min.' and * ]) rises at 8 h. 35 min.' we have
before us a mixture
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(delwedd E6109) (tudalen 101)
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RUmC
AND ROMAN. 101
i
f
of the pictorial with the alphabetical, the most elementary
with the most consummate method of writing.
j 92. Our nation, in common with the other nations of western Europe, has adopted the Roman
alphabet. This change began in the
latter end of the sixth century, but it
was not completed at a single step.
This alphabet was introduced into our island from two opposite quarters, from the north-west by
the Irish missionaries, and from the south-east by the Roman missionaries. It
is to be remembered that when our Saxon
ancestors were pagans and barbarians. Christian life and culture had already taken so deep a hold of
Ireland that she sent forth missions
to instruct and convert her neighbours.
Their books were written with the Roman alphabet, which they must have possessed from an early
date, and to which they had already
imparted a distinct Hibernian physiognomy.
Of the two denominations of missionaries which thus from opposite quarters entered our island, one
gained the ecclesiastical pre-eminence; but the other, for a long time,
furnished the schoolmasters.
Hence it was that an insular calligraphy was retained for centuries, the first Anglo-Saxon writing
having been formed after the Irish and
not after the Roman model.
93. But another style of alphabetic writing had been in use among our Saxon ancestors from time
immemorial — this was the Runic
The name Runic was so called from the term which was used by our barbarian ancestors to
designate the mystery of alphabetic
writing. This was Run sing.. Rune pi., and also RuN-sTAFAS, Rune-staves, or, as we should
now speak, Runic characters. This word
Run signified mystery or secret ; and
a verb of this root was in use down to a comparatively recent date in English
literature, as an equivalent
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(delwedd E6110) (tudalen 102)
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T02 7.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
for the verb to whisper. In a * Moral Ode ' of the thuteenth century it is said of the Omniscient,
Elche rune he ihur'S & he wot alle dede/
Each whisper he hears, and he knows all deed*.
In Chaucer's Friar's Tale (7132) the Sompnour is described as drawing near to his travelling
companion,
Ful prively, and rouned in his ere;
i.e. quite confidentially, and whispered in his ear. It was also much used in the mediaeval ballads for
the chattering and chirping of birds,
as being unintelligible and mysterious,
except to a few who were wiser than their neighbours ; as —
Lenten ys come with love to toune.
With blosmen and with briddes roune.
94. It was used also of any kind of discourse ; but mostly of private or privileged communication in
council or conference :
The steward on knees him sat adown,
With the emperor for to rown.
Richard Coer de Lion, 2142 ; in Weber's Metrical Romances.
These uses of the term are very ancient; — in the Moesogothic Gospels we find
runa ne'mun, they took counsel, Matt,
xxvii. i, and other instances.
This rown became rownd and round, on the principle of N drawing a d after it; see below, 138. As
in The Faery Queene, iii. 10. 30: —
But Trompart, that his Maistres humor knew.
In lofty looks to hide an humble minde, Was inly tickled with that golden vew. And in his eare him rownded close behinde.
In the following passage from Shakspeare, The Winter's Taky i. 2. 217, the editor Hanmer proposed
as a correction, 'whispering round': —
They're here with me already; whisp'ring, rounding.
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(delwedd E6111) (tudalen 103)
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RUNES.
103
Thus the word Run had a progeny something like that of the Latm word Ittierae ; whence leiier^
Utters (learning, eradition), literature^ literary.
95. The Runes were the alphabetic characters which were in use before our ancestors learnt the
Roman writing. They were differently
shapen from the Roman characters, being
almost without curves, a mere composition of right lines at various inclinations and elevations
relatively to each other.
This rigidity would naturally have resulted from the fact that they were used chiefly in the way of
incision on hard materials such as
wood, bone, stone, and metal. Indeed the
word write (German einri^en) seems properly to belong to this runic sort of inscription, as it is
aptly worded in the Exeter Song-Book :
—
Raed sceal mon secgan, RidB is thing for man to say. Rune writan. Rum to unite.
Codex Exoniensis, p. 342, ed. Thorpe.
It is now agreed that the Runic Futhorc is a branch of that network of alphabets which spread
through the world from the Phoenician
stock: and a further opinion is
gaining ground that the Runes are but an imitation of the Roman characters, and that their peculiar
aspect, so stark and slanting, has
been caused by the exigencies of cutting
upon wood, where the grain would guide the hand to eschew horizontal lines. This wooden literature is
however hypothetical ; if it existed it has naturally perished ; that
which survives is mostly upon harder
material.
The extant Runic literature is mostly carved on objects of stone or metal : — such as arrows, axes,
knife-handles, swords and sword hilts,
clasps, spear-heads, pigs of metal, amulets,
rings, bracelets, brooches, combs, horns, gold bracteates, coffins, bells, fonts, clog-almanacks — and
but little in books. Runic
inscriptions are chiefly found in the northern and
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(delwedd E6112) (tudalen 104)
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104
7. OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
western extremes of Europe, the parts which were visited by Roman armies, or where (as in
this country) immigrations took place
after the Romans had retired. 96.
There are many varieties of Runes found i
books, but the chief alphabets are the Norse an" Anglian. The former gives the key to the
^Manx ris the latter to the
"Ruthwell Cross and other monu
found in this island.
Names.
Value.
Anglian.
Norse.
Manx.
Ac
A
K
-r
H
Beorc
B
^
^
^
Cen
C
h
r
Y
Deg
D
M
t
1
Eh
E
M
+
+
Feoh
F
P
p
P
Gifu
G
X
P
Haegl
H
N
*
Is
I
1
1
1
Calc]
K
,^
Y
r
Lagu
L
r
r
r
Man
M
M
Y
Y
Nyd
N
>
-h
h
Os
f*
^
N
Peor«
P
C
Cweom
Q
rT
Rad
R
R
R
R
^ J. G. Gumming, The Runic and other Monumental Remains of of Man, Bell & Daldy, 1857.
^ In the decipherment of the Ruthwell Cross the interpretation of tb is now so patent as to leave little opening
to doubt. See the strange anc story in
Daniel Wilson, Prehistoric Annals of Scotland (ed, 2, 1863) p. 319; or, more at large, in Dr. George
Stephens, Runic Monuments, For those
who wish to know about Runes, no more delightful avenc be found than the study of the Ruthwell
inscription.
THE P AND THE D. T05
^*
Names. Value. Anglian. Norse. Manx
Sigel S h h H
Tir T T
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(delwedd E6113) (tudalen 105)
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105
Thorn TH \
Ur U n
Wen W p
Yr Y Bl As
iEsC 2d F^
Eoh eo, yo >r
When our Saxon ancestors adopted the use of the Latin alphabet, they still retained even in book
literature two of the Runes, because
there were no Roman characters corresponding to them. One was the old Thorn,
}?, for which the Latin mode of
expression was by the use of two letters
TH : the other was the Wen, p.
97. The p was superseded by a double U (V) after the Conquest, but the }? had a more prolonged
career. This, and a modified Roman
letter, namely D S, divided the ih
sound between them; and during the Saxon period they were used either without any distinction at
all or with very ill-observed
discrimination, until they were both ultimately banished by the general adoption of the th.
This change was not completely
established until the very close of the
fifteenth century. And even then there was one case of the use of the Rune J> which was not
abolished. The words thi and that
continued to be written J>e and J>at or /'. This habit lasted on long after its original
meaning was forgotten. The J) got
confused with the character^ at a time when
the^ was closed a-top, and then people wrote *ye' for the and *yat' or *yt' for that. This has lasted
down close to our own times : and it
may be doubted whether the practice
has entirely ceased even now.
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(delwedd E6114) (tudalen 106)
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lo6 I.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
Ben Jonson, in TAe English Grammar ^ considered that by the loss of the Saxon letters }> and 8
we had fallen into what he called *the
greatest difficulty of our alphabet and
true writing/ inasmuch as we had lost the means of distinguishing the
two sounds of thy as in thiSy thai^ them^
thine, from the sound of the same character in ihing, thick, thready thrive. The same regret has
been expressed by Rask.
As a means of distinguishing these two sounds, the letters \> and "S might have been highly
serviceable ; but that they were ever
used with this discrimination in Saxon literature there is little if any evidence to prove.
The older Saxon scholars, namely Spelman, Somner, Hickes, and Lye, held that tS represented
the sound in thin^ and J> that in
thine. Rask, in his Saxon Grammar, maintained the contrary ; and he was
followed by Jacob Grimm. Rask's
argument is well worth the attention of the student ; for whatever the validity of the
conclusion, it is a good sample of
phonetic reasoning. It is very little based on the direct evidence of Saxon documents, and
almost entirely upon comparison with
the Icelandic and Old (i.e. continental) Saxon. Mr. H. Sweet maintains that
originally they both denoted the same
sound, namely that of dh, which is
heard in thine^.
98. When, in the sixth century, the Latin alphabet began to obtain the ascendancy over the native
Runes, the latter did not at once fall
into disuse. Runes are found on gravestones, church crosses, fibulae, ^c,
down at least to the eleventh century.
The Isle of Man is famous for its Runic
stones, especially the church of Kirk Braddau, These are
^King Alfreds West-Saxon Version of Gregorys Pastoral Cart, Appendix I.
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(delwedd E6115) (tudalen 107)
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VARIETY
OF FORMS. I07
Scandinavian, and are due to the Norwegian setdements of the tenth century. For lapidary
inscriptions, clog almanacs, and other
familiar uses, it is difficult to say how long they may have lingered in remote localities. In
such lurkingplaces a new kind of importance and of mystery came to be attached to them. They were held in a sort
of traditional respect which at length
grew into a superstition. They were
the heathen way of writing, while the Latin alphabet was a symbol of Christianity. The Danish
pirates used Runes at the time when
they harried the Christian nations. On
a marble lion now in Venice there is a Runic inscription, which records a
visit of one of the northern sea-rovers
at Athens (where the lion then was) in the tenth century. After a time the Runes came to be regarded
as positive tokens of heathendom, and
as being fit only for sorcery and
magic.
99. In the eleventh century the fashion of our calligraphy was changed; the old Saxon forms (which
were in fact Hibernian) being
superseded by the French form of the
Roman writing. During the succeeding centuries this new character assumed a variety of guises, but
there was one particular form which
acquired predominance north of the
Alps, the form which is known to us as * Black Letter/ and which was hardly less rectilinear than the
old Runes themselves. This form was maintained in Germany down to our times, but now it seems to be yielding
to that character which has become
general throughout modem Europe. This
character, in its two forms of * Roman ' and * Italic,' is of Italian growth, and took its final
shape in the fifteenth century, in
association with the invention of printing and the Revival of the ancient Classics. The
following table exhibits the chief
forms under which the Roman alphabet
has at different times been used in these islands : —
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(delwedd E6116) (tudalen 108)
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I08 7.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
Ibiib.
c After ^°^- Saxoh.
Black
Letter.
Roman.
Italic
A A
Ti. a
9 a
A a
A a
b b
B b
30 lb
B b
B h
C c
E c
€D (
C c
C c
b 6
D b
B D
D d
D d
e e
e e
% t
£ e
E e
T V
F F
jff i
F f
F f
5 3
3 3
ffi fl
G g
G g
\) h
I? h
» ft
H h
H h
1 1
I 1
I i
I i
J j
I i
J j
K k
« <t
K k
K k
I I
L 1
S 1
L 1
L I
til ID
CD m
iW m
M m
Mm
n n
N n
Jt n
N n
N n
O o
<<^
O o
P P
P P
i? 9
P p
P P
<ft 4
Q q
Q q
n I.
R p
]& r
R r
R r
r r
8 r
Sb a
S s
S s
C c
T z
Z t
T t
T t
U u
U u
SI u
U u
V V
V u
V V
P P
satp
W w
W w
X X
X X
X X
X X
Y y
1? S
Y y
Y y
Z z
Si i
Z z
Z z
P !>
D 8
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(delwedd E6117) (tudalen 109)
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THE VOWEL NAMES. IO9
Of the Vowel Names,
100. We now pass from the forms of the Roman alphabet to note some of the local peculiarities of
its use among ourselves. And first, of
our vowels, and the remarkable names
by which we are wont to designate them. Our
names for the vowels are singularly at variance with the continental names for the same characters.
Of the ^wq vowels A E I o u, there is
but one, viz. o, of which the name is
at all like that which it bears in France or Germany. But it is in the names of A and / and U
that our insular tendencies have
wrought their most pronounced effect. The
first we call by an unwriteable name, and one which we cannot more nearly describe than by saying,
that it is the sound which drops out
of the half-open mouth, with the
lowest degree of effort at utterance. It is an obscurely diphthongal sound, and if we must spell it,
it is this — Ae. The character / we
call Eye or Igh ; the ^ we call Few,
101. The extreme oddity of our sound of U comes out onder a used-up or languid utterance, as
when a dilettante is heard to excuse
himself from purchasing pictures which are
offered to him at a great bargain, on the plea that 'they do ac-cyew-myew-layte [accumulate] so!* In
France this letter has the narrow
sound which is unknown in English, but
which it has in Welsh, and which seems ever ready to degenerate into Y: — ^in German it has the
broad sound of 00,
102. That / was called Eye in Shakspeare's time, seems indicated by that line in A Midsummer
Night* s Dream, iii. 2. 188:—
Fair Helena; who more engilds the night.
Then ail yon fierie oes and eies of light.
Where it seems plain that the stars are called O's and Fs.
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(delwedd E6118) (tudalen 110)
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no /.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
If this passage left it doubtful whether the letter / were sounded in Shakspeare*s time as eye^ th6re
is a passage in Romeo and Juliet^ iii.
2, which removes the doubt :-^—
Hath Romeo slaine himselfe? say thou but I,
And that bare vowell I shall poyson more
Than the death-darting eye of Cockatrice:
I am not I, if there be such an I :
Or those eyes shut, that makes thee answere I.
If he be slaine say I ; or if not, no :
Briefe sounds determine of my weale or wo.
Here it is plain that the affirmative which we now write ay, and the noun eye^ and the pronoun /, and
the vowel /, are regarded as having
all the self-same sound.
103. How are we to account for these strange msular names of our vowels ? The five vowels are
called Ae, Ee^ Ighy Oh, Few; but these
names, which are distinctly our own,
and among the peculiarities of our language, do not in the case of any single vowel express the
prevalent sound of that vowel in
practical use.
The chief sound of our A is that which it has in a/, 5a^, caff dagger, fat, gap, hat, land, man, nap,
pan, rai, sat, tan^ vat, wag. It has
another very distinct sound, especially
before the letter L, namely the sound of aw : as, all, halt, call, /all, gall, hall, malt, pall, tall,
talk, wall, walk, want, water. But the
sound which is expressed in the name Ae
is a dull diphthongal sound, which A never bears in a final syllable except when to the a an ^ is
appended, not immediately indeed, but after an intervening consonant : as,
ate, hate, cate, date, /ate, gape,
hate, jape, late, make, nape, pane, rate,
state, tale, vale, wane. This final e must be considered as embodied with its a, just as in the German
sound d, which is only a brief way of
writing ac. It is difiicult to suppose
that the name of our first vowel has been dictated by the sound which it bears in the last-recited
list of instances.*
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(delwedd E6119) (tudalen 111)
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A AND
E. Ill
There is no apparent feason why that class of instances should have drawn to itself any such
special attention, to the neglect of
the instances which more truly exemplify the power of the vowel. But there is one particular
instance of the use ofi4 which is
sufficiently frequent and conspicuous to have
determined the naming of the letter. I can only suppose that the name which the letter bears has been
adopted from the ordinary way in Which
the indefinite article a is pronounced.
104. The vowel J^, When single, does not represent the sound -£> which its name indicates. When
it is doubled, it always has this
sound, as in dee, creed, deer, feet, greet, heed, jeer, keep, leer, meed, need, peep, queer,
reed, seed, teem, weep. But the single
e only does so when it is supported by another e after an intervening consonant. Examples
: — bere, cere, here, intercede,
intervene, mere, scene.
We are therefore driven to look for some familiar and oft-recurring words Which have the e
exceptionally pronounced as Ee. And such we find in the personal pronouns.
The words he, she, me, we, have all the e long, and if they were spelt according to their
sound, they would appear as hee, shee,
mee, wee. In proof of this may be cited
the case of the pronoun thee, which is written with its vowel double, though it has no innate right in
this respect over the pronoun nu. In
the solitary instance of thee, it was a matter of convenience to write the double vowel,
that the word might be distinguished
at sight from the definite article the. It is
by reference then to the function of the letter e in the personal
pronouns, that we explain the name of Ee by which that vowel is incorrectly designated.
It is interesting to remember that in Devonshire (unless the schoolmaster has driven the fashion
out) the letter E is called eh, like
hay without the h, or like the French h ouvert somewhat continued. This may be derived
from the period
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(delwedd E6120) (tudalen 112)
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Iia 1.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
of French tuition ; or it may be that Devonshire preserves the old Saxon dialect of Wessex in this
particular as it does in so many
others ; or thirdly, the Saxon and the French had one sound and one name for £; and this
seems the mosi probable account of the
matter.
105. It may be left to the reader to observe by a collection of instances,
like btif dip, fit, hit, nip, sit, wit, thai
the name which we have given to the vowel / does by nc means give a just report of the general
sound of that lettei in our
orthography. In what syllables is that eye sound represented by /? Chiefly in two kinds. The
first is wher€ it is supported by an
^-subscript, as bite, drive, five, hive, ict^
kite, like, mine, nine, pipe, quire, ripe, strive, thine, vine,
wine But to this there are exceptions,
as give, live. The second case is
where it has an old guttural after it, as blight, dighi^ fight, high, knight, light, might, night,
right, sigh, tight, wight, Wright.
Beyond these two groups the examples are desultory. Many of them are before I
or n with another consonant : child, mild, wild — bind, find, hind, kind,
mind, rind, wind, verb (except wind,
subst., as generally pronounced): also
these — condign, malign, sign. But, after all, the name oi Igh does not represent truly the general
use of this vowel. To account for its
having acquired so inappropriate a name, we
must again seek for a familiar and frequent word in which the vowel does bear this sound. We find it
in the personal pronoun /, which we
might have written as Igh with equal
propriety, and on the same principles as have determined the orthography of right, might, sight The
Saxon form was Ic \ the German form is
3d^, the Dutch Ik, the Danish Jeg (pron.
Vigh) the Swedish Jag. So that in fact the name we have bestowed on / is not the due of that vowel
in its simplicity, hut only of that
vowel after it has absorbed and assimilated
an ancient guttural.
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(delwedd E6121) (tudalen 113)
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THE
SOUND OF U. II3
106. The offers less to remark on than the other vowels. It has been the most stable member of our
vowel-system, and that in which we are
most in harmony with other nations.
107. Of the C/, it is very obscure what has led to its name. The pronunciation of the u as yew can
hardly be of EastAnglian growth, though natives of that province
sometimes bring in the sound
unexpectedly. When they utter the words
rule, truihy Jerusalem^ with energy, they have been observed to convert them into ryuU, iryewth,
Jeryewsalem. I have seen it somewhere
suggested that possibly this peculiar
vowd-sound has risen out of a distorted effort to imitate the inimitable French U. There is perhaps
something in this idea, A very
peculiar u exists in Devonshire, one
which is near the French, and one which would seem to have been inherited from British
pronunciation, if we may judge from
its proximity to the Welsh U. Now this Devonshire u is not at 2^yew^ but it
has been often so reported of, and
tourists tell how in that strange land they heard the natives say byewts, myewn, for boots, moon.
I do not believe they ever heard any
such thing, and I take their evidence to
be good oiily to shew that there is some point of contact between the French u and ih^yew sound, at
least on the ear. Thus the idea that
our yew grew out of the French u is
plausible. But I do not think it to be correctly stated in this form, and for the following reason : —
the sound recurs in many independent
and external places. The Dutch nteuw
indicates by its orthography the same sound as our new. The Danish lys (light) is pronounced lyews,
and in Swedish it is phonetically so
written, namely Ijm. The tree which in
English is called yew was in Saxon written rw, from which we gather that the pronunciation is
unaltered. These instances seem to shew that the sound we are treating o^
"w^s* an andently inherited one,
and if French influeiice Vi^^.^
I
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(delwedd E6122) (tudalen 114)
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114 I.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
anything to do with putting it on our «, it only caused tbe extension of a sound akeady domestic and
familiar.
To so great a length have I pursued this subject of the naming of our vowels, because it is in fact
a most exceptional and insular phenomenon. As a criterion of the whole case we might refer to the designations of
the five vowels in French or German,
and the reasonableness of those designations. If this were done, the result
would be something as follows. The
French and Germans have named the vowels,
but the English have nick- named them. When a man is called a king or a servant, he is
characterised by what may properly be
called a name. But if we call him Longshanks
or Peach-blossom, we nick^name him. And this is analogous to what we
have done with the vowels. They have
been named, not after their proper functions or chief characteristics,
but after some anomaly or adventitious oddity which has attracted a too pointed attention.
0/ the Vowel Functions.
108, The tendency of observations like the above, arising out of the arbitrary naming of our vowels,
is to create in the mind an impulse
such as that which is attributed to
the etymologists of a past age, to put the vowels amde as if they were hopelessly beyond the reach of
scientific method. Each vowel sign has
such a variety of sounds in English^
and each sound has such a variety of vowel signs, and these so cross each other^s track, that anything
like disentanglement and orderly arrangement might well be despaired of, if there were no help to be found beyond
the limits of the single language. But
much of that which is arbitrary or
accidental may be eliminated by the process of comparing two dialects together^ and then a third
with the results of
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(delwedd E6123) (tudalen 115)
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THE
VOWEL FUNCTIONS. II5
the first comparison, and so on ; sifting each time the net product to a clearer expression ; till we
at length reach the conclusion that a
phonology or science of vocal sounds is
possible. It is found that there are three principal sounds, which are those of *a,' *i,' 'u' — that is
to say, not according to the value of
these signs in the English naming, Ae, Igh,
Yew, but according to the value which they most commonly represent in European languages, and which
we may spell thus, ah, ee, 00. It is
the sound of * a* in arm^ father, of * i *
in d^, and of * u' mfulL It will be convenient to distinguish these signs by quotation marks, when we use
them for the true and principal
sounds. That these are the cardinal vowels
can be shewn in two ways.
109. Either we may observe the organs of speech, or we may examine those languages in which the
vowel system is most robust and
symmetrical. There is one dialect of our
family which is distinguished for such a vocalism, and that is the Moesogothic. In this dialect, all
the vocalic and diphthongal sounds are
so regularly derivable from these
three, that we are compelled to regard the * a/ ' i ' and * u ' as fundamental, at least for that
particular language. Other languages
are found to contribute, some more some less, to the general adoption of this trio of
vowel-sounds as the basis of
phonology,
A like result is obtained by physical analysis of the sounds, and the acoustical study of the organs of
speech. Experiments of exquisite ingenuity and delicacy have been made by Helmholz and Koenig on the musical
contents of the several vowels, and by
these it has been established, that U
is, musically speaking, the lowest, I the highest, and A the central of all the vowels. Thus these
vowels appear by a novel kind of
evidence as the three Cardinal Vowels. (122.).
J 2
i
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(delwedd E6124) (tudalen 116)
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Jl6 I.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
A.
110. Of this central vowel, Mr. HuUah says : — ' On one vowel only is the timbre of the human voice
to be heard in its highest perfection
— the vowqI a pronounced as in the
English word father J And again : — * Recent physiological researches have justified the choice of aa
not merely as the vowel on which the
voice is heard to the greatest advantage,
J)ut also as that on which, with a view to its improvement, it should be most exercised ^' There is no
doubt that the a in Saxon writing
represented this 'a' sound, sometimes
short as in van^ sometimes long as m father. But this *a' had already in Saxon times lost much of the
ground it once occupied, especially
the short 'a.' And many examples which
then existed are now lost. (We will consider the losses first, and the compensations
afterwards. 112.)
The single instance of -as, the plural form of an increasing group of
substantives, presents a great amount
of loss in regard to this principal vowel-sound. The *a' jis lost in every one of those instances;
and words which were written dagas,
endas, fixas, pathas, smithaSy stanas^ are
now written with a toneless e as in fishes^ or a merely orthographic e as in stones ; or else, and
this is the commonest result, it has left no trace behind, as in smiths, days, ends, paths. But then it is in
flexional terminations that the vowels
degenerate most rapidly, and we must not
hastily conclude that the * a ' is becoming a stranger to oiff language, as some phonologists seem almost
to do, when they speak of this
cardinal sound as * the Italian A.' .
111. Words in which the Saxon ' a ' is fully retained :— addle, adesa adze, ancra anchor, and,
anfilt anvil, ask, assa ass, awul awl,
air alder, apul afple, blac dlack^ brand
^ The Cultivation of the Speaking Voice, Clarendon Press Series, ch. viu
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(delwedd E6125) (tudalen 117)
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CHANGES
OF THE SAXON ^ A* 117
(fire-), candel candle, cat, crabbe crab, fann /an (vannus), gader gather, gangwseg gang-^zy, ganra
gander, garleac. garlic, galga gallow,
halgian hallow, hand, lamb, land, malwe
mUmx), man, panne pan, plant, ramm ram, sadol saddle, sand^ span (subst.), stand, swalewe swallow, tan,
wann wan (colour).
Words in which the character is preserved but the sound afeered to ae: — apa ape, cara care, cran
crane, cafer chafer, capim cafxm,
cradel cradle, faran fare, hara hare, nihtscada mghtshade, raca rake, sala sale, scamu
shame, spada spade^ sam same, tarn
tame, wacian wake.
Words in which * a ' has become o : — camb comh . clatX ch/k, fkld fold, gaSt ghost, halig holy,
laiig /(?«^, ma]7u »/(?/>^, r^
r<^, sang song, Strang strong, tacen /c?>&^«, tange tongs.
Words in which it has become o with subscript e : — ban bone, dran drone, ham ^<?/«^, lar
lore, mara /«(?r^, rah roe,, ap rt?/^,
sar j^r^, sla sloe, stan j/o«^, spaca spoke (of a wheel)^ The Saxon ma (more) became mo and moe.
Words in which the Saxon 'a' has become oa : — dc (>fl^, iS (w/A, dt (wir, bit boat, brdd 3r(?tfi/,
gid ^^d;^, git ^(?fl/, hir A(?flr,
hlaf loaf, lid /(?«4 lim /oa^^, rid r(?a^, wid ze'^Jdi^i The original * a ' in all these cases was
long ; but the Saxon long ' a ' did
not always produce English oa, thus bin bofie^ Stan stone.
In one instance this oa has drawn in a cockney r, namely his hoarse. In Devonshire the true analogy
is preserved, and this word is
pronounced hoase or hoaze,
112, As we have thus seen that the Saxon ' a ' has broken and dissipated itself into a variety of
modifications, so now" on the
other hand we must see what compensation there has been that this chief vowel should not
perish out of the language. We shall
find that many words which in Saxon
had not * a/ but some weaker and softer vowel, have now by
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(delwedd E6126) (tudalen 118)
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Il8 L
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
some means acquired it. Change from ce to *«*: — aecem acorn (according to a rare pronunciation),
aefter q/ier, aesc ash, selmesse alms,
sex axe, baeS dafA, draegnet drag-net,
fact /at or vat, faeder father, faej>m fathom, faest .^/,
glaes glass, gaers grass, gnaet ^«^/,
haefde ^a^, hlaedder /3^ifli?r, laetta
lattice, maeddre madder, maest /waij/, raedic radish, raefter r<^(?r, taeppere tapster.
Other words with ^ have acquired the character but not the sound of * a ' central : — aecem
acorn (according to the common
pronunciation), baecere baker, blaed blade,
haesel hazel, hwael whale, smael small, waeter water, waesp
There are many instances in which ea became *a* or «: as, beag badge, QQ2S chaff , (eslu fallow,
fit2jiflax, gealla gaU, geard yard,
heall ^//, heard hard, hearp ^af^, pearruc /ar^, sealt salt, sceaft ^^^/, scearp sharp,
steal j/tz//, weal u^ wearp warp. This
was for the most part a reversion to the
older form.
Miscellaneous examples of the present use of* a' where the Saxon had some inferior vowel are —
breml brambUt steorra star, steort
start, as in red-start and Start Point.
113. In the transition period the Saxon character cb was dropped, and a was often written in its
place. Sometimes this gives an
appearance of the recovery of ' a,' which is
not real ; because under the guise of a it is the Saxon cb that is heard. Thus the Moesogothic akr is the
archaic Saxon acer, the classic Saxon
cecer, and the English acre: but the
pronunciation of the two latter is substantially identical. There is, however, a considerable number of
cases of the undoubted recovery in
English of an *a' that in classic
Saxon had fallen into an inferior sound. The following are instances of words which had possessed
this soimd, in the earlier Saxon
period, had lost it in the classic
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(delwedd E6127) (tudalen 119)
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VOWMl"
PRONUNCIATION. I19
Stage, and recovered it again in the transition to modern English : —
Saxon i.
Saxon 3.
Enoliiu.
after
aefter
after
Alfred
-Alfred
Alfred
at
flBt
at
batJ
bxiS
bath
crat
craet
cart
pi9
PCb9
path
was
waes
was
114. The same may be shewn of some other weakenings of * a,* which occurred in the Kterary
Saxon period, and were corrected in
English: —
aldorman
ealdorman
alderman
arcebiscop
jercebiscop
archbishop
half
healf
half
ward
weard
ward
al
eal
all
If in one or two of these latter instances the sound of the English vowel is not * a,' but rather au,
it still indicates more or less a
return towards the original and too often supplanted *a/ As far then as
regards the incidence of this chief of
vowel-sounds, there was a great redistribution, and while some words lost it, others acquired
or recovered the ^a* vowel.
If from the Saxon words we now turn to those of French and Latin origin, we soon perceive that the
Romanesque contact was favourable to
the restoration of this vowel to
something like a proportionate place among the vowelsounds. It is not
necessary to transcribe examples : the
student can easily furnish himself with them by the help of the list at 75.
116. When we attribute to any word the possession of a true * a,' we mean that if the word be
adequately pronounced, that sound i$
heard. In average conversation or reading
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(delwedd E6128) (tudalen 120)
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I20 /.
OP THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
this vowel is too often slurred or squeezed up between the consonants. Indeed, it is a great fault in
our utterance that our vowels are so
skipped, till our whole speech seems to
the foreign ear what Welsh looks to the foreign eye — a mass of consonants. Our language might be
improved, if it were made an aim in
education that boys should not only articulate the consonants, but also give
due expression to the vowels. If men
have not time to say their words any more
fully than is absolutely necessary for the transaction of business, we may at least hope that boys
have : and as the importance of
musical instruction is now appreciated,
the moment seems favourable for winning attention to the culture of our vowel-pronunciation.
I.
116. The statement is advanced with some diffidence, and commended to further observation ; but it
seems to me that the vowels are not always
most satisfactorily uttered by those
who have had the benefit of a careful education. When I seek a standard of pronunciation for any
particular vowel, it seems to present
itself to me in some specimen of rustic
diction. This is the case as regards the *I.' While there are many words in cultured English that
have the true *i,' there are not many
that strike the ear as models of that
incisive sound. But if it ever happened to any reader to be standing by when two boys ran a race in
Devonshire, he may have heard their
several favourers encouraging them to
*rinn' in so clear a note that the vowel might thenceforward live in his ear
as a sample of the true * i.' * Rinn,
Jack ! rinn, Joe ! rinn, rinn, rinn ! '
117. Words in which Saxon * i ' is fully retained : — biddan hid, cicen chicken^ cin chiriy disc dtshy
fill, fine finch, finger, fSXz. fifth,
Mi\^ fifty, flint, gift, begin, grist, hit it, hricg ridge^
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(delwedd E6129) (tudalen 121)
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T^E
SAXON *7* AND * £7.' IJ2I
hring ring, king, lifer Iwer, litel IMe, itiicg midge, mid, midl «i*^, OTw/, ribb rib, sicol j/c^/f, scip
j^/j^, siS sith, smith, spin, spit,
stirap stirrup, swift, J>istl thistle, thing, wincian wink, wind, winter.
Words in which the character is retained but with the sound altered to igh or ^e : — blind,
bridle, briht bright, cild Md, dicere
diker, Mfive, grind, hid hide (skin), hind (cerva)^ hrind rind, ive ivy, lif life, liht light,
lim ^iw^, miht might, rail OTj/f, min
/tt/>^, niht night, riht r^^^/, ridan r/(c/<?, scir shire, scric shrike, serin shrine, swin swine,
J>in /^i«^, wif ze^?/^, wiht
i»ig'^, wi/e/, wis a;i>^ (adj.), s:e;/>^ (subst.), win wine.
In isgicel /«<:/?, the first / is altered, the second has remained true.
The Saxon * i ' has sometimes turned to ee or ie ; as flis jUece, slife sleeve, scir sheer, sife
sieve.
The instances in which we have acquired * i ' in the stead of some less characteristic vocalism are
few : — seolc silk, weoce wick of
candle, spreot sprit (bowsprit), meolc milk.
U.
118. The * U ' is best pronounced in the rustic speech of the north of England. The northerners are
weak in the * i,' which is apt to run
into a dull u, as hull for hill : and in the
*a' also — man is apt to sound in North Britain as mon or nun. But their *u* is often perfect; and
when I travel northward, I consider
myself to be then among people of the
northern tongue, when I hear the frequent exhortation *Cum, cum ! ' uttered with such a genuine *
u ' that he who has once heard and
heeded it, will not stand to ask what was
the ancient pronunciation of the verb cuman.
This letter now represents the long * u ' sound in very few words : bull, bush, full, pull, push, puss.
The word put has this vocalism in some
mouths, and the word punish had
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(delwedd E6130) (tudalen 122)
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122 /.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
rather than has; for we may regard the pronunciation * poonish ' as now obsolete.
119. The following words have preserved the Saxon u short:— bucca duck, butan du/, dust, fmh
/urraw, hutU, Atmdredf hunter^ iung youngs nut, must (in brewing), nunne
mm, sunder, sunne sun, sumor summer,
tunne tun, iurf, iusk^ ]>iuna
thumb, under, up.
In the following the u long has changed to <w, or aw : — clut clout, cusloppe cowslip, cu cow, cu8
couth, grundeswelge groundsel, hu how,
hund hound, hus house, husel housel, lus
louse, mus mouse, mvX mouth, pund pound, scH^d shroud, tfin town, ]>urh through, ]>usend
thousand, ule r^ze//, ut ^w/.
Sometimes the Saxon * u ' became o, but the elder sound is still heard in many of the instances : —
hunig honey, munuc monk, sum some,
sunu son, tunge tongue, wulf wo^, wunn
worm, wurS worth. It has been questioned what is the relation of this to the *«'; — I am
disposed to think that these have the
true * u ' sound though short. Where * « ' is
now written oo the long vowel is well kept, as, wudu wood, wul wooL
The elongation of this vowel has in a few instances produced a disyllabic
word out of an old monosyllable ; as, bur
bower, scur shower ; to which we might add, if pronunciation only were considered, sur sour.
Of the instances in which we have acquired a « in place of some other vowel, the most noticeable is
where it has taken the place of an old
* i * : — irnan run, rise rush (juncus).
120. When in philology we call these three the elementary vowels, we do not imply that they are the *
original * vowels, or that languages
which exhibit these three with the purest
and best defined expression, are therefore in the most primitive condition. In like manner, when
we bestow the name of * primary' upon
the three prismatic colours, the
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(delwedd E6131) (tudalen 123)
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THE
OFFICES OF E. 1^3
priority thus attributed is one of thought, and derived from analysis, not a matter of the order of
time. And when we find a language like
the Gothic -exhibiting a regular vowelsystem markedly based on the three
primary vowels, we only conclude that
a vigorous speech-instinct must have been for
a long time at work upon this element of pronunciation.
The vowels which claim our attention after A I U are and e. The natural relation of these
inferior vowels to the Three, may be
rudely figured as in the subjoined diagram:
I e A o U
Of the O it has already been incidentally shewn that it has grown out of the A and out of the U, and
therefore it appears intermediate to
these two.
121. The E is the most frequent of all the letters of the English alphabet. This is well known to
printers, and also to decipherers of
cryptograph. It occasions the weak point
of any simple cypher. If a person attempts concealment by merely substituting some fixed letter or
figure in place of each letter of his
words, the decipherer will at once detect
every e in the performance : first by their numerical preponderance,
and then by their position. As o between *a*
and *u,' so e has its seat between *a* and *i* : and it is easy to point to instances in which it has been
produced by the enfeeblement of one or
other of these cardinal vowels. Of the
derival of e from a we have an instance in the words England^ English ; the people from whom
these names are derived being written
down in the Saxon Chronicles as Angel
cynn. The relation of e to i is sufliciently indicated by the pronunciation of England, in virtue
of which it has an I in some of its
foreign translations, as in the Italian
Inghillerra, But the use of e that tends more than any
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(delwedd E6132) (tudalen 124)
|
124 ^'
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
to the overwhelming preponderance of this character in our' books, is the ^-subscript. Of this E no particular
origin can be assigned ; it may be the
relic of any one of the vowels.
E has many varieties of sound : it has the sound of a, as in /here ; it has the sound of * /,' as in
England, English ; when doubled it has
the sound of long * i^ as in seen ; lastly,
as e subscript, it has no sound of its own at all Here is a single line which contains three of these
uses, while at the same time it shews
with what a frequency this character
is capable of appearing:
Seea here and there and everywhere.
H. W. Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn,
122. And if we turn, as we have done before, from the evidence of language to observe the organs
of speech, we shall by a new path
reach the same end ; namely this — that
the order I E A O U is the order not only of the instinct of speech but also of acoustical science.
* The vocal mechanism,* says Professor Willis^, * may be considered as consisting of lungs or
bellows, capable of transmitting, by
means of the connecting windcavity P^P^> ^ current of air through an
apparatus contained in the upper part of the windpipe, which *'^"* is termed the larynx. This
apparatus is capable §, of producing
various musical (and other) sounds, •§
which are heard after passing through a van-
^ able cavity consisting of the pharynx (the cavity
Lungs behind the tongue), mouth, and nose.' If the
°' whole of this arrangement is required for the Bellows , ,..?,, r .
vocal mechanism, it is only the outer part of it
which we shall regard as the instrument of speech, namely,
^ Quoted in The Cultivation of the Speaking Voice, by John Hullah, Clarendon Press Series, 1870.
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(delwedd E6133) (tudalen 125)
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OF THE
ABLAUT. I25|
the larynx and the variable cavity. Of these two, the larynx is to the variable cavity or oral tube what
the vibrating mouthpiece which
generates the note is to the variable tube
of some wind-instruments. Our power of observation is practically confined to the oral tube, and
it is on this most accessible part of
the speech-organs that Helmholz and
Koenig have made their wonderful experiments. Helmholz struck a tuning-fork and held it to the
mouth when it was ready to utter each
particular vowel. Thus it was quickly
discovered what musical note was reinforced by the airvibrations in
that particular position of the oral cavity. He had no tuning-fork high enough for the I ;
but Koenig having made one, he
completed and essentially confirmed the results of Helmholz. The vibrations per second for
the several vowels are proximately as
follows : —
U O A E I
450 900 1800 3600 7200
From these experiments it appears, that the five vowels are musically separated from each other by
distances as regular and as well defined
as those of the ordinary scale in music ^.
And we observe herewith, that E and O stand to the Cardinal Vowels precisely in that alternating
position and relation which the purely
philological evidence would assign to
them.
0/ the Ablaut,
123. At some distant time, before the historical era of the Gothic languages, the primitive community
became aware that they might enlarge
the range of their speech, if they
only spaced their vowels well; and they prosecuted this sentiment until they actually multiplied
three-fold, or even
* Comptes Rendus, April 1870.
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(delwedd E6134) (tudalen 126)
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126 /.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
four-fold, the expressive powers of their inherited vocabulary. The German
name of Ablaut has become so established, and it is so widely used, that it
seems better to adopt it with an
explanation than to seek a vernacular
substitute for it. Glossarially, it would be represented by Off-Sound ; and the name imports a certain
ofl5ng or distancing of vowel-sounds, whereby simple words have been provided with a ready change of form, and
have thus been promptly qualified to
express a contrast of significa^ tion.
Relics of this method of variation are strewn about our vocabulary. There is the verb to dtnd,
and the substantive kind, and another substantive dond. Or compare the verb to shear with the substantive
share and the adjective sheer, and
another substantive sht're, and yet another shore,-^ and we see what a variety of service one
consonantal framework may perform, with the aid of a well-defined
voweldifferentiation.
124. But it was in the verbal conjugation that the Ablaut found its peculiar home, and there it took
formal and methodical possession. In that position it became the chief means of expressing the distinction of
Time, superseding almost entirely the
previous habit of denoting the Past by
Reduplication. The clearest examples of this systematic vowd-change that the English language
affords are to be found in the old
verbs, and in those especially which have
their chief time-distinctions based upon the vocalic series t\ a,u; as the following : —
drunk
begun
shrunk
sunk
sung
slung
slunk
spun
sprung
drink
drank
begin
shrink
began
shrank
sink
sank
sing
sling
slink
sang
slang (272)
slank
spin
spaa
spring
sprang
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(delwedd E6135) (tudalen 127)
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VOWEL-CHANGES.
127
126. In these examples the regularity of the Ablaut is manifest, even in the literary language. If
we take account of the inroads that
time and neglect have made on this
ancient structure, we may often supply the slight restoration that is required to bring many other verbs
into this table. Thus, if we remember
that the verb to run is originally nn,
we have at once the series, n'n, ran, run. After this pattern we may sometimes reconstruct old verbs that
have had their conjugation modernised.
When we read in Chaucer of the
feelings of the woman who was ready to burst till she had told her secret, how that
Hir thoQghte it swal so soore aboute hir herte,
Wifo/BatkU Tale, 967,
we may surmise not only that our preterite swelled is a modernism, but also that the spelling of
swell was formerly ml; and then if we
compare the Moesogothic we actually
find swi'l, swal, swul, to have been the Ablaut of that verb.
Analogies are often caught beautifully by children. I have heard dag as the preterite of dig. Also the
original preterite of the verb to
s/ir^ I heard from the mouth of a little maid
of four years old, who said to her father, in rich tones of genial enquiry which writing cannot render
: * If a bee stang you, dad, would you
cry ? '
Enough has now been said to indicate that the Ablaut is a vowel-differentiation of words, and
that its character depends upon that
distinctness of the vowels from which it
obtains its value, and force, and title. They need not always be quite so chromatically distinct as a, i,
u. A humble instance of Ablaut may be quoted which took place in the seventeenth century, when the word Iken was
differentiated into the two forms /ken
and /kan. The term Ablaut may
comprehend all such instances of differentiation.
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(delwedd E6136) (tudalen 128)
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I^fcS
7. OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
Of the Umlaut
126. The Umlaut, on the contrary, is not so much a vowel change, as a vowel modification. In
order to see what it is that induces
this modification, we may revert to
the parallel between the organs of speech and a wind instrument. In an
elaborate instrument, with keys and other
adjustments, if all the parts are not in smart working order, there will be a danger lest each note
should modify its successor. The keys have been touched for a given note,
and unless they promptly recover their
normal position, something will be heard of the first note at the time when
the second is delivered. So it is in
language: a letter or a syllable is
apt to carry on its influence to the letter or syllable that succeeds. In the neighbourhood of
Bath, the childish form of the name of
that city is Bab, Here we see the
second consonant has been overpowered by the first. In the Finnish and Samoyedian languages, this
principle has developed into a
grammatical vowel-harmony, according to
which the vowel of the stem of a word determines the vowel of the afiix. Thus hoha (skin) makes its
ablative hobahad) warnge (crow) makes
it warngeked\ ano (boat) makes the
same case anohod\ ^(^3/ (servant) makes habihid\ ^rApandju (lump) makes the ablative paeidjuhud^. In
all these instances we see the vowel
of the afiix harmonised to the nearest in
the stem : and we recognise the development of a natural tendency into a law.
In our schools we sometimes hear this Harmonic Permutation of vowels, as,
Duhlun^ Mosos, prommuSy righteousnuss^
Thommus; but it is not admirable in Aryan children how*
' M. Alexander Castren, GrammcUik der Samojidisehen Sprachen, St Petersburg, j8s4 ; p. 25.
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(delwedd E6137) (tudalen 129)
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THE
UMLAUT. I29
ever interestmg it may be as a part of Turanian grammarsystems.
127. The Umlaut of the Indo-European languages is 8 phenomenon of a different order. Here the
vowel of the after-member of the word
influences that which has gone before,
so that a present vowel is influenced by one yet onspoken.
It seems as if we ought to take into our philological consideration the fact
that the human organ of speech, while it
is an instrument, is not a mere instrument ; inasmuch as it ^ntains hound up in the same constitution
with itself the performer also. It
would seem as if the consciousness which
tl»e moral agent has of the task before it, influenced a present Btterance by the presentiment of that which
is to follow. The Umlaut is a
modification that has risen in our stock of Ianplages within the historical
period. There is no trace of it in the
Mcesogothic, but it appears in the Old High German and Anglo-Saxon. Yet the Mcesogothic
supplies the conditions out of which it has grown.
If we look at Mark i. 16 we see the word nafi, where our English Testament has ne/. Here the t of
the termination has drawn the a
towards it, and has harmonised it into e.
The intermediate form ne^z is preserved in the Oldsaxon of the Heliand. In the same manner the
Mcesogothic /am reappears in the
English y^«. The action of the Umlaut continued visibly to alter the shapes
of words during the whole Saxon period.
Thus the same word would appear with an
'a,' or an cb in the stem, according as it had a full or a thin vowel in the termination. For example, the
word day was ^ in the nominative
(pointing to an earlier dagt), dceges
and dcBge in the genitive and dative singular; but in the plural it made nom. dagas^ gen. daga^ dat.
dagttm. So likevise sicBf a letter, plur. s/q/as; hwcel a whale, plur.
fcwaias \
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(delwedd E6138) (tudalen 130)
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130 /.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
fcsS a path, plur. fa^as. Our modern pronunciation of th< word day retains the trace of this Umlaut,
which the ortho graphy obscures; for
it exactly corresponds to dcBt\ the
orthography which succeeded to dcsg. And, to take an example from adjectives, the word small
bears no trace, either in its spoken
or in its written form, of having formerly been subject to Umlaut ; but it
was so. It appears as smcsi, smcB/re,
smcslra, smcelne ; a thin vowel being, or having been, though here unwritten, in every one
of these Cases next after the /. In
another set of Cases it appears as stnalu^
smalum, smalay smalan, and it was by the preponderance ol these that our modern form was determined.
128. The Conquest gave the death-blow to the Umlaut among us, and even the traces of it were
largely obliterated But some of the
Umlaut-forms had allied themselves witl:
certain grammatical functions, and in this new charactei they have secured office and position. Such
are those fev plurals which, likey^^/,
geese, men, mice, are formed by inwar<
vowel-change. The Germans have retained this plura function much more largely than we have,
and also anothe of far greater scope
and utility; for they have found ii
Umlaut a means of differentiating the indicative from th( subjunctive mood, thus — l^atte habebat,
l^dtte haberet.
The Consonants,
129. The consonants will be most conveniently arrange in the order according to which they recede
more and mor from the nature of the
vowels. We begin with the hal vowels,
W and Y.
Before the Conquest the character W was little usee Where the Anglo-Saxon printed books have
it, the manu scripts have the old Rune
p. But after the Conques when a great
many Romance words beginning with ^
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(delwedd E6139) (tudalen 131)
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THE
CONSONANTS. I3I
were coming into the English, and a distinction had to be made between this sound and that of the
old p, the letter was represented by a
double v. But it must carefully be observed that the novelty as regards the W
was only in the character and not in
the souiid. The sound of w was an
ancient sound in the language, and upon it an
interesting question rises; — Whether this sound, which is now a chief characteristic of our language
amidst its family, was contracted in
this island by the mingling of the Saxons
with the British Kelts, or whether it really is the relic of a once pangothic sound, which has faded
everywhere else, alike in the Teuton
and Scandinavian worlds.
The sound of the w may be described as a consonantism resulting from the collision of *u' with
another vocalic sound. Say oa first,
and then say ee : if you keep an
interval between, the vocalic nature of each is preserved, but if you pass quickly from the utterance
of 00 to that of «, you engender the
consonantal sound w, and produce the
word we. Any vowel coming into collision with ' u ' will engender the w. It is. said in Grammars
that w (like y) is a consonant when it
is initial, either of a word or syllable ;
and a vowel elsewhere. According to this rule (which fairly states the case) we find that w is a vowel
now, where once it was a consonant.
Take the word /ew, in which w has only
a vocalic sound ; this word was once a di$y\\2Lb\e,/eawa, and then the second syllable wa gave the w a
consonantal value.
130. Y is a Greek letter adopted by the Romans, and used in Saxon writing for the thin u (like
French u or Geraian u) apt to be
confused with /. The French call it
the Greek I, * I grec'
Y is only a vowel all through the Saxon literature ; — the consonantal function was added after the
Conquest. Then
K 2
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(delwedd E6140) (tudalen 132)
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132 ,
7. OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
Y Stepped Into the place of an ancient G-initial, which was in a state of decay. This is the history of
y in such words as ye^ yes^ yet, year^
yard^ ^^^^> yearn, yelp, yield,
from the older forms ge, gese, git, gear, geard, gearo, geom, gilpan, gieJd. In the process of this
transition, there appeared for two centuries or more (the twelfth to the
fourteenth) a separate form of letter, neither g nor y, which was written thus 3, and was ultimately dropped.
It was a pity we lost this letter, as
the result has been a heterogeneous
combination of functions under the letter Y which it is difficult for
a learner to disentangle. Had we retained the
consonant 5 we should have had fewer accumulations of vowel and consonant functions in single
letters.
In old Scottish writing this 3 slid into the form of z, as in the following, where _y^ar is written
zeir : —
In witness quhairof we haif subscrivit thise presents with our hands at Westminster the loth day of December, the
zier of God 1 568 Zeirs.
James, Regent, &c.
So yet was written zit, as in Buchanan's Detection : —
Quhilk wryting being without dait, and thocht sum wordis thairin seme to the contrarie, zit is upon credibill
groundis supposit to have bene maid
and written be hir befoir the deith of hir husband.
Now Y (like w) is half vowel and half consonant : it is a consonant in the beginning of a word or
syllable, and a vowel elsewhere. This
gives the y a peculiar position in
English which k does not hold in other languages. Om consonantal sound of y is represented in
German and Danish and Swedish by j. In
the English young the y sounds exactly
as the j sounds in German Jung, or in the Danisb pronoun of the first person Jeg, Swedish
Jag.
131, The bringing out of this consonantal y is a feature
of the modern language. If it existed in Saxon times,
Jt was not expressed in writing, e'x.ce^x. \xv ^o far as mt
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(delwedd E6141) (tudalen 133)
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rAND^.
133
can suppose the o to have expressed it, as in iufige (I love) and in the words above quoted. It is
in the West that this Y displays
itself most conspicuously. In Barnes's
poems we meet with yadle able, yacKen aching, yacre acre, yaWier acorn, yah ale, yarhs herbs, yarm
arm, yarn earn, yarnesi earnest, yean
eacnian, yeaze ease. On Sunday
evenings, arm in arm ; —
O* Zundiy evemens, yarm in yarm:—
and first they'd go to see their lots of pot-herbs in the garden plots; —
An' vust tha'd goo to zee ther lots O*
pot-yarbs in the ghiarden plots.
The history of y has been confused by means of the fashion which prevailed in the fifteenth
century of substituting it often for /. Already in the fourteenth
century, hzsiABC Poeniy we find tlie
letter y thus introduced :
Y for I in wryt is set.
A reaction followed and corrected this in some measure ; but still too many cases remained in which
the y had become fixed in places where
an i should have been. A conspicuous
example is the word rhyme, from the Saxon
rim (number), in which the y was put for i probably through confusion with the Greek pvBfwsy as we
certainly do owe many of our j/s to
the Greek v, as in tyrant, zephyr,
hydraultc, hyssop, hypocrisy, hypothesis.
The consonantal value of y cannot however be traced wholly to the decay of the initial g. This
does not account for the sound of y in
the pronunciation of ewe, or in the
unwritten name of the vowel u. The Saxon iw, which had no initial o. Old High Dutch iwa, German
difce, has become yno in English. Both
of these half-consonants can rise out
of vocalic conditions; if iw has become j-m; in oithog;ta.^\\^ ^ one has become wu/i in pronunciation..
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(delwedd E6142) (tudalen 134)
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134 ^.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
132. The next in order are the Spirants, H, S, Z, partially C, and partially CH.
H, in the ancient language, was a guttural. This letter has undergone more change of value since
its introduction into our language
than any other letter. It is now a mere
dumb historical reUc in many cases, and where it has any sound it is but the sign of aspiration. It
is almost classed with the vowels, as
in the familiar rule which tells us to say
an before a word beginning with a vowel or a silent h. It once had in English the guttural force of
the German ch, or even of the Welsh
ck.
This ancient guttural is heard now only in those portions of the old Anglian provinces which are in
the southern counties of Scotland, and
the northern counties of England.
There you may still hear hM and neMj for hgh^ and n^h^, pronounced in audible gutturals. In the
Anglo-Saxon these were written with
the simple h thus, IM and nM^ but pronounced gutturally. As we now regard c
and k as interchangeable in certain cases, e. g. Calendar or Kalendar,
so in the early time stood c and h to
each other. There were a certain
number of words in which the Anglian c (of the time of Baeda) was represented by a Saxon
h. The word derd (bright) is of
frequent occurrence in the Ecclesiastical
History of the Angles. It occurs in proper names, as Bercta, Berctfrid, Berctgils, Bercthun, Berctred,
Berctuald, Cudberct, Hereberct,
Husetberct. The same was also freely used in
Saxon names, but in them the Anglian c became h, dn'h/ or heorht\ Brihthelm, Brihtnojj, Brihtric,
Brihtwold, Brihtwulf, Ecgbriht,
CutSbriht. Some lingering relics of h guttural are found as late as the middle of the
fourteenth century. For example, sixi
thou for seest ikou, or rather sekest ihou, in Piers Plowman, i. 5, is evidence that his
sihi (sight) was gutturally
pronounced.
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(delwedd E6143) (tudalen 135)
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H, S,
Z. 135
As the H began to be more feebly uttered, and it was- no longer regarded as a sure guttural sign, it
had to be reinforced by putting a c before it, as in the above Itcht and necht] or by a g, as in though^
S2LXonJ>eah ; daughter^ Saxon
dohkr. But the gh had little power to arrest the tendency of the language to divest itself of its
gutturals, and gh in its turn has
grown to be a dumb monument of bygone pronunciation.
133, S has two sounds, one of which is heard in house^ and the other in houses : — the former we call
the proper S sound, the latter we now
assign to Zed. But this Z sound is the old
property of S, and it lives on in that universal habit of die Western counties to make every S a Z, of
which the form Zummerzei is the
proverbial type. The growth of the milder
use has doubled the functions of S ; and Z has done httle as yet to relieve S of its equivocal
situation.
Little change has taken place in the use of s since the most ancient times; — in the vast majority
of instances its uses in English and
German are alike, and indeed in all the
Gothic family of languages. One remarkable exception to this uniformity of the area of s, is its
use in Moesogothic in many words where
the other dialects have r.
I McBsoooTHic. English. German.
I ahs ear ^e^re
i mais more Wlt^x
\ basi berry 93eerc
hauedaxi hear ^oren
dius deer %ijXtx
S interchanges with T, as between German and English : ffiaffer water, wei^ white, l^ei^. hot.
This is included in the
Lautverschiebung, 12,
134. Z is a letter of late introduction. During the Saxon time it appears in Bible translations in
names like ZacheuSy
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(delwedd E6144) (tudalen 136)
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136 7.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
Zacharias ; and otherwise only in one or two stray instances, e.g. Caztet, the French town-name Chezy^ in
the following description of the path
of the Northmen in France :-^
887. Her for %t here tip ]>Qrh 9a brycge ct Paris, and }» up andfalig Sigene otS Mxterne, and ]ki up on Maeterne
otS Caziet.
887. This year went the host up through the bridge at Paris, and ikem up along the Seine to the Mame, and then up
the Mame to Ckezy,
There was the less demand for a Z in Saxon, because the S was sounded as Z ; yea we find S used as
the representative of z down to the fifteenth century : e. g. Sepherus
for Zephyrus, Nor is this letter
anything more than a foreigner among
us now. There will be found very few genuine English words with a z in them.
C is a spirant or sibilant only in certain positions ; namely, before the vowels i and e, as city, centre.
This is simply the French c, and the
earliest English instance I can produce is
in the Saxon Chronicle of Peterborough, anno 11 28, where mtlce appears for Saxon milise, perhaps by
influence of French merci.
And as we have a FfeAch c, so have we also ft French ch, which is equivalent to sh. This function is
vdry rare with us, for we nearly
sllways assimilate it either to the £nglish ch or to the Italian ch : 140. We took
chirurgeon from French, and at first
we pronounced it shirurgeon, whence it became
surgeon. But now Walker teaches us to say kirurgeom Yet we can muster a few examples of French ch,
as, chagrin^ chaise, chamois^
champagne, charade, charlatan, Charlotte,
chicanery, chivalry, machine,
136. The next in order are the Liquids L^ M, N, R, These letters hold a similar position in
all the great languages, though subject to occasional peculiarities of
uttefance, such as the * l mouill^,' or the nasal m and n of the French with which we have little to do. The
Liquids have
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(delwedd E6145) (tudalen 137)
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LABIALS,
137
undergone no Varisition in passing from the Saxon into the English language, except that r has
unhappily lost much of its earlier
resonance^
Of these liquids, li and r group together, aS being more vocalic than the other two. These have a
softening effect upon vowels, as may
be seen above, 114 ; while m and n on
the other hand have a conservative effect. With respect to the Mutes, m has a great attraction for b,
137 ; and n for d
OTT.
136. We have now touched all the sounds represented by our Alphabet, except the Mutes ; and these
are they which were spoken of at the
outset in relation to the law of Lautverschiebung. They are subdivided into
the Labials, Dentals, and Gutturals.
The Labials are P, B, F, V.
P is a letter that was not much used in Saxon as an initial letter of words. In Kemble's Glossary to
the Beowulf, he has given only three
words under the letter t» ; and in Bouterwek's Glossary to Cadmon there are
only two, both of which are comprised
in the former three. Thus two glossaries of our two oldest national poems
exhibit only three words beginning
with p. One of the three is now extinct,
but the other two are quite familiar to us ; they are path and ^y. These were, in the eighth century,
exceptional words in English, from the
fact that they began with p. And to
this day it may still be asserted that almost all the English words beginning with p are of foreign extraction.
187. B is a great companion of m, as climh^ lamb, timber. In these and many other instances it has
been brought in by the M, as in limb
from lim ; number from the Latin
numerus.
F has sometimes become v in English : as sefen even, delfe ^Ive, lifet liver, lufu love, steorfe
starve. And indeed the Saxon F seems
to have represented the v-sound rather thaiv
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(delwedd E6146) (tudalen 138)
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138 1.
OF THE ENGUSH ALPHABET.
that now attached to r. This is also the power of f in Welsh.
V as a spoken consonant, as a sound, came in after the Conquest, with such French words as mriue,
uisage^ uairu^ tieray^ uenene. But the
character v as a sign proper to this
consonantal sound, and so distinct from the vowel u, was not established until the seventeenth century.
138. The Dentals are T, D, TH.
T has an afl&nity to n, and this is why a sermon is apt to be called a sermotiL It is also sometimes
drawn in by s. In Acts xxvii. 40 we
read * hoised up the main-sail,' where
we should now say and write ' hoisted,* not for any etymological
reason, but from a purely phonetic cause.
D has a like affinity for n, and is often brought into a word as a sort of shadow to n. In the words
impound, expound, from the Latin
impono and exponoy the d is a pure
English addition : so likewise in sound from French son^ Latin sonus. Provincial phonetics go
still further, and call a gown gownd.
See above, 94.
D has also a disposition to slip in between l and R. Thus the Saxon ealra, gen. plur. of eal
all, became first aJler and then alder
y as in *Mine alder-liefest Sovereign,'
2 Henry VI y i. i.
TH has been touched on above, 97, in connection with the Rune p ; but its more modern relations have
to be considered here. It has two
sounds: one which nearly approaches
the lisp, as in thin ; the other, which is more vocal, as in thine. The latter is sometimes represented
by dk. Both are pre-eminently English,
although the dh is heard in Danish at
the end of some words where d is written, as in brod bread, ved with, pronounced brodh,
vedh. There are but three European
languages, besides our own, that have
A well recogm'sed TH-souud, lYie "^d^Yv, \3aft S^janish, and
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(delwedd E6147) (tudalen 139)
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DENTALS. 139 the Greek. The latter has both the
sounds; the Spanish gives the lisp M-sound to c before e or i; the Welsh has
the vocal sound in its strongest form, written as dd. Neither of the sounds
is heard in German,, though /// is written, as in Xbicx, Xfyal. In French
also it is written, but not heard: as the, pronounced toy. The th with its
twofold value is one of the most characteristic features of our language, and
more than any other the Shibboleth of foreigners. 139. The Gutturals are C,
K, G, CH, J, H, Q, X. The Tenues are C and K. The word icicle shews us that c
has two powers, the sibilant and the guttural. The sibilant has been noticed,
132. The guttural c has the ksound before a, 0, u, also before /, r\ as call,
cob, cut, clew, crop. K is not properly a Latin, but a Greek letter. In Roman
writing it had an undefined position as a superfluous character, a mere
duplicate-variety of c. This was also its position through the whole period
of Anglo-Saxon literature: it was a mere fancy to write k, and it meant
nothing different from the c. But very soon after the Conquest, the greater
frequency of k is observable; and it went on increasing just in proportion as
the value of c became equivocal through its frenchified employment with the
sound of s: 132. Already in the twelfth century, k is found to have a place
and function of its own to the entire exclusion of c, namely, before the
vowels e and 1, the cases in which c had gone off into the s-sound. Thus the
old words cene, cempa warrior, Cent, cepan, cyn, cyng, were in the twelfth
century written constantly as kene keen, kempa champion, Kent, keep, kin,
king. But when the character had to be doubled, it was by prefixing c, and
not by repetition of k, that the doubling was effected: thus, acknotvledge,
which is only a compound of the particle a with knowledge, the c expressing the
reverber
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I40 7.
OF THE SNOtlSH ALPHABET.
ation of the K-sound. So also in lack^ crackajacks and the old-fashioned spellings of politick^
cBstheiick, ck may be taken as
equivalent to double*K.
140. G has two uses, the first before a^ o, Uy or a liquidj as gang, gate, good, gold, great, green,
grim, gull, gusk This sound is the
true medial of the guttural series. The
second use is that which it has before e and /, where it sounds the same as our j, as, engine,
gentle, giant, gin^ ginger, change.
The former is the true English g, the
latter is Romanesque.
The rale is suspended where some Saxon words are concerned, thus, in get,
give, it has the first sound though before
e and i'. So that we might say the first is the Saxon G, tlu second is French or Italian.
CH has three uses : —
1. The English use as in church. How far back this icl sound may have been in existence is one of
the mos interesting questions in Saxon
phonology. In Swedish w< find this
sound attached to x when it is followed by a sof vowel ; thus the initial k of Swedish fyrka
sounds as ch u our church,
2. The French use, like sh, as in Charlotte, 134.
3. The Italian use, like k, as in architect, character, chro nicle, monarch.
Of these three, only the first and third belong here amon] the Gutturals, the second belongs to 132*
141. J is the consonant that has grown out of the vowel 1 Now the process of making i into a
consonant would seet to result most
naturally in the product of the Y-sound. An
so we saw above, 131, that iw became_>/^z«;.
But we had not developed this consonantal use of i whe
a different one was imported from France, along with sue
words as tangler^ iealous^ iest, iewel^ ioin^ ioUy^iourney^tm
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GUTTURALS.
I4I
wy, iudge, lulyy tusttce. The sound of this French i-consonant was a
palato-guttural, like that of g in gfi jacet
We may compare its sound with the sound of g in certain analogous positions in Italian,
French. Italiaiy. Latin.
Jean Giovanni loannes
majeur maggior maior
and wonder whether in any sense this consonant can be traced back to the Latin. At any rate, we
have adopted it from the French, have
altered it to a sound of our own, and
then we have lent it to the Latin language in our printed texts, transforming maior ^ peior, luvare,
iam, luncus, hmtis, Qus^ into major,
pejoryjuvare, Jam, juncus, hujtis, ejus.
As a dharacter distinct from i, the j dates from the seventeenth century.
142, H has already been spoken of in its living character, as a spirant. But it must also have mention
here in the guttural series, because
this was its old historic function,
and also because it still represents the guttural-aspirate in many English words for the purposes of
comparative philology. Thus Latin cam's is English hound, according to Grimm's Law.
Q is a Latin letter, which was not recognised in English till the close of the twelfth or the
beginning of the thirteenth century.
Previous to this the Anglo-Saxon writers had
done very well without it; having expressed the sound of p by the letters cw ; as cwalm qualm,
pestilence, death ; «o«8 quoth, cwen
queen, cwic quick. At first the qu was
only admitted in writing Latin or French words, while cw kept its place in native words. Among the
earliest Latin or French words
beginning with qu which were adopted in
English are quart, quarter, quarterne prison, quarrel^ quarry ^ pire, quit from ^u/e/us quiet. This is the
positioii 'w\i\c\v q,
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142 /.
OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
holds at this day in the Dutch language; it is used f( spelling certain Latin words, while kw is
used for the sam sound in the words of
native origin. In English, on th
contrary, the qu very soon prevailed even in the home-bor words; and before the close of the
thirteenth century w find quake^
qualm^ queeriy quelle quick,
X has two powers : one its original value, ks ; and the othe gSi a development common to English and
French. 1 sounds as gs when the
syllable following the x is open am
accented, as exhaust^ exalt, exotic ; in other cases it has tb original value of ks. This distinction is,
however, ques tioned; and the decision
of it is all the more difficult, a: we
may not trust the report of our own organs in delicate points of pronunciation. Our utterance is
warped the ma ment we set ourselves to
observe and examine it.
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CHAPTER
II.
SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION.
143. The spelling of our language has admitted a succession of changes from
the earliest times to the present day.
We now call our orthography fixed : but perhaps the next generation will detect some changes that
have taken place in our time. Orthography
is always in the rear of pronunciation, and this .distance is continually
increasing. As a language grows old,
it more and more tends towards being
governed by precedent. We spell words as we have been taught to spell them. The more literature
is addressed to the eye, the more that
organ is humoured, and the ear is less and
less considered. A settied orthography is a habit of spelling which rarely admits of modification, and
tends towards a state of absolute
immutability.
When a language has become literary, its orthography has already begun to be fixed. The varieties of
spelling which have taken place from
the fourteenth century until now, may
appear considerable to those who have only glanced at old hooks; but in reality they are very
limited. A few slight variations,
often repeated, will make a great difference in the legibility of a page, to the eye that
is unaccustomed to snch variations. It
might be thought that the idea of orthography was a modem affair, and that
the spelling of our early ^ters was
chaotic and imstudied. But this NVO^Vd \i^
^ great mistake*
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(delwedd E6152) (tudalen 144)
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144
^^- SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION.
144. The poet of the Ormulum (a.d. 12 15) earnestly begs that in future copies of his work, respect
may be had to his orthography. The
passage has been quoted and translated
above, 50.
Chaucer also, in the closing stanzas of his Troilus and Creseide^ begs that no one will 'miswrite'
his little book, by which he means
that no one should deviate from his orthography :
Go, little booke, go my little tragedie
• ••••••
And for there is so great diversite
In English, and in writing of our tong.
So pray I to God, that none miswrite thee,
Ne the mis-metre, for defaut of tong:
And redd wherso thou be or des song,
That thou be understond, —
It was not for want of interest in orthography that so great diversity continued to exist, but it was
from the obstacles which naturally
delayed a common understanding on such
a point. A standard was, however, set up in the fifteenth century, or at furthest in the sixteenth,
by the masters of the Printing-press.
It was the Press that determined our orthography. This may easily be
discerned by the fact that whereas
private correspondence continues for a long time to exhibit all the old diversity of spelling, the
Bible of 16 11, and the First Folio of
Shakspeare (1623) are substantially in the orthography which is now prevalent
and established.
145, If any one will be at the trouble to compare the following verses from
the Bible of 1 6 1 1 with our present Bible,
he will see that the variation is not so great as at first sight appears.
Diners opinions of him among the people. The Pharisees are angry that their officers tooJte him not, Ct* chide
with Nicodemus for taking his part,
37 In the last day, that great day of the feast, lesus stood, and cried,
saying, If any man thirst, let him come vnto me, and drinke.
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THE
BIBLE OF 161I. I45
38 He that beleeueth on me, as the Scripture hath saide, out of his
belly shall flow riuers of liuing
water.
39 (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they 4hat beleeue on him
should leceiue. For the holy Ghost was
not yet giuen, because that lesus was not
yet glorified.)
40 1 Many of the people therefore, when they heard this saying, saide. Of a trueth this is the Prophet.
41 Others said. This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out ofGaUIee?
4a Hath not the Scripture saide, that Christ commeth of the seede of Dauid, and out of the towne of Bethlehem,
where Dauid was ?
43 So there was a diuision among the people because of him.
44 And some of them would haue taken him, but no man layed hands on him.
45 1 Then came the officers to the chiefe Priests and Pharises, and they said vnto them. Why haue ye not brought him
?
46 The officers answered, Neuer man spake like this man.
47 Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceiued ?
48 Haue any of the rulers, or of the Pharises beleeued on him ?
49 But this people who knoweth not the Law, are cursed.
50 Nicodemus saith vnto them, (He that came to lesus by night, being one of them.)
51 Doth our Law iudge any man before it heare him, & know what he doth?
52 They answered, and said vnto him, Art thou also of Galilee ? Search, aid looke : for out of Galilee ariseth no
Prophet.
53 And euery man went vnto his owne house.
146. A large part of the strange effect which this specimen has to the modern eye is due to something
which is distinct from spelling —
namely, to a change of form in certain characters. The modern distinction of
j the consonant from i the vowel was
not yet known. The v was not practically
distinguished from the u. Instead oi judge we see iudge \ and inst^d of deceived it is deceiued.
These may come under the notion of
orthography, but they cannot be called diversities of spelling. To these have
to be added a few instances of tf
final, which have since been disused. Also a few more capital letters. Such are the chief
elements to which the strange aspect
is due. The only real differences in this
piece from our present use, are beleeue, layed (for laid)^ commeik,
trueth.
L
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146
//. SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION.
Let us glance at a few of the changes which have produced the present settlement. For this purpose we
must look back to the last great
disturbance, that is to say, to the Conquest
and its sequel. At that time there had been a fixed orthography for a
hundred years ; hardly less fixed than ours now is, after four centuries of printing. We
must remember that the Press is a sort
of dictator in orthography. If we were to
judge of present English orthography by a collection of manuscripts of the day, it would be a
different thing from judging of it by
printed books. For a manuscript literature,
that of the last hundred years of the Saxon period is singularly
orthographicaL
Modifications of the old Saxon Orthography.
147. The clashing of dialects in the transition period, and the French influence, combined to raise up
a new sort of spelling in the place of
the old. Even the Saxon words could
not escape the new influence. A very large proportion of the words beginning with c were now
spelt either with k or with CH.
Examples of a Saxon c-initial turned into k : —
Caeg hey Cnawau know
Cene heert Cnedan knead
Ceol keel Cneow knee
Cent Kent Cniht kmght
Cepan keep Cy'5 kyth
Cnapa knave Cyn kin
Examples of Saxon words beginning with c, which in modern English have taken ch instead of c :
—
Ceafu chaff Cidan chide
Ceaster Chester Cin chin
Ccorl churl Circe church
Ceosan choose Cyle chill
Cild child Cypman chapman
In the close of words also ch has taken the place of the Saxon c (or sometimes cc\ as in church
cyrice, speech spaec,
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SAXON
WORDS. I47
reach raecan, teach taecan; and sometimes it has taken the form ichj as in lakh laeccan, thatch
J>aec, match ^^maecca, wcUch wacie,
wretch wreccea. This -tch extended at one time beyond its present bomids ; thus in
Spenser's Faery Qtieene, L 2. 21, we
read ritch for 'rich.' The quaint old Scottish grammarian, Alexander Hume, who was *
Scolemaester of Bath' in 1592, speaks
contemptuously of this ch and tch
development of our pronunciation, calling it 'an Italian chirt':
With c we spil the a^iration, turning it into an Italian chirt ; as, charite,
cberrie, of quhilk hereafter This consonant, evin quher in the original
it hes the awne sound, we turn it into the chirt we spak of, quhilk
indeed can be symbolized with none,
neither greek nor latin letteres ; as from cauo, chant; from canon, chanon'; from castus,
chast; &c. — Of the Orthographie
of the Britan Tongue by Alexander Hume (Early English Text Society,
1865), pp. 13. H-
148. It is a point of much interest and of some uncertainty, how the ch is to
be accounted for in this class of
examples. Was this simply a reform in the direction of phonetic spelling, and had these words been
pronounced with the ch sound even
while they were written with the c ?
That this was not the case universally the Scotch form Kirk is a sufficient evidence. But may it have
been so partially — may the chirt have
been in the southern and western pronunciation ? Something of this sort may
be seen at present in Scandinavia. The
Swedish and Danish languages have
initial k in common in a large number of words. The Danish k has no chirt anywhere ; but the
Swedish k is pronounced as English ch when it is followed by certain
vowels. The Danish word for church is
kirke ; the Swedish word is fy'ka. In
the former case the K-initial is pronounced as in Scotland ; in the latter it sounds like the
first consonant in
* This indicates a former pronanciarion of canon more like the French tikenome,
L 2
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(delwedd E6156) (tudalen 148)
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148
11. SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION.
the English church, A like division of pronunciation may possibly have existed in this island before
the Conquest. Or the chirt may have
been still more partial than this ; it may
have had but an obscure and disowned existence (like the sh sound as a substitute for the ch in
Germany) ; and the French influence
may have fostered it by a natural aflSnity, and given it a permanent place in the English
language.
140. Analogous to the use of / before the ch (anciently f) is the putting a d before an ancient g.
Thus we have the forms hedge hege,
wedge wecg, ridge hrycg, sledge slecge.
The form knowledge (323), and the rejected form oblidgt (173), are but confused assimilations.
150. Saxon words beginning with sc are in modem English often spelt sh ; —
Scadu $hade Sceap iheep
Sceaf sheaf Scearp sharp
Sceaft shaft Seel shell
Sceal shall Sceort short
Sceamu shame Sceo shoe
Sceanca shank Scild shield
In some words, however, the Saxon sc is preserved, as scale (of a balance), scar, score, scot,
scrub, and scypen cattleshed. In some cases it is now written sk as in skin,
skiiiU^ skulk. In one instance it is
written sch where nothing but the
simple sc is heard, as school. This is probably a Grecism.
The English is more sibilant than the Anglo-Saxon was, and the change of sc to sh has contributed
to this effect. The sibilancy of our
language is a European proverb. Undoubtedly our whole stock is sibilant, and
the Moesogothic itself most of all.
The Saxon was one of the least sibilant of the family, as the lists above (10 and 12)
suflSciently indicate. Gur modern
access of sibilancy has been due entirely to
French contact. Besides our native sibilants, which had
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(delwedd E6157) (tudalen 149)
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SAXON
WORDS. I49
been reduced below average proportions, we accepted all those of the French, which were many. That
language is eminently sibilant now to
the eye, though not to the ear. It is
by the silence of their final s that our old neighbour is in a position to smile at the susurration of
the English language. Apart from the
French influence, we were less sibilant than
either the French or the German.
15L One of the earliest changes was the quiescence of the old guttural-aspirate h. This produced more
than one set of modifications in
spelling.
The habit of writing wk instead of the old Aw was one of these. It seems that the decaying sound of
the guttural gave the zez-sound more
prominence to the ear, and that accordingly
the w was put before the h in writing. This alteration had the more effect on the appearance of the
language, because many of the words so
spelt are among the commonest and most
frequently recurring. The following are some of the more conspicuous examples : —
Hwa who Hwylc which
Hwses whose Hweol wheel
Hwzl whale Hwi why
Hwaer where Hwil while
Hwaet whai Hwisperung whispering
HwsBtstan whetstone Hwistlere whistler
Hwsete wheat Hwit white
The modem result is this, that the syllable which was pronounced from the
throat (guttural), is now pronounced
mainly on the lips (aspirate-labial). The Scotch retained the guttural much longer ; and indeed it is
still audible in Scotland. And they wrote as well as pronounced
gutturally: thus, guha, quhilk, quhaL
Alexander Hume thus recounts a dispute
he had with some Southrons on the point : —
To clere this point, and alsoe to reform an errour bred in the south,
and now usurped be our ignorant
printeres, I wil tel quhat befel my self quhen I was in the south with a special gud
frende of myne. Ther rease, upon sun^
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B5237: 
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aith δ δ £ g