kimkat2123k The Philology of the English Tongue. John
Earle, M.A. Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford. Third
Edition. 1879.
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Gwefan Cymru-Catalonia |
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….
https://translate.google.com/
(Cymraeg,
català, English, euskara, Gàidhlig, Gaeilge, Frysk, Deutsch, Nederlands,
français, galego, etc)
...
llythrennau duon = testun wedi ei gywiro
llythrennau gwyrddion = testun heb ei gywiro
.....
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I50 II. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. accident, quhither quho, quhen, quhat, etc., should be
symbolised with 7 or w, a hoat disputation betuene him and me. After manie
conflictes (for we oft encountered), we met be chance, in the citie of Baeth,
with a Doctour of divinitie of both our acquentance. He invited us to denner.
At table my antagonist, to bring the question on foot amangs his awn
condisciples, began that I was becum an heretick, and the doctour spering
how, ansuered that I denyed quho to be spelled with a w, but with qu. Be
quhat reason? quod the doctour. Here, I beginning to lay my grundes of
labial, dental, and guttural soundes and symboles, he snapped me on this hand
and he on that, that the doctour had mikle a doe to win me roome for a
syllogisme. Then (said I) a labial letter can not svmboliz a guttural syllab.
But w is a labial letter, quho a guttural sound. And therfoer w can not
symboliz quho, nor noe syllab of that nature. Here the doctour staying them
again (for al barked at ones), the proposition, said he, I understand; the
assumption is Scottish, and the conclusion false. Quherat al laughed, as if I
had bene dryven from all replye, and I fretted to see a frivolouse jest goe
for a solid ansuer. — Of the Orthographie, &c, p. 18. The Scotchman was
right. And the Southrons might thank the Scotch for having preserved a fine
trait of English pronunciation, yea they might even endeavour by culture and
education to recover the true and masculine utterance of what, which, where,
when, while. 152. To the same cause must be attributed the motive for
changing the spelling of liht, miht, nihl, siht, to light, might, night,
sight. Probably the g was prefixed to the h in order to insist on the h being
uttered as a guttural. If so, it has failed. The guttural writing remains as
a historical monument, but the sound is no longer heard except in Scotland
and the conterminous parts of England. After gh had become quiescent, it was
liable to be employed carelessly or arbitrarily. For example, Spenser wrote
the adjective white in the following unrecognisable manner, whight: His
Belphcebe was clad All in a silken camus lilly whight. — Faery Queene, ii. 3.
26. In Ralegh's letters we repeatedly find wright write; so also spright was
written instead of sprite; and although it is |
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SAXON WORDS. 151 now obsolete,
yet its derivative sprightly is still in use. Spight for spite, in Spenser,
quoted below (156), may seem to have more right to the guttural, as it is
from despectare. 153. Likewise Saxon H-flnal has become gh, as burh burgh and
borough, sloh slough, f>ruh trough. But the case of ugh must be noticed
apart. Sometimes it sounds like simple u or w; as in plough, through, daughter,
slaughter. In other cases it sounds like_/*; as cough, enough, rough,
laughter. In dough, though it is quiescent. The same variety occurs in local
and family names. In some parts of England the name Waugh is pronounced as
Waw, and in others as Waff. Opinions differ about the f sound: chough, cough,
enough, laughter, rough, slough (of a snake), tough, trough. Some have
thought that this pronunciation may have risen from interpreting the u as f,
as lieutenant becomes 'leftenant.' But this hardly gives an adequate
explanation, inasmuch as it applies only within the pale of literature,
whereas some of the strongest examples rise outside. Indeed it would seem
that there is hardly any of these ugh words, that has not had the f sound at
some time or in some locality. The 1 Northern Farmer ' says thru/ for
through; and in Mrs. Trimmer's Robins, chap, vi., though receives a like
treatment; for Joe the gardener says, ' No, Miss Harriet; but I have
something to tell you that will please you as much as ihdf I had 1 / The
following quotation from Surrey seems to indicate that taught in his time
might be pronounced as ' toft ': — Farewell! thou hast me taught, To think me
not the first That love hath set aloft, And casten in the dust. 1 This will
not be found in all editions, because such rude things are deemed
objectionable by modern educationists; and Mrs. Trimmer is expurgated. |
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1$2 II. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. At Ilkley, near Leeds, slaughter may be heard pronounced like laughter;
and John Bunyan could pronounce daughter as ' dafter ': — Despondency, good
man, is coming after, And so is also Much-afraid, his daughter. With these
facts before us, it seems plain we must acknowledge that the gh itself does
sound as f\ the guttural has undergone transition to the labial. There is one
word of this group whose pronunciation is not yet uniformly established (in
the public reading of Scripture), and that is the word draught. The
colloquial pronunciation is now ' draft,' but in Dryden we find the other
sound: — Better to hunt the fields for health unbought, Than fee the doctor
for a nauseous draught. The gh with which we have been now dealing is a
domestic product: there is yet another gh, and the notice of it shall close
this division, which has been occupied with the modifications that befell the
old Saxon spelling. Initial gh as equivalent to g (hard) or French gu, is an
Italian affectation, and for the most part a toy of the Elizabethan period:
a-ghast, ghastly, gherkin, ghost (gost in Chaucer, Prol. 205). The word which
we now write guess is in Spenser ghess. Orthography of the French Element.
154. If we now leave the Saxon and notice the French words that entered
largely into our language in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there are
two general observations to be made concerning them: 1. They take their
orthography from the French of the time, and therefore the Old French is
their standard of comparison. 2. They were at first pronounced as French
words; and although the ori |
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FRENCH WORDS. 1 53 ginal
pronunciation was soon impaired, yet a trace of their native sound followed them
for a long time, just as happens in like cases in our own day. The French
accentuation would remain after every other tinge of their origin had faded
out. In course of time they were so completely familiarised that their origin
was' lost sight of, and then they insensibly slid into an English
pronunciation. The spelling would sometimes follow all these changes, but in
other cases the habit of writing was too strongly fixed. The modern French
words bouquet, trait, familiar as they are among us, still keep their French
form and French pronunciation. The Old French word honour appeared in English
as honure in Layamon and then as honour in Chaucer, and in both cases it was
accented after the French manner on the last syllable. But now that the
accent has moved forward to the first syllable, there is a tendency to
abolish the traces of French orthography The adjective hojiourable is
anglicised in the titular use of the word, when it is written Honorable; and
there are some authors who now omit the u in the substantive and adjective
alike, and upon all occasions. The American writers are conspicuous for their
disposition to reject these traces of early French influence. 155. In reading
early English poets, if we wish to catch the music as well as the sense, we must
bear in mind the difference of pronunciation; and that difference is for the
most part a matter of Old French. The tendency of the French nation is the
reverse of ours in the matter of accentuation. They are disposed to throw the
accent on the close of a word; we always try to get it as near the beginning
as possible. There is a large body of French words in our language which have
at length yielded |
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154 n - SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. to the influences by which they are surrounded, and have come
to be pronounced as English-born words. The same words were for centuries
accented in the French manner, and these are especially the ones we ought to
attend to, if we would wish not to stumble at the rhythm of our early poets.
Chaucer has |
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FRENCH WORDS. 1$$ the current
judgment of the polite society of his and of our day. We find it in Shakspeare,
Romeo and Juliet, i. 5: — You must contrary me, marry 'tis time. And Spenser,
Faery Queene, ii. 2. 24, where I will quote the whole stave for the sake of
its beauty: — As a tall ship tossed in troublous seas (Whom raging windes,
threatning to make the pray Of the rough rockes, doe diversly disease) Meetes
two contrarie billowes by the way, That her on either side doe sore assay,
And boast to swallow her in greedy grave; Shee, scorning both their spigbts,
does make wide way, And, with her brest breaking the fomy wave, Does ride on
both their backs, and faire herself doth save. And Milton in Samson
Agonisles, 972: — Fame, if not double-fac'd, is double-mouth'd, And with
contrary blast proclaims most deeds. 157. Although the disposition of our language
is to throw the accent back, yet we are far from having divested ourselves of
words accented on the last syllable. There are a certain number of cases in
which this constitutes a useful distinction, when the same word acts two
parts. Such is the case of humane and human; of august and the month of
August ', which is the selfsame word. Sometimes the accent marks the
distinction between the verb and the noun: thus we say to reb/l, to record)
but a rebel a re'cord. When the lawyers speak of a record (substantively),
they merely preserve the original French pronunciation, and thereby remind us
that the distinction last indicated is a pure English invention. We have many
borrowed words to which we have given a domestic character by setting them to
a music of our own. But independently of the instances in which the accent on
the last syllable is of manifest utility, there are others naturally accented
in the same manner, in which there seems |
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156 U. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. to be no disposition to introduce a change. Examples: —
polite, urbane, jocose, divine, complete. 158. In the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries, it was a trick and fashion of the times to lengthen
words by the addition of an e, a silent ^-final. A great number of these
final e's have been abolished, others have been utilised, as observed in 159;
but these fashions mostly leave their traces in unconsidered relics. Such is
the e at the end of therefore, which has no use as expressive of sound, and
which exerts a delusive effect on the sense, making the word look as if it
were a compound of fore, like before, instead of with for, which is the fact;
and for this reason some American books now print therefor. 159. In the case
of this ^-subscript, that which had originally been nothing more than a trick
or fashion of the times came to have a definite signification assigned to it.
In the fifteenth century it was a mere Frenchism, a fashion and nothing more.
But by the end of the sixteenth century it came to be regarded as a
grammatical sign that the proper vowel of the syllable was long \ Against
this orthographical idiom the Scotch grammarian, Alexander Hume, who
dedicated his book to King James I, stoutly protested: — We use alsoe, almost
at the end of everie word, to wryte an idle e. This sum defend not to be
idle, because it affectes the voual before the consonant, the sound quherof
many tymes alteres the signification; as, hop is altero tantam pede sallare;
hope is sperare: fir, abies; fyre, ignis: a fin, pinna; fine, probatus: bid,
jubere; bide, manere: with many moe. It is true that the sound of the voual
befoer the consonant many tymes doth change the signification; but it is as
untrue that the voual e behind the consonant doth change the sound of the
voual before it. A voual devyded from a voual be a consonant can be noe
possible means return thorough the consonant into the former voual.
Consonantes betuene vouales are lyke partition walles 1 To indicate the
subservient use of this letter, I have (for want of a better expression)
borrowed from a somewhat analogous thing in Greek grammar the term
e-subscript. |
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VARIATIONS, 157 betuen roomes.
Nothing can change the sound of a voual but an other voual coalescing with it
into one sound. . . . To illustrat this be the same exemples, saltare is to
hop; sperare is to hoep; abies is_/fr; ignis fyr; or, if you will.^er: jubere
is bid; manere byd or bied. — 0/ the Orthographie, &c, p. 21. 160. The
fifteenth century is the period in which we adopted the French combination gu
to express the retention of the hard G-sound before e or i. Chaucer has
guerdon, which is a French word; but he did not apply this spelling to words
of English origin, such as, guess, guest, guild, guilt. These in Chaucer are
written without the u. Mr. Toulmin Smith spells gild throughout his book
entitled English Gilds. In language we have an abnormal French spelling,
which lost its footing with them, but established itself with us. Here the u
has acquired a consonantal value as a consequence of the orthography. In
Chaucer it is langage, but in the Promptorium (1440) we read 'Langage or
langwage/ (168.) The form of tongue has been altered (119) through French
imitation, probably by the attraction of French la?igue. Divers incidental
variations. 161. Another fashion was the doubling of consonants, as in the
case of ck. Many of these remained to a late date; and there are some few
archaisms of this sort which have only just been disused. Such are poetick,
ascetick, politick, catholick, instead of poetic, ascetic, politic, catholic.
This was the constant orthography of Dr. Johnson: ' The next year (17 13), in
which Cato came upon the stage, was the grand climacteric^ of Addison's
reputation/ When such exuberances are dismissed, it is quite usual to make an
exception in favour of Proper names. There are very good and practical
reasons why these should affect a spelling somewhat removed from the common
habits of the Ian |
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I $8 //. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. guage, and accordingly we find that almost every discarded fashion
of spelling lives on somewhere in Proper names. The orthography of Frederick
has not been reformed, and the ck holds its ground advantageously against the
timidly advancing fashion of writing Frederic. 162. To the same period
belongs the practice of writing double / at the end of such words as
celestially mortall, faithfully eternall, counsell, naturally unequally
wakefull, cruell: also in such words as lilly, 152. It is a relic of this
fashion that we still continue to write till, all, full, instead of til,
al,ful, which were the forms of these words in Saxon. Spenser has an
inclination to put French c for s (132), and y for i, thus bace desyre {Faery
Queene, ii. 3. 23) for base desire. The vacillation between c and s
terminated discriminatively in a few instances. Thus we have prophesy the
verb and prophecy the noun, to practise and a practice. Less established, but
often observed, is the differentiation of license the verb from licence the
substantive, as — Licence they mean when they cry Liberty. John Milton,
Sonnet xii. 11; ed. Tonson, 1725. 163. In the sixteenth century there
appeared a fashion of writing certain words with initial sc- which before had
simple s-. It was merely a way of writing the words, and was without any
significance as to the sound. Hence the forms scent, scile, scitualion: and
Saxon siZe became scythe. It probably sprang from the analogy of such Latin
forms as scene, science, sceptre. These cases are to be kept apart from those
of 150. Scent is from the Latin sentire, French senlir, and is written sent
in Spenser, Faery Queene, i. 1. 53. Scile seems to be returning to its
natural orthography of |
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VARIATIONS 159 site, as being
derived from the Latin situs; and we once more write it as did Spenser and
Ben Jonson. But there are still persons of authority who adhere to the
seventeenth-century practice — the practice of Fuller, Burnet, and Drayton.
164. In the sixteenth century there/was a great disposition to prefix a w
before certain words beginning with an h or with an r. This seems to have
been due to association. There was in the language an old group of words
beginning with wh and wr; such as, whale, wharf, wheal, what, wheel, when,
where, which, who, whither, wrath, wreak, wrestle, wretch, wright, wrist,
write, wrong, — all familiar words, and some of them words of the first
necessity. The contagion of these examples spread to words beginning with h
or r simple, and the movement was perhaps aided in some measure by the desire
to reassert the languishing gutturalism of h and (we may add) of r. This was
the means of engendering some strange forms of orthography, which either
became speedily extinct or maintained an obscure existence. For example, whot
is found instead of hot, as — He soone approched, panting, breathlesse, whot,
Faery Queene, ii. 4. 37, and red-whot, iv. 5. 44; whome, instead of home\
wrote instead of root. In Shakspeare, Troylus and Cressida, iii. 3. 23, wrest
most probably belongs here, being an Elizabethan form of rest. In Sir W.
Ralegh's Letters we find wrediness readiness. Ralegh's own name occurs in
contemporary documents as Wrawlegh. The form wrapt, as quoted in 197, belongs
here. Modern writers seem to have decided for rapt: this is the only form in
Tennyson, who has wrapt only in such phrases as ' wrapt in a cloak.' This is
an instance in which it may be doubted whether the word |
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l6o II. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. does not lose a certain poetic haze by being so rigidly
etymologized. In Dean Milman's History of the Jews, ed. 1868, it stands,
'Elijah had been wrapt to heaven in a car of fire/ 165. By this process was
formed the vexed word wretchlessness in the seventeenth Article. To
understand this word, we have only to look at it when divested of its initial
w, as retchlessness; and then, according to principles already defined, to
remember that an ancient Saxon c at the end of a syllable commonly developed
into tch (147); and in this way we get back to the verb to reck, Anglo-Saxon
recan, to care for. So that retch-less-ness is equivalent to
care-nought-state of mind, that is to say, it is much the same thing as '
desperation.' The prefixed w has in this instance proved fatal to the word.
The tch form of this root has fallen out of use, and probably it was the
prefixing of this w that extinguished it. For it had the effect of creating a
confusion between this word and wretch, a word totally distinct, and this is
one of the greatest causes of words dying out, when they clash with others
and promote confusion. We retain the verb to reck, and also reckless and
recklessness, which means the same as wretchlessness. The Bible-translator,
Myles Coverdale 1 spelt r aught (the preterite of reach, and equivalent of
our reached) with a wSpeaking of Adam stretching forth his hand to pick the
forbidden fruit, he says, ■ he wrought life and died the death.' That is to say, he raught, or
snatched at, life. But besides these obscure forms, one at least sprang up
under the same influence, which has retained a place in standard English. The
form whole stood for hole or hale, which sense it bears in the English New
Testament, though 1 Writings 0/ Myles Coverdale, Parker Society, The Old
Faith, p. 17. |
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VARIATIONS. l6l it has since run
off from the sense of hale, sound (integer), into that of complete (totus).
In this case, the language has been accidentally enriched. A new word has
been introduced, and one which has made for itself a place of the first
importance in the language. For the expression the whole has obtained
pronominal value in English. 166. One of the most remarkable instances of
this change (remarkable because it was made in the pronunciation only and not
in the writing of the word) is that of the numeral one. It used to be
pronounced as written, very like the preposition on, a sound naturally
derived from its original form in the Saxon numeral an. But it has now long
been pronounced as wun or won (in Devonshire wonn), and this change may with
probability be placed at the close of the sixteenth century. It was
apparently a west-country habit which got into standard English. In
Somersetshire may be heard ' the wonn en the wother ' for ' the one and the
other.' In the eastern parts of England, and especially in London, it is
well-known vernacular to say un, commonly written y un, as if a w had been
elided; e. g. 'a good 'un.' In Loves Labour's Lost, iv. 2. 80, it is plainly
pronounced on or oon. One of the features of the Dorset dialect is the broad
use of this initial w, both in the first numeral and in other words, such as
woak for oak, wold for old, woofs for oats. John Bloom he wer a jolly soul, A
grinder o' the best o' meal, Bezide a river that did roll, Vrom week to week,
to push his wheel. His flour were all a-meade o' wheat, An' fit vor bread
that vo'k mid eat; Vor he would starve avore he'd cheat. * Tis pure,' woone
woman cried; ' Ay, sure,' woone mwore replied; 'You'll vind it nice. Buy
woonce, buy twice,' Cried worthy Bloom the miller. |
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1 62 II. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. The same worthy miller sitting in his oaken chair is described
as A-zitten in his cheair o' woak. In Tyndale's earliest New Testament, which
reached England in 1526, one is repeatedly spelt won. 167. But while we point
to the western counties as abounding in this feature, we must not overlook
the fact that in Yorkshire, and generally throughout the North, one is pronounced
wonn, and oats are called wu/s, as distinctly as in Gloucestershire and the
West of England. Whatever its antecedents, we must regard this w with
particular interest as being a property of the English speech. To the
Scandinavians it is ungenial; they have dropped it in words where it is of
ancient standing, and where we have it in common with the Germans, as in
week, wool, wolf, Woden, wonder, word, which the Danes call uge, uld, ulf,
Odin, under, ord. The Germans do in fact write the w in these words, SSocfye,
2BoIle, SBotf, SBunber. But they do not properly share with us our w, for
they pronounce it as our v; at least it is so pronounced in the literary
German. If, however, we listen to the voice of the people, we perceive great
variation in Germany. In the southern parts they seem to approach very nearly
to the sound of our w; and, according to Paulus Diaconus, the Lombards
exaggerated this sound, for he says that they pronounced Wodan as Gwodan.
Even in France we occasionally catch a complete w-sound, as in aiguille, out,
Edouard, Longwy. But with all this, it may still be safely said that they all
leave us in the sole possession of our w, which is accordingly a distinct
property and special birthright of the English language. 168. The influence
of association (164) explains many other peculiarities of our spelling. It
was on this principle that the word could acquired its l. This word has no
natural |
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VARIATIONS. 163 right to the l
at all, being of the same root as can, and the second syllable in uncouth,
viz. from the verb which in Saxon was written cunnan. In would and should the
l is hereditary; but could acquired the l by mere force of association with
them. And it seems probable that the silence of the l in all three of these
words may be due to the example of could. The coud sound still kept its place
after it was written could, and at length drew would and should over to the
like pronunciation. In the poet Surrey and his contemporaries we find would
zxi<\ even could rhymed to mould', and thus we perceive that could might
easily have acquired a pronunciation answering to its new spelling. The word
fault used to be pronounced without the sound of l, but here orthography has
proved stronger than tradition. In the Deserted Village it rhymes to aught: —
Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in
fault. This is another instance in which we have dropped a French
pronunciation for one of our own making, and in the making of which we have
been led by the spelling. 160. 169. Between spelling and pronunciation there
is a mutual attraction, insomuch that when spelling no longer follows the
pronunciation, but is hardened into orthography, the pronunciation begins to
move towards the spelling. A familiar illustration of this may be found in
the words Derby, clerk, in which the er sounds as ar, but which many persons,
especially of that class which is beginning to claim educated rank, now
pronounce literally. The ar pronunciation was a good Parisian fashion in the
fifteenth century. Villon, the French poet of that period, affords in his
rhymes some illustrations of this. He rhymes Robert, haubert, with pluspart,
poupart; bar re with terre; appert with part. 1 |
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1 6 4 II. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. But it must have been much older than the time of Villon. In
Chaucer, Prologue 391, we are not to suppose that Deriemouthe is to be
pronounced as it was by the boy who in one of our great schools was the cause
of hilarity to his class-fellows by calling that seaport Dirty-mouth. In
Chaucer's pronunciation the first syllable represents the same sound as Dart
now does. The popular sarmon, sermon, is found in Chaucer. Sarvant and
sarvice occur in Ralegh's letters. We pronounce ar in serjeant. We write ar
in farrier; and ferrier is forgotten. Both forms are preserved in the case of
person and parson: in Love's Labour's Lost, iv. 2. 78, the old editions are
divided on this word. In Ralegh we find parson in the sense of ' person.'
Merchant was originally a mere variety of spelling for marchant, but the
pronunciation has now adapted itself to the prevalent value of er. 170. There
are other familiar instances in which we may trace the influence of
orthography upon pronunciation. The generation which is now in the stage
beyond middle life, are some of them able to remember when it was the correct
thing to say Lunnon. At that time young people practised to say it, and
studied to fortify themselves against the vulgarism of saying London,
according to the literal pronunciation. At the same time Sir John was
pronounced with the accent on Sir, in such a manner that it was liable to be
mistaken for surgeon. This accentuation of ' Sir John ' may be traced further
back, however, even to Shakspeare, unless our ears deceive us, 2 Henry VI,
ii. 3. 13: |
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VARIATIONS. 165 Compare Milton,
Sonnet xi: Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheek, Hated not learning
worse than toad or asp, When thou taught'st Cambridge and King Edward Greek.
171. The same generation said poonish for punish (a relic of the French u in
punir); and when they spoke of a joint of mutton they called it jink or
jeynt. In some cases it approximated to the sovM&jiveynte, and this was
heard in the more retired parts among country gentlemen. This is in fact the
missing link between the ei or eye sound and the French diphthong oi or oie —
in imitation of which the peculiarity originated. The French words loi and
joie are sounded as Vwa and j'wa. When the French pronunciation had
degenerated so far in such words as join, joint, that the was taken no
account of, and they were uttered as jine, jinte, a reaction set in, and
recourse was had to the native English fashion of pronouncing the diphthong
oi. Hence our present join, joint, do not always rhyme where they ought to
rhyme and once did rhyme. That beautiful verse in the 106th Psalm (New
Version) is hardly producible in refined congregrations, by reason of this
change in its closing rhyme: — O may I worthy prove to see Thy saints in full
prosperity! That I the joyful choir may join, And count thy people's triumph
mine! 172. The fashion has not yet quite passed away of pronouncing Rome as
the word room is pronounced. This is an ancient pronunciation, as is well
known from puns in Shakspeare. No doubt it is the phantom of an old French
pronunciation, and it bears about the same relation to the French utterance
of Rome (pron. Ro?n) that boon does to the French don. But it is remarkable
that in Shakspeare's day the modern pronunciation (like roam) was already
heard and |
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1 66 IT. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. recognised, and the two pronunciations have gone on side by
side till now, and it has taken so long a time to establish the mastery of
the latter. The fact probably is, that the room pronunciation has been kept
alive in the aristocratic region, which is almost above the level of
orthographic influences: while the rest of the world has been saying the name
according to the value of the letters. Room is said to have been the habitual
pronunciation of the late Lord Lansdowne and the late Lord Russell. The
Shakspearean evidence is from the following passages. King John, iii. i: Con.
O lawfull let it be That I have roome with Rome to curse a while. So also in
Julius Ccesar, i. 2. But in 1 Henry VI, iii. 1: Winch. Rome shall remedie
this. Warw. Roame thither then. The street in which Charles Dickens went to
school at Chatham bears its evidence here: Then followed the preparatory
day-school, a school for girls and boys, to which he went with his sister
Fanny, and which was in a place called Rome (pronounced Room) lane. — John
Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, (1872) ch. i. 1816-21. 173. There still
exist among us a few personages who culminated under George IV, and who
adhere to the now antiquated fashion of their palmy days. With them it used
to be, and still is, a point of distinction to maintain certain traditional
pronunciations: gold as gould or gu-uld; yellow as y 'allow; lilac as leyloc;
china as cheyney, oblige as obhegt\ after the French obliger. To this group
of waning and venerable sounds, which were talismans of good breeding in
their day, may be added the pronunciation of the plural verb are like the
word air: but not without observing that, in this instance, it is the modern
pronunciation that runs counter to orthography. The following quotation from
Wordsworth, Thoughts near |
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RECENT DIPHTHONGS. 1 67 the
Residence of Burns, exhibits it in rhyme with prayer, bear, share: — But why
to him confine the prayer, When kindred thoughts and yearnings bear On the
frail heart the purest share With all that live? — The best of what we do and
are, Just God, forgive! 174. Rarer are the instances in which the number of
syllables has been effected by change of pronunciation. A celebrated example
is the plural ' aches,' which appears as a disyllable in Shakspeare, Samuel
Butler, and Swift. The latter, in his own edition of ' The City Shower ' has
l old aches throb' — but modern printers, who had lost the twosyllable
pronunciation, found it necessary to make good the metre thus: — ' old aches
will throb.' If thou neglect'st, or dost unwillingly What I command, I'll
rack thee with old cramps; Fill all thy bones with aches; make thee roar That
beasts shall tremble at the din. — Tempest, i. 2. Can by their pangs and
aches find All turns and changes of the wind. Hudibras, iii. 2. 407. Some
recent Diphthongs. 175. We will devote the remainder of this chapter to the
new English diphthongs: they are among the more conspicuous instances of that
revolution in orthography which has caused Saxon literature to look so
uncouth and strange in its own native country. To begin with the archaic EW.
Represents a terminal condensation in a small set of early English words,
viz. Andrew, Bartholomew, feverfew (French feverfuge), Grew (obsolete for
Greek), Hebrew, few (French Juif). AU. It resulted from our peculiar ae sound
of a as de |
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1 68 II. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. scribed in the last chapter, that the English a was found
unequal to represent the French a, and accordingly we see au put for it in
many words, as chaunt, the old spelling for chant; au?it for ante; haunt from
' hanter'; laund, & frequent word in our early poetry, also written
tawnd, from the French ' lande,' and still preserved in the lawns of our
gardens. Blaunche, haunch, paunch, French ' panse '; launch, French 'lancer/
Also for Saxon a, as hlahhan laugh. And this representation of the ' a ' by
the English au, from Chaucer to Spenser, is an acknowledgment of the early
incapacity of the English a to express that full ' a ' sound. 176. OU. There
was no such diphthong as this in Saxon, though it is common in what are now
called ' Saxon ' words. It was one of the French transformations. The Saxon u
was changed to French ou, as in iung young, f>ruh trough, ful became foul,
butan keeps its u in but, and changes it in about. Thus the Saxon nehgebur
became neighbour in conformity to such terminations as honour, favour, which
represented a French -eur. This ou is sometimes present in sound when absent
from the spelling. If we compare the words move, prove, with such words as
love, dove, shove, we become aware that the former, though they have laid
aside their French spelling from mouvoir, prouver, yet have retained their
French sound notwithstanding. 177. 01. This is no Saxon diphthong, but Saxon
words readily admitted it. It came from the French oui or eui, or even ou.
The Saxon sol borrowed from the French souil a new vocalisation, and hence
the English soil. The French feuil a leaf, has given us foil in several
technical uses; and from fouler, to tread down, we have the verb to foil. The
Saxon tilian lives on in the verb to till the ground; while its French
vocalisation has resulted in toil. |
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RECENT DIPHTHONGS. 169 OE. If
this combination occurred only in such instances as foe, hoe, roe, toe, woe,
it would not call for notice here, because there is no diphthong; the e in
these cases being but the ^-subscript, though no consonant intervenes. But
there was an oe of a thoroughly diphthongal character, which represented the
French eu or sometimes ou. The French peuple became poeple in Chaucer, with
variants puple and peple. So we find moeuyng moving, proeued proved, and
woemen women. The sound of this oe is preserved in canoe, shoe. EO. This has
no connection with the Saxon eo. Ben Jonson said, ' it is found but in three
words in our tongue, yeoman, people, jeopardy, which were truer written
ye'man, pe'ple, jepardy! In two out of these three cases it is the
transposition of oe representing French eu, as treated above. 178. EE. This
is not properly a diphthong, but a long vowel; it is the long ' i \ But it is
convenient to speak of it here, with a view to introduce the present tendency
of diphthongs to merge into this sound \ English spelling has been produced
by such a variety of heterogeneous causes that its inconsistencies are not to
be wondered at. Grimm has remarked on the want of regularity in our vowel
usage: for we use a double e in thee, and a single one in vie, whereas the
vowel-sound is alike in the pronunciation. The probable cause was the need of
distinction between the pronoun thee and the definite article the — words
which down to the end of the fifteenth century are spelt alike, and often
check the reader. The eye has its claims as well as the ear, when so much is
written and read; and this accounts for many cases of dissimilar spelling of
similar sounds, as be the verb and bee the insect. 1 Below, 191, in a short
program of phonetic amendments, this ee gains seven places and loses none. |
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I70 77. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. 179. EA. This combination is particularly interesting, and we
select it for expansion. It has no connection with the Saxon diphthong of the
same form. It is not found in Chaucer. Where we write ea he wrote e: beste
beast, bred bread, clene clean, ded dead, del deal, deth death, dere dear,
grete great, herte heart, mel meal, pes peace, pies please, redy ready,
sprede spread, tere tear, whete wheat. The change from e to ea may be thus
accounted for. Chaucer's e was the French e-ouvert, which sounded as eh, not
far from the vocalism of day, hay, nay. But in the English mouth this e
became less open and more shrill continually, till at last it merged in ' i '
which is its present lot. The a was then added to it in such syllables as
adhered to the former sound; and thus I suppose ea was at first a
reinforcement of e-ouvert, just as gh was a reinforcement of the old
gutturality of h. (132.) At first ea sounded as ay; but after a while it
found the old tendency too strong for it, and it drifted away in that very
direction from which the addition of a had vainly sought to stay it. And now
most of the ea syllables are pronounced as ee. Our illustration of this shall
be connected with the history of the word tea. 180. We have all heard some
village dame talk of her dish o' toy; but the men of our generation are
surprised when they first learn that this pronunciation is classical English,
and is enshrined in the verses of Alexander Pope. The following rhymes are
from the Rape of the Lock. Soft yielding minds to Water glide away, And sip,
with Nymphs, their elemental Tea. Canto i. Here thou, great Anna! whom three
realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes Tea. Canto iii. That
this was the general pronunciation of good company down to the close of the
last century there is no doubt. The following quotation will carry us to
1775, the date |
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EA COME TO SOUND AS EE. 171 of a
poem entitled Bath and It's Environs, in three cantos, p. 25: Muse o'er some
book, or trifle o'er the tea, Or with soft musick charm dull care away. This
old pronunciation was borrowed with the word from the French, who still call
the Chinese beverage toy, and write it the. And when tea was introduced into
England by the name of toy, it seemed natural to represent that sound by the
letters tea. 181. Although there are a great many words in English which hold
the diphthong ea, as beat, dear, death, eat, fear, gear, head, learn, meati,
neat, pear, read, seat, teat, wean, — yet the cases of ea ending an English
word are very few. Ben Jonson, in his day, having produced four of them, viz.
flea, plea, sea, yea, added, 'and you have at one view all our words of this
termination/ He forgot the word lea, or perhaps regarded it as a bad spelling
for ley or lay. This makes five. A sixth, pea, has come into existence since.
To these there has been added a seventh, viz. tea. At the time when the
orthography of tea was determined, it is certain that most instances of ea
final sounded as ay, and probable that all did. In a number of words with ea
internal, the pronunciation differed. But even in these cases there is room
to suspect that the ay sound was once general, if not universal. We still
give it the ay sound in break, great, measure, pleasure, treasure. In Surrey
we find heat rhyme to great, and no doubt it was a true rhyme. Surrey
pronounced heat as the majority of our countrymen, at least in the west
country, still do, viz. as hayt. The same poet rhymes ease to assays: — The
peasant, and the post, that serves at all assays; The ship-boy, and the
galley-slave, have time to take their ease; — where it is plain that ease
still kept to the French sound of |
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172 //. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. ai'se. Then, further, the same poet has in a sonnet the
following run of rhyming words: — |
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EA COME TO SOUXD AS EE. 1 73
French fait, suggests the sounds fayi and ayt. The same applies Cofeature O.
French faiture, eagle French aigle, eager French aigre. In The Stage-Players
Complaint (1641), we find nay spelt nea: ' Nea you know this well enough, but
onely you love to be inquisitive.' 183. Michael Drayton, Polyolbion, xixth
song (1662) rhymed seas with raise; Cowper rhymed sea with survey; and Dr.
Watts (1709) rhymed sea to away. But timorous mortals start and shrink To
cross this narrow sea, And linger shivering on the brink, And fear to launch
away. Book of Praise, clxi. Goldsmith puts this into the mouth of an
under-bred fine-spoken fellow: — An under-bred fine-spoken fellow was he, And
he smil'd as he look'd on the venison and me. ' What have we got here? — Why,
this is good eating! Your own, I suppose — or is it in waiting?' The Haunch
of Venison, When, in 1765, Josiah Wedgwood, having received his first order
from Queen Charlotte, wrote to get some help from a relative in London, he
described the list of tea-things which were ordered, and he spelt the word
tray thus, ' trea ' — for so only can we understand it — ' Tea-pot &
stand, spoon-trea.' The orthography may be either his own or that of Miss
Chetwynd, from whom the instructions came. Family names offer some examples
to the same effect. A friend informs me that he had once a relative, who in
writing was Mr. Lea, but he pronounced his name ' Lay '; and I am courteously
permitted to use for illustration the name of Mr. Rea, of Newcastle, the
well-known organist, whose family tradition renders the name as ' Ray.' The |
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174 u - SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. little river in Shropshire, which is written ^Rea, is called
Ray. 184. If it has been made plain that ea sounded ay, it will be a step to
the clearing of an old anomaly. It has been asked why we spell conceive with
ei, and yet spell believe, reprieve with ie. The difficulty lies in the fact,
that the pronunciation of these dissimilar diphthongs is now the same. And
the answer lies in this — that the pronunciation was formerly different.
Those words which we now write with ei — to wit, deceive, perceive, conceive,
receive — were all pronounced with a -cayve sound, as they still are in many
localities. The readiest proof of this is in the facts, (i) that you will not
find them rhymed with words of the ie type, and (2) that you will continually
find them spelt with ea, as deceave,perceave, conceave, receave. (3) But
however these words are spelt in' the early prints, they are constantly
distinguished in some way or other, as decerned, beleeued. Above, 145.
Another illustration of the old power of ea may be gathered from a source
which has not received due attention: I mean the pronunciation of English in
Ireland. It is well known that there resayve is the sound for receive, pays
for pease, say for sea, aisy for easy, baste for beast. These, and many other
so-called Irishisms, are faithful monuments of the pronunciation of our
fathers, at the time when English was planted in Ireland. All these words
have now gone into the ^-sound which is represented by ie in believe, and
there is no doubt that this sound is a very encroaching one. There have long
been two pronunciations of great, namely greet and grayt; though the latter
is still dominant, and is likely to remain so. It is in bookish words that
the progress of the ^-sound will be most rapid, because the teacher will
there be less obstructed by usage, and teachers love general rules. Therefore
ea once |
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EA COME TO SOUND AS EE. 1 75 ee
shall be always ee. A child learning to read, and coming to the word inveigle
shall be told to call it inveegle, though the best usage at present is to say
invaygle. Sir Thomas Browne spelt it with ea: These Opinions I never
maintained with pertinacy, or endeavoured to enveagle any mans belief unto
mine. — Religio Medici, fol. 1686; p. 4. Among the words which still vacillate
between the two sounds of ea, is the word break: Still feel the breeze down
Ettrick break Although it chill my withered cheek. — Scott. Ah, his eyelids
slowly break Their hot seals, and let him wake! — Matthew Arnold. That the
latter is the pronunciation at the present time there can be no doubt: and
yet the former is heard from persons of weight enough to suggest the doubt
whether it may not perhaps establish itself in the end. Thus we see that ea
has in numerous instances changed its sound from that of ay to that of ee.
How are we to render any account of so apparently capricious a movement,
except by saying that a sentiment has taken possession of the public mind to
the effect that ay is a rude braying sound, while ee is a refined and sweetly
bleating one. Or, shall we suppose that this is only a reprisal and natural
compensation for the area lost by this ee sound when it was ejected from its
ancient lot, and the ' i ' was invaded by the sound of Igh? Leaving such
enquiries to the younger student, I will add two striking examples of the
encroachment of this popular favourite, this ee sound. The first is the
well-known instance of Beauchamp, which is pronounced Beecham. The second is
more remarkable. All along I have assumed that the written ay is constant in
value, and capable of being referred to as a standard, as the unshaken
representative of that sound which ea had and |
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1 7 6 II. SPELLING AND
PRONUNCIATION. has lost. But there is at least one remarkable exception to
this assumed security of ay. For the last forty years or so there has been a
prevailing tendency to pronounce quay kee; and Torquay is most numerously
called Torquee. How has this habit grown? It seems to prove that our
pronunciation is not set by the best examples; for nearly all those whom I
should have thought most worthy of being imitated have from the earliest time
in my memory said kay and Tor-kay. 185. In summing up the case of Spelling
and Pronunciation, we may make good use of the example of tea. When this word
was first spelt, the letters came at the call of the sound: the spelling
followed the pronunciation. Since that time, the letters having changed their
value, the sound of the word has shared the vicissitude of its letters; the .
pronunciation has followed the spelling. It is manifest that these movements
have one and the same aim, namely, to make the spelling phonetically
symbolize the pronunciation. There are two great obstacles to such a
consummation: (i) The letters of the alphabet are too few to represent all
the variety of simple sounds in the English language; and (2) even what they
might do is not done, because of the restraining hand of traditional
association. The consequence is, that when we use the word ' orthography,' we
do not mean a mode of spelling which is true to the pronunciation, but one
which is conventionally correct. The spirit of Orthography is embodied in
this dictum of Samuel Johnson: ' It is more important that the law should be
known than that it should be right.' The notion of Right in orthography has
been more obscured in the English than in any other language. For there have
swept over it two great and lengthened waves of foreign influence, which have
divided the last eight |
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CROSS CURRENTS. J J J hundred
years between them; namely, First the revolution from Saxon to French
orthography; and Secondly, that from the French to the Latin complexion.
Still, the desire for a true, natural, phonetic, system of spelling is not
extinguished, and it has from time to time pushed itself into notice. |
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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II. On
Spelling-reform. 186. Alphabetic writing is essentially phonetic. It was the
result of a sifting process which was conducted with little conscious design,
by which all the other suggestions of picturewriting were gradually
eliminated, and each figure was brought to represent one of the simple sounds
obtained by the analysis of articulate speech. The historical development of
Letters tells us what their essence and function is — viz. The expression of
the Sound of words. Spelling is the counterpart of pronunciation. But there
is a law at work to dissever this natural affinity. Pronunciation is ever
insensibly on the move, while spelling grows more and more stationary. The
agitation for spelling-reform which appears in cultivated nations from time
to time, aims at restoring the harmony between these two. Among the Romans —
a people eminently endowed withthe philological sense — there were some
attempts of this kind, one of which is of historical notoriety. The emperor
Claudius was a phonetic reformer, and he wrote a book on the subject while in
the obscurity of his early life. Three letters as a first instalment of
reform he forced into use when he was emperor, but they were neglected after
his time and forgotten. Yet two of the three have been quietly resumed by a
late posterity. These represented I and U consonants as distinct from the
connate vowels. In the seventeenth century the European press gave these
powers to the forms J and V. Claudius was not however the first to direct
attention to the inadequacy of the Roman alphabet. Verrius Flaccus had made a
memorable proposal with regard to the letter M. At the end of Latin words it was
indistinctly heard, and therefore he proposed to cut the letter in two, and
write only half of it in such positions — thus, N. 187. During the last three
centuries many proposals for spelling-reform have been made in this country
and in America. Among the reformers we find distinguished names 1 . 1 Sir
John Cheke, 1540 (Strype's Life). John Hart, 1569: 'An Orthographic
conteyning the due order and reason howe to write or painte thimage |
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PHONETIC SPELLING. ] 79 But for
practical results, the first was Noah Webster. In his Dictionary, 1828, he
spelt traveler, worshiped, favor, honor, center, and these were widely
adopted in American literature, especially the ejection of the French u from
the termination -our. But he was an etymological as well as a phonetic
reformer. And when he proceeded to write bridegoom, /ether, for bridegroom,
feather, his public declined to follow him, and he retraced his steps. Julius
Hare and Connop Thirlwall in their joint translation of Niehbuhr's History
made some reforms, partly phonetic, partly etymological; such as forein,
sovran, stretcht. Thirlwall returned to the customary spelling in his History
of Greece 1835; but he covered his retreat with an overloaded invective at
English prejudice, which has since been quoted oftener than his wisest
sentences. A strictly phonetic spelling-reform requires that we should have a
separate character for every separate sound, and that no character should
ever stand for any but its own particular sound. One such system has acquired
the consistency which a working experience alone can give. Mr. Pitman's
phonetic alphabet has been tested by thirty years of practical work, in
printing books large and small, as well as in the continuous appearance of
the Phonetic Journal, which is now in its thirty-sixth year. In this system
the Roman alphabet is adopted as far as it goes, and new forms are added for
the digraphs which, like th, sh, represent simple sounds. The place of
publication is Bath, but the movement first took a practical shape in
Birmingham, where in 1843 Mr. Thomas Wright Hill originated a Phonetic Fund
to meet the necessary sacrifices of such an experiment. Mr. Hill was the
father of Matthew Davenport Hill, Q.C., and of Sir Rowland Hill, and of three
other distinguished sons. After the meeting of 1843, ^ r - Ellis helped Mr.
Pitman in the formation of the new characters, and from that year to the
present the system has been in operation. The alphabet of marine's voice,
moste like to the life or nature.' Bishop Wilkins, 1668. Benjamin Franklin,
1768. William Pelham, Boston, U.S. 1808, printed ' Rasselas' phonetically.
Abner Kneeland, Philadelphia, 1825. Rev. W. Beardsley, St. Louis, 1841.
Andrew Comstock, Philadelphia, 1846. John S. Pulsifer, Orswigsburg,
Pennsylvania, 1 848. Alexander Melville Bell, London, 1865. N 2 |
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181THE PHONETIC METHOD. |
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182 |
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183 |
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1 84 |
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CONSISTENT METHODS. 1 85 • kh,
ph, rh, sh, th, wh, ng, as alphabetic characters, adding to them dh and zh.
He would write the and that as ' dhe ' and ' dhat ': and azure he would write
' azhure/ After the same manner the vocalic digraphs ee, ai, aa, au, oa, 00,
oz, ou, would be counted as primary letters, and thus complete an alphabet of
forty-six characters. The e final would be discarded in all instances in
which it is really idle, having no effect ori the preceding vowel; and freez,
gauz, would take the place of freeze, gauze (158). In this scheme the idea
seems to be that an orthography — reasonably phonetic and consistent — ought
to be -discovered without the sacrifice of tradition and historical
association. It would be — ' not uniform spelling, but consistent spelling;
so dhat dhat half ov dhe language which iz spelt etymologically may be spelt
consistently on dhe etymological principle, while dhe odher half ov dhe
language which iz spelt phonetically may be spelt consistently on dhe
phonetic principle.' The phonetic principle is to be admitted when it does
not conflict with the etymological. For instance, the s would be rejected
from island (properly Hand), but retained in isle, to which it rightly
belongs. For Mr. Fry proposes, as a means of reconciling tradition with
current pronunciation, that silent letters should be preserved whenever
required by etymology, but otherwise omitted. 192. More plans are proposed
than we have enumerated or have space to enumerate. It is plain where so many
schemes are broached that the need of some change is very widely felt, but
there seems to be little agreement as to the direction reform should take. If
however a distinct path is chosen, it will at once lay open to our view a new
and as yet unnoticed difficulty. When we enter on the path of
spelling-reform, we pass from that on which we are tolerably agreed, namely
conventional orthography, to raise a new structure on a foundation of
unascertained stability. The moment you resolve to spell the sound, you bring
into the foreground what before lay almost unobserved — the great diversity
of opinion which exists as to the correct sound of many words. |
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CHAPTER III. OF INTERJECTIONS.
193. The term Interjection signifies something that is ' pitched in among '
things of which it does not naturally form a constituent part. The
Interjection has been so named by grammarians in order to express its
relation to grammatical structures. It is found in them, but it forms no part
of them. The interjection may be defined as a form of speech which is
articulate and symbolic but not grammatical. It is only to be called
grammatical in that widest sense of the w r ord, in which all that is
written, including accents, stops, and quotation marks, would be comprised
within the notion of grammar. When we speak of grammar as the handmaid of
logic, then the interjection must stand aside. Emotion is quick, and leaves
no time for logical thought: if it use grammatical phrases they must be ready
made and familiar to the lips; there is not time to select what is
appropriate or consecutive. Hence the limited variety of interjections, and
the almost unlimited use of single forms. An interjection implies a meaning
which it would require a whole grammatical sentence to expound, and it may be
regarded as the rudiment of such a sentence. But it is a confusion of thought
to rank it among the parts of speech. It is not in any sense a part; it is a
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'nature of interjections. 187
jection bears to its context the same sort of relation as a pictorial
illustration does. We rightly call an adjective or an adverb a Part of
Speech, because these have no meaning by themselves without the aid of nouns
and verbs, and because their very designation implies the existence of nouns
and verbs. But an interjection is intelligible without any grammatical
adjunct; and such completeness as it is capable of is attained without
collateral assistance. 194. Ancient grammarians ranked the interjections as
adverbs, but the moderns have made them a separate class. If it were a
question to which of the parts of speech the interjection is most cognate, it
must be answered to the verb. For if we take any simple interjection, such
as, for example, the cry ' Oh! Oh! ' in the House of Commons, and assign to
it a predicative value, it can only be done by a verb, either in the
imperative or in the indicative first person. Either you must say it is
equivalent to 'Don't say such things/ or else to ' I doubt,' ' I wonder/ ' I
demur, 1 1 dispute/ ' I deny/ ' I protest ': by one or more of these or such
verbs must ' Oh, Oh! ' be explained; and thus it seems to present itself as a
rudimentary verb. But this again rises, not out of any singular affection
that it bears to the verb in its formal character, but out of the general
fact that the verb is the central representative and focus of that
predicative force, which unequally pervades all language, but which in the
interjection is wrapped round and enfolded with an involucre of emotion. It
may stand either insulated in the sentence, or by virtue of this obscure
verbal character, it may be connected with it by a preposition, as — Oh for a
humbler heart and prouder song! This is the nearest approach which it makes
to structural |
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1 88 III. OF INTERJECTIONS.
relations with the sentence, and this sort of relation it can have with a
noun or pronoun, as — They gaped upon me with their mouths, and said: Fie on
thee, fie on thee, we saw it with our eyes. — Psalm xxxv. 21. From that same
germ of verbal activity it joins readily with the conjunction. Operating with
the conjunction, it rounds off and renders natural an abrupt beginning, and
forms as it were the bridge between the spoken and the unspoken: — Oh if in
after life we could but gather The very refuse of our youthful hours! —
Charles Lloyd. Because of the variety of possible meanings in the
interjection, writing is less able to represent interjections than to express
grammatical language. Even in the latter, writing is but an imperfect medium,
because it fails to convey the accompaniments, such as the look, the tone,
the gesture. This defect is more evident in the case of interjections, where
the written word is but a very small part of the expression; and the manner,
the pitch of tone, the gesture, is nearly everything. 195. Hence also it
comes to pass that the interjection is of all that is printed the most
difficult thing to read well aloud; for not only does it require a rare
command of modulation, but the reader has moreover to be perfectly acquainted
with the situation and temperament of the person using the interjection.
Shakspeare's interjections cannot be rendered with any truth, except by one
who has mastered the whole play. In the accompaniments of tone, air, action,
lies the rhetoric of the interjection, which is used with astonishing effect
by children and savages. For it is to these that the interjection more
especially belongs; and in proportion to the march of culture is the decline
of interjectional speech. |
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I. THE NATURAL INTERJECTION. 1
89 But though the use of interjections is very much reduced by civilisation,
and though there are whole fields of literature from which they are utterly
banished, as History, Mathematics, Physical Science, — yet they have a sphere
in which they are retained, and in this, the literature of the emotions,
their importance will always be considerable. It should moreover be added,
that while certain of the natural accompaniments of interjectional speech,
such as gestures, grimaces, and gesticulations, are restrained by
civilisation,, there yet remains one, which alone is able to render justice
to the interjection, and which culture tends to improve and develope, and
that is, modulation. It is this which make^ it still worth a poet's while to
throw meaning into his interjections. Moreover, though it is true on the
whole that interjectional communications are restrained by civilisation; yet
it is also to be noted on the other hand, that there are certain
interjections which are the fruits of culture, and only find a place in the
higher and more mature forms of human speech. Hence an important division,
which will make this chapter fall into the two heads of (1) interjections of
nature, or primitive interjections; and (2) artificial or historical
interjections. The distinction between these sorts will be generally this, —
that the latter have a philological derivation, and the former have not. § 1
. The Natural Interjection. 196. O; oh! This is well known as one of the
earliest articulations of infants, to express surprise or delight. Later in
life it comes to indicate also fear, aspiration, appeal, and an indefinite
variety of emotions. It would almost seem that in proportion as the
spontaneous modulation of the voice . comes to perfection, in the same degree
the range of this |
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190 ///. OF INTERJECTIONS. most
generic of all interjections becomes enlarged, and that according to the tone
in which oh is uttered, it may be understood to mean almost any one of the
emotions of which humanity is capable. This interjection owes its great
predominance to the influence of the Latin language, in which it was very
frequently used. And there is one particular use of it which more especially
bears a Latin stamp. That is the of thevocative case, as when in prayers we
say, Lord; Thou to whom all creatures bow. We should distinguish between the
sign of the vocative and the emotional interjection, writing O for the
former, and oh for the latter, as — Who could have thought such darkness lay
concealed Within thy beams, O Sun! — Blanco White. But she is in her grave, —
and oh The difference to me! — Wordsworth. This distinction of spelling
should by all means be kept up, as it is well founded. There is a difference between
' O sir! ' ' O king! ' and ' Oh! sir,' ' Oh! Lord/ both in sense and
pronunciation. As to the sense, the prefixed merely imparts to the title a
vocative effect; while the Oh conveys some particular sentiment, as of
appeal, entreaty, expostulation, or some other. And as to sound, the O is
enclitic; that is to say, it has no accent of its own, but is pronounced with
the word to which it is attached, as if it were its unaccented first
syllable. The term Enclitic signifies ' reclining on/ and so the interjection
in ' O Lord ' reclines on the support afforded to it by the accentual
elevation of the word ' Lord.' So that ' O Lord' moves like such a disyllable
as alight, alike, away) in which words the metrical stroke could never fall
on the first syllable. Oh I on the contrary, is one of the fullest of |
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I. THE NATURAL INTERJECTION. 191
monosyllables, and it would be hard to place it in a verse except with the
stress upon it. The example from Wordsworth illustrates this. Precedence has
been given to this interjection because it is the commonest of the simple or
natural interjections, — not that it is one of the longest standing in the
language. Our oldest interjections are la and wa, and each of these merits a
separate notice. 197. La is that interjection which in modern English is
spelt lo. It was used in Saxon times, both as an emotional cry, and also as a
sign of the respectful vocative. The most reverential style in addressing a
superior was La leof, an expression not easy to render in modern English, but
which is something like my liege, or my lord, or sir. In modern times it has
taken the form of lo in literature, and it has been supposed to have
something to do with the verb to look. In this sense it has been used in the
New Testament to render the Greek l8oi> that is, Behold! But the
interjection la was quite independent of another Saxon exclamation, viz. loc,
which may with more probability be associated with locian, to look. The fact
seems to be that the modern lo represents both the Saxon interjections la and
loc, and that this is one among many instances where two Saxon words have
been merged into a single English one. Lo, how they feignen chalk for cheese.
Gower, Confessio Amantis, vol. i. p. 17, ed. Pauli. 198. The la of Saxon
times has none of the indicatory or pointing force which lo now has, and
which fits it to go so naturally with an adverb of locality, as ' Lo here,'
or ' Lo there'; or Lo! where the stripling, wrapt in wonder, roves. Beattie,
Minstrel, Bk. i. |
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J 92 III. OF INTERJECTIONS.
While lo became the literary form of the word, la has still continued to
exist more obscurely, at least down to a recent date, even if it be not still
in use. La may be regarded as a sort of feminine to lo. In novels of the
close of last century and the beginning of this, we see la occurring for the
most part as a trivial exclamation by the female characters. In Miss
Edgeworth's tale of The Good French Governess, a silly affected
boarding-school miss says la repeatedly: — 4 La! ' said Miss Fanshaw, ' we
had no such book as this at Suxberry House.' Miss Fanshaw, to shew how well
she could walk, crossed the room, and took up one of the books. 4 Alison upon
Taste — that 's a pretty book, I daresay; but la! what 's this, Miss
Isabella? A Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments — dear me! that must be a
curious performance — by a smith! a common smith!' In The Election: a Comedy,
by Joanna Baillie (1798), Act ii. Sc. 1, Charlotte thus soliloquises: —
Charlotte. La, how I should like to be a queen, and stand in my robes, and
have all the people introduced to me! And when Charles compares her cheeks to
the 'pretty delicate damask rose/ she exclaims, ' La, now you are flattering
me.' 199. That this trivial little interjection descends from early times,
and that it is in all probability one with the old Saxon la, we may cite the
authority of Shakspeare in the mid interval, who, in The Merry Wives of
Windsor, puts this exclamation into the mouths of Master Slender first, and
of Mistress Quickly afterwards. Slen. Mistris Anne: your selfe shall goe
first. Anne. Not I sir, pray you keepe on. Slen. Truely, I will not goe
first: truely la; I will not doe you that wrong. Anne. I pray you Sir. Slen.
He rather be vnmannerly, then troublesome; you doe your selfe wrong
indeede-la. (Act i. Sc. I.) |
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PRIMARY INTERJECTIONS. 193 Here
the interjection seems to retain somewhat of its old ceremonial significance:
but when, in the ensuing scene, Mistress Quickly says, ' This is all
indeede-la: but ile nere put my finger in the fire, and neede not/ there is
nothing in it but the merest expletive. 200. Wa has a history much like that
of la. It has changed its form in modern English to wo. ' Wo,' in the New
Testament, as Rev. viii. 13, stands for the Greek interjection oval and the
Latin vae. In the same way it is used in many passages in which the
interjectional character is distinct. This word must be distinguished from
woe, which is a substantive. For instance, in the phrase 'weal and woe.' And
in such scriptures as Prov. xxiii. 29: 'Who hath woe? who hath sorrow?' The
fact is, that there were two distinct old words, namely, the interjection wa
and the substantive woh, genitive woges, which meant depravity, wickedness,
misery. Often as these have been blended, it would be convenient to observe
the distinction, which is still practically valid, by a several orthography,
writing the interjection wo, and the substantive woe. This interjection was
compounded with the previous one into the forms wala and walawa — a frequent
exclamation in Chaucer, and one which, before it disappeared, was modified
into the feebler form of wellaway. A still more degenerate variety of this
form was well-a-day. Pathetic cries have a certain disposition to implicate
the present time, as in woe worth the day! The Norman cry Harow coupled with
the Saxon walawa is often met with in our early literature, as 'Harrow and
well away!' Faery Queene, ii. 8. 46. 201. There was yet another compound
interjection made with la by prefixing the interjection ea. This was the
Saxon eala; — ' Eala J>u wif mycel ys )?in geleafa,' Oh woman, |
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194 In - 0F INTERJECTIONS. great
is thy faith, Matthew xv. 28; ' Eala faeder Abraham, gemiltsa me/ Oh father
Abraham, pity me, Luke xvi. 24. This eala may have made it easier to adopt
the French he'las, in the form alas, which appears in English of the
thirteenth century, as in Robert of Gloucester, 4198, 'Alas! alas! f>ou
wrecche mon, wuch mysaventure haf> f>e ybrogt in to J>ys stede/
Alas! alas! thou wretched man, what misadventure hath brought thee into this
place? And in Chaucer it is a frequent interjection. Alias the wo, alias the
peynes stronge, That I for yow haue suffred, and so longe; Alias the deeth,
alias myn Emelye, Alias departynge of our compaignye, Alias myn hertes
queene, alias my wyf, Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf. Knight's Tale. Alack
seems to be the more genuine representation of eala, which, escaping the
influence of he'las, drew after it (or preserved rather?) the final guttural
so congenial to the interjection. Thus the modern alack suggests an old form
ealah. This interjection has rather a trivial use in the south of England,
and we do not find it used with a dignity equal to that of alas, until by Sir
Walter Scott the language of Scotland was brought into one literature with our
own. Jeanie Deans cries out before the tribunal at the most painful crisis of
the trial: ' Alack a-day! she never told me/ Still, the word is on the whole
associated mainly with trivial occasions, and in this connection of ideas it
has engendered the adjective lackadaysical, to characterise a person who
flies into ecstasies too readily. 202. Pooh seems connected with the French
exclamation of physical disgust: Pouah, quelle infection I But our pooh
expresses an analogous moral sentiment: ' Pooh I pooh! it 's all stuff and
nonsense.' |
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PRIMARY INTERJECTIONS. 1 95
Psha, Pshaw, expresses contempt. 'Doubt is always crying psha and sneering.'
— Thackeray, Humourists, p. 69. Tush. Now little used, but frequent in
writers of the sixteenth century, and familiar to us through the Psalter of
1539. Heigh ho. Some interjections have so vague, so filmy a meaning, that it
would take a great many words to interpret what their meaning is. They seem as
well fitted to be the echo of one thought or feeling as another; or even to
be no more than a mere melodious continuance of the rhythm: — How pleasant it
is to have money, heigh ho! How pleasant it is to have money. Arthur H.
Clough. This will suffice to exhibit the nature of the first class of
interjections; — those which stand nearest to nature and farthest from art \
those which owe least to conventionality and most to genuine emotion; those
which are least capable of orthographic expression and most dependent upon
oral modulation. It is to this class of interjections that the following
quotation applies. It has long and reasonably been considered that the place
in history of these expressions is a very primitive one. Thus De Brosses
describes them as necessary and natural words, common to all mankind, and
produced by the combination of man's conformation with the interior
affections of his mind. — Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, ch. v. vol. i.
p. 166. And this writer has produced a large collection of evidence tending
to the probability that the affirmative answers aye, I (102, 205), yea, yes,
are of this primitive class of words, although their forms may have been
modified by admixture of grammatical material. |
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ig6 III. OF INTERJECTIONS. |
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SECONDARY INTERJECTIONS. 1 97
when the authority of the Speaker was withdrawn, it was hardly possible to
preserve order. Sharp personalities were exchanged. The phrase ' hear him,' a
phrase which had originally been used only to silence irregular noises, and
to remind members of the duty of attending to the discussion, had, during
some years, been gradually becoming what it now is; that is to say, a cry indicative,
according to the tone, of admiration, acquiescence, indignation, or derision.
The historian could not have chosen more suitable words had it been his
intention to describe the transition of a , grammatical part of speech into
the condition of an interjectional symbol, whose signification depends on the
tone in which it is uttered. The fact is, that when a large assembly is
animated with a common sentiment which demands instantaneous utterance, it
can find that utterance only through interjections. A crowd of grown men is
here in the same condition as the infant, and must speak in those forms to
which expression is imparted only by a variety of tone. Nothing is too
neutral or too colourless to make an interjection of, especially among a
demonstrative people. In Italian altro is simply other, and yet it has
acquired an interjectional power of variable signification. ' Have you ever
thought of looking to me to do any kind of work? ' John Baptist answered with
that peculiar back-handed shake of the right forefinger, which is the most
expressive negative in the Italian language. ' No! You knew from the first
moment when you saw me here, that I was a gentleman? ' 'Altro!' returned John
Baptist, closing his eyes and giving his head a most vehement toss. The word
being, according to its Genoese emphasis, a confirmation, a contradiction, an
assertion,, a denial, a taunt, a compliment, a joke, and fifty other things,
became in the present instance, with a significance beyond all power of
written expression, our familiar English ' I believe you! ' — Charles
Dickens, Little Dorrit, Bk. I. ch. i. 204. The Liturgy, when it was in Latin,
was a prolific source for the minting of popular interjections. Where
vernacular words are changed into interjections, some plain reason for their
selection may generally be found in the grammatical sense of such words. But
where a Latin word of religion came to be popular as an exclamation, it was
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198 III. OF INTERJECTIONS.
likely to be the sound as the sense that gave it currency. In the fourteenth
century, benedicite had this sort of career; and it does not appear how it
could have been other than a senseless exclamation from the first. It often
occurs in Chaucer; and with that variety of misspelling which a degenerate
word is naturally liable to, we find it written benedicitee, benediste. The charm
of this word, and its availability as an interjection, was no doubt largely
due to its being in a dead language. So Mr. Mitford tells us that the
Japanese have an interjection which was originally a conglomerate of certain
sacred words which they no longer understand; and that this compound
interjection serves by tonal variation for all manner of occasions: —
Nammiyo! nammiyo! self-depreciatory; or grateful and reverential; or
expressive of conviction; or mournful and with much head-shaking; or meekly and
entreatingly; or with triumphant exultation 1 . Ejaculations which once were
earnest, may sink into trite and trivial expletives. The cursory
conversational way in which Mon Dien is used in France by all classes of
persons, without distinction of age, sex, education, or condition, astonishes
English people; not because the like is unheard in England, but because among
us it is restricted both as to the persons who use it, and also as to the
times and occasions of its utterance. There is no person whatever in England
who uses such an exclamation when he is upon his good behaviour. In past ages
we have had this interjectional habit in certain graver uses, and have not
quite discarded it. In Coverdale's Translation, 1535, we read ' Wolde God
that I had a cotage some where farre from folke/ which was corrected in the
Bible of 16 r 1 to this — 'Oh that I had in the wilderness a 1 Tales of Old
Japan, by A. B. Mitford, vol. ii. p. 128. Macmillan, 1871. |
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SECONDARY INTERJECTIONS. 1 99
lodging place of wayfaring men/ Jer. ix. 2. But even the later version
retained traces of this exclamatory habit which will probably be removed in
our day. 205. Not only is it true that interjections are formed out of
grammatical words, but also it is further true that certain grammatical words
may stand as interjections in an occasional way, without permanently changing
their nature. This chiefly applies to some of the more conventional
colloquialisms. Perhaps there is not a purer or more condensed interjection
in English literature than that indeed in Othello, Act iii. Sc. 3. It
contains in it the gist of the chief action of the play, and it implies all
that the plot developes. It ought to be spoken with an intonation worthy of
the diabolic scheme of Iago's conduct. There is no thought of the grammatical
structure of the compound, consisting of the preposition l in ' and the substantive
' deed,' which is equivalent to act, fact, or reality. All this vanishes and
is lost in the mere iambic disyllable which is employed as a vehicle for the
feigned tones of surprise. Ictgo. I did not thinke he had bin acquainted with
hir. Oth. O yes, and went betweene vs very oft. Iago. Indeed! Oth. Indeed? I
indeed. Discern'st thou ought in that? Is he not honest? Iago. Honest, my
lord? Oth. Honest? I, honest! Thus strong passion may so scorch up, as it
were, the organism of a word, that it ceases to have any of that grammatical
quality which the calm light of the mind appreciates; and it becomes, for the
nonce, an interjection. 206. And not only passion, but ignorance may do the
like. With uneducated persons, their customary words and phrases grow to be
very like interjections, especially those phrases which are peculiar to and
traditional in the vocation |
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200 ///. OF INTERJECTIONS. they
follow. When a porter at a railway-station cries by'r leave, he may
understand the analysis of the words he uses; and then he is speaking logically
and grammatically, though elliptically. If he does not understand the
construction of the phrase he uses, and if he is quite ignorant how much is
implied and left unsaid, he merely uses a conventional cry as an
interjection. A cry of this sort, uttered as a conglomerate whole, where the
mind makes no analysis, is, as far as the speaker is concerned, an
interjection. We cannot doubt that this is the case in those instances where
we hear it uttered as follows: 'By'r leave, if you please!' It is plain in
this instance that the speaker understands the latter clause, but does not
understand the former — for, if he did, he would feel the latter to be
superfluous. 207. Fudge. Isaac Disraeli, in his Curiosities of Literature,
vol. hi., quotes a pamphlet of the date 1700, to shew that this interjection
has sprung from a man's name. There was, sir, in our time, one Captain Fudge,
commander of a merchantman, who, upon his return from a voyage, how
ill-fraught soever his ship was, always brought home his owners a good cargo
of lies; so much that now aboard ship, the sailors when they hear a great lie
told, cry out 'You fudge it.' He has added a circumstance which is of great
use for the illustration of this section: — 'that recently at the bar, in a
court of law, its precise meaning perplexed plaintiff and defendant, and
their counsel.' It is of the very nature of an interjection, that it eludes
the meshes of a definition. But it was Goldsmith who first gave this
interjection a literary currency. Mr. Forster, speaking of The Vicar of
Wakefield, recognises the elasticity of the interjectional function: There
never was a book in which indulgence and charity made virtue look so
lustrous. Nobody is strait-laced; if we except Miss Carolina Wilhelmina
Amelia Skeggs, whose pretensions are summed up in Burchell's noble
monosyllable. |
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SECONDARY INTERJECTIONS. 201 '
Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is that to
be found?' _ 'Fudge.' 208. Hail. Here we have the case of an adjective which
has become an interjection. It is a very old salutation, being found not only
in Anglo-Saxon, but also in Old High Dutch. In the early examples it always
appears grammatically as an adjective of health joined with the verb ' to be
' in the imperative. In the Saxon Version of the Gospels, Luke i. 28, 'Hal
wes Su,' Hale be thou! and in the plural, Matt, xxviii. 9, ' Hale wese ge/
Hale be ye! All hail. This also was at first purely adjectival, as in the
following from Layamon, which is quoted and translated above, 47: — al hal me
makien mid haleweije drenchen. By the sixteenth century this 'all hail!' had
become a worshipful salutation, and having lost all construction, was
completely interjectionalised. Did they not sometime cry All hayle to me?
Shakspeare, Richard II, iv. I. The pronunciation is iambic; the All being
enclitic, and the stress on hayle, as if the whole were a disyllabic We
sometimes hear it otherwise uttered in Matthew xxviii. 9, as if All meant
omnes, mures; instead of being merely adverbial, omnino, iravrvs. It does not
indeed in that place represent any separate word at all, the original being
simply Xaipere. In the Vulgate it is Avele; and this is rendered by Wiclif
Heil y. Tyndal was the first who introduced this All hayle into the English
version. The Geneva translators substituted for it God saueyou. 204. 209. A
remarkable example of a phrase which has passed into the interjectional state
is Hallelujah, or in its Greek |
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202 III. OF INTERJECTIONS.
aspect Alleluia; meaning, Praise ye the Lord. This is a world-wide
interjection of religious fervour; and it may safely be said of those who use
it, that not one in a thousand understands it grammatically, or
misunderstands it interjectionally. 210. But the example which holds the most
conspicuous historical position, is the great congregational interjection of
faith, the universal response of the Christian Church as well as of the
Hebrew Synagogue, Amen. This word, at first in Hebrew a verbal adjective, and
thence an affirmative adverb, signifying verily, truly, yea, was used in the
early times of the Jewish Church (Deut. xxvii. 15; Ps. xli. 14, lxxii. 19,
lxxxix. 53) for the people's response: 'and let the people say Amen/ It was
continued from the first in the Christian community, as we know from 1 Cor.
xiv. 1 6, and is ' still in use in every body of Christians. For the most part
it has been preserved in its original Hebrew form of Amen; but the French
Protestants have substituted for it a translation in the vulgar tongue, and
they do not respond with Amen, but with Ainsi-soit-il, So be it \ They have
by this change limited this ancient interjection to one of its several
functions. For in this modern form it is only adapted to be a response to
prayer, or the expression of some desire. There are other sorts of assent and
affirmation for which Amen is available, besides that single one of desire or
aspiration. In mediaeval wills it was put at the head of the document In the
name of God AMEN. This was a protestation of earnestness on the part of the
testator, and a claim on all whom it might concern to respect his
dispositions. In Jeremiah xxviii. 6 we find one Amen delivered by the 1 I am
informed that the Freemasons have a time-honoured rendering of their own: So
mote it be I |
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SECONDARY INTERJECTIONS. 203
prophet with the wishful meaning only, while there is an ominous reserve of
assent. In the Comrriination Service, the Amens to the denunciations are not
expressions of desire that evil may overtake the wicked, but the solemn
acknowledgment of a liability to which they are subject; as the preliminary
instruction sets forth the intent wherefore 'ye should answer to every
sentence, Amen? In this place Amen cannot be rendered by So be it; and the
attempt to substitute for it any grammatical phrase must rob it of some of
its symbolic freedom. This is the case with all interjections, and it is of
the essence of an interjection that it should be so. |
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CHAPTER IV. OF THE PARTS OF
SPEECH. 211. Philology seeks to penetrate into the Nature of language:
Grammar is concerned only with its literary Habits. Grammatical analysis is
the dissection of speech as the instrument of literature. The student may
help himself to remember this by observing that Grammar Grammattce {ypafifxarLKT])
is derived from the Greek word for literature, ypdfj.fj.ara. The chief result
of grammar, and the exponent of grammatical analysis, is the doctrine of the
Parts of Speech. All the words which combine to make up structural language
are classified in this systematic division. But the philologer should observe
that the quality of words, whereby they are so distinguished and divided into
Parts of Speech, is a habit, and not anything innate or grounded in the
nature of the words. We shall endeavour to make this plain. Grammar analyzes
language in order to ascertain the conditions on which the faculty of
expression is dependent, and also to gain more control over that faculty.
This object limits the range of grammatical enquiry. The grammarian makes a
certain number of groups to which he can refer any word, and then he forms
rules in which he legislates class-wise for the words so grouped. 'We must
here assume that the ordinary grammatical |
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OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 205
knowledge is already in the possession of the reader. To be able to designate
each word as such or such a part of speech, and to practise the rules for
combining parts of speech together, is the ordinary task of grammar. The
determination of the part of speech is the barrier beyond which grammar does
not (generally speaking) pursue the analysis. Although what is called Parsing,
or assigning words to their parts, is a juvenile exercise, yet it is
nevertheless the surest test of a persons having learnt that which grammar
has to teach; especially if he can do it in the English sentence. For it is
easier to do in Latin. A boy may be quite ignorant of the meaning of a Latin
sentence, and of each word in it; and yet he may be able to answer that
navabat, for example, is a verb in the active voice, imperfect tense,
indicative mood. He knows this from having learnt the forms of the Latin verb,
and he knows the ending -abat for the verbal form of that voice, tense, and
mood. Such knowledge is but formal and mechanical. If, however, in parsing
English, he meets the verb loved, he cannot venture to pronounce what part of
the verb it is by a mere look at the form. It may be the indicative, or the
subjunctive, or it may be the participle. Which it is he can only tell by
understanding the phrase in which it stands. 212. Throughout the Latin
language the words are to a very great extent grammatically ticketed. In the
English language the same thing exists, but in a very slight degree. In
Latin, the part of speech is most readily determined by mere regard to the
form, and it is only occasionally that attention to the structure becomes
necessary. Parsing in Latin is therefore mainly an exercise in what is called
the Accidence, that is, the grammatical inflections of words. In English, on
the contrary, there is so little to be gathered by looking at the mere form,
that the exercise of parsing trains |
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206 IV. OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH.
the mind to a habit of judging each word's value by reference to its
yoke-fellows in the sentence. Parsing in English is an exercise in Syntax. A
single example will make this plain. It would be a foolish question to ask,
without reference to a context, What part of speech is love? because it may
stand either for a verb or for a noun. But if you ask in Latin, What part of
speech is amare or caritas? the question can be answered as well without a
context as with. Each word has in fact a bit of context attached to it, for
an inflection is simply a fragment of context, and a nominative is as much an
inflection as a genitive. This is the cause why it is easier to catch the
first elements of grammatical ideas through the medium of a highly inflected
language like Latin. On the other hand, those ideas can best be perfected through
the medium of a language with few inflections, like English. Through such a
medium we learn to see in language a reflex of mind, and to analyze it by
reference not to the outward forms but to the inward intelligence. 213. In
studying grammar through the English language, we purge our minds of the
wooden notion that it is an inherent quality in a word to be of this or that
part of speech. To be a substantive, or a verb, or an adjective, is a
function which the word discharges in such and such a context, and not a
character innate in the word or inseparable from it. Thus the word save is a
verb, whether infinitive to save, or indicative / save, or imperative save
me: but it is the selfsame word when it stands as a preposition, 'forty
stripes save one/ The force of these observations is not lessened by the fact
that there are many words in English that discharge but one function, and are
of one part of speech only. In such cases the Habit of the word has become
fixed, it has lost the plastic state which is the original and natural
condition of |
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SPEECH-PART-SHIP A HABIT. 2CJ
every word, and it has contracted a rigid and invariable character. The bulk
of Latin words are in this state, simply because they are not pure words at
all, but fragments of a phrase. Each Latin word has its function as noun or
verb or adverb ticketed upon it. But in English the words of fixed habit are
comparatively few. In a general way it may be said that the pronouns are so
in all languages. Yet even this group, of all groups the most habit-bound, is
not without its occasional assertions of natural freedom. The prepositions
are many of them in the fixed state, but the researches of the philologer
tend to set many of them in a freer light. We must not therefore regard the
parts of speech as if they were like the parts of a dissected map, where each
piece is unfit to stand in any place but one. Each part of speech is what it
is, either by virtue of thf place it now occupies in the present sentence; or
else, by virtue of an old habit which has contracted its use to certain
special positions. The inflected word carries both position and habit about
with it, in that very inflection by which its function is limited because its
grammatical relations are determined. 214. Before we proceed to the examples
which will illustrate these remarks, we must make a clearance of one thing
which else might cause confusion. There is a sense in which every word in the
world is a noun. When we speak of the word have, or the word marry, these
words are regarded as objects of sense, and are mere nouns. Just in the same
way in the expression ' the letter A,' this alphabetic symbol becomes a noun.
In this aspect each item in the whole catalogue of letters and words in a
dictionary is presented to our minds as a noun. And beyond the pages of the
dictionary, there are situations in the course of conversation and of
literature in which this is the case. Thus, |
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208 IV. OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH.
in Shakspeare, King John, i. i, ' Have is have'; and in Longfellow's Mother,
what does marry mean? In these cases the word is (as one may say) taken up
between the finger and thumb, and looked at, and made an object of. It is no
longer, as words commonly are, a symbol of some object or idea in the mind's
meaning, i.e. subjective; it enters for the moment into an objective position
of its own. There are many instances of this. Must is a verb. But when we
hear the popular saying 1 Oh! you must, must you? Must is made for the Queen
' — here must is a noun. This ' objective ' citation of words being cleared
away, it remains now to consider how words may change their subjective
condition, that is to say, their relation to the thinking mind, and vary
their characters as parts of speech accordingly. 215. And first, the verb may
become a substantive, as — To err is human, to forgive divine. To live in
hearts we leave behind, Is not to die. — Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground.
The word handicap is an old Saxon noun meaning a compromise or bargain, and
in this character, I suppose, it figures in the technical language of
horse-racing. This sporting substantive signifies the extra weight which
horses carry as a compensation for any advantage they may have in respect of
age. It frequently stands for a verb, as in the following from a contemporary
journal. The legitimate objects of the Trades Unions are overlaid by
elaborate attempts to handicap ability and industry, and to exclude
competition. 216. Further examples of the functional interchange between
substantive and verb: — With all good grace to grace a gentleman. The Two
Gentlemen of Verona, ii. 4. |
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COLLOQUIAL EVIDENCES. 209 In
1811 the Swedes, though not yet actually at war with England, were making
active preparations for defence by sea and land, ' in case,' says Parry, 1 we
should be inclined to Copenhagen them.' — Memoirs of Sir W. E. Parry, by his
Son, ch. ii. Passing to more familiar and trivial instances, such as are (be
it remembered) the best examples of the unfettered and natural action of a
language, we hear such expressions as 'to cable a message'; and again, 'If
such a thing happens, wire me.' I do not say that these expressions have
become an acknowledged part of the language. If we confined our attention
solely to that which is mature and established, we should act like a botanist
who never studied buds, or a physiologist who neglected those phenomena which
are peculiar to young things. Young sprigs of language have a levity and
skittishness which render them unworthy of literature and grammar, but which
make an exhibition of the highest value for the purposes of philology. There
are many movements that are natural and that are among the best guides to the
student of nature, which are discontinued with staid age. It is a main
character of philology as contrasted with grammar that it is unconfined by
literary canons, and that the whole realm of speech is within its province.
217. To such an extent does the language exert this faculty of verbifying a
substantive, that even where there is already by the ancient development of
the language a verb and a noun of the same stem, it will sometimes drop the
established verb, and make a new verb by preference out of the noun. Thus we
have the verb to graff, and the noun graft. But we have dropped the proper
verb graff and have made a new verb out of the substantive. Everybody now
talks of grafting, and says to graft, and we never hear of to graff except in
church. p |
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2LO IV. OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH.
The pronoun can be used as a verb, thus — Taunt him with the license of lake:
if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be aniisse. — Twelfe Night,
iii. 2. 42. The substantive becomes an adjective. This is so common in our
language that examples are offered not to establish the fact but to identify
it. Main is a well-known old Saxon substantive, which appears in its original
character in such an expression as ' might and main '; but it becomes an
adjective in ' main force,' or in this: — And on their heads Main
promontories flung. John Milton, Paradise Lost, vi. 654. We have an example
of a different kind in the word cheap. This originally was a substantive,
meaning market, and the expression ' good cheap I meant to say that a person
had made a good marketing, after the French don march/. While it went with an
adjective harnessed to it, it was manifestly regarded as a substantive. But
since we no more speak of 1 good cheap'; since we have changed it to ' very
cheap'; and since the word has taken the degrees of cheaper and cheapest, —
its adjectival character is established beyond question. 218. The adjective
becomes a substantive. In such expressions as ' the young and the old/ ' the
good and the bad,' 1 the rich and the poor/ ' the high and the low/ ' the
strong and the weak,' we have adjectives used substantively. The adjective
employed substantively sometimes takes the plural form; and then it is
impossible to deny it the quality of a substantive; for the adjective has no
plural form in English grammar. Therefore the words irrationals and
comestibles in the following quotations, though adjectives by form and
extraction, must be called grammatical substantives, not only on account of
their substantival use, but also by reason of their grammatical form. |
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SUBSTANTIVE TURNED ADVERB. 211
Irrationals all sorrow are beneath. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, v. 538.
What thousands of homes there are in which the upholstery is excellent, the
comestibles costly, and the grand piano unexceptionable, both for cabinet
work and tone, in which not a readable book is to be found in secular
literature. — Intellectual Observer, October 1866. So the adjective worthy
has become a substantive when we speak of a worthy and the worthies. Other
grammatical structures, besides plurality, may demonstrate that an adjective
has become a substantive. We call contemporary an adjective in the connection
contemporary with; but it is a noun when we say a contemporary of. The word
good considered by itself would be called an adjective, but it is an
acknowledged substantive, not only in the plural form goods, but also in such
a construction as 'the good of the land of Egypt,' Genesis xlv. 18. And
specially must the whilom adjective be called a substantive when it is suited
with an adjective of its own. The adjectives ancient, preventive, must be
parsed as substantives in the following quotations: — Still, however, I must
remain a professed ancient on that head.— Goldsmith, Dedication of the Deserted
Village. Those sanitary measures which experience has shown to be the best
preventive. — Queen's Speech, 1867. More examples in 404, 413, 415, 417. 219.
The same changeableness of grammatical character may be seen in the adverb.
The commonest form of the adverb, namely -ly } was made out of an adjective,
which was made out of a substantive; as will be fully explained below, 398,
438, 441. A substantive may suddenly by a vigorous stroke of art be
transformed into an adverb, as forest in the following passage: — 'Twas a lay
More subtle-cadenced, more forest wild Than Dryope's lone lulling of her
child. John Keats, Endymion. P 2 |
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'212 IV. OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH.
In the following line the word ill appears first as an adverb and secondly as
a substantive: — 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey. Oliver
Goldsmith, The Leserted Village. The same word may appear as an adverb or as
a conjunction. The word but sustains these two characters in one line.. His
yeares but young, but his experience old. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ii. 4.
Sometimes the employment of one and the same word in a diversity of
grammatical powers leads to a modification of the form of the word. The old
preposition Surh has come to be employed as an adjective, in ' a thorough
draught,' or, as in the following quotation: — These two critics, Bentley and
Lachmann, were thorough masters of their craft. — Dr. Lightfoot, Galatians,
Preface. It has been a modern consequence of this adjectival use of thorough,
that a different form has been established for the preposition, viz. through.
But this variety of form does not interfere with the justice of the statement
that here we have had the same word in two grammatical characters. 220. How
easily the offices of preposition and conjunction glide into each other may
be seen from one or two examples. In the Scotch motto, ' Touch not the cat
but the glove,' but is the old preposition butan, signifying ' without.' This
is the character and signification which it had in early times, and from
which the better known uses of but are derivative. If however we expand this
sentence a little without alteration to its sense, and write it thus — '
Touch not the cat but first put on the glove/ we perceive that but is no
longer a preposition — it has become a conjunction. In the sentence, 'I saw
nobody else but him,' but is a preposition: if it be recast and expressed
thus, ' I saw nobody else, but I saw him,' but is a conjunction. |
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PEOPLES ENGLISH. 213 In the
following quotation we have for in the two characters of conjunction and
preposition: — For for these things every friend will depart. — Ecclus. xxii.
22. In the sentence, ' I will attend to no one before you/ before is a
preposition. But if the same thing be thus worded, ' I will attend to no one
before I have attended to you/ before is a conjunction. In the sentence, ' He
behaved like a scoundrel/ like is a preposition. But if we say it in
provincial English, thus, * He behaved like a scoundrel would,' like is a
conjunction. 221. While was once a noun, signifying time. Indeed it is so
still, as a long while. But it is better known as a conjunction: thus — It is
very well established that one man may steal a horse while another may not so
much as look over the hedge. As is generally called a conjunction, but in the
combination such as it is rather a relative pronoun than a conjunction; and
it bears distinctly its' old character of a relative pronoun in the following
quotation: — As far as I can see, 'tis them as is done wrong to as is so
sorry and penitent and all that, and them as wrongs is as comferble as ever
they can stick. — Lettice Lisle, ch. xxvii. In quoting a passage of this
sort, I am liable I know to be challenged as if I had produced an arbitrary
or unauthoritative illustration. But for me it is authority enough to know
that this way of speaking is used by millions of speakers. And the present is
a case in which the dialect supplies a link which the central language has
lost. Herein lies the difference between a grammatical and a philological
illustration, that the former requires literary authority, the latter only existence,
as its warrant. I grant that if in any writing of my own I adopted this use
of as, I might be justly confronted with the demand for my ' authority/ If I
declined the challenge, and |
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214 W> OF THE PARTS OF
SPEECH. continued to use the expression, it would amount to a trial of
strength on my part whether I had the power to introduce this provincialism.
Occasionally a strange expression is admitted, but the privilege of ushering
it belongs chiefly to those lawful lords of literature, the poets. I am under
the ordinary rules of grammar in my composition, but not in my illustrations.
Why, indeed, the best facts of language often lie beyond these formal props
that fence the park of literature! Therefore I trust that the benevolent
reader will not cavil about authority, but gratefully acknowledge the help
which the dialects supply towards a completer view of our language. We will
conclude this list of interchangeable functions by the remark that the
interjection shares in this faculty of transformation. It may become a verb,
as when we say ' to pooh-pooh a question '; or a noun, as — Many hems passed
between them, now the uncle looking on the nephew, now the nephew on the
uncle. — Sir Charles Grandison, Letter xvi. Or, as in the following from
Cowper: — Where thou art gone, Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown. 222.
The difference of function which one and the same word may perform, often furnishes
the ground of a playful turn of expression, something like a pun. But it is
distinct from a pun, is more subtle, and is allowed to constitute the point
of an epigram, as in that of Mrs. Jane Brereton on Beau Nash's full-length
picture being placed between the busts of Newton and Pope: — This picture
placed these busts between, Gives satire its full strength; Wisdom and wit
are little seen, But folly at full length. This is a play on two functions of
the word little, which |
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ONLY A HABIT. 21 5 must here be
thought of as adjective and adverb at once, i. e. (in Latin) as equal at once
to exigui, small, and to parwn, not enough. For want of attention to this,
the line has been erroneously edited thus: — Wisdom and wit are seldom seen.
If any one wishes for more illustrations of this fact, that the grammatical
character of a word is only a habit — one actual habit out of many possible
ones — he should consider some of the following references to Shakspeare.
Winter s Tale, i. I. 28, vast (substantive). 2 . 50, verily. ii. 3. 63, hand.
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21 6 IV. OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH.
the meaning of great, greatness, greatly, and to be great. Everything in fact
depends in Chinese on the proper collocation of words in a sentence. Between
this state of things and the development of the modern languages, there has
intervened the flectional state of speech, of which the grammatical character
is as nearly as possible the direct opposite to that which has been stated
concerning the Chinese. In the flectional state of language, each word
carries about with it a formal mark of distinction, by which the habitual
vocation of that word is known. Thus in Greek the word novos, even standing
alone, bears the aspect of being a noun in the nominative case; but the
English word labour, standing alone, is no more a noun than it is a verb, and
no more a verb than it is a noun. The flectional languages are not all
equally flectional; this character has its degrees. The Greek is not so
rigidly flectional as the Latin. But both of them are far more so than any of
the languages of modern Europe. Of the great languages, that which has most
shaken off inflections is the English, and next to the English, the French.
We have but a very few inflections remaining in our language. This increases
the freedom with which the language moves. We are recovering some of that
long-lost and infantine elasticity which was the property of primitive
speech. 224. But while the modern languages, and English especially, are
casting off that cocoon of inflections which the habits of thousands of years
had gradually swathed about them, there is no possibility of their getting
back to a Chinese state of verbal homogeneousness. Such a state is
incompatible with a high condition of development. A language of which no
part has any fixed character must rank low among languages, just as among
animals those which have no distinction of flesh, bone, sinew, hair. Or, as
in |
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A GREATER DISTINCTION. 21 7
communities of men, division of labour, distinct vocations, and all the
concomitant rigidity of individual habit, is necessary to advanced
civilisation. There is no appearance of a tendency to fall back into a
primitive state of language. The freedom which modern languages are asserting
for themselves as against the restraints of flexion, may be carried out to
its extremest issues, and no appearance would ever arise of a tendency
backwards to a state of pulpy homogeneousness. For there is a movement from
which there is no going back, a slow but incessant movement, which gradually
creates a distinction among words greater and more deeply seated than that of
the parts of speech. This is a movement in which all languages partake more
or less, according to the vigour of intellectual life with which they are
animated. This is a movement which rears barriers of distinction between one
and another class of words as immoveable as the sea-wall which the sea itself
has sometimes built to sever the pasture from the bed of the ocean. The
explanation of this movement must occupy another chapter. |
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CHAPTER V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, AND OF INFLECTIONS. 225. Philology makes more use of the
signification of words than grammar does. For grammar deals only with the
literary forms, functions, and habits of words; philology deals with the very
words themselves. Grammar regards words as the instruments of literature:
philology regards them as the exponents of mind. Philology has to do with
language in its fullest sense, as being that whole compound thing which is
made up of voice and meaning, sound and signification, written form and
associated idea. It appertains to philology to omit none of the phenomena of
language, but to give them all their due consideration. Hence it comes to
pass that the outward and the inward, the form and the signification, will
come by turns under review. And though the inward or mental side of language
will occupy less of our space than its correlative, yet each reference to it
will be more in the nature of a reference to principle, and will score its
results deeper on our whole method of proceeding. As we advance, the subject
grows upon our hands. We cannot treat of our native language in a
philological manner without getting down to some fundamental principles. In
the present work we began like a botanist with the flower; but the progress
of the enquiry leads in due time through |
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OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC
WORDS, ETC. 21 9 the whole economy of the plant, and will at length bring us
to its root. While we dwelt over the historical circumstances in the midst of
which our language expanded to the light, while we noted the source from
which it was supplied with alphabetic characters, while we surveyed its
spelling and pronunciation, and its homely interjections, we were acting like
a botanist examining successive florets of the multitudinous head of some
grassy inflorescence. But now we move down the stalk which bears many such
florets, and we have to admit principles which embrace the systems of many
languages. At this point we enter upon the very heart of the subject; and the
growing importance of the matter makes me fear lest I should fail in the
exposition of it. All things cannot be rendered equally easy for the student,
and I must here ask him to lend me the vigour of his attention while I try to
expound that upon which will hinge much of the meaning of chapters to come.
226. There is a distinction in the signification of words which calls for
primary attention in philology. I would ask the reader to contemplate such
words as spade, heron, handsaw, flag-staff, barn-door; and then to turn his
mind to such as the following, an, by, but, else, for, from, he, how, 1, it,
if, in, not, never, on, over, since, the, therefore, they, under, who, where,
yet, you. It will be at once felt that there is a gulf between these two
sorts of words, and that there must be a natural distinction between them.
The one set presents objects to the mind, the other does not. Some of them,
such as the pronouns, continue to reflect an object once presented, as John
he. But there is a difference in nature between the word John and the word
he. If I say at Jerusalem .... there, the word Jerusalem belongs to the one
class, and the words at, there, belong to the other. |
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220 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, 227. We will call these two classes of words by the names of
Presentive and Symbolic. The Presentive are those which present an object to
the memory or to the imagination; or, in brief, which present any conception
to the mind. For the things presented need not be objects of sense, as in the
first list of examples. The words justice, patience, clemency, fairy, elf,
spirit, abstraction, generalization, classification, are as presentive as any
words can be. The only point of difference between these and those is one
that does not belong to philology. It is the difference of minds. There are
people to whom some of the latter words would have no meaning, and therefore
would not be presentive. But every word is supposed by the philologer to
carry its requisite condition of mind with it. The Symbolic words are those
which by themselves present no meaning to any mind, and which depend for
their intelligibility on a relation to some presentive word or words. We
enter not at present into the question how they became so dependent; we take
our stand on the fact. Whether they can be shewn to be mere altered specimens
of the presentive class, or whether there is room to imagine in any case that
they have had a source of their own, independent of the presentives, — the
difference exists, and is most palpable. And the more we attend to it, the
more shall we find that broad results are attainable from the study of this
distinction. 228. What, for example, is the joke in such a question as that
which has afforded a moment's amusement to many generations of youth, Who
dragged whom round what and where? except this, that symbols which stand
equally for any person, any thing, or any place, are rendered ludicrous by
being employed as if they presented to the mind some par |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 221 ticular
person, some particular thing, or some particular place. The question is
rather unsubstantial, simply because the words are symbolic where they should
be presentive. It is not utterly unsubstantial, because the verb dragged round
is presentive. Put a more symbolic verb in its stead and you have a perfectly
unsubstantial question: Who did what, and where did he do it? This is a
clown's toy in Shakspeare: — . . . for, as the old hermit of Prage, that
never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of king Gorbuduc, That
that is is. — Twelfe Night, iv. 2. 14. It will therefore be desirable to
attempt some understanding of the nature of this difference between
presentiveness and symbolism. The difficulty and danger of confusion lies in
the fact — That all language is symbolical. As the chief characteristic of
human language in regard to its external form is this, that it should be
articulate; so, in regard to its signification, the chief characteristic is
that it should be symbolical. If a man barks like a dog or crows like a cock,
or whistles, these utterances do not constitute language in any but a
metaphorical sense. They might indeed carry a real signification, — might in
conceivable situations be necessary as means of communication between man and
man; they might serve the purpose of language: but they would not be
language. When the bark of the dog is represented in articulate syllables, as
bow-wow, there is an important step made towards the attainment of language.
' Bow-wow/ says the dog; and this bow-wow, in the human mouth may pass for
speech, but it is not yet a true specimen of the relation in which mature
speech stands to meaning. When however we advance another step, and call the
dog a bow-wow, here we have language. A childish specimen, it is true; but
still a real specimen of language. And the |
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212 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, character which determines it is Symbolism. An understanding
is established between minds that this articulate imitation of a dog's bark
shall stand in human intercourse as the sign or symbol of a dog. And there is
such a movement in language that, although at first bow-wow signified a bark,
and so was a mere sound-word, yet it would be likely to move on a step and mean
something else, as it actually has come to be used symbolically for a dog.
Thus language is radically symbolical. This fundamental truth is however
overlaid and concealed from view by a mental habit which we call Association.
We became acquainted with objects and ideas at the same time that we learnt
how to name them, and the names have become so intimately identified with the
things, that it is only. by force of reflection we can separate them wide
enough to verify their symbolic nature. This associative faculty is limited
to words which express objects and ideas. When words express neither objects
nor ideas they cannot be so associated; and their symbolic character is then
patent, because it is their only character; insomuch that if it be fairly looked
at, it must be immediately recognised. The difference then between the
Presentive and the Symbolic words, is based, not upon the absence of
symbolism in the -ormer, but upon the absence of the presentive faculty in
the latter, which leaves their unmixed symbolic character open to view. When
therefore we call a particular set of words bymbolic, we mean that they
display in a clear and conspicuous manner that symbolism which is a pervading
characteristic of all human language. And they display it in such a manner as
to bear a great testimony to the fact that the symbolic tendency is infused
into human language with its earliest germ. As a natural consequence of this
innate |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 223
tendency, there is developed in language a graduated series of elevations
from the sensible and material to the ethereal and subtle. Such is the best
explanation I can offer of this great distinction. Whatever be the value of
the explanation, we must observe that it affects in no way either the fact of
the distinction or the fact of its importance. These are to be established
not by theory, but by evidence and exemplification: and to these we now
proceed. Analogous movements may be traced in examples beyond the pale of
language. When barbers' poles were first erected, they were pictorial and
presentive, for they indicated by white bands of paint the linen bandages
which were used in bloodletting, an operation practised by the old
surgeon-barbers. In our time we only know (speaking of the popular mind) that
the pole indicates a barber's shop; the why or how is unknown. And this is symbolism.
229. A highly appropriate illustration may be gathered from the letters of
the Alphabet. Egyptian research seems to have quite established it for a
fact, that the Phoenician Alphabet, which is the source of ours, was itself
derived from the hieroglyphic picture-writing of Egypt; and many prototypes
of our letters have been recognised in writing of four thousand years ago.
Our a was at first a picture of an eagle, the b of some other bird, the d was
a man's hand, the f was the horned viper whose horns still figure in the two
upper strokes, while the cross-line in the h is a surviving trace of the
pictured sieve whereof this letter is the symbol. Thus the Alphabet began in
presentation and has reached a state of symbolism. 230. Writing is in fact
the symbolism of the picture-story. Here we perceive that there has been a
complete change of nature. The pictorial character with which the first
artist |
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224 v - 0F PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 22$
velopment of languages has hinged mainly upon symbolic words, and that their
instrumentality has been the chief means of what progress has been made in
the capabilities of expression. 231. The same general tendency which makes
symbols take the place of pictures, makes or has made symbolic words take the
place of presentives in a great number of instances. This tendency has led to
the formation out of the large mass of presentive verbs of a select number of
symbolic verbs, which are the light and active intermediaries, and the
general servants of the presentive verbs. Thus the verbs partake of both
characters, the presentive and the symbolic. But as regards the rest of the
parts of speech, they fall into two natural halves in the light of this
distinction. The substantives, adjectives, and adverbs are presentive words;
the pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions are symbolic words. But as the
grammatical classification has become rigid in some of its parts, it must not
be allowed to govern the Natural divisions which we are here seeking to
establish. There is much of what is arbitrary in the denomination assigned by
grammarians to many a word. 234. Some will think perhaps that my symbolic
words are found to invade the domain of noun, adjective, and adverb; while
they fail to cover and fully occupy what I have assigned to them — namely,
the pronoun, conjunction, and preposition. Therefore the grammatical scheme
should not be trusted to as a frame for the new division. The student must
seize the distinction itself; and the illustration of it by reference to the
grammatical scale is only offered as a temporary assistance. As in the chapter
Of the Parts of Speech we saw that the same word assumes a diversity of
characters, so here Q |
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226 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, also the same word will be at one time presentive and at
another time symbolic. And there is perhaps no more effective display of the
distinction now before us than that which shews itself within the limits of
the history of single words. Let us therefore take a few examples of the
transition of a word from a presentive to a symbolic use. 232. Thing. This is
a very good example, on account of its unmixed simpleness. For it is almost
purely symbolic, and devoid of presentive power. It is still more. It is of
universal application in its symbolic power. There is not a subject of speech
which may not be indicated by the word thing. For thou, O Lorde God, art the
thynge that I longe for. — Psalm lxxi. 4, (1539) By these ways, as by the
testimony of the creature, we come to find an eternal and independent Being,
upon which all things else depend, and by . which all things else are
governed. — John Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed, Art. I. It is plain
that we cannot name a creature, whether visible or invisible, whether an
object of sense or of thought, which may not be indicated by the word thing.
It is therefore of universal application in its symbolical power. 1 But if we
ask, on the other hand, What idea does this word present? We answer, None!
There is no creature, no subject of speech or of thought, which can claim the
word thing as its presenter. There was' a time when the word was presentive
like any ordinary noun, but that time is now far behind us. The most recent
example I am able to quote is of the fourteenth century. In Chaucer's
Prologue it occurs twice presentively: — 1 The few instances in which thing
(with a faint rhetorical emphasis) is opposed to person, are to be regarded
as stranded relics on the path of the transition which the bulk of the word
has passed through. |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 227 He wolde
the see were kept for any thyng Bitwixen Myddelburgh and Orewelle. (1. 278.)
Ther to he koude endite and make a thyng. (1. 327.) 233. The fullness of tone
which the rhythm requires for the word thyng in both these places, is by
itself almost enough to indicate that they are not to be taken as when we say
' I would not do it for anything,' or ' Here 's a thing will do/ In these
trivial instances the word is vague and symbolical, but it would hardly have
beseemed such a poet as Chaucer to bring the stroke of his measure down upon
such gossamer. The Merchant desired that the sea should be protected for the
sake of commerce at any price, condition, or cost — on any terms; for such is
the old sense of the word thing. The old verb to thing, Saxon f>ingian,
meant to make terms, to compromise, pacisci. So also in German the word 5)mc}
had a like use, as may be seen through its compounds. The verb bebirujert is
to stipulate, bargain; and -JBefciuvjuncj is condition, terms of agreement,
contract. In Denmark and Norway the word still retains its presentiveness,
and signifies a judicial or deliberative assembly. In Denmark the places
where the judges hold session are called Ting. In Norway the Parliament is called
Stor Ting, that is, Great Thing. In Iceland the old parliament field was
called Thing-vollr, and the hill in the Isle of Man from which the laws are
proclaimed is called Tynwald. The same word in the same sense is contained in
the Danish word husting, as Longfellow indicates by his manner of printing
it: — Olaf the King, one summer morn, Blew a blast on his bugle-horn, Sending
his signal through the land of Drontheim. And to the Hus-Ting held at Mere
Gathered the farmers far and near, With their war weapons ready to confront
him. The Saga of King Olaf. Q 2 |
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228 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, In Molbech's Danish Dictionary there is a list of compounds
with Ting, in its presentive value of adjudicating or adjusting conflicting
interests. In such a sense it is said by Chaucer that his Sergeaunt of Lawe
could endite and make a thyng, meaning, he could make a contract, was a good
conveyancer. 234. How wide is the separation between such a use of the word
and that more familiar one which meets us so often in this manner, ' The
liberal deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand ' — in
which ' liberal things ' is equivalent to ' liberality,' or at any rate the
difference between the general and the abstract is so fine that, if preserved
at all, it requires a high metaphysical discernment to define it A question
may be raised here — What part of speech is this symbolic thing* Grammar,
which looks only to its literary action, will say it is a noun, and that
however much it may have changed in sense, it cannot cease to be a noun. Yet
it will often be found to act the part and fill the place of pronouns in
other tongues. The Latin neuter pronouns hcec, ea, ista, their Greek
analogues ravra, eKelva, roiavra Toa-avra, can hardly be rendered in English
in any other way than by the expressions these things, those things, such
things, so great things. If in all cases we must grammatically insist that
thing is a noun, then what part of speech are something, nothing, anything,
everything? It may be a question at what stage of symbolism a noun passes
over to the ranks of the pronoun, but it appears plain that there is a point
at which this transition must be admitted, and that the whole question turns
upon the degree of symbolism that is requisite. If the word thing has not
quite attained that degree, it certainly approaches very near to it. It would
not have been worth while to dwell so long on these aspects, if they had not
been typical. But that they |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 229, are so
we may assure ourselves, both by observation of the same tendency in other
languages, and also in other words of our own language. In Latin res and
causa have moved on a like path, and have generated rien and chose in French.
In German the word Sing has had the same history, except that its field has
been narrowed by the rival word 8ac^e, a forensic word, like causa and thing,
and familiar to us through the old Saxon legal jargon, ' sac and soc.' In
Hebrew dabhar had a like career: as a presentive it meant ' word,' as a
symbolic it signified ' thing/ A variety of words in English have partially
graduated in the same faculty, and have attained a symbolic degree in certain
connections. Let the student consider the following substantives, and
probably he will be able to fit most of them to phrases in which they shall
figure symbolically: — account, affair, article, behalf, business, case,
circumstance, concern, course, deal, gear, hand, lot, manner, matter , part,
party, person, question, regard, respect, score, sort, stuff, wise. 235.
Some. As in Mrs. Barbauld's apostrophe to Life: — Say not good night, but in
some brighter clime, Bid me good morning. More. This is now generally known
to us as a symbolic word, a mere sign of the comparative degree. But it is
presentive in Acts xix. 32, 'The more part knew not wherefore they were come
together;' and in that sentence of Bacon's — ' discretion in speech is more
than eloquence.' Now. In this word we may illustrate the aerial perspective
which exists in symbolism. At first it appeared as an adverb of time,
signifying ' at the present time.' Even in this character it is a symbolic
word, but it is one that lies very near the presentive frontier. It is
capable of light emphasis, as in ' Now is the accepted time! ' Then it moves
off another stage, as, ' Now faith is the confidence of things hoped for, |
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230 V. OF PRESENT1VE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, the evidence of things not seen.' Here the now is incapable
of accent; one hardly imagines the rhetorical emergency which would impose an
emphasis on this now. Thus we see there is in symbolism a near and a far
distance. And this second now, the more rarefied and symbolic of the two, is
gradually undermining the position of the other. The careful writer will
often have found it necessary to strike out a now which he had with the
weightier meaning set at the head of a sentence, because of its liability to
be accepted by the reader for the toneless?iow. Symbolism of Auxiliary Verbs.
236. But a signal example of the growth of symbolism is afforded by the
auxiliary verbs; and these are a class of words so important in so many
aspects, that we gladly seize all convenient occasions for bringing them
forward. It is difficult to say when they are most interesting, whether in
those more numerous specimens which we possess in common with German, and
which we derive from the old ancestral pangothic stock; or whether in those
fewer examples which are of our own several and insular development. Shall,
should; will, would. .The word shall offers a good example of the movement
from presentiveness to symbolism. When it flourished as a presentive word, it
signified to owe. Of this ancient state of the word a memorial exists in the
German adjective fdnttbig, indebted. From this state it passed by slow and
unperceived movements to that sense which is now most familiar to us, in
which it is a verbal auxiliary, charging the verb with a sense fluctuating
between the future tense and the imperative mood. There are intermediate uses
of shall which belong neither to the presentive state when it signified '
owe,' nor to the sym |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 23 1 bolic
state in which it is a mere imponderable auxiliary. In the following
quotation it has a sense which lies between these two extremes. If the
Reformers saw not how or where to draw the fine and floating and
long-obscured line between religion and superstition, who shall dare to
arraign them? — Henry Hart Milman, The Annals of St. Paul's, p. •231. What
has been said about shall applies equally to its preterite should. Its common
symbolic use is illustrated in the following quotation: — Labourers indeed
were still striving with employers about the rate of wages — as they have
striven to this very day, and will continue to strive to the world's end,
unless some master mind should discover the true principle for its
settlement. — William Longman, Edward III, vol. ii. ch. iii. Let the reader
fully comprehend the nature of this should, that he may be prepared to
appreciate the contrast of the examples which follow. I found the first near
my own home. I was 'borneing' out some allotment ground, and Farmer Webb
having driven a corner 'borne' into the ground very effectively, exclaimed, '
There, that one '11 stand for twenty years, if he should! ' To a person who
knows only the English of literature, the condition would seem futile — if he
should! It would seem to mean that the 1 borne ' would stand if it happened
to stand. But this was not our neighbour's meaning. The person who should so
misunderstand him, would do so for want of knowing that the word should has
still something extant of its old presentive power. In this instance it would
have to be translated into Latin, not thus — si forte iia evenerit; but thus
— si debuerit, sifuerit opus: if it ought; if it be required to stand so
long; or, in the brief colloquial, if required. 237. Connected with this thread
of usage, and equally derived from the radical sense of ' owe,' is another
power of shall and should, which is of a very subtle nature. It is one of the
native traits of our mother tongue of which we have |
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232 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, been deprived by the French influence. German scholars well
know that foil has a peculiar use to express something which the speaker does
not assert but only reports. @r foU e£ getfycm tydbm, literally, ' he shall
have done it,' signifies, ' he is said to have done it.' In Saxon this use
was well known. Thus in the Peterborough Chronicle, a.d. 1048 (p. 178), we read:
' for f>an Eustatius haefde gecydd J?am cynge pet hit sceolde beon mare
gylt )?oere burhwara J^onne his ' — ' forasmuch as Eustace had told the king
that it was (forsooth!) more the townsfolk's fault than his.' Twice in the
same Chronicle it is recorded that a spring of blood had issued from the
earth in Berkshire, namely, under the years 1098 and 1200. In both places it
is added, ' swa swa manige saedan pe hit geseon sceoldan ' — ' as many said
who professed to have seen it, or were believed to have seen it/ But. now
this usage is only provincial. It is very common in Devonshire, and indeed in
all the west. ' I'm told such a one should say/ 238. How ancient it is, we
may form an estimate by observing that it exists not only in German but in
Danish also. In Holberg's Erasmus Montanus, the pedantic student is at home
for vacation, and complaining that there is no one m the town who has
learning enough to be a fit associate for himself. At this point he says,
according to an anonymous translator, who is substantially correct: ' The
clerk and the schoolmaster, it is reported, have studied; but I know not to
what extent/ The original Danish is, 'Degnen og Skolemesteren skal have
studeret, men jeg veed ikke hvorvidt det strsekker sig' — literally, 'the
clerk and the schoolmaster shall have studied, but I know not how far it
reaches.' These illustrations are so many traces of the course which this
ancient verb has described in its passage from the presentive to the symbolic
state. |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 233 We
proceed now to will, would. How greatly the word will is felt to have lost
presentive power in the last three centuries may be judged from the
following. In Matthew xv. 32, where our Bible has 'I will not send them away
fasting,' it is proposed by Dean Alford as a correction to render 'I am not
willing to.' Again, in Matthew xx. 14, ; I will give unto this last even as unto thee,' the
same critic finds it desirable to substitute ' It is my will to give.' It
should be noticed that in neither of these criticisms is there any question
of Greek involved. It is simply an act of fetching up the expression of our
Bible to the level of modern English; and it furnishes the best evidence that
a change has come over the word will. And yet it has still a good deal of
presentive power left. Wilt thou have, &c.? / will! This verb in its
presentive sense retains a pair of old flexional forms which are never found
in the symbolic sense. These are wiliest, willeth. ' God willeth Samuel to
yeeld vnto the importunitie of the people ' (1 Sam. viii, Contents); 'It is
not of him that willeth' [Rom. ix. 16). Wiliest be asked, and thou shalt
answer then. Frederic W. H. Myers, St. Paul. This verb has also an infinitive
as, 'to will and to do'; and in this respect differs from the more highly
symbolic shall, of which an infinitive was never heard in our language. We
see in the verb will the graduated movement from the presentive to the
symbolic state well displayed. And not unfrequently the transition is played
upon, as in the following dialogue: — Cres. Doe you thinke I will? Troy. No,
but something may be done that we wil not. Shakspeare, Troylus and Cressida,
iv. 4. 91. |
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234 V- OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, Both will and shall are seen in their presentive power in the
familiar proposal to carry a basket, or to do any other little handy service,
I will if I shall 1; that is, I am willing if you will command me; I will if
so required. The different powers of would are illustrated in the following
quotation, where the first would has absolutely nothing remaining of that
original idea of the action of Will, which is still appreciably present in
the second would. It would be a charity if people would sometimes in their
Litanies pray for the very healthy, very prosperous, very light-hearted, very
much bepraised. — John Keble, Life, p. 459. . 239. Before we leave these
auxiliaries we must notice a curious phenomenon, as Dean Alford has called it
2 , one which has arrested attention thousands of times, and which brings
valuable illustration to this place. 1 speak of the very old and familiar
fact that large numbers of our Englishspeaking fellow-subjects cannot seize
the distinction between shall, should, and will, would. Here is a distinction
which is unerringly observed by the most rustic people in the purely English
counties, while the most carefully educated persons who have grown up on
Keltic soil cannot seize it! This Kelticism is by no means rare in Sir Walter
Scott's works: — At the same time I usually qualified my denial by stating,
that, had I been the author of these works, I would have felt myself quite
entitled to protect my secret by refusing my own evidence. — General Preface
to the 1829 Edition of the Waverley Novels. Note a remarkable contrast. In
the case of shall we admire the substantial uniformity of its application
over wide areas and peoples long dissociated; but as to will, its application
is unequalized even within the four seas! And why is this? Simply because
shall is a primeval pangothic symbol, 1 I have since discovered that this is
not generally understood: but at least every native of Devon should be
familiar with it. 2 Queen s English, § 208. |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 2$$
installed in its office long ages ago; whereas will is a recent symbol, a
product of our insular history, which is not yet come to maturity and the
verification of its province. 240. May, Might. We get this word in its
presentive function in our early poetry, as in the following from Chevelere
Assigne, 1. 134,— I my3te not drowne hem for dole, the meaning of which is, I
was not able to drown them for compassion. Here my$te, which is the same as
might, is presentive, and means ' potui,' ' I was able.' This word originally
meant, not ability by admission or permission (as now) but by power and
right, as in the substantive might and the adjective mighty. We no longer use
the verb so. But it makes a characteristic feature of the fourteenth-century
poetry: — There was a king that mochel might Which Nabugodonosor hight.
Confessio Ama?itis, Bk. i. vol. i. p. 1316, ed. Pauli. This would be in
Latin, ' Rex quidam erat qui multum valebat, cui nomen Nabugodonosoro.' Some
traces of its presentive use linger about may. We use it in its old sense of
' to be able ' in certain positions, as ' It may be avoided.' But, curious to
note, we change the verb in the negative proposition, and say, ' No, it
cannot.' Power cannot change them, but love may. John Keble, Christian Year,
Sunday after Christmas. Dare. So completely has the sense of dare-ing
evaporated from this auxiliary, that ' I dare say ' is a different thing from
' I dare to say.' The latter might be negatived by ' I dare not to say '; but
' I dare not say ' would not be the just negative of ' I dare say.' In that
expression, the verb ' dare ' has lost its own colour, and it is infused into
' say.' And therefore the two often merge by symphytism into one |
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2$6 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, word, as in the following, from a newspaper report of a
public speech: — ,1 daresay you have heard of the sportsman who taught
himself to shoot steadily by loading for a whole season with blank cartridge
only. 241. Disturbances apart, the constant law is, that the deeper a word
imbibes the symbolic character, the more is it naturally liable to attrition.
This is artificially counteracted through the vigilance of literature, but we
get some peeps into Nature's workshop. We find a good friend in John Bunyan.
He writes the auxiliary have as a, often and often: — ' I thought you would a
come in.' — ' Who, that so was, could but a done so? ' — ' Christiana had
like to a been in.' — ' Thou wouldst not a bin afraid of a dog.' — ' Why I
would a fought as long as breath had been in me.' — ' He had like to a
beguiled Faithful' — ' But it would a made you a wondered to have seen the
dead.' To find these gems, however, the reader must go to the original, from
which I have quoted, and will quote once more: — Mercy. I might a had
husbands afore now, tho' I spake not of it to any. — Pilgrims Progress, ii.
84. ed. facsim. Elliot Stock. 242. Do. This word is presentive in such a
sentence as the following: — My object is to do what I can to undo this great
wrong. — Edward A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, vol. iii. init.
It is however in full activity, both as a near and also as a far-off symbolic
word. Diddest not thou accuse women of inconstancie? Diddest not thou accompt
them easie to be won? Diddest not thou condemne them of weakenes?— John Lyly,
Euphues, 1579, p. 59, ed. Arber. I have often heard "an old friend quote
the following, which he witnessed at an agricultural entertainment. The
speaker was proposing the chairman's health, and after much eulogy, he
apostrophized the gentleman thus: — ' What I |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 2^J mean to
say, Sir, is this: that if more people was to do as you do, there wouldn't be
so many do as they do do! ' In the final 'do do ' it is clear we have the
verb in two different powers, the first being highly symbolic, and the second
almost presentive. Again, in the familiar salutation, ' How d'ye do? ' we
have the same verb in two powers. Here moreover the usual mode of writing it
conveys the important lesson, that the more symbolic a word is, the more it
loses tone and becomes subject to elision. It might seem as if this
observation were contradicted by the previous example, in which it is plain
to the ear of every reader that of the two words in ' do do,' the former,
that is to say, the more symbolic, is the more emphatic. But this is caused
by the antithesis between that word and the * was to do ' preceding. It is a
disturbance of the intrinsic relative weight by rhetorical influence. In
these gradations of symbolism, we see what provision is made for the lighter
touches of expression, the vague tints, the vanishing points. Towards a deep
and distant background the full-fraught picture of copious language carries
our eye, while the foreground is almost palpable in its reality. 243. As a
further illustration of this distinction it may be observed that a little
more or less of the symbolic element has a great effect in stamping the
character of diction. By a little excess of it we get the sententious or ' would-be
wise' mannerism. By a diminution of it we get an air of promptness and
decision, which may produce (according to circumstances) an appearance of the
business-like, or the military, or the off-hand. This is one of those
observations which may best be justified by an appeal to caricatures of
acknowledged merit. In the Pickwick Papers, the conversation of Mr. Weller
the elder, a man of maxims and proverbs and store of experience, is marked by
an occasional excess of the |
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238 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, symbolic element. While ' you're a considering of it ' he
will proceed to suggest ' as how,' &c. On the other hand, the off-hand
impudence of the adventurer Mr. Jingle, is represented by the artist mainly
through this particular trait, which characterizes his conversation
throughout, namely, that it has the smallest possible quantity of symbolic
words. 244. To make it still more distinct what symbolism is, I add a
paragraph in which the symbolic element is distinguished by italics. There is
a popular saying in the Brandenburg district, where Bismarck's family has
been so many centuries at home, which attributes to ths Bismarcks, as the
characteristic saying of the house, the phrase, ' Noch lange nicht genug' — '
Not near enough yet,' and which expresses, we suppose, the popular conception
of their tenacity of purpose, — that they were not tired out of any plan they
had formed by a reiterated failure or a pertinacious opposition which would
have disheartened most of their compeers There is a somewhat extravagant
illustration of this characteristic in Bismarck's wild, youthful days, if
his. biographer may be trusted. When studying law at Berlin he had been more
than once disappointed by a bootmaker who did not send home his boots when
they were promised. Accordingly when this fiext happened, a servant of the
young jurist appeared at the bootmaker's at six in the morning with the
simple ' question, ' Are Herr Bismarck's boots ready? ' When he was told they
were not, he departed, but at ten minutes past six another servant appeared
with the same inquiry, and so at precise intervals of ten minutes it went on
all day, till by the evening the boots were finished and sent home. Doubt may
sometimes arise concerning a particular word, when its signification lies on
the confines of presentation and symbolism. In the above passage, I have let
the word home stand once presentively, and twice I have marked it as
symbolic. In English prose the number of symbolic words is generally about
sixty per cent, of the whole number employed, leaving forty per cent, for the
presentives. A passage with many proper names and titles in it may, however,
bring the presentives up to, or even cause them to surpass, the number |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. . 2? 9 of
the symbolics; but the average in ordinary prose is what we have stated. Mr.
Ward says very truly that ' the men and women of Pope's satires and epistles,
his Atticus and Atossa, and Sappho and Sporus, are real types, whether they
be more or less faithful portraits of Addison and the old Duchess, of Lady
Mary and Lord Hervey. His Dunces are the Dunces of all times; his orator Henley
the mob orator, and his awful Aristaich the don, of all epochs; though there
may have been some merit in Theobald, some use even in Henley, and though in
Bentley there was undoubted greatness. But in Pope's hands individuals become
types, and his creative power in this respect surpasses that of the Roman
satirists, and leaves Dryden himself behind.' Out of 115 words, we here find
the unusually large number of fifty-three presentives, and the small
proportion of sixty-two symbolics. But if we compare this with the previous
paragraph, we observe that whereas the presentives are a new set of words,
the symbolics are to a large extent identical in the two pieces. The symbolic
words hold a large space in context, yet they are but few in the whole
vocabulary of the language. 245. It would be a very interesting investigation
to examine whether the chief modern languages have any considerable diversity
as to the bulk and composition of their symbolic element. For here it is that
we must seek the matured results of aggregate national thought, in the case
of the modern languages. The symbolic is the modern element — is, we might go
so far as to say, the element which alone will give a basis for a
philological distinction between ancient and modern languages. Not that any
ancient languages are known which are absolutely destitute of this element.
There is but one that I know, and that for the most part a rather unwritten
language, in which the symbolic has not yet been started. That is the
language of infancy. Whoever has observed the shifts made by prattling
children to express their meaning without the |
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240 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, help of pronouns, will need no further explanation of the
statement that infantine speech is unsymbolic. But I may establish this
important position by the independent testimony of a philosopher 1 . In
discussing the question, When does consciousness come into manifestation? we
found that man is not born conscious; and that therefore consciousness is not
a given or ready-made fact of humanity. In looking for some sign of its
manifestation, we found that it has come into operation whenever the human
being has pronounced the word ' I,' knowing what this expression means. This
word is a highly curious one, and quite an anomaly, inasmuch as its true
meaning is utterly incommunicable by one being to another, endow the latter
with as high a degree of intelligence as you please. Its origin cannot be
explained by imitation or association. Its meaning cannot be taught by any
conceivable process; but must be originated absolutely by the being using it.
This is not the case with any other form of speech. For instance, if it be
asked What is a table? a person may point to one and say, ' that is a table.'
But if it be asked, What does ' I ' mean? and if the same person were to
point to himself and say ' this is /,' this would convey quite a wrong meaning,
unless the inquirer, before putting the question, had originated within
himself the notion * I,' for it would lead him to call the other person ' I.'
The difference so well demonstrated by Professor Ferrier, as separating the
nature of the word ' I ' from that of the word ' table/ is the difference
which splits the whole vocabulary into the two divisions of the Presentive
and the Symbolic. A child does not understand any of the symbolic words at
all. Where it uses them, it is by unconscious imitation. This happens
particularly in the case of the prepositions, which are to the opening
intelligence not separate words at all, but mechanical appendages to the
presentives which they understand. Observation will, moreover, shew us that
when children have fully mastered all the symbolics of the first distance,
they will stumble at those which are more remote. Only yesterday I stepped
into a cab with a boy of seven years old, |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 24 1 who is
of an inquiring turn of mind. The number 20 was on the vehicle, and he asked
me whether that signified that the price of it was £20. I said a few words in
explanation, and as I knew that he had been exercised in thought about money
values, I added, ' You could not build a cab for £20.' He replied: 'No,
/could not; could you?' The surprising turn thus given to the conversation
will enable the reader to estimate the interval which separates you the
personal from you the impersonal pronoun, and thus open up to view a further
symbolic distance out beyond. 247. We sometimes talk of the speech of
animals. It is hardly possible to deny them all share in this faculty. They
certainly communicate their emotions by the voice. And this voice is not
without discrimination. The cry of the barn-door fowl at the sisrht of a fox
or of a hawk is such O as would tell an experienced person what was going on.
The various accents of the Newfoundland dog, where he has a real
understanding with his master, or of the collie among the sheep on the
northern fells, are manifestations wonderfully like inceptive speech; and
that everybody feels this to be so is evidenced from the common meed of
praise bestowed on a sagacious dog — that he all but talks. Whether the cries
of animals are humble specimens of speech, or whether they are altogether
different in kind, is however a question which we have not to solve. The
subject has only been introduced in order that it might afford us another
point of view from which to contemplate the important distinction between
presentive and symbolic speech. If we estimate at its very highest the claims
that can be made for the language of the beasts, it will always be limited by
the line which severs these tw r o kinds of expression. We can imagine an
orator on behalf of the animals maintaining that their cries might represent
to other animals not only R |
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242 V. OF PRESENT1VE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, emotions but also objects of the outer sense or even objects
reflected in the memory. We should not think a man quite unreasonable if he
imagined that a certain whinny of a horse indicated to another horse as much
as the word 'stable.' But we should think him talking at random, if he
pretended to be able to imagine that a horse's language possessed either a
pronoun or a preposition. 248. Here then we consider ourselves to touch upon
that in human speech which bears the highest and most distinctive impress of
the action of the human mind. Here we find the beauty, the blossom, the
glory, the aureole of language. Here we seem to have found a means of
measuring the relative progress manifested in different philological eras.
Among ancient languages, that one is most richly furnished with this element
which in every other respect also bears off the palm of excellence. Dr. Arnold
was not likely to have written the following passage unless he had been
sensible of a high intellectual delight. There is an actual pleasure in
contemplating so perfect a management of so perfect an instrument as is
exhibited in Plato's language, even if the matter were as worthless as the
words of Italian music: whereas the sense is only less admirable in many
places than the language. Life, i. 387. The admiration which is accorded on
all hands to the Greek language is due to the exquisite perfection of its
symbolic element. It is not that Ao'yoy or prjpa or (pcovi) have any
intrinsic superiority over ratio or verbum or vox; that dvrjp or audpconos is
preferable to vir or homo: nor is it even that the music, sweet as it may
have been, reaches so effectually to the ear of the modern scholar as to
carry him captive and cause him to forget the more audible march of j
Ausonian rhythms. No; it all lies in the coyness of those I little words
whose meaning is as strikingly telling as it is impalpably subtle. It is
those airy nothings which scholars |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 243 have
been chasing all these centuries ever since the revival of letters, every now
and then fancying they had seized them, till they were roused from their
sweet delusion by the laughter of their fellow-idlers. The exact distinction
between firj and ov, the precise meaning of av and apa and 8r) must forsooth
be defined and settled; and it is very possible that we have not yet seen the
last of these dreamy lucubrations. These things will be settled when the
truant schoolboy has bound the rainbow to a tree. 249. There are still
scholars who seek to render a firm reason for the Greek article m every place
in which it occurs. But can they do so for their own language? Can they say,
for example, what is the value of the definite article which occurs three
times in the following distich? And to watch as the little bird watches When
the falcon is in the air. Where is the man who can handle language so
skilfully as to describe and define the value of these articles? He may say
they are equivalent to so and so in Greek or in French, but he cannot render
an account of what that value is. And yet this word was once a demonstrative
pronoun, and it is time and use that has filed it down to this airy tenuity
and delicate fineness. The sense would be affected by the absence of these
little words, and yet it cannot be said that they are necessary to the sense.
They seem to be at once nothing and something. The gold is beaten out to an
infinitesimal thinness. Indeed, it is with language as with glory in
Shakspeare's description: Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never
ceaseth to enlarge it selfe, Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught. I
Henry VI, i. 2. 133. 250. It is painful to think how much good enthusiasm R 2
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244 v - 0F PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 245 it is a
passage borrowed from an Examination Paper. The symbolics are printed in
thick type. 'EyW U€V OVV €CTT6 Ji€V dl (TTTOvScil TJCTaV OV1TOT6 kTTav6pU]V
T]uds |JL«v olitTeipajv, (3aai\£a Se Kal tovs crtiv airru /xaKCipifav,
8ta.66ajjj.evos avrwv ccrqv uev x^P av Kai oXav exoiev, "S 8« dcpdova ra
kmTTjdeia, chtovs 8« Oepcnrovras, ocra 8e KT-qvrj, xP vo ° v 8c, eoOfJTa 8e.
Td 8' at) twv (TTpaTiojTU)v cttotc lv6vp.oip.rju on tuv u«v d-yaOcuv irdvTCOv
ouSevos "rjuiv [X6T6LT], €i p.!] Trpia.ijj.e9a, otov 8' d/vrjau/xeda
rfdeiv on 6Ai"yovs exoi'Tas, dWcos 8c ttcos TropifaoOai to kTTiTijdeia
r\ u/vovpevovs optcovs -f^Sif] /carexovras "fjuds* tovt' ovv
\oyi£6p.evos cviotc Tas C7ro^Sds (xdAAov £(f>o&ovpLT]v r\ vvv tov
iroKep-ov. 'Ettcl utvroi tKetvoi cA-vcrav rds (77roi/5ds Kekvadai uol 5o/«f
Kal fj tKetvwv t//3/>ts Kal tj ■fjU€T€pa viToipia. — Xenophon, Anabasis, iii. I, § 19. The symbolics in Latin
are strikingly different from those in Greek. They differ as the flowers of
the florist differ from those of nature. It is manifest to the eye that the
symbolics in Greek have grown spontaneously, while their Latin analogues have
a got-up and cultivated look. The modifying words especially, those which are
sometimes roughly comprised under the term particles, look very much like
scholastic products. A long period of Greek education preceded the Augustan
age of the Latin language, and the symbolic part could not help getting an
educated development, when the youth of successive generations had been dailv
translating their bits of Greek into the vernacular Latin. 252. Although the
symbolics in Latin are very effective when understood, yet it must be allowed
that they are very hard to understand. This is one reason why a real Latin
scholar, one who can command this title among scholars, is such a very rare
personage. The symbolical element, which is to the mode of thought the
essential element in every phrase in which it is present, did not grow of
itself unconsciously and in the open air as in Greece, but it was the product
of artificial elaboration and studied adaptation. And |
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246 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS t it still sits on the Latin like a ceremonious garment. The
old native Latin, whose vitality and functionality was all but purely
flectional, springs out of its Greek disguise every now and then, and shews
what it can do with its own natural armour. Look at the muscular
collectedness of such a sentence as beati mundo corde, and compare it in
respect of the total absence of symbolics, either with the Greek MaKapioi ol
KaOapol rfj Kapbiq, or with the English Blessed are the pure in heart. There
spoke out the native and pre-classic Latin, a truly ancient language, and one
in comparison with which we must call the Greek truly modern. For that rich
and free outflow of the symbolic which marks the Greek, is the badge and
characteristic of modernism in language. On the other hand, that independence
of symbolics, and that power of action by complete inflectional machinery, which
marks the Latin, is the true characteristic and best perfection of the
ancient or pre-symbolic era. Not that our monuments reach back absolutely to
a period when the symbolic element had yet to begin. Already in the Sanskrit,
the symbolic verb is, than which nothing can be more purely symbolic, is in
as full maturity as it is in our modern languages. The latter have made more
use of it, but the oldest languages of the Aryan race were already in
possession of it. We learn from Professor Max Muller that the Sanskrit root
is as, ' which, in all the Aryan languages, has supplied the material for the
auxiliary verb. Now, even in Sanskrit, it is true, this root as is completely
divested of its material character; it means to be, and nothing else. But
there is in Sanskrit a derivative of the root as, namely asu, and in this
asu, which means the vital breath, the original meaning of the root as has
been preserved, as, in order to give rise to such a noun as asu, must have
meant to breathe, then to live, then to exist. |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 247 and it
must have passed through all these stages before it could have been used as
the abstract auxiliary verb which we find not only in Sanskrit but in all
Aryan languages 1 .' 253. Although we cannot pursue our research so far up
into antiquity as to arrive at a station where inflections exist without
symbolic words, yet we have sufficient ground for treating flexion as an
ancient, and symbolism as a modern phenomenon. One reason is, that in the
foremost languages of the world, flexion is waning while symbolism is waxing.
Another consideration is this, that after the growth of the symbolic element,
the motive for flexion would no longer exist. We have every reason to
anticipate in the future of the world's history, that symbolic will continue
to develope, and that flexion will cease to grow. A widening divergence
separates them at their hither end. But if we could take a look into that far
distant antiquity in which they had their rise, we might perhaps find their
fountains near each other if not absolutely identified in one well-head. A
large part of the inflections are simply words which, having made some
progress towards symbolism, and having lost accordingly in specific gravity,
have been attracted by, and at length absorbed into, the denser substance of
presentive words. This would account for the great start which flexion had
over symbolic; and yet we should understand how a marked and prominent
symbolic word like is, charged with a singular amount of vitality, should
have found the opportunity to make and keep a place for itself even as early
as our highest attainable antiquity. 1 Lectures, ii. p. 349. |
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248 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 249 Yet 'tis
not to adorn and gild each part, That shews more cost than art. Jewels at
nose and lips but ill appear; Rather than all things wit, let none be there.
Several lights will not be seen, If there be nothing else between. Men doubt,
because they stand so thick f th' sky, If those be stars which paint the
galaxy. Abraham Cowley, Ode of TI7.'. (2) We have Flexion when a combination
of this kind gives any word a grammatical flexibility, a faculty for some
relative office, a parsing value. Thus the word am has an affinity and a
functional relativity to the First Person, because it is composed of two
parts, whereof a represents the verb, and m the first personal pronoun, like
me. We find this m again in Latin sum; we find it in the fuller form of mi in
Greek h/u and in Sanskrit asmi, I am. The Saxon lie (body) gets symbolised to
the sense of ' like,' and added tofolc (people) makes the adjective/0/W/V
(public, popular). A modified form of this adjectival termination, namely
-lice, makes adverbs, as sceortlice (shortly). Hence our present adverbs in
-ly. The union becomes closer in words oftener uttered, thus hwa (who) added
to lie (like) constitutes huyle, now which: siva (so) and lie constitute
sivile, which has become such. In these instances we see the steps of the
movement as it passes through symbolisation, attraction, combination, to
Flexion: the process is complete, the result is mature, and the effect is
past recall. But our language also furnishes instances in which this was
partly accomplished, and afterwards undone: and with a few examples of this,
which may be called ' arrested flexion,' we will close the chapter. In the early
period of our literature we see symbolics |
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250 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, growing on to their presentives and forming one word with
them. In the case of the pronouns with the verbs this was very conspicuous in
early English, as it was also in early German. The first personal pronoun /,
which was anciently Ic, is found coalescing both before and after its verb.
In the latter case the c is generally developed into ch. In the Canterbury
Tales, 14362 — Let be, quod he; it schal not be, so theech! Here iheech is
the coalition of thee ic, equivalent to the more frequent phrase, so mote I
thee; that is to say, ' So may I prosper' (A.S. J>eon, to flourish,
prosper). In the Owl and Nightingale (a.d. 1250) we find we?iestu for wenest
pu weenest thou, wultu wilt thou, shaltu shalt thou, etestu eatest thou. In
Bamford's Dialect of South Lancashire, there is cildto couldst thou? cudtono
couldst thou not? 255. And not only does the pronoun adhere to its verb when
it stands as subject to the verb. In the following westcountry sentence the
Object-pronoun adheres: ' Telln, what a payth out, I'll payn agan' — Tell
him, what he pays out, I will pay him again. Here the n represents the old
accusative pronoun hine, which has been absorbed into the verb. Two symbolics
would run together like two drops of water on a pane of glass. The verb shall
is often found making one word with be down as late as the seventeenth
century. It is the rule in the Bible of 161 1. Thus, Isaiah xl. 4: — Euery
valley shalbe exalted, and euery mountaine and hill shalbe made low. In King
Lear, iv. 6, where Edgar assumes the character of a rustic, he says chill for
/ will, and chud for / ivould. Here we have to understand that the first
pronoun was pronounced as Ich, so that chill is just as natural a coalition |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 2$\ of ich
will as nill is of ne will. In the following lines cham is for ' ich am,' I
am. |
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252 V. OF PRESENTIVE AND
SYMBOLIC WORDS, an adverb ywis much used in Early English, especially in
poetry, as in Robert of Gloucester (above, 63). This word represented Saxon
gewis certain, plain, sure: it got used adverbially, as it now is in German
gercif, and thus we find it in Spenser: A right good knyght, and trew of word
ywis. Faery Queene, ii. 1.19. But it somehow came to be mentally analyzed
into a pronoun and a verb, and we often find it written and printed in that
aspect, as / wis. 290. This furnishes us with a strong illustration of the
existence of that counter- force which restrains the tendency to symphytic
coalition. 257. In fact the growth of symbolic words and the growth of
inflections are naturally antagonistic to, and almost mutually exclusive of,
each other. They are both made of the same material, but they result from
opposite states of the aggregate mind. If the attention of the community is
fully awake to its language and takes an interest in it, no word can lose its
independence. If language is used unreflectingly, the lighter words will
either coalesce among themselves or get absorbed by those of greater weight.
Thus even Greek, our brightest ancient example of symbolism, produced
conglomerations in its obscure and neglected period, as Siamboul, the modern
name of Constantinople, which is a conglomerate of w rrjv noXiv. So also
Stanchio or Stanko, a conglomerate of es rrjv Ka), is the modern name for the
island anciently known as Cos or Coos. For the passage of words into the
symphytic condition, a certain neglect and obscurity is necessary; while the
requisite condition for the formation of a rich assortment of symbolics is a
general and sustained habit of attention to the national language. |
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AND OF INFLECTIONS. 253
Postscript (1878). If there are any expressions in this chapter which seem to
assert that Symphytism gives a complete and exhaustive account of Flexion, it
is more than was intended. There are indeed philologers who favour the
opinion that if a thorough analysis were possible, all inflections would be
found to have been the product of combination. Home Tooke was, I believe, the
first to throw out this surmise: — 'I think I have good reasons to believe
that all terminations may likewise be traced to their respective origins; and
that . . . they were . . . but separate words by length of time corrupted and
coalescing with the words of which they are now considered as the
terminations.' Of late years the subject has been a good deal discussed, and
the prevailing opinion seems to be that there is a flexional differentiation
which cannot be attributed to Symphytism, but rather to what the Germans call
Ableitung, Derival. I would point to the forms in 316 — 318 as probable
instances of Derival rather than of Combination. |
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CHAPTER VI. THE VERBAL GROUP.
258. The verb is distinguished from all other forms of speech by very marked
characteristics and a very peculiar organization. It has surrounded itself
with an assortment of subordinate means of expression, such as are found in
attendance on no other part of speech. The power of combining with itself the
ideas of Person, Time, besides all the various contingencies which we
comprise under the term Mood, is a power possessed by the verb alone. It
makes no difference whether these accessory ideas are added to the verb by
means of inflections or of symbolic words. The important fact is this, — that
under the one form or the other, the verb has such means of expression at its
service in every highly organized language. The cause wherefore the verb is
thus richly attended with its satellites becomes very plain when we consider
what a verb is. A verb is a word whereby the chief action of the mind finds
expression. The chief action of the mind is judgment; that is to say, the
assertion or the denial of a proposition. This is explicitly done by means of
the verb. Out of this function of the verb, and the exigencies of that
function, have arisen the peculiar honours and prerogatives of the verb. This
part of speech has, by a natural |
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WHAT A VERB IS. 2$$ operation,
drawn around it those aids which were necessary to it for the discharge of
its function as the exponent of the mental act of judgment. 259. It will be
well to distinguish the essence of the verb from that which is but a result
of its essential characterThe power of expressing Time by those variations
which we call Tense (after an old form of the French word for time), has attracted
notice as the most salient feature about the verb. Aristotle defined a verb
as a word that included the expression of Time. The established German word
for a verb is QtiUwoTt, that is to say, Time-word. Others have thought that
the power of expressing Action is the real and true characteristic of the
verb. Ewald, in his Hebrew Grammar, calls the verb accordingly $(\ttstrcrt,
that is to say, Deed-word. But in these expressions the essential is obscured
by that which is more conspicuous. Madvig, in his Latin Grammar, seems to put
it in the right light. He designates the verb as Udsagnsord, that is
Outsayingsword; because it ' udsiger om en Person eller Ting en Tilstand
eller en Virksomhed,' outsays, pronounces, assert?, delivers, about a person
or thing a condition or an action. // is the instrument by which the mind
expresses its judgments, or (in modern parlance) makes its deliverances. 260.
To know a verb from a noun is perhaps the most elementary step in the
elements of grammar. Assuming that the reader has thoroughly mastered this
distinction, which is very real and necessary to be known, we proceed to a
statement which may at first sight appear to contradict it. The verb and the
noun spring from one root. It often happens that distinctions which are very
real and useful for a certain purpose and in a certain view, are found to
disappear or to lose their importance on a 'wider or deeper investigation.
Grammatical distinctions will often vanish in |
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2j6 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP.
philology. Philologically speaking, the presentive verb is only a noun raised
to a verbal power. As a ready illustration of this, we may easily form an
alphabetical list of words which are nouns if they have a or an, and verbs if
they have to prefixed: — ape, bat, cap, dart, eye, fight, garden, house, ink,
knight, land, man, number, order, pair, question, range, sail, time, usher,
vaunt, wing, yell. As soon as you put to any one of these the sign of a noun
or of a verb, a great difference ensues — a difference hardly less than that
between the gunpowder to which you have put the match and that over which you
have snapped the pouch's mouth. Little by little, external marks of
distinction gather around that word which the mind has promoted to the
foremost rank. Pronunciation first, and orthography at a slower distance,
seek gradually to give a form to that . which a flash of thought has
instantaneously created. Pronunciation takes advantage of its few
opportunities, while orthography contends with its many obstacles. We have a
distinction in pronunciation between a house and to house, between a present
and to present, a record and to record, between a use and to use. But these
distinctions of sound are as yet unwritten, and they may hereafter be lost.
It is only known to us through poetic rhythm that the substantive of to
manure was once called manure: — The smoking manure and o'erspreads it all.
William Cowper, The Garden. In other cases orthography has added its mark of
distinction also. We distinguish both by sound and writing an advice from to
advise, a gap from to gape, and a prophecy from to prophesy. So also a device
and to devise, life and live, strife and strive, breath and breathe. This is
perhape as much as need here be said to account for the wide separation now
existing between nouns and |
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WHAT A VERB IS. 257 verbs,
though they were originally one. The difference of condition that now severs
them as by a gulf is the accumulated result of the age-long continuation of
that process whose beginnings are here indicated. We have spoken of the verb
as a transformed noun, because this is the most frequent occurrence. But any
word, whether pronoun, or interjection, or whatever it may be, can be raised
to this power. The mere act of predication, which is the most central and
dominant of all the acts in which language is exercised, is sufficient to
transform any word whatever, and constitute it a Verb. 261. By reason of its
central position, and by its continual and unsuspended action, the verb has a
greater tenacity of form than any other part of speech. Hence it is that the
most remarkable antiquities of the English language are to be found in the
verb. It is in the verb that we find the Saxon forms best preserved, and that
we find the most conspicuous tokens of the relationship of our language to
the German and Dutch and Danish and Icelandic. In fact, it would be hardly
too much to say, that a description of the elder verbs of any of the Gothic
languages would, with slight alterations, pass for a description of the elder
verbs of any one of the others. The verbs which we shall notice first, and
which are known as the Strong verbs, have preserved tense-forms which are
among the boldest features of the English language, which are among its most
striking features of similitude with other Gothic tongues, and which at the
same time are among the most peculiar characteristics of the Gothic family in
its comparison with other families of speech. This coincidence of internal harmony
with external contrast, knits together the Gothic family in a compact and
separate unity, and seems to indicate that it must have remained undivided
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258 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP.
undispersed for a long period after its separation from the other members of
the Indo-European stock. > 262. But when from the time-forms we proceed to
consider the person-forms, then English falls away. These forms appear to
have been originally the six personal pronouns, which were suffixed to the
verb. They constitute one of the most permanent features of the Aryan or
Indo-Germanic languages, from Sanskrit downwards. Thus, the root da meaning
to give, the six persons are thus exhibited by Curtius in the way of a
scientific restoration: dd-ma give-I, dd-iwa give-thqu, dd-ta give-he,
dd-ma-tvi give-we, dd-tva-tvi give-you, dd-anti give-they. And he asserts
strongly that these forms are an indelible feature of all Indo-German tongues
1 . The English has gone further than any of its cognates in dropping these
personal inflections. The German says, Ich glaube, du glaubesl, er glaubi; wir
glauben, ihr glaube/, sie glauben. The Englishman says, / believe, thou
believes/, he believes; we believe, you believe, they believe. And as thou
believest is but rarely used, much more rarely than du glaubesl, and perhaps
more rarely even than ihr glaubel, we have only the -s of the third singular
he believes as the one personal inflection left in ordinary use among us.
Particularly is it to be observed that we have lost the n of the plural
present, which is preserved in the German form glauben. We know from the
Latin sunt, amant, moncnt, regunt, audiunt, and from other sources, that nt
was anciently a very wide-spread termination for the plural verb. This is
boldly displayed in the Mcesogothic verb, as may be seen |
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PERSON FORMS. 259 in the
following example of the present indicative of galaubjan, to believe: — ist.
2nd. 3rd. Singular galaubja galaubeis galaubaith Plural galaubjam galaubeith
galaubjand 263. Here we have nd in the third person plural. In the Old High
German it was as in Latin kt. The Germans have dropped the dental t and have
kept the liquid n. We dropped the n, or rather we merged it in a thicker
vowel before, and a thicker consonant after. The plural termination -acS of
the Saxon present indicative is the analogue of the Gothic termination -and.
In the same manner an n has been absorbed in the English words tooth, goose,
mouth, five, soft, which are in German 3^, ©alio, 2)htnb, fiinf, fanft: also
in sooth, which is in Danish sand. The following is the present indicative of
the Saxon verb gelyfan, to believe: — |
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26o VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. English.
It is characteristic of transition and the beginnings of a new era, that
forms hitherto neglected have a new chance of recognition. And smale foweles
maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open lye, So priketh hem nature
in hir corages — Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrymages. The same thing
may be seen in the quotation from Gower, above, 197. This -n was retained as
one of the recognised archaisms available only for poetic diction, and it
long continued in the heroic or mock-heroic style, as we see in the
following, from the eighteenth century. In every village mark'd with little
spire, Embower'd in trees, and hardly known to fame, There dwells, in lowly
shed and mean attire, A matron old, whom we Schoolmistress name, Who boasts
unruly brats with birch to tame; They grieven sore, in piteous durance pent,
Aw'd by the power of this relentless dame, And oft times, on vagaries idly
bent, For unkempt hair, or task unconn'd, are sorely shent. William Shenstone
(i 714-1 763), The Schoolmistress. 265. In the ordinary paths of the
language, however, the personal inflections were reduced nearly to their
present simplicity before the Elizabethan era. The tenacity of which we spoke
displays itself most conspicuously in the tense-forms; that is to say, the
form? used for expressing varieties of time. The boldest feature which is
found among the verbs of our family, is the formation of the preterite by an
internal vowel-change, without any external addition. The regulating law of
this vowel-change is called Ablaut, and has been explained above, 123. This
character supplies a basis for the division of the verbs into three classes,
— the Strong, the Mixed, and the Weak. |
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TENSE FORMS. |
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263 |
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264 |
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1. STRONG VERBS — REMARKS. 265
beuk. Allan Ramsay, Gentle Shepherd, act ii. sc. 1. bowln. A relic of a
forcible word in Saxon poetry, gebolgen, swollen, generally with anger. It is
found in Surrey's Translation of the Second Book of the Aeneid, and there it
means physically swollen: — Distained with bloody dust, whose feet were bowln
With the strait cords wherewith they haled him. bid, preterite. Paley, Evidences,
ii. 1. § 2. bate. Spenser, Faery Queene, ii. 5, 7: — Yet there the steel
stayd not, but inly bate Deepe in bis flesh, and opened wide a red floodgate.
bote. Eger and Grime, 992. DOWne. And now he is bowne to turn home againe.
Eger and Grime, 948. Here also must be put the expression w Homeward bound' —
though there is a great claim for the Icelandic buinn. 269. Carf. And carf
biforn his fader at the table Chaucer, Prologue, 100. COOSt. Maggie coost her
head fu' high, Looked asklent and unco skeigh, Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh.
Robert Burns, Duncan Gray. casten. Genesis xxxi. 36; Numbers xx. 3. chode. As
in the quotation from Surrey, above, 153. comen. Spenser, Faery Queene, iv.
1. 15, overcommen. And if thou be comen to fight with that knight. Eger and
Grime, 887. trope, cropcrt. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales 4257, 11918. crap.
Allan Ramsay, Gentle Shepherd, act v. sc. 1. drunken. Luke xvii. 8. fell,
participle. Which thou hast perpendicularly fell. King Lear, iv. 6. 54.
fOUghten. On the foughten field Michael and his Angels prevalent Encamping.
Paradise Lost, vi. 4 10. |
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266 , VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. 270.
0;lot», Poem of Genesis and Exodus, 76. Shelley has ' glode.' gnew. In
Tyndale we find gnew as the preterite of gnaw. Wherevpon for very payne &
tediousnesse he laye downe to slepe, for to put ye comaundement which so gnew
& freated his coscience, out of minde; as ye nature of all weked is, whe
they haue sinned a good, to seke al meanes with riot, reuel & pastyme, to
driue ye remenbraunce of synne out of their thoughtes. — Prologe to Prophete
Jonas. gnawn. Shakspeare: ' begnawn with the bots/ Taming of the Shrew iii.
2. The Saxon form was gnagen. graven. Psalm vii. 1 6, elder version, ' He
hath graven and digged up a pit.' And often ' graven image ' in the Bible of
1611. holp, participle. Shakspeare, Richard II, v. 5. 62. hing. This form
occurs in one of the narratives of Dean Ramsay, who puts it into the mouth of
a Scotch judge of the last generation. It is quite common in Scotland to this
day. This verb made an early transit to the weak form, and was conjugated
thus — ha?ig, hanged, hanged. Properly speaking, this was a new and quite
different verb, and should have had the transitival use, while the strong
hing, hang, hung, kept the intransitive function. There are extant traces of
the observance of this principle. Thus, nobody says that his hat hanged on a
peg. But this early broke rule, and the young weak form hanged, stood for the
old strong preterite. Example: — But could not finde what they might do to
him: for all the people hanged vpon him when they heard him. — Luke xix. 48.
Geneva, 1560. 271. holden. Psalm lxiii. 9 (1539): and eleven times in the
Bible of 161 1. loden. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, 1581; ed.
Edward Arber, p. 19. lien. ' Though ye have lien among the pots/ Psalm
lxviii. 1 3 (1539). Shakspeare, King fohn, iv. 1. 50, where the first three
folios spell it lyen. |
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REMARKS ON CERTAIN STRONG FORMS.
26 J plet. Allan Ramsay, Gen/k Shepherd, act ii. sc. 4. I took delyte To pou
the rashes green, wi roots sae white; O' which, as weel as my young fancy
cou'd, For thee I plet the flow'ry belt and snood. rid. Spectator, Aug. 24,
171 1. I remember two young fellows who rid in the same squadron of a troop
of horse. This form is in present use in Somersetshire and Gloucestershire: —
He walked all the way there, Sir: but he rid home again. (Swanswick.) rose,
participle. And I was ta'en for him, and he for me; And thereupon these
errors are arose. Comedy of Errors, v. 1. 386. No civil broils have since his
death arose. John Dryden, Oliver Cromwell. see. This preterite is well known
as a provincialism. In Shakspeare's time it was heard high up in the world:
Lord Sandys says of the newly fashionable folk — L. San. They have all new
legs, and lame ones; one would take it, That neuer see 'em pace before, Henry
VIII, i. 3. 12. 272. sod. Genesis xxv. 29. shook. The preterite form was much
adopted for the participle from the seventeenth to the early part of the
present century. Thus Milton, Paradise Lost, vi. 219: — All Heaven Resounded,
and had Earth been then, all Earth Had to her Center shook. And Samuel Taylor
Coleridge: — For oh! big gall-drops, shook from Folly's wing, Have blackened
the fair promise of my spring. shotten. Shakspeare, Henry V, iii. 5. 14. In
that nooke-shotten He of Albion. |
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268 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. shof.
In a Romance of about 1450 we have shof as a preterite, where we now use the
weak preterite shoved'. — And he shof theron so sore that he bar hym from his
horse to the grounde. — Merlyn, p. 265. sung, participle of singe. Gentle
Shepherd, act ii. sc. 1. slang. 1 Samuel xvii. 49. spoke, participle. In
Shakspeare, King John, iv. 1. 51; King Richard II, i. 1. 77. strake. Acts xxvii.
17, ' strake saile.' stricken. This old participle, meaning ' gone,' '
advanced,' is now quite extinct. We read it in Luke i. 7, ' well stricken in
years '; and we retain it in the compound povertystricken, which means ' far
gone in poverty,' extremely poor. In Sidney's Arcadia (ed. 1599), p. 5, we
read, ' He being already well striken in years.' 273. took. See what has been
said under shook. Too divine to be mistook. — Milton, Arcades. waxen. Joshua
xvii. 13; Jeremiah v. 27, 28: — They are become great and waxen rich. They
are waxen fat, they shine. foortf). Mediaeval participle. See below, 283.
ywroken. Spenser, Colin Clouts come home againe, 921: — Through judgement of
the gods to been ywroken. wrat. This preterite form occurs in Ralegh's
correspondence under date May 29, 1586: — And the sider which I wrat to you
for. — Letter xv, ed. Edwards. wrote, participle. I have wrote to you three
or four times. — Spectator, No. 344 (1712). Stanzas wrote in a Country
Church-Yard: — such is the heading of a manuscript poem, on two sheets of
paper about eight inches long and six wide, which was sold by auction last
week for £230. — The Guardian, June 2, 1875. |
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269 |
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275. This list does not include
the strong verbs that have altogether died out since Saxon times. It only
contains those ancient strong verbs which still exist in the language under
weak forms. The list is of practical utility for reference in reading Chaucer
or the Elizabethan writers. Many a strong form, now unfamiliar to us, lingers
in their pages. The verb mete, to measure, is one that we do not often use at
all, for the whole root is, as Webster says, obsolescent. In our Bible it has
the weak conjugation, as — Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his
hand? and meted out heauen with the spanne, and comprehended the dust of the
earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hilles in a
balance? — Isaiah xl. 12. 1 But Chapman has the strong preterite: — Then
Hector, Priam's martial son, stepp'd forth, and met the ground. Iliad iii.
327. Fragmentary relics of an old strong conjugation are sometimes preserved,
though the verb itself has gone off into the weak or mixed form. Thus the
verb to lose is now declined weak, lose, lost, lost. But in Saxon it was
strong, leose, leas, lore?i: and from this ancient conjugation we have
retained the participle lorn, forlorn: — |
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STRONG BECOME WEAK. 27 1 My only
strength and stay: forlorn of thee, Whither shall I betake me, where subsist?
Paradise Lost, x. 921. 276. Some strong forms long extinct in the old country
live on in America. The preterite dove of the verb dive figures not only in
the poetry of Longfellow, but also in American prose: — I know not why, but
the whole herd [of walruses] seemed suddenly to take alarm, and all dove down
with a tremendous splash almost at the same instant. — Dr. Hayes, Open Polar
Sea, ch. xxxvi. To set against this gradual defection of strong verbs towards
the prevalent form, we rarely find even a slight example of movement in the
opposite direction. New verbs are hardly ever added to the ranks of the
strong; whatever verb is invented or borrowed is naturally conjugated after
the prevalent pattern. The few exceptions to this rule are all the more
marked on account of their rarity; such as the Scottish formula of verdict
Not proven. Here we have a French verb which has taken the form of a strong
Gothic participle. Another of this sort is the preterite pled of the French
verb to plead, now called an Americanism, but found in Spenser: — And with
him, to make part against her, came Many grave persons that against her pled.
First was a sage old Syre, that had to name The Kingdomes Care, with a white
silver hed, That many high regards and reasons gainst her red. Faery Qjieene,
v. 9, 43. The Substantive Verb, am, was, been. 277. But the member of this
class which above all others demands our attention is the substantive verb to
be: or rather, the fragments of three ancient verbs (in Sanskrit as. |
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272 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. bhu,
vas) which join to fill the place of the substantive verb. The 'substantive
verb' is so called, not from any connection with the part of speech called a
substantive; but for a distinct reason. It is the verb which expresses least
of all verbs; for it expresses nothing but to have existence. Every other
verb implies existence besides that particular thing which it asserts: as if
I say I think, I imply that I am in existence, or else I could neither think
nor do anything else. The verb substantive, then, is the verb which, unlike
all other verbs, confines itself to the assertion of existence, which in all
other verbs is contained by implication. The Greek word for existence or
being was vnocrrao-is, which was done into Latin by the word substantia, and
by this avenue did the verb which predicates nothing but existence come to be
named the Substantive verb. 278. It seems so natural and easy to say that a
thing is' or was or has been, that we might almost incline to fancy the
substantive verb to be the oldest and most primitive of verbs. But there is
more reason for thinking contrariwise, that it was a mature and comparatively
late product of the human mind. The French word e'ie' for been is not an old
word: we know its history. It is derived from stare, the Latin word for
standing, as is witnessed by siato, the Italian participle of the substantive
verb. There are other cases in which the substantive verb is of no very
obscure origin. We seem to be able to trace our word be, for example, by the
help of the Latin/«z' and the Greek 4>vo>, to the concrete sense of
growing. Or, the stock of our be may be no other than that familiar word for
building and dwelling which in Scotland is to big, in Icelandic is bua, and
which appears in the second member of so many of our Danish town-names in the
form of by, as Rugby, Whitby. In Icelandic ' biia bui sinu.' is to ' big
ane's ain Digging,' i. e. to have one's own |
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THE SUBSTANTIVE VERB. 273
homestead 1 . The history of our preterite was seems to point in a like direction.
Traces seem to be preserved in the Mcesogothic wisan, to abide, sojourn;
compared with the form wizon, to live. In these cases, the concrete sense of
growing or standing or building or dwelling, has been as it were washed or
worn out of the verb, and nothing left but the pale underlying texture of
being. 279. I one day expressed to an intimate friend my regret that the
collectors of vocabularies among savage tribes did not tell us something
about the verb l to be,' and especially I instanced the admirable
word-collections of Mr. Wallace. To this conversation I owe the pleasure of
being able to quote Mr. Wallace's own observations on this subject in his
reply to my friend's query. He says: — As to such words as ' to be,' it is
impossible to get them in any savage language till you know how to converse
in it, or have some intelligent interpreter who can do so. In most of the
languages such extremely general words do not exist, and the attempt to get
them through an ordinary interpreter would inevitably lead to error. . . .
Even in such a comparatively high language as the Malay, it is difficult to
express 'to be ' in any of our senses, as the words used would express a
number of other things as well, and only serve for ' to be ' by a roundabout
process. From Western Australia, where the natives are forming an
intermediate speech for communication with our people, and are converting
morsels of English to their daily use, we have the following apposite
illustrations: — ' The words get down have been chosen as a synonym for the
verb " to be," and the first question of a friendly native would be
Mammon all right get down? meaning " Is father quite well? " for,
strange to say, Mamman is the native word for father, whilst N-angan or Oongan
stands for mother.' And a little further on, after mentioning the native
fondness for grease, which they prefer to soap as an abstergent: — ' A
neighbour 1 Icelandic-English Dictionary, Cleasby and Vigfusson, v. Bua. T |
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274 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. of
ours told me of two natives who presented themselves at her door to beg for
grease, and who accounted for the dried-up condition of their legs, to which
they ruefully pointed, by saying "in jail no grease get down;" the
poor fellows having just been liberated from prison, where the authorities
had failed to recognise unguents as a substitute for soap V 280. Ewald seems
to think that the Hebrew substantive verb iTil was developed from an ancient
root meaning ' to make, prepare/ In Sanskrit, as the substantive verb is said
to have been developed from a root signifying to breathe, and accordingly
this would be the original sense of the Greek eo-n, the Latin est, the German
ift, and our is. Here we catch a glimpse of the pedigree of our modern
languages, and of the processes by which the most familiar instruments of
speech have been prepared for their present use. As the presentive noun fades
or ripens into the symbol pronoun; as the pronoun passes into the still more
subtle conjunction, — so also do verbs graduate from concrete to abstract,
form particular to general, from such a particular sense as stand or grow or
dwell or breathe, to the large and comprehensive sense of being. Nor does the
sublimation stop here. The Symbol Verb. 281. It is not when this verb
expresses simple existence that it has reached its highest state of
refinement. When Coleridge said ' God has all the power that is/ he made this
verb a predicate of existence. In this case the verb to be has still a
concrete function, and is a presentive word: but in its state of highest
abstraction it is equally in place in 1 An Australian Parsonage; or, the
Settler and the Savage in Western Australia. By Mrs. Edward Millett. London:
Edward Stanford, 1872. |
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THE SYMBOL VERB, 2 75 every
proposition whatever, and is the purest of symbols. We can express ' John
runs ' by c John is running '; and every proposition is capable of being
rendered into this form. The verb substantive here exhibits the highest
possible form of verbal abstraction, and has become a pure symbol. It is the
mere instrument of predication, and conveys by itself no idea whatever. It is
the most symbolic of all the symbolic verbs, and it is symbolised to the
utmost that is possible. For it contains only that which every verb must
contain in order to be a verb at all, viz. the mental act of judgment. Forms
of the Substantive- and Symbol-Verb. Indicative present am, art, is: are. ,,
past was, wast, was: were. Infinitive, imperative, and \ , subjunctive
present / Subjunctive past were, wert, were: were. Participle present being.
„ past been. 282. This verb has been more tenacious of its personal forms
than our other verbs, and the remarks in the beginning of this chapter about
the disuse of the personal forms are less applicable here. Until the
fifteenth or sixteenth centuries there was a larger variety of these forms,
among which may be specified the N-forms of the third person plural, am and
weren. The following is from one of the versified precepts of good manners
which are so frequent in the literature of the fifteenth century. Thus God
pat is begynnere & former of alle thyng, In nomber', weyght, & mesure
alle bis world wrought he; And mesure he taughte us in alle his wise werkis,
Ensample by the extremitees pat vicious arn euer. That is to say, Extremes
are always wrong. T 2 |
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21 6 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. 283.
From the Strong verbs there sprang yet another symbol- verb which is now
almost extinct. It is the verb worth, to be or become. In Saxon it was thus
conjugated: weorSan, wear^, gewordex. The whole verb is still in full force
in German: irerben, rcarb, geirorben. But with us it was already archaic in
Chaucer's time, and it is but rarely found in his writings. The form in which
it is best known is the imperative or subjunctive - imperative: as, Wo worth
the day; that is, ' Wo be to the day'; as Ezekiel xxx. 2, and in The Lady of
the Lake, — Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day, That cost thy life, my
gallant grey. We find the infinitive worthe in the Tale of Gamelyn: — Cursed
mot he worthe bothe fleisch and blood, That ever do priour or abbot ony good!
In the following quotation from Pierce the Ploughma?is Crede, 744, we have
the infinitive twice, and once with the ancient termination: — Now mot ich
soutere his sone ' setten to schole And ich a beggers brol ■ on J)e booke lerne, And wor|> to a writere * & wij) a lorde dwell, Ojjer falsly
to a frere ■ J>e fend for to seruen! So of J>at beggers brol ■ a bychop schal worsen, — Translation. — Now each cobbler may set his son to
school, and every beggar's brat may learn on the book and become a writer and
dwell with a lord; or iniquitously become a friar, the fiend to serve! So of
that beggars brat, a bishop shall be made, ifc. In Shakspeare we find this
verb played off against the substantive worth: 'Her worth worth yours'; that
is, in Latin, 'Ejus meritum fiat vestrum.' Measure for Measure, v. i. 495.
284. Regarded as a product of human speech, the symbol-verb is very remarkable.
The production of this particular word is to the verb-system what the leader
is |
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ORIGIN OF STRONG FORMS. 2JJ to a
tree. Cut it off, and the tree will try to produce another leader. If we
could imagine the whole elaborate system of verbs to be utterly abolished
from memory and consigned to blank oblivion, insomuch that there remained no
materials for speech but nouns, pronouns, and the rest, the verb would yet
grow again, as surely as a tree when it is cut down (unless it die) will
sprout again. The verb would form itself again, and it would repeat its
ancient career, and the topmost product of that career would be as before,
the symbol-verb to be. Proof enough of this will be seen in the fact that
many roots have in our stock of languages made a run for this position; and
in the further fact that languages whose development has been wide of ours,
as the Hebrew, have culminated in the selfsame result — the substantive-verb
and out of it the symbol-verb. In the third section of the Syntax we shall
have to consider this symbolverb in regard to the effects which it has
wrought in the structure of language. So much for the strong verbs and the
symbol-verbs which they have produced. 285. We cannot close this section
without a few words of comment. The venerable sire of Gothic philology, Jacob
Grimm, has said of the strong preterites that they constitute one of the
chief beauties of our family of languages, ' eine Haupt-schonheit unsrer
Sprachen.' The question naturally arises, How did so very singular a
contrivance come into existence? The question is put here, not so much for
the certainty of the answer that can be given, as for the purpose of directing
the student to enquiries which will supply a definite aim to his
investigations. It was surmised by Grimm that the origin of this internal and
vocalic change is to be sought in reduplication. He particularly instances
the preterite high/, which in the ordinary Saxon |
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278 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. form
was het, but which appears also in the nobler form of heht, as on the Alfred
Jewel; Alfred mec heht gewyrcean, Alfred me ordered to make. When in
Mcesogothic the same preterite appears as haihait, we see that a
reduplication of the root had by the action of phonetic laws simplified
itself first into heht and then into het. The German ging, preterite of the
verb go, indicates a reduplicate form which was lost in English. But next to
heht, there is no example so striking as that of the verb to do, which is
strong by its participle done, and yet in its preterite has the appearance of
a weak form. It is redeemed from the appearance of inconsistency by supposing
dyde, the Saxon form of did, to be a reduplication of the root do, and so of
a piece with the strong preterites, only less altered. That reduplication has
been resorted to in the growth of verbs as a figure of in-. tensity for the
expression of past time and acts really done, we know as a matter of fact
from comparison not only of Gothic, but likewise of Latin and Greek verbs.
Latin instances are didici, poposci, tetigi, pepuli. In Greek the most
conspicuous instrument for the expression of past time is reduplication:
reTV(f)a, Tervix/xai; 7T€7roirjKa, 7re7roir//xai; TreVpa^a, 7T€7rpayjJLai )
rere'XeKa, TereXeafxai. 286. In the antiquities of our race a preterite
formed by reduplication is manifest, and in the fourth century this had still
an energizing vitality, in the dialect of Ulphilas. But in the earliest
traces of our insular language this appears only as the relics of an old
formation peeping out of the new, while the new order of the verbal system is
determined simply by an internal vowel-change of the root of the verb. The
feature of this vocalic alteration, which we call by the German name of
Ablaut, has already been described, 124. This new principle of order may
possibly have sprung out of the old reduplicate forms by ordinary phonetic
processes, but |
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2. MIXED VERBS. 279 it had a
root of its own independently of them, it established itself upon the ruins
of reduplication, and within its overgrowth it has enclosed enough of the old
unreduced stuff to guide the analytic and reconstructive eye of modern
Philology. 2. Mixed Verbs. 287. The second class of verbs are those which may
conveniently be called Mixed, because they unite in themselves the characters
of the first and third classes. Some critics would deny them the distinction
of being a class at all. There are (say they) but two principles at work in
the verb-flexions; namely, internal change and external addition. And this is
the fact. But then, the variety of relations in which two systems are ranged
may easily give rise to a third series of conditions. When the sun peers
through the foliage of an aged oak, it produces on the ground those oval spots
of dubious light which the poet has called a mottled shade. Each oval has its
own outline, and its own particular degree of luminousness; but where two of
them overlap each other a third condition of light is induced. Such an
overlapping is this sample of mixed verbs, a compromise between the strong
and the weak. 288. In the formation of the preterite, they suffer both
internal vowel-change, and also external addition. They form the participle
in t or d. Such are the following: — |
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28o |
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2. MIXED VERBS. 28 1 Remarks on
the Forms signed with an Asterisk. 289. fet. Baker's Northamptonshire
Glossary, v. Fet. Fought, participle. It occurs in Congreve's Way of the
World, iv. 4, where Sir Wilfull Witwoud says to Millamant— I made bold to
see, to come and know if that how you were disposed to fetch a walk this
evening, if so be that I might not be troublesome, I would have fought a walk
with you. — Ed. Tonson, 1710. lat). Spenser, Faery Queene, iv. 8. 2. glat). Chaucer,
Prologue, 532. Ought is historically the preterite of owe. But it is now a
preterite only in form: it is a present in its ordinary usage as an
auxiliary. The present owe has not accompanied the preterite in its
transition to this moral and semi-symbolic use. When the old preterite had
deserted the service of the verb owe in its original sense, that verb
supplied itself with a new preterite of the modern type, oived. The
distinction between ought the old preterite, and owed the new preterite, is
now quite established, and no confusion happens. But the reader of our old
poets should observe that ought once did duty for both these senses. In the
following from Spenser, the modern usage would require owed'. — Now were they
liegmen to this Ladie free, And her knights service ought, to hold of her in
fee. The Faery Queene, iii. I. 44. refc. Spenser, Faery Queene, iv. 8. 29.
Spet. The Saxon form is spsetan, spaette; whereby we see that Shakspeare's
0»st is more genuine than the modern 1 to spit.' 290. Stood. That passing of
strong verbs over into the ranks of the weak, which was the subject of remark
in the last section, is often due to mere gregariousness, or the common human
proneness to follow with the greatest numbers. But here we may quote an
instance in which a like change belongs rather to an active than to a passive
movement. In the sixteenth century there sprang up the form ' understanded/
and this form associated itself in a |
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282 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. marked
manner with the contention of the time to have a Bible and Liturgy '
understanded of the people/ Thus a' weak form was temporarily substituted for
a mixed form, not by way of negligence, but by the emphasis of resolute
self-assertion. Wot, though it has been used as a present tense from remote
times, is really an ancient preterite of an old strong verb witan; and so far
resembles the case of ought, except that wot is of far higher antiquity. It
is in fact one of the ancient prseterito-prsesentia, of which mention will
presently be made. Wist is sometimes referred to a present / wis. See the
explanation above, 256. SKUtSt the participle is more rare: it occurs in the
phrase 1 had I wist,' which see below, chap. xi. sect. iii. 291. These
frontier verbs are a small class; and they do. not admit of addition to their
numbers any more than the strong verbs. They would seem to have been mostly
the growth of a limited period; that, namely, wherein the transition of habit
was taking place from the strong to the weak methods of conjugation. But,
insignificant as this class is in point of numbers, it contains within it a
small batch of verbs of very high importance. It contains all those verbs
which are commonly known as Auxiliaries. And these are little less than the
whole remainder of symbolic verbs, after the two already mentioned in the
previous section, which may be called the primary symbol verbs, namely, be
and worth. The very fact that so well-marked a group of words is contained
within this division of Mixed Verbs, offers a justification of the division.
These help-verbs are a very ancient group of so-called prseterito-praesentia,
that is to say, they are former preterites of strong verbs, which have taken
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REMARKS ON CERTAIN MIXED FORMS
283 cation, and from this point making a fresh start, have thrown out new
preterites of the weak type. This is the history of all in the subjoined
column, except the last. can could pEARF, tfjar pORFTE dare durst may might
mote irtoste, must shall should will would These verbs, it will be seen, are
destitute of participles; and this is merely because they have dropped off through
disuse. In like manner, and from the same cause, few of them have
infinitives. Indeed, none of them have infinitives of symbolic use. As
symbolics, it has been their function to serve the participles and
infinitives of other verbs, and to have none of their own. We can indeed say
' to will ' and 1 to dare '; but in neither instance would the sense or the
tone of the word be the same as when we say, 'it will rain,' or ' I dare
say.' 292. ]}earf, tfjar, fORFTE. This verb has been supplanted by such phrases
as it behoveth, it needs, there is ground/or, call for. Even in Chaucer, it
is used less as of the poet's own speech, than as the set words of a proverb
or old traditional saw: — And therfore this proverb is seyd ful soth, Him
thar nat weene wel that yuel doth. Canterbury Tales, 431 7. That is to say: —
' It is not for him that doeth evil, to indulge flattering expectations ';
or, ' He that doeth evil needn't fancy all right.' 293. May has long been
without an infinitive, but there was one as late as the sixteenth century, in
the form mowe. |
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284 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP, An
example may be seen above, 71; and in the Secret Instructions from Henry VII
respecting the young Queen of Naples: — And to knowe the specialties of the
title and value therof in every behalf as nere as they shall mowe. — National
Manuscripts, Part I, 20 Hen. VII. 294. Can originally meant ' to know/ and in
this pre sentive sense we meet with an infinitive which
appears as konne in the fourteenth, and as to con in the fifteenth century.
Thanne seyde Melibe, I shal nat konne answere vn to so manye reasons as ye
putten to me & shewen. — Chaucer, Tale of Melibeus. To mine well-beloved
son, I greet you well, and advise you to think once of the day of your
father's counsel to learn the law, for he said many times that whosoever
should dwell at Paston, should have need to con [i.e. know how to] defend
himself. — Paston Letters, Letter x. (a.d. 1444-5). The French equivalent for
this con would be savoir, and in fact the English auxiliary can, could, is
largely an imitation of the conduct of that French verb. In the following
quotation we see can in both senses, in the elder presentive and in the later
symbolic. That can I wel, what shold me lette? I can wel frenshe latyn
englissh and duche, I haue goon to scole at Oxenford; I haue also wyth olde
and auncyent doctours ben in the audyence and herde plees, and also haue
gyuen sentence; I am lycensyd in bothe Iawes: — what maner wrytyng that ony
man can deuyse I can rede it as perfyghtly as my name. — William Caxton,
Reynart (1481), ed. Arber, p. 62. 295. Some auxiliaries have become obsolete.
Such is mote the present, of which must is the preterite. It lingered till
recent times as a formula of wishing well or ill, and indeed an extant
example has been given above, at 210, note. Its place has now been taken by
may. In a ballad on the Battle of Flodden Field, a.d. 15 13, this benison is
bestowed on the Earl of Surrey: — In the myddyll warde was the Erie of
Surrey, Ever more blessyd mote thowe be; The ffadyr of witte, well call him
we may; The debite [deputy] most trusty of Englond was he. |
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AUXILIARIES. 285 296. Gan is
quite extinct: it was used as now we use did, and was probably extinguished by
the preference for the latter. This auxiliary must not be too closely
associated with the more familiar word began. The latter is a compound of
ga?i, but the sense of commencing is the property of the compound rather than
of the root. Of a wryght I wylle you telle That some tjme in thys land gan
dwelle.' The Wryght' s Chaste Wife (a.d. 1460). 297. Let in early times
signified the causation of some action. Thus it is said of William the
Conqueror by the vernacular historian that he ' let speer out ' all the
property of the country so narrowly that there was never a rood of land or a
cow or a pig that was not entered in his book — ' swa swytSe nearwelice he
hit lett ut aspyrian 1 .' This 'let' is the same word and yet a very
different thing from the light symbol now in use, as when one says to a
friend, ' Will you let your servant bring my horse?' To this levity of
symbolism it had already arrived in the Elizabethan era: — Let Gryll be
Gryll, and have his hoggish minde; But let us hence depart whilest wether
serves and winde. The Faery Queene, Bk. ii. e?id. 298. There are two verbs of
a character so peculiar that they are for distinction sake reserved to a
place at the end of this section of Mixed verbs. The first is the verb which,
though common to German and the other dialects, is yet in one sense peculiar
to English, namely as an auxiliary. Speaking generally, we share our
auxiliaries with the rest of the Gothic family, but there is one all our own.
It is do, did, done. The peculiarity of its form has been touched on at the
close of the former section, 285. As a symbolic verb it has been treated
above, 242: here 1 Two Saxon Chronicles Parallel, p. 218. |
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286 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. it
only remains to observe its twofold character (i) as an auxiliary, in which
use it has no participle, and (2) as a general substitute or representative
verb, in which it is complete in all its parts. In both characters it has
acquired its large place in our language through imitation of the
Frenchy^zr^. 299. The other is the verb get, got, got, which is a more
peculiarly English auxiliary, and is singular in this respect, that its
participle has an auxiliary function; and further, it is remarkable for that
which it expresses, as it gives to the English language a Middle Voice, or a
power of verbal expression which is neither active nor passive. Thus we say
to get acquitted, beaten, confused, dressed, elected, frightened, killed,
married, offended, qualified, respected, shaved, washed. This is an instance
of a mixed verb that has detached itself from the ranks of the strong verbs,
where we must continue to retain in its due place the elder conjugation —
get, gat, gotten. 300. The power of expression which our language enjoys by
means of the auxiliaries is commended to the student's attention. The
disproportionate study which men of learning have devoted to the inflected
languages, has prevented our own verbal system from receiving the
appreciation which is due to it. The following quotation from Southey may
tend to redress the balance: — I had spoken as it were abstractedly, and the
look which accompanied the words was rather cogitative than regardant. The
Bhow Begum laid down her snuff-box and replied, entering into the feeling as
well as echoing the words, ' It ought to be written in a book, — certainly it
ought.' They may talk as they will of the dead languages. Our auxiliary verbs
give us a power which the ancients, with all their varieties of mood and
inflections of tense, never could attain. 'It must be written in a book,'
said I, encouraged by her manner. The mood was the same, the tense was the
same; but the gradation of meaning was marked in a way which a Greek or Latin
grammarian might have envied as well as admired. — The Doctor, ch. vii. A. I.
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3. WEAK VERBS. |
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288 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. |
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289 |
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290 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP.
shaked. The very point I shaked my head at. — Richard Steele, Spectator,
March 5, I?" meaned. The sovereign meaned Charles, Duke of
Somerset. . . .The patriots meaned to make the king odious. — Horace Walpole,
Royal and Noble Authors, creeped. Perhaps some secret animosities, naturally
to be expected in that situation, had creeped in among the great men, and had
enabled the king to recover his authority. — David Hume, History of England,
ch. xvii. While we consider this to be the most recent of our verbal
inflections, it is of high antiquity nevertheless. It is common to all the
dialects of our family, and in the oldest monuments it is already
established. But whatever tokens of antiquity it may boast, the single fact
that it has produced no symbolic verb would seem to place it far in the rear
of the two pre-' vious classes. 1 4. Verb-making. 305. It has been shewn at
216, 260, that the English language can turn a noun or any other word into a
verb, and use it as a verb, without any alteration to the form of the word,
such as would be caused by the addition of a verbal formative. This does not
hinder, however, but that there always have been verbal formatives in the
language, and that the number and variety of these is from time to time
increased. By Verbal Formative is meant any addition to a word, whether
prefix or suffix, which stamps that word as a verb independently of a
context. Such is the suffix -en, by means of which, from the sub 1 The -ed of the weak
conjugation has been explained as a relic of the verb do, did; as if hoped
were a condensation of hope-did. Max Midler, Science of Language, 1861, p. 2
1 9. |
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4. VERB-MAKING. 29 1 stantives
height, haste, length, strength, are formed the verbs heighten, hasten,
lengthen, strengthen. From the adjectives bright, deep, fast, quick, short,
wide, tight, are formed the verbs brighten, deepen, fasten, quicken, shorten,
widen, tighten. Belonging to the same group, are — broaden, christen,
frighten, glisten, harden, lighten, madden, sicken, slacken. This verbal
formative N is of Saxon antiquity; but it is quite separate and distinct from
the Saxon infinitive form -ax. 306. Such again is the prefix be-, by means of
which, from the substantives head, friend, tide, are formed the verbs behead,
befrie?id, betide. This formative is still in operation, but is less active
than it formerly was. It enters into sixtysix different verbs in Shakspeare,
as appears in Mrs. Cowden Clarke's Complete Concordance. They are the
following: — bechance, become, befal, befit, befriend, beget, begin, begnaw,
begrime, beguile, behave, behead, behold, behove, behowl, belie, believe,
belong, belove (' more beloving than beloved ' Ant. and Cleop. i. 2), bemad,
bemele, bemoan, bemock, bemoil, bepaini, bequeath, beraitle, bereave,
berhyme, beseech, beseek, beseem, beset, beshrew, besiege, beslubber,
besmear, besmirch, besorl, besot, bespeak, bespice, bestain, bestead,
bestill, bestir, bestow, bestraught, bestrew, bestride, betake, beieem,
bethink, bethump, betide, betoke?i, betoss, betray, betrim, betroth, bewail,
beweep, bewet, bewitch, bewray. 307. Such again is the prefix un-, by means
of which other words are made beside verbs, as the substantives and
adjectives unbeliever, unjust, unmeet', yet it is also a verbal formative
because it transforms other words into verbs which even without a context
cannot be regarded as being anything else than verbs. Examples: — unchurch,
wifrock, unlink, unlock, untie. 308. The above examples of verbal formatives
are all genuine natives: the next two are after French models. u 2 |
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292 VI. THE VERBAL GROUP. The
prefix en- is not only adopted with the French verbs in which it is embodied,
as encroach, enhance; but it also has been used by us to make new verbs, and
still is so used, as in the following line: — Encharnelled in their fatness,
men that smile, — Frederick W. H. Myers, St. John the Baptist. The suffix -fy
is taken from those French words which end in -fier, after Latin verbs ending
in -facer e. Examples: — beatify, beautify, codify, deify, dignify, dulcify,
edify, electrify, horrify, modify, mollify, mortify, nullify, qualify,
ratify, satisfy, scarify, stultify, unify. dulcify. He never condescended to
anything like direct flattery; but he felicitously hit upon the topic which
he knew would tickle the amour propre of those whom he wished to dulcify. —
Lord Campbell, Life of Lord Lyndhurst, 1869. 309. The Latin formative -ate is
from the participle passive of the first conjugation: as aestimatus, valued.
Examples: — abdicate, captivate, decimate, eradicate, estimate, exculpate,
expostulate, fabricate, indicate, invalidate, liquidate, mitigate, nominate,
operate, postulate, ruinate, venerate. . . . the city ruinated, the people captiuated.
— Jeremiah xxxix, Contents. 310. The above formatives are of great standing
in the language; but that which we have now to mention, the formative -ize,
is comparatively modern. It occurs in Shakspeare, as tyrannize in King fohn,
v. 7. 47; partialize, in King Richard II, i. 1. 120; monarchize, Id. iii. 2.
165, but was not in general use until the time of the living generation. This
is a formative which we have identified with the Greek verbs in -/fcur.
Examples: — advertize, anathematize, anatomize, cauterize, christianize,
deodorize, evangelize, fraternize, generalize, macadamize, monopolize,
patronize, philosophize, soliloquize, subsidize, symbolize, sympathize,
systematize, utilize. |
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-IZE OR -ISE. 293 These verbs
have been multiplied indefinitely in our day, partly in consequence of their
utility for scientific expression, and partly from the fact that about twenty
years ago it became a toy of University-men to make verbs in -ize about all
manner of things. A walk for the sake of bodily exercise having been called a
' constitutional/ the verb co?istitutio7ialize was soon formed thereupon. It
was then caught up in country homes, and young ladies who helped the parson
in any way were said to parochialize. A. H. Clough, when engaged on his
edition of Plutarch's Lives in English, used to report progress to his
correspondents by saying that he devoted so much of his time to
Pliitarchizing. 311. These verbs are now more commonly written with -ise than
with -ize. That is to say, we are met here again, as in so many other
passages of our language, with that quiet unnoticed French influence. Here it
will probably prove stronger than Greek, and recover that tenure which the
Greek sentiment has long had in quiet possession. This spelling-change is the
more noticeable, because it has taken place against two naturally opposing
forces. It was against the pronunciation, and also against the general
persuasion of a Greek origin. Over both these the French influence, aided
perhaps by the unpopularity of z, has induced us to imitate the French form
-iser. They who helped to effect this change, little thought that they were
promoting an etymological restoration. This form may indeed be regarded as
Greek because that view has been established and consciously acted upon for a
long time past. But though it has now acquired the reputation of a Greek
form, it does not follow that the first suggestion of it was due to the Greek
language. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is nevertheless true, that words
have the singular power of effecting a change of ancestry. |
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294 W. THE VERBAL GROUP. As
regards the present case, reason will be given in the next chapter for
supposing that this ' Greek form ' had a French origin. 312. The English
verbs present so great a variety of age and featuring, that they may as a
whole be compared to a venerable pile of buildings, which have grown by
successive additions through a series of centuries. One spirit animates the
whole, and gives it a unity of thought in the midst of the most striking
diversities of external appearance. The later additions are crude and harsh
as compared with the more ancient — a fact which is partly due to the
mellowing effect of age, and partly also to the admission of strange models. In
our speech, as well as in our architecture, we are now sated with the classic
element, and we are turning our eyes back with curiosity and interest to what
was in use before the revival of letters, and before the renaissance of
classic art. Except that the verbs require not their hundreds, but their
thousands of years, to be told off when we take count of their development,
we might offer this as a fitting similitude. They are indeed variously
featured, and bearing the characters of widely differing ages, and they are
united only in a oneness of purpose; and by reason of these characters I have
used the collective expression which is at the head of this chapter, and
designated them as The Verbal Group. |
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CHAPTER VII. THE NOUN GROUP.
313. We are now come to the backbone of our subject. The relation of the verb
to the noun may be-' figured not unaptly by calling the verb the headpiece,
and the noun the backbone. When we say the noun, we mean a group of words
which comprise no less than the whole essential presentives of the language.
In grammars they are ordinarily divided into three groups, the Substantive,
the Adjective, and the Adverb. We call these the presentives, and they will
be found precisely co-extensive with that term. It is true that many verbs
are presentive, and this may seem a difficulty. More verbs are presentive
than are not. But it is no part of the quality of a verb to be presentive; if
it is presentive, that circumstance is a mere accident of its material
condition. On the other hand all the words which we shall include in the
noun-group are essentially presentive, and they constitute the store of
presentive words of the language. When verbs are presentive, they are so
precisely in proportion to the amount of nounal stuff that is mixed up in
their constitution. For we must regard the verbs — always excepting the
symbolic verbs, that is, verbs which in whole or in part have shed their old
nounal coat — simply as words raised to an official position in the organized
constitution of |
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2<)6 VII. THE NOUN GROUP. the
sentence, and qualified for their office by receiving a predicative power.
314. As the verb is most retentive of antiquity, and as it therefore offers
the best point of comparison with other languages of the same Gothic stock,
so, on the side of the noun we may say that it exhibits best the
stratification of the language. By which is meant, that the traces of the
successive influences which have passed over the national mind have left on
the noun a continuous series of deposits, and that it is here we can most
plainly read off the history and experiences of the individual language. The
verb will tell us more of comparative philology j but the noun will tell more
of the historical philology of the English language. Under the title then of
the Noun-Group three parts of speech are included — the Substantive, the
Adjective, and the Adverb. For all these are in fact Nouns under different •
aspects. This chapter will consist of three sections corresponding to these
three parts of speech. |
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k SUBSTANTIVES — SAXON FORMLESS.
297 Saxon Forms. The oldest group consists of short words, mostly found in
the cognate dialects, which have no distinguishable suffix or formative
attached to them, or whose formative is now obscured by deformation. The bulk
of this class is monosyllabic, but this is sometimes by condensation. Thus
lord was in Saxon hlaf-ord, awe was ege (disyllabic), door duru, head heafod,
son sunu, star steorra, world woruld. Examples: — ash, awe, badge, bear, bed,
bee, bier, bliss, boat, bone, borough, bread, breast, bride, buck, calf,
chin, cloth, corn, cow, craft, day, deal, deed, deer, doom, door, down on a
peach, drink, drone, ear, earth, east, edge, elf, eye, fat (vessel), field,
fish, flesh, flood, fly, foe, fold, foot, frog, frost, furze, ghost, goal,
God, goose, glass, gnat, ground, guest, hand, harp, head, heap, heart, herd,
hill, hood, hoof, horse, hound, house, ice, ivy, keel, knave, knee, knight,
knot, lamb, land, laugh, leaf, Lent, life, lord, lore, louse, love, lust,
man, mark, meed, mist, mood, moon, mouse, mouth, neat (cattle), need, nest,
net, north, nose, oak, oath, ox, path, pith, rake, ram, rest, rick, rind,
ring, roof, rope, salve, sap, scar, sea, seal (phoca), seed, shame, share,
sheaf, shears, sheep, shield, ship, shire, shoe, sin, skin, skull, smith,
son, song, sough, south, speed, staff, stall, star, steer, stone, stock,
stow, stream, sun, swine, sword, thief, thing, tide, tongue, tooth, tree,
way, wear, well, west, wether, whale, wheel, whelp, while, wife, will, wind,
wold, wolf, womb, wood, word, world, worm, yard, year, yoke. These we may
regard as Simple words; that is to say, words in which we cannot see more
than one element unless we mount higher than the biet of the present
treatise. From these we pass on to others in which we begin to recognise
formative traces, that is, something of terminations as distinct from the
body of the words. |
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298 VII. THE NOUN GROUP. The
Saxon substantival forms are: — -w -1 -m -IX -r -t, -th -k, -kin -ing, -ling
-er -ness -dom -red -lock, -ledge -hood -ship -ric 316. The first group
consists of those in which the termination is a mere letter or syllable of
which we can give no further account, but only notice the obscure appearance
of a formative value. Forms in -w: — arrow, barrow, borrow, harrow, mallow, marrow,
meadow, morrow, sallow salh, shadow, sinew, sorrow, sparrow, tallozu, ividow,
yarrow gearwe. When traced back to Anglo-Saxon, these will fall into two or
more groups. 388. Assimilated is the Danish fellow. borrow. This was the
first sourse of shepheards sorowe, That now nill be quitt with baile nor
borrowe. Edmund Spenser, Maye, 1 30. Forms in -1: — apple, awl, bubble,
bundle, bushel, churl, cradle, earl, evil, fowl, girdle, hail hsegol, handle,
hurdle, kernel, kettle, kirtle, ladle, maple, nail, nettle, nipple, ripple,
rundle, sail segel, settle a bench, sickle, skittle, snaffle, snail snegel,
soul, shovel, spindle, spittle, stubble, thimble, tile, treadle, weevil,
whistle. |
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1. SUBSTANTIVES — SAXON FORMS.
299 Assimilated: — myrtle, French myrte, Latin myrtus. Forms in -m: — arm,
barm, beam, besom, bosom, farm, fathom, gleam, helm, qualm, seam, steam,
stream^ swarm, team. Forms in -n: — aivn, beacon, Main, brain braegen,
burden, chicken, even aefen, heaven, maiden,- main maegen, morn, rain, raven,
stern, steven Ch, thane J^egen, token, town, wagon, weapon, ivelkin woken.
Forms in -r: — acre aecer, boiver, brother, clover, cock-chafer, daughter,
father, feather, finger, hammer hamor, hunger, leather, liver, mother,
shower, silver, sister, stair staeger, summer, tear, thunder, timber, tinder,
water, winter, wonder. 317. Forms in -t: — bight, blight, fight, flight,
gift, height, light, might, right, sight, sleight, thought, thrift, weight,
zvight, yeast. bight. Cross-examination resumed. — 'I got the bight of the
handkerchief behind the boy's head, and laid hold of the two corners of it.
All this time prisoner was trying, as well as I, to get the boy in. I was
lying down and so was prisoner, reaching across the water.' Forms in -th: —
breadth, dearth, filth, growth, length, lewlh Devon, mirth, ruth, sloth,
spilth Sh, stealth, strength, troth, warmth, width. Here also belongs math in
Tennyson's ' after-math/ from the verb to moiv. Assimilated \— faith, which
was formed upon the French foi, anglicised/^. The two wordsy^y and faith went
on for a long time together, with a tolerably clear distinction of sense. Fey
meant religious belief, creed, as in the exclamation By my fey! while faith
signified the moral virtue of loyalty or fidelity: and this signification it
still bears in the phrase in good faith. In -Is., producing a termination -ock,
an ancient diminutival form — as, bullock, hassock, hillock, tussock. In
-kin, properly k-en, Platt-Deutsch -ken, German -d)en, a |
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....
Sumbolau:
a A / æ Æ / e E / ɛ Ɛ / i I / o O / u U / w W / y Y /
MACRON: ā Ā / ǣ Ǣ / ē Ē / ɛ̄ Ɛ̄ / ī Ī / ō Ō /
ū Ū / w̄ W̄ / ȳ Ȳ /
MACRON + ACEN DDYRCHAFEDIG: Ā̀ ā̀ , Ḗ ḗ, Ī́ ī́
, Ṓ ṓ , Ū́ ū́, (w), Ȳ́ ȳ́
MACRON + ACEN DDISGYNEDIG: Ǟ ǟ , Ḕ ḕ, Ī̀ ī̀,
Ṑ ṑ, Ū̀ ū̀,
(w), Ȳ̀ ȳ̀
MACRON ISOD: A̱ a̱ , E̱ e̱ , I̱ i̱ , O̱ o̱, U̱ u̱, (w), Y̱ y̱
BREF: ă Ă / ĕ Ĕ / ĭ Ĭ
/ ŏ Ŏ / ŭ Ŭ / B5236: 
B5237: 
BREF GWRTHDRO ISOD: i̯, u̯
CROMFACHAU: ⟨ ⟩ deiamwnt
A’I PHEN I LAWR: ∀, ә, ɐ
(u+0250) https: //text-symbols.com/upside-down/
ˡ ɑ ɑˑ aˑ a: / æ æ: / e eˑe: / ɛ ɛ: / ɪ iˑ i: / ɔ oˑ o: / ʊ uˑ u: / ə / ʌ /
ẅ Ẅ / ẃ Ẃ / ẁ Ẁ
/ ŵ Ŵ /
ŷ Ŷ / ỳ Ỳ / ý Ý / ɥ
ˡ ð ɬ ŋ ʃ ʧ θ ʒ ʤ / aɪ ɔɪ əɪ uɪ ɪʊ aʊ ɛʊ əʊ / £
ә ʌ ẃ ă ĕ ĭ ŏ
ŭ ẅ ẃ ẁ Ẁ ŵ ŷ ỳ Ỳ Hungarumlaut: A̋ a̋
U+1EA0 Ạ U+1EA1 ạ
U+1EB8 Ẹ U+1EB9 ẹ
U+1ECA Ị U+1ECB ị
U+1ECC Ọ U+1ECD ọ
U+1EE4 Ụ U+1EE5 ụ
U+1E88 Ẉ U+1E89 ẉ
U+1EF4 Ỵ U+1EF5 ỵ
g
yn 
aith δ δ £ gyn aith δ δ £ U+2020
† DAGGER
wikipedia, scriptsource. org
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ǣ
---------------------------------------
Y TUDALEN
HWN: www.kimkat.org/amryw/1_testunau/testun-246_philology-english-tongue_earle_1879_rhan-2_2123k.htm
Creuwyd: 15-11-2018
Ffynhonell: archive.org
Adolygiad diweddaraf: 15-11-2018
Delweddau:
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Freefind: |
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