 Chapter 1 of the English language. This is a LibriVox recording or LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The English Language by Logan Pearsle-Smith, Chapter 1, Part 1. The Origins of the English Language. Among the many living forms of human speech, and those countless others which have arisen and perished in the past, the English Language, which is now spread over so large a portion of the world, is as humble and obscure in its origin as any other. It is, of course, in no sense native to England. It was brought to the by the German tribes who conquered the island in the fifth and sixth centuries, and its nearest relations that we found among the humble dialects of a few barren islands on the German coast. When our Anglo-Saxon ancestors came first to ravage Britain and finally to settle there, they found the island inhabited by a people weaker indeed, but infinitely more civilised than themselves. For several centuries the Celts in England had enjoyed the benefits of Roman government and shared in the civilisation of the Roman Empire. They lived in walled cities, worshipped in Christian churches, and spoke to a certain extent at least the Latin language. And it is possible, if this Teutonic invasion had never happened, that the inhabitants of England would be now speaking a language descended from Latin, like French or Spanish or Italian. It is true that English has become almost a half-sister to these romance languages, as they are called, and a large part of its vocabulary is derived from Latin sources. But this is not in any way due to the Roman conquest of Britain, but to later causes. In whatever parts of Britain the Teutonic tribes settled, the Roman civilisation and the Roman language perished. And we find at first a purely Germanic race, a group of related tribes speaking dialects of what was substantially the same language, the language which is apparent about present English speech. This Anglo-Saxon, or as it is now preferably called Old English language, belonged to the great Teutonic family of speech, which in its turn was separated into three main families, East Germanic, no extinct, Scandinavian or Old Norse, from which Icelandic, Danish and Swedish had ascended, and West Germanic, from which had arrived the two great branches of high and low German. High German has become the modern literary German, while low German has split up into a number of different languages, Frisian, Dutch and Flemish. It is to the last of these groups that English belongs, and its nearest relatives are the Frisian dialect, Dutch and Flemish. But the Teutonic tongues themselves form one branch of another great family, the Aryan or Indo-European, which is spread from India in the East to Ireland in the West, and includes Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic and several other languages. The grammatical structure of English and German, and a large element of their vocabularies proves their relationship to these other tongues, though in the course of their wanderings from their primitive home forms were changed or dropped and pronunciation of some of the vowels and consonants shifted. Many old words perished and many new ones were acquired. The study of the relationships between these various languages forms the subject of these signs of comparative philology, a science almost entirely based in its turn on what is called phonology, the study of changes in sound and the elaborate laws by which they are governed. It is only indeed since the discovery of these laws that the science of language or linguistics has become possible, and it is on the careful and accurate study of sound changes that is founded the modern historical conception of English, its relationship to other languages and its development from the early speech of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. This early speech was, as we have seen, a Teutonic or German language. Although our modern English has been derived from it by a regular process of change, it was in its character more like modern Dutch or modern German. Its vocabulary was what is now called a pure one containing few foreign words and its grammar was even more complicated than that of modern German. It retained the elaborate system of genders. Its nouns were masculine, feminine or neuter. They had five cases and various declensions and the adjectives as in German agreed with the noun and were declined with them. And in the conjugation of the verbs there were twice as many forms as in modern English. It was therefore like Latin and Greek and German and inflected language. While in modern English inflections have almost disappeared and other means of expressing grammatical relations have been devised. As this loss of inflections as one of the main characteristics of modern English and illustrates a tendency of language which has been carried further in English than in any other form of European speech, it will be well perhaps to say a few more words about it. To the older philologists, when the change of language from the earliest tongues down to the present day was at last unfolded before their eyes, the long and uninterrupted history of grammatical losses which they found, the perishing of one nice distinction after another, seemed to them a non-interruptive process of ruin and degeneration. But this few of the history of language, a continuous advance namely in richness and accuracy of expression accompanied and produced by a continual process of decay, is too paradoxical to be maintained and it is coming to be realised more and more that the disappearance of grammatical forms is not a loss but a gain and that they have been superseded by means of expression which renders the more or less superfluous and is itself vastly more expressive and convenient. This means of expression is called analysis and consists in stating the relations once expressed by verbal terminations by separate words of an abstract character, by prepositions for the cases of nouns and by auxiliaries for the tenses of the verbs. If we look in a Latin grammar we shall find, for instance, that to translate one Latin word, for we sem, four words, I should have been, I used in English, that is to say the different notions combined by inflection in one Latin word are taken out from the conglomerate whole by analysis and are expressed each of them by a separate word. The development of analysis in language, the habit of using a separate word for the expression of each separate element in a complex notion is one that we can trace throughout the whole history of language. In primitive forms of speech, whole complexes of thought and feeling are expressed in single terms. I said it to him, there's one word, I said it to her, another. My head is a single term, his head a different one. My head is, of course, to me an enormously different thing from his head and it is an immense advance in the clearness of thought when I analyse the thought of my head into its different parts, one of which is peculiar to me and named mine and the other that of the head which I share with other human beings. Simplicity of language is, in fact, like other kinds of simplicity, a product of higher civilisation, not a primitive condition and the advance of analysis, the creation of words expressing abstract relations is one of the most remarkable triumphs of the human intellect. This development of analysis had already, of course, reached a high point in languages like Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon but it has been carried even further in modern forms of speech and reaches in Europe at least its furthest limit in modern English. We see it in the first place in the greatly increased use of prepositions of and to and for and by and still more in the use of the auxiliary verbs have and do and shall and will and be by means of which we are now able to express almost every shade of thought which was formally rendered by changes in the form of the verb. Along with this creation of new grammatical machinery modern English is remarkable for the way in which other superfluous forms and unnecessary terminations have been discarded. In the first place we must note the loss in English of grammatical gender. The absence of this in English is more extraordinary than we always realize for this irrational distinction which corresponds to no distinction of thought and capriciously attributes sex to sexless objects and often the wrong gender to living beings is yet found as a survival of barbarism and a useless burden to the memory in all the other well-known languages of Europe. With the loss of gender we have also discarded the agreement of adjectives of possessive pronouns and the article with their nouns. An Englishman can say for instance my wife and children while the Frenchman must repeat the possessive pronoun as in ma femme et mes enfants. If we regard it as the triumph of culture to fit means perfectly to ends and to do the most with the greatest economy of means we must consider this discarding of the superfluous as a great gain in modern English. Another great characteristic of modern English as of other modern languages is the use of word order as a means of grammatical expression. If in an English sentence such as the wolf ate the lamb we transpose the positions of the nouns we entirely change the meaning of the sentence. The subject and object are not denoted by any terminations to the words as they would be in Greek or Latin or in modern German but by their position before or after the verb. This is one of the last developments of speech a means of expression unknown to the rich and beautiful languages of antiquity. This tendency to a fixed word order was more or less established in early English as it is in modern German in spite of the richness of inflections in these languages and it is a debatable point whether the decay of inflections made it necessary or its establishment made the inflections superfluous and so brought about their decay. Probably each acted on the other as the inflections faded a fixed word order became more important and the establishment of this order caused the inflections to be more and more forgotten. How is it then that these amazing changes, this loss of genders, this extraordinary simplification have happened in our English speech? For five hundred years after the invasion of England the language of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors remained as far as we can judge practically unchanged. Then a transformation began in three or four centuries what is practically a new language somewhat suddenly appears. In the first place as an answer to this question is the fact that simplification is the law of development in all languages and has influenced more or less all European forms of speech. At the time that English changed the other languages of Europe were changing too. That this process was carried further and proceeded faster in England than elsewhere is not however due to any special enlightenment or advance of civilisation in the English nation. For as a matter of fact education, culture and enlightenment although they help progress in other ways are intensely conservative in matters of speech and while for their own purposes the educated classes have to connive at changes in vocabulary Any grammatical advance is opposed by them with all the powers they possess. We know how intensely repugnant to them are any proposals for the reform of our absurd and illogical system of spelling and we can imagine the outcry that would arise should anyone dare to suggest the slightest and most advantageous simplification in English grammar. In our plurals these and those for instance were retained as Dr. Sweeters pointed out to quite useless and illogical survivals of the old concord of attribute words with their nouns. But if we do not change our adjectives or possessive pronouns for the plural and say his hat and his hats why should we change this and that and these and those in the same positions and yet the whole force of education and culture would furiously oppose the dropping of these superfluous words if indeed they could be brought to consider any such proposal. As a matter of fact the progress in English is due not to the increase of education but to its practical disappearance among those who used the national speech. It is the result not of national prosperity but of two national disasters the Danish invasion and the Norman conquest. End of chapter one part one. Chapter one part two of the English language by Logan Pyssell Smith this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The first district of England to attain any high degree of civilisation according to the standards of that time was the north where Christianity and culture were introduced from Ireland where literature and scholarship flourished and where the local or Northumbrian dialect seemed likely to become the standard speech of England. It was indeed from the angles settled here and their Anglian dialect that our language acquired the name of English which it has ever since retained. This Northumbrian civilisation however was almost utterly destroyed in the 8th and 9th centuries by a new invasion of pagan tribes from across the German Ocean. The Danes who now came like the Angles and Saxons first to Harry England and then to settle there were near relatives of the inhabitants they conquered and came from a district not far from the original home of the earlier invaders. Their language was so like Anglo-Saxon that it could be understood without great difficulty so when the two races were settled side by side and when before long they became amalgamated it was natural that mixed dialects should arise mainly English and character but with many Danish words and with many differing grammatical forms confused and blurred. As there was no literature nor any literary class to preserve the old language the rise of these mixed dialects would be unchecked and we can safely attribute to this settlement of the Danes a great influence on the change in the English language. It is in the districts where the Danes were settled that the English language became first simplified so that in the process of development their speech was at least two centuries ahead of that of the south of England but this effect was only local and did not at first affect the language as a whole. When the Northumbrian culture was destroyed the Kingdom of Wessex became the centre of English civilisation and under the scholarly influence of King Alfred and the revival of learning he promoted West Saxon became the literary and classical form of English and almost all the specimens of early English that have been preserved are written in this dialect. Classical Anglo-Saxon therefore with its genders and its rich inflectional forms was not affected by the Danish invasion and had it suffered from no further disaster England would probably have developed much as the other low German forms have developed and we should now be speaking a language not unlike modern Dutch but for the third time a foreign race invaded England and the language of Wessex like that of Northumbria was in its turn almost destroyed. The effect however of the Norman conquest though quite as far reaching was more indirect than that of the Danish the Normans did not like the Danes break up or confuse Anglo-Saxon by direct conflict but their domination by interrupting the tradition of the language by destroying its literature and culture by reducing it to the speech of uneducated peasants simply removed the conservative influence of education and allowed the forces which have been long at work to act unchecked and English being no longer spoken by the cultivated classes or taught in the schools developed as a popular spoken language with great rapidity each man wrote as Pharisee wrote it all in the dialect he spoke phonetic changes that had appeared in speech were now recorded in writing these changes by levelling terminations produced confusion and that confusion led to instinctive search for new means of expression word order became more fixed the use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs to express the meanings of lost inflections increased and the great unity of England under the Norman rule helped in the diffusion of the advanced and simplified forms of the North we even find what is a very rare thing in the history of grammar that some foreign pronouns were actually adopted from another language namely the Danish words she they them there which had replaced the Anglo-Saxon forms in the North and were gradually adopted into the common speech from the North to spread the use of the genitive and plural in S for nearly all nouns are not only for those of one declension although the development of English was gradual and there is at no period a definite break in its continuity it may be said to present three main periods of development the old, the middle and the modern which may be distinguished by their grammatical characteristics these have been defined by Dr. Sweet as first, the period of full inflections which may be said to last down to AD 1200 the period of middle English of leveled inflections from 1200 to 1500 and that of modern English all lost inflections from 1500 to the present time although the grammar of the language by the end of the middle English period was fixed in its main outlines there has nevertheless been some change in development since that time thus the northern R A-R-E for B-B-E spread southwards in the early part of the 16th century and became current towards its end where it appears in Shakespeare into the authorised version of the Bible and it has now in modern times almost supplanted the southern B in the subjunctive mood the use of auxiliary verbs to express various shades of meaning although it had begun in the old and developed in the middle English period it has been greatly extended in modern times the distinction in meaning between I write and I am writing between the habitual and the actual present is a modern innovation and another modern development which expresses a useful shade of meaning is that of the emphatic present with the auxiliary do I do think, I do believe as contrast with the less emphatic I think I believe both forms exist in old English but until the 17th century no clear distinction was made between them as we see in the biblical phrase and they did eat and were all filled the 17th century saw also the adoption of the neuter possessive pronoun its I-T-S which is first found in 1598 which is not used in the Bible of 1611 nor in any of Shakespeare's plays printed in his lifetime the use of nouns as adjectives the attributive noun as it is called as in garden flowers, railway train etc is a new and most useful innovation which has come into use since the period of old English and has been greatly developed in modern times there is nothing quite like it in any other language except Chinese and it is a great step in advance towards that ideal language in which meaning is expressed not by terminations but by the simple method of word position and following also this line of development we find a curious case in modern English when the termination used for inflection the S of the English genitive has become detached from its noun and used almost as a separate word this is the group genitive as in the king of England's son instead of the king's son of England and in colloquial speech we can even use a phrase such as the man I saw yesterday's hat here the S of the genitive has become detached from its noun and made into a sign with the abstract character of a mathematical symbol one of the most modern developments of English grammar which dates from the end of the 18th century is a new imperfect passive as in the phrase the house is being built for the older the house is building or is a building these modern instances will prove that the concept of grammar is not a matter entirely depending as has sometimes been thought upon historical causes or upon phonetic change historical accidents and the decay of terminations no doubt help in the creation of new forms but they not themselves the cause of their creation behind all the phenomena of changing form we are aware of the action of a purpose an intelligence incessantly modifying and making use of this decadence of sound this wear and tear of inflections and patiently forging for itself out of the debris of grammatical ruin new instruments for a more subtle analysis of thought and a more delicate expression of every shade of meaning it is an intelligence which takes advantage of the smallest accidents that divide itself with new resources and it is only when we analyse and study the history of some new grammatical contrivance that we become aware of the long and patient labour which has been required to embody in a new and convenient form a long train of reasoning and yet we only know this force by its workings it is not a conscious or deliberate will an instinctive sense of what people wish their language to be and although we cannot predict its actions yet when we examine its results we cannot but believe that thought and intelligent purpose have produced them this corporate will is indeed like other human manifestations often capricious in its working and not all its results are worthy of approval it sometimes blurs useful distinctions preserves others that are unnecessary allows admirable tools to drop from its hands its methods are often illogical and childish and in some ways it is unduly and obstinately conservative while it allows of harmful innovations in other directions yet on the whole its results are beyond all praise it has provided an instrument for the expression not only of thought but of feeling and imagination fitted for all the needs of man and far beyond anything that could ever have been devised by the deliberation of the wisest and most learned experts when the early physicists became aware of forces they could not understand they tried to escape their difficulty by personifying the laws of nature and inventing spirits that controlled material phenomena the student of language in the presence of the mysterious power which creates and changes language has been compelled to adopt this medieval procedure and is vaguely defined by the name of the genius of the language the power that guides and controls its progress if we ask ourselves who are the ministers of this power and when its decrees derive their binding force we cannot find any definite answer to our question it is not the grammarians or philologists who form or carry out its decisions for the philologists' disclaim or responsibility and the school masters and grammarians generally oppose and fight bitterly but in vain against the new developments we can perhaps find its nearest analogy in what among social insects we call for lack of a more scientific name the spirit of the hive this spirit in societies of bees is supposed to direct their labours on a fixed plan with intelligent consideration of needs and opportunities and although proceeding from no fixed authority it is yet operative in each member of the community and so in each one of us the genius of the language finds an instrument for the carrying out of its decrees we each of us possess in a greater or less degree what the Germans call speech feeling a sense of what is worthy of adoption and what should be avoided and condemned this in almost all of us is an instinctive process we feel the advantages or disadvantages of new forms and new distinctions although it should be hard put to it to give a reason for our feeling we know for instance that it is now wrong to say much rather than many thanks though shakes be used to the phrase and much happier is right that the old much happy is wrong and the very must in many cases take the place once occupied by much we say a picture was hung but a murderer was hanged often perhaps without being conscious that we make the distinction and we all of us probably observe the modern and subtle difference between born B-O-I-N-E and born B-O-R-N the two past participle of the verb to bear as we write born by a slave mother B-O-R-N-E but born of a slave B-O-R-N few of us realize the subtle distinction between actually bringing forth and the more general notion of coming into existence on which this difference is based one of the most elaborate and wonderful achievements of the genius of the language in modern times is the differentiation of the uses of shell and will a distinction not observed in Shakespeare and the Bible and so complicated that it can hardly be mastered by those born in parts of the British islands in which it has not yet been established Cromarians can help this corporate will by registering its decrees and extending its analogies but they fight against it in vain they were not able to banish the imperfect passive the house is being built which some of them declared was an outrage on the language the phrase different too has been used by most good authors in spite of their protests and if the genius of the language finds the split infinitive useful to express certain shades of thought we can safely guess that all opposition to it will be futile better guides are to be found in our great writers in whom this sense of language is highly developed and it is in them if and anyone that this power finds its most efficient ministers but even they can only select popular forms or at the most suggest new ones but the adobtional rejection of these depends on the enactments of the popular will whose degrees carried in no legislation and subject to no veto are final and without appeal End of chapter 1 part 2 the English language by Logan Pearsle Smith chapter 2 part 1 this is a LibriVox recording or LibriVox recordings are in the public domain foreign elements if the Norman conquest had but an indirect influence on the development of English grammar and the other part of the language of the vocabulary its effect was so great as almost to transform the character of our speech Old English contained but a small proportion of borrowed words but when it ceased to be a literary language and almost all its learned compounds perished their place was gradually taken by words borrowed from the French speech of the Norman invaders the character of the words now borrowed the objects and ideas they denoted a full of significance for our early history and they will be treated from this point of view in later chapter we are now concerned however for the present more with their formal aspect their shapes the sources whence they would arrived and the transformations they had undergone before they reached us the conquest doing them by the Normans was the third invasion of this island by a Teutonic race from countries across the German sea for the Normans were closely related both to the Anglo-Saxons and to their subsequent Danish conquerors and originally they spoke a language allied to the Anglo-Saxon but they had travelled far and quite much since they left their remote Scandinavian birthplace for 150 years before they came to England they had been settled in Normandy where they had lost almost all memory of their original speech and had adopted a new religion, new system of law and society new thoughts and new manners they therefore came practically as Frenchmen to their English and Danish cousins and it was the speech of France the civilisation of France that they brought with them but the speech of France was very different language from modern French as we know it indeed there was not at this time any recognised and classical French but only a number of dialects among which that of Normandy was the one which was first introduced into England these French dialects were descended from the popular and colloquial Latin once common in most of the Roman provinces but which underwent diverse changes in various regions changes which have produced the various related forms of speech French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese etc which are united under the common name of romance languages these Latin words suffered many transformations in becoming French many of the consonants and vowels were so changed and the words were so shortened and clipped by the omission of unaccented syllables that the connection with their Latin ancestors is often not very apparent as later in the history of English many of these words came to language in forms more nearly approaching their Latin originals we can see by comparing them with those adopted from the French after they had undergone the process of phonetic decay how greatly they had been changed in their process thus compute and count both descend from the Latin computare secure and sure blasphemes and blame dominion and dungeon dignity and dainty cadence and chance are others among these doublets as they are called in which the longer form of the word in each case is more directly from the Latin while the shorter has suffered a French transformation but the French language has undergone considerable and more recent changes since the date when the Normans brought it to England some words that we borrowed have become obsolete in their native country some consonants have been dropped and the sound of others has been changed we retain for instance the S that the French have lost in many words like beast and feast which are bet and fit in modern French so too the sound of C-H has become S-H in France but in our words of early borrowing, chamber, charity, etc we keep the old pronunciation we keep more over in many cases forms peculiar to the Norman dialect as Catef, Canca, Carrion, etc in which the C before A did not become C-H as it did in the Parisian dialect carc and charge are both from the same Latin word caracare but one is the Norman and the other the Parisian form of the word in many cases the G of Norman French was changed to J in the central dialects and our word jail, G-A-O-L has preserved its northern spelling while it is pronounced and sometimes written with the J of Parisian French when in the year 1204 Normandy was lost to the English crown and the English Normans were separated from their relatives on the continent their French speech began to change as all forms of speech must change and developed into a dialect of its own with some peculiar forms and many words borrowed from the English this was at first the language of the court and law in England it was taught in the schools and written in legal enactments and continued to be used by lawyers for more than 300 years indeed in the form of what is called law French it continued in use down to quite recent times an attempt was indeed made in the 14th century to replace French by English in the law courts but the lawyers went on thinking and writing in French and developed little by little a queer jargon of their own which continued in use down to the end of the 17th century from this dialect or technical law jargon many words were adopted into English not only strictly legal terms like jewellery, larceny, lease, perjury etc but other words which have gained more popular use as assets, embezzle, disclaim, distress, hue and cry, hodgepodge, improve one of the most curious of these is the word culprit which is a contraction of the legal phrase culpable pressed meaning he is guilty and we are ready to prove it it was then from this Anglo or Norman French that the earliest of our French words were derived and the greater part of those borrowed before 1350 were probably from this source in the meantime moreover the central or Parisian French dialect having become the language of the French court of French literature began to be fashionable in England and many words were adopted from it into English and it is by no means always easy to distinguish between the sources of French words whether they came to us from Anglo or Parisian French in many cases the forms are the same but as a rule the early and popular words may be put down to Anglo French and the later adoptions and the learned words to borrowings from the literary language of Paris in addition to these two classes the first borrowings from Anglo French and the later ones from the Parisian French we have in English a third class of words borrowed from the French in more recent times speaking in general terms we may say that down to about 1650 the French words that were borrowed were thoroughly naturalised in English and were made central later to conform to the rules of English pronunciation and accent while in the later borrowings unless they have become very popular the accent is made to pronounce them in the French fashion the tendency in English is to put the accent on the first syllable and this has affected the words of older adoption but in words more recently borrowed like grimace bazaar et cetera we throw the accent forward to imitate as nearly as we can the French accent words have sometimes been borrowed twice as gentle and gentile dragon and dragoon gallant and gallant and the older can easily be distinguished from the later by the position of the accent if words like baron button mutton had been recent and not old borrowings we should have pronounced them baroon buttoon muttoon as we pronounce buffoon cartoon and balloon and many others derived from the French words ending in O-N in these modern borrowings moreover we preserve as much as we can the modern pronunciation of the French consonants as we can see in the soft C-H of chandelier and chaperone as compared with the older chandler and chapel and the soft G in massage, mirage, prestige while the older sound is kept in message and cabbage there are no words in English so unfixed and fluctuating as these late borrowings from the French where there is often no standard by which we can decide how we are to speak them like envelope and avalanche have two pronunciations one English and one as nearly French as possible and one word, vase for ASC is spoken in at least three ways and as so often in the case of language we find two tendencies at work one following the old rule to pronounce the words as English words to give the vowels and consonants their English sounds and to throw back the accent this affects words which have become popular and familiar and are in common use like glacia and develop the other tendency which seems to be going stronger in recent years is to keep as much as possible the foreign sounds an accent as in promenade, croquet, tray, T-R-A-I-T mirage, prestige, rouge, ballet, debris, nuance this tendency do perhaps to the widest study of French has had a curious effect in changing the pronunciation and spelling of a number of old established and long naturalized words thus biscuit which in the form of B-I-S-K-E-T is found as an old English word has recently put on a French costume although its pronunciation has not yet been changed and blue has been altered from the older B-L-E-W owing to French influence several old words have had their accent changed by the same cause police is an old word in English and still retains its English accent like malice in parts of Ireland and Scotland and our old word marine has had its pronunciation changed owing to the influence of the French marine even a word like invalid of Latin origin has when used as an arm thrown its accent forward to correspond to the French embélide this tendency to give a foreign character to old established words is a curious manifestation of that capricious force called the genius of the language when a word has what we may call a French or foreign meaning as enrouge or ballet a foreign pronunciation or an attempt at it may perhaps make it more expressive but there is surely no reason by such words as T-R-A-I-T and VAZ should not be pronounced after the English fashion and we might well be spared the discomfort and embarrassment of our attempts to keep the nasal sound of the French in in words like encore, ennui, nonchalant and nuance as we have seen the main additions to the English language additions so great as to change its character in a fundamental way were from the French first of all from the northern French of the Norman conquerors and then from the literary and learned speech of Paris but the French language as we have also seen is mainly based on Latin not on the Latin of classical literature but the popular spoken language the speech of the soldiers and uneducated people and the Latin words were so clipped changed and deformed by them not however capriciously but in accordance with certain definite laws that they were often at first unrecognisable from early times however a large number of Latin words were taken into French and then sent to English from literary Latin and as they were never used in popular speech they did not undergo this process of popular transformation and when we speak of learned words adopted from the Latin we must not suppose that the scholars and literary men of that time borrowed as we should now borrow from the classical Latin studied in our schools the language of the great orators and poets of Rome the Latin from which they borrowed was not a dead but a living language a language which they spoke and wrote although it was descended from the classical Latin and preserved many of its forms yet differed from it in many ways and was regarded as barbarous by the scholars of the Renaissance it was this feature of a small minority of a few thousand learned men almost all in religious orders an aristocracy intellectual and cosmopolitan who preserved in the Dark Ages something of the literary tradition of classical times and made to it important contributions of their own it was a universal language for the scholars of all Europe and even in England men from different districts could converse in it better than in their local and often mutually unintelligible dialects it disappeared at last in the 16th century owing to the efforts of the humanists the Saronians to restore the classical language of Rome but not before it had had an immense effect on modern French and English by far the greater part of the learned Latin words adopted into French and from French into English from the 9th to the 14th century are derived from this low Latin many of them of course are classical in Rome many especially the abstract words have been formed by the addition of terminations in the medieval Latin in the 14th century however when the first effects of the classical Renaissance began to make themselves felt words began to be borrowed into French direct from classical Latin this process went on with increased rapidity in the 15th century since its end and at the beginning of the 16th century almost a new language formed on classical models was created in France with the importation therefore of the French vocabulary into English many of the learned words borrowed first from late and then from classical Latin were adopted into our language but in England also Latin was spoken by the clergy and learned men of the country the Bible and the service books were in Latin the historical and devotional books were largely written in it when these Latin books were translated into English or when a scholar writing in English wished to use a Latin word he followed the analogy of the Latin words that had already come to us through the French and altered them as if they had first been adopted into French it is often difficult to say whether a Latin word has come to us through the French or has been taken immediately from the Latin a curious tendency do not so much to the genius of the language as to the self-conscious action of learned people has affected the form of Latin words both in English and French particularly perhaps on this side of the channel primarily times the feeling has existed that the popular forms of words were incorrect and attempts more or less capricious and often wrong have been made to change back the words to shapes more in accordance with their original spelling thus the H was added to words like umbil honor, abbot, etc B was inserted into debt to show its derivation from the Latin debitum and L in fault as a proof of its relation to the Latin falare and P found its way into receipt as a token of the Latin receptum these pedantic forms were either borrowed direct into English from the French or in many old words the change was made by English scholars and in some words as for instance debt and fault their additions have remained in English one in French the words have reverted to their old spelling these changes as in honour debt receipt do not always affect the pronunciation but in many words as vault fault assault the letters pedantically inserted have come gradually to be pronounced vault rhymed with thought in the 18th century and only in the 19th century has H come to be pronounced in humble and hospital more inexcusable the many errors introduced into English spelling by this old pedantry and among our words which have been deformed by this learned ignorance may be mentioned advance and advantage advance and advantage and scent sc, ent and scissors which should have been spelled sc, ent the borrowing of words direct from the Latin which began first in prehistoric times continued in the Anglo-Saxon period and only attained large proportions in the 14th and 15th centuries but it has continued uninterruptedly ever since until perhaps one fourth of the Latin vocabulary has been transplanted either directly or through the French while most of these words are reformed in English according to definite usage nouns being taken from the stem of the accusative and verbs from that of the past participle there is really no absolute rule save that a convenience about the matter the nominative form appears in terminus, bonus, stimulus etc the appletive in folio the gerund in memorandum and in uendo different parts of the verb as in veto and affidavit recipe is the imperative directing the apothecary to take certain drugs and dirge is from another imperative the dirge-dominé of Psalm 5 verse 8 used as an antiphon in the service for the dead as French was full of learned Latin words so Latin in its turn abounded in expressions borrowed from the Greek and thus Greek words were through the Latin adopted into French and English with one or two very early exceptions to be mentioned later all the Greek words found in English before the 16th century are derived from Latin sources and pronounced not as they were in Greek but as the Romans spelled and pronounced them the Greek U became a Y in Latin and the K a C when after the Roman time C lost the sound of K before E I and Y the pronunciation of many Greek words was changed and we get a word like the modern cycle which is very unlike the Greek cookloss other Greek words have been early adopted into the popular vocabulary and have undergone the strange transformations that popular words undergo learned names for diseases and flowers are peculiarly liable to be affected by this process thus dropsy stands for the Greek hydropsis palsy for paralysis emerald for the Greek smaragdos Athanasia has become tansy and carofilan ghillie flower in English this process still goes on whenever a Greek word comes into common and popular use pediment is believed to be a working man's corruption through pediment of pyramid Banjo has come to us through the pronunciation of negro slaves from the Spanish Panduria which is ultimately derived from the Greek Pandura and we are now witnessing the struggle of the genius of the language with the popular but somewhat indigestible word cinematograph by the middle of the 16th century Greek was so well known in England that scholars began to borrow from it directly from the invention of French and Latin these were all learned adoptions and they were for the most part conducted in an absurdly learned way these old scholars took a pedantic pride in adorning their pages with actual Greek letters and thus words like ACME apotheosis and many others are in 16th and 17th century books often printed in Greek type very lately in the 19th century a tendency has shown itself to adopt words not with the Latin but with the original Greek spelling as nearly as we can reproduce it and now with our modern passion for correctness and the modern weakening of the traditions of the language words especially scientific terms tend to keep their Greek appearance as we see in words like kinetics K-I-N-E-T-I-C-S which would have become synetics C-I-N-E-T-I-C-S had it been borrowed earlier end of chapter 2 part 1 the English language by Logan Piersle Smith chapter 2 part 2 this LibriVogs recording is in the public domain foreign elements part 2 this short account of the Greek element in English must suffice for the present although the enormous influence of Greek on our language is by no means to be measured by the number of Greek words in English for a very large part of our vocabulary of thought and culture comes from Greece by way of literal translations into Latin of these words we shall speak when we come to the history of thought and culture and in that division of our subject we can best treat of our later borrowings from modern languages such as Dutch and Spanish and all the travellers words brought into English from Indian, African and American languages there remain however three other elements of early English the Celtic, the Scandinavian and the Teutonic words come to us through French or Italian channels there's one of the puzzles of English philology that so very few words of Celtic origin have been adopted into the language the Teutonic invaders found and conquered a Celtic race dwelling in England there is evidence to show that the conquered race was not entirely massacred but the large portion of it was united with the conquerors and the number of Celtic words adopted into English before the 12th century is less than a dozen and several of these were probably imported from Ireland or the continent bin and dun, d-u-n a colour, cum, c-w-o-n-b a small valley and one or two more words are the only ones that seem to have been derived from the native British and around d-o-w-n a hill may have been borrowed from them or perhaps brought by the Anglo-Saxons into England since 1200 more words have been adopted from Irish or Scotch-Gaelic but most of these like brogue, bog, galore, pillion, shamrock are a fairly recent introduction and it is certainly very curious that no word of any great importance has been borrowed by the English from their Welsh-speaking neighbours many more Celtic words have come into our language indirectly through French channels the Romans borrowed a few Celtic terms the original inhabitants of Gaul were Celts the Bretons still speak a Celtic language and from these sources a number of Celtic words have found their way into French and from French into English among these words of probable possible Celtic origin may be mentioned battle, beak, bray of a donkey, budget car and its derivatives career, cargo, carc, carry cart, charge, chariot, etc carpenter, gravel league, mutton tan, toant, valet violet, basal many more words than these are commonly given as being of Celtic origin but the tendency of modern scholarship is to decrease the number of Celtic words in English and even in the above list many are considered to be very doubtful one curious and charming form is found in the Irish English with which you have been delighted lately namely a literal translation of Celtic idioms into English as in such phrases as is herself at home? is it reading you are? he interrupted me and I writing my letters the French not only brought us a number of Celtic words but an even larger number of native Teutonic terms came back to our Teutonic speech through French channels words that we had lost words that had arisen in Germany after our ancestors came to England or French-ified forms which supplanted the Anglo-Saxon words derived from the same source the Teutonic Barbarians who served in the Roman armies added some words to the Latin language the Franks who conquered France and gave their name to that country the Gothic and Burgundian invaders in which the French language with many terms of war feudalism and of sport and finally the Norman conquerors of the 11th century added a few terms mostly nautical of their original Scandinavian speech such as equip flounder the fish and perhaps the verb to sound nearly 300 Teutonic words altogether have come to us from French sources at whom no inconsiderable or unimportant addition to the language moreover if we compare these travelled words with their stay at home relations we can in many cases see what richness of meaning they have gained by being steeped in the great romance civilisation of Europe Park for instance is a Teutonic word and obeled by French usage far beyond the meaning of its humble native cousin Paddock Blue by passing through southern mines has acquired a brilliance not to be found in our dialect Ble, B-L-A-E Dark and dingy colour our bench has become through Italian the bank of finance and has given rice to banquet and among other homely old German words thus embellished by their foreign travels maybe mentioned dance garden, gaiety, salon harbinger, gonfalon banner and herald the other great Teutonic addition to the English language is that from Scandinavian sources when the Danes came to England they brought with them a language now called Old Norse which was closely related to Anglo-Saxon many of the words however were different and a large number of these were ultimately taken into English as however our earliest English literature was almost all written in the dialect of the south where the Danes did not settle but few Scandinavian words appear in English before the 12th century when however the language of the Midlands and the North where there were large Danish settlements began to be written the strong infusion of Scandinavian elements became apparent and from the northern dialects which abound Old Norse words, standard English has ever since been borrowing terms a great army of them appear in the 13th century words so strong and vigorous as to drive out their Anglo-Saxon equivalents as take and cast replaced the Anglo-Saxon n-i-m-a-n and weopan and raise has driven the old English rear into the archaic language of poetry even when the English words have survived they've sometimes been assimilated to the Scandinavian form as in words like give and sister other familiar words of Scandinavian origin are call fellow get hit leg low L-O-W root same skin want wrong the familiar every day and useful carriage of these words shows how great is the Danish influence on the language and how strongly the Scandinavian element persisted when the two races were amalgamated this drifting into standard English of Scandinavian words from northern dialects still goes on the following words are possibly of Scandinavian origin and have made their appearance from dialects into literary English at about the dates which are appended to them below 1552 to batten 1591 clumsy 1597 blight 1619 doze 1647 gill or G-H-Y-L-L a steep ravine wordsworth 1787 a beck a stream Sadi 1795 to nag 1835 and to scamp 1837 it is from these and some other minor sources to be mentioned later that English has derived its curiously mixed character and the great variety and richness of its vocabulary no purist has ever objected to the teutonic words that have come to us from Scandinavian or French sources but the upsetting of so larger part of the French, Latin and Greek vocabularies into English speech is a more or less unique phenomenon in the history of language and its supposed advantages or disadvantages have been the subject of much discussion writers who attempt to criticize and estimate the value of different forms of speech often begin with an era of impartiality but soon arrived at a comfortable conclusion that their own language owing to its manifest advantages its beauties, its rich powers of expression is on the whole by far the best and noblest of all living forms of speech the Frenchman, the German, the Italian, the Englishman to each of whom his own literature and the great traditions of his national life are most dear and familiar cannot help but feel that the vernacular and must be superior to the alien and awkward languages of his neighbours nor can he easily escape the conclusion that in respect to his own speech whatever has happened has been an advantage and whatever is, is good it will be as well therefore in regard to this question of a mixed vocabulary to state as impartially as is humanly possible the considerations to opposing ideals are based the ideal of a pure language built up as much as possible on native sources and that of a comprehensive speech borrowing words from other nations let us begin with the ideal of purity which in many European languages such as German, Bohemian and modern Greek is leading to determine evidence to keep out foreign words and to drive out those that have already been adopted the upholders of this ideal maintain that extents of borrowing from other nations is the proof of want of imagination and a certain weakness of mental activity that of people who cannot or do not take the trouble to find native words for new conceptions show thereby the poverty of their invention speech feeling the desire to use foreign terms comes these patriots of language believe partly also from vanity to show one's familiarity with foreign culture and they claim that the use of native compounds for abstract ideas is a great advantage as it enables even the uneducated to obtain some notion of the meaning of these high terms they maintain moreover that just as an old-fashioned farmer prided himself on procuring the main stables of life from his own farm and garden and found a fresh taste in the fruit and vegetables of his own growing so we find in words which are the product of our own soil and are akin to the ancient terms of our speech an intimate meaning and a beauty not possessed by exotic products these words breed in us a proud sense of the old and noble race from which we are descended they link the present to the past and carry on the tradition of our nation to the new generations the main upholders of this view are the modern Germans who take a great pride in the purity of their language and compare it to that of Greece which in spite of the immense influence on it of eastern civilisations and the great number of ideas and products it borrowed from dense yet has so strong a feeling for language and so great a pride of race that the Greek of classical times possessed no more than a few hundred words borrowed from other tongues in Germany therefore since the 17th century a deliberate effort has arisen to make the language still more pure and societies have been formative with this special purpose this movement has grown with the growth of national unity and a powerful society the Sprachverein has been recently founded and has published handbooks of native words for almost every department of modern life although English so hopelessly mixed a language that any such attempt to purify it will be hopeless nevertheless the use of Saxon words has often been advocated among us and even here lists have been suggested of native compounds that might replace some of our foreign terms as Steadholder S-T-E-A-D-H-O-L-D-E-R for Lieutenant Quimwork W-H-I-M-W-R-K for Grotesque Folkward F-O-L-K-W-A-R-D for parapet and Folkwayne for Omnibus those however who defend a mixed language like Latin or English maintain that the ideal of purity is really in its essence a political and not a philological one that it is due to political aspirations or resentments that the Germans decide to banish with their French words the memory of the long, literary and political domination of France over their native country that for the same reason the Bohemians wish to read themselves of German words the modern Greeks of Turkish terms they hold that the patriots in language are the victims also of a fallacy which all history disproves the fallacy namely that there is some connection between the purity of language and the purity of race that most modern races however pure their language are of mixed origins and the majority races speak a tongue borrowed either from their concourse or from the peoples they have themselves subdued and as we are all a mixed race so our civilisation is equally derived from various sources ideas, products and inventions spread from one nation to another and finally become the common inheritance of humanity and they hold it there for a natural process for foreign names to spread with foreign ideas and to form a common vocabulary the beginnings of an international speech in which we can all to some extent at least understand each other an independent nation conscious of its strength and not afraid of being overwhelmed by foreign influences does well therefore in their view to welcome the foreign names of foreign products it does not corrupt but really enriches its language and even when as in English it possesses a multitude of cinnamon partly native and partly foreign for more or less the same conceptions this variety of terms is a great advantage for the genius of the language which works more by making use of existing terms than creating them is enabled to give to each a different shade of meaning thus as Mr Bradley points out the subtle shades of difference of meaning of emotional significance between such pairs of words in English as paternal and fatherly fortune and luck celestial and heavenly royal and kingly could not easily be rendered in any other language while the upholders of this view would admit that the words of Saxon origin are as a rule more vivid and expressive they maintain that this expressiveness is largely due to the existence with them of less vivid synonyms from the Latin and that these words moreover can be appropriately employed for statements in which we wish to avoid over emphasis a force of diction stronger than the feelings which we wish to express which is a fault of style as reprehensible and often more annoying than inadequate expression great demand moreover in the age of science is for clearness of thought and precise definition in language rather than for emotional power and it is often an advantage for the expression of abstract ideas to possess terms borrowed for this purpose only from a foreign language which express their abstract meaning and nothing more unhindered by the rich but confusing associations of native etymology from this point of view abstract words like our intuition, perception, representation are much clearer than their German equivalence osteology and pathology to be preferred to bone law and pain law which have been suggested by Saxon enthusiasts to take their place and even for the purposes of poetry and association they believe it is no small gain that the descendants of rude teutonic tribes inhabiting a remote and northern island should become the inheritors of the traditions of the great Greek and Latin civilization of the south these traditions, the rich accumulations of poetic and historic memories are embodied in and cling to the great classical words we have borrowed magnanimity sense palace contemplate still give egos to us of the greatness of ancient Rome and the arts and lofty thoughts of Greece still even great Greek words like philosophy astronomy poem, planet idea and tragedy these then are the two opposing ideals nationalism and language as against borrowing the next language to those for whom nationalism is the important thing in modern life and who could wish that their own race should derive its language and thought from native sources a pure language is the ideal form of speech while those who regard the great inheritance of European culture as the element of most importance in civilization will not regret the composite character of the English language the happy marriage which it shows of north and south or wish to deprive it of those foreign elements which go to make up its unparalleled richness and variety end of chapter 2 part 2 chapter 3 of the English language by Logan Piersle-Smith this LibriVox recording is in the public domain modern English the flooding of the English vocabulary with French words began as we've seen in the 13th century and reached very large proportions in the century that followed at the same time Anglo-French which had maintained itself for 200 years or more as the language of the governing classes gradually fell into disuse and in 1362 English was adopted in the law courts and at about the same time in the schools and yet properly speaking there was before the latter part of the 14th century no English language no standard form of speech understood by all and spoken everywhere by the educated classes when such restraining and conservative influences was exercised by the west Saxon language of the court had been removed at the conquest the centrifugal forces which are always present in language and tend to split it up into varieties of speech had begun to assert themselves and the old dialects of England diverged until the inhabitants of each part of the country could hardly understand each other the dialects of this period can be roughly divided into three main divisions which correspond to the divisions of speech in the pre-conquest period but are called by new names in all the countries south of the Thames what is called the southern dialect was spoken and this was the descendant of the west Saxon speech which under Alfred the Great had become the literary language of England north of the Thames there were two main dialects the Midland corresponding to the old Mercian and the northern extending from the Humber to Aberdeen and corresponding to the old Northumbrian in each of these districts authors as far as they wrote in English at all wrote in their own native dialect and in the middle of the 14th century it must have seemed that the development of no common form of English speech was possible but as at first the northern nor Northumbrian dialect had developed in the 8th century into a literary language and then had been replaced by the southern or west Saxon so now the neglected speech of Mercia the Midland was destined to attain that supremacy which it has since never lost the southern dialect was very conservative of old forms and inflections in the northern owing to the Danish settlements changes have been rapidly going on so that these two had become almost separate languages the Midland however less progressive than the northern but more advanced than the southern stood between the two and it was more or less comprehensible to the speakers of each dialect moreover the Midland being the speech of London naturally became familiar to many business and of the educated classes who frequented the capital and it was the language of the two great universities as well philologists divide this Midland dialect into two subdivisions West Midland which was more conservative and archaic in type which had been more affected by Danish influence and was somewhat more progressive than the West it was then this East Midland spoken in London and in Oxford and Cambridge which was adopted as our standard speech this result was no doubt greatly helped by the greatest man of literary genius in this period the poet of Chaucer the part played by Enius in the formation of classical Latin is well known Dante did much to form modern Italian the German language owes an immense debt to Luther and in the same way Chaucer has been claimed as the father of the English language this view has indeed been recently disputed and it is now admitted that the Midland dialect would have become a standard speech even if Chaucer had never written at the same time but for his influence and the great popularity of his writings this process would probably have been more hesitating and slow he found indeed an already cultivated language in the Midland dialect but he wrote it with an ease and elegance and regularity hitherto unknown giving it the stamp of high literature and making it the vehicle for his wide cultivation at his knowledge of the world a Londoner of the citizen class a courtier as well a traveller and diplomatist he was admirably fitted to sum up and express in modern speech the knowledge and varied interests of his time and when we add to this the splendid accident of genius popularity of his poems we see how great his influence must have been although the exact character of that influence is not quite easy to define probably in addition to the ease and polish he gave the language Chaucer's greatest contribution was the large number of words he borrowed from French and naturalised in the language it is indeed been said that there is no proof that any of the foreign words in his writings had not been used before and this is of course strictly true as it is impossible to prove a negative of this kind but as the Oxford dictionary shows the number of these words not to be found in any previous writings no extent is really immense to his translations of Boethius to his work on astrology to his prose and poems are traced a large number of our great and important words besides many learned terms attention diffusion fraction, duration, position first found in Chaucer and then not apparently used again till the 16th century almost equally important in their influence on the language with the Wycliffe translations of the Bible made public at about the same time as Chaucer's poems Wycliffe like Chaucer wrote in the dialect of the East Midlands like Chaucer he possessed a genius for language and in number and importance his contributions to the English vocabulary seem according to the results published in the Oxford dictionary to have almost if not quite equalled those of Chaucer while Chaucer borrowed mainly from the French Wycliffe's new words are largely adaptations from the Latin of the Vulgate and as he finds it necessary to explain many of these words by notes it's fairly certain that he himself regarded them as innovations with the growing importance then of the East Midland dialect and with the stamp set upon by Chaucer and Wycliffe and the immense popularity of their writings we witness at the end of the 14th century what we may consider to be the birth of the English language as we know it despised ruined and destroyed for three centuries ousted from its pride of place by an alien tongue and then almost swamped by the inrush of foreign words yet like the fabled bird of Arabia it arose swiftly from its ashes and spread its wings for new and hitherto unequal flights the English of Chaucer and Wycliffe was now accepted as the standard language of the country and all the other and rival dialects sank to the level of uneducated and local forms of speech with the exception of one variety of the Northern Lumbrian dialect which was developed into the Scottish language received a considerable amount of literary cultivation and remained the standard speech of Scotland until the union of the two countries the death of Queen Elizabeth but although Chaucer's English is substantially the language that we speak and there are whole pages of Chaucer that a person of ordinary education could read with little difficulty and a person will perceive at once great differences between the English of the 14th century and that of our own day and should he not read but have read to him Chaucer's poems with the correct and contemporary pronunciation the difference would seem still more startling for no language of course ever remains unchanged but undergoes a perpetual process of transformation the sounds of many vowels and consonants are slowly shifted the old words become outworn or change their meaning and new terms are needed to replace them and with the passing of time fresh experiences are acquired and new ways of thought and feeling become popular and these also demand and find their appropriate terminology grammar also becomes more simple but on the whole the change of English Chaucer's time has been a change in vocabulary and to this we shall return in a later chapter there are however certain changes of a formal character which should be mentioned before we approach the history of the language in its connection with the history of culture by the end of the 14th century as we've seen the middle and dialect was established as standard English the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century and especially the works printed and published by Caxton made its supremacy undisputed and practically fixed its form for the future Caxton's English is as we might expect more modern than that of Chaucer the spelling although to our eyes old fashioned is more definite and settled and any one of us can read Caxton's English with very little difficulty two influences of the 16th century had a marked effect on the English language one European and the other national the revival of learning the renewed study of classical Latin the growth of the cosmopolitan republic of learned humanists who drove out the old low Latin of the middle ages and devoted themselves to the cultivation of elegant and Ciceronian prose made at first the enthusiasts of the new learning somewhat disdainful of their mother tongues they saw how rapidly these native languages were changing and naturally believed that a right in the vernacular was to write in a local and perishing speech awkward moreover and barbarous and unfitted to embody high thoughts and scholarly distinctions while therefore these scholars somewhat neglected their native tongues or wrote in them with apologies and condescension the study nevertheless of classical models their care for the art of speech their love of apt and beautiful words and rhythms and phrases did much to mould the literary languages of modern Europe and added to the many graces of style, expression and music towards the middle of the 16th century another and opposing influence began to make itself felt with the reformation and the growth of national feeling under Henry the 8th and his tutor successes English scholars began to value more and more highly the institutions and language of their own country the church services were now in English English translations of the Bible were printed and the beauty of these services and translations opened men's eyes to the value and expressiveness of their native tongue English became what it had never been before the object of serious study and the native element which had tended to be overshadowed by the latinity of the humanists was now more valued under the teutonic influence of the reformation there were now patriots who started the ideal of a pure language freed as much as possible from foreign elements while others attempted often too successfully as we have seen to remodel words of foreign derivation we now reach in fact the stage of a self-conscious language no longer allowed to develop at its own free will, unbound by rules or study, but affected both for good and evil by the theories and ideals of writers and learned men in the Elizabethan period however when the influences of the classical revival and the growth of national pride in England and things English both reached their highest mark and were mingled together by the exuberant vitality and creative force of the time the new ideal of correctness could as yet make but little headway against the opposing forces of innovation and experiment the language was still in a plastic and unformed state writers and speakers the whole world of new thoughts to express reached out eagerly uncritically to every source from which they could derive means of expression inkhorn terms strange coinages pedantic borrowings fashions affectations were mingled with archaisms and sham antiques while the needs of popular preaching and discussion brought into common and even literary use many colloquialisms and homely old Saxon words the result was the language of unsurpassed richness and beauty which however defies all rules to the Elizabethans it seemed as if almost any word could be used in any grammatical relation adverbs for verbs for nouns or adjectives nouns and adjectives for verbs and adverbs thus as Dr Abbott points out in his Shakespearean grammar quote you can happy your friend malice or foot your enemy or fall an axe on his neck unquote he is used for a man a she for a woman and every variety of what is now considered bad grammar plural nominatives with singular verbs double negatives double comparatives more better etc are commonly employed the end of this period of Tudor English and the beginning of modern English coincides with the appearance of a revised version of the English Bible published in 1611 in the earlier part of the 17th century the borrowing of learned words especially from the Latin though now also to a certain extent direct from the Greek went on a pace indeed by now English had adopted far more new material than it could assimilate and at the restoration when a new ideal of language prevailed and speech tended more towards the easy elegance of a cultivated manner of fashion the vocabulary was sifted and many of these cumbersome tremendous terms of 16th and 17th century thought and theology fell into disuse with the restoration also came a new wave of French influence Charles II and his court had lived long in France French fashions were supreme at the English court and the light, speech and literature was once more fitted with French expressions and it became now as we have seen the custom not to naturalize these borrowed words but to preserve as much as possible their native pronunciation the structure of the English sentence moreover was modified only to French influence under the stately and splendid old English prose with its rolling glances and involved clauses of dogmatic assertion or inspired metaphor gave place to a more and more concise easy and limpid statement without the eagle high flights of old English but also without its cumbersomeness awkwardness and obscurity with the learned Latin words that are now discarded many old English terms fell into disuse and the English language in the 18th century suffered something of the same purification or impoverishment which in the 17th century reduced the literary vocabulary of French by an enormous number of native words with the romantic movement however at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century and with also the increased historical sense and interest in the past many of these old words were revived and we are probably now much nearer to Chaucer not only in our understanding of his age but also in our comprehension of his language than our ancestors were at the time when Dryden and his contemporaries found it almost incomprehensible without special study indeed the 50 years between the death of Shakespeare and the restoration created a much wider gulf between the courtiers of Charles II and those of Elizabeth than the 300 years which divide us from that period and Shakespeare and Spencer are much more easily comprehended by us than by the men of letters who were born not many years after the death of these great poets besides the shifting of the English vocabulary the extinction of superfluous words and other and more subtle processes been steadily going on and it's done much to enrich our language only into its varied sources our language was as we've seen provided with a great number of synonyms words of different form but expressing the same meaning but this superfluity of terms soon turned to a good use by the ever vigilant genius of the language little by little slightly different meanings began to attach themselves to these different words each gradually assertive for itself its separate sphere of expression from which the others were excluded until often two words which could originally be used indifferently one to have quite separate and distinct meanings this differentiation or as it is called de-synonymization of words is most plainly seen with two words one from a Saxon and one from a Latin or Greek source have begun with identical meanings but have gradually diverged as pasta and shepherd for sight and providence boyish and purile homicide and murder often however the two words are derived from the same language as ingenious and ingenuous invent and discover astrology and astronomy and many others or one word with two different spellings both of which were used indifferently has become two distinct words each of which appropriates a part of the original meaning thus our word human was generally spelled H-U-M-A-N-E till the beginning of the 18th century though H-U-M-A-N occasionally appeared then however the distinction between what men are and what they ought to be arose and H-U-M-A-N was adopted for the first and the old spelling H-U-M-A-N-E for the other idea so divers D-I-V-E-R-S and divers were originally the same word and not distinguished in spelling till the 17th century and the distinctions between core, C-O-R-P-S and corpse clots and clothes flower, F-L-O-U-R and F-L-O-W-E-R were not established before quite modern times these are obvious distinctions which we can all understand at once the exact process which produces them remains like so much in language somewhat mysterious and unknown but as we have seen in the development of grammatical distinctions the genius of the language is often extremely subtle and delicate in its analysis so subtle that although we feel instinctively the discriminations that it makes we cannot without some effort understand the distinctions of thought on which they are based often indeed our usage will be right when the reason we give for it is entirely mistaken the human mind half consciously aware of infinite shades of thought and feeling which it wishes to express chooses with admirable discrimination though I know deliberate art among the materials provided for by historical causes or mere accidents of spelling different forms to express its inner meaning stamps them with the peculiar shade it wishes to express and uses them for its delicate purposes and thus with admirable but unforeseen design finds a beautiful and appropriate and subtle clothing for its thought to take a simple instance of these distinctions in the use of words we would all speak of riding in an omnibus or tram car or a farmer's cart in which we were given a lift on the road but of driving in a cable carriage which we own or hire many of us would not however be aware that the distinction we make between the two words is really due to the sense that in the case of the omnibus or farmer's cart the vehicle is not under our own control while the cable carriage is so also in modern standard English though not in the English of the United States a distinction which we feel but many of us could not define is made between forward and forwards forwards being used in definite contrasts to any other direction as if you move at all you can only move forwards while forward is used where no such contrast is implied as in the common phrase to bring a matter forward distinctions and nice discriminations of this kind are continually arising and attempting to establish themselves in the language and we could all witness now the struggle going on to define the usages of the three adjectives Scots, Scottish and Scotch another distinction now attending to establish itself is between the terminations of agent nouns in E-R or O-R we speak of a sailor O-R but of a boat being a good sailor E-R of a respecter of persons E-R but an inspector of nuisances O-R of a projector O-R and a rejecter E-R who opposes him here again the distinction is a somewhat subtle one the agent noun in O-R implying a trade or professional habitual function while that in E-R has no such special meaning it is in instances of this kind in the variations of our own speech and that of others that the study of words enables us to observe in little the processes and somewhat mysterious workings of those forces to which I do the perpetual change and development of national ways and usages and institutions End of chapter 3