 Chapter 7, Part 1 of the English Language by Logan Piersle-Smith. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Language and history, the dark and the middle ages. We have in the previous chapter traced the evidence embedded in the English language of the culture of our ancestors and their progress and civilization up to the time that they left the continent to settle in their English homes. From the Roman civilization of Britain which they destroyed and from its Celtic inhabitants whom they massacred or enslaved, they received, if we are to believe what language tells us, practically nothing. The Latin word castra, which survives in the name of Chester and the ending of many other names such as Don Castor Winchester etc. is almost the only word they can be proved to have taken from the Romanized Britons. While from the Celtic speeches we have already seen, their borrowings were equally scanty. The next great stratum in our language, the next great deposit of civilization is that left by the conversion of the Angles and Saxons to Christianity in the 6th and 7th centuries. By their conversion they were transformed into members of the community of Europe and at this point the two streams of Teutonic race and classical civilization at last met and mingled. In the 6th century, however, Europe was plunged in the night of the dark ages. It was not the culture of Athens and free Rome. The literature and philosophic thought of the great classical tradition that the Christian missionaries brought to England but the rights and the doctrines of the church as they were preached and understood in the obscure period of the late Roman Empire. The effect on English life and thought was nevertheless immense and we must test it not only by the foreign words that were brought by Christianity into our language but also by the change of meaning in our native words due to Christian influence. The early missionaries, in order to make their simpler and more fundamental doctrines clear to the understandings of their hearers, chose native words nearest the meanings they wish to express and thus much of our religious vocabulary is formed out of old words filled with new significance, words such as God, Heaven, Hell, Love and Sin. The Anglo-Saxons, indeed like the modern Germans, preferred to translate rather than to borrow foreign terms and some Christian words were rendered by native equivalents which have since become obsolete as R-O-E-Q-E or RUD-R-O-D the native word for the Latin cross. Many Christian words were nevertheless borrowed from Greek and Latin and still remain in the language as witnesses of that great transformation. Among them may be mentioned altar, ulb, candle, cowl, creed, disciple, font, nun, mass, shrine and temple from Latin, acolyte, archbishop, anthem, apostle, canon, calarque, C-L-E-I-K, deacon, epistle, hymn, martyr, pentecost, pope, psalm, solter and stole are words borrowed at the same time which were of Greek origin but which were adopted in Latin and came from Latin into English. If we examine the vocabulary of continental Christianity, so large a part of which has been imported at various times into English, we shall see that most of the terms belong to the classical languages of Greece and Rome, but that they have been curiously transformed and have required new and strange significations by being made the medium of Christian thought and feeling. The Greek language did not possess terms to describe the deeper experiences of religious life, still less for such words to be found in the speech of the practical and warlike Romans. The task therefore set before the early Christians was to forge from these materials a new language capable of expressing a whole new world of thought, the beautiful or dark conceptions of Oriental mysticism and introspection, the dizzy heights of Oriental poetry and the joys and terrors of the soul. This task they accomplished with amazing success, partly by changing the meaning of old words, partly by the formation of new derivatives, partly by violent translations of Hebrew idioms and to a certain extent by borrowing Hebrew words, they found means to express such conceptions as charity, salvation, purgatory, sacrament and miracle and many others. Sabbath was borrowed from the Hebrew, Abbot from the Syriac. The Greek word for overseer Episcopos became our bishop. The Daimon, the God or divine power of the Greeks, was changed into the medieval demon. Eidolon, a word for image or phantom, became our idol and the Angolos or messenger, the Diabolos or slanderer, were transformed into the great figures of Angel and Devil. There remain two other Christian words which deserve more than a passing mention. One of these is Easter in which is preserved the name of a pagan goddess at the dawn or spring and of a pagan spring festival which Christianity adopted to its purposes. The other word is cross which embodies in its form an important aspect of English history. The word crooks, C-R-U-X, which denoted an instrument of execution in classical Latin and which was given by Christianity, so tender and miraculous a meaning, was translated into Anglo-Saxon as we've said by the native word rod. Cross is a form borrowed by the Irish from the Latin crux and spread by them in their great missionary efforts among the Danish populations whom they converted in the north of England. It appears first of all in northern place names like Crosby, Crosthwaite, etc. and finally makes its way from the northern dialects into literary English. The word cross, therefore, which we employ in so many and often such trivial uses is a memorial for us of the golden age of Irish civilisation. When Ireland was the great seminary of Europe, whence missionaries travelled to convert and civilise not only the pagan north of England but a large part of the continent as well. The conversion of England meant however not only the introduction of a new religion. The flood of Christianity flowed from sources deep in the past of Greece and Asia and brought with it much of the secular thought and knowledge which it had gathered on its way and the Union of England moreover to the Universal Church opened for our ancestors the door into the common civilisation of Europe. Of the effect of these influences on Anglo-Saxon culture, the growth of literature and learning before the conquest, it is hardly within our province to speak. The Anglo-Saxon language with its multitude of terms formed from native elements was partially destroyed as we've seen at the Norman conquest and almost all its learned words perished. We are only concerned with the deposit left in our living English speech by this first great flood of European culture. With the Bible came words riddled into the east like camel, lion, palm, cedar and terms of drugs and spices like cassia and hisop and myrrh which is one of the offerings of the Magi to the infant Christ. Gem 2 is a Bible word and crystal which our ancestors used not only for the mineral but for ice as well as they believed rock crystal to be a form of petrified ice. The more secular part of the early deposit of borrowed words from other sources resolves itself very largely like the earlier continental borrowings into the names of useful instruments, animals, plants and products. Cup, kiln, mortar, mat, post, pitch, ban for winnowing, plaster in its medical use are among the early English borrowings and with them the names of capon, lobster, trout, mussel and turtle for turtle dove and of useful plants like coal, C-O-L-E, cabbage, parsley, peas, asparagus, beet, fennel, radish with trees like pine and box. The lily and the rose are also Anglo-Saxon borrowings but seem to have been used first in literary allusions. The names India and Saracen reached England before the Norman conquest and there were two far-wounded words like the earlier pepper and the later orange which travelled to Anglo-Saxon England from remote sources in the east. One of them, our familiar word ginger, is derived from the Sanskrit and believed to belong ultimately to one of the non-Aryan languages of India. Ginger was imported into Greece and Italy from India by way of the Red Sea. Ancient merchants brought its name with them, hence it came to us through Greek and Latin. Silk is believed to have come all the way from China and to have reached us from Greece and Rome through some Slavonic language and by means of early traders in the Baltic provinces. Phoenix, the name of an imaginary bird and adamant, used in literature to describe a half-fabulous rock or crystal combining the qualities of the diamond and the lodestone, were with the earlier Drake, the first of the names of the legendary animals and jewels to reach us from the east. Purple, being the name of the royal cloth worn by kings, was like the earlier Caesar, a reminiscence of the Roman Empire. School, Scholar, Verse, Philosoph, P-H-I-L-O-S-O-P-H-E have famed gleams penetrating in the dark ages of this remote island from the light of Athenian civilization. The words circle and horoscope bowed late in the Old English period of traces of the interest which the Anglo-Saxons took in mathematics and astrology. But among the words of learned borrowing that seemed to have survived the Norman conquest, not a few were really forgotten with their companions and were adopted again from the French. Thus the antique and noble word philosopher which King Alfred had taken from the Latin in the form of Phyllis Soph, P-H-I-L-O-S-O-P-H-E, appeared again in the 14th century in the French form of Ph-I-L-O-S-O-P-H-E. Circle and horoscope also perished and were re-borrowed in the same century and our word scholar probably comes to us not from early English but from the later French. Well the term is therefore for the common and unchanging experience of life for the most vivid of human conceptions sun and summer, moon, stars and night, heat and cold, sea and land, hand and heart and for the commonest human ties and strongest human feelings remain in English substantially unchanged from the terms of the angles and Saxons inherited from a prehistoric past. Practically all our terms of learning and higher civilization have been buried from the continent and especially from France. The conquered island of England was for centuries a pale moon illuminated by the sun of French civilization and it must now be our task to trace the penetration of that light into the English language and the common consciousness of the English people. For the influence of France before the conquest language gives little evidence. We find two or three French names for drugs or herbs in learned works and at the time the ginger was buried from the Latin Gunningale came through France after an even longer journey having travelled through Arabia and Persia all the way it is believed from China where it was in its original form Collien-Kiang, Mild Ginger from Co a place in the province of Canton. Two other French words buried before the conquest are of considerable interest. These are Pride which appears about AD 1000 and Proud which came in about 50 years later. They are both derived from the French Proud P-I-U-D-P-R-P-I-E-U-X in modern French which descends from the first element of the Latin verb Prodesse P-R-O-D-E-W-C to be of value. These words which in French had the meaning of valiant, brave, gallant soon acquired in English the sense of arrogant, haughty, overweening. This change of meaning was due perhaps to the bearing of the proud Normans who came over to England before the conquest in the train of Iber the Confessor and the aspect in which these haughty nobles and ecclesiastics presented themselves to the Englishmen they scorned. Another word introduced at this time and no doubt by Iber the Confessor is Chancellor. A word full of old history which for all its present dignity is derived ultimately from canker that in word for crab. How the Cancelarius, a petty officer of the Eastern Empire stationed at the bars or crab-like lattices canceli of the law courts rose from an usher to be notary or secretary and came to be invested with judicial functions and to play a more and more important part in the Western Empire belongs however to European and not to English history. But the word is of interest to us as being one of the three or four French terms that found their way into English in Anglo-Saxon times. Before we dismiss the subject of Anglo-Saxon borrowings there are a few words of Danish derivation that should be mentioned. The greater part of the Scandinavian words in English have not much historical significance save insofar as they are a record of the Danish invasions and the large Danish element in the English population. The great word law L-A-W however and such terms as moot, hustings and the names for the divisions of counties Wappen, Take and Riding all of which appear in English in the late Anglo-Saxon period are memorials of the fact that England was once partly settled and ruled by Danes. End of section 11 Chapter 7 part 2 of the English language by Logan Piersle-Smith this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. We now come to the Norman Conquest which was destined to change and transform our language in so radical a manner. Of its effect on English grammar we have already spoken its influence on the English vocabulary was still greater but did not make itself felt for a considerable period of time. For nearly 150 years the two languages, Anglo-Saxon and Norman French ran side by side without mingling. French being the language of the government and the aristocracy while English was reduced almost to the condition of a peasant's dialect. Some relics however of written English during the first 100 years after the conquest have been preserved and after the year 1150 these grew somewhat more numerous although as we have seen it was not till the 14th century that a standard English was established and authors ceased to employ in writing their own local dialects. The lightest class of words adopted into English between the Conquest and the year 1200 are of an ecclesiastical character and share the influence of the Norman devotion to the church. These words in approximately chronological order are prior, chaplain, procession, nativity, cell, miracle, charity, archangel, evangelist, grace, mercy, passion, paradise, sacrament, saint. Words that we may associate with the solemn mabies and cathedral churches of Norman architecture which were then being built in so many parts of England. The remaining words are almost all connected with government and war and architecture court and crown, empress, legate, council, prison, robber and justice, rent in the sense of property by the terms of government while for military words we find tower and castle, standard, peace and treason. War, another early borrowing is a word adopted into French from old German. It came to us in its Norman form that has become with the common change of W to G-U-G-R in modern French. In the 13th century the process of borrowing went on with great rapidity and hundreds of French words were adopted into English and began to assume the composite character which it has ever since retained. An analysis of these words will give some notion of the character of this period beginning with the turbulent reign of King John and continued during those of his son Henry III and his grandson Everett I. In the first place we find a great accession especially in the first half of the century of religion. The earlier of these represent Catholicism or in its formal and outward aspect but shortly after the coming of the preaching friars to England when the effects of the great religious revival of the continent were brought home to the villages and poor townsfolk we find other words representing the inward and personal aspect of religious faith. Devotion, pity, comfort, anguish conscience, purity, salvation these words we may call not perhaps too fantastically early Gothic words as their introduction coincides in date with the great churches such as Salisbury Cathedral and the great monastic houses which were then being erected in what is called the early English period of Gothic architecture. Another religious movement of about this period that of the Crusades has left its mark on the English language. By the Crusades the gulf between Europe and the Orient was again bridged and the Eastern products and Eastern ideas began to spread over Europe. The East was from of old the home of jewels, rich dyes and splendid stuffs and among the Arabian words that came to us from this new intercourse with the Orient are terms like azure and saffron of scarlet which was at first the name of a rich cloth and damask from the name of the town Damascus. To this period we are also the Arabian names and our modern knowledge of two of the great staples of modern trade cotton and sugar and the word orange like sugar came from Sanskrit through the medium of Persian and Arabic found its way to the west in the train of the Crusaders. Others of the Crusaders words are assassin, Bedouin, hazard, loot caravan and mattress from Arabian sources miscreant and perhaps capstan of French or province soul formation. Assassin is like Bedouin a plural noun meaning hashish eaters it was used by the Crusaders for the murderers who were sent forth by the old man of the mountains to kill the Christian eaters and who were want to intoxicate themselves with hashish or hemp before undertaking these attempts. Hazard originally a game played with dice has been traced to the name of a castle Hasat or Asat in Palestine during the siege of which the game is said to have been invented. Miscreant misbeliever is a term of abuse for the Mohammedan cemented by the French Crusaders. Capstan is an article term from province and as it appears earlier in English than in French it was perhaps borrowed at this time by English seaman at Marseille or Barcelona. These Crusaders words however drifted into English at various times for the most part long after the 13th century of words actually adopted at this time the most important after the religious terms already mentioned are terms of law, government and war. It was in the 13th century that English law and English legal institutions undertake the form that they were destined to keep for the future and we find now in English for the most part borrowed from the Anglo-French language of law such words as judge and judgment inquest, a size, accuse and acquit fine, imprison felon, human cry plea, pleader and to plead with a number of other terms relating to feudal usages such as manor, air thief, homage. It is in this century too that the English parliament assumed substantially its present form and the great word parliament makes its first appearance. The campaigns of ever the first against the Welsh and the Scotch seem to have familiarised his subjects with many military terms in the latter part of the 13th century and it is now that battle, armour, assault conquer and pursue are first found in the vocabulary of English. If in the 13th century the degraded and poverty-stricken English language had begun to enlarge and enrich its vocabulary with terms of religion, law, government and war in the following century it became a fit vehicle at last for thought, learning and speculation and absorbed into its texture practically all the vocabulary of medieval culture. We find first of all those names of exotic animals that figured so fantastically in the medieval imagination. The ostrich, the leopard, the panther already made their appearance in the 13th century. These in the next 100 years were followed by the crocodile, the hippopotamus, the elephant, the dromedary, the rhinoceros, the camelapad, the hyena, the tiger and the pad. But with the names of these real beasts came a host of fabulous and fantastic creatures equally real however to the medieval mind the monoceros or unicorn the siren S-Y-R-E-N who was half-woman and half-fish the ono-centaur with the head of a man and the body of an ass, the griffin with an eagle's wings and a lion's body, the salamander which lived in flame, the fire-breathing chimera, the basilisk or cockatrice who was hatched by a serpent from a cox-egg and whose glance was fatal the dipsass whose bite produced a raging thirst and the amperspana a serpent with a head at either end and even of the authentic and actually existing animals, their beliefs were almost equally fabulous to then the camel lion was a combination of the camel and the lion and the camel a pad had the body of a pad with the lion's head the elephant was supposed to hide its offspring in deep water to protect it from dragons and our phrase crocodile's tears is due to the belief that crocodiles wept while they sated themselves on human flesh with the knowledge of these exotic beasts and serpents came also the names of many jewels and precious stones with their supposed magical qualities the car-bungle which shone in the dark the amethyst which preserved its possessor from intoxication the jascent which warded off sadness and which with the chrysophrase was found in the heads of Ethiopian dragons the sapphire which gave its possessor the power of prophecy appear in the English of the 13th century while in the 14th they found the beryl which preserves a domestic piece the diamond which discovers poison jasper useful against fevers and coral against enchantments calcedony against ghosts and drowning and the names of other precious materials such as amber, ebony, alabaster, jet and pearl when however we examined the vocabulary of medicine we found ourselves in a less fabulous world the medical law of the middle ages was somewhat more directly founded on experience and already in the 13th century we find such words as medicine ointment, poison, powder diet, physique physician, dropsy gout, malady with approximately their modern and scientific meanings this medical vocabulary is increased in the 14th century by apothecary artery, poor, vein the names of drugs like opium and of diseases such as asthma, quincy policy and dysentery but if we examine the theory of medicine on which the practice of these medieval physicians is based we find ourselves far removed indeed from modern science this theory is in the main the Greek theory of humus which reached Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries from the great schools of Arabian medicine according to this theory the body of man contains poor humus or liquids blood, phlegm, yellow bile or color and black bile or melancholy the last of which is a purely imaginary substance the excess of one of these humus might cause disease or make a man odd or fantastic and hence we have the humus of Elizabethan drama our phrases good humid or bad humid and our modern use of humorous and humor that the Latin word for a liquid or fluid has come to mean a mood or a quality, exciting amusement and to begin even speak of dry humor is due therefore to this old physiology which is left to many other marks on the English language an examination of some of our commonest expressions will show how many of them bear the imprint of medieval thought and how great is the deposit left in the English language by the science and culture of the middle ages thus sound names for different temperaments sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholy are derived from the supposed predominance in each one of the four humus the word temperament itself which has become so popular of late is derived from the Latin temperamentum meaning do you mixture and is used at first for the mixture of these humus and the familiar word complexion derived from the Latin complexionum formed from the verb plectore to weave or twine had originally the same meaning as temperament although now it is mainly used for the appearance of the skin as the temperament of the complexion sanguine, phlegmatic or melancholy could be best observed in the face this step from a man's physical condition to its appearance in his face was a natural one though it requires some knowledge of medieval notions to trace the relation of the modern adjective complex and such a phrase as a fair complexion closely connected with the four humus elementary qualities dryness and moisture, heat and cold there were also qualities of the humus and by their mixture produced various complexions and temperaments temper itself was originally a due mixture or proportion of these qualities and this use has survived in such words as distemper and good or bad tempered as temper was most frequently used in combination with words like ill, bad or violent it is acquired in the 19th century and such a phrase for instance as an outburst of temper the very opposite of its original meaning for an outburst of temper would have meant an outburst of composure and while we keep the old meaning in the phrase to keep one's temper our other phrase to have a temper exactly contradicts it spirited animal spirits and good spirits are other phrases due to the physiologists of the middle ages who regarded the arteries as air ducts containing bacterial fluids distinct from the blood of the veins of these spirits there was supposed to be three the vital and the natural the animal being named after the soul or animal was the highest and controlled the brain and nerves when animal in the 17th century became restricted in meaning to living creatures lower than man animal spirits changed with it and came to mean the joy of life we share with animals phrases such as cold blooded in cold or hot blood or my blood boils addu also to the old view derived from the sensations of the face that the blood is heated by excitement while an immense number of words and phrases hearty, heartless to take to heart to learn by heart and cordial from the Latin word for heart and due to the old belief that the heart was the seat of the internet and the feelings so to hypochondriacal and its modern abbreviation HIPT come to us from the medieval belief that the region of the hypochondria containing the liver spleen etc was the seat of the melancholy human another medical era is embodied in the old word rheumatic this rheumatism was believed to be a defluxion of room to the affected part and there is a reminiscence of medieval psychology to be found in common sense the common sense being a supposed internal sense acting as a common bond or center for the five external senses the 13th century word lunatic is evidence of the early belief that mental health was affected by the changes of the moon while the adjectives jovial satinine mercurial are due of course to the astrological belief that men owed their temperaments to the planets under which they were born indeed the large deposit left by medieval astrology in the English language is a sufficient proof of the great part that celestial phenomena and the supposed influence of the stars on the affairs that men played in the imaginative life of the middle ages influence itself derived from the Latin inflowere to flow in was at first a term of astrology and meant the emanation from the stars to men of an ethereal fluid which affected their characters and fates and our modern word influenza embodies the old belief that epidemics were caused by astral influence disaster and ill-starred need no explanation ascendant predominant conjunction and opposition are other words of astrology aspect meant originally the way the planets looked down on the earth and men derived their dispositions from the dispositions or situations of their native planets even our current word motor has descended towards from the heavens for it was first used to describe the primus motor the imaginary tenth sphere added by the Arabian philosopher Avicenna to the nine spheres of the Greeks among them Olympic alkali arsenic Tata are alchemists words which made their first English appearance in the 14th century quintessence which appears a little later was another alchemist's term describing the imaginary fifth by Aristotle to the four earth, air, fire, water of the early Greek philosophers the 14th century word test and the later alcohol are also terms of alchemy alcohol meant originally a fine powder the test is derived through testum from the Latin word tester an earthen vessel or pot which through ancient slang has become tet the French word for head it was used by the alchemists to describe the metal vessel in which they made their alloys from such a phrase as Shakespeare's tested gold as there is in the verb to test which is now commonly used in England although it was regarded as an Americanism not many years ago the names of the seven liberal sciences of medieval teaching the arts of the universities grammar, logic, rhetoric arithmetic, geometry music, astronomy were early adopted into English from the Latin in which they were taught and with them came in the 13th and 14th centuries a number of terms of learning and culture such as melody, rhyme comedy, tragedy, theater philosophy and history these words belonging as they do to the culminating period of the middle ages may be associated with the rich and decorated forms into which Gothic architecture flowered at about the same period the learning and science of the middle ages or at least that part of it which was assimilated during the 13th and 14th centuries into English thought can be perhaps as fairly estimated by the lists of these learned borrowings as by any other method some of them were no doubt mere ink horn terms and had no current use at the time outside the books in which they are found the greater part of here however in the works of popular writers like Chaucer and Gower as they must have become familiar to the educated contemporaries of the poets an etymological analysis moreover of this vocabulary of medieval culture will show with surprising accuracy the sources from which that culture was derived and the channels through which it passed on its way to England we find in the first place that practically all these words were borrowed from the French and that the French borrowed them from the Latin and that with the exception of some Arabian words the ultimate source of almost all of them was Greek they represent indeed the ricks and fragments of Greek learning which have been absorbed into Roman civilization and which after the destruction of the classical world were handed on through the dark ages from compilation to compilation going dimmer and more obscure more overlaid with eras and fantastic notions in this process of stale reproduction such as it was however this body of learning described for the most part from abridgments of Aristotle was not questioned medieval science was based not on the observation of nature but on the study of the ancients and a writer of natural history in this period felt it necessary to quote the authority of Aristotle in support of so elementary a statement as that eggs are hardened by heat or hatched by the brooding of their female parents in the 13th century however this body of learning had been much increased by a great accession from Arabian sources we have already mentioned the effect of the first contact during the crusades between east and west by means of the peaceful intercourse which followed Europe drew immense profit from the high culture of the civilized Arabs who in the east or in Spain kept the torch of learning a light while Europe was still developed in comparative darkness the Arabs have preserved through Syriac versions the works of Aristotle and much of the astronomical and medical learning of ancient Greece in the 13th century this body of learning reached Europe by means of translations from Arabic into Latin this accession of knowledge from eastern sources accounts for the greater part of the Arabic words adopted into English Euro, almanac, algebra, cypher, azimuth nadia, zenith olympic alkali, camphor, alcohol, amber are Arabian words alchemy olympic and perhaps some aldum are Greek words given an Arabic shape by passing through that language the rest of this early vocabulary comes in the main as has been said from Greek sources the names of jewels and precious materials of animals, real or imaginary are Greek pard and sapphire and perhaps tiger, ebony, beryl and jasper are words early borrowed by the Greeks from oriental languages alabaster and ammonia and perhaps alchemy came to Greece from Egyptian sources while ostrich is a hybrid word formed in popular Latin from the Latin avis and strithian the Greek name for ostrich the medical vocabulary is for the most part Greek and the Latin medical words are in the main translations from Greek the vocabulary of astronomy is more largely Latin but almost all these words also are direct translations from Greek and are no proof of additions made by the Romans to this science saving more politics, law and agriculture the practical and unimaginative Romans made few or no additions to culture and the study of languages as well as other studies leads us sooner or later back to Greece to the art and thought of that small and ancient people from which almost all that is highest in our civilization descends there is however one more department of medieval thought which going to its effect on English, life and language must be by no means admitted in this hasty survey this is the study of logic which more than any other subject absorbed the intellectual energies of the middle ages philosophy was in a sense the passion of the 13th century in Europe when scholasticism formed a mold of thought which lasted till the revival of learning about scholasticism with its quibbles and quiddities there still lingers much of the ridicule poured on it at the Renaissance and this is no place to do justice to this great medieval effort to understand the metaphysical basis of thought and to reconcile reason and the Christian faith can only be said that there can be no more pervasive permanent and important influence on civilization than metaphysical discussion barren and abstract and fruitless as it at first appears in the scholastic disputes of the middle ages habits of accurate reasoning were formed the internet was trained to deal with abstract ideas and tomes were borrowed or coined for their expression preachers educated not in secluded monasteries but in secular universities visited or took up their residence in English villages and through their sermons familiarized their heroes with at least some of the great abstractions and distinctions of Aristotelian thought by this means and by means of the lawyers and of Wycliffe's popular writings part of the scholastic terminology was absorbed into the English language indeed our present vocabulary of philosophic terms is very largely a production of scholasticism and owes its admirable clearness and definiteness to the hard thinking and these old logicians and already in the 13th and 14th centuries we find in English writing such words as accident absolute apprehension attribute cause essence existence matter and form quality and quantity general and special object and subject particular and universal substance intelligence and intellect medieval philosophy like the rest of medieval learning can make no great claims to originality its basis was the Aristotelian logic and its vocabulary although almost entirely Latin was formed for the most part by the literal translation into Latin of Aristotelian terms it cannot however be said that scholasticism made no contributions to human thought the distinction for instance between free will and determinism was not clearly defined in Greek philosophy developed by the medieval philosophers and theologians pre-destination is a word first found in St Augustine and free will is an English translation of the Latin phrase of a church father by means moreover of the disputations and the subtle distinctions of the scholastic logicians much that was latent or obscure in Greek philosophy was brought into great clearness and a large number of words were formed in low Latin to express these conceptions and distinctions entity and identity majority and minority duration existence ideal individual real and reality intuition object motive tendency predicate are among the words that English shows to late not to classical Latin our word premise or premises is a term of logic which came into use originally as the translation into Latin of an Arabic word meaning put before from the premises of a syllogism it acquired a legal meaning and used for the aforesaid in legal documents it soon was applied to the aforesaid houses, lands or tenements mentioned in the premises of the deed and so acquired its present use of a house with its grounds and other appurtenances whenever indeed a large number of new words however learned and abstract their character make their appearance in a language the genius of popular speech is sure to appropriate some of them in its own illogical and often absurd way to its own practical uses we are all familiar with the horn of a dilemma though few of us trace it to the argumentum corneutum of scholastic argument quiddity is a scholastic word and perhaps quandary also and even the modern locomotive is formed from the medieval translation of a phrase of Aristotle species one of the great words of the scholastic logic was soon appropriated in the early form of spice by the medieval druggists to describe the four kinds of ingredients in which they traded saffron, cloves, cinnamon and nutmegs but the main agents in the distribution of these words were the lawyers of the middle ages scholastic words and scholastic distinctions found their way to Anglo-French and then into English well as yet there was little science and no popular science the lawyer mediated between the abstract Latin logic of the school men and the concrete needs and homely talk of gross unschooled mankind law was the point where life and logic met if therefore we were to study the history of almost any of the great terms of ancient or medieval philosophy and trace all the varied and often remote uses to which it has been applied we should be able to observe the effect of the drifting down into the popular consciousness of the definitions of high and abstract thought we should find that many of our commonest notions and most obvious distinctions were by no means as simple and as self-evident as we think them now but were the result of severe intellectual struggles carried on to hundreds of years and that some of the words we put to the most trivial uses are tools fashioned long ago by old philosophers, theologians and lawyers and sharpened on the wet stone of each other's brains End of section 12 Chapter 8 Part 1 of the English language by Logan Piersle Smith this livery box recording of the great domain language and history the modern period by the end of the 14th century the English language had absorbed into itself the greater part of the vocabulary of medieval learning and had been formed into a standard and literary form of speech for the whole nation but from the point of view of vocabulary the 15th century marks a pause England exhausted and demoralised by its disastrous conflicts abroad in France and by the voice of the roses at home had little energy to devote to the higher interests of civilisation literature languished and the vocabulary of this period shows with little advance on that of the previous age some medical and chemical added to it the poems of Liddgate at the beginning and the works printed by Caxton at the end of the century contain many new words but we cannot find in them many signs of new conceptions or of any great additions to life and thought perhaps the most curious of these new terms are the words derived from medieval games and sports under the large accession of sea terms which make their appearance at about this time among Hawking terms had already appeared in the previous century the word Reclaim derived through the French from the Latin Retlamare Retlamare however meant in Latin to cry out against to contradict it acquired in Hawking the technical sense of calling back a hawk to the fist and so the notion of calling back or reclaiming a person from a wrong course of action among 15th century Hawking words may be mentioned rebate which meant to bring back to the fist debating hawk to allure from the older lure of obscure etymology and apparatus for recalling hawks and to rouse used first for the hawks shaking its feathers Haggard is a somewhat later word and being used of a wild hawk has been derived from the French word for Hedge H-A-I-E but this etymology is doubtful among early terms borrowed from the Chase is the word to worry which meant to seize by the throat and the curious verb to muse which is believed to be derived from the same word as muzzle and to mean originally the action of a dog holding up his nose or muzzle to sniff the air when in doubt about the scent the early word scent S-C-E-N-T derived ultimately from the Latin scentire was first a hunting term and the later word sagacious meant originally an English acute of scent Retrieve the French Retriever is also a hunting term and our verb to a bet is supposed to come through the French from the Norse B-E-I-T-A to cause debate and if so is perhaps like Trist another hunting term one of the few Scandinavian words preserved by the Normans after their settlement in France its original meaning was to bait or hound dogs on their prey and then from the action of inciting summer to commit a crime it acquired its present meaning a relay was originally a set of fresh hounds posted to take up the chase a couple was a leash for holding two hounds together ruse which is the same word as rush was a doubling or turning of the hunted animal and the hounds were said to run riot when they followed the wrong scent our verb to rove is a term of 15th century archery obscure in origin it meant originally to shoot arrows at a mark selected at random it has no connection with rover a sea term word borrowed from the Dutch and cognate with our old word r-e-a-v-e-r or robber these words give us a little glimpse into the sports of our medieval ancestors and we may add to them the verb to check or checkmate a chess term derived through the Arabian from the Persian shah or king the later terms derived from the sports are bias the colloquial phrase to bowl over and the word rub in the familiar phrase there's the rub or from the game of bowls while crestfallen and white feather come to us from the cockpit our language shows the close connection that existed from early medieval times between England and the low countries pack from which package and packet are derived is an early word in English used in the wool trade and apparently came to us in the 12th from the Dutch or Flemish traders spool striped and the verb to scar I thought to be technical terms brought in by the Flemish workmen whom ever the third settled in England to improve English manufacturers tub and scum are possibly early brewing terms borrowed from the Dutch or Flemish like the word hops which came to us from the low countries in the 15th century but many of the most important Dutch words in English are C terms indeed our nautical vocabulary is largely Dutch in origin and shows how much our early sailors owed to the mariners and fishermen of the low countries among the words that have been traced with moral is certainty to Dutch Flemish or low German sources bowsprit and skipper to be found in the 14th century while in the 15th appear hoy, pink, skirt keel and lighter for the names of boats pump and leak both first found in nautical use orlop, marlin, freight and boy B-U-O-Y the connection between Dutch and English sailors long remained a close one and among later additions to the English sea vocabulary which are probably Dutch in origin are reef belay, dock mesh, aloof and fly boat which appears in the 16th century and the 17th century words sloop, yacht commodore, yawl cruise and cruiser bow and boom keelhaul, jibe and avast if the 15th century may but few additions to the vocabulary of English thought and culture the century that followed this period of intellectual barrenness was one of unexampled richness and splendor it was in this century that the effects of the revival of learning reached England and the study of classical Latin and Greek soon exerted a powerful influence on the language although the learned words borrowed in the 14th century were most of them ultimately derived from classical antiquity they may yet be compared to the architectural forms and ornaments which were borrowed by Gothic architecture from Roman buildings but which were transformed and assimilated by the Gothic spirit these words were Greek or Roman in origin but medieval in sentiment and meaning and served like the borrowed architectural forms and ornaments to build up the great religious and Gothic edifice of medieval thought but now just as classical forms began to replace Gothic architecture so Latin and Greek words began to appear in English not borrowed through the medium of low Latin or medieval French but taken direct from the classics we note in this century the appearance of many renaissance words like Arcadian Dryad Hesperian Elysian which brought within the echoes of the great poetry of Greece and Rome at the same time as secular meaning was given to many old words which had hitherto had only a religious use and signification it was indeed in this century that the foundations were laid in the modern world in which we live old words were given new meanings or borrowed to express the new conceptions, activities and interests which have coloured and formed the life of the last three centuries to the more fundamental of these conceptions and the immense effect on the vocabulary of English we must devote a special chapter first it will be well to mention the positive words in the language by the various historical and religious movements and events of the 16th and succeeding centuries the first great modern movement was of course the Protestant reformation the name Protestant came to England probably from Germany the old word reformation was given a new use and the derivatives reformed and reformer were made from it evangelical and sincere were new words much used by the Protestants of their doctrines and now by their unfortunate identification of the Hebrew Sabbath with the Christian Sunday they fastened on that day the sabatic law of the Old Testament Godly in its modern sense is first found with the new derivatives Godliness and Godless in Tyndale's writings religion which was used before rites and observances or of monastic orders was given by the Protestants it's new and important abstract meaning of belief and the state of mind it induces pious was another of their new words and the old piety which had sometimes been used for pity acquired from them its modern meaning these words are a testimony of the new and inner religious life of the Protestants and the Roman Catholic words mission and missionary which were first used of the Jesuit missions shows the seal of their opponents this seal showed itself also in a new crop of controversial words pernicious, factional and factious first appeared in the writings of Catholic controversialists who however was soon eclipsed by the superior linguistic powers of the church it is in terms of abuse as we have already noticed that the gift for language is most vigorously displayed and Tyndale, Coverdale and Latimer to whom the English Bible and the church service so much made liberal use also of their word creating faculty to invent terms of obliquy for those who opposed their views Dunce which was derived from the name of the scholastic philosopher Dunn Skotas first appears with Romish Popery Povishness in the works of Tyndale Dunce the Monquerie Povishly were used by Latimer Luther's word Romanist was apparently introduced by Coverdale who also seems to have invented for his own use Dunceical, Babylonical Monish other terms of Protestant for Tuperation which belong to this period are Babylonian Malignant, Papish Papistical, Monkish with terms that are now obsolete such as Popling Duncery and the once common Abbey Lover bigoted and bigotry are words of Protestant views of a somewhat later date the history of Roman Catholic is a curious one the terms Roman Romanist and Romish had acquired by the end of the 16th century so so ambiguous a meaning that the need for a non-controversial term was felt and Roman Catholic was adopted for this purpose it was employed as the Oxford Dictionary states for conciliatory reasons in the negotiations for the Spanish marriage of Charles I found its way into general use while still engaged in their quarrel with the old faith the Protestants soon began those controversies among themselves by which the English vocabulary has been enriched already in the 16th century we note the words Puritan Precise and Precision and also Liberty which was first used as the name of the Antonomians sect of Anabaptist Reprobate is a sinister word which belongs to this period being a Calvinist term for souls rejected by God and fordoomed to eternal misery to turn however from these old controversies to secular matters we find that the English language became after the middle of the 16th century greatly enriched by far enriched and exotic words gathered from the distant east and west by the English travelers merchants and adventurous pirates the English people who had so long used their energies in the vain attempt to conquer France found now at last their true vocation in seamanship and their true place of expansion in the trade and finally the empire of India and America the exotic words that have found their way into English before this date had as we've seen come almost entirely at second hand by way of France but now that England was forming a more independent civilization of her own an Englishman were getting for themselves a wider knowledge of the world the French influence though still strong was not paramount and these travelers words were borrowed either directly from native languages or from the speech of the Portuguese Dutch and Spaniards who had preceded English sailors in the distant countries of the east and west of our words belonging to this period and derived from the languages of India and the Far East Calico was taken from the name of Calicut Cooley and Curry seemed to have come through Portuguese Malay and words bamboo cockatoo through Dutch junk through Spanish or Italian and gong another word from Malay was probably a direct borrowing indigo is from the Portuguese monsoon is believed to be an Arabian word but it came to us from the Dutch who had borrowed it from the Portuguese typhoon is also Arabian ultimately Greek in origin from the Near East coffee is an Arabian and dervish a Persian word reaching us through Turkish while Harim and Hashish and magazine were borrowed direct from Arabian banana is supposed to be a native African word from the Congo district it reached us slightly grow through Portuguese or Spanish the earlier words from the languages of the West Indies Mexico and South America all come to us as we might expect from the language of the early Spanish conquests and explorers of these countries Alligator is a popular corruption of the Spanish name for the lizard el or al lagato chocolate coca-tomato are Mexican cannibal hurricane hammock Arabian words while canoe, tobacco and potato are from the island of Haiti and guano from Peru all these come to us through the medium of Spanish cannibal and canoe are of interest to us as words brought back to Europe like Christopher Columbus and in cannibal as in the name West Indies and in Indian for the American Aborigines it's embodied the geographical era of the time when Columbus believed that in his voyage across the Atlantic he had reached what are now called the East Indies for when he heard the name cannibal which is simply a variant of caribou caribes he thought that it signified that these savage people were subjects of the grand carn of tartary whose domains he believed to be not far distant other words associated with early travellers are mulatto which is first found in the account of Drake's last voyage and breeze which in the 16th century was an adaptation of the Spanish brisa a name for the northeast trade wind in the Spanish main and which first appears in the account of one of Hawkins's voyages with these old sailors we may associate the words brought back to England by Captain Cook from the Pacific in the 18th century tattoo kangaroo and taboo Zasaphrus seems to be the earliest word borrowed from North America if indeed it be not a corruption of the Latin sex of Rada and came into English through the Spanish the 17th century words from North America moccasin prepossum tomahawk hickory terrapin were borrowed directly from Indian speech by the English settlers of North America there is much in the history and etymology of words that is merely curious and quaint and possesses a little but an archaeological interest that trousers should be traced back to the Greek Therosos and that banjo and galoshes to be able to boast of an illustrious Greek descent is certainly interesting but these associations can do but little to add poetic dignity to such words other words there are that gain immensely in value when we know their history and among them must be counted these exotic words of Elizabethan travel and adventure cannibal, hurricane alligator, savannah breeze, monsoon and we still may feel some of the strangeness of remote people and places that echoed in them when far-travelled seamen brought them back to English seaports from the Indian Ocean or the Spanish main to the war with Spain and the reign of Elizabeth we owe the Spanish words embargo and contraband and the Dutch word freebooter among other Dutch or Flemish terms that were perhaps brought back to England by soldiers from their campaigns in the low countries may be mentioned furlough, cashier liga, sconce onslaught drill and domineer comrade is a Spanish word but seems to have been a soldier's term learnt in the low countries and for law and hope is a military phrase being the Dutch for law and hope in which hope means a troop and is cognate with our word heap the separation from Rome the founding of a national church the war with Spain and the great victory over the Amada did much to awaken Englishmen to a sense of national pride and consciousness in the middle ages England shared in the cosmopolitan civilization of Europe with its catholic church and its ideal of a universal empire dynastic pretensions were paramount to those of nationality and even the claim of English kings to the French crown was supported by a considerable part of the population of that country but in the 16th century the ideal of nationality of political unity and independence began to take the prominent place in men's thoughts and feelings which it has since preserved and we can trace this growth in the curiously late appearance in the English language of what we may call patriotic terms nation was an early word but it was used more with the notion of different races than that of national unity and was indeed commonly employed to describe any class citizens it gained its present meaning in the 16th century and later in that century we find the adjective national formed from it and we can note at about the same date the appearance of such terms as fellow countrymen and mother country fatherland and compatriot appear a little later and patriot and patriotic belong to the middle of the 17th century but did not acquire their present meaning until a hundred years later at which time patriotism is found public in the sense of public spirited belongs to the early 17th century but public a hyphen spirit and public a hyphen spirited are somewhat later End of section 13 Chapter 8 Part 2 of the English language by Logan Pearsle Smith this liby box recording is in the public domain if we turn to literature we find as we might expect that the age of Shakespeare brought a little large accession to our literary vocabulary lyric, epic dramatic blank verse, fiction and critic we know too in the 16th century the beginning of our modern political vocabulary political itself belongs to this period and politics and politician in the older and more dignified meaning of statesman and secretary of state and the adjective parliamentary this political vocabulary was largely increased with the growth of political institutions in the 17th century the words politician and minister began to acquire the present meaning in its earlier years and legislator was borrowed from Latin in the same period cabinet council was apparently introduced at the accession of Charles I in 1625 and we hear of the cabinet about 20 years later privy councillor and cabal belong to the period of the civil war and the commonwealth and the phrase the army came gradually into use with the formation of a standing army at this time and was first applied to the parliamentary forces in 1647 we can trace to in this period the first beginnings of the vocabulary of modern democracy populace was indeed borrowed in the 16th century by means of France from the Italian popolaccio but like other Italian words ending in accio it was a term of abuse the populace was used in England as an equivalent for the mob or rabble and the adjective popular had something of the same depreciatory meaning the people however in its modern sense appears during the civil war when parliament made a solemn declaration that quote the people are under God the original of all just power and quote it was at this time too that the late Latin word radical used first in medieval physiology for the inherent or radical humours of plants and animals and in the 16th century applied to mathematics and philology came to acquire something of its modern meaning of fundamental or thorough it was however at this time a theological term being used in the Puritan phrase radical regeneration it was not definitely applied to politics till about 1785 and soon became in the reaction after the French Revolution a term of low reproach more or less equivalent to black guard a meaning it is said still to preserve in some remote or exalted regions scriptural is a Puritan word of the 17th century and so also are independent and independence which soon acquired a political meaning while demagogues are royalist term which most appeared in a comb basalike as this defence of Charles I was supposed at the time to have been written by the king himself the great word coin Milton in his answer to it abused it as a goblin word and declared summity liberally that the king could not quote coin English as he could coin money end quote plunder is a German word meaning originally clothes or household stuff it was much used during the 30 years war and became familiar on the outbreaks of the civil war being especially connected with Prince Rupert's reigns the quote plunderous Rupertism of Carlisle's eccentric coining Tory was originally a term of reproach for the half savage bog totters in Ireland supposed to be in the king's service royalist and round head date of course from this period Cavalier was adopted by the Puritans as a term of abuse for the swashbucklers on the king's side to whom also applied the protestant word malignant prelatory prelortise gooseary bustianist with terms coined in the controversies of this time by Milton who was as highly gifted for recuperation as he was for poetry sectarian was first used by the Presbyterians for the independence but was soon applied by the Anglicans to the nonconformists Kant as we use it now and fanatic are abusive terms introduced by the royalists and although they were defeated in the field we must on the whole condemn the crown of victory in this linguistic contest as their terms of recuperation have been more widely accepted and have gained a much larger circulation than those of their Puritan opponents at the restoration when Charles the second returned to England he brought the spirit of mockery with him and in the reaction against the austerity and zeal of the pious Puritans a large number of mocking words arose or became current to this period belong the verbs to burlesque to banter to droll to ridicule nouns like travesty badanage and adjectives like dracos and teasing in their modern use while prig was borrowed from rogue's Kant to describe a Puritan or nonconformist minister as typical of this time we may quote Anthony Wood's description in 1678 of a news set in academic circles the quote banterers of Oxford who make it their employment to talk at a venture, lie and pray to what nonsense they please if they see a man talk seriously they talk floridly nonsense what he says this is like throwing a cushion that a man's head that pretends to be grave and wise unquote of the more serious side of the restoration period the immense revolution in thought caused by the foundation at that time of modern science and the growth of a scientific vocabulary and of a scientific view of the world we shall speak in another chapter they remain however a few words in which are embedded events or aspects of the 17th century history Bivouac, like Plunder is a word that arose in the 30 years war though it did not come into English until the beginning of the 18th century campaign recruit commander in chief and the military sense of capitulation appear in the civil war and many other military terms parade pontoon, patrol, bombard cannonade barracks, brigadier, fusilia etc were borrowed in the later part of the 17th century from the French who are now the masters in the military art as indeed in most of the arts of this period refugee came into that language with the Huguenot refugees excises apparently a dutch word and though borrowed earlier came into general use when this system of taxation was borrowed from Holland in 1643 it long remained unpopular and Dr Johnson defined it in his dictionary as a hateful tax levied by wretches drub used originally of the bastonado is supposed to be an Arabic word brought in the 17th century from the Barbary states where so many Christians suffered captivity and where they learned the expression from the cuddling of their Mohammedan captors we can trace moreover to the 17th century the beginnings of our modern commercial vocabulary capital investment dividend belong to the earlier insurance commercial and discount part of the century and the great words bank machine and manufacture begin to acquire their modern meaning this commercial vocabulary was largely increased in the 18th century bankruptcy banking currency remittance appear before 1750 in this period the old word business acquires its present meaning and we hear of bulls and bears and of trade being dull or brisk after 1750 consoles finance appear and bonus and capitalist the vocabulary of modern politics grows with the development of political institutions we hear of the ministry in the reign of queen Anne of the premier in that of George I while in the early years of George II's reign the administration, the budget the estimates appear with party as the word is now used prime minister was borrowed from the courts of despotic sovereigns and applied to war as an abuser term but this title was expressly disowned by him as it was by lord north under George III it fell more or less out of use being replaced by premier or first minister until about the middle of the 19th century and it only received official recognition in 1905 at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th some of the vocabulary of the French revolution was imported into England aristocracy came now to be contrasted not with monarchy but democracy the words aristocrat and democrat were borrowed from the French and the old word despot required its present hostile meaning and despotism was enlarged from the rule of a despot to any arbitrary use of unlimited power the verb to revolutionize and the slightly later terrorize with royalism and terrorism are words of the French revolution conscription gained its present meaning from the conscriptions of the French Republic intersection in its geographical use and the 19th century word sectional are derived from the division of France into electoral sections under the directory even the most superficial survey however of the 18th century must not be dismissed without a reference at least to its contributions to our vocabulary of literature and social life literature itself only acquired the sense of literary production in this century and literary which is not included in Johnson's dictionary has till this time only the meaning of alphabetical of new formed words or old words that acquired their present meanings between 1700 and 1800 may be mentioned editor, novelist magazine, publisher copyright the verb to review and the great word the press of social life in this golden age of good society we find as we might expect many new characteristic terms the words season, polite and club take on new meanings we hear of callers and visiting cards and the immense number of compounds formed from the word tea tea room, tea party, tea drinker etc would afford much material for the student of social customs in the new compounds morovo which were now formed from the old word sea, sea beach sea bathing and the adjective seaside and the use of sea air as a cause not of sickness but of health we would find evidence of that discovery the sea is a source of pleasure and well being which we also owe to this period the earliest sea terms in English seaman, seafaring sea coast etc many of which date from the Anglo-Saxon period are all of a practical and unromantic character the renaissance compounds sea green sea god, sea nymph are translations from the classics and show the influence of the classical feeling for the sea although Shakespeare's epithets for the sea, rude dangerous, rough etc are generally hostile he yet shows in such adjectives as silver and multitudinous and in phrases like beached, margined and yellow sands a sense of its beauty beyond that of most of his contemporaries the popular love however for the sea and its shores dates from the 18th century and finds its latest expression in 19th century compounds like sea smell and sea memory which we owe to Tennyson the 19th century has provided us with an amazing wealth of characteristic terms and a chronological list of these and of the ones which have made their appearance since 1900 would if we had space to give it show us a curious picture of our own age and all its interests and developments but there is another aspect of the subject which is even more important the development as mirrored in our language of modern ways of thought and feeling and to this we must devote our last chapter end of section 14 chapter 9 part one of the English language by Logan Pizzle Smith this LibriVox recording is in the public domain language and thought if we were given what purported to be a transcript of a medieval manuscript and to find in it words like enlightenment or skepticism we should not hesitate to pronounce it a glaring flattered forgery and we should reject with equal promptness a pretended Elizabethan play in which we came upon such phrases as an exciting event an interesting personality or found the character speaking of their feelings or when we read in the famous cryptogram supposed to have been inserted by Bacon in Shakespeare's and his own writings secret interviews tragedies of great interest and disagreeable insinuations we begin to doubt Bacon's authorship of these phrases a doubt which is considerably strength and when we find him speaking of his affaire de coeur and the lone garden of his heart these are extreme instances but there are thousands of other words and phrases which we feel belong to definite periods and would never have been used at an earlier date the reason for our feeling is only to a slight extent philological as far as their form is concerned the greater part of these words would have been perfectly possible it is in their meanings the thoughts they express that they are such obvious anachronisms this curious sense of the dates of words or rather the ideas they express comes to us from our knowledge grown half instinctive of the ways of thought dominant in different epochs the mental atmosphere as we call it which made certain thoughts current and possible and others impossible at this time or that this study of the social consciousness of past ages is perhaps the most important part of history the government crusades religious reforms, revolutions all these are half meaningness events to us unless we understand the ideas, the passions the ways of looking at the world of which they are the outcome it is also the most elusive thing in history we gain enough of it indeed from literature to make us aware of any glaring anachronism but we are too apt to read any conceptions into old words and it is one of the most difficult of mental feats to place ourselves in the minds of our ancestors and to see life and the world as they saw it it is here that language can give the most important aid to history if we know what words were current and popular at a given period what new terms were made or borrowed and the new meanings attached to old ones we become aware in a curiously intimate way of interests of that period we cannot did as to always trace by means of language the ultimate source of all new ideas they may have been inherited from Greece or Rome they may have been discovered by some pioneer long before they became current but the date at which they are absorbed into the common consciousness and fairly accurately by the new words to which they give birth or the change in meaning which they produce in old ones one of the best tests of the importance and popularity of words is the number of compounds and derivatives which in a given period are formed from them we find for instance that many compounds from the word church, church bell church door, church book etc were formed in the Anglo-Saxon period that many derivatives were formed from court and crown courtier, courteous courtesy crowning, crownment in the 13th century and that religious words like Bess and Damels have produced many new terms in the early middle ages on the other hand an old word like rational which dates from the 14th century forms no derivatives until the 17th when we find rationalist rationality and several others while rationalism rationalize, rationalistic belong to the 19th century taking then this test of language and relying in particular on those words that take root and multiply at various periods let us start with the middle ages and to see what light we can get on the growth through the intervening centuries of our modern view of ourselves and the universe it is a common place to say that the dominant conception of modern times is that of science of immutable law and order in the material universe this great and fruitful conception so permeates our thought and so deeply influences even those who most oppose it that it is difficult to realize the mental consciousness of a time when it hardly existed but if we study the vocabulary of science the words by which its fundamentals thoughts are expressed we will find that the great apartment not to be found in the English language a few centuries ago or if they did exist that they were used at religious institutions or human affairs and that their adherence to natural phenomena has been very gradual and late order is indeed a very old word in English and appears in the 13th century in reference to monastic orders and the heavenly hierarchy thrones, dominations, powers etc of Christian theology it acquires some notion of fixed arrangement in the 14th century but it is not till the 16th century that its derivatives orderliness and orderly are found ordered meant in holy orders till this period when we also find the noun disorder regular is a 14th century word but was also used of monastic orders being the opposite of secular until 1584 while regularity, regulation and the verb to regulate belong to the following century method and system are also modern words with the adjectives methodical, systematic and uniform the verb to arrange is an old word and was used like array in a military sense but it does not appear in Shakespeare of the bible and did not acquire its present meaning until the 18th century at which time arrangement was also found the verb to classify with classification belongs to the 18th century organism to the 17th at which time the slightly earlier organize and organization acquired their present meanings if we take the great word law we do not find it applied in English to natural phenomena before the restoration although its Latin equivalent was employed in this sense by Bacon earlier in the 17th century the Roman and medieval phrase natural law meant the law of God implanted in the human reason for the guidance of human conduct and even the laws of nature by those who first used the phrase in our modern sense whereas the Oxford dictionary tells us regarded as commands which were imposed by the deity upon matter and which as we still say were evade by phenomena many other instances could be given but the above will suffice to show how the notion of law and order in nature and visible phenomena spread in the 16th and 17th centuries replacing the older notion of magic or divine interference partly produced by this sense of law and order in nature and probably still more the cause of it we notice also at this time a great increase in the vocabulary of observation speaking generally the names of the abstract reasoning processes reason, cogitation, intuition etc. belong to the middle ages while those which describe the investigation of natural phenomena belong to the modern epoch or only acquire at that time their present meaning and their popular use to observe meant to obey a rule or to inspect auguries for the purpose of divination until the 16th century when it acquired the meaning of examination of phenomena observant and observation for old religious words meaning the obedience to religious laws until the same time perception meant the collection of rents until the 17th century and scrutiny was only used of boats until that period experiment and experimental are old words used in alchemy but experiment as a process as in the phrase to try by experiment is modern and experimental had hardly more the vague meaning of observed until the 16th century the verbs to analyse to distinguish to investigate appear in the same period and in the next hundred years to remark to inspect to scrutinise to notice is an old verb meaning to notify but it fell out of use and was only revived and given its present meaning in America the 18th century we may also note that while words expressing belief certainty assurance credence etc are generally old in the language those that suggest doubt questioning and criticism almost all belong to the modern period doubt is of course an old theological word and doubtful appears in the 14th century but doubtfulness dubious dubiousness with sceptical sceptical scepticism are of modern formation and in this period too the old verbs to dissent and disagree became applied to matters of opinion or conviction this conception of order in the material universe and the spirit of investigation inquiry resulted of course in great increase of knowledge about natural phenomena this increase of knowledge and its popular diffusion shows itself very clearly in the large number of words that now come into use to describe the qualities of matter we note in the 16th century a new use of words like tenacity and texture while in the following century we find cohesion tension, elasticity and temperature at this time too the word force acquired its physical meaning and energy a word of Aristotle's creation which was first employed in English as a term of literary criticism was applied to the material world though its precise modern use was not defined before the 19th century but it will be outside our scope to trace in detail the formation of the vocabulary of modern science we can only note that the experimental study of nature began in modern Europe in the 16th century and that many observations were made and much material collected and that then after the Czech cause by the civil war when men's minds were turned at the restoration from theological controversies to the affairs of this world an immense and unprecedented advance was suddenly made in scientific knowledge although somewhat disconnected observations collected by previous generations were now ordered and systematized and modern science sprang into existence and began to extend its domain over the whole universe but this conception of science was not so much a new discovery as the revival of ancient thought which found out the renaissance and atmosphere favorable to its fruitful development the order however which the ancients found in the universe was a fixed and unchangeable one the belief in progressive change in evolution is modern and forms perhaps the most essential difference between our view of the world and that of the Greeks and Romans we do not perhaps always realize how very modern the conception is but if we take the words by which it is expressed advance amelioration development improvement progress evolution we shall find that none of them can be found in English with their present meaning before the 16th century advance and advancement are old words in English with the meaning of promotion from a lower to a higher office and only acquire the sense of progress after the middle ages improve and improvement with terms of law French originally employed to describe the process of enclosing wasteland and bringing it into cultivation they acquired the sense of making better in the 17th century and one of the earliest uses of improve with this modern meaning is found appropriately enough in the title of the Royal Society of London for improving natural knowledge founded about 1660 evolution is of course a modern word in English it appeared first in a military sense in the 17th century and acquired its present meaning and its immense development from the work of Darwin and Herbert Spencer in the 19th century indeed it is not too much to say that although the middle ages had words like regeneration and amendment with reference to the notion of personal conduct and its reform there were at that time no general terms to express the ideas of continuous improvement of advance to better and better conditions the reason that there were no such terms is of course that they were not needed the idea of progress may have visited the thoughts of a few lonely philosophers but it obtained no general acceptance and found no expression in the language the social consciousness was not favourable to it and dominated as it was by the religious belief in the degeneracy of a world fallen from grace and fated to worse deterioration before its sudden end which might come at any time even at the reformation the ideal, as the word reformation shows was that of a return to the purity of primitive and uncorrupted times and the conception of continuous evolution of an advance beyond the limits set by the past is one which has appeared at a late period in the history of thought indeed the application of this thought to human society the belief in human progress hardly became diffused and popular before the middle of the 18th century progress is an old word for a journey a royal progress began to acquire the meaning of continuous improvement at the time of Shakespeare at which time the verb to progress appeared and the adjective progressive which was used by Bacon in his essays the verb however became obsolete in English and was introduced again from America after the notion of progress taken into their systems and popularised by the 18th century philosophers had found its way into the popular imagination and given birth to the great new hope of modern times the modern belief that human society is advancing or can advance to better and better conditions we have given a summary account in the previous chapter of the deposits left by various historical events in the English language of words as historical documents still more interesting is the evidence of language about the growth of the sense of history itself the change that the modern conceptions of order and progress have produced in our way of regarding the past ages if we examine our historical vocabulary the words and phrases by which we express our sense that the past was not the same but something different from the present we shall find that they are all of the modern and most of them indeed a very recent introduction men in the middle ages were fully conscious of antiquity but safe for the sense of increasing deterioration no clear distinction existed in the popular mind between the life of the present and the past feudal institutions and medieval ways of thought were attributed to the Greeks who were always pictured as dressed in medieval costumes probably the first word in which our modern historical sense finds expression is the word primitive as applied by the reformers to the early church indeed the effect of the reformation in turning men's thoughts not only to past events but to the customs and institutions of earlier ages did much to create a sense of history this was increased by the revival of learning and a tour understanding of classical times the distinction between ancient and modern appears in Bacon's writings and the word classical with something that by no means all of the meaning we give it is found not much later the Puritans by adopting from the church fathers the distinction between the older new testament dispensations increased the sense of historical perspective and the words epoch century decade with the adjectives antiquated primeval gothic old fashioned out of date show its growth in spread in the 17th century it is not however till the 18th century that the sense of the past embodies its open phrases like the dark ages the revival of learning one medieval feudalism Elizabethan the Renaissance belong to the 19th century an acronism was used in the 17th century for an era in computing time its modern meaning first found in is very significant and conveying as it does the idea of a thing which is appropriate to one age but out of harmony with another it expresses a thought a way of feeling which is very modern and which would not have needed expression at an earlier period the latest addition to a historical vocabulary is the word prehistoric which is first found in 1851 and which represents the opening up of an immense new field of investigation the history of mankind before the existence of written records with this growing sense of the past and its difference from the present we find as we might expect the growth of a romantic and sentimental attitude towards bygone ages of English history the earlier attitude of the 18th century towards the middle ages which is expressed in phrases like ages and barbarous or gothic to describe everything medieval was not long after succeeded by the romantic movement and its revival which we have already mentioned of old and half forgotten words but these words of the romantic revival chivalry, chivalrous minstrel, bad etc have now taken on a romantic glamour then by no means originally possessed minstrel was a name for a buffoon or juggler as well as a musician in early times while bad as a name for a Gaelic singer was used with beggar and vagabond as a term of contempt until it became associated with the classical use of the same word and it was idealised by so well to Scott our modern use of chivalry as an ideal of conduct dates no further back than Burke's famous phrase the age of chivalry is gone the above instances of modern ways of thought and feeling will give us some slight notion of the words we must delete from our vocabulary the ideas we must dismiss from our mind should we wish to enter into the spirit and popular consciousness of the middle ages should we succeed in our attempt we should find ourselves in a world strangely different from the world which modern thought has created for us a world not governed by impersonal law but expressing supernatural purpose and subject to constant supernatural intervention the sense of the past and future the looking before and after of modern times the historical sense makes the past so different from the present and fills our minds with speculation and ideals for the future would drop from us the present would be for us the same as the past and our future prospect will be that of more or less swift destruction of the world and human society our modern universe is a vast process of ordered change and regular development theirs was a definite and almost unchanging creation formed in a moment out of nothing and destined to end as suddenly as it began but perhaps what would impress us most would be the absorption of thought in immediate practical considerations the absence of curiosity about natural objects saving so far as they ministered to man's service we should find that the movements of heavenly bodies were mainly of interest for their supposed effect on the destiny of human beings the plants that were useful or supposed to be useful in medicine and magic were the ones that were known and named zoology was important for the moral lessons to be drawn from the ways of animals mineralogy consisted largely of a knowledge of the magical powers of duels chemistry was pursued for the purpose of transmuting metals into gold and even the philosophy of the middle ages was an effort not so much to arrive at truth as to reconcile reason and revealed religion we should find plenty of speculation about the practical uses of things and many words to describe their nature from this point of view but words to describe their qualities apart from their uses would be almost entirely wanting even the vocabulary of another side of disinterested observation the sense of beauty will be scanty for words like admiration and beautiful belong to the 16th century and not to the middle ages end of chapter 9 part 1