VICISSITUDES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Thevicissitudes of the English language are more evident than its origin. In the history of a language we are perpetually reminded, by the remonstrances of the critics, of the corruptions of its purity, the perils of innovation, and the obtrusion of neologisms, while we find these same critics fastidiously rejecting what they deem the antiquated and the obsolete; many causes are constantly operating these changes of language. The style of one age ceases to be that of another; new modifications of thought create new modes of expression; and as knowledge enlarges its sphere, and society changes its manners, novel objects imperiously demand adequate terms.
Our language has been subjected to those dominant events in the history of our country which have so powerfully influenced our genius and our destiny; and, our insular position occasioning a general intercourse with all the Continental nations, our national idiom has been mottled by foreign neologisms.
For more than five centuries was the Saxon language the language of England; the awful revolution of 1066 produced novelties of all kinds, but none greater than the entire change in our Saxon language, which, however, our Norman masters could never eradicate from among the people. During three centuries most of our English writers composed in French. When Greek was first studied in the reign of Henry the Seventh, it planted many a hellenism in our English; the translation of the Scriptures in that of Edward the Sixth, while it transmitted many latinisms, at the same time revived the simplicity of the Saxon-English, which seemed to bear a sort of evidence that a primitive language was most suitable for primitive Christianity in contrast with the pompous corruptions of Rome.
Under Elizabeth favourite phrases were insinuated into the dialect by over-refined travellers, who spoke “minionlike,”while the revolution of the Netherlands incorporated among us many a rough but vigorous inmate. In the days of James and Charles, the long residence of the Spanish Gondomar at our court, and the romantic pilgrimage of love to Madrid, and the political ties which bound the two nations, framed the style of courtesy, as well as set the fashions.
The puritanic commonwealth under Cromwell sunk down the language to its basest uses. Stripped to nakedness, the jargon of the market and the shop hid itself under the gibberish of its cant. Writers then abounded equally illiterate and fanatical. Perhaps we owe to these mean scribblers the scorn and pride with which Milton constructed on the Latin model of inversions and involutions of sentences his artificial and learned prose, unlike the style of his contemporaries, and which was never to be that of his successors; it was a machinery too costly for its price, and too unwieldy for the handling of an ordinary workman. Under the second Charles we see the nation and the language equally gallicised, and so it remained to the days of Anne. Suppose for a moment that when the first Georges were appointed to the English throne, the Germany of that day had been the Germany of the present. What would have been the result? Instead of two torpid Germans, destitute of every sensibility to literature and art, we might have seen an accomplished Duke of Weimar at St. James’s, and a Wieland, a Schiller, and a Goethe at our court; our authors had been impressed by the German genius, in our emulation and delight. Such is the simple history of the English language as it has been, or might have been, subjected to our national events.
The history of the vernacular language of other European nations discovers the same mutability, though not always produced by those great public incidents which may have been peculiar to ourselves. In Spain, however, we find that the possession of that land by the Moors has left in the Castilian language a whole dictionary of Arabic words which now mingle with the vernacular idiom, and for ever shall bear witness of the triumphs of their ancient masters. But in the history of a vernacular language it may also happen that the first writers, combiningin a singleness of taste, may construct a particular style. The earliest writers of France had modelled their taste by the Greek; Jodelle, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and others, imbued with Attic literature, Greekised the French idiom, by their compounds, their novel terms, and their sonorous periphrases. The Court and the ladies were adopting this new style, and, as usual, the unskilful were diverging into the most ridiculous affectations. But it was possible that the French language might have acquired a concision and vigour of which it is now destitute, for those early writers threw out a more original force than their tame successors. The artificial delicacy of the French critics has condemned these attempts as barbarisms; but to have transplanted these atticisms into the native soil, partook more of boldness than of barbarism. The attempt failed, if it could ever have succeeded, by the civil wars which soon drew off the minds of men from the placable innovators of language.
The French, though not an insular people, have been subject to rapid revolutions in their language. The ancient Gaulish-French has long been as unintelligible to a modern Frenchman as our Saxon is to us; even those numerous poets of France who at a later period composed in theirlangue Romane, are strewed in the fields of their poesy only as carcasses, which no miracle of antiquarian lore shall ever resuscitate. Compare the style of one writer with another only two centuries later, or Rabelais with Voltaire! The age of Louis XIV. effected the most rapid change in the vernacular style, insomuch that the diction of the writers of the preceding reign of Louis XIII. had fallen obsolete in the short space of half a century. And yet the chastened style of the age of Louis XIV., with its cold imitation of classical antiquity, was to receive a higher polish from the hand of a Pascal, a novel brilliancy from the touch of a Montesquieu, and a more numerous prose from the impassioned Rousseau. The age of erudition and taste was to be succeeded by the more energetic age of genius and philosophy. An anecdote recorded of Vaugelas may possibly be true, and is a remarkable evidence of this perpetual mobility of style. This writer lived between 1585 and 1650, and during thirty years had been occupied,more suo, on a translation of Quintus Curtius. It wasduring this protracted period that the French style was passing through its rapid transitions. So many phrases had fallen superannuated, that this martyr to the purity of his diction was compelled to re-write the former part of his version to modernise it with his later improved composition. The learned Menage lived to be old enough to have caught alarm at this vicissitude of taste, and did not scruple to avow that no work could last which was not composed in Latin.
The languages of highly cultivated nations are more subject to this innovation and variableness than the language of a people whose native penury receives but rare accessions. Hence the ancient and continued complaints through all the generations of critics, from the days of Julius Cæsar and Quintilian to those in which we are now writing.1The same hostility against novelty in words or in style is invariably proclaimed. The captiousness of criticism has usually referred to the style of the preceding authors as a standard from which the prevalent style of its contemporaries has erringly diverged. The preceptors of genius at all times seem to have been insensible to the natural progress of language, resisting new qualities of style and new forms of expression; in reality, this was inferring, that a perfect language exists, and that a creative genius must be trammelled by their limited and arbitrary systems. This prejudice of the venerable brotherhood may, I think, be traced to its source. Every age advantageously compares itself with its predecessor, for it has made some advances, and rarely suspects that the same triumph is reserved for its successor; but besides this illusion in regard to the style, which, like the manners of the time, is passing away, the veteran critic has long been a practised master, and in the daring and dubious novelties which time has not consecrated, he must descend to a new pupilage; but his rigid habits are no longer flexible; and for the matured arbiter of literature who tastes “the bitterness of novelty,” what remains but an invective against the minting of new words, and the versatility of new tastes?
The fallacy of the systematic critics arises from theprinciple that a modern language is stationary and stable, like those which are emphatically called “the dead languages,” in which every deviation unsupported by authority is legally condemned as a barbarism. But the truth is, that every modern language has always existed in fluctuation and change. The people themselves, indeed, are no innovators; their very phrases are traditional. Popular language can only convey the single uncompounded notions of the people; it is the style of facts; and they are intelligible to one another by the shortest means. Their Saxon-English is nearly monosyllabic, and their phraseology curt. Hence we find that the language of the mob in the year 1382 is precisely the natural style of the mob of this day.2But this popular style can never be set up as the standard of genius, which is mutable with its age, creating faculties and embodying thoughts which do not enter into the experience of the people, and therefore cannot exercise their understandings.
A series of facts will illustrate our principle, that the language of every literary people exists in a fluctuating condition, and that its vaunted purity and its continued stability are chimerical notions.
In this history of the vicissitudes of the English language, we may commence with our remote ancestors the Anglo-Saxons. When their studies and their language received a literary character, they coveted great pomposity in their style. They interlarded their staves with Latinwords; and, even in the reign of the Confessor, the French language was fashionable. “The affectation of the Anglo-Saxon literati was evidently tending to adulterate their language; and even if the Conquest had not taken place, the purity of the English language would have been speedily destroyed by the admixture of a foreign vocabulary.”3Thus early were we perilling our purity!
In 1387, John de Trevisa, translating the Latin Polychronicon of Higden, tells us he avoids what he calls “the old and ancient English.” A century afterwards, Caxton, printing this translation of Trevisa, had to re-write it, to change the “rude and old English, that is, to wit, certain words which in these days be neither used nor understood.” It might have startled Master Caxton to have suspected that he might be to us what Trevisa was to him, as it had equally amazed Trevisa, when he discovered archaisms which had contracted the rust of time, to have imagined that his fresher English were to be archaisms to his printer in the succeeding century.
At the period at which our present vernacular literature opened on us, Eliot, More, and Ascham maintained great simplicity of thought and idiom; yet even at this period, about 1550, the language seemed in imminent danger; it raised the tone of our primitive critics, and the terrors of neologism took all frightful shapes to their eyes!
A refined critic of our language then was the learned SirJohn Cheke, who at this early period considered that the English language was capable of preserving the utmost purity of style, and he was jealously awake to its slightest violations. A friend of his, SirThomas Hoby, a courtly translator of the “Courtier of Castiglione,” had solicited his critical opinion. The learned Cheke, equally friendly and critical, insinuated his abhorrence of “an unknown word,” and apologises for his corrections, lest he should be accounted “overstraight a deemer of things, by marring his handywork.” Hoby had evidently alarmed, by some sprinklings of Italianisms—some capriccios of “new-fangled” words—the chaste ear of our Anglican purist. I preserve this remarkable letter to serve as a singularspecimen of our English, unpolluted even by a Latinism.4
“Our own tongue should be writtencleanandpure, unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein, if we take not heed, by time, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tongue naturally and praisably utter her meaning, when she borroweth no counterfeitness of other tongues to attire herself withal; but used plainly her own, with such shift as nature, craft, experience, and following of other excellent, doth lead her unto; and if she want at any time (as, being imperfect, she must), yet let her borrow with such bashfulness that it may appear, that if either the mould of our own tongue could serve us to fashion a word of our own, or if the old denizened words could content and ease this need, we would not boldly venture on unknown words. This I say, not for reproof of you, who have scarcely and necessarily used, where occasion seemeth, a strange word so, as it seemeth to grow out of the matter, and not to be sought for; but for my own defence, who might be counted overstraight a deemer of things, if I give not this account to you, my friend, of my marring this your handy work.”
Such was the tone even of our primitive critics! the terrors of neologism were always before their eyes. All those accessions of the future opulence of the vernacular language were either not foreseen or utterly proscribed, while, at the same time, the wants and imperfections of the language, amid all its purity or its poverty, were felt and acknowledged. We perceive that even this stern champion of his vernacular idiom confesses that “he may want at time, being imperfect, and must borrow with bashfulness.” The cries of the critics suddenly break on us. Another contemporary critic of not inferior authority laments that “there seemed to be no mother-tongue.” “The far-journeyed gentlemen” returned home not only in love with foreign fashions, but equally fond “to powdertheir talk with over-sea language.” There was French-English, and English Italianated. Professional men disfigured the language by conventional pedantries; the finical courtier would prate “nothing but Chaucer.” “The mystical wisemen and the poetical clerks delivered themselves in quaint proverbs and blind allegories.”5The pedantic race, in their furious Latinisms, bristling with polysyllabic pomposity, deemed themselves fortunate when they could fall upon “dark words,” which our critic aptly describes “catching an ink-horn term by the tail.” The eloquence of the more volatile fluttered in the splendid patches of modern languages. It seemed as if there were to be no longer a native idiom, and the good grain was choked up by the intruding cockle which flourished by its side. Another contemporary critic announces that “our English tongue was a gallimaufry or hodge-podge of all other speeches.”Arthur Goldinggrieves over the disjected members of the language:—
“Our English tongue driven almost out of kind (nature),Dismember’d, hack’d, maim’d, rent, and torn,Defaced, patch’d, marr’d, and made in scorn.”
“Our English tongue driven almost out of kind (nature),
Dismember’d, hack’d, maim’d, rent, and torn,
Defaced, patch’d, marr’d, and made in scorn.”
A critic who has left us “An Arte of English Poetry,” written perhaps about 1550 or 1560, exhorting the poet to render his language, which, however, he never could in his own verses, “natural, pure, and the most usual of all his country,” seemed at a loss where to fix on the standard of style. He would look to the Court to be the modellers of speech, but there he acknowledges that “the preachers, the secretaries, and travellers,” were great corrupters, and not less “our Universities, where scholars use much peevish affectation of words out of the primitive languages.” The coarse bran of our own native English was, however, to be sifted; but where was the genuine English idiom to be gathered? Our fastidious critic remonstrates against “the daily talk of northern men.” Thegood southernwas that “we of Middlesex or Surrey use.” Middlesex and Surrey were then to regulate the idiom of all British men! and all our England was doomed to barbarism, as it varied from “the usual speech of the Court,and that of London within sixty miles, and not much above.” But was our English more stable within this assigned circumference of the metropolis than any other line of demarcation? About 1580,Carewinforms us that “Within these sixty years we have incorporated so many Latin and French words as the third part of our language consisteth in them.”
Some there were among us who, alarmed that such ceaseless infusions were polluting the native springs of English, would look back with veneration and fondness on our ancient masters. Our great poetSpenser,6then youthful, declared that the language ofChaucerwas the purest English; and our bard hailed, in a verse often quoted by the critics—
Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled.
But in this well are deposited many waters. Chaucer has been accused of having enriched the language with the spoils of France, blending the old Saxon with the Norman-French and the modern Gallic of his day, for which he has been vehemently censured by the austerity of philological antiquaries. Skinner and his followers have condemned Chaucer for introducing “a waggon-load of words,” and have proclaimed that Chaucer “wrote the language of no age;” a reproach which has been transferred to our Spenser himself, who has transplanted many an exotic into the English soil, and re-cast many an English word for the innocent forgery of a rhyme! So that two of the finest geniuses in our literature, for recasting the language, must lay their heads down to receive the heavy axe of verbal pedantry.
Descending a complete century, in 1656 we are surprised at discoveringHeylin, at a period relatively modern, reiterating the language of his ancient predecessors. This latter critic published his animadversions on the pedantic writings ofHamon L’Estrange, who had opened on us a floodgate of Latinisms. Heylin observes: “More French and Latin words have gainedground upon us sincethe middle of Queen Elizabeth’s reignthan were admitted by our ancestors, not only since the Norman, but the Roman conquest.” This was written before the Restoration of Charles the Second, when we were to be overrun by Gallicisms. This complaint did not cease with Heylin, for it has often been renewed. Heylin drew up in alphabetical order the uncouth and unusual words which are to be found in Hamon L’Estrange’s “History,” and yet many of these foreigners since the days of Heylin have become denizens. So unsettled were the notions of our philology with regard to style, that L’Estrange could venture in his rejoinder, which contains sufficient vinaicre, as he writes it, a defence of these hard words, which is entertaining. “As to those lofty words, I declare to all the world this not uningenuous acknowledgment, that having conversed with authors of the noblest and chief remark in several languages, not only their notions but their very words especially being of the most elegant import, became at length so familiar with me, as when I applied myself to this present work I found it very difficult to renounce my former acquaintance with them; but as they freely offered themselves, so I entertained them upon these considerations. First, I was confident that among learned men they needed no other passe than their own extraction; and for those who were mere English readers I saw no reason they should wonder at them, considering that for their satisfaction I had sent along with every foreigner his interpreter, to serve instead of a dictionary.” Hamon L’Estrange’s “Life of Charles I.” was certainly a piece of infelicitous pedantry, as we may judge by this specimen.7
Even great authors glanced with a suspicious eye on these vicissitudes of language, not without a conviction that they themselves were personally interested in these uncertain novelties. It would seem as if Milton, from the new invasion of Gallic words and Gallic airiness which broke in at the Restoration, had formed some uneasy anticipations that his own learned diction and sublime form of poetry might suffer by the transition, and that Miltonhimself might become as obsolete as some of his great predecessors appeared to his age. The nephew of Milton, in the preface to his “Theatrum Poetarum,” where the critical touch of the great master so frequently betrays itself, pleads for our ancient poets, who are not the less poetical because their style is antiquated. Writing in the reign of Charles II., in 1675, he says: “From Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the language hath not been so unpolished as to render the poetry of that time ungrateful to such as at this day will take the pains to examine it well. If no poetry should please but what is calculated to every refinement of a language, of how ill consequence this would be for the future let him consider, and make it his own case, who, being now in fair repute, shall, two or three ages hence, when the language comes to be double-refined, understand that his works are come obsolete and thrown aside. I cannot—” he, perhaps Milton, continues—“I cannot but look upon it as a very pleasant humour that we should be so compliant with the French custom as to follow set fashions, not only in garments, but in music and poetry. For clothes, I leave them to the discretion of the modish; breeches and doublet will not fall under a metaphysical consideration. But in arts and sciences, as well as in moral notions, I shall not scruple to maintain, that what was ‘verum et bonum’ once, continues to be so always. Now whether the trunk-hose fancy of Queen Elizabeth’s days, or the pantaloon genius of ours be best, I shall not be hasty to determine.”
Would we learn the true history of a modern language, we must not apply to theCritics, who only press for conformity and appeal to precedents; but we must look to those other more practical dealers in words, theLexicographers, who at once reveal to us all the incomings and outgoings of their great “exchequer of words.” Turn over the prefaces of our elder lexicographers. Every one of them pretends to prune away the vocabulary of his predecessors, and to supply, in this mortality of words, those which live on the lips of contemporaries. In the great tome of his record of archaisms and neologisms, the grey moss hangs about the oak, and the graft shoots forth with fresh verdure.Baret, one of our earliestlexicographers, in the reign of Elizabeth thus expresses himself:—“I thought it not meete to stuffe this worke with old obsolete words which now a daies no good writer will use.”8Words spurned at by the lexicographer of 1580 had been consecrated by the venerable fathers of our literature and of the Reformation, not a century past; yet another century does not elapse when another dictionary throws all into confusion.Henry Cockram, whose volume has been at least twelve times reprinted, boldly avows that “what any before me in this kind have begun, I have not only fully finished, but thoroughly perfected;” and, presuming on the privilege of “an interpreter of hard English words,” the language is wrecked in a stormy pedantry of Latin and Greek terms, which however indicate that new corruption of our style which some writers and speakers, as Hamon L’Estrange, were attempting.9What a picture have we sketched of the mortality of words, through all the fleeting stages of their decadency fromTrevisatoCaxton, fromCaxtontoBaret, fromBarettoCockram, and fromCockramto his numerous successors!
Thus then has our language been in perpetual movement, and that “purity of style,” whose presumed violation has raised such reiterated querulousness, has in reality proved to be but a mocking phantom, fugitive or unsubstantial. Our English has often changed her dress, to attract by new graces, and has spoken with more languages than one. She has even submitted to Fashion, that most encroaching usurper of words, who sends them no one knows how and no one knows why, banishing theold and establishing the new; and who has ever found her legitimacy unquestioned when in her matured age we recognise Fashion under the consecrated name ofCustom.
But let us not quit this topic of “purity of style” without offering our sympathies for those who have suffered martyrdom in their chimerical devotion. In the days of my youth there were some who would not write a word unwarranted by Swift or Tillotson; these were to be held fast for pure idiomatic prose, by those who felt insulted by the encumbering Lexiphanicisms of the ponderous numerosity of Johnson; and recently a return to our Saxon words, diminutive in size, has been trumpeted in a set oration at the University of Glasgow by a noble personage. This taste is rife among critics of limited studies. Charles Fox, a fine genius who turned towards the pursuits of literature too late in life, was a severe sufferer, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist, so nervously apprehensive was this great man lest he should not write English. Addison, Bolingbroke, and Middleton were not of sufficient authority, for he would use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. Alas! what disappointments await the few who creep along their Saxon idiom, or who would pore on the free gracefulness of Dryden as a dictionary of words and phrases! Could the chimerical purity which these are in search of be ever found, never would it lend enchantment to their page, should their taste be cold or their fancy feeble. The language of genius must be its own reflection, and the good fortune of authors must receive the stamp used in their own mint.
It happens with the destiny of words, as in the destiny of empires. Men in their own days see only the beginnings of things, and more sensibly feel the inconvenience of that state of transition inflicted by innovation, in its first approaches often capricious, always empirical. These vicissitudes of language in their end were to produce a vernacular idiom more wealthy than our native indigence seemed to promise. All those vehement cries of the critics which we have brought together were but the sharp pangs and throes of a parturient language in the natural progress of a long-protracted birth.
A national idiom in its mighty formation, struggling into its perfect existence, encumbered by the heavy mass in which it lies involved, resembles the creation of the lion of the Bard of Paradise, when
————Half appear’dThe tawny Lion,pawing to get freeHis hinder parts.
————Half appear’d
The tawny Lion,pawing to get free
His hinder parts.
1“Curiosities of Literature,” Art. “History of New Words.”2These are political squibs thrown out by the mobocracy in the reign of Richard the Second. They are preserved in Mr. Turner’s “History of England.” I print them in their modern orthography. The first specimen runs in familiar rhymes:—“Jack the Miller asked help to turn his mill aright. He hath ground small, small! The King’s son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy Mill go aright with the four sails, and the post stand in steadfastness. With Right and with Might, with Skill and with Will, let Might help Right, and Skill go before Will, and Right before Might, then goes our Mill aright, and if Might go before Right, and Will before Skill, then is our Mill mis adyght.”Now we have plain, intelligible prose—“Jack Carter prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well, and still better and better; for at the even men near the day. If the end be well, then is all well. Let Piers the ploughman dwell at home, and dyght us corn. Look that Hobbe the robber be well chastised. Stand manly together in truth, and help the truth, and truth shall help you.”3Sir Francis Palgrave’s “Rise and Progress of the English Common wealth;” Proofs and Illustrations, ccxiii.4This letter to the translator Hoby has been passed over by those who collected the few letters of the learnedCheke; and, what seems strange, appears only in the first edition of Hoby’s translation, having been omitted in the subsequent editions. Perhaps the translator was not enamoured of his excellent critic.5Sir Thomas Wilson’s “Arte of Rhetoric,” 1553.6Spenser’s protest against the Innovators of Language may be seen in his “Three Letters,” which are preserved unmutilated in Todd’s “Spenser;” they are deficient in Hughes’ edition.7Heylin’s “Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles.” L’Estrange’s rejoinder may be found in the second edition of his History.8“Alvearie, or quadruple Dictionary of Four Languages,” 1580.9“The English Dictionary, or an Interpreter of Hard English Words,” by H. C., gent., 1658. The eleventh and twelfth editions are before me. The last, edited by another person, is not so copious as the former. In Cockram’s own edition we have a first “Book” of his “Hard Words,” followed by a second of what he calls “Vulgar Words,” which are English. The last editor has wholly omitted the second part. Of the first part, or the “Hard Words,” Cockram observes that “They are thechoicest words now in use, and wherewith our language is enriched and become so copious, to which words the common sense is annexed.” [See note on this Dictionary, with some few specimens of its contents, in “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii.]
1“Curiosities of Literature,” Art. “History of New Words.”
2These are political squibs thrown out by the mobocracy in the reign of Richard the Second. They are preserved in Mr. Turner’s “History of England.” I print them in their modern orthography. The first specimen runs in familiar rhymes:—
“Jack the Miller asked help to turn his mill aright. He hath ground small, small! The King’s son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy Mill go aright with the four sails, and the post stand in steadfastness. With Right and with Might, with Skill and with Will, let Might help Right, and Skill go before Will, and Right before Might, then goes our Mill aright, and if Might go before Right, and Will before Skill, then is our Mill mis adyght.”
Now we have plain, intelligible prose—
“Jack Carter prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well, and still better and better; for at the even men near the day. If the end be well, then is all well. Let Piers the ploughman dwell at home, and dyght us corn. Look that Hobbe the robber be well chastised. Stand manly together in truth, and help the truth, and truth shall help you.”
3Sir Francis Palgrave’s “Rise and Progress of the English Common wealth;” Proofs and Illustrations, ccxiii.
4This letter to the translator Hoby has been passed over by those who collected the few letters of the learnedCheke; and, what seems strange, appears only in the first edition of Hoby’s translation, having been omitted in the subsequent editions. Perhaps the translator was not enamoured of his excellent critic.
5Sir Thomas Wilson’s “Arte of Rhetoric,” 1553.
6Spenser’s protest against the Innovators of Language may be seen in his “Three Letters,” which are preserved unmutilated in Todd’s “Spenser;” they are deficient in Hughes’ edition.
7Heylin’s “Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles.” L’Estrange’s rejoinder may be found in the second edition of his History.
8“Alvearie, or quadruple Dictionary of Four Languages,” 1580.
9“The English Dictionary, or an Interpreter of Hard English Words,” by H. C., gent., 1658. The eleventh and twelfth editions are before me. The last, edited by another person, is not so copious as the former. In Cockram’s own edition we have a first “Book” of his “Hard Words,” followed by a second of what he calls “Vulgar Words,” which are English. The last editor has wholly omitted the second part. Of the first part, or the “Hard Words,” Cockram observes that “They are thechoicest words now in use, and wherewith our language is enriched and become so copious, to which words the common sense is annexed.” [See note on this Dictionary, with some few specimens of its contents, in “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii.]
DIALECTS.
Dialectsreflect the general language diversified by localities.
A dialect is a variation in the pronunciation, and necessarily in the orthography of words, or a peculiarity of phrase or idiom, usually accompanied by a tone which seems to be as local as the word it utters. It is a language rarely understood out of the sphere of the population by whom it is appropriated. A language is fixed in a nation by a flourishing metropolis of an extensive empire, a dialect may have existed coeval with that predominant dialect which by accident has become the standard or general language; and moreover, the contemned dialect may occasionally preserve some remains or fragments of the language which, apparently lost, but hence recovered, enable us rightly to understand even the prevalent idiom.
All nations have had dialects. Greece had them, as France, and Italy have them now. Homer could have included in a single verse four or five dialects; but though the Doric and the Ionic were held the most classical, none of them were barbarous, since their finest writers have composed in these several dialects. Even some Italian poets and comic writers have adopted a favourite dialect; but no classical English author could have immortalised any one of our own.
Ancient Greece, as Mitford describes, “though a narrow country, was very much divided by mountains and politics.” And mountains and politics, which impede the general intercourse of men, inevitably produce dialects. Each isolated state with fear or pride affected its independence, not only by its own customs, but by its accent or its phrase. In France the standard language was long but a dialect. There potent nobles, each holding a separate court and sovereignty in his own province, offered many central points of attraction. The Counts of Foix, of Provence and of Toulouse, and the Dukes of Guienne, of Normandy and of Brétagne, were all munificent patrons of those who cultivatedwhat they termed “l’art du beau parler,” each in their provincial idiom. These were all subdivisions of the two rival dialects to which the Romane language had given birth. But the river Loire ran between them; and a great river has often been the boundary of a dialect: France was thus long divided. On the south of the Loire their speech was called the language ofOc, and on the north the language ofOil; names which they derived from the different manner of the inhabitants pronouncing the affirmativeOui. The language of the poetical Troubadours on the south of the Loire had not the happier destiny of its rival, used by the Trouvères on the north. It was this which became the standard language, while the other remains a dialect. Here we have a remarkable incident in the history of dialects in a great country; it was long doubtful which was to become the national language; and it has happened, if we may trust an enthusiast of Languedoc, that his idiom, expressing with more vowelly softness andnaïvetéthe familiar emotions of love and friendship, and gaiety andbonhomie, gave way to a harsher idiom and a sharp nasal accent; and all ended by the Parisian detecting the provincials by their shibboleth, and calling them all alike Gascons, and their taste for exaggeration and rhodomontade gasconades; while the southerns, who hold that what is called the French language is only a perversion of their own dialect, like our former John Bull, fling on the Parisian the old Gaulish appellative ofFranchiman.1
The dialects of England were produced by occurrences which have happened to no other nation. Our insular site has laid us open to so many masters, that it was long doubtful whether Britain would ever possess a uniformlanguage. The aboriginal Britons left some of their words behind them in their flight, as the Romans had done in their dominion,2and even the visiting Phœnician may have dropped some words on our coasts. The Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons brought in a new language, and, arriving from separate localities, that language came to us diversified by dialects; and the Danes, too, joined the northern brotherhood of pirate-kings who planted themselves in our soil. The gradual predominance of the West-Saxon over the petty kingdoms which subdivided Britain first approached to the formation of a national language. The West-Saxon was the land of Alfred, and the royal cultivation of its dialect, supreme in purity as the realm stood in power, rendered it the standard language which we now call Anglo-Saxon.
“Had the Heptarchy (Octarchy) continued,” observed Bishop Percy, “our English language would probably have been as much distinguished for its dialects as the Greek, or at least as that of the several independent states of Italy.” In truth, we remained much in that condition while a power hostile to the national character assumed the sovereignty. So unsettled was the English language, that a writer at the close of the fourteenth century tells us that different parts of the island experienced a difficulty to understand one another. A diversity of pronunciation, as well as a diversity in the language, was so prevalent, that the Northern, the Southern, and the Middle-land men were unintelligible when they met; the Middle-land understood the Northern and the Southern better than the Northman and the Southman comprehended one another; the English people seemed to form an assemblage of distinct races. Even to this day, a scene almost similar might be exhibited. Should a peasant of the Yorkshire dales, and one from the vales of Taunton, and another from the hills of the Chiltern, meet together, they would require an interpreter to become intelligible to each other; but in this dilemma what county could produce the Englishman so versed in provincial dialects as to assist his three honest countrymen?
If etymology often furnishes a genealogy of wordsthrough all their authentic descents, so likewise a map of provincial idioms might be constructed to indicate the localities of the dialects. There we might observe how an expansive and lengthened river, or intervening fells and mountains which separate two counties, can stop the course of a dialect, so that the idiom current on one side, when it passes the borders becomes intrusive, little regarded, and ere it reaches a third county has expired in the passage. Thus the Parret, we are told, is the boundary of the Somersetshire dialect; for words used cast of the Parret are only known by synonyms on the west side. The same incident occurs in Italy, where a single river runs through the level plain; there the Piedmontese peasant from the western end meeting with a Venetian from the eastern could hold but little colloquial intercourse together; a Genoese would be absolutely unintelligible to both, for, according to their proverb, “Language was the gift of God, but the Genoese dialect was the invention of the devil.” In those rank dialects left to run to seed in their wild state, without any standard of literature, we hardly recognise the national idiom; the Italian language sprung from one common source—its maternal Latin; but this we might not suspect should we decide solely by its dialects: and we may equally wonder how some of our own could ever have been mangled and distorted out of the fair dimensions of the language of England.
All who speak a dialect contract a particular intonation which, almost as much as any local words, betrays their soil; these provincial tones are listened to from the cradle; and, as all dialects are of great antiquity, this sounding of the voice has been bequeathed from generation to generation.3It is sometimes a low muttering in the throat, a thick guttural like the Welsh, or a shrill nasal twang, or a cadence or chant; centuries appear not to have varied the tone more than the vocable. The Romanceof “Octavien Imperator,” which was written possibly earlier than the reign of Henry VI., is in the Hampshire dialect nearly as it is spoken now. The speech of a Yorkshireman is energetically described by our ancient Trevisa. “It is so sharpe, slytting, frotyng, and unshape, that we sothern men maye unneth understond that language.” As we advance in the North, the tones of the people are described as “round and sonorous, broad open vowels, and the richness and fulness of the diphthongs fill their mouths” with a firm, hardy speech.
A striking contrast is observable among those who by their secluded position have held little intercourse with their neighbours, and have contracted an overweening estimation of themselves, and a provincial pride in their customs, manners, and language. Norfolk, surrounded on three sides by the sea, remains unaltered to this day, and still designates as “Shiremen” all who are born out of Norfolk, not without “some little expression of contempt.” There is “a narrowness and tenuity in their pronunciation,” such as we may fancy—for it is but a fancy—would steal out of the lips of reserved, proudful men, and who, as their neighbours of Suffolk run their common talk into strange melancholy cadences, have characterised their peculiar intonation as “the Suffolk whine!” In Derbyshire the pronunciation is broad, and they change the G into K. The Lancashire folk speak quick and curt, omit letters, or sound three or four words all together; thus,I wou’didd’n, orI woudyedd’d, is a cacophony which stands forI wish you would! When the editor of a Devonshire dialect found that it was aspersed as the most uncouth jargon in England, he appealed to the Lancashire.4
But such vile rustic dissonance or mere balderdash concerns not our vernacular literature, though it seems that even such agrestic rubbish may have its utility in a provincial vocabulary; for the glossary to the “Exmoor language” was drawn up for the use of lawyers on thewestern circuit, who frequently mistook the evidence of a rustic witness for want of an interpretation of his words. Some ludicrous misconceptions of equivocal terms or some ridiculous phraseology have been recorded in other counties, among the judges and the bar at a county assize.
But it is among our provincial dialects that we discover many beautiful archaisms, scattered remnants of our language, which explain those obscurities of our more ancient writers, singularities of phrase, or lingual peculiarities, which have so often bewildered the most acute of our commentators. After all their voluminous research and their conjectural temerity, a villager in Devonshire or in Suffolk, and, more than either, the remoter native of the North Countree, with their common speech, might have recovered the baffled commentators from their agony. The corrections of modern editors have often been discovered to be only ingenious corruptions of their own whenever the original provincial idiom has started up.
These provincial modes of speech have often actually preserved for us the origin of English phraseology, and enlightened the philologist in a path unexplored. In one of the most original and most fanciful of the dramas of Ben Jonson, “The Sad Shepherd,” the poet designed to appropriate a provincial dialect to the Witch Maudlin’s family. He had consulted Lacy the comedian, who was a native of Yorkshire, respecting the northern phraseology. Unfortunately, this drama was never finished; and the consequence is, that the dialects are incorrectly given, and are worsened by the orthography of the printer. Yet it was from this imperfect attempt to convey some notion of our dialects that Horne Tooke was able to elucidate one of his grammatical discoveries, in regard to the conjunctionif, which, from “The Sad Shepherd,” is demonstrated to be anciently the imperative of the verbgif, or give. Thus it was, by apparently very rude dialects, this famous philologist was enabled to substantiate beyond doubt a signification which had occurred to no one but himself.5
A language in the progress of its refinement loses as well as gains in the amount of words, and the good fortune of expressive phrases. Some become equivocal by changing their signification, and some fall obsolete, one cannottell why, for custom or caprice arbitrate, guided by no law, and often with an unmusical ear. These discarded but faithful servants, now treated as outcasts, and not even suspected to have any habitation, are safely lodged in some of our dialects. As the people are faithful traditionists, repeating the words of their forefathers, and are the longest to preserve their customs, they are the most certain antiquaries; and their oral knowledge and their ancient observances often elucidate many an archæological obscurity. Hence, two remarkable consequences have been discovered in the history of our popular idioms; many words and phrases used in the land of Cockney, now deemed not only vulgar but ungrammatical, are in fact not corruptions of the native tongue, but the remains of what was anciently at different periods the established national dialect.6This transmitted language descended to the humbler classes, unimpaired and unaugmented, through a long line of ancestry. Again, it is often probable that the provincial word which in its pronunciation merely reverses the order of the letters, as now uttered, and which is only heard from the mouths of the people, may convey the original spoken sound, and be the genuine English. Are we quite sure that the polishers may not often have been the corrupters of our language? Nor let us be positive that the metropolitan taste has always fixed on the most felicitous or the most forcible of our idiomatic words or phrases, since we may discover some lingering among our provincial dialects which should never have been dismissed, and which claim to be restored. WhenJohnsoncompiled his “Dictionary,” he was not aware of the authentic antiquity of our dialectic terms and phrases. Our literary antiquities had not yet engaged the attention of general scholars. Provincialisms were not deemed by the legislator of our language legitimate words; he did not recognise their primitive claims, nor their relative affinities, but ejected them as vagabonds. But words are not barbarous norobsolete because no longer used in our written composition, since some of the most exquisite and picturesque, which have ceased to enrich our writings, live in immortal pages. After the issue of Johnson’s great labour, our national literature began to attract the studies of literary men, who soon perceived how this neglected but existing stock of idiomatic English in our provincialisms more certainly explained our elder writers in verse and prose. Amid the murmurs raised by the archæologists,Ashattempted to supply the palpable deficiency of Johnson; but the matter was too abundant, and his space too contracted. In vain he attempted his “Supplement;” all the counties in England seemed to rise against the luckless glossarist; but notwithstanding its limited utility, his vocabulary was often preferred for its copiousness to the more elaborate lexicon. The spirit of inquiry was now abroad after the “winged words;” and ingenious persons, within these twenty years,7have produced a number ofprovincial glossaries; but several are still wanting, particularly those of Kent, and Sussex, and Hampshire. All these glossaries collected together might form a provincial lexicon marking each county. A few might be allowed to enter into the great dictionary of the English language; but that would not be their safest place, for they would then lie at the mercy of successive editors, who would not always discern a precious archaism amid the baseness and corruption of language. The origin, the nature, and the history of our provincial idioms have yet never been investigated, though the subject, freed from its mere barbarisms, opens a diversified field to the philosopher, the antiquary, and the philologist.
Grose, who wrote in 1785, notices the state of those counties which were remote from the metropolis, or which had no immediate intercourse with it before “newspapers and stage-coaches imported scepticism, and made every ploughman and thresher a politician and a freethinker.” The accelerated intercourse of the people has long passed beyond the diurnal folio and the evanescent stage-coach, and in a century of railroads and national schools the provincial glossary will finally vanish away.