III

[97][An error. Prof. Skeat shows that ‘tram’ was an old word in Scottish and Northern English (Etym. Dict., 655 and 831).]

[98]Several of these we have in common with theFrench.Of their own they have ‘sardanapalisme’, any piece of profuse luxury, from Sardanapalus; while for ‘lambiner’, to dally or loiter over a task, they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of Pascal’sProvincial Letterswill remember Escobar, the great casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the notoriety which he thus acquired he owes his introduction into the French language; where ‘escobarder’ is used in the sense of to equivocate, and ‘escobarderie’ of subterfuge or equivocation. The name of an unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette, unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary expenses in the state, was applied to whatever was cheap, and, as was implied, unduly economical; it has survived in the black outline portrait which is now called a ‘silhouette’. (Sismondi,Histoire des Français, tom. xix, pp. 94, 95.) In the ‘mansarde’ roof we have the name of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. I need hardly add ‘guillotine’.

[99]See Col. Mure,Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, vol. i, p. 350.

[100]See Génin,Des Variations duLangageFrançais, p. 12.

[101][Dr. Murray in the N.E.D. calls these by the convenient term ‘nonce-words’.]

[102]Persa, iv. 6, 20-23. At the same time these words may be earnest enough; such was theἐλαχιστότεροςof St. Paul (Ephes. iii, 8); just as in the Middle Ages some did not account it sufficient to call themselves “fratres minores, minimi, postremi”, but coined ‘postremissimi’ to express the depth of their “voluntary humility”.

[103]It is curious that a correspondent of Skinner (Etymologicon, 1671), although quite ignorant of this story, and indeed wholly astray in his application, had suggested that ‘chouse’ might be thus connected with the Turkish ‘chiaus’. I believe Gifford, in his edition of Ben Jonson, was the first to clear up the matter. A passage inThe Alchemist(Act i. Sc. 1) will have put him on the right track. [But Dr. Murray notes that Gifford’s story, as given above, has not hitherto been substantiated from any independent source, and is so far open to doubt.]

[104][These are quite distinct words, though perhaps distantly related.]

[105]If there were any doubt about this matter, which indeed there is not, a reference to Latimer’s famousSermon on Cardswould abundantly remove it, where ‘triumph’ and ‘trump’ are interchangeably used.

[106][Dr. Murray does not regard these words as ultimately identical.]

[107][‘Rant’ (old Dutchranten) has no connection with ‘rend’ (Anglo-Saxonhrendan) (Skeat).]

[108]On these words see a learned discussion inEnglish Retraced, Cambridge, 1862.

[109][These are quite unconnected (Skeat).]

[110][Neither are these words to be confused with one another.]

[111]The appropriating of ‘Frances’ to women and ‘Francis’ to men is quite of modern introduction; it was formerly nearly as often Sir Frances Drake as Sir Francis, while Fuller (Holy State, b. iv, c. 14) speaks of Francis Brandon, eldestdaughterof Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; and see Ben Jonson’sNew Inn, Act. ii, Sc. 1.

[112][Not connected.]

[113][‘Sad’ akin to ‘sated’ bears no relationship to ‘set’; neither does ‘medley’ to ‘motley’.]

[114][On the connection of these words see myFolk and their Word-Lore, p. 110.]

[115][Not connected, see Skeat.]

[116]Were there need of proving that these both lie in ‘beneficium’, which there is not, for in Wiclif’s translation of the Bible the distinction is still latent (1 Tim. vi. 2), one might adduce a singularly characteristic little trait of Papal policy, which once turned upon the double use of this word. Pope Adrian the Fourth writing to the Emperor Frederic the First to complain of certain conduct of his, reminded the Emperor that he had placed the imperial crown upon his head, and would willingly have conferred even greater ‘beneficia’ upon him than this. Had the word been allowed to pass, it would no doubt have been afterwards appealed to as an admission on the Emperor’s part, that he held the Empire as a feud or fief (for ‘beneficium’ was then the technical word for this, though the meaning had much narrowed since) from the Pope—the very point in dispute between them. The word was indignantly repelled by the Emperor and the whole German nation, whereupon the Pope appealed to the etymology, that ‘beneficium’ was but ‘bonum factum’, and protested that he meant no more than to remind the Emperor of the ‘benefits’ which he had done him, and which he would have willingly multiplied still more. [‘Benefice’ from Latinbeneficium, and ‘benefit’ from Latinbene-factum, are here confused.]

[117][‘Hoard’ (Anglo-Saxonhord) cannot be equated with ‘horde’ (from Persianórdú).]

[118][These words have been differentiated in comparatively modern times. ‘Ingenuity’ was once used for ‘ingenuousness’.]

[119][The words are really unconnected, ‘to gamble’ being ‘to gamle’ or ‘game’, and ‘to gambol’ being akin to Frenchgambiller, to fling up the legs (gambesorjambes) like a frisking lamb.]

[120]The same happens in other languages. Thus in Greek ‘ἀνάθεμα’ and ‘ἀνάθημα’ both signify that which is devoted, though in very different senses, to the gods; ‘θάρσος’, boldness, and ‘θράσος’, temerity, were no more at first than different spellings of the same word; not otherwise is it withγρῖποςandγρῖφος,ἔθοςandἦθος,βρύκωandβρύχω, whileὀβελὸςandὀβολὸς,σορὸςandσωρὸς, are probably the same words. So too in Latin ‘penna’ and ‘pinna’ differ only in form, and signify alike a ‘wing’; while yet ‘penna’ has come to be used for the wing of a bird, ‘pinna’ (its diminutive ‘pinnaculum’, has given us ‘pinnacle’) for that of a building. So is it with ‘Thrax’ a Thracian, and ‘Threx’ a gladiator; with ‘codex’ and ‘caudex’; ‘forfex’ and ‘forceps’; ‘anticus’ and ‘antiquus’; ‘celeber’ and ‘creber’; ‘infacetus’ and ‘inficetus’; ‘providentia’, ‘prudentia’, and ‘provincia’; ‘columen’ and ‘culmen’; ‘coitus’ and ‘cœtus’; ‘ægrimonia’ and ‘ærumna’; ‘Lucina’ and ‘luna’; ‘navita’ and ‘nauta’; in German with ‘rechtlich’ and ‘redlich’; ‘schlecht’ and ‘schlicht’; ‘ahnden’ and ‘ahnen’; ‘biegsam’ and ‘beugsam’; ‘fürsehung’ and ‘vorsehung’; ‘deich’ and ‘teich’; ‘trotz’ and ‘trutz’; ‘born’ and ‘brunn’; ‘athem’ and ‘odem’; in French with ‘harnois’ the armour, or ‘harness’, of a soldier, ‘harnais’ of a horse; with ‘Zéphire’ and ‘zéphir’, and with many more.

[121]Coleridge,Church and State, p. 200.

[122][One hardly expects to find this otiose Americanism (first used by J. Adams in 1759) in the work of a verbal purist, when ‘longish’ or the old ‘longsome’ were at hand. No one, as yet, has ventured on ‘strengthy’ or ‘breadthy’ for somewhat strong or broad.]

[123][This prediction was correct. ‘Dissimilation’ is first found in philological works published in the decade 1874-85. See N.E.D.]

[124][Coblenz, at the junction of the Moselle and Rhine (fromConfluentes), reminds us that the word was so used.]

[125]A passage from Hacket’sLife of Archbishop Williams, part 2, p. 144, marks the first rise of this word, and the quarter from whence it arose: “When they [the Presbyterians] saw that he was notselfish(it is a word of their own new mint), etc”. In Whitlock’sZootomia(1654) there is another indication of it as a novelty, p. 364: “If constancy may be tainted with thisselfishness(to use ournew wordingsof old and general actings)”—It is he who in his striking essay,The Grand Schismatic, or Suist Anatomized, puts forward his own words, ‘suist’, and ‘suicism’, in lieu of those which have ultimately been adopted. ‘Suicism’, let me observe, had not in his time the obvious objection of resembling another word nearly, and being liable to be confused with it; for ‘suicide’ did not then exist in the language, nor indeed till some twenty years later. The coming up of ‘suicide’ is marked by this passage in Phillips’New World of Words, 1671, 3rd ed.: “Nor less to be exploded is the word ‘suicide’, which may as well seem to participate ofsusa sow, as of the pronounsui”. In theIndexto Jackson’s Works, published two years later, it is still ‘suicidium’—“the horridsuicidiumof the Jews at York”. ‘Suicide’ is apparently of much later introduction into French. Génin (Récréations Philol.vol. i, p. 194) places it about the year 1728, and makes the Abbé Desfontaines its first sponsor. He is wrong, as the words just quoted show, in supposing that we borrowed it from the French, or that the word did not exist in English till the middle of last century. The French sometimes complain that the fashion of suicide was borrowed from England. It would seem at all events probable that the word was so borrowed.Let me urge here the advantage of a complete collection, or one as nearly complete as the industry of the collectors would allow, of all the notices in our literature, which mark, and would serve as dates for, the first incoming of new words into the language. These notices are of the most various kinds. Sometimes they are protests and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new word’s introduction; sometimes they are gratulations at the same; while many hold themselves neuter as to approval or disapproval, and merely state, or allow us to gather, the fact of a word’s recent appearance. There are not a few of these notices in Richardson’sDictionary: thus one from Lord Bacon under ‘essay’; from Swift under ‘banter’; from Sir Thomas Elyot under ‘mansuetude’; from Lord Chesterfield under ‘flirtation’; from Davies and Marlowe’sEpigramsunder ‘gull’; from Roger North under ‘sham’ (Appendix); the third quotation from Dryden under ‘mob’; one from the same under ‘philanthropy’, and again under ‘witticism’, in which he claims the authorship of the word; that from Evelyn under ‘miss’; and from Milton under ‘demagogue’. There are also notices of the same kind inTodd’s Johnson. The work, however, is one which no single scholar could hope to accomplish, which could only be accomplished by many lovers of their native tongue throwing into a common stock the results of their several studies. The sources from which these illustrative passages might be gathered cannot beforehand be enumerated, inasmuch as it is difficult to say in what unexpected quarter they would not sometimes be found, although some of these sources are obvious enough. As a very slight sample of what might be done in this way by the joint contributions of many, let me throw together references to a few passages of the kind which I do not think have found their way into any of our dictionaries. Thus add to that which Richardson has quoted on ‘banter’, another fromThe Tatler, No. 230. On ‘plunder’ there are two instructive passages in Fuller’sChurch History, b. xi, § 4, 33; and b. ix, § 4; and one in Heylin’sAnimadversionsthereupon, p. 196. On ‘admiralty’ see a note in Harington’sAriosto, book 19; on ‘maturity’ Sir Thomas Elyot’sGovernor, b. i, c. 22; and on ‘industry’ the same, b. i, c. 23; on ‘neophyte’ a notice in Fulke’sDefence of the English Bible, Parker Society’s edition, p. 586; and on ‘panorama’, and marking its recent introduction (it is not in Johnson), a passage in Pegge’sAnecdotes of the English Language, first published in 1803, but my reference is to the edition of 1814, p. 306; on ‘accommodate’, and supplying a date for its first coming into popular use, see Shakespeare’s2 Henry IV.Act 3, Sc. 2; on ‘shrub’, Junius’Etymologicon, s. v. ‘syrup’; on ‘sentiment’ and ‘cajole’ Skinner, s. vv., in hisEtymologicon(‘vox nuper civitate donata’); and on ‘opera’ Evelyn’sMemoirs and Diary, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such a collection should be included those passages of our literature which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence of a word up to a certain moment. It may be urged that it is difficult, nay impossible, to prove a negative; and yet a passage like this from Bolingbroke makes certain that when it was written the word ‘isolated’ did not exist in our language: “The events we are witnesses of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very often original, unprepared, signal andunrelative: if I may use such a word for want of a better in English. In French I would sayisolés” (Notes and Queries, No. 226). Compare Lord Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date March 12, 1767: “I have survived almost all my cotemporaries, and as I am too old to make new acquaintances, I find myselfisolé”. So, too, it is pretty certain that ‘amphibious’ was not yet English, when one writes (in 1618): “We are like those creatures calledἀμφίβια, who live in water or on land”.Ζωολογία, the title of a book published in 1649, makes it clear that ‘zoology’ was not yet in our vocabulary, asζωόφυτον(Jackson) proves the same for ‘zoophyte’, andπολυθεϊσμος(Gell) for ‘polytheism’. One precaution, let me observe, would be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the adopting of any statements about the newness of a word—for the passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not the less to be noted—namely, that, where there is the least motive for suspicion, no one’s affirmation ought to be accepted simply and at once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are liable to error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as new in his time, ‘magnanimity’ for example (The Governor, 2, 14), are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed of ‘sentiment’ that it had only recently obtained the rights of English citizenship from the translators of French books, he was altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives inNotes and Queries, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which have not the smallest right to be so considered.

Let me urge here the advantage of a complete collection, or one as nearly complete as the industry of the collectors would allow, of all the notices in our literature, which mark, and would serve as dates for, the first incoming of new words into the language. These notices are of the most various kinds. Sometimes they are protests and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new word’s introduction; sometimes they are gratulations at the same; while many hold themselves neuter as to approval or disapproval, and merely state, or allow us to gather, the fact of a word’s recent appearance. There are not a few of these notices in Richardson’sDictionary: thus one from Lord Bacon under ‘essay’; from Swift under ‘banter’; from Sir Thomas Elyot under ‘mansuetude’; from Lord Chesterfield under ‘flirtation’; from Davies and Marlowe’sEpigramsunder ‘gull’; from Roger North under ‘sham’ (Appendix); the third quotation from Dryden under ‘mob’; one from the same under ‘philanthropy’, and again under ‘witticism’, in which he claims the authorship of the word; that from Evelyn under ‘miss’; and from Milton under ‘demagogue’. There are also notices of the same kind inTodd’s Johnson. The work, however, is one which no single scholar could hope to accomplish, which could only be accomplished by many lovers of their native tongue throwing into a common stock the results of their several studies. The sources from which these illustrative passages might be gathered cannot beforehand be enumerated, inasmuch as it is difficult to say in what unexpected quarter they would not sometimes be found, although some of these sources are obvious enough. As a very slight sample of what might be done in this way by the joint contributions of many, let me throw together references to a few passages of the kind which I do not think have found their way into any of our dictionaries. Thus add to that which Richardson has quoted on ‘banter’, another fromThe Tatler, No. 230. On ‘plunder’ there are two instructive passages in Fuller’sChurch History, b. xi, § 4, 33; and b. ix, § 4; and one in Heylin’sAnimadversionsthereupon, p. 196. On ‘admiralty’ see a note in Harington’sAriosto, book 19; on ‘maturity’ Sir Thomas Elyot’sGovernor, b. i, c. 22; and on ‘industry’ the same, b. i, c. 23; on ‘neophyte’ a notice in Fulke’sDefence of the English Bible, Parker Society’s edition, p. 586; and on ‘panorama’, and marking its recent introduction (it is not in Johnson), a passage in Pegge’sAnecdotes of the English Language, first published in 1803, but my reference is to the edition of 1814, p. 306; on ‘accommodate’, and supplying a date for its first coming into popular use, see Shakespeare’s2 Henry IV.Act 3, Sc. 2; on ‘shrub’, Junius’Etymologicon, s. v. ‘syrup’; on ‘sentiment’ and ‘cajole’ Skinner, s. vv., in hisEtymologicon(‘vox nuper civitate donata’); and on ‘opera’ Evelyn’sMemoirs and Diary, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such a collection should be included those passages of our literature which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence of a word up to a certain moment. It may be urged that it is difficult, nay impossible, to prove a negative; and yet a passage like this from Bolingbroke makes certain that when it was written the word ‘isolated’ did not exist in our language: “The events we are witnesses of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very often original, unprepared, signal andunrelative: if I may use such a word for want of a better in English. In French I would sayisolés” (Notes and Queries, No. 226). Compare Lord Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date March 12, 1767: “I have survived almost all my cotemporaries, and as I am too old to make new acquaintances, I find myselfisolé”. So, too, it is pretty certain that ‘amphibious’ was not yet English, when one writes (in 1618): “We are like those creatures calledἀμφίβια, who live in water or on land”.Ζωολογία, the title of a book published in 1649, makes it clear that ‘zoology’ was not yet in our vocabulary, asζωόφυτον(Jackson) proves the same for ‘zoophyte’, andπολυθεϊσμος(Gell) for ‘polytheism’. One precaution, let me observe, would be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the adopting of any statements about the newness of a word—for the passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not the less to be noted—namely, that, where there is the least motive for suspicion, no one’s affirmation ought to be accepted simply and at once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are liable to error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as new in his time, ‘magnanimity’ for example (The Governor, 2, 14), are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed of ‘sentiment’ that it had only recently obtained the rights of English citizenship from the translators of French books, he was altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives inNotes and Queries, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which have not the smallest right to be so considered.

[126]There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (Opera, vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title,Considérations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue Allemande.

[127]Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwörter im Deutschen, von. Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91.

I took occasion to observe at the commencement of my last lecture that it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux[128]and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies remain for ever without subtraction or addition. As I then undertook for my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own language had made, I shall consider in the present some of the losses, or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured. But it will be well here, by one or two remarks going before, to avert any possible misapprehensions of my meaning.

It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in the end, perish. They run their course; not at all at the same rate, for the tendency to change is different in different languages, both from internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life, they have their youth, their manhood,their old age, their decrepitude, their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary, out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a chief part of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we count the Provençal and Wallachian; not a few in our own. Still in their own proper being languages perish and pass away; there are dead records of what they were in books; not living men who speak them any more. Seeing then that they thus die, they must have had the germs of a possible decay and death in them from the beginning.

Languages Gain and Lose

Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built fabrics as these, the causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been actually at work very long before the results began to be visible. Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and in languages, it would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and period is growth and gain, while all after is decay and loss. On the contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions isgoing hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower, and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more; when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than those of life and order. It is from this moment the decline of a language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses of a language, and may esteem them most real, without in the least thereby implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun. This may yet be far distant, and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining. Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only different in that it is passing into another stage of its development; only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the flower from the bud; havingchanged its merits, but not having renounced them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but more of usefulness; not, perhaps, serving the poet so well, but serving the historian and philosopher and theologian better than before.

One observation more let me make, before entering on the special details of my subject. It is this. The losses and diminutions of a language differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions—namely, that they are oftwokinds, while its gains are only ofone. Its gains are only inwords; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a newpower; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a new comparative. But its losses are both in words and inpowers—in words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of tenses which it once used; forgets its dual; is content with one termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. “In all languages”, as has been well said, “there is a constant tendency to relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion”. For example, a vast number of languages had at an early period of their development, besides the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I mean by a language renouncing its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you before my lecture is concluded. This muchI have here said on the matter, to explain and justify a division which I shall make, considering first the losses of the English language inwords, and then inpowers.

Words become Extinct

And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in our language—as indeed in every other. When I speak of this, the dying out of words, I do not refer to meretentative, experimental words, not a few of which I adduced in my last lecture, words offered to the language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or if not so, which had been domiciled in it long, that they might have been supposed to have found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the times of our early English, have subsequently dropped out of our vocabulary, sometimes leaving a gap which has never since been filled, but their places oftener taken by others which have come up in their room. Not to mention those of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are very numerous, many held their ground to far later periods, and yet have finally given way. That beautiful word ‘wanhope’ for despair, hope which has sowanedthat now there is an entirewantof it, was in use down to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of Gascoigne[129]. ‘Skinker’ for cupbearer,(an ungraceful word, no doubt) is used by Shakespeare and lasted till Dryden’s time and beyond.

Spenser uses often ‘to welk’ (welken) in the sense of to fade, ‘to sty’ for to mount, ‘to hery’ as to glorify or praise, ‘to halse’ as to embrace, ‘teene’ as vexation or grief: Shakespeare ‘to tarre’ as to provoke, ‘to sperr’ as to enclose or bar in; ‘to sag’ for to droop, or hang the head downward. Holland employs ‘geir’[130]for vulture (“vultures orgeirs”), ‘specht’ for woodpecker, ‘reise’ for journey, ‘frimm’ for lusty or strong. ‘To schimmer’ occurs in Bishop Hall; ‘to tind’, that is, to kindle, and surviving in ‘tinder’, is used by Bishop Sanderson; ‘to nimm’, or take, as late as by Fuller. A rogue is a ‘skellum’ in Sir Thomas Urquhart. ‘Nesh’ in the sense of soft through moisture, ‘leer’ in that of empty, ‘eame’ in that of uncle,mother’sbrother (the German ‘oheim’), good Saxon-English once, still live on in some of our provincial dialects; sodoes‘flitter-mouse’ or ‘flutter-mouse’ (mus volitans), where we should use bat. Indeed of those above named several do the same; it is so with ‘frimm’, with ‘to sag’, ‘to nimm’. ‘Heft’ employed by Shakespeare in the sense of weight, is still employed in the same sense by our peasants in Hampshire[131].

Vigorous Compound Words

A number of vigorous compounds we have dropped and let go. ‘Earsports’ for entertainments of song or music (ἀκροάματα) is a constantly recurring word in Holland’sPlutarch. Were it not for Shakespeare, we should have quite forgotten that young men of hasty fiery valour were called ‘hotspurs’; and even now we regard the word rather as the proper name of one than that which would have been once alike the designation of all[132]. Fuller warns men that they should not ‘witwanton’ with God. Severe austere old men, such as, in Falstaff’s words would “hate us youth”, were ‘grimsirs’, or ‘grimsires’ once (Massinger). ‘Realmrape’ (= usurpation), occurring inThe Mirror for Magistrates, is a vigorous word. ‘Rootfast’ and ‘rootfastness’[133]were ill lost, being worthy to have lived; so too was Lord Brooke’s ‘bookhunger’; and Baxter’s ‘word-warriors’, with which term he noted those whose strife was only about words. ‘Malingerer’ is familiar enough to military men, but I do not find it in our dictionaries; being the soldier who, out ofevil will(malin gré) to his work, shams and shirks and is not found in the ranks[134].

Those who would gladly have seen the Anglo-Saxon to have predominated over the Latin element in our language, even more than it actually has done, must note with regret that in many instances a word of the former stock had been dropped, and a Latin coined to supply its place; or where the two once existed side by side, the Saxon has died, and the Latin lived on. Thus Wiclif employed ‘soothsaw’, where we now use proverb; ‘sourdough’, where we employ leaven; ‘wellwillingness’ for benevolence; ‘againbuying’ for redemption; ‘againrising’ for resurrection; ‘undeadliness’ for immortality; ‘uncunningness’ for ignorance; ‘aftercomer’ for descendant; ‘greatdoingly’ for magnificently; ‘to afterthink’ (still in use in Lancashire) for to repent; ‘medeful’, which has given way to meritorious; ‘untellable’ for ineffable; ‘dearworth’ for precious; Chaucer has ‘forword’ for promise; Sir John Cheke ‘freshman’ for proselyte; ‘mooned’ for lunatic; ‘foreshewer’ for prophet; ‘hundreder’ for centurion; Jewel ‘foretalk’, where we now employ preface; Holland ‘sunstead’ where we use solstice; ‘leechcraft’ instead of medicine; and another, ‘wordcraft’ for logic; ‘starconner’ (Gascoigne) did service once, if not instead of astrologer, yet side by side with it; ‘halfgod’ (Golding) had the advantage over ‘demigod’, that it was all of one piece; ‘to eyebite’ (Holland) told its story at least as well as to fascinate; ‘shriftfather’ as confessor; ‘earshrift’ (Cartwright) is only two syllables, while ‘auricular confession’ is eight; ‘waterfright’ is a better word than our awkward Greek hydrophobia. The lamprey (lambens petram) was called once the ‘suckstone’ or the ‘lickstone’; and the anemone the ‘windflower’. ‘Umstroke’, if it had lived on (itappears as late as Fuller, though our dictionaries know nothing of it), might have made ‘circumference’ and ‘periphery’ unnecessary. ‘Wanhope’, as we saw just now, has given place to despair, ‘middler’ to mediator; and it would be easy to increase this list.

Local and Provincial English

I had occasion just now to notice the fact that many words survive in our provincial dialects, long after they have died out from the main body of the speech. The fact is one connected with so much of deep interest in the history of language that I cannot pass it thus slightly over. It is one which, rightly regarded, may assist to put us in a just point of view for estimating the character of the local and provincial in speech, and rescuing it from that unmerited contempt and neglect with which it is often regarded. I must here go somewhat further back than I could wish; but only so, only by looking at the matter in connexion with other phenomena of speech, can I hope to explain to you the worth and significance which local and provincial words and usages must oftentimes possess.

Let us then first suppose a portion of those speaking a language to have been separated off from the main body of its speakers, either through their forsaking for one cause or other of their native seats, or by the intrusion of a hostile people, like a wedge, between them and the others, forcibly keeping them asunder, and cutting off their communications one with the other, as the Saxons intruded between the Britons of Cornwall and of Wales. In such a case it will inevitably happen that before very long differences of speech willbegin to reveal themselves between those to whom even dialectic distinctions may have been once unknown. The divergences will be of various kinds. Idioms will come up in the separated body, which, not being recognized and allowed by those who remain the arbiters of the language, will be esteemed by them, should they come under their notice, violations of its law, or at any rate departures from its purity. Again, where a colony has gone forth into new seats, and exists under new conditions, it is probable that the necessities, physical and moral, rising out of these new conditions, will give birth to words, which there will be nothing to call out among those who continue in the old haunts of the nation. Intercourse with new tribes and people will bring in new words, as, for instance, contact with the Indian tribes of North America has given to American English a certain number of words hardly or not at all allowed or known by us; or as the presence of a large Dutch population at the Cape has given to the English spoken there many words, as ‘inspan’, ‘outspan’[135], ‘spoor’, of which our home English knows nothing.

Antiquated English

There is another cause, however, which will probably be more effectual than all these, namely, that words will in process of time be dropped by those who constitute the original stock of the nation, which will not be dropped by the offshoot; idioms which those have overlived, and have stored up in the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will still be in use and currency among the smaller and separated section which has gone forth; andthus it will come to pass that what seems and in fact is the newer swarm, will have many older words, and very often an archaic air and old-world fashion both about the words they use, their way of pronouncing, their order and manner of combining them. Thus after the Conquest we know that our insular French gradually diverged from the French of the Continent. The Prioress in Chaucer’sCanterbury Talescould speak her French “full faire and fetishly”, but it was French, as the poet slyly adds,

“After the scole of Stratford atte bow,For French of Paris was to hire unknowe”.

One of our old chroniclers, writing in the reign of Elizabeth, informs us that by the English colonists within the Pale in Ireland numerous words were preserved in common use, “the dregs of the old ancient Chaucer English”, as he contemptuously calls it, which had become quite obsolete and forgotten in England itself. For example, they still called a spider an ‘attercop’—a word, by the way, still in popular use in the North;—a physician a ‘leech’, as in poetry he still is called; a dunghill was still for them a ‘mixen’; (the word is still common all over England in this sense;) a quadrangle or base court was a ‘bawn’[136]; they employed ‘uncouth’ in the earlier sense of unknown. Nay more, their general manner of speech was so different, though containing English still, that Englishmen at their first coming over often found it hard or impossible to comprehend. We have another example of the same in what took place after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the consequent formation of colonies of Protestant French emigrants in various places, especially in Amsterdam and other chief cities of Holland. There gradually grew up among these what came to be called ‘refugee French’, which within a generation or two diverged in several particulars from the classical language of France; its divergence being mainly occasioned by this, that it remained stationary, while the classical language was in motion; it retained usages and words, which the latter had dismissed[137].

Provincial English

Nor is it otherwise in respect of our English provincialisms. It is true that our country people who in the main employ them, have not been separated by distance of space, nor yet by insurmountable obstacles intervening, from the main body of their fellow-countrymen; but they have been quite as effectually divided by deficient education. They have been, if not locally, yet intellectually, kept at a distance from the onward march of the nation’s mind; and of them also it is true that many of their words, idioms, turns of speech, which we are ready to set down asvulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the primary rules of grammar, do merely attest that those who employ them have not kept abreast with the advance of the language and nation, but have been left behind by it. The usages are only local in the fact that, having once been employed by the whole body of the English people, they have now receded from the lips of all except those in some certain country districts, who have been more faithful than others to the tradition of the past[138].

It is thus in respect of a multitude of isolated words, which were excellent Anglo-Saxon, which were excellent early English, and which only are not excellent present English, because use, which is the supreme arbiter in these matters, has decided against their further employment. Several of these I enumerated just now. It is thus also with several grammatical forms and flexions. For instance, where we decline the plural of “I sing”, “we sing”, “ye sing”, “they sing”, there are parts of England in which they would decline, “we singen”, “ye singen”, “they singen”. This is not indeed the original form of the plural, but it is that form of it which, coming up about Chaucer’s time, was just going out in Spenser’s; he, though we must ever keep in mind that he does not fairly represent the language of his time, or indeed of any time, affecting a certain artificial archaism both in words and forms, continually uses it[139]. After him it becomes ever rarer, the last of whom I am aware as occasionally using it being Fuller, until it quite disappears.

Earlier and Later English

Of such as may now employ forms like these we must say, not that they violate the laws of the language, but only that they have taken theirpermanentstand at a point which was only a point of transition, and which it has now left behind, and overlived. Thus, to take examples which you may hear at the present day in almost any part of England—a countryman will say, “He made meafeard”; or “The price of cornrislast market day”; or “I willaxehim his name”; or “I tellye”. You would probably set these phrases down for barbarous English. They are not so at all; in one sense they are quite as good English as “He made meafraid”; or “The price of cornroselast market day”; or “I willaskhim his name”. ‘Afeard’, used by Spenser, is the regularparticiple of the old verb to ‘affear’, still existing as a law term, as ‘afraid’ is of to ‘affray’, and just as good English[140]; ‘ris’ or ‘risse’ is an oldpræteriteof ‘to rise’; to ‘axe’ is not a mispronunciation of ‘to ask’, but a genuine English form of the word, the form which in the earlier English it constantly assumed; in Wiclif’s Bible almost without exception; and indeed ‘axe’ occurs continually, I know not whether invariably, in Tyndale’s translation of the Scriptures; there was a time when ‘ye’ was an accusative, and to have used it as a nominative or vocative, the only permitted uses at present, would have been incorrect. Even such phrases as “Putthemthings away”; or “The manwhatowns the horse” are not bad, but only antiquated English[141]. Saying this, I would not in the least imply that these forms are open to you to employ, or that they would be good English foryou. They would not; inasmuch as they are contrary to present use and custom, and these must be our standards in what we speak, and in what we write; just as in our buying and selling we are bound to employ the current coin of the realm, must not attempt to pass that which long since has been called in, whatever merits orintrinsicvalue it may possess. All which I affirm is that the phrases just brought forward represent past stages of the language, and are not barbarous violations of it.

The same may be asserted of certain ways of pronouncing words, which are now in use among the lower classes, but not among the higher; as, for example, ‘contrāry’, ‘mischiēvous’, ‘blasphēmous’, instead of ‘contrăry’, ‘mischiĕvous’, ‘blasphĕmous’. It would be abundantly easy to show by a multitude of quotations from our poets, and those reaching very far down, that these are merely the retention of the earlier pronunciation by the people, after the higher classes have abandoned it[142]. And on the strength of what has just been spoken, let me here suggest to you how well worth your while it will prove to be on the watch for provincial words and inflexions, local idioms and modes of pronunciation, and to take note of these. Count nothing in this kind beneath your notice.Luncheon,NuncheonDo not at once ascribe anything which you hear to the ignorance or stupidity of the speaker. Thus if you hear ‘nuncheon’, do not at once set it down for a malformation of ‘luncheon’[143], nor‘yeel’[144], of ‘eel’. Lists and collections of provincial usage, such as I have suggested, always have their value. If you are not able to turn them to any profit yourselves, and they may not stand in close enough connexion with your own studies for this, yet there always are those who will thank you for them; and to whom the humblest of these collections, carefully and intelligently made, will be in one way or another of real assistance[145]. And there is the more need to urge this at the present, because, notwithstanding the tenacity with which our country folk cling to their old forms and usages, still these forms and usages must now be rapidly growing fewer; and there are forces, moral and material, at work in England, which will probably cause that of those which now survive the greater part will within the next fifty years have disappeared[146].

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