By JOHN PEILE, M. A.
Words are subject to an incessant change. Substantives, for example, are the names of things actually existing, or of qualities of those things. When I say an oak, I mean an oak and not a beech; goodness is not badness; and if these things don’t change, how can the names which express them change without causing utter confusion? Perhaps variations so violent as these are not very common, and yet both these changes have occurred in language. The very same word which to the Greeks meant an oak, to the Romans meant a beech, though an oak never yet changed into a beech.Schlechtin German first of all meant “straight.” Now the “straightness” of a visible object, such as a line, is the most obvious metaphor by which to express the moral idea of “straightforwardness” and simplicity of heart and purpose, just as our common wordrightmeans originally that which is straight, the Latinrectus. But then simpleness may shade into the folly of the simpleton; and lastly the fool in worldly wisdom may give his name to the fool of whom Solomon spoke; and by some such process as thisschlechtin modern German means “bad” only. After seeing this change of nouns, can we wonder that verbs can vary their meaning by imperceptible degrees so much that the first sense would be altogether unrecognizable unless we had the history of the word recorded by its use in successive writers?
Great changes of language are sometimes due to great convulsions in history; as when the Roman civilization was destroyed by nations comparatively uncivilized and the language of the Romans remained modified in different ways in the countries of which they were the lords no longer. Such great changes do not often take place; yet just as surely, though more slowly, a gradual change goes on in the most peaceful times, of which you cannot have a better example than in your own English. “Well,” you say, “surely English has not changed much in the last three hundred years. We can read Shakspere without any difficulty.” That is saying a little too much; we are so familiar with the best parts of Shakspere that perhaps we are hardly conscious of the difference; the words have a well-known sound, and if we are not students of language we may not examine them very carefully. But open your Shakspere almost at random and you will soon find out, if you really consider, how much is now obsolete, how many words have passed out of use or are used in a different sense. I have opened on “Macbeth,” Act. i. Sec. 7, and there I find in Lady Macbeth’s speech:—
“His two chamberlainsWill I with wine and wassail so convinceThat memory, the warder of the brain,Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reasonA limbec only.”
“His two chamberlainsWill I with wine and wassail so convinceThat memory, the warder of the brain,Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reasonA limbec only.”
“His two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbec only.”
Now look at a few of the words here. (1) “Chamberlain,” as we all know, etymologically a man of the chamber; it comes fromcamera, a chamber, originally a vault; the root of this iscam—to be bent or crooked, which is supposed to be the origin of the name of our most crooked river. The old sense of “chamberlain” has not quite died out of our recollection; yet when we speak of the Lord Chamberlain—the only person to whom the title is now applied—we don’t think of a man whose business it is to guard his king’s sleep when on a journey, or, generally, of a bed-room attendant, but of one whose best known duty is the censorship of plays. (2) “Wassail” is a word which we should expect to find in a historical novel, but not to hear in every-day talk. We feel pretty sure that it has something to do with good cheer, but we may not know that it was originally a drinking of health; thatwaswas the imperative of the verbwas“tobe,” which we have turned into an auxiliary verb to mark past time; and the last syllable is our wordhale—healthy, which we have pretty well restricted to the description of an elderly man, whom we call “hale for his years;” though we are familiar with the word in corrupted formwhole, which we have in the Bible, “I have made a man every whit whole on the Sabbath day.” (3) “Convince” has wavered much in sense; we use it now simply for persuading a person, but the primary meaning was “to overpower,” which it has here; in the Bible phrase “Which of youconvincethme of sin?” we have the same special sense of overcoming by testimony, whichconvincerehad in Latin.
So again (4) “Warder,” like “wassail” is a word with which we are familiar from books, but which we should not ourselves use without the appearance of affectation; we should use the equivalent “guard.” We have here a couple of words identical in meaning, just as we havewiseandguise,warrantandguarantee,wagerandgaze, and others which explain the riddle, such aswarand Frenchguerre,warrenand Frenchgarenne. It is well known that in all these thewmarks the Teutonic word introduced alike into England by the Anglo-Saxons and into France by the Franks, which the earlier inhabitants of France were unable to pronounce without letting agescape before it; and so they produced the second form beginning withgu. Some of these second forms were brought into England by the Normans, and existed there by the side of the English word brought long before; but as there was no distinction in sense, one form generally fell into disuse, only to be revived for a special purpose, as by Sir Walter Scott, to give a mediæval look to his poems.
(5) “Fume” meant smoke or steam. Shakspere used it metaphorically, just as we might speak of a man’s reason being clouded. Such a use of the word may have been familiar at his time, but no such idea would now attach to it; if we use it at all, we do so in the old simple sense, as the “fumes of tobacco,” the same sense which the word bore at Rome and in the far-away India more than twenty centuries ago; while the Greeks turned it, by a different metaphor, to express the steam of passion, and Plato in his famous analysis distinguished the “thumoeides,” the spirited part of the soul, from that part which reasons, and from that part which desires. (6) “Receipt” seems to be used of a place, that place where reason is found, just as we hear of Matthew in the Bible “sitting at the receipt of custom.” (7) “Limbec” has probably died out altogether. It is only the student of the history of the English language who can guess that the word is equivalent toalembic, which meant a still or retort, and so is used here by Shakspere merely in the sense of an empty vessel, that into which anything may be poured. The word is Arabic; it was brought into England with chemical study likealchemyitself,algebra, and many others. Then by degrees people fancied that theaat the beginning of the word was our article, though really the first syllablealis the Arabic article; and thuslembicorlimbicwas left. The article has often been a thief in England. It has two formsananda, and meantone, as you may see in the old Scotch form, “ane high and michty lord.” The shortened formawas naturally used before a consonant, but when the word began withn, people did not always see where to divide rightly. Thusa nadderturned intoan adder,a napronhas becomean apron, etc.; on the other hand theeft(ewt) seems to have robbed the article in its turn and becomea newt.
Thus we have examined one passage, and have found in its four lines seven words which are either not used now at all or are used in a different sense. Yet, as we said, the passage as a whole sounds simple enough when we read it or hear it on the stage. We must admit then that the English of to-day differs much from Shakspere’s English in the meaning of its words.