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Title: Outline of the history of the English language and literature

Author: Anonymous

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{1}

OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY

OF

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

AND

LITERATURE

W. & R. CHAMBERS
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
1882{2}

Edinburgh:
Printed by W. & R. Chambers.

PREFACE.

The object of this book, as indicated in the title, is to give an outline of the History of the English Language and Literature.

It aims, however, at being something more than a mere statement of facts. It is intended to excite an interest in English philology, and in the leading authors that from the time of Cædmon have used the English tongue.

It is therefore to be regarded as an introduction to English philology and literature; and is adapted for use in the advanced classes of elementary schools, in secondary schools, and for pupil teachers, as well as for private students.{5}

CONTENTS.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.{7}

CHAPTER I.

History of its Vocabulary.

1. WHAT A LANGUAGE IS.—A language is a number of different sounds which are made by the tongue and the other organs of speech. But a spoken language is, or may be, written or printed upon paper by the aid of a number of signs or symbols—which are generally printed in black ink upon white paper.—The parts of a spoken language are called sounds; the smallest parts of a written or printed language are called letters.—A language is also called a tongue or a speech.—A language, like a living being, does not remain always the same. It grows. As it grows, it alters in appearance; small and great changes take place in it; and the story of these changes is called the History of the Language.

2. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE is the name given to the language which is spoken in Great Britain and Ireland, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, in South Africa, and in many other parts of the world where Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen are found. In the middle of the fifth century it was spoken by a few thousand{8} men who came over to Britain from the north-west of Europe, and by many thousands of men and women who dwelt on the banks of the lower parts of the great German rivers—the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Weser. It is now spoken by more than 100 millions of people. But the English spoken in the fifth century was a very different language from the English that is spoken now. It was different, yet still the same. It was different in appearance, as a child of one year old is different in looks from a man of forty; but both the English of to-day and the English of the fifth century are the same—because the one has grown out of the other, just as the tall strong man of forty has grown out of the child of one year old.

3. FAMILY.—To what family of languages does our English speech belong? It belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. This family is so called, because the languages which belong to it are spoken both in India and in Europe. Many thousand years ago, the people from whom we are descended lived on the high table-lands in the heart of Asia. Bands of them kept travelling always farther and farther west; and it is from their language that most of the tongues spoken in Europe are derived. These bands left their friends and relations and country, just as young men and women nowadays leave the homes of their parents to go and settle in distant countries. The Indo-European is also called the Aryan family of languages. Altogether, it embraces seven great languages—(1) The Indian or Sanskrit; (2) Persic; (3) Greek; (4) Latin; (5) Keltic; (6) Teutonic; and (7) Slavonic, which includes Russian, Polish, &c.

4. TEUTONS.—The English language was introduced into this country by bands of warlike colonists from Northwestern Germany, who drove the old inhabitants to the mountainous regions in the west of the island. Those colonists were variously called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; but they all belonged to the Teutonic race, and their speech was a branch of the Teutonic group of languages. The Teutonic group of languages contains three main sections, from which all the others spring. These three main sections{9} are: High-German, Low-German, and Scandinavian. High-German is the name given to the kind of German which is spoken on the higher lands or table-lands of South Germany—those table-lands which slope from the Central Plain of Europe up to the Alps; and its northern boundary is the pretty river Main, which falls into the Rhine. Low-German is the name given to the kind of German spoken in the lowlands of Germany; and the southern boundary of this kind of speech is the river Main—its northern boundary being the Baltic and the North Sea. Scandinavian is the wide general name given to those kinds of Teutonic speech which are found in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. These divisions may be placed in a table in the following manner:

5. HIGH-GERMAN.—High-German is spoken in the southern parts of Germany—such as Bavaria, Swabia, and other hilly regions; and also in the north and east of Switzerland.—It is this form of the language that has become the book-speech or literary language of the Germans; and its technical name is New High-German.

6. LOW-GERMAN.—The languages which belong to this division are spoken in the plains of Germany, especially along the lower courses of the rivers, in Holland, in part of Belgium, in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the British Colonies, and in the United States of North America. The Low-German spoken in Holland is called Dutch; the Low-German spoken in Belgium is called Flemish; the Low-German spoken in Friesland—a wealthy province of Holland—is called Frisian; and the Low-German spoken in England is called English. (But, as we shall soon see, English contains many thousands of words in addition{10} to those which are purely Low-German.) The language on the continent which is most like English is the Frisian language. There is indeed a well-known couplet, every word in which is said to be both Frisian and English. It runs thus:

The following are the chief subdivisions of

7. SCANDINAVIAN.—Scandinavian is the general name given to the different kinds of Teutonic speech which are employed in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. The oldest and purest kind of Scandinavian speech is that spoken in the far-off country in the middle of the North Atlantic, called Iceland; and it is the purest, because for many centuries there has been very little communication with that country. Indeed, the Icelandic of the 12th century differs very little from the Icelandic of to-day. But the English of the twelfth century differs so much from the English of the nineteenth century, that we should at first sight hardly know them for the same speech.—One peculiar mark of a Scandinavian speech is the preference for hard consonants—the preference, for example, of a k over a ch or sh. Thus the Danes say Dansk for Danish; and it is Danish influence that has given to Scotchmen and to the north of England the form kirk instead of church.

8. THE THREE CHIEF TEUTONIC LANGUAGES.—The three most important languages belonging to the great Teutonic stock are English, Dutch, and German. If we look at the words used in these languages, we shall at once see that they are sister-languages. If we look at the way in which their words are changed—or at their inflections—we shall also see{11} that they are very closely related. Thus the commonest words appear in these three languages in the following shape:

Again, the inflections of these three languages are very similar—are in fact, different shapes of the same changes. Thus the possessive case of nouns in all three languages ends in s or es[3] or ’s. The second person singular of verbs in all three ends in st; and the ending of the past participle in all three is generally en. We know, then, both from history and from a comparison of the actual facts in the present state of the languages, that all three are sister-tongues.

9. WHERE THE ENGLISH CAME FROM.—Those Teutons who brought over the English tongue to this island, came from the north-west of Europe—most of them from that part of the German coast which lies between the river Elbe and the river Weser. The kind of Low-German spoken by them is much the same as that still spoken in the lowlands of Hanover, Holstein, and Schleswig. There is in Holstein—upon the west coast—a small district which is called Angeln—that is, England—to this day. The Teutons who came over to Britain belonged to three tribes. They were Jutes and Angles and Saxons. The Jutes came from Jutland.[4] The Angles came from Schleswig and Holstein. The Saxons came from Hanover and the land to the west of it. The Jutes settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons settled in Essex (or East Sex), Wessex[5] (or West Sex), Sussex (or South Sex), and Middlesex; and the ending sex is an indication of the fact. The Angles settled chiefly in the north and east. One of the kingdoms founded by them was called East Anglia; and the northern and southern settlers{12} in it gave their names to the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, which are only later forms of the words North folk and South folk. These three tribes all spoke different dialects of the same speech. The early predominance of the Angles, especially as the Angles in Northumbria were the first to have a literature, gave to the language the name of English, though the Keltic people still call it Saxon or Sassenach. The country also in time acquired, from the same cause, the name of Engla-land, or the land of the English. The first landing of Teutons took place in the year 449; and for about a hundred years afterwards, bands of strong young warriors and colonists continued to arrive at short intervals.

10. THE PERIODS OF ENGLISH.—The language brought over to Britain by these three tribes has grown very much since the fifth century. It has been growing for fourteen hundred years. It has therefore altered very much in every way; its appearance has changed; and we have to learn the English of the fifth, or the eighth, or the eleventh century, almost as if it were a foreign language. There are four chief periods in the history of the English language. These are:

But it must not be forgotten that there is no hard and fast line between one period and another. A living language, like a living body, is always changing. It takes on new additions of new matter; it loses the old. With these new additions, its form also changes. We are rarely sensible of these changes; but they are going on all the time for all that.

11. THE OLDEST ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON, 450-1100.—This form of the English language contained a very large number of inflections. The definite article was inflected for gender, number, and case; nouns and adjectives were highly inflected; and the verb had a very much larger number of inflections than it has now. The words of the English{13} vocabulary during this period were almost entirely English; a few Latin and Greek words—brought in chiefly by the church—and a few Keltic words, had found their way into the English vocabulary. The rhyme used in poetry was not end-rhyme, as at the present date, but head-rhyme or alliteration—as we find it in the well-known line from Pope:

To this period belong the writings of the poet Cædmon and of King Alfred.

12. EARLY ENGLISH, 1100-1250.—The Normans had seized all power in the state and in the church, and had held it since the year 1066. During the early part of this period, English was not written, had ceased to be employed in books; and French words began to creep in even among the spoken words of the English people. The inflections of words began to drop off, or to be carelessly used, and then to be mixed up and confused with each other. One of the chief writers of this period is a priest called Layamon, who wrote a poem called the Brut (Brutus), which gave some account of the beginnings of the English people, who were believed to be descended from Brutus, the fabled son of Æneas of Troy.

13. MIDDLE ENGLISH, 1250-1485.—Nouns and adjectives during this period lost almost all their inflections. The inflections of verbs were very much altered and greatly simplified.—In the year 1349, boys in school were allowed to cease translating their Latin into French, and began to translate it into English. In the year 1362 Edward III. passed an act of parliament ordering the use of English in the pleadings of cases in all courts of law, instead of Norman-French, which had hitherto been employed. To the first half of this period belong such works as the Metrical Chronicle and the Lives of the Saints, supposed to have been written and translated by Robert of Gloucester; to the second half belong the works of the great poet Chaucer, of William Langland, and of the reformer Wicliffe.

14. MODERN ENGLISH, 1485-1882.—The year 1485 marks{14} the accession of the House of Tudor to the throne, in the person of Henry VII. By this time almost all inflections had disappeared from our language. Many hundreds of French words had come into the language. From the time of the Revival of Letters[6]—which may be said to have begun in the sixteenth century—several thousands of Latin words were poured into the English vocabulary. The period which lies between 1485 and 1603—the year in which James I. came to the throne—is sometimes called the period of Tudor English. Its greatest verse-writer is Shakspeare; its greatest prose-writer is Hooker, who wrote The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

15. ENGLISH WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.—The English language has for centuries been importing words from many foreign tongues into its own vocabulary; and it has given a hearty welcome to all kinds of strangers. So much is this the case, and so far has this habit of taking in strangers gone, that we can now quite accurately say: Most of the words in our English language are not English. There are more Latin words in our tongue than there are English. But this statement is true only of our words as we find them in the dictionary. The words which we use every day—the language of the mouth—is almost entirely English. The fixed vocabulary—the vocabulary printed in the dictionary—is more Latin than English; the moving vocabulary—the words which are daily spoken—is English. Thus, if we take a passage in our translation of the Four Gospels, we shall find from 90 to 96 per cent. of the words used are English—and pure English. In the Prologue which Chaucer wrote to his famous set of poems called The Canterbury Tales, 88 per cent. of the words are English; while, in Mrs Browning’s Cry of the Children, the English words rise to the large proportion of 92 per cent.

The following is a list of a few more percentages of{15} purely English words in the writings of well-known authors:

16. CHANGES IN ENGLISH.—Let us take a passage from the Saxon translation of the Old Testament—and it is the oldest English version we have—and notice what differences there are between this English and the English of the present day. This translation was made by Abbot Ælfric, who lived and wrote late in the tenth century. He translated into English the five books of Moses—commonly called the Pentateuch—Joshua, Judges, and part of the book of Job. Let us see how he writes (Genesis, ix. 1):

Now every word in the above verse is modern English; but every word has been changed—with the exception of God, his, and and. All the other words have changed enormously in the course of the eight centuries since the verse was written. The words have changed; and the grammar has changed. The word bletsian has become bless. The grammar of the verbs has changed enormously. For example, the imperative ending ath in Veahxath and âfyllath has quite fallen away. It existed, in the form of eth, down to the time of Chaucer, who writes Standeth up! in addressing several persons.—Next, we ought to notice that all the words are pure English. The modern{16} version which we still use, and which was published in 1611, has been obliged to use Latin and French words. It says—and the words in italics are all foreign words: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth’! That is, it employs three Latin words in the most important parts of the sentence.

17. LOSS AND GAIN.—But, while the English language has, in the course of centuries, lost almost all its inflections, it has been all that time gaining new words, and at the same time gaining new powers of expression. In fact, the history of our language is a history of both loss and gain. It has lost inflections and gained new words. An inflected language is generally called a Synthetic Language, because it expresses changes of relations by the adding-on (synthesis) of something to the end of the word. A language which expresses relations by little words like prepositions is called an analytic language. We may therefore say that:

So much for the form or grammar of it. But, on the other hand, if we look at the matter or words or vocabulary of it, we shall find that:

18. THE FOREIGN ELEMENTS IN ENGLISH.—These have come into our language chiefly because the English people have come so much into contact with other peoples and tribes and nations. They came over to this island in the fifth century, and found Kelts here; and from them they took some Keltic words. About the end of the eighth century, the Danes came to them; and a number of Danish words entered the language. Then another set of Danes or Scandinavians—called Normans—came to them, conquered them, and gave them many hundred Norman-French words. Then, with the Revival of Letters, many scholars came over here, taught the English people to read Greek and Latin books; and these books gave the language several thousand words. Then the English people have always been the{17} greatest travellers in the world. They have gone to China and brought home Chinese words (as well as things); they have long held India, which has given us Hindu words; they have imported names and terms from North and from South and Central America; they have borrowed from Spaniards and Italians; they have taken words, nearer home, from the Dutch and from the Germans; they have gone to the farthest east and to the farthest west, and there is hardly a language on the face of the globe from which they have not imported some words that live and make themselves useful in our language.

19. WELSH.—When the English settled in this island, they found a people who were called Britons, and who spoke a language called British or Kymric. It is a language very different from English; and at first the English warriors and the British people did not understand one single word of what each other said. The Old English word for foreigners was Wealhas—or, as we call it now, Welsh; and the English fighting men who came over called the British people, not by the name which they themselves used, but simply the foreigners—the Welsh. In the same way, a German to this day calls an Italian or a Frenchman a Welshman; and he calls France or Italy Welshland. The language spoken by the Welsh belongs to the Keltic group of languages. This group contains also Erse, which is spoken in the west of Ireland; Manx, which is spoken in the Isle of Man; Gaelic, which is spoken in the Highlands of Scotland; and Breton, which is spoken in Brittany—a mountainous and rugged peninsula in the north-west of France. It at one time embraced also Cornish—the language spoken in Cornwall, which was also called West Wales. But that language died out in 1778; and it is not now spoken by any one. The following is a table of the Keltic group:

20. THE KELTIC ELEMENT.—The words given to the English language by the Kelts are of two kinds:

(i) Names of mountains, rivers, lakes, and other natural features;

(ii) Names of common things, which the English picked up in their daily intercourse with the British or Welsh.

(i) The Keltic name for a mountain is Pen—a word which we find in Pennine and Apennine. The Gaelic or Scotch Keltic form of the word is Ben. Thus we have Ben More—which means the Big Mountain—Ben Nevis, and many others. The commonest Keltic word for a river is Avon. There are fourteen Avons in Great Britain. Esk is another common Keltic name for a river; and there are eight Esks in Scotland alone. In England the name takes the form of Ex or Exe (the consonants having changed places, Ex = Eks). The name appears as Ex in Exeter (the old form was Exanceaster)—that is, the camp on the Ex; as Ax in Axminster; as Ox in Oxford; as Ux in Uxbridge; as Usk, in Wales; and even as Ouse, in Yorkshire and other counties.—Aber is a Keltic word which means the mouth of a river; and we find it in Aberdeen (the town at the mouth of the Dee); Arbroath, which is = Aberbrothock; Aberystwith; Berwick—the old form of which was Aberwick. Berwick accordingly means the wick or town at the mouth of the Tweed. Car or Caer is the Keltic word for castle or stronghold; and we find this name in Carlisle, Cardiff, Caernarvon, and others.

(ii) The names of common things which we have received from the Kelts are—basket, bran, cradle, crockery, clout, cuts (= lots), darn. Such words as button, ribbon, barrel, car, and cart, are also Keltic, but have come into the English language through the Norman-French, who received them from the descendants of the ancient Gauls. Some Keltic words have come to us from Scotland—such as pony, clan, whisky, claymore (a kind of sword), pibroch, and plaid; and it is chiefly to Sir Walter Scott’s writings that we owe the common use of these words. Ireland has also sent us a few Keltic words, such as Tory, brogue, and shamrock.

21. THE LATIN ELEMENT OF THE FIRST PERIOD (i).—The{19} Roman power, as is generally known, was settled in Britain from the year 43 till the year 410. In the beginning of the year 410, the very existence of the Roman Empire was threatened by the Goths and other warlike peoples; and the Roman forces were withdrawn to defend the very heart of the empire. The Romans, though conquerors, were true benefactors. They gave the Britons good laws; cut roads for them through the island; established camps; built forts and strongholds; dug harbours or ports; and planted military settlements—which they called colonies—here and there among the conquered people. When the Romans went away, they left these important benefits behind them; and, with the things themselves, the words also remained. But they left only six words behind them, and all of these have combined themselves, or gone into composition, with words that are purely English. The following are the six words: Castra, a camp; Strata (via), a paved road; Vallum, a rampart; Fossa, a ditch; Colonia, a settlement; and Portus, a harbour.

22. THE LATIN ELEMENT OF THE FIRST PERIOD (ii).—(a) The Latin word Castra has become chester, caster, cester, and even ter (in Exeter). We generally find it in the form of chester in the south and west; cester in the middle; and caster in the north and east of England. Thus we have Chester, Manchester, and Winchester in the west and south; Leicester and Towcester in mid-England; and Tadcaster, Doncaster, and Lancaster in the north.

(b) Strata.—The Romans drove a strongly-built military road from the south-east to the north-west of the island—from Richborough, near Dover, up to the standing camp on the river Dee, which is now called Chester. This was the Strata or Street. It was afterwards carried farther north, and even into Scotland. It went right over the crest of a hill in Westmoreland, which is called High Street to this day. We can trace the path of this great military road by the names of the towns and villages that are strung upon it. Thus there are Streatham (near London), Stretton, Stratford-on-Avon, Stony Stratford, Stretford (near Manchester), Stradbroke, and many others.{20}

(c) Vallum is found in wall.

(d) Fossa is found in the names Fossway, Fosbrooke, Fosbridge, and others.

(e) Colonia is found in Colne, Colchester, Lincoln, and others.

(f) Portus appears in Portsmouth, Portsea, Bridport, and some other names.

23. THE LATIN ELEMENT OF THE SECOND PERIOD (i).—This element was not introduced by the Romans themselves, but by Christian missionaries who came from Rome, sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert, not the Britons, but the English, to Christianity. A band of forty monks, with St Augustine at their head, landed in Kent in the year 597. For four centuries from this date a large number of Latin words came into the English language, chiefly words relating to the church and church observances.

Church Terms.—Calic, from calix, a cup; cluster, from claustrum, a closed place; priest, from presbyter, an elder; sanct, from sanctus, a holy man; sacrament, from sacramentum, a sacred oath; predician, from prædicare, to declare; regul, from regula, a straight piece of wood. But the old form of most of these words has disappeared, to make room for Norman-French forms from the same Latin source. Along with these were adopted a few Greek words—such as bishop, from episkopos, an overseer; angel, from anggelos, a messenger; apostle, from apostolos, a person sent; monk, from monăchos,[7] a person who lives alone; and a few others.

24. THE LATIN ELEMENT OF THE SECOND PERIOD (ii).—The introduction of Christianity proved to be the beginning of an intercourse with Rome, Italys, and the Continent; and this intercourse brought with it commerce. Commerce imported many new things; and the names of these things came into the island along with the things themselves. Thus we have butter from butŷrum; cheese from caseus; and tunic from tunica. We have also fig from ficus; pear from pirum; lettuce from lactuca, which itself comes from lac—milk (and hence means the milky plant); and pease from pisum.{21} (Pease is really the singular; and pea is a false singular—not a plural.) We have also from the same source some names of animals. Such are camel from camēlus; lion from leo; oyster from ostrea; trout from trutta. A few miscellaneous words have also come to us from this quarter—such as pound from the Latin pondus, a weight; candle from candēla; and table from tabŭla. The Latin word uncia, which means the twelfth part of anything, is, as it were, split up into two—and gives the two words inch and ounce, which are fundamentally but two forms of one word. (But with regard to this class of words also it should be observed that the words directly introduced from the Latin have either been greatly changed in form; or they have been subsequently borrowed again from the French.)

25. THE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT (i).—In the year 787, the Northmen, Norsemen, or Normans of Scandinavia, began to make descents on the east coast of England. These attacks were so dreaded by the English that prayers were regularly used in the churches against them; and a part of the Litany of the time contained the utterance: ‘From the incursions of the Normans, good Lord, deliver us!’ These attacks went on for three centuries. In the ninth century, these Danes obtained a permanent footing in the northern and eastern parts of England; and by the eleventh century they had become so strong that Danish kings sat upon the throne of England from 1016 to 1042. These Norsemen were Teutons. They were Teutons who had migrated to the north. As northern people generally do, they preferred hard sounds to aspirates. They preferred a k to a ch; a p to an f. The probable reason is that, in the cold mists of the north, they had learned not to open too much their mouths and throats; and thus they formed the habit of using a shut sound like k to a sound like ch (in loch), which requires a stream of air to be passed through the throat. We must not forget that it was the spoken language of England that was affected by the Danes; not the written language; for the simple reason that, in these times, not more than one man in a thousand—either among Danes or Englishmen—could read and write.{22}

26. THE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT (ii).—The Danish contribution is, like the Keltic, of two kinds: (a) Names of places; and (b) Common words.

(a) The most remarkable example of the place-name is the noun by, which means town. There are in England more than six hundred names ending in by. Almost all of these lie to the north and east of Watling Street; to the south of it, there is scarcely one. Thus we have Whitby, the White Town; Tenby, in Wales, Dane’s town; and Grimsby, the town of Grim. We find the word by also in the compound by-law. The following words are also derived from the Danes:

(b) To the Norsemen we also owe the words are, which pushed out the pure English syndon; talk; tarn; busk (dress); sky; hustings; fellow; odd; blunt; kid; and many more.

27. THE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT (iii).—One result of this mixture of Danes with Englishmen was that both, in trying to speak the language or to use the words of each other, would naturally take firm hold of the root of the word, and allow the inflections to take care of themselves. Hence English words would lose their inflections; and this process, after it had once begun, would go on at an increased speed, the greater became the communication at church and at market between the English and the Danes. The same{23} process is now going on in the United States. Thousands upon thousands of Germans have settled there among an English-speaking people. These Germans are rapidly falling into the habit of using their German words without inflections at all.

28. LATIN ELEMENT OF THE THIRD PERIOD (i).—This element is really Norman-French. French is Latin, with many of the inflections lost or changed, and with the pronunciation of the vowel-sounds enormously altered. But it did not come from the written Latin of books; but from the spoken Latin of soldiers and country-people (the lingua Romana rustica). Norman-French is the French spoken by the Normans, who lost their own Norsk or Danish speech, and learned French from their French wives and children. In the year 912, the Normans, under Duke Rolf or Rollo, wrested from King Charles the Simple the beautiful valley of the Seine, which was afterwards called by the name of Normandy. Norman-French was a dialect of French, and it differed in many respects from the French spoken in the other parts of France. This Norman-French was introduced into England as a court language by Edward the Confessor, in the year 1042; but it was brought into this country as a folk-speech by bands of Norman-French under the leadership of Duke William, the seventh Duke of Normandy, in the famous year 1066. This Norman-French, which they brought with them, became in England the language of the ruling classes, of the court, of the lawyers, and of all priests high in the ranks of the church. Books ceased to be written in English; boys translated their Latin into French; an English churl had to employ a lawyer who used only French in his law-papers and his pleadings; and even ‘uplandish’ or country people tried ‘to speak Frensch, for to be more ytold of.’ The saturation of English with French words probably reached its highest point at the end of the fourteenth century; and about that time a reaction set in. As has been before pointed out, in 1349, boys were allowed to translate their Latin into English; in 1362, Edward III. passed an act of parliament to authorise the use{24} of English in courts of law; and even the Normans who lived in London had begun to use English in their families. But, by the time French had ceased to be the language of the upper classes, several thousand French words had found their way into our vocabulary, which had become to a large extent bilingual.[8]

29. NORMAN-FRENCH (ii).—The words which have been introduced into our pure English speech from the Normans fall easily into classes.

The English word for armour was harness; and Macaulay uses harness in this sense in one of his Lays:

—Chivalry comes from the Fr. cheval, which is a broken-down form of the Low Latin word caballus, a horse.—Captain comes from the Lat. caput, a head.—Battle comes from the Fr. battre, to beat.—Duke comes from the Fr. duc—which comes from the Lat. dux (accusative ducem, most French nouns being borrowed from the accusative, not the nominative form of the Latin noun), a leader.—Fealty is the Norman-French form of the word fidelity, from the Lat. fidelitas, faithfulness.—Real-m is the noun from the adjective real, which comes from Lat. regal-is; it is the land ruled over by a rex or ré (a king).

Forest comes from the Low Lat.[10] foresta; from Lat. foris, out-of-doors. A forest does not necessarily contain trees; it is merely the name for the open hunting-ground as contrasted with the inclosed space called a park.—{25}Leveret, a young hare, from the Fr. lièvre; from the Lat. lepus (-oris).—Quarry comes from the Lat. cor, the heart, and at first meant the heart and intestines, which were thrown to the dogs who hunted down the wild beast. Milton has the phrase, ‘scents his quarry from afar.’—Couple comes from the Lat. copula, a band.—Venison means hunted flesh, and comes from the Fr. venaison, which comes from the Lat. verb venari, to hunt.

The Saxon hind had the charge of the cattle and animals on the farm while they were alive; but he never saw anything of them after they were killed. He never met them at dinner. The flesh of these animals received French names from the Norman-Frenchmen who ate them; and their Saxon or English names were forgotten. A German says calf’s flesh, but we use the Norman-French word veal. Thus the corresponding English words to those printed above are ox, calf, swine, sheep, and fowl. The word beef comes from the Fr. bœuf, which comes from the Lat. bos (acc. bovem), an ox.—Veal comes from the old French word veel, which comes from the Lat. vitellus, a little calf.—Pork comes from Fr. porc, which is derived from the Lat. porcus, a pig.—Mutton comes from the Fr. mouton, from the Low Latin word multo, a sheep.—Pullet comes from Fr. poulet, which comes from the Low Latin word pulla, a hen.

The word chancellor comes from the Fr. chancelier; from the Lat. cancellarius, the keeper of written papers. ‘The officer who had the care of the records stood behind the screen of lattice-work or of cross-bars which fenced off the judgment-seat.’ Cancer is the Latin name for a crab; cancellus is a little crab; cancelli are cross-bars or lattice-work, like the claws of crabs crossed. Hence also to cancel, which means to draw cross strokes through writing.—Judge comes from the French word juge, which comes from the Lat. judex (= jus-dic-s, a sayer of right). The old English term was dempster,{26} from the verb deem; noun, doom.—Parliament comes from the Fr. parler, to speak; from Low Lat. parabolāre, to talk; whence also parlour, a room for speaking in.—Court comes from the old Fr. cort; from Lat. cohors or cors, an inclosed space. A cohors was a sheep-pen; but it was afterwards applied to a number of soldiers.—Assize comes from the old Fr. assise, an assembly of judges; from the Lat. assidēre, to sit beside.—Sue comes from the old Fr. suir (modern Fr. suivre); from the Lat. sequi, to follow. We have from the same root the words suit, suite, pursue, ensue, issue.—Damages, from the old Fr. damáge, which comes from the Low Lat. damnaticum, harm; which comes from the Lat. damnum, loss.

Friar is a word which comes from the old Fr. freire, which is derived from the Lat. frater, a brother.—Relic, chiefly used in the plural, from Fr. reliques; from Lat. reliquiæ, remains.—Tonsure comes from the Fr. tonsure; from Lat. tonsura, a cutting.—Ceremony, from the Fr. cérémonie, a rite; from Lat. cærimonia.

34. SYNONYMS GIVEN US BY NORMAN-FRENCH.—Among other benefits which we have received from the coming in of Norman-French into our language, is a number of synonyms.[11] These have enabled us to give a different shade or colouring to certain words, or to put them to a special use. Thus we speak of the blessing of God, and the benediction of a clergy-man; of the bloom on a peach, and the flower of a lily; of a person as a member of a learned society, but not a limb. Now blessing, bloom, and limb are all English; benediction, flower, and member are all Latin words—Latin words which have come to us through the doorway of the French language. The following are some more of these synonyms; and, after examining them, it will generally be found that the English{27} words are stronger, simpler, and more homely than the French words.

35. BILINGUALISM.—During the three centuries which lay between 1066 and 1362, the English and the Normans had to meet each other constantly in the field, in the church, at markets, and in towns and villages. They had to buy and sell from each other; to give and take orders from and to each other; and to speak with each other on many kinds of business. They also intermarried. Thus the Norman got slowly into the habit of joining an English word with his French word—so as to make it clear to the Englishman; while the Englishman, on his side, joined the corresponding French word—when he happened to know it—to the English word he had to employ. These words, ever after, ran in couples; and this habit of going in couples became a habit of the language. Hence it is that, in the opening words of our Prayer-Book, we use such couples as assemble and meet together; acknowledge and confess; dissemble and cloak; and humble and lowly. The words meet together, acknowledge, cloak, and lowly, represent the purely English part of the congregation; while the Norman-French supplies such words as assemble, confess, dissemble, and humble. The great poet of the fourteenth century—Chaucer—has hundreds of examples of such phrases. He gives us, for example, hunting and venerye; mirth and jollity; care and heed; swinke and labour; pray and beseech; a wright and carpenter. The practice of using these pairs of words has very greatly diminished in our day; but a few examples still keep their place in the language. Such are will and testament, use and wont, aid and abet, and several others.{28}

36. DOUBLETS.—It is chiefly to the same Norman-French influence that we owe a minor phenomenon of the language—the appearance of two forms of the same word. These two forms are called doublets. The Norman-French could not pronounce our semi-vowel w. They had either to make a v of it, or a hard g. They preferred the hard g; and, to keep it hard, they added a u. Thus, for wile, they said guile; for wise (= manner), they said guise; for ward, guard; for warden, guardian; for wardrobe, garderobe; for warrant, guarantee; and so on.

37. DOUBLETS FROM DIALECTS AND OTHER SOURCES.—Besides the doublets due to Norman-French influences, there are many interesting cases which may be referred to. Some are evidently due to differences of dialect. The English language grew up from different centres, which had little or no connection with each other, on account of the difficulties of travelling. Hence a word would take different forms in different dialects—like church in the south of the English-speaking country, and kirk in the north; so also with cole, of which the northern form is kail. Sometimes one word is merely a later and modified form of another, as draw of drag. In all cases doublets are forms of the same word, which have come through different experiences of place, or time, or other influence. In short, they should be recognised as really one word, with a difference in spelling and meaning, resulting from its history. Other specimens of doublets are down and dune; shriek and screech; shell and scale; wagon and wain.

38. PRONUNCIATION.—The Norman-French refined our mode of speaking; made the existing vowel-sounds less coarse; gave us some new vowel-sounds; and, above all, taught us to give up most of our rough throat-sounds or gutturals. They gradually turned out the gutturals from the beginning of words; and genoh became enough, and gif, if. They turned them out of the middle of words; and nagel became nail, and hagel, hail. They got rid of them at the ends of words; and we no longer pronounce the guttural in flight, might, right, and sight. This is all the more absurd{29} and remarkable that we write the sound that once was there with two strong gutturals, g and h. Sometimes the influence of the Norman-French was to turn the guttural into a kind of hissing sound or sibilant; and it is in this way that we came to say teach, beseech, and catch. But the ch in these words comes back to its older use, and becomes a gh again, in the past tense—in taught, besought, and caught.

39. LATIN OF THE FOURTH PERIOD.—The Latin introduced into our language by the Norman-French was a spoken Latin. It was the Latin of the ear and mouth. It was the everyday speech of the people; and underwent very great change. The Latin introduced into our language by learned men was a written or printed Latin. It was the Latin of the eye and pen. This Latin is called the Latin of the Fourth Period; and it was brought into our language by a powerful movement known as the Revival of Learning.—When the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, the learned Greeks of that capital fled from the city, carrying with them their precious manuscript copies of Greek and Latin writers. They fled into Italy, into Germany, and into France and England. They taught Greek and Latin in the universities of these countries; and very soon the study of Greek and Latin became the fashion among all persons of leisure; and the stores of thought and beauty in Homer and Sophocles, in Virgil and Horace, were diligently studied and appropriated. Queen Elizabeth was a good Greek scholar, and could both speak and write good Latin. Now began to come into our language thousands of Latin words; until, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, an eminent writer complains that Englishmen will have ‘to learn Latin to understand English, and a work will prove of equal facility in either.’ Unlike the Latin words of the Third Period, the Latin words introduced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suffered little or no change. They were transferred from Latin books just as they were—by the accurate aid of the hand and eye, and underwent no process of change or corruption. The Latin opinio became opinion; notio, notion; suggestio, suggestion; separatum, separate; iteratum, iterate; and so on. It would be a great mistake,{30} however, to suppose that all the Latin of this Fourth Period came directly from the Latin. Most of it came through the medium of French, as did the Latin of the Third Period; but unlike it, it was not the language of the people. In French, as in English, it was the language merely of books, of the literary and of learned men.—It is worthy of notice that many words which we use every day, and which we think must always have been in the language, only came in about this period, and are therefore comparatively new. Thus Mr Gill, the high-master of St Paul’s School in 1619, and the teacher of John Milton in his boyhood, complains of the introduction of words which are now quite common to all of us. He says: ‘O harsh lips! I now hear all around me such words as common, vices, envy, malice; even virtue, study, justice, pity, mercy, compassion, profit, commodity, colour, grace, favour, acceptance.’ The wonder nowadays would be how we could possibly get on without these words, and how we could ever have done without them.

40. MOUTH LATIN AND BOOK LATIN.—The introduction of Latin words into our English speech by two doors—by the living conversation of living people, and by the silent door of books, has given rise to a phenomenon of the same kind as that described in section 36. But the phenomenon of duplicates or doublets presents itself to our notice on a much larger scale now; and, in every case, the duplicate word becomes in reality two separate words—employed for separate purposes, and with perfectly distinct meanings. Thus, though legal, leal, and loyal are, in their origin, fundamentally the same word, their meanings are perfectly distinct and even widely different; hospital and hotel are the same words, but they are no longer used in the same sense; while fact and feat have also widely diverged from each other in use and in signification. The Latin words that have come from the Latin language by the path of books, have kept their Latin shape, and may be called Book Latin. The Latin words that have come to us by the path of Norman-French have undergone great alterations; and they may be called spoken Latin. The chief process of alteration{31} undergone by them is that of squeezing; three syllables have generally been squeezed into two. The following is a list:

DUPLICATE WORDS OR DOUBLETS.

Many of the Book Latin words in the above list, such as captive, debit, defect, fact, &c., were borrowed directly from the Latin, and not through the medium of French books.

41. GREEK DOUBLETS.—The same phenomenon has also taken place with reference to Greek words. It is of course the newer form of these words that was given us by the revival of learning; the older forms may have existed in the language since the coming of Augustine in the end of the sixth century.

42. ENGLISH WORDS AND FRENCH WORDS IN SENTENCES.—The difference between English steeped in French and Latin, and English written almost wholly in pure English words, can be at once seen in the two following passages, which are taken from the work of Mr C. Schele De Vere, an American writer.

(a) ‘The Norman altered and increased our language; but he could not extirpate it. To defend his conquest, he took possession of the country; and, master of the soil, he erected fortresses and castles, and attempted to introduce new terms. The universe and the firmament—the planets, comets, and meteors—the atmosphere and the seasons, all were impressed with the seal of the conqueror. Hills became mountains, and dales valleys; streams were called rivers, and brooks rivulets; waterfalls, cascades; and woods, forests.’

All the words in italics in the above passage are either of Latin or of French origin; if of French, then they are Latin at second-hand.

(b) ‘But the dominion of the Norman did not extend to the home of the Englishman, it stopped at the threshold of his house; there, around the fireside in his kitchen,[A] and the hearth in his room,[12] he met his beloved kindred; the bride, the wife, and the husband, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, tied to each other by love, friendship, and kind feelings, knew nothing dearer than their own sweet home.’

Only one word in the above is French (dominion), and two are Latin (extend and kitchen). All the others are purely English.

43. ENGLISH WORDS LOST.—The copious introduction of Norman-French, Latin, and Greek terms into our language, had the effect of pushing a great number of purely English words out of our speech, or at least of making them less frequent in use. Thus we used to say fore-elders, but this word has had its place taken by ancestors; fairhood has been pushed out by beauty; and wonstead by residence. In the same{34} way, forewit has given place to caution; licherest[13] to cemetery; inwit to conscience; bookhoard to library; and hindersome to obstructive. In fact, it is often easier for us to understand foreign words than those of our own native home-grown speech. The title of an old book written in the thirteenth century is the Ayenbite[14] of Inwyt—a title which is to us much more intelligible in its Franco-Latin translation of Remorse of Conscience. Mr Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet, has tried to re-introduce the genuine homely English way of speaking and writing; and to banish Latin terms. Thus, in his Grammar or ‘Book of Speech-Craft,’ he calls singular, onely; plural, somely; and he calls degrees of comparison, pitches of suchness. The difficulty he has to contend with is, that this home English is less intelligible to our modern ears than the foreign Latin. Thus the following sentence looks like a word-puzzle: ‘These pitch-marks off mark sundry things by their sundry suchnesses, as, “The taller or less tall man of the two is my friend.”’ And he also says—what is a useful warning for us: ‘Speech was shapen of the breath-sounds of speakers, for the ears of hearers; and not from speech-tokens (letters) in books, for men’s eyes.’

CHAPTER II.

The History of the Grammar of English.

1. AN INFLECTED LANGUAGE.—When, in the fifth century, our English speech was brought over from the Continent, it was a highly inflected or Synthetic language; and it remained in this condition for several centuries. The coming of the Danes had the effect of beginning the dropping off of inflections. The coming of the Normans extended very much and hastened this process, which has gone on with considerable rapidity down to the present day. We may put the general fact in this way:{35}

2. THE GRAMMAR OF NOUNS.—In the very oldest English—or, as it is commonly called, Anglo-Saxon—nouns were declined in different ways, and had several declensions, just as German and Latin have. Each of these declensions had four cases. Nowadays we have only one declension and only one inflection for the cases of nouns. That one inflection is ’s for the possessive case. The following is an example of an old declension:

Declension of EAGE, the eye.

Again, in this English, gender did not follow sex, but was poetic and fantastic. Tongue and week were feminine nouns, as they still are in modern German; star and sea, masculine; wife and child, neuter.—In old English there were a great many plural endings, as -as, -an, -u, -a, -o. After the Norman Conquest they were greatly reduced, -es or -s being now the ordinary ending, -en being exceptional.

3. THE GRAMMAR OF ADJECTIVES.—Adjectives had also cases. Adjectives had four cases, three genders, and two numbers. Now we say good for all cases, genders, and numbers. In the fourteenth century the only ending which adjectives possessed was e for the plural. Thus Chaucer (1340-1400) writes of the little birds:

4. GRAMMAR OF DEFINITE ARTICLE.—This article was declined like an adjective, in three different genders. Now it has no inflections at all. It has still, however, a clear and distinct memory of one case, which survives in such phrases as, ‘The more, the merrier.’ This sentence might be written, ‘þŷ more, þŷ merrier.’ That is to say, ‘By that more, by that merrier.’ The measure of the increase of the company is the measure of the increase of the merriment.{36}

5. GRAMMAR OF THE PERSONAL PRONOUN.—The personal pronoun was also highly inflected in the oldest English; and the two personal pronouns of the first and second persons possessed this remarkable peculiarity, that it had three numbers, singular, dual, and plural. The dual form stood for We two and for You two; and, if we cared to trouble ourselves nowadays with a host of inflections, these would certainly be very convenient.

All this is now very much changed. The dual number is completely gone; the use of thou, except in religious compositions, has been given up, and the true possessive of it, which is his, has given place to the incorrect form its. The possessive its is very seldom found in Shakspeare, and there is only one instance of it in our present translation of the Bible: ‘That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap’ (Lev. xxv. 5). But another reading is, ‘of it own accord.’

6. GRAMMAR OF VERBS.—The verb possessed also, in the oldest times, before the language was at all influenced by Norman-French, a large number of inflections. At the present time a verb has only five inflections; but, if it belongs to the strong conjugation, it may have six. Let us look at the old verb niman, to take, which still survives in our adjective nimble, which means quick at taking.

The chief tenses of niman were inflected as follows:

Of all the inflections in the above, only two still remain, st in the second person singular, and th in the third person; and even these two inflections are nowadays hardly used at all.

7. FRAGMENTS OF NOUN INFLECTIONS.—Although our language, in the course of its history, has lost almost all of its inflections, there still remain, here and there, in our grammar, fragments of inflections which are often curiously{37} disguised, and therefore difficult to recognise. Thus, at first sight, it is not easy to see that vixen is the feminine of fox. But vixen is simply the same as fixen, or fyxen, and it was one of the laws of Anglo-Saxon vowel-change that o became y. It was very usual to make the plural of nouns in en. Thus we said shoon, hosen, tren, been (for bees), toon (for toes), flon (for arrows), and fleen (for fleas). But, of all these and other similar plurals, we now possess only one—oxen. The plurals children and brethren are really double plurals. The oldest plurals were cildru, afterwards childer; and brether. It was then forgotten that these were real plurals, and an en was added.

8. FRAGMENTS OF ADJECTIVE INFLECTIONS.—We have the comparative rather (rightly pronounced in Ireland rayther); but we have no rathe or rathest. An old writer, speaking of a star, says: ‘It rose rather and rather (earlier).’ Nighest becomes next; because the g + s is equal to an x. So there was in our country an old proverb, ‘When bale is hext, bone is next’—that is, ‘When evil is highest, boon is nighest.’ Over is now only used as a preposition. But it is really the comparative degree of the old adjective ov, which is a form of up or off.

9. FRAGMENTS OF PRONOUN INFLECTIONS.—The t in it (which was formerly hit, as the neuter of he) is simply the sign of the neuter gender, and is the same t that is found in tha-t, wha-t (the neuter of who), etc. Hence the true possessive of it is his; and this is the form in use in Shakspeare and Bacon, and even down to the middle of the seventeenth century. Its, as we have already seen, is a blunder. They is not the true plural of he; but really of the old definite article thaet.

10. FRAGMENTS OF VERB INFLECTIONS.—The inflections of the verb are very strangely disguised; and, if learned men had not worked hard, and made diligent inquiry in many directions, we should never have known what they really are. Thus the m in am is the same m that is found in me; and the oldest form known of the verb am, in the oldest language, is asmi.—The t which we find in the second person of some{38} verbs, such as art, wast, shalt, and wilt, is the same as the th in thou. This t is therefore the pronoun thou added to the verb.—The th in the old-fashioned third person singular writeth, hopeth, etc., is the same th that we find in the and that. Accordingly, we may say that burneth is = that (thing) burns.—The last d in did is not the same as the ed in walked. Did is not = doed. An older form of did is dude; and from this we see that the past tense was formed by doubling the present—by reduplication. Thus we see that it is the last d that represents the do.—The word worth in the well-known lines from the Lady of the Lake—

is not an adjective, but the remnant of an old verb. This verb is weorthan, to become; and worth is the imperative of it. When a verb has lost one of its parts, it goes to another verb, and borrows the use of one of its parts. Thus went, the past tense of go, is borrowed from wend.

11. FRAGMENTS OF INFLECTIONS IN ADVERBS.—Adverbs contain a great number of disguised inflections. In the present day, we make adverbs from adjectives by adding ly to them—as neat, neatly; warm, warmly. But, in old English, the adverb was made by employing the dative of the adjective. Thus, brightë was = in a bright manner; swiftë was = swiftly. Then ë very soon dropped off; and the word was left in its bare root—stripped of inflections. And so it has happened that we have many adverbs which are used in their simplest form, and are just the same as adjectives. We do not say, ‘He runs fastly,’ but ‘He runs fast;’ ‘He works hardly,’ but ‘He works hard.’—But the remnants of other cases are also found in adverbs. Thus needs, always, sideways, once (for onës), twice (for twiës), unawares, whence (for whennës) and others, are all old possessives.—Seldom is an old dative plural. Seld meant rare; and seldom means at rare times.—The in the phrase, ‘The older the better,’ is an ablative or instrumental case; and therefore means by that. Accordingly this sentence means: ‘By that older, by that better.’{39} The measure of the increase of age is the measure of the increase of the quality.

12. FRAGMENTS OF INFLECTIONS IN PREPOSITIONS.—Since is the possessive case of the old English word sithen. The following are the steps: Sithennës; sithens; sithence; since.—After is the comparative degree of the old preposition af (= of), which meant from. Over is another comparative form, from a root which appears in up.

CHAPTER III.

Changes in Modern English.

1. FORMATION OF MODERN ENGLISH.—We have seen that the substance of the living English tongue was brought from Germany to this island by our Teutonic ancestors. We have seen also that it has undergone a great variety of influences, the greatest and strongest of which was the Norman Conquest. For a long time after the Conquest, the English language was the tongue of a subject and humiliated race; it ceased to be fashionable, and almost ceased to be literary. In the thirteenth century it began to revive, but with very important changes; the inflections, and many of the old English words, being lost, and a multitude of new words being introduced. In Chaucer’s time it regained its old position as the language of the court, of fashion, and of literature. In 1485 we find the language in all important respects fixed as we have it now. Every intelligent Englishman is able to understand all that has since been written.

Modern English, then, dates from 1485, the year when the Wars of the Roses ended with the battle of Bosworth, and the Tudor line ascended the throne. It was the time also when the art of printing was introduced by Caxton; and about the time when the two great events, the Revival of Learning and the Reformation, took place.

2. CONTINUED HISTORY OF OUR LANGUAGE.—It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the language has{40} no history after 1485. Language is the expression and embodiment of thought; and as thought varies with the varying experience of man, language must change accordingly. Since 1485 the English people have gone through marvellous changes—changes in political and social life, in science, in art, and industry. They have planted extensive colonies, they carry on trade in every part of the world, and have dealings with every nation. In all this widening and progressive life, we have got to know far more than we did in 1485, and thus require to use a multitude of words unknown to the people of that period. The result has been a large addition to our vocabulary.

3. BORROWING FROM SPANISH AND ITALIAN.—Under the heading ‘Latin of the Fourth Period,’ we have noted the number of words borrowed from the Latin during the sixteenth century. We are now to observe that about the same time there was a considerable borrowing of words from the Spanish and Italian. Of course, as Italian and Spanish are offshoots from Latin, these words also are mostly of Latin origin.

(i) Italian.—During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Italian literature was very extensively studied by English writers. For some centuries the Italians were the most cultivated people in Europe. Italy was the home of music, painting, and sculpture. Her poets served as models to those of other nations. The earliest poets of modern England, such as Wyatt and Surrey, were inspired by them; Spenser and Milton were ardent students of their works. During this period, consequently, we introduced from the Italian language many important words, among which may be mentioned sonnet, opera, cupola, balcony, palette.

(ii) Spanish.—At the same time we had even more intimate relations with Spain, though of a different kind. In the sixteenth century Spain was the leading nation of Europe. She had the best soldiers, the first generals and statesmen; her ships discovered America; and her kings aimed at universal dominion. As both friend and enemy, England was brought into close connection with{41} the Spaniards. Under these circumstances we naturally adopted many words from them. While most of these were of Latin origin, not a few related to the new countries discovered and conquered by Spain in America. Among the Spanish words may be mentioned buffalo, alligator, don, armada, indigo, potato, tobacco. The last two are of American origin. The rest are Latin. Alligator is of Latin origin, but is the name of an American animal.

4. DUTCH WORDS.—We have borrowed very few words from the Germans; but from the people of the Netherlands, who have always been near neighbours to us, we have derived not a few. Long ago, Flemings (or people of Flanders) were settled in Wales and Norfolk. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, thousands of Protestant refugees from Antwerp and other places in the Netherlands found an asylum in England. Since the rise of Holland we have had many dealings, both warlike and commercial, with the Dutch. All this accounts for the goodly number of Dutch words which we now find in the English language, such as burgomaster, ballast, holster, trigger, yacht, yawl.

5. It will have been clearly seen that there are two main elements in the English language—the Teutonic element, which is by far the most important; and the Latin element. It is interesting to trace the relative proportion of these two elements as used by the great English writers. In the seventeenth century, especially in such writers as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne, we find a large use of the Latin element, accompanied by a Latin or complex and involved structure of sentence. Towards the end of the century, and especially in the beginning of the eighteenth, during the period of Queen Anne, a simpler style prevailed, the classical element being more sparingly used. But as we proceed into the eighteenth century, the Latin part of the language is again more largely employed by such writers as Johnson, Gibbon, and Hume; and it is again accompanied by a more formal and elaborate structure of sentence. But before the century closes, there is a return to simplicity and naturalness.{42}

6. In the present century there are many influences specially worth noting as affecting the language:

(i) Social and Political Causes.—Society is a complex thing, continually growing. New facts and ideas are perpetually making themselves felt, necessitating new words, or a more extending meaning in old words. In this province, then, changes in language are incessantly required. Hence the need for such new words as extradition, neutralisation, secularisation; even for such unhappy coinages as burke. On occasion of the great volunteer reviews of 1881, words like entrain and detrain, applied to troops, could be noticed creeping in. Closure and clôture were rivals for currency during the debates of 1882; and Boycott began to present serious claims to permanent citizenship in the English tongue.

(ii) Popularising of Technical and Scientific Terms.—One of the most marked features of the nineteenth century is the great diffusion of scientific knowledge, and the application of it to the uses of practical life. The highest scientific results are becoming common property; and the discoveries of science have been made to satisfy the common needs of men. The result is that terms once unknown or exclusively technical have gained the widest currency in the popular speech. There is no need to mention such familiar words as telegraph, photograph, or even telephone or photophone. The old noun wire has now established its right to be used as a verb. In other spheres such terms as objective, subjective, æsthetics, now fulfil important functions; æsthete also seems too useful a word to be dispensed with.

(iii) Revival of Archaisms.—In many of our recent poets there has been a tendency to revive some of the old Spenserian or Shaksperian words. But as these are purely literary terms, with no currency in the common speech, they need not be dwelt on.

(iv) Introduction of Scotticisms and Americanisms.—The right of the Scottish tongue to be considered one of the worthiest varieties of the genuine old English or Saxon tongue is now generally recognised. But apart from that,{43} the intrinsic merit of such words as eerie, glamour, sough, bonnie, douce (both of which last, however, are of French origin), will probably secure them a permanent place in our language. The influence of America will also be more and more felt on the common English language, whether through its stock of old Saxon phrases which have been preserved in America, through the innovations made by its humorists, or the new experiences in its social and political life.

(v) Further borrowing from Foreign Languages.—Even the most remote and unlikely make important and familiar contributions to our tongue. From the Malays we have (along with the thing) borrowed the words bamboo, gong, sago; from the Australians we have boomerang and kangaroo; and from South African tongues, gnu, quagga, kraal.

CHAPTER IV.

Words adopted from Foreign Languages.

1. FROM AFRICAN DIALECTS.—Chimpanzee, gnu, gorilla, karoo, kraal, zebra.

2. FROM AMERICAN TONGUES.—Buccaneer, cacique, cannibal, canoe, caoutchouc, cayman, chocolate, condor, guano, hammock, jaguar, jalap, jerked (beef), llama, mahogany, maize, manioc, moccasin, mustang, opossum, pampas, pemmican, potato, skunk, squaw, tapioca, tobacco, tomahawk, tomato, wigwam, yam.

3. FROM THE ARABIC LANGUAGE. (The word al means the. Thus alcohol = the spirit. A few of the following words, however, though they have come to us through Arabic, belong originally to other tongues. Thus alchemy and talisman are from the Greek; apricot is Latin.)—Admiral, alchemy, alcohol, alcove, alembic, algebra, alkali, amber, apricot, arrack, arsenal, artichoke, assassin, assegai, attar, azimuth, azure, caliph, carat, chemistry, cipher, civet, coffee, cotton, crimson, dragoman, elixir, emir, fakir, felucca, gazelle, giraffe, harem, hookah, koran (or alcoran), lute, magazine, mattress, minaret, mohair, monsoon, mosque, mufti, nabob, nadir, naphtha, salaam, senna, sherbet, shrub (the drink), simoom, sirocco, sofa, sultan, syrup, talisman, tamarind, tariff, vizier, zenith, zero.

4. FROM CHINESE.—Bohea, congou, hyson, joss, junk, nankeen, pekoe, souchong, tea.

5. FROM DUTCH (words relating chiefly to naval affairs).—Boom, boor, hoy, luff, reef, schiedam (gin), skates, skipper, sloop, smack, smuggle, stiver, taffrail, wear (of a ship), yacht.

6. FROM FRENCH.—Aide-de-camp,{44} belle, bivouac, blonde, bouquet, brunette, brusque, carte-de-visite, coup-d’état, débris, début, déjeûner (breakfast), depot, éclat, ennui, etiquette, naive, naïveté, nonchalance, personnel, précis, programme, protégé, recherché, soirée.

7. FROM GERMAN (mostly mining terms).—Cobalt, felspar, horn-blend, landgrave, loafer, margrave, meerschaum, nickel, plunder, poodle, quartz, zinc.

8. FROM HEBREW (words relating chiefly to religion).—Abbey, abbot, amen, behemoth, cabal, cherub, gehenna, hallelujah, hosannah, Jehovah, jubilee, leviathan, manna, paschal, pharisee, pharisaical, rabbi, sabbath, Sadducees, Satan, seraph, shibboleth, Talmud.

9. FROM HINDU.—Avatar, banyan, bungalow, calico, chintz, coolie, cowrie, durbar, jungle, lac (of rupees), loot, mulligatawny, pagoda, palanquin, pariah, punch, pundit, rajah, rupee, ryot, sepoy, shampoo, sugar, suttee, thug, toddy.

10. FROM HUNGARIAN.—Hussar.

11. FROM ITALIAN.—Alarm, alert, alto, bagatelle, balcony, balustrade, bandit, bankrupt, bravo, brigade, brigand, broccoli, burlesque, bust, cameo, canteen, canto, caprice, caricature, carnival, cartoon, cascade, cavalcade, charlatan, citadel, colonnade, concert, contralto, conversazione, cornice, corridor, cupola, curvet, dilettante, ditto, doge, domino, extravaganza, fiasco, folio, fresco, gazette, gondola, granite, grotto, guitar, incognito, influenza, lagoon, lava, lazaretto, macaroni, madonna, madrigal, malaria, manifesto, motto, moustache, niche, opera, oratorio, palette, pantaloon, parapet, pedant, pianoforte, piazza, pistol, portico, proviso, quarto, regatta, ruffian, serenade, sonnet, soprano, stanza, stiletto, stucco, studio, tenor, terra-cotta, tirade, torso, trombone, umbrella, vermilion, vertu, virtuoso, vista, volcano, zany.

12. FROM MALAY.—Amuck, bamboo, bantam, caddy, cockatoo, dugong, gamboge, gong, guttapercha, mandarin (through the Portuguese), mango, ourangoutang, rattan, sago, upas.

13. FROM PERSIAN.—Bazaar, bashaw, caravan, check, checkmate, chess, dervish, divan, firman, hazard, horde, houri, jar, jackal, jasmine, lac (a gum), lemon, lilac, lime (the fruit), musk, orange, paradise, pasha, rook, saraband, sash, scimitar, shawl, taffeta, turban.

14. FROM POLYNESIAN DIALECTS.—Boomerang, kangaroo, taboo, tattoo (to paint the skin).

15. FROM PORTUGUESE.—Albatross, caste, cobra, cocoa-nut, commodore, fetish, lasso, marmalade, moidore, palaver, port (Oporto).

16. FROM RUSSIAN.—Czar, drosky, knout, morse (walrus), steppe, ukase.

17. FROM SPANISH.—Alligator, armada, barricade, battledore, bravado, buffalo, caracole, cargo, cigar, cochineal, cork, creole, desperado, don, duenna, El dorado, embargo, filibuster (from English flyboat), filigree, flotilla, galleon (a ship), grandee, grenade, guerilla, indigo, jennet, matadore, merino, mosquito, mulatto, negro, octoroon, quadroon, renegade, savannah, sherry (Xeres), tornado, vanilla.

18. FROM TARTAR.—Caviare (the roe of the sturgeon).

19. FROM TURKISH.—Bey, caftan, chibouk, chouse, janissary, kiosk, odalisque, ottoman, tulip, yashmak, yataghan.{45}

CHIEF DATES IN THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

{46}CHAPTER V.

Notes on the Growth of English Words.

1. ROOTS; INFLUENCE OF IMITATION ON LANGUAGE.—The question of the origin of language is an extremely interesting one, which has been long and keenly discussed. But it is one on which the opinions of the learned are not agreed, and we cannot dwell upon it here. There is an established fact, however, which is of the highest interest and importance: most of the words of the great family of Indo-European languages can be traced to a few hundred roots; and these roots are common to the whole family. It is the greatest achievement of philological science to have clearly established this fact. How these roots have originated, is a more uncertain inquiry: in fact, is just the question of the origin of language presented in another form. It is the theory of some that words have arisen from the imitation of natural sounds; the names of animals, for instance, being imitations of the sounds they utter. Though this has been ridiculed under the nickname of the bow-wow theory, there seems to be some truth in it: at anyrate no one will deny that in the English, as in all other languages, a great many words exist which are imitative of natural sounds. Among such words the following may be mentioned: Babble, boom, chatter, chirp, clang, clatter, clink, crash, croak, cuckoo, fizz, giggle, gurgle, hiss, howl, hum, hush, murmur, quack, scream, shriek, squeal, thud, thump, thwack, twang, whack, wheeze, whirr, whizz.

Of course these words were not all originally English. Clang and murmur, for instance, are Latin words; but they also are of imitative origin.

2. HYBRIDS.—A hybrid is a word composed of a mixture of foreign and native elements. Sometimes an English word has a Latin ending; sometimes a Latin word has an English{47} ending. All such words are called hybrids. One of the most interesting of the earliest hybrids in English was the word bondage, which is said to have been introduced in the year 1303. The word bond comes to us from the Icelandic or Norwegian word bondi, which means farmer or tiller of the soil. Farmers in Norway are to this day called bonders. The suffix age is Latin; but it has come to us through Norman-French. The full Latin ending is atĭcum, which, in France, in the course of generations, was compressed into age. There are other hybrids with this ending, such as tillage (which has pushed out the pure English tilth), cartage, stowage, and others.—The ending able, which comes to us from Latin, combines very easily with words which are purely English. Thus we have lovable, biddable, laughable, breakable, and others.—The Latin ending osus means full of. Thus, vinum is wine, and vinosus is full of wine. This ōsus becomes in English ous; and we find this Latin suffix added to words which are purely English. Thus we have wondrous from wonder, and ravenous from raven. We have also righteous, which was originally rightwîs, and the change into righteous was a corruption of the spelling.—Dis is a Latin prefix, and it is added to English words. Thus we have dislike and disown. We have also dishearten, an old word, in which the prefix dis contradicts the suffix en (which means to put or make).—Re, another Latin prefix, unites with purely English words, and we find renew, reopen, rebuild, reclothe, and others.—French words with English prefixes are also found. Thus we have besiege; the word siege, a seat, being French. To besiege means to take a seat in front of a town, with your mind made up not to go till you have taken it.—Latin words with English endings are found in useful, useless, usefulness, uselessness, and others. English words with Latin or French endings are not uncommon. Thus we have goddess, forbearance, hindrance, oddity, and others. In old-fashioned English, and even in Wordsworth, who died in 1850, we find such curious formations as oddments, needments, eggments (eggings on or incitements), and a few others.{48}

3. WORDS DISGUISED IN FORM OR IN MEANING.

{53}4. WORDS THAT HAVE CHANGED THEIR MEANING.

5. WORDS DERIVED FROM THE NAMES OF PERSONS.

6. WORDS DERIVED FROM NAMES OF PLACES.

7. ENGLISH (OR TEUTONIC) ROOTS.

8. LATIN ROOTS.

9. GREEK ROOTS.

10. THE BRANCHING OF WORDS FROM LATIN STEMS.

11. THE BRANCHING OF WORDS FROM ENGLISH STEMS.

CHAPTER VI.

Prefixes and Suffixes.

PREFIXES.

1. ENGLISH (OR TEUTONIC).

{71}2. LATIN.

{72}3. GREEK.

SUFFIXES.

4. ENGLISH (OR TEUTONIC).

Noun Suffixes.

5. LATIN.

Noun Suffixes.

6. GREEK.

Noun Suffixes.

{76}LITERATURE.

I.

Outline of Our Early Literature

(WITH ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE EARLY LANGUAGE).

1. THE BEOWULF.—The Beowulf is a poem which recounts the life and death of a hero of that name, who slays a monster called Grendel. It was a poetic legend brought from the Continent by our Teutonic ancestors. It does not seem to have been written down, or committed to paper, till the seventh century; and it was probably preserved in the memory of different generations, by its being taught by fathers to their sons, and by the habit of chanting portions of it at the banquets of kings and warriors. It is a poem which in substance belongs to the Continental Teutons as much as to the English; and it marks the point at which their literatures and languages begin to branch off. The scene is laid in the north of Denmark; so that the poem is Northern, and not Southern, Teutonic. Its present form is due to a Christian writer of Northumbria. In literary form, therefore, it is English; and is one of the earliest monuments of our literature. The poem consists of 6350 short lines, and is written throughout in head-rhymes,[15] or alliterative rhymes.

2. CÆDMON.—But the first true English poem was the work of a Northumbrian called Cædmon, who was a servant to the monks of the abbey of Hilda, in Whitby. It was written about the year 670. It is a paraphrase of the history given in the Old and the New Testament. It sings of the creation of the world, of the history of Israel, of the life of Christ, of death, judgment, purgatory, heaven, and hell.{77}

3. BÆDA.—The oldest literature of a nation—the early writings of its childhood—are always poetic; and prose-writings do not appear until the nation has, as it were, grown up. The first English prose-writer was Bæda—or, as he is generally called, The Venerable Bede. He was born in the year 673. Like Cædmon, our first poet, he was a Northumbrian, and belonged to the monastery of Jarrow-upon-Tyne. His most important writings were in Latin; and the best known of them is an Ecclesiastical History of the English People. But the work which makes Bæda our first writer of English prose, is a translation into English of the Gospel of St John. It was his last work; and, in fact, he died just after he had dictated the last sentence. This was in the year 735.

4. KING ALFRED.—Up to the year 866, Northumbria was the home of learning and literature; and the Northumbrian monks were its loving and diligent cultivators. But the incursions of the Danes, the destruction of the monasteries, and the perpetual danger to life and property arising from the troubled condition of the country, put a stop for some time to study and to letters. The cultivation of English as a book-language reappears, towards the end of the ninth century, in the south of the island. Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, is its great friend and promoter. Winchester was the capital of his kingdom; and it was at Winchester that Alfred and his colleagues laboured at the writing of English books. He invited great scholars from different parts of the world; he set up schools; he himself taught a school in his own court; he translated the Latin manuals of the time into English, and added largely to them from his own materials; he translated also the History of the Venerable Bede; and, most probably, he worked at the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and made it much fuller and more detailed than it had ever been before. He founded schools in the different parts of his kingdom, with the purpose and in the hope that ‘every free-born youth, who has the means, may attend to his book till he can read English writing perfectly.’ Alfred was born in the year 849, and died in 901. His own personal diligence—his unceasing head-work, are well known. He gave eight hours a{78} day to the work of public affairs—of managing the business of his kingdom; eight hours to books and study; and he reserved only eight hours for sleep, meals, exercise, and amusement. The following is a passage from one of King Alfred’s writings:

5. THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE.—This chronicle was written chiefly by monks, and was, in its earliest forms, a dry register or record of events—of the births and deaths of kings, bishops, earls, and other distinguished persons. In Alfred’s time, it became more of a history; and even war-songs and battle odes are quoted in it. It was continued down to the death of King Stephen in 1154; and the last portions of it were composed and transcribed by the monks of Peterborough.

6. ARCHBISHOP ÆLFRIC.—Ælfric was Archbishop of Canterbury in the early part of the eleventh century; and he translated the first seven books of the Bible, and part of Job, into the oldest form of English, which is generally called Anglo-Saxon. The following is a specimen:

7. ANGLO-SAXON GOSPELS.—This translation of the four gospels forms another land-mark in the history of our English tongue. This translation was made before the Norman Conquest—before French words had come into our{79} language, and therefore before the inflections of English had dropped off from the words.

8. OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS.—For more than a century after the Conquest, English ceased to be used as a literary language—as a book-speech, except in the Saxon Chronicle, which was continued down to 1154. It still continued, of course, to be the language of the English nation. The Normans, when they used books at all, imported French books from France; and they never dreamed that English was a language worthy to be written down. Different English counties spoke different kinds of English; and this continued for many centuries—and still continues to a considerable extent. Thus the English spoken by a Yorkshire-man is very different from the English spoken by a Dorsetshire-man; and the English of both differs very much from that spoken in Kent. But, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—and even much later—travelling was very difficult and expensive; working-men could not travel at all; there was little motive to travel for any one; and generations were born and died within the same village, or on one farm, or at least in one part of the ‘country-side.’ Thus different parts of this island pronounced their English in their own way; had their own grammar—that is, their own inflections; and each division of England looked upon itself as the right and correct speakers of the English tongue. But, among the large number of different dialects, there gradually emerged into distinct and even remarkable prominence three chief dialects. These are now known as the Northern, Midland, and Southern. The grammar of the three differs in several respects; but the chief grammatical mark is found in the plural ending of the present tense of verbs. This is ës in the North; en in the Midland dialect; and eth in the South. Thus we have:

This variety of the plural forms the test which enables{80} readers of books written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to determine in what part of England and in what dialect they were written. The following are the chief books written in these dialects:

9. THE FIRST ENGLISH BOOK AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST.—Normandy was lost to England in the reign of King John, in the year 1204. From that date, as we have seen, there was a compulsion on the Norman-French to forget their foreign origin, and to look upon themselves as genuine Englishmen. A year after, in the year 1205, ten years before the winning of the Magna Charta, appeared the first work—it was a poem—that was written in English after the Conquest. It is a translation by a Somersetshire priest called Layamon or Laweman, from a French poem. Brut is the French form of the name Brutus, who was said to be a son of Æneas, and to be the founder of the British nation. In those rude times, when history was quite unknown, the origin of every nation was traced up to Troy, and the persons of the Iliad of Homer. The Brut is a poem written chiefly in head-rhymes, and consists of about thirty thousand lines. But though it is translated from a French poem, there are not fifty French words in the whole—that is, there is not one French word in every six hundred lines.

10. ORM’S ORMULUM, 1215.—The Ormulum was a poem written by an Augustine monk, called Orm or Ormin, and called after his own name. It is a poem of nearly{81} twenty thousand short lines, without rhyme of any kind—but with a regular number of accents. There are not five French words in the whole poem. Orm was extremely particular about his spelling; and, when an accent struck a consonant after a short vowel, he insisted on doubling the consonant.

11. LANGLAND AND CHAUCER.—William Langland represents the part of the nation that spoke pure English; Geoffrey Chaucer, that part which spoke English with a large admixture of Norman-French. In fact, Chaucer’s poems show the high-water mark of the French saturation of our English vocabulary. Langland—a west-countryman, a monk, a man of the people, and of intensely radical sympathies—was born in 1332; Chaucer, a Londoner, in the very centre of English society, page to the Duchess of Clarence at sixteen years of age, and afterwards for great part of his life in court employment, was born in 1340. Both died in the year 1400. Langland’s most important poem is the Vision of (concerning) Piers Plowman. It is written in pure English, and in head-rhyme. It is the last English poem that was written in this kind of alliterative verse. The following lines are taken from the introduction:

Chaucer’s great work is his Canterbury Tales, a series of tales supposed to be told by a company of pilgrims to beguile their journey to the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury. The company represented men and women of almost every class in England; and their manners and character are painted with wonderful truth and beauty. The following is a passage from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; and{82} the French words are in italics. It is from the character of the Knight:

12. ALLITERATION OR HEAD-RHYME.—Alliteration is the correspondence of the first letter of several words in the same line. It is like the well-known: ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pepper off a pewter plate.’

In Old English or Anglo-Saxon poetry it was the only kind of rhyme used. The rhyme which is called end-rhyme was not known to the Saxons, and was imported into England by the Normans. In the ordinary Old English verse, the lines are written in pairs, and in each pair there are usually three alliterations, two in the first line and one in the second. Even as late as the fourteenth century we find such verses as the following, written by Langland:

Shakspeare is fond of making fun of it. But it has unconsciously survived in the language; and there is not a single great English poet, from Shakspeare to Tennyson, who does not make a large use of it. Thus Shakspeare himself has

and many other similar lines.{83}

Milton gives us such lines as:

Shelley has the line:

Tennyson is very fond of alliteration. Thus, in the Day-Dream:

13. JOHN GOWER.—A contemporary of Chaucer was John Gower, a gentleman of Kent. The date of his birth is not known; but he survived Chaucer eight years, dying in 1408. He wrote the Lover’s Confession in English verse; the Mirror of the Meditative Man in French verse (lost); the Voice of one crying, in Latin. His style was heavy and prosaic. Chaucer called him the ‘moral Gower.’

14. JOHN BARBOUR.—Another eminent contemporary of Chaucer was John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, who wrote in the Scottish, or Northern English, form of our tongue. He was a learned man, and a man of the world, who filled important office in the employment of the Scottish king. His great work was a narrative poem, The Bruce, giving an account of the life and adventures of the great Bruce. It is valuable both as a monument of our language and a storehouse of historical incident. Barbour died about 1395. The literature of Scotland was worthily continued by the royal poet, James I. (1394-1437), brought up as a prisoner in England, and well educated. His great work was the King’s Quhair (or book), a poem in the style and in one of the metres of Chaucer.

15. SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE.—Sir John Mandeville is the first writer of the new English prose—the prose with a large addition of French words. He is sometimes called the Father of English Prose. He was born at St Albans, in Hertfordshire, in 1300, and died at Liège, in 1372. He was a great{84} traveller, soldier, and physician; travelled through the Holy Land, served under the Sultan of Egypt and the Great Khan of Cathay (the old name for China); and wandered through almost all the then known parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. He wrote his travels in three languages—first in Latin for the learned; then in French for the Norman-French; and lastly in English, ‘that every man of the nation might understand them.’ The following is a specimen of his prose:

This is almost quite like modern English—with the exception of the spelling;

16. JOHN WICLIFFE.—John Wicliffe,* or John de Wycliffe, was born at the village of Hipswell, near Richmond, in Yorkshire, in the year 1324. He died at the vicarage of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, in the year 1384, at the age of sixty. He was the first Englishman who attempted to make a complete translation of the Scriptures. Of this work, however, the Gospels alone can be certainly identified as the work of Wicliffe himself. The Old Testament and apocryphal books were translated principally by Nicolas de Hereford, and it is supposed that his work was interrupted in 1382, and that the Bible was completed about that time by extracting the text of the gospels from Wicliffe’s commentary on the gospels (written in 1360), and adding to it a new translation of the rest of the New Testament. A later version was finished by Wicliffe’s friend, John Purvey, about 1388, and appears to be mainly a revision of the work of Hereford and Wicliffe. The later is a less close and literal version than the former, and is expressed in more idiomatic and less laboured English.{85}

17. OUR ENGLISH BIBLE AND ITS HISTORY.—The first fresh translation from the original sources was that of William Tyndale. His New Testament, printed at Cologne and at Worms, reached the English shores in 1526, and was followed three years later by the Pentateuch. To this translation our authorised version owes much of its peculiar force and beauty. The first complete English Bible was that of Miles Coverdale, which appeared in 1535. In April 1539 appeared the Great Bible (so called from its large size), prepared by Coverdale at Paris, but completed in London under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell. The translation of the psalms in the Great Bible has remained, without alteration, the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer. During the last year of Mary’s reign and the beginning of Elizabeth’s, the English refugees at Geneva completed a fresh revision of the Great Bible, which was published in 1560, in a handy size, with a marginal commentary, and the chapters divided into verses. The Genevan version (sometimes called the Breeches Bible), became popular with the Puritans, and more than two hundred editions of it were published, and it gave way slowly before the present authorised version. Soon after Elizabeth’s accession, Archbishop Parker organised a revision of the Great Bible of 1539, which was published in 1568, and became known as the Bishops’ Bible. During Elizabeth’s reign, the Popish exiles at Rheims produced a new version from the Vulgate, which was printed at Douay in 1609, and is known as the Douay Bible. The English Bible which is now recognised as the ‘authorised version’ wherever the English language is spoken, is a revision of the Bishops’ Bible, begun in 1604 and finished in 1611. Of this noble version many millions have been printed, and its general acceptance by all English-speaking people is the best testimony to its excellence. No book has had so great an influence on our language and literature; its words and phrases have been preserved in our vocabulary, and are the most familiar to our ears, consecrated as they are with the associations of two hundred and seventy years. A revision of our version by the most eminent scholars is now in progress, and the revised{86} New Testament was published, May 17, 1881. Appended is a passage from Romans (xii. 6-8), as it appears in Wicliffe’s, Tyndale’s, the Great Bible, the Genevan Bible, the Bishop’s Bible, and our Authorised Version:

{87}

II.

Tabular Outline of modern English Literature.

(Poems are mentioned in Italics.)

THE END.


Edinburgh:
Printed by W. & R. Chambers.

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