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;rowth and structure )f the english language
BY
OTTO JESPERSEN, ph.d., lit.d.,
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN, AUTHOR OF "progress IN LANGUAGE",
"lehrbuch der phonetik", "phonetische grundfragen", "how to teach a foreign language", "a modern english grammar", etc.
AWARDED THE VOLNEY PRIZE OF THE INSTITUT DE FRANCE 1906
SECOND EDITION REVISED
LEIPZIG PUBLISHED BY B. G. TEUBNER
1912
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED BY B.G.TEUBNER, LEIPZIG
"^I^ -10-76
PREFACE.
The scope and plan of this volume have been set forth in the introductory paragraph. I have endeavoured to write at once popularly and so as to be of some profit to the expert philologist. In some cases I have advanced new views without having space enough to give all my reasons for deviating from commonly accepted theories, but I hope to find an opportunity in future works of a more learned character to argue out the most debatable points.
I owe more than I can say to numerous predecessors in the fields of my investigations, most of all to the authors of the New English Dictionary. The dates given for the first and last appearance of a word are nearly always taken from that splendid monument of English scholarship, and it is hardly necessary to warn the reader not to take these dates too literally. When I say, for instance, th^it fenester was in use from 1 290 to 1548, I do not mean to say that the word was actually heard for the first and for the last time in those two years, but only that no earlier or later quotations have been discovered by the painstaking authors of that dictionary.
I have departed from a common practice in retaining the spelling of all authors quoted. I see no reason why in so many English editions of Shakespeare the spelling is modernized while in quotations from other Elizabethan authors the old spelling is followed. Quotations from Shakespeare are here regularly given in the spelling of the First FoHo (1623). The only point where, for the convenience of modern readers, I regulate the old usage,
236288
IV Preface.
is with regard to capital letters and «, z', z*, /, printing, for instance, us and love instead of vs and loue. — To avoid misunderstandings, I must here expressly state that by Old English (O. E.) I always understand the language before 1150, still often termed Anglo-Saxon. I want to thank Mr. A. E. Hayes of London, Dr. Lane Cooper of Cornell University, and especially Pro- fessor G. C. Moore Smith of Sheffield University, who has in many ways given me the benefit of his great knowledge of the English language and of English literature.
In the second edition I have here and there modi- fied an expression, added a fresh illustration, and removed a remark or an example that was not per- haps very felicitously chosen; but in the main the work remains unchanged.
Gentofte (Copenhagen), September 191 1.
O.J.
CONTENTS.
Chapter I ^*^®
Preliminary Sketch ^
Chapter II The Beginnings ^^
Chapter III Old English 33
Chapter IV The Scandinavians 59
Chapter V The French 84
Chapter VI Latin and Greek iH
Chapter VII Various Sources 152
Chapter VIII Grammar ^7^
Chapter IX Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry . . 210
Chapter X Conclusion 234
Phonetic Symbols. Abbreviations . . . 249 Index 250
Chapter /.
Preliminary Sketch.
1. It will be my endeavour in this volume to character- ize the chief peculiarities of the English language, and to explain the growth and significance of those features in its structure which have been of permanent import- ance. The older stages of the language, interesting as their study is, will be considered only in so far as they throw light either directly or by way of contrast on the main characteristics of present-day English, and an at- tempt will be made to connect the teachings of linguistic history with the chief events in the general history of the English people so as to show their mutual bearings on each other and the relation of language to national character. The knowledge that the latter conception is a very difficult one to deal with scientifically, as it may easily tempt one into hasty generalizations, should make us wary, but not deter us from grappHng with problems which are really both interesting and important. — My plan will be, first to give a rapid sketch of the language of our own days, so as to show how it strikes a foreigner — a foreigner who has devoted much time to the study of English, but who feels that in spite of all his efforts he is only able to look at it as a foreigner does, and not exactly as a native would — and then in the following chapters to enter more deeply into the history of the language in order to describe its first shape, to trace the
Jespershn: English. 2nd ed. I
,2%; Ic J V; ' ' ' I.'- Pvelim'inary Sketch.
various foreign influences it has undergone, and to give an account ot its own inner growth.
2, It is, of course, impossible to characterize a lan- guage in one formula; languages, like men, are too com- posite to have their whole essence summed up in one short expression. Nevertheless, there is one expression that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of the English language and compare it with others: it seems to me positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it. A great many things go together to produce and to confirm that impression, things phonetical, grammatical, and lexical, words and turns that are found, and words and turns that are not found, in the language. In dealing with the English language one is often reminded of the characteristic English hand-writing; just as an English lady will nearly always write in a manner that in any other country would only be found in a man's hand, in the same manner the language is more manly than any other language I know.
3. First I shall mention the sound system. The English consonants are well defined; voiced and voiceless con- sonants stand over against each other in neat symmetry, and they are, as a rule, clearly and precisely pronounced. You have none of those indistinct or half-slurred con- sonants that abound in Danish, for instance (such as those in ha^e, hage, liz;lig) where you hardly know whether it is a consonant or a vowel-glide that meets the ear. The only thing that might be compared to this in English, is the r when not followed by a vowel, but then this has really given up definitely all pretensions to the rank of a consonant, and is (in the pronunciation of the South of England) either frankly a vowel (as in here) or else nothing at all (in hart, etc.). Each English
Sound System. ^
consonant belongs distinctly to its own type, a / is a /, and a ^ is a ^, and there an end. There is much less modification of a consonant by the surroundmg vowels than in some other languages, thus none of that palatal- ization of consonants which gives an insinuating grace to such languages as Russian. The vowel sounds, too, are comparatively independent of their surroundings, and in this respect the language now has deviated widely from the character of Old English and has become more clear-cut and distinct in its phonetic structure, although, to be sure, the diphthongization of most long vowels (in ale, whole, eel, who, phonetically eil, houl, ijl, huw) counteracts in some degree this impression of neatness and evenness.
4. Besides these characteristics, the full nature of which cannot, perhaps, be made intelligible to any but those familiar with phonetic research, but which are still felt more or less instinctively by everybody hearing the language spoken, there are other traits whose importance 'can with greater ease be made evident to anybody possessed of a normal ear.
5. To bring out cleaily one of these points I select at random, by way of contrast, a passage from the language of Hawaii: 'T kona hiki ana aku ilaila ua hookipa ia mai la oia me ke aloha pumehana loa.'' Thus it goes on, no single word ends in a consonant, and a group of two or more consonants is never found. Can any one be in doubt that even if such a language sound plea- santly and be full of music and harmony, the total im- pression is childlike and effeminate? You do not expect much vigour or energy in a people speaking ouch a lan- guage; it seems adapted only to inhabitants of sunny regions where the soil requires scarcely any labour on the part of man to yield him everthing he wants, and where life therefore does not bear the stamp of a hard
1*
A I. Preliminary Sketch,
struggle against nature and against fellow-creatures. In a lesser degree we find the same phonetic structure in such languages as Italian and Spanish; but how different are our Germanic tongues. English has no lack of words ending in two or more consonants, — I am speaking, of course, of the pronunciation, not of the spelling — age, hence, wealth, tent, tempt, tempts, months, helped, feasts, etc. etc., and thus requires, as well as presupposes, no little energy on the part of the speakers. That many suchlike consonant groups do not tend to render the language beautiful, one is bound readily to concede; however, it cannot be pretended that their number in English is great enough to make the language harsh or rough. While the fifteenth century greatly increased the number of consonant groups by making the e mute in monthes, helped, etc., the following centuries, on the con- trary, lightened such groups as -ght in night, thought (where the "back-open'' consonant as German ch is still spoken in Scotch) and the initial kn-, gn- in know, gnaw, etc. Note also the disappearance of / in alms,' folk, etc., and of r in hard, court, etc.; the final conso- nant groups have also been simplified in comb and the other words in -mb (whereas b has been retained in timber) and in the exactly parallel group -ng, for in- stance in strong, where now only one consonant is heard after the vowel, a consonant partaking of the nature of n and of g, but identical with neither of them; formerly it was followed by a real g, which has been retained in stronger.
6. In the first ten stanzas of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall", three hundred syllables, we have only thirty-three words ending in two consonants, and two ending in three, certainly no excessive number, especially if we take into account the nature of the groups, which are nearly all of the easiest kind (-dz: comrades, Pleiads;
Endings. 5
-mz: gleams, comes; -nz: robin's, man's, turns; -ns: distance, science; -ks: overlooks; -ts: gets, thoughts; -kts: tracts, cataracts; -zd: reposed, closed; -st: rest, West, breast, crest; -Jt: burnish'd; -nd: sound, around, moorland, behind, land; -nt: want, casement, went, present; -Id: old, world; It: result; -If: himself; -pt: dipt). Thus, we may perhaps characterize English, phonetically speaking, as possessing male energy, but not brutal force. The accentual system points in the same direction, as will be seen below (26 — 28).
7. The Italians have a pointed proverb: "Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi." If briefness, concise- ness and terseness are characteristic of the style of men, while women as a rule are not such economizers of speech, English is more masculine than most languages. We see this in a great many ways. In grammar it has got rid of a great many superfluities found in earlier English as well as in most cognate languages, reducing endings, etc., to the shortest forms possible and often doing away with endings altogether. Where German has, for instance, alle diejenigen wilden Here, die dort leben, so that the plural idea is expressed in each word separately (apart, of course, from the adverb), English has all the wild animals that live there, where all, the article, the adjective, and the relative pronoun are alike incapable of receiving any mark of the plural number; the sense is expressed with the greatest clearness imagi- nable, and all the unstressed endings -e and -en, which make most German sentences so drawling, are avoided.
8. Rimes based on correspondence in the last syl- lable only of each line (as bet, set; laid, shade) are termed male rimes, as opposed to feminine rimes, where each line has two corresponding syllables, one strong and one weak (as better, setter; lady, shady). It is true
6 I. Preliminary' Sketch.
that these names, which originated in France, were not at first meant to express any parallelism with the charac- teristics of the two sexes, but arose merely from the grammatical fact that the weak -e was the ending of the feminine gender (grande, etc.). But the designa- tions are not entirely devoid of symbolic significance; there is really more of abrupt force in a word that ends with a strongly stressed syllable, than in a word where the maximum of force is followed by a weak ending. 'Thanks' is harsher and less polite than the two-sylla- bled 'thank you'. English has undoubtedly gained in force, what it has possibly lost in elegance, by reducing so many words of two syllables to monosyllables. If it had not been for the great number of long foreign, espe- cially Latin, words, English would have approached the state of such monosyllabic languages as Chinese, Now one of the best Chinese scholars, G. v. d. Gabelentz, somewhere remarks that an idea of the condensed power of the monosyllabism found in old Chinese may be gath- ered from Luther's advice to a preacher 'Geh rasch 'nauf, tu's maul auf, hor bald auf.' He might with equal justice have reminded us of many English sentences. 'First come first served' is much more vigorous than the French 'premier venu, premier moulu' or 'le premier venu en- gr^ne', the German 'wer zuerst kommt mahlt zuerst' and especially than the Danish 'den der kommer forst til melle, far farst malet'. Compare also 'no cure, no pay', 'haste makes waste, and waste makes want', 'live and learn,* 'Love no man: trust no man: speak ill of no man to his face; nor well of any man behind his back' (Ben Jonson), 'to meet, to know, to love, and then to part' (Coleridge) , 'Then none were for the party; Then all were for the state; Then the great man help'd the poor. And the poor man loved the great' (Macaulay).
I
Monosyllabism. 7
9. It will be noticed, however, — and the quotations just given serve to exemplify this, too — that itMs not every collocation of words of one syllable that produces an effect of strength, for a great many of the short words most frequently employed are not stressed at all and therefore impress the ear in nearly the same way as pre- fixes and suffixes do. There is nothing particularly vigor- ous in the following passage from a modern novel: 'It was as if one had met part of one's self one had lost for a long time', and in fact most people hearing it read aloud would fail to notice that it consisted of nothing but one-syllable words. Such sentences are not at all rare in colloquial prose, and even in poetry they are found oftener than in most languages, for instance: —
And there a while it bode ; and if a man Could touch or see it, he was heal'd at once, By faith, of all his ills.
(Tennyson, The Holy Grail:)
But then, the weakness resulting from many small con- necting words is to some extent compensated in Eng- lish by the absence of the definite article in a good many cases where other languages think it indispensable, e. g. •Merry Old England', 'Heaven and Earth'"; 'life is short'; 'dinner is ready'; 'school is over'; 'I saw him at church', and this peculiarity delivers the language from a number of those short 'empty words', which when accumulated cannot fail to make the style somewhat weak and prolix.
10. Business-like shortness is also seen in such con- venient abbreviations of sentences as abound in English, for instance, 'While fighting in Germany he was taken prisoner' (= while he was fighting). 'He would not answer when spoken to.' 'To be left till called for.' 'Once at home, he forgot his fears.' 'We had no idea what to do.' 'Did they run.> Yes, I made them' (= made them
8 I. Preliminary Sketch.
run). 'Shall you play tennis to-day.? Yes, we are going to. I should like to, but I can't.' 'Dinner over, he left the house.' Such expressions remind one of the abbrevia- tions used in telegrams; they are syntactical correspond- encies to the morphological shortenings that are also of such frequent occurrence in English: cab for cabriolet, bus for omnibus, photo for photograph, phone for telephone, and innumerable others.
11. This cannot be separated from a certain sobriety in expression. As an Englishman does not like to use more words or more syllables than are strictly necessary, so he does not like to say more than he can stand to. He dislikes strong or hyperbolical expressions of appro- val or admiration; 'that isn't half bad' or 'she is rather good-looking' are often the highest praises you can draw out of him, and they not seldom express the same warmth of feeling that makes a Frenchman ejaculate his 'char- mant' or 'ravissante' or 'adorable'. German kolossal or pyramidal can often be correctly rendered by English great or biggish, and where a Frenchman uses his adverbs extremement or infiniment, an Englishman says only very or rather or pretty. 'Quelle horreur I' is 'That's rather a nuisance'. 'Je suis ravi de vous voir* is 'Glad to see you', etc. An Englishman does not like to commit himself by being too enthusiastic or too distressed, and his language accordingly grows sober, too sober perhaps, and even barren when the object is to express emotions. There is in this trait a curious mixture of something praise- worthy, the desire to be strictly true without exaggerat- ing anything or promising more than you can perform, and on the other hand of something blameworthy, the idea that it is affected, or childish and effeminate, to give vent to one's feelings, and the fear of appearing ridic- ulous by showing strong emotions. But this trait is certainly found more frequently in men than in women.
Sobriety. g
so I may be allowed to add this feature of the English language to the signs of masculinity I have collected.
12. Those who use many strong words to express their likes or dislikes will generally also make an extensive use of another linguistic appliance, namely violent changes in intonation. Their voices will now suddenly rise to a very high pitch and then as suddenly fall to low tones. An excessive use of this emotional tonic accent is charac- teristic of many savage nations; in Europe it is found much more in Italy than in the North. In each nation it seems as if it were more employed by women than by men. Now, it has often been observed that the English speak in a more monotonous way than most other nations, so that an extremely slight lising or lowering of the tone indicates what in other languages would require a much greater interval. 'Les Anglais parlent extr^mement bas', says H. Taine [Notes sur V Angleterre, p. 66). 'Une soci^t^ italienne, dans laquelle je me suis fourvoy^ par hasard, m'a positivement etourdi; je m'6tais habitue k ce ton mod^re des voix anglaises.' Even English ladies are in this respect more restramed than many men belonging to other nations:
'She had the low voice of your English dames, Unused , it seems , to need rise half a note To catch attention'
(Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh p. 91).*
13. If we turn to other provinces of the language we shall find our impression strengthened and deepened.
It is worth observing, for instance, how few diminu- tives the language has and how sparingly it uses them. English in this respect forms a strong contrast to Italian with its -ino (ragazzino, fratellino, originally a double
I Cf. my Lehrbuch der Phonetik, p. 226; Fonetik (Dan. ed.) p. 588.
lO I. Preliminary Sketch.
diminutive), -ina (donnina), -etto (giovinetto), -etta (oretta), -ello, -ella (asinello, storiella) and other endings, German with its -chen und -lein, especially South German with its eternal -le, Dutch with its -;>, Russian, Magyar, and Basque with their various endings. The continual recurrence of these endings without any apparent ne- cessity cannot but produce the impression that the speakers are innocent, childish, genial beings with no great business capacities or seriousness in life. But in English there are very few of these fondling-endings; •let is in the first place a comparatively modern ending, very few of the words in which it is used go back more than a hundred years; and then its extensive use in modern times is chiefly due to the naturalists who want it to express in a short and precise manner certain small organs [budlet Darwin ; hladelet Todd ; conelet Dana ; bulb- let Gray; leaflet, fruitlet, jeatherlet, etc.) — an employ- ment of the diminutive which is as far removed as pos- sible from the terms of endearment found in other lan- guages. The endings -kin and -ling (princekin, prince- ling) are not very frequently used and generally express contempt or derision. Then, of course, there is -y, -ie (Billy, Dicky, auntie, birdie, etc.) which corresponds exactly to the fondling-suffixes of other languages; but its application in English is restricted to the nursery and it is hardly ever used by grown-up people except in speak- ing to children. Besides, this ending is more Scotch than English, and the Scotch with all their deadly ear- nestness, especially in religious matters, are, perhaps, in some respects more childlike than the English.
14. The business-like, virile qualities of the English language also manifest themselves in such things as word- order. Words in English do not play at hide-and-seek, as they often do in Latin, for instance, or in German, where ideas that by right belong together are widely
Word - order. 1 1
sundered in obedience to caprice or, more often, to a rigorous grammatical rule. In English an auxiliary verb does not stand far from its main verb, and a negative will be found in the immediate neighbourhood of the word it negatives, generally the verb (auxiliary). An adjective nearly always stands before its noun; the only really important exception is when there are qualifications added to it which draw it after the noun so that the whole complex serves the purpose of a relative clause: *a man every way prosperous and talented' (Tennyson), *an interruption too brief and isolated to attract more notice' (Stevenson). And the same regularity is found in modern English word-order in other respects as well. A few years ago I made my pupils calculate statistically various points in regard to word-order in different lan- guages. I give here only the percentage in some modern authors of sentences in which the subject preceded the verb and the latter in its turn preceded its object (as in 'I saw him' as against 'Him I saw, but not her' or 'Whom did you see.?'): —
Shelley, prose 89, poetry 85.
Byron, prose 93, poetry 81.
Macaulay, prose 82.
Carlyle, prose 87. • .
Tennyson, poetry 88.
Dickens, prose 91,
Swinburne, poetry 83.
Pinero, prose 97.
For the sake of comparison I mention that one Danish prose-writer (J. P. Jacobsen) had 82, a Danish poet (Drachmann) 61, Goethe (poetry) 30, a modern German prose-writer (Tovote) 31, Anatole France 66, Gabriele d'Annunzio 49 per cent of the same word-order. That English has not always had the same regularity, is shown by the figure for Beowulf being 16, and for King Alfred's
12 I. Preliminary Sketch.
prose 40. Even if I concede that our statistics did not embrace a sufficient number of extracts to give fully reliable results, still it is indisputable that English shows more regularity and less caprice in this respect than most or probably all cognate languages, without however, attaining the rigidity found in Chinese, where the per- centage in question would be lOO (or very near it). Eng- lish has not deprived itself of the expedient of inverting the ordinary order of the members of a sentence when emphasis requires it, but it makes a more sparing use of it than German and the Scandinavian languages, and in most cases it will be found that these languages emphasize without any real necessity, especially in a great many every-day phrases: 'daer har jeg ikke vaeret', 'dort bin ich nicht gewesen', 'I haven't been there'; 'det kan jeg ikke', *das kann ich nicht', 'I can't do that'. How superfluous the emphasis is, is best shown by the usual phrase, 'det veed jeg ikke', 'das weiss ich nicht', where the Englishman does not even find it necessary to state the object at all: 'I don't know.' Note also that in English the subject precedes the verb after most intro- ductory adverbs: 'now he comes'; 'there he goes', while German and Danish have, and English had till a few centuries ago, the inverted order: 'jetzt kommt er', 'da geht sie' ; 'nu kommer han', 'daer gar hun' ; 'now comes he', 'there goes she'. Thus order and consistency signalize ^ the modern stage of the English language.
15. No language is logical in every respect, and we must not expect usage to be guided always by strictly logical principles. It was a frequent error with the older- grammarians that whenever the actual grammar of a language did not seem conformable to the rules of ab- stract logic they blamed the language and wanted to correct it. Without falling into that error we may, never- theless, compare different languages and judge them by
Logic. 13
the standard of logic, and here again I think that, apart from Chinese, which has been described as pure applied logic, there is perhaps no language in the civilized world that stands so high as English. Look at the use of the tenses; the difference between the past he saw and the composite perfect he has seen is maintained with great consistency as compared with the similarly formed tenses in Danish, not to speak of German, so that one of the most constant faults committed by English-speaking Germans is the wrong use of these forms ('Were you in Berlin?' for 'Have you been in (or to) Berlin?', 'In 181 5 Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo' for 'was de- feated'). And then the comparatively recent develop- ment of the extended (or 'progressive') tenses has furnished the language with the wonderfully precise and logi- cally valuable distinction between 'I write' and 'I am writing', 'I wrote' and 'I was writing'. French has something similar in the distinction between le pass6 defini (j'ecrivis) and I'imparfait (j'6crivais), but on the one hand the former tends to disappear, or rather has already disappeared in the spoken language, at any rate in Paris and in the northern part of the country, so that fai ecrit takes its place and the distinction between 'I wrote' and 'I have written' is abandoned; on the other hand the distinction applies only to the past while in English it is carried through all tenses. Furthermore, the distinction as made in English is superior to the similar one found in the Slavonic languages, in that it is made uniformly in all verbs and in all tenses by means of the same device [am -ing), while the Slavonic languages employ a much more complicated system of prepositions and derivative endings, which has almost to be learned separately for each new verb or group of verbs.
16. In praising the logic of the English language we must not lose sight of the fact that in most cases where,
I A I. Preliminary Sketch.
so to speak, the logic of facts or of the exterior world is at war with the logic of grammar, English is free from the narrow-minded pedantry which in most languages sacrifices the former to the latter or makes people shy of saying or writing things which are not 'strictly grammatical'. This is particularly clear with regard to number. Family and clergy are, grammatically speaking, of the singular number; but in reality they indicate a plurality. Most languages can treat such words only as singulars, but inr English one is free to add a verb in the singular if the idea of unity is essential, and then to refer to this unit as it, or else to put the verb in the plural and use the pronoun they, if the idea of plurality is predominant. It is clear that this liberty of choice is often greatly advan- tageous. Thus we find sentences like these, 'As the clergy are or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation' (Miss Austen), or 'the whole race of man (sing.) proclaim it lawful to drink wine' (De Quincey), or 'the club all know that he is a disappointed man' (the same). In 'there are no end of people here that I don't know' (George Eliot) no end takes the verb in the plural because it is equivalent to 'many', and when Shelley writes in one of his letters 'the Quarterly are going to review me' he is thinking of the Quarterly (Review) as a whole staff of writers. Inversely, there is in English a freedom paralleled nowhere else of expressing grammati- cally a unity consisting of several parts, of saying, for instance, 'I do not think I ever spent a more delightful three weeks' (Ch. Darwin), 'for a quiet twenty minutes', 'another United States', cf. also 'a fortnight' (originally a fourteen-night) ; 'three years is but short' (Shakespeare), 'sixpence was offered him' (Ch. Darwin), 'ten minutes is heaps of time' (E. F. Benson), etc. etc.
17. A great many other phenomena in English show the same freedom from pedantry, as when passive con-
Freedom from Pedantry. I e
structions such as 'he was taken no notice of are allowed, or when adverbs or prepositional complexes may be used attributively as in 'his then residence/ 'an almost reconciliation' (Thackeray), 'men invite their out-College friends' (Steadman), 'smoking his before-breakfast pipe' (Co. Doyle), 'in his threadbare, out-at-elbow shooting- jacket' (G. du Maurier), or when even whole phrases or sentences may be turned into a kind of adjective, as in 'with a quite at home kind of air' (Smedley), 'in the pretty diamond-cut-diamond scene between Pallas and Ulysses' (Ruskin), 'a little man with a puffy Say-nothing to-me-, -or-FU-contradict-you sort of countenance' (Dickens), 'With an I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air' (Lowell), 'Rose is simply self-willed; a 'she will' or 'she won't' sort of httie person' (Meredith). Although such combinations as the last-mentioned are only found in more or less jocular style, they show the possibilities of the language, and some expressions of a similar order be- long permanently to the language, for instance, 'a would- be artist', 'a stay-at-home man', 'a turn-up collar'. Such things — and they might be easily miultiplied — are in- conceivable in such a language as French where every- thing is condemned that does not conform to a definite set of rules laid down by grammarians. The French language is like the stiff French garden^ of Louis XIV, while the English is like an English park, which is laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations. The English language would not have been what it is if the English had not been for centuries great respecters of the liberties of each individual and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself.
J 5 I- Preliminary Sketch.
18. This is seen, too, in the vocabulary. In spite of the efforts of several authors of high standing, the English have never suffered an Acaden^y to be instituted among them like the French or Italian Academies, which had as one of their chief tasks the regulation of the vocab- ulary so that every word not found in their Dictionaries was blamed as unworthy of literary use or distinction. In England every writer is, and has always been, free to take his words where he chooses, whether from the ordinary stock of everyday words, from native dialects, from old authors, or from other languages, dead or living. The consequence has been that English dictionaries com- prise a larger number of words than those of any other nation, and that they present a variegated picture of terms from the four quarters of the globe. Now, it seems to be characteristic of the two sexes in their relation to language that women move in narrower circles of the vocabulary, in which they attain to perfect mastery so that the flow of words is always natural and, above all, never needs to stop, while men know more words and always want to be more precise in choosing the exact word with which to render their idea, the consequence being often less fluency and more hesitation. It has been statistically shown that a comparatively greater number of stammerers and stutterers are found among men (boys) than among women (girls). Teachers of foreign languages have many occasions to admire the ease with which fe- male students express themselves in another language after so short a time of study that most men would be able to say only few words hesitatingly and falteringly, but if they are put to the test of translating a difficult piece either from or into the foreign language, the men will generally prove superior to the women. With regard to their native language the same difference is found, though it is perhaps not so easy to observe. At any rate
Vocabulary. j >i
our assertion is corroborated by the fact observed^^by every student of languages that novels written by ladies are much easier to read and contain much fewer difficult words than those written by men. All this seems to justify us in setting down the enormous richness of the English vocabulary to the same masculinity of the English nation which we have now encountered in so many various fields.
To sum up: The English language is a methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency and is opposed to any attempt to narrow-in life by police regulations and strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon. As the language is, so also is the nation,
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within. (Tennyson.)
Jbspersbn : English, and ed.
Chapter II. The Beginnings.
20. The existence of the English language as a separ- ate idiom began when Germanic tribes had occupied all the lowlands of Great Britain and when accordingly
' the invasions from the continent were discontinued, so that the settlers in their ^ew homes were cut off from that steady intercourse with their continental relations which always is an imperative condition of linguistic unity. The historical records of English do not go so far back as this, for the oldest written texts in the English language (in 'Anglo-Saxon') date from about 700 and are thus removed by about three centuries from the begin- j nings of the language. And yet comparative philology is able to tell us something about the manner in which the ancestors of these settlers spoke centuries before that period, and to sketch the prehistoric development of what was to become the language of King Alfred, of Chaucer \ and of Shakespeare.
21. The dialects spoken by the settlers in England belonged to the great Germanic (or Teutonic) branch of the most important of all linguistic families, termed by many philologists the Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic) and by others, and to my mind more appropriately, Arian (Aryan). The Arian family comprises a great variety of languages, including, besides some languages of less importance, Sanskrit with Prakrit and many living
Primitive Arian. ig
languages of India; Iranian with Modern Persian; Greek; Latin with the modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French, etc.); Celtic, two divisions of which still survive, one in Welsh and Armorican or Breton, the other in the closely connected Irish and Scotch-Gaelic, besides the nearly extinct Manx; Baltic (Lithuanian and Lettic) and Slavonic (Russian, Czech, Polish, etc.). Among the extinct Germanic languages Ulfila's Gothic was the most important; the living are High German, Dutch, Low, German, Frisian, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. The first five are generally grouped to-' gether as West-Germajjijc^ ^h^s the four last-mentioned or Scandinavian languages^onstitute with Gothic the East-Germanic group, a grouping which does not, how- ever, account for the really much more complex rela- tionship between these languages.
22. The Arian language, which was in course of time differentiated into all these languages, or as the same , fact is generally expressed in a metaphor of dubious value, was the parent-language from which all these languages have descended, must by no means be imagined as a language characterized by a simple and regular struc- ture. On the contrary it must have been, grammatically and lexically, extremely complicated and full of irreg- ularities. Its grammar was highly inflexional, the relations between the ideas being expressed by means of endings more intimately fused with the chief element of the word than is the case in such agglutinative lan- guages as Hungarian (Magyar). Nouns and verbs were kept distinct, and where the same sense-modifications were expressed in both, such as plurality, it was by means of totally different endings. In fact, the indication of number — the threefold division into singular, dual, and plural — was inseparable from the case-endings in the nouns and frorn the person-endings as well as signs
2*
20 II- The Beginnings.
of mood and tense in the verbs: one cannot point to distinct parts of such a Latin form as est (cantat) or sunt (cantant) or fuissem (cantavissem) and say, this element means singular (or plural), this one means indicative (or subjunctive) and that one indicates what tense the whole form belongs to. There were eight cases, but they did not, for the greater part, indicate such clear, con- crete, outward relations as the Finnic (local) cases do; the consequence was a comparatively great number of clashings and overlappings, in form as well as in function. Each noun belonged to one of three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter; but this division by no means corresponded with logical consistency to the natural -j division into (l) living beings of one sex, (2) living beings J of the other sex, and (3) everything else. Nor did the moods and tenses of the verb agree very closely with any definite logical categories, the idea of time being, moreover, mixed up with that of 'tense-aspect' (in Ger- man 'aktionsart'), i. e. distinctions according as an action was viewed as momentary or protracted or iterated, etc. In the nominal as well as in the verbal inflexions the endings varied with the character of the stem they were ' added to, and very often the accent was shifted from one syllable to another according to seemingly arbitrary rules, just as in modern Russian. In a great many cases, too, one form was taken from one word and another from a totally different one, a phenomenon (called by Osthoff 'suppletivwesen') which we have in a few in- stances in modern English (good, better; go, went, etc.). An idea of the phonetic system of the old Arian language may best be gathered from Greek, which has preserved the old system with great fidelity on the whole, especially the vowels. But of course, no one of the historically transmitted languages, not even one of the oldest, can give more than an approximate idea of the common Arian
Germanic, 2 1
language distant from us by so many thousand years, and scholars have now learnt more prudence than was shown when Schleicher was bold enough to print a fable in what he believed to be a fairly accurate representation of prim- itive Arian.
23. In historical times we find Arian split up into a variety of languages, each with its own peculiarities, in sounds, in grammar, and in vocabulary. So different were these languages that the Greeks had no idea of any similarity or relationship between their own tongue and that of their Persian enemies; nor did the Romans sus- pect that the Gauls and Germans they fought spoke lan- guages of the same stock as their own. Whenever the Germanic languages are alluded to, it is always in ex- pressions like these, 'a Roman tongue can hardly pro- nounce such names' or (after giving the names of some Germanic tribes) 'the names sound like a noisy war- trumpet, and the ferocity of these barbarians adds horror even to the words themselves'. Julian the Apostate compares the singing of Germanic popular ballads to the croaking and shrill screeching of birds. ^ Much of this, of course, must be put down to the ordinary Greek and Roman contempt for foreigners generally; nor can it be wondered at that they did not recognize in these lan- guages congeners of their own, for the similarities had been considerably blurred by a great many important changes in sound and in structure, so that it is only the patient research of the nineteenth century that has enabled us to identify words in separate languages which are now so dissimilar as not to strike the casual observer as in any way related. What contributed, perhaps, more than anything else to make Germanic words look strange, were two great phonetic changes affecting large
I Kluge, Paul's Grundriss I 354.
2 2 II- The Beginnings.
parts of the vocabulary, the consonant- ski ft^ and the stress- shift.
24. The consonant-shift must not be imagined as having taken place at one moment; on the contrary it must have taken centuries, and modern research has begun to point out the various stages in this develop- ment. This is not the proper place to deal with detailed explanations of this important change, as we must hurry on to more modern times; suffice it then to give a few examples to show how it affected the whole look of the language. Any p was changed to /, — thus we have father corresponding to pater and similar forms in the cognate languages; any t was made into th [{)], as in three, — compare Latin tres\ any k became h, — as cornu = horn.^ And as any ^ or ^ or g, any bh, dh, gh was similarly shifted, you will understand that there were comparatively few words that were not altered past recognition; still such there were, for instance mus, now
I In English books this change ('die erste lautverschiebung ') is often called Grimm's law, because the 2nd edition of the first volume of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche grammatik (1822) made it generally known. But in his first edition (18 19) Grimm did not yet know the law; between the two editions he had read the Danish scholar Rasmus Rask's Unders^gelse om det gamle nor- diske spi'ogs oprindelse (written 18 14, printed 18 18), where the sound -correspondences are clearly set forth on p. 169. Grimm saw the enormous importance of the discovery and formulated the law in a more abstract manner than Rask. As part of the law had been seen more or less clearly by a few earlier philo- logists, and as Grimm's manner of stating it has been considerably modified by recent investigations , the law should not be named after any one man. At any rate it is perfectly absurd to extend the name of 'Grimm's law' to any similar phonetic change, as is sometimes done ('Grimm's Law in South -Africa'). L 2 Latin words are here chosen for convenience only as re- presenting these old consonants with great fidelity; but of course it must not be supposed that the English words named come from the Latin.
Sound Changes. 2 ^
mouse, which contained none of the consonants suscep- tible of the shifting in question.
25. The second change affected the general character of the language even more thoroughly. Where pre- viously the stress was sometimes on the first syllable of the word, sometimes on the second, or on the third, etc., without any seeming reason and without any regard to the intrinsic importance of that syllable, a complete revo- lution simplified matters so that the stress rules may be stated in a couple of lines: nearly all words were stressed on the first syllable; the chief exceptions occurred only where the word was a verb beginning with one out of a definite number of prefixes, such as those we have in modern English beget, forget, overthrow, abide, etc. Verner has shown that this shifting of the place of the accent took place later than the Germanic consonant - shift, and we shall now inquire into the relative importance of the two.
26. The consonant-shift is important to the modern philologist, in so far as it is to him the clearest and least ambiguous criterion of the Germanic languages: a word with a shifted consonant is Germanic, and a word with an unshifted consonant in any of the Germanic languages must be a loan-word; whereas the shifted stress is no such certain criterion, chiefly because many words had always had the stress on the first syllable. But if we ask about the intrinsic importance of the two changes, that is, if we try to look at matters from the point of view of the language itself, or rather the speakers, we shall see that the second change is really the more im- portant one. It does not matter much whether a certain number of words begin with a p or with a /, but it does matter, or at any rate it may matter, very much whether the language has a rational system of accentuation or not; and I have no hesitation in saying that the old
2 4 II. The Beginnings.
V"' stress-shift has left its indelible mark on the structure of the language and has influenced it more than any other phonetic change.^ The significance of the stress shift will, perhaps, appear most clearly if we compare two sets of words in modern English. The original Arian I stress system is still found in numerous words taken in recent times from the classical languages, thus ^family, fa^miliar, famiWarity or ^photograph, phohographer, photo- ^graphic,^ The shifted Germanic system is shown in such groups as Hove, Hover, Hoving, Hovingly, Hovely, Hove- liness, Hoveless, Hovelessness, or ^king, ^kingdom, ^kingship, ^kingly, ^kingless, etc. As it is characteristic of all Arian < languages that suffixes play a much greater role than prefixes, word-formation being generally by endings, it follows that where the Germanic stress system has come into force, the syllable that is most important has also the strongest stress, and that the relatively insignificant modifications of the chief idea which are indicated by ^ formative syllables are also accentually subordinate. This is, accordingly, a perfectly logical system, correspond- ing to the piincipal rule observed in sentence stress, viz. that the stressed words are generally the most important ones. As, moreover, want of stress tends everywhere to obscure vowel-sounds, languages with moveable accent are exposed to the danger that related words, or different forms of the same word, are made more different than they would else have been, and their connexion is more obscured than is strictly necessary; compare, for in- stance, the two sounds in the first syllable of family [seP
1 Except perhaps the disappearance of so many weak^'s about 1400.
2 I indicate stress by means of a short vertical stroke ' im- mediately before the beginning of the strong syllable.
3 A list of the phonetic symbols used in this book will be found on the last page.
Accent.
25
and familiar (9), or the different treatment of the vowels in photograph, photographer and photographic. The pho- netic clearness inherent in the consistent stress system is certainly a linguistic advantage, and the obscuration of the connexion between related words is generally to be considered a drawback. The language of our fore- fathers seems therefore to have gained considerably by replacing the movable stress by a fixed one.
27. The question naturally arises: why was the accent shifted in this way.? Two possible answers present them- selves. The change may have been either a purely mechanical process, by which the first syllable was stressed without any regard to signification, or else it may have been a psychological process, by which the root syllable became stressed because it was the most important part of the word. As in the vast majority of cases the root syllable is the first, the question must be decided from those cases where the two things are not identical. Kluge^ infers from the treatment of re- duplicated forms of the perfect corresponding to Latin cecidi, peperci, etc. that the shifting was a purely mechani- cal process; for it was hot the most important syllable that was stressed in Gothic haihait 'called', rairo^ 're- flected', lailot 'let' (read ai as short e), while in the Old English forms of these words heht, reord, leort the vowel of the root syllable actually disappears. But it may be objected to this view that the reduplicated syllable was in some measure the bearer of the root signification, as it had enough left of the root to remind the hearer of it, and in pronouncing it the speaker had before, him part at least of the significant elements. The first syllable of a reduplicated perfect must to him have been of a far greater importance than one of those prefixes which
I Paul's Grundriss I 2 389.
26 II- The Beginnings.
served only to modify to a small extent the principal idea expressed in the root syllable. The fact that the reduplicated syllable attracted the accent therefore speaks less strongly in favour of the mechanical ex- planation than does the want of stress on the verbal prefixes in the opposite direction, so that the case /seems to me strongest for the psychological theory. In other words, we have here a case of value- stressing;'^ that part of the word which is of greatest value to the speaker and which therefore he especially wants the hearer to notice, is pronounced with the strongest stress.
28. We find the same principle of value-stressing everywhere, even in those languages whose traditional stress rests or may rest on other syllables than the root — this word is here used not in the sense of the ety- mologically original part of the word, but in the sense of what is to the actual instinct of the speaker intrinsi- cally the most significant element — but in these lan- guages it only plays the part of causing a deviation from the traditional stress now and then whereas in Germanic it became habitual to stress the root syllable^, and this led to other consequences of some interest. In those languages where the stress syllable is not always the most significant one, the difference between stressed and un- stressed syllables is generally less than in the Germanic languages; there is a nicer and subtler play of accent, which we may observe in French, perhaps, better than elsewhere. In nous chantons the last syllable is stressed, but chan- is stronger than for- in Eng. we forget, because its psychological value is greater. Where a contrast is
1 See my Fonetik, Copenh. 1899, p. 557 and 5(^0; Lehrbuch def Phonetik, Leipz. 1904, p. 209 ff.
2 Fonetik, p. 554; Lehrbuch der Phonetik, p. 270.
Accent. 2 7
to be expressed it will most often be associated with one of the traditionally unstressed syllables, and the result is that the contrast is brought vividly before the mind with much less force than is necessary in English; in nous chantons, et nous ne dansons pas you need not even make chan and dan stronger, at any rate not much stronger than the endings, while in English we sing, hut we don't dance, the syllables sing and dance must be spoken with an enormous force, because they are in themselves strongly stressed even when no contrast is to be pointed out. A still better example is French c'est un acteur et non pas un auteur and English he is an actor, and not an author; the Frenchman produces the intended effect by a slight tap, so to speak, on the two initial syllables of the contrasted words, while an Englishman hammers or knocks the corresponding syllables into the head of the hearer. The French system is more elegant, more artistic; the Germanic system is heavier or more clumsy, perhaps, in such cases as those just mentioned, but on the whole it must be said to be more rational, more logi- cal, as an exact correspondence between the inner and the outer world is established, if the most significant element receives the strongest phonetic expression. This Germanic stress-principle has been instrumental in bringing about important changes in other respects than those considered here. But what has been said here seems to me to indicate a certain connexion between language and national character; for has it not always been considered characteristic of the Germanic peoples (English, Scandinavians, Germans) that they say their say bluntly without much considering the artistic effect, and that they emphasize what is essential without al- ways having due regard to nuances or accessory notions.? and does not the stress system we have been considering present the very same aspect."*
28 n. The Beginnings.
29. We do not know in what century the stress was shifted^ but the shifting certainly took place centuries before the immigration of the English into Great Britain. To a similar remote period we must refer several other great changes affecting equally all the Germanic lan- guages. One of the most important is the simplification of the tense system in the verb, no Germanic language having more than two tenses, a present and a past. As many of the old endings gradually wore off, they were not in themselves a sufficiently clear indication of the differences of tense, and the gradation (ablaut) of the root vowel, which had at first been only an incidental con- sequence of differences of accentuation, was felt more and more as the real indicator of tense. But neither gradation nor the remaining endings were fit to make patterns for the formation of tenses in new verbs; con- sequently, we see very few additions to the old stock of 'strong' verbs, and a new type of verbs, 'weak verbs', is constantly gaining ground. Whatever may have been the origin of the dental ending used in the past tense of these verbs, it is very extensively used in all Germanic languages and is, indeed, one of the characteristic fea- tures of their inflexional system. It has become the 'regular' mode of forming the preterite, that is, the one resorted to whenever new verbs are called into existence.
30. To this early period, while the English were still living on the Continent with their Germanic brethren,
I Nothing can be concluded from the existence at the time "t)f Tacitus of such series of alliterating names for members of the same family as Segestes Segimerus Segimundus, etc. (Kluge, Paul's Grundriss ^357, 388) for alliteration does not necessarily imply that the syllable has the chief stress of the word; cf. the French formulas 7nesse et matines, Florient et Floretie , Basans et Basilie, monts et merveilles, quivivraverra, d tortetd travers (Nyrop, Grammaire his tongue I *448).
Loan-words. 2Q
belong the first class of loan-words. No language is entirely pure; we meet with no nation that has not adopted some loan-words, so we must suppose that the forefathers of the old Germanic tribes adopted words from a great many other nations with whom they came into contact; and scholars have attempted to point out words borrowed very early from various sources. Some of these, however, are doubtful, and none of them are important enough to arrest our attention before we arrive at the period when Latin influence began to be felt in the Germanic world, that is, about the beginning of our Christian era. But before we look at these borrowings in detail, let us first consider for a moment the general lesson that may be derived from the study of words taken over from one language into another.
31. Loan-words have been called the milestones of philology, because in a great many instances they per- mit us to fix approximatively the dates of linguistic changes. But they might with just as much right be termed some of the milestones of general history, because they show us the course of civilization and the wanderings of inventions and institutions, and in many cases give us valuable information as to the inner life of nations when dry annals tell us nothing but the dates of the deaths of kings and bishops. When in two languages we find no trace of the exchange of loan-words one way or the other we are safe to infer that the two nations have had nothing to do with each other. But if they have been in contact, thef number of the loan-words and still more the quality of the loan-words, if rightly inter- preted, will inform us of their reciprocal relations, they will show us which of them has been the more fertile in ideas and on what domains of human activity each has been superior to the other. If all other sources of information were closed to us except such loan-words
JO !!• The Beginnings.
in our modern North- European languages as piano^ soprano, opera, libretto, tempo, adagio, etc., we should still have no hesitation in drawing the conclusion that Italian music has played a great role all over Europe. Similar instances might easily be multiplied, and in many ways the study of language brings home to us the fact that when a nation produces something that its neighbours think worthy of imitation these will take over not only the thing but also the name. This will be the general rule, though exceptions may occur, especially when a language possesses a native word that will lend itself without any special effort to the new thing imported from abroad. But if a native word is not ready to hand it is easier to adopt the ready-made word used in the other country, nay this foreign word is very often im- ported even in cases where it would seem to offer no great difficulty to coin an adequate expression by means of native word-material. As, on the other hand, there is generally nothing to induce one to use words from foreign languages for things one has just as well at home, loan-words are nearly always technical words belonging to one special branch of knowledge or industry, and may be grouped so as to show what each nation has learnt from each of the others. It will be my object to go through the different strata of loans in English with special regard to their significance in relation to the history of civilization.
32. What, then, were the principal words that the barbarians learnt from Rome in this period which may be called the pagan or pre-Christian period.?^ One of the earliest, no doubt, was wine (Lat. vinum), and a few
I See especially Kluge , Paul's Gnnidriss , p. 327 ff.; Pogat- scher, J^autlehre der griech., lat. it. roman. leluiworte im alt- englischen (Strassb. 1888). I give the words in their modern English forms, wherever possible.
Latin Words. 5j
other words connected with the cultivation of the vine and the drinking of wine such as Lat. calicem, OE. calic (Germ, kelch) 'a cup'. It is worth noting, too, that the chief type of Roman merchants that the Germanic people dealt with, were the caupones 'wine-dealers, keepers of wine-shops or taverns'; for the word German kaufen, OE. ceapian 'to buy' is derived from it,^as is also cheap, the old meaning of which was 'bargain, price'. (Cf. Cheapside). Another word of commercial significance is monger (fishmonger, ironmonger, costermonger), OE. mangere from an extinct verb mangian, derived from Lat. mango 'retailer'. Lat. moneta, pondo, and uncia were also adopted as commercial terms: OE. mynet 'coin, coinage', now mint; OE. pund, now pound; OE. ynce, now inch; the sound-changes point to very early borrow- ing. Other words from the Latin connected with com- merce and travel are: mile, anchor, punt (OE. punt from Lat. ponto) ; a great many names for vessels or receptacles of various kinds; I take some from Pogatscher's list^ and add the modern forms if the word is still living: cist (chest), hinn (bin), byden, bytt, cylle, omber or amber (amber), disc (dish), scutel, ore, cytel (kettle), mortere (mortar), earc (ark), etc. This makes us suspect a com- i plete revolution in the art of cooking food, an impression which is strengthened by such Latin loan-words as cook (OE. coc from coquus), kitchen (OE. cycene from coquina) and mill (OE. mylen from molina), as well as names for a great many plants and fruits which had not previously been cultivated in the north of Europe, such as pear, OE. cirs 'cherry', persoc 'peach' (the modern forms are later adoptions from the French), plum (OE. plume, from prunus), pea (OE. pise from pisum), cole {caul, kale, Scotch kail, from Lat. caulis), OE. ncep, found in the
I 1. c. 122. Cf. also Kluge, p. 331.
32 II- The Beginnings.
second syllable of mod. turnip, from napus, beet (root), mint, pepper, etc. As military words, though not wanting, were not taken over in such great numbers as one might expect, we have now gone through the principal cate- gories of early loans from the Latin language, from which conclusions as to the state of civilization may be drawn. In comparing them with later loan-words from the same source we are struck by their concrete character. It was not Roman philosophy or the higher mental culture that impressed our Germanic forefathers; they were not yet ripe for that influence, but in their barbaric simplicity they needed and adopted a great many purely practical and material things, especially such as might sweeten everyday life. It is hardly necessary to say that the words for such things were learnt in a purely oral manner, as shown in many cases by their forms; and this, too, is a distinctive feature of the oldest Latin loans as op- posed to later strata of loan-words. They were also short words, mostly of one or two syllables, so that it would seem that the Germanic tongues and minds could not yet manage such big words as form the bulk of later loans. These early words were easy to pronounce and to remember, being of the same general type as most of the indigenous words, and therefore they very soon came to be regarded as part and parcel of the native language, indispensable as the things themselves which they symbolized.
Chapter III.
Old English.
33. We now come to the first of those important historical events which have materially influenced the Enghsh language, namely the settlement of Britain by Germanic tribes. The other events of paramount im- portance, which we shall have to deal with in succes- sion, are the Scand^inavian invasion, the Npxman con- quest, and the revival of learning. A future historian will certainly add the spreading of the English language in America, Australia, and South Africa. But none of these can compare in significance with the first con- quest of England by the EngHsh, an event which was, perhaps, fraught with greater consequences for the future of the world in general than anything else in history. The more is the pity that we know so very little either of the people who came over or of the state of things they found in the country they invaded. We do not know exactly when the invasion began; the date usually given ' is 449, but Bede, on whose authority this date rests, wrote about three hundred years later, and much may have been forgotten in so long a period. Many consider- ations seem to make it more advisable to give a rather earlier date;^ however, as we must imagine that the
I R. Thurneysen, Wann sind die Germane n nach England gekommen? in Eng. Studien 22, 163.
Jespersen: English. 2nd ed. 7
34 ni. Old English.
invaders did not come all at once, but that the settlement took up a comparatively long period during which new hordes were continually arriving, the question of date is of no great consequence, and we are probably on the safe side if we say that after a long series of Germanic invasions the country was practically in their power in the latter half of the fifth century.
, 34. Who were the invaders, and where did they come from? This, too, has been a point of controversy. Accord- ing to Bede, the invaders belonged to the three tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; and linguistic history corrob- orates his statement in so far as we have really three dialects, or groups of dialects: the Anglian dialects in the ■■ North with two subdivisions, Northumbrian and Mercian, the Saxon dialects in tlie grea'ter part of the South, the most important of which was the dialect of Wessex (West-Saxon), and the Kentish dialect, Kent having been, according to tradition, settled by the Jutes. But when Bede points out the district now called Angel (German Angeln) in South Jutland (Slesvig) ^ as the home of the Anglians, and identifies the Jutes with the inhabitants of Jutland, his views have oi late years been much contested.^ It is not necessary here to enter on this debatable ground; suffice it to say that neither the language of the Anglians nor that of the Kentish people is Danish or ^hows any signs of closer relationship with Danish than West - Saxon, so that if the settlers came from Angel and other parts of Jutland, these districts cannot then have been inhabited by the same Danish population that has lived there as
I See especially A. Erdmann, i/der die heiviat unci den namen der Angel?i. Upsala 1890. — H. Moller, Anzeiger fiir deutsches altertum XXII, lagff. — G. Schiitte, Var Angleme Tyskere, in S0nderjydske aarbeger 1900. — O. Bremer, in Paul's Grundriss I 2 1 1 5 ff. , where other references will be found.
The invaders. le
far back as ascertained history reaches. The continental language that shows the greatest similarity to English, is Frisian, and it is interesting to note that Frisian has some points in common with Kentish and some with Anglian, some even with the northernmost division of the Anglian dialect, points in which these OE. dialects differ from literary West-Saxon. Kentish resembles more particularly West Frisian, and Anglian East Frisian^ facts which justify us in looking upon the Frisians as the neighbours and relatives of the English before their emi- gration from the continent. We may therefore speak of Tan Anglo-Frisian language, forming in some respects a J connecting link between German Saxon (Low German) [ on the one hand and Scandmavian, especially Danish, on V^the other.
35. What language or what languages did the sett- lers find on their arrival in Britain.? The original popu- lation was Celtic; but what about the Roman conquest.'* The Romans had been masters of the country for cen- turies; had they not succeeded in making the native population learn Latin as they had succeeded in Spain and Gaul? Some years ago Pogatscher^ took up the view that they had succeeded, and that the Angles and Saxons found a Brito-Roman dialect in full vigour. Po- gatscher endorsed Wright's view that 'if the Angles and Saxons had never come, we should have been now a people talking a Neo-Latin tongue , closely resem- bling French.' But this view was very strongly attacked by Loth^, and Pogatscher, in a subsequent
1 W. Heuser, Altfriesisches lesebuch 1903 p. i — 5, and Indo- germanische forschungen, Anzeiger XIV 29.
2 Zur lautlehre der . . . lehnworte ifn Altenglischen 1888.
3 Les mots latins aans les langues brittoniques . Paris 1892.
->*
v
36 III. Old English.
article^ had to withdraw his previous theory, if not completely, yet to a great extent, so that he no longer maintains that Latin ever was the national language of Britain, though he does not go the length of saying with Loth that the Latin language disappeared from Britain when the Roman troops were withdrawn. The possibility is left that while people in the country spoke Celtic, the inhabitants of the towns spoke Latin or that some of them did. However this may be, the fact remains that the English found on their arrival a population speaking a different language from their own. Did that, then, affect their own language, and in what manner and to what extent.?
36. In his 'Student's History of England' p. 31 Gardiner says *So far as British words have entered into the Eng- lish language at all, they have been words such as gown or curd, which are likely to have been used by women, or words such as cart or pony^ which are likely to have been used by agricultural labourers, and the evidence of lan- guage may therefore be adduced in favour of the view that many women and many agricultural labourers were spared by the conquerors.' Here, then, we seem to have a Celtic influence from which an important historical in- ference can be drawn. Unfortunately, however, not a single word of those adduced can prove anything of the kind. For gown is not an old Celtic word, but was taken over from French in the 14th century (mediaeval Latin gunna); curd, too, dates only from the 14 th century, whereas if it had been introduced from Celtic in the old period we should certainly find it in older texts; 'it is not certain what relation (if any) the Celtic words hold to I
I Angelsachsen u?id Rommieji. Engl. Studien XIX 329 — 352 (1894). See also MacGillivray, The Influence of Christimtity on the Vocabulary of Old Eftglish p. XI.
Celtic words.
37
the English' (N. E. D.). Cart is an Old Norse word; it is found in Celtic languages, but is there 'palpably a foreign word' (N. E. D.) introduced from English; and pony'^, finally, is Lowland Scotch powney from Old French pou- lenet 'a little colt', a diminutive of poulain 'a colt'. Simi- , larly, most of the other words of alleged Celtic origin are , either Germanic or French words which the Celts have borrowed from English, or else they have not been used in England more than a century or two; in neither of these cases do they teach us anything with regard to the relations between the two nationalities fifteen hundred years ago.^ The net result of modern investigation seems • to be that not more than half a dozen words did pass over into English from the Celtic aborigines [bannock, brock, ■ crock, dun, dry 'magician', slough). How may we account for this very small number of loans? Sweet^ says the reason was that 'the Britons themselves were to a great extent Romanized', a theory which we seem bound to abandon now (see above). Are we to account for it, as Lindelof does* from the unscrupulous character of the
1 Skeat, Notes on English Etymology 224.
2 Curse, OE. cursian, is often referred to Ir. cursagaim, but 'no word of similar form and sense is known in Celtic' (N. E. D.) Cradle, OE. cradol, seems to be a diminutive of an old Germanic word meaning 'basket' (O. H. G. chratto). See also hog in N. E. D. Windisch, in the article quoted below, p. 38, thinks that the Germanic tun in English took over the meaning of Celtic dunum (Latin 'arx') on account of the numerous old Celtic names of places in -dunum; but in OE. tu?i had more frequently the meaning of ' enclosure, yard' (cf. Dutch tuin) , ' enclosed land round a dwell- ing', 'a single dwelling house or farm' (cf. Old Norse tun\ still in Devonshire and Scotland); it was only gradually that the word acquired its modern meaning of village or town , long after the influenze of the Celts must have disappeared. — Sloga?t, pibroch, clan, etc , are modern loans from Celtic.
3 New English Gra?nmar § 607.
4 Grunddragen a/ Engelska sfirakets historiska Ijud- ochforrn- Idra (Helsingfors 1895 p. 47) — an excellent little book.
38 HI. Old English.
conquest, the English having killed all those Britons who did not run away into the mountainous districts? The supposition of wholesale slaughter is not, however, neces- sary, for a thorough consideration of the general con- ditions under which borrowings from one language by another take place will give us a clue to the mystery.^ And as the whole history of the English language may be described from one point of view as one chain of borrow- ings, it will be as well at the outset to give a little thought to this general question.
37. The whole theory of Windisch about mixed lan- guages turns upon this formula: it is not the foreign lan- guage a nation learns which is made into a mixed language, but its own native language becomes mixed under the influence of the foreign language. When we try to learn and talk a foreign language we do not intermix it with words taken from our own language; our endeavour will always be to speak the other language as purely as pos- sible, generally we are painfully conscious of every native word that we use in the middle of phrases framed in the other tongue. But what we thus avoid in speaking a foreign language we very often do in our own. One of Windisch's illustrations is taken from Germany in the eighteenth century. It was then the height of fashion to imitate everything French, and Frederick the Great prided him- self on speaking and writing good French. In his French writings one finds not a single German word, but whenever he wrote German, French words and phrases in the middle of German sentences abounded, for French was considered more refined, more distingue. Similarly, in the last re-
I See especially Windisch, Zur theorie der mischsprachen unci lehnworter. Berichte iiber die verhdl. d. sachs. gesellsch. d. wissensch. XLIX. 1897 p. 101 ff. — G. Hempl, Language- Rivalry' and Speech- Differentiation in the Case of Race -Mix- ture. Trans, of the Amer. Philol. Association XXIX. 1898 p. 3off.
Mixed Languages. ig
mains of Cornish, the extinct Celtic language of Cornwall, numerous English loan-words occur, but the English did not mix any Cornish words with their own language, and the inhabitants of Cornwall themselves, whose native language was Cornish, would naturally avoid Cornish words when talking English, because in the first place English was considered the superior tongue, the language of culture and civilization, and second, the English would not understand Cornish words. Similarly in the Brittany of to-day, people will interlard their Breton talk with French words, while their French is pure, without any Breton words. We now see why so few Celtic words were taken over into English.^ There was nothing to induce the ruling classes to learn the language of the inferior natives; it could never be fashionable for them to show an acquaintance with that despised tongue by using now and then a Celtic word. On the other hand the Celt would have to learn the language of his masters, , and learn it well; he could not think of addressing his superiors in his own unintelligible gibberish, and if the first generation did not learn good English, the second or third would, while the influence they themselves exercised on English would be infinitesimal. — There can be no doubt that this theory of Windisch's is in the main correct, though we shall, perhaps, later on see instances where it holds good only with some qualification. At any rate we need look for no other explanation of the fewness of Celtic words in English.
38. About 600 A. D. England was christianized, and the conversion had far-reaching linguistic consequences. We have no literary remains of the pre-Christian period, j
I And so few Gallic words into French.
40 ni. Old English.
\ but in the great epic of Beowulf we see a strange niixture of pagan and Christian elements. It took a long time thoroughly to assimilate the new doctrine, and, in fact, much of the old heathendom survives to this day in the shape of numerous superstitions. On the other hand we must not suppose that people were wholly unacquainted with Christianity before they were actually converted, and linguistic evidence points to their knowing, and hav- ing had names for, the most striking Christian pheno- mena centuries before they became Christians themselves. One of the earliest loan-words belonging to this sphere is church, OE. cirice , cyrice , ultimately from Greek kuriakSn '(house) of the Lord* or rather the plural
, kuriakd. It has been well remarked that *it is by no means necessary that there should have been a single kirika in Germany itself; from 313 onwards. Christian churches with their sacred vessels and ornaments were well - known objects of pillage to the German invaders of the Empire: if the first with which these made acquaintance, wherever sit- uated, were called kuriakd, it would be quite sufficient to account for their familiarity with the word.'^ They knew this word so well that when they became Christians they did not adopt the word universally used in the Latin church and in the Romance languages {ecclesia, eglise, chiesa, etc.), and the English even extended the signi- fication of the word church from the building to the con- gregation, the whole body of Christians. Minster, OE. mynster from monasterium, belongs also to the pre- Christian period. Other words of very early adoption were devil from diaholus, Greek didbolos, and angel, OE.
I See the full and able article church in the N. E. D. We need not suppose, as is often done, that the word passed through Gothic, where the word is not found in the literature that has come down to us.
Christianity, 4 1
engel^ from angelus, Greek dggelos. But the great bulk of specifically Christian terms did not enter the language till after the conversion.
39. The number of new ideas and things introduced with Christianity was very considerable, and it is inter- esting to note how the English managed to express them in their language. ^ In the first place they adopted a great many foreign words together with the ideas. Such words are apostle OE. apostol, disciple OE. discipul, which has been more of an ecclesiastical word in English than in other languages, where it has the wider Latin sense of 'pupir or 'scholar', while in English it is more or less limited to the twelve Disciples of Jesus or to similar applications. Further, the names of the whole scale of dignitaries of the church, from the Pope, OE. papa, downwards through archbishop OE. ercebiscop, bishop OE. biscop, to priest OE. preost; so also monk OE. munuc, nun OE. nunna with provost OE. prafost (praepositus) and profost (propositus), abbot OE. abbod (d from the Romance form) and the feminine OE. abbudisse. Here belong also such obsolete words as sacerd 'priest', canonic 'canon', decan 'dean', ancor or ancra 'hermit' (Latin anachoreta). To these names of persons must be added not a few names of things, such as shrine OE. serin (scrinium), cowl OE. cugele (cuculla), pall OE. pcell or pell (pallium); regol or reogol '(monastic) rule', capitul 'chapter', mcssse 'mass', and offrian, in Old English used only in the sense of 'sacrificing, bringing an offering'; the modern usage in
1 See below, § 86, on the^ relation between the OE. and the modern forms.
2 See especially H. S. MacGillivray , The Influeitce of Christianity on the Vocabulary of Old English (Halle 1902). I arrange his material from other points of view and must often pass the limits of his book, of which only one half has appeared.
42 III. Old English.
*he offered his friend a seat and a cigar' is later and from the French.
40. It is worth noting that most of these loans were short words that tallied perfectly well with the native words and were easily inflected and treated in every re- spect like these; the composition of the longest of them, ercebiscop, was felt quite naturally as a native one. Such long words as discipul or capitul, or as exorcista and acoli- tus, which are also found, never became popular words; and anachoreta only became popular when it had been shortened to the convenient ancor.
41. The chief interest in this chapter of linguistic history does not, however, to my mind concern those words that were adopted, but those that were not. It is not astonishing that the English should have learned some Latin words connected with the new faith, but it is astonishing, especially in the light of what later gene- rations did, that they should have utilized the resources of their own language to so great an extent as was actu- ally the case. This was done in three ways : by forming new words from the foreign loans by means of native affixes, by modifying the sense of existing Eng- lish words, and finally by framing new words from native stems.
At that period the English were not shy of affixing native endings to foreign words; thus we have a great many words in -had (mod. -hood): preosthad 'priesthood', clerichad, sacerdhad, hiscophad 'episcopate*, etc.; also such compounds as hiscopsedl 'episcopal see', hiscopscir 'dio- cese', and with the same ending profostscir 'provostship' and the interesting scriftscir 'parish, confessor's district' from scrift 'confession', a derivative of scrifan (shrive) which is the Latin scrihere with its signification curiously changed. Note also such words as cristendom 'Christen- dom, Christianity' (also cristnes), and cristnian 'christen'
Native Words.
43
or rather 'prepare a candidate for baptism'^ and biscopian 'confirm' with the noun biscepung 'confirmation'.
42. Existing native words were largely turned to ac- count to express Christian ideas, the sense only being more or less modified. Foremost among these must be mentioned the word God. Other wdrds belonging to the same class and surviving to this day are sin OE synn, tithe OE teoba, the old ordinal for 'tenth'; easier OE eastron was^,the name of an old pagan spring festival, called after Austro, a goddess of spring. ^ Most of the native words adapted to Christian usage have since been superseded by terms taken from Latin or French. Where we now say saint from the French, the old word was halig (mod. holy), preserved in All-hallows- day and Allhallow- e'en] the Latin sand was very rarely used. Scaru, from the verb scieran 'shear, cut' has been supplanted by tonsure, had by order, hadian by consecrate and ordain, gesomnung by congregation, ]>egnung by service, witega by prophet, 'prowere (irom J>rowian 'to suffer') by martyr, J>ro- werhad or prowung by martyrdom, niwcumen mann ('new- come man') by novice, hrycg-hrcegel (from hrycg 'back' and hrcegel 'dress') by dossal, and ealdor by prior. Com- pounds of the last-mentioned Old English word were also applied to things connected with the new religion, thus teobing- ealdor 'dean' (chief of ten monks). Ealdormann, the native term for a sort of viceroy or lord-lieutenant, was used to denote the Jewish High-Priests as well as the Pharisees. OE husl, mod. housel 'the Eucharist'^, was an
1 ^Cristnian signifies primarily the 'prima signatio' of the catechumens as distinguished irom the baptism proper.' Mac Gillivray p. 2i.
2 Connected with Sanscrit usra and Latin aurora and , there- fore, originally a dawn- goddess.
3 Still used in the nineteenth century , e. g. by Tennyson , as an archaism.
44 ni. Old English.
old pagan word for sacrifice or offering; an older form is seen in Gothic hunsl. The OE word for 'altar', weofod, is an interesting heathen survival, for it goes back to a compound wigheod 'idol-table*, and it was probably only because phonetic development had obscured its connex- ion with wig 'idol' that it was allowed to remain in use as a Christian technical term.
43. This second class is not always easily distinguished from the third, or those words that had not previously existed but were now framed out of existing native speech-material to express ideas foreign to the pagan world. Word-composition and other formative processes were resorted to, and in some instances the new terms were simply fitted together from translations of the com- ponent parts of the Greek or Latin word they were in- tended to render, as when Greek euaggelion was render- ed god-spell (good-spell, afterwards with shortening of the first vowel godspell, which was often taken to be the 'speir or message of God), mod. gospel; thence godspellere where now the foreign word evangelist is used. Heathen, OE. hceben, according to the generally accepted theory, is derived from hcel> 'heath' in close imitation of Latin paganus from pagus 'a country district'. Of. also ^rynnes or prines ('three-ness') for trinity.
44. But in most cases we have no such literal rendering of a foreign term, but excellent words devised exactly as if the framers of them had never heard of any foreign expression for the same conception — as, perhaps, in- deed, in some instances they had not. Some of these display not a little ingenuity. The scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament were called hoceras (from boc book) and sunder- halgan {irom sundor 'apart, asunder, separate'); in the north the latter were also called celarwas 'teachers of the Law' or celdo 'elders'. A patriarch was called heahfceder 'high-father' or eald- feeder 'old-father'; the
New Terms. as
three Magi were called tungol-witegan from tungol 'star', and witega 'wise man'. For 'chaplain' we have handpreost or hiredpreost ('family-priest') ; for 'acolyte' different word expressive of his several functions: husl^egn ('Eucharist- servant'), taporherend ('taper-bearer') and wcexberend ('wax-bearer') ; instead of ercebiscop 'archbishop' we some- times find heahhiscop and ealdorbiscop. For 'hermit' ansetla and westensetla ('sole-settler', 'desert-settler') were used. 'Magic art' was called scincrceft ('phantom- art'); 'magician' scincrceftiga or scinlceca, scinnere, 'phan- tom' or 'superstition', scinlac. For the disciples of Christ we find, beside discipul mentioned above, no less than ten different English renderings (cniht, folgere, gingra, hiere- mon, Iceringman, leornere, leorning- cniht, leormngman, underpeodda, ^egn).^ To 'baptize' was expressed by dyppan 'dip' (cf. German taufen, Dan. debe) or more often by fulwian (from ful-wihan 'to consecrate completely'); 'baptism' by fulwiht or, the last syllable being phoneti- cally obscured, fulluht, and John the Baptist was called Johannes se fulluhtere.
45. The power and boldness of these numerous na- tive formations can, perhaps, best be appreciated if we go through the principal compounds of God: godbot 'ato- nement made to the church', godcund 'divine, religious, sacred*, godcundnes 'divinity, sacred office', godferht 'pious', godgield 'idol', godgimm 'divine gem', godhad 'divine nature', godmcegen 'divinity', godscyld 'impiety', godscyldig 'impious', godsibb 'sponsor', godsibbrceden 'sponsorial obligations', godspell (cf., however, § 43), godspelbodung 'gospel-preaching', godspellere 'evangelist', godspellian 'preach the gospel', godspellisc 'evangelical', godspeltraht 'gospel-commentary', godsprcece 'oracle', god- sunu 'godson', god]>rymm 'divine majesty', godwrcec 'im-
I MacGillivray p. 44.'
^5 ni. Old English.
pious', godwrcecnes 'impiety'. Such a list as this, with the modern translations, shows the gulf between the old system of nomenclature, where everything was native and, therefore, easily understood by even the most un- educated, and the modern system, where with few ex- ceptions classical roots serve to express even simple ideas; observe that although gospel has been retained, the easy secondary words derived from it have given way to learn- ed formations. Nor was it only religious terms that were devised in this way; for Christianity brought with it also some acquaintance with the higher intellectual achievements in other domains, and we find such scienti- fic terms as Icece-crceft ieech-craft' for medicine, tungol-ce
, ('star-law') for astronomy, efnniht for equinox, sun-stede and sungihte for solstice, sunfolgend (sunfollower) for heliotrope, tid 'tide' and gemet 'measure' for tense and
, mood in grammar, foresetnes for preposition etc., in short a number of scientific expressions of native origin, such as is equalled among the Germanic languages in Icelandic only.
46. If now we ask, why did not the Anglo-Saxons adopt more of the ready-made Latin or Greek words, it is easy toseethattheconditions here are quite different from those mentioned above when we asked a similar question with regard to Celtic. There we had a real race-mixture, where people speaking two different languages were living in actual contact in the same country. Here we have no Latin-speaking nation or community in actual inter- course with the English; and though we must suppose that there was a certain mouth-to-mouth influence from missionaries which might familiarize part of the English nation with some of the specifically Christian words, these were certainly at first introduced in far greater num- ber through the medium of writing, exactly as is the case with Latin and Greek importations in recent times. Why,
Why not Foreign Words? aj
then, do we see such a difference between the practice of that remote period and our own time? One of the reasons seems obviously to be that people then did not know so much Latin as they learnt later, so that these learned words, if introduced, would not have been under- stood. We have it on King Alfred's authority that in the time immediately preceding his own reign 'there were very few on this side of the Humber who could under- stand their (Latin) rituals in English, or translate a letter from Latin into English, and I believe that there were not many beyond the Humber. There were so few of them that I cannot remember a single one south of
the Thames when I came to the throne and there
was also a great multitude of God's servants, but they had very Httle knowledge of the books, for they could not understand anything of them, because they were not written in their language.'^ And even in the previous period which Alfred regrets, when 'the sacred orders were zealous in teaching and learning', and when, as we know from Bede and other sources, ^ Latin and Greek studies were pursued successfully in England, we may be sure that the percentage of those who would have understood the learned words, had they been adopted into English, was not large. There was, therefore, good reason for devising as many popular words as possible. However, the manner in which our question was put was not, perhaps, quite fair, for we seemed to presuppose that it would be natural for a nation to adopt as many foreign terms as its linguistic digestion would admit, and that it would be matter for surprise if a language had fewer
1 King Alfred's West -Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. Preface (Sweet's translation).
2 See T. N. Toller, Outlines of the History of the English Language. Cambridge 1900, p. 68fif.
48 in. Old English.
foreign elements than Modern English. But on the contrary, it is rather the natural thing for a language to utilize its own resources before drawing on other lan- guages. The Anglo-Saxon principle of adopting only such words as were easily assimilated with the native vocabulary, for the most part names of concrete things, and of turning to the greatest possible account native words and roots, especially for abstract notions, — that principle may be taken as a symptom of a healthful con- dition of a language and a nation; witness Greek, where we have the most flourishing and vigorous growth of abstract and other scientifically serviceable terms on a native basis that the world has ever seen, and where the highest development of intellectual and artistic activity went hand in hand with the most extensive creation of indigenous words and an extremely limited importation of words from abroad. It is not, then, the Old English system of utilizing the vernacular stock of words, but the modern system of neglecting the native and borrowing from a foreign vocabulary that 'has to be accounted for as something out of the natural state of things. A particular case in point will illustrate this better than long explanations.
47. To express the idea of a small book that is always ready at hand, the Greeks had devised the word egkhei- ridion from en 'in', kheir 'hand' and the suffix -idion denoting smallness; the Romans sirhilarly employed their adjective manualis 'pertaining to manus, the hand' with liber 'book' understood. What could be more natural then, than for the Anglo-Saxons to frame according to the genius of their own language the compound handboc? This naturally would be especially applied to the one kind of handy books that the clergy were in particular need of, the book containing the occasional and minor public offices of the Roman church. Similar compounds
Handbook.
49
were used, and are used, as a matter of course, in the other cognate languages, — German handbuch, Danish handbog, etc. But in the Middle English period, handboc was disused, the French (Latin) manual taking its place, and in the sixteenth century the Greek word [enchiridion) too was introduced into the English language. And so accustomed had the nation grown to preferring strange and exotic words that when in the nineteenth century handbook made its re-appearance it was treated as an unwelcome intruder. The oldest example of the new use in the NED. is from 1814, when an anony- mous book was published with the title 'A Handbook for modelling wax flowers.' In 1833 Nicolas in the preface to a historical work wrote 'What the Germans would term and which, if our language admitted of the expression , would have been the fittest title for it, 'The Handbook of History' ', — but he dared not use that title himself. Three years later Murray the publisher ventured to call his guide-book 'A Hand - Book for Travellers on the Continent', but reviewers as late as 1843 apologized for copying this coined word. In 1838 Rogers speaks of the word as a tasteless innovation, and Trench in his 'Eng- lish Past and Present' (1854; 3rd ed. 1856 p. 71) says, 'we might have been satisfied with 'manual', and not put together that very ugly and very unnecessary word 'handbook', which is scarcely, I should suppose, ten or fifteen years old.' Of late years, the word seems to have found more favour, but I cannot help thinking that state of language a very unnatural one where such a very simple, intelligible, and expressive word has to fight its way instead of being at once admitted to the very best society.
48. The Old English language, then, was rich in possi- bihties, and its speakers were fortunate enough to possess
Jespersbn : English. 2nd ed. 4.
50 HI. Old English.
a language that might with very little exertion on their part be made to express everything that human speech can be called upon to express. There can be no doubt that if the language had been left to itself, it would easily have remedied the defects that it certainly had, for its resources were abundantly sufficient to provide natural and expressive terms even for such a new world of concrete things and abstract ideas as Christianity meant to the Anglo-Saxons. It is true that we often find Old English prose clumsy and unwieldy, but that is more the fault of the literature than of the language itself. A good prose style is everywhere a late acquire- ment, and the work of whole generations of good authors is needed to bring about the easy flow of written prose. Neither, perhaps, were the subjects treated of in the extant Old English prose literature those most suitable for the development of the highest literary qualities. But if we look at such a closely connected language as Old Norse, we find in that language a rapid progress to a narrative prose style which is even now justly admired in its numerous sagas; and I do not see so great a difference between the two languages as would justify a scepticism with regard to the perfectibility of Old English in the same direction. And, indeed , we have positive proof in a few passages that the language had no mean power as a literary medium; I am thinking of Alfred's report of the two Scandinavian travellers Ohthere and Wulfstan, who visited him — the Fridtjof Nansen and Sven Hedin of those days — , of a few passages in the Saxon Chronicle, and especially of some pages of the homilies of Wulfstan, where we find an impassioned prose of real merit.
49. If Old English prose is undeveloped, we have a ; very rich and characteristic poetic literature, ranging
Prose and Poetry. ei
from powerful pictures of battles and of fights with mythical monsters to rehgious poems, idyllic descrip- tions of an ideal country and sad ones of moods of me- lancholy. It is not here the place to dwell upon the literary merit of these poems, as we are only concerned with the language. But to anyone who has taken the trouble — and it is a trouble — to familiarize himself with that poetry, there is a singular charm in the language it is clothed in, so strangely different from modern poetic style. The movement is slow and leisurely; the measure of the verse does not invite us to hurry on rapidly, but to linger deliberately on each line and pause before we go on to the next. Nor are the poet's thoughts too light-footed; he likes to tell us the same thing two or three times. Where a single he would suffice he prefers to give a couple of such descriptions as 'the brave prince, the bright hero, noble in war, eager and spirited' etc., descriptions which add no new trait to the mental picture, but which , nevertheless , impress us artistically and work upon our emotions , very much like repetitions and variations in music. These effects are chiefly produced by heaping synonym on synonym , and the wealth of synonymous terms found in Old English poetry is really astonishing, especially in certain domains, which had for centuries been the stock subjects of poetry. For 'hero' or 'prince' we find in Beowulf alone at least thirty- seven words (cedeling. cescwiga. aglceca. headorinc. heag- gyfa. healdor. beorn. brego. brytta. byrnwiga. ceorl. cniht. cyning. dryhten. ealdor. eorl. ebelweard. jengel. frea. freca. fruma. hceleb. hlaford. hyse. lead. mecg. nid. oretta. rceswa. rinc. scota. secg. ^egn. jengel. peoden. wer. wiga). For 'battle' or 'fight' we have in Beowulf at least twelve synonyms (beadu. gub. hea^o. hild. lindplega. nid. orleg. rcBs. sacu. geslyht. gewinn. wig). Beowulf has seventeen
4*
52 in. Old English.
expressions for the 'sea' (brim. flod. garsecg. hcef. hea^u? holm, holmwylm. hronrad. lagu. mere, merestrcet. see. seglrad. stream, weed. wceg. yp), to which should be add- ed thirteen more from other poems (flodweg. flodwielm. fiot. flotweg. holmweg. hronmere. mereflod. merestream. sceflod. sceholm. scestream. sceweg. y]>mere). For 'ship' or 'boat' we have in Beowulf eleven words (bat. brenting. ceol. jeer, flota. naca. scebat. scegenga. scewudu. scip. sund- wudu) and in other poems at least sixteen more words (brimhengest. brim^isa. brimwudu. cnearr. flodwudu. flot- scip. holmmcern. holmmcegen. merebat. merehengest. mere- ])yssa. sceflota. scehengest. scemearh. ypbord. yphengest. y]>hof. yplid. yMida).
50. How are we to account for this wealth of syno- nyms? We may subtract, if we like, such compound words as are only variations of the same comparison, as when a ship is called a sea-horse, and then different words for sea (see, mere, y]>) are combined with the words hengest 'stallion' and mearh 'mare'; but even if , this class is not counted, the number of synonyms is great enough to call for an explanation. A language ' has always many terms for those things that interest the speakers in their daily doings; thus Sweet says: 'if we open an Arabic dictionary at random, we may expect to find something about a camel: 'a young camel', 'an old camel', 'a strong camel', 'to feed a camel on the 1^ fifth day', 'to feel a camel's hump to ascertain its fat- ness', all these being not only simple words, but root- words'.^ And when we read that the Araucanians (in Chile) distinguished nicely in their languages between a great many shades of hunger, our compassion is ex- cited, as Gabelentz remarks.^ In the case of the Anglo-
1 Sweet, The Practical Study of Language, 1899, p. 163.
2 Gabelentz, Sprachwissenschaft 189, 463. -
Synonyms. ^^
Saxons, however, the conclusion we are justified in drawing from their possessing such a great number of words connected with the sea is not , perhaps , that they were a seafaring nation, but rather, as these words are chiefly poetical and not used in prose , that the nation had been seafaring, but had given up that life while reminiscences of it were still Hngering in their imagination.
51. In many cases we are now unable to see any difference in signification between two or more words, but in the majority of these instances we may assume that even if, perhaps, the Anglo-Saxons in historical times felt no difference, their ancestors did not use them indiscriminately. It is characteristic of primitive peoples that their languages are highly speciahzed , so that where we are contented with one generic word they have several specific terms. The aborigines of Tasmania had a name for each variety of gum-tree and wattle -tree, etc., but they had no equivalent for the expression 'a tree'. The Mohicans have words for cutting various objects, but none to convey cutting simply. The Zulus have such words as 'red cow', 'white cow', 'brown cow', etc., but none for 'cow' generally. In Cherokee, instead of one word for 'washing' we find different words, according to what is washed, 'I wash myself, — my head, — the head of somebody else, — my face, — the face of somebody else, — my hands or feet, — my clothes, — dishes, — a child, etc.^
52. Very Httle has been done hitherto to investigate the exact shades of meaning in Old English words, but I have Httle doubt that when we now render a number
I Cf. Jespersen, Progress in Language, London 1894 p. 250.
54 in. Old English.
of words indiscriminately by 'sword', they meant origi- nally distinct kinds of swords, and so in other cases as well. With regard to washing, we find something corre- sponding, though in a lesser degree, to the exuberance of Cherokee, for we have two words, wacsan (wascan) and iwean, and if we go through all the examples given in Bosworth and Toller's Dictionary, we find that the latter word is always applied to the washing of persons (hands, feet, etc.), never to inanimate objects, while wascan is used especially of the washing of clothes, but also of sheep , of 'the inwards' (of the victim, Leviticus I, 9 and 13^). Observe also that wascan was originally only used in the present tense (as Kluge infers from -sk-) , — a clear instance of that restriction in the use of words which is so common in the old stages of the language, but which so often appears unnatural to us.
53. The old poetic language on the whole showed a great many divergences from everyday prose, in the choice of words, in the word forms, and also in the con- struction of the sentences. This should not surprise us, for we find the same thing everywhere, and the differ- ence between the dictions of poetry and of prose is perhaps greater in old or more primitive languages than in those most highly developed. In English, certainly, the distance between poetical and prose language was much greater in this first period than it has ever been since. The poetical language seems to have been to a
I In a late text (R. Ben. 59, 7) we find the contrast agtier ge fata Jjwean, ge wcBterclacias wascan, which does not agree exactly with the distinction made above, — Curiously enough, in Old Norse, vaska is in the Sagas used only of washing the head with some kind of soap. In Danish, as well as in English, vaske, wash, is now the only word in actual use.
Language of Poetry. 55
certain extent identical all over England, regardless of dialect differences shown in prose writings. King Alfred's prose is always distinctly West Saxon, but when he breaks out occasionally into poetry, he uses such forms as the preterite heht, instead of het, the only form found in his prose. We have such more or less artificial poetic dialects, which agree with no one of the actually spoken dialects, in Homeric Greek and elsewhere, for example in the Old Saxon Heliand according to H. CoUitz.^ The, hypothesis of a poetical language of this kind, absorbing ' forms and words from the different parts of the country where poetry was composed at all, seems to me to offer a better explanation of the facts than the current theory, according to which the bulk of Old English poetry was written at first in Northumbrian dialect and later translated into West-Saxon with some of the old Anglian forms kept inadvertently — and translated to such an extent that no trace of the originals should have been preserved. The very few and short pieces extant in old Northumbrian dialect are easily accounted for, even if we accept the theory of a poetical koine or standard language prevailing in the time when Old English poetry flourished. But the whole question should be taken up by a more competent hand than mine.
54. The external form of Old English poetry was in the main the same as that of Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German poetry; besides definite rules of stress and quantity, which were more regular than might at first appear, but which were not so strict as those of classical poetry, the chief words of each line were tied
I TAe Home of the Heliand; Publications of the Modern Lan- guage Association of America, Vol. XVI, p. I23fr. See also Bauer's Waldeckisches Worterbuch, 1901, p. 91* ff.
^6 ni. Old English.
together by alliteration, that is, they began with the same sound, or, in the case of sp, st, sc, with the same sound group. The effect is peculiar, and may be appre- ciated in such a passage as this:
Him pa ellenrof andswarode, wlanc Wedera leod, word aefter spraec, heard under helme: 'We synt Higelaces beod-geneatas, Beowulf is min nama. Wille ic a-secgan suna Halfdenes, maerum peodne min aerende, aldre ]7inum gif he us geunnan wile, ]73et we hine swa godne gretan mot on.' Wulfgar ma]7elode, Ipaet waes Wendla leod, waes his mod-sefa manegum gecy^ed, wig ond wisdom. 'Ic ]7ses wine Deniga, frean Scildinga, frinan wille, beaga bryttan, swa ]7u bena eart, ]7eoden maerne ymb ]7inne sid.^
55. Very rarely, combined with alliteration we fird a sort of rime or assonance. In the prose of the last period of Old English the same artistic means were often resorted to to heighten the effect, and we find in Wulf- stan's homilies such passages as the following where all tricks of phonetic harmony are brought into play: 'in mordre and on mane, in susle and on sare, in wean and on wyrmslitum betweonan deadum and deoflum, in bryne and on biternesse, in bealewe and on bra- dum ligge, in yrm]?um and on earfe^um, on swyltcwale and sarum sorgum, in fyrenum bryne and on ful- nesse, in to^a gristbitum and in tintegrum' or again *)>aer is ece ece and J^aer is sorgung and sargung, and a singal heof ; ^aer is benda bite and dynta dyne, )?aer is wyrma slite and ealra wsedla gripe, ]>xr is wanung
I Beowult 340 fif.
Alliteration. cj
and granung, J?aer is yrm^a gehwylc and ealra deofla gearing'. 1
56. Nor has this love of alliterative word-combinations ever left the language; we find it very often in n^odern poetry, where however it is always subordinate to end rime, and we find it in such stock phrases as — : it can neither make nor war me, as ^usy as ^ees (Chaucer, E 2422), /?art and parcel, /aint and feeble, chucks and brakes (sometimes: play dick-duck-drake; Stevenson, Merry Men 277), what ain't missed ain't mourned (Pinero, Magistrate 5), as ^old as ^rass, free and /ranke (Caxton, Reynard 41), Barnes are Messings (Shakesp., All's I. 3. 28), as ^ool as a cucumber, as 5^ill as (a) stone (Chaucer, E 121, as any stoon E 171, he stode stone style, Malory 145), over stile and stone (Chaucer B 1988), from top to ^06 (from the top to toe, Shakesp. R 3 III. i. 155), 7;nght and main, fuss and /ume, manners makyth man, rare billed a rat, rack and ruin, nature and nurture (Shakesp. Tp. IV. I. 189; English Men of Science, their Nature and Nurture, the title of a book by Galton), etc. etc., even to Thackeray's 'faint fashionable fiddle-faddle and feeble court slipslop'. Alliteration sometimes modifies the meaning of a word, as when we apply chick to human f- offspring in 'no chick or child', or when we say 'a labour of love', without giving to labour the shade of meaning* which it generally has as different from work. The word' ' foe, too, which is generally used in poetry or archaic prose only, is often used in ordinary prose for the sake of aUitcration in connexion with /riend ('Was it an ir- ruption of a friend or a foe.?' Meredith, Egoist 439; 'The Danes of Ireland had changed from foes to friends', Green, Short Hist. 107). Indeed alHteration comes so
I Wulfstan, Homilies, ed. by Napier, p. 187, 209. It is worthy of note that these poetical flights occur in descriptions of hell.
58 III. Old English.
natural to English people, that Tennyson says that 'when I spout my lines first, they come out so allitera- tively that I have sometimes no end of trouble to get rid of the alliteration'.^ I take up the thread of my narra- tive after this short digression.
I Life, by his Son, Tauchn. ed. II. 285. Cf. R. L. Stevenson, The Art of Writing 31, and what the Danish poet and metricist E. V. d. Recke says to the same effect, Principernefor den danske verskunst 1881, p. 112; see also the amusing note by De Quincey, Opium Eater p. 95 (Macmillan's Library of Eng. Classics): 'Some people are irritated, or even fancy themselves insulted, by overt acts of alliteration, as many people are by puns. On their account let me say, that, although there are here eight separate f's in less than half a sentence, this is to be held as pure accident. In fact, at one time there were nine fs in the original cast of the sentence, until I, in pity of the affronted people, substituted fe?na/e agent for female friend.' The reader need not be re- minded of the excessive use of alliteration in Euphuism and of Shakespeare's satire in Love's Labour's Lost and Midsufmner Night's Dream.
Chapter IV.
The Scandinavians.
57. The Old English language, as we have seen, was essentially self-sufficing; its foreign elements were few and did not modify the character of the language as a whole. But we shall now consider three very important factors in the development of the language, three super- structures, as it were, that came to be erected on the Anglo-Saxon foundation, each of them modifying the character of the language, and each preparing the ground for its successor. A Scandinavian element, a French element, and a Latin element now enter largely into the texture of the English language, and as each element is characteristically different from the others, we shall treat them separately. First, then, the Scandinavian element.^
I The chief works on these loan-words, most of them treat- ing nearly exclusively phonetic questions, are: Erik Bjorkman, Scandinavian Loa7i-Wo7'ds in Middle English (Halle I 1900, II 1902), an excellent book; Erik Brate, No7dische Lehnworter im Orrmulum (Beitrage zur Gesch. d. deutschen Sprache X, Halle 1884); Arnold Wall, A Contribution towards the Study of the Scandinavia?i Ele??ieJit in the English Dialects (Anglia XX, Halle 1 8 98); G. T Flom, Scandinavian Influence on Southern Lowland Scotch (New York, 1900). The dialectal material of the two last -mentioned treatises is necessarily to a great extent of a doubtful character. See also Kluge in Paul's GrunariSs d. germ. Philol. 2nd ed. p. 931 ff. (Strassburg 1899J, Skeat, Principles
5o IV. The Scandinavians.
58. The EngHsh had resided for about four' centuries in the country called after them, and during that time they had had no enemies from abroad. The only wars they had been engaged in were internal struggles be- tween kingdoms belonging to, but not yet feeling them- selves as one and the same nation. ^The Danes were to them not deadly enemies but a brave nation from over the sea, that they felt to be of a kindred race with them- selves. The peaceful relations between the two nations may have been more intimate than is now generally supposed. Fresh light seems to be thrown on the sub- ject by the theory that an interesting, but hitherto mysterious Old English poem which is generally ascribed to the eighth century is a translation of a lost Scan- dinavian poem dealing with an incident in what was later to become the Volsunga Saga.^ This would establish a literary intercourse between England and Scandinavia previous to the Viking ages, and therefor^ would accord with the fact that the old Danish legends about 'King Hrothgar and his beautiful hall Heorot'^were pre- served in England, even more faithfully than by the Danes themselves. Had the poet of Beowulf been able to foresee all that his countrymen werfi-deatiiied to suffer atJJifiJiands of the Danes, he would have chosen another
subject for his great epic, and we should have missed the earliest noble outcome of the sympathy so often displayed by Englishmen for the fortunes of Denmark.
of English Etymology p. 453 fif. (Oxford 1887), and some other works mentioned below. I have excluded doubtful material; but a few of the words I give as Scandinavian, have been considered as native by other writers. In most cases I have been convinced by the reasons given by Bjorkman.
1 W. W. Lawrence, The First Riddle ofCyneiuulf; W. H. Scho- field, Signy's Lament. (Publications of the Modem Language Association of America, vol, XVII. Baltimore 1902.)
Vikings. 6 1
But as it is, in Beowulf no coming events cast their shadow before, and the English nation seems to have been taken entirely by surprise when about 790 the I long series of inroads began, in which 'Danes' and 'hea- V^thens' became synonyms for murderers and plunderers. At first the strangers came in small troops and disap- peared as soon as they had filled their boats with gold and other valuables; but from the middle of the ninth century, 'the character of the attack wholly changed. The petty squadrons which had till now harassed the coast of Britain made way for larger hosts than had as yet fallen on any country in the west; while raid and foray were replaced by the regular campaign of armies who marched to conquer, and whose aim was to settle on the land they won'.^ Battles were fought with various success, but on the whole the Scandinavians proved the stronger race and made good their footing in their new country. In the peace of Wedmore (878), King Alfred, the noblest and staunchest defender of his native soil, was fain to leave them about two-thirds of what we now call England; all Northumbria, all East Anglia and one half of Central England made out the district called the Danelaw.
59. Still, the relations between the two races were ■ not altogether hostile. King Alfred not only effected the repulse of the Danes; he also gave us the first geo- graphical description of the countries that the fierce in- vaders came from, in the passage already referred to (§ 48). Under the year 959, one of the chroniclers says of the Northumbrian king that he was widely revered on account of his piety, but in one respect he was blamed : 'he loved foreign vices too much and gave heathen
(
I J. R. Green, A Short History of the Engl. People, Illustr. ed. p. 87.
62 IV. The Scandinavians.
(i. e. Danish) customs a firm footing in this country, alluring mischievous foreigners to come to this land.' And in the only extant private letter in Old English^ the unknown correspondent tells his brother Edward that 'it is a shame for all of you to give up the English customs of your fathers and to prefer the customs of heathen men, who grudge you your very life; you show thereby that you despise your race and your forefathers with these bad habits, when you dress shamefully in Danish wise with bared neck and blinded eyes' (with , hair falling over the eyes.?). We see, then, that the English were ready to learn from, as well as to fight wnth the Danes. It is a small, but significant fact that in the glorious patriotic war-poem written shortly after the battle of Maldon (993) which it celebrates, we find for the first time one of the most important Scandinavian loan-words, to call] this shuais-iiaw: early the linguistic influence of the Danes began to be felt.
60. A great number of Scandinavian families settled in England never to return, especially in Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire, but also in Yorkshire, Northumber- land, Cumberland, Westmoreland, etc. Numerous names of places, ending in-^y, -thorp (-torp), -beck, -dale, -thwaite, etc., bear witness to the preponderance of the invaders in great parts of England, as do also many names of per- sons found in English from about 1000 a. d.^ But these foreigners were not felt by the natives to be foreigners in the same manner as the English themselves had been looked upon as foreigners by the Celts. As Green has it, 'when the wild burst of the storm was over, land, people, government reappeared unchanged. England still re-
1 Edited by Kluge, Engl. Studien VIII, 62.
2 Bjorkman, Nordische Personennamen in England (Halle 19 10).
Danish Settlements.
63
mained England; the conquerors sank quietly into the mass of those around them; and Woden yielded without
' a struggle tQ^Christ. The secret of this difference be- tween the two invasions was that the battle was no longer between men of different races. It was no longer a fight between Briton and German, between English- man and Welshman. The life of these northern folk was in the main the life of the earlier Englishmen. Their customs, their religion, their social order were the same; they were in fact kinsmen bringing back to an England that had forgotten its origins the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers. Nowhere over Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the combatants men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason
^the fusion of the northmen with their foes was nowhere so peaceful and so complete.'^ — "^t should be remem- bered , too , that it was a Dane, King Knut who achieved what every English ruler had failed to achieve, the union of the whole of England into one peaceful realm. )
61. King Knut was a Dane, and in the Saxon Chron- icle the invaders were always called Danes, but from other sources we know that there were Norwegians too among the settlers. Attempts have been made to de- cide by linguistic tests which of the two nations had the greater influence in England^, a question beset with
1 J. R. Green, A Short History of the E. People, Illustr. ed. p. 84.
2 Brate thought the loan-words exclusively Danish; Kluge, Wall, and Bjorkman consider some of them Danish, others Norwegian, though in details they arrive at different results. See Bjorkman, Zur dialektischen provenienz der nordischen lehnwdrter im Englischen, Sprakvetensk. sallskapets for- handlingar 1898 — 1901 , Upsala, and his Scand. Loan -Words p. 281 ff.
64
IV. The Scandinavians.
considerable difficulties and which need not detain us' here. Suffice it to say that some words, such as ME. boun, Mod. bound 'ready' (to go to), busk, boon, addle, point rather to a Norwegian origin, while others, such as -by in place-names, die (>), booth, drown, ME. sum 'as', agree better with Danish forms. In the great majority of cases, however, the Danish and Norwegian forms were at that time either completely or nearly identical, so that no decision as to the special homeland of the Eng- lish loans is warranted. In the present work I there- fore leave the question open, quoting Danish or ON (Old Norse, practically = Old Icelandic) forms according as it is most convenient in each case, meaning simply Scandinavian.^
62. In order rightly to estimate the Scandinavian in- fluence it is very important to remember how great the
Simijarity w?^s hp^w^^^ ^^^'^ ^^iglj^l^ ?^^ ^'^^ ^(^rfiP To
those who know only modern English and modern Danish, this resemblance is greatly obscured, first on account of the dissimilarities^ that are unavoidable when two nations live for nearly one thousand years with very little intercommunication, and when there is, accordingly, nothing to counterbalance the natural tendency towards ' differentiation, and secondly on account of a powerful foreign influence to which each nation has in the mean- i time been subjected, English from French, and Danish | from Low German. But even now we can see the essen- tial conformity between the two languages, which in I those times was so - much greater as each stood so much nearer to the common source. An enormous number
I Bjorkman's final words are: 'These facts would seem to point to the conclusion that a considerable number of Danes were found everywhere in the Scandinavian settlements, while the existence in great numbers of Norwegians was confined to certain definite districts.'
Similarities. 65
of words were then identical in the two languages, so that we should now have been utterly unable to tell which language they had come from, if we had had no English literature before the invasion; nouns such as man, wife, father, mother, folk, house, thing, life, sor- row, winter, summer, verbs like will, can, meet, come, bring, hear, see, think, smile, ride, stand, still, sit, set, adjectives and adverbs Hke full, wise, well, better, best, mine and thine, over and under, etc. etc. The conse- quence was that an Englishman would have no great difficulty in understanding a viking, nay we have posi- tive evidence that Norse people looked upon the Eng- lish language as one with their own. In many cases, however, the words were already so dissimilar that it offers no difficulty to distinguish them, for instance, when they contained an original ai, which in OE. had become long a (OE. swan = ON. sveinn), or au, which in OE. had become ea (OE. leas = ON. lauss, louss), or sk, which in English became sh (OE. scyrte, now shirt = ON. skyrta).
63. But there are, of course, many words to which no such reliable criteria apply, and the difficulty in de- ciding the origin of words is further complicated by the fact that the English would-oftf^n modify n word, when adoptingjt, according to somejiiore or less^ vague feel- ing of the English sound that corresponded generally to this or that Scandinavian sound. Just as the name of the English king ^delred Eadgares sunu is mentioned in the Norse saga of Gunnlaugr Ormstunga, as A^alra^r Jatgeirsson, in the same manner shift is an Anglicized form of Norse skipta^; ON. brudlaup 'wedding' was modi- fied into hrydlop (cf. OE. bryd 'bride'; a consistent AngH- cizing would be hrydhleap) ; tidende is unchanged in Orrms
I In ME. forms with sk are also found; Bjorkman p. 126.
Jespersen: English, and ed. 5
56 IV. The Scandinavians.
ti^ennde, but was generally changed into tiding (s), cf. OE. tid and the common Eng. ending -ing; ON. ijdnusta 'service' appears as ])eonest, Jjenest, and J)egnest; ON. words with the negative prefix u are made into English wn-, e. g. untime 'unseasonableness', unbain (ON. ubeinn) 'not ready', unrad or unrcsd 'bad counsel'^; cf. also wcepna- getcBc below, and others.
] 64. Sometimes the Scandinavians gave a fresh lease ' of life to obsolescent or obsolete native words. The pre- pngifinn j^ for instance, is found only once or twice in OE. texts belonging to the pre-Scandinavian period, but after that time it begins to be exceedingly common in the North, from whence it spreads southward; it was used as in Danish with regard both to time and space and it is still so used in Scotch. Similarly ^<2^^ (OE. dcel) 'appears to have been reinforced from Norse (dal), for it is in the North that the word is a living geographical name' (NED.) , and barn, Scotch bairn (OE. beam) would probably have disappeared in the North, as it did in the South, if it had not been strengthened by the Scandinavian word. The verb blend y too, seems to owe its vitality (as well as its vowel) to Old Norse , for blandan was very rare in Old English.
65. We also see in England a phenomenon, which, I think, is paralleled nowhere else to such an extent, namely the existence side by side for a long time, sometimes for centuries, of two slightly differing forms for the same word, one the original English form and the other Scandinavian. In the following the first form is the native one, the form after the dash the imported one.
I Though the Scand. form is also found in a few instances i oulist 'listless', oumautin 'swoon'.
Parallel Forms.
67
66. In some cases both forms survive in standard speech, though, as a rule, they have developed slightly different meanings: whole (formerly hool) — hale] both were united in the old phrase 'hail and hool' | no — nay\ the latter is now used only to add an amplifying remark ('it is enough, nay too much'), but formerly it was used to answer a question, though it was not so strong a neg- ative as no ('Is it true? Nay/ 'Is it not true? No') | rear — raise \ from — fro, now used only in 'to and fro' | shirt — skirt \ shot — scot \ shriek — screak, screech \ edge — ^gg vb. (to egg on, 'to incite'). OE. leas survives only in the suffix -less (nameless, etc.), while the Scand. loose has entirely supplanted it as an independent word.
67. In other cases, the Scandinavian form survives in dialects only, while the other belongs to the literary language: dew — dag 'dew, thin rain; vb. to drizzle' | true — trigg 'faithful, neat, tidy' | leap — loup \ neat — nowt 'cattle' | church — kirk^ \ churn — kirn^ \ chest — kist^ I mouth — mun \ yard — garth *a small piece of en- closed ground'. All these dialectal forms belong to Scot- land or the North of England.
68. As a rule, however, one of the forms has in course of time been completely crowded out by the other. The surviving form is often the native form, as in the following instances : goat — gayte \ heathen — heythen, haithen \ loath — laith \ grey — gra, gro \ few — fa, fo ash(es) — ask \ fish — fisk \ naked — naken \ yarn — gam bench — bennk \ star — sterne \ worse — werre. Simil- arly the Scand. thethen, hethen, hwethen are generally supposed to have been discarded in favour of the native forms, OE. ^anon, heonan, hwanon, to which was added an adverbial s: thence, hence, whence-, but in reality these modern forms seem to be due to the Scandinavian ones,
1 These >&-words are, however, subject to some doubt.
5*
58 IV. The Scandinavians.
, whose vowels they keep; for the loss of th cf. since from ^sithence (sithens, OE. si])j)an + s)^
I 69. This then leads us on to those instances in which the intruder succeeded in ousting the legitimate heir. Caxton in a well-known passage gives us a graphic des- cription of the struggle between the native ey and the Scandinavian egg:
And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used and spoken whan I was borne. For we englysshe men ben borne under the domynacyon of the mone, whiche is never stedfaste, but ever waverynge, wexynge one season, and waneth & dyscreaseth another season. And that comyn eng- lysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyse, for to have sayled over the see into zelande. And for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named sheffelde,^ a mercer, cam in-to an hows and axed for mete; and specyally he axyd after eggys. And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren. Certaynly it is harde to playse every man, by cause of dyversite & chaunge of langage.*
Very soon after this was written, the old English forms ey, eyren finally went out of use.
1 Probably a north. country man.
2 Caxton's Efieydos, p. 2 — 3. (E. E. T, S. Extra Series 57.
Native Words Discarded. 59
70. Among other word-pairs similarly fated may be mentioned: OE. a, ME. 0 'ever' — ay (both were found together in the frequent phrase 'for ay and 00') | tho (cf. those) — they \ theigh, thah, theh and other forms — though \ swon — swain (boatswain, etc.) | tbirde — hirth \ eie — awe I Mnresdcei — Thursday \ in (on) I>e lijte — on lofte, now aloft I swuster — sister \ chetel — kettle; and finally not a few words with English y over against Scand. g: yete — get \ yeme 'care, heed' — goni(e), dialectal gaum 'sense, wit, tact' | yelde — guild 'fraternity, association' |. yive or yeve — give \ yift — gift. In this last- mentioned word gift, not only is the initial sound due to Scandi- navian, but also the modern meaning, for the Old Eng- lish word meant 'the price paid by a suitor in consider- ation of receiving a woman to wife' and in the plural 'marriage, wedding'. No subtler linguistic influence can be imagined than this, where a word has been modified both with regard to pronunciation and meaning, and curiously enough has by that process been brought nearer to the verb from which it was originally derived (give).
71. In some words the old native form has survived, but has adopted the signification attached in Scandi- navian to the corresponding word; thus dream in OE. meant 'joy', but in ME. the modern meaning of 'dream' was taken over from ON. draumr, Dan. drom; analogous cases are bread (OE. bread 'fragment'), bloom (OE. bloma 'mass of metal'). In one word, this same process of sense- shifting has historical significance; the OE. eorl meant vaguely a 'nobleman' or more loosely 'a brave warrior' or 'man' generally; but under Knut it took over the mean- ing of the Norse jarl 'an under-king' or governor of one of the great divisions of the realm, thus paving the way for the present signification of earl as one of the grades in the (French) scale of rank. OE. freond meant
yo IV. The Scandinavians.
only 'friend', whereas ON. frcendi, Dan. frcende means 'kinsman', but in Orrm and other ME. texts the word sometimes has the Scand. meaning^ and so it has to this day in Scotch and American dialects (see many instances in J. Wright's Dialect Dictionary, e. g. 'We are near friends, but we don't speak'); the Scotch proverb 'Friends agree best at a distance' corresponds to the Danish 'Fraende er fraende vaerst'. OE. dwellan or dwelian meant only 'to lead astray, lead into error, thwart' or intr. 'to go astray'^; the intransitive meanings, 'to tarry, abide, remain in a place', which correspond with the Scandi- navian meanings, are not found till the beginning of the 13th century. OE. ploh is found only with the meaning of 'a measure of land' (still in Scotch pleuch), but in ME. it came to mean the implement plough (OE. sulh) as in ON. pldgr. OE. holm meant 'ocean', but the modern word owes its signification of 'islet, flat ground by a river' to Scandinavian holm.
72. These were cases of native words conforming to foreign speech habits; in other instances the Scandina- vians were able to place words at the disposal of the English which agreed so well with other native words as to be readily associated with them, nay which were felt to be fitter expressions for the ideas than the Old English words and therefore survived. Death (dea]?) and dead are OE. words, but the corresponding verbs were steorfan and sweltan; now it is obvious that Danish deya (now d&) was more easily associated with the noun and the adjective than the old verbs, and accordingly it was
1 Saxon Chron. 11 35, which is given in the NED. as an in stance of this meaning, appears to me to be doubtful.
2 Divelode, in /Elfric, Homilies i. 384, is wrongly trans- lated by Thorpe 'continued', so that Kluge is wrong as giving this passage as the earliest instance of the modern meaning; it means 'wandered, went astray'.
Ready Associations. 7 1
soon adopted (deyen, now die), while sweltan was dis- carded and the other verb acquired the more special signi- fication of starving. Scete, Mod. E. seat, was adopted be- cause it was at once associated with the verbs to sit and to set. The most important importation of this kind was! that of the pronominal forms they, them and their, which entered readily into the system of English pronouns be- ginning with the same sound (the, that, this) and were felt to be more distinct than the old native forms which they supplanted. Indeed these were liable to constant confusion with some forms of the singular number (he, him, her) after the vowels had become obscured, so that he and hie, him and heom, her (hire) and heora could no longer be kept easily apart. We thus find the obscured form, which was written a (or 'a), in use for *he' till the beginning of the i6th century (compare the dialectal use, for instance in Tennyson's 'But Parson a cooms an' a goas'), and in use for 'she' and for 'they' till the end of the 14 th century. Such a state of things would naturally cause a great number of ambiguities; but al- though the th-iorms must consequently be reckoned a great advantage to the language, it took a long time before the old forms were finally displaced, nay, the dative hem still survives in the form 'em ('take 'em'), which is now by people ignorant of the history of the language taken to be a shortened them; her 'their' is the only form for the possessive of the plural found in Chaucer (who says they in the nominative) and there are two or three instances in Shakespeare. One more Scandinavian pronoun is same, which was speedily associated with the native adverb same [swa same 'similarly'). Other words similarly connected with the native stock are want (adj. and vb.), which reminded the English of their own wan 'wanting', wana 'want' and wanian 'wane, lessen', and ill, which must have appeared like a stunted form of evil,
>j2 IV. The Scandinavians.
especially to a Scotchman who had made his own devil into deil and even into ein.
73. If now we try to find out by means of the loan- word test (see above, § 31) what were the spheres of hu man knowledge or activity in which the Scandinavians were able to teach the English, the first thing that strikes us is that the very earliest stratum of loan-words\ words which by the way were soon to disappear again from the language^, relate to war and more particularly to the navy: orrest 'battle', fylcian 'to collect, marshal', li^ •fleet', harda, cnear, scegt> different sorts of warships, ha 'rowlock'. This agrees perfectly well with what the Saxon Chronicle relates about the English being inferior to the heathen in ship-building, until King Alfred under- took to construct a new kind of warships.^
74. Next, we find a great many Scandinavian law- terms; they have been examined by Professor Steenstrup in his well-known work on 'Danelag'.* He has there been able, in an astonishing number of cases, to show conclusively that the vikings modified the legal ideas of the Anglo-Saxons, and that numerous new law-terms sprang up at the time of the Scandinavian settlements which had previously been utterly unknown. Most of them were simply the Danish or Norse words, others were Anglicizings, as when ON. vapnatak was made into wcepnagetcBC (later wapentake) or when ON. heimsokn ap- pears as hamsocn 'house-breaking or the fine for that offence', or saklauss as sacleas 'innocent'. The most im- portant of these juridical imports is the word law itself,
1 See Bjorkman, p. 5.
2 They were naturally supplanted py French words , see below.
3 Therefore, I cannot believe that ON. bat is a loan from OE lai (boat), although it is difficult to account for the vowel by any other theory.
4 Copenhagen 1882 (— Normanneme IV).
Legal Terms. ^^
known in England from the loth century in the form lagu, which must have been the exact Scandinavian form as it is the direct fore-runner of the ON. form log, ODan. logh.'^ By-law is now felt to be a compound of the pre- position by and law, but originally by was the Danish by 'town, village' (found in Derby, Whitby, etc.), and the Danish genitive-ending is preserved in the other English form byrlaw. Other words belonging to this class are nicfing 'criminal, wretch', thriding 'third part', preserved in the mutilated form riding^, carlman 'man' as opposed to woman, bonda or bunda 'peasant', lysing 'freedman', ^rcell, Mod. thrall,, mal 'suit, agreement', wi]>ermal 'counter-plea, defence', seht 'agreement', stefnan 'summon', crafian now crave, landcop or anglicized landceap and lahcop or lahceap (for the signification see Steenstrup p. 192 ff.); ran 'robbery'; infangen]>eof later infangthief 'jurisdiction over a thief apprehended within the manor'. It will be seen that with the exception of law, bylaw, thrall and crave — the least juridical of them all — these Danish law-terms have disappeared from the language as a simple consequence of the Norman conquerors taking into their own hands the courts of justice and legal affairs generally. Steenstrup's research, which is largely based on linguistic facts, may be thus summarized. The Scandinavian settlers re-organized the administration of the realm and based it on a uniform and equable division of the country; taxes were imposed and collected after the Scandinavian pattern; instead of the lenient criminal
1 The OE. word was ce or csw , which meant 'marriage' as well and was restricted to that sense in late OE,, until it was displaced by the French word.
2 North -thriding being heard as North-riding; in the case of the two other ridings of Yorkshire, East -thriding and West- thriding, the th-so\m.d was assimilated to the preceding /, the result in all three cases being the same misdivision of the word (' metanalysis ').
y^. IV. The Scandinavians.
law of former times, a virile and powerful law was intro- duced which was better capable of intimidating fierce and violent natures. More stress was laid on personal honour, as when a sharp line was drawn between stealthy or clandestine crimes and open crimes attributable to ob- stinacy or vindictiveness. Commerce, too, was regulated so as to secure trade. ^
75. Apart from these legal words it would be very difficult to point out any single group of words belonging to the same sphere from which a superiority of any des- cription might be concluded. Window is borrowed from vindauga ('wind-eye'); but we dare not infer that the northern settlers taught the English anything in archi- tecture, for the word stands quite alone; besides OE. had another word for 'window', which is also based on the eye-shape of the windows in the old wooden houses: eag^yrel 'eye-hole' (cf. nospyrel nostril.) ^ Nor does the borrowing of steak, ME. steyke from ON. steik prove any superior cooking on the part of the vikings. But it is possible that the Scandinavian knives (ME. knif from Scand. knif) were better than or at any rate different from those of other nations, for the word was introduced into French (canif) as well as into English.
76. If, then, we go through the lists of loan-words, looking out for words from which conclusions as to the state of culture of the two nations might be drawn, we shall be doomed to disappointment, for they all seem to denote objects and actions of the most commonplace de xription and certainly do not represent any new set
1 Steenstrup, Danelag p. 391 ff
2 Most European languages use the \^2X. fenestra {G. fenster, Dutch venster, Welsh ^enester), which was also imported from French into English as fenester , in use from 1290 to 1548. Slavonic languages have okno, derived from oko 'eye'. On the eye -shape of old windows see R. Meringer, Indogerm. For- schungen XVI 1904, p. 125.
Commonplace Words, 75
of ideas hitherto unknown to the people adopting them. We find such everday nouns as husband, fellow, sky, skull, skin, wing, haven, root, skill, anger, gate^, etc. Among the adjectives adopted from Scand. we find meek, low, scant, loose, odd^, wrong, ill, ugly, rotten. The impression produced perhaps by this list that only unpleasant ad- jectives came into English from Scandinavia, is easily shown to be wrong, for happy and seemly too are derived from Danish roots, not to speak of stor, which was com- mon in Middle English for 'great', and dialectal adjec- tives like glegg 'clear-sighted, clever', heppen 'neat, tidy', gain 'direct, handy', (Sc. and North E. the gainest way, ON. hinn gegnsta veg, Dan. den genneste vej). The only thing common to the adjectives, then, is seen to be their extreme commonplaceness, and the same impression is confirmed by the verbs, as for instance, thrive, die, cast, hit, take, call, want, scare, scrape, scream, scrub, scowl, skulk, bask, drown, ransack, gape, guess (doubtful), etc. To these must be added numerous words preserved only in dialects (north country and Scotch) such as lathe 'barn' Dan. lade, hoast 'cough' Dan. hoste, flit 'move' Dan. flytte, gar 'make, do' Dan. gore, lait 'search for' Dan. lede, red up 'to tidy' Dan. rydde op, keek in 'peep in', ket 'carrion, horseflesh, tainted flesh, rubbish', originally 'flesh, meat' as Dan. kQd, etc., all of them words belonging to the same familiar sphere, and having nothing about them that might be called technical 01 indicative of a higher culture. The same is true of that large class of words which have been mentioned above (§ 65 — 72), where the Scandinavians did not properly bring the word itself,
1 Gate 'way, road, street', frequent in some northern towns An the names of streets , frequent also in ME- adverbial phrases
algate, anothergate{s) (corrupted into anotherguess), etc. In the sense 'manner of going' it is now spelt gait.
2 Cf. North-Jutland dialect (Vendsyssel) oj 'odd (number)'.
7 5 IV. The Scandinavians.
but modified either the form or the .ignification of a native word; among them we have seen such everyday words as get, give, sister, loose, birth, awe, bread, dream, etc.^ It is precisely the most indispensable elements of^ the language that have undergone the strongest Scandi- navian influence, and this is raised into certainty whenl we discover that a certain number of those grammatical] words, the small coin of language, which Chinese gram- marians term 'empty words', and which are nowhere else transferred from one language to another, have been taken over from Danish into English: pronouns like they, them, their, the same and probably both', a modal verb like Scotch maun, mun (ON. munu, Dan. mon, monne); comparatives like minne 'lesser', min 'less', helder •rather'; pronominal adverbs like hethen, thethen, whethen 'hence, thence, whence', samen 'together'; conjunctions like though, oc 'and', sum, which for a long time seemed likely to displace the native swa (so) after a comparison, until it was itself displaced by eallswa > as; prepositions L like fro and till (see above § 64). ^
77. It is obvious that all these non-technical words can show us nothing about mental or industrial superi- ority; they do not bear witness to the currents of civili- zation; what was denoted by them cannot have been new to the English; we have here no new ideas, only new names. Does that mean, then, that the loan-word test which we are able to apply elsewhere, fails in this one case, and that linguistic facts can tell us nothing
1 It is noticeable, too, that the native word heaven has been more and more restricted to the figurative and religious accep- tation, while the Danish sky is used exclusively of the visible firmament; sky originally meant cloud.
2 Another preposition, umbe, was probably to a large extent due to Scandinavian, the native form being ymde, embe\ but perhaps in some texts u in umbe may represent the vowel [y].
Intimate Fusion. *j<n
about the reciprocal relations of the two races? No; on the contrary, the suggestiveness of these loans leaves nothing to be desired, they are historically significant enough. If the English loan-words in this period extend to spheres where other languages do not borrow, if the Scandinavian and the English languages were woven more intimately together, the reason must be a more in- timate fusion of the two nations than is seen anywhere else. They fought like brothers and afterwards settled down peaceably, like brothers, side by side. The num- bers of the Danish and Norwegian settlers must have been considerable, else they would have disappeared without leaving such traces in the language.
78. It might at the first blush seem reasonable to think that what was going on among Scandinavian sett- lers in England was parallel to what we see going on now in the United States. But there is really no great similarity between the two cases. The language of Scan- dinavian and other settlers in America is often a curious mixture, but it is very important to notice that it is i Danish or Norwegian, sprinkled with English words: 'han har fencet sin farm og venter en god krop' he has fenced his farm and expects a good crop; 'lad os krosse streeten' let us cross the street, 'tag det trae' take that tray; 'hun suede ham i courten for 25 000 daler' etc. But this is toto ccbIo different from the English language of the middle ages. And if we do not take into account those districts where Scandinavians constitute the im- mense majority of the population and keep up their old speech as pure as circumstances will permit, the children or at any rate the children's children of the immigrants speak English, and very pure English too without any Danish admixture. The English language of America has no loan-words worth mentioning from the languages of the thousands and thousands of Germans, Scandina-
78
IV. The Scandinavians.
vians, French, Poles and others that have settled there. Nor are the reasons far to seek.^ The immigrants come in small groups and find their predecessors half, or more than half, Americanized; those belonging to the same country cannot, accordingly, maintain their nationality i collectively; they come in order to gain a livelihood, | generally in subordinate positions where it is important to each of them separately to be as little different as possible from his new surroundings, in garb, in manners, and in language. The faults each individual commits in talking English, therefore, can have no con&jquences of lasting importance, and at any rate his children are in most respects situated like the children of the natives J and learn the same language in essentially the same manner. In old times, of course, many a Dane in Eng- land would speak his mother-tongue with a large admix- ture of English, but that has no significance in linguistic history, for in course of time the descendants of the im- migrants would no longer learn Scandinavian as their mother-tongue, but English. But that which is import- ant, is the fact of the English themselves intermingling their own native speech with Scandinavian elements. Now the manner in which this is done shows us that the culture or civilization of the Scandinavian settlers cannot have been of a higher order than that of the English, for then we should have seen in the loan-words special groups of technical terms indicative of this superi- ority. Neither can their state of culture have been much inferior to that of the English, for in that case they would have adopted the language of the natives without ap-
I See G. Hempl's valuable paper on Language -Rivalry and Speech - Differentiation in the case of Race Mixture. (Trans- act, of the Amer. Philol. Association, XXIX, 1898, p. 35). Hempl's very short mention of the Scandinavians in England, is , perhaps , the least satisfactory portion of his paper ; none of his classes apply to our case.
Speech Mixture. nq
preciably influencing it. This is what happened with the Goths in Spain, with the Franks in France and with the Danes in Normandy, in all of which cases the Ger- manic tongues were absorbed into the Romance lan- guages.^ It is true that the Scandinavians were, for a short time at least, the rulers of England, and we have found in the juridical loan-words linguistic corroboration of this fact; but the great majority of the settlers did not belong to the ruling class. Their social standing must have been, on the whole, slightly superior to the average of the English, but the difference cannot have been great, for the bulk of Scandinavian words are of a purely democratic character. This is clearly brought out by a comparison with the French words introduced in the following centuries, for here language confirms what history tells us, that the French represent the rich, the ruling, the refined, the aristocratic element in the Eng- lish nation. How different is the impression made by the Scandinavian loan-words. They are homely ex- pressions for things and actions of everyday importance; their character is utterly democratic. The difference is also shown by so many of the French words having never penetrated into the speech of the people, so that
I It is instructive to contrast the old speech - mixture in Eng- land with what has been going on for the last two centuries in the Shetland Islands. Here the old Norwegian dialect (' Norn ') has perished as a consequence of the natives considering it more genteel to speak English (Scotch). All common words of their speech now are English , but they have retained a certain number of Norn words, all of them technical, denoting different species of fish, fishing implements, small parts of the boat or of the house and its primitive furniture, those signs in clouds, i etc., from which the weather was forecast at sea, technicalities of sheep rearing, nicknames for things which appear to them ludicrous or ridiculous, etc. — all of them significant of the language of a subjugated and poor population. (J. Jakobsen, Det norr^me sprog pa Shetland, Copenhagen 1897.)
3o IV. The Scandinavians.
they have been known and used only by the 'upper ten', while the Scandinavian ones are used by high and low alike; their shortness too agrees with the mono- syllabic character of the native stock of words, conse- quently they are far less felt as foreign elements than^ many French words; in fact, in many statistical calcu- lations of the propoition of native to imported words in' English, Scandinavian words have been more or less in- advertently included in the native elements. Just as it is impossible to speak or write in English about higher intellectual or emotional subjects or about fashionable mundane matters without drawing largely upon the French (and Latin) elements, in the same manner Scan- dinavian words will crop up together with the Anglo- Saxon ones in any conversation on the thousand nothings of daily life or on the five or six things of paramount importance to high and low alike. An Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare. To this element of his language an Englishman might apply what Wordsworth says of the daisy:
Thou unassuming common -place Of Nature, with that homely face And yet with something of a grace Which Love makes for thee! —
79. The form in which the words were borrowed oc- casions very few remarks. Those nouns which in Scand. had the nominative ending -r, did not keep it, the kernel only of the word (= accus.) being taken over. In one instance the Norse genitive-ending appears in English; \ the Norse phrase d ndttar ]>eli 'in the middle of the night' ' (pel means 'power, strength') was Anglicized into on ; nighter tale (Cursor Mundi), or bi nighter tale (Havelock, ? * Chaucer etc.). The -t in neuters of adjectives, that
Grammar. 8 1
distinctive Scandinavian trait, is found in scani^, want ' and (a) thwart. Most Norse verbs have the weak inflexion in English, a3 might be expected {e. g. die, which in Old Scand. was a strong verb), but there is one noteworthy exception, take, that kept its Scand. strong inflection, ON. taka tdk taken. There are a few interesting words with the Scand. passive voice in -sk (from the reflexive pronoun sik): bask^ and busk^, but in English they are treated like active forms. The shortness of the ^^-forms may have led to their being taken over as inseparable wholes, for ON. otlask and privask lost the reflexive end- ing in English addle 'acquire, earn' and thrive.
80. As the Danes and the English could understand one another without much difficulty it was natural that many niceties of grammar should be sacrificed, the in- telligibility of either tongue coming to depend mainly on its mere vocabulary.* So when we find that the wearing away and leveUing of grammatical forms in the regions in which the Danes chiefly settled was a couple of centuries in advance of the same process in the more southern parts of the country, the conclusion does not seem unwairantable that this is due to the settlers who did not care to learn EngHsh correctly in every minute particular and who certainly needed no such accuracy in order to make themselves understood.
80 a. With regard to syntax our want of adequate early texts in Scandinavia as well as in North England makes
I Properly skammt, neuter of skammr 'short'; the derived verb skemta, Dan. skemte 'joke' is found in ME. skemten. ' 2 ON. bdba-sk 'bathe oneself rather than baka-sk 'bake oneself.
3 ON. bua-sk 'prepare oneself.
4 Jespersen, Progress iii Language, p. 173. Compare the ex- planation of the similar simplification of Dutch in South Africa given by H.Meyer, Die Sprache der Buren. (Gottingen 1901, p. 16.)
Jespersen: English. 2nd ed. 6
g2 / IV, The Scandinavians.
it impossible for us to state anything very definite; but the nature of those loans which we are able to verify, warrants the conclusion that the intimate fusion of the two languages must certainly have influenced syntactical relations, and when we find in later times numerous striking correspondences between English and Danish, it seems probable that some at least of them date from the viking settlements, i It is true, for instance, that rela- tive clauses without any pronoun are found in very rare cases in Old English; but they do not become common till the Middle English period, when they abound; the use of these clauses is subject to the same restrictions in both languages, so that in ninety out of a hundred instances where an Englishman leaves out the relative pronoun, a Dane would be able to do likewise, and vice versa. The rules for the omission or retention of the conjunction that are nearly identical. The use of will and shall in Middle English corresponds pietty nearly with Scandinavian; if in Old English an auxiliary was used to express futurity, it was generally sceal, just as in modern Dutch (sal) ; wile was rare. In Modern Enghsh the older rules have been greatly modified, but in many cases where English commentators on Shakespeare note divergences from modern usage, a Dane would have used the same verb as Shakespeare. Furness, in his note to the sentence 'Besides it should appear' (Merch. III. 2. 289 = 275 Globe ed.) writes: 'It is not easy to define this 'should' .... The Elizabethan use of should is to me always difficult to analyse. Compare Stephano's question about Caliban: 'Where the devil should he learn our language .f*' Now, a Dane would say 'det skulde, synes', and 'Hvor fanden skulde han laere vort sprog?' Abbott (Shakeip. Grammar § 319) says 'There is a diffi- culty in the expression 'perchance I will'; but, from its constant recurrence, it would seem to be a regular idiom';)
,»!
Syntax. g^
a Dane, in the three quotations given, would say vil. And similarly in other instances. *He could have done it' agrees with 'han kunde have gjort det' as against 'er hatte es tun konnen' (and French *il aurait pu le faire'), and the Scotch idiom 'He wad na wrang'd the vera Deir (Burns), 'ye wad thought Sir Arthur had a pleasure in it' (Scott), where Caxton and the Elizabethans could also omit have, has an exact parallel in Danish 'vilde gjort', etc. Other points in syntax might perhaps be ascribed to Scandinavian influence, such as the universal position of the genitive case before its noun (where Old English like German placed it very often after it), the use of a preposition governing a dependent clause (he talked of how people had injured him, found as early as Orrmulum; here German must say davon, wie, and Dutch er van hoe), etc.; but in these delicate matters it is not safe to assert too much, as in fact many similarities may have been independently developed in both lan- guages.
Chapter V. The French.
81. If with regard to the Scandinavian invasion histo- rical documents were so scarce that the linguistic evi- dence drawn from the number and character of the loan- words was a very important supplement to our histori- cal knowledge of the circumstances, the same cannot be said of the Norman Conquest. Tlhe Normans^ much more ^an the Danes, were felt as an alipn rarp; i-Viair occu- pation of the country attracted much more notice and lasted much longer; they became the ruling^class and as_^iidi_Jvere much more spoken of in contemporary literature and in historical records than the comparatively obscure Scandinavian element; and finally, they repre- sented ahigher culture than the natives and had a literature of their own, in which numerous direct state- ments and indirect hints tell us about their doings and their relations with the native population. No wonder, therefore, that historians should have given much more attention to this fuller material and to all the interesting problems connected with the Noiman conquest than to the race-mixture attending the Scandinavian immigra- tions. This is true in respect not only of political andjj social history, but also of the language, in which the Nor- man-French element is so conspicuous, and so easily ac- cessible to the student that it has been discussed very!] often and from various points of view. And yet, there is
II
The Rulers of England. 85
still much work for future investigators to do. In accord- ance with the geneial plan of my work, I shall in this chapter deal chiefly with what has been of permanent importance to the future of the English language, and endeavour to characterize the influence exercized by
(French as contrasted with that exercized by other lan- guages with which English has come into contact.
82. The. Normans hfrc^mp mac;<-pr<; nf_Fng1anH^ and
they remained masters for a sufficiently long time to leave a deep impress on the language. The conquerors were numerous and powerful, but the linguistic influence would have been far less if they had not continued for centuries in actual contact and constant intercourse with the French of France, of whom many were induced by later kings to settle in England. We need only go through a list of French loan-words in English to be firmly con- vinced of the fact that the immigrants formed the upper classes of the English societyjifter the conquestTso^any >of the woxds,are_distinctly aristocratic^ It is true that they left the old words king and queen intact, but apart from these nearly all words relating to government and to the highest administration are French; see, for in- stance, crown, state, government and to govern, reign^ realm (0. Fr. realme, Mod. Fr. royaume), sovereign^ country, power; minister, chancellor, council (and counsel), authority, parliament, exchequer. People and nation, too, were political words; the corresponding OE. Jjeod is not found latei than the thirteenth century. Feudalism was imported from France, and with it were introduced a number of words, such as fief, feudal, vassal, liege, and [ the names of the various steps in the scale of rank: j prince, peer, duke with duchess, marquis, viscount, baron^ I It is, perhaps, surprising that lord and lady should have [ remained in esteem, and that earl should have been i retained, count being chiefly used in speaking of for-
86 V. The French.
eigners, but the earl's wife was designated by the French word countess, and court is French, as well as the ad- jectives relating to court life, such as courteous, noble, fine and refined. Honour and glory belong to the French, and so does heraldry, while nearly all English expressions relating to that difficult science are of French origin, some of them curiously distorted.
83. The upper classes, as a matter of course, took into their hands the management of military matters; and although in some cases it was a long time before the old native terms were finally displaced {here and fird, for instance, were used till the fifteenth century when army began to be common), we have a host of French mili- tary words, many of them of very early introduction. Such are war (ME. werre. Old North Fr. werre, Central French guerre) and peace, battle, arms, armour, buckler, hauberk, mail (chain-mail; O Fr. maille 'mesh of a net'), lance, dart, cutlass, banner, ensign, assault, siege, etc. Further officer, colonel, chieftain {captain is later), lieu- tenant, sergeant, soldier, troops, dragoon, vessel, navy and admiral (orig. amiral in English as in French, ultimately an Arabic word). Some words which are now used very extensively outside the military sphere, were without any doubt at first purely military, such as challenge^ enemy, danger, escape (scape), espy (spy), aid, prison^ hardy, gallant, march, force, company, guard, etc.
84. Another natural consequence of the power of the Norman upper classes is that most of the terms per- taining to the law are of French origin, such as justice, just, judge; jury, court (we have seen the word already in another sense), suit, sue, plaintiff and defendant, a plea, plead, to summon, cause, assize, session, attorney, fee, ac- cuse, crime, guile, felony, traitor, damage, dower, heritage, property, real estate, tenure, penalty, demesne, injury, priv ilege. Some of these are now hardly to be called tech-
i]
Military and Legal Words. 87
nical juridical words, and there are others which belong still more to the ordinary vocabulary of every-day life, but which were undoubtedly at first introduced by lawyers at the time when procedure was conducted entirely in French^; for instance, case, marry, marriage, oust, prove^ false (pel haps also fault), heir, probably also male and female, while defend and prison are common to the juri- dical and the military worlds. Petty (Fr. petit) was, I suspect, introduced by the jurists in such combinations as petty jury, petty larceny, petty constable, petty sessions, petty averages, petty treason (still often spelt petit treason), etc., before it was used commonly. The French puis ne in its legal sense remains puisne in English (in law it means 'younger or inferior in rank', but originally 'later born*), while in ordinary language it has adopted the spell- ing puny, as if the -y had been the usual adjective ending. 85. Besides, there are a good many words that have never become common property, but have been known to jurists only, such as mainour (to be taken with the mainour, to be caught in the very act of steahng, from Fr. manoeuvre), jeofail ('an oversight', the acknowledge- ment of an error in pleading, from je faille), cestui que trust, cestui (a) que vie and other phrases equally shrouded in mystery to the man in the street. Larceny has been almost exclusively the property of lawyers, so that it has not ousted theft from general use; such words as thief and steal were of course too popular to be displanted by French juridical terms, though burglar is probably of French origin. It is also worth observing how many of the phrases in which the adjective is invariably placed
I From 1362 English was established as the official lan- guage spoken in the courts of justice , yet the curious mongrel language known as 'Law French' continued in use there for centuries; Cromwell tried to break its power, but it was not finally abolished till an act of Parliament of i73i-
38 V. The French.
after its noun, are law terms, taken over bodily from the French, e. g. heir male, issue male, fee simple, proof \ demonstrative, malice prepense (or, Englished, malice aforethought)'^, letters patent (formerly also with the ad- jective inflected, letters patents, Shakesp. R 2 II i. 202), attorney general (and other combinations of general, all of which are official, though some of them are not juridical).
86. As ecclesiastical matters were also chiefly under the control of the higher classes, we find a great many French words connected with the ch\irch, such as religion, service, trinity, saviour, virgin, angel (O Fr. angele, now Fr. ange; the OE. word engel was taken direct from Latin, see § 38), saint, relic, abbey, cloister, friar (ME. frere as in French), clergy, parish, baptism, sacrifice, orison, homily, altar, miracle, preach, pray, prayer, sermon, psalter (ME. sauter), feast ('religious anniversary'). Words like rule, lesson, save, tempt, blame, order, nature, which now belong ' to the common language and have very extensive ranges of signification, were probably at first purely ecclesiasti- cal words. As the clergy were, moreover, teachers of morality as well as of religion they introduced the whole gamut of words pertaining to moral ideas from virtue to vice: duty, conscience, grace, charity, cruel, chaste , covet , desire , lechery, fool (one of the oldest meanings is 'sensual'), jealous, pity, discipline, mercy, and others.
87. To these words, taken from different domains, may be added other words of more general meaning, which are highly significant as to the relations between the Normans and the English, such as sir and madam, master and mistress with their contrast servant (and the verb to serve), further command and obey, order, rent, rich and
I Cf. also lords spiritual and lords temporal', the body politic.
Masters and Servants. 8q
poor with the nouns riches and poverty; money, interest^ cash, rent, etc.
88. It is a remark that was first made by John WaHis^ and that has been very often repeated, especially since Sir Walter Scott made it popular in 'Ivanhoe', that while the names of seveial animals in their lifetime are English (oXf cow, calf, sheep, swine, boar, deer) they appear on the table with French names (heef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, brawn, venison). This is generally explained | from the masters leaving the care of the living animals to the lower classes, while they did not leave much of 1 the meat to be eaten by them. But it may with just as i much right be contended that the use of the French words here is due to the superiority of the French cuisine, which is shown by a great many other words as well, such as sauce, boil, fry, roast, toast, pasty, pastry, soup, sausage, jelly, dainty; while the humbler breakfast is Eng- lish, the more sumptuous meals, dinner and supper, as well as feasts generally, are French.
89. We see on the whole that the masters knew how to enjoy life and secure the best things to themselves; / note also such words as joy and pleasure, delight, ease' and comfort] flowers and fruits may be mentioned in the same category. And if we go through the different ob- jects or pastimes that make life enjoyable to people having plenty of leisure (this word, too, is French) we shall find an exceedingly large number of French words. The chase^ of course was one of the favourite pastimes, and though the native hunt was never displaced, yet we find many French terms relating to the chase, such as brace and couple, leash, falcon, quarry, warren, scent, track. The general term sport, too, is of course a French
1 Grammatica linguae Anglicanae 1653.
2 This is the Central French form of the word that was taken over in a North French dialectal form as catch (Latin captiare).
go V. The French.
word; it is a shortened form of desport (disport). Cards and dice are French words, and so are a great many words relating to different games (partner, suit, trump), some of the most interesting being the numerals used by card and dice players: ace, deuce, tray, cater, cinque, size; cf. Chaucer's 'Sevene is my chaunce, and thyn is cynk and treye' (C 653).
90. The French led the fashion in the middle ages, just as they do to some extent even now, so we expect to find a great many French words relating to dress; in fact, in going through Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where in introducing his gallery of figures he seldom omits to mention their dress, one will -see that in nearly all cases where etymologists have been .able to trace the special names of particular garments to their sources these are French. And of course, such general terms as apparel, dress, costume, and garment are derived from the same language.
91. The French were the teachers of the English in most things relating to art; not only such words as art, beauty, colour, image, design, figure, ornament, to paint, but also the greater number of the more special words of technical significance are French; from architecture may be mentioned, by way of specimens: arch, tower, pillar, vault, porch, column, aisle, choir, reredos, transept, chapel, cloister (the last of which belong here as well as to our § 86), not to mention palace, castle, manor, mansion, etc. If we go through the names of the various kinds of artisans, etc., we cannot fail to be struck with the dif- ference between the more homely or more elementary occupations which have stuck to their old native names (such as baker, miller, smith, weaver, saddler, shoemaker, wheelwright, -fisherman, shepherd, and others), on the one hand, and on the other those which brought their practi- tioners into more immediate contact with the upper
Dress, Art, Phrases. gi
classes, or in which fashion perhaps played a greater part; these latter have French names, for instance, tailor^ butcher, mason, painter, carpenter and joiner (note also such words as furniture, chair, table etc.).
92. I am afraid I have tired the reader a little with all these long lists of words. My purpose was to give abundant linguistic evidence for the fact that the French were the rich, the powerful, and the refined classes. It was quite natural that the lower classes should soon begin to imitate such of the expressions of the rich as they could catch the meaning of. They would adopt inter- jections and exclamations like alas, certes, sure, adieu; and perhaps verray (later very) was at first introduced as an exclamation. Whole phrases were adopted: in the Ancrene Riwle (about 1225) we find (p. 268) Deu- leset (Dieu le sait) in two manuscripts while a third has j Crist hit wat; and three hundred years later, we find 'As good is a becke (= a wink), as is a dewe vow garde* (Bale, Three Lawes I. 1470). As John of Salisbury (Johannes Sarisberiensis) says expressly in the twelfth century^, it was the fashion to interlard one's speech with f French words; they were thought modish, and that will account for the fact that many non - technical ij words too were taken over, such as ai>, flg^ (juridical.?), ' arrive (military.?), beast, change, cheer, cover, cry, debt (juridical.?), feeble, large, letter, manner, matter, nurse and nourish, place, point, price, reason, turn, use, and a great many other everyday words of very extensive employment. 93. If, then, the English adopted so many French words because it was the fashion in every respect to imitate their 'betters', we are allowed to connect this adoption of non-technical words with that trait of their N character which in its exaggerated form has in modern times been termed snobbism or toadyism, and which
1 Quoted by D. Behrens, Paul's Grundriss 1-963-
92
V. The French.
has made certain sections of the English people more interested in the births, deaths and especially marriages of dukes and marquises than in anything else outside their own small personal sphere.
94. But when we trace this feature of snobbishness back to the first few centuries after the Norman conquest, we must not forget that there were great differences, so that some people would affect many French words and others would stick as far as possible to the native stock of words. We see this difference in the literary works that have come down to us. In Layamon's 'Brut', written very early in the thirteenth century and amounting in all to more than 56,000 short lines, the number of words of Anglo-French origin is only about 150.^ The *Orr- mulum', which was writter perhaps tw^enty years later, contains more than 20,000 lines, yet even Kluge, who criticizes the view that this very tedious work contains no French words, has not been able to find in it more than twenty odd words of French origin.^ But in the con- temporary prose work 'Ancrene Riwle', we find on 200 pages about 500 French words. A couple of centuries later, it would be a much harder task to count the French words in any author, as so many words had already be- come part and parcel of the English language; but even then one author used many more than another. Chaucer undoubtedly employs a far greater number of French words than most other writers of his time. Nor would it be fair to ascribe all these borrowings to what I have mentioned as snobbism; the greater a writer's familiarity with French culture and literature, the
n
1 Skeat, Principles of English Etymology , IT (1891) p. 8; Morris, Historical Outl. of Engl. Accidence (1885) p. 338.
2 Kluge, Das franzosische element im Orrmulum, Englische Studien, XXII p. 179.
Date of Adoption. q3
greater would be his temptation to introduce French words for everything above the commonplaces of daily life. 95. The following table shows the strength of the in- flux of French words at different periods; it comprises one thousand words (the first hundred French words in the New English Dictionary for each of the first nine letters and the first 50 for / and /) and gives the half-century to which the earliest quotation in that Dictionary belongs.^
Before 1050 .... 2
105 1 — 1 100 2
iioi — 1150 I
1151 — 1200 15
1201 — 1250 64
1251 — 1300 127
1301 — 1350 120
1351 — 1400 180
1401 — 1450 70
145 1 — 1500 ^^
I50I— 1550 84
I55I— 1600 91
I60I — 1650 69
1651 — 1700 34
1701 — 1750 24
1751 — 1800 16
1801 — 1850 23
1851 — 1900 2
1000
I I have followed the authority of the same Dictionary also in regard to the question of the origin of the words, reckoning thus as French some words which I should, perhaps, myself have called Latin. Derivative words that have certainly or probably arisen in English (e. g. daintily, damageable) have been excluded, as also those perfectly unimportant words for which the N. E. D. gives less than five quotations. Most of them cannot really be said to have ever belonged to the English language. Cf. also R. Mettig, Die franz. elemente im alt- und mittelengl. Engl. St. 41. i76fF.)
\
/
QA V. The French.
The list shows conclusively that the linguistic in- fluence did not begin immediately after the conquest, and that it was strongest in the years 125 1 — 1400, to which nearly half of the borrowings belong (42.7 p. c). Further it will be seen that the common assumption that the age of Dryden was particularly apt to intro- duce new words from French is very far from being correct.
96. In a well-known passage, Robert of Gloucester (ab. 1300) speaks about the relation of the two lan- guages in England: 'Thus, he says, England came into Normandy's hand; and the Normans at that time iJ)o; it is important not to overlook this word) could speak only their own language, and spoke French just as they did at home, and had their children taught in the same manner, so that people of rank in this country who came of their blood all stick to the same language that they received of them, for if a man knows no French people will think little of him. But the lower classes still^ stick to English and to their own language. I imagine there are in all the world no countries that do not keep their own language except England alone. But it is well known that it is the best thing to know both languages, for the more a man knows the mpre is he worth.' This passage raises the question: How did com- mon people manage to learn so many foreign words? — and how far did they assimilate them?
97. In a few cases the process of assimilation was facilitated by the fact that a French word happened to resemble an old native one; this was sometimes the natural consequence of French having in some previous period borrowed the corresponding word from some Ger-
I yute 'yet'; sometimes curiously mistranslated, hold to their own £^ood speech.
4i
How was French learnt? nc
manic dialect. Thus no one can tell exactly how much modern rich owes to OE. rice 'powerful, rich' and how much to French riche; the noun (Fr. and ME.) richesse (now riches) supplanted the early ME. richedom. The old native verb choose was supplemented with the noun choice from Fr. choix. OE. hergian and OFr. herier^ harier, run together in Mod. E. harry; OE. hege and Fr. haie run together in hay 'hedge, fence'. It is difficult to separate two main's, one of which is OE. mcegen 'strength, might' and the other OFr. maine (Latin mag- nus] the root of both words is ultimately the same), cf. main sea and main force. The modern gain (noun and verb) was borrowed in the fifteenth century from French {gain, gaain; gagner gaaignier, cf. It. guadagnare, a Ger- manic loan), but it curiously coincided with an earlier noun gain (also spelt gein, geyn, gayne, etc., oldest form ga^henn), which meant 'advantage, use, avail, benefit, i remedy' and a verb gain (gayne, ge^^nenn) 'to be suit- able or useful, avail, serve', both from Old Norse. When French isle (now He) was adopted, it could not fail to remind the English of their old iegland. Hand and eventually it corrupted the spelling of the latter into is- land, Neveu (now spelled nephew) recalled OE. nefa^ meneye [menye, Fr. maisnie 'retinue, troop') recalled many (OE. menigeo), and lake, the old lacu 'stream, river. '^ There is some confusion between Eng. rest (repose) and OF. rest (remainder). In grammar, too, there were a few correspondences, as when nouns had the voiceless and the corresponding verbs the voiced consonants; French us — user, now use sb. pronounced [ju's], vb. [j^'z] just as Eng. house sb. [haus], vb. [hauz]; French grief — griever, Eng. grief — grieve just as half — halve. Note also the formation of nouns in -er [baker, etc.), which is
I This is still the meaning of lake in some dialects.
t
96
V. The French.
hardly distinguishable from French formations in words like carpenter (Fr. -ier), interpreter (ME. interpretour, Fr. -eur), etc. But on the whole such more or less accidental similarities between the two languages were few in num- ber and could not materially assist the English popu- lation in learning the new words that were flooding their language.
98. A greater assistance may perhaps have been de- rived from a habit which may have been common in con- versational speech, and which was at any rate not un- common in writing, that of using a French word side by side with its native synonym, the latter serving more or less openly as an interpretation of the former for the benefit of those who were not yet familiar with the more refined expression. Thus in the Ancrene Riwle (ab. 1225): cherit6 )?et is luve (p. 8) | in desperaunce, pet is, in unhope & in unbileave forte beon iboruwen (p. 8) | Understonde^ )?et two manere temptaciuns — two kunne vondunges — beo^ (p. 180) | pacience, J^et is )?olemod- nesse (ibid.) | lecherie, pet is, golnesse (p. 198) | igno- raunce, pet is unwisdom & unwitenesse (p. 278). I quote from Behrens's collection of similar collocations^ the follow- ing instances that prove conclusively that the native word was then better known than the imported one: bigamie is unkinde [unnatural] J^ing, on engleis tale twiewifing (Genesis & Exod. 449) | twelfe iferan, pe Freinsce heo cleopeden dusze pers (Layamon I. I. 69) ] J7at craft: to lokie in J?an lufte, pe craft his ihote [is called] astronomic in o]7er kunnes speche [in a speech of a different kind] (ib. II. 2. 598). It is well worth observing that in all these cases the French words are perfectly familiar to a modern reader, while he will probably re-
I Franz. Studien V. 2 p, 8 Cf. also 'of whiche tribe, that is to seye, kynrede Jesu Crist was bom' (Maundeville 67).
Tautology. n ^
quire an explanation of the native words that served then to interpret the others. In Chaucer we find similar double expressions, but they are now introduced for a totally different purpose; the reader is evidently sup- posed to be equally familiar with both, and the writer uses them to heighten or strengthen the effect of the style^; for instance: He coude songes make and wel endyte (A 95) = Therto he coude endyte and make a thing (A 325) | faire and fetisly (A 124 and 273) | swinken with his handes and laboure (A 186) | Of studie took he most cure and most hede (A 303) | Poynaunt and sharp (A 352) | At sessiouns ther was he lord and sire (A 355). ^ In Caxton this has become quite a mannerism, see, e. g. I shal so awreke and avenge this trespace (Reynard 56, cf. p. 116 advenge and wreke it) 1 in honour and worship (ib. p. 56) | olde and auncyent doctours (p. 62) | feblest and wekest (p. 64) I I toke a glasse or a mirrour (p. 83) | Now ye
shal here of the mirrour \ the glas [P- 84) | good
ne prof[yt (p, 86) | fowle and dishonestly (p. 94) | prouffyt and for dele (p. 103). It will be observed that with the exception of the last word, the language has preserved in all cases both the synonyms that Caxton uses side by side, so that we may consider this part of the English vocabulary as settled towards the end of the fifteenth century.
99. Many of the French words, such as cry, claim, state, poor, change, and, indeed, most of the words enu-
' 1 This use of two expressions for the same idea is extremely :[ common in the middle ages and the beginning of the modem 5 period, and it is not confined to those cases where one was a f native and the other an imported word; see Kellner, Engl. \ Studien XX p. iiff. (1895); Greenough and Kittredge, Words j and their Ways, p. iisff.; so also in Danish, see ViHi. Andersen :| in Dania p. 86 ff. (1890) and Danske Studier 1893, p. jff. f 2 Cf. also, Curteys he was, lowly, and servisable (A 99); Cur- ' teys he was, and lowly of servyse (A 250).
Jespersen: English. 2nd ed. 7
gg V, The French.
merated above, (§ 82 — 92), and one might say, nearly all the words taken over before 1350 and not a few of those of later importation, have become part and parcel of the English language, so that they appear to us all just as English as the pre-Conquest stock of native words. But a great many others have never become so popular. There are a great many gradations between words of everyday use and such as are not at all understood by the common people, and to the latter class may sometimes belong words which literary people would think familiar to everybody. Hyde Clark relates an anecdote of a clergyman who blamed a brother preacher for using the word felicity J *I do not think all your hearers understood it; I should say happiness.' *I can hardly think,' said the other, 'that any one does not know what felicity means, and we will ask this ploughman near us. Come hither, my man ! you have been at church and heard the sermon; you heard me speak of felicity; do you know what it means?' *Ees, sir!' 'Well, what does felicity mean?' 'Summut in the inside of a pig, but I can't say altogether what.'^ — Note also the way in which Touch- stone addresses the rustic in As You Like It (V. I. 52) 'Therefore, you Clowne, abandon, — which is in the vulgar leave, — the societie — which in the boorish is companie, — of this female, — which in the common is woman; which together is, abandon the society of this Female, or, Clowne, thou perishest; 01, to thy better understanding, dyest.'
100. From what precedes we are now in a position to understand some at least of the differences that have developed in course of time between two synonyms when both have survived, one of them native, the other French.
i
I A Grammar of the English Tongue. 4 th ed. London 1879. 61.
i
Synonyms. ng
The former is always nearer the nation's heart than the latter, it has the strongest associations with everything primitive, fundamental, popular, while the French word is often more formal, more polite, more refined and has a less strong hold on the emotional side of Hfe. A cottage is finer than a hut, and fine people often live in a cottage, at any rate in summer 'The word hill was too vulgar and famihar to be apphed to a hawk, which had only a heak (the French term, whereas bill is the A. S. bile), 'Ye shall say, this hauke has a large beke, or a short beke, and call it not bille' \ Book of St. Alban's, fol. a 6, back'.^ — To dress means to adorn, deck, etc., and thus generally presupposes a finer garment than the old word to clothe^ the wider signification of which it seems, however, to be more and more appropriating to itself. Amity means 'friendly relations, especially of a public character be- tween states or individuals', and thus lacks the warmth of friendship. The difference between help and aid is thus indicated in the Funk-Wagnalls Dictionary: 'Help ex- presses greater dependence and deeper need than aid. In extremity we say 'God help me!' rather than 'God aid me !' In time of danger we cry 'help! help!' rather than ^aid! aid!' To aid is to second another's own exer- tions. We can speak of helping the helpless, but not of aiding them. Help includes aid, but aid may fall short of the meaning of help.' All this amounts to the same thing as saying that help is the natural expression, be- longing to the indispensable stock of words and there- fore possessing more copious and profounder associations than the more literary and accordingly colder word aid. Folk has to a great extent been superseded by people, chiefly, I suppose, on account of the political and social employment of the word; Shakespeare rarely uses folk
I Skeat, The Works of G. Chaucer, vol. Ill p. 261.
7*
lOo ^ • The French.
{4 times) and folks (ten times), and the word is evidently a low-class word with him; it is rare in the Authorized Version, and Milton never uses it; but in recent usage folk seems to have been gaining ground, partly, perhaps, from antiquarian and dialectal causes. Hearty and cor- dial made their appearance in the language at the same time (the oldest quotations 1380 and 1386, NED.), but where they signify the same thing their force is not the same, for *a hearty welcome' is warmer than 'a cordial welcome', and hearty has many applications that cordial has not (heartfelt, sincere; vigorous: a hearty slap on the back; abundant: a hearty meal), etc. Saint smacks of the official recognition by the Catholic Church, while holy refers much more to the mind. Matin(s) is used only with reference to church service, while morning is the ordinary word. Compare also darling with favourite, deep with profound, lonely with solitary, indeed with in fact, to give or to hand with to present or to deliver, love with charity, etc.
101. In some cases the chief difference between the native word and the French synonym is that the former is more colloquial and the latter more literary, e. g. begin — commence, hide — conceal, feed — nourish, hinder — pre- vent, look for — search for, inner and outer — interior and exterior, and many others. In a few cases, however, the native word is more literary. Valley is the everyday word, and dale has only lately been introduced into the standard language from the dialects of the hilly northern counties. Action has practically supplanted deed in ordi- nary language, so that the latter can be reserved for more dignified speech.
102. In spite of the intimate contact between French and English it sometimes happens that French words which have been introduced into other Germanic lan- guages and belong to their everyday vocabulary are not
Colloquial and ' literary. , I O i
found in English or are there much more felt to be foreign intruders than in German or Danish. This is true for instance of friseur, manchette, replique, of gene and the verb gener (the NED. has no instances of it, but a few are found in the Stanford Diet.). Serviette is rarer than napkin. Atelier is not common; it occurs in Thackeray's The Newcomes p. 242, where immediately afterwards the familiar word studio is used: did EngHsh artists go more to Italy and less to Paris to learn their craft than their Scandinavian and German confreres? To the same class belong the following words, which, when found in English books, are generally indicated to be foreign by
; italic letters: na'ive^ bizarre, and motif, — the last word
|| an interesting recent doublet of motive.
103. As the grammatical systems of the two languages were very different, a few remarks must be made here
I about the form in which French words were adopted. Substantives and adjectives^were nearly always taken over in the accusative case, which differed in most words from the nominative in having no s. The latter ending is, however, found in a few words, such as fitz (Fitzher- bert, etc.; in French, too, the nominative fils has ousted the old ace. fil', fitz is an Anglo-Norman spelling), fierce (0 Fr. nom. fiers, ace. fier), and James.^ In the plural,
ll' Old French had a nominative without any ending and an accusative in -s, and English popular instinct natur-
I But Chaucer Yizs by seint Jame (riming with name, D. 1443). A similar vacillation is found in the name Steven Stephen, where now the j-less form has prevailed, but where formerly the Fr. nom. was also found (seynt stevyns, Malory 104). — Where the French inflexion was irregular, owing to Latin stress shifting, etc., the accusative was adopted, in emperof (■our, O Fr. nom. emperere), companion (O Fr. nom. compain), neveu, nephew (O Fr. nom. nies) and others, but the nom. is kept in stre (O Fr. ace. seigno?), mayor (O Fr. maire, ace. majeur).
IQ2 V. The French.
ally associated the' 'latter form with the common English plural ending in -es. In course of time those words which had for a long time, in English as in French, formed their plural without any ending (e. -g. cas) were made to conform with the general rule (sg. case, pi. cases). ^ — French adjectives had the s added to them just like French nouns, and we find a few adjectives with the plural 5, as in the goddes celestials (Chaucer); letters patents survived as a fixed group till the time of Shakespeare (§ 85). But the general rule was to treat French adjectives exactly like English ones.
104. As to the verbs, the rule is that the stem of the French present plural served as basis for the English form; thus (je survis), nous survivons, vous survivez, Us survivent became survive, (je resous), resolvons, etc., be- came resolve, O Fr. (je desjeun), nous disnons, etc., be- came dine; thus is explained the frequent ending -ish, in punish, finish, etc. English hound (to leap), accordingly, cannot be the French hondir, which would have yielded hondish, but is an English formation from the noun bound, which is the French bond. I think that levy is similarly formed on the noun levy, which is Fr. levee; but in sally the y represents the i which made the Fr. // mouilU. Where the French infinitive was imported it was generally in a substantival function, as in dinner, remainder, at- tainder, rejoinder, cf. the verbs dine, remain, attain, rejoin; so also the law terms merger, user, and misnomer. Still we have a few verbs in which the ending -er can hardly be anything else but the French infinitive ending: render (which is thereby kept distinct from rend), sur-
I Note invoice, trace (part of a horse's harness), and quince, where the French plural ending now forms part of the English singular; cf. Fr. envoi, trait, coign.
Grammar. 103
render, tender (where the doublet tend also exists), and perhaps broider (embroider) . There is a curious parallel to the Norse bask and busk (79) in saunter, where the French reflective pronoun has become fixed as an insep- arable element of the word, from s'auntrer, another form for s'aventurer 'to adventure oneself.
105. French words have, as a matter of course, parti- cipated in all the sound changes that have taken place in English since their adoption. Thus words with the long [i] sound have had it diphthongized into [ai], e. g. fine, price, lion. The long [u], written ou, has similarly- become [au], e. g. O Fr. espouse (Mod. Fr. Spouse), M. E. spouse, pronounced [spu'za], now pron. [spauz], Fr. tour, Mod. E. tower. Compare also the treatment of the vowels in grace, change, beast (OFr. beste), ease (Fr. aise)^ etc. Such changes of loan-words are seen everywhere: they are brought about gradually and insensibly. But there is another change which has often been supposed to have come about in a different manner. A great many words are now stressed on the first syllable which in French were stressed on the final syllable, and this is often ascribed to the inability of the English to imitate the French accentuation. All English words, it is said, had the stress on the first syllable, and this habit was unconsciously extended to foreign words on their first adoption into the language. We see this manner of treating foreign words in Icelandic at the present day. But the explanation does not hold good in our case. English had a few words with unstressed first syllable [be-, for-, etc., see above, § 25), and as a matter of fact, French words in English were for centuries accented in the French manner, as shown conclusively by Middle English poetry. It was only gradually that more and more words had their accent shifted on to its present place. The causes of this shifting were the same as are else-
J04 ^- The French.
where at work in the same direction.^ In many words the first syllable was felt as psychologically the most im- portant one, as in punish, finish, matter, manner, royal, army and other words ending with meaningless or form- ative syllables. The initial syllable very often received the accent of contrast. In modern speech we stress the otherwise unstressed syllables to bring out a contrast clearly, as in 'not oppose but suppose' or 'If on the one hand speech gives ^;vpression to ideas, on the other hand it receives impressions from them' (Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, p. 238), and in the same manner we must imagine that in the days when real, formal, object, subject and a hundred similar words were normally stressed on the last syllable, they were so often contrasted with each other that the modern accentuation became grad- ually the habitual one. This will explain the accent of January, February, cavalry, infantry, primary, orient and other words. An equally powerful principle is rhythm, which tends to avoid two consecutive strong syllables; compare modern go down^stairs, but the ^downstairs room, St. Paul's church^yard, but the ^churchyard wall. Chaucer stresses many words in the French manner, except when they precede a stressed syllable, in which case the accent is shifted, thus co^syn (cousin), but ^cosyn ^myn; in felici'te par^flt, but a ^verray ^parfit ^gentil ^knight; severe (secret), but in hecre wyse, etc. An instructive illus- tration is found in such a line as this (Cant. Tales D i486):
In 'divers 'art and in di'vers fi'gures.
These principles — value-stressing, contrast, rhythm — will explain all or most of the instances in which Eng- lish has shifted the French stress; but it is evident that it took a very long time before the new forms of the
I See the detailed exposition in my Modern English Gram- mar (Heidelberg, Carl Winter) 1909 ch. V.
Accent; Hybrids. 105
words which arose at first only occasionally through their influence were powerful enough finally to supplant the older forms. ^
106. Not long after the intrusion of the first French words we begin to see the first traces of a phenomenon which was to attain very great proportions and which must now be termed one of the most prominent features of the language, namely hybridism. Strictly speaking, we have a hybrid (a composite word formed of elements from different languages) as soon as an English inflexion- al ending is added to a French word, as in the genitive the Duke's children or the superlative noblest, etc., and from such instances we rise by insensible gradations to others, in which the fusion is more surprising. From the very first we find verbal nouns in -ing or -ung formed from French verbs (indeed, they are found at a tim.e when they could not be formed from every native verb, § 200), e. g. prechinge; riwlunge (Ancrene Riwle); scor- nunge and servinge (Layamon) ; spusinge (Owl & N.), Other instances of English endings added to French words are faintness (from the end of the fourteenth century), closeness (half a century later), secretness (Chaucer se- creenesse B 773), simpleness (Shakespeare and others), materialness (Ruskin), ahnormalness (Benson)^ etc. Fur- ther, a great many adjectives in -ly (courtly, princely, etc.) and, of course, innumerable adverbs with the same en- ding (faintly, easily, nobly); adjectives in -ful (beautiful, dutiful, powerful, artful) and -less (artless, colourless); nouns in -ship (courtship, companionship) and -dom (dukedom, martyrdom) and so forth.
I In recent borrowings the accent is not shifted, of. machine, intrigue, where the retention of the French /-sound is another sign that the words are of comparatively modem introduction.
lo6 V. The French.
107. While hybrid words of this kind are found in comparatively great numbers in most languages, hybrids of the other kind, i. e. composed of a native stem and a foreign ending, are in most languages much rarer than in English. Before such hybrids could be formed, there must have been already in the language so great a num- ber of foreign words with the same ending that the form- ation would be felt to be perfectly transparent. Here are to be mentioned the numerous hybrids in -ess (shep- herdess, goddess; Wycliffe has dwelleresse; in a recent volume I have found 'seeress and prophetess'), in -ment (endearment and enlightenment are found from the 17th century, but bewilderment not before the 19th; wonder- ment, frequent in Thackeray; oddment, R. Kipling, hut- ment), in -age (mileage, acreage, leakage, shrinkage, wrappage, breakage, cleavage, roughage, shortage, etc.); in -ance (hindrance, used in the fifteenth century in the meaning 'injury'; in the signification now usual it is found as early as 1526, and perhaps we may infer from its occurring neither in the Bible, nor in Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, that it was felt to be a bastard, though Locke, Cowper, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson ad- mit it; forbearance, originally a legal term; further- ance); in -ous (murderous; thunderous; slumberous is used by Keats and Carlyle); in -ry (fishery, bakery, etc.; gossipry, Mrs. Browning; Irishry; forgettery jocularly formed after memory); in -ty (oddity, womanity nonce- word after humanity): in -fy (fishify, Shakespeare; snug- gify, Ch, Lamb; Torify, Ch. Darwin; scarify, Fielding; tipsify, Thackeray; funkify; speechify^ with the corre- {^ sponding nouns in -fication (uglification, Shelley).'^
1 Cf. also 'Daphne — before she was happily treeified', Lowell, Fable for Critics.
2 See below on hybrids with Latin and Greek endings
(S 123).
1
Hybridism. 1 07
108. One of the most fertile English derivative endings is -able, which has been used in a great number of words besides those French ones which were taken over ready made (such as agreeable^ variable, tolerable). In comparatively few cases it is added to substantives (serviceable, companionable , marriageable, peaceable, seasonable). Its proper sphere of usefulness is in forming adjectives from verbs, rarely in an active sense [suitable = that suits, unshrinkable), but generally in a passive sense {bearable = that can or may be borne). Thus we have now drinkable, eatable, steer able (balloons) , weavable , unutterable , answerable , punish- able, unmistakable, etc., and hundreds of others, so that everybody has a feeling that he is free to form a new adjective of this kind as soon as there is any necessity for, or convenience in, using it, just as he feels no hesitation in adding -ing to any verb, new or old. And of course, no one ever objects to these ad- jectives (or the corresponding nouns in -ability) because they are hybrids or bastards, any more than one would object to forms like acting or remembering on the same score.
109. These adjectives have now become so indispen- sable that the want is even felt of forming them from composite verbal expressions, such as get at. But though get-at-able and come-at-able are pretty frequently heard in conversation, most people shrink from writing or print- ing them. Sterne has come- at- ability. Smiles get-at- ability, and George Eliot in a letter knock-upable. Tenny- son, too, writes in a jocular letter, 'thinking of you as no longer the comeatable runupableto, smokeablewith J. S. of old.' Note here the place of the preposition in the last two adjectives, and compare 'enough to make the house unliveable in for a month' (The Idler, May 1892, 366) and 'the husband being fairly good-natured
Io8 V. The French.
and livable-with' (Bernard Shaw, Ibsenism 41). It is obvious that these adjectives are too clumsy to be ever extensively used in serious writing. But there is an- other way out of the difficulty which is really much more conformable to the genius of the language, namely to leave out the preposition in all those cases where there can be no doubt of the preposition understood. Unac- countable {= that cannot be accounted for) has long been accepted by everybody; I have found it, for instance, in Congreve, Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, De Quincey, Miss Austen, Dickens and Hawthorne. Indispensable has been — well, indispensable, for two centuries and a half. Laughable is used by Shake- speare, Dryden, Carlyle, Thackeray, etc. Dependable, disposable , and available are in general use.^ All this being granted, it is difficult to see why reliable should be the most abused word of the English language. It is certainly formed in accordance with the funda- mental laws of the language; it is short and unam- biguous, and what more should be needed.? Those who measure a word by its age will be glad to hear that Miss Mabel Peacock has found it in a letter, bearing the date of 1624, from the pen of the Rev. Richard Mountagu, who eventually became a bishop. And those who do not like using a word unless it has been accepted by great writers will find a formidable array of the best names in Fitzedward Hall's list^ of
1 Miss Austen writes, 'There will be work for five sum- mers before the place is liveable (Mansf. Park 216) = the above-mentioned liveable- in. Cf. below gazee and others in -ee (§ III) The principle of formation is the same as in Tvaite? 'he who waits on people', calle? 'he who calls on some one'.
2 On English Adjectives in -able, with special reference to reliable. London 1877. Fitzedward Hall reverted to the sub- ject on several other occasions.
i
Reliable. lOO
authors who have used the word.^ It is curious to note that the word which is always extolled at the expense of reliable as an older and nobler word, namely trustworthy, is really much younger: at any rate, I have not been able to trace it further back than the beginning of the nine- teenth century; besides, any impartial judge will find its sound less agreeable to the ear on account of the consonant group — stw — and the heavy second syllable.
110. Fitzedward Hall in speaking about the recent word aggressive^ says, 'It is not at all certain whether the French agressif suggested aggressive^ or was suggest- ed by it. They may have appeared independently of each other/ The same remark applies to a great many other formations on a French or Latin basis; even if the several components of a word are Romance, it by no means follows that the word was first used by a French- man. On the contrary, the greater facility and the greater boldness in forming new words and turns of expression which characterizes English generally in contradistinction to French, would in many cases speak in favour of the assumption that an innovation is due to an English mind. This I take to be true with regard to dalliance, which is i so frequent in ME. [dalyaunce, etc.) while it has not been recorded in French at all. The wide chasm between the most typical Enghsh meaning of sensible (a sensible
1 Coleridge, Sir Robert Peel, John Stuart Mill, Abp. Long- ley, Samuel Wilberforce , Dickens, Charles Reade, Walter Bage- hot, Anthony Trollope, R. A. Proctor, Harriet Martineau, Car- dinal Newman, Gladstone, James Martineau, S. Baring-Gould, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Sir Monier Williams, Sir Leslie Stephen, H. Maudsley, Saintsbury, Henry Sweet, Robinson Ellis, Thomas Arnold. In America, Washington Irving, Daniel Webster, Edw. Everett, G. P. Marsh; I leave out, rather arbitrarily I fear, six- teen of the names given by Fitzedward Hall.
2 Modem English 314.
I lo V. The French.
man, a sensible proposal) and those meanings which it shares with French sensible and Lat. sensibilis, probably J shows that in the former meaning the word was an in- dependent English formation. Duration as used by- Chaucer may be a French word; it then went out of the language, and when it reappeared after the time of Shake- speare, it may just as well have been re-formed in Eng- land as borrowed; duratio does not seem to have existed in Latin. Intensitas is not a Latin word, and intensity is older than intensite.
111. In not a few cases, the English soil has proved more fertilizing than the French soil from which words were transplanted. In French, for instance, mutin has fewer derivatives than in English, where we have mutine sb., mutine vb. (Shakespeare), mutinous, mutinously, mutinousness, mutiny sb., mutiny vb., mutineer sb., mu- tineer vb., mutinize, of which it is true that mutine and , mutinize are now extinct. We see the same thing in such a recent borrowing as clique, which stands alone in French ^ while in English two centuries have provided us with cliquedom, cliqueless, cliquery, cliquomania, cliqiiomaniac, clique, vb,, cliquish, cliquishness, cliquism, cliquy or cli- quey. From due we have duty, to which no French cor- respondent word has been found in France itself, although duete, duity, dewetS are found in Anglo-French writers; in English duty is found from the 13th century, and we have moreover duteous, dutiable, dutied, dutiful, dutifullyf dutifulness, dutiless, none of which appear to be older than the i6th century. Aim, the noun as well as the verb, is now among the most useful and indispensable words in the English vocabulary and it has some deriva- tives, such as aimer, aimful, and aimless, but in French the two verbs from which it originates, esmer < Lat. aestimare, and aasmer, < Lat. adaestimare, have totally .1 disappeared. Note also the differentiations of the words
I
English Formations. ill
strange and estrange;'^ of entry (< Fr. entree^) and entrance^ while in French entrance has been given up; and the less perfect one of guaranty (action) and guarantee (person), not to speak of warrant and warranty. The extent to which foreign speech-material has been turned to account is really astonishing, as is seen, perhaps, most clearly in the extensive use of the derivative ending -ee. This was originally the French participial ending -e used in a very few cases such as apele^ E. appellee as opposed to apelor, E. appellor, nominee, presentee, etc. and then gradually extended in legal use to words in which such a formation would be prohibited in French by formal as well as syntactical reasons: vendee is the man to whom something is sold (I'homme ^ qui on a vendw quelque chose), cf. also referee, lessee, trustee, etc. Now, these formations are no longer restricted to juridical language, and in general literature there is some disposition to turn this ending to account as a convenient manner of forming passive nouns; Goldsmith and Richardson have lovee,
Sterne speaks of 'the mortgager and mortgagee the
jester and jestee'; further the gazee (De Quincey) = the one gazed at, staree (Edgeworth), cursee and laughee (Carlyle), flirtee, floggee, wishee, bargainee, beatee, examineCf callee (our callee = the man we call on), etc. Such a word as trusteeship is eminently characteristic of the composite character of the language: Scandinavian trust + a French ending used in a manner unparalleled !J in French -|- an old English ending.
112, French influence has not been restricted to one particular period (see § 95), and it is interesting to com-
1 Compare also the juridical estray and the ordinary stray, estate and state.
2 This word has recently been re -adopted: entree 'made -dish served between the chief courses'.
J I 2 V. The French.
pare the forms of old loan-words with those of recent ones, in which we can recognize traces of the changes ^ the French language has undergone since medieval times. Where a ch in an originally French word is pronounced as in change, chaunt, etc. (with the sound-group tj), the y loan is an old one; where it is sounded as in champagne \ (with simple p, we have a recent loan. Chief is thus shown to belong to the first period, while its doublet chef (= chef de cuisine) is much more modern. It is curious that two petnames should now be spelled in the same way Charlie, although they are distinct in pro- nunciation: the masculine is derived from the old loan Charles and has, therefore, the sound [tJ], the feminine is from the recent loan Charlotte with [fj. Similar^ g as in giant and / as in jaundice [pronounced d^] are indicative of old loans, while the pronunciation [^] is only found in modern adoptions, such as rouge. Sometimes, however, recent loans are made to conform to the old practice; jaunty, gentle and genteel represent three layers of borrow- ing from the same word, but they have all of them the same initial sound. Other instances of the same French word appearing in more than one shape according to its age in English are saloon and salon, suit and suite, liquor and