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