others as _dead_. All spoken languages may be ranged in the first class;
for as men will never consent to use a language without more or less
modifying it in their use, will never so far forgo their own activity as
to leave it exactly where they found it, it will therefore, so long as
it is thus the utterance of human thought and feeling, inevitably show
itself alive by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition,
loss, progress, and decay. A living language therefore is one which
abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is
by living men, a _vital_ formative energy is still at work. It is one
which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates
it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it
anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources,
increasing its wealth; while at the same time it is casting off useless
and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it
finds no use, rejecting from itself by a re-active energy the foreign
and heterogeneous, which may for a while have been forced upon it. I
would not assert that in the process of all this it does not make
mistakes; in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions which
were not useless, and which it would have been better to retain; the
acquisitions which it makes are very far from being all gains; it
sometimes rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which
were most worthy to have lived. So far as it does this its life is not
perfectly healthy; there are here signs, however remote, of
disorganization, decay, and ultimate death; but still it lives, and even
these misgrowths and malformations, the rejection of this good, the
taking up into itself of that ill, all these errors are themselves the
utterances and evidences of life. A dead language is the contrary of all
this. It is dead, because books, and not now any generation of living
men, are the guardians of it, and what they guard, they guard without
change. Its course has been completely run, and it is now equally
incapable of gaining and of losing. We may come to know it better; but
in itself it is not, and never can be, other than it was when it ceased
from the lips of men.
{Sidenote: _English a Living Language_}
Our own is, of course, a living language still. It is therefore gaining
and losing. It is a tree in which the vital sap is circulating yet,
ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new
leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping
away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some
of the evidences of this life at work in it still. As I took for the
subject of my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several
elements of our composite English are now found in it, and the service
which they were severally called on to perform, so I shall consider in
this the _sources_ from which the English language has enriched its
vocabulary, the _periods_ at which it has made the chief additions to
this, the _character_ of the additions which at different periods it has
made, and the _motives_ which induced it to seek them.
I had occasion to mention in that lecture and indeed I dwelt with some
emphasis on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of our
language, is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or mingled as it must be
freely allowed to be, it is only such in respect to words, not in
respect of construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms.
These are all of one piece; and whatever of new has come in has been
compelled to conform itself to these. The framework is English; only a
part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this filling in, of these
its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.
{Sidenote: _The Norman Conquest_}
The first great augmentation by foreign words of our Saxon vocabulary,
setting aside those which the Danes brought us, was a consequence,
although not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the
Norman domination which Duke William’s victory established in our land.
And here let me say in respect of that victory, in contradiction to the
sentimental regrets of Thierry and others, and with the fullest
acknowledgement of the immediate miseries which it entailed on the Saxon
race, that it was really the making of England; a judgment, it is true,
but a judgment and mercy in one. God never showed more plainly that He
had great things in store for the people which should occupy this
English soil, than when He brought hither that aspiring Norman race. At
the same time the actual interpenetration of our Anglo-Saxon with any
large amount of French words did not find place till very considerably
later than this event, however it was a consequence of it. Some French
words we find very soon after; but in the main the two streams of
language continued for a long while separate and apart, even as the two
nations remained aloof, a conquering and a conquered, and neither
forgetting the fact.
Time however softened the mutual antipathies. The Norman, after a while
shut out from France, began more and more to feel that England was his
home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme
depression which had ensued on his defeat, became every day a more
important element of the new English nation which was gradually forming
from the coalition of the two races. His language partook of his
elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French was no
longer the only language in which a gentleman could speak, or a poet
sing. At the same time the Saxon, now passing into the English language,
required a vast addition to its vocabulary, if it were to serve all the
needs of those who were willing to employ it now. How much was there of
high culture, how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures,
which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no
utterance in Saxon words. All this it was sought to supply from the
French.
We shall not err, I think, if we assume the great period of the
incoming of French words into the English language to have been when the
Norman nobility were exchanging their own language for the English; and
I should be disposed with Tyrwhitt to believe that there is much
exaggeration in attributing the large influx of these into English to
one man’s influence, namely to Chaucer’s{38}. Doubtless he did much; he
fell in with and furthered a tendency which already prevailed. But to
suppose that the majority of French vocables which he employed in his
poems had never been employed before, had been hitherto unfamiliar to
English ears, is to suppose that his poems must have presented to his
contemporaries an absurd patchwork of two languages, and leaves it
impossible to explain how he should at once have become the popular poet
of our nation.
{Sidenote: _Influence of Chaucer_}
That Chaucer largely developed the language in this direction is indeed
plain. We have only to compare his English with that of another great
master of the tongue, his contemporary Wiclif, to perceive how much more
his diction is saturated with French words than is that of the Reformer.
We may note too that many which he and others employed, and as it were
proposed for admission, were not finally allowed and received; so that
no doubt they went beyond the needs of the language, and were here in
excess{39}. At the same time this can be regarded as no condemnation of
their attempt. It was only by actual experience that it could be proved
whether the language wanted those words or not, whether it could absorb
them into itself, and assimilate them with all that it already was and
had; or did not require, and would therefore in due time reject and put
them away. And what happened then will happen in every attempt to
transplant on a large scale the words of one language into another. Some
will take root; others will not, but after a longer or briefer period
will wither and die. Thus I observe in Chaucer such French words as
these, ‘misericorde’, ‘malure’ (malheur), ‘penible’, ‘ayel’ (aieul),
‘tas’, ‘gipon’, ‘pierrie’ (precious stones); none of which, and Wiclif’s
‘creansur’ (2 Kings iv. 1) as little, have permanently won a place in
our tongue. For a long time ‘mel’, used often by Sylvester, struggled
hard for a place in the language side by side with honey; ‘roy’ side by
side with king; this last quite obtained one in Scotch. It is curious to
mark some of these French adoptions keeping their ground to a
comparatively late day, and yet finally extruded: seeming to have taken
firm root, they have yet withered away in the end. Thus it has been, for
example, with ‘egal’ (Puttenham); with ‘ouvert’, ‘mot’, ‘ecurie’,
‘baston’, ‘gite’ (Holland); with ‘rivage’, ‘jouissance’, ‘noblesse’,
‘tort’ (=wrong), ‘accoil’ (accuellir), ‘sell’ (=saddle), all occurring
in Spenser; with ‘to serr’ (serrer), ‘vive’, ‘reglement’, used all by
Bacon; and so with ‘esperance’, ‘orgillous’ (orgueilleux), ‘rondeur’,
‘scrimer’ (=fencer), all in Shakespeare; with ‘amort’ (this also in
Shakespeare){40}, and ‘avie’ (Holland). ‘Maugre’, ‘congie’, ‘devoir’,
‘dimes’, ‘sans’, and ‘bruit’, used often in our Bible, were English
once{41}; when we employ them now, it is with the sense that we are
using foreign words. The same is true of ‘dulce’, ‘aigredoulce’
(=soursweet), of ‘mur’ for wall, of ‘baine’ for bath, of the verb ‘to
cass’ (all in Holland), of ‘volupty’ (Sir Thomas Elyot), ‘volunty’
(Evelyn), ‘medisance’ (Montagu), ‘petit’ (South), ‘aveugle’, ‘colline’
(both in _State Papers_), and ‘eloign’ (Hacket){42}.
We have seen when the great influx of French words took place--that is,
from the time of the Conquest, although scantily and feebly at the
first, to that of Chaucer. But with him our literature and language had
made a burst, which they were not able to maintain. He has by Warton
been well compared to some warm bright day in the very early spring,
which seems to say that the winter is over and gone; but its promise is
deceitful; the full bursting and blossoming of the springtime are yet
far off. That struggle with France which began so gloriously, but ended
so disastrously, even with the loss of our whole ill-won dominion there,
the savagery of our wars of the Roses, wars which were a legacy
bequeathed to us by that unrighteous conquest, leave a huge gap in our
literary history, nearly a century during which very little was done for
the cultivation of our native tongue, during which it could have made
few important accessions to its wealth.
{Sidenote: _Latin Importation_}
The period however is notable as being that during which for the first
time we received a large accession of Latin words. There was indeed
already a small settlement of these, for the most part ecclesiastical,
which had long since found their home in the bosom of the Anglo-Saxon
itself, and had been entirely incorporated into it. The fact that we had
received our Christianity from Rome, and that Latin was the constant
language of the Church, sufficiently explains the incoming of these.
Such were ‘monk’, ‘bishop’ (I put them in their present shapes, and do
not concern myself whether they were originally Greek or no; they
reached _us_ as Latin); ‘provost’, ‘minster’, ‘cloister’, ‘candle’,
‘psalter’, ‘mass’, and the names of certain foreign animals, as
‘camel’, or plants or other productions, as ‘pepper’, ‘fig’; which are
all, with slightly different orthography, Anglo-Saxon words. These,
however, were entirely exceptional, and stood to the main body of the
language not as the Romance element of it does now to the Gothic, one
power over against another, but as the Spanish or Italian or Arabic
words in it now stand to the whole present body of the language--and
could not be affirmed to affect it more.
So soon however as French words were imported largely, as I have just
observed, into the language, and were found to coalesce kindly with the
native growths, this very speedily suggested, as indeed it alone
rendered possible, the going straight to the Latin, and drawing directly
from it; and thus in the hundred years which followed Chaucer a large
amount of Latin found its way, if not into our speech, yet at all events
into our books--words which were not brought _through_ the French, for
they are not, and have not at any time been, French, but yet words which
would never have been introduced into English, if their way had not been
prepared, if the French already domesticated among us had not bridged
over, as it were, the gulf, that would have otherwise been too wide
between them and the Saxon vocables of our tongue.
In this period, a period of great depression of the national spirit, we
may trace the attempt at a pedantic latinization of English quite as
clearly at work as at later periods, subsequent to the revival of
learning. It was now that a crop of such words as ‘facundious’,
‘tenebrous’, ‘solacious’, ‘pulcritude’, ‘consuetude’ (all these occur in
Hawes), with many more, long since rejected by the language, sprung up;
while other words, good in themselves, and which have been since
allowed, were yet employed in numbers quite out of proportion with the
Saxon vocables with which they were mingled, and which they altogether
overtopped and shadowed. Chaucer’s hearty English feeling, his thorough
sympathy with the people, the fact that, scholar as he was, he was yet
the poet not of books but of life, and drew his best inspiration from
life, all this had kept him, in the main, clear of this fault. But in
others it is very manifest. Thus I must esteem the diction of Lydgate,
Hawes, and the other versifiers who filled up the period between Chaucer
and Surrey, immensely inferior to Chaucer’s; being all stuck over with
long and often ill-selected Latin words. The worst offenders in this
line, as Campbell himself admits, were the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
century. “The prevailing fault”, he says, “of English diction, in the
fifteenth century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of
anglicising Latin words. In this pedantry and use of “aureate terms” the
Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the south....
When they meant to be eloquent, they tore up words from the Latin, which
never took root in the language, like children making a mock garden with
flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither”{43}.
To few indeed is the wisdom and discretion given, certainly it was
given to none of those, to bear themselves in this hazardous enterprise
according to the rules laid down by Dryden; who in the following
admirable passage declares the motives that induced him to seek for
foreign words, and the considerations that guided him in their
selection: “If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who
shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out
the treasure of the nation which is never to return, but what I bring
from Italy I spend in England. Here it remains and here it circulates,
for, if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade
both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native
language. We have enough in England to supply our necessity, but if we
will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by
commerce. Poetry requires adornment, and that is not to be had from our
old Teuton monosyllables; therefore if I find any elegant word in a
classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by using it myself; and
if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man cannot
distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry: every man therefore is not fit
to innovate. Upon the whole matter a poet must first be certain that the
word he would introduce is beautiful in the Latin; and is to consider in
the next place whether it will agree with the English idiom: after this,
he ought to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as are learned
in both languages; and lastly, since no man is infallible, let him use
this licence very sparingly; for if too many foreign words are poured
in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not to assist the natives,
but to conquer them”{44}.
{Sidenote: _Influence of the Reformation_}
But this tendency to latinize our speech was likely to receive, and
actually did receive, a new impulse from the revival of learning, and
the familiar re-acquaintance with the great masterpieces of ancient
literature which went along with this revival. Happily another movement
accompanied, or at least followed hard on this; a movement in England
essentially national; and which stirred our people at far deeper depths
of their moral and spiritual life than any mere revival of learning
could have ever done; I refer, of course, to the Reformation. It was
only among the Germanic nations of Europe, as has often been remarked,
that the Reformation struck lasting roots; it found its strength
therefore in the Teutonic element of the national character, which also
it in its turn further strengthened, purified, and called out. And thus,
though Latin came in upon us now faster than ever, and in a certain
measure also Greek, yet this was not without its redress and
counterpoise, in the cotemporaneous unfolding of the more fundamentally
popular side of the language. Popular preaching and discussion, the
necessity of dealing with truths the most transcendent in a way to be
understood not by scholars only, but by ‘idiots’ as well, all this
served to evoke the native resources of our tongue; and thus the
relative proportion between the one part of the language and the other
was not dangerously disturbed, the balance was not destroyed; as it
might well have been, if only the Humanists{45} had been at work, and
not the Reformers as well.
The revival of learning, which made itself first felt in Italy, extended
to England, and was operative here, during the reigns of Henry the
Eighth and his immediate successors. Having thus slightly anticipated in
time, it afterwards ran exactly parallel with, the period during which
our Reformation was working itself out. The epoch was in all respects
one of immense mental and moral activity, and such never leave the
language of a nation where they found it. Much is changed in it; much
probably added; for the old garment of speech, which once served all
needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them now no more. “Change in
language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not
equable, but eminently by fits and starts”; and when the foundations of
the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater
and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two
centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. Thus the activities and
energies which the Reformation awakened among us here--and I need not
tell you that these reached far beyond the domain of our directly
religious life--caused mighty alterations in the English tongue{46}.
{Sidenote: _Rise of New Words_}
For example, the Reformation had its scholarly, we might say, its
scholastic, as well as its popular, aspect. Add this fact to the fact of
the revived interest in classical learning, and you will not wonder that
a stream of Latin, now larger than ever, began to flow into our
language. Thus Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s reign{47}, gives
a long list of words which, as he declares, had been quite recently
introduced into the language. Some of them are Greek, a few French and
Italian, but very far the most are Latin. I will not give you his whole
catalogue, but some specimens from it; it is difficult to understand
concerning some of these, how the language should have managed to do
without them so long; ‘method’, ‘methodical’, ‘function’, ‘numerous’,
‘penetrate’, ‘penetrable’, ‘indignity’, ‘savage’, ‘scientific’,
‘delineation’, ‘dimension’--all which he notes to have recently come up;
so too ‘idiom’, ‘significative’, ‘compendious’, ‘prolix’, ‘figurative’,
‘impression’, ‘inveigle’, ‘metrical’. All these he adduces with praise;
others upon which he bestows equal commendation, have not held their
ground, as ‘placation’, ‘numerosity’, ‘harmonical’. Of those neologies
which he disallowed, he only anticipated in some cases, as in
‘facundity’, ‘implete’, ‘attemptat’ (‘attentat’), the decision of a
later day; other words which he condemned no less, as ‘audacious’,
‘compatible’, ‘egregious’, have maintained their ground. These too have
done the same; ‘despicable’, ‘destruction’, ‘homicide’, ‘obsequious’,
‘ponderous’, ‘portentous’, ‘prodigious’, all of them by another writer a
little earlier condemned as “inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the
Latin”.
{Sidenote: _French Neologies_}
It is curious to observe the “words of art”, as he calls them, which
Philemon Holland, a voluminous translator at the end of the sixteenth
and beginning of the seventeenth century, counts it needful to explain
in a sort of glossary which he appends to his translation of Pliny’s
_Natural History_{48}. One can hardly at the present day understand how
any person who would care to consult the book at all would find any
difficulty with words like the following, ‘acrimony’, ‘austere’, ‘bulb’,
‘consolidate’, ‘debility’, ‘dose’, ‘ingredient’, ‘opiate’, ‘propitious’,
‘symptom’, all which, however, as novelties he carefully explains. Some
of the words in his glossary, it is true, are harder and more technical
than these; but a vast proportion of them present no greater difficulty
than those which I have adduced{49}.
The period during which this naturalization of Latin words in the
English Language was going actively forward, may be said to have
continued till about the Restoration of Charles the Second. It first
received a check from the coming up of French tastes, fashions, and
habits of thought consequent on that event. The writers already formed
before that period, such as Cudworth and Barrow, still continued to
write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and Latin in diction,
but not so those of a younger generation. We may say of this influx of
Latin that it left the language vastly more copious, with greatly
enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat burdened, and not always
able to move gracefully under the weight of its new acquisitions; for as
Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy enough to acquire foreign
words, but to know what to do with them after you have acquired, is the
difficulty.
{Sidenote: _Pedantic Words_}
It might have received indeed most serious injury, if _all_ the words
which the great writers of this second Latin period of our language
employed, and so proposed as candidates for admission into it, had
received the stamp of popular allowance. But happily it was not so; it
was here, as it had been before with the French importations, and with
the earlier Latin of Lydgate and Occleve. The re-active powers of the
language, enabling it to throw off that which was foreign to it, did not
fail to display themselves now, as they had done on former occasions.
The number of unsuccessful candidates for admission into, and permanent
naturalization in, the language during this period, is enormous; and one
may say that in almost all instances where the Alien Act has been
enforced, the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was such as the
circumstances of the case abundantly bore out. Either the word was not
idiomatic, or was not intelligible, or was not needed, or looked ill, or
sounded ill, or some other valid reason existed against it. A lover of
his native tongue will tremble to think what that tongue would have
become, if all the vocables from the Latin and the Greek which were then
introduced or endorsed by illustrious names, had been admitted on the
strength of their recommendation; if ‘torve’ and ‘tetric’ (Fuller),
‘cecity’ (Hooker), ‘fastide’ and ‘trutinate’ (_State Papers_),
‘immanity’ (Shakespeare), ‘insulse’ and ‘insulsity’ (Milton, prose),
‘scelestick’ (Feltham), ‘splendidious’ (Drayton), ‘pervicacy’ (Baxter),
‘stramineous’, ‘ardelion’ (Burton), ‘lepid’ and ‘sufflaminate’ (Barrow),
‘facinorous’ (Donne), ‘immorigerous’, ‘clancular’, ‘ferity’,
‘ustulation’, ‘stultiloquy’, ‘lipothymy’ (λειποθυμία), ‘hyperaspist’
(all in Jeremy Taylor), if ‘mulierosity’, ‘subsannation’, ‘coaxation’,
‘ludibundness’, ‘delinition’, ‘septemfluous’, ‘medioxumous’,
‘mirificent’, ‘palmiferous’ (all in Henry More), ‘pauciloquy’ and
‘multiloquy’ (Beaumont, _Psyche_); if ‘dyscolous’ (Foxe), ‘ataraxy’
(Allestree), ‘moliminously’ (Cudworth), ‘luciferously’ (Sir Thomas
Browne), ‘immarcescible’ (Bishop Hall), ‘exility’, ‘spinosity’,
‘incolumity’, ‘solertiousness’, ‘lucripetous’, ‘inopious’, ‘eluctate’,
‘eximious’ (all in Hacket), ‘arride’{50} (ridiculed by Ben Johnson),
with the hundreds of other words like these, and even more monstrous
than are some of these, not to speak of such Italian as ‘leggiadrous’ (a
favourite word in Beaumont’s _Psyche_), ‘amorevolous’ (Hacket), had not
been rejected and disallowed by the true instinct of the national mind.
{Sidenote: _Naturalization of Words_}