nearly complete as the industry of the collectors would allow, of
all the notices in our literature, which mark, and would serve as
dates for, the first incoming of new words into the language.
These notices are of the most various kinds. Sometimes they are
protests and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new
word’s introduction; sometimes they are gratulations at the same;
while many hold themselves neuter as to approval or disapproval,
and merely state, or allow us to gather, the fact of a word’s
recent appearance. There are not a few of these notices in
Richardson’s _Dictionary_: thus one from Lord Bacon under ‘essay’;
from Swift under ‘banter’; from Sir Thomas Elyot under
‘mansuetude’; from Lord Chesterfield under ‘flirtation’; from
Davies and Marlowe’s _Epigrams_ under ‘gull’; from Roger North
under ‘sham’ (Appendix); the third quotation from Dryden under
‘mob’; one from the same under ‘philanthropy’, and again under
‘witticism’, in which he claims the authorship of the word; that
from Evelyn under ‘miss’; and from Milton under ‘demagogue’. There
are also notices of the same kind in _Todd’s Johnson_. The work,
however, is one which no single scholar could hope to accomplish,
which could only be accomplished by many lovers of their native
tongue throwing into a common stock the results of their several
studies. The sources from which these illustrative passages might
be gathered cannot beforehand be enumerated, inasmuch as it is
difficult to say in what unexpected quarter they would not
sometimes be found, although some of these sources are obvious
enough. As a very slight sample of what might be done in this way
by the joint contributions of many, let me throw together
references to a few passages of the kind which I do not think have
found their way into any of our dictionaries. Thus add to that
which Richardson has quoted on ‘banter’, another from _The
Tatler_, No. 230. On ‘plunder’ there are two instructive passages
in Fuller’s _Church History_, b. xi, § 4, 33; and b. ix, § 4; and
one in Heylin’s _Animadversions_ thereupon, p. 196. On ‘admiralty’
see a note in Harington’s _Ariosto_, book 19; on ‘maturity’ Sir
Thomas Elyot’s _Governor_, b. i, c. 22; and on ‘industry’ the
same, b. i, c. 23; on ‘neophyte’ a notice in Fulke’s _Defence of
the English Bible_, Parker Society’s edition, p. 586; and on
‘panorama’, and marking its recent introduction (it is not in
Johnson), a passage in Pegge’s _Anecdotes of the English
Language_, first published in 1803, but my reference is to the
edition of 1814, p. 306; on ‘accommodate’, and supplying a date
for its first coming into popular use, see Shakespeare’s _2 Henry
IV._ Act 3, Sc. 2; on ‘shrub’, Junius’ _Etymologicon_, s. v.
‘syrup’; on ‘sentiment’ and ‘cajole’ Skinner, s. vv., in his
_Etymologicon_ (‘vox nuper civitate donata’); and on ‘opera’
Evelyn’s _Memoirs and Diary_, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such
a collection should be included those passages of our literature
which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence of a word up
to a certain moment. It may be urged that it is difficult, nay
impossible, to prove a negative; and yet a passage like this from
Bolingbroke makes certain that when it was written the word
‘isolated’ did not exist in our language: “The events we are
witnesses of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very
often original, unprepared, signal and _unrelative_: if I may use
such a word for want of a better in English. In French I would say
_isolés_” (_Notes and Queries_, No. 226). Compare Lord
Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date March 12,
1767: “I have survived almost all my cotemporaries, and as I am
too old to make new acquaintances, I find myself _isolé_”. So,
too, it is pretty certain that ‘amphibious’ was not yet English,
when one writes (in 1618): “We are like those creatures called
ἀμφίβια, who live in water or on land”. Ζωολογία, the title of a
book published in 1649, makes it clear that ‘zoology’ was not yet
in our vocabulary, as ζωόφυτον (Jackson) proves the same for
‘zoophyte’, and πολυθεϊσμος (Gell) for ‘polytheism’. One
precaution, let me observe, would be necessary in the collecting,
or rather in the adopting of any statements about the newness of a
word--for the passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not
the less to be noted--namely, that, where there is the least
motive for suspicion, no one’s affirmation ought to be accepted
simply and at once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are
liable to error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot
indicates as new in his time, ‘magnanimity’ for example (_The
Governor_, 2, 14), are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed
of ‘sentiment’ that it had only recently obtained the rights of
English citizenship from the translators of French books, he was
altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual
recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives in
_Notes and Queries_, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent
neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with
caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which
have not the smallest right to be so considered.
{126} There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (_Opera_,
vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title,
_Considérations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue
Allemande_.
{127} _Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwörter im Deutschen_,
von. Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91.
III
DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
I took occasion to observe at the commencement of my last lecture that
it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux{128}
and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as
little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one
another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies
remain for ever without subtraction or addition. As I then undertook for
my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own
language had made, I shall consider in the present some of the losses,
or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured.
But it will be well here, by one or two remarks going before, to avert
any possible misapprehensions of my meaning.
It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in
the end, perish. They run their course; not at all at the same rate, for
the tendency to change is different in different languages, both from
internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external
to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and
social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life,
they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude,
their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has
arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary,
out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the
materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these
now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus
for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a chief part
of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages,
French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we count the
Provençal and Wallachian; not a few in our own. Still in their own
proper being languages perish and pass away; there are dead records of
what they were in books; not living men who speak them any more. Seeing
then that they thus die, they must have had the germs of a possible
decay and death in them from the beginning.
{Sidenote: _Languages Gain and Lose_}
Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built fabrics as these, the
causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been
actually at work very long before the results began to be visible.
Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some
respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already
unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote
overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and in languages, it
would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and
period is growth and gain, while all after is decay and loss. On the
contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions
is going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are
being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during
which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower,
and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and
gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a
compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more;
when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than
those of life and order. It is from this moment the decline of a
language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point
has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses of a
language, and may esteem them most real, without in the least thereby
implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun. This
may yet be far distant, and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and
diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not
conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the
downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my
intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining.
Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting
with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous
or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English
is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only
different in that it is passing into another stage of its development;
only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the
flower from the bud; having changed its merits, but not having
renounced them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but more of
usefulness; not, perhaps, serving the poet so well, but serving the
historian and philosopher and theologian better than before.
One observation more let me make, before entering on the special details
of my subject. It is this. The losses and diminutions of a language
differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions--namely, that they
are of _two_ kinds, while its gains are only of _one_. Its gains are
only in _words_; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a
new _power_; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a
new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in _powers_--in
words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels
onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of
tenses which it once used; forgets its dual; is content with one
termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a
peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. “In all
languages”, as has been well said, “there is a constant tendency to
relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for
every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and
detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion”. For
example, a vast number of languages had at an early period of their
development, besides the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a
trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I mean by a language
renouncing its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you before my
lecture is concluded. This much I have here said on the matter, to
explain and justify a division which I shall make, considering first the
losses of the English language in _words_, and then in _powers_.
{Sidenote: _Words become Extinct_}
And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in
our language--as indeed in every other. When I speak of this, the dying
out of words, I do not refer to mere _tentative_, experimental words,
not a few of which I adduced in my last lecture, words offered to the
language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either
belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or if not so, which had
been domiciled in it long, that they might have been supposed to have
found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few pure Anglo-Saxon words which
lived on into the times of our early English, have subsequently dropped
out of our vocabulary, sometimes leaving a gap which has never since
been filled, but their places oftener taken by others which have come up
in their room. Not to mention those of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are
very numerous, many held their ground to far later periods, and yet have
finally given way. That beautiful word ‘wanhope’ for despair, hope which
has so _waned_ that now there is an entire _want_ of it, was in use down
to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of
Gascoigne{129}. ‘Skinker’ for cupbearer, (an ungraceful word, no doubt)
is used by Shakespeare and lasted till Dryden’s time and beyond.
Spenser uses often ‘to welk’ (welken) in the sense of to fade, ‘to sty’
for to mount, ‘to hery’ as to glorify or praise, ‘to halse’ as to
embrace, ‘teene’ as vexation or grief: Shakespeare ‘to tarre’ as to
provoke, ‘to sperr’ as to enclose or bar in; ‘to sag’ for to droop, or
hang the head downward. Holland employs ‘geir’{130} for vulture
(“vultures or _geirs_”), ‘specht’ for woodpecker, ‘reise’ for journey,
‘frimm’ for lusty or strong. ‘To schimmer’ occurs in Bishop Hall; ‘to
tind’, that is, to kindle, and surviving in ‘tinder’, is used by Bishop
Sanderson; ‘to nimm’, or take, as late as by Fuller. A rogue is a
‘skellum’ in Sir Thomas Urquhart. ‘Nesh’ in the sense of soft through
moisture, ‘leer’ in that of empty, ‘eame’ in that of uncle, _mother’s_
brother (the German ‘oheim’), good Saxon-English once, still live on in
some of our provincial dialects; so does ‘flitter-mouse’ or
‘flutter-mouse’ (mus volitans), where we should use bat. Indeed of those
above named several do the same; it is so with ‘frimm’, with ‘to sag’,
‘to nimm’. ‘Heft’ employed by Shakespeare in the sense of weight, is
still employed in the same sense by our peasants in Hampshire{131}.
{Sidenote: _Vigorous Compound Words_}
A number of vigorous compounds we have dropped and let go. ‘Earsports’
for entertainments of song or music (ἀκροάματα) is a constantly
recurring word in Holland’s _Plutarch_. Were it not for Shakespeare, we
should have quite forgotten that young men of hasty fiery valour were
called ‘hotspurs’; and even now we regard the word rather as the proper
name of one than that which would have been once alike the designation
of all{132}. Fuller warns men that they should not ‘witwanton’ with God.
Severe austere old men, such as, in Falstaff’s words would “hate us
youth”, were ‘grimsirs’, or ‘grimsires’ once (Massinger). ‘Realmrape’
(=usurpation), occurring in _The Mirror for Magistrates_, is a vigorous
word. ‘Rootfast’ and ‘rootfastness’{133} were ill lost, being worthy to
have lived; so too was Lord Brooke’s ‘bookhunger’; and Baxter’s
‘word-warriors’, with which term he noted those whose strife was only
about words. ‘Malingerer’ is familiar enough to military men, but I do
not find it in our dictionaries; being the soldier who, out of _evil
will_ (malin gré) to his work, shams and shirks and is not found in the
ranks{134}.
Those who would gladly have seen the Anglo-Saxon to have predominated
over the Latin element in our language, even more than it actually has
done, must note with regret that in many instances a word of the former
stock had been dropped, and a Latin coined to supply its place; or where
the two once existed side by side, the Saxon has died, and the Latin
lived on. Thus Wiclif employed ‘soothsaw’, where we now use proverb;
‘sourdough’, where we employ leaven; ‘wellwillingness’ for benevolence;
‘againbuying’ for redemption; ‘againrising’ for resurrection;
‘undeadliness’ for immortality; ‘uncunningness’ for ignorance;
‘aftercomer’ for descendant; ‘greatdoingly’ for magnificently; ‘to
afterthink’ (still in use in Lancashire) for to repent; ‘medeful’, which
has given way to meritorious; ‘untellable’ for ineffable; ‘dearworth’
for precious; Chaucer has ‘forword’ for promise; Sir John Cheke
‘freshman’ for proselyte; ‘mooned’ for lunatic; ‘foreshewer’ for
prophet; ‘hundreder’ for centurion; Jewel ‘foretalk’, where we now
employ preface; Holland ‘sunstead’ where we use solstice; ‘leechcraft’
instead of medicine; and another, ‘wordcraft’ for logic; ‘starconner’
(Gascoigne) did service once, if not instead of astrologer, yet side by
side with it; ‘halfgod’ (Golding) had the advantage over ‘demigod’, that
it was all of one piece; ‘to eyebite’ (Holland) told its story at least
as well as to fascinate; ‘shriftfather’ as confessor; ‘earshrift’
(Cartwright) is only two syllables, while ‘auricular confession’ is
eight; ‘waterfright’ is a better word than our awkward Greek
hydrophobia. The lamprey (lambens petram) was called once the
‘suckstone’ or the ‘lickstone’; and the anemone the ‘windflower’.
‘Umstroke’, if it had lived on (it appears as late as Fuller, though
our dictionaries know nothing of it), might have made ‘circumference’
and ‘periphery’ unnecessary. ‘Wanhope’, as we saw just now, has given
place to despair, ‘middler’ to mediator; and it would be easy to
increase this list.
{Sidenote: _Local and Provincial English_}
I had occasion just now to notice the fact that many words survive in
our provincial dialects, long after they have died out from the main
body of the speech. The fact is one connected with so much of deep
interest in the history of language that I cannot pass it thus slightly
over. It is one which, rightly regarded, may assist to put us in a just
point of view for estimating the character of the local and provincial
in speech, and rescuing it from that unmerited contempt and neglect with
which it is often regarded. I must here go somewhat further back than I
could wish; but only so, only by looking at the matter in connexion with
other phenomena of speech, can I hope to explain to you the worth and
significance which local and provincial words and usages must oftentimes
possess.
Let us then first suppose a portion of those speaking a language to have
been separated off from the main body of its speakers, either through
their forsaking for one cause or other of their native seats, or by the
intrusion of a hostile people, like a wedge, between them and the
others, forcibly keeping them asunder, and cutting off their
communications one with the other, as the Saxons intruded between the
Britons of Cornwall and of Wales. In such a case it will inevitably
happen that before very long differences of speech will begin to reveal
themselves between those to whom even dialectic distinctions may have
been once unknown. The divergences will be of various kinds. Idioms will
come up in the separated body, which, not being recognized and allowed
by those who remain the arbiters of the language, will be esteemed by
them, should they come under their notice, violations of its law, or at
any rate departures from its purity. Again, where a colony has gone
forth into new seats, and exists under new conditions, it is probable
that the necessities, physical and moral, rising out of these new
conditions, will give birth to words, which there will be nothing to
call out among those who continue in the old haunts of the nation.
Intercourse with new tribes and people will bring in new words, as, for
instance, contact with the Indian tribes of North America has given to
American English a certain number of words hardly or not at all allowed
or known by us; or as the presence of a large Dutch population at the
Cape has given to the English spoken there many words, as ‘inspan’,
‘outspan’{135}, ‘spoor’, of which our home English knows nothing.
{Sidenote: _Antiquated English_}
There is another cause, however, which will probably be more effectual
than all these, namely, that words will in process of time be dropped by
those who constitute the original stock of the nation, which will not be
dropped by the offshoot; idioms which those have overlived, and have
stored up in the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will still be in
use and currency among the smaller and separated section which has gone
forth; and thus it will come to pass that what seems and in fact is the
newer swarm, will have many older words, and very often an archaic air
and old-world fashion both about the words they use, their way of
pronouncing, their order and manner of combining them. Thus after the
Conquest we know that our insular French gradually diverged from the
French of the Continent. The Prioress in Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_
could speak her French “full faire and fetishly”, but it was French, as
the poet slyly adds,
“After the scole of Stratford atte bow,
For French of Paris was to hire unknowe”.
One of our old chroniclers, writing in the reign of Elizabeth, informs
us that by the English colonists within the Pale in Ireland numerous
words were preserved in common use, “the dregs of the old ancient
Chaucer English”, as he contemptuously calls it, which had become quite
obsolete and forgotten in England itself. For example, they still called
a spider an ‘attercop’--a word, by the way, still in popular use in the
North;--a physician a ‘leech’, as in poetry he still is called; a
dunghill was still for them a ‘mixen’; (the word is still common all
over England in this sense;) a quadrangle or base court was a
‘bawn’{136}; they employed ‘uncouth’ in the earlier sense of unknown.
Nay more, their general manner of speech was so different, though
containing English still, that Englishmen at their first coming over
often found it hard or impossible to comprehend. We have another example
of the same in what took place after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, and the consequent formation of colonies of Protestant French
emigrants in various places, especially in Amsterdam and other chief
cities of Holland. There gradually grew up among these what came to be
called ‘refugee French’, which within a generation or two diverged in
several particulars from the classical language of France; its
divergence being mainly occasioned by this, that it remained stationary,
while the classical language was in motion; it retained usages and
words, which the latter had dismissed{137}.
{Sidenote: _Provincial English_}
Nor is it otherwise in respect of our English provincialisms. It is true
that our country people who in the main employ them, have not been
separated by distance of space, nor yet by insurmountable obstacles
intervening, from the main body of their fellow-countrymen; but they
have been quite as effectually divided by deficient education. They have
been, if not locally, yet intellectually, kept at a distance from the
onward march of the nation’s mind; and of them also it is true that many
of their words, idioms, turns of speech, which we are ready to set down
as vulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the primary rules of
grammar, do merely attest that those who employ them have not kept
abreast with the advance of the language and nation, but have been left
behind by it. The usages are only local in the fact that, having once
been employed by the whole body of the English people, they have now
receded from the lips of all except those in some certain country
districts, who have been more faithful than others to the tradition of
the past{138}.
It is thus in respect of a multitude of isolated words, which were
excellent Anglo-Saxon, which were excellent early English, and which
only are not excellent present English, because use, which is the
supreme arbiter in these matters, has decided against their further
employment. Several of these I enumerated just now. It is thus also with
several grammatical forms and flexions. For instance, where we decline
the plural of “I sing”, “we sing”, “ye sing”, “they sing”, there are
parts of England in which they would decline, “we sin_gen_”, “ye
sin_gen_”, “they sin_gen_”. This is not indeed the original form of the
plural, but it is that form of it which, coming up about Chaucer’s time,
was just going out in Spenser’s; he, though we must ever keep in mind
that he does not fairly represent the language of his time, or indeed of
any time, affecting a certain artificial archaism both in words and
forms, continually uses it{139}. After him it becomes ever rarer, the
last of whom I am aware as occasionally using it being Fuller, until it
quite disappears.
{Sidenote: _Earlier and Later English_}