ENGLISH LANGUAGE. In its historical sense, the
name
English is now conveniently used to comprehend the
language of the English people from their settlement in
Britain to the present day, the
various stages through which it has passed being distinguished as
Old, Middle, and New or Modern English. In works yet recent, and
even in some still current, the term is confined to the third, or
at most extended to the second and third of these stages, since the
language assumed in the main the vocabulary and grammatical forms
which it now presents, the oldest or inflected stage being treated
as a separate language, under the title of
Anglo-Saxon,
while the transition period which connects the two has been called
Semi-Saxon. This view had the
justification that, looked upon by
themselves, either as vehicles of thought or as objects of study
and analysis, Old English or Anglo-Saxon and Modern English are,
for all practical ends, distinct languages, - as much so, for
example, as
Latin and Spanish.
No amount of familiarity with Modern English, including its local
dialects, would enable the student to read Anglo-Saxon,
three-fourths of the vocabulary of which have perished and been
reconstructed within 900 years. 1-nor would a knowledge even of
these lost words give him the power, since the grammatical system,
alike in
accidence and
syntax, would be entirely strange to him. Indeed, it is probable
that a modern Englishman would acquire the power of
reading and writing French in
less time than it would cost him to attain to the same proficiency
in Old English; so that if the test of distinct languages be their
degree of practical difference from each other, it cannot be denied
that " Anglo-Saxon " is a distinct language from Modern English.
But when we view the subject historically, recognizing the fact
that living speech is subject to continuous change in certain
definite directions, determined by the constitution and
circumstances of mankind, as an
evolution or development of which we can
trace the steps, and that, owing to the abundance of written
materials, this evolution appears so gradual in English that we can
nowhere draw distinct lines separating its successive stages, we
recognize these stages as merely temporary phases of an individual
whole, and speak of the English language as used alike by
Cynewulf, by Chaucer, by
Shakespeare and by Tennyson. 2 It
must not be forgotten, however, that in this wide sense the English
language includes, not only the literary or courtly forms of speech
used at successive periods, but also the popular and, it may be,
altogether unwritten dialects that exist by their side. Only on
this basis, indeed, can we speak of Old, Middle and Modern English
as the same
language, since in actual fact the precise
dialect which is
now the cultivated language, or " Standard English," is not the
descendant of that dialect which was the cultivated language or
"Englisc " of
Alfred, but of a sister dialect then
sunk in comparative obscurity, - even as the direct descendant of
Alfred's Englisc is now to be found in the non-literary rustic
speech of
Wiltshire and
Somersetshire.
Causes which, linguistically 1 A careful examination of several
letters of Bosworth's AngloSaxon dictionary gives in 2000 words
(including derivatives and compounds, but excluding orthographic
variants) 535 which still exist as modern English words.
2 The practical convenience of having one name for what was the
same thing in various stages of 3evelopment is not affected by the
probability that (E. A.
Freeman notwithstanding)
Engle and
Englisc were, at an
early period,
not applied
to the whole of the inhabitants of Teutonic Britain, but only to a
part of them. The dialects of
Engle and
Seaxan
were alike old forms of what was afterwards English speech, and so,
viewed in relation to it,
Old English, whatever their
contemporary names might be.
considered, are external and accidental, have shifted the
political and intellectual centre of
England, and along with it transferred literary
and official patronage from one form of English to another; if the
centre of influence had happened to be fixed at
York or on the
banks of the Forth, both would probably have been
neglected for a third.
The English language, thus defined, is not " native " to
Britain, that is, it was not found there at the
dawn of history, but was introduced by foreign
immigrants at a date many centuries later. At the Roman Conquest of
the island the languages spoken by the natives belonged all (so far
as is known) to the Celtic branch of the
Indo-European or Indo-Germanic
family, modern forms of which still survive in
Wales,
Ireland, the Scottish Highlands,
Isle of Man and
Brittany, while one has at no
distant date become extinct in
Cornwall (see
Celt:
Language). Brythonic
dialects, allied to Welsh and Cornish, were apparently spoken over
the greater part of Britain, as far north as the firths of Forth
and
Clyde; beyond these
estuaries and in the isles to the west, including Ireland and Man,
Goidelic dialects, akin to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, prevailed.
The long occupation of south Britain by the
Romans (A.D. 43-409) - a period, it must not be
forgotten, equal to that from
the Reformation to the present day, or
nearly as long as the whole duration of modern English -
familiarized the provincial inhabitants with Latin, which was
probably the ordinary speech of the towns.
Gildas, writing nearly a century and a half
after the renunciation of
Honorius in 410, addressed the British princes
in that language; 1 and the linguistic history of Britain might
have been not different from that of
Gaul,
Spain and
the other provinces of the. Western Empire, in which a local type
of Latin, giving birth to a neo-Latinic language, finally
superseded the native tongue except in remote and mountainous
districts, 2 had not the course of events been entirely changed by
the Teutonic conquests of the 5th and 6th centuries.
The Angles,
Saxons, and
their allies came of the Teutonic stock, and spoke a tongue
belonging to the Teutonic or Germanic branch of the Indo-Germanic
(Indo-European) family, the same race and form of speech being
represented in modern times by the people and languages of
Holland,
Germany,
Denmark, the Scandinavian peninsula and
Iceland, as well as by those of
England and her colonies. Of the original home of the so-called
primitive
Aryan race, whose language was the parent Indo-European,
nothing is certainly known, though the subject has called forth
many conjectures; the present tendency is to seek it in
Europe itself. The tribe can
hardly have occupied an extensive area at first, but its language
came by degrees to be diffused over the greater part of Europe and
some portion of
Asia. Among those
whose Aryan descent is generally recognized as beyond dispute are
the Teutons, to whom the Angles and Saxons belonged.
The Teutonic or Germanic people, after dwelling together in a
body, appear to have scattered in various directions, their
language gradually breaking up into three main groups, which can be
already clearly distinguished in the 4th century A.D., North
Germanic or Scandinavian, West Germanic or Low and High German, and
East Germanic, of which the only important representative is
Gothic. Gothic, often called
Moeso-Gothic, was the language of a people of the Teutonic stock,
who, passing down the
Danube,
invaded the borders of the Empire, and obtained settlements in the
province of
Moesia, where
their language was committed to writing in the 4th century; its
literary remains are of peculiar value as the oldest specimens, by
several centuries, of Germanic speech. The dialects of the invaders
of Britain belonged to the West Germanic branch, and within this to
the Low German group, represented at the present 1 The works of
Gildas in the original Latin were edited by Mr Stevenson for the
English Historical Society. There is an English translation in
Six Old English Chronicles in Bohn's Antiquarian
library.
2 As to the continued existence of Latin in Britain, see further
in Rhys's
Lectures on Welsh Philology, pp. 226-227; also Dogatschar,
Lautlehre d. gr., lat. u. roman. Lehnworte im Altengl.
(Strassburg, 1888).
day by Dutch, Frisian, and the various "Platt-Deutsch" dialects
of North Germany. At the dawn of history the forefathers of the
English appear to have been dwelling between and about the
estuaries and lower courses of the
Rhine and the
Weser, and the adjacent coasts and isles; at the
present day the most English or
Angli-form dialects of the European continent are
held to be those of the North
Frisian islands of
Amrum and
Sylt,
on the west coast of
Schleswig. It is well known that the greater
part of the ancient
Friesland has been swept away by the
encroachments of the
North
Sea, and the
disjecta membra of the Frisian race,
pressed by the sea in front and more powerful nationalities behind,
are found only in isolated fragments from the
Zuider Zee to the coasts of Denmark. Many
Frisians accompanied the
Angles and Saxons to Britain, and Old English was in many respects
more closely connected with Old Frisian than with any other Low
German dialect. Of the Geatas, Eotas or "
Jutes," who, according to
Bede, occupied
Kent and the
Isle of Wight, and formed a third tribe
along with the Angles and Saxons, it is difficult to speak
linguistically. The speech of Kent certainly formed a distinct
dialect in both the Old English and the Middle English periods, but
it has tended to be assimilated more and more to neighbouring
southern dialects, and is at the present day identical with that of
Sussex, one of the old Saxon
kingdoms. Whether the speech of the Isle of Wight ever showed the
same characteristic differences as that of Kent cannot now be
ascertained, but its modern dialect differs in no respect from that
of
Hampshire, and shows
no special connexion with that of Kent. It is at least entirely
doubtful whether Bede's Geatas came from
Jutland; on linguistic grounds we should expect
that they occupied a district lying not to the north of the Angles,
but between these and the old Saxons.
The earliest specimens of the language of the Germanic invaders
of Britain that exist point to three well-marked dialect groups:
the Anglian (in which a further distinction may be made between the
Northumbrian and the Mercian, or SouthHumbrian); the Saxon,
generally called West-Saxon from the almost total lack of sources
outside the West-Saxon domain; and the Kentish. The Kentish and
West-Saxon are sometimes, especially in later times, grouped
together as southern dialects as opposed to midland and northern.
These three groups were distinguished from each other by
characteristic points of phonology and inflection. Speaking
generally, the Anglian dialects may be distinguished by the absence
of certain normal West-Saxon vowel-changes, and the presence of
others not found in WestSaxon, and also by a strong tendency to
confuse and simplify inflections, in all which points, moreover,
Northumbrian tended to deviate more widely than Mercian. Kentish,
on the other hand, occupied a position intermediate between Anglian
and WestSaxon, early Kentish approaching more nearly to Mercian,
owing perhaps to early historical connexion between the two, and
late Kentish tending to conform to West-Saxon characteristics,
while retaining several points in common with Anglian. Though we
cannot be certain that these dialectal divergences date from a
period previous to the occupation of Britain, such evidence as can
be deduced points to the existence of differences already on the
continent, the three dialects corresponding in all likelihood to
Bede's three tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Geatas.
As it was amongst the
Engle or Angles of
Northumbria that
literary culture first appeared, and as an Angle or
Englisc dialect was the first to be used for
vernacular literature,
Englisc came eventually to be a general name for all forms
of the vernacular as opposed to Latin, &c.; and even when the
West-Saxon of Alfred became in its turn the literary or classical
form of speech, it was still called Englisc or
English.
The origin of the name
A ngul-Seaxan (Anglo-Saxons) has
been disputed, some maintaining that it means a union of Angles and
Saxons, others (with better foundation) that it meant
English
Saxons, or Saxons of England or of the
Angel-cynn as distinguished from Saxons of the
Continent (see
New English Dictionary, s.v.). Its modern
use is mainly due to the little band of scholars who in the 16th
and 17th centuries turned their attention to the long-forgotten
language of Alfred and Æthic, which, as it differed so greatly from
the English of their own day, they found it convenient to
distinguish by a name which was applied to themselves by those who
spoke it. 1 To these scholars " Anglo-Saxon " and " English " were
separated by a gulf which it was reserved for later scholarship to
bridge across, and show the historical continuity of the English of
all ages.
As already hinted, the English language, in the wide sense,
presents three main stages of development - Old, Middle and Modern
- distinguished by their inflectional characteristics. The latter
can be best summarized in the words of Dr
Henry Sweet in his
History of English Sounds:
2 "Old English is the period of
full inflections
(
nama, gifan, caru), Middle English of
levelled
inflections (
naame, given, caare), and Modern English of
lost inflections (
name, give, care = nam, giv, car). We have besides two periods
of
transition, one in which
nama and
name exist side by side, and another in which final
e [with other endings] is beginning to drop." By
lost inflections it is meant that only very few remain,
and those mostly non-syllabic, as the
-s in stones and
loves, the
-ed in loved, the
-r in their, as
contrasted with the Old English stan-as, lufa6, luf-od-e and
luf-od-on, pá-ra. Each of these periods may also be
divided into two or three; but from the want of materials it is
difficult to make any such division for all dialects alike in the
first.
As to the
chronology of the successive stages, it is
of course impossible to lay down any exclusive series of dates,
since the linguistic changes were inevitably gradual, and also made
themselves felt in some parts of the country much earlier than in
others, the north being always in advance of the midland, and the
south much later in its changes. It is easy to point to periods at
which Old, Middle and Modern English were fully developed, but much
less easy to draw lines separating these stages; and even if we
recognize between each part a " transition " period or stage, the
determination of the beginning and end of this will to a certain
extent be a matter of opinion. But bearing these considerations in
mind, and having special reference to the midland dialect from
which literary English is mainly descended, the following may be
given as approximate dates, which if they do not demarcate the
successive stages, at least include them: Old English or
Anglo-Saxon .
Transition Old English (" Semi-Saxon ") .
Early Middle English .
(Normal) Middle English Late and Transition Middle English Early
Modern or
Tudor English .
Seventeenth century transition .
Modern or current English. .
Dr Sweet has reckoned Transition Old English (Old Transition)
from IoSo to 1150, Middle English thence to 1450, and Late or
Transition Middle English (Middle Transition) 1450 to 1500. As to
the Old Transition see further below.
The OLD
English or
Anglo-Saxon tongue, as introduced into Britain, was highly
inflectional, though its inflections at the date when it becomes
known to us were not so full as those of the earlier Gothic, and
considerably less so than those of Greek and Latin during their
classical periods. They corresponded more closely to those of
modern literary German, though both in nouns and verbs the forms
were more numerous and distinct; for example, the German
guten answers to
three Old English forms, -
godne,
godum, godan; guter to two - godre, Odra; liebten
to
two, - lufodon and
lufeden. Nouns had four
cases,
Nominative, Accusative (only sometimes distinct),
Genitive, i fEthelstan in 934 calls himself in a charter "
Ongol-Saxna cyning and Brytaenwalda eallaes thyses iglandes ";
Eadred in 955 is " Angul-seaxna cyning and casere totius
Britanniae," and the name is of frequent occurrence in documents
written in Latin. These facts ought to be remembered in the
interest of the scholars of the 17th century, who have been blamed
for the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, as if they had invented it. By
" Anglo-Saxon " language they meant the language of the people who
sometimes at least called themselves "
Anglo-Saxons." Even
now the name is practically useful, when we are dealing with the
subject
per se, as is
Old English, on the other
hand, when we are treating it historically or in connexion with
English as a whole.
Transactions of the Philological Society (1873-1874),
p. 620; new and much enlarged edition, 1888.
Dative, the latter
used also with prepositions to express locative, instrumental, and
most
ablative relations;
of a distinct
instrumental case only vestiges occur. There
were several declensions of nouns, the main division being that
known in Germanic languages generally as strong and weak, - a
distinction also extending to adjectives in such wise that every
adjective assumed either
the strong or the weak inflection as determined by associated
grammatical forms. The first and second personal pronouns possessed
a dual number =
we two, ye two; the third person had a
complete declension of the stem
he, instead of being made
up as now of the three stems seen in
he, she, they. The
verb distinguished the subjunctive from the indicative
mood, but had only two inflected
tenses, present and past (more accurately, that of incomplete and
that of completed or " perfect " action) - the former also used for
the future, the latter for all the shades of past time. The order
of the sentence corresponded generally to that of German. Thus from
King Alfred's additions to his translation of Orosius: " Donne ]'y
ylcan loge hi hine to ]'a m ade beran wylla5 ponne todaelalS hi his
feoh ] aet par to lafe bib' after ]'am gedrynce and pam plegan, on
fif once syx, hwilum on ma, swa swa paes feos andefn
bit " (" Then on the same day [that] they him to
the
pile bear will, then divide they his property that
there to remainder shall be after the drinking and the sports, into
five or six, at times into more, according as the property's value
is "). The
poetry was
distinguished by
alliteration, and the abundant use of
figurative and metaphorical expressions, of bold compounds and
archaic words never found in
prose. Thus in the following lines from
Beowulf (ed. Thorpe, 1.645,
Zupitza 320) Straet waes
stall-fah, stig wisode Gumum z tgeedere.
05'-byrne scan Heard hond-locen. hring-iren scir Song in searwum,
fa hie to sele furkim In hyra gry're geatwum gangan cwomon.
Trans.: The street was stone-variegated, the path guided (The)
men together; the war-mailcoat shone, Hard hand-locked. Ring-
iron sheer (bright ring-mail) Sang in
(their) cunning-trappings, as they to hall forth In their
horror-accoutrements going came.
The Old English was a homogeneous language, having very few
foreign elements in it, and forming its compounds and derivatives
entirely from its own resources. A few Latin appellatives learned
from the Romans in the German wars had been adopted into the common
West Germanic tongue, and are found in English as in the allied
dialects. Such were
strcete street,
via strata),
camp (battle),
cdsere (Caesar), mil (mile),
pin (punishment),
mynet
(money),
pund (pound),
win (wine); probably ttlso
cyrice (church),
bishop (bishop),
lceden (Latin
language),
cese (cheese),
butor (butter),
pipor (pepper),
olfend (camel,
elephantus),
ynce (inch,
uncia), and a few others. The relations
of the first invaders to the Britons were to a great extent those
of destroyers; and with the exception of the proper names of places
and prominent natural features, which as is usual were retained by
the new population, few British words found their way into the Old
English. Among these are named
broc (a
badger),
brec (breeches),
chit (clout), pul (pool), and a
few words relating to the employment of field or household menials.
Still fewer words seem to have been adopted from the provincial
Latin, almost the only certain ones being
castra, applied
to the Roman towns, which appeared in English as
ccestre,
ceaster, now found in composition as
-caster, -chester, -tester, and culina(kitchen),which gave
cylen(kiln). The introduction and gradual adoption of
Christianity, brought
a new series of Latin words connected with the offices of the
church, the accompaniments of higher civilization, the foreign
productions either actually made known, or mentioned in the
Scriptures and devotional books. Such were
mynster
(monasterium),
munuc (monk),
nunne (nun),
maesse (mass),
schol (school),
celmesse
(eleemosyna),
candel (candela),
turtle (turtur),
fic (ficus),
cedar (cedrus). These words, whose number
increased from the 7th to the 10th century, are commonly called
Latin of the second period, the Latin of the first period
including the Latin words brought by the English from the
continent, as well as those picked up in Britain either from the
Roman provincials or the Welsh. The Danish invasions of the 8th and
10th centuries to Imo 1100 t0 1150 1150 to 1250 1250 to 1400 1400
to 1485 1485 to 1611 161 1 to 1688 1689 onward resulted in the
establishment of extensive Danish and Norwegian populations, about
the basin of the
Humber and
its tributaries, and above
Morecambe Bay. Although these Scandinavian
settlers must have greatly affected the language of their own
localities, but few traces of their influence are to be found in
the literature of the Old English period. As with the greater part
of the words adopted from the Celtic, it was not until after the
dominion of the
Norman had
overlaid all preceding conquests, and the new English began to
emerge from the ruins of the old, that Danish words in any number
made their appearance in books, as equally " native " with the
Anglo-Saxon.
The earliest specimens we have of English date to the end of the
7th century, and belong to the Anglian dialect, and particularly to
Northumbrian, which, under the political
eminence of the early Northumbrian kings from
Edwin to Ecgfr16, aided perhaps by the learning of the scholars of
Ireland and
Iona, first attained
to literary distinction. Of this literature in its original form
mere fragments exist, one of the most interesting of which consists
of the verses uttered by Bede on his deathbed, and preserved in a
nearly contemporary MS.
Fore there neid faerae. naenig uuiurthit thonc snotturra. than
him tharf sie, to ymb-hycgganna. aer his hin-iongae, huaet his
gastae. godaes aeththa yflaes, aefter deoth-daege. doemid
uueorthae.
Trans.: Before the inevitable journey becomes not any Thought
more wise than (that) it is needful for him, To consider, ere his
hence-going, What, to his
ghost,
of good or ill, After death-day, doomed may be.
But our chief acquaintance with Old English is in its WestSaxon
form, the earliest literary remains of which date to the gth
century, when under the political supremacy of
Wessex and the scholarship of King Alfred it
became the literary language of the English nation, the classical "
Anglo-Saxon." If our materials were more extensive, it would
probably be necessary to divide the Old English into several
periods; as it is, considerable differences have been shown to
exist between the " early West-Saxon " of King Alfred and the later
language of the i z th century, the earlier language having
numerous phonetic and inflectional distinctions which are
"levelled" in the later, the inflectional changes showing that the
tendency to pass from the synthetical to the analytical stage
existed quite independently of the Norman Conquest. The northern
dialect, whose literary career had been cut short in the 8th
century by the Danish invasions, reappears in the 10th in the form
of glosses to the Latin gospels and a service-book, often called
the
Ritual of Durham, where we find that,
owing to the confusion which had so long reigned in the north, and
to special Northumbrian tendencies,
e.g. the dropping of
the inflectional
n in both verbs and nouns, this dialect
had advanced in the process of inflectionlevelling far beyond the
sister dialects of Mercian and the south, so as already to
anticipate the forms of Early Middle English.
Among the literary remains of the Old English may be mentioned
the epic poem of Beowulf, the original
nucleus of which has been supposed to date to
heathen and even continental
times, though we now possess it only in a later form; the poetical
works of Cynewulf; those formerly ascribed to Caedmon; several
works of Alfred, two of which, his translation of Orosius and of
The Pastoral Care
of St
Gregory, are
contemporary specimens of his language; the Old English or
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the
theological works of Alfric (including translations of the
Pentateuch and the
gospels) and of
Wulfstan;
and many works both in prose and verse, of which the authors are
unknown.
The earliest specimens, the inscriptions on the Ruthwell and
Bewcastle crosses, are in a
Runic character;
but the letters used in the manuscripts generally are a British
variety of the Roman
alphabet which the Anglo-Saxons found in the
island, and which was also used by the Welsh and Irish.' Several of
the Roman letters had in Britain developed forms, and retained or
acquired values, unlike those used on the continent, in particular
b r a n r Z 1 See on this Rhys,
Lectures on Welsh Philology,
v. (d f g r s t). The letters q and z were not used, q being
represented by
cw, and
k was a rare alternative
to
c; u or
v was only a vowel, the consonantal
power of
v being represented as in Welsh by
f.
The Runes called
thorn
and
wen, having the consonantal values now expressed by
th and w, for which the Roman alphabet had no character,
were at first expressed by
th, o (a contraction for 88 or
8h), and
v or
u; but at a later period the
characters ' and p were revived from the old Runic alphabet.
Contrary to Continental usage, the letters
c and g
(
g) had. originally only their hard or guttural powers, as
in the neighbouring
Celtic languages; so that words which,
when the Continental Roman alphabet came to be used for Germanic
languages, had to be written with
k, were in Old English
written with
c, as cene = keen, cynd = kind.' The
key to the values of the letters, and
thus to the
pronunciation of Old English, is also to
be found in the Celtic tongues whence the letters were taken.
The Old English period is usually considered as terminating
1120, with the death of the generation who saw the Norman Conquest.
The Conquest established in England a foreign court, a foreign
aristocracy and a
foreign
hierarchy.' The
French
language, in its Norman dialect, became the only polite medium
of intercourse. The native tongue, despised not only as unknown but
as the language of a subject race, was left to the use of boors and
serfs, and except in a few stray cases ceased to be written at all.
The natural results followed. 4 When the educated generation that
saw the arrival of the Norman died out, the language, ceasing to be
read and written, lost all its literary words. The words of
ordinary life whose preservation is independent of books lived on
as vigorously as ever, but the literary terms, those that related
to science, art and higher culture, the bold artistic compounds,
the figurative terms of poetry, were speedily forgotten. The
practical vocabulary shrank to a fraction of its former extent. And
when, generations later, English began to be used for general
literature, the only terms at hand to express ideas above those of
every-day life were to be found in the French of the privileged
classes, of whom alone art, science, law and
theology had been for generations the
inheritance. Hence each
successive literary effort of the reviving English tongue showed a
larger adoption of French words to supply the place of the
forgotten native ones, till by the days of Chaucer they constituted
a notable part of the vocabulary. Nor was it for the time being
only that the French. words affected the English vocabulary. The
Norman French words introduced by the Conquest, as well as the
Central or Parisian French words which followed under the early
Plantagenets, were mainly Latin words which had lived on among the
people of Gaul, and, modified in the mouths of succeeding
generations, had reached forms more or less remote from their
originals. In being now adopted as English, they supplied
precedents in accordance with which other Latin words might be
converted into English ones, whenever required; and long before the
Renascence of classical learning, though in much greater numbers
after that epoch, these precedents were freely followed.
While the eventual though distant result of the Norman Conquest
was thus a large reconstruction of the English vocabulary, 2 During
the Old English period both
c and g appear to have
acquired a palatal value in conjunction with front or palatal
vowelsounds, except in the north where
c, and in some
cases a, tended to remain guttural in such positions. This value
was never distinguished in Old English writing, but may be deduced
from certain phonetic changes depending upon it, and from the use
of
c, cc, as an alternative for
tj (as in
ort g eard, orceard =
orchard,
fetian, feccean = fetch), as
well as from the normal occurrence of
ch and
y in
these positions in later stages of the language,
e.g. cild =
child, ta e cean = teach,
g iellan = yell,
dae
a =day, &c.
3 For a discriminating view of the effects of the Norman
Conquest on the English Language, see Freeman, Norman
Conquest, ch. xxv.
4 There is no reason to suppose that any attempt was made to
proscribe or suppress the native tongue, which was indeed used in
some official documents addressed to Englishmen by the Conqueror
himself. Its social degradation seemed even on the point of coming
to an end, when it was confirmed and prolonged for two centuries
more by the accession of the Angevin dynasty, under whom everything
French received a fresh impetus.
the grammar of the language vas not directly affected by it.
There was no reason why it should - we might almost add, no way by
which it could. While the English used their own
words,
they could not forget their own
way of using them, the
inflections and constructions by which alone the words expressed
ideas - in other words, their grammar; when one by one French words
were introduced into the sentence they became English by the very
act of admission, and were at once subjected to all the duties and
liabilities of English words in the same position. This is of
course precisely what happens at the present day:
telegraph and
telegram make participle
telegraphing and plural
telegrams, and
naïve the adverb
natively, precisely as if they had been in the language
for ages.
But indirectly the grammar was affected very quickly. In
languages in the inflected or synthetic stage the terminations must
be pronounced with marked distinctness, as these contain the
correlation of ideas; it is all-important to hear whether a word is
bonus or
bonis
or
bonas or
bonos. This implies a measured and
distinct pronunciation, against which the effort for ease and
rapidity of utterance is continually struggling, while indolence
and carelessness continually
compromise it. In the Germanic languages, as
a whole, the main stress-
accent falls on the radical syllable, or on the
prefix of a nominal compound, and thus at or near the beginning of
the word; and the result of this in English has been a growing
tendency to suffer the concluding syllables to fall into obscurity.
We are familiar with the
cockney winder, sofer, holler, Sarer,
Sunder, would yer, for
window,
sofa,
holla, Sarah, Sunday, would
you, the various final vowels
sinking into an obscure neutral one now conventionally spelt
er, but formerly represented by final
e. Already
before the Conquest, forms originally
hatu, sello, tunga,
appeared as
hate, selle, tunge, with the terminations
levelled to obscure e; but during the illiterate period of the
language after the Conquest this careless obscuring of terminal
vowels became universal, all unaccented vowels in the final
syllable (except
i) sinking into
e. During the
12th century, while this change was going on, we see a great
confusion of grammatical forms, the full inflections of Old English
standing side by side in the same sentence with the levelled ones
of Middle English. It is to this state of the language that the
names
Transition and
Period of Confusion (Dr
Abbott's appellation) point; its appearance, as that of Anglo-Saxon
broken down in its endings, had previously given to it the
suggestive if not logical appellation of Semi-Saxon.
Although the written remains of the transition stage are few,
sufficient exist to enable us to trace the course of linguistic
change in some of the dialects. Within three generations after the
Conquest, faithful pens were at work transliterating the old
homilies of iElfric, and other lights of the Anglo-Saxon Church,
into the current
idiom of their
posterity.' Twice during the period, in the reigns of
Stephen and
Henry II., rElfric's gospels were similarly
modernized so as to be " understanded of the people." Homilies and
other religious works of the end of the 12th century show us the
change still further advanced, and the language passing into Early
Middle English in its southern form. While these southern remains
carry on in unbroken sequence the history of the Old English of
Alfred and IElfric, the history of the northern English is an
entire
blank from the 11th to
the 13th century. The stubborn resistance of the north, and the
terrible
retaliation
inflicted by William, apparently effaced northern English culture
for centuries. If anything was written in the vernacular in the
kingdom of
Scotland during
the same period, it probably perished during the calamities to
which that country was subjected during the half-century of
struggle for independence. In reality, however, the northern
English had entered upon its transition stage two centuries
earlier; the glosses of the 10th century show that the Danish
inroads had there anticipated the results hastened by the Norman
Conquest in the south.
2 Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, &c., ed. for Cambridge Press, by
W. W. Skeat (1871-1887), second text.
Old English Homilies of Twelfth Century, first and
second series, ed. R.
Morris
(E.E.T.S.), (1868-1873).
Meanwhile a dialect was making its appearance in another quarter
of England, destined to overshadow the old literary dialects of
north and south alike, and become the English of the future. The
Mercian kingdom, which, as its name imports, lay along
the marches of
the earlier states, and was really a congeries of the outlying
members of many tribes, must have presented from the beginning a
linguistic mixture and transition; and it is evident that more than
one intermediate form of speech arose within its confines, between
Lancashire and the
Thames. I he specimens of early
Mercian now in existence consist mainly of glosses, in a mixed
Mercian and southern dialect, dating from the 8th century; but, in
a 9th-century gloss, the so-called
Vespasian Psalter, representing what is
generally held to be pure Mercian. Towards the close of the Old
English period we find some portions of a
gloss to the Rushworth Gospels, namely
St Matthew and a few
verses of St
John
xviii., to be in Mercian. These glosses, with a few charters
and one or two small fragments, represent a form of Anglian which
in many respects stands midway between Northumbrian and Kentish,
approaching the one or the other more nearly as we have to do with
North Mercian or South Mercian. And soon after the Conquest we find
an undoubted midland dialect in the transition stage from Old to
Middle English, in the eastern part of ancient
Mercia, in a district bounded on the south and
south-east by the Saxon
Middlesex and
Essex, and on the east and north by the East
Anglian
Norfolk and
Suffolk and the Danish
settlements on the Trent and Humber. In this district, and in the
monastery of
Peterborough, one of the copies of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, transcribed about 1120, was continued by two
succeeding hands to the death of Stephen in 1154. The section from
1122 to 1131, probably written in the latter year, shows a notable
confusion between Old English forms and those of a Middle English,
impatient to rid itself of the inflectional trammels which were
still, though in weakened forms, so faithfully retained south of
the Thames. And in the concluding section, containing the annals
from 1132 to 1154, and written somewhere about the latter year, we
find Middle English fairly started on its career. A specimen of
this new tongue will best show the change that had taken place:
1140
A.D. - And 4 te eorl of Angeu
ward ded, and his sune Henri toc to Pe
rice. And te cuen of
France to-d ae lde fra Pe king,
and scan
corn to Pe iunge eorl
Henri.
and he toc hire to wiue,
and al Peitou mid
hire. Pa ferde he mid micel fxrd into Engleland and, wan castles -
and te king ferde agenes him mid micel mare ferd.
PoPwwthere fuhtten hi noht. oc ferden Pe arcebiscop
and te
wise men betwux heom, and makede
that sahte
that
te king sculde ben lauerd
and king wile he liuede.
and
after his da i ware Henri king.
and he helde him for
fader,
and he him for sune,
and sib
and
swhte sculde ben betwyx heom, and on al Engleland.5 With this may
be contrasted a specimen of southern English, from io to 20 years
later (Hatton Gospels,
Luke i. 46
6): Da cwaeo Maria: Min saule mersed drihten, and min gast
geblissode on gode minen haelende. For Pam Pe he geseah his Pinene
eadmodnysse. Soflice henen-foro me eadige segge16 alle cneornesse;
for Pam Pe me mychele Ping dyde se Pe mihtyg ys;
and his
name is halig.
And his mildheortnysse of cneornisse on
cneornesse hine ondraedende. He worhte maegne on hys earme; he
to-daelde Pa ofermode, on moda heora heortan. He warp Pa rice of
setlle, and Pa eadmode he up-an-
hof.
Hyngriende he mid gode ge-felde,
and Pa ofermode ydele
for-let. He afeng
israel his
cniht, and gemynde his mildheortnysse; Swa he
sprxc to ure f ae deren, Abrahame
and his
sade on a weorlde.
To a still later date, apparently close upon 1200, belongs the
versified chronicle of
Layamon or Laweman, a
priest of Ernely on the Severn, who, using as
his basis the French
Brut of Wace, expanded it by
additions from other sources to more than twice the extent: his
work of 32,250 lines is a mine of illustration for the language of
his time and locality. The latter was intermediate between midland
and southern, and the language, though forty years later than the
specimen from the Chronicle, is much more archaic in structure, and
can scarcely be considered even as Early Middle English. The
following is a specimen (lines 9064-9079): ' The article Pe becomes
te after a preceding
t or
d by
assimilation. Earle,
Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel
(1865), p. 265. Skeat,
Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian
Gospels (1874).
On Kinbelines daeie. .. Pe king wes inne Bruttene, corn a Pissen
middel aerde. anes maidenes sune, iboren wes in BePleem. of berste
alre
burden. He is ihaten Jesu
Crist. .. Purh Pene halie gost, alre worulde wunne. .. walden
englenne; faeder he is on heuenen. froure moncunnes; sune he is on
eor6en. .. of sele Pon maeidene, & Pene halie gost. .. haldeo
mid him seoluen.
The Middle English was pre-eminently the
Dialectal
period of the language. It was not till after the middle of the
14th century that English obtained official recognition. For three
centuries, therefore, there was no standard form of speech which
claimed any pre-eminence over the others. The writers of each
district wrote in the dialect familar to them; and between extreme
forms the difference was so great as to amount to
unintelligibility; works written for southern Englishmen had to be
translated for the benefit of the men of the north: " In sotherin
Inglis was it drawin, And turnid is haue it till
ur awin Langage of Pe northin lede That can na
nothir Inglis rede."
Cursor Mundi, 20,064.
Three main dialects were distinguished by contemporary writers,
as in the often-quoted passage from Trevisa's translation of
Higden's
Polychronicon completed in 1387: " Also Englysche
men. .. hadde fram Pe bygynnynge pre maner speche, Souperon,
Norperon
and Myddel speche (in Pe myddel of Pe lond) as by
come of Pre maner people of Germania.. Also of Pe forseyde Saxon
tonge, Pat ys deled a Pre,
and ys abyde scarslyche wiP
feaw uplondysche men
and ys gret wondur, for men of Pe est
wiP men of fe west, as hyt were under Pe same part of heyvene,
acordeP more in sounynge of s p eche
Pan men of Pe norP wiP men of f e
sou p; Perfore hyt ys Pat Mercii, Pat buP men of
myddel Engelond, as hyt were parteners of Pe endes, undurstondeP
betre Pe syde longages NorPeron and SouPeron, Pan NorPern
and SouPern undurstondeP oyPer oPer." The modern study of
these Middle English dialects, initiated by the elder
Richard
Garnett, scientifically pursued by Dr
Richard Morris, and elaborated by many
later scholars, both English and German, has shown that they were
readily distinguished by the conjugation of the present tense of
the verb, which in typical specimens was as follows: -
Southern. Ich singe. We singeP.
Pou singest. 3e singeP.
He singeP. Hy singeP. Midland. Ich, I, singe. We
singen.
Pou singest. 3e singen.
He singeP. Hy, thei, singen. Northern. 'Ic,' I, sing(e)
(I Pat singes). We sing(e), We Pat synges.
Pu singes. 3e sing(e), 3e foules synges.
He singes. Thay sing(e), Men synges. Of these the southern is
simply the old West-Saxon, with the vowels levelled to
e.
The northern second person in
-es preserves an older form
than the southern and West-Saxon
-est; but the
-es of the third person and plural is derived from an
older
-eth, the change of
-th into
-s
being found in progress in the Durham glosses of the 10th century.
In the plural, when accompanied by the pronoun subject, the verb
had already dropped the inflections entirely as in Modern English.
The origin of the
-en plural in the midland dialect,
unknown to Old English, is probably an instance of
form-levelling, the inflection of the present indicative
being assimilated to that of the past, and the present and past
subjunctive, in all of which
-en was the plural
termination. In the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns,
the northern dialect had attained before the end of the 13th
century to the simplicity of Modern English, while the southern
dialect still retained a large number of inflections, and the
midland a considerable number. The dialects differed also in
phonology, for while the northern generally retained the hard or
guttural values of g,
sc, these were in the two other
dialects palatalized before front vowels into
ch, j and
sh. Kirk, chirche or
church, bryg, bridge; scryke,
shriek, are examples. Old English
hw was written in
the north qu(h), but elsewhere
wh, often sinking into
w. The original long a in
shin, mdr, preserved in
the northern
stane, mare, became o elsewhere, as in
stone, more. So that the north presented a general aspect
of conservation of old sounds with the most thorough-going
dissolution of old
inflections; the south, a tenacious retention of the inflections,
with an extensive evolution in the sounds. In one important
respect, however,phonetic decay was far ahead in the north: the
final
e to which all the old vowels had been levelled
during the transition stage, and which is a distinguishing feature
of Middle English in the midland and southern dialects, became
mute, i.e., disappeared, in the
northern dialect before that dialect emerged from its three
centuries of obscuration, shortly before 1300. So thoroughly modern
had its form consequently become that we might almost call it
Modern English, and say that the Middle English stage of the
northern dialect is lost. For comparison with the other dialects,
however, the same nomenclature may be used, and we may class as
Middle English the extensive literature which northern England
produced during the 14th century. The earliest specimen is probably
the Metrical Psalter in the Cotton Library,' copied during the
reign of Edward II. from an original of the previous century. The
gigantic versified
paraphrase of Scripture history called the
Cursor Mundi, 2 is held also to have been composed before
1300. The dates of the numerous alliterative romances in this
dialect have not been determined with exactness, as all survive in
later copies, but it is probable that some of them were written
before 1300. In the 14th century appeared the theological and
devotional works of
Richard Rolle the anchorite of
Hampole,
Dan Jon Gaytrigg, William
of Nassington, and other writers whose names are unknown; and
towards the close of the century, specimens of the language also
appear from Scotland both in official documents and in the poetical
works of
John
Barbour, whose language, barring minute points of
orthography, is
identical with that of the contemporary northern English writers.
From 1400 onward, the distinction between northern English and
Lowland Scottish becomes
clearly marked.
In the southern dialect one version of the work called the
Ancren
Riwle or " Rule of Nuns," adapted about 1 225 for a small
sisterhood at Tarrant-Kaines, in
Dorsetshire, exhibits a dialectal
characteristic which had probably long prevailed in the south,
though concealed by the spelling, in the use of
v for
f, as
valle fall,
vordonne fordo,
vorto for to,
veder father,
vrom from.
Not till later do we find a recognition of the parallel use of z
for
s. Among the writings which succeed,
The Owl and the Nightingale of
Nicholas de
Guildford, of Portesham in Dorsetshire,
before 1250, the
Chronicle of
Robert of
Gloucester, 1298, and Trevisa's translation
of Higden, 1387, are of special importance in illustrating the
history of southern English. The earliest form of Langland's
Piers Ploughman, 1362, as preserved in the Vernon MS.,
appears to be in an intermediate dialect between southern and
midland. 3 The Kentish form of southern English seems to have
retained specially archaic features; five short sermons in it of
the middle of the 13th century were edited by Dr Morris (1866); but
the great work illustrating it is the
Ayenbite of Inwyt
(Remorse of
Conscience), 1340, 4 a translation from the
French by
Dan Michel of Northgate, Kent,
who tells us " Pet Pis boc is y-write mid engliss of Kent; Pis boc
is y-mad uor lewede men, Vor uader, and uor moder, and uor oPer
ken,
Ham uor to betre uram alle
manyere zen, Pet
ine hare inwytte ne bleue no uoul wen." In its use of
v (u) and z for
f and
s, and its
grammatical inflections, it presents an extreme type of southern
speech, with peculiarities specially Kentish; and in comparison
with contemporary Midland English works, it looks like a fossil of
two centuries earlier.
Turning from the dialectal extremes of the Middle English to the
midland speech, which we left at the closing leaves of the 1 Edited
for the Surtees Society, by Rev. J. Stevenson.
2 Edited for the Early English Text Society, by Rev. Dr Morris.
3. The Vision of William
concerning Piers the Ploughman exists in three different
recensions, all of which have been edited for the Early English
Text Society by Rev. W. W. Skeat.
4 Edited by Rev. Dr Morris for Early English Text Society, in
1866.
Peterborough
Chronicle of 1154, we find a rapid
development of this dialect, which was before long to become the
national literary language. In this, the first great work is the
Ormulum, or metrical Scripture paraphrase of
Orm or Ormin, written about 1200,
somewhere near the northern frontier of the midland area. The
dialect has a decided
smack of
the north, and shows for the first time in
English
literature a large percentage of Scandinavian words, derived
from the Danish settlers, who, in adopting English, had preserved a
vast number of their ancestral forms of speech, which were in time
to pass into the common language, of which they now constitute some
of the most familiar words.
Blunt, bull, die, dwell, ill, kid,
raise, same, thrive, wand, wing, are words from this source,
which appear first in the work of Orm, of which the following lines
maybe quoted: " Pe Judewisshe folkess boc hemm se33de, Patt hemm
birrde Twa bukkes samenn to Pe preost att kirrke-dure brinngenn;
And te33 Pa didenn bliPel13, swa summ Pe boc hemm tahhte,
And brohhtenn twe33enn bukkess l ? r Drihhtin p aerwiPl to
lakenn.
And att 1 to kirrke-dure toc Pe preost to twe33enn bukkess,
And o Patt an he le33de
pier all pe33re sake
and sinne,
And let itt eornenn for p wiP p all At inntill wilde
wesste;
And toc
and sna p Patt oPerr bucc
Drihhtin j: erwiPI to lakenn.
All Piss wass
don forr here ned,
and ec forr ure nede; For hemm itt hallp biforenn Godd to
clennssenn hemm of sinne;
And all swa ma33 itt hellpenn Pe
31ff Patt tu willt [itt] foll3henn.
Siff Patt tu willt full innwarrdl13 wiN' fulle trowwPe lefenn
All Patt tatt wass bitacnedd taer, to lefenn and to
trowwenn." Ormulum, ed. White, 1.1324.
The author of the
Ormulum was a phonetist, and employed
a special spelling of his own to represent not only the quality but
the
quantities of vowels and consonants - a circumstance
which gives his work a peculiar value to the investigator. He is
generally assumed to have been a native of
Lincolnshire or Notts, but the point is a
disputed one, and there is somewhat to be said for the
neighbourhood of
Ormskirk
in Lancashire.
It is customary to differentiate between east and west midland,
and to subdivide these again into north and south. As was natural
in a tract of country which stretched from
Lancaster to Essex, a very considerable
variety is found in the documents which agree in presenting the
leading midland features, those of Lancashire and Lincolnshire
approaching the northern dialect both in vocabulary, phonetic
character and greater neglect of inflections. But this diversity
diminishes as we advance.
Thirty
years after the
Ormulum, the east midland rhymed
Story of Genesis and
Exodus ? shows us the dialect in a more southern form,
with the vowels of modern English, and from about the same date,
with rather more northern characteristics, we have an east midland
Bestiary. Different tests and different dates have been
proposed for subdividing the Middle English period, but the most
important is that of Henry Nicol, based on the observation that in
the early 13th century, as in Ormin, the Old English short vowels
in an open syllable still retained their short quantity, as
llama, over, mete; but by 1250
or 1260 they had been lengthened to
nä-me, o-ver, me-te, a
change which has also taken place at a particular period in all the
Germanic, and even the Romanic languages, as in
buo-no for
bo-num, pa-dre for
pd-trem, &c. The
lengthening of the penult left the final syllable by contrast
shortened or weakened, and paved the way for the disappearance of
final
e In the century following, through the stages
nel-me, 1 Here, and in
tatt, tu, taer, for
patt, pu, Pad, after
t,
d, there is the same phonetic assimilation as in the last
section of the AngloSaxon Chronicle above.
2 Edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr Morris
(1865).
na-me, nd-m', nam, the one long syllable in
nam(e) being the quantitative equivalent of the two short
syllables in nd-me; hence the notion that mute e
makes a preceding vowel long, the truth being that the lengthening
of the vowel led to the e becoming mute.
After 1250 we have the
Lay of Havelok, and about 1300
the writings of Robert of Brunne in South Lincolnshire. In the 14th
century we find a number of texts belonging to the western part of
the district. South-west midland is hardly to be distinguished from
southern in its south-western form, and hence texts like
Piers
Plowman elude any satisfactory classification, but several
metrical romances exhibit what are generally considered to be west
midland characteristics, and a little group of poems,
Sir
Gawayne and the Grene Knighte, the Pearl, Cleanness and
Patience, thought to be
the work of a north-west midland writer of the 14th century, bear a
striking resemblance to the modern Lancashire dialect. The end of
the century witnessed the prose of Wycliff and Mandeville, and the
poetry of Chaucer, with whom Middle English may be said to have
culminated, and in whose writings its main characteristics as
distinct from Old and Modern English may be studied. Thus, we find
final
e in full use representing numerous original vowels
and terminations as, Him thoughte that his herte wolde breke, in
Old English Him Puhte p at his heorte wolde brecan, which may be
compared with the modern German Ihm dauchte dass sein Herze wollte
brechen.
In nouns the -es of the plural and genitive case is
still syllabicReede as the berstl-es of a sow-es eer-es.
Several old genitives and plural forms continued to exist,, and
the dative or prepositional case has usually a final e..
Adjectives retain so much of the old declension as to have
-a in the definite form and in the plural The tend-re
cropp-es and the yong-e sonne.
And smal-e
fowl-es maken
melodie.
Numerous old forms of comparison were in use, which have not
come down to Modern English, as
herre, ferre, longer,
hext= higher, farther, longer, highest. In the pronouns,
ich lingered alongside of
I; ye was only
nominative, and
you objective; the northern
thei had
dispossessed the southern
hy, but
her and
hem (the modern '
em) stood their ground against
their and
them.. The verb is
I lov-e, thou
lov-est, he lov-eth; but, in the plural,
lov-en is
interchanged with
lov-e, as
rhyme or euphony requires. So in the plural of
the past
we love-den or
love-de. The
infinitive also ends in
en, often
e, always syllabic. The present
participle,. in Old English
-ende, passing through
-inde, has been confounded with the verbal noun in
-ynge, -yng, as in Modern English. The past participle
largely retains the prefix
y- or
i-, representing
the Old English
ge-, as in
i-ronne, y-don, Old
English
zerunnen,. zedon, run, done. Many old verb forms
still continued in existence. The adoption of French words, not
only those of Norman introduction, but those subsequently
introduced under the Angevin kings, to supply obsolete and
obsolescent English ones, which had kept
pace with the growth of literature since the
beginning of the Middle English period, had now reached its climax;
later times added many more, but they also dropped some that were
in regular use with Chaucer and his contemporaries.
Chaucer's great contemporary,
William Langland, in his
Vision of
William concerning Piers the Ploughman, and his imitator the
author of
Pierce the Ploughman's Crede (about 1400) used
the Old English alliterative versification for the last time in the
south. Rhyme had made its appearance in the language shortly after
the Conquest - if not already known before; and in the south and
midlands it became decidedly more popular than alliteration; the
latter retained its hold much longer in the north, where it was
written even after 1500: many of the northern romances are either
simply alliterative, or have both alliteration and rhyme. To these
characteristics of northern and southern verse respectively Chaucer
alludes in the
prologue of
the " Persone," who, when called upon for his tale said: - But
trusteth wel; I am a sotherne man, I cannot geste
rom, ram, ruf, by my letter, And, God
wote, rime hold I but litel better: And therefore, if you list, I
wol not glose, I wol you tell a litel tale in prose." The changes
from Old to Middle English may be summed up thus: Loss of a large
part of the native vocabulary, and adoption of French words to fill
their place; not infrequent adoption of French words as synonyms of
existing native ones; modernization of the English words preserved,
by vowel change in a definite direction from back to front, and
from open to close, a becoming ?, original e,
o,
tending to
ee, oo, monophthongization of the old
diphthongs
eo, ea, and
development of new diphthongs in connexion with
g, h, and
w; adoption of French orthographic symbols,
e.g.
ou foru,
qu, v, ch, and gradual loss of the symbols
7, J', 5, obscuration of vowels after the accent, and especially of
final
a, o, u to e; consequent confusion and loss of old
inflections, and their replacement by prepositions,
auxiliary verbs and rules
of position;
abandonment of alliteration for rhyme; and
great development of dialects, in consequence of there being no
standard or recognized type of English.
But the recognition came at length. Already in 1258 was issued
the celebrated English
proclamation of
Henry III., or rather of
Simon de Montfort
in his name, which, as the only public recognition of the native
tongue between William the Conqueror and
Edward III., has sometimes been spoken of as
the first specimen of English. It runs: " Henri
bur3 godes fultume king on Engleneloande Lhoauerd
on Yrloande. Duk on
Normandie on
Aquitaine and eorl on Aniow. Send igretinge
to alle hise holde ilwrde and ileawede on Huntendoneschire. pant
witen 3e wel alle pant
we willen and vnnen pat pant vre
raedesmen alle oiler Pe moare dael of heom pant beop ichosen bur3
us and pur3 rant loandes folk on vre kuneriche. habber idon and
schullen don in be worpnesse of gode and on vre treowpe. for re
freme of re loande. pur3 Pe bes13te of
ban to-foren-iseide redesmen. beo stedef ae st and
ilestinde in alle pinge a buten aende. And we hoaten alle vre
treowe in Pe treowpe Pant heo vs 03en. pant heo stedefaestliche
healden and swerien to healden and to werien ro isetnesses reset
ben imakede and beon to makien pur3 ban to-foren iseide r a desmen.
ober pur3 re moare dael of heom alswo alse
hit is biforen iseid. And pant aehc oper helpe P an
t for to done bi ban ilche ore a3enes alle men. R13t for to done
and to foangen. And noan ne nime of loande ne of e3te. wherrur3 pis
bes13te mu3e beon ilet oper iwersed on onie wise. And 31f oni oper
onie cumen her on3enes; we willen and hoaten pant alle vre treowe
heom healden deadliche ifoan. And for p an t we willen p an t pis
beo stedefaest and lestinde; we senden 3ew pis
writ open iseined wit) vre seel. to halden amanges
3ew ine hord. Witnesse vs seluen
ant
Lundene.
Pane E3tetenpe day. on Pe
Monpe of Octobre In re Two-and-fowert13Pe 3eare of vre cruninge.
And pis wes idon aetforen vre isworene redesmen.. .
" And al on
Po ilche worden is
isend in to aeurihce
ogre shcire
ouer al Pare kuneriche on Engleneloande. and ek in tel Irelonde."
The dialect of this document is more southern than anything else,
with a slight midland admixture. It is much more archaic
inflectionally than the
Genesis and Exodus or
Ormulum; but it closely resembles the old Kentish sermons
and
Proverbs of Alfred in the southern dialect of 1250. It
represents no doubt the
London
speech of the day. London being in a Saxon county, and contiguous
to Kent and
Surrey, had
certainly at first a southern dialect; but its position as the
capital, as well as its proximity to the midland district, made its
dialect more and more midland. Contemporary London documents show
that Chaucer's language, which is distinctly more southern than
standard English eventually became, is behind the London dialect of
the day in this respect, and is at once more archaic and
consequently more southern.
During the next hundred years English gained ground steadily,
and by the reign of Edward III. French was so little known in
England, even in the families of the great, that about 1350 " John
Cornwal, a maystere of gramere, chaungede })e
lore (
=teaching) in gramere scole
and construccion of [i.e.
from] Freynsch into
Englysch "; 1 and in 1362-1363 English by statute took the place of
French in the pleadings in courts of law. Every reason conspired
that this " English " should be the midland dialect. It was the
intermediate dialect, intelligible, as Trevisa has told us, to both
extremes, even when these failed 1 Trevisa,
Translation of
Higden's Polychronicon. to be intelligible to each other; in
its south-eastern form, it was the language of London, where the
supreme law courts were, the centre of political and commercial
life; it was the language in which the Wycliffite versions had
given the Holy Scriptures to the people; the language in which
Chaucer had raised English poetry to a height of excellence admired
and imitated by contemporaries and followers. And accordingly after
the end of the 14th century, all Englishmen who thought they had
anything to say to their countrymen generally said it in the
midland speech. Trevisa's own work was almost the last literary
effort of the southern dialect; henceforth it was but a rustic
patois, which the dramatist might
use to give local colouring to his creations, as Shakespeare uses
it to complete Edgar's
peasant disguise in
Lear, or which
10th century research might disinter to illustrate obscure chapters
in the history of language. And though the northern English proved
a little more stubborn, it disappeared also from literature in
England; but in Scotland, which had now become politically and
socially estranged from England, it continued its course as the
national language of the country, attaining in the 15th and 16th
centuries a distinct development and high literary culture, for the
details of which readers are referred to the article on Scottish
Language.
The 15th century of
English history, with its bloody French
war abroad and
Wars of the Roses at home, was a
barren period in literature, and a transition one in language,
witnessing the decay and disappearance of the final
e, and
most of the syllabic inflections of Middle English. Already by
1420, in Chaucer's
disciple Hoccleve, final
e was quite
uncertain; in Lydgate it was practically gone. In 1450 the writings
of
Pecock against the
Wycliffites show the verbal inflections in
-en in a state
of obsolescence; he has still the southern pronouns
her
and
hem for the northern
their, them:- " And
here-a3ens holi scripture wole pat men schulden lacke re coueryng
which wommen schulden haue, & thei schulden so lacke bi Pat re
heeris of her heedis schulden be schorne, & schulde not growe
in lengpe doun as wommanys hoer schulde growe... .
" Also here-wipal into re open s13t of ymagis in open chirchis,
alle peple, men & wommen & children mowe come whanne euere
Pei wolen in ech tyme of Pe day, but so mowe Pei not come in-to be
vice of bokis to be delyuered to hem neiper to be red bifore hem;
& Perf ore, as for to soone & ofte come into remembraunce
of a long mater bi ech oon persoon, and also as forto make pat re
mo persoones come into remembraunce of a mater, ymagis &
picturis serven in a specialer maner pan bokis doon, Pou3 in an
oper maner ful substanciali bolos seruen better into remembrauncing
of Po same materis pan ymagis & picturis doon; & Perfore,
Pou3 writingis seruen weel into remembrauncing upon re bifore seid
pingis, 31t not at re ful: Forwhi re bokis han not re avail of
remembrauncing now seid whiche ymagis han." 2 The change of the
language during the second period of Transition, as well as the
extent of dialectal differences, is quaintly expressed a generation
later by Caxton, who in the prologue to one of the last of his
works, his translation of Virgil's
Eneydos (1490), speaks
of the difficulty he had in pleasing all readers: " I doubted that
it - shoude not please some gentylmen, whiche late blamed me,
sayeng, y t in my translacyons I had ouer curyous termes, whiche
coud not be vnderstande of comyn peple, and desired me to vse olde
and homely termes in my translacyons. And fayn wolde I satysfy
euery man; and so to doo, toke an olde boke and redde therein; and
certaynly the englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wele
vnderstande it. And also my lorde
abbot of Westmynster ded do shewe to me late
certayn euydences wryton in olde englysshe for to reduce it in to
our englysshe now vsid. And certaynly it was wreton in suche wyse
that it was more lyke to dutche than englysshe; I coude not reduce
ne brynge it to be vnderstonden. And certaynly, our langage now
vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was
borne. For we englysshemen ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the
mone, whiche is neuer stedfaste, but euer wauerynge, wexynge one
season, and waneth and dycreaseth another season. And that comyn
englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so
much that in my days happened that certayn marchauntes were in a
shipe in tamyse, for to haue sayled ouer the sea 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, Skeat,
Specimens of English Literature, pp. 49,
54.
for he also coulde speke no frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges;
and she vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that
he wolde haue eyren; then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym
wel. Loo! what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or
eyren? certaynly, it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of
dyuersite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes, euery man
that is in ony reputacyon in his countre wyll vtter his
comynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes that f
ewe men shall vnderstonde theym. And
som honest and grete clerkes haue ben wyth me, and desired me to
wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene
playn, rude and curyous, I stande abasshed; but in my Iudgemente,
the comyn termes that be dayli vsed ben lyghter to be vnderstonde
than the olde and auncyent englysshe." In the productions of
Caxton's press we see the passage from Middle to Early Modern
English completed. The earlier of these have still an occasional
verbal plural in
-n, especially in the word
they
ben; the southern
her and
hem of Middle
English vary with the northern and Modern English
their,
them. In the late works, the older forms have been practically
ousted, and the year 1485, which witnessed the establishment of the
Tudor dynasty, may be conveniently put as that which closed the
Middle English transition, and introduced Modern English. Both in
the completion of this result, and in its comparative permanence,
the
printing press had an
important share. By its exclusive patronage of the midland speech,
it raised it still higher above the sister dialects, and secured
its abiding victory. As books were multiplied and found their way
into every corner of the land, and the art of reading became a more
common acquirement, the man of
Northumberland or of Somersetshire had
forced upon his attention the book-English in which alone these
were printed. This became in turn the model for his own writings,
and by-and-by, if he made any pretensions to education, of his own
speech. The written
form of the language also tended to
uniformity. In previous periods the scribe made his own spelling
with a primary aim at expressing his own speech, according to the
particular values attached by himself or his contemporaries to the
letters and combinations of the alphabet, though liable to
disturbance in the most common words and combinations by his ocular
recollections of the spelling of others. But after the introduction
of printing, this ocular recognition of words became ever more and
more an aim; the book addressed the mind directly through the eye,
instead of circuitously through eye and
ear; and thus there was a continuous tendency for
written words and parts of words to be reduced to a single form,
and that the most usual, or through some
accident the best known, but not necessarily
that which would have been chosen had the
ear been called
in as
umpire. Modern English
spelling, with its rigid uniformity as to individual results and
whimsical caprice as to principles, is the creation of the
printing-office, the victory which, after a century and a half of
struggle, mechanical convenience won over natural habits. Besides
eventually creating a uniformity in writing, the introduction of
printing made or at least ratified some important changes. The
British and Old English form of the Roman alphabet has already been
referred to. This at the Norman Conquest was superseded by an
alphabet with the French forms and values of the letters. Thus
k took the place of the older
c before
e
and
i; qu replaced
cw; the Norman w took the
place of the wen (p), &c.; and hence it has often been said
that Middle English stands nearer to Old English in pronunciation,
but to Modern English in spelling. But there were certain sounds in
English for which Norman writing had no provision; and for these,
in writing English, the native characters were retained. Thus the
Old English g (a), beside the
sound in
go, had a guttural sound as in
German tag, Irish magh, and in certain positions a palatalized form
of this approaching
y as in you (if pronounced with
aspiration hyou or
ghyou). These sounds continued to be
written with the native form of the letter as
bur3, our,
while the French form was used for the sounds in
go, age, -
one original letter being thus represented by two. So for the
sounds of
th, especially the sound in that, the Old
English
thorn (p) continued to be used. But as these
characters were not used for French and Latin, their use even in
English became disturbed towards the i 5th century, and when
printing was introduced, the founts, cast for continental
languages, had no characters for them, so that they were dropped
entirely, being replaced, by
gh, yh, y, and p by
th. This was a real loss to the English alphabet. In the
north it is curious that the printers tried to express the
forms rather than the powers of these letters, and
consequently was represented by z, the'black letter form of which
was confounded with it, while the p was expressed by
y,
which its MS. form had come to approach or in some cases simulate.
So in early Scotch books we find
zellow, ze, yat, yem= yellow,
ye, that, them; and in Modern Scottish, such names as
Menzies, Dalziel, Cockenzie, and the word
gaberlunzie, in which the z stands for
y. Modern
English thus dates from Caxton. The language had at length reached
the all but flectionless state which it now presents. A single
older verbal form, the southern
-elk of the third person singular, continued to
be the literary prose form throughout the 26th century, but the
northern form in -s was intermixed with it in poetry (where it
saved a syllable), and must ere long, as we see from Shakespeare,
have taken its place in familiar speech. The fuller
an, none,
mine, thine, in the early part of the 16th century at least,
were used in positions where their shortened forms
a, no, my,
thy are now found (
none other, mine own = no other, my
own) . But with such minute exceptions, the accidence of the i
6th century was the accidence of the r 9th. While, however, the
older inflections had disappeared, there was as yet no general
agreement as to the mode of their replacement. Hence the 16th
century shows a syntactic
licence and freedom which distinguishes it
strikingly from that of later times. The language seems to be in a
plastic, unformed state, and its writers, as it were, experiment
with it, bending it to constructions which now seem indefensible.
Old distinctions of case and mood have disappeared from noun and
verb, without custom having yet decided what prepositions or
auxiliary verbs shall most fittingly convey their meaning. The
laxity of word-order which was permitted in older states of the
language by the
formal expression of relations was often
continued though the inflections which expressed the relations had
disappeared. Partial
analogy
was followed in allowing forms to be identified in one case,
because, in another, such identification was accidentally produced,
as for instance the past participles of
write and
take were often made
wrote and
took,
because the contracted participles of
bind and
break were
bound and
broke. Finally,
because, in dropping inflections, the former distinctions even
between parts of speech had disappeared, so that
iron,
e.g., was at once noun, adjective and verb,
clean,
adjective, verb and adverb, it appeared as if any word whatever
might be used in any grammatical relation, where it conveyed the
idea of the
speaker. Thus,
as has been pointed out by Dr Abbott, " you can happy your friend,
malice or
foot your enemy, or
fall an
axe on his neck. You can speak and act
easy, free, excellent, you can talk of
fair
instead of beauty (fairness), and a pale instead of a
paleness. A
he is used for a man, and a lady is
described by a
gentleman
as ` the fairest
she he has yet beheld.' An adverb can be
used as a verb, as ` they
askance their eyes'; as a noun,
` the
backward and
abyss of time'; or as an adjective, a
`seldom pleasure.' " 1 For, as he also says, "clearness
was preferred to grammatical correctness, and brevity both to
correctness and clearness. Hence it was common to place words in
the order' in which they came uppermost in the mind without much
regard to syntax, and the result was a forcible and perfectly
unambiguous but ungrammatical sentence, such as The prince that
feeds great natures they will slay him.
Ben Jonson. or, as instances of
brevity, Be guilty of my death since of my
crime.
Shakespeare. It cost more to get than to lose in a
day.
Ben Jonson." These characteristics, together with the
presence of words now obsolete or archaic, and the use of existing
words in senses I A Shakspearian Grammar, by Dr E. A.
Abbott. To this book we are largely indebted for its admirable
summary of the characters of Tudor English.
different from our own, as general for specific, literal for
metaphorical, and vice versa, which are so apparent to every reader
of the 16th-century literature, make it useful to separate
Early Modern or Tudor English from the subsequent
and still existing stage, since the consensus of usage has declared
in favour of individual senses and constructions which are alone
admissible in ordinary language.
The beginning of the
Tudor period was contemporaneous with
the Renaissance
in art and literature, and the dawn of modern discoveries in
geography and science. The
revival of the study of the classical writers of
Greece and
Rome, and the translation of their works into the
vernacular, led to the introduction of an immense number of new
words derived from these languages, either to express new ideas and
objects or to indicate new distinctions in or grouping of old
ideas. Often also it seemed as if scholars were so pervaded with
the form as well as the spirit of the old, that it came more
natural to them to express themselves in words borrowed from the
old than in their native tongue, and thus words of Latin origin
were introduced even when English already possessed perfectly good
equivalents. As has already been stated, the French words of Norman
and Angevin introduction, being principally Latin words in an
altered form, when used as English supplied models whereby other
Latin words could be converted into English ones, and it is after
these models that the Latin words introduced during and since the
16th century have been fashioned. There is nothing in the
form of the words
procession and
progression to
show that the one was used in England in the 11th, the other not
till the 16th century. Moreover, as the formation of new words from
Latin had gone on in French as well as in English since the
Renaissance, we often cannot tell whether such words,
e.g.
as
persuade and
persuasion, were borrowed from
their French equivalents or formed from Latin in England
independently. With some words indeed it is impossible to say
whether they were formed in England directly from Latin, borrowed
from contemporary late French, or had been in England since the
Norman period, even
photograph, geology and
telephone have the form that they would
have had if they had been living words in the mouths of Greeks,
Latins, French and English from the beginning, instead of
formations of the 19th century.' While every writer was thus
introducing new words according to his notion of their being
needed, it naturally happened that a large number were not accepted
by contemporaries or posterity; a long list might be formed of
these mintages of the 16th and 17th centuries, which either never
became current
coin, or circulated
only as it were for a moment. The revived study of Latin and Greek
also led to modifications in the spelling of some words which had
entered Middle English in the French form. So Middle English
doute, dette, were changed to
doubt, debt, to
show a more immediate connexion with Latin
dubitum,
debitum; the actual derivation from the French being ignored.
Similarly, words containing a Latin and French
t, which
might be traced back to an original Greek
0, were
remodelled upon the Greek,
e.g. theme, throne, for Middle
English
tome, trone, and, by false association with Greek,
anthem, Old English
antefne, Latin
antiphona; Anthony, Latin
Antonius; Thames, Latin
Tamesis, apparently after
Thomas. The voyages of English navigators
in the latter part of the 16th century introduced a considerable
number of Spanish words, and American words in Spanish forms, of
which
negro, potato, tobacco, cargo, armadillo, alligator, galleon may serve as
examples.
The date of 1611, which nearly coincides with the end of
Shakespeare's literary work, and marks the appearance of the
Authorized Version of the
Bible
(a compilation from the various 16th-century versions), may be
taken as marking the close of Tudor English. The language was
thenceforth Modern in structure,
style and expression, although the spelling did
not
settle down to present
usage till about the revolution of 1688. The latter date also marks
the disappearance from literature of
1 Evangelist, astronomy, dialogue, are words that
have so lived, of which their form is the result.
Photograph,
geology, &c., take this form
as if they had the
same history.
a large number of words, chiefly of such as were derived from
Latin during the 16th and 17th centuries. Of these nearly all that
survived 1688 are still in use; but a long list might be made out
of those that appear for the last time before that date. This
sifting of the literary vocabulary and gradual fixing of the
literary spelling, which went on between 1611, when the language
became modern in structure, and 1689, when it became modern also in
form, suggests for this period the name of Seventeenth-Century
Transition. The distinctive features of Modern English have already
been anticipated by way of contrast with preceding stages of the
language. It is only necessary to refer to the fact that the
vocabulary is now much more composite than at any previous period.
The immense development of the physical sciences has called for a
corresponding extension of terminology which has been supplied from
Latin and especially Greek; and although these terms are in the
first instance
technical, yet, with the spread of
education and general
diffusion of the rudiments and appliances of
science, the boundary line between
technical and
general, indefinite at the best, tends more and more to
melt away - this in addition to the fact that words still technical
become general in figurative or metonymic senses.
Ache,
diamond, stomach, comet, organ, tone, ball, carte, are none the less familiar
because once technical words. Commercial, social, artistic or
literary contact has also led to the adoption of numerous words
from modern European languages, especially French,
Italian, Portuguese, Dutch
(these two at a less recent period): thus from French
soiree,
seance, depot, debris, programme, prestige; from Italian
bust, canto, folio, cartoon, concert, regatta, ruffian; from Portuguese
caste, palaver; from Dutch
yacht, skipper, schooner, sloop. Commercial intercourse and
colonization have extended far beyond Europe, and given us words
more or fewer from
Hindostani, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Malay,
Chinese, and from American, Australian, Polynesian and
Africadlanguages. 2 More important even than these, perhaps, are
the dialect words that from time to time obtain literary
recognition, restoring to us obsolete Old English forms, and not
seldom words of Celtic or Danish origin, which have been preserved
in local dialects, and thus at length find their way into the
standard language.
As to the actual proportion of the various elements of the
language, it is probable that original English words do not now
form more than a fourth or perhaps a fifth of the total entries in
a full English dictionary; and it may seem strange, therefore, that
we still identify the language with that of the 9th century, and
class it as a member of the
Low German division. But this
explains itself, when we consider that of the total words in a
dictionary only a small portion are used by any one individual in
speaking or even in writing; that this portion includes the great
majority of the Anglo-Saxon words, and but a minority of the
others. The latter are in fact almost all
names - the vast
majority names of
things (nouns), a smaller number names
of
attributes and
actions (adjectives and verbs),
and, from their very nature, names of the things, attributes and
actions which come less usually or, it may be, very rarely under
our notice. Thus in an ordinary book, a novel or story, the foreign
elements will amount to from io to 15% of the whole; as the subject
becomes more recondite or technical their number will increase;
till in a work on
chemistry or abstruse
mathematics the proportion may be 40%. But
after all, it is not the question whence words
may have
been taken, but
how they are used in a language that
settles its character. If new words when adopted conform themselves
to the manner and usage of the adopting language, it makes
absolutely no difference whether they are taken over from some
other language, or invented off at the ground. either case they are
new words to begin with; in either case also, if they are
needed, they will become as thoroughly native,
i.e.
familiar from childhood to those who use them, as those that
possess the longest native
pedigree. In this respect English is still the
same language it was in the days of Alfred; and, comparing its
history with that of other Low German tongues, there is no reason
to believe that 2 See extended lists of the foreign words in
English in Dr Morris's
Historical Outlines of English
Accidence, p. 33.
its grammar or structure would have been very different, however
different its vocabulary might have been, if the Norman Conquest
had never taken place.
A general broad view of the sources of the English vocabulary
and of the dates at which the various foreign elements flowed into
the language, as well as of the great change produced in it by the
Norman Conquest, and consequent influx of French and Latin
elements, is given in the accompanying
chart. The transverse lines represent centuries,
and it will be seen how limited a period after all is occupied by
modern English, how long the language had been in the country
before the Norman Conquest, and how much of this is prehistoric and
without any literary remains. Judging by what has happened during
the historic period, great changes may and indeed
must
have taken place between the first arrival of the Saxons and the
days of King Alfred, when literature practically begins. The chart
also illustrates the continuity of the main stock of the
vocabulary, the body of primary " words
of
common life," which, notwithstanding numerous losses and more
numerous additions, has preserved its corporate identity through
all the periods. But the " poetic and rhetorical," as well as the "
scientific " terms of Old English have died out, and a new
vocabulary of " abstract and general terms " has arisen from
French, Latin and Greek, while a still newer " technical,
commercial and scientific " vocabulary is composed of words not
only from these, but from every civilized and many uncivilized
languages.
The preceding sketch has had reference mainly to the grammatical
changes which the language has undergone; distinct from, though
intimately connected with these (as where the confusion or loss of
inflections was a consequence of the weakening of final sounds) are
the great phonetic changes which have taken place between the 8th
and 19th centuries, and which result in making modern English words
very different from their Anglo-Saxon originals, even where no
element has been lost, as in words like
stone, mine, doom, day, nail, child, bridge, shoot, Anglo-Saxon
stan, 'min,' dom, dceg, ncegel, cild, brycg, sceot. The
history of English sounds (see
Phonetics) has been treated at length by Dr
A. J. Ellis and Dr Henry Sweet; and it is only necessary here to
indicate the broad facts, which are the following. (I) In an
accented closed syllable, original short vowels have remained
nearly unchanged; thus the words
at, men, bill, God, dust are pronounced now nearly
as in Old English, though the last two were more like the Scotch
o and North English u respectively, and in most words the
short a had a broader sound like the provincial a in
man.
(2) Long accented vowels and diphthongs have undergone a regular
sound shift towards closer and more advanced positions, so that the
words
ban, hoer, soece or
sece, stol (bahn or
bawn, her, sok or
saik, stole) are now
bone, hair, seek, stool; while the two high vowels
oo) and
i (ee) have become diphthongs, as
hits, stir, now
house, shire, though the old
sound of
u remains in the north (
hoose), and the
original
i in the pronunciation
sheer, approved
by Walker, " as in machine, and shire, and magazine." (3) Short
vowels in an open syllable have usually been lengthened, as in
na-ma, co fa, now
name, cove; but to this there are exceptions,
especially in the case of i and
ii. (4) Vowels in terminal
unaccented syllables have all sunk into short obscure e, and then,
if final, disappeared; so
oxa, seo, wudu became
ox-e, se-e, wud-e, and then
ox,
see, wood; oxan, lufod, now
oxen, loved, lov'd; settan,
setton, later
setten, sette, sett, now
set.
(5) The back consonants,
c, g, sc, in connexion with
front vowels, have often become palatalized to
ch, j, sh,
as
circe, rycg, fist,
now
church, ridge, fish.
A medial or final
g has passed through a guttural or
palatal continuant to w or y, forming a diphthong or new vowel, as
in
boga, laga, dreg, heg, drig, now
bow, law, day, hay,
dry. W and h have disappeared before
r and
1, as in
write, (w)lisp, (h)ring; h final
(
=gh) has become
k, w or nothing, but has
developed the glides
u or
i before itself, these
combining with the preceding vowel to form a diphthong, or merging
with it into a simple vowel-sound, as
ruh, hoh, boh, dealt,
heah, hleah, now
rough, hough, bough, dough, high, laugh =
ruf, hok, bow, do, hi, laf. R after a vowel has practically
disappeared in standard English, or at most become vocalized, or
combined with the vowel, as in
hear, bar, more, her. These and other changes have
taken place gradually, and in accordance with well-known phonetic
laws; the details as to time and mode may be studied in special
works. It may be mentioned that the total loss of grammatical
gender in English, and the almost complete disappearance
of
cases, are purely phonetic phenomena.
Gender
(whatever its remote origin) was practically the use of adjectives
and pronouns with certain distinctive terminations, in accordance
with the
genus, genre, gender or
kind of nouns to
which they were attached; when these distinctive terminations were
uniformly levelled to final e, or other weak sounds, and thus
ceased to distinguish nouns into kinds, the distinctions into
genders or kinds having no other existence disappeared. Thus when
Peet Bode hors, pone godan hund, pa godan Mc, became, by
phonetic weakening,
pe gode hors,) e gode hownd, gode
boke, and later still the
good horse, the
good hound, the
good book, the words
horse, hound, book were no longer grammatically different
kinds of nouns; grammatical gender had ceased to exist. The
concord of adjectives has
entirely disappeared; the concord of the pronouns is now regulated
by
rationality and
sex, instead of grammatical gender, which has
no existence in English. The man
who lost
his
life; the
bird which
built
its nest.
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LD ENGLISH
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K.
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OLD Q`r. 1 _______'
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?y
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?
'44 111 - 111., ARLV La n E L'hro ufeera, m n <C'
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E
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00
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MIDDLE ENGLISH a
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It
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00 MIDDLE ENGLISH
LATI '
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LATE MIDDLE ENGL
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TUDOR ENGL SH ,'
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00 ?
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17 T " I? Milron ? ?
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. ?
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Our remarks from the end of the 14th century have been confined
to the standard or literary form of English, for of the other
dialects from that date (with the exception of the northern 68113 1
15 16 17 18 19 English in Scotland, where it became in a social and
literary sense a distinct language), we have little history. We
know, however, that they continued to exist as local and popular
forms of speech, as well from occasional specimens and from the
fact that they exist still as from the statements of writers during
the interval. Thus Puttenham in his
Arte of English Poesie
(1589) says: " Our maker [i.e. poet] therfore at these dayes shall
not follow Piers Plowman, nor
Gower, nor Lydgate, not yet Chaucer, for their
language is now not of use with us: neither shall he take the
termes of Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, whether
they be noble men or gentle men or of their best clarkes, all is a
[ =one] matter; nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of
Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English
Saxon at this day, yet it is not so Courtly nor so
currant as our
Southerne English is, no more is the far Westerne mans
speach: ye shall therefore take the usual speach of the Court, and
that of London and the shires lying about London within lx myles,
and not much above. I say not this but that in every shyre of
England there be gentlemen and others that speake but specially
write as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not
the common people of every shire, to whom the gentlemen, and also
their learned clarkes do for the most part condescend, but herein
we are already ruled by th' English Dictionaries and other bookes
written by learned
men." - Arber's Reprint, p. 157.
In comparatively modern times there has been a revival of
interest in these forms of English, several of which following in
the
wake of the revival of Lowland
Scots in the 18th and 19th centuries, have produced a considerable
literature in the form of local poems, tales and " folk-lore." In
these respects
Cumberland, Lancashire,
Yorkshire, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, the "
far north " and " far west " of Puttenham, where the dialect was
felt to be so independent of literary English as not to be branded
as a mere vulgar corruption of it, stand prominent. More recently
the dialects have been investigated philologically, a department in
which, as in other departments of English philology, the elder
Richard Garnett must be named as a
pioneer. The work was carried out zealously by
Prince Louis Lucien
Bonaparte and Dr A. J. Ellis, and more
recently by the English Dialect Society, founded by the Rev.
Professor Skeat, for the investigation of this branch of philology.
The efforts of this society resulted in the compilation and
publication of glossaries or word-books, more or less complete and
trustworthy, of most of the local dialects, and in the production
of grammars dealing with the phonology and grammatical features of
a few of these, among which that of the Windhill dialect in
Yorkshire, by Professor
Joseph Wright, and that of West Somerset,
by the late F. T. Elworthy, deserve special mention. From the whole
of the glossaries of the Dialect Society, and from all the earlier
dialect works of the 18th and 19th centuries, amplified and
illustrated by the contributions of local collaborators in nearly
every part of the British Isles, Professor Joseph Wright has
constructed his
English Dialect Dictionary, recording the
local words and senses, with indication of their geographical
range, their pronunciation, and in most cases with illustrative
quotations or phrases. To this he has added an
English Dialect
Grammar, dealing very fully with the phonology of the
dialects, showing the various sounds which now represent each Old
English sound, and endeavouring to define the area over which each
modern form extends; the accidence is treated more summarily,
without going minutely into that of each dialect-group, for which
special dialect grammars must be consulted. The work has also a
very full and valuable index of every word and form treated.
The researches of Prince L. L. Bonaparte and Dr Ellis were
directed specially to the classification and mapping of the
existing dialects,' and the relation of these to the dialects of
Old and Middle English. They recognized a
Northern dialect
lying north of a line drawn from Morecambe Bay to the Humber,
which, with the kindred Scottish dialects (already investigated and
classed), 2 is the direct descendant of early northern English, '
See description and
map in
Trans. of Philol. Soc., 1875-1876, p. 570.
2 The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, its
Pronunciation, Grammar and Historical Relations, with an Appendix
on the present limits of the Gaelic and Lowland Scotch, and the
Dialectal Divisions of the Lowland Tongue; and a Linguistical Map
of Scotland, by James A. H. Murray (London, 1873).
and a
South-western dialect occupying Somerset, Wilts,
Dorset, Gloucester and western Hampshire, which, with the
Devonian
dialect beyond it, are the descendants of early southern English
and the still older West-Saxon of Alfred. This dialect must in the
14th century have been spoken everywhere south of Thames; but the
influence of London caused its extinction in Surrey, Sussex and
Kent, so that already in Puttenham it had become " far western." An
East Midland dialect, extending from south Lincolnshire to
London, occupies the
cradle-land of the standard English speech, and
still shows least variation from it. Between and around these
typical dialects are ten others, representing the old Midland
proper, or dialects between it and the others already mentioned.
Thus " north of Trent " the
North-western dialect of south
Lancashire,
Cheshire,
Derby and
Stafford, with that of
Shropshire, represents the early West
Midland English, of which several specimens remain; while the
North-eastern of
Nottingham and north Lincolnshire represents
the dialect of the
Lay of Havelok. With the
North
Midland dialect of south-west Yorkshire, these represent forms
of speech which to the modern Londoner, as to Puttenham, are still
decidedly northern, though actually intermediate between northern
proper and midland, and preserving interesting traces of the
midland pronouns and verbal inflections. There is an
Eastern dialect in the East Anglian counties; a
Midland in
Leicester and
Warwick shires; a
Western in Hereford,
Worcester and north
Gloucestershire, intermediate between
south-western and north-western, and representing the dialect of
Piers Plowman. Finally, between the east midland and
south-western, in the counties of
Buckingham,
Oxford, Berks, Hants, Surrey and Sussex, there
is a dialect which must have once been south-western, but of which
the most salient characters have been rubbed off by proximity to
London and the East Midland speech. In east Sussex and Kent this
South-eastern dialect attains to a more distinctive
character. The
Kentish form of early Southern English
evidently maintained its existence more toughly than that of the
counties immediately south of London. It was very distinct in the
days of
Sir
Thomas More; and even, as we see from the dialect attributed to
Edgar in
Lear, was still strongly marked in the days of
Shakespeare. In the south-eastern corner of Ireland, in the
baronies of Forth and Bargy, in county
Wexford, a very archaic form of English, of
which specimens have been preserved, 3 was still spoken in the 18th
century. In all probability it dated from the first English
invasion. In many parts of
Ulster forms of Lowland Scotch dating to the
settlement under
James I.
are still spoken; but the English of Ireland generally seems to
represent 16th and 17th century English, as in the pronunciation of
tea, wheat (tay, whait), largely affected, of
course, by the native Celtic. The subsequent work of the English
Dialect Society, and the facts set forth in the
English Dialect
Dictionary, confirm in a general way the classification of
Bonaparte and Ellis; but they bring out strongly the fact that only
in a few cases can the boundary between dialects now be determined
by precise lines. For every dialect there is a central region,
larger or smaller, in which its characteristics are at a maximum;
but towards the edges of the area these become mixed and blended
with the features of the contiguous dialects, so that it is often
impossible to define the point at which the one dialect ends and
the other begins. The fact is that the various features of a
dialect, whether its distinctive words, characteristic
pronunciations or special grammatical features, though they may
have the same centre, have not all the same circumference. Some of
them extend to a certain distance round the centre; others to a
much greater distance. The only approximately accurate way to map
the area of any dialect, whether in England, France, Germany or
elsewhere, is to take a well-chosen set of its characteristic
features - words, senses, sounds or grammatical peculiarities, and
draw a line round the area over which each of these extends;
between the innermost and outermost of these there will often be a
large border district. If the same process be followed with the
contiguous dialects, '
A Glossary (with some pieces of Verse)
of the Old Dialect of the English Colony of Forth and Bargy, collected by
Jacob
Poole, edited by W.
Barnes, B.D. (London, 1867).
|
CHRONOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE.
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LITERARY DEVELOPMENT OF THE LEADING DIALECTS.
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Divisions.
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Subdivisions. Dates.
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Northern English. Midland English. Southern English.
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500
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a
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a
cv
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d
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G
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N
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600
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Cadmon, 660.
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(Charter Glosses), 679-770.
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(Charter Glosses),692-780.
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(Laws of hie, 700).
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Beda,
Leiden Riddle.
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(CharterGlosses),736-800.
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.3
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EARLY OLD ENGLISH.
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Cynewulf,
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Beowulf (?)
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(I) a
O
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C..7
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800
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O
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(Charte r Glosses), 80 5 -.
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Z c z
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V Ps., c. 825. "+
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Charters, 805-840.
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0
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y
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Charters, 8 3 6 -840. `<
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Q 7.
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?
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Psalm 50, c. 860.
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..a
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a
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p a
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O.
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TYPICAL OLD ENGLISH,
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Lorica Glosses. cn
p ::
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Alfred, 885.
Judith, 900-910.
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or
ANGLO-SAXON
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Durham Glosses, 95 0 -975. °
Lindisfarne Gospel
Gloss. Rushworth Gloss, St.
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Poems in O. E. Chron.,
7 979
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'
Matthew, ? 975-1000. B.
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1000-
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1Elfric,
1000.
Wulfstan, ,016.
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0
p'.
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O. E. Chron., Parker MS.
ends, 1070.
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LATE OLD ENGLISH
and OLD ENGLISH I 100
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TRANSITION.
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tt
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Peterborough Chronicle,
1123-31.
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II 0
5'
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH. 1200
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F
'<,,
R
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,Chronicle 1154.
5 7
a Ormulum, 1200.
G
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Cotton Homilies, 1160.
Layamon, 1203.
Ancren Riwle, 1220.0
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Hatton Gospels, 1170.
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- 0
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a
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Genesiso'Exodus, c. 1250. t ,
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Kentish Sermons, 1250.
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1250-
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n
Procl.of Henrylll., 1258...
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0 >,
Z
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13
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Cr1 Cursor Mundi (?). `-
8. `=
|
G
Robt. Gloucester, 1300.
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W
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MIDDLE ENGLISH
|
N 0 Robt. of Brunne, 1303-30. C
t7
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Shoreham, 1320.
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W 'C
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(typical)
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..
n tit
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A yenbite, 1340.
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W
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a
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Hampole, 1350. Pearl, Sir
Gawayne.Barbour, 1375. ? N
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Q y
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w
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Wycliffe.
Chaucer, Gower.
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co
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Trevisa, 1387.
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,.a
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4
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Mandeville (Northern ver-
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and MIDDLE ENGLISH
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8 Wyntoun, 1420. Ision). Lydgate.
w Townley Mysteries.
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TRANSITION.
1485 .
.- .,. ...
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Henryson, Ig70. Caxton, 1477 -90.
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Dunbar, ,Soo-.
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Lyndesay. Tyndal, 1525.
y y
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Cornishman in A. Boorde, S11 ( in Sir. More.)
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EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
|
°
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1547 E'
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(Tudor English).
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Homilies, 1 547- 6 3 .
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Gammer Gurton, 1575. t7 ' (Edgar in Lear,
1605.)
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0 James VI., 1590. Xi
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(in Ben Jonson.)
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cr --.
j U
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8-
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Montgomer y, c. 1600.
|
Shakspere, 1590-1613.
King James's Bible, 161,.
c
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R
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Kentish Wooing Song,
1611.
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161 I -
T RANSITIONAL MODERN,
or
7T CENTURY ENGLISH
1h .
|
Sir W. Mure, 1617-57.
YorkshireDialo Dialogue, 1 6^
g 3'
|
r
Somersetsh. Man's Com-
playnt, c. 1645.
|
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O
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1 689'--
|
Dryden, 1663 - 1700.
|
Nairne, Kentish Tales,
|
|
W }
V)
O
W
Q ...
|
1
CL RRE NT ENGLIS H. 1800
|
Allan Ramsay, 1717. Addison, 1717. a
Johnson, 1750.
r ,, C r
? Burn, 179 0. p
o.Coleridge, 1805.
|
Exmoor Scolding, 1746.
|
1700.
Dick and 1821.
|
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y
S t 1815. Macaulay, 1825.
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o 6 Tennyson, 1830.
Crockett, etc.
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Barnes, 1844.
. Elworthy, 1875-88.
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.
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|
Chronological Table Of The Periods And Dialects Of The English
Language The vertical lines represent the four leading forms of
English-Northern, Midland, Southern, and
Kentish-and the names occurring down the course of each
are those of writers and works in that form of English at the given
date. The thickness of the line shows the comparative literary
position of this form of speech at the time: thick
indicating a literary language; medium, a literary dialect;
thin, a popular dialect or patois; a dotted line
shows that this period is unrepresented by specimens. The
horizontal lines divide the periods; these (after the first two)
refer mainly to the Midland English; in inflectional decay the
Northern English was at least a century in advance of the Midland,
and the Southern nearly as much behind it.
it will be found that some of the lines of each intersect some
of the lines of the other, and that the passing of one dialect into
another is not effected by the formation of intermediate or blended
forms of any one characteristic, but by the overlapping or
intersecting of more or fewer of the features of each. Thus a
definite border village or district may use io of the 20 features
of dialect A and Io of those of B, while a village on the one side
has 12 of those of A with 8 of those of B, and one on the other
side has 7 of those of A with 13 of those of B. Hence a dialect
boundary line can at best indicate the line within which the
dialect has, on the whole, more of the features of A than of B or
C; and usually no single line can be drawn as a dialect boundary,
but that without it there are some features of the same dialect,
and within it some features of the contiguous dialects.
Beyond the limits of the British Isles, English is the language
of extensive regions, now or formerly colonies. In all these
countries the presence of numerous new objects and new conditions
of life has led to the supplementing of the vocabulary by the
adoption of words from native languages, and special
adaptation and extension
of the sense of English words. The use of a common literature,
however, prevents the overgrowth of these local peculiarities, and
also makes them more or less familiar to Englishmen at home. It is
only in the older states of the American Union that anything like a
local dialect has been produced; and even there many of the
so-called Americanisms are quite as much archaic English forms
which have been lost or have become dialectal in England as
developments of the American soil.
The steps by which English, from being the language of a few
thousand invaders along the eastern and southern seaboard of
Britain, has been diffused by conquest and colonization over its
present area form a subject too large for the limits of this
article. It need only be remarked that within the confines of
Britain itself the process is not yet complete. Representatives of
earlier languages survive in Wales and the Scottish Highlands,
though in neither case can the substitution of English be very
remote. In Ireland, where English was introduced by conquest much
later, Irish is still spoken in patches all over the country;
though English is understood, and probably spoken after a fashion,
almost everywhere. At opposite extremities of Britain, the Cornish
of Cornwall and the Norse dialects of
Orkney and
Shetland died out very gradually in the course
of the 18th century. The Manx, or Celtic of Man, is even now in the
last stage of dissolution; and in the Channel Isles the Norman
patois of
Jersey and
Guernsey have largely
yielded to English.
The table on p. 599 (a revision of that brought before the
Philological Society in Jan. 1876) graphically presents the
chronological and dialectal development of English. Various names
have been proposed for the different stages; it seems only
necessary to add to those in the table the descriptive names of Dr
Abbott, who has proposed (
How to Parse, p. 298) to call
the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, the " Synthetical or Inflexional
Period "; the Old English Transition (Late Anglo-Saxon of Dr
Skeat), the " Period of Confusion "; the Early Middle English, "
Analytical Period " (1250-1350); the normal Middle English, "
National Period" (1350-150o); the Tudor English, " Period of
Licence "; and the Modern English, " Period of Settlement."
Bibliography.-As the study of English has made immense advances
within the last generation, it is only in works recently published
that the student will find the subject satisfactorily handled.
Among the earlier works treating of the whole subject or parts of
it may be mentioned - A
History of English Rhythms, by
Edwin Guest (London,
1838); the
Philological Essays of Richard Garnett
(1835-1848), edited by his son (London, 1859);
The English
Language, by R. G. Latham (5th ed., London, 1862);
Origin
and History of the English Language, by G. P.
Marsh (revised 1885);
Lectures on the English
Language, by the same (New York and London, 1863);
Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, by C. F.
Koch (Weimar, 1863, &c.);
Englische Grammatik, by Eduard Matzner (Berlin,
1860-1865), (an English translation by C. J. Grece, LL.B., London,
1874);
The Philology of the English Tongue, by
John Earle, M.A. (Oxford,
1866, 5th ed. 1892);
Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon
Language, by F. A. March (New York, 1870);
Historical
Outlines of English Accidence, by the Rev. R. Morris, LL.D.
(London, 1873), (new ed. by Kellner);
Elementary Lessons in
Historical English Grammar, by the same (London, 1874);
The Sources of Standard English, by T. L. Kington
Oliphant, M. A. (London,
1873);
Modern English, by F. Hall (London, 1873);
A
Shakespearian Grammar, by E. A. Abbott, D.D. (London, 1872);
How to Parse, by the same (London, 1875);
Early
English Pronunciation, &c., by A. J. Ellis (London, 1869);
The History of English Sounds, by Henry Sweet (London,
1874, 2nd ed. 1888); as well as many separate papers by various
authors in the
Transactions of the Philological Society,
and the publications of the Early English Text Society.
Among more recent works are: M. Kaluza,
Historische
Grammatik der englischen Sprache (Berlin, 1890); Professor W.
W. Skeat,
Principles of English Etymology (Oxford, 1887-1891); Johan
Storm,
Englische
Philologie (Leipzig, 1892-1896); L. Kellner,
Historical
Outlines of English Syntax (London, 5892); O. F. Emerson,
History of the English Language (London and
New York, 1894); Otto
Jespersen,
Progress in Language, with special reference to
English (London, 1894); Lorenz Morsbach,
Mittelenglische
Grammatik, part i. (Halle, 1896);
Paul, " Geschichte der englischen Sprache," in
Grundriss der german. Philologie (Strassburg, 1898);
Eduard Sievers,
Angelsachsische Grammatik (3rd ed.,
Halle, 1898); Eng. transl. of same
(2nd ed.), by A. S.
Cook (Boston,
1887); K. D. Balbring,
Altenglisches Elementarbuch
(Heidelberg, 1902); Greenough and Kittredge,
Words and their
Ways in English Speech (London and New York, 1902); Henry
Bradley,
The Making of
English (London, 5904). Numerous contributions to the subject
have also been made in
Englische Studien (ed. KOlbing,
later Hoops;
Leipzig, 1877
onward);
Anglia (ed. Walker, Fliigel, &c.; Halle, 1878
onward); publications of Mod. Lang. Assoc. of
America (J. W. Bright;
Baltimore, 1884 onward), and A. M. Elliott,
Modern Language Notes (Baltimore, 1886 onward). (J. A. H.
M.; H. M. R. M.)
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