Studies in English

Front matter

Class

Book

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Chapter I. Page

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 1

CHAPTER H.

CHAPTER HI.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VHI.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

VI CONTENTS.

CHAPTER XL

PAGE HOW NOUNS ARE ABUSED 196

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHAPTER XVH.

CHAPTER XVHI.

SHIFTING LETTERS 345

STUDIES IN ENGLISH.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

The youngest of all European idioms, our great and noble language has yet spread farthest over the globe and now rules the world without a rival. More than fifty millions of men, forming the most enterprising race upon earth, speak it as their native and only tongue. The elder cousin, staid, precise, and settled, uses it at home in his counting-room ; the younger, bold and adventurous, carries it with him as he roves through the wide world. It has long since become the great instrument of European culture, superseding the Latin, which was once as general, though used mainly by the scholar and the churchman, and the French, the language of courts and the higher circles of the Continent. Even in the early days of Queen Elizabeth, the gentle Daniel, the Atticus of his age, foresaw its future greatness and sang : —

" Who knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue ? To what strange shores This gain of our best glory may be sent T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident May come refined with accents that are ours? "

The prophecy has come true, and wherever on this wide earth men may meet, in the merchant's busy marts or on the prairies and pampas of America, amid the nomadic tribes of Asia, or in the mysterious heart of the land of Ham, ice-bound in polar regions or becalmed under the tropics, — everywhere they may hear words familiar to their ear and dear to their heart. For our good English has become the language of the world ; and strong with the colonist, cunning with the merchant, and bringing the blessings of the gospel with the missionary, it promises soon to spread the benefits of civilization, and the glory of God over the whole earth.

Surely, then, such a language deserves to be well studied, to be thoroughly known by those whose precious birthright it is, and by all who agree with old Roger Ascham that, " even as a hawke fleeth not hie with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tongue." Modern science has done much to acquaint us with the form and the nature of our fellow-men. It goes and counts their inches, it weighs them by the pound, it measures their skulls and examines their bumps, it counts the years of their life and the hours of sickness, it knows how many cubic feet of air they breathe and what are their chances of marriage or suicide — and should it not inquire what they tell each other and how they say it ? Is not language, daguerreotyped thought as we may well call it, more expressive than manners and customs, law and constitution, history and literature ? As there is no race among men that possesses a character so sharply defined as the English, so there is no tongue upon earth more clearly expressive of the nation's mind. Boldly and freely the Englishman uses his mother tongue, boldly and freely it proclaims him abroad, by its simple forms, its nervous power, its deep meaning. It never forgets its own dignity, its noble descent. For the English has an ancestry unparalleled in the history of languages. It is heir to all the greatness and all the power of the two idioms that represent the two ruling races of Christendom, — the Romance and the Germanic. Here alone they are fused

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 3

together to form a harmonious whole of unsurpassed efficacy, in striking contrast with the Roman French and the Gothic German. Flowing from a bold mixture of such elements, freeing itself by the power of its own mighty current of all incumbrance and superfluity, adopting with wise discrimination whatever it finds good and useful in other idioms, as historic events bring it in contact with foreign nations, it has become well-nigh incomparable, the simplest of all languages in form, the most spiritual in its mode of expression.

With a just pride, therefore, based on a legitimate appreciation of its great beauty and powers, Englishmen and all their descendants have ever loved it dearly and used it freely. It was their affection for it that made them, centuries ago, scorn to pray and to worship their Maker in a foreign tongue when the whole of Europe, under the sway of Rome, yet held Latin sacred. They used their vernacular before all their kindred races for prose writing, and thus showed their early mental maturity, since prose requires knowledge and deep thought, whilst poetry may at least and often does content itself with the expression of feelings. Never did foreign idioms play the master in England, as they did on the Continent ; never did her great writers disgrace their names by a subservient preference for foreign languages. How different is this from the German, which was despised by the great Frederick, held in contempt by Leibnitz, the most renowned philosopher of Germany, and, to some extent at least, laid aside even in our day, by the master of modern writers, Alexander von Humboldt, avowedly for the purpose of making his works, written in French, accessible to scholars of all countries. Men who have thus abandoned the tongue of their fathers may have gained individually, but they have lost the pleasure of writing in their mother tongue, inseparable as it needs must be of greater force and stronger individuality ; they have abandoned at once all hope of the eternal renown of having created a language like the immortal Dante.

The same love and pride, which Englishmen thus showed in their strong attachment to their language, and their stubborn resistance to all influence from abroad, has ever protected them against tyranny at home, and they alone of all nations have always enjoyed unrestrained freedom of the press. Already Hermes notices with natural satisfaction, that England never knew an Index Expurgatorius, nor has its genius ever been shackled by an Inquisition. On the contrary, this freedom of speech called forth and fostered a corresponding spirit of free inquiry and led the way to that prudent enjoyment of liberty, of which the British people have just cause to be proud, amid fallen thrones and shattered democracies.

With all these attractions, however, and in spite of the rich reward held out to the diligent student, little has as yet been done for the proper study of English. Much time and labor are bestowed in schools and at home on Greek and Latin ; French and Italian, Spanish and German, receive their share of attention, but everybody is apparently expected to know English by instinct. Where efforts have been made in the right direction, they have been thwarted by the old scholastic method, which fills our grammars with Latin terms and contents itself with longwinded definitions. We seem to forget entirely that language consists of two parts, like man himself — of the outward form, the word corresponding to our earth-born body, and of the inner meaning, which represents the immortal soul. The knowledge of words themselves is worth little. It was this view which led the great Polyglot-cardinal to reply peevishly to an indiscreet flatterer : " What am I but an ill-bound dictionary ? " To attain a thorough knowledge of the meaning of words and of the manner in which at different times and under changing influences they may be made to succeed in expressing it in their out-

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 5

ward form, this is the true object of the study of language. We must never lose sight of the fact that words are the only medium of the inner life between man and man, and that, as Montaigne already expressed it, " Nous ne sommes hommes et nous ne tenons les uns aux autres que par la parole."

Nor must it be forgotten that, interesting as the history of words is — and Dean Trench surely has convinced his many readers of this fact — there is also a history of languages, which may be studied with profit and pleasure. Their pedigree is as complete and as full of adventure as that of the Rohan s, though it may not lead us with them to the door of Noah's Ark. Few subjects in the w T hole ranp-e of human knowledge are fuller of interest and richer in instruction than the gradual development of a national language, exhibiting as in a mirror the many changes going on in the nation's mind. We all have felt this more or less distinctly, when we have marked the difference between the virtus of the manly Roman, and the vertu of the degenerate but art-loving Italian of our day, or when the knave of our day recalls by chance to us those lines of the version of the great Wickliffe, in which St. Paul calls himself reverently " a knave of Jesus Christ." It is not accident nor arbitrary power that makes

" words, whilom flourishing

Pass now no more, but banished from the court, Dwell with disgrace among the vulgar sort, And those, which eld's strict doom did disallow And damn for bullion, go for cm-rent now."

What is true of words, is equally true of the whole language ; it ever bears on its surface the impress of the mind of the people by whom it is spoken, and he who studies it with History by his side and Philosophy coming to his aid, will soon find that it leads him directly to the most retired and inmost parts of the soul of a nation, the secrets of which no other key can unlock.

It is the purpose of this Essay to throw out some suggestions and to furnish some information that may aid in thus studying a language, of which the master of philology, Grimm, says that " in wealth, wisdom, and strict economy, none of the living languages can vie with it." The richer, the wiser, and the more perfect in its mechanism it is, the greater of course the difficulty of appreciating it fully and of entering deeply into its secret chambers. Noble efforts, however, have been made toward this end in England and abroad, and there is reason to hope that we shall soon be fully acquainted with the private as well as the public history of our language, and then agree with the sentiment of an enthusiastic admirer, who sings, that —

" Stronger far than hosts that march With battle-flags unfurled, It goes with Freedom, Thought, and Truth, To rouse and rule the world."

Chapter II. English Relations

" Idioms have their kindred as well as men." — Duponceau.

When a man rises to eminence in our midst, friend and foe become alike anxious to ascertain who his forefathers were and what relations he has now among men. To trace his pedigree back beyond a few generations is generally found a difficult task, which is finally, if not altogether abandoned, as is apt to be the case in this country, referred to the Herald's College, where fact and fancy are happily blended. There it is all well ascertained and duly attested, but in spite of shield and motto we do not believe the statement quite as readily and as fully as the ingenious officers would have us do. It is not otherwise with languages. Let one of them become great and powerful, and at once curiosity and genuine interest are eagerly at work, to ascertain the early history of the idiom. Here also easy and complete solutions are freely offered. Now the Sanscrit is declared to be the common ancestor of all languages, and now the Hebrew ; some prefer the Celtic, and others again trace all words back to the famous nine syllables of the great Murray. In our day, even, champions take up arms in behalf of the Interjections, and proclaim them to have been the original words from which all others have been derived, somewhat after the manner of Darwin's great theory, and immediately they are met by the advocates of the famous Bow-wow theory, as Max Muller calls it, who believe in the cries of animals and the voices of Nature as having taught man his speech.

In spite of all these varied explanations, however, the first origin of language is still, to this day, one of those mysteries which a wise Providence has, for some good purpose, concealed as yet from our eye, even as our great mother Nature hides the grain in her dark bosom, until it breaks as a tender blade through the clod to greet the light of day. Whether language be a gift granted to man, like all other faculties, at the time of his creation, or whether he be capable to produce and form it by means of his own unaided powers, is a much vexed question. Nor have the wisest among us yet agreed as to the unity of language, for while some admit without doubt or gainsay the simple statement of Holy Writ, from the first moment of man's existence to the confounding of lips at Babel, others insist upon this view, that as races owe their origin to different pairs of first men, so languages also have arisen from as many different mother tongues. Fortunately, it is not impossible to understand English well without tracing it back to the creation of the world. We are quite sure that the poor Egyptian boy, who was sent, with a goat for his sole companion, into the Libyan desert to teach Psammitichus by the first words he would utter the original tongue of the earth, did not speak English ; and as the Spanish have settled it to their own satisfaction that Castilian is the language which has ever been used in heaven, we dare not present an equal claim for our English.

This only we know, that it had its first origin, as far as is known to history and to tradition, in the Orient. JEx Oriente lux, seems to be true with regard to languages as well as with creeds. For our researches point all to the one great fact, that, if we set aside the comparatively unexplored territories of the American and African idioms, together with the Chinese, there are in the whole kingdom of speech but three grammatical families to which every known dialect can be referred with unerring certainty. Each of these families bears its own distinctive marks, so clearly defined that there is no mingling between them, no possibility of mistaking the allegiance of even the latest descendants. The white, the red, and the black races are not more strikingly different from each other in color and character than the Shemitic, the Aryan, and the nomadic Turanian families of languages. With the first and the last of these groups our English has nothing in common, though the Bible has made some Shemitic terms dear and sacred to us, and trade and commerce have familiarized us with a few Turanian words. But there is neither kindred nor sympathy between those languages and our own. For the English is a child of the great Aryan family, so called from its ancient homestead in Asia, now known as Iran. Thence all the descendants of that most noble family have spread westward, until Asia and Europe formed, as to language, but one great country, and their vast brotherhood became known as the Indo-European.

All the members of this family trace back their origin to one great central language, and all of them abandoned their first home in times far earlier than those when Homer sang, when Zoroaster gave his laws, and the poets of the Vedas wrote their marvelous myths. All, moreover, from the oldest known, the Sanscrit, to the youngest born, our English, are but varied forms of the same type, — modifications of the same language as it was once spoken in Asia. When they dwelt there, and where they ruled, we cannot now ascertain, for their early history goes back far beyond historic chronology ; and yet that they possess an existence and a reality is proved by inductive evidence beyond all cavil and doubt. But this is not all, for recent discoveries have taught us even more surprising facts regarding these mysterious ancestors of our English. The most careful researches, the most sifting investigations, have failed to bring to light a single new root that has been added to the first common inheritance of these dialects, or a single new element that has been created in the gradual formation of their grammar since their first separation! On the other hand, it has been discovered that many words, which witnessed that early breaking up of the family, are still living in India and Europe alike, and thus bear evidence, now, of the common first origin. The terms for God, house, father and mother, son and daughter, heart and tears, axe and tree, dog and cow, identical in all Indo-European families, have thus been well compared to watchwords of a great army on its solemn march around the globe. For many of these terms, which sprang up more than four thousand years ago at Agra, at Delhi, and Benares, have but quite lately scaled the Rocky Mountains of Western America, and are rapidly filling the forests on the shores of the Pacific.

Of the many members of this family, seven have risen to such distinction as to have become, in their turn, founders of great and powerful races. Two alone have maintained themselves at home :

1. The Indie, represented of old by the Sanscrit, which was spoken more than fifteen hundred years before Christ, and yet produced in that hoary antiquity already the far-famed Yedas. Its living forms are the Pracrit and Tali, and another strange, uncouth language, long considered a mere jargon, and then traced back to ancient Egypt or Palestine, but now re-established in its genuine birthright. This is the idiom spoken by the Gypsies, who have at last succeeded in proving their melancholy claim to be considered exiles from Hindostan, their native land. It is they alone who have brought the few strange forms of Sanscrit words we know to Western Europe, as parts of their quaint language, in which the oldest words of ancient idioms mingle with the latest offspring of modern tongues.

2. The Iranic, famous under the name of Zend, as the language of Zoroaster's great work, Zencla Yesta, and of late much endeared to us by the remarkable discoveries made in the wedge-shaped inscriptions of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, which so strikingly illustrate and confirm numerous, hitherto unexplained, statements of the Bible. Both languages, however, are like the pure Sanscrit, now dead languages, and survive only in the slightly altered form of Armenian and the national language of the Persian, who could boast already a thousand years before Christ, of an illustrious poet, Ferdusi. The other prominent members of this family have, with the races that spoke them, left the cradle of mankind in Central Asia, and, in successive waves, made their way westward. One after another the idioms of the ruling nations of the world, they have each been supreme for a time, and then given way to a successor. The oldest of all these is —

3. The Celtic, which Herodotus already knew as the language of a people that had passed even beyond the pillars of Hercules, and who are, therefore, commonly looked upon as the oldest settlers in Europe. At the very first dawn of history it is found as the idiom used by the masters of Europe. It was heard alike in England and in Ireland, in France and in Spain, in Switzerland and in the eastern regions as far back as Thracia. But its splendor has departed as the sceptre has been wrested from the Celtic race, and now it is spoken by little more than ten millions. But it still bears marks of a strange individuality ; its double words are so loosely joined together that the original elements may be easily seen and severed, and its mode of inflection differs strangely from that of all other languages, inasmuch as it affects not, as usually, the final, but changes, instead, the initial letters.

In Great Britain it has, from of old, exhibited a strict line of division between the Cymric or Old British, and the Gadhelic or Irish. The former is now represented by the Welsh, which alone survives in full vigor. The Cornish can hardly be said to exist any longer except as a written language, for the last person who Spoke it as her mother-tongue is reported to have died more than seventy years ago. The Armorican, introduced by fugitive Britons into that part of northern France which, from the new settlers, took its name of Little Britanny, resembles the Welsh so nearly that Count de la Villemarque, a native of Bretagne, who used it in addressing a literary club in Wales, was understood by 'all who were present.

The Gadhelic or Gaelic survives as Erse in Ireland, where it still claims to be considered a national tongue. The Gaelic proper, carried across the channel to Scotland, is now only heard in the remoter valleys of the Grampian Mountains and in some parishes of the country lying between Cairn and Caithness. The Isle of Man enjoys its own Celtic dialect, the Manx, which is, however, mixed with Danish and other Norse elements.

Between these dialects and our English there is no other relationship than that of common descent, obscured by an early separation, which dates back to very ancient times. The mechanical admixture of Celtic words and forms of expression is but small, as there seems to have existed a strong, reciprocal repulsion between the Celts and all other European families and their languages. Theirs was the fierce warfare between the Druid and the priest, the mistletoe and the palm, and the victorious cross in those days spared not the beaten foe. Even in those counties of Wales, which were last Anglicized, not a dozen words have been adopted by the Saxon from the Celt — his mouth abhors their fluent gutturals.

After the Celts came those mysterious wanderers, whose sea-faring life marked them early among the nations of the earth, and earned for them the name of Pelasgi. Their idioms now in turn ruled the world, as

4. Hellenic in fair Hellas, after the four dialects of earlier days, the Doric, Aeolic, Attic, and Ionic had formed the common language of ancient Greece, and as

5. Italic, which, in its new home of Latium, became known as Latin. Like the Greek it also arose from a mixture of early dialects : the Oscan, spoken by the Samnites, and not unknown to Rome as late even as the days of the Caesars, the Umbrian, which could boast of the earliest priestly literature and the renowned seven " Tables of Iguvium," and the Latin of Latium. In its turn it has, after the fall of Rome and the advent of new races, divided into numerous branches, and bequeathed to our day the beautiful dialects, which we know as Romance languages. Its descendants now spoken are the Italian, the Wallachian, a quaint form of Latin mixed with Turkish, Greek, and ancient Illyrian, the Spanish with its younger son the Portuguese, the French, and the Provencal.

Among these the English finds itself already more at home, and a striking family-likeness may be discovered here and there. The French enters actually into our vernacular, and claims, since the days of the Norman Conquest, a large share of our vocabulary. What makes it more important to us, is the fact that the distribution does not seem to have been left to chance only, and close observation will easily show the remarkable lines that divide the two elements. Where the true Saxon words have to do with the sensible world, the French words deal with the spiritual ; the former stand for things particular and concrete, the latter for things general and abstract. Still, there ever remains something foreign and uncongenial in the descendants of the Romance family, which shows clearly that there is no near kinship between them and the older, dearer part of our English. " English words," says ' Hare, " sound best from English lips," and though there are many French terms, which we could not well do without, we still prefer, in familiar language and for ordinary purposes, the good old Saxon terms. Thus we say rather like than similar, give than present, beg than solicit, kinsman than relation, neighborhood than vicinity, and praise than encomium.

We feel much more at home with the members of the 6. Teutonic family, in whose midst our English stands as the fairest and strongest of all. Here it meets above all the High German, the oldest in culture, the richest in pure vowels, euphony and vigor, the greatest in intellectual strength for nearly ten centuries. Inferior by far is the elder brother, who sold his birthright long ago, the Low German, although its oldest branch, the Gothic, was spoken by the conquerors of Imperial Rome, the followers of Alaric, Theodoric, and Attila, and grand old Ulfilas himself, who used it, not four hundred years after Christ, to render the word of God for the first time into a modern tongue. A lowly branch of this family, the Anglo-Saxon, found its way from the Continent and Southern Denmark to the distant shores of England, and there rose slowly and painfully, to become in our day the language of the world. The Old Dutch, which has gained its independence and a literature of its own only since the thirteenth century, is its nearest relation, and together with the old Frisic on the northern coast of Germany, which is unfortunately dying out since the Frisians have been held in subjection by foreign rulers, furnishes the best illustrations and exhibits the most striking resemblance to our Old English.

Of scarcely inferior rank and antiquity with the High and the Low German are the members of the Scandinavian family. The Swedish preserves its oldest spoken forms in a few remote valleys of the interior, whilst the Icelandic, brought from Sweden to the Ultima Thule, can boast of the oldest written forms of these idioms. The Danish and the Norwegian are comparatively modern, and can hardly lay claims to be considered truly national tongues, though the former has a literature worthy of the highly cultivated people by whom it is spoken.

These, then, are the nearest relations our English has among the many idioms spoken in Europe. The languages of the first wave of immigration have receded to the far West of the Continent, and barely survive there in daily declining vigor and in wholly changed forms. Those of the second wave, the Germanic, rule now in the centre of Europe, and between them and English the feeling of kindred is strong and the facility of interchange most abundant. The last-comer in Europe,

7. The Sclavonic family has not yet penetrated to the centre, though it is firmly and indefatigably pushing its outposts farther and farther westward. It holds supreme but somewhat barbarous sway over the gigantic East, and in the form of powerful Russian claims the assistance of its kinsmen, the Polish, Bohemian, and others, to aid in establishing a vast Panslavism. With them our English has noth ing in common ; there may even be said to exist a feeling of antagonism, as if the languages, like the races, foresaw that the day cannot be far, when they will have to struggle, as their predecessors have done before them, for the sceptre of the world.

Chapter III. English Elements

11 The English, thanks to its varied elements, is a vehicle of marvelous power and beauty for the expression of thought."

A scion of the great Germanic family, our English is the direct and legitimate descendant of the Anglo-Saxon, but in the course of its long and prosperous career it has entered into many an alliance with other idioms and taken at least one other language, the French, to its heart and home, fairly dividing with it the rule of Great Britain. It may well be said that in English all the existing nationalities of Europe — the Sclavonic alone excepted — meet and mingle together. The Celtic race, the oldest of them all, has nowhere preserved itself so long and so nobly as here ; the Germanic has here borne its earliest fruit, shown its greatest independence, and held its own bravely to this day against foe and rival ; then the Northman vigorously entered upon the scene, and though possessing great power of his own blended willingly with the Saxon, and thus added the last elements wanting to national greatness. The Latin of ancient Rome, of the Church, and of Modern Science, brought each its fair offering ; the Greek has supplied some recent wants, and hardly a race upon earth but has sent a tribute to the mighty idiom. The immense power of such a mingling of dialects, each endowed with its own peculiar strength, was early seen. The first result was not the adoption of any one prevailing speech, but the formation of a jargon, which not until the fourteenth century adopted a fixed, though degenerate form. And yet, but a few generations later this tongue possessed already the greatest poet the human race has ever known, and since then it has become the first of all languages spoken.

We would err grievously, however, if we were to conclude from this variety of elements, which constitute the idiom, that it is a mere farrago of discordant material, or even a mere continuation of one or more of the parent stocks. As a living organism English is an entirely new individual. It is neither Anglo-Saxon in a new garb, nor the offspring of a union between Saxon and Norman French. Both these languages were inflected, and had their rigidly fixed syntax dependent on inflections. In the continued struggle, however, during which the two tongues fought for supremacy, both lost all the looser forms and more changeable modes of expression, retaining little beyond the essentials of their substance. These the new idiom., English, freed from all inflections, and subjected to entirely new laws of syntax,- which how make up its striking and exclusive character among the languages of Europe.