>
thinking too highly of oneself, since one's estimate of oneself
inclines to be too high.
thinking too highly of oneself, since one's estimate of oneself
inclines to be too high.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
443 (#473) ############################################
6
xv]
Losses in Syntax
443
eighteenth century, were of rejected conditions and unfulfilled
wishes seemed to be regularly giving place to was.
But it has
recovered lost ground, and in such constructions was for were
is now a distinct vulgarism. The subjunctive, however, has
been entirely or almost entirely abandoned in the following-
indirect assertions : 'I think he be transformed into a beast'
(As You Like It); indefinite adjective clauses : 'a prone and
speechless dialect such as move men' (Measure for Measure);
concessive clauses regarded as real : ‘no marvel though thou
scorn thy noble peers, when I, thy brother, am rejected thus'
(Edward II); and clauses of future time. The last construction
is still, occasionally, found, especially in poetry : Tennyson writes,
Till in all lands and through all human story
The path of duty be the way to glory.
At the present time, Othello’s ‘Judge me the world' would
regularly be expressed by 'Let the world judge me’; and,
generally, forms with may, might, should, would, are, for clearness,
preferred to simple subjunctives. In ‘Hadst thou been here, my
brother had not died,' the apodosis would take the compound form.
Other syntactical losses since Shakespeare's day include the
constructions 'good my lord' and 'I know thee who thou art';
against and without as conjunctions; the ethic dative; the
accusative and infinitive as subject, now superseded by the
construction with for: 'for a man to behave so is absurd’; be
as the auxiliary of perfect tenses in certain intransitive verbs, a
usage still existing in instances like ‘he is gone. ' In the Elizabethan
age, me as the ethic dative was sometimes felt to be obscure
and was easily mistaken for the direct object. This ambiguity
Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew, 1, 2, ad init. ) seized upon
to bewilder the clown Grumio-
Petruchio. Villain, I say, knock me at this gate
And rap me well, or I'll knock your knave's pate.
Grumio. My master is grown quarrelsome. I should knock you first,
And then I know after who comes by the worst.
These old usages bave been revived in recent times in poetry and
historical fiction ; but, unless skilfully and sparingly employed,
they are apt to offend, as when Stevenson overdoes the ethic dative
in The Black Arrow.
In certain nouns, the same combination of sounds may stand
for different ideas. To the ear, horses represents the genitive
singular as well as all the plural cases. To the eye, this defect is
## p. 444 (#474) ############################################
444 Changes in the Language [Ch.
6
so far remedied by the device of the apostrophe: horse's, horses,
horses'. This distinction began to appear in the seventeenth
century, but it was not a settled usage till the eighteenth.
"The gradual restriction of the apostrophe to the genitive,' says Henry
Sweet in his New English Grammar, 'apparently arose from the belief that
such a genitive as prince's in the prince's book was a shortening of prince
his, as shown by such spellings as the prince his booki!
The employment of his for the genitive suffix was most prevalent
from 1400 to 1750. In the sixteenth and the seventeenth century,
it was chiefly used with proper names ending in a sibilant, or to
avoid an awkward inflectional genitive. It occurs in Dryden, as in
Astraea Redux,
Such is not Charles his too too active age.
The Prayer Book of 1662 has, ' And this we beg for Jesus Christ
his sake. ' The Pilgrim's Progress, part 11, has. Gaius his kindness
to Feeble-mind. ' Many an old tome is inscribed 'John Smith his
book'; and the usage (which still survives, in book-keeping for
example) was turned by Dickens into a joke in ‘Bill Stumps, His
mark. '
Many changes exemplify what Addison calls humouring our
national taciturnity, while they do no injury to clearness of
expression. Old and Middle English revelled in multiplying
negatives for emphasis. The practice was retained by the Eliza-
bethans; but, in time, the principle prevailed that two negatives
contradict each other and make an affirmative. In standard
English, we now find one negative only, though, colloquially, we
may still hear the old redundancy. Double comparison, another
Elizabethan characteristic-Ben Jonson reckoned it an elegancy
of style, 'a certain kind of English Atticism'-began to die out in
the seventeenth century, and now survives only as a vulgarism.
Occasionally, however, it appears in poetry, as in Swinburne's
Atalanta,
Touch the most dimmest height of trembling heaven.
The desire to lop off superfluities accounts for various types of
omissions, as of in 'That is no use'; the verb after to in ‘Are you
going? '--'I should like to,' or 'He must leave now, though he
doesn't want to'; and it is in as usual. ' Swift still wrote the last
in full (Gulliver's Travels, part II, chap. I), ‘Whereof three or four
came into the room, as it is usual in farmers' houses. '
1 'I might here observe that the same single letter [8] on many occasions does
the office of a whole word and represents the His and Her of our forefathers. '
Addison, The Spectator, no. 135.
## p. 445 (#475) ############################################
Xv]
The Attributive Noun
445
Further condensation is seen in the wide use in modern
English of the attributive noun instead of a phrase more or less
lengthy. The usage began in Middle English, and has been
vigorously extended in present-day language. It is regularly
employed in all kinds of new phrases, as when we speak of
birthday congratulations, Canada balsam, a motor garage.
Compound expressions are similarly applied, as loose leaf book
manufacturers, The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, a
dog-in-the-manger policy.
The attributive noun is not an isolated phenomenon in English.
It belongs to the widespread tendency whereby a part of speech
jumps its category. The dropping of distinctive endings made
many nouns, for example, identical with the corresponding verbs;
and, consequently, form presented no obstacle to the use of the
one for the other. The interchange was also facilitated by the
habit of indicating a word's function or construction by its
position in the sentence. This liberty became licence in the
Elizabethan age. ‘Almost any part of speech,' says E. A. Abbott,
'can be used as any other part of speech? ' Later usage has been
more restrained, but of the liberty advantage has been amply
and profitably taken. The following are examples of nouns con-
verted into verbs in recent times: ape, balloon, burlesque, cartoon,
dovetail, gas, laager, lampoon, loot, palaver, sky, tailor, telescope,
tiptoe, tool; of verbs into nouns: build, futter, haul, shampoo,
sip, sneer, sneeze, splash, tinkle, trend; of adjectives into verbs :
grey, tidy. To distinguish the double function, the pronunciation
is sometimes varied, as a good rec'ord but to record' it; an agëd
man but he ag(e)d rapidly.
An extreme instance of this freedom appears in sentences
transformed, for the nonce, into attributes, as when Dickens writes,
'a little man with a puffy “Say-nothing-to-me-or-I'll-contradict-
you" sort of countenance'; or into verbs, as in Browning's lines,
While, treading down rose and ranunculus,
You Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle' us.
One might have expected that the tendency to simplify would
lead English to abolish the strong conjugation with its numerous
complications; but, apparently, any bias towards uniformity has
been counteracted by conservatism linked with the superiority
which the strong verbs possess in clearness, brevity and ease of
pronunciation. Weak forms have, indeed, been adopted, as crowed
for crew, climbed for clomb, melted for molten. On the other
1 A Shakespearian Grammar, Introduction ad init. and 8 290.
## p. 446 (#476) ############################################
446
Changes in the Language [ch.
hand, certain verbs, as dig and stick, formerly weak, are now
strong. It was in the eighteenth century that dug prevailed over
digged, which is the only form found in Shakespeare, The
Authorised Version and Milton. Dug and stuck are easier
sounds than digged and sticked. Within the strong conjugation,
numerous changes have been made. In the sixteenth and the
seventeenth century, there was a general movement towards
supplanting the form of the perfect participle by the form of the
past indicative. Shakespeare used mistook for mistaken, drove
for driven, wrote for written. Goldsmith and other eighteenth-
century writers did the same; and, in their days, drank threatened
to supersede drunk. In present-day English, the original parti-
ciples have, as a rule, been restored, though stood has permanently
displaced stonden.
Other parts of speech have been regularised. One instance is
the modern distinction between who and which as relatives. In
the Elizabethan age, these pronouns could refer indifferently to
persons and things, a usage which lasted into the eighteenth
century. In the first half of the preceding century, they had
seemed likely to drive out that; but, in time, that recovered
lost ground and even encroached upon the others. Steele (The
Spectator, no. 78, cf. no. 80) sets forth the grievances of who and
which in a petition to Mr Spectator-
. . . your petitioners, being in a forlorn and destitute condition, know not to
whom we should apply ourselves for relief, because there is hardly any man
alive who has not injured us. Nay, we speak it with sorrow, even you
yourself, whom we should suspect of such a practice the last of all mankind,
can hardly acquit yourself of having given us some cause of complaint. We
are descended of ancient families, and kept up our dignity and honour many
years, till the jacksprat that supplanted us.
Later in the eighteenth century, who and which came again into
favour; and the three relatives have since been advantageously
employed to fulfil different functions.
In Elizabethan English generally, a strange welter appears
in the cases of pronouns-nominative for accusative, accusative
for nominative. Since then, order has been, for the most part,
restored : nominative and accusative are, as a rule, correctly
employed. We have still, however, such expressions as “Who is
that for? ' But 'It is me' is not frequent till the first half of
the eighteenth century. Before that, 'It is I' was general.
In Middle English, the two methods of comparing adjectives—
by inflection and by periphrasis--were employed indiscriminately,
Later, the method was regularised; and inflectional comparison
## p. 447 (#477) ############################################
Xv] Regularising of Parts, of Speech 447
became restricted to monosyllables and to such disyllables as
the addition does not make discordant. Sixteenth-century writers
supply examples of what we now consider uncouth shapes—elo-
quenter, virtuouser, artificialest, excellentest, famousest, learned'st,
tediousest, unwillingest. Sometimes, the pages of recent poets
and prose-writers bristle with forms like daringest, wonderfulest,
wretcheder.
In Middle English and early modern English (for example, in
Shakespeare and The Authorised Version), shall and will, when
employed as auxiliaries, are not in conformity with present-day
usage. This established itself in the seventeenth century, but
only in England. It never got a footing in the Scottish or the
Irish dialect; and natives of Scotland and Ireland find it hard, if
not impossible, to acquire the standard system with its intricate
rules 1.
By the beginning of the modern English period, do was in
regular use as an auxiliary; and it seemed as if the forms with do
and did were to oust those without. At first, no fixed principle
guided the employment of do write, did write, for write, wrote.
It might be euphony, or perspicuity, or metre, or caprice. Com-
pare the following:
So they did eat, and were filled.
Mark, viii, 8.
Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.
Romans, xii, 15.
It lifted up it head, and did address
Itself to motion.
Hamlet, 1, 2, 215 f.
In the early seventeenth century, however, the language began to
restrict do to certain special functions. 'Does he write? ' came
to take the place of 'Writes he? ' 'He did not write’ the place of
'He wrote not. ' In affirmations, the custom arose of avoiding do
except for emphasis, or in particular cases where the order of
words requires it, as in 'So quietly does he come,’ ‘Nor did he
hesitate. ' But the indiscriminate use of unemphatic do did not
readily vanish; and that gave point to Pope's gibe in 1711,
While expletives their feeble aid do join.
In his Dictionary (1755), Johnson brands unemphatic do 'as a
vicious mode of speech. ' A quarter of a century later, he writes
(Lives of the Poets), 'The words do and did, which so much
degrade in present estimation the line that admits them, were in
1 Gerald Molloy's book on the subject has as its sub-title. The Irish Difficulty';
and J. M. Barrie (When a Man's Single, chap. XVII) uses the mystery to poke fun at
a fellow-Scot.
6
## p. 448 (#478) ############################################
448
Changes in the Language [CH.
the time of Cowley little censured or avoided. ' In spite of Johnson,
later poets have gladly availed themselves of do and did for pur-
poses of metre. Till recent times, doest and dost, doeth and doth
were not differentiated in use. In vain one searches the 1611
edition of The Authorised Version to find why doth appears in
one place, doeth in another. The nineteenth century made doest,
doeth, the verb of full meaning, dost, doth, the auxiliary.
But, during the last three centuries, English has not merely
been regularised and simplified. It has also devised new gram-
matical material to improve the old or replace the lost.
One of the most striking inventions is its. A clear and un-
ambiguous possessive was required for neuters, in place of the old
his and the stopgap it, both felt to be inconvenient. The earliest
known instance of its is in Florio's Worlde of Wordes (1598),
where part of the explanation of spontaneamente is 'for its
owne sake. ' Though in colloquial use before this date, the new
pronoun found favour in literature very slowly. It does not
occur in the 1611 edition of The Authorised Version. A few
examples appear in Shakespeare, but only in plays printed after
his death, while three are met with in Milton's poetry and some
in his prose. Its, however, was too useful to be ignored, and, by
1660, had won a place in the language. The idea that it was an
upstart had disappeared before the end of the century, and Dryden
censured Ben Jonson for writing in Catiline,
Though heaven should speak with all his wrath at once,
remarking 'Heaven is ill syntax with his. ' So quickly was the
old usage forgotten.
Our period has also established a new verbal—the gerund.
This form originated in the use of nouns in -ing preceded by the
and followed by of. The preposition was frequently omitted, a con-
struction which lasted till through the eighteenth century. Steele
writes, “a very great difference between the reading a prayer and
a gazette'; Swift, ‘you owe the cultivating those many virtues';
and Goldsmith, “the gaining two or three battles, or the taking
half a score of towns. ' But the had also been dropped, as in
Shakespeare's ‘Deserve well at my hands by helping me'; and this
shorter form was destined to prevail. Though always retaining
certain noun functions, these -ing forms were considered to belong
to verbs; and, by analogy, others were constructed which had not
and could not have nouns to correspond, as 'He boasts of having
won the game,' 'He was annoyed at being contradicted. '
6
## p. 449 (#479) ############################################
Xv] Tenses of English Verbs 449
In the syntax of the gerund, a genitive case or a possessive
pronoun must sometimes precede, as ‘we could prevent his knowing
it' To express the same notion, a variant construction is prevent
him knowing,' found frequently in recent writers. This has been
attacked as ungrammatical and illogical, but is defended on the
ground of long descent and greater concreteness.
A noticeable feature of the English verb is its wealth of tenses,
whereby precise and accurate expression is given to many shades
of meaning. Though our mode of tense formation by auxiliaries
began in Old English and was gradually extended in Middle
English, it has been, for the most part, settled and developed in
modern times. Forms like I am writing existed long ago; but
it was well into the seventeenth century before the current
distinction arose between I am writing, the actual present, and
I write, the present of general application or of habit. Our
friends all stay for you,' in The Merchant of Venice, and, 'Behold,
three men seek thee,' in The Acts of the Apostles, show the usual
mode of expressing the actual present three centuries ago, while
the regular form today would be are staying and are seeking.
The double forms are also distinguished in the past and the future
tenses. The corresponding passive forms in -ing were much later in
origin than the active, and at first met with fierce opposition, in spite
of their manifest convenience and freedom from ambiguity. Con-
structions like "The house is being built' and 'Rabbits were being
shot in the field' have not been traced further back than the last
decade of the eighteenth century. These forms, however, were
inevitable, since English makes a wider use of the passive voice
than any other modern literary language. How untrammelled the
English passive is, may be seen in the fact that, not content with
a construction like 'A book was given him,' the language has
devised ‘He was given a book. '
Two other constructions may be mentioned. The genitive in -'s
must stand immediately before its governing noun or separated
therefrom only by qualifiers. This produced the peculiar modern
usage by which -'s is detached from the word really governed,
and attached to some group containing that word, as “The father-
in-law's gift,' "The Duke of Oldenburg's dominions. ' The detach-
ment has gone too far in ‘The man I saw yesterday's attempt,'
where the relative clause is regarded as united with man to make
one compound word. Another innovation, involving a minor
change, is 'the split infinitive,' when a word or phrase is inserted
between the to and the verbal part of the infinitive. Though
29
6
2
E. L. XIV.
CH, XV.
## p. 450 (#480) ############################################
450 Changes in the Language [CH.
existing in Middle English, this construction seems to have
become most common in the second half of the nineteenth
century. It has been defended on the plea of occasional superiority
in clearness and emphasis. Purists, however, have energetically
denounced it and sometimes branded its presence as a sign of
stylistic depravity. And certainly many examples are extremely
ugly and in very bad taste.
The extent to which English grammar has been simplified,
has tempted some to speculate whether it could not be simplified
still further. They have suggested that we might dispense with
these and those ; and might drop s in the third person of the
present tense. Others demand the evolution of fresh material-
new pronouns of the third person for indirect speech, and a new
pronoun, of singular number and common gender, to refer to
everyone, each, in order to avoid the inconvenience of Everyone
did what they could' or 'Each did his or her best. '
6
Vocabulary
During the last three centuries, the vocabulary of English has
displayed the characteristic marks of a living tongue—words have
become obsolete, words have altered in meaning, words have been
created. In addition, many words have been borrowed, and the
borrowing has been world-wide.
It is sometimes hard to determine if a word is really obsolete,
for it may linger in obscurity and then suddenly emerge. To
thieve, found in Old English, then for long unrecorded, reappears
in the seventeenth century. Through their occurrence in the
Prayer Book, in the Bible, and in Shakespeare's plays, many
expressions, though disused in ordinary speech and writing, have
remained in knowledge and can hardly be termed obsolete. Again,
the romantic revival restored old words to literature, some of which
have returned into general use. To this class belong words like
dight, nearly lost in the eighteenth century but revived in the
nineteenth ; elfish; hue, archaic about 1600, afterwards reintro-
duced as a poetic synonym for colour; to jeopard; to smoulder ;
sooth
fast, brought back by Sir Walter Scott.
Some words naturally fell out of use with the objects they
denoted, as crowd (fiddle), spontoon (half-pike). But, in many
cases, the exact reason for disuse is obscure. It may be to avoid
ambiguity or to obtain greater vividness, the feeling that a word
is played out or merely the longing for novelty. The following
## p. 451 (#481) ############################################
Xv]
Words Altered in Meaning
451
are examples of words obsolete in the standard language since
Shakespeare's time : accite, bisson, brickle, cypress (gauze), end
(gather in harvest), gent (graceful), grin (a snare), hent, makesport,
neeze, nesh, pink (small), rear (half-cooked), terrestrious, uneath.
Other words may be regarded as archaic, employed to impart an
antique flavour to speech or writing, as an (if), anon, astonied,
bewray, certes, coil (uproar), ear (to plough), eld, feat (adroit), fere,
glister, gobbet, lazar, leasing (falsehood), leman, murrey, nim,
peradventure, sennight, sooth, targe, thole, thrall, throughly, vails
(perquisites), yare.
When we meet an obsolete word, its strangeness puts us on our
guard : not so a word which, while still in common use, has under-
gone a change of meaning. Its familiar appearance lulls the mind
into accepting it at its most familiar value, while, in reality, its
meaning is quite different. Shakespeare's 'Security is mortals’
‘
chiefest enemy,' the Biblical injunction to the receivers of the
talents Occupy till I come,' the petition in the Prayer Book
that they may truly and indifferently minister justice, must
frequently be misunderstood. Some thinking is required to dis-
cover the precise meaning of Swift's whole pack of dismals
coming to you with their black equipage,' while Goldsmith’s ‘loud
laugh that spoke the vacant mind' is often so quoted as to betray
misapprehension of what he meant by vacant.
In some of the numerous words which have altered in meaning
during the last three centuries the change is slight, in others it is
very great, in all the result is a real addition to the capacity of
the language. When a name is required for a new mechanical in-
vention, for a new idea, for a disturbance in the body politic, instead
of coining a word, we may employ an old word with a new sense.
The application of mule in spinning, of train in railways, of
negative in photography, exemplifies how inventions divert words
into new channels. Sometimes, as in the case of train, the
new channel comes to be one of the most important. Nine-
teenth-century politics gave new meanings to conservative,
unionist, liberal, radical, as seventeenth-century troubles did
to puritan, roundhead, cavalier, covenanter. The new use may
originate in the desire for a fresh and vivid designation, which
at first may be dubbed slang, as guinea-pig (a paid director), go
baldheaded (to stake all and disregard consequences), blackbird
(negro), garret (head). The fact that presently now means 'by and
by' testifies to the universality of procrastination. Conceited no
longer signifies full of imagination, full of judgment, but suggests
29_2
## p. 452 (#482) ############################################
452 Changes in the Language [ch.
>
thinking too highly of oneself, since one's estimate of oneself
inclines to be too high. Censure acquired its notion of fault-finding
because we are apt to be harsh in judging others. Words may
change for the better, or for the worse ; may be widened in sense
or narrowed. Politician, nowadays, does not necessarily connote
scheming, nor does emulation, as formerly, convey the bad meaning
of envy, malicious rivalry. Clever, in the eighteenth century, was,
according to Dr Johnson, 'a low word scarcely ever used but in
burlesque or conversation; and applied to anything a man likes,
without any settled meaning. ' On the other hand, officious has
dropped its former good sense of obliging; disgust has taken
the notion of loathing; and blooming, because employed as a
euphemism, now bears the sinister meaning it was intended to
gloss over. Romantic writers elevated the meaning of bard and
minstrel, narrowing, also, the latter, which is no longer applied to
buffoons and jugglers. Science has been severely restricted in
its most common use, while, except in dialect or as an archaism,
meat has ceased to mean food in general. Figurative usage is
frequently the starting point of a permanent change in sense.
Copper may designate something made of the material, as a coin
or a vessel; and then, when another material is substituted, the
previous name may remain. We now apply copper to coins of
bronze and vessels of iron, just as we call one article a shoehorn
though made of silver, and another a fire-iron though made of
brass. Association of ideas plays a great part in transferring
names. An example of this is the application of bluestocking to
Barebone's parliament in the seventeenth century, and to a group
of learned ladies in the eighteenth? An invention, a production,
a practice, may take its name from the originator, from the
place of origin, or from some place or person connected with it.
This, in recent times, has added an extremely varied number of
words to English; as to boycott, to burke, to shanghai, pinchbeck,
mackintosh, gamp, glengarry, chesterfield, jersey, cardigan, joseph,
ulster, wellingtons, snider, shrapnel, gatling, negus, sandwich,
glenlivet, cheddar, gage (in greengage), mocha, strathspey, hansom,
brougham, limerick, guy, mohock. Others of this type belong, in
part, to the section on derivation, since they have been prepared
for use by the addition of formal endings; as boswellise, bowd-
lerise, grangerise, macadamise, daltonism, grundyism, malaprop-
ism, spoonerism, pickwickian, fabian, procustean, peeler. When
we employ burke to mean stifle a rumour or an enquiry, we really
1 See, ante, vol. XI, pp. 344—5.
1
.
## p. 453 (#483) ############################################
15
xv]
Word-making
453
make one word do the work of several, i. e. 'to stifle a rumour as
Burke stifled his victims. ' One recent example of this shortening
is wireless, to indicate Marconi's system of telegraphy. At the end
of the eighteenth century, telegraphy was applied to transmitting
messages by moving arms attached to posts. When electricity was
employed, the term was electric telegraphy; but, as this method
predominated, it monopolised the word telegraphy, and electric
was dropped. Marconi's system received the name wireless
telegraphy, and then the adjective alone came to designate the
whole.
The two chief methods of word-making-composition and deriva-
tion-are extensively employed in modern English. Composition
is very prominent in Old English, especially in poetry. Later
English gave up certain of the old methods of compounding. This
surrender has frequently been exaggerated, and the assertion has
more than once been made that English is, in consequence, weakened
as a language. But, since English achieves by other means the
primary end and aim of language—communication between man
and man-why should it be termed enfeebled? Instead of com-
pounding, English often prefers to make a noun do the work of an
adjective or a verb, or it borrows from other tongues. And who
shall say that English has done wrong in choosing loans like disciple
and impenetrable rather than coinages like learning-knight and
undrivethroughsome? English seems to feel that a word need
not always consciously define or describe what it stands for. It is
sufficient if the word designates. But modern English has kept
a rich store of compounds and possesses the power to coin more.
True, our poetry no longer teems with the formations found in
Beowulf. But the practice of compounding is proved from such
examples as Milton's vermeil-tinctured, many-twinkling; Gray's
feather-cinctured, incense-breathing; Keats's subtle-cadenced;
Shelley's passion-winged; Tennyson’s gloomy-gladed; Swinburne's
sun-forgotten; Arnold's ray-crowned; Browning's dew-pearled.
Nor is it only the poets that employ this device. All strata of the
language—from slang to poetic prose—possess compounds. They
crowd our larger dictionaries in battalions, many of quite recent
origin, while they swarm in newspapers and magazines, clamouring
for recognition as valuable additions to the vocabulary. And,
besides using native material, English appropriates foreign words
and stems, which it links together, sometimes in arbitrary fashion,
to produce shapes, often hybrids, 'that would have made Quin-
tilian stare and gasp. ' A few instances of these are aerodrome,
## p. 454 (#484) ############################################
454
Changes in the Language [CH.
autocar, bibliomania, barometer, cyclostyle, hydroplane, joco-
serious, kaleidoscope, megalomania, neo-catholic, neolithic,
ornithorhyncus, pandemonium, panorama, phantasmagoria,
photograph, pictograph, pseudo-Gothic, quasi-war, somnam-
bulist, stereoscope, telephone, zincograph, zoology. Many words
of this type have been coined to supply the needs of inventors
and men of science. English, as a rule, chooses this method
of making a scientific terminology in preference to employing
native terms with their intimate associations. Greek and, in a
.
less degree, Latin are the chief sources ? .
The following compounds, all modern, exemplify various modes
of coining from native materials: king-emperor, hero-worship,
mad-doctor, teacup, bushranger, catspaw, clothesbrush, ballot-box,
backwoodsman, sponge-cake, jackass, tomcat, tomfoolery, spokes-
woman, sportsman, easy-chair, yellowback, dreadnought, holdall,
knownothing, makeweight, skinflint, spoilsport, outvoter, over-
mantel, to outclass, to overdevelop, to caseharden, to copperbottom,
to roughgrind, duty-free, colour-blind, absent-minded? , one-ideaed,
one-legged, one-roomed, round-faced, great-coated, bounty-fed,
jerry-built, sea-borne, sea-washed, self-governing, self-centred,
highflown, cold-drawn, fresh-run, calf-bound, chance-down.
In forming derivatives, many of the Old English prefixes and
suffixes are no longer employed. To compensate for this, unlimited
use is made of foreign prefixes and suffixes.
The native prefixes most frequent in modern formations are
be-, mis-, un- (reversal of action), un- (negative), as in bespangle,
bedevil; misapprehend, misconduct, misspell; unlimber, unpatriotic,
The number of un- words, in both senses, is enormous. The Old
English suffixes -ster, -dom, -en, -ling, -some, are still employed,
though not extensively, to make new words; as tipster, boredom,
freshen, tighten, princeling, adventuresome. On the other hand,
-ed, -er, -ful (for nouns and adjectives), -ing, -ish, -less, -ly (for
adjectives and adverbs), -ness, -ship, -y, are freely and widely
.
1 This appears when we examine the compounds of tele- and tetra-, • Down to the
last years of the 18th century,' says Sir James A. H. Murray, 'the only tele- words
were TELESCOPE and two derivatives; then, in 1794–5 came TELEGRAPH, with
derivatives; but now, with telepathy, telephone, telephotography, and the like, the tele-
words have grown from Dr Johnson's 2 to 130, and fill 16 columns—an example of
how scientific discovery and invention have enlarged the existing vocabulary. The
words in tetra- are even more numerous (250, besides chemical terms innumerable)
and occupy 19 columns. ' Nine tetra- words are found before 1600, twenty-one more
appear between 1600 and 1800, for all the rest the nineteenth century is responsible.
(The Oxford English Dictionary. )
* This type (adjective + noun +-ed) is very prevalent in present-day English.
## p. 455 (#485) ############################################
Xv]
Word-making
455
-
suffixed, as talented, self-coloured, skater, tobogganer, boxful,
artful, cycling, homing, baddish, mulish, fingerless, tideless, yearly,
suavely, aloofness, nothingness, championship, slangy, fidgety.
The foreign prefixes and suffixes come from Latin, Greek and
French. They are not added merely to stems from their own
language, but, without restriction, they combine with stems from
anywhere to make new English words. The following exemplify
(1) the commonest foreign prefixes; (2) the commonest foreign
suffixes—(1) ante-chapel, ante-diluvian, anti-macassar, anti-Dar-
winian, bi-weekly, bi-millionaire, circumambient, cis-Elizabethan,
co-education, counter-attraction, counter-clockurise, decentralise,
disarrange, disbelief, enslave, ex-Prime Minister, ex-official, extra-
mural, international, intertwine, non-intervention, pre-arrange,
post-glacial, postgraduate, pro-tariff-reform, recount! , re-afforest,
semi-detached, submarine, sub-kingdom, super-heat, ultra-radical;
(2) clubbable, traceable, blockade, orangeade, breakage, approval,
prudential, Johnsoniana, nitrate, vaccinate, addressee, auctioneer,
Carlylese, leatherette, Frenchification, beautification, speechify,
Addisonian, Byronic, butterine, jingoism, toadyism, positivist,
Jacobite, pre-Raphaelite, hypnotise, oxidise, streamlet, booklet,
bereavement, oddments.
Of minor modes of word-production active during the last
three centuries, the first to be noticed consists in change of accent.
One word thus becomes two, differing in sound and sense, and, at
times, in spelling; as conjure', con'jure; hu'man, humane'; ur'ban,
urbane'. A second mode is shortening-part of the habit common
in English and frequently assailed by purists. Swift struggled for
years against mob, an abbreviation of mobile vulgus; but in vain.
Mob has proved a valuable addition to the vocabulary. Abbrevia-
tions are not additions unless the shortened form differs, more or
less, in meaning from the original, or, while retaining the meaning,
is applicable under different circumstances. Sometimes it is the
last part of the word that remains, as bus from omnibus, wig from
periwig, cute from acute, van from caravan. More frequently it is
the first part that remains, as cab from cabriolet, cad from cadet,
Miss from Mistress, navvy from navigator, rake from rake-hell,
tar (a sailor), from tarpaulin, tick (credit), from ticket. Port (the
wine), from Oporto, has lost both head and tail. Another mode has
been termed "back-formation. The word burglar, for example,
was regarded as containing the suffix seen in liar; and, by a piece
1 Re- has been employed with special frequency since about 1850. The number of
forms made with it is practically infinite,' says The Oxford English Dictionary.
## p. 456 (#486) ############################################
456
Changes in the Language [CH.
of false logic, it was assumed that, as liar presupposes to lie, so
burglar presupposes to burgle. Similarly to sidle was made from
sideling, taken for a participle. Other modern back-formations are
to char (burn), from charcoal; to frivol from frivolous ; to process
from procession; to roughride from roughrider; to spring clean
from spring cleaning; to stoke from stoker; to subedit from sub-
editor; to sulk from sulky; to swindle from swindler; to tightlace
from tightlacing or tightlaced.
Finally, we may note words which seem to have ‘sprung up'-
instances, in fact, of 'root-creation. For the most part, they are
words originating in onomatopoeia, the principle underlying the
poet's music, in Tennyson :
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees,
as well as more obtrusively in Browning :
Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife.
The term onomatopoeia has been widened to include words which,
while not precisely imitating the sound, yet commend themselves
to the ear as symbolic suggestions to the mind of the sound's effect.
Such words continually arise. To ridicule ‘swell' modes of utter-
ance, la-di-da originated about 1883; pom-pom was a soldier's
invention in 1899, during the South African war; ping-pong
appeared with the game in 1900, ping itself (for the ring of rifle
bullets) being then some fifty years old. A few similar modern
creations are boo, fizz, furry, fribble, fuss, hubble-bubble, hurdy-
gurdy, kittiwake, miaow, miminy-piminy, puf-puff, ratatat,
snigger, sniffling, splutter, splodge.
When a new term is required, rather than coin a word or
burden an old one with a fresh meaning, English often borrows.
The earliest known English contains loans; and, in modern times,
borrowing has been extensively practised—so extensively, indeed,
that, in recent dictionaries, only about one-fifth, or, at most, one-
fourth, of the words can claim to be native. This, of course, is no
test of their use; for, while scientific works, especially on chemistry,
may be written in, perhaps, equal parts, foreign and native, the
percentage of native words in works of literature may rise to 85
or 90, or even more. Taking, however, the vocabulary as it stands
in a dictionary, we are justified in calling it much more composite
than it ever was before. But, whatever be the elements composing
our vocabulary, the mode in which they are employed is purely
English. Foreign words soon cease to be treated as aliens: they
## p. 457 (#487) ############################################
xv] Appropriations from Foreign Tongues 457
are naturalised and become subject 'to all the duties and liabilities
of English words. '
In the seventeenth century, as is shown by writers like Sir
Thomas Browne, there was a continual influx of Latin words,
many of which, however, failed to establish themselves in the
language. French influence, after 1660, checked Latin borrowing.
This age was also a time of sifting of the vocabulary. A large
number of words, chiefly Latin, borrowed since the renascence,
did not survive the end of the seventeenth century, and most of
the survivors are still with us. Borrowing from Latin and French
has gone on to the present day. The war of 1914, like other wars,
seems likely to add to our stock. Communiqué has secured a firm
foothold in our newspapers not only for French official communica-
tions but, also, for British, German and Russian, and even South
African. From French and from other languages of Europe we
have borrowed words of commerce, of seafaring, of science, of art,
of literature, of social life. War, exploration, trading, colonising
and travelling have brought us words from America, Africa, Asia,
Australia and the islands of the sea, while the Celtic tongues at
home have added to the store. It is sometimes difficult to know
the immediate source of a loan. A word may come to us from
French, or it may be taken from Latin though it mimics the French
mode. Words from distant lands may, for example, reach us
through Italian or Spanish, through French or Dutch English
has received from French the Arabic houri, minaret, sofa and
zero; the Turkish odalisque and kiosk; the Russian ukase; the
Mexican jalap and ocelot. From the Dutch came the Malay
cockatoo; from the Portuguese the Persian sepoy and the East
Indian teak; from Spanish the Peruvian puma. Italian handed
on the Persian bazaar; an Indian vernacular gave us the Persian
shawl. Gaelic words like cairn, ingle, sporran entered English
from the Scottish dialect. Many classical Greek words have
been transmitted by Latin or have assumed a Latin shape, as
atmosphere, chrysalis, geology, monad, nausea, oasis, octopus,
phase, phenomenon, phonetic, phosphorus, siphon, sporadic,
thesaurus.
During the last three centuries, the sources from which English
has borrowed most freely have been French, Latin, Greek and, to
a less extent, Italian. The loans are of great variety, which, in
a fragmentary way, appears in the following lists. From Latin we
have such words as arena, axis, bacillus, cactus, circus, devastate,
deviate, exert, facsimile, farrago, fortuitous, hallucination,
## p. 458 (#488) ############################################
458
Changes in the Language [CH.
incandescent, incipient, indigenous, indulge, joke, junction, larva,
maximum, minimum, mollusca, nebula, noxious, nucleus, obtrude,
odium, omnivorous, osseous, otiose, par, pendulum, permeate,
preclude, puerile, quadruped, quota, ratio, reluctant, sinecure,
spontaneous, tact, tandem, terrific, ulterior, vertigo, veto, viaduct;
from Greek, autonomy, cacophonous, eczema, euphemism, exegesis,
heterodox, idiomatic, kinetic, kudos, meteorology, monotony, nous,
orthodox, ostracise, panoply, semantic, tonic, zymotic; from
French, avalanche, badinage, bagatelle, barracks, bivouac, bronze,
buccaneer, burlesque, chauffeur, chicane, cockade, cutlet, debouch,
decamp, dragoon, echelon, embarrass, façade, gala, glacier,
hangar, isolation, lampoon, levee, moraine, mystify, naïve, ogre,
oxygen, parachute, parasol, parade, parvenu, picnic, piston,
prude, quadrille, ration, ricochet, roué, rouge (cosmetic), routine,
sash (of window), séance, solidarity, sobriquet, soufflé, souvenir,
tableau, terrorism, trousseau, vaudeville, zouave; from Italian,
balcony, bravura, crescendo, dado, dilettante, extravaganza,
granite, grotto, incognito, influenza, lava, martello, oboe, opera,
pianoforte, quartet, regatta, semolina, sirocco, solo, sonata,
soprano, terracotta, ultramarine. From the other European
tongues, the loans are far fewer though still important. The
following exemplify what we owe to Dutch-commodore, casel,
gas, Hottentot, hustle, kink, maulstick, morass, ogle, roster, skate
(on ice), sketch, sloop, smack (ship), splice, taffrail, tattoo (of drum),
trigger, yacht; to South African Dutch-commandeer, kraal,
laager, spoor, sjambok, trek, veldt; to Spanish—castanet, cigar,
flotilla, garrotte, guerrilla, junto, quadroon, regalia (cigar),
sambo, sierra, siesta; to Portuguese-albatross, cobra, dodo, emu,
jose, palaver, verandah, zebra; to German--feldspar, gneiss,
kriegspiel, lager, mangel-wurzel, poodle, plunder, quartz, swindler,
waltz, zeitgeist, zinc; to Russian-drosky, knout, mammoth,
samovar, steppe; to Hungarian-shako, tokay (wine); to Polish-
mazurka; to Icelandic-geyser; to Swedish-sloyd; to Norwegian
-fiord, ski ; to Welsh—cromlech, eisteddfod ; to Gaelic-clay-
more, ptarmigan, pibroch; to Irish-banshee, Fenian, shillelagh,
Tory; to Breton-menhir.
When we come to Asia, we naturally find that our vocabulary
has borrowed largely from the Indian languages-chintz, coolie,
juggernaut, jungle, jute, khaki, loot, pyjamas, pundit, raj,
shampoo, sikh, sirdar, thug, tomtom, zenana. We have from
Persian-baksheesh, durbar; from Turkish-bosh, effendi, jackal,
kismet, pasha; from Arabic-allah, ameer, emir, fellah, harem,
## p. 459 (#489) ############################################
F
XV] Appropriations from Foreign Tongues 459
salaam, simoom, zareba; from Malay-amuck, compound (en-
closure), guttapercha, trepang, upas; from Japanese-jinricksha;
from Javanese—bantam ; from Chinese_bohea, kotow, pekoe,
souchong, tea. With few exceptions, of which kosher may be one,
words of Hebrew origin in common English use have come through
other tongues.
American languages have given us moccasin, musquash, skunk,
squaw, tapir, toboggan, tomahawk, totem, wigwam ; African-
chimpanzee, gnu, morocco, quagga; Australasian and Polynesian
-atoll, boomerang, dingo, kangaroo, taboo, tattoo (skin-marking).
Many of these loans have interesting associations. The Poly-
nesian tattoo was first made known to Englishmen in the third
quarter of the eighteenth century by captain Cook; the German
plunder reminds us of the devastating Thirty Years' war and of
prince Rupert's marauders in England during the civil war;
words like easel and sketch, smack and yacht recall the painters
and the sailors of Holland, as terracotta and ultramarine, opera
and soprano recall the artists and singers of Italy. Tomahawk
goes back to the early English settlements near the Red Indians;
terrorism, first recorded in English in 1795, is an offspring of the
French ‘Reign of Terror,' 1793—4; and the Spanish guerrilla, in
a despatch of Wellington (1809), is a legacy from the Peninsular
But these few instances must suffice.
The readiness with which English borrows from foreign tongues
or builds words out of foreign materials, explains the existence of
such pairs as mind, mental ; mouth, oral; spring, vernal ; moon,
lunar ; son, filial; man, human; coal, carbonic; milk, lacteal ;
where the noun is native, the adjective foreign. This is sometimes
termed a defect, on the ground that the words, while connected
in sense, are not outwardly linked by form. Custom, however,
obviates any disadvantage the defect may have. Besides, in many
cases, native adjectives exist by the side of the foreign, as manly,
human; fatherly, paternal ; watery, aqueous ; kingly, royal.
Similar pairs of nouns are greatness, magnitude; length, longitude;
height, altitude. By means of the double forms, we express
differences of meaning, or vary the phraseology according to
circumstances. This advantage will naturally have little weight
with those who wish foreign words expelled, whether useful or
not, who, like William Barnes, advocate demsterhood, folkdom,
folkwain, pushwainling, cudchewsome for criticism, democracy,
omnibus, perambulator, ruminating.
Barnes represents the extreme views of the supporters of the
war.
## p. 460 (#490) ############################################
460
Changes in the Language [CH.
>
native element in English against the foreign. This opposition is,
in part, associated with the alternation in style which has been
manifest, most noticeably in the domain of prose, during the last
three centuries—the recurrent movement between the plain,
unadorned style and the rhetorical, ornate style. Each form has
ebbed and flowed : neither, however, has existed absolutely alone.
Each is exposed to its own danger : the plain may degenerate into
the bald or the vulgar, the ornate into the extravagant or the
gaudy.
Among the Elizabethans, Lyly and Sidney had endeavoured to
beautify prose. In the first half of the seventeenth century, we
meet with various devices to enrich literary style, exemplified by
the 'conceits' of Donne, Crashaw and other metaphysical poets,
and, in prose, by the antitheses and tropes of Bacon, the quaintness
of Burton and Fuller, the ornate splendour of Taylor, Milton and
Browne. But the average reader found it difficult to comprehend
their strange-often highly Latinised-vocabulary, their involved
sentences, their far-fetched allusions, their bold figures ; and after
the restoration arose the cry for a plainer, clearer style? A longing
for an academy on the French model was several times expressed.
In 1664, the Royal Society appointed a committee to improve the
English language, but nothing resulted. One of the members of
the committee was John Dryden, who had already (Rival-Ladies,
dedication) lamented
that, speaking so noble a language as we do, we have not a more certain
measure of it as they have in France, where they have an Academy, enacted
for the purpose.
Dryden, however, was destined to take the lead in adapting the
conversational English of the age to be a suitable medium for the
varied aims of prose ; and this simpler style he also introduced into
poetry. His Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) is written in straight-
forward conversational English, and may be regarded, indirectly at
least, as a manifesto of the new prose. A direct manifesto bad
recently appeared in The History of the Royal Society, by Thomas
Sprat. There he condemns 'this vicious abundance of phrase, this
trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great
a noise in the world. He points out that the Royal Society had
vigorously applied the only remedy for this extravagance;
and that has been a constant resolution to reject all amplification, digressions,
and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness
,
when men delivered so many things almost in an equal number of words.
See, ante, vol. vini, chap. XVI.
a
1
## p. 461 (#491) ############################################
Xv]
Influence of The Spectator
461
They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of
speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all
things as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the
language of artisans, countrymen and merchants before that of wits and
scholars.
However plausible the Society's preference might seem, however
admirably the vernacular was handled by Bunyan and Defoe, as
later by Cobbett, however effective was Locke's plain bluntness,
the unmeasured use of the language of the common people nearly
destroyed literary English at the end of the seventeenth century
and the beginning of the eighteenth. The language of the average
man abounds in colloquial elisions and abbreviations, in careless
constructions, in familiar catchwords and slang. These were in-
dulged in by L'Estrange and other writers of periodicals and
controversial pamphlets. Swift, Addison and Steele, on the other
hand, sought to restore the purity of the language. In The Tatler
(no. 230), Swift censures elisions like can't do't for cannot do it,
the pronunciation of absolves instead of absolveth, and shortenings
like phizz, mob, rep. He pillories banter, bamboozle, country put,
kidney, adding ‘I have done my utmost for some years past to stop
the progress of mob and banter, but have been plainly bore down
by numbers. '
Accordingly, he appeals to Isaac Bickerstaff to make use of his
authority as censor, and by an annual Index Expurgatorius expunge all
words and phrases that are offensive to good sense, and condemn those
barbarous mutilations of vowels and syllables.
The Spectator (nos. 135, 147, 165) took up the theme of abbrevia-
tions of syllables and inroads of foreign words. In the first of
these papers, Addison desiderates ‘something like an Academy,
that by the best authorities and rules drawn from the analogy of
languages shall settle all controversies between grammar and
idiom. '
The Spectator continued, for several generations, to be the
general pattern for prose. Johnson reminds us of this when he
says, Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not
coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and
nights to the volumes of Addison. '
Occasionally, however, the model was diverged from; and style
degenerated. Then, dignity was restored to prose, in different
ways, by Johnson, with his Latinised diction, his antitheses, his
balanced structure; by Gibbon, with his periphrases and his rolling
6
## p. 462 (#492) ############################################
462
Changes in the Language [CH. ,
a
periods ; by Burke, with his eloquent copiousness and his glowing
imagery.
With the romantic revival came a vital change. Eighteenth-
century poets, in their efforts to distinguish the language of poetry
from the language of prose, had elaborated a conventional diction.
The romantic poets eagerly sought to supersede this convention by
vivid, appropriate words. To obtain these, they often ransacked
the older treasures of the language. Prose, also, was influenced by
the romantic movement, though more slowly; and, to a certain
extent, was freed from artificiality and formality of diction. In the
early nineteenth century, Southey is an instance of the perfection
attainable in the simple style. Since then, there have been several
movements away from the standard style, some of them towards
elaborate, gorgeous, rhythmical prose. The earliest movement
took various directions in De Quincey, Landor, Macaulay and
Carlyle. About the middle of the century, contemporary with the
word-painting and music of Ruskin's prose and the simple beauty
of Newman's, many writers showed a tendency towards a slipshod
colloquialism. The reaction that followed—the effects of which are
not yet exhausted-is seen in the striving after the refinements of
style associated with the names of Rossetti and Swinburne in verse,
and of Pater and Stevenson in prose.
Several of the suggestions to establish a censorship of English
have been mentioned. But the greatest effort was Swift's Proposal
for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English Tongue
(1712), in a letter to the earl of Oxford, then lord high treasurer.
After repeating and amplifying his views in The Tatler, Swift
asks Oxford to appoint a society with authority to remove defects
in the grammar of English and gross improprieties, however well
sanctioned by usage. Many words should be expelled, many more
should be corrected, perhaps not a few should be restored. But
the kernel of his proposal is
that some method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our
language for ever, after such alterations are made in it as shall be thought
requisite. For I am of opinion, that it is better a language should not be
wholly perfect, than that it should be perpetually changing.
He does not, however, mean that the vocabulary is not to be
increased.
Provided that no word, which a society shall give a sanction to be after-
wards antiquated and exploded, they may have liberty to receive whatever
new ones they shall find occasion for.
This ‘petty treatise,' as Dr Johnson terms it, had some effect, for
a
## p. 463 (#493) ############################################
a
xv]
Summary
463
Oxford nominated several persons, but the death of queen Anne
stopped the scheme.
One of Johnson's aims in compiling his Dictionary was to fix
the English language; but, in the preface, he confessed he had been
too sanguine.
6
xv]
Losses in Syntax
443
eighteenth century, were of rejected conditions and unfulfilled
wishes seemed to be regularly giving place to was.
But it has
recovered lost ground, and in such constructions was for were
is now a distinct vulgarism. The subjunctive, however, has
been entirely or almost entirely abandoned in the following-
indirect assertions : 'I think he be transformed into a beast'
(As You Like It); indefinite adjective clauses : 'a prone and
speechless dialect such as move men' (Measure for Measure);
concessive clauses regarded as real : ‘no marvel though thou
scorn thy noble peers, when I, thy brother, am rejected thus'
(Edward II); and clauses of future time. The last construction
is still, occasionally, found, especially in poetry : Tennyson writes,
Till in all lands and through all human story
The path of duty be the way to glory.
At the present time, Othello’s ‘Judge me the world' would
regularly be expressed by 'Let the world judge me’; and,
generally, forms with may, might, should, would, are, for clearness,
preferred to simple subjunctives. In ‘Hadst thou been here, my
brother had not died,' the apodosis would take the compound form.
Other syntactical losses since Shakespeare's day include the
constructions 'good my lord' and 'I know thee who thou art';
against and without as conjunctions; the ethic dative; the
accusative and infinitive as subject, now superseded by the
construction with for: 'for a man to behave so is absurd’; be
as the auxiliary of perfect tenses in certain intransitive verbs, a
usage still existing in instances like ‘he is gone. ' In the Elizabethan
age, me as the ethic dative was sometimes felt to be obscure
and was easily mistaken for the direct object. This ambiguity
Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew, 1, 2, ad init. ) seized upon
to bewilder the clown Grumio-
Petruchio. Villain, I say, knock me at this gate
And rap me well, or I'll knock your knave's pate.
Grumio. My master is grown quarrelsome. I should knock you first,
And then I know after who comes by the worst.
These old usages bave been revived in recent times in poetry and
historical fiction ; but, unless skilfully and sparingly employed,
they are apt to offend, as when Stevenson overdoes the ethic dative
in The Black Arrow.
In certain nouns, the same combination of sounds may stand
for different ideas. To the ear, horses represents the genitive
singular as well as all the plural cases. To the eye, this defect is
## p. 444 (#474) ############################################
444 Changes in the Language [Ch.
6
so far remedied by the device of the apostrophe: horse's, horses,
horses'. This distinction began to appear in the seventeenth
century, but it was not a settled usage till the eighteenth.
"The gradual restriction of the apostrophe to the genitive,' says Henry
Sweet in his New English Grammar, 'apparently arose from the belief that
such a genitive as prince's in the prince's book was a shortening of prince
his, as shown by such spellings as the prince his booki!
The employment of his for the genitive suffix was most prevalent
from 1400 to 1750. In the sixteenth and the seventeenth century,
it was chiefly used with proper names ending in a sibilant, or to
avoid an awkward inflectional genitive. It occurs in Dryden, as in
Astraea Redux,
Such is not Charles his too too active age.
The Prayer Book of 1662 has, ' And this we beg for Jesus Christ
his sake. ' The Pilgrim's Progress, part 11, has. Gaius his kindness
to Feeble-mind. ' Many an old tome is inscribed 'John Smith his
book'; and the usage (which still survives, in book-keeping for
example) was turned by Dickens into a joke in ‘Bill Stumps, His
mark. '
Many changes exemplify what Addison calls humouring our
national taciturnity, while they do no injury to clearness of
expression. Old and Middle English revelled in multiplying
negatives for emphasis. The practice was retained by the Eliza-
bethans; but, in time, the principle prevailed that two negatives
contradict each other and make an affirmative. In standard
English, we now find one negative only, though, colloquially, we
may still hear the old redundancy. Double comparison, another
Elizabethan characteristic-Ben Jonson reckoned it an elegancy
of style, 'a certain kind of English Atticism'-began to die out in
the seventeenth century, and now survives only as a vulgarism.
Occasionally, however, it appears in poetry, as in Swinburne's
Atalanta,
Touch the most dimmest height of trembling heaven.
The desire to lop off superfluities accounts for various types of
omissions, as of in 'That is no use'; the verb after to in ‘Are you
going? '--'I should like to,' or 'He must leave now, though he
doesn't want to'; and it is in as usual. ' Swift still wrote the last
in full (Gulliver's Travels, part II, chap. I), ‘Whereof three or four
came into the room, as it is usual in farmers' houses. '
1 'I might here observe that the same single letter [8] on many occasions does
the office of a whole word and represents the His and Her of our forefathers. '
Addison, The Spectator, no. 135.
## p. 445 (#475) ############################################
Xv]
The Attributive Noun
445
Further condensation is seen in the wide use in modern
English of the attributive noun instead of a phrase more or less
lengthy. The usage began in Middle English, and has been
vigorously extended in present-day language. It is regularly
employed in all kinds of new phrases, as when we speak of
birthday congratulations, Canada balsam, a motor garage.
Compound expressions are similarly applied, as loose leaf book
manufacturers, The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, a
dog-in-the-manger policy.
The attributive noun is not an isolated phenomenon in English.
It belongs to the widespread tendency whereby a part of speech
jumps its category. The dropping of distinctive endings made
many nouns, for example, identical with the corresponding verbs;
and, consequently, form presented no obstacle to the use of the
one for the other. The interchange was also facilitated by the
habit of indicating a word's function or construction by its
position in the sentence. This liberty became licence in the
Elizabethan age. ‘Almost any part of speech,' says E. A. Abbott,
'can be used as any other part of speech? ' Later usage has been
more restrained, but of the liberty advantage has been amply
and profitably taken. The following are examples of nouns con-
verted into verbs in recent times: ape, balloon, burlesque, cartoon,
dovetail, gas, laager, lampoon, loot, palaver, sky, tailor, telescope,
tiptoe, tool; of verbs into nouns: build, futter, haul, shampoo,
sip, sneer, sneeze, splash, tinkle, trend; of adjectives into verbs :
grey, tidy. To distinguish the double function, the pronunciation
is sometimes varied, as a good rec'ord but to record' it; an agëd
man but he ag(e)d rapidly.
An extreme instance of this freedom appears in sentences
transformed, for the nonce, into attributes, as when Dickens writes,
'a little man with a puffy “Say-nothing-to-me-or-I'll-contradict-
you" sort of countenance'; or into verbs, as in Browning's lines,
While, treading down rose and ranunculus,
You Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle' us.
One might have expected that the tendency to simplify would
lead English to abolish the strong conjugation with its numerous
complications; but, apparently, any bias towards uniformity has
been counteracted by conservatism linked with the superiority
which the strong verbs possess in clearness, brevity and ease of
pronunciation. Weak forms have, indeed, been adopted, as crowed
for crew, climbed for clomb, melted for molten. On the other
1 A Shakespearian Grammar, Introduction ad init. and 8 290.
## p. 446 (#476) ############################################
446
Changes in the Language [ch.
hand, certain verbs, as dig and stick, formerly weak, are now
strong. It was in the eighteenth century that dug prevailed over
digged, which is the only form found in Shakespeare, The
Authorised Version and Milton. Dug and stuck are easier
sounds than digged and sticked. Within the strong conjugation,
numerous changes have been made. In the sixteenth and the
seventeenth century, there was a general movement towards
supplanting the form of the perfect participle by the form of the
past indicative. Shakespeare used mistook for mistaken, drove
for driven, wrote for written. Goldsmith and other eighteenth-
century writers did the same; and, in their days, drank threatened
to supersede drunk. In present-day English, the original parti-
ciples have, as a rule, been restored, though stood has permanently
displaced stonden.
Other parts of speech have been regularised. One instance is
the modern distinction between who and which as relatives. In
the Elizabethan age, these pronouns could refer indifferently to
persons and things, a usage which lasted into the eighteenth
century. In the first half of the preceding century, they had
seemed likely to drive out that; but, in time, that recovered
lost ground and even encroached upon the others. Steele (The
Spectator, no. 78, cf. no. 80) sets forth the grievances of who and
which in a petition to Mr Spectator-
. . . your petitioners, being in a forlorn and destitute condition, know not to
whom we should apply ourselves for relief, because there is hardly any man
alive who has not injured us. Nay, we speak it with sorrow, even you
yourself, whom we should suspect of such a practice the last of all mankind,
can hardly acquit yourself of having given us some cause of complaint. We
are descended of ancient families, and kept up our dignity and honour many
years, till the jacksprat that supplanted us.
Later in the eighteenth century, who and which came again into
favour; and the three relatives have since been advantageously
employed to fulfil different functions.
In Elizabethan English generally, a strange welter appears
in the cases of pronouns-nominative for accusative, accusative
for nominative. Since then, order has been, for the most part,
restored : nominative and accusative are, as a rule, correctly
employed. We have still, however, such expressions as “Who is
that for? ' But 'It is me' is not frequent till the first half of
the eighteenth century. Before that, 'It is I' was general.
In Middle English, the two methods of comparing adjectives—
by inflection and by periphrasis--were employed indiscriminately,
Later, the method was regularised; and inflectional comparison
## p. 447 (#477) ############################################
Xv] Regularising of Parts, of Speech 447
became restricted to monosyllables and to such disyllables as
the addition does not make discordant. Sixteenth-century writers
supply examples of what we now consider uncouth shapes—elo-
quenter, virtuouser, artificialest, excellentest, famousest, learned'st,
tediousest, unwillingest. Sometimes, the pages of recent poets
and prose-writers bristle with forms like daringest, wonderfulest,
wretcheder.
In Middle English and early modern English (for example, in
Shakespeare and The Authorised Version), shall and will, when
employed as auxiliaries, are not in conformity with present-day
usage. This established itself in the seventeenth century, but
only in England. It never got a footing in the Scottish or the
Irish dialect; and natives of Scotland and Ireland find it hard, if
not impossible, to acquire the standard system with its intricate
rules 1.
By the beginning of the modern English period, do was in
regular use as an auxiliary; and it seemed as if the forms with do
and did were to oust those without. At first, no fixed principle
guided the employment of do write, did write, for write, wrote.
It might be euphony, or perspicuity, or metre, or caprice. Com-
pare the following:
So they did eat, and were filled.
Mark, viii, 8.
Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.
Romans, xii, 15.
It lifted up it head, and did address
Itself to motion.
Hamlet, 1, 2, 215 f.
In the early seventeenth century, however, the language began to
restrict do to certain special functions. 'Does he write? ' came
to take the place of 'Writes he? ' 'He did not write’ the place of
'He wrote not. ' In affirmations, the custom arose of avoiding do
except for emphasis, or in particular cases where the order of
words requires it, as in 'So quietly does he come,’ ‘Nor did he
hesitate. ' But the indiscriminate use of unemphatic do did not
readily vanish; and that gave point to Pope's gibe in 1711,
While expletives their feeble aid do join.
In his Dictionary (1755), Johnson brands unemphatic do 'as a
vicious mode of speech. ' A quarter of a century later, he writes
(Lives of the Poets), 'The words do and did, which so much
degrade in present estimation the line that admits them, were in
1 Gerald Molloy's book on the subject has as its sub-title. The Irish Difficulty';
and J. M. Barrie (When a Man's Single, chap. XVII) uses the mystery to poke fun at
a fellow-Scot.
6
## p. 448 (#478) ############################################
448
Changes in the Language [CH.
the time of Cowley little censured or avoided. ' In spite of Johnson,
later poets have gladly availed themselves of do and did for pur-
poses of metre. Till recent times, doest and dost, doeth and doth
were not differentiated in use. In vain one searches the 1611
edition of The Authorised Version to find why doth appears in
one place, doeth in another. The nineteenth century made doest,
doeth, the verb of full meaning, dost, doth, the auxiliary.
But, during the last three centuries, English has not merely
been regularised and simplified. It has also devised new gram-
matical material to improve the old or replace the lost.
One of the most striking inventions is its. A clear and un-
ambiguous possessive was required for neuters, in place of the old
his and the stopgap it, both felt to be inconvenient. The earliest
known instance of its is in Florio's Worlde of Wordes (1598),
where part of the explanation of spontaneamente is 'for its
owne sake. ' Though in colloquial use before this date, the new
pronoun found favour in literature very slowly. It does not
occur in the 1611 edition of The Authorised Version. A few
examples appear in Shakespeare, but only in plays printed after
his death, while three are met with in Milton's poetry and some
in his prose. Its, however, was too useful to be ignored, and, by
1660, had won a place in the language. The idea that it was an
upstart had disappeared before the end of the century, and Dryden
censured Ben Jonson for writing in Catiline,
Though heaven should speak with all his wrath at once,
remarking 'Heaven is ill syntax with his. ' So quickly was the
old usage forgotten.
Our period has also established a new verbal—the gerund.
This form originated in the use of nouns in -ing preceded by the
and followed by of. The preposition was frequently omitted, a con-
struction which lasted till through the eighteenth century. Steele
writes, “a very great difference between the reading a prayer and
a gazette'; Swift, ‘you owe the cultivating those many virtues';
and Goldsmith, “the gaining two or three battles, or the taking
half a score of towns. ' But the had also been dropped, as in
Shakespeare's ‘Deserve well at my hands by helping me'; and this
shorter form was destined to prevail. Though always retaining
certain noun functions, these -ing forms were considered to belong
to verbs; and, by analogy, others were constructed which had not
and could not have nouns to correspond, as 'He boasts of having
won the game,' 'He was annoyed at being contradicted. '
6
## p. 449 (#479) ############################################
Xv] Tenses of English Verbs 449
In the syntax of the gerund, a genitive case or a possessive
pronoun must sometimes precede, as ‘we could prevent his knowing
it' To express the same notion, a variant construction is prevent
him knowing,' found frequently in recent writers. This has been
attacked as ungrammatical and illogical, but is defended on the
ground of long descent and greater concreteness.
A noticeable feature of the English verb is its wealth of tenses,
whereby precise and accurate expression is given to many shades
of meaning. Though our mode of tense formation by auxiliaries
began in Old English and was gradually extended in Middle
English, it has been, for the most part, settled and developed in
modern times. Forms like I am writing existed long ago; but
it was well into the seventeenth century before the current
distinction arose between I am writing, the actual present, and
I write, the present of general application or of habit. Our
friends all stay for you,' in The Merchant of Venice, and, 'Behold,
three men seek thee,' in The Acts of the Apostles, show the usual
mode of expressing the actual present three centuries ago, while
the regular form today would be are staying and are seeking.
The double forms are also distinguished in the past and the future
tenses. The corresponding passive forms in -ing were much later in
origin than the active, and at first met with fierce opposition, in spite
of their manifest convenience and freedom from ambiguity. Con-
structions like "The house is being built' and 'Rabbits were being
shot in the field' have not been traced further back than the last
decade of the eighteenth century. These forms, however, were
inevitable, since English makes a wider use of the passive voice
than any other modern literary language. How untrammelled the
English passive is, may be seen in the fact that, not content with
a construction like 'A book was given him,' the language has
devised ‘He was given a book. '
Two other constructions may be mentioned. The genitive in -'s
must stand immediately before its governing noun or separated
therefrom only by qualifiers. This produced the peculiar modern
usage by which -'s is detached from the word really governed,
and attached to some group containing that word, as “The father-
in-law's gift,' "The Duke of Oldenburg's dominions. ' The detach-
ment has gone too far in ‘The man I saw yesterday's attempt,'
where the relative clause is regarded as united with man to make
one compound word. Another innovation, involving a minor
change, is 'the split infinitive,' when a word or phrase is inserted
between the to and the verbal part of the infinitive. Though
29
6
2
E. L. XIV.
CH, XV.
## p. 450 (#480) ############################################
450 Changes in the Language [CH.
existing in Middle English, this construction seems to have
become most common in the second half of the nineteenth
century. It has been defended on the plea of occasional superiority
in clearness and emphasis. Purists, however, have energetically
denounced it and sometimes branded its presence as a sign of
stylistic depravity. And certainly many examples are extremely
ugly and in very bad taste.
The extent to which English grammar has been simplified,
has tempted some to speculate whether it could not be simplified
still further. They have suggested that we might dispense with
these and those ; and might drop s in the third person of the
present tense. Others demand the evolution of fresh material-
new pronouns of the third person for indirect speech, and a new
pronoun, of singular number and common gender, to refer to
everyone, each, in order to avoid the inconvenience of Everyone
did what they could' or 'Each did his or her best. '
6
Vocabulary
During the last three centuries, the vocabulary of English has
displayed the characteristic marks of a living tongue—words have
become obsolete, words have altered in meaning, words have been
created. In addition, many words have been borrowed, and the
borrowing has been world-wide.
It is sometimes hard to determine if a word is really obsolete,
for it may linger in obscurity and then suddenly emerge. To
thieve, found in Old English, then for long unrecorded, reappears
in the seventeenth century. Through their occurrence in the
Prayer Book, in the Bible, and in Shakespeare's plays, many
expressions, though disused in ordinary speech and writing, have
remained in knowledge and can hardly be termed obsolete. Again,
the romantic revival restored old words to literature, some of which
have returned into general use. To this class belong words like
dight, nearly lost in the eighteenth century but revived in the
nineteenth ; elfish; hue, archaic about 1600, afterwards reintro-
duced as a poetic synonym for colour; to jeopard; to smoulder ;
sooth
fast, brought back by Sir Walter Scott.
Some words naturally fell out of use with the objects they
denoted, as crowd (fiddle), spontoon (half-pike). But, in many
cases, the exact reason for disuse is obscure. It may be to avoid
ambiguity or to obtain greater vividness, the feeling that a word
is played out or merely the longing for novelty. The following
## p. 451 (#481) ############################################
Xv]
Words Altered in Meaning
451
are examples of words obsolete in the standard language since
Shakespeare's time : accite, bisson, brickle, cypress (gauze), end
(gather in harvest), gent (graceful), grin (a snare), hent, makesport,
neeze, nesh, pink (small), rear (half-cooked), terrestrious, uneath.
Other words may be regarded as archaic, employed to impart an
antique flavour to speech or writing, as an (if), anon, astonied,
bewray, certes, coil (uproar), ear (to plough), eld, feat (adroit), fere,
glister, gobbet, lazar, leasing (falsehood), leman, murrey, nim,
peradventure, sennight, sooth, targe, thole, thrall, throughly, vails
(perquisites), yare.
When we meet an obsolete word, its strangeness puts us on our
guard : not so a word which, while still in common use, has under-
gone a change of meaning. Its familiar appearance lulls the mind
into accepting it at its most familiar value, while, in reality, its
meaning is quite different. Shakespeare's 'Security is mortals’
‘
chiefest enemy,' the Biblical injunction to the receivers of the
talents Occupy till I come,' the petition in the Prayer Book
that they may truly and indifferently minister justice, must
frequently be misunderstood. Some thinking is required to dis-
cover the precise meaning of Swift's whole pack of dismals
coming to you with their black equipage,' while Goldsmith’s ‘loud
laugh that spoke the vacant mind' is often so quoted as to betray
misapprehension of what he meant by vacant.
In some of the numerous words which have altered in meaning
during the last three centuries the change is slight, in others it is
very great, in all the result is a real addition to the capacity of
the language. When a name is required for a new mechanical in-
vention, for a new idea, for a disturbance in the body politic, instead
of coining a word, we may employ an old word with a new sense.
The application of mule in spinning, of train in railways, of
negative in photography, exemplifies how inventions divert words
into new channels. Sometimes, as in the case of train, the
new channel comes to be one of the most important. Nine-
teenth-century politics gave new meanings to conservative,
unionist, liberal, radical, as seventeenth-century troubles did
to puritan, roundhead, cavalier, covenanter. The new use may
originate in the desire for a fresh and vivid designation, which
at first may be dubbed slang, as guinea-pig (a paid director), go
baldheaded (to stake all and disregard consequences), blackbird
(negro), garret (head). The fact that presently now means 'by and
by' testifies to the universality of procrastination. Conceited no
longer signifies full of imagination, full of judgment, but suggests
29_2
## p. 452 (#482) ############################################
452 Changes in the Language [ch.
>
thinking too highly of oneself, since one's estimate of oneself
inclines to be too high. Censure acquired its notion of fault-finding
because we are apt to be harsh in judging others. Words may
change for the better, or for the worse ; may be widened in sense
or narrowed. Politician, nowadays, does not necessarily connote
scheming, nor does emulation, as formerly, convey the bad meaning
of envy, malicious rivalry. Clever, in the eighteenth century, was,
according to Dr Johnson, 'a low word scarcely ever used but in
burlesque or conversation; and applied to anything a man likes,
without any settled meaning. ' On the other hand, officious has
dropped its former good sense of obliging; disgust has taken
the notion of loathing; and blooming, because employed as a
euphemism, now bears the sinister meaning it was intended to
gloss over. Romantic writers elevated the meaning of bard and
minstrel, narrowing, also, the latter, which is no longer applied to
buffoons and jugglers. Science has been severely restricted in
its most common use, while, except in dialect or as an archaism,
meat has ceased to mean food in general. Figurative usage is
frequently the starting point of a permanent change in sense.
Copper may designate something made of the material, as a coin
or a vessel; and then, when another material is substituted, the
previous name may remain. We now apply copper to coins of
bronze and vessels of iron, just as we call one article a shoehorn
though made of silver, and another a fire-iron though made of
brass. Association of ideas plays a great part in transferring
names. An example of this is the application of bluestocking to
Barebone's parliament in the seventeenth century, and to a group
of learned ladies in the eighteenth? An invention, a production,
a practice, may take its name from the originator, from the
place of origin, or from some place or person connected with it.
This, in recent times, has added an extremely varied number of
words to English; as to boycott, to burke, to shanghai, pinchbeck,
mackintosh, gamp, glengarry, chesterfield, jersey, cardigan, joseph,
ulster, wellingtons, snider, shrapnel, gatling, negus, sandwich,
glenlivet, cheddar, gage (in greengage), mocha, strathspey, hansom,
brougham, limerick, guy, mohock. Others of this type belong, in
part, to the section on derivation, since they have been prepared
for use by the addition of formal endings; as boswellise, bowd-
lerise, grangerise, macadamise, daltonism, grundyism, malaprop-
ism, spoonerism, pickwickian, fabian, procustean, peeler. When
we employ burke to mean stifle a rumour or an enquiry, we really
1 See, ante, vol. XI, pp. 344—5.
1
.
## p. 453 (#483) ############################################
15
xv]
Word-making
453
make one word do the work of several, i. e. 'to stifle a rumour as
Burke stifled his victims. ' One recent example of this shortening
is wireless, to indicate Marconi's system of telegraphy. At the end
of the eighteenth century, telegraphy was applied to transmitting
messages by moving arms attached to posts. When electricity was
employed, the term was electric telegraphy; but, as this method
predominated, it monopolised the word telegraphy, and electric
was dropped. Marconi's system received the name wireless
telegraphy, and then the adjective alone came to designate the
whole.
The two chief methods of word-making-composition and deriva-
tion-are extensively employed in modern English. Composition
is very prominent in Old English, especially in poetry. Later
English gave up certain of the old methods of compounding. This
surrender has frequently been exaggerated, and the assertion has
more than once been made that English is, in consequence, weakened
as a language. But, since English achieves by other means the
primary end and aim of language—communication between man
and man-why should it be termed enfeebled? Instead of com-
pounding, English often prefers to make a noun do the work of an
adjective or a verb, or it borrows from other tongues. And who
shall say that English has done wrong in choosing loans like disciple
and impenetrable rather than coinages like learning-knight and
undrivethroughsome? English seems to feel that a word need
not always consciously define or describe what it stands for. It is
sufficient if the word designates. But modern English has kept
a rich store of compounds and possesses the power to coin more.
True, our poetry no longer teems with the formations found in
Beowulf. But the practice of compounding is proved from such
examples as Milton's vermeil-tinctured, many-twinkling; Gray's
feather-cinctured, incense-breathing; Keats's subtle-cadenced;
Shelley's passion-winged; Tennyson’s gloomy-gladed; Swinburne's
sun-forgotten; Arnold's ray-crowned; Browning's dew-pearled.
Nor is it only the poets that employ this device. All strata of the
language—from slang to poetic prose—possess compounds. They
crowd our larger dictionaries in battalions, many of quite recent
origin, while they swarm in newspapers and magazines, clamouring
for recognition as valuable additions to the vocabulary. And,
besides using native material, English appropriates foreign words
and stems, which it links together, sometimes in arbitrary fashion,
to produce shapes, often hybrids, 'that would have made Quin-
tilian stare and gasp. ' A few instances of these are aerodrome,
## p. 454 (#484) ############################################
454
Changes in the Language [CH.
autocar, bibliomania, barometer, cyclostyle, hydroplane, joco-
serious, kaleidoscope, megalomania, neo-catholic, neolithic,
ornithorhyncus, pandemonium, panorama, phantasmagoria,
photograph, pictograph, pseudo-Gothic, quasi-war, somnam-
bulist, stereoscope, telephone, zincograph, zoology. Many words
of this type have been coined to supply the needs of inventors
and men of science. English, as a rule, chooses this method
of making a scientific terminology in preference to employing
native terms with their intimate associations. Greek and, in a
.
less degree, Latin are the chief sources ? .
The following compounds, all modern, exemplify various modes
of coining from native materials: king-emperor, hero-worship,
mad-doctor, teacup, bushranger, catspaw, clothesbrush, ballot-box,
backwoodsman, sponge-cake, jackass, tomcat, tomfoolery, spokes-
woman, sportsman, easy-chair, yellowback, dreadnought, holdall,
knownothing, makeweight, skinflint, spoilsport, outvoter, over-
mantel, to outclass, to overdevelop, to caseharden, to copperbottom,
to roughgrind, duty-free, colour-blind, absent-minded? , one-ideaed,
one-legged, one-roomed, round-faced, great-coated, bounty-fed,
jerry-built, sea-borne, sea-washed, self-governing, self-centred,
highflown, cold-drawn, fresh-run, calf-bound, chance-down.
In forming derivatives, many of the Old English prefixes and
suffixes are no longer employed. To compensate for this, unlimited
use is made of foreign prefixes and suffixes.
The native prefixes most frequent in modern formations are
be-, mis-, un- (reversal of action), un- (negative), as in bespangle,
bedevil; misapprehend, misconduct, misspell; unlimber, unpatriotic,
The number of un- words, in both senses, is enormous. The Old
English suffixes -ster, -dom, -en, -ling, -some, are still employed,
though not extensively, to make new words; as tipster, boredom,
freshen, tighten, princeling, adventuresome. On the other hand,
-ed, -er, -ful (for nouns and adjectives), -ing, -ish, -less, -ly (for
adjectives and adverbs), -ness, -ship, -y, are freely and widely
.
1 This appears when we examine the compounds of tele- and tetra-, • Down to the
last years of the 18th century,' says Sir James A. H. Murray, 'the only tele- words
were TELESCOPE and two derivatives; then, in 1794–5 came TELEGRAPH, with
derivatives; but now, with telepathy, telephone, telephotography, and the like, the tele-
words have grown from Dr Johnson's 2 to 130, and fill 16 columns—an example of
how scientific discovery and invention have enlarged the existing vocabulary. The
words in tetra- are even more numerous (250, besides chemical terms innumerable)
and occupy 19 columns. ' Nine tetra- words are found before 1600, twenty-one more
appear between 1600 and 1800, for all the rest the nineteenth century is responsible.
(The Oxford English Dictionary. )
* This type (adjective + noun +-ed) is very prevalent in present-day English.
## p. 455 (#485) ############################################
Xv]
Word-making
455
-
suffixed, as talented, self-coloured, skater, tobogganer, boxful,
artful, cycling, homing, baddish, mulish, fingerless, tideless, yearly,
suavely, aloofness, nothingness, championship, slangy, fidgety.
The foreign prefixes and suffixes come from Latin, Greek and
French. They are not added merely to stems from their own
language, but, without restriction, they combine with stems from
anywhere to make new English words. The following exemplify
(1) the commonest foreign prefixes; (2) the commonest foreign
suffixes—(1) ante-chapel, ante-diluvian, anti-macassar, anti-Dar-
winian, bi-weekly, bi-millionaire, circumambient, cis-Elizabethan,
co-education, counter-attraction, counter-clockurise, decentralise,
disarrange, disbelief, enslave, ex-Prime Minister, ex-official, extra-
mural, international, intertwine, non-intervention, pre-arrange,
post-glacial, postgraduate, pro-tariff-reform, recount! , re-afforest,
semi-detached, submarine, sub-kingdom, super-heat, ultra-radical;
(2) clubbable, traceable, blockade, orangeade, breakage, approval,
prudential, Johnsoniana, nitrate, vaccinate, addressee, auctioneer,
Carlylese, leatherette, Frenchification, beautification, speechify,
Addisonian, Byronic, butterine, jingoism, toadyism, positivist,
Jacobite, pre-Raphaelite, hypnotise, oxidise, streamlet, booklet,
bereavement, oddments.
Of minor modes of word-production active during the last
three centuries, the first to be noticed consists in change of accent.
One word thus becomes two, differing in sound and sense, and, at
times, in spelling; as conjure', con'jure; hu'man, humane'; ur'ban,
urbane'. A second mode is shortening-part of the habit common
in English and frequently assailed by purists. Swift struggled for
years against mob, an abbreviation of mobile vulgus; but in vain.
Mob has proved a valuable addition to the vocabulary. Abbrevia-
tions are not additions unless the shortened form differs, more or
less, in meaning from the original, or, while retaining the meaning,
is applicable under different circumstances. Sometimes it is the
last part of the word that remains, as bus from omnibus, wig from
periwig, cute from acute, van from caravan. More frequently it is
the first part that remains, as cab from cabriolet, cad from cadet,
Miss from Mistress, navvy from navigator, rake from rake-hell,
tar (a sailor), from tarpaulin, tick (credit), from ticket. Port (the
wine), from Oporto, has lost both head and tail. Another mode has
been termed "back-formation. The word burglar, for example,
was regarded as containing the suffix seen in liar; and, by a piece
1 Re- has been employed with special frequency since about 1850. The number of
forms made with it is practically infinite,' says The Oxford English Dictionary.
## p. 456 (#486) ############################################
456
Changes in the Language [CH.
of false logic, it was assumed that, as liar presupposes to lie, so
burglar presupposes to burgle. Similarly to sidle was made from
sideling, taken for a participle. Other modern back-formations are
to char (burn), from charcoal; to frivol from frivolous ; to process
from procession; to roughride from roughrider; to spring clean
from spring cleaning; to stoke from stoker; to subedit from sub-
editor; to sulk from sulky; to swindle from swindler; to tightlace
from tightlacing or tightlaced.
Finally, we may note words which seem to have ‘sprung up'-
instances, in fact, of 'root-creation. For the most part, they are
words originating in onomatopoeia, the principle underlying the
poet's music, in Tennyson :
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees,
as well as more obtrusively in Browning :
Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife.
The term onomatopoeia has been widened to include words which,
while not precisely imitating the sound, yet commend themselves
to the ear as symbolic suggestions to the mind of the sound's effect.
Such words continually arise. To ridicule ‘swell' modes of utter-
ance, la-di-da originated about 1883; pom-pom was a soldier's
invention in 1899, during the South African war; ping-pong
appeared with the game in 1900, ping itself (for the ring of rifle
bullets) being then some fifty years old. A few similar modern
creations are boo, fizz, furry, fribble, fuss, hubble-bubble, hurdy-
gurdy, kittiwake, miaow, miminy-piminy, puf-puff, ratatat,
snigger, sniffling, splutter, splodge.
When a new term is required, rather than coin a word or
burden an old one with a fresh meaning, English often borrows.
The earliest known English contains loans; and, in modern times,
borrowing has been extensively practised—so extensively, indeed,
that, in recent dictionaries, only about one-fifth, or, at most, one-
fourth, of the words can claim to be native. This, of course, is no
test of their use; for, while scientific works, especially on chemistry,
may be written in, perhaps, equal parts, foreign and native, the
percentage of native words in works of literature may rise to 85
or 90, or even more. Taking, however, the vocabulary as it stands
in a dictionary, we are justified in calling it much more composite
than it ever was before. But, whatever be the elements composing
our vocabulary, the mode in which they are employed is purely
English. Foreign words soon cease to be treated as aliens: they
## p. 457 (#487) ############################################
xv] Appropriations from Foreign Tongues 457
are naturalised and become subject 'to all the duties and liabilities
of English words. '
In the seventeenth century, as is shown by writers like Sir
Thomas Browne, there was a continual influx of Latin words,
many of which, however, failed to establish themselves in the
language. French influence, after 1660, checked Latin borrowing.
This age was also a time of sifting of the vocabulary. A large
number of words, chiefly Latin, borrowed since the renascence,
did not survive the end of the seventeenth century, and most of
the survivors are still with us. Borrowing from Latin and French
has gone on to the present day. The war of 1914, like other wars,
seems likely to add to our stock. Communiqué has secured a firm
foothold in our newspapers not only for French official communica-
tions but, also, for British, German and Russian, and even South
African. From French and from other languages of Europe we
have borrowed words of commerce, of seafaring, of science, of art,
of literature, of social life. War, exploration, trading, colonising
and travelling have brought us words from America, Africa, Asia,
Australia and the islands of the sea, while the Celtic tongues at
home have added to the store. It is sometimes difficult to know
the immediate source of a loan. A word may come to us from
French, or it may be taken from Latin though it mimics the French
mode. Words from distant lands may, for example, reach us
through Italian or Spanish, through French or Dutch English
has received from French the Arabic houri, minaret, sofa and
zero; the Turkish odalisque and kiosk; the Russian ukase; the
Mexican jalap and ocelot. From the Dutch came the Malay
cockatoo; from the Portuguese the Persian sepoy and the East
Indian teak; from Spanish the Peruvian puma. Italian handed
on the Persian bazaar; an Indian vernacular gave us the Persian
shawl. Gaelic words like cairn, ingle, sporran entered English
from the Scottish dialect. Many classical Greek words have
been transmitted by Latin or have assumed a Latin shape, as
atmosphere, chrysalis, geology, monad, nausea, oasis, octopus,
phase, phenomenon, phonetic, phosphorus, siphon, sporadic,
thesaurus.
During the last three centuries, the sources from which English
has borrowed most freely have been French, Latin, Greek and, to
a less extent, Italian. The loans are of great variety, which, in
a fragmentary way, appears in the following lists. From Latin we
have such words as arena, axis, bacillus, cactus, circus, devastate,
deviate, exert, facsimile, farrago, fortuitous, hallucination,
## p. 458 (#488) ############################################
458
Changes in the Language [CH.
incandescent, incipient, indigenous, indulge, joke, junction, larva,
maximum, minimum, mollusca, nebula, noxious, nucleus, obtrude,
odium, omnivorous, osseous, otiose, par, pendulum, permeate,
preclude, puerile, quadruped, quota, ratio, reluctant, sinecure,
spontaneous, tact, tandem, terrific, ulterior, vertigo, veto, viaduct;
from Greek, autonomy, cacophonous, eczema, euphemism, exegesis,
heterodox, idiomatic, kinetic, kudos, meteorology, monotony, nous,
orthodox, ostracise, panoply, semantic, tonic, zymotic; from
French, avalanche, badinage, bagatelle, barracks, bivouac, bronze,
buccaneer, burlesque, chauffeur, chicane, cockade, cutlet, debouch,
decamp, dragoon, echelon, embarrass, façade, gala, glacier,
hangar, isolation, lampoon, levee, moraine, mystify, naïve, ogre,
oxygen, parachute, parasol, parade, parvenu, picnic, piston,
prude, quadrille, ration, ricochet, roué, rouge (cosmetic), routine,
sash (of window), séance, solidarity, sobriquet, soufflé, souvenir,
tableau, terrorism, trousseau, vaudeville, zouave; from Italian,
balcony, bravura, crescendo, dado, dilettante, extravaganza,
granite, grotto, incognito, influenza, lava, martello, oboe, opera,
pianoforte, quartet, regatta, semolina, sirocco, solo, sonata,
soprano, terracotta, ultramarine. From the other European
tongues, the loans are far fewer though still important. The
following exemplify what we owe to Dutch-commodore, casel,
gas, Hottentot, hustle, kink, maulstick, morass, ogle, roster, skate
(on ice), sketch, sloop, smack (ship), splice, taffrail, tattoo (of drum),
trigger, yacht; to South African Dutch-commandeer, kraal,
laager, spoor, sjambok, trek, veldt; to Spanish—castanet, cigar,
flotilla, garrotte, guerrilla, junto, quadroon, regalia (cigar),
sambo, sierra, siesta; to Portuguese-albatross, cobra, dodo, emu,
jose, palaver, verandah, zebra; to German--feldspar, gneiss,
kriegspiel, lager, mangel-wurzel, poodle, plunder, quartz, swindler,
waltz, zeitgeist, zinc; to Russian-drosky, knout, mammoth,
samovar, steppe; to Hungarian-shako, tokay (wine); to Polish-
mazurka; to Icelandic-geyser; to Swedish-sloyd; to Norwegian
-fiord, ski ; to Welsh—cromlech, eisteddfod ; to Gaelic-clay-
more, ptarmigan, pibroch; to Irish-banshee, Fenian, shillelagh,
Tory; to Breton-menhir.
When we come to Asia, we naturally find that our vocabulary
has borrowed largely from the Indian languages-chintz, coolie,
juggernaut, jungle, jute, khaki, loot, pyjamas, pundit, raj,
shampoo, sikh, sirdar, thug, tomtom, zenana. We have from
Persian-baksheesh, durbar; from Turkish-bosh, effendi, jackal,
kismet, pasha; from Arabic-allah, ameer, emir, fellah, harem,
## p. 459 (#489) ############################################
F
XV] Appropriations from Foreign Tongues 459
salaam, simoom, zareba; from Malay-amuck, compound (en-
closure), guttapercha, trepang, upas; from Japanese-jinricksha;
from Javanese—bantam ; from Chinese_bohea, kotow, pekoe,
souchong, tea. With few exceptions, of which kosher may be one,
words of Hebrew origin in common English use have come through
other tongues.
American languages have given us moccasin, musquash, skunk,
squaw, tapir, toboggan, tomahawk, totem, wigwam ; African-
chimpanzee, gnu, morocco, quagga; Australasian and Polynesian
-atoll, boomerang, dingo, kangaroo, taboo, tattoo (skin-marking).
Many of these loans have interesting associations. The Poly-
nesian tattoo was first made known to Englishmen in the third
quarter of the eighteenth century by captain Cook; the German
plunder reminds us of the devastating Thirty Years' war and of
prince Rupert's marauders in England during the civil war;
words like easel and sketch, smack and yacht recall the painters
and the sailors of Holland, as terracotta and ultramarine, opera
and soprano recall the artists and singers of Italy. Tomahawk
goes back to the early English settlements near the Red Indians;
terrorism, first recorded in English in 1795, is an offspring of the
French ‘Reign of Terror,' 1793—4; and the Spanish guerrilla, in
a despatch of Wellington (1809), is a legacy from the Peninsular
But these few instances must suffice.
The readiness with which English borrows from foreign tongues
or builds words out of foreign materials, explains the existence of
such pairs as mind, mental ; mouth, oral; spring, vernal ; moon,
lunar ; son, filial; man, human; coal, carbonic; milk, lacteal ;
where the noun is native, the adjective foreign. This is sometimes
termed a defect, on the ground that the words, while connected
in sense, are not outwardly linked by form. Custom, however,
obviates any disadvantage the defect may have. Besides, in many
cases, native adjectives exist by the side of the foreign, as manly,
human; fatherly, paternal ; watery, aqueous ; kingly, royal.
Similar pairs of nouns are greatness, magnitude; length, longitude;
height, altitude. By means of the double forms, we express
differences of meaning, or vary the phraseology according to
circumstances. This advantage will naturally have little weight
with those who wish foreign words expelled, whether useful or
not, who, like William Barnes, advocate demsterhood, folkdom,
folkwain, pushwainling, cudchewsome for criticism, democracy,
omnibus, perambulator, ruminating.
Barnes represents the extreme views of the supporters of the
war.
## p. 460 (#490) ############################################
460
Changes in the Language [CH.
>
native element in English against the foreign. This opposition is,
in part, associated with the alternation in style which has been
manifest, most noticeably in the domain of prose, during the last
three centuries—the recurrent movement between the plain,
unadorned style and the rhetorical, ornate style. Each form has
ebbed and flowed : neither, however, has existed absolutely alone.
Each is exposed to its own danger : the plain may degenerate into
the bald or the vulgar, the ornate into the extravagant or the
gaudy.
Among the Elizabethans, Lyly and Sidney had endeavoured to
beautify prose. In the first half of the seventeenth century, we
meet with various devices to enrich literary style, exemplified by
the 'conceits' of Donne, Crashaw and other metaphysical poets,
and, in prose, by the antitheses and tropes of Bacon, the quaintness
of Burton and Fuller, the ornate splendour of Taylor, Milton and
Browne. But the average reader found it difficult to comprehend
their strange-often highly Latinised-vocabulary, their involved
sentences, their far-fetched allusions, their bold figures ; and after
the restoration arose the cry for a plainer, clearer style? A longing
for an academy on the French model was several times expressed.
In 1664, the Royal Society appointed a committee to improve the
English language, but nothing resulted. One of the members of
the committee was John Dryden, who had already (Rival-Ladies,
dedication) lamented
that, speaking so noble a language as we do, we have not a more certain
measure of it as they have in France, where they have an Academy, enacted
for the purpose.
Dryden, however, was destined to take the lead in adapting the
conversational English of the age to be a suitable medium for the
varied aims of prose ; and this simpler style he also introduced into
poetry. His Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) is written in straight-
forward conversational English, and may be regarded, indirectly at
least, as a manifesto of the new prose. A direct manifesto bad
recently appeared in The History of the Royal Society, by Thomas
Sprat. There he condemns 'this vicious abundance of phrase, this
trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great
a noise in the world. He points out that the Royal Society had
vigorously applied the only remedy for this extravagance;
and that has been a constant resolution to reject all amplification, digressions,
and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness
,
when men delivered so many things almost in an equal number of words.
See, ante, vol. vini, chap. XVI.
a
1
## p. 461 (#491) ############################################
Xv]
Influence of The Spectator
461
They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of
speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all
things as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the
language of artisans, countrymen and merchants before that of wits and
scholars.
However plausible the Society's preference might seem, however
admirably the vernacular was handled by Bunyan and Defoe, as
later by Cobbett, however effective was Locke's plain bluntness,
the unmeasured use of the language of the common people nearly
destroyed literary English at the end of the seventeenth century
and the beginning of the eighteenth. The language of the average
man abounds in colloquial elisions and abbreviations, in careless
constructions, in familiar catchwords and slang. These were in-
dulged in by L'Estrange and other writers of periodicals and
controversial pamphlets. Swift, Addison and Steele, on the other
hand, sought to restore the purity of the language. In The Tatler
(no. 230), Swift censures elisions like can't do't for cannot do it,
the pronunciation of absolves instead of absolveth, and shortenings
like phizz, mob, rep. He pillories banter, bamboozle, country put,
kidney, adding ‘I have done my utmost for some years past to stop
the progress of mob and banter, but have been plainly bore down
by numbers. '
Accordingly, he appeals to Isaac Bickerstaff to make use of his
authority as censor, and by an annual Index Expurgatorius expunge all
words and phrases that are offensive to good sense, and condemn those
barbarous mutilations of vowels and syllables.
The Spectator (nos. 135, 147, 165) took up the theme of abbrevia-
tions of syllables and inroads of foreign words. In the first of
these papers, Addison desiderates ‘something like an Academy,
that by the best authorities and rules drawn from the analogy of
languages shall settle all controversies between grammar and
idiom. '
The Spectator continued, for several generations, to be the
general pattern for prose. Johnson reminds us of this when he
says, Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not
coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and
nights to the volumes of Addison. '
Occasionally, however, the model was diverged from; and style
degenerated. Then, dignity was restored to prose, in different
ways, by Johnson, with his Latinised diction, his antitheses, his
balanced structure; by Gibbon, with his periphrases and his rolling
6
## p. 462 (#492) ############################################
462
Changes in the Language [CH. ,
a
periods ; by Burke, with his eloquent copiousness and his glowing
imagery.
With the romantic revival came a vital change. Eighteenth-
century poets, in their efforts to distinguish the language of poetry
from the language of prose, had elaborated a conventional diction.
The romantic poets eagerly sought to supersede this convention by
vivid, appropriate words. To obtain these, they often ransacked
the older treasures of the language. Prose, also, was influenced by
the romantic movement, though more slowly; and, to a certain
extent, was freed from artificiality and formality of diction. In the
early nineteenth century, Southey is an instance of the perfection
attainable in the simple style. Since then, there have been several
movements away from the standard style, some of them towards
elaborate, gorgeous, rhythmical prose. The earliest movement
took various directions in De Quincey, Landor, Macaulay and
Carlyle. About the middle of the century, contemporary with the
word-painting and music of Ruskin's prose and the simple beauty
of Newman's, many writers showed a tendency towards a slipshod
colloquialism. The reaction that followed—the effects of which are
not yet exhausted-is seen in the striving after the refinements of
style associated with the names of Rossetti and Swinburne in verse,
and of Pater and Stevenson in prose.
Several of the suggestions to establish a censorship of English
have been mentioned. But the greatest effort was Swift's Proposal
for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English Tongue
(1712), in a letter to the earl of Oxford, then lord high treasurer.
After repeating and amplifying his views in The Tatler, Swift
asks Oxford to appoint a society with authority to remove defects
in the grammar of English and gross improprieties, however well
sanctioned by usage. Many words should be expelled, many more
should be corrected, perhaps not a few should be restored. But
the kernel of his proposal is
that some method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our
language for ever, after such alterations are made in it as shall be thought
requisite. For I am of opinion, that it is better a language should not be
wholly perfect, than that it should be perpetually changing.
He does not, however, mean that the vocabulary is not to be
increased.
Provided that no word, which a society shall give a sanction to be after-
wards antiquated and exploded, they may have liberty to receive whatever
new ones they shall find occasion for.
This ‘petty treatise,' as Dr Johnson terms it, had some effect, for
a
## p. 463 (#493) ############################################
a
xv]
Summary
463
Oxford nominated several persons, but the death of queen Anne
stopped the scheme.
One of Johnson's aims in compiling his Dictionary was to fix
the English language; but, in the preface, he confessed he had been
too sanguine.
