Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/413

Rh ENGLISH LANGUAGE 393 independently of the Norman Conquest. The northern dialect, whose literary career had been cut short in the 8th century by the Danish invasions, reappears in the 10th in the form of glosses to the Latin gospels and the Ritual of Durham, where we find that in the process of inflexion- levelling it has, owing to the confusion which had so long reigned in the north, advanced far beyond the sister dialect of the south, so as to be already almost Transition English, or &quot; Semi-Saxon.&quot; Among the literary remains of the Old English may be mentioned the epic poem of Beownlf, the original nucleus of which has been supposed to date to heathen and even Continental times, though we now possess it only in a later form ; several works of Alfred, two of which, his translation of Orosius, and of Tke Pastoral Care of Sfc Gregory, are contemporary specimens of his language ; the theological works of JElfric (including translations of the Pentateuch and the gospels) and of Wulfstan ; the poetical works of Cynewulf : those ascribed to Csedmon ; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ; and many works both in prose and verse of which the authors are unknown. The earliest specimens, the inscriptions on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses, are in a Runic character ; but the letters used in the manuscripts generally are a British variety of the Roman alphabet which the Anglo-Saxons found in the island, and which was also used by the Welsh and Irish. 1 Several of the letters had iu Britain developed forms, and retained or acquired values, unlike those used on the Continent, in particular b f j n r c (d f g r s t). The letters k q z were not used, q being represented by cw ; u or v was only a vowel, the consonantal power of v being repre sented as in Welsh by f. The Runes called thorn and iven, for which the Roman alphabet had no character, were at first expressed by th, &amp;lt;5 (a contraction for bb or bh), and v or u; but at a later period the characters ]&amp;gt; and p were revived from the old Runic alphabet. Contrary to Continental usage, the letters c and 5 (g) had only their hard or guttural powers, as in the neighbouring Celtic languages ; so that words which, when the Continental Roman alphabet came to be used for Germanic languages, had to be written with k, were in Old English written with c, as cirice = Icirke. The key to the values of the letters, and thus to the pro nunciation of Old English, is also to be found in the Celtic tongues whence the letters were taken. The Old English period is usually considered as terminat ing about the year 1100, that is, with the death of the generation who saw the Norman Conquest. The Conquest established in England a foreign court, a foreign aristocracy, and a foreign hierarchy. 2 The French language, in its Xorman dialset, became the only polite medium of intercourse. The native tongue, despised not only as unknown but as the language of a subject race, was left to the use of boors and serfs, and except in a few stray cases ceased to be written at all. 3 The natural results followed. When the educated generation that saw the arrival of the Norman died out, the language, ceasing to be read and written, lost all its literary words. The words of ordinary life whose preservation is independent of books lived on as vigorously as ever, but the literary terms, those thatrelated to science, art, andhigher culture, the bold artistic compounds, the figurative terms of poetry, were speedily forgotten. The practical vocabulary 1 See on this Rhys, Lectures on Wclxh FhiloUxjy, v. 2 For a discriminating view of the effects of the Norman Conquest on the English Language, see Freeman, Nartnan Conquest, eh. xxv. 1 There is not the least reason to suppose that any attempt was tnade to proscribe or suppress the native tongue, which was indeed usud in some official documents addressed to Englishmen by the Con queror himself. Its social degradation seemed even on the point of conung to au end, when it was confirmed and prolonged for two cen turies more by tlie accession of the Angevin dynasty, under whom everything French received a fresh impetus. shrank to a fraction of its former extent. And when, genera tions later, English began to be used for general literature, the only terms at hand to express ideas above those of every day life wers to be found in the French of the privileged classes, of whom alone art, science, law, and theology had been for generations the inheritance. Hence each successive literary effort of the reviving English tongue shows a larger adoption of French v/ords to supply the place of the forgotten native ones, till by the days of Chaucer they constituted a formidable part of the vocabulary. Nor was it for the time being only that the French words affected the English vocabulary. The Norman French words introduced by the Conquest, as well as the Parisian French words which followed under the early Plantagenets, were, the bulk of them, Latin words which had lived on among the people of Gaul, and, modified in the mouths of succeeding genera tions, had reached forms more or less remote from their originals. In being now adopted as English, they supplied precedents in accordance with which other Latin words without limit might be converted into English ones, when ever required ; and long before the Renaissance of classical learning, though in much greater numbers after that epoch, these precedents were eagerly followed. While the eventual though distant result of the Norman Conquest was thus a large reconstruction of the English vocabulary, the grammar of the language was not directly affected by it. There was no reason why it should, we might almost add, no way by which it could. While the English used their own ivords, they could not forget their own way of using them, the inflexions and constructions by which alone the words expressed ideas, in other words, their grammar ; when one by one French words were intro duced into the sentence they became English by the very act of admission, and were at once subjected to all the duties and liabilities of English words in the same position. This is of course precisely what we do at the present day : telegraph and telegram make participle telegraphing and plural telegrams, and &quot;scrumptious,&quot; adverb &quot; scrumji- tiously&quot; precisely as if they had been in the language for ages. But indirectly the grammar was affected very quickly. In languages in the inflected or synthetic stage the termina tions must be pronounced with marked distinctness, as these contain the correlation of ideas ; it is all-important to hear whether a word is bonus or bonis or bonas or bonos. This implies a measured and careful pronunciation, against which the effort for ease and rapidity of utterance is con tinually struggling, while indolence and carelessness con tinually compromise it. There has been an increasing tendency in English, as in other languages, to give each word one main accent, at or near the beginning, and to suffer the concluding syllables to fall into obscurity. We are familiar with the cockney ivinder, safer, holler, Sarer, Sander, for windo*&amp;lt;, sofa, holla, Sarah, Sunday, the various final vowels sinking into an obscure neutral one convention ally spelt er. Already before the Conquest, forms originally hatu, sello, tunga, appeared as hate, selle, tunge, with the terminations levelled to obscure e, but during the illiterate period of the language after the Conquest, this careless obscuring of terminal vowels became universal, all unaccented vowels in the final syllable (except i) sinking into e. During the 12th century, while this change was going on, we find a great confusion of grammatical forms, the full inflexions of Old English standing side by side in the same sentence with the levelled ones of Middle English. It is to this state of the language that the names Transition and Period of Confusion (Dr Abbott s appellation) point ; its appearance, as that of Anglo-Saxon broken down in its endings, had previously given to it the suggestive if not strictly logical title of Semi-Saxon. By most writers the VIII. 50