Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/418

Rh 398 ENGLISH LANGUAGE certaynly, our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne. For we englysshemen ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mono, whiche is neuer stedfaste, but euer wauerynge, wex- ynge one season, and waneth and dycreaseth another season, And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so much that in my days hap pened that certayn marchauntes were in a shipe in tamyse, for to haue sayled ouer the sea into zelande, and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for mete, and specy- ally he axyd after eggys, And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges ; and she vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren ; then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel. Loo ! what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren 1 certaynly, it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes, euery man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre wyll vtter his comynycacyon and maters in sucho maners &amp;lt;fe termes that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym. And som honest and grete clerkes hauo ben wyth me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene playn, rude, and curyous, I stande abasshed ; but in my Juclgemente, the comyn termes that be dayli vsed ben lyghter to be vnderstonde than the olde and auncyent englysshe.&quot; In the productions of Caxton s press, we see the passage from Middle to Modern English completed. The earlier of these have still an occasional verbal plural in -n, especially in the word they ben; the southern her and hem of Middle English vary with the northern and Modern English their, them. In the late works, the older forms have been practi cally ousted, and the year 1485, which witnessed the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, may be conveniently put as that which closed the Middle English transition, and introduced Modern English. Both in the completion of this result, and in its comparative permanence, the printing press had an important share. By its exclusive patronage of the midland speech, it raised it still higher above the sister dialects, and secured its abiding victory. As books were multiplied and found their way into every corner of the land, and the art of reading became a more common acquirement, the man of Northumberland or of Somerset shire had forced upon his attention the book-English in which alone these were printed. This became in turn the model for his own writings, and by and by, if he made any pretensions to education, of his own speech. The written form of the language also tended to uniformity. In previ ous periods the scribe made his own spelling with a primary aim at expressing his own speech, according to the particu lar values attached by himself or his contemporaries to the letters and combinations of the alphabet, though liable to disturbance in the most common words and combinations by his ocular recollections of the spelling of others. But after the introduction of printing, this ocular recognition of words became ever more and more an aim ; the book addressed the mind directly through the eye, instead of circuitously through eye and ear ; and thus there was a continuous tendency for written words and parts of words to be reduced to a single form, and that the most usual, or through some accident the best known, but not necessarily that which would have been chosen had the ear been called in as umpire. Modern English spelling, with its rigid uniformity as to individual results and whimsical caprice as to principles, is the creation of the printing-office, the victory which, after a century and a half of struggle, mechanical convenience won over natural habits. Besides eventually creating a uniformity in writing, the introduction of printing made or at least ratified some important changes. The British and Old English form of the Roman alphabet has already been referred to. This at the Norman Conquest was superseded by an alphabet with the French forms and values of the letters. Thus k took the place of the older c before e and i ; qu replaced cw ; the Norman iv took the place of the wen (p), &c. But there were certain sounds in English for which Norman writing had no provision ; and for these, in writing English, the native characters were retained. Thus the Old English g (5), beside the sound in go, had a guttural sound as in German tag, Irish m&gh, and in certain positions a palatalized form of this approaching y as in you (if pronounced with aspiration Ayou or ghyo). These sounds continued to be written with the native form of the letter as bur], pur, while the French form was used for the sounds in go, age, one original letter being thus split into two. So for the sounds of th, especially the sound in ^at, the Old English thorn (J&amp;gt;) continued to be used. But as these characters were not used for French and Latin, their use even in English became disturbed towards the 15th century, and when printing was intro duced, the founts, cast for Continental languages, had no characters for them, so that they disappeared entirely, being replaced, 3 by gh, yh, y, and ]&amp;gt; by th. This was a real loss to the English alphabet. In the north it is curious that the printers tried to express the forms rather than the powers of these letters, and consequently 5 was represented by z, the black letter form of which was confounded with it, while the ]&amp;gt; was expressed by y, which its MS. form had come to approach or in some cases simulate. So in early Scotch books we find zellow, ze, yat, yem, = yellow, ye, that, them. MODERN ENGLISH thus dates from Caxton. The language had at length reached the all but inflexionless state which it now presents. A single older verbal form, the southern -eth of the third person singular, continued to be the literary prose form throughout the 16th century, but the northern form in -s was intermixed with it in poetry (where it saved a syllable), and must ere long, as we see from Shakespeare, have taken its place in familiar speech. The fuller an, none, mine, thine., in the early part of the 16th cen tury at least, were- -used in positions where their contracted forms a, no, my, thy are now found. But with such minute exceptions, the accidence of the IGth century was the accidence of the 19th. While, however, the older inflexions had disappeared, there was as yet no general agreement as to the mode of their replacement. Hence the 16th century shows a syntactic licence and freedom which distinguishes it strikingly from that of later times. The language seems to be in a plastic, unformed state, and its writers, as it were, experiment with it, bending it to constructions which now seem indefensible. Old distinctions of case and mood have disappeared from noun and verb, without fashion having yet decided what pre positions or auxiliary verbs shall most fittingly convey their meaning. The laxity of word-order which was per mitted in older states of the language by the formal expression of relations was often continued though the inflexions which expressed the relations had disappeared. Partial analogy was followed in allowing forms to be identified in one case, because, in another, such identifica tion was accidentally produced, as for instance the past participles of write and take were made wrote and took, because the contracted participles of bind and break were bound and broke. Finally, because, in dropping inflexions, the former distinctions even between parts of speech had disappeared, so that iron, e.g., was at once noun, adjective.