Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/420

Rh 400 ENGLISH LANGUAGE the others. The latter are in fact almost all names, the vast majority names of things (nouns), a smaller number names of attributes and actions (adjectives and verbs), and, from their very nature, names of the things, attributes, and actions which come less usually or very rarely under our notice. Thus in an ordinary book, a novel or story, the foreign elements will amount to from 10 to 15 per cent, of the whole ; as the subject becomes more recondite or technical their number will increase ; till in a work on chemistry or abstruse mathematics the proportion may be 40 per cent. But after all, it is not the question whence words may have been taken, but how they are used in a language that settles its character. If new words when adopted conform themselves to the manner and usage of the adopting language, it makes absolutely no difference whether they are transferred from some other language, or invented off at the ground. In either case they are new words to begin with ; in either case also, if they are needed, they will become as thoroughly native, i.e., familiar from childhood to those who use them, as those that possess the longest native pedigree. In this respect English is still strictly the same language it was in the days of Alfred ; and comparing its history with that of other Low German dialects, there is no reason to believe that its grammar or structure would have been different, however different its vocabulary might have been, if the Norman Conquest had never taken place. The preceding sketch has had reference mainly to the inflexional changes which the language has undergone ; distinct from, though intimately connected with these (as where the confusion or loss of inflexions was a consequence of the weakening of final sounds) are the great phonetic changes which have taken place between the 8th and 19th centuries, and which result in making modern English words very different from their Anglo-Saxon originals, even where no element has been lost, as in words like stone, mine, doom, day, child, bridge, shoot, A.-S. stdn, min, dam, dung, did, brycg, sceot. The history of English sounds has been treated at length by Mr A. J. Ellis and Mr Henry Sweet 1 (with whose results those of Dr Weymouth 2 should be compared); and it is only necessary here to indicate the broad facts, which are the following. (1) In an accented closed syllable, original short vowels have remained nearly unchanged; thus the words at, men, bill, God, dust, are pro nounced now nearly as in O. E., though the last two were more like the Scotch o and North English u respectively, and in most words the short a had a broader sound like the provincial a in man. (2) Long accented vowels and diphthongs have undergone a regular laut-verschiebung or shift towards higher and more advanced positions, so that the words ban, hcer, soece or sece, stol (i.e., bahn or bawn, her, sok and saik, stole) are now bone, hair, seek, stool; while the two high vowels u ( = 00) and i (ee) have become diph thongs, as hils, scir, now house, shire, though the old sound of u remains in the north (hoose), and the original i in the pronunciation sheer, approved by Walker, &quot; as in machine, and shire, and magazine.&quot; (3) Short vowels in an open syllable have usually been lengthened, as in nd-ma, co-fa, now name, cove; but to this there are many exceptions. (4) Vowels in terminal unaccented syllables have all sunk into short obscure e, and then, if final, disappeared; so oxa, seo, wudu, became ox-e, se-e, wood-e, and then ox, see, wood; oxan, lufod, now oxen, loved, lov d; writan, writon, later writ-en, writ-e, now write, i.e., ivnt. (5) The back con- 1 See list of works at the end of this article. An important work by Mr Henry Nicol, on the history of &quot;French Sounds in English,&quot; is in course of publication for the Philological Society. 2 On Early English Pronunciation, &c., by R. F. Weymouth, D.Lit., M.A., London, 1874, and paper On Here&quot; and There&quot; w Chaucer, Phil, Soc., 1877. sonants, c, g, sc, in connection with front vowels, have often become palatalized to ch, j, sh, as circe, rycg, fisc, now church, ridge, fish. A final g has passed through a guttural or palatal continuant to w or y, forming a diphthong or new vowel, as in boga, laga, dceg, heg, drig, now bow, lau&amp;gt; t day, hay, dry. W and h have disappeared before r and I, as in write, wlisp ; h final (=gh) has become /, k, w, or nothing, as ruh, hoh, boh, deah, heah, now rough, hough, bough, dough, high ruf, hok, bow, do, hi. R after a vowel has practically disappeared in standard English, or at most become vocalized, or combined with the vowel, as in hear, bar, more, her. These and other changes have taken place gradually, and in accordance with well-known phonetic laws; the details as to time and mode may be studied in the special works already named. It may be mentioned that the total loss of grammatical gender in English, and the almost complete disappearance of cases, are purely phonetic phenomena. Gender was practically (whatever its remote origin) the use of adjectives and pronouns with certain distinctive terminations, in accordance with the Icind of nouns to which they were attached; when these distinc tive terminations were uniformly levelled to final e, or other weak sounds, and thus ceased to distinguish nouns into kinds, the distinction into kinds having no other existence disappeared. Thus when ]icet gode hors, ]&amp;gt;one godan hund, &amp;gt;a godan boc, became, by phonetic weakening, e goode hors, ]&amp;gt;e goode hoivnd, tye goode boke, the words horse, hound, book were no longer different kinds of nouns ; grammatical gender had ceased to exist. The concord of the pronouns is now regulated by rationality and sex, instead of gender, which has no existence in English. The man who lost his life ; the bird which built its nest. Our remarks from the end of the 14th century have been confined to the standard or literary form of English, for of the other dialects from that date (with the exception of the northern English in Scotland, where it became in a social and literary sense a distinct language), we have no history. We know, however, that they continued to exist as local and popular forms of speech, as well from the fact that they exist still as from the statements of writers during the interval. Thus Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie, 1589, says &quot;Our maker [i.e., poet] therfore at these dayes shall not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now not of use with us : neither shall he take the termes of Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noble men or gentle men or of their best clarkes, all is a [= one] matter ; nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet it is not so Courtly nor so currant as our Southerns English is, no more is the far Westerne mans speach : ye shall therefore take the usual speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within Ix myles, and not much above. I say not this but that in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that speake but specially write as good Southerns as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the com mon people of eveiy shire, to whom the gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes do for the most part condescend, but herein we are already ruled by th English Dictionaries and other bookes written by learned men.&quot; Arber s Reprint, p. 157. In comparatively modern times, there has been a revival of interest in these long-neglected forms of English, several of which, following in the wake of the revival of Lowland Scotch last century, have produced a considerable literature in the form of local poems, tales, and &quot; folk-lore.&quot; In these respects Lancashire, Cumberland, Yorkshire, Devon shire, and Dorsetshire, the &quot;far north &quot; and &quot;far west&quot; of Puttenham, where the dialect was felt to be so inde pendent of literary English as not to be branded as a vulgar corruption. of it, stand prominent. More recently the dialects have been investigated philologically, a department in which, as in English philology generally, the name of Richard Garnett takes the lead. The work has been