Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/269

 9 th S. II. OCT. 1,'9S.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

261

LONDON, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1898.

CONTENTS. -No. 40.

NOTES : The Antiquity of English, 261 St. Bartholomew, 262- The George worn by Charles I., 263 Sir Balthazar Gerbier, 264" Do it by degrees, as the cat ate the pestle " Alcuin Club Kose Castle Dr. Johnson and Tea-drink- ing Edition, 265 Garden in Bishopsgate Insect Names Epitaph" Seldom comes a better " Eastell's ' Pastyme of People' Two Husbands following a Wife to the

Grave, 266.

QUERIES: "Hullabaloo" "Hean' 'Hue and Cry L. Middlemore "The four square humors" Sir W. Garter "Les Quatre Mendiants " ' More Hints on Eti- quette,' 267 Churches without Fonts Arthur Jones Water'corn-mill Romance Book of the Gospels-Keltic Remains Armorial, 268 Volney's ' Ruins' Authors Wanted, 269.

REPLIES: "The Queen's English," 269 FitzStephen 'Comin' thro' the Rye,' 270 Cromwell's Followers Morris's Coffee-HouseOld Pretender's Marriage Sweat- ing-pits, 271 Judge "Nice fellows " Patches, 273 Sheridan and Dundas, 274 De Liancourt Linwood's Picture Galleries Old English Letters Cecil, 275 Brothers bearing the same Name Wireless Telegraphy- High Commissioner of the Church, 276 Church at Sil- chester, 277 Oldest Parish Register, 278.

NOTES ON BOOKS : Tuer's ' Pagea and Pictures from Forgotten Children's Books ' Colyer-Fergusson's ' Marriage Registers of St. Dunstan's, Stepney,' Vol. I. Lang's Scott's The Abbot ' Lumby's ' Chronicon Henrici Knighton Monachi Leycestrensis.'

Notices to Correspondents.

THE ANTIQUITY OF ENGLISH.

IT is within my experience that none but a very few Englishmen have the remotest conception of the antiquity of the native element of English, comprising, as it does, the most useful and necessary portion of the language.

The usual error is to confuse speech with writing, and to limit the chronology of the spoken word by a consideration of the actual accidental moment when it happened to be written down. Yet there are strange excep- tions. Many people are willing to concede at once that Welsh is merely a modern form of ancient British, and, consequently, that the Celtic languages are far older than the date of the existence of Julius Csesar. Accord- ing to Prof. Khys, the oldest Welsh glosse only go back to the ninth century ; let us say, to about A.D. 800. At this rate, it is at once obvious that, for practical purposes, an old form of Welsh must have been spoken in Britain at least a thousand years before any of it was written down. And this is very much within the mark.

Wh en, again, we compare Welsh with Breton Gaelic, and Irish, and note their divergences, it becomes clear that they must have taken

a long time to diverge ; before which era the ommon Celtic language required a long time tor its grammatical formation. We are thus arried back into remote prehistoric times ; and as a thousand years is quite an insuffi- cient period to produce such developments as must have existed in Caesar's time, we are very much within the mark when we say that some form of Celtic was being spoken omewhere in the time of King Solomon.

We learn from comparative philology that such languages as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic, and the rest, are (as far as relates to unborrowed primitives) practically coeval. The fact that the oldest English MS. (viz., the Epinal Glossary, about A.D. 700) is older than any Celtic gloss does not affect the question in the least, nor need we con- sider the fact that Greek MSS. are older than Sanskrit ones. It is, however, import- ant to learn that a certain Greek inscription can be dated as early as B.C. 474 (Palseo- graphical Society's ' Facsimiles '), and the Homeric poems must have been composed some centuries earlier. A still higher anti- quity is assigned to the 'Rig- Veda.

From all this it follows that Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, and Germanic were already distinct languages in the days of Solomon, and it is further highly probable that, even at that early date, the Celtic and Germanic branches of the Indo - European languages must have been subdivided. We may be sure that a Germanic language essentially the same as English was then being spoken somewhere, though we may not be able to locate the tribe that spoke it. I venture to think that this way of stating the case may seem novel to many, yet the more it is considered the more readily the truth will appear. It must riot be forgotten that Eng- lish sometimes preserves an older form than Greek (as in the case of the word work, where Greek has lost the initial w) or than Sanskrit (as in the case of star, where Sanskrit has lost the initial s). I observe that Kluge refers to the original Indo-Germanic as existing " several millenniums " before our era, and suggests the year B.C. 2000 as the latest date for the Aryan division of dialects.

By way of further illustration, take the words corn and storm. These words were spelt in the year 700 precisely as they are spelt now, having preserved their apparent form (with the loss of the trilled r in Southern England) for 1,200 years to our certain know- ledge. Hence these words must be of extreme antiquity, and it becomes difficult to limit
 * the time of their origin.

WALTER W. SKEAT.