Page:On the history and use of the suffixes -ery (-ry), -age, and -ment in English.djvu/15

Rh The position of the French language was very seriously threatened. A chronicle-writer tells us that during the war everybody who could not speak English was exposed to the scorn and contempt of the common people.

A great part of the population must have been bilingual by the turn of the fourteenth century; and this has no doubt contributed to the fusion of the two languages. Several facts, historical and linguistic, go to show that this was completed about the middle of the fourteenth century.

The question of the relation between the Romanic and the Germanic element in English has been the subject of much discussion, and various opinions have been pronounced as to their relative importance. I shall not enter on this question here. Suffice it to say that the philologists of the nineteenth century on the whole strongly urged the Germanic character of English and were anxiously zealous to prove the preponderance of the 'native' element. In course of time this view has been modified, and attempts have been made to do full justice to the French element. quotes several pronouncements to this effect. I shall only repeat what Dr. says in the Preface to NED.: «the Anglo-French words are now no less 'native' and no less important constituents of our vocabulary than the Teutonic words». This means that the fusion of French and English in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries resulted in a harmonised and homogeneous language.

If we keep this fact in mind, some phenomena in English linguistic history which have been characterized as abnormal will admit of a natural explanation, e. g. the great invasion of Latin and Greek words in the sixteenth century.

It is, of course, not due to chance that of all non-Romanic tongues English shows the greatest number of such