Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/125

* ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 103 ENGLISH LANGUAGE. breaking up of the grammar. During the Middle English period all the important changes took place that resulted in transforming English from a highly inflected into a practically uninfected language. It should be remembered, however, that the tendency of English to substitute an analytical for a synthetical structure; thai is, to indicate syntactical relations bj the use of par- ticles and by the position of words in the sen- tence, is not peculiar to our language. Among the Scandinavian languages, Danish and Swedish belong now to about I he same stage as English, and Dutch is no less distinctly analytical. Ger- man, on the other hand, is still a highly inflected language. Beginning with the noun in English we find that, as early as 1200, the three or four cases in the singular had been reduced to two in the majority of nouns, and that in the plural the com- mon form in es had been adopted. During the latter part of the period almost all nouns were de- clined in practically their present manner. The apostrophe in the genitive singular was intro- duced to indicate the original e of the ending, and it was later extended to the plural. The sim- plification of the declension of the noun was effected by two principles — one. phonetic, the weakening of all the vowels of the endings to e and the dropping of final n, which reduced all vowel endings to the one form; the other logical, the principle of analogy, by which the various declensions of Anglo-Saxon were reduced to the most prominent one, the strong masculine end- ing in the plural in as, later weakened to es. i Inly one original weak plural, oxen, has sur- vived in Modern English, Line and brethren being later formations. Several representatives of the so-called mutation class, or nouns showing a modification of the root vowel in the plural, as man, men, are still found, and there are also a few nouns having the same form in the plural as in the singular, as deer, survivals of Anglo- Saxon neuters. Along with the leveling of in- flections there has been a change from the gram- matical to the natural gender. This was a neces- sary result of the his- of distinctive inflectional endings. In the adjective there has been a com- plete loss of inflections, since comparison belongs not to inflection, but to composition. In this respect English has gone further than Danish, in which a distinctive form has been retained for the definite and the plural. The definite form of the adjective is still used by Chaucer. In the de- clension of the pronoun the dual number has been lost, and the dative and accusative have been reduced to a common form, derived in most in- stances from the dative. One entirely new form, its, has been developed in the seventeenth century, the original genitive being his, which is the only form used in the King James translation of the Bible. The relatives who, which, that, were in- troduced in the Middle English period, and the plural of the demonstrative then was substituted for the original plural hi <>f the third personal pronoun. In the conjugation of the verb the principal change has been in the loss of about two-thirds of the strong class, most of them pass- ing over to the weak conjugation. With a very few exceptions nil verbs borrowed from foreign languages during the Middle and Modern periods are weak. This tendency is the result of analogy. The conjugation has also been greatly simplified by the loss of endincrs and the use of a common form for the singular and plural of strong verbs. it 'a ill be seen i i i in in hi mrvej i ii;ii Modern English, although it has greatlj simplified its inflection, is not ■< whollj analytical language. In the nouns the process has bei n carried further than in the pronouns, since in the former the relation of subject and object is determined wholly by position, while in the latter there is in must cases a distinct form lor each. That there is a tendency, especially in the speech of the uneducated, to disregard this distinction in the pronoun is (dearly shown by such idioms as Who are you talking to?' 'l"i ween you and I.' The sole- cisms, 'you was.' 'they was,' indicate a similar tendency in t he verb. 'fuming now to the foreign element in the vocabulary of Middle and Modern English, we should take care to distinguish between the Xor- miiii French words introduced during the former and the Parisian or standard French words intro- duced during the latter period. As Skeat truly states {Principles of English Etymology, Part II.) : "Hundreds of words of Anglo-French ori- gin, owing to their early int induct ion into the lan- guage, and the thoroughness with which they have been incorporated in it, have quite as strong a claim to our attention, and arc found in prac- tice to be quite as useful in their way as are those of truly native origin." (See Xouman- French.) The presence of French is very notice able in the poetry of Chaucer and Gower; but, there is no ground for the statement that these writers corrupted the language by a large admix- ture of novel French words. We may here notice the question which has often been asked : "Which of the early dialects spoken in England is the origin of the form now used?" We have seen that in the Anglo-Saxon period two were used for literary purposes — a Northern, or Anglian, and a Southern, or Saxon. In the period, however, succeeding the Norman Conquest, and more especially after 1250, we find not two, but three dialects: a Northern, a .Mid- land, and a Southern. During the fourteenth cen- tury circumstances gave prominence to the Mid- land counties, in which arose the great universi- ties, the rich monasteries, and many other reli- gious foundations. One of its subdivisions, the East Midland, was the dialect in which Wiclif, Gower, and, above all, Chaucer wrote. It had then become the speech of the metropolis, and had probably forced its way south of the Thames into Kent and Surrey. All these circumstances, com- bined with the fact that the Midland avoided the extremes of the Northern on the one hand and of the Southern on the other — that it was. in fact. a sort of compromise, gave to the East Midland a commanding position and made it the parent of the Modern English literary language. But while the East Midland came to be regarded as the standard English speech, the other dialects con- tinued to exist and are in use at the present day: ami a nucleus of new dialects, based upon several of the parent dialects, but gradually departing from them, has developed in the United States. (See AMERICANISMS.) Although all Anglo Saxons write practically the same form of English, in their every-day speech they show difference- of pronunciation and of vocabulary that are very marked. In English there is no standard of pro- nunciation such as is given in French by the French Academy. Durins the modern period of English the most decided change in the language has been in con-