Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/102

Rh act through ‘wicci rede.’ This is the first appear&shy;ance in our island of the common word wicked, a word which Mr. Wedgwood derives from Lapland or Esthonia. There is a change in the meaning of words; thus w’œr of old meant cautus, but it now gets the new sense of sciens; as in the account of the year 1140, ‘he wart it war,’ he became aware of it. By this time many of the Southern corruptions had made their way to Rutland and its neighbourhood: thus o was beginning to replace a; mor and oune are used instead of már and ân. We see here œie, agenes, alsuic, alse, for, onoh, a, just as we saw them in the Homilies; and ahte stands for debuit, following the Southern fashion. What was hwa swa thirty years earlier is now wua sua, not for from our whoso. Eall is dropped alto&shy;gether, in favour of the Anglian all. A form, of old found but seldom, now appears instead of œlc; to this word ever is prefixed, and œric (every) is the result. In this way our fathers afterwards compounded whoever, whatsoever, and other strange forms. Ic makes way for I, the old Anglian ih, found in the Northum&shy;brian Gospels; seo changes into scœ, but we have to wait more than a hundred years for our well-known she; hit becomes it. The Southern ‘heo hefde íbí’ is seen in the Midland as scœ hadde ben. The particle ne of old was always attached to the verb to express negation; but this ne is now replaced by noht, our not; in the account of 1132, we read, was it noht lang. This form was unknown at London for nearly two hundred years afterwards: Peterborough, it is plain, has had more in&shy;fluence upon our speech than London. The Anglian til