Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/182

Rh the Old English. So we may hope that our ire is from an English and not from a Latin source. The word majestas (Vol. I. page 233) is tamed into an ingenious compound, mastehede.

What was in the year 800 a-ðeastrade sind (obscurati sunt) is now seen as er sestrede (Vol. I. page 241). This is a good example of the gradual change in the sounds of letters; thus eaðe became easy. The translator of the Psalter was used to write the French word city; he, therefore, sometimes writes cestrede as well as sestrede. Here we have the soft sound of c coming in; before this time it was always sounded hard, except in a French word. In Vol. I. page 243, we see, ‘when time tane haf I;’ the first instance of taken being cut down to tane — a sure mark of the North.

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About the year 1250, Layamon's poem was turned into the English of the day; many old words of 1200 are dropped, being no longer understood; and some new French words are found. The old henan (hinc), already corrupted into henne, now becomes hennes, our hence; and betwyx becomes bitwixte. In this poem we first find our leg (crus); it comes from the Old Norse leggr, a stem; and slehþe (our sleight) comes from the Icelandic slœgð. Cloke (chlamys) is a Celtic word.

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We owe a great deal to the men who, between 1240 and 1440, drew up the many manuscript collections of English poems that still exist, taken from various sources by each compiler. The writer who copied many lays