Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/215

186 if English endings were no longer in request. He holds fast to the Norse of his forefathers when writing words like yole, kirk, til, werre (pejus). For the Latin idem he has both same and yche. We can gather from his poem that England was soon to replace &#x0293;ede (ivit) by went, oþer by second; that she was soon to lose her swithe (valdè), and to substitute for it right and full: very is of rather later growth. Almost every one of the Teutonic changes in idiom, distinguishing the New English from the Old, the speech of Queen Victoria from the speech of Hengist, is to be found in Manning's work. We have had few Teutonic changes since his day, a fact which marks the influence he has had upon our tongue. He it was who sometimes substituted w for u, as down for doun. In his writings we see clearly enough what was marked by Sir Philip Sidney almost three hundred years later: ‘English is void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which I think was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole to learne his mother tongue; but for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the minde, which is the ende of speech, that it hath equally with any other tongue in the world.’ The Elizabethan knight ought to have been well pleased with the clippings and parings of the Edwardian monk.

In the Handlyng Synne are the following Scandina&shy;vian words: