Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/271

242 also shows us the first germ of our new word because. In page 24, he tells us that the Humber was so called, ‘for þe cas þat Homber. . . þer ynne adreynt was.’ He has also that most curious compound pece-mele. A new idiom is found in the Life of Becket, at page 40: ‘he upe the poynte was to beo icast.’ A still greater change is seen in the Alexander; the French word round, which had not taken root in England much before 1300, was used as a Preposition:

In the Life of Becket this word takes an English prefix, and becomes around. A great change was coming over England about the year 1300, from the Severn to the Wash; the old Teutonic sources of diction had been sadly dried up and could no longer supply all her wants; Germany was to have a happier lot, at least in speech. Nothing can more clearly set forth the inroad of the French than the following sentence, which is made up of words in the every-day use of the lowest among us:

‘Of course I immediately just walked quite round the second of the walls, because perhaps it might have been very weak.’

We should find it hard to change these foreign words in italics for Teutonic equivalents, without laying ourselves open to the charge of obsolete diction. England, too careless of her own wealth, has had to draw upon France even for prepositions and conjunc&shy;tions. After reading such a sentence as the one above, we are less astonished to find words like face, voice, dress, flower, river, uncle, cousin, pass, touch, pray, try, glean,