Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/275

246 peyne driving out the English pine. At page 325, we light on the old coverde (convaluit); and at page 222, we see the new French form, recovere. But Robert writes ‘to new,’ not ‘to renew.’

In page 30, les tempestes cesserent is translated by tempest secede; we have long confounded the sound of c with that of s. In page 358, we see that our g had been softened in sound, for Robert writes the word mageste (majestas). In this way brig got the sound of bridge.

In page 7, Robert translates the deable, the supposed idol of the Saracens, by maumette and termagaunt: both of these are as yet masculine in gender; Layamon had used them earlier.

In page 77, we see terme eslu, certein, nome, turned into a certeyn day of terme. But this certain was not used as an equivalent for quidam until Chaucer's time.

Our bard finds it needful to give long explanations in English rime of the strange words mattok, sacrilege, and miner (pages 31, 266, 331).

I have kept the greatest changes of all to the last; in page 321 we find a French Participle doing duty for a Preposition,

And in page 180,

This bondage is the first of many words in which a French ending was tacked on to an English root. So barren had our tongue become by the end of this