Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/280

Rh

Some of Robert's words, that needed explanation in 1360, are as well known to us in 1873 as those where&shy;with his transcriber corrected what seemed obsolete. Words will sometimes fall out of written speech, and crop up again long afterwards. Language is full of these odd tricks. It is mournful to trace the gradual loss of old words. This cannot be better done than by comparing three English versions of the Eleven Pains of Hell: one of these seems to belong to the year 1250, another to 1340, another to 1420. Each successive loss was of course made good by fresh shoals of French words. Steady indeed was the flow of these into English prose and poetry all through the Fourteenth Century, as may