Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/338

Rh Armada's wreck, and that saw Shakespere act in his own plays, must have lived long enough to read the greatest of all Milton's works.

The boyhood of such a child would witness a new corruption in English; the change of the old Neuter Genitive of he from his into its. This last comes not once in our Bible; but Shakespere sometimes has the unlucky new-fangled word. These corruptions com&shy;monly begin with children, and are then passed up to women, and at length to men; in this way many of our Strong verbs have become Weak: in this very year 1873 I see a tendency in writers (who should know better) to change the participles sown and mown into sowed and mowed. Holpen has been replaced by helped, though the true form occurs in one of the oftenest-read parts of the Bible. But some old forms were hard of dying. In that first-rate little book on Ireland, printed by Sir John Davies in 1612, a book that may be called ‘Irish History in a nutshell,’ we find the Old English Genitive Plural of horse in the term mansmeate and horsemeat, two exactions that come under those evil words coigne and livery (page 174). In the same book we find sithence, I think for the last time. Two other Old English forms were now to drop out of men's speech; the old Genitive alre (omnium), used by Shakespere in the compound alderliefest; and the prefix to, our form of the Latin dis and the German zer. We read that a stone ‘all to-brake Abimelech's scull;’ and this Scriptural expression, oddly mangled by the printers, has puzzled many a man, woman, and child for the last two hundred years. The Version of