Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/77

48 would be more to the purpose to inveigh against the great Norse settlement two hundred years before Wil&shy;liam's landing. What happened in Northumbria and Eastern Mercia will always take place when two kindred tribes are thrown together. An intermingling either of Irish with Welsh, or of French with Spaniards, or of Poles with Bohemians, would break up the old inflec&shy;tions and grammar of each nation, if there were no acknowledged standard of national speech whereby the tide of corruptions might be stemmed.

When such an intermingling takes place, the endings of the verb and the substantive are not always caught, and therefore speedily drop out of the mouths of the peasantry. In our own day this process may be seen going on in the United States. Thousands of Germans settle there, mingle with English-speakers, and thus corrupt their native German. They keep their own words indeed, but they clip the heads and tails of these words, as the Dano-Anglians did many hundred years ago.

About the year 970, another work was compiled in Northern English, the Lindisfarne Gospels. I give a specimen of words, taken from these, side by side with the corresponding West Saxon. A great many of the corruptions of the Old English, already found in the Psalter and Rushworth Gospels, are here repeated. Two or three of the forms, given in the second column, are not peculiar to the North.