Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/98

Rh and does not appear later except in Kent and Essex. The letter o in this work begins to supplant the old a, though not often. This corruption is found in full vigour a hundred years later both in Suffolk and Dorset. Some town lying nearly half-way between the two shires, may have given birth to the new form. We now find mor, long, non, ogen (own), and haligost, for the old már, lang, nán, ágen, and hálig gást. Moreover, as we learn from the Conqueror's English charter to London, the great city was the abode of a large French-speaking population. From these men (Becket's father was one of them), it seems likely that their English fellow-subjects learned to turn the hard c into the soft ch; ceósan and ríce into chiésen and riche. Long before this time, the French castel had become chastel. The changes of the a and the c, most sparingly found as yet, are the two main corruptions that our Standard English has borrowed from the South. Yet the old sounds are apt to linger in proper names; as in Aldgate and Peakirk — a village not far from Rutland. The letter h is now often found wrongly used, or is dropped at the beginning of words. We find the true Southern shibboleth, the Active Participle ending in inde, as birnind instead of the old birnende. Fourscore years later, this was to be still further corrupted. In page 235, we find þes wer isent. This of old would have been wo&#x0302;eron gesended. The old English ân is now pared down into a, and is sometimes also seen as one; so nân þing become na þing. What was bathe at Peterborough is found in the