Page:The ancient language, and the dialect of Cornwall.djvu/68

 ungrammatical, was in use centuries before the modern word ask to signify the same thing; in truth the latter word is corrupted from the Saxon.

In this quotation two of the words in the lady's request, ax for ask and wol for will, have very good authority for their use, and we find them still retained in the Cornish dialect.

Words like them, therefore, are not vulgar, they are simply disused by the educated of modern days. As to a dialect being vulgar and ungrammatical, there may be found in Latham's Elements of Comparative Philology some instructive remarks on this very subject. He says '^ of that particular form of his mother tongue which any individual uses, the speaker is thoroughly, and in every sense, the master. He uses it as an instrument of his own. He uses it as he uses his arms and legs : to a great extent unconsciously, but almost always instinctively. He cannot err in this, so long as he is at one and the same time, unconscious, spontaneous, and intelligible. If he thinks about grammar, and, by so doing, modify its spontaneity, it is pro tanto, a language influenced aliunde.

"As long as he speaks it simply from his instincts it is in good grammar; being simply what he makes it. What is called bad grammar is a detail in which he differs from some one else who calls his form of speech good grammar.