Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Numerous old forms of comparison were in use, which have not come down to Modern English, as _herre_, _ferre_, _lenger_, _hext_ = higher, farther, longer, highest. In the pronouns, _ich_ lingered alongside of _I_; _ye_ was only nominative, and _you_ objective; the northern _thei_ had dispossessed the southern _hy_, but _her_ and _hem_ (the modern '_em_) stood their ground against _their_ and _them_. The verb is _I lov-e_, _thou lov-est_, _he lov-eth_; but, in the plural, _lov-en_ is interchanged with _lov-e_, as rhyme or euphony requires. So in the plural of the past _we love-den_ or _love-de_. The infinitive also ends in _en_, often _e_, always syllabic. The present participle, in Old English -_ende_, passing through -_inde_, has been confounded with the verbal noun in -_ynge_, -_yng_, as in Modern English. The past participle largely retains the prefix _y_- or _i_-, representing the Old English _ge_-, as in _i-ronne_, _y-don_, Old English _zerunnen_, _zedon_, run, done. Many old verb forms still continued in existence. The adoption of French words, not only those of Norman introduction, but those subsequently introduced under the Angevin kings, to supply obsolete and obsolescent English ones, which had kept pace with the growth of literature since the beginning of the Middle English period, had now reached its climax; later times added many more, but they also dropped some that were in regular use with Chaucer and his contemporaries.

Chaucer's great contemporary, William Langland, in his _Vision of William concerning Piers the Ploughman_, and his imitator the author of _Pierce the Ploughman's Crede_ (about 1400) used the Old English alliterative versification for the last time in the south. Rhyme had made its appearance in the language shortly after the Conquest--if not already known before; and in the south and midlands it became decidedly more popular than alliteration; the latter retained its hold much longer in the north, where it was written even after 1500: many of the northern romances are either simply alliterative, or have both alliteration and rhyme. To these characteristics of northern and southern verse respectively Chaucer alludes in the prologue of the "Persone," who, when called upon for his tale said:--

"But trusteth wel; I am a sotherne man,
I cannot geste _rom_, _ram_, _ruf_, by my letter.
And, God wote, rime hold I but litel better:
And therefore, if you list, I wol not glose,
I wol you tell a litel tale in prose."

The changes from Old to Middle English may be summed up thus: Loss of a large part of the native vocabulary, and adoption of French words to fill their place; not infrequent adoption of French words as synonyms of existing native ones; modernization of the English words preserved, by vowel change in a definite direction from back to front, and from open to close, _[=a,]_ becoming _[=o,]_, original _e_, _o_ tending to _ee_, _oo_, monophthongization of the old diphthongs _eo_, _ea_, and development of new diphthongs in connexion with _g_, _h_, and _w_; adoption of French orthographic symbols, e.g. _ou_ for _u_, _qu_, _v_, _ch_, and gradual loss of the symbols [j], th, dh, Th; obscuration of vowels after the accent, and especially of final _a_, _o_, _u_ to _e_; consequent confusion and loss of old inflections, and their replacement by prepositions, auxiliary verbs and rules of position; abandonment of alliteration for rhyme; and great development of dialects, in consequence of there being no standard or recognized type of English.

But the recognition came at length. Already in 1258 was issued the celebrated English proclamation of Henry III., or rather of Simon de Montfort in his name, which, as the only public recognition of the native tongue between William the Conqueror and Edward III., has sometimes been spoken of as the first specimen of English. It runs:--

"Henr_i_ thur[gh] godes fultume king on Engleneloande Lhoauerd on
Yrloand_e_. Duk on Norm_andie_ on Aquitaine and eorl on Aniow. Send
igretinge to alle hise holde ilaerde and ileawede on
Huntendoneschir_e_. thaet witen [gh]e wel alle thaet _we_ willen and
vnne_n_ thaet thaet vre raedesmen alle other the moare dael of heom
thaet beoth ichosen thur[gh] us and thur[gh] thaet loandes folk on vre
kuneriche. habbeth idon and schullen don in the worthnesse of gode and
on vre treowthe. for the freme of the loande. thur[gh] the besi[gh]te
of than to-foren-iseide redesmen. beo stedefaest and ilestinde in alle
thinge a buten aende. And we hoaten alle vre treowe in the treowthe
thaet heo vs o[gh]en. thaet heo stedefaestliche healden and swerien to
healden and to werien tho isetnesses thaet ben imakede and beon to
makien thur[gh] than to-foren iseide raedesmen. other thur[gh] the
moare dael of heom alswo alse hit is biforen iseid. And thaet aehc
other helpe thaet for to done bi than ilche othe a[gh]enes alle men.
Ri[gh]t for to done and to foangen. And noan ne nime of loande ne of
e[gh]te. wherthur[gh] this besi[gh]te mu[gh]e beon ilet other iwersed
on onie wise.' And [gh]if oni other onie cumen her on[gh]enes; we
willen and hoaten thaet alle vre treowe heom healden deadliche ifoan.
And for thaet we willen thaet this beo stedefaest and lestinde; we
senden [gh]ew this writ open iseined with vre seel. to halden amanges
[gh]ew ine hord. Witnesse vs seluen aet Lunden_e_. thane E[gh]tetenthe
day. on the Monthe of Octobr_e_ In the Two-and-fowerti[gh]the [gh]eare
of vre cruninge. And this wes idon aetforen vre isworene redesmen....

"And al on tho ilche worden is isend in to aeurihce othre shcire ouer
al thaere kuneriche on Engleneloande. and ek in tel Irelonde."

The dialect of this document is more southern than anything else, with a slight midland admixture. It is much more archaic inflectionally than the _Genesis and Exodus_ or _Ormulum_; but it closely resembles the old Kentish sermons and _Proverbs of Alfred_ in the southern dialect of 1250. It represents no doubt the London speech of the day. London being in a Saxon county, and contiguous to Kent and Surrey, had certainly at first a southern dialect; but its position as the capital, as well as its proximity to the midland district, made its dialect more and more midland. Contemporary London documents show that Chaucer's language, which is distinctly more southern than standard English eventually became, is behind the London dialect of the day in this respect, and is at once more archaic and consequently more southern.

During the next hundred years English gained ground steadily, and by the reign of Edward III. French was so little known in England, even in the families of the great, that about 1350 "John Cornwal, a maystere of gramere, chaungede the lore (= teaching) in gramere scole _and_ construccion of [i.e. _from_] Freynsch into Englysch";[23] and in 1362-1363 English by statute took the place of French in the pleadings in courts of law. Every reason conspired that this "English" should be the midland dialect. It was the intermediate dialect, intelligible, as Trevisa has told us, to both extremes, even when these failed to be intelligible to each other; in its south-eastern form, it was the language of London, where the supreme law courts were, the centre of political and commercial life; it was the language in which the Wycliffite versions had given the Holy Scriptures to the people; the language in which Chaucer had raised English poetry to a height of excellence admired and imitated by contemporaries and followers. And accordingly after the end of the 14th century, all Englishmen who thought they had anything to say to their countrymen generally said it in the midland speech. Trevisa's own work was almost the last literary effort of the southern dialect; henceforth it was but a rustic patois, which the dramatist might use to give local colouring to his creations, as Shakespeare uses it to complete Edgar's peasant disguise in _Lear_, or which 19th century research might disinter to illustrate obscure chapters in the history of language. And though the northern English proved a little more stubborn, it disappeared also from literature in England; but in Scotland, which had now become politically and socially estranged from England, it continued its course as the national language of the country, attaining in the 15th and 16th centuries a distinct development and high literary culture, for the details of which readers are referred to the article on SCOTTISH LANGUAGE.

The 15th century of English history, with its bloody French war abroad and Wars of the Roses at home, was a barren period in literature, and a transition one in language, witnessing the decay and disappearance of the final _e_, and most of the syllabic inflections of Middle English. Already by 1420, in Chaucer's disciple Hoccleve, final _e_ was quite uncertain; in Lydgate it was practically gone. In 1450 the writings of Pecock against the Wycliffites show the verbal inflections in _-en_ in a state of obsolescence; he has still the southern pronouns _her_ and _hem_ for the northern _their_, _them_:--

"And here-a[gh]ens holi scripture wole that men schulden lacke the
coueryng which wommen schulden haue, & thei schulden so lacke bi that
the heeris of her heedis schulden be schorne, & schulde not growe in
lengthe doun as wommanys heer schulde growe....

"Also here-withal into the open si[gh]t of ymagis in open chirchis,
alle peple, men & wommen & children mowe come whanne euere thei wolen
in ech tyme of the day, but so mowe thei not come in-to the vce of
bokis to be delyuered to hem neither to be red bifore hem; & therfore,
as for to soone & ofte come into remembraunce of a long mater bi ech
oon persoon, and also as forto make that the mo persoones come into
remembraunce of a mater, ymagis & picturis serven in a specialer maner
than bokis doon, thou[gh] in an other maner ful substanciali bokis
seruen better into remembrauncing of tho same materis than ymagis &
picturis doon; & therfore, thou[gh] writing is seruen weel into
remembrauncing upon the bifore seid thingis, [gh]it not at the ful:
Forwhi the bokis han not the avail of remembrauncing now seid whiche
ymagis han."[24]

The change of the language during the second period of Transition, as well as the extent of dialectal differences, is quaintly expressed a generation later by Caxton, who in the prologue to one of the last of his works, his translation of Virgil's _Eneydos_ (1490), speaks of the difficulty he had in pleasing all readers:--

"I doubted that it sholde not please some gentylmen, whiche late
blamed me, sayeng, y^t in my translacyons I had ouer curyous termes,
whiche coud not be vnderstande of comyn peple, and desired me to vse
olde and homely termes in my translacyons. And fayn wolde I satysfy
euery man; and so to doo, toke an olde boke and redde therein; and
certaynly the englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wele
vnderstande it. And also my lorde abbot of Westmynster ded do shewe to
me late certayn euydences wryton in olde englysshe for to reduce it in
to our englysshe now vsid. And certaynly it was wreton in suche wyse
that it was more lyke to dutche than englysshe; I coude not reduce ne
brynge it to be vnderstonden. And certaynly, our langage now vsed
varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne.
For we englysshemen ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone, whiche
is neuer stedfaste, but euer wauerynge, wexynge one season, and waneth
and dycreaseth another season. And that comyn englysshe that is spoken
in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so much that in my days
happened that certayn marchauntes were in a ship_e_ in tamyse, for to
haue sayled ouer the sea into zelande, and for lacke of wynde thei
taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one
of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for
mete, and specyally he axyd after eggys, And the goode wyf answerde,
that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he
also coulde speke no frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges; and she
vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde
haue eyren; then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel. Loo!
what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? certaynly,
it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of
langage. For in these dayes, euery man that is in ony reputacyon in
his countre wyll vtter his comynycacyon and maters in suche maners &
termes that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym. And som honest and grete
clerkes haue ben wyth me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous
termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene playn, rude and curyous, I
stande abasshed; but in my Iudgemente, the comyn termes that be dayli
vsed ben lyghter to be vnderstonde than the olde and auncyent
englysshe."

In the productions of Caxton's press we see the passage from Middle to Early Modern English completed. The earlier of these have still an occasional verbal plural in _-n_, especially in the word _they ben_; the southern _her_ and _hem_ of Middle English vary with the northern and Modern English _their_, _them_. In the late works, the older forms have been practically ousted, and the year 1485, which witnessed the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, may be conveniently put as that which closed the Middle English transition, and introduced Modern English. Both in the completion of this result, and in its comparative permanence, the printing press had an important share. By its exclusive patronage of the midland speech, it raised it still higher above the sister dialects, and secured its abiding victory. As books were multiplied and found their way into every corner of the land, and the art of reading became a more common acquirement, the man of Northumberland or of Somersetshire had forced upon his attention the book-English in which alone these were printed. This became in turn the model for his own writings, and by-and-by, if he made any pretensions to education, of his own speech. The written _form_ of the language also tended to uniformity. In previous periods the scribe made his own spelling with a primary aim at expressing his own speech, according to the particular values attached by himself or his contemporaries to the letters and combinations of the alphabet, though liable to disturbance in the most common words and combinations by his ocular recollections of the spelling of others. But after the introduction of printing, this ocular recognition of words became ever more and more an aim; the book addressed the mind directly through the eye, instead of circuitously through eye and ear; and thus there was a continuous tendency for written words and parts of words to be reduced to a single form, and that the most usual, or through some accident the best known, but not necessarily that which would have been chosen had the _ear_ been called in as umpire. Modern English spelling, with its rigid uniformity as to individual results and whimsical caprice as to principles, is the creation of the printing-office, the victory which, after a century and a half of struggle, mechanical convenience won over natural habits. Besides eventually creating a uniformity in writing, the introduction of printing made or at least ratified some important changes. The British and Old English form of the Roman alphabet has already been referred to. This at the Norman Conquest was superseded by an alphabet with the French forms and values of the letters. Thus _k_ took the place of the older _c_ before _e_ and _i_; _qu_ replaced _cw_; the Norman _w_ took the place of the _wen_ (Th), &c.; and hence it has often been said that Middle English stands nearer to Old English in pronunciation, but to Modern English in spelling. But there were certain sounds in English for which Norman writing had no provision; and for these, in writing English, the native characters were retained. Thus the Old English g ([g]), beside the sound in _go_, had a guttural sound as in German ta_g_, Irish ma_gh_, and in certain positions a palatalized form of this approaching _y_ as in _y_ou (if pronounced with aspiration _hy_ou or _gh_you). These sounds continued to be written with the native form of the letter as _bur[gh]_, _[gh]our_, while the French form was used for the sounds in _go_, _age_,--one original letter being thus represented by two. So for the sounds of _th_, especially the sound in _th_at, the Old English _thorn_ (th) continued to be used. But as these characters were not used for French and Latin, their use even in English became disturbed towards the 15th century, and when printing was introduced, the founts, cast for continental languages, had no characters for them, so that they were dropped entirely, being replaced, [gh] by _gh_, _yh_, _y_, and _th_ by _th_. This was a real loss to the English alphabet. In the north it is curious that the printers tried to express the _forms_ rather than the powers of these letters, and consequently [gh] was represented by _z_, the black letter form of which was confounded with it, while the th was expressed by _y_, which its MS. form had come to approach or in some cases simulate. So in early Scotch books we find _zellow_, _ze_, _yat_, _yem_ = _yellow_, _ye_, _that_, _them_; and in Modern Scottish, such names as _Menzies_, _Dalziel_, _Cockenzie_, and the word _gaberlunzie_, in which the _z_ stands for _y_.

MODERN ENGLISH thus dates from Caxton. The language had at length reached the all but flectionless state which it now presents. A single older verbal form, the southern _-eth_ of the third person singular, continued to be the literary prose form throughout the 16th century, but the northern form in _-s_ was intermixed with it in poetry (where it saved a syllable), and must ere long, as we see from Shakespeare, have taken its place in familiar speech. The fuller _an_, _none_, _mine_, _thine_, in the early part of the 16th century at least, were used in positions where their shortened forms _a_, _no_, _my_, _thy_ are now found (_none other_, _mine own_ = _no other_, _my own_). But with such minute exceptions, the accidence of the 16th century was the accidence of the 19th. While, however, the older inflections had disappeared, there was as yet no general agreement as to the mode of their replacement. Hence the 16th century shows a syntactic licence and freedom which distinguishes it strikingly from that of later times. The language seems to be in a plastic, unformed state, and its writers, as it were, experiment with it, bending it to constructions which now seem indefensible. Old distinctions of case and mood have disappeared from noun and verb, without custom having yet decided what prepositions or auxiliary verbs shall most fittingly convey their meaning. The laxity of word-order which was permitted in older states of the language by the _formal_ expression of relations was often continued though the inflections which expressed the relations had disappeared. Partial analogy was followed in allowing forms to be identified in one case, because, in another, such identification was accidentally produced, as for instance the past participles of _write_ and _take_ were often made _wrote_ and _took_, because the contracted participles of _bind_ and _break_ were _bound_ and _broke_. Finally, because, in dropping inflections, the former distinctions even between parts of speech had disappeared, so that _iron_, e.g., was at once noun, adjective and verb, _clean_, adjective, verb and adverb, it appeared as if any word whatever might be used in any grammatical relation, where it conveyed the idea of the speaker. Thus, as has been pointed out by Dr Abbott, "you can _happy_ your friend, _malice_ or _foot_ your enemy, or _fall_ an axe on his neck. You can speak and act _easy_, _free_, _excellent_, you can talk of _fair_ instead of beauty (fairness), and a _pale_ instead of a _paleness_. A _he_ is used for a man, and a lady is described by a gentleman as 'the fairest _she_ he has yet beheld.' An adverb can be used as a verb, as 'they _askance_ their eyes'; as a noun, 'the _backward_ and abyss of time'; or as an adjective, a '_seldom_ pleasure.'"[25] For, as he also says, "clearness was preferred to grammatical correctness, and brevity both to correctness and clearness. Hence it was common to place words in the order in which they came uppermost in the mind without much regard to syntax, and the result was a forcible and perfectly unambiguous but ungrammatical sentence, such as

The prince that feeds great natures they will slay him.

_Ben Jonson._

or, as instances of brevity,

Be guilty of my death since of my crime.

_Shakespeare._

It cost more to get than to lose in a day.

_Ben Jonson._"

These characteristics, together with the presence of words now obsolete or archaic, and the use of existing words in senses different from our own, as general for specific, literal for metaphorical, and vice versa, which are so apparent to every reader of the 16th-century literature, make it useful to separate _Early Modern_ or _Tudor_ English from the subsequent and still existing stage, since the consensus of usage has declared in favour of individual senses and constructions which are alone admissible in ordinary language.

The beginning of the Tudor period was contemporaneous with the Renaissance in art and literature, and the dawn of modern discoveries in geography and science. The revival of the study of the classical writers of Greece and Rome, and the translation of their works into the vernacular, led to the introduction of an immense number of new words derived from these languages, either to express new ideas and objects or to indicate new distinctions in or grouping of old ideas. Often also it seemed as if scholars were so pervaded with the form as well as the spirit of the old, that it came more natural to them to express themselves in words borrowed from the old than in their native tongue, and thus words of Latin origin were introduced even when English already possessed perfectly good equivalents. As has already been stated, the French words of Norman and Angevin introduction, being principally Latin words in an altered form, when used as English supplied models whereby other Latin words could be converted into English ones, and it is after these models that the Latin words introduced during and since the 16th century have been fashioned. There is nothing in the _form_ of the words _procession_ and _progression_ to show that the one was used in England in the 11th, the other not till the 16th century. Moreover, as the formation of new words from Latin had gone on in French as well as in English since the Renaissance, we often cannot tell whether such words, e.g. as _persuade_ and _persuasion_, were borrowed from their French equivalents or formed from Latin in England independently. With some words indeed it is impossible to say whether they were formed in England directly from Latin, borrowed from contemporary late French, or had been in England since the Norman period, even _photograph_, _geology_ and _telephone_ have the form that they would have had if they had been living words in the mouths of Greeks, Latins, French and English from the beginning, instead of formations of the 19th century.[26] While every writer was thus introducing new words according to his notion of their being needed, it naturally happened that a large number were not accepted by contemporaries or posterity; a long list might be formed of these mintages of the 16th and 17th centuries, which either never became current coin, or circulated only as it were for a moment. The revived study of Latin and Greek also led to modifications in the spelling of some words which had entered Middle English in the French form. So Middle English _doute_, _dette_, were changed to _doubt_, _debt_, to show a more immediate connexion with Latin _dubitum_, _debitum_; the actual derivation from the French being ignored. Similarly, words containing a Latin and French _t_, which might be traced back to an original Greek [theta], were remodelled upon the Greek, e.g. _theme_, _throne_, for Middle English _teme_, _trone_, and, by false association with Greek, _anthem_, Old English _antefne_, Latin _antiphona_; _Anthony_, Latin _Antonius_; _Thames_, Latin _Tamesis_, apparently after _Thomas_.

The voyages of English navigators in the latter part of the 16th century introduced a considerable number of Spanish words, and American words in Spanish forms, of which _negro_, _potato_, _tobacco_, _cargo_, _armadillo_, _alligator_, _galleon_ may serve as examples.

The date of 1611, which nearly coincides with the end of Shakespeare's literary work, and marks the appearance of the Authorized Version of the Bible (a compilation from the various 16th-century versions), may be taken as marking the close of Tudor English. The language was thenceforth Modern in structure, style and expression, although the spelling did not settle down to present usage till about the revolution of 1688. The latter date also marks the disappearance from literature of a large number of words, chiefly of such as were derived from Latin during the 16th and 17th centuries. Of these nearly all that survived 1688 are still in use; but a long list might be made out of those that appear for the last time before that date. This sifting of the literary vocabulary and gradual fixing of the literary spelling, which went on between 1611, when the language became modern in structure, and 1689, when it became modern also in form, suggests for this period the name of Seventeenth-Century Transition. The distinctive features of Modern English have already been anticipated by way of contrast with preceding stages of the language. It is only necessary to refer to the fact that the vocabulary is now much more composite than at any previous period. The immense development of the physical sciences has called for a corresponding extension of terminology which has been supplied from Latin and especially Greek; and although these terms are in the first instance _technical_, yet, with the spread of education and general diffusion of the rudiments and appliances of science, the boundary line between _technical_ and _general_, indefinite at the best, tends more and more to melt away--this in addition to the fact that words still technical become general in figurative or metonymic senses. _Ache_, _diamond_, _stomach_, _comet_, _organ_, _tone_, _ball_, _carte_, are none the less familiar because once technical words. Commercial, social, artistic or literary contact has also led to the adoption of numerous words from modern European languages, especially French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch (these two at a less recent period): thus from French _soiree_, _seance_, _depot_, _debris_, _programme_, _prestige_; from Italian _bust_, _canto_, _folio_, _cartoon_, _concert_, _regatta_, _ruffian_; from Portuguese _caste_, _palaver_; from Dutch _yacht_, _skipper_, _schooner_, _sloop_. Commercial intercourse and colonization have extended far beyond Europe, and given us words more or fewer from Hindostani, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Malay, Chinese, and from American, Australian, Polynesian and African languages.[27] More important even than these, perhaps, are the dialect words that from time to time obtain literary recognition, restoring to us obsolete Old English forms, and not seldom words of Celtic or Danish origin, which have been preserved in local dialects, and thus at length find their way into the standard language.

As to the actual proportion of the various elements of the language, it is probable that original English words do not now form more than a fourth or perhaps a fifth of the total entries in a full English dictionary; and it may seem strange, therefore, that we still identify the language with that of the 9th century, and class it as a member of the _Low German_ division. But this explains itself, when we consider that of the total words in a dictionary only a small portion are used by any one individual in speaking or even in writing; that this portion includes the great majority of the Anglo-Saxon words, and but a minority of the others. The latter are in fact almost all _names_--the vast majority names of _things_ (nouns), a smaller number names of _attributes_ and _actions_ (adjectives and verbs), and, from their very nature, names of the things, attributes and actions which come less usually or, it may be, very rarely under our notice. Thus in an ordinary book, a novel or story, the foreign elements will amount to from 10 to 15% of the whole; as the subject becomes more recondite or technical their number will increase; till in a work on chemistry or abstruse mathematics the proportion may be 40%. But after all, it is not the question whence words _may_ have been taken, but _how they are used_ in a language that settles its character. If new words when adopted conform themselves to the manner and usage of the adopting language, it makes absolutely no difference whether they are taken over from some other language, or invented off at the ground. In either case they are _new_ words to begin with; in either case also, if they are needed, they will become as thoroughly native, i.e. familiar from childhood to those who use them, as those that possess the longest native pedigree. In this respect English is still the same language it was in the days of Alfred; and, comparing its history with that of other Low German tongues, there is no reason to believe that its grammar or structure would have been very different, however different its vocabulary might have been, if the Norman Conquest had never taken place.

A general broad view of the sources of the English vocabulary and of the dates at which the various foreign elements flowed into the language, as well as of the great change produced in it by the Norman Conquest, and consequent influx of French and Latin elements, is given in the accompanying chart. The transverse lines represent centuries, and it will be seen how limited a period after all is occupied by modern English, how long the language had been in the country before the Norman Conquest, and how much of this is prehistoric and without any literary remains. Judging by what has happened during the historic period, great changes may and indeed _must_ have taken place between the first arrival of the Saxons and the days of King Alfred, when literature practically begins. The chart also illustrates the continuity of the main stock of the vocabulary, the body of primary "words of common life," which, notwithstanding numerous losses and more numerous additions, has preserved its corporate identity through all the periods. But the "poetic and rhetorical," as well as the "scientific" terms of Old English have died out, and a new vocabulary of "abstract and general terms" has arisen from French, Latin and Greek, while a still newer "technical, commercial and scientific" vocabulary is composed of words not only from these, but from every civilized and many uncivilized languages.

The preceding sketch has had reference mainly to the grammatical changes which the language has undergone; distinct from, though intimately connected with these (as where the confusion or loss of inflections was a consequence of the weakening of final sounds) are the great phonetic changes which have taken place between the 8th and 19th centuries, and which result in making modern English words very different from their Anglo-Saxon originals, even where no element has been lost, as in words like _stone_, _mine_, _doom_, _day_, _nail_, _child_, _bridge_, _shoot_, Anglo-Saxon _stan_, _min_, _dom_, _daeg_, _naegel_, _cild_, _brycg_, _sceot_. The history of English sounds (see PHONETICS) has been treated at length by Dr A.J. Ellis and Dr Henry Sweet; and it is only necessary here to indicate the broad facts, which are the following, (1) In an accented closed syllable, original short vowels have remained nearly unchanged; thus the words _at_, _men_, _bill_, _God_, _dust_ are pronounced now nearly as in Old English, though the last two were more like the Scotch _o_ and North English _u_ respectively, and in most words the short _a_ had a broader sound like the provincial _a_ in _man_. (2) Long accented vowels and diphthongs have undergone a regular sound shift towards closer and more advanced positions, so that the words _ban_, _haer_, _soece_ or _sece_, _stol_ (_bahn_ or _bawn_, _her_, _sok_ or _saik_, _stole_) are now _bone_, _hair_, _seek_, _stool_; while the two high vowels _u_ (= _oo_) and _i_ (_ee_) have become diphthongs, as _hus_, _scir_, now _house_, _shire_, though the old sound of _u_ remains in the north (_hoose_), and the original _i_ in the pronunciation _sheer_, approved by Walker, "as in mach_i_ne, and sh_i_re, and magaz_i_ne." (3) Short vowels in an open syllable have usually been lengthened, as in _na-ma_, _co-fa_, now _name_, _cove_; but to this there are exceptions, especially in the case of _i_ and _u_. (4) Vowels in terminal unaccented syllables have all sunk into short obscure _e_, and then, if final, disappeared; so _oxa_, _seo_, _wudu_ became _ox-e_, _se-e_, _wud-e_, and then _ox_, _see_, _wood_; _oxan_, _lufod_, now _oxen_, _loved_, _lov'd_; _settan_, _setton_, later _setten_, _sette_, _sett_, now _set_. (5) The back consonants, _c_, _g_, _sc_, in connexion with front vowels, have often become palatalized to _ch_, _j_, _sh_, as _circe_, _rycg_, _fisc_, now _church_, _ridge_, _fish_. A medial or final _g_ has passed through a guttural or palatal continuant to _w_ or _y_, forming a diphthong or new vowel, as in _boga_, _laga_, _daeg_, _heg_, _drig_, now _bow_, _law_, _day_, _hay_, _dry_. _W_ and _h_ have disappeared before _r_ and _l_, as in _write_, _(w)lisp_, _(h)ring_; _h_ final (=_gh_) has become _f_, _k_, _w_ or nothing, but has developed the glides _u_ or _i_ before itself, these combining with the preceding vowel to form a diphthong, or merging with it into a simple vowel-sound, as _ruh_, _hoh_, _boh_, _deah_, _heah_, _hleah_, now _rough_, _hough_, _bough_, _dough_, _high_, _laugh=ruf_, _hok_, _bow_, _do_, _hi_, _laf_. _R_ after a vowel has practically disappeared in standard English, or at most become vocalized, or combined with the vowel, as in _hear_, _bar_, _more_, _her_. These and other changes have taken place gradually, and in accordance with well-known phonetic laws; the details as to time and mode may be studied in special works. It may be mentioned that the total loss of grammatical _gender_ in English, and the almost complete disappearance of _cases_, are purely phonetic phenomena. _Gender_ (whatever its remote origin) was practically the use of adjectives and pronouns with certain distinctive terminations, in accordance with the _genus_, _genre_, _gender_ or _kind_ of nouns to which they were attached; when these distinctive terminations were uniformly levelled to final _e_, or other weak sounds, and thus ceased to distinguish nouns into kinds, the distinctions into genders or kinds having no other existence disappeared. Thus when _thaet gode hors_, _thone godan hund_, _tha godan boc_, became, by phonetic weakening, _the gode hors_, _the gode hownd_, _the gode boke_, and later still the _good horse_, the _good hound_, the _good book_, the words _horse_, _hound_, _book_ were no longer grammatically different kinds of nouns; grammatical gender had ceased to exist. The concord of adjectives has entirely disappeared; the concord of the pronouns is now regulated by _rationality_ and _sex_, instead of grammatical gender, which has no existence in English. The man _who_ lost _his_ life; the bird _which_ built _its_ nest.

Our remarks from the end of the 14th century have been confined to the standard or literary form of English, for of the other dialects from that date (with the exception of the northern English in Scotland, where it became in a social and literary sense a distinct language), we have little history. We know, however, that they continued to exist as local and popular forms of speech, as well from occasional specimens and from the fact that they exist still as from the statements of writers during the interval. Thus Puttenham in his _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589) says:--

"Our maker [i.e. poet] therfore at these dayes shall not follow Piers
Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, not yet Chaucer, for their language
is now not of use with us: neither shall he take the termes of
Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noble
men or gentle men or of their best clarkes, all is a [= one] matter;
nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of Trent, though no man
can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet
it is not so Courtly nor so currant as our _Southerne_ English is, no
more is the far Westerne mans speach: ye shall therefore take the
usual speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying
about London within lx myles, and not much above. I say not this but
that in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that
speake but specially write as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or
Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire, to whom the
gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes do for the most part
condescend, but herein we are already ruled by th' English
Dictionaries and other bookes written by learned men."--_Arber's
Reprint_, p. 157.

In comparatively modern times there has been a revival of interest in these forms of English, several of which following in the wake of the revival of Lowland Scots in the 18th and 19th centuries, have produced a considerable literature in the form of local poems, tales and "folk-lore." In these respects Cumberland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, the "far north" and "far west" of Puttenham, where the dialect was felt to be so independent of literary English as not to be branded as a mere vulgar corruption of it, stand prominent. More recently the dialects have been investigated philologically, a department in which, as in other departments of English philology, the elder Richard Garnett must be named as a pioneer. The work was carried out zealously by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte and Dr A.J. Ellis, and more recently by the English Dialect Society, founded by the Rev. Professor Skeat, for the investigation of this branch of philology. The efforts of this society resulted in the compilation and publication of glossaries or word-books, more or less complete and trustworthy, of most of the local dialects, and in the production of grammars dealing with the phonology and grammatical features of a few of these, among which that of the Windhill dialect in Yorkshire, by Professor Joseph Wright, and that of West Somerset, by the late F.T. Elworthy, deserve special mention. From the whole of the glossaries of the Dialect Society, and from all the earlier dialect works of the 18th and 19th centuries, amplified and illustrated by the contributions of local collaborators in nearly every part of the British Isles, Professor Joseph Wright has constructed his _English Dialect Dictionary_, recording the local words and senses, with indication of their geographical range, their pronunciation, and in most cases with illustrative quotations or phrases. To this he has added an _English Dialect Grammar_, dealing very fully with the phonology of the dialects, showing the various sounds which now represent each Old English sound, and endeavouring to define the area over which each modern form extends; the accidence is treated more summarily, without going minutely into that of each dialect-group, for which special dialect grammars must be consulted. The work has also a very full and valuable index of every word and form treated.

The researches of Prince L.L. Bonaparte and Dr Ellis were directed specially to the classification and mapping of the existing dialects,[28] and the relation of these to the dialects of Old and Middle English. They recognized a _Northern_ dialect lying north of a line drawn from Morecambe Bay to the Humber, which, with the kindred Scottish dialects (already investigated and classed),[29] is the direct descendant of early northern English, and a _South-western_ dialect occupying Somerset, Wilts, Dorset, Gloucester and western Hampshire, which, with the _Devonian_ dialect beyond it, are the descendants of early southern English and the still older West-Saxon of Alfred. This dialect must in the 14th Century have been spoken everywhere south of Thames; but the influence of London caused its extinction in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, so that already in Puttenham it had become "far western." An _East Midland_ dialect, extending from south Lincolnshire to London, occupies the cradle-land of the standard English speech, and still shows least variation from it. Between and around these typical dialects are ten others, representing the old Midland proper, or dialects between it and the others already mentioned. Thus "north of Trent" the _North-western_ dialect of south Lancashire, Cheshire, Derby and Stafford, with that of Shropshire, represents the early West Midland English, of which several specimens remain; while the _North-eastern_ of Nottingham and north Lincolnshire represents the dialect of the _Lay of Havelok_. With the _North Midland_ dialect of south-west Yorkshire, these represent forms of speech which to the modern Londoner, as to Puttenham, are still decidedly northern, though actually intermediate between northern proper and midland, and preserving interesting traces of the midland pronouns and verbal inflections. There is an _Eastern_ dialect in the East Anglian counties; a _Midland_ in Leicester and Warwick shires; a _Western_ in Hereford, Worcester and north Gloucestershire, intermediate between south-western and north-western, and representing the dialect of _Piers Plowman_. Finally, between the east midland and south-western, in the counties of Buckingham, Oxford, Berks, Hants, Surrey and Sussex, there is a dialect which must have once been south-western, but of which the most salient characters have been rubbed off by proximity to London and the East Midland speech. In east Sussex and Kent this _South-eastern_ dialect attains to a more distinctive character. The _Kentish_ form of early Southern English evidently maintained its existence more toughly than that of the counties immediately south of London. It was very distinct in the days of Sir Thomas More; and even, as we see from the dialect attributed to Edgar in _Lear_, was still strongly marked in the days of Shakespeare. In the south-eastern corner of Ireland, in the baronies of Forth and Bargy, in county Wexford, a very archaic form of English, of which specimens have been preserved,[30] was still spoken in the 18th century. In all probability it dated from the first English invasion. In many parts of Ulster forms of Lowland Scotch dating to the settlement under James I. are still spoken; but the English of Ireland generally seems to represent 16th and 17th century English, as in the pronunciation of _tea_, _wheat_ (_tay_, _whait_), largely affected, of course, by the native Celtic. The subsequent work of the English Dialect Society, and the facts set forth in the _English Dialect Dictionary_, confirm in a general way the classification of Bonaparte and Ellis; but they bring out strongly the fact that only in a few cases can the boundary between dialects now be determined by precise lines. For every dialect there is a central region, larger or smaller, in which its characteristics are at a maximum; but towards the edges of the area these become mixed and blended with the features of the contiguous dialects, so that it is often impossible to define the point at which the one dialect ends and the other begins. The fact is that the various features of a dialect, whether its distinctive words, characteristic pronunciations or special grammatical features, though they may have the same centre, have not all the same circumference. Some of them extend to a certain distance round the centre; others to a much greater distance. The only approximately accurate way to map the area of any dialect, whether in England, France, Germany or elsewhere, is to take a well-chosen set of its characteristic features--words, senses, sounds or grammatical peculiarities, and draw a line round the area over which each of these extends; between the innermost and outermost of these there will often be a large border district. If the same process be followed with the contiguous dialects, it will be found that some of the lines of each intersect some of the lines of the other, and that the passing of one dialect into another is not effected by the formation of intermediate or blended forms of any one characteristic, but by the overlapping or intersecting of more or fewer of the features of each. Thus a definite border village or district may use 10 of the 20 features of dialect A and 10 of those of B, while a village on the one side has 12 of those of A with 8 of those of B, and one on the other side has 7 of those of A with 13 of those of B. Hence a dialect boundary line can at best indicate the line within which the dialect has, on the whole, more of the features of A than of B or C; and usually no single line can be drawn as a dialect boundary, but that without it there are some features of the same dialect, and within it some features of the contiguous dialects.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF THE PERIODS AND DIALECTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

CHRONOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE.

Divisions. Subdivisions. Dates
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
OLD ENGLISH
(Full Inflections.) EARLY OLD ENGLISH. 500-850

TYPICAL OLD ENGLISH, 850-1000
or ANGLO-SAXON.

LATE OLD ENGLISH 1000-1150
and OLD ENGLISH
TRANSITION.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MIDDLE ENGLISH.
(Levelled Inflections.)

EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH. 1150-1250

MIDDLE ENGLISH (typical). 1250-1400

LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH
and MIDDLE ENGLISH
TRANSITION. 1400-1485
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MODERN ENGLISH.
(Lost Inflections.)
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
(Tudor English). 1450-1611

TRANSITIONAL MODERN or
17TH CENTURY ENGLISH. 1611-1689

CURRENT ENGLISH. 1689-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

LITERARY DEVELOPMENT OF THE LEADING DIALECTS.

Northern English. Midland English. Southern English.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Anglian. Anglian. Saxon. Kentish.
------- ------- ----- -------
Caedmon, 660. (Charter Glosses), 736-800. (Charter Glosses), 692-780. (Charter Glosses), 679-770.
Beda, 734. Beowulf(?) (Laws of Ine, 700) Charters_, 805-840.
Leiden Riddle_. Mercian. Literary West-Saxon Lorica Prayer.
Cynewulf, c. 750. ------- or Anglo-Saxon. Psalm 50, c. 860.
Old Northumbrian. (Charter Glosses), 805--. Charter, 847.
---------------- Vespasian Ps., c. 825. Alfred, 885.
Durham Glosses, 950-975. Charters, 836-840. Judith, 900-910.
Lindisfarne Gospel Gloss. Lorica Glosses. Poems in O.E. Chron., 937-979.
Rushworth Gloss, St. Battle of Maldon, 993.
Matthew, ? 975-1000. Aelfric, 1000.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Peterborough Chronicle Wulfstan, 1016.
1123-31. O.E. Chron., Parker MS.
ends, 1070.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Early Northern English Early Midland. Early Southern and Middle Kentish.
and Early Scotch. ------------- S.W. English --------------
---------------------- Chronicle, 1154. ------------------ Hatton Gospels, 1170.
Ormulum, 1200. Cotton Homilies, 1160. Kentish Sermons, 1250.
Genesis & Exodus, c. 1250. Layamon, 1203.
Middle English. Ancren Riwle, 1220.
-------------- --------------------------
Cursor Mundi (?). Harrowing of Hell, 1280. Shoreham, 1320.
Hampole, 1350. Robt. of Brunne, 1303-30. Procl. of Henry III., 1258. Ayenbite, 1340.
Barbour, 1375. Pearl, Sir Gawayne. Robt. Gloucester, 1300.
Mandeville (Northern Wycliffe. Trevisa, 1387.
version) Wyntoun, 1420. Chaucer, Gower.
Townley Mysteries. Lydgate.
Henryson, 1470. Caxton, 1477-90.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Middle Sccotch. Tudor English. South-Western Dialect. Kentish Dialect.
-------------- ------------- --------------------- ---------------
Dunbar, 1500--. Tyndal, 1525. Cornishman in A. Boorde, (in Sir. T. More.)
Lyndesay. Homilies, 1547-63. 1547. (Edgar in Lear, 1605.)
Archbp. Hamilton, 1552. Shakspere, 1590-1613. Gammer Gurton, 1575. (in Ben Jonson.)
James VI., 1590. King James's Bible, 1611. Somersetsh. Man's Complaynt, Kentish Wooing Song, 1611
Montgomery, c. 1600. Milton, 1626-71. c. 1645.
Sir W. Mure, 1617-57. Dryden, 1663-1700.
Yorkshire Dialogue, 1673.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Modern Scotch and Current English. Exmoor Scolding, 1746. Nairne, Kentish Tales,
North Eng. Dial. --------------- Barnes, 1844. 1700.
----------------- Addison, 1717. Elworthy, 1875-88. Dick and Sal, 1821.
Allan Ramsay, 1717. Johnson, 1750.
Burns, 1790. Coleridge, 1805.
Scott, 1815. Macaulay, 1825.
Ian Maclaren, Barrie, Tennyson, 1830.
Crockett, etc.

The vertical lines represent the four leading forms of
English--_Northern_, _Midland_, _Southern_, and _Kentish_--and the
names occurring down the course of each are those of writers and works
in that form of English at the given date. The thickness of the line
shows the comparative literary position of this form of speech at the
time: _thick_ indicating a _literary language_; _medium_, a _literary
dialect_; _thin_, a _popular dialect_ or _patois_; a _dotted_ line
shows that this period is _unrepresented_ by specimens. The horizontal
lines divide the periods; these (after the first two) refer mainly to
the Midland English; in inflectional decay the Northern English was at
least a century in advance of the Midland, and the Southern nearly as
much behind it.

Beyond the limits of the British Isles, English is the language of extensive regions, now or formerly colonies. In all these countries the presence of numerous new objects and new conditions of life has led to the supplementing of the vocabulary by the adoption of words from native languages, and special adaptation and extension of the sense of English words. The use of a common literature, however, prevents the overgrowth of these local peculiarities, and also makes them more or less familiar to Englishmen at home. It is only in the older states of the American Union that anything like a local dialect has been produced; and even there many of the so-called Americanisms are quite as much archaic English forms which have been lost or have become dialectal in England as developments of the American soil.

The steps by which English, from being the language of a few thousand invaders along the eastern and southern seaboard of Britain, has been diffused by conquest and colonization over its present area form a subject too large for the limits of this article. It need only be remarked that within the confines of Britain itself the process is not yet complete. Representatives of earlier languages survive in Wales and the Scottish Highlands, though in neither case can the substitution of English be very remote. In Ireland, where English was introduced by conquest much later, Irish is still spoken in patches all over the country; though English is understood, and probably spoken after a fashion, almost everywhere. At opposite extremities of Britain, the Cornish of Cornwall and the Norse dialects of Orkney and Shetland died out very gradually in the course of the 18th century. The Manx, or Celtic of Man, is even now in the last stage of dissolution; and in the Channel Isles the Norman _patois_ of Jersey and Guernsey have largely yielded to English.

The table on p. 599 (a revision of that brought before the Philological Society in Jan. 1876) graphically presents the chronological and dialectal development of English. Various names have been proposed for the different stages; it seems only necessary to add to those in the table the descriptive names of Dr Abbott, who has proposed (_How to Parse_, p. 298) to call the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, the "Synthetical or Inflexional Period"; the Old English Transition (Late Anglo-Saxon of Dr Skeat), the "Period of Confusion"; the Early Middle English, "Analytical Period" (1250-1350); the normal Middle English, "National Period" (1350-1500); the Tudor English, "Period of Licence"; and the Modern English, "Period of Settlement."