elderly man, whom we call hale for his years ;' though we are familiar with the word in the corrupted form whole, which we have in the Bible, 'I have made a man every whit whole on the Sabbath day;' and the corresponding Greek word, as you may see by Grimm's Law (see Appendix I.), is kalos. (3) Convince has wavered much in sense; we use it now simply for persuading a person, but the primary meaning was to overpower,' which it has here; in the Bible phrase 'Which of you convinceth me of sin?' we have the same special sense of overcoming by testimony, which convincere had in Latin. 6. So again (4) Warder, like 'wassail' is a word with which we are familiar from books, but which we should not ourselves use without the appearance of affectation: we should use the equivalent 'guard.' We have here a couple of words identical in meaning, just as we have wise and guise, warrant and guarantee, wager and gage, and others which explain the riddle, such as war and French guerre, warren and French garenne. It is well known that in all these the w marks the Teutonic word introduced alike into England by the Anglo-Saxons and into France by the Franks, which the earlier inhabitants of France were unable to pronounce without letting a g escape before it; and so they produced the second form beginning with gu. Some of these second forms were brought into England by the Normans, and existed there by the side of the English word brought long before; but as there was no distinction in sense, one form generally fell into disuse, only to be revived for a special purpose, as by Sir Walter Scott to give a mediæval look to his poems. (5) Fume meant smoke or steam. Shakespeare used it metaphorically, just as we might speak of a man's reason being clouded. Such a use of the word may have been familiar at his time, but no such idea would now attach to it; if we use it at all, we do so in the old simple sense, as the fumes of tobacco,' the same sense which the word bore at Rome and in far-away India more than twenty centuries ago; while the Greeks turned it, by a different metaphor, to express the steam of passion, and Plato in his famous analysis distinguished the 'thumoeides,' the spirited part of the soul, from that part which reasons, and from that part which desires. (6) Receipt seems to be used of a place, that place where reason is found, just as we hear of Matthew in the Bible sitting at the receipt of custom.' (7) Limbec has probably died out altogether. It is only the student of the history of the English language who can guess that the word is equivalent to alembic, which meant a still or retort, and so is used here by Shakespeare merely in the sense of an empty vessel, that into which anything may be poured. The word is Arabic; it was brought into England with chemical study like alchemy itself, algebra, and many others. Then by degrees people fancied that the a at the beginning of the word was our article, though really the first syllable al is the Arabic article: and thus lembic or limbic was left. The article has often been a thief in England. It has two forms an and a, and meant one, as you may see in the old Scotch form, 'ane high and michty lord.' The shortened form a was naturally used before a consonant, but when the word began with n, people did not always see where to divide rightly. Thus a nadder turned into an adder, a napron has become an apron, &c.; on the other hand the eft (ewt) seems to have robbed the article in its turn and become a newt. 7. Thus we have examined one passage, and have found in its four lines seven words which are either not used now at all or are used in a different sense. Yet, as we said, the passage as a whole sounds simple enough when we read it or hear it on the stage. We must admit then that the English of to day differs much from Shakespeare's English in the meaning of its words. The main reason why the change does not strike us at once is that the verbs and nouns have no more inflections than they have in our every day language. 8. Take another passage, and this time of an author but little older than Shakespeare-Gawin Douglas, who died in 1522, and who, as Sir Walter Scott tells us, was "More pleased that in a barbarous age The lines, which are part of the prologue to the twelfth book of the translation of the Æneid run as follows: "In lissouris and on leys litill lammys Full tayt and tryg socht bletand to thar dammys, All snog and slekit worth thir bestis skynnys." 9. But this is not English at all, you say. Indeed it is, quite as good as Shakespeare's: though its lineal descendant is now no longer called English-Northern English as it really is-but Scotch; which ought to be the name of some Keltic language. It is true that some French words have crept in, because of the close political and social connection between Scotland and France but they can be recognised, though very queer they look. Thus a little farther on we have pastans, which is nothing but passe-temps, our pastime. The very common Scotch, to fash is nothing but fâcher: fashious is fâcheux. In this passage, veilys is French. It is nothing but a calf, the old French veel (vitellus in Latin) modernised into veau. Now let us try, very quickly, what we can make out of the lines. First we see that plural nouns still have, as a rule, an additional syllable: and this is spelt -is, or -ys, not -es, or -s, as it would have been farther south: thus we have lammys, dammys, veilys, bestis, skynnys. But there is another plural form here-ky; this we know is still used in the north as the plural of 'cow' (cu in Old English, and the Northerners still keep the old sound). Then these plurals ky and veilys hint to us that lowys and rynnys must be plural verbs-not singular, as they look: and so they are: this was the regular form for the plural in the north, as eth was in the south, and en in the midlands. Then there is the ensnaring verb worth; which is a form of the A.-S. weorthan, the same in meaning as the German werden. It is present and has no suffix. It is the same word (though how few of us guess it!) as Sir Walter Scott could use in the Lady of the Lake. "Woe worth (i.c. is) the chase, woe worth the day, 10. Then we have the present participle bletand, with the northern termination and; instead of end (midland) and inde (south). Note lastly the Scotch nominative plural thir, quite unlike the southern 'those;' but it has cousins in Iceland. These are all the grammatical points which strike us in these lines: but even the knowledge of these, though it may enable every one to guess the general meaning, will not explain all the words. Lissouris is a doubtful form ; we have leasowes as a name for a pasture in some parts of England: and this points to Anglo-Saxon læsu; but the is strange in our word; it may have been euphonic (see $36). Then what are tayt and tryg? We shall not be able to explain them by the Anglo-Saxon. But if we look at Icelandic we shall find teit-r (where is the sign of the nominative, the same as s in many languages) meaning 'glad;' and it is also a proper name in Iceland, so that we feel little doubt that our name 'Tait' has descended in England from a Norse pirate to the present Archbishop of Canterbury. Tryg also is to be explained from the same source. In Gothic indeed triggws occurs and means 'true' or 'faithful,' but this does not quite suit the sense here; it is the Danish tryg and Icelandic tryggr which have the secondary meaning, 'unconcerned,'' secure,' which explains this use of the word. No one will wonder that Norse words or forms (like thir) should be found on the south-east coast of Scotland. Tydy seems to be our own word, which is an adjective formed from tide 'time' or 'season;' so that the natural meaning is 'seasonable,' here 'in good condition.' II. After this explanation of all the difficulties, I hope that you can translate this old English into the speech of our own day. If you cannot, here it is in flat prose "In pastures and on meadows little lambs Full gladsome and free from care sought bleating to their dams, Kine in good condition low, calves run by them, All smooth and sleek are those beasts' skins." The original is full of poetry, but, if you want to feel that, you must know how to scan it. 12. These passages have shown us three things in our own language; (1) change constantly going on in the meaning of words: (2) the loss of inflexions in which our speech was once as rich as any (3) the fact has dawned that there are different kinds of English speech within our four seas. This last result may seem strange to you. You may say: 'I grant that English has changed with the lapse of time, yet at one and the same time, there is but one English language in England: common people may use vulgar words or may pronounce them in a vulgar way, but there is only one correct kind of English.' But there is a confusion here. By 'vulgar' you mean unrefined,' that which is proper to uneducated people who don't read, and therefore do not speak that particular form of English which is now found in books; you may call it literary English. Now |