these uneducated people are in the main the labouring classes who live in the country: though in the great towns of the North there are plenty of these 'vulgar' words which their speakers have inherited from their fathers who lived in the country, and which they transmit to their children; these however will undoubtedly die out in the town sooner than in rural districts. Now the country folk certainly did not make these words themselves; there is nothing that they are less likely to do. We therefore guess (and history proves) that these words which they use, and the sounds with which they pronounce them, are remnants of the form of English originally spoken in that province, and not merely spoken, but written in books which are of the greatest literary importance: these we may therefore call fairly enough 'provincial,' but not 'vulgar,' except in the sense that they form the 'vulgar tongue' of the 'common' people. The connexion between them and vulgarity is accidental. These provincial dialects were once literary dialects; they doubtless were, and still may be, spoken with as much refinement as our present literary English: and the Northern English, which we call Scotch, is so spoken; no doubt because Scotland has long had a higher average of education than England. On the other hand, literary English may be pronounced with just as much vulgarity as any other dialect; as when we run two syllables into one, or slur the ends of our words.

13. So we must learn to recognise different forms of English even in our own day. It is quite true that the area of each of these forms is diminishing, while that of modern literary English is ever increasing. This has been so ever since printing began ; by which the forms of words of one particular dialect were stereotyped, so to speak, and preserved to a great degree from further change: but it is due still more to wider education : it is, of course, literary English which

is taught at school; and this by degrees drives out the provincial English which is spoken at home; and due perhaps most of all to the railroad which levels all local peculiarities. But the comparatively few forms which still remain in ordinary use are as valuable to the philologist as a rare flower just about to become extinct is to the botanist: they connect the present with the past and enable him to realise the exuberant life which has passed away. Compared with living forms of speech in daily use, the words of old dialects, as recorded in literature only, are like the dried specimens of a botanical museum.

14. It is worth our while to look a little more closely into these varieties of our own language. They will show us in a small compass the operation of all or nearly all those principles of change which regulate the development of all language. The words are for the most part familiar to us; and inferences drawn from familiar facts are more immediately intelligible than if we have to explain the facts themselves. But this very familiarity is a danger against which it is just as well to give a caution. Because an Englishman 'knows' his own language, he may think that he knows the history of any and every word in it, without any previous study of it. He might just as well think that, because he knows the use of opium, he therefore knows, without reading, the whole history of the drug, how and where it was grown, and how it was brought to England. I once read somewhere a burlesque on literary soirées, and therein on fashionable etymology. The question was the meaning of the Greek name of Greece, Hellas. One lady derived it at once from the lovely Helen: another said that the name was a classical ejaculation of sorrow in all ages. A prosaic major who had served in the country said that these derivations were rather fanciful; the name was really 'Hill-as,' because you couldn't go a mile without coming to a hill. The parable may show that we may be just as foolish, and

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in what way; namely, when we etymologise as if each man were a standard to himself, and ignore the laws of philology which painful students have discovered. In any language-our own or that of others-until we know the history of a word, and till we know the variations of sound which distinguish that language from other languages, every explanation we give of the word is a guess, and much more likely to be a wrong guess than a right one.

15. Many old grammatical forms still survive in England, and can be explained from our older literature, or from that of kindred peoples. A few remain in our literary English; in which they naturally look 'exceptions,' and we are tempted in learning grammar to wish that they had gone altogether. Thus we regularly form our plurals by adding es or s, foxes, books, &c.; but then we make 'ox,' ox-en; and this is our only plural in -en in regular use; for eyne (eyes), shoon and hosen are no longer used by writers of books, although they are used in all English dialects and many other forms of the same sort are to be heard everywhere south of the Humber. Thus in Dorsetshire you will hear of cheesen and housen, in Cambridgeshire of housen and shippen (i.e. sheep). In the North you will find (besides the regular -s) such a plural as child-er (Anglo-Saxon cild-r-u'); and you may note that in ordinary English we have added on to the word a second plural suffix (apparently because the form in was so strange that it did not suffice), and say child-r-en; kine is another double plural, for, as we saw before, the simple form was ky; in Cambridgeshire there is a similar form mis-en (pronounced 'meezen') instead of mice. Then how are plurals like mice, feet, men, to be accounted for? In these the plural seems to be formed by change of the vowel. Well, if we knew nothing of the older forms of our language, these different plurals (which are, in all, but few compared with those in s) would seem to

us mere accidents; they would puzzle us, as exceptions from the ordinary rule, and we should perhaps regard them in the end as curious mistakes which had somehow become current, perhaps like the 'vulgar' forms mentioned above.

16. But the explanation is plain when we look at the different forms of our older literature-the southern English which was the 'literary' dialect in the days of Alfred, or the midland English which became supreme before the end of the fourteenth century mainly through the influence of Chaucer, or the northern English form of the first English speech of which we have written record, the writings of Bede and of Cadmon, and of which we have already seen something. These forms, so rare with us now, were regular then. Just as the plural of A.-S. cild (child) was cildru, so the plural of cealf (calf) was cealfru, and the plural of ag (egg) was agru; and if we may for a moment go beyond our own speech, Icelandic plurals mostly contain an r and end in -ar, -ir, or -ur. Then as regards the plural in en, we shall find in Anglo-Saxon that all the nouns of the simplest class formed their plural in -an, later -en : but very soon in southern English the forms in -es began to supersede those in en, and later they were used indiscriminately, but with the s-form always gaining ground. The reason for this is not far to seek : the Norman-French plurals were formed in s, not in n : therefore when English came to be spoken by Normans they naturally formed plurals on their own principle, and as the English themselves used the s-form at least as often as the n, the chance against n being used was at least three to one.

17. Lastly, the plurals formed by change of the vowel of the noun, such as 'foot,' 'feet,' can be partly explained by Anglo-Saxon, and still more by the kindred languages of the Continent, especially the Old Saxon. In Anglo-Saxon the plural is fet, where

the original vowel (fot) has been changed as much as in English. But in Old Saxon the plural is fôti, and in Gothic words of the same form we find the traces of the fuller suffix -is. Now this final syllable explains the change of the vowel in the original syllable. It is a well-known phenomenon in language (of which we shall see more hereafter) that one sound affects another in pronunciation; that, for example, if two consonants meet, which differ in some principle of their formation, and therefore are not easily pronounced together, one generally modifies the other; thus the plural of 'fowl' (fowl + s) is really pronounced 'fowlz,' because / is a soft letter and s a hard one (see Ch. VIII. 16 for the meaning of these terms), and the / changes it into the soft z. Similarly a

consonant can affect a vowel, and one vowel can affect another, though not generally in the same syllable; sometimes a vowel changes that of the following syllable, as when Latin facilis becomes difficilis; more commonly the vowel of the preceding syllable is brought nearer to-not made identical with-that which follows. These plurals are examples of such a change. Thus in 'fôti' we have the two vowels o and i (ee-sound); for o the back of the tongue is raised much higher than for i (see Ch. VIII., 25); e (sounded as in French fête) comes nearer to i in this respect; also the mouth is 'rounded' for o, that is, the lips form a circular hole, the extremities being brought nearer; but the lips are not moved in sounding either e or i; therefore a speaker mindful of the coming i, and wishing half-unconsciously to spare his labour, so modified the preceding syllable that he sounded instead of ô and said 'fêti.' Just so he said 'menni' instead of 'manni' for the plural of 'man.' Then in process of time the termination i, like so many others, was dropped and 'feet,' 'men,' &c., alone were left. Yet, none the less, the lost vowel had been the cause of the change. This we