English Past and Present

Sometimes you will find in English what I may call the double adoption of a Latin word; which now makes part of our vocabulary in two shapes; 'doppelgängers' the Germans would call such words[21]. There is first the elder word, which the French has given us; but which, before it gave, it had fashioned and moulded, cutting it short, it may be, by a syllable or more, for the French devours letters and syllables; and there is the later word which we borrowed immediately from the Latin. I will mention a few examples; 'secure' and 'sure', both from 'securus', but one directly, the other through the French; 'fidelity' and 'fealty', both from 'fidelitas', but one directly, the other at second-hand; 'species' and 'spice', both from 'species', spices being properly only kinds of aromatic drugs; 'blaspheme' and 'blame', both from 'blasphemare'[22], but 'blame' immediately from 'blâmer'. Add to these 'granary' and 'garner'; 'captain' (capitaneus) and 'chieftain'; 'tradition' and 'treason'; 'abyss' and 'abysm'; 'regal' and 'royal'; 'legal' and 'loyal'; 'cadence' and 'chance'; 'balsam' and 'balm'; 'hospital' and 'hotel'; 'digit' and 'doit'[23]; 'pagan' and 'paynim'; 'captive' and 'caitiff'; 'persecute' and 'pursue'; 'superficies' and 'surface'; 'faction' and 'fashion'; 'particle' and 'parcel'; 'redemption' and 'ransom'; 'probe' and 'prove'; 'abbreviate' and 'abridge'; 'dormitory' and 'dortoir' or 'dorter' (this last now obsolete, but not uncommon in Jeremy Taylor); 'desiderate' and 'desire'; 'fact' and 'feat'; 'major' and 'mayor'; 'radius' and 'ray'; 'pauper' and 'poor'; 'potion' and 'poison'; 'ration' and 'reason'; 'oration' and 'orison'[24]. I have, in the instancing of these named always the Latin form before the French; but the reverse I suppose in every instance is the order in which the words were adopted by us; we had 'pursue' before 'persecute', 'spice' before 'species', 'royalty' before 'regality', and so with the others[25].

The explanation of this greater change which the earlier form of the word has undergone, is not far to seek. Words which have been introduced into a language at an early period, when as yet writing is rare, and books are few or none, when therefore orthography is unfixed, or being purely phonetic, cannot properly be said to exist at all, such words for a long while live orally on the lips of men, before they are set down in writing; and out of this fact it is that we shall for the most part find them reshaped and remoulded by the people who have adopted them, entirely assimilated to their language in form and termination, so as in a little while to be almost or quite indistinguishable from natives. On the other hand a most effectual check to this process, a process sometimes barbarizing and defacing, however it may be the only one which will make the newly brought in entirely homogeneous with the old and already existing, is imposed by the existence of a much written language and a full formed literature. The foreign word, being once adopted into these, can no longer undergo a thorough transformation. For the most part the utmost which use and familiarity can do with it now, is to cause the gradual dropping of the foreign termination. Yet this too is not unimportant; it often goes far to making a home for a word, and hindering it from wearing the appearance of a foreigner and stranger[26].

But to return from this digression-I said just now that you would learn very much from observing and calculating the proportions in which the words of one descent and those of another occur in any passage which you analyse. Thus examine the Lord's Prayer. It consists of exactly seventy words. You will find that only the following six claim the rights of Latin citizenship-'trespasses', 'trespass', 'temptation', 'deliver', 'power', 'glory'. Nor would it be very difficult to substitute for any one of these a Saxon word. Thus for 'trespasses' might be substituted 'sins'; for 'deliver' 'free'; for 'power' 'might'; for 'glory' 'brightness'; which would only leave 'temptation', about which there could be the slightest difficulty, and 'trials', though we now ascribe to the word a somewhat different sense, would in fact exactly correspond to it. This is but a small percentage, six words in seventy, or less than ten in the hundred; and we often light upon a still smaller proportion. Thus take the first three verses of the 23rd Psalm:-"The Lord is my Shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing; He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort; He shall convert my soul, and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness for his Name's sake". Here are forty-five words, and only the three in italics are Latin; and for every one of these too it would be easy to substitute a word of Saxon origin; little more, that is, than the proportion of seven in the hundred; while, still stronger than this, in five verses out of Genesis, containing one hundred and thirty words, there are only five not Saxon, less, that is, than four in the hundred.

Shall we therefore conclude that these are the proportions in which the Anglo-Saxon and Latin elements of the language stand to one another? If they are so, then my former proposal to express their relations by sixty and thirty was greatly at fault; and seventy and twenty, or even eighty and ten, would fall short of adequately representing the real predominance of the Saxon over the Latin element of the language. But it is not so; the Anglo-Saxon words by no means outnumber the Latin in the degree which the analysis of those passages would seem to imply. It is not that there are so many more Anglo-Saxon words, but that the words which there are, being words of more primary necessity, do therefore so much more frequently recur. The proportions which the analysis of the dictionary that is, of the language at rest, would furnish, are very different from these which I have just instanced, and which the analysis of sentences, or of the language in motion, gives. Thus if we examine the total vocabulary of the English Bible, not more than sixty per cent. of the words are native; such are the results which the Concordance gives; but in the actual translation the native words are from ninety in some passages to ninety-six in others per cent[27].

The notice of this fact will lead us to some very important conclusions as to the character of the words which the Saxon and the Latin severally furnish; and principally to this:-that while the English language is thus compact in the main of these two elements, we must not for all this regard these two as making, one and the other, exactly the same kind of contributions to it. On the contrary their contributions are of very different character. The Anglo-Saxon is not so much, as I have just called it, one element of the English language, as the foundation of it, the basis. All its joints, its whole articulation, its sinews and its ligaments, the great body of articles, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, numerals, auxiliary verbs, all smaller words which serve to knit together and bind the larger into sentences, these, not to speak of the grammatical structure of the language, are exclusively Saxon. The Latin may contribute its tale of bricks, yea, of goodly and polished hewn stones, to the spiritual building; but the mortar, with all that holds and binds the different parts of it together, and constitutes them into a house, is Saxon throughout. I remember Selden in his Table Talk using another comparison; but to the same effect: "If you look upon the language spoken in the Saxon time, and the language spoken now, you will find the difference to be just as if a man had a cloak which he wore plain in Queen Elizabeth's days, and since, here has put in a piece of red, and there a piece of blue, and here a piece of green, and there a piece of orange-tawny. We borrow words from the French, Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man pleases".

I believe this to be the law which holds good in respect of all composite languages. However composite they may be, yet they are only so in regard of their words. There may be a medley in respect of these, some coming from one quarter, some from another; but there is never a mixture of grammatical forms and inflections. One or other language entirely predominates here, and everything has to conform and subordinate itself to the laws of this ruling and ascendant language. The Anglo-Saxon is the ruling language in our present English. Thus while it has thought good to drop its genders, even so the French substantives which come among us, must also leave theirs behind them; as in like manner the French verbs must renounce their own conjugations, and adapt themselves to ours[28]. I believe that a remarkable parallel to this might be found in the language of Persia, since the conquest of that country by the Arabs. The ancient Persian religion fell with the government, but the language remained totally unaffected by the revolution, in its grammatical structure and character. Arabic vocables, the only exotic words in Persian, are found in numbers varying with the object and quality, style and taste of the writers, but pages of pure...