ENGLISH LANGUAGE and verb, dean, 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 in stead 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. ?>1 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 con structions which are alone admissible in ordinary language. The commencement of the Tudor period was contempo raneous 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 Gree:e and Rome, and the translation of their works into the vernacu lar, 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 groupings 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 them selves 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 equi valents. 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 /bra* of the words procession and progression to show that the one was used in England in the llth, the other not till the 16th century. Moreover, as the formation of new words from Latin has gone on in French as well as in English since the Renaissance, we cannot tell whether such words, e.g , as persuade and persuasion, were borrowed from their French equivalents or formed in England independently. With some words indeed it is impossible to say whether they were formed in England directly from Latin, borrowed from contsmporary late French, or had been in England since the Xorman period ; even photograph, geology, and telephone have the form that they would have had if they had been 1 .1 SJiakspcarian Grammar, by E. A. Abbott, M.A. To this book we are largely indebted for its admirable summary of the characters of Tudor English. living words in the mouths of Greeks, Latins, French, and English from the beginning, instead of formations of the 19th century. 2 While every writer was thus introducing new words according to his idea of their being needed, it naturally happened that a large number were not accepted by contemporaries or posterity ; a portentous 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 voyages of English navigators in the latter part of the 16th century also introduced a considerable number of Spanish words, and American words in Spanish forms, of which potato, tobacco, cargo, armadillo, alligator, galleon may serve as examples. The date of 1611, which coincides with the end of Shakespeare s literary work and 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 Restoration. 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, 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, cartoon, concert, regatta, ruffian ; from Portuguese caste, palaver ; from Dutch yacht, skipper, schooner, sloop. Commercial inter course and colonization have extended far beyond Europe, and given us words more or fewer from Hindu, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Malay, Chinese, and from American, Australian, Polynesian, and African languages. 3 More important even than these perhaps are the dialectal 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 ele ments, it is probable that original English words do not now form more than a third or perhaps a fourth of the total entries in a full English dictionary ; and it might 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 all or nearly all the Anglo-Saxon words, and but a small fraction of
- Evangelist, astronomy, dialogue, are words that have so lived, of
which their form is the result. Photograph, &c., take this form as if they had the same history. s See extended lists of the foreign words in English in Dr Morris s
Historical Outlines of English Accidence, p. 33.