Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/221

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192
The Sources of Standard English.

particular as to drawing on French or English; thus, lequel is translated literally. The yn as moche is re­markable as a sister form to the Gloucestershire foras­much; many such forms were to crop up in the Four­teenth Century and to remain in use till about the Re­storation. When new phrases come into a language, it is in adverbial forms and in conjunctions that they are mostly found; thus only and rather are in the Thirteenth Century used, not merely as adjectives, but in a new sense. The Handlyng Synne should be compared with another poem due to the same shire, and written five hundred and sixty years later; I mean Mr. Tennyson's Northern Farmer. Some of the old forms are there repeated, especially the a which stands first in the fol­lowing rimes:

He ys wurþy to be shent,
For a[1] doþ aʓens þys comaundment. — Page 84.
Yole, ys yone[2] þy page? — Page 184.
A gode man and a ryʓt stedefaste. — Page 74.
A man yn fiesshe as[3] he dyde se. — Page 391.
Beþ wakyng . . . .
What tyme þat ʓoure lorde wyl kalle. — Page 137.
Crystendom . . . .
>Þurghe þe whych we are savede alle. — Page 294.

  1. The he had become ha and then a; this is one of the new forms
    that we have rejected; Mrs. Quickly used it.
  2. This is the Gothic jains, the Greek keinos. When I was at Hastings in March, 1873, I heard a maid (she had been told to look at a man carefully) reply, ‘What! yon?’ I asked where she came from; the answer was, from Lincolnshire.
  3. This stands for quem; it was an idiom that Robert was unable
    to establish.