what he soffrede so sore! For my synnes y wil wete, Ant alle y wyle hem for-lete nou ant evermore. Mon that is in joie ant blis, ant lith in shame ant synne, He is more then un-wis that ther-of nul nout blynne. Al this world hit geth a-way, Me thynketh hit nezyth domesday, nou man gos to grounde; Jhesu Crist that tholede ded, He may oure soules to hevene led, withinne a lutel stounde. Thah thou have al thi wille, thenk on Godes wondes, For that we ne shulde spille, he tholede harde stoundes; Al for mon he tholede ded, gyf he wyle leve on is red, ant leve his folie, We shule have joie ant blis, More than we conne seien y-wys in Jesu compagnie. Jhesu, that wes milde ant fre, wes with spere y-stonge; He was nailed to the tre, with scourges y-swongen. Al for mon he tholede shame, Withouten gult, withouten blame, bothe day ant other. Mon, ful muchel he lovede the, ant bicome thi brother. NOTE ON INFLECTIONAL AND GRAMMATICAL CHANGES. The origin of changes in inflection can very seldom be traced, because they originate in popular speech, and are not adopted by the written tongue until the mode and occasion of their introduction is forgotten; but in cases where the native has been brought into contact with a foreign language, we can often see how a new tendency might have been created, or an existing one strengthened, towards a revolution in a particular direction. Let us take the case of the old verbal plural in -en. The Anglo-Saxon plural indicative present, as we have already seen, ended in th, so that instead of we love, or we loven, the Saxons said we lufiath, with the same consonantal ending as in the singular, he luf-ath. The past tense of the indicative, as we luf-odon, we loved, and of both tenses of the subjunctive, as we luf-ion, that we may love, we luf-odon, that we might love, always ended in -on. But though the present indicative plural of all regular verbs ended in th, all the semi-auxiliaries, except willan, to will, made the plural in on, and the Anglo-Saxons said we willath, we will, but, at the same time, we scealon, we magon, we cunnon, we moton, for we shall, we may, we can, we must. The Norman-French, like modern French, made the first person plural, in all cases, in ons-the s being probably silent as it now is— and said nous aimons, we love. This termination, though a nasal, bore a considerable resemblance to the Saxon plural in on. There was, then, a common point in which the two languages concurred. The Frenchman could not pronounce the th, and as the two nations had agreed to adopt s, the nearest approximation a Norman could make to the sound of th, as the sign of the third person singular of the verb, it was very natural that they should employ the sign on, which was common to both, as the sign of the plural. The Saxon ending on was not accented, and the vowel was probably somewhat obscurely articulated, like the e, in the modern termination en, in the verb harden and others of that ending. These circumstances tend to explain why we find the plural of the indicative present in the Ormulum with the ending in en instead of th. This soon became the regular form in English, and this was the first step of progress to the modern dialect, in which we have dropped the plural ending altogether, giving it, in all the persons, the same form as the first person singular. Thus we say, I love, and we love, you love, they S love, while early Eng ish writers said: I love, but we loven, you loven, they loven. In modern French, and there is every reason to believe in Old Norman-French also, the three persons of the singular and the third person of the plural of the verb, though the latter has an additional syllable in writing, are pronounced alike, the terminal syllable being silent in speech; for the plural aiment is pronounced aime, just like the singular, aime. Of the six persons, singular and plural, the French pronounce four alike, rejecting the plural ending ent altogether, and this fact probably contributed to facilitate the dropping of the new English plural ending in en, which did not long remain in use. Another new form of expression first exemplified, so far as I know, in the thirteenth century, is the use of the plural pronoun instead of the singular, in addressing a single person. I do not observe this use of the pronoun in contemporaneous French, nor in any of the Northern Gothic languages, but it was already common in Dutch, and it is possible that the English borrowed it from that source. Not many English words or forms are derived from the Dutch, but Chaucer quotes a Flemish proverb, and one of the words occurring in it, quad or qued, bad, evil, is found in the Owl and Nightingale, the Surtees Psalter, as well as in other early English writers. Bidine, too, common in old ballads, occurs in the Surtees Psalter.* These words are not AngloSaxon, and as they were probably taken from the Dutch, other words and forms may have been received from the same language. But though the plural pronoun was thus early applied to single persons, the complete separation of the two, and the confinement of the singular thou to the religious dialect, are very much later. They seem to have 'n employed indiscriminately for several centuries, and in the Morte d'Arthur, printed in 1485, thou and you, thy and your are constantly ccurring in the same sentence, and addressed to one and the same son. * Huydei per, in his Breedere aantekeningen op Melis Stoke, I., 227, examines the etymol y of bideen at considerable length. It is a compound of the particle by ind the demonstrative pronoun: by dien, the primitive meaning being, therevy, thereupon, and hence, immediately. LECTURE VI. COMMENCEMENT OF SECOND PERIOD: FROM 1350 TO THE TIME OF THE AUTHOR OF PIERS PLOUGHMAN. We are now to enter on a new philological and literary era, an era in which English genius first acquired a self-conscious individuality, and the English language and its literature disentangled themselves from the confusion in which the conflicting authority of Saxon precedent and French example had involved them. In this second period, the speech of England became, no longer an ill-assorted mixture of discordant ingredients, but an organic combination of well assimilated, though heterogeneous elements, animated by a law of life, and endowed with a vigour of constitution which has given it a luxuriant youth and a healthful manhood, and still promises it a length of days as great, an expansion as wide, as have fallen to the lot of any of the tongues of man. Considering English, then, as primarily and radies" a Gothic speech, invested with a new aspect, and inspired with a new life by Romance influences - just as animals are so modified, in habits, instincts, size and specific characteristics, 1 y changes of nutriment, climate, and other outward circums aces, that the unscientific observer hesitates to recognise then as still belonging to the primitive stock - let us inquire for a moment into the nature of the action by which external forces could produce such important revolutions. There are two principal modes in which foreign conquest and foreign influence affect language. The first and most obvious is, by the introduction of foreign words, idioms, and grammatical forms, which may be carried far without any very appreciable effect upon the radical character of the language, or upon the spirit of the people who use it. The other is the more slowly and obscurely manifested action of new institutions, laws, and opinions upon the intellectual constitution and habits of thought of the people, and, indirectly, upon the logical structure of the language as the vehicle of the expression of the national mind and character. We should suppose, à priori, that the first influence of a cultivated language, employed by a conquering people, upon the less advanced speech of a ruder subject race, would be to denationalize its vocabulary by the introduction of a large number of foreign words, and that syntactical changes would be slower in finding their way into the grammar; but the history of the modern languages known in literature seems to show that this is not universally the case. I have already mentioned the curious inversion of periodic arrangement which the Turkish has produced in the modern Armenian, without much affecting the vocabulary; and I have given reasons for believing that both Moso-Gothic and AngloSaxon were influenced, in certain points of their grammar, by Greek and Latin syntax. The Gothic languages, which seem to have modified the structure of the Romance dialects, have not bestowed upon them any very large proportion of Northern words; and though the syntax of the native speech of England underwent important changes between the Norman Conquest and the close of the period we have just dismissed, yet the number of Romance words which had been naturalized in England was, thus far, by no means considerable. As has been before observed, the whole number of Greek, Latin, and French words found in the printed English authors of the thirteenth century, even including those which Anglo-Saxon had borrowed from the nomenclature of theology and ethics, scarcely exceeds one |