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learning, much valuable information has been obtained concerning ancient and mediæval peoples and their relations to each other at certain periods when history itself leaves many important questions in doubt. In the study of borrowed words, particularly, is this the case. Words introduced into English from the Old High German and other languages of the Continent are admirably handled by Skeat and his co-laborers, so as to throw much needed light upon even so recent a period as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In order to follow the changes and modifications of root-forms from the parent stem to the present English word, it will be necessary at the outset to have carefully studied Grimm's Law, a condensed summary of which will be found elsewhere. This Law may be justly regarded as the key to modern English etymology, as well as its foundation and vital principle.

The history of the English language most familiar to all persons of fair education is that it was at first Anglo-Saxon; that, after the Norman Conquest, in 1066, many new words were introduced from the French of that time; and that, down to our own day, new words have been constantly added, formed largely from the Latin and Greek. From the earliest Saxon times down to the present, this history has been divided into periods and epochs, each marking the rise, progress and decay of some distinctive variety of literature. We have, for example, the epochs of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, the Restoration, Queen Anne, the Georgian, and, in our own day, the modern epoch of the English language, with a well-defined and somewhat varying development in the United States and in Great Britain.

These epochs have been studied with reference to the development of English literature rather than the English language. This study has given glory and renown to the illustrious masters with whose names the English language shall be forever associated; but it tells us nothing of the birth, parentage and growth of the words which have been the masters' servants-at times their slaves and playthings.

And yet these little words in their root-forms were serving the human race long, long before the Saxon set foot on Britain; and they will continue to delight, and give comfort, and preserve for unborn generations the beautiful, the sublime, the good and the true thoughts and mind-pictures of the masters, long after the large majority of present and past littérateurs have ceased to be named, in literary circles!

These words have a venerable history, back in those early days when man-and lovely woman-first learned they had two tongues, one in each head! When words -these very root-forms unearthed by the learned Skeat and his co-laborers-first came into fashion the race was indeed in its infancy, non-progressive and unenterprising. At that early day, we stand truly at the dawn of a new era. Man begins to speak in words, and his fellow-man understands him. Then comes a separation, and different tribes, races and nations set up, each one for itself.

Is not the history of words, from their parent-forms to their present fair and harmonious proportions, a history worth writing and studying? In so doing we shall not be studying or glorifying the ideas of great individuals, the greatest of whom must reach total or partial oblivion with the lapse of ages; but we shall be studying and marking the progress of the human species itself, from its primitive or primeval helplessness to its reign of universal empire, acquired by the communication of thought by means of words." We shall find men of a race all but extinct leaving perhaps

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some strange inscription on a buried temple or burial vault, by which inscription the learned will discover their descendants and trace a connection between the living words of to-day and the words first uttered by the human voice. We shall see the human race in its dispersion to the various habitable portions of the globe carrying with it to its new-found homes the precious gift of articulate language, developing into forms as various as the scattered habitations themselves, but still maintaining intact the germ, the root, common to the different members of the original linguistic family.

Ages pass, and men begin to visit the homes of races that were not of the same family. A conquering stranger race brings new and strange words to its conquered foe, along with its chains and its oppressions, but the language of the enslaved and captive race does not wholly perish. After long ages words of the captive race are found in the language of the conqueror. Sometimes they are kept because they have. the same sounds; but they are not of the same parent stock-one was Aryan, the other non-Aryan. Again, two long-separated tribes, members of the same linguistic family, are brought into contact. Their words do not sound alike. Words with the same meaning have invariably a different sound, and neither tribe adopts any of the words of the other. Thus their words, descended from the same parent-form, continue to grow more and more divergent, at the same time preserving a certain uniformity of variation.

It is the triumph of modern etymology that it gives the rule to determine what this uniformity is and in what words it is found.

Coming down to the Fall of the Roman Empire, we find two polished, highly-finished languages in Europe, the Greek and the Latin. The northern races that completed the overthrow and shared the spoils of the Empire of the West found their richest treasure, without appreciating it, in the smooth, precise and musical language of Virgil, Horace and Cicero.

The Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, found a Celtic. tongue on the island of Britain in 449. The familiar modifications of the Latin, now known to us as French, Spanish and Italian, began their development at this time. It is highly probable that the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, had received additions from the Latin which ante-date the additions and modifications which affected it after the Norman Conquest. The same is probably true of the Teutonic dialect spoken by the German Franks before Clovis crossed into Gaul; and also of the Celtic dialects spoken in Gaul and Britain, respectively, before the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish conquests of those countries. On this view of the case, the " English" which resulted from the amalgamation of the Celtic-Latin-Germanic Norman-French with the Celtic-Saxon of England must have been a very complex and heterogeneous compound.

But time works many wonders. The Church Latin of the Ages of Faith no doubt added its contributions to the Old English vocabulary. It aided in toning down the harshness of the early French to the Romance dialects which succeeded. When the Conqueror won at Hastings, he brought a less uncouth language to enrich the vocabulary of England than that which was used by his pirate ancestors.

The study of Latin in the monasteries and universities of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the use of that language by the scholars and churchmen of England, gave to many of the productions of English authors of that time a decidedly Johnsonese tone and pretentiousness.

INTRODUCTION.

During all this time simple, short words were quietly resting in the bosom of Old English. Some were related to the Swedish, Old High German, Scandinavian and Gothic. Some were Celtic in disguise, carried captive by the Frank and Roman, in Gaul, and by the Saxon, in Britain! These little words did not die. And they were related-many of them-to the smoothly-flowing Latin of Cicero, and the roaring, rolling, resonant Greek of Demosthenes and Homer. These little words came to us from the tribal settlements of primeval man. They are Aryan or IndoEuropean, and they do not come to us from the Semitic Hebrew or Syro-Chaldaic, and cannot, at present, be traced to the cradle of the human race. They are the imperishable little words that Swift loved and could use so effectually to strike his hardest blows. They are also the "toughest " riddles that modern English etymology gives us to solve-they are so old, so often hunted down and so little.

We must now briefly review the different languages which have contributed to the present structure and form of English words-either by adaptation or by natural descent. There is a class of words of Old Low German descent. The term includes a limited class of words, whose precise origin is enveloped in obscurity. "If not precisely English, they come very near it," says Skeat. The chief difficulty about them is that the time of their introduction into English is uncertain. Either they belong to Old Friesian and were introduced by the Friesians who came over to England with the Saxons, or to some form of Old Dutch or Old Saxon, and may have been introduced from Holland, possibly even in the fourteenth century, when it was not uncommon for Flemings to visit England, for commercial and other purposes, and end by taking up their residence there.

The introduction of Dutch words into English received little attention until Skeat took up the subject. History shows that England's relations with Holland were often very close. We read of Flemish mercenary soldiers being employed by the Normans, and of Flemish settlements in Wales, "where," says old Fabyan, "they remained a long whyle, but after, they sprad all Englande ouer."

History tells us of the alliance between Edward III. and the free towns of Flanders; and of the importation of Flemish weavers by the same monarch. The wool used by the cloth-workers of Flanders grew on the backs of English sheep; closer relations between the two countries grew out of the brewing trade and the invention of printing, and were secured by the new bond of the Protestant faith. Caxton spent thirty years in Flanders (where the first English book was printed) and translated the Low German version of "Reynard the Fox." Tyndale settled at Antwerp to print his New Testament. After Antwerp had been captured by the Duke of Parma "a third of the merchants and manufacturers of the ruined city," says Mr. Green, are said to have found a refuge on the banks of the Thames." All this must have affected the English language at that time; and it is tolerably certain that during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly the last, several Dutch words were introduced into England.

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Scandinavian or old Danish words were introduced into England by the Danes and Northmen who settled in the country at various times before the Conquest. Their language is best represented by Icelandic, owing to the curious fact that, ever since the first colonization of Iceland by the Northmen, about 874, the language of the settlers has been preserved with but

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slight changes. Hence, instead of its being strange that English words should be borrowed from Icelandic, it must be remembered that this name represents, for philological purposes, the language of those Northmen who, settling in England, became ancestors of some of the leading families in the country; and, as they settled chiefly in Northumbria and East Anglia, parts of England not strictly represented by Anglo-Saxon, "Icelandic " has come to be English of the English. Skeat, in some cases, derives "Scandinavian " words from Swedish, Danish or Norwegian; but, he explains, this means that the Swedish, Danish or Norwegian words are the best representative of the Icelandic that can be found. The number of words adopted into modern English from the Swedish and Danish is very small.

The German language is properly called High German, to distinguish it from the other Teutonic dialects, which belong to Low German. This, of all Teutonic languages, is the furthest removed from English, and the one from which fewest words are directly borrowed, though there is a very general popular notion (due, says Skeat, to the utter want of philological training among English-speaking people) that the contrary is the case. A knowledge of German is often the sole idea by which an Englishman or an American regulates his "derivations" of Teutonic words; and he is better pleased if he can find the German equivalent of an English word than by any true account of the same word, however clearly expressed. Yet it is well-established, by Grimm's Law of sound-shiftings, that the German and the English consonantal systems are very different. Owing to the replacement of the Old High German p by the Modern German b, and other changes, English and German now approach each other more nearly than Grimm's Law suggests; but we may still observe the following very striking difference in the dental consonants: English: d t th day, tooth, thorn, foot. German: tz (ss) d tag, zahn, dorn, fuss.

The number of words in English that are borrowed directly from the German is quite insignificant, and they are all of late introduction. It is more to the purpose to remember that there are, nevertheless, a considerable number of German words that were borrowed indirectly, viz., through the French. Examples of such words are, brawn, dance, gay, guard, halbert, etc., many of which would hardly be at once suspected. It is precisely in accounting for these Frankish words that German is so useful to the English etymologist. The fact that we are highly indebted to German writers for their excellent philological work is very true and one to be thankfully acknowledged; but that is quite. another matter altogether.

The influence of French upon English is too well known to require comment. But the method of the derivation of French words from Latin or German is often very difficult, and requires the greatest care. There are numerous French words in quite common use; such as aise, ease, trancher, to cut, which have never yet been clearly solved; and the solution of many others is highly doubtful. Latin words often undergo the most curious transformations, as may be seen by consulting Brachet's Historical Grammar. What are called "learned" words, such as mobile, which is merely a Latin word with a French ending, present no difficulty; but the "popular" words in use since the first formation of the language are distinguished by three peculiarities: (1) the continuance of the tonic accent, (2) the suppression of the short vowel, (3) the loss of medial consonant. The last two peculiarities tend to

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disguise the origin, and require much attention. Thus, in the Latin bonitatem, the short vowel i, near the middle of the word, is suppressed; whence F. bonté, E. bounty. And again, in the Latin ligare, to bind, the medial consonant g, standing between two vowels, is lost, producing the F. lier, whence E. liable.

The result is a great tendency to compression, of which an extraordinary but well-known example is the Low Latin ætaticum, reduced to edage by the suppression of the short vowel i, and again to eage by the loss of the medial consonant d; hence F. dge, E. age.

One other peculiarity is too important to be passed over. With rare exceptions, the substantives (as in all the Romance languages) are formed from the accusative case of the Latin, so that it is commonly a mere absurdity to cite the Latin nominative, when the form of the accusative is absolutely necessary to show how the French word arose.

French may be considered as being a wholly unoriginal language, founded on debased Latin; but it must at the same time be remembered that, as history teaches us, a certain part of the language is necessarily of Celtic origin, and another part is necessarily Frankish, that is, Old High German. It has also clearly borrowed words freely from Old Low German dialects, from Scandinavian (due to the Normans), and, in later times, from Italian, Spanish, etc., and even from English and many entirely foreign languages.

The other Romance languages, i. e., languages of Latin origin, are Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Provençal, Romansch and Wallachian. English contains words borrowed from the first four of these, but there is not much in them that needs special remark. The Italian and Spanish forms are often useful for comparison with, and consequent restoration of, the crushed and abbreviated Old French forms. Italian is remarkable for assimilation, as in ammirare (for admirare) to admire, ditto (for dicto), a saying, whence E. ditto. Spanish, on the other hand, dislikes assimilation, and

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carefully avoids double consonants; the only conso nants that can be doubled are c, n, r, besides ll, which is sounded as E. 7 followed by y consonant, and is not considered as a double letter. The Spanish ñ is sounded by y consonant, and occurs in dueña, Englished as duenna. Spanish is also remarkable as containing many Arabic (Moorish) words, some of which have found their way into English. The Italian infinitives commonly end in -are, -ere, -ire, with corresponding past participles in -ato, -uto, -ito. Spanish infinitives commonly end in -ar, -er, -ir, with corresponding past participles in -ado, -ido, -ido. In all the Romance languages, substantives are most commonly formed, as in French, from the Latin accusative.

Words of Celtic origin form a particularly slippery subject to deal with, for want of definite information on their older forms in a conveniently accessible arrangement. That English has borrowed several words from Celtic cannot be doubted, but we must take care not to multiply the number of these unduly. Again, "Celtic" is merely a general term, and in itself means nothing definite, just as "Teutonic" and "Romance are general terms. To prove that a word is Celtic, we must first show that the word is borrowed from one of the Celtic languages, as Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish or Breton, or that it is of a form which, by the help of these languages, can be fairly presumed to have existed in the Celtic of an early period. The chief difficulty lies in the fact that Welsh, Irish, Cornish and Gaelic have all borrowed English words at various periods, and Gaelic has certainly also borrowed some words from Scandinavian, as history tells us must have been the case. We gain, however, some assistance by comparing all the languages of this class together, and again, by comparing them with Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, etc., since the Celtic consonants often agree with these, and, at the same time, differ from Teutonic. Thus the word boast is probably Celtic, since it appears in Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic. +

CANONS FOR ETYMOLOGY.

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4. In comparing two words, A and B, belonging to the same language, of which A contains the lesser number of syllables, A must be taken to be the more original word, unless we have evidence of contraction or other corruption.

"5. In comparing two words, A and B, belonging to the same language and consisting of the same number of syllables, the older form can usually be distinguished by observing the sound of the principal vowel.

"6. Strong verbs, in the Teutonic languages, and the so-called irregular verbs' in Latin, are commonly to be considered as primary, other related forms being taken from them.

7. The whole of a word, and not a portion only, ought to be reasonably accounted for; and, in tracing changes of form, any infringement of phonetic laws is to be regarded with suspicion.

"8. Mere resemblances of form and apparent connection in sense between languages which have different phonetic laws or no necessary connection are commonly a delusion, and are not to be regarded.

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9. When words in two different languages are more nearly alike than the ordinary phonetic laws would allow, there is a strong probability that one language has borrowed the word from the other. Truly cognate words ought not to be too much alike.

"10. It is useless to offer an explanation of an English word which will not also explain all the cognate

forms.

"These principles, and other similar ones well known to comparative philologists, I have tried to observe. Where I have not done so, there is a chance of a mistake. Corrections can only be made by a more strict observance of the above canons.

"A few examples will make the matter clearer. "1. The word surloin, or sirloin, is often said to be derived from the fact that the loin was knighted as Sir Loin by Charles II., or (according to Richardson) by James I. Chronology makes short work of this statement, the word being in use long before James I. was born. It is one of those unscrupulous inventions with which English etymology' abounds, and which many

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people admire because they are 'so clever. The num ber of those who literally prefer a story about a word to a more prosaic account of it is only too large. "As to the necessity for ascertaining the oldest form and use of a word there cannot be two opinions. Yet this primary and all-important rule is continually disregarded, and men are found to rush into etymologies' without the slightest attempt at investigation or any knowledge of the history of the language, and think nothing of deriving words which exist in AngloSaxon from German or Italian. They merely think it over,' and take up with the first fancy that comes to hand, which they expect to be obvious' to others because they were themselves incapable of doing better; which is a poor argument, indeed. It would be easy to cite some specimens which I have noted (with a view to the possibility of making a small collection of such philological curiosities), but it is hardly necessary. I will rather relate my experience-viz.: that I have frequently set out to find the etymology of a word without any preconceived ideas about it, and usually found that, by the time its earliest use and sense had been fairly traced, the etymology presented itself unasked. 2. The history of a nation generally accounts for the constituent parts of its language. When an early English word is compared with Hebrew or Coptic, as used to be done in the old editions of "Webster's Dictionary," history is set at defiance; and it was a good. deed to clear the later editions of all such rubbish. As to geography, there must always be an intelligible geographical contact between races that are supposed to have borrowed words from one another; and this is particularly true of olden times, when travelling was less common. Oid French did not borrow words from Portugal, nor did Old English borrow words from Prussia, much less from Finnish or Esthonian or Coptic, etc., etc. Yet there are people who still remain persuaded that Whitsunday is derived, of all things, from the German Pfingsten.

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shows

"3. Few delusions are more common than the comparison of L. cura with E. care, of Gr. As with E. whole, and of Gr. xápis with E. charity. I daresay I myself believed in these things for many years, owing to that utter want of any approach to any philological training, for which England in general has long been so remarkable. Yet a very slight (but honest) attempt at understanding the English, the Latin and the Greek alphabets soon these notions to be untenable. The E. care, A. S. cearu, meant, originally, sorrow, which is only a secondary meaning of the Latin word; it never meant, originally, attention or painstaking. But this is not the point at present under consideration. Phonetically. the A.S. c and the L. c, when used initially, do not correspond; for where Latin writes c at the beginning of a word, A. S. has h, as in L. cel-are-A. S. hel-an, to hide. Again, the A. S. ea, before r following, stands for original a, cearu answering to an older caru. But

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the L. cara, Old Latin coira, is spelt with a long u, originally a diphthong, which cannot answer exactly to an original a. It remains that these words both contain the letter r in common, which is not denied; but this is a slight ground for the supposed equivalence of words of which the primary senses were different. The fact of the equivalence of L. c to A. S. h is commonly known as being due to Grimm's Law. The popular notions about Grimm's Law are extremely vague. Many imagine that Grimm made the law not many years ago, since which time Latin and AngloSaxon have been bound to obey it. But the word law is then strangely misapprehended; it is only a law in the sense of an observed fact. Latin and Anglo-Saxon were thus differentiated in times preceding the earliest record of the latter, and the difference might have been observed in the eighth century if anyone had had the wits to observe it. When the difference has once been perceived, and all other A. S. and Latin equivalent words are seen to follow it, we cannot consent to establish an exception to the rule in order to compare a single (supposed) pair of words which do not agree in the vowel-sound, and did not originally mean the same thing. "As to the Gr. os, the aspirate (as usual) represents an original s, so that or answers to Sans. sarva, all, Old Lat. sollus, whilst it means 'whole' in the sense of entire or total. But the A. S. hál (which is the old spelling of whole) has for its initial letter an h, answering to Gr. «, and the original sense is 'in sound health,' or 'hale and hearty.' It may much more reasonably be compared with the Gr. Kaλós; as to which see Curtius, i. 172. As to xápis, the initial letter is x, a guttural sound answering to Lat. h or g, and it is, in fact, allied to L. gratia. But in charity, the ch is French, due to a peculiar pronunciation of the Lat. c, and the Fr. charité is, of course, due to the L. acc. caritatem, whence also Ital. caritate or carità, Span. caridad, all from L. carus, with long a. When we put ráps and carus side by side, we find that the initial letters are different, that the vowels are different, and that, just as in the case of cearu and cura, the sole resemblance is that they both contain the letter r! It is not worth while to pursue the subject further. Those who are confirmed in their prejudices and have no guide but the ear (which they neglect to train), will remain of the same opinion still; but some beginners may perhaps take heed, and if they do, will see matters in a new light. To all who have acquired any philological knowledge, these things are wearisome.

"4. Suppose we take two Latin words such as caritas and carus. The former has a stem car-i-tat-; the latter has a stem car-o-, which may very easily turn into car-i-. We are perfectly confident that the adjective came first into existence, and that the sb. was made out of it by adding a suffix; and this we can tell by a glance at the words, by the very form of them. It is a rule in all Aryan languages that words started from monosyllabic roots or bases, and were built up by supplying new suffixes at the end; and, the greater the number of suffixes, the later the formation. When apparent exceptions to this law present themselves, they require especial attention; but as long as the law is followed, it is all in the natural course of things. Simple as this canon seems, it is frequently not observed; the consequence being that a word A is said to be derived from B, whereas B is its own offspring. The result is a reasoning in a circle, as it is called; we go round and round, but there is no progress upward and backward, which is the direction in which we should travel. Thus Richardson derives chine from 'Fr. echine,' and this from Fr. echiner, to chine, divide, or break the back of (Cotgrave), probably from the A. S. cinan, to chine, chink or rive. From the absurdity of deriving the Fr. echiner' from the A. S. cinan' he might have been saved at the outset, by remembering that, instead of echine being derived from the verb echiner, it is obvious that echiner, to break the back of, is derived from echine, the back, as Cotgrave certainly meant us to understand; see eschine, eschiner in Cotgrave's Dictionary.' Putting eschine and eschiner side by side, the shorter form is the more original.

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"5. This canon, requiring us to compare vowelsounds, is a little more difficult, but it is extremely important. In many dictionaries it is utterly neglected, whereas the information to be obtained from vowels is often extremely certain; and few things are more beautifully regular than the occasionally complex, yet often decisive manner in which, especially in the Teutonic languages, one vowel sound is educed from another. The very fact that the A. S. é is a modification of ó tells us at once that fédan, to feed, is a derivative of fód, food; and that to derive food from feed is simply impossible. In the same way the vowel e in the verb to set owes its very existence to the vowel a in the past tense of the verb to sit; and so on in countless in

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