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and Roman classics to eager and earnest learners; and thus a new impulse was given to the study of the great masterpieces of human thought and literary style. And so it came to pass in course of time that every one who wished to become an educated man studied the literature of Greece and Rome. Even women took to the study. Lady Jane Grey was a good Greek and Latin scholar; and so was Queen Elizabeth. From this time began an enormous importation of Latin words into our language. Being imported by the eye and the pen, they suffered little or no change; the spirit of the people did not influence them in the least-neither the organs of speech nor the ear affected either the pronunciation or the spelling of them. If we look down the columns of any English dictionary, we shall find these later Latin words in hundreds. Opinionem became opinion; factionem, faction; orationem, oration; pungentem passed over in the form of pungent (though we had poignant already from the French); pauperem came in as pauper; and separatum became separate.

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38. Latin of the Fourth Period. (ii) This went on to such an extent in the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, that one writer says of those who spoke and wrote this Latinised English, "If some of their mothers were alive, they were not able to tell what they say." And Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) remarks: "If elegancy (the use of Latin words) still proceedeth, and English pens maintain that stream we have of late observed to flow from many, we shall, within a few years, be fain to learn Latin to understand English, and a work will prove of equal facility in either." Mr Alexander Gill, an eminent schoolmaster, and the then head-master of St Paul's School, where, among his other pupils, he taught John Milton, wrote a book in 1619 on the English language; and, among other remarks, he says: "O harsh lips! I now hear all around me such words as common, vices, envy, malice; even virtue, study, justice, pity, mercy, compassion, profit, commodity, colour, grace, favour, acceptance. But whither, I pray, in all the world, have you banished those words which our forefathers used for these new-fangled ones?

Are our words to be executed like our citizens?" And he calls this fashion of using Latin words "the new mange in our speaking and writing." But the fashion went on growing; and even uneducated people thought it a clever thing to use a Latin instead of a good English word. Samuel Rowlands, a writer in the seventeenth century, ridicules this affectation in a few lines of verse. He pretends that he was out walking on the highroad, and met a countryman who wanted to know what o'clock it was, and whether he was on the right way to the town or village he was making for. The writer saw at once that he was a simple bumpkin; and, when he heard that he had lost his way, he turned up his nose at the poor fellow, and ordered him to be off at once. Here are the lines :

:

"As on the way I itinerated,
A rural person I obviated,
Interrogating time's transitation,
And of the passage demonstration.
My apprehension did ingenious scan
That he was merely a simplician;
So, when I saw he was extravagant,
Unto the obscure vulgar consonant,
I bade him vanish most promiscuously,
And not contaminate my company."

39. Latin of the Fourth Period.—(iii) What happened in the case of the Norman-French contribution, happened also in this. The language became saturated with these new Latin words, until it became satiated, then, as it were, disgusted, and would take no more. Hundreds of

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crowded into the English language; but many of them were doomed to speedy expulsion. Thus words like discerptibility, supervacaneousness, septentrionality, ludibundness (love of sport), came in in crowds. The verb intenerate tried to turn out soften; and deturpate to take the place of defile. But good writers, like Bacon and Raleigh, took care to avoid the use of such terms, and to employ only those Latin words which gave them the power to indicate a new idea- —a new meaning or a new shade

of meaning. And when we come to the eighteenth century, we find that a writer like Addison would have shuddered at the very mention of such "inkhorn terms.”

40. Eye-Latin and Ear-Latin.-(i) One slight influence produced by this spread of devotion to classical Latin—to the Latin of Cicero and Livy, of Horace and Virgil-was to alter the spelling of French words. We had already received-through the ear the French words assaute, aventure, defaut, dette, vitaille, and others. But when our scholars became accustomed to the book-form of these words in Latin books, they gradually altered them for the eye and ear-into assault, adventure, default, debt, and victuals. They went further. A large number of Latin words that already existed in the language in their Norman-French form (for we must not forget that French is Latin "with the ends bitten off"-changed by being spoken peculiarly and heard imperfectly) were reintroduced in their original Latin form. Thus we had caitiff from the Normans; but we reintroduced it in the shape of captive, which comes almost unaltered from the Latin captivum. Feat we had from the Normans; but the Latin factum, which provided the word, presented us with a second form of it in the word fact. Such words might be called Ear-Latin and Eye-Latin; MouthLatin and Book-Latin; Spoken Latin and Written Latin; or Latin at second-hand and Latin at first-hand.

41. Eye-Latin and Ear-Latin.-(ii) This coming in of the same word by two different doors-by the Eye and by the Earhas given rise to the phenomenon of Doublets. The following is a list of Latin Doublets; and it will be noticed that Latin1 stands for Latin at first-hand-from books; and Latin 2 for Latin at second-hand-through the Norman-French.

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42. Remarks on the above Table.-The word benison, a blessing, may be contrasted with its opposite, malison, a curse. -Cadence is the falling of sounds; chance the befalling of events.-A caitiff was at first a captive-then a person who made no proper defence, but allowed himself to be taken captive. -A corps is a body of troops.-The word sample is found, in older English, in the form of ensample.—A feat of arms is a deed or fact of arms, par excellence.-To understand how fragile became frail, we must pronounce the g hard, and notice how the hard guttural falls easily away—as in our own native words flail and hail, which formerly contained a hard g.—A major is a greater captain; a mayor is a greater magistrate.-A magister means a bigger man—as opposed to a minister (from minus), a smaller man. Moneta was the name given to a stamped coin, because these coins were first struck in the temple of Juno Moneta, Juno the Adviser or the Warner. (From the same root-mon-come monition, admonition; monitor; admonish.) -Shakespeare uses the word orison freely for prayer, as in the address of Hamlet to Ophelia, where he says, "Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered!"-Poor comes to us from an Old French word poure; the newer French is pauvre.—To understand the vanishing of the g sound in poignant, we must remember that the Romans sounded it always hard.—Sever we get through separate, because p and v are both labials, and therefore easily interchangeable.-Treason-with its s instead of ti-may be compared with benison, malison, orison, poison, and reason.

43. Conclusions from the above Table.-If we examine the table on page 231 with care, we shall come to several undeniable conclusions. (i) First, the words which come to us direct from Latin are found more in books than in everyday speech. (ii) Secondly, they are longer. The reason is that the words that have come through French have been worn down by the careless pronunciation of many generations—by that desire for ease in the pronouncing of words which characterises all languages, and have at last been compelled to take that form which was least difficult to pronounce. (iii) Thirdly, the two

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