Master. Is it all one to say, God made the earth, and the earth made God? Covetousness overcomes all men, and all men overcome covetousness?
Scholar. No, not so; for here the effect is turned to be the cause, and the agent is made the patient.
Master. So is it to say Summer makes long days, when you should say: Long days make summer.
Scholar. I perceive it now: but I was so blinded with the vulgar error, that if you had demanded of me further what did make the summer, I had been like to have answered that green leaves do make summer; and the sooner by remembrance of an old saying that a year should come in which the summer should not be known but by the green leaves.
Master. Yet this saying does not import that green leaves do make summer, but that they betoken summer; so are they the sign and not the cause of summer."
I have taken a whole page of our author, without omission, that the reader may see that I do not pick out sentences convenient for my purpose. I have done nothing but alter the third person of the verb and the spelling: but great is the effect thereof. We say "the Sun shining makes the day"; Recorde, "the Sonne shynynge maketh the daye."
These points apart, we see a resemblance between our English and that of three hundred years ago, in the common talk of educated persons, which will allow us to affirm that the language of the authorized Bible must have been very close to that of its time. For I cannot admit that much change can have taken place in fifty years: and the language of the version represents both our common English and that of Recorde with very close approximation. Take sentences from Bacon and Raleigh, and it will be apparent that these writers will be held to differ from all three, Recorde, the version, and ourselves, by differences of the same character. But we speak of Recorde's conversation, and of our own. We conclude that it is the plain and almost colloquial character of the Authorized Version which distinguishes it from the English of Bacon and Raleigh, by approximating it to the common idiom of the time. If any one will cast an eye upon the letters of instruction written by Cecil[[610]] and the Bishop of London to the translators themselves, or to the general directions sent to them in the King's name, he will find that these plain business compositions differ from the English of Bacon and Raleigh by the same sort of differences which distinguish the version itself.
PRONUNCIATION.
The foreign word, or the word of a district, or class of people, passes into the general vernacular; but it is long before the specially learned will acknowledge the right of those with whom they come in contact to follow general usage. The rule is simple: so long as a word is technical or local, those who know its technical or local pronunciation may reasonably employ it. But when the word has become general, the specialist is not very wise if he refuse to follow
the mass, and perfectly foolish if he insist on others following him. There have been a few who demanded that Euler should be pronounced in the German fashion:[[611]] Euler has long been the property of the world at large; what does it matter how his own countrymen pronounce the letters? Shall we insist on the French pronouncing Newton without that final tong which they never fail to give him? They would be wise enough to laugh at us if we did. We remember that a pedant who was insisting on all the pronunciations being retained, was met by a maxim in contradiction, invented at the moment, and fathered upon Kaen-foo-tzee,[[612]] an authority which he was challenged to dispute. Whom did you speak of? said the bewildered man of accuracy. Learn your own system, was the answer, before you impose it on others; Confucius says that too.[[613]]