One phase of this leaning to the grandiose style is an affectation of foreign words and phrases. The extent to which this practice is carried by some writers is extraordinary. They can scarcely call anything by its proper English name, but must apply to it some Italian or French word. Such writers describe people as ‘blasés,’ or perhaps as having ‘un air distingué;’ and these people are said to do everything ‘à merveille.’ Some few Italian phrases are also occasionally introduced, such as ‘in petto,’ the ‘dolce far niente,’ &c.; and the style of many writers learned in the ancient classics is in like manner infected with Greek and Latin words and idioms.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE SPELLING OF WORDS.
Since, before the invention of printing, there was no standard of English spelling, our orthography can have no history before that epoch. The variety of forms in which words appeared was endless; for not only did different writers spell them differently, but one writer would often present his readers with several forms of the same word even in the same page. During the whole of our early history, then, the language can hardly be said to have had any fixed laws of spelling.
The orthography of Anglo-Saxon itself seems to have been very unsettled. Few words appeared invariably in the same form, and some had as many as three or four different modes of spelling. We find ‘ác’ and ‘æc’ (oak); ‘lang’ and ‘long’ (long); ‘geaf’ and ‘gef’ (give); ‘seolf,’ ‘self,’ and ‘sylf’ (self); ‘sweaster’ and ‘swuster’ (sister); ‘heauwod’ and ‘heafod’ (head), &c. &c.
The accent also made a difference in both the pronunciation and meaning of some words. Thus, ‘ís’ meant ice, but ‘is’ (without the accent) was the 3rd singular present of the verb ‘to be.’ ‘God,’ in Anglo-Saxon, was, in spelling and meaning, our word ‘God;’ but ‘gód’ (pronounced ‘gōād’) was our adjective ‘good,’ &c.
The marked difference in form between the Saxon and the early English was the substitution of e for the Saxon endings a, e, and u. Thus, ‘nama,’ ‘ende,’ and ‘wudu’ appeared in early English as name, ende, and woode (probably pronounced as two syllables). At a still later period there was a tendency to get rid not only of this e, but of the whole system of Anglo-Saxon inflections; and the nouns, adjectives, and verbs were stripped of nearly all their endings.
The only two inflections of the noun which survived this decay, and which may be traced to the present time, were the es of the possessive (or genitive) singular, and the as of the subjective (or nominative) plural. The Saxon for ‘of a smith’ was ‘smides,’ and the nominative plural of the same word was ‘smidas.’ Wiclif often uses ‘is’ as a plural ending, as in ‘housis,’ ‘barelis,’ &c. Caxton writes ‘thynges,’ and More, tythes, arrowes, &c. Now the usual ending is s; as in ‘books,’ trees, &c.