Whistle-fish.—The same for gadus mustela, or weazel-cod.
Liquorice=glycyrrhiza.
Wormwood=weremuth, is an instance of a word from the same language, in an antiquated shape, being equally transformed with a word of really foreign origin.
[§ 167]. Sometimes the transformation of the name has engendered a change in the object to which it applies, or, at least, has evolved new ideas in connection with it. How easy for a person who used the words beef-eater, sparrow-grass, or Jerusalem, to believe that the officers designated by the former either eat or used to eat more beef than other people (or at least had an allowance of that viand); that the second word was the name for a grass, or herb of which sparrows were fond; and that Jerusalem artichokes came from Palestine.
What has just been supposed is sometimes a real
occurrence. To account for the name Shotover-hill, I have heard that Little John shot over it. Here the confusion in order to set itself right, breeds a fiction. Again, in chess, the piece now called the queen, was originally the elephant. This was in Persian, ferz. In French it became vierge, which, in time, came to be mistaken for a derivative, and virgo=the virgin, the lady, the queen.
[§ 168]. Sometimes, where the form of a word in respect to its sound is not affected, a false spirit of accommodation introduces an unetymological spelling; as frontispiece[[28]] from frontispecium, sovereign, from sovrano, colleague from collega, lanthorn (old orthography) from lanterna.
The value of forms like these consists in their showing that language is affected by false etymologies as well as by true ones.
[§ 169]. In lambkin and lancet, the final syllables (-kin and -et) have the same power. They both express the idea of smallness or diminutiveness. These words are but two out of a multitude, the one (lamb) being of Saxon, the other (lance) of Norman origin. The same is the case with the superadded syllables: -kin is Saxon; -et Norman. Now to add a Saxon termination to a Norman word, or vice versâ, is to corrupt the English language.