English Past and Present

by Richard Chenevix Trench

For example, the Reformation had its scholarly, we might say, its scholastic, as well as its popular, aspect. Add this fact to the fact of the revived interest in classical learning, and you will not wonder that a stream of Latin, now larger than ever, began to flow into our language. Thus Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s reign[47], gives a long list of words which, as he declares, had been quite recently introduced into the language. Some of them are Greek, a few French and Italian, but very far the most are Latin. I will not give you his whole catalogue, but some specimens from it; it is difficult to understand concerning some of these, how the language should have managed to do without them so long; ‘method’, ‘methodical’, ‘function’, ‘numerous’, ‘penetrate’, ‘penetrable’, ‘indignity’, ‘savage’, ‘scientific’, ‘delineation’, ‘dimension’—all which he notes to have recently come up; so too ‘idiom’, ‘significative’, ‘compendious’, ‘prolix’, ‘figurative’, ‘impression’, ‘inveigle’, ‘metrical’. All these he adduces with praise; others upon which he bestows equal commendation, have not held their ground, as ‘placation’, ‘numerosity’, ‘harmonical’. Of those neologies which he disallowed, he only anticipated in some cases, as in ‘facundity’, ‘implete’, ‘attemptat’ (‘attentat’), the decision of a later day; other words which he condemned no less, as ‘audacious’, ‘compatible’, ‘egregious’, have maintained their ground. These too have done the same; ‘despicable’, ‘destruction’, ‘homicide’, ‘obsequious’, ‘ponderous’, ‘portentous’, ‘prodigious’, all of them by another writer a little earlier condemned as “inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the Latin”.

French Neologies

It is curious to observe the “words of art”, as he calls them, which Philemon Holland, a voluminous translator at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, counts it needful to explain in a sort of glossary which he appends to his translation of Pliny’s Natural History[48]. One can hardly at the present day understand how any person who would care to consult the book at all would find any difficulty with words like the following, ‘acrimony’, ‘austere’, ‘bulb’, ‘consolidate’, ‘debility’, ‘dose’, ‘ingredient’, ‘opiate’, ‘propitious’, ‘symptom’, all which, however, as novelties he carefully explains. Some of the words in his glossary, it is true, are harder and more technical than these; but a vast proportion of them present no greater difficulty than those which I have adduced[49].

The period during which this naturalization of Latin words in the English Language was going actively forward, may be said to have continued till about the Restoration of Charles the Second. It first received a check from the coming up of French tastes, fashions, and habits of thought consequent on that event. The writers already formed before that period, such as Cudworth and Barrow, still continued to write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and Latin in diction, but not so those of a younger generation. We may say of this influx of Latin that it left the language vastly more copious, with greatly enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat burdened, and not always able to move gracefully under the weight of its new acquisitions; for as Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy enough to acquire foreign words, but to know what to do with them after you have acquired, is the difficulty.

Pedantic Words

It might have received indeed most serious injury, if all the words which the great writers of this second Latin period of our language employed, and so proposed as candidates for admission into it, had received the stamp of popular allowance. But happily it was not so; it was here, as it had been before with the French importations, and with the earlier Latin of Lydgate and Occleve. The re-active powers of the language, enabling it to throw off that which was foreign to it, did not fail to display themselves now, as they had done on former occasions. The number of unsuccessful candidates for admission into, and permanent naturalization in, the language during this period, is enormous; and one may say that in almost all instances where the Alien Act has been enforced, the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was such as the circumstances of the case abundantly bore out. Either the word was not idiomatic, or was not intelligible, or was not needed, or looked ill, or sounded ill, or some other valid reason existed against it. A lover of his native tongue will tremble to think what that tongue would have become, if all the vocables from the Latin and the Greek which were then introduced or endorsed by illustrious names, had been admitted on the strength of their recommendation; if ‘torve’ and ‘tetric’ (Fuller), ‘cecity’ (Hooker), ‘fastide’ and ‘trutinate’ (State Papers), ‘immanity’ (Shakespeare), ‘insulse’ and ‘insulsity’ (Milton, prose), ‘scelestick’ (Feltham), ‘splendidious’ (Drayton), ‘pervicacy’ (Baxter), ‘stramineous’, ‘ardelion’ (Burton), ‘lepid’ and ‘sufflaminate’ (Barrow), ‘facinorous’ (Donne), ‘immorigerous’, ‘clancular’, ‘ferity’, ‘ustulation’, ‘stultiloquy’, ‘lipothymy’ (λειποθυμία), ‘hyperaspist’ (all in Jeremy Taylor), if ‘mulierosity’, ‘subsannation’, ‘coaxation’, ‘ludibundness’, ‘delinition’, ‘septemfluous’, ‘medioxumous’, ‘mirificent’, ‘palmiferous’ (all in Henry More), ‘pauciloquy’ and ‘multiloquy’ (Beaumont, Psyche); if ‘dyscolous’ (Foxe), ‘ataraxy’ (Allestree), ‘moliminously’ (Cudworth), ‘luciferously’ (Sir Thomas Browne), ‘immarcescible’ (Bishop Hall), ‘exility’, ‘spinosity’, ‘incolumity’, ‘solertiousness’, ‘lucripetous’, ‘inopious’, ‘eluctate’, ‘eximious’ (all in Hacket), ‘arride’[50] (ridiculed by Ben Johnson), with the hundreds of other words like these, and even more monstrous than are some of these, not to speak of such Italian as ‘leggiadrous’ (a favourite word in Beaumont’s Psyche), ‘amorevolous’ (Hacket), had not been rejected and disallowed by the true instinct of the national mind.

Naturalization of Words

A great many too were allowed and adopted, but not exactly in the shape in which they first were introduced among us; they were made to drop their foreign termination, or otherwise their foreign appearance, to conform themselves to English ways, and only so were finally incorporated into the great family of English words[51]. Thus of Greek words we have the following: ‘pyramis’ and ‘pyramides’, forms often employed by Shakespeare, became ‘pyramid’ and ‘pyramids’; ‘dosis’ (Bacon) ‘dose’; ‘distichon’ (Holland) ‘distich’; ‘hemistichion’ (North) ‘hemistich’; ‘apogæon’ (Fairfax) and ‘apogeum’ (Browne) ‘apogee’; ‘sumphonia’ (Lodge) ‘symphony’; ‘prototypon’ (Jackson) ‘prototype’; ‘synonymon’ (Jeremy Taylor) or ‘synonymum’ (Hacket), and ‘synonyma’ (Milton, prose), became severally ‘synonym’ and ‘synonyms’; ‘syntaxis’ (Fuller) became ‘syntax’; ‘extasis’ (Burton) ‘ecstasy’; ‘parallelogrammon’ (Holland) ‘parallelogram’; ‘programma’ (Warton) ‘program’; ‘epitheton’ (Cowell) ‘epithet’; ‘epocha’ (South) ‘epoch’; ‘biographia’ (Dryden) ‘biography’; ‘apostata’ (Massinger) ‘apostate’; ‘despota’ (Fox) ‘despot’; ‘misanthropos’ (Shakespeare) if ‘misanthropi’ (Bacon) ‘misanthrope’; ‘psalterion’ (North) ‘psaltery’; ‘chasma’ (Henry More) ‘chasm’; ‘idioma’ and ‘prosodia’ (both in Daniel, prose) ‘idiom’ and ‘prosody’; ‘energia’, ‘energy’, and ‘Sibylla’, ‘Sibyl’ (both in Sidney); ‘zoophyton’ (Henry More) ‘zoophyte’; ‘enthousiasmos’ (Sylvester) ‘enthusiasm’; ‘phantasma’ (Donne) ‘phantasm’; ‘magnes’ (Gabriel Harvey) ‘magnet’; ‘cynosura’ (Donne) ‘cynosure’; ‘galaxias’ (Fox) ‘galaxy’; ‘heros’ (Henry More) ‘hero’; ‘epitaphy’ (Hawes) ‘epitaph’.

The same process has gone on in a multitude of Latin words, which testify by their terminations that they were, and were felt to be, Latin at their first employment; though now they are such no longer. Thus Bacon uses generally, I know not whether always, ‘insecta’ for ‘insects’; and ‘chylus’ for ‘chyle’; Bishop Andrews ‘nardus’ for ‘nard’; Spenser ‘zephyrus’, and not ‘zephyr’; so ‘interstitium’ (Fuller) preceded ‘interstice’; ‘philtrum’ (Culverwell) ‘philtre’; ‘expansum’ (Jeremy Taylor) ‘expanse’; ‘preludium’ (Beaumont, Psyche), ‘prelude’; ‘precipitium’ (Coryat) ‘precipice’; ‘aconitum’ (Shakespeare) ‘aconite’; ‘balsamum’ (Webster) ‘balsam’; ‘heliotropium’ (Holland) ‘heliotrope’; ‘helleborum’ (North) ‘hellebore’; ‘vehiculum’ (Howe) ‘vehicle’; ‘trochæus’ and ‘spondæus’ (Holland) ‘trochee’ and ‘spondee’; and ‘machina’ (Henry More) ‘machine’. We have ‘intervalla’, not ‘intervals’, in Chillingworth; ‘postulata’, not ‘postulates’, in Swift; ‘archiva’, not ‘archives’, in Baxter; ‘demagogi’, not ‘demagogues’, in Hacket; ‘vestigium’, not ‘vestige’, in Culverwell; ‘pantomimus’ in Lord Bacon for ‘pantomime’; ‘mystagogus’ for ‘mystagogue’, in Jackson; ‘atomi’ in Lord Brooke for ‘atoms’; ‘ædilis’ (North) went before ‘ædile’; ‘effigies’ and ‘statua’ (both in Shakespeare) before ‘effigy’ and ‘statue’; ‘abyssus’ (Jackson) before ‘abyss’; ‘vestibulum’ (Howe) before ‘vestibule’; ‘symbolum’ (Hammond) before ‘symbol’; ‘spectrum’ (Burton) before ‘spectre’; while only after a while ‘quære’ gave place to ‘query’; ‘audite’ (Hacket) to ‘audit’; ‘plaudite’ (Henry More) to ‘plaudit’; and the low Latin ‘mummia’ (Webster) became ‘mummy’. The widely extended change of such words as ‘innocency’, ‘indolency’, ‘temperancy’, and the large family of words with the same termination, into ‘innocence’, ‘indolence’, ‘temperance’, and the like, can only be regarded as part of the same process of entire naturalization.

The plural very often tells the secret of a word, and of the light in which it is regarded by those who employ it, when the singular, being less capable of modification, would have failed to do so; thus when Holland writes ‘phalanges’, ‘bisontes’, ‘ideæ’, it is clear that ‘phalanx’, ‘bison’, ‘idea’, were still Greek words for him; as ‘dogma’ was for Hammond, when he made its plural not ‘dogmas’, but ‘dogmata’[52]; and when Spenser uses ‘heroes’ as a trisyllable, it plainly is not yet thoroughly English for him[53]. ‘Cento’ is not English, but a Latin word used in English, so long as it makes its plural not ‘centos’, but ‘centones’, as in the old anonymous translation of Augustin’s City of God[54]; and ‘specimen’, while it makes its plural ‘specimina’ (Howe). Pope making, as he does, ‘satellites’ a quadrisyllable in the line