English Past and Present

by Richard Chenevix Trench

III

DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

I took occasion to observe at the commencement of my last lecture that it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux[128] and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies remain for ever without subtraction or addition. As I then undertook for my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own language had made, I shall consider in the present some of the losses, or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured. But it will be well here, by one or two remarks going before, to avert any possible misapprehensions of my meaning.

It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in the end, perish. They run their course; not at all at the same rate, for the tendency to change is different in different languages, both from internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life, they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude, their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary, out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a chief part of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we count the Provençal and Wallachian; not a few in our own. Still in their own proper being languages perish and pass away; there are dead records of what they were in books; not living men who speak them any more. Seeing then that they thus die, they must have had the germs of a possible decay and death in them from the beginning.

Languages Gain and Lose

Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built fabrics as these, the causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been actually at work very long before the results began to be visible. Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and in languages, it would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and period is growth and gain, while all after is decay and loss. On the contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions is going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower, and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more; when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than those of life and order. It is from this moment the decline of a language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses of a language, and may esteem them most real, without in the least thereby implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun. This may yet be far distant, and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining. Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only different in that it is passing into another stage of its development; only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the flower from the bud; having changed its merits, but not having renounced them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but more of usefulness; not, perhaps, serving the poet so well, but serving the historian and philosopher and theologian better than before.

One observation more let me make, before entering on the special details of my subject. It is this. The losses and diminutions of a language differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions—namely, that they are of two kinds, while its gains are only of one. Its gains are only in words; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a new power; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in powers—in words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of tenses which it once used; forgets its dual; is content with one termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. “In all languages”, as has been well said, “there is a constant tendency to relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion”. For example, a vast number of languages had at an early period of their development, besides the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I mean by a language renouncing its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you before my lecture is concluded. This much I have here said on the matter, to explain and justify a division which I shall make, considering first the losses of the English language in words, and then in powers.

Words become Extinct

And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in our language—as indeed in every other. When I speak of this, the dying out of words, I do not refer to mere tentative, experimental words, not a few of which I adduced in my last lecture, words offered to the language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or if not so, which had been domiciled in it long, that they might have been supposed to have found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the times of our early English, have subsequently dropped out of our vocabulary, sometimes leaving a gap which has never since been filled, but their places oftener taken by others which have come up in their room. Not to mention those of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are very numerous, many held their ground to far later periods, and yet have finally given way. That beautiful word ‘wanhope’ for despair, hope which has so waned that now there is an entire want of it, was in use down to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of Gascoigne[129]. ‘Skinker’ for cupbearer, (an ungraceful word, no doubt) is used by Shakespeare and lasted till Dryden’s time and beyond.

Spenser uses often ‘to welk’ (welken) in the sense of to fade, ‘to sty’ for to mount, ‘to hery’ as to glorify or praise, ‘to halse’ as to embrace, ‘teene’ as vexation or grief: Shakespeare ‘to tarre’ as to provoke, ‘to sperr’ as to enclose or bar in; ‘to sag’ for to droop, or hang the head downward. Holland employs ‘geir’[130] for vulture (“vultures or geirs”), ‘specht’ for woodpecker, ‘reise’ for journey, ‘frimm’ for lusty or strong. ‘To schimmer’ occurs in Bishop Hall; ‘to tind’, that is, to kindle, and surviving in ‘tinder’, is used by Bishop Sanderson; ‘to nimm’, or take, as late as by Fuller. A rogue is a ‘skellum’ in Sir Thomas Urquhart. ‘Nesh’ in the sense of soft through moisture, ‘leer’ in that of empty, ‘eame’ in that of uncle, mother’s brother (the German ‘oheim’), good Saxon-English once, still live on in some of our provincial dialects; so does ‘flitter-mouse’ or ‘flutter-mouse’ (mus volitans), where we should use bat. Indeed of those above named several do the same; it is so with ‘frimm’, with ‘to sag’, ‘to nimm’. ‘Heft’ employed by Shakespeare in the sense of weight, is still employed in the same sense by our peasants in Hampshire[131].