[190] The existence of ‘stony’—‘lapidosus’, ‘steinig’, does not make ‘stonen’—‘lapideus’, ‘steinern’, superfluous, any more than ‘earthy’ makes ‘earthen’. That part of the field in which the good seed withered so quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was ‘stony’. The vessels which held the water that Christ turned into wine (John iii. 6) were ‘stonen’.
[191] J. Grimm (Deutsche Gramm. vol. i, p. 1040): Dass die starke form die ältere, kräftigere, innere; die schwache die spätere, gehemmtere und mehr äusserliche sey, leuchtet ein. Elsewhere, speaking generally of inflections by internal vowel change, he characterizes them as a ‘chief beauty’ (hauptschönheit) of the Teutonic languages. Marsh (Manual of the English Language, p. 233, English ed.) protests, though, as it seems to me, on no sufficient grounds, against these terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, as themselves fanciful and inappropriate.
[192] The entire ignorance as to the past historic evolution of the language, with which some have undertaken to write about it, is curious. Thus the author of Observations upon the English Language, without date, but published about 1730, treats all these strong præterites as of recent introduction, counting ‘knew’ to have lately expelled ‘knowed’, ‘rose’ to have acted the same part toward ‘rised’, and of course esteeming them as so many barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and concluding with the warning that “great care must be taken to prevent their increase”!!—p. 24. Cobbett does not fall into this absurdity, yet proposes in his English Grammar, that they should all be abolished as inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming obsolescent. How seldom do we hear ‘drank’, ‘shrank’, ‘sprang’, ‘stank’.]
[193] J. Grimm (Deutsche Gramm. vol. i. p. 839): “Die starke flexion stufenweise versinkt und ausstirbt, die schwache aber um sich greift”. Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5; iv. 509.
[194] [See also J. C. Hare, Two Essays in Eng. Philology i. 47-56.]
[195] Thus Wallis (Gramm. Ling. Anglic., 1654): Singulari numero siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion of the old use of ‘thou’, see the Hares, Guesses at Truth, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even at the present day a Wessex matron has been known to resent the too familiar address of an inferior with the words, “Who bist thou a-theein’ of”? (The Spectator, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]
[196] What the actual position of the compellation ‘thou’ was at that time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller’s Church History, Dedication of Book vii.: “In opposition whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that thou from superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity; but from inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt”.
[197] See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical gender, Pott, Etymologische Forschungen, part 2, pp. 404, sqq.