ex cathe'dra is wrong, that nomad is pronounced nomad, not nōmad, that pariah is pronounced pă'riah and only ignorantly pari'ah, that primates as a term in zoölogy is pronounced primā'tēs and not as people usually do pronounce it, that parallelepiped is pronounced parallelĕ' piped and not parallelepi'ped, that centenary should be pronounced only cente'nary and not centě'nary, and so with dozens of other niceties of speech that are likely to be the scholar's special property. Of course the scholar purist does not expect that everybody shall know all these matters that mean so much to him, but he is amused nevertheless at the simplicity of the world in which his fine distinctions play no part. Perhaps his is a harmless amusement, and it has at least the advantage of being susceptible of indefinite extension. It would be possible to add to the stock of these private satisfactions to the point where the scholar purist lived in a state of perpetual amusement and wonder at the ignorance of the world about him. When he reached this point, however, he would probably find himself in the position of Falstaff, not only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men.

Advancing in the direction of seriousness, the next mood of purism is that of prudery, the fear of the simple and natural. Prunes and prisms propriety is a form of defense readily assumed by weaklings who feel the need of permanent protective habits. Still more serious is that temper or mood which appears in what might be called the purism of priestly caste. This is the mood of those persons who have convinced themselves that they are of the elect and that the welfare of the speech lies in their hands. What will become of the language, they ask,

unless our small band of chosen spirits, unless we who know, guide and direct it? These purists take their mission very seriously, much more seriously on the whole than the vast multitudes whose activities they would direct take it. The processes by which they convince themselves that they are rightly numbered among those of the priestly caste must always remain dark to outsiders. But it seems to be true that people have the conviction of sin in others, and of righteousness --in themselves, as often in matters of language as they do in other complications of human relationships.

Now that a few of the different types of purist attitude have been set forth as illustrations for the opportunity they afforded of condemning and rejecting this whole way of thinking about language, the reader may well ask in conclusion that some proper and commendable attitude of mind towards language shall at least be indicated by way of contrast. How shall one think about language if one does not want to be either a puristor a sloven, but merely a sensible well-regulated speaker and writer? The statement with which we began was that the purist is one who pays too great heed to the forms of language, and by implication this statement carries with it the principle that there is something more important in language which must not be sacrificed to merely formal demands. This something is that sense of intelligibility, of sympathetic communication, of satisfying self-realization which is always present when the activities of speech are carried on happily and successfully. This is the larger thing which justifies the invention of speech and which is the reason for existence of those forms by means of which it is realized. The normal attitude is there

fore one which leads the speaker or hearer, the reader or writer, to put himself into harmonious relations to this larger purpose. One must strive first of all to hear others as they would be heard and to understand them as they | would be understood. Every moment in our use of language depends so much for its successful issue upon our willingness to understand that without this willingness no practicable use of speech would be possible, The first necessity therefore requires that we shall not take speech as something which must first satisfy our personal demands on the side of its formal character before we shall regard it as a possibly intelligible or acceptable act / of communication. If it should happen, however, that our sense of harmony and complete absorption in the human situation for which speech exists is disturbed in spite of ourselves by something in the mere form of the communication, good manners demand that as far as possible these disturbing elements shall be set aside as merely personal variations. We do not require in other social relationships complete correspondence to our own code of procedure, nor should we demand it in speech. Common politeness requires that we shall permit others to do things in their own way within reasonable limits. Just when the limits of reason are passed is of course an important matter, and undoubtedly different persons will set different limits. But we may say as a general principle that the limits of reason are passed, that one moves out of the region of polite negligible variation, as soon as something in the forms of language disturbs the sense of completeness and harmony in the language situation so shockingly that it cannot be restored. When this point is reached, however, a new language situation has been

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produced, and what had been before merely a form of the language becomes weighted with a special and often unintended meaning of its own. At that point we then have to do not with purely formal matters, but with a great variety of general associations, with prejudices, preferences, and all the texture of habits by which one establishes oneself in a harmonious social grouping. It seems in the end, therefore, that merely formal matters are never of any significance in language. So long as we can, we disregard any variations that may occur, in the interests of politeness and of fullness of understanding. When we can no longer disregard them, they then cease to be merely formal matters and become instead the most deeply significant parts of the situations in which they arise. But the thoroughgoing purist knows nothing of these qualifications. To him the forms of the language, as he sees them, are sacred in themselves, and neither politeness, nor intelligibility, nor frailty, nor any other human virtue or weakness will avail to soften his stern decrees.

XV

THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH

It is the purpose of this and the immediately following chapters to indicate the character of the information the student accumulates who wishes to ground himself in the knowledge of English from the historical point of view, and to point out how he is to go about acquiring this information if he has it not. First of all, a clear division should be made between matters which are of collateral interest in the history of the language, and matters which have to do with the actual details of the language itself. These matters of collateral interest are of importance for filling in the background of the history of the language, but obviously the history of the language cannot be written merely in terms of background. The background may help to explain what happened and it may make more vivid the human surroundings of the language in its several stages. But for the history of the language itself it is necessary to turn to the specific and individual facts of linguistic experience.

The background of English is to be discovered in the ethnological, political, and cultural history of the English\ speaking peoples. It is of some interest to the student of language to know the race origins of the many peoples who have spoken the language, and also to know the relations of these English speaking peoples to other races with whom they have come into contact. The very beginnings of this ethnological history are obscured by