VI.

Terminations of the Participle.

239

sometimes occurring side by side in the same poem ; for example in The Romance of William of Palerne, of date about 1350. Spenser's 'glitterand' (F. Q. i. last surviving specimen of the northern form, that is in English; in Scotch it maintained its ground to a far later day, in some sort maintains it still.

7, 29) is about the

It is thus, and by steps such as these, that a change is brought about. That which ultimately is to win all comes in, it may be, at first as an exception; it then just obtains a footing and allowance; it next exists side by side and on equal terms with the old; then overbears it; and finally, it may be, claims the whole domain of the language as its own; so that sometimes a single isolated word, like the 'paterfamilias' of the Latins, keeps record of what was once the law of all the words of some certain class in a language.

I will not conclude this lecture without one further illustration of the same law, which, as I have sought to show, is evermore working, and causing this and that to be dismissed from a language, so soon as ever the speakers feel that it is not absolutely indispensable, that they can attain their end, which is, to convey their meaning, without it; though having dwelt on the subject so fully, I shall do little more than indicate this. I refer not here to any change in English now going forward, but to one which completed its course several centuries ago; namely, to the renouncing upon its part, of any distribution of nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in German, or even into masculine and feminine, as in French; and with this, and as a necessary consequence of

this, the dropping of any flexional modification of the adjectives in regimen with them. It was the boldest step in the way of simplification which the language has at any time taken; and, after what has lately been said, I need not observe was one which it took centuries to accomplish. Natural sex, of course, remains, being inherent in all language; but grammatical gender, with the exception of 'he,' 'she,' and 'it,' and perhaps one or two other fragmentary instances, the language has altogether forgone. An example will make clear the distinction between these. Thus it is not the word 'poetess' which is feminine, but the person indicated who is female. So too 'daughter,' 'queen,' are in English not feminine nouns, but nouns designating female persons. Take on the contrary 'filia,' or 'regina,' 'fille' or 'reine,' there you have feminine nouns as well as female persons. We did not inherit this simplicity from others, but, like the Danes, in so far as they have done the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or, which is for us more important, to the old Gothic, we find gender; and in all the daughter languages which were born of the Latin, in most of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully established to this day. The practical businesslike character of the English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction, which in a vast proportion of words, that is, in all which are the signs of inanimate objects, and as such incapable of sex, rested upon a fiction, and had no ground in the real nature of things. It is only by an act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be attributed to a table, a ship,

VI.

No Gender of Nouns in English. 241

or a tree; and there are aspects, this being one, in which the English is among the least imaginative of all languages, even while it has been employed in some of the mightiest works of imagination which the world has ever seen.†

What, it may be asked, is the meaning and explanation of all this? It is that at certain earlier periods of a nation's life its genius is synthetic, and at later becomes analytic. At earlier periods the imagination is more than the understanding; men love to contemplate the thing and the mode of the thing together, as a single idea, bound up in one. time arrives when the intellectual obtains the upper hand of the imaginative, when the inclination of those that speak a language is to analyse, to distinguish

But a

* Compare Pott, Etymologische Forschungen, part 2, p. 404. The entirely arbitrary character of the attribution of gender to sexless things is illustrated well by the way in which different genders are ascribed in. the same book to one and the same thing; thus in our Authorized Version, the tree his fruit' (Dan. iv. 14), the tree her fruit' (Rev. xxii. 1); and the different Versions vary, thus the vine her roots' (Ezek. xvii. 7, E. V.), 'the vine his roots' (ibid. Coverdale), 'the salt his savour' (Matt. v. 13, E. V.), 'the salt her saltness' (ibid. Tyndale). But at a much earlier date it had become to a great extent a matter of subjective individual feeling whether his (masculine and neuter) or her (feminine) should be employed. The two recensions of Wiclif frequently differ from one another; thus at Job xxxix. 14, the first, 'the ostridge her eggs,' the second, the ostridge his eggs;' so too at Gen. viii. 9, the first, 'the culver his foot,' the second, 'the culver her fo t.'

6

+ Compare Chasles, Études sur l'Allemagne, p. 25.

R

between these two, and not only to distinguish, but to divide, to have one word for the thing itself, and another for the quality or manner of the thing; and this, as it would appear, is true not of some languages only, but of all,

VII. Changed Meaning of our Words

I

LECTURE VII.

CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH
WORDS.

PROPOSE in my present lecture a little to con

sider those changes which have found or are now finding place in the meaning of English words; so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we employ them at this day in senses very different from those in which our forefathers employed them of old. You will observe that it is not obsolete words, such as have quite fallen out of present use, which I propose to consider; but such, rather, as are still on the lips of men, although with meanings more or less removed. from those which once they possessed. My subject is far more practical, has far more to do with your actual life, than if I were to treat of words at the present day altogether out of use. These last have an interest indeed, but so long as they remain what they are, and are to be found only in our glossaries, it is an interest of an antiquarian character. They constitute a part of the intellectual money with which our ancestors carried on the business of their lives; but now they are rather medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious than current money for the service of all. Their wings are clipped; they are 'winged words' no more; the spark of thought or