III.]

*

THOU, FAMILIAR OR RUDE.

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which it stirred up in them who were not aware of, or would not allow for, the scruples which induced them to it. It is however. in its other aspect that we must chiefly regret the dying out of the use of 'thou' that is, as the voice of peculiar intimacy and special affection, as between husband and wife, parents and children, and such other as may be knit together by bands of more than common affection.

I observed in entering upon this part of my subject, that my illustrations of it should be drawn in the main from that which is now going forward in the language; yet before concluding my lecture, I will draw one illustration from its remoter periods, and will call your attention to a force not now waning and failing, but which has wholly disappeared long ago. I cannot well pass it by; because we have here the boldest step which in this direction of simplification the English language has at any time taken. I allude to the renouncing of the distribution of its nouns into masculine, feminine and neuter, or even into mas

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* 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."

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culine and feminine, as in the French; and with this, and as a necessary consequence of this, the dropping of any flexional modification in the adjectives connected with them. 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 foregone. An example will make clear the distinction between these. When I use the word 'poetess,' it is not the word 'poetess' which is feminine, but the person indicated by the word 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. I need hardly say to you that 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 the four daughter languages which have descended from the Latin, in most of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully established to the present day. The practical business-like character of the English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction, which in the great multitude of words, that is, in all having to do with inanimate things, and as such incapable of sex, rested upon a fiction, and had no ground in the real nature of things. It

III.]

ENGLISH UNIMAGINATIVE.

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is only by an act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be attributed to a table, a ship, a tree; and there are aspects, this is one, in which the English is among the least imaginative of all languages, even while it has been employed in some of the greatest works of imagination which the world has ever seen.

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LECTURE IV.

CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS.

I

PROPOSE, according to the plan which I sketched out in my first lecture, to take for the subject of my present one the changes which in the course of time have found place, or now are finding place, in the meaning of many among our 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, it is not words which have quite fallen out of present use that I propose to consider -words rather, which are still on the lips of men, but with meanings more or less removed from those which once they possessed. My subject is far more practical, you will feel it to have far more to do with your actual life, than if I had taken obsolete words, and considered them. These last have an interest indeed, but it is an interest somewhat of an antiquarian character. Such words were a part of the intellectual money with which our ancestors carried on their affairs, but now they are rather medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious than current money for the needs and pleasures of all. Their wings are clipped, so that they are "winged words” (πεa πτepóεvтa) no more;

DUTCH FOR GERMAN.

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the spark of thought or feeling, kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs along them, as along the electric wires of the soul.

And then, besides this, there is little or no danger that any should be misled by them. A reader lights for the first time on one of these obsolete English words, 'frampold,' or 'garboil,' or 'brangle;' he is at once conscious of his ignorance; he has recourse to a glossary, or if he guesses from the context at the word's signification, still his guess is as a guess to him, and no more. But words that have changed their meaning have often a deceivableness about them, so that he never doubts but that he knows their intention, has no misgiving but that they possess for him the same force which they possessed for their writer, and conveyed to his contemporaries, when indeed it is otherwise altogether.

Let me illustrate this by examples. A reader of our day lights upon such a passage as the following (it is in the Preface to Howell's Lexicon, 1660):

Though the root of the English language be Dutch, yet it may be said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French stock." He may know that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to our own; but this that it is the mother or root of it will certainly perplex him, and he will hardly know what to make of the assertion; perhaps he ascribes it to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered in his esteem. But presently in the course of his reading he meets with the following statement, this time in Fuller's Holy War,