those sentiments for all English-speaking persons, and thus intensified a hundred fold the tender connotations which it aimed merely to express. In this way, home, at first a mere concrete term, has become an abstract expression for all that is best in family life. There is at present a tendency to overuse the word (at least in this country) as little more than a softer synonym for 'house' or 'place where one lives.' The result of this process would finally be to strip the word of all its associations, and reduce it once more to the position of a colorless descriptive term.1 Conservatism, and the inevitable revolt against overdone sentimentality, may be strong enough to save the word.

County is properly the domain of a count or earl. Count is French (O. Fr. counte, modern comte), from L. comes, 'companion' (member of the imperial court). The influence of French on our language was sufficient to bring in countess and county, but count is still a foreign title. The English word is earl. The history of this word is almost the history of England. In A.S. eorl simply meant a 'nobleman,' a person of higher rank than an ordinary freeman. Among the Danes, the kindred word jarl was applied to a special class of noblemen of very high rank, who often exercised viceregal sway over particular districts, the same class that were called aldermen (ealdormenn) in Anglo-Saxon. When Cnut, the Dane, became king of England, jarl was of course used by the Danish nobles in England, and the corresponding English word eorl soon took on this special sense. The Normans found it in use, and it was recognized as equivalent to their term count.

1 This is a natural tendency of all language, and must not be regarded as anything specially objectionable or noteworthy in itself. In the case of this particular word, it seems a pity: that is all. There is nothing abnormal or unusual about the process.

Thereafter, count was used by French-speaking Englishmen, and earl by those who spoke the vernacular; but though count entered our language, it never displaced earl as the legal and popular English term. Countess, however, for earl's wife,' came in almost immediately, and is one of the oldest French words in our language. It occurs in the Peterborough continuation of the AngloSaxon Chronicle under the year 1140, and was certainly in use considerably earlier. Earl continued to be the highest rank in the English peerage until the fourteenth century, when the French titles of duke and marquess were bestowed on certain members of the royal family. These titles were later extended beyond their royal limits, and thus grew up the present system. Earl has now no territorial significance, but is a mere title of rank, inferior to that of duke and marquess. The old name of alderman did not go out of use when earl was substituted for it. It ceased to be a title of nobility, but was applied to the head of a guild or trade-company. Towns were governed by the heads of guilds, and hence alderman easily passed into its present civic meanings with the development of municipal government in England and America. Thus the complete history of the single word earl involves the Anglo-Saxon, the Danish, and the Norman Conquest, the amalgamation of the different races into the present English nation, the growth of the social system of Great Britain, and the development of municipal government on both sides of the Atlantic.

But this is not all. The etymology of earl is uncertain (perhaps it meant in the first place merely man'). But alderman is derived from aldor, 'chief,' literally an 'elder,' and so conducts us back to very primitive times, when the community was a family, and the head of the clan was

L

the father or patriarch. We have before us, then, not merely the history of England, but the history of government itself. The vicissitudes of a word like alderman, which once meant 'viceroy,' and now means a 'city official,' are curious enough; but the interest in them is far from that of mere curiosity.

CHAPTER XI

UNITY OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY

THE assimilating power of the English language is not less remarkable than the complexity of its sources. Our commonest words, as we have just seen, come from every corner of the world, and have been subjected to almost every conceivable process in form and meaning. Yet the language is consistent with itself, and has its distinctive character. A priori, one might expect that a tongue like our own would be like the learned jargon of Hudibras:

But, when he pleased to show't, his speech

In loftiness of sound was rich;

A Babylonish dialect,

Which learned pedants much affect.

It was a parti-colored dress

Of patched and piebald languages;
'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin,
Like fustian heretofore on satin;

It had an odd, promiscuous tone

As if h' had talked three parts in one;

Which made some think, when he did gabble,

Th' had heard three laborers of Babel;

Or Cerberus himself pronounce

A leash of languages at once.

In fact, however, English produces no such effect. Our Sprachgefühl, the genius of the language,' or whatever one may call the great conservative force which we have already considered, has not only kept English true to

itself through long periods of time, but revolts instantly against any neologism that does not accord with our idiom. English is full of French words, but it is none the less English. Transfer a French sentence1 into English words, literally, without regard to our idiom, and the vigor with which our language resents a Gallicism is evident at once; and the argument is clinched by the admitted impossibility of translating Macbeth or Hamlet into the language of Racine.

The diverse sources of English have been abundantly exemplified in the preceding chapter by the citation of groups of words for common things or familiar ideas. The harmony with which these diverse elements combine to make a consistent language may best be seen by examining the words that make up a particular passage of connected discourse.

Let us take, then, the following brief paragraph of recent narrative prose:

The negro pilot was naturally of a gloomy and savage expression of countenance, and at these unwelcome tidings his forbidding features were so hideously distorted with anger and terror that he looked more like a demon than a man of this world. Springing to his feet, he tore his cap from his head with a spasmodic twitch that half detached the glazed visor, threw off his tattered pea-jacket, seized a harpoon, and rushed toward the companion-way. The captain, poor, peevish martinet, was at his wit's end. How should he exorcise the roaring devil that his own cantankerous folly had raised?

This is somewhat wordy, but not unusually so, and no one will challenge any of its words as 'un-English.' It

1 This favorite trick of schoolboys and other humorists has, then, a real scientific value, though it does not prove that French is inferior to English as a medium of intellectual expression. The classic example of the joke is Mark Twain's Jumping Frog, which has amused two continents.