had never been born. Still, the process would have been more gradual and much less certain. What was needed at this juncture was a literary man, a poet of commanding genius, whose native dialect was that which stood ready to be stamped as literary English forever. Chaucer was such a poet; and after his death nobody doubted that the language as he had written it was the best English.

It must not be thought that Chaucer actually imported many new words into our language. Almost every word that he used can be found somewhere at any earlier date. Most of his French and Latin borrowings' had been made before. What he did for the Midland dialect was rather to write it with an ease, a polish, and a regularity which had not been hitherto attained, and to use it as the vehicle for first-rate poetry. This stamped the language of Chaucer at once as the literary standard. The excellence of his English is celebrated by his contemporaries and successors. By his side stood Gower, who wrote in the same dialect. Gower, though no genius, was a skilful versifier and the master of an extremely neat style. Fortunately, his influence on the language coincided with Chaucer's in almost every particular. Gower without Chaucer would not have sufficed. Chaucer without Gower would have been abundantly able to accomplish what was necessary. The coincidence of their efforts was fortunate for the English language. Chaucer died in 1400. His successors and feeble pupils, Hoccleve and Lydgate, though they contributed nothing of value to English poetry, did much to popularize the language of Chaucer, which they directly imitated in every possible way. There was no longer any doubt what was the English literary language: it was the East Midland dialect, and whoever wrote in any other dialect was not

writing standard English, but a local or provincial patois. Since 1400 there has been a very slight shift, so that Modern English is a trifle more northerly than Chaucer's dialect, but this is of no importance in the present discussion.1

It is to be noticed that the dialect which finally became literary English, and which, therefore, all educated speakers of English use, however they may differ among themselves in details, is not the descendant of King Alfred's West Saxon, but of quite a different dialect, the Mercian. The West Saxon is now represented by the rustic dialects of Wilts and Dorset in the South of England.

The triumph of the Midland Dialect was complete by 1450, and soon caused most of the other dialects to fall into disuse as literary media. In the north, however, a variety of the Northumbrian was developed into the Scottish language, which was subjected to many special influences, and received much literary cultivation. The Scottish language could not maintain itself, however. It has been constrained to consort with the dialects once more, though it still maintains an exceptionally dignified position among them.

Thus every one of the three dialects of the Anglo-Saxons has had its chance. The Northumbrian became the first literary English. The West Saxon succeeded to that position, and held it until the Norman Conquest. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Mercian made good its claims and won a recognition which was final.

1 The most striking evidence of this shift is seen in the use of s instead of th in the third person singular of verbs. Chaucer said hath, doth, waileth, for example, but we say has, does, wails.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LATIN IN ENGLISH

IN sketching the development of the English language. we have confined our attention to the native (AngloSaxon) element and to the influence exerted by Norman and Parisian French. We have yet to consider the indebtedness of our language to the Latin.

The

English began to borrow words from the Latin before there was any English. Street (L. strata [via], 'a paved road'), wall (L. vallum), chalk (L. calx, calcis, ‘lime'), and a few other terms entered the West Germanic dialects before the Anglo-Saxon Conquest of Britain. A few others were learned by the invaders from the Britons, who had been Roman colonists for three or four hundred years. Among these were port (L. portus) and -chester, -caster (L. castra, 'camp'), as seen in the name of the County of Chester, and in Silchester, Lancaster, etc. conversion of the invaders to Christianity immediately brought in a number of religious and ecclesiastical words, like pope, bishop, monk, nun, which we have already studied (p. 44). From this time to the present, the borrowing of Latin words has gone on incessantly. We have seen that this is true of the technical dialects of divinity, philosophy, law, and natural science. But the influence of Latin is not confined to the technical vocabulary. It is felt in almost every sentence that we utter. It pervades the whole system of English speech.

The relations between French and Latin on the one hand, and English and French on the other, make the influence of Latin on English extremely complex. In outline, however, the subject may be easily grasped.

One fact of cardinal importance should be kept constantly in mind. In the eighth century, when AngloSaxon was developing a written literature, every educated Englishman spoke and wrote Latin as easily as he spoke and wrote his mother tongue. Indeed, the ability to use Latin freely was, until a comparatively recent period, the chief distinguishing mark of an educated man. Hence in all the earlier periods of our language, anybody who was learned enough to borrow a Latin word at all, was sufficiently familiar with that language to borrow the word in conversation as well as from the written page. This significant fact is often lost sight of.

Before the Norman Conquest, then, a good many Latin words had been introduced into English, either orally or with the pen. Many of these disappeared when the literary West Saxon went to pieces, but a few have survived and are still in use.

After the Conquest, as we have seen, French words began to come into our language,-first from Norman French, and afterwards, in much larger numbers, from the Central dialect, the French of Paris' which Chaucer's Prioress had never learned. The Norman-French words

which became English were mostly 'popular' from the outset. They include such simple terms as peace, tower, castle, grief, prison, court, countess, and the like, which are indistinguishable in the minds of all English-speaking persons from the commonest words of native origin. Later, from 1300 on, there took place a wholesale importation of words from Central French, and to this the large proportion of

French words in our language is chiefly due. This importation was made by Englishmen to whom French was almost a second mother tongue, and was therefore effected, to a considerable extent, through oral rather than written borrowing. Yet many French words came in through literary channels as well. Now, all literary Englishmen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries knew a good deal of Latin. Gower, for instance, wrote three long poems, -one in English, one in French, and one in Latin, — and handled the three languages with equal facility. Thus the same persons who were borrowing from French were at the same time borrowing from Latin, and, since French itself is only Latin in a corrupt form, it is often impossible to determine from which of the two languages a particular word was directly taken. The mere fact that the form of the English word is rather French than Latin does not settle the question. For the form which a Latin word assumed when it became English was frequently determined by the habits of the French language. Thus our word figure is ultimately derived from the Latin figura, of which the French figure is a clipped form. It is probable that we took the word directly from the French. Yet this is not certain. For any English writer who had wished to introduce the Latin figura into the vernacular would at once have modified the word after the French fashion. Thus, whether figure came from Latin directly or from French, it would inevitably have taken the same form in English: namely, figure. Texture, for example, is known to have come directly from the Latin textura; yet it has been remade, after the French model, as set by figure and other words already in the language, so that, so far as appears from its form, it might perfectly well have come from the French texture. So