HISTORY OF THE GRAMMAR OF ENGLISH.

1. The Oldest English Synthetic. —The oldest English, or Anglo-Saxon, that was brought over here in the fifth century, was a language that showed the relations of words to each other by adding different endings to words, or by synthesis . These endings are called inflexions . Latin and Greek are highly inflected languages; French and German have many more inflexions than modern English; and ancient English (or Anglo-Saxon) also possessed a large number of inflexions.

2. Modern English Analytic. —When, instead of inflexions, a language employs small particles—such as prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and suchlike words—to express the relations of words to each other, such a language is called analytic or non-inflexional . When we say, as we used to say in the oldest English, “God is ealra cyninga cyning,” we speak a synthetic language. But when we say, “God is king of all kings,” then we employ an analytic or uninflected language.

3. Short View of the History of English Grammar. —From the time when the English language came over to this island, it has grown steadily in the number of its words. On the other hand, it has lost just as steadily in the number of its inflexions. Put in a broad and somewhat rough fashion, it may be said that—

(i) Up to the year 1100—one generation after the Battle of Senlac—the English language was a Synthetic Language.

(ii) From the year 1100 or thereabouts, English has been losing its inflexions, and gradually becoming more and more an Analytic Language.

4. Causes of this Change. —Even before the coming of the Danes and the Normans, the English people had shown a tendency to get rid of some of their inflexions. A similar tendency can be observed at the present time among the Germans of the Rhine Province, who often drop an n at the end of a word, and show in other respects a carelessness about grammar. But, when a foreign people comes among natives, such a tendency is naturally encouraged, and often greatly increased. The natives discover that these inflexions are not so very important, if only they can get their meaning rightly conveyed to the foreigners. Both parties, accordingly, come to see that the root of the word is the most important element; they stick to that, and they come to neglect the mere inflexions. Moreover, the accent in English words always struck the root; and hence this part of the word always fell on the ear with the greater force, and carried the greater weight. When the Danes—who spoke a cognate language—began to settle in England, the tendency to drop inflexions increased; but when the Normans—who spoke an entirely different language—came, the tendency increased enormously, and the inflexions of Anglo-Saxon began to “fall as the leaves fall” in the dry wind of a frosty October. Let us try to trace some of these changes and losses.

5. Grammar of the First Period, 450-1100. —The English of this period is called the Oldest English or Anglo-Saxon . The gender of nouns was arbitrary, or—it may be—poetical; it did not, as in modern English it does, follow the sex. Thus nama , a name, was masculine; tunge , a tongue, feminine; and eáge , an eye, neuter. Like nama , the proper names of men ended in a ; and we find such names as Isa, Offa, Penda, as the names of kings. Nouns at this period had five cases, with inflexions for each; now we possess but one inflexion—that for the possessive.—Even the definite article was inflected.—The infinitive of verbs ended in an ; and the sign to —which we received from the Danes—was not in use, except for the dative of the infinitive. This dative infinitive is still preserved in such phrases as “a house to let;” “bread to eat;” “water to drink.”—The present participle ended in ende (in the North ande ). This present participle may be said still to exist—in spoken, but not in written speech; for some people regularly say walkin , goin , for walking and going .—The plural of the present indicative ended in ath for all three persons. In the perfect tense, the plural ending was on .—There was no future tense; the work of the future was done by the present tense. Fragments of this usage still survive in the language, as when we say, “He goes up to town next week.”—Prepositions governed various cases; and not always the objective (or accusative), as they do now.

6. Grammar of the Second Period, 1100-1250. —The English of this period is called Early English . Even before the coming of the Normans, the inflexions of our language had—as we have seen—begun to drop off, and it was slowly on the way to becoming an analytic language. The same changes—the same simplification of grammar, has taken place in nearly every Low German language. But the coming of the Normans hastened these changes, for it made the inflexional endings of words of much less practical importance to the English themselves.—Great changes took place in the pronunciation also. The hard c or k was softened into ch ; and the hard guttural g was refined into a y or even into a silent w .—A remarkable addition was made to the language. The Oldest English or Anglo-Saxon had no indefinite article. They said ofer stán for on a rock . But, as the French have made the article un out of the Latin unus , so the English pared down the northern ane (= one ) into the article an or a . The Anglo-Saxon definite article was se , seo , þaet ; and in the grammar of this Second Period it became þe , þeo , þe .—The French plural in es took the place of the English plural in en . But housen and shoon existed for many centuries after the Norman coming; and Mr Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet, still deplores the ugly sound of nests and fists , and would like to be able to say and to write nesten and fisten .—The dative plural, which ended in um , becomes an e or an en . The um , however, still exists in the form of om in seldom (= at few times) and whilom (= in old times).—The gender of nouns falls into confusion, and begins to show a tendency to follow the sex.—Adjectives show a tendency to drop several of their inflexions, and to become as serviceable and accommodating as they are now—when they are the same with all numbers, genders, and cases.—The an of the infinitive becomes en , and sometimes even the n is dropped.— Shall and will begin to be used as tense-auxiliaries for the future tense.

7. Grammar of the Third Period, 1250-1350. —The English of this period is often called Middle English .—The definite article still preserves a few inflexions.—Nouns that were once masculine or feminine become neuter, for the sake of convenience.—The possessive in es becomes general.—Adjectives make their plural in e .—The infinitive now takes to before it—except after a few verbs, like bid , see , hear , etc.—The present participle in inge makes its appearance about the year 1300.

8. Grammar of the Fourth Period, 1350-1485. —This may be called Later Middle English . An old writer of the fourteenth century points out that, in his time—and before it—the English language was “a-deled a thre,” divided into three; that is, that there were three main dialects, the Northern , the Midland , and the Southern . There were many differences in the grammar of these dialects; but the chief of these differences is found in the plural of the present indicative of the verb. This part of the verb formed its plurals in the following manner:—

Northern.	Midland.	Southern.
We hopës	We hopen	We hopeth.
You hopës	You hopen	You hopeth.
They hopës	They hopen	They hopeth. 14

In time the Midland dialect conquered; and the East Midland form of it became predominant all over England. As early as the beginning of the thirteenth century, this dialect had thrown off most of the old inflexions, and had become almost as flexionless as the English of the present day. Let us note a few of the more prominent changes.—The first personal pronoun Ic or Ich loses the guttural, and becomes I .—The pronouns him , them , and whom , which are true datives, are used either as datives or as objectives.—The imperative plural ends in eth . “Riseth up,” Chaucer makes one of his characters say, “and stondeth by me!”—The useful and almost ubiquitous letter e comes in as a substitute for a , u , and even an . Thus nama becomes name , sunu (son) becomes sune , and withutan changes into withute .—The dative of adjectives is used as an adverb. Thus we find softë , brightë employed like our softly , brightly .—The n in the infinitive has fallen away; but the ë is sounded as a separate syllable. Thus we find brekë , smitë for breken and smiten .

9. General View. —In the time of King Alfred, the West-Saxon speech—the Wessex dialect—took precedence of the rest, and became the literary dialect of England. But it had not, and could not have, any influence on the spoken language of other parts of England, for the simple reason that very few persons were able to travel, and it took days—and even weeks—for a man to go from Devonshire to Yorkshire. In course of time the Midland dialect—that spoken between the Humber and the Thames—became the predominant dialect of England; and the East Midland variety of this dialect became the parent of modern standard English. This predominance was probably due to the fact that it, soonest of all, got rid of its inflexions, and became most easy, pleasant, and convenient to use. And this disuse of inflexions was itself probably due to the early Danish settlements in the east, to the larger number of Normans in that part of England, to the larger number of thriving towns, and to the greater and more active communication between the eastern seaports and the Continent. The inflexions were first confused, then weakened, then forgotten, finally lost. The result was an extreme simplification, which still benefits all learners of the English language. Instead of spending a great deal of time on the learning of a large number of inflexions, which are to them arbitrary and meaningless, foreigners have only to fix their attention on the words and phrases themselves, that is, on the very pith and marrow of the language—indeed, on the language itself. Hence the great German grammarian Grimm, and others, predict that English will spread itself all over the world, and become the universal language of the future. In addition to this almost complete sweeping away of all inflexions,—which made Dr Johnson say, “Sir, the English language has no grammar at all,”—there were other remarkable and useful results which accrued from the coming in of the Norman-French and other foreign elements.

10. Monosyllables. —The stripping off of the inflexions of our language cut a large number of words down to the root. Hundreds, if not thousands, of our verbs were dissyllables, but, by the gradual loss of the ending en (which was in Anglo-Saxon an ), they became monosyllables. Thus bindan , drincan , findan , became bind , drink , find ; and this happened with hosts of other verbs. Again, the expulsion of the guttural, which the Normans never could or would take to, had the effect of compressing many words of two syllables into one. Thus haegel , twaegen , and faegen , became hail , twain , and fain .—In these and other ways it has come to pass that the present English is to a very large extent of a monosyllabic character. So much is this the case, that whole books have been written for children in monosyllables. It must be confessed that the monosyllabic style is often dull, but it is always serious and homely. We can find in our translation of the Bible whole verses that are made up of words of only one syllable. Many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, too, are written in monosyllables. The same may be said of hundreds of our proverbs—such as, “Cats hide their claws”; “Fair words please fools”; “He that has most time has none to lose.” Great poets, like Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, understand well the fine effect to be produced from the mingling of short and long words—of the homely English with the more ornate Romance language. In the following verse from Matthew Arnold the words are all monosyllables, with the exception of tired and contention (which is Latin):—

In Tennyson’s “Lord of Burleigh,” when the sorrowful husband comes to look upon his dead wife, the verse runs almost entirely in monosyllables:—

An American writer has well indicated the force of the English monosyllable in the following sonnet:—

It will be observed that this sonnet consists entirely of monosyllables, and yet that the style of it shows considerable power and vigour. The words printed in italics are all derived from Latin, with the exception of the word phrase , which is Greek.

11. Change in the Order of Words. —The syntax—or order of words—of the oldest English was very different from that of Norman-French. The syntax of an Old English sentence was clumsy and involved; it kept the attention long on the strain; it was rumbling, rambling, and unpleasant to the ear. It kept the attention on the strain, because the verb in a subordinate clause was held back, and not revealed till we had come to the end of the clause. Thus the Anglo-Saxon wrote (though in different form and spelling)—

“When Darius saw, that he overcome be would.”

The newer English, under French influence, wrote—

“When Darius saw that he was going to be overcome.”

This change has made an English sentence lighter and more easy to understand, for the reader or hearer is not kept waiting for the verb; but each word comes just when it is expected, and therefore in its “natural” place. The Old English sentence—which is very like the German sentence of the present day—has been compared to a heavy cart without springs, while the newer English sentence is like a modern well-hung English carriage. Norman-French, then, gave us a brighter, lighter, freer rhythm, and therefore a sentence more easy to understand and to employ, more supple, and better adapted to everyday use.

12. The Expulsion of Gutturals. —(i) Not only did the Normans help us to an easier and pleasanter kind of sentence, they aided us in getting rid of the numerous throat-sounds that infested our language. It is a remarkable fact that there is not now in the French language a single guttural. There is not an h in the whole language. The French write an h in several of their words, but they never sound it. Its use is merely to serve as a fence between two vowels—to keep two vowels separate, as in la haine , hatred. No doubt the Normans could utter throat-sounds well enough when they dwelt in Scandinavia; but, after they had lived in France for several generations, they acquired a great dislike to all such sounds. No doubt, too, many, from long disuse, were unable to give utterance to a guttural. This dislike they communicated to the English; and hence, in the present day, there are many people—especially in the south of England—who cannot sound a guttural at all. The muscles in the throat that help to produce these sounds have become atrophied—have lost their power for want of practice. The purely English part of the population, for many centuries after the Norman invasion, could sound gutturals quite easily—just as the Scotch and the Germans do now; but it gradually became the fashion in England to leave them out.

13. The Expulsion of Gutturals. —(ii) In some cases the guttural disappeared entirely; in others, it was changed into or represented by other sounds. The ge at the beginning of the passive (or past) participles of many verbs disappeared entirely. Thus gebróht , gebóht , geworht , became brought , bought , and wrought . The g at the beginning of many words also dropped off. Thus Gyppenswich became Ipswich ; gif became if ; genoh , enough .—The guttural at the end of words—hard g or c —also disappeared. Thus halig became holy ; eordhlic , earthly ; gastlic , ghastly or ghostly . The same is the case in dough , through , plough , etc.—the guttural appearing to the eye but not to the ear.—Again, the guttural was changed into quite different sounds—into labials, into sibilants, into other sounds also. The following are a few examples:—

( a ) The guttural has been softened, through Norman-French influence, into a sibilant . Thus rigg , egg , and brigg have become ridge , edge , and bridge .

( b ) The guttural has become a labial — f —as in cough , enough , trough , laugh , draught , etc.

( c ) The guttural has become an additional syllable, and is represented by a vowel-sound . Thus sorg and mearh have become sorrow and marrow .

( d ) In some words it has disappeared both to eye and ear. Thus makëd has become made .

14. The Story of the GH. —How is it, then, that we have in so many words the two strongest gutturals in the language— g and h —not only separately, in so many of our words, but combined? The story is an odd one. Our Old English or Saxon scribes wrote—not light , might , and night , but liht , miht , and niht . When, however, they found that the Norman-French gentlemen would not sound the h , and say—as is still said in Scotland— li ch t , &c., they redoubled the guttural, strengthened the h with a hard g , and again presented the dose to the Norman. But, if the Norman could not sound the h alone, still less could he sound the double guttural; and he very coolly let both alone— ignored both. The Saxon scribe doubled the signs for his guttural, just as a farmer might put up a strong wooden fence in front of a hedge; but the Norman cleared both with perfect ease and indifference. And so it came to pass that we have the symbol gh in more than seventy of our words, and that in most of these we do not sound it at all. The gh remains in our language, like a moss-grown boulder, brought down into the fertile valley in a glacial period, when gutturals were both spoken and written, and men believed in the truthfulness of letters—but now passed by in silence and noticed by no one.

15. The Letters that represent Gutturals. —The English guttural has been quite Protean in the written or printed forms it takes. It appears as an i , as a y , as a w , as a ch , as a dge , as a j , and—in its more native forms—as a g , a k , or a gh . The following words give all these forms: ha i l, da y , fo w l, tea ch , e dge , a j ar, dra g , truc k , and trou gh . Now hail was hagol , day was daeg , fowl was fugol , teach was taecan , edge was egg , ajar was achar . In seek , beseech , sought —which are all different forms of the same word—we see the guttural appearing in three different forms—as a hard k , as a soft ch , as an unnoticed gh . In think and thought , drink and draught , sly and sleight , dry and drought , slay and slaughter , it takes two different forms. In dig , ditch , and dike —which are all the same word in different shapes—it again takes three forms. In fly , flew , and flight , it appears as a y , a w , and a gh . But, indeed, the manners of a guttural, its ways of appearing and disappearing, are almost beyond counting.

16. Grammatical Result of the Loss of Inflexions. —When we look at a Latin or French or German word, we know whether it is a verb or a noun or a preposition by its mere appearance—by its face or by its dress, so to speak. But the loss of inflexions which has taken place in the English language has resulted in depriving us of this advantage—if advantage it is. Instead of looking at the face of a word in English, we are obliged to think of its function ,—that is, of what it does. We have, for example, a large number of words that are both nouns and verbs—we may use them as the one or as the other; and, till we have used them, we cannot tell whether they are the one or the other. Thus, when we speak of “a cut on the finger,” cut is a noun , because it is a name; but when we say, “Harry cut his finger,” then cut is a verb , because it tells something about Harry. Words like bud , cane , cut , comb , cap , dust , fall , fish , heap , mind , name , pen , plaster , punt , run , rush , stone , and many others, can be used either as nouns or as verbs . Again, fast , quick , and hard may be used either as adverbs or as adjectives ; and back may be employed as an adverb , as a noun , and even as an adjective . Shakespeare is very daring in the use of this licence. He makes one of his characters say, “But me no buts!” In this sentence, the first but is a verb in the imperative mood; the second is a noun in the objective case. Shakespeare uses also such verbs as to glad , to mad , such phrases as a seldom pleasure , and the fairest she . Dr Abbott says, “In Elizabethan English, almost any part of speech can be used as any other part of speech. An adverb can be used as a verb, ‘they askance their eyes’; as a noun, ‘the backward and abysm of time’; or as an adjective, ‘a seldom pleasure.’ Any noun, adjective, or neuter verb can be used as an active verb. You can ‘happy’ your friend, ‘malice’ or ‘fool’ your enemy, or ‘fall’ an axe upon his neck.” Even in modern English, almost any noun can be used as a verb. Thus we can say, “to paper a room”; “to water the horses”; “to black-ball a candidate”; to “ iron a shirt” or “a prisoner”; “to toe the line.” On the other hand, verbs may be used as nouns; for we can speak of a work , of a beautiful print , of a long walk , and so on. PwD5UM3dTbX74FUG/40CWAFkw7vtmUso8xTiSL09fqdRlWE3HFrZ7pUhfc6EJy7X