By JOHN PEILE, M. A.

Words are subject to an incessant change. Substantives, for example, are the names of things actually existing, or of qualities of those things. When I say an oak, I mean an oak and not a beech; goodness is not badness; and if these things don’t change, how can the names which express them change without causing utter confusion? Perhaps variations so violent as these are not very common, and yet both these changes have occurred in language. The very same word which to the Greeks meant an oak, to the Romans meant a beech, though an oak never yet changed into a beech. Schlecht in German first of all meant “straight.” Now the “straightness” of a visible object, such as a line, is the most obvious metaphor by which to express the moral idea of “straightforwardness” and simplicity of heart and purpose, just as our common word right means originally that which is straight, the Latin rectus. But then simpleness may shade into the folly of the simpleton; and lastly the fool in worldly wisdom may give his name to the fool of whom Solomon spoke; and by some such process as this schlecht in modern German means “bad” only. After seeing this change of nouns, can we wonder that verbs can vary their meaning by imperceptible degrees so much that the first sense would be altogether unrecognizable unless we had the history of the word recorded by its use in successive writers?

Great changes of language are sometimes due to great convulsions in history; as when the Roman civilization was destroyed by nations comparatively uncivilized and the language of the Romans remained modified in different ways in the countries of which they were the lords no longer. Such great changes do not often take place; yet just as surely, though more slowly, a gradual change goes on in the most peaceful times, of which you cannot have a better example than in your own English. “Well,” you say, “surely English has not changed much in the last three hundred years. We can read Shakspere without any difficulty.” That is saying a little too much; we are so familiar with the best parts of Shakspere that perhaps we are hardly conscious of the difference; the words have a well-known sound, and if we are not students of language we may not examine them very carefully. But open your Shakspere almost at random and you will soon find out, if you really consider, how much is now obsolete, how many words have passed out of use or are used in a different sense. I have opened on “Macbeth,” Act. i. Sec. 7, and there I find in Lady Macbeth’s speech:—

Now look at a few of the words here. (1) “Chamberlain,” as we all know, etymologically a man of the chamber; it comes from camera, a chamber, originally a vault; the root of this is cam—to be bent or crooked, which is supposed to be the origin of the name of our most crooked river. The old sense of “chamberlain” has not quite died out of our recollection; yet when we speak of the Lord Chamberlain—the only person to whom the title is now applied—we don’t think of a man whose business it is to guard his king’s sleep when on a journey, or, generally, of a bed-room attendant, but of one whose best known duty is the censorship of plays. (2) “Wassail” is a word which we should expect to find in a historical novel, but not to hear in every-day talk. We feel pretty sure that it has something to do with good cheer, but we may not know that it was originally a drinking of health; that was was the imperative of the verb was “to be,” which we have turned into an auxiliary verb to mark past time; and the last syllable is our word hale—healthy, which we have pretty well restricted to the description of an elderly man, whom we call “hale for his years;” though we are familiar with the word in corrupted form whole, which we have in the Bible, “I have made a man every whit whole on the Sabbath day.” (3) “Convince” has wavered much in sense; we use it now simply for persuading a person, but the primary meaning was “to overpower,” which it has here; in the Bible phrase “Which of you convinceth me of sin?” we have the same special sense of overcoming by testimony, which convincere had in Latin.

So again (4) “Warder,” like “wassail” is a word with which we are familiar from books, but which we should not ourselves use without the appearance of affectation; we should use the equivalent “guard.” We have here a couple of words identical in meaning, just as we have wise and guise, warrant and guarantee, wager and gaze, and others which explain the riddle, such as war and French guerre, warren and French garenne. It is well known that in all these the w marks the Teutonic word introduced alike into England by the Anglo-Saxons and into France by the Franks, which the earlier inhabitants of France were unable to pronounce without letting a g escape before it; and so they produced the second form beginning with gu. Some of these second forms were brought into England by the Normans, and existed there by the side of the English word brought long before; but as there was no distinction in sense, one form generally fell into disuse, only to be revived for a special purpose, as by Sir Walter Scott, to give a mediÆval look to his poems.

(5) “Fume” meant smoke or steam. Shakspere used it metaphorically, just as we might speak of a man’s reason being clouded. Such a use of the word may have been familiar at his time, but no such idea would now attach to it; if we use it at all, we do so in the old simple sense, as the “fumes of tobacco,” the same sense which the word bore at Rome and in the far-away India more than twenty centuries ago; while the Greeks turned it, by a different metaphor, to express the steam of passion, and Plato in his famous analysis distinguished the “thumoeides,” the spirited part of the soul, from that part which reasons, and from that part which desires. (6) “Receipt” seems to be used of a place, that place where reason is found, just as we hear of Matthew in the Bible “sitting at the receipt of custom.” (7) “Limbec” has probably died out altogether. It is only the student of the history of the English language who can guess that the word is equivalent to alembic, which meant a still or retort, and so is used here by Shakspere merely in the sense of an empty vessel, that into which anything may be poured. The word is Arabic; it was brought into England with chemical study like alchemy itself, algebra, and many others. Then by degrees people fancied that the a at the beginning of the word was our article, though really the first syllable al is the Arabic article; and thus lembic or limbic was left. The article has often been a thief in England. It has two forms an and a, and meant one, as you may see in the old Scotch form, “ane high and michty lord.” The shortened form a was naturally used before a consonant, but when the word began with n, people did not always see where to divide rightly. Thus a nadder turned into an adder, a napron has become an apron, etc.; on the other hand the eft (ewt) seems to have robbed the article in its turn and become a newt.

Thus we have examined one passage, and have found in its four lines seven words which are either not used now at all or are used in a different sense. Yet, as we said, the passage as a whole sounds simple enough when we read it or hear it on the stage. We must admit then that the English of to-day differs much from Shakspere’s English in the meaning of its words.