A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2

John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

Informations

• Publié par: thawyang
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 36
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2), by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) Author: John Miller Dow Meiklejohn Release Date: June 3, 2007 [EBook #21665] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE *** Produced by Louise Hope, Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net This e-text includes a few characters that will only display in UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding: ā ă ē ŏ ī ĭ ŭ: vowels with “long” or “short” marks (macron and breve) œ, ȝ: “oe” ligature; yogh If any of these characters do not display properly—in particular, if the diacritic does not appear directly above the letter—or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that the browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change your browser’s default font. All Greek words were given in transliteration, and have not been changed. A few typographical errors have been corrected. They have been marked in the text with mouse-hover popups. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY J. M. D. MEIKLEJOHN, M.A. PROFESSOR OF THE T HEORY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS , SCOTLAND B O 1887 S T O N D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1887, BY D. C. HEATH & CO. iii P U B L I S H E R ’ S N O T I C E . The present volume is the second part of the author’s “English Language—Its Grammar, History, and Literature.” It includes the History of the English Language and the History of English Literature. The first part comprises the department of Grammar, under which are included Etymology, Syntax, Analysis, Word Formation, and History, with a brief outline of Composition and of Prosody. The two may be had separately or bound together. Each constitutes a good one year’s course of English study. The first part is suited for high schools; the second, for high schools and colleges. The book, which is worthy of the wide reputation and ripe experience of the eminent author, is distinguished throughout by clear, brief, and comprehensive statement and illustration. It is especially suited for private students or for classes desiring to make a brief and rapid review, and also for teachers who want only a brief text as a basis for their own instruction. v P R E F A C E . This book provides sufficient matter for the four years of study required, in England, of a pupil-teacher, and also for the first year at his training college. An experienced master will easily be able to guide his pupils in the selection of the proper parts for each year. The ten pages on the Grammar of Verse ought to be reserved for the fifth year of study. It is hoped that the book will also be useful in Colleges, Ladies’ Seminaries, High Schools, Academies, Preparatory and Normal Schools, to candidates for teachers’ examinations and Civil Service examinations, and to all who wish for any reason to review the leading facts of the English Language and Literature. Only the most salient features of the language have been described, and minor details have been left for the teacher to fill in. The utmost clearness and simplicity have been the aim of the writer, and he has been obliged to sacrifice many interesting details to this aim. The study of English Grammar is becoming every day more and more historical —and necessarily so. There are scores of inflections, usages, constructions, idioms, which cannot be truly or adequately explained without a reference to the past states of the language—to the time when it was a synthetic or inflected language, like German or Latin. The Syntax of the language has been set forth in the form of R ULES. This was thought to be better for young learners who require firm and clear dogmatic statements of fact and duty. But the skilful teacher will slowly work up to these rules by the interesting process of induction, and will—when it is possible —induce his pupil to draw the general conclusions from the data given, and thus to make rules for himself. Another convenience that will be found by both teacher and pupil in this form of rules will be that they can be compared with the rules of, or general statements about, a foreign language—such as Latin, French, or German. It is earnestly hoped that the slight sketches of the History of our Language and of its Literature may not only enable the young student to pass his examinations with success, but may also throw him into the attitude of mind of Oliver Twist, and induce him to “ask for more.” The Index will be found useful in preparing the parts of each subject; as all the separate paragraphs about the same subject will be found there grouped together. J. M. D. M. vii vi C O N T E N T S . Italicized items were added by the transcriber. As explained in the Publisher’s Notice, this text is the second of two volumes; pagination was continuous, beginning at 193 for this volume. PART III. PAGE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, AND THE FAMILY TO WHICH IT BELONGS THE PERIODS OF ENGLISH H ISTORY OF THE VOCABULARY H ISTORY OF THE GRAMMAR SPECIMENS OF ENGLISH OF D IFFERENT PERIODS MODERN ENGLISH LANDMARKS IN THE H ISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE PART IV. H ISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Our Oldest English Literature The Fourteenth Century The Fifteenth Century The Sixteenth Century The Seventeenth Century The First Half of the Eighteenth Century The Second Half of the Eighteenth Century The First Half of the Nineteenth Century The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century TABLES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE INDEX Publisher’s Advertising 193 198 202 239 250 258 266 271 271 280 286 289 298 311 323 336 353 367 381 Ad 1 P A III. R T 191 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 193 I N T R O D U C T I O N . 1. Tongue, Speech, Language.—We speak of the “English tongue” or of the “French language”; and we say of two nations that they “do not understand each other’s speech.” The existence of these three words—speech, tongue, language—proves to us that a language is something spoken,—that it is a number of sounds; and that the writing or printing of it upon paper is a quite secondary matter. Language, rightly considered, then, is an organised set of sounds. These sounds convey a meaning from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the hearer, and thus serve to connect man with man. 2. Written Language.—It took many hundreds of years—perhaps thousands —before human beings were able to invent a mode of writing upon paper—that is, of representing sounds by signs. These signs are called letters; and the whole set of them goes by the name of the Alphabet—from the two first letters of the Greek alphabet, which are called alpha, beta. There are languages that of the Greek alphabet, which are called alpha, beta. There are languages that have never been put upon paper at all, such as many of the African languages, many in the South Sea Islands, and other parts of the globe. But in all cases, every language that we know anything about—English, Latin, French, German —existed for hundreds of years before any one thought of writing it down on paper. 3. A Language Grows.—A language is an organism or organic existence. Now every organism lives; and, if it lives, it grows; and, if it grows, it also dies. Our language grows; it is growing still; and it has been growing for many hundreds of years. As it grows it loses something, and it gains something else; it alters its appearance; changes take place in this part of it and in that part, —until at length its appearance in age is something almost entirely different from what it was in its early youth. If we had the photograph of a man of forty, and the photograph of the same person when he was a child of one, we should find, on comparing them, that it was almost impossible to point to the smallest trace of likeness in the features of the two photographs. And yet the two pictures represent the same person. And so it is with the English language. The oldest English, which is usually called Anglo-Saxon, is as different from our modern English as if they were two distinct languages; and yet they are not two languages, but really and fundamentally one and the same. Modern English differs from the oldest English as a giant oak does from a small oak sapling, or a broad stalwart man of forty does from a feeble infant of a few months old. 4. The English Language.—The English language is the speech spoken by the Anglo-Saxon race in England, in most parts of Scotland, in the larger part of Ireland, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, in South Africa, and in many other parts of the world. In the middle of the fifth century it was spoken by a few thousand men who had lately landed in England from the Continent: it is now spoken by more than one hundred millions of people. In the course of the next sixty years, it will probably be the speech of two hundred millions. 5. English on the Continent.—In the middle of the fifth century it was spoken in the north-west corner of Europe—between the mouths of the Rhine, the Weser, and the Elbe; and in Schleswig there is a small district which is called Angeln to this day. But it was not then called English; it was more probably called Teutish, or Teutsch, or Deutsch—all words connected with a generic word which covers many families and languages—Teutonic. It was a rough guttural speech of one or two thousand words; and it was brought over to this country by