Englishmen had at that period to pick up their mother tongue as best they could. "The first English Grammar was not published until 1586. Little, if any, English was taught even in the lower classes of the Grammar schools, and this fact accounts for the wonderful varieties in spelling proper names common to the period. When there is scarcity of writing and printing language is unsettled and variable." Macaulay, describing an English county gentleman of William III's time, observes: "His language and pronunciation were such as we should now expect to have only from the from the most most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accent of his province." 1 One hundred years earlier, when language was even more unformed, the surrounding speech must have struck the ear almost as strangely as foreign tongue. It is stated that the dialects of the different shires were so marked that the militia were unable to comprehend their orders unless given by an officer from their own district. In Mrs Everett Green's Letters of Illustrious Ladies there is quoted an epistle from Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, to her brother Lord Stafford. It runs : "Brorder I pra you to ssand me my ness dorety by kass I kno har kon dessess se sal not lake hass I leffe and he wold be hord by me at hor haless I kyng he be hone kyne tha ffaless drab and kouk and nat ben I hade hadehar to my couffert. I Goadby. The England of Shakespeare. p. 101. Mrs Green appends the following key as the best rendering she can offer : "Brother, I pray you to send me my niece Dorothy, because I know her conditions she shall not lack as long as I live, an you would be heard by me at (all), or else I think you be own kin to the false drab and cook: had it not been I had had her to my comfort. ” 1 This is perhaps an extreme instance, but there is little doubt that the spelling, pronunciation and grammar of the Elizabethan gentry were very uncouth. The speech of the illiterate lower orders must have been many degrees more rude and barbarous; reading and writing being accomplishments beyond their ken. It has been shewn that the playhouse habitués were almost, if not entirely, vagrant persons, masterless men, thieves, horsestealers, whoremongers, cozeners, coneycatchers, contrivers of treason and other idle and dangerous persons. In The Roaring Girl Middleton has preserved a specimen of their discordant jargon. I 2 Trapdoor. Ben mort, shall you and I heave a bough, mill a ken, or nip a byng, and then we'll couch a hogshead under the ruffmans, and there you shall wap with me, and I'll niggle with you. Moll. Out, you damned impudent rascal! Trap. Cut benar whids, and hold your fambles and your stamps. L. Noland. Nay, nay, Moll, why art thou angry? what was his gibberish? Extracted from Social England. Vol. 11, pp. 244-246. 2 See ante p. 4. to Moll. Marry, this, my lord, says he: "Ben mort, good wench, "shall you and I heave a bough, mill a ken, or nip a bung? "shall you and I rob a house or cut a purse? Moll. Come, you rogue, sing with me. By Moll and Tearcat. Peck, pennam, lap, or popler, All Fine knaves, i'faith! J. Dapper. The grating of ten new cartwheels, and the gruntling of five hundred hogs coming from Rumford market, cannot make a worse noise than this canting language does in my ears. Burns coming from the plough uttered his inspirations in the dialect familiar to himself and his auditors. So also the West Country poet William Barnes, and others too numerous to recite; but the Elizabethan dramatists, though for the most part canaille writing for the pence and patronage of canaille, sang their music in pure and academic English. Just as their princely minds were apparent to each other, so also were the limpid beauties of their speech. "Whence are you sir?" cc says Greene, your terms are finer than the common sort of men. "Are you native of this place?" asks Shakespeare, your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling. " 2 "Note his language" recommends Massinger, "It relishes of better breeding than his present state dares promise. "Note the difference," repeats Webster, "T'wixt a noble strain, and one bred from the rabble.” ✦ Similarly, Ford in Perkin Warbeck comments on "the difference between noble natures and the base born. " 5 It is not nowadays a popular and vulgar occurrence for an actor to write a good play, still less is it usual for him to express himself in poetic form. Probably the rascality, on whose favour the Elizabethan playwrights subsisted, would have been as well, if not better pleased by a knockabout farce, or a morrice dance by Kemp. It seems, however, to have been de rigueur that the Elizabethan hacks should write in swelling numbers, and spin their drumming decasyllables from their own brains. The pedantic and bombastic coinages of the dramatists are the more inexplicable as Dekker confesses that the heads of "our I Friar Bacon. 1594. 2 A. Y. L. I. 1623. 4 Appius. and Virginia 1654. 5 (1. 1.) 1654. audience miserably run a wool gathering if we do but offer to break them with hard words. " 1 The The publication now in progress, under the auspices of the Philological Society, of Dr Murray's New English Dictionary renders it possible to say with approximate accuracy how much of the English language we owe to the fellowship of brilliant Spirits now under consideration. New English Dictionary is a registry where may be found recorded the birthday and parent, so far as known, of every English word now, or ever, in use. An examination of this work will therefore enable anyone by the Law of Average to arrive at an estimate of the number of words coined in certain periods by certain writers. The analysis of a sequence of 143 pages, (equal to 429 columns,) selected at random yielded so incredible a result that I deemed it desirable to examine further. My first investigation having by chance fallen upon a group of words including the Latin prefix Ex, I decided to examine a further sequence of 143 pages which should include the Greek prefix Ge. No author coins from a tongue with which he is not sufficiently familiar to think in, and Greek being "neglected and despised," I thought it probable that few if any words from this source were likely to have come into being during the Elizabethan era. This reasoning having been partly borne out, it will, I think, be sufficiently approximate to strike an average between the Latin and Greek groups, from which average we can arrive with sufficient accuracy at the probable total aggregate. As it will be many I (Kings Entertainment 1604.) |