than a tenth of the population, kept on side by side for a time without much intermingling. When at last the native language became permeated with French words, the result was due in part to causes quite independent of and later than the Conquest.

The direct effect of the Conquest was this. The leading positions in church and state were occupied by Normans. Natives speaking only English became, of necessity, an inferior class. Some of them might, indeed, attain to the dignity of town bailiff or village priest. But the bulk of the population was illiterate, and the language became, to use a technical term, a "rustic" speech. Grammatical niceties were disregarded. The tendency, already noted in § 215, to reduce a, o, u in termination-syllables to obscure e, and even to slough off these termination-syllables altogether, became irresistible. Distinction of (grammatical) gender was dropped, the declension classes were merged in one (with an occasional variety), and the conjugations were simplified and normalized. In less than two centuries the language, still quite free from foreign admixture, had almost ceased to be an inflectional language and had assumed most of the characteristics of our modern speech. Thus the Ormulum, written about 1200, in the Midland dialect, differs but slightly from English of to-day in point of grammar. The chief difference is one of vocabulary: in the Ormulum many native words are retained which have been supplanted, since 1200, by French or Latin.*

219. Another phenomenon of the period is the multiplicity of dialects. Before the Norman Conquest there were three leading dialects. After the Conquest these three are represented by a variety of sub-dialects, the dividing lines of which are not always clear. This multiplicity resulted from the loss of all centres of literary influence. In the

*There are also not a few Danish words in the Ormulum; most of these, too, have passed away.

olden time Canterbury, Winchester, Worcester, York, Durham, perhaps Peterborough, had been at least provincial standards of correct usage. But these towns had declined in influence, and London, which was eventually to become the all-powerful centre of the new English, was only slowly coming to the front. Consequently each petty section spoke its own speech without regard to its neighbors, and each writer wrote in the speech of his section.

Precisely when the preponderance of London began to assert itself, and how it happened that the language of the new London was Midland rather than Southern, these are points upon which we are not fully enlightened. But we shall scarcely err seriously, if we hold that by the year 1300 London English was in the lead.

3. THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES.

220. The exact year of Chaucer's birth is not known. Probably it was 1340, certainly not many years before. By that time the supremacy of London English was unquestioned. The young poet, accordingly, as a Londoner by birth and a follower of the brilliant Court of the Edwards, enjoyed the inestimable advantage of speaking and writing the standard language. Compared with him, other poets of the period, Gower perhaps excepted, seem more or less provincial. Chaucer's language, apart from certain archaisms of pronunciation, has for us five centuries later nothing uncouth.

It was not alone the rare poetic gifts of Chaucer and his contemporaries that made the fourteenth century memorable. The century set the fashion in word-borrowing. Although subsequent centuries have performed greater feats in the way of borrowing, the century of Chaucer and Gower gave to our language its peculiar bent in this direction. French medieval literature was then at the height of its supremacy over Europe. In all branches of art and knowledge French terms were introduced freely, supplant

ing the native terms. The language became, at least in the color of its vocabulary, Romance rather than Germanic. To test the assertion we need only read from twenty to thirty pages of Chaucer. We shall find the poet's Romance vocabulary quite familiar, seldom requiring definition; whereas the words and phrases which do require definition are nearly always native expressions, still current in the fourteenth century, but now obsolete. Also many Latin words were introduced, either directly, or through the medium of French.

221. The grammatical structure of Chaucer's language is so like our own that the few points of difference may be ignored here. In truth, the language is almost as fresh, as direct and intelligible to us as it was to the Londoner of 1400.

But in one respect, certainly, we must be on our guard. The pronunciation of the fourteenth century retained many features which have since been radically changed. To mention them all would not be possible in this place. Only three classes will be briefly touched upon. 1. The long vowels i, o, u were still pronounced as they had been in Oldest English. Namely, i had the sound of our ee in seen; ō, oo, had the sound of our o in bone; u had the sound of our oo in soon. Put negatively, the had not been diphthonged into ai, the u (often written ou) had not been diphthonged into au. In fact the complete conversion of ū to au did not take place before the end of the sixteenth century.

2. The final -e was sounded in many places where it is now silent. Thus note: wyde, perles, whyte, clothes, gemmës, delyte, in the Chaucer extract, § 186. This sounding of e is indispensable for the scansion of Chaucer's poetry.

3. Many French words retained the Romance accentuation upon the end of the word, e. g., vicious, subjeccioun, Septemtrioun, in § 186.

222. The fifteenth century is less interesting to the

student of literature than the fourteenth; but to the student of language it is fully as important. During this century of political disturbance (the War of the Roses) the language was stripped of its few lingering inflectional syllables and reduced to its present comparatively uninflectional structure. When Henry VII. made himself king, 1485, English grammar was on its present basis. The vocabulary was in the main that of the age of Chaucer, although some more words had been borrowed from French and Latin.

4. FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT Day.

223. In most respects the sixteenth century was profoundly significant for modern English. Under the Tudor sovereigns England was subjected to several influences: the maritime discoveries of Da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan; the revival of classical learning; the Protestant Reformation. The effect of these influences upon English character is indicated in § 175. The effect upon the vocabulary was no less marked. Words were introduced from the Spanish and Portuguese, also-through these languages-from the Orient and from the Indian dialects of North and South America. Italian terms of art and literature were introduced, and many French terms, either on their own merits or by reason of the active part played by France in transmitting the results of the revival of classical learning from the Continent to England. Also some High German words came in through the association of English with German Protestants. In the drama of the immediate successors of Shakespeare, under James I., the language had already acquired that polyglot vocabulary which was to be henceforth its characteristic.

Further, the religious disputes, first between Catholics and Protestants, afterward between Anglicans and Puritans, together with the widespread use of the Prayer Book and English translations of the Bible, swelled the

current vocabulary with many theological terms of Greek and Latin origin.

224. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, the language was again subjected to strong French influences. For France, under Louis XIV., had taken the lead and set the fashion; and, although England was engaged in a desperate struggle with France for the mastery of the seas, a struggle which ended only with the conquest of Canada and India, Englishmen of letters were under the spell of the Court of Versailles. This period of our literature, conveniently designated the Dryden-Pope era, has an evident French vein of thought and diction.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many words have been introduced from the colonies, i. e., from India, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia; not to speak of borrowings from the Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, and the native languages of America, in short, from all the peoples with whom the Anglo-American race has had commercial dealings.

There is still another class of foreign words, very numerous and important, namely, the terms of science. Under science is here included every study which aims at exact knowledge. Usually these scientific terms are of Greek or Latin formation; some were used by the Greeks and Romans, but most of them are of modern coinage. In mathematics we have such terms as binomial, differential, integral, etc.; in biology, systole, diastole, oviposit, etc.; in geology, eocene, pliocene, troglodyte, etc.; in chemistry, oxygen, hydrogen, ethyl, methyl, etc.; in theology, unitarian, trinitarian, hagiology, and hundreds more in -ology; in philosophy, conceptualism, determinism, atavism, etc. It would be useless to multiply examples. These terms of science are already to be counted by the tens of thousands, and the number is constantly increasing. Each new discovery gives rise to a nomenclature of its own.