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Common terms and phrases
abstract acquired adjectives adopted affixes ancestors Anglo-Saxon appearance Arabian ARTHUR THOMSON Aryan become believed belong Celtic Century words character Chaucer Christian Church civilization classical Latin compounds Conquest culture Danish derived descended dialect Dictionary distinction Dutch early borrowing England English language English words Europe express foreign formation forms of speech four humours French words genius German Gothic architecture grammar Greek words guage HERBERT FISHER human ideal immense important inflections influence instance large number later Latin word learned literary literature LL.D Low German Low Latin medieval Middle Ages Midland modern English natural ness Norman Norman Conquest nouns number of words old English old word origin Pelman perhaps period philosophy phrase popular possessed present meaning primitive Prof race religious revival Roman Saxon Scholasticism sense Shakespeare sources suffixes Teutonic tion traced translations verb vocabulary words in English writings XIVth XIXth XVIIth Century XVth
Popular passages
Page 208 - Occasion therby given to all people to talk what they please — especially the ' banterers ' of Oxon (a set of scholars so called, some Masters of Art) who made it and make it their employment to talk at a venture, lye and prate what nonsense they please.
Page 124 - Language, either literary or colloquial, demands a rich store of living and vivid words — words which are "thought pictures," and appeal to the senses and also embody our feelings about the objects they describe. But science cares nothing about emotion or vivid presentation ; her ideal is a kind of algebraic notation, to be used simply as an instrument of analysis; and for this she rightly prefers dry and abstract terms, taken from some dead language, and deprived of all life and personality.
Page 26 - When the early physicists became aware of forces they could not understand, they tried to escape their difficulty by personifying the laws of nature and inventing " spirits " that controlled material phenomena. The student of language, in the presence of the mysterious power which creates and changes language, has been compelled to adopt this medieval procedure, and has vaguely denned, by the name of " the Genius of the Language," the power that guides and controls its progress.
Page 14 - ... see it, in the first place, in the greatly increased use of prepositions, of, and to, and for, and by, and still more in the use of the auxiliary verbs have, and do, and shall, and will, and be, by means of which we are now able to express almost every shade of thought which was formerly rendered by changes in the form of the verb. Along with this creation of new grammatical machinery, modern English is remarkable for the way in which other superfluous forms and unnecessary terminations have...
Page 13 - In primitive forms of speech whole complexes of thought and feeling are expressed in single terms. " I said it to him " is one word, " I said it to her " another ; " my head " is a single term, " his head