Status Updates From The English Language

The invention of Prime Minister as a phrase was originally a term of abuse borrowed from despotic governments.

‘Nation was an early word, but it was used more with the motion of different races than that of national unity, and was indeed commonly employed to describe any class or kind of persons.’

The origin of ‘premise’ as a term of logic and another name for residences.

Skipped right over the contribution of Arabic to English here. At least, there's no citation.

The idea of ‘common sense’ comes from this physiological idea of four humours in balance and contributing to cognition.

Temperament comes from the Latin word meaning ‘due mixture’ vis-à-vis the four humours.

Interesting stuff on words related to medieval physiology and medicine.

The introduction of three names of stones in the 13th and 14th century and their supposed magical qualities. An amethyst, for example, supposedly protects its possessor from intoxication. The word itself suggests it, too. Μέθη in Greek means intoxication; α- is a negating prefix.

‘the dipsas, whose bite produced a raging thirst’, from the Greek word διψώ to thirst

Still a beautiful description of old Indo-European words

Aryan words and ‘race-experience’. Strange terminology.

Vague (see my italics) ‘Although the belief in a homogenous Aryan race is now generally abandoned, the evidence of language shows a continuity, if not of race, at least of culture’. What does he mean by this? How would it look if there were a racial continuity?

‘It is very rare, indeed, that a word is deliberately and consciously made out of sounds arbitrarily chosen, but this has sometimes been successfully accomplished, as in Spenser's word blatant and in gas, which was formed by a Dutch chemist in the 17th century.’

‘To the Elizabethan it seemed as if almost any word could be used in any grammatical relation’

‘We now reach, in fact, the stage of a self-conscious language, no longer allowed to develop at its own free will, unbound by rules or study, but affected, both for good and evil, by the theories and ideals of writers and learned men.’

‘They hold that the patriots in language are the victims also of a fallacy which all history disproves—the fallacy, namely, that there is some connexion between the purity of language and the purity of race; that most modern races, however pure their language, are of mixed origins, and that many races speak a tongue borrowed either from their conquerors, or from the peoples they face themselves subdued.’

The idea of purity in language discussed.

Pp. 22–27 describes the influence of various languages, modern and ancient, on English. Page 27 is Greek!!

‘This [aforedescribed] fancy for preserving the alien form of borrowed words, and of restoring it to term long naturalized, is tending to impoverish our language, and to make it more difficult and undemocratic than is at all necessary. It is due to an ideal of ‘correctness’ which is both false and pedantic. True correctness is assimilation, the harmonizing of borrowed elements with the real core of the language …’

‘We each of us possess, in a greater or less degree, what the Germans call ‘speech-feeling’ [Sprachgefühl], a sense of what is worthy of adoption and what should be avoided and condemned.’

‘… innovations in other directions. Yet, on the whole, its results are beyond all praise; it has provided an instrument for the expression, not only of thought, but of feeling and imagination, fitted for all the needs of man, and far beyond anything that could ever have been devised by the deliberation of the wisest and most learned experts.’

‘This corporate will [of language] is, indeed, like other human manifestations, often capricious in its working, and not all its results are worthy of approval. It sometimes blurs useful distinctions, preserves others that are unnecessary, allows admirable tools to drop from its hands; its methods are often illogical and childish, in some ways it is unduly and obstinately conservative, while it allows of harmful …