188!).] 



311 



but to disguise our language, to hinder education and to suggest false ety- 

 mologies." And from Henry Sweet : "The notion that the present spell- 

 ing has an etymological value was quite popular twenty-five years ago. 

 But this view is now entirely abandoned by filologisls ; only a few half- 

 trained dabblers in the science uphold it." 



Testimony of this kind is worth more than a logical array of facts to the 

 average mind, because it adds to the cold fact, the fervor of the personal 

 conviction of those whose convictions are themselves the result of the 

 logic of facts. And just here we cannot do better than quote from Skeat's 

 "The Principles of English Etymology." 



"The old spelling was, in the main, very strictly etj'mological, because 

 it was so unconsciously.* In striving to be fonetic, our ancestors kept up 

 the history of words, and recorded, more or less exactly, the changes that 

 took place in them from time to time. But in the sixteenth century an 

 entirely new idea was for the first time started, and probably took its 

 rise from the revival of learning, which introduced the study of Greek, 

 and brought classical words, and with them a classical mode of spelling, 

 to the front ; a movement which was assisted by the fact that the spelling 

 was all the while becoming less fonetic. This new idea involved the 

 attempt to be consciously etymological ; i. e., to reduce tlie spelling of 

 English words, as far as possible, to an exact conformity in outward appear- 

 ance with the Latin and Greek words, from which they were borrowed. 

 But it was only possible to do this with a portion of the language. It was 

 easy to do this where words were actually borrowed from those languages, 

 as, for example, in the case of such a verb as to tolerate, which was now 

 spelt with one I, in order to conform it in outward appearance to the Latin 

 tolerare. But the words of native English or Scandinavian origin were 

 less tractable ; for which reason our writers, wisely enough, let them 

 alone. There remained words of French origin, and these suffered con- 

 siderably at the hands of the pedants, who were anything but scholars as 

 regarded Old French. For example, the Latin debita had become the Old 

 French and Middle English dette, by assimilation of the 6 to ^ in the con- 

 tracted form deb'ta, precisely as it became deita in Italian. The modern 

 French and the Italian have the forms dette and detta still. But in the 

 sixteenth century the disease of the so-called ' etymological ' spelling had 

 attackt the French language as well as the English, and there was a craze 

 for rendering such etymology evident to the eye. Consequently, the 

 Old French dette was recast in the form dthte, and the Middle English 

 dette was respelt dehte or debt in the same way. Hence, we actually find 

 in Cotgrave's French dictionary the entry: ' Debte, a debt.' Another 

 word similarly treated was the Old French and Middle English doute ; 

 and, accordingly, Cotgrave gives ' Doubte, a doubt.' The modern 

 French has gone back to the original Old French spellings dette and doute; 



* "Conscious attempts at etymologj' sometimes produced rather queer results. Thus 

 the M. E./emefewas turned into female, obviously because men fancied it must have some 

 connection with male." 



