PROBLEMS IN STUDY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE 225 



had very little direct influence on English; that the dialect from 

 which most of the Old French words came that made their way into 

 the language of the island was Central French; that most of these 

 words came in after 1300 (say between 1300 and 1400), and that 

 many of them were in the first instance literary or society borrowings, 

 like prestige or fiancee in modern times. But nobody has yet grappled 

 victoriously with the details. The complicated linguistic situation 

 in England in the early fourteenth century the critical moment in 

 this concern is, in fact, appreciated by very few persons, if one 

 may judge from what one hears or reads. One of the best of Middle 

 English scholars one of the small number to whom the English of 

 that period is a living language has gone so far as to declare that 

 the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe was the language of the English 

 court in Chaucer's time, and that that great poet and accomplished 

 courtier thought as highly of it as of the French of Paris. Another 

 good scholar appears to believe that the French of Gower came 

 straight down from Anglo-Norman times. It is seldom recognized 

 that there were in the fourteenth century, as there are now, great 

 differences among the gentry and nobility of England in the purity 

 with which they spoke the language of the polite nation, and that 

 a Parisian accent was then, as now, a highly valued accomplishment. 

 We shall never get these tangles straightened out until some Ro- 

 mance scholar whose native language is English and who has a philo- 

 logical as well as a practical command of it, gives us an authoritative 

 book in which all the needed distinctions are made and the evidence 

 that establishes them is marshaled. At present it cannot be denied 

 that everything that has been written on the subject is superficial, 

 or fragmentary, or honeycombed with error. I know you all 

 know a philologist of the first rank, equally versed in Romance 

 and in Germanic philology, who has such a book as we want in his 

 head at this moment, and who merely needs to overcome his modesty, 

 to lay aside the self-sacrificing work which he is constantly doing for 

 others, and to abandon for the moment a modicum of his com- 

 mendable caution, to perform an inestimable service to the history 

 of the English language. 



Another point of great importance is the role which is to be 

 ascribed to Chaucer in the development of our standard idiom. Here 

 one would think there might be agreement; but there is none. The 

 old view that Chaucer made literary English by mixing French 

 with corrupt Anglo-Saxon, throwing in final e's at will, and polishing 

 the conglomerate, was so absurd (though it is far from being exploded 

 in outside circles) that it has, by a revulsion of feeling, prompted 

 some to reduce his services to an infinitesimal quantity. These 

 revolutionists seem to believe that Chaucer found the literary lan- 

 guage ready made in the dialect of educated Londoners, and that 



