Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue Part 7

4. Therfoer inferres the conclusion; as, noe man can keep the law in thought, word, and deed: and therfoer noe man befoer the judg of the hart, word, and deed, can be justifyed be the law.

5. Because inferres the reason; as, I wil spew the out, because thou art nether hoat nor cald.

OF DISTINCTIONES.

Cap. 13.

1. A distinction is quherbe sentences are distinguished in wryting and reading. And this is perfect or imperfect.

2. A perfect distinction closes a perfect sense, and is marked with a round punct, thus . or a tailed punct, thus ?

3. The round punct concludes an a.s.sertion; as, if Abraham was justifyed be workes, he had quherof to glorie.

4. The tailed punct concludes an interrogation; as, sal we, quha are dead to syn, leve to it?

5. The imperfect distinction divydes the partes of a period, and is marked with tuoe punctes, the one under the other, thus : and is red with half the pause of a perfect punct; as, al have synned, and fallen from the glorie of G.o.d: but are justifyed frelie be his grace.

6. The com_m_a divydes the least partes of the period, and is p.r.o.nunced in reading with a short sob.

7. The parenthesis divydes in the period a sentence interlaced on sum occurrences q_uhi_lk coheres be noe syntax w_i_th that q_uhi_lk preceedes and followes; as, for exemple of beath, and to conclud this treatesse:

Bless, guyd, advance, preserve, prolong Lord (if thy pleasur be) Our King _and_ Queen, and keep their seed thy name to magnifie.

NOTES.

The foregoing Tract is one of great interest, not only on account of its intrinsic merit, but also for the racy style of writing adopted by its author. We find him continually garnis.h.i.+ng his language with such idiomatic and colloquial expressions as the following:--"Quhae's sillie braine will reache no farther then the compas of their cap" (page 2); and again, "but will not presume to judge farther then the compa.s.se of my awn cap" (p. 20). He observes of the printers and writers of his age that they care "for noe more arte then may win the pennie" (p. 2), and on the same page he says, "quhiles I stack in this claye," which appears to be equivalent to our term "stuck in the mud." At p. 3 he says, "and it wer but a clod;" at p. 14, "neither daer I, with al the oares of reason, row against so strang a tyde;" and again, on p. 18, we find reason under another aspect, thus, "noe man I trow can denye that ever suked the paepes of reason."

It seems that the expression, _Queen's English_, is by no means of modern date, as we have it as the _king's language_ at p. 2.

Hume laments, in his Dedication, the uncertainty of the orthography prevailing at the time he writes, and yet we find him spelling words several different ways, even within the compa.s.s of a single sentence, without being able to lay the blame upon the printers; thus we find him writing ju_d_gement on p. 11, ju_d_ge p. 8, and ju_d_g p. 33, but juge p. 18; and there are numberless other instances that it would be tedious to enumerate. Again, the author uses a mixture of Scotch and English, so we have sometimes ane and sometimes one; nae on page 1 and noe on p. 2; mare and mast, and more and most, even in the same sentence (p. 30); and two is spelt in three different ways, tuae, tuo, and tuoe.

Our author's stay in England appears to have drawn his attention to the differences between the two languages of Scotland and England, which he distinguishes as North and South. He certainly shows, in some instances, the greater correctness of the Scotch with regard to the spelling of words derived from the Latin; as, retine instead of retain, corage instead of courage, etc. (p. 20), in which words the redundant letters that we Southerners have introduced are thrown out. He is, however, by no means partial, and gives us praise when he thinks we deserve it.

Page 9. The arguments in favour of the sound given by the English Universities to the Latin _i_ are curious: it is stated to have its value in the Greek e?; but the author seems to have been in error as to the English sounding mihi and tibi alike, or our p.r.o.nunciation must have changed since his time.

P. 10. The author speaks of the letter _y_ as being used by the South for the sound now symbolized by _i_ with a final _e_ following the succeeding consonant, as _will_ with an _i_, and _wile_ with a _y_ in place of the _i_ and final _e_; thus in the same way he spells write, _wryt_.

P. 11 (7). He gives food, good, blood, as examples of the same sound, thus inferring that the English p.r.o.nounced the two latter so as to rhyme with food.

P. 11 (8). He objects to the use of _w_ for _u_ in the diphthongal sound of _ou_, and therefore spells _how_, _now_, etc., _hou_, _nou_.

P. 11 (10). It is difficult here to see what the p.r.o.nunciation of _buu_ would be, which the author gives as the sound of bow (to bow).

Probably the sound he meant would be better represented by _boo_.

P. 13 (12). The author here recommends the distinction both of sound and symbol of _j_ and _v_ as consonants, and _i_ and _u_ as vowels, and proposes that we should call _j_ _jod_ or _je_, and _v_ _vau_ or _ve_, and not single _u_, "as now they doe" (p. 16), and _w_ he would call _wau_ or _we_, and moreover he places them in his alphabet on the same page. If this proposal was originally his own, it is curious that the name _ve_ should have been adopted, though not the _we_ for _w_.

Ben Jonson points out the double power of _i_ and _v_ as both consonant and vowel, but he does not attempt to make them into separate letters as Hume does.

P. 15 (12). He gives as an anomaly of the South that while the _d_ is inserted before _g_ in hedge, bridge, etc., it is omitted in age, suage, etc. He does not see that the short vowel requires a double consonant to prevent it from being p.r.o.nounced long.

P. 21 (6). He disputes the possibility of a final _e_, separated from a preceding vowel by a consonant, having any effect whatever in altering the sound of the preceding vowel, and recommends the use of a diphthong to express the sound required; as, hoep for hope, fier for fire, bied for bide, befoer for before, maed for made, etc. He uniformly throughout follows this rule.

P. 22 (5). Hume here accents difficultie on the antepenultimate instead of the first syllable.

P. 23 (7). He puts down outrage as an instance of two distinct words joined by a hyphen, which is the derivation given by Ash in his dictionary, in strange obliviousness of the French word _outrage_.

P. 27 (1, 6). _T_ is omitted after _s_ in the second person singular of the verb, and so no distinction is made between the second and the third persons; thus, thou wrytes, and at p. 32 thou was, and thou hes.

P. 29 (7). The supposition that the apostrophe 's as a mark of the possessive case is a segment of his, a question which has been lately revived, is here denied.

P. 34. In this last chapter on Punctuation, which the author styles "of Distinctiones," no mention whatever is made of the "semicolon,"

though it occurs frequently in the MS., as, for instance, p. 30, cap.

6. This stop, according to Herbert, was first used by Richard Grafton in _The Byble_ printed in 1537: it occurs in the Dedication. Henry Denham, an English printer who flourished towards the close of the sixteenth century, was the first to use it with propriety.

P. 34 (6). The explanation of the mode of p.r.o.nouncing the comma "with a short _sob_" is odd.[5]

[Footnote 5: It will be here as well to mention that as the punctuation in the MS. is extremely unsystematic, it has been dispensed with whenever the meaning was confused by it.]

The author continually uses a singular verb to a plural noun; for instance, "of this we, as the latines, hes almost no use" (p. 22), though on p. 20 he writes, "in our tongue we have some particles."

With regard to the Ma.n.u.script, there are two corrections in it worth noting. At p. 10 (6), in the phrase, "the auctours _whole_ drift," the word had been originally written _hael_, but is marked through, and _whole_ subst.i.tuted for it in the same handwriting. At p. 21 (4), the word _frensh_ has been inserted before _exemples_, but has been afterwards struck through.

The numbering is wrong in three places, but it has not been corrected.

At p. 8 there are no sections 12 and 13, at pp. 17, 19, there are two cap. 7, and at p. 19 there are two sections 4.