Elementary Lessons in Historical English Grammar: Containing Accidence and Word-formation |
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adjectives adverb alphabet auxiliary became become belong blind-e called century we find Chaucer compounds conjugation consonant Cursor Cursor Mundi dative declension derived feminine Flat form their plurals fourteenth century French gender genitive grammatical Greek Grimm's law Gutturals High-German Husbondrie IMPERATIVE MOOD indefinite INDICATIVE MOOD infinitive inflexions intransitive verbs language late Latin letters lost Low-German M.E. we find marks Masc masculine modern English Neut neuter nominative Norman Conquest Norman-French Northern dialects O.E. Plays occurs Old English older oldest English passive participle PAST PASS past tense period Piers Plowman Plur prefix preposition Pres Present Tense pronouns replaced Romance root scip-e seventeenth century Shakespeare Sharp silf Sing singular sixteenth century sometimes sounds speech Spenser spoken ster strong verbs subjunctive mood substantives suffix syllable Teutonic thai thirteenth century thou Trevisa verbal vowel vowel change weak verbs Wicliffe words
Popular passages
Page 173 - In the first Person simply shall foretells ; In will a Threat, or else a Promise dwells. Shall, in the second and the third, does threat ; Will simply, then, foretells the future feat.
Page 114 - Two principles in human nature reign, Self-love to urge, and reason to restrain; Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call, Each works its end, to move or govern all: And to their proper operation still, Ascribe all good: to their improper, ill.
Page 22 - Calvinism, it can easily be demonstrated that during the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century...
Page 21 - O harsh lips, I now hear all around me such words as common, vices, envy, malice; even virtue, study, justice, pity, mercy, compassion, profit, commodity, colour, grace, favour, acceptance. But whither, I pray, in all the world have you banished those words which our forefathers used for these new-fangled ones ? Are our words to be exiled like our citizens? Is the new barbaric invasion to extirpate the English tongue...
Page 119 - Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof six cubits : he set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon.
Page 21 - Among other lessons this should first be learned, that we never affect any strange ink-horn terms, but...
Page 112 - Raised by thy breath, has quench'd the orb of day? To-morrow he repairs the golden flood And warms the nations with redoubled ray. Enough for me : with joy I see The different doom our fates assign : Be thine Despair and sceptred Care, To triumph and to die are mine.
Page 61 - Be thou a reveller and a mistress-server all the year by wearing feathers in thy hair; whose length before the rigorous edge of any puritanical pair of scissors should shorten the breadth of a finger, let the three housewifely spinsters of Destiny rather curtail the thread of thy life.
Page 103 - What the actual position of the compellation ' thou' was at that time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller's Church History, Dedication of Book vii. : " In opposition whereunto [i. •'. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that thou from superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command ; from equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity ; but from inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of clownishness ; if from affectation, a tone of contempt.
Page 13 - French designation of them. The sciences too, medicine, physics, geography, alchemy, astrology, all of which became known to England chiefly through French channels, added numerous specific terms to the existing vocabulary, and very many of the words, first employed in English writings as a part of the technical phraseology of these various arts and knowledges, soon passed into the domain of common life, in modified or untechnical senses, and thus became incorporated into the general tongue of society...