our investigations further back, beyond the present written form of our words, we shall light upon much more extraordinary cases of mutilation and abbreviation. Thus, to take but a single, though rather striking, example, our alms is the scanty relic of the long Greek vocable eleēmosumē. All the monosyllables, in fact, of which especially the Anglo-Saxon portion of our daily speech is in so great measure composed, are relics of long polysyllabic forms, usual at an earlier stage of the language. Some words are but just through, or even now passing through, a like process. In often and soften, good usage has taken sides with the corruption which has ejected the t, and accuses of being old-fashioned or affectedly precise the large and respectable class who still pronounce that letter; while, on the other hand, it clings to the t of captain, and stigmatizes as vulgar those who presume to say cap'n.
Again, it is the prevailing English custom to accent a noun of two syllables on its first syllable; hosts of nouns of French origin have had their native accent altered, in order to conform them to this analogy. Such changes have been going on at every period in the history of our tongue: in Pope, in Milton, in Shakspeare, in Chaucer, you will find examples of their action, in ever increasing numbers as you go backward from the present time. Nor are they yet over: there is ally, which all the authorities agree in pronouncing allý, while prevailing popular usage, on both sides of the Atlantic, persists in favouring álly; and it is not unlikely that, in the end, the people will prove too strong for the orthoëpists, as they have done so many times before.
When our Bible translation was made, the verb speak had a proper imperfect form, spake: a well-educated Englishman would no more have written he spoke than he come and done it. But, just as the ill-instructed and the careless now-a-days are often guilty of these last two blunders, so then, undoubtedly, large numbers habitually said spoke for spake; until, at last, the struggle against it was given up as hopeless; and no one now says I spake save in conscious imitation of Biblical style.
At the same period, but two centuries and a half ago, the
