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The idea here is not that he watched all night, but that he

was a short sleeper.

Conjunctions formed from nouns :-as while, the old substantive for 'time.'

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Thou calledst upon me in troubles, and I delivered thee: and heard thee what time as the storm fell upon thee.'-Psalm lxxxi. 7, elder version.

Sith is an old substantive for 'journey,' 'road,' 'turn' it is used as a conjunction in Ezechiel xxxv. 6, and not again in the text of our Bible:

'Being iustified by faith, wee haue peace with God, and ioy in our hope, that sith we were reconciled by his blood, when wee were enemies, wee shall much more be saued being reconciled.'—Romans v. Contents.

It occurs five times in the First Book of Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, as appears by the Glossary to Mr. Church's edition.

Conjunctions formed from verbs, or containing verbs in their composition. The first place here is claimed by the old familiar if, Saxon gif, imperative of the verb gifan, to give.

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Ac gif ic hafde swilcne anweald, swilce se ælmihtega God hæfp; Conne ne lete ic no ða yfelan derian dam godum swa swipe swa hi nu dop.'King Alfred's Boethius, ed. Cardale, p. 304.

But if I had such power as the Almighty God has; then would not I let the evil burt the good so much as they now do.

Horne Tooke says that an in such expressions as 'An it please your honour,' is the imperative of the Saxon verb. unnan, to grant. I doubt the explanation; but as I cannot disprove it, I place the word here. For my own part I

would as lief think it merely a special habit of the common and, and we know it was often written so.

And my will is that xii pore men and they may be gete have xii gownes,' &c.-The Will of Dame Jane Lady Barre, 1484, in A Memoir of the Manor of Bitton, by the Rev. H. T. Ellacombe, formerly Vicar of Bitton.

howbeit, notwithstanding.

'Howbeit (as evermore the simpler sort are, even when they see no apparent cause, jealous notwithstanding over the secret intents and purposes of wiser men) this proposition of his did somewhat trouble them.'-Richard Hooker, Of the Laws, &c., Preface, ch. ii.

seeing.

And one morn it chanced

He found her in among the garden yews,
And said, "Delay no longer, speak your wish,
Seeing I must go to-day."

according.

Idylls of the King.

'Their abominations were according as they loved.-Hosea ix. 10.

talk of.

'Talk of the privileges of the Peerage, of Members' exemption from the Eighth Commandment, of the separate jurisdiction secured on the Continent to soldiers, what are they all put together to a privilege like this?'

depend upon it.

'Depend upon it, a good deal is lost by not looking round the corner.'Mrs. Prosser, Quality Fogg's Lost Ledger.

When a sentence is opened with No doubt, this seems to claim a place among these verbal conjunctions, being a condensed expression for 'There is no doubt that.' It has, however, a less emphatic burden than would be conveyed by the latter formula:

'No doubt a determined effort would be made by many of those who are now engaged in these occupations, to prevent the admission of females to them, and to keep up the monopoly of sex.'-Frederic Hill, Crime: its Amount, Causes, and Remedies, 1853, p. 86.

Here it may be objected-Do you call these words symbolic? What does 'presentive' mean, if such words as see,

talk, depend, doubt, are not presentive? In what sense can these belong to a group which is called essentially symbolic?

This very contradiction troubled the author of Hermes, a famous book on universal grammar, which was published in 1751. He had pitched upon the distinction of presentive and symbolic as the fundamental and essential distinction of his universal grammar. He did not, indeed, use the terms ; but he spoke of words as (1) significant by themselves, or significant absolutely, and (2) significant by association, or significant relatively. When he treats of conjunctions, he regards them as belonging to the second class, and yet he cannot shut his eyes to certain refractory instances. The embarrassment of James Harris on this occasion became the sport of Horne Tooke, who published his Diversions of Purley in 1786. In his saucy manner he sums up the doctrine of the Hermes as follows:

Thus is the conjunction explained by Mr. Harris :

A sound significant devoid of signification,

Having at the same time a kind of obscure signification;
And yet having neither signification nor no signification,

Shewing the attributes both of signification and no signification;
And linking signification and no signification together.'

Diversions of Purley, Part I. ch. vii.

This is of course a caricature, and we only avail ourselves of its exaggerated features, in order to raise up before us in bolder relief the difficulty which we are here confronting.

The solution seems to be this:-That the essential nature of a conjunction (or of any other organic member of speech) discovers itself, not in the recent examples of the class, but in those which have by long use been purged of accidental elements. This will be clearer by an illustration drawn from familiar experience.

It is well known that many words in common use are masked, that they do not express plainly the sense which

they are notwithstanding intended to convey. We do not always call a spade a spade. We have recourse in certain well-known cases to forms of expression as distant from the thing meant as is any way consistent with the intention of being understood. In such cases it will have struck every philological observer that it becomes necessary from time to time to replace these makeshifts with others of new device. In fact, words used to convey a veiled meaning are found to wear out very rapidly. The real thought pierces through; they soon stand declared for what they are, and not for what they half feign to be. Words gradually drop the nonessential, and display the pure essence of their nature. the real nature of a word is to be found in the thought which is at the bottom of its motive. As we know full well how this nature pierces through all disguise, casts off all drapery and pretext and colour, and in the course of time stands forth as the name of that thing which was to be ignored even while it was indicated, so in the case now before us.

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There are reasons why the speaker is not satisfied with the old conjunctions, and he brings forward words with more body and colour to reinforce the old conjunctions or to stand as conjunctions alone. If these words continue for any length of time to be used as conjunctions, the presentive matter which now lends them colour will evaporate, and they will become purely symbolic. Of this we may be sure from the experience of the elder examples. Who now

thinks of if as an imperative verb? Even in such a conjunction as because, where the presentive matter is still very plain, it has, generally speaking, no existence to the mind. of the speaker.

It is not indeed a singular quality in the conjunction, that being itself essentially symbolic, it should receive accessions from the presentive groups. This is seen also in the

pronoun and in the preposition, and it is only as a matter of degree that the conjunction is remarkable in this respect. As far as observation reaches, the symbolic element is everywhere sustained by new accessions from the presentive, and it is worthy of note that the extreme symbolic word, the conjunction, which is chiefly supplied from groups of words previously symbolic, seems to be the one which most eagerly welcomes presentive material, as if desirous to recruit itself after its too great attenuation through successive stages of symbolic refinement.

The employment of conjunctions has greatly diminished from what it once was, as the reader may readily ascertain if he will only look into the prose of three centuries back. The writings of Hooker, for example, bristle with conjunctions, which we have now for the most part learned to dispense with. The conjunction being a comparatively late development, and being moreover a thing of literature to a greater extent than any other part of speech, was petted by writers and scholars into a fantastic luxuriance. It connected itself intimately with that technical logic which was the favourite study of the middle ages. Logic formed the base of the higher region of learning, and was the acquirement that popularly stamped a man as one of the learned, and hence it came that men prided themselves on their wherefores and therefores, and all the rest of that apparatus which lent to their discourse the prestige of a formulated piece of ratiocination.

But this is now much abated, and the connection of sentences is to a large extent left to the intelligence of the reader. Two or three very undemonstrative conjunctions, such as if, but, for, that, &c., will suffice for all the conjunctional appliances of page after page in a well-reasoned book. Often the word and is enough, where more than mere

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