AN OUTLINE
OF
ENGLISH SPEECH-CRAFT
BY
WILLIAM BARNES, B.D.
‘Præsens Angli sermonis formamagis magisque recedit a stirpeantiquâ’—Lexicon Frisicum, byJustus Halbertsma, under‘Dunsi’
LONDON
C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1878
(The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved)
FORE-SAY.
This little book was not written to win prize or praise;but it is put forth as one small trial, weak though it maybe, towards the upholding of our own strong old Anglo-Saxonspeech, and the ready teaching of it to purelyEnglish minds by their own tongue.
Speech was shapen of the breath-sounds of speakers,for the ears of hearers, and not from speech-tokens(letters) in books, for men’s eyes, though it is a greathappiness that the words of man can be long holden andgiven over to the sight; and therefore I have shapenmy teaching as that of a speech of breath-soundedwords, and not of lettered ones; and though I have, ofcourse, given my thoughts in a book, for those whommy voice cannot reach, I believe that the teachingmatter of it may all be put forth to a learner’s mind, andreadily understood by him, without book or letters. So,for consonants and vowels, as letters, I put breath-penningsand free-breathings, and these names would begood for any speech, of the lettering of which a learnermight know nothing. On the grounds here given, I[iv]have not begun with orthography, the writing or spellingof our speech, or of any other, while as yet the teachingor learning of the speech itself is unbegun.
I have tried to teach English by English, and so havegiven English words for most of the lore-words (scientificterms), as I believe they would be more readily and moreclearly understood, and, since we can better keep inmind what we do than what we do not understand, theywould be better remembered. There is, in the learningof that charmingly simple and yet clear speech, purePersian, now much mingled with Arabic, a saddeningcheck; for no sooner does a learner come to the time-wordsthan he is told that he should learn, what is thenput before him, an outline of Arabic Grammar. And thereare tokens that, ere long, the English youth will want anoutline of the Greek and Latin tongues ere he can wellunderstand his own speech.
The word grammar itself seems a misused word, forgrapho is to write, and graphma, worn into gramma,means a writing, and the word grammatikē meant, withthe Greeks, booklore or literature in the main, and notspeech-teaching alone.
Whether my lore-words are well-chosen is a questionfor the reader’s mind. I have, for better or worse, treatedthe time-words, and nearly all the parts of speech, in anew way. I have clustered up the time-words as weakor strong on their endings, rather than on their headings,which had nothing to do with their forshapening or conjugation.Case I have taken as in the thing, and not in[v]the name of it, a