Excerpt from The Macro Plays: 1. Mankind (Ab. 1475), 2. Wisdom (Ab. 1460), 3. The Castle of Perseverance (Ab. 1425) While I am leaving the philological commentary on these plays to be written by Dr. Furnivall, I may note from the very old-fashioned side from which I am interested in the history of words that the Latinisms in the speeches of Mercy and Mankind (in his moral moments) ofizer a rich harvest to the historical dictionaries. Any one who consults the Oxford Dictionary will see how speedily its editors fastened on ...
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Excerpt from The Macro Plays: 1. Mankind (Ab. 1475), 2. Wisdom (Ab. 1460), 3. The Castle of Perseverance (Ab. 1425) While I am leaving the philological commentary on these plays to be written by Dr. Furnivall, I may note from the very old-fashioned side from which I am interested in the history of words that the Latinisms in the speeches of Mercy and Mankind (in his moral moments) ofizer a rich harvest to the historical dictionaries. Any one who consults the Oxford Dictionary will see how speedily its editors fastened on Dr. Brandl's text published in 1898, and in the volumes of the Dictionary issued before that year we can bring back the dates of the first occurrence of some words by over a century and a half. Thus annexion (l. 850) is not registered in the Oxford Dictionary until 1610, apprehensible (l. 735) till 1635, approximate (l. 216) till 1646, convict (l. 398) in the sense of 'vanquish' till 1595, expeditious (l. 853) till 1610. Alleetuous (l. Dalyaeyon (l. Interleccyon (l. 442) and intermyse (l. 290) are not in the Dictionary at all, I hope for what would be the best ot'all reasons, that no one save the author of this play ever used them. Others of our author's long words {had already been introduced by vvyclif in others he j ust anticipates Fabyan. There is of course no reason to suppose that Fabyan had read juanhz'nd, or that the author of Mankind had read vvyclif, much less that the use of amzexz'on, apprehensible, (gaproxz'mate, etc., in the seventeenth century was in any way influenced by this play. As long as Latin was the learned language of all Europe, any vernacular which had any capacity for admitting1 Latinisms had to sutfer from these intrusions, which tried their luck again and again whenever they came readily to the pen of any author who could not think of an English word to express what he meant. Ou the whole, English has not done badly with them. It is only the poetry written between 1450 and 1550 with which they have played havoc, and the experiment as to whether they were or were not fitted to lend dignity to verse no doubt had to be tried. The sin of our author lay in the fact that he saw how unsuited they were to verse intended to appeal to simple folk, and amused himself by crowding them into his lines, and then making fun of them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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