(vii) Father=feeder; cognate of fat, food, feed, fodder, foster, etc.

(viii) Goose; in the oldest A.S. gans; Gandr-a (the a being the sign of the masc.). Hence gander, the d being inserted as a cushion between n and, as in thunder, gender, etc.

(ix) Hart=the horned one.

(x) Mare, the fem. of A.S. mearh, a horse. Hence also marshal, which at first meant horse-servant.

(xi) Husband, from Icelandic, husbondi, the master of the house. A farmer in Norway is called a bonder.

(xii) King, a contraction of A.S. cyning, son of the kin or tribe.

(xiii) Lord, a contraction of A.S. hláford-from hláf, a loaf, and weard, a ward or keeper.

(xiv) Lady, a contraction of A.S. hlaéfdige, a loaf-kneader.

(xv) The old A.S. words were nefa, nefe.

(xvi) Woman = wife - man. The pronunciation of women (wimmen) comes nearer to the old form of the word. See note on (iii.)

(xvii) Sir, from Lat. senior, elder.

(xviii) Madam, from Lat. Mea domina (through the French Ma dame) =my lady.

(xix) Daughter=milker. Connected with dug.

(xx) Wizard, from old French guiscart, prudent. Witch has no connection with wizard.

16. All feminine nouns are formed from the masculine, with four exceptions: bridegroom, widower, gander, and drake, which come respectively from bride, widow, goose, and duck.

(i) Bridegroom was in A.S. brýdguma=the bride's man. (Guma is a cognate of the Lat. hom-o, a man-whence humanity.)

(ii) Widower. The old masc. was widuwa; the fem. widuwe. It was then forgotten that widuwa was a masculine, and a new masculine had to be formed from widuwe.

NUMBER.

17. Number is, in nouns, the mode of indicating whether we are speaking of one thing or of more.

18. The English language, like most modern languages, has two numbers: the singular and the plural.

(i) Singular comes from the Lat. singuli, one by one; plural, from the Lat. plures, more (than one).

(ii) Mr Barnes, the eminent Dorsetshire poet, who has written an excellent grammar, called 'Speech-craft,' calls them onely and somely. 19. There are three chief ways of forming the plural in English :

(i) By adding es or s to the singular.

(ii) By adding en.

(iii) By changing the vowel-sound.

20. First Mode. The plural is formed by adding es or s. The ending es is a modern form of the old A.S. plural in as, as stanas, stones. The following are examples :

(i) It will be seen that es in heroes does not add a syllable to the sing. (ii) Nouns ending in f change the sharp f into a flat v, as in beeves, etc. But we say roofs, cliffs, dwarfs, chiefs, etc.

(iii) An old singular of lady was ladie; and this spelling is preserved in the plural. But there has arisen a rule on this point in modern English, which may be thus stated :—

(a) Y, with a vowel before it, is not changed in the plural. Thus we write keys, valleys, chimneys, days, etc.

(b) Y, with a consonant before it, is changed into ie when s is added for the plural. Thus we write ladies, rubies, and also soliloquies.

(iv) Beef is not now used as the word for a single ox. Shakespeare has the phrase "beef-witted "= with no more sense than an ox.

ne.

21. Second Mode. The plural is formed by adding en or Thus we have oxen, children, brethren, and kine.

(i) Children is a double plural. The oldest plural was cild-r-u, which became childer. It was forgotten that this was a proper plural, and en was added. Brethren is also a double plural. En was added to the old Northern plural brether-the oldest plural being brothr-u.

(ii) Kine is also a double plural of cow. The oldest plural was cŷ, and this still exists in Scotland in the form of kye. Then ne was added.

22. Third Mode. The plural is formed by changing the vowel-sound of the word. The following are examples :

(i) To understand this, we must observe that when a new syllable is added to a word, the vowel of the preceding syllable is often weakened. Thus we find nātion, nătional; fox, vixen. Now the oldest plurals of the above words had an additional syllable; and it is to this that the change in the vowel is due.

23. There are in English several nouns with two plural forms, with different meanings. The following is a list :

(i) Pea is a false singular. The s belongs to the root; and we find in Middle English as big as a pease," and the plurals pesen and peses.

24. Some nouns have the same form in the plural as in the singular. Such are deer, sheep, cod, trout, mackerel, and others.

(i) Most of these nouns were, in Old English, neuter.

(ii) A special plural is found in such phrases as: A troop of horse; a company of foot; ten sail of the line; three brace of birds; six gross of steel pens; ten stone weight, etc. In fact, the names of numbers, weights, measures, etc., are not put into the plural form. Thus we say, ten hundredweight, five score, five fathom, six brace. In Old English we also said forty year, sixty winter; and we still say, a twelvemonth, a fortnight (=fourteen nights).

25. There are in English several false plurals-that is, real . singulars which look like plurals. These are alms, riches, and

eaves.

B

(i) Alms is a compressed form of the A.S. aelmesse (which is from the Greek eleemosuně). We find in Acts iii. 3, an alms."

connected with it is eleemosynary.

66

(ii) Riches comes from the French richesse.

The adjective

(iii) Eaves is the modern form of the A.S. efese, a margin or edge.

26. There are in English several plural forms that are regarded and treated as singulars. The following is a list :

27. There are many nouns that, from the nature of the case, can be used only in the plural. These are the names of things (a) That consist of two or more parts; or (b) That are taken in the mass.

(a) The following is a list of the first:

(b) The following is a list of the second

Tweezers.
Tongs.

Trousers.

It must be noticed that several nouns-some of them in the

above class change their meaning entirely when made plural. Thus―

28. The English language has adopted many foreign plurals. These, (a) when fully naturalised, make their plurals in the usual English way; (b) when not naturalised, or imperfectly, keep their own proper plurals.

(a) As examples of the first kind, we have—

Bandits, cherubs, dogmas, indexes, memorandums, focuses, formulas, terminuses, etc.

(i) The Greek plurals acoustics, ethics, mathematics, optics, politics, etc., were originally adjectives. We now say logic-but logics, which still survives in the Irish Universities-was the older word.

29. Compounds attach the sign of the plural to the leading word, especially if that word be a noun. These may be divided into three classes :

(a) When the plural sign is added to the Noun, as: sons-in-law, hangers-on, lookers-on, etc.

(b) When the compound word is treated as one word, as: attorneygenerals, major-generals, court-martials, spoonfuls, handfuls, etc.

(c) When both parts of the compound take the plural sign, as: menservants, knights-templars, lords-justices, etc.

CASE.

30. Case is the form given to a noun to show its relation to other words in the sentence. Our language has lost most of these forms; but we still use the word case to indicate the function, even when the form has been lost.

(i) The word case is from the Latin casus, and means a falling. The old grammarians regarded the nominative as the upright case, and all others as fallings from that. Hence the use of the words decline and declension. (Of course the nominative cannot be a real case, because it is upright and not a falling.)

Possessive

Dative

Objective

Vocative