+amiable consort+; of +a wretched man+ instead of +a miserable individual+. 33. +Bilingualism.+-- How did these Norman-French words find their way into the language? What was the road by which they came? What was the process that enabled them to find a place in and to strike deep root into our English soil? Did the learned men-- the monks and the clergy-- make a selection of words, write them in their books, and teach them to the English people? Nothing of the sort. The process was a much ruder one-- but at the same time one much more practical, more effectual, and more lasting in its results. The two peoples-- the Normans and the English-- found that they had to live together. They met at church, in the market-place, in the drilling field, at the archery butts, in the courtyards of castles; and, on the battle-fields of France, the Saxon bowman showed that he could fight as well, as bravely, and even to better purpose than his lord-- the Norman baron. At all these places, under all these circumstances, the Norman and the Englishman were obliged to speak with each other. Now arose a striking phenomenon. Every man, as Professor Earle puts it, turned himself as it were into a walking phrase-book or dictionary. When a Norman had to use a French word, he tried to put the English word for it alongside of the French word; when an Englishman used an English word, he joined with it the French equivalent. Then the language soon began to swarm with “yokes of words”; our words went in couples; and the habit then begun has continued down even to the present day. And thus it is that we possess such couples as +will and testament+; +act and deed+; +use and wont+; +aid and abet+. Chaucer’s poems are full of these pairs. He joins together +hunting and venery+ (though both words mean exactly the same thing); +nature and kind+; +cheere and face+; +pray and beseech+; +mirth and jollity+. Later on, the Prayer-Book, which was written in the years 1540 to 1559, keeps up the habit: and we find the pairs +acknowledge and confess+; +assemble and meet together+; +dissemble and cloak+; +humble and lowly+. To the more English part of the congregation the simple Saxon words would come home with kindly association; to others, the words _confess_, _assemble_, _dissemble_, and _humble_ would speak with greater force and clearness. --Such is the phenomenon called by Professor Earle +bilingualism+. “It is, in fact,” he says, “a putting of colloquial formulæ to do the duty of a French-English and English-French vocabulary.” Even Hooker, who wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, seems to have been obliged to use these pairs; and we find in his writings the couples “cecity and blindness,” “nocive and hurtful,” “sense and meaning.”