_Zachary Macaulay_=_Zumalacarregui_; _Billy Ruffian_=_Bellerophon_; _Sir
Roger Dowlass_=_Surajah Dowlah_, although so limited to the common
soldiers, and sailors who first used them, as to be exploded vulgarisms
rather than integral parts of the language, are examples of the same
tendency towards the irregular accommodation of misunderstood foreign
terms.
_Birdbolt._--An incorrect name for the _gadus lota_, or _eel-pout_, and a
transformation of _barbote_.
_Whistle-fish._--The same for _gadus mustela_, or _weazel-cod_.
_Liquorice_=_glycyrrhiza_.
_Wormwood_=_weremuth_, is an instance of a word from the same language, in
an antiquated shape, being equally transformed with a word of really
foreign origin.
s. 167. Sometimes the transformation of the _name_ has engendered a change
in the object to which it applies, or, at least, has evolved new ideas in
connection with it. How easy for a person who used the words _beef-eater_,
_sparrow-grass_, or _Jerusalem_, to believe that the officers designated by
the former either eat or used to eat more beef than other people (or at
least had an allowance of that viand); that the second word was the name
for a _grass_, or herb of which _sparrows_ were fond; and that _Jerusalem_
artichokes came from Palestine.
What has just been supposed is sometimes a real {109} occurrence. To
account for the name _Shotover-hill_, I have heard that Little John _shot
over_ it. Here the confusion in order to set itself right, breeds a
fiction. Again, in chess, the piece now called the _queen_, was originally
the _elephant_. This was in Persian, _ferz_. In French it became _vierge_,
which, in time, came to be mistaken for a derivative, and _virgo_=_the
virgin_, _the lady_, _the queen_.
s. 168. Sometimes, where the form of a word in respect to its _sound_ is
not affected, a false spirit of accommodation introduces an unetymological
_spelling_; as _frontispiece_[28] from _frontispecium_, _sover_eig_n_, from
_sovrano_, _colle_a_gue_ from _collega_, _lant_h_orn_ (old orthography)
from _lanterna_.
The value of forms like these consists in their showing that language is
affected by false etymologies as well as by true ones.
* * * * *
s. 169. In _lambkin_ and _lancet_, the final syllables (_-kin_ and _-et_)
have the same power. They both express the idea of smallness or
diminutiveness. These words are but two out of a multitude, the one
(_lamb_) being of Saxon, the other (_lance_) of Norman origin. The same is
the case with the superadded syllables: _-kin_ is Saxon; _-et_ Norman. Now
to add a Saxon termination to a Norman word, or _vice vers[^a]_, is to
corrupt the English language.
This leads to some observations respecting--
s. 170. _Introduction of new words_--_Hybridism._--Hybridism is a term
derived from _hybrid-a_, _a mongrel_; a Latin word _of Greek extraction_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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