1380984377.3491A History of English Language

The renaissance, 1500-1650 209
anachronism, atmosphere, autograph, capsule, denunciation, dexterity, disability,
disrespect, emanation, excrescence, excursion, expectation, halo, inclemency,
jurisprudence. Among adjectives we find abject (in our sense of “down in spirit”), agile,
appropriate, conspicuous, dexterous, expensive, external, habitual, hereditary,
impersonal, insane, jocular, malignant. Few of these could we dispense with. But it is
among the verbs, perhaps, that we find our most important acquisitions, words like adapt,
alienate, assassinate, benefit (first used by Cheke, who thought “our language should be
writ pure”!), consolidate, disregard (introduced by Milton), emancipate, emdicate, erupt,
excavate, exert, exhilarate, exist, extinguish, harass, meditate (which Sidney apparently
introduced). It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a movement that enriched the
language with words such as these.
Most of the words in this list are Latin. But some of them were earlier acquired by
Latin from Greek. Examples are anachronism, atmosphere, autograph. Others might be
added, such as antipathy, antithesis, caustic, chaos, chronology, climax, crisis, critic,
dogma, emphasis, enthusiasm, epitome, parasite, parenthesis, pathetic, pneumonia,
scheme, skeleton, system, tactics. Indeed most of the Greek words in English until lately
have come to us either through Latin or French. But in the Renaissance the renewed study
of Greek led to the introduction of some Greek words at first hand. Such, for example,
are acme, anonymous, catastrophe, criterion, ephemeral, heterodox, idiosyncrasy,
lexicon, misanthrope, ostracize, polemic, tantalize, thermometer, and tonic.
162. Adaptation.
Some words, in entering the language, retained their original form; others underwent
change. Words like climax, appendix, epitome, exterior, delirium, and axis still have their
Latin form. The adaptation of others to English was effected by the simple process of
cutting off the Latin ending. Conjectural (L. conjectural-is), consult (L. consult-are)
exclusion (L. exclusion-em), and exotic (L. exotic-us) show how easily in many cases this
could be done. But more often a further change was necessary to bring the word into
accord with the usual English forms. Thus the Latin ending -us in adjectives was changed
to -ous (conspicu-us>conspicuous) or was replaced by -al as in external (L. externus).
Latin nouns ending in -tas were changed in English to -ty (brevity