Exercises. 1. Point out the nouns in the following passage Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats, And even spoiled the women's chats In fifty different sharps and flats.—Browning. 2. Arrange in two columns the common and proper nouns in the following passages— a. My name is Norval; on the Grampian hills My father feeds his flocks.-Home. b. Be England what she will, With all her faults she is my country still.- Churchill. c. Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.-Gray. d. But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repressed their noble rage And froze the genial current of their soul.-Id. e. England is not now what it was under the Edwards and the Henries. f. That man is little to be pitied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.-Johnson. g. What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.-Pope. h. There have been many Diogenes and as many Timons, though but few of that name. i. Aldeborontiphoscophornio! Where left you Chrononhotonthologos ?-Carey. k. Cæsar crossed the Rubicon and marched to Rome. 7. The Bacons were related to the Cecils. m. 26 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran.-Coleridge. While stands the Coliseum o. I've stood upon Achilles' tomb, And heard Troy doubted; men will doubt of Rome.-Byron. p. The Emperor met the Queen at Boulogne. 4. The English are not a military people. Give instances from the foregoing passages of (a) proper nouns becoming common; (b) common nouns becoming proper. 3. Arrange in two columns the concrete and abstract nouns in the following passages— a. Words are the daughters of earth, and deeds are the sons of heaven.-Indian saying. b. Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom. E. of Chatham. c. Praise undeserved is scandal in disguise.-Pope. d. A little learning is a dangerous thing; e. Liturgy. f. g. The evil that men do lives after them: h. My hopes are gone; my worst fears are realized; my goods are seized. THE INFLEXION OF NOUNS. 10. Nouns undergo various changes of form in order to express changes of meaning. Thus lion is changed into lions to express a change of number, into lion's to express possession, and into lioness to express a she-lion. These changes are called inflexions from the Latin flecto, I bend; the word that is inflected being regarded as bent from its simple form. GENDER OF NOUNS. 11. Nouns that are the names of males are said to be of the Masculine Gender, e.g. sailor, master, lord, Harry. The names of females are said to be of the Feminine Gender, e.g. wife, girl, queen, Harriet. The names of things that have no sex are said to be of the Neuter Gender (Lat. neuter, neither), e.g. book, London. The word Gender means kind or class, and comes from the Latin genus, a sort or kind. Thus Shakspere writes, 'Supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many' (Othello). In some languages the gender of nouns is, for the most part, independent of sex, and depends on the terminations of the nouns. Thus in Latin, mensa, a table, is feminine; oculus, an eye, is masculine. So in Old English, tunge, a tongue, was feminine; dag, a day, was masculine. In modern English both tongue and day are neuter. Gender should not be confounded with sex. Gender is a distinction between words, sex a distinction between things. Gender is not strictly an inflexion, except in those cases in which the gender is expressed by the termination, e.g. giant, giantess; testator, testatrix. Nouns that admit of being applied without inflexion to things of either sex, as friend, parent, dove, cousin, bird, are said to be of the Common Gender.1 12. When impersonal things are personified, i.e. when they are spoken to, or spoken of, as if they were living persons, we often attribute to them sex; and the nouns which name them are then said to be of the masculine or feminine gender, according as masculine or feminine qualities are attributed to them. Thus we often speak of the Sun, Death, Time, as masculine; of Nature, Virtue, Religion, Law, as feminine. The gender of nouns denoting sexless things is, of course, arbitrary. In O.E. sun is feminine, moon is masculine; in modern English the genders of these words are reversed. We, thinking mainly of the beauty and gentle motion of the moon, make moon feminine. Our forefathers, when they made 'moon' masculine, probably thought of the moon as 'the measurer, the ruler of days and weeks and seasons, the regulator of the tides, the lord of their festivals, and the herald of their public assemblies' (Max Müller). The sailor invariably speaks of his ship as feminine; in a similar way the enginedriver speaks of his engine; both giving expression, in this way, to a certain admiration and fondness for the things with which they are, respectively, so closely associated. 'It is curious to observe that country labourers give the feminine appellations to those things only which are more closely identified with themselves, and by the qualities and condition of which their own efforts and character as workmen are affected. The mower calls his scythe a she; the ploughman calls his plough a she; but a prong, or a shovel, or a barrow, which passes promiscuously from 1 Some nouns that were formerly of the common gender are now restricted to one sex. E.g. girl, hoyden, niece, shrew, courtesan, termagant, witch, wench, man, hand to hand, and which is appropriated to no particular labourer, is called a he.'- Cobbett. Many of our old English writers make the gender of English nouns correspond to the gender of the equivalent nouns in Latin and Greek. 13. The differences of gender are indicated in three ways in English, viz.— (1) By different words: bachelor (Low Lat. baccalarius, maid or spinster a cowherd, from bacca, a Low Lat. form of vacca, a cow) boar (O.E. bár) sow (O.E. sugu) girl (dim. of Low Ger. gör, a little child) sister (O.E. sweóstor) doe (O.E. dá) cow (O.E. cú) heifer (O.E. heahfor, from heah, high, and fear, ox;= full-grown ox or cow) hen (fem. of O.E. hana, cock) filly (dim. of foal) bitch (O.E. bicce. Cp. Ger. betze) bee (also used as of the common = roe (O.E. rá) or hind (O.N. hind, a female deer) mare (O.E. mere, a mare: mearh, a horse, was mas.) wife (O.E. wif= woman. Cp. fishwife, goodwife [goody], housewife [huzzy]. Also Ger. web= woman) queen (from root gan, to produce Cp. O.E. cwén-fugel hen-kird) lady (O.E. hlæfdige, from aláf, loaf, and dæger, kneader) In modern English 'servant' is of the common gender. In Bible English it is masculine, the feminine being 'maid,' e.g. 'nor his servant, nor his maid' (Ex. xx. 17, P. Book version. Cp. Ps. cxxiii. 2). (2) By distinctive terminations, mostly derived either directly or indirectly from Latin, e.g.— -trix, as testator, testatrix; executor, executrix. -en, the only instance of this termination in modern Eng- In Old English we find several distinctive gender terminations. Thus, all nouns ending in a were masculine; most nouns ending in e were feminine; e.g. wuduwa, a widower; wuduwe, a widow. The old feminine suffix -stere still survives in spinster, though a spinster no longer means, as it did once, a female spinner. In many other |