Читать книгу An Outline of English Speech-craft - Barnes William - Страница 4

and mark-words or mark-wording of suchness, as good, bad, long, heavy.

Suchness may be marked by one word, as ‘a white lily,’ or by a some or many of words, as ‘a very white lily,’ or ‘a most dazzlingly white lily,’ or ‘a lily as white as snow.’

Things are marked as having much of something, as hilly, stony, watery; or made of something, as golden, wooden, woollen; or having some things, as two-legged, three-cornered, long-eared, or loved or hated; of the same set or likeness of something, as lovely, quarrelsome, manly, childish; wanting of something, as beardless, friendless.

Pitches of Suchness.

The Suchnesses of Things are of sundry pitches, which are marked by sundry shapes or endings or bye-words of the mark-words, as ‘My ash is tall, the elm is taller, and the Lombardy poplar is the tallest of the three trees’; or ‘Snow is whiter than chalk,’ or ‘Chalk is less white than snow,’ or ‘John is the tallest or least tall of the three brothers.’

These Pitch-marks offmark sundry things by their sundry suchnesses, as ‘The taller or less tall man of the two is my friend,’ or ‘The tallest man is less tall than the tree,’ or ‘The least tall man is taller than the girl.’

The three Pitches may be called the Common Pitch, the Higher Pitch, and the Highest Pitch.

The Welsh has a fourth Pitch-word, called the Even Pitch, as pell, far; pellach, farther; pellaf, farthest; pelled, as far (as something else).

Younger may mean younger reckoned from young, or younger reckoned from old; as ‘Alfred at 80 is younger than Edward at 85.’ In this case we may well say less old.

Worse (wyrse) is shapen from wo, wa, we, a stub-root which means wrong, atwist, bad in any way, and is our woe.

The r in weor is most likely of a forstrengthening and not a comparative meaning —weor, wyr, very bad; weorer, wyrer, still more strongly bad. But, not to double the r, men might have put a strengthening s, and so had weors.