In English the -r- began to drop out in Late West Saxon and was gone by mid-12c., perhaps from influence of Danish spage "crackle," also used in a slang sense of "speak" (compare crack (v.) in slang senses having to do with speech, such as wisecrack, cracker, all it's cracked up to be). This has sometimes been said to represent a PIE root meaning "to strew," on notion of speech as a "scattering" of words, but Boutkan finds no Indo-European etymology for the Germanic word. Middle English speken, from Old English specan, variant of sprecan "to utter words articulately without singing, have or use the power of speech make a speech hold discourse" with others (class V strong verb past tense spræc, past participle sprecen), from Proto-Germanic *sprekanan (source also of Old Saxon sprecan, Old Frisian spreka, Middle Dutch spreken, Old High German sprehhan, German sprechen "to speak," Old Norse spraki "rumor, report"). I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.īut when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak,Ĭaring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, Half his present repute for the freedom to think,Īnd, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, The meaning "address delivered to an audience" is recorded by 1580s.Īnd I honor the man who is willing to sink The spr- forms were extinct in English by 1200. Middle English speche, from Old English spæc "act of speaking power of uttering articulate sounds manner of speaking statement, discourse, narrative, formal utterance language." It is a variant of Old English spræc, which is from Proto-Germanic *sprek-, *spek- (source also of Danish sprog, Old Saxon spraca, Old Frisian spreke, Dutch spraak, Old High German sprahha, German Sprache "speech").
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