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Other documents randomly have
different content
 The laws of phonology must be established by as large a number
of instances as possible. In no other way can the chances of
accident or mistake be avoided. A law, in fact, must hold good of all
the phænomena that are summed up under it, and the more
numerous the phænomena, the wider and more firmly established
will the law be. Grimm’s laws of the interchanges of sound in the
Aryan family of speech depend on the observation and comparison
of a very large number of words. As soon as it was found that
English words which contained a th answered in signification and
general form to Latin and Greek words which had a t in the same
place, it was possible to formulate the law: English th = Latin and
Greek t; all that remained was to verify the law by fresh instances,
and in this way to strengthen the proof of the connection of the two
languages. If it could be shown that real exceptions to the law occur
which are not due to the interference of other laws, the law would
have to be given up, however numerous might be the apparent
instances on which it rested. The progress of comparative philology
is continually strengthening its phonological laws and adding to their
number.
The intimate connection of sound and sense must never be lost
sight of in etymological research. They are as it were the outer and
inner sides of the same object. Where the significations are
unrelated, we cannot connect two words which agree in phonetic
sound any more than we can connect two words of the same
signification but different sound. In our own group of tongues the
two separate roots dhā “to suck,” and dhā “to place,” for example,
are identical in sound; and if we turn to languages like Chinese or
Ancient Egyptian, we shall find numberless cases in which the same
word, so far as pronunciation is concerned, has a variety of unallied
meanings like our English box or scale. Of course, it is not necessary
that the signification of the words we compare should be exactly the
same; the signification of words changes as much as their outward
phonetic form; but we must be able to show that one meaning is
derived from the other, or from a common parentage, just as we
show that one sound is derived from another or from a common
source.
For the purposes of phonology more especially, the study of living
spoken dialects is indispensable. No doubt the historical character of
glottology requires us to investigate the records of extinct languages
with as much care as the facts of living ones, and it is only by
learning what a language once was that we can properly know what
it is now. Nevertheless, it is only in the modern languages that we
can discover the nature and laws of pronunciation; it is only here,
moreover, that we are brought face to face with the problems and
realities of speech. The biologist, it is true, cannot dispense with the
aid of comparative anatomy, but his primary object is the study of
the living organism. What has been termed “antiquarian philology”
has sometimes stood in the way of scientific progress; sounds have
been confounded with letters, and words instead of sentences have
been made the units of speech. Antiquarian philology, furthermore,
still has the shadow of classical scholasticism hanging over it; it will
need a long education before the world is disabused of the idea that
superiority in literature means superiority in language, and that a
scientific study of language is identical with the old-fashioned
“philology” of the classical scholar. Before the forms of an extinct
speech can be made available for scientific investigation, they must
be revivified by the translation of their written symbols into phonetic
sounds, and how hard such a task is need not be pointed out. If we
wish to work back to the former pronunciation of a language we
must start from its modern and actual pronunciation, and in spite of
all that we can do, in spite of slow and patient induction and a
careful weighing of the facts, our conclusions will be at the best
imperfect and approximative. The older and more scanty the
remains of a language, the more defective and uncertain will be our
restoration of its pronunciation. In the larger number of cases we
have to be content with merely approximative results. What Mr. Ellis
and Mr. Sweet have done for the pronunciation of early English, is
due to the abundance of the data and the unbroken tradition which
they embody; to restore the pronunciation of Latin is a work of
greater difficulty, to restore that of ancient Greek of greater difficulty
still. In short, the records of dead speech must be interpreted by the
facts of living language, just as the conditions which brought about
the deposition of the rocks can only be explained by the forces still
at work upon the surface of the globe. Here as elsewhere in science,
we must proceed from the known to the unknown. The laws of
consonantal change laid down for Latin and Greek, for Sanskrit and
Zend, for Keltic and Old High German, receive their verification and
explanation from the Romance dialects of modern Europe; while it is
in the study of savage idioms, in the languages of Bushmen and of
Kafirs, of North American Indians and of Papuans, that some of the
most precious facts of linguistic science have been obtained. An
extinct literary language, indeed, is by its very nature less
serviceable to the comparative philologist than the artless jargons of
barbarous tribes. It is artificial rather than natural, and the product
of individual idiosyncrasies rather than of the whole community. The
further removed it is from the fresh current of living speech, the less
capable it becomes of strictly scientific treatment. The individual
element, with all its arbitrary capriciousness, has entered too largely
into it. The grammatical forms invented and enforced by ignorant
grammarians, the words coined after false analogy by the Homeric
rhapsodists and their successors, or the stilted phrases and inverted
expressions employed by a particular writer and his imitators, all
belong to the domain of the “philologist” rather than to that of the
scientific student of language. He has nothing to do with textual
criticism or the study of style, much less with the successful
reproduction of the idiosyncrasies of classical authors.
Philology in the narrower sense of the term has to prepare
materials for comparative philology in so far as the latter is
concerned with literary languages or dialects. In its turn it is guided
in its researches and kept within the limits of scientific accuracy by
comparative philology which tests and rectifies its conclusions, and
prevents for the future attempts like that of Buttmann to derive
ἄφνος from ἄφθονος or that of K. O. Müller to extract πελασγός from
πελαργός. The particular can only be understood in the light of the
universal, and as long as we are dealing with one language only our
comparisons must be limited to that language alone at different
stages of its growth, and will consequently sometimes lead us astray.
Error can only be avoided by making our field of comparison as wide
as possible, and so bringing our theory to the test of the greatest
possible number of facts. It is evident from this, however, that the
comparative philologist will have a special and minute acquaintance
with but a few out of the many facts which come before his view.
The memory even of a Mezzofanti is limited, and the ordinary
student of language must be content to derive from others a large
proportion of the materials on which he works. Caution in the choice
and use of his authorities is here absolutely requisite, and it ought to
be the business of the specialists in each language to see that the
facts presented to him are thoroughly accurate and exact. Their
work is the foundation upon which the structure of comparative
philology has to be built.
But the comparative philologist cannot dispense with a specialist’s
knowledge of at least two languages. In no other way can he have
that intimate acquaintance with the inner life of speech requisite for
his studies, or possess the necessary instinct for selecting the right
authorities to whom to trust when dealing with tongues with which
he is unacquainted. The more languages he knows thus thoroughly
the better, especially if these belong to different classes of speech.
Unless the Aryan scholar is acquainted with a Semitic language, his
theory of flection is likely to be one-sided and faulty, and unless he
have a further knowledge of some agglutinative dialect, his views on
the relation between flection and agglutination must be received
with a certain amount of distrust. Grammars and dictionaries will not
give us that grasp upon the inner structure and spirit of a dialect
which is all-important in determining some of the chief problems of
speech. They present us only with the external facts of a language:
before we can think in it, before we can place ourselves in the
mental attitude of its framers and speakers, we must be saturated
with it, as it were, and have that knowledge of it which can only
come from daily and constant use.
 At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the comparative
philologist should not introduce the frame of mind of the specialist
into his comparative inquiries. The specialist who takes up
comparative philology as a subsidiary pursuit is likely to spoil it in the
taking. The minor details of his special subject, whether it be Greek
or Sanskrit or Hebrew, will assume an unreal importance in his eyes,
and the main phænomena to which his attention ought to be
directed will be correspondingly dwarfed. Bopp was the father of
comparative philology simply because he was not a specialist in any
one of the Aryan languages; had he been a Sanskritist, and nothing
else, he would doubtless have produced an excellent Sanskrit
grammar, but not the famous text-book of scientific philology. The
errors into which he fell have since been corrected by the special
students of the various languages he handled so freely: the
knowledge he acquired of them was sufficient for the great purpose
he had in view, and an exhaustive study of any one of them would
merely have consumed the time and energy which were needed for
his other work.
We can now see clearly what is the object and scope of the
science of language. It has to do with language in all its forms as
the significant utterance of society. Where utterance ceases to be
significant, the science of language also ceases to investigate it.
Beyond the barrier of roots it is unable to pass; other sciences—
ethnology, psychology, physiology—must be called in if we wish to
know what lies beyond that barrier, what, in short, were the
inarticulate utterances and gestures which gave rise to articulate
speech. Glottology has to investigate the origin of language so far as
it is really language, but no further. By the use of the comparative
method, words, forms, sentences, dialects, and languages are
classified and traced back to their most primitive form, and the laws
which govern their development and relationships determined and
explained. In this work of comparison, phonology and sematology
ought to go hand in hand, since language consists in the intimate
union of sound and thought; but inasmuch as the facts and laws of
phonology can be more readily discovered and tested than those of
sematology, it is necessary that our linguistic researches should have
their starting-point on the phonological side. Inasmuch as language
is the reflection of the thought of a community, the history of words
and forms, as determined by the application of the laws of
glottology, will be also the mental and spiritual history of the
community that used them. Like the geologist, therefore, who can
reconstruct the material history of the earth and restore the various
forms of life that have successively peopled it, the scientific student
of language can read the past history of human society in the fossil-
records of speech. By tracing the Greek δῆμος to the root δα, “to
divide,” he can show that private property in Attica originated in that
allotment of land by the commune which still prevails among the
Slavs, while not only the existence but even the mode of life and
intellectual horizon of the primitive Aryans has been revealed by
comparative philology with more certainty and minuteness than
could have been done by any chronicle, however perfect. But
perhaps the most important of the results obtained by the
application of the comparative method to language, has been the
light thrown upon the origin and nature of mythology and the history
of religion. Two new sciences, those of comparative mythology and
comparative religion, have grown up under the shelter of glottology,
and form subordinate sciences dependent upon it. In the more
immediately practical sphere of education, again, the science of
language has lightened the labours of the learner by explaining the
reason of the rule while it insists upon the reversal of the old
unscientific mode of teaching languages by beginning with the dead
ones, and points out that the method of science and of nature alike
is to proceed from the known to the unknown. By breaking down the
prejudices that have so long maintained our present cumbrous and
inaccurate spelling, it is preparing the way for a reform in that
direction, with its consequent saving of time and labour, while the
construction of an universal language is the aim towards which its
students ultimately look.
But meanwhile, though much has been accomplished, much more
still remains to be done. Comparative philology and the science of
language are not yet a century old, and the problems of speech that
still await solution are many and important. The previous chapter will
have shown how various are the opinions still held as to the nature
of language and its science, while the belief that the exceptional—
we might almost say abnormal—Aryan family of speech is the type
and rule of all others still unconsciously influences a large amount of
philological reasoning. Is the science of language a physical or a
historical one? Did roots constitute a spoken language or are they
phonetic types which never entered into actual speech? Have
isolating languages become agglutinative and agglutinative
languages inflectional? Do dialects precede the common language or
does the common language precede dialects? Have the languages of
the world been all derived from one or two primitive centres or do
they point to an infinite diversity of origin? Such are some of the
questions which still await an answer, and the answer requires more
investigation, more patient observation and induction, and, above
all, more labourers in the field of research.
 CHAPTER III.
THE THREE CAUSES OF CHANGE IN
LANGUAGE.

“Πάντα ῥεῖ.”—Herakleitus.

Sciences may be classed as historical or physical according as they

deal with the mind of man or with external nature. The forces and
materials of nature remain always the same: oxygen and hydrogen,
for instance, are in no way different to-day from what they were a
million of ages ago, and, combined in the same proportions, would
always have produced water. Man and his intellectual creations, on
the other hand, have a history; that is, the same causes do not
always act in the same way, nor do the causes themselves always
remain the same. The sum of the forces set in motion by the human
will goes on increasing in an accelerated ratio: each new generation
is influenced and moulded by the one that preceded it, and that
influence becomes itself a fresh factor in the sum of the forces and
causes at work. In place of the simpler processes of nature, with
their unvarying uniformity of action, we have an infinitely
complicated development, each stage of which is the immediate
growth of the previous one, and is in turn the origin and germ of all
that are to follow. Unlike the forces and phænomena of nature,
thought is infinitely progressive, for

“through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the
suns.”

Wherever we have to deal with the products of human thought,

there we have a constant ever-varying evolution, conditioned, it is
true, by the uniform laws of outward nature, but continually
modifying and adapting them. It is through the conditions thus
imposed on the development of thought that we can discover the
direction it has taken, and our inquiry thus becomes in great
measure a historical one. We have to see under what conditions, in
what external shape, as it were, the development of thought has
displayed itself at each particular stage of its progress.
Like sociology, or comparative law, the science of language is
concerned with a product of the human intelligence, and must
consequently be included among the historical sciences. Language,
we have seen, is significant sound; sound without significance is not
yet language. As it is the inward sense and meaning, therefore,
which constitute the essence of language, the primary object of
comparative philology ought to be to discover the nature, origin, and
history of the signification we breathe into our words and sentences.
This can only be done, however, by finding out the conditions under
which this signification is put into them, and by questioning the
external side of language, those articulate sounds, namely, whereby
we communicate our meaning to another. Now the external side of
language is purely physiological and governed accordingly by purely
physical laws. Phonology, in short, is as much a physical science as
sematology is a historical one; and if we claim for the science of
language in general the rank of a historical science, it is only
because the meaning, rather than the sound, is the essence of
speech, and phonology the handmaid and instrument rather than
the equivalent of glottology. The method pursued by the science of
language is the method of physical science; and this, combined with
the fact that the laws of sound are also physical—the same
conditions producing the same sounds in all periods of human
history,—has occasioned the belief that the science of language is a
physical science. But such a view results in identifying phonology
and glottology, in making a subordinate science equivalent to the
higher one, and in ignoring all those questions as to the nature and
origin of language which are of supreme importance to the
philosophy of speech. If we treat glottology as a physical science we
must content ourselves with an exposition of the laws of sound and
a mere description of the languages of the world and their
classification, so far as it is founded on phonology alone. It is
evident that such a classification must be superficial and incomplete;
the relationship of languages is primarily based on grammar and
structure rather than on a community of roots, and even roots must
agree in sense as well as in sound before they can be admitted in
proof of linguistic kinship. The intimate and inseparable connection
between the inward and the outward, between sense and sound, in
articulate speech, is a symbol of the connection between the
historical and the physical methods of investigating it; but inasmuch
as the sense is more important than the sound, so, too, the historical
side of linguistic science is more important than its physical side.
Language and languages are in a constant state of change:
nowhere, indeed, can the maxim of Herakleitus, πάντα ῥεῖ, be better
illustrated. This perpetual flux and change is necessitated by the
very fact that language is a product and creation of the human
mind. Thought is ever shifting, moving, developing, and so, too, is
the language in which it seeks to embody itself. But language is not
only changing on this its inner side, it changes also on its outward,
its phonetic side. The physiological organs of speech may be
affected by an alteration in climate, food, or other physical
conditions: they are certain to be affected by the psychological
desire to save trouble or to add emphasis in speaking.
The three great causes of change in language may be briefly
described as (1) imitation or analogy, (2) a wish to be clear and
emphatic, and (3) laziness. Indeed, if we choose to go deep enough
we might reduce all three causes to the general one of laziness,
since it is easier to imitate than to say something new, while
clearness in expression not only saves our neighbour trouble, but
also preserves us from unnecessary repetition. Nothing is gained,
however, by too wide a generalization; and it is, therefore, better to
keep the three causes of linguistic change distinct and separate.
 Imitation has played a far more important part in the history of
speech than is ordinarily admitted. Imitation is the primary instinct
of the infant and the savage, and, under the name of fashion, is a
ruling power among civilized men. The great imitative powers of
barbarous tribes have often been remarked upon by travellers; and a
marvellous facility in mimicry and imitation seems to exist in
proportion to the scanty development of the reasoning faculties. In
this respect, at all events, the savage has not much ground for
boasting of his superiority to the ape. Among the less cultivated
races, indeed, the passion for imitation frequently passes into a
morbid mania, and strange stories are related concerning it. Thus Dr.
R. Maak, in his “Journey to the Amur,” states that “it is not unusual
for the Maniagri to suffer from a nervous malady of the most
peculiar kind, with which we had already been made acquainted by
the descriptions of several travellers.[84] This malady is met with, for
the most part, amongst the wild people of Siberia, as well as
amongst the Russians settled there. In the district of the Yakutes,
where this affliction very frequently occurs, those affected by it, both
Russians and Yakutes, are known by the name of Emiura; but here
the same malady is called by the Maniagri Olon, and by the Argurian
Cossacks Olgandschi. The attacks of the malady which I am now
mentioning consist in this, that a man suffering from it will, if under
the influence of terror or consternation, unconsciously, and often
without the slightest sense of shame, imitate everything that passes
before him.” So, too, Mr. Jagor, in his “Travels in the Philippines,”[85]
tells us that the malady in question is well known in those islands
under the name of Mali-mali, and in Java under that of Sakit-latar;
and goes on to relate how his “companions availed themselves of
the diseased condition of a poor old woman who met us in the
highway, to practise some rough jokes upon her. The old woman
imitated every motion as if impelled by an irresistible impulse, and
expressed at the same time the most extreme indignation against
those who abused her infirmity.” The description reminds us of the
feats of our own “electro-biologists.”
 It is to the desire of imitation that we owe our first knowledge of
our mother-tongue. The child tries to imitate those about him, and
as the faculties of imitation and memory are the only ones yet
developed in him his efforts are usually successful. The distance at
which we stand from the infantile state, and the development of our
reasoning powers, are measured by the prominence given to
individuality and our power of taking the initiative. The community in
which each man acts like his neighbour is not yet a civilized
community; Athens is typical of all that is highest in human culture,
and Athens was emphatically the State in which individuality had the
freest play. It is well for the child who has to learn the language of
his parents that he is rather a member of an uncivilized community
than of Periklean Athens.
The love of imitation is the instrument whereby one language is
able to influence another. Sometimes we find a community giving up
its own tongue altogether and adopting that of his neighbours. Such
has been the case with the Kelts of Cornwall, with the Wends of
Prussia, or with the Huns of Bulgaria. The Negroes of Haiti speak
French, the Lapps Finnish, while according to Humboldt and
Bonpland,[86] “a million of the aborigines of America have
exchanged their native for a European language.” Social contact and
not identity of race occasions a similarity of language, since
language is the medium of communication between the members of
the same community, not between the scattered branches of the
same race. No doubt where the languages are essentially distinct,
based on radically different conceptions of the sentence and its
parts, even the desire of imitation will be often not strong enough to
cause the one language to be borrowed by the speakers of the
other. Here and there we come across children who have a difficulty
in imitating the pronunciation or use of the words they hear, and
such a difficulty is a main cause of the origination of dialects; but it
is among the speakers of agglutinative or polysynthetic tongues
when brought into contact with an inflectional language that the
difficulty is best exemplified. The Negro of the United States still
speaks a jargon which can be called English only by courtesy, and
Humboldt states[87] that “nothing can exceed the difficulty
experienced by the (South American) Indians in learning Spanish,”
although they “manifest quickness of intellect” in other respects, and
“the missionaries assert that their embarrassment is neither the
effect of timidity nor of natural stupidity, but that it arises from the
impediments they meet with in the structure of a language so
different from their native tongue.” Potent as imitation is, it yet has a
limit, and this limit is reached wherever the element of conscious
intelligence intervenes. The savage, like the child, finds it hard to
mimic the products of civilized man, in so far as these embody the
application of the reasoning faculties, and the mode of thought
elaborated through long ages by a cultivated race necessarily forms
a stumbling-block to the Negro or the South American Chayma. The
Ethics of Aristotle could not have been written in a Semitic language,
and a Negro Goethe is a somewhat incongruous conception.
Wherever the distance between the two languages or the two levels
of culture is great enough, the attempt to imitate is either given up
altogether or else becomes a failure. The modes of thought of the
borrower are read into the language he borrows. The Chinaman
endeavoured to assimilate English, and the result was the Pigeon-
English of Canton, a jargon in which we have a framework of English
reared upon Chinese grammar and Chinese pronunciation. The
difficulty of reproducing a cultivated language of foreign origin, or a
language based upon a wholly alien conception of things and their
relations, may be illustrated by the difficulty of translating accurately
books written in another tongue. However closely related two
languages may be, the various shades of meaning they attach to
corresponding words or idioms will necessarily differ, and the more
cultivated the style of a writer, the more impossible will it be to
represent it exactly in a translation.
Where a language is not borrowed bodily, or at any rate engrafted
upon the old modes of thinking and expression, it may yet exercise a
greater or less influence upon a neighbouring language. Words,
sounds, idioms, suffixes, and even grammatical forms may be and
constantly are borrowed from one dialect by another; and it is not
too much to say that a thoroughly pure and unmixed language does
not exist among the civilized races of mankind. Our own English is a
superstructure of Norman-French and Latin upon a foundation of
Anglo-Saxon, and nine-tenths of the Hindi language is Sanskrit. No
people can have neighbours close to them without receiving
something from them in the shape of inventions, products, or social
institutions; and these almost inevitably are adopted under foreign
names. Thus the French have taken meeting and comfortable from
us, and we have received naïve and éclat in return from them. Such
loan-words are of great use in tracing the history and distribution of
civilization, as well as the geographical and social relationships of the
past. Boomerang proves our intercourse with the natives of
Australia, from whom we have derived both the idea and the name
of the weapon; pew, the Dutch puyde, puye, “a pulpit” or “reading-
desk,” from the Latin podium, reveals the close connection that
existed between the Churches of England and Holland in the
seventeenth century, while words like maize, hammock, canoe, and
tobacco, derived as they are from Haytian through the medium of
Spanish, show as plainly as ordinary history that the Spaniards must
have been the discoverers of America and the introducers of its
products into the West. By similar reasoning we infer that the Baltic
provinces must have been inhabited by a Teutonic population at the
time when the Romans received amber from them under the name
of glæsum (our glass), and Professor Thomsen has proved that the
Finns must have bordered on Scandinavians and Teutons some two
thousand or more years ago from the number of words borrowed by
Finnish from their languages.
Sounds, again, may be borrowed from one language by another,
or native sounds modified through the influence of a foreign tongue.
The easier of the Hottentot clicks have been borrowed by the Kafirs,
and the Souletin dialect of Basque has admitted the French vowel u.
Idioms, too, may pass readily from one tongue to another. Words
like avenir and contrée in French, are the result of an attempt to
express German idioms in the Romance of the conquered
provincials, avenir or ad venire being a literal translation of the
German zu-kunft, and contrée for contrata (terra), a curious
representative of the German gegend, “country,” as derived from
gegen, “against.” The great extension of the English plural in -s,
confined as it was in Anglo-Saxon to a comparatively few words,
seems due to Norman-French influence, and the use of the genitive
and dative of the personal pronouns in English “of me,” “to me,” in
the place of the Anglo-Saxon min and me, is modelled after a French
pattern. Bulgarian and Roumanian seem to have caught the infection
of Albanian usage in which the definite article is attached to the end
of the word, as in the Roumanian domnu-l, “the lord,” and Persian
has even adopted the Semitic order of words so repugnant to the
general structure of the Aryan group, in saying dăst-ĭ-’Umăr, for
“Omar’s hand.” For instances of borrowed suffixes, we have only to
point to our English -ize and -ist from the Greek -ιζ-ω and -ιστ-ης,
which tend to supersede the old corresponding suffixes of the
language, and the French participial termination is imitated in the
letter of Gawin Douglas to Richard II. (1385), where we find such
phrases as “Zour honourable lettres contenand,” and “brekand the
trewis.”
The borrowing of grammatical forms is of much rarer occurrence,
inasmuch as grammar is the essence and life blood of language, and
to borrow the forms of grammar, therefore, is to intermingle the
psychological histories of two separate tongues. It is a
metamorphosis of the whole inherited mode of thinking and of
viewing the relations of things to ourselves and one another, and to
mix two grammars together is like mixing two different and
incompatible modes of thought. A supposed instance of a mixed
grammar (that is, of a mixed language) generally turns out to have
another explanation. Thus it has been believed that the modern
Aryan languages of India have substituted agglutinated postfixes for
flection, and so have adopted the grammatical machinery of their
Dravidian neighbours. Thus in Gujerati, dêv-mā̃ means “in the god,”
like the Hindustani ãdhe-mē̃, “in the blind,” and in Nepalese mânis-
visê is “in man,” mā̃ or mē̃ being a contraction of the Sanskrit
madhyê (= madhya-i), “in the middle,” and visê of visayê, “in the
thing.” What has really happened in these cases, however, is this.
The first noun instead of being provided with the locative suffix (-i)
is compounded with another noun which still retains the suffix, and
the locative signification accordingly resides not in the second
member of the compound, but in its worn-away flection. Here, then,
there is no example of grammatical confusion. There are other
instances of “mixed grammar,” however, which cannot be so easily
disposed of, and it would really seem that in rare cases there
actually has been an interchange of grammatical forms between two
unallied languages. Thus in Assamese, which appears to be at
bottom an Aryan language, the plural affix (bilak) is inserted
between the noun and the case-ending, so that from manuh-bilak,
“men,” we get the genitive manuh-bilak-or, the dative manuh-bilak-
oloi, the accusative manuh-bilak-ok, the locative manuh-bilak-ot, and
the ablative manuh-bilak-e, where the postpositions are all of them
said to be of non-Aryan origin. The language of Harar, in Northern
Africa, again, though apparently belonging to the Semitic family of
speech, makes use of postpositions, and reverses the Semitic order
of words when employing the genitive; while, according to Schott,
the Persian affix of the dative and accusative was originally a
Turanian postposition. Cases like these must, of course, be carefully
distinguished from those in which we are dealing with an artificial
language and not with the spoken language of the people. A curious
language of this kind, the Pehlevi, was formed in the courts of the
Sassanian princes of Persia, in which the elements of Aryan and
Semitic grammar were mixed together in a strange fashion, but such
a language did not penetrate beyond the limits of the learned class.
Of the same nature are such affected plurals as termini and fungi
from terminus and fungus in English, or the genitive and dative
Christi and Christo in theological German. They would not be
understood beyond the boundaries of a narrow circle.[88]
The most usual way in which the grammar of one language is
influenced by that of another is by the adaptation of existing words
and forms to express new grammatical ideas and relations imported
from abroad. Thus the Assyrians became familiarized with the
distinction between present and past time through their
acquaintance with the extinct Accadian of ancient Chaldea, and they
accordingly set apart certain separate phonetic forms, which had
previously existed side by side without any difference of meaning, to
express the present and the past tense.[89] So Spiegel[90] believes
that he has discovered the influence of Semitic grammar in the Zend
use of the feminine to denote a neuter or abstract, and of the dual
to denote a pair. The invariable rule of the ancient Maya of placing
the adjective after its substantive, is sometimes violated in the
modern language through the influence of Castilian,[91] and the
Ragusan custom of using the Illyrian svoj, “his own,” in the place of
njegòv, “his,” is referred by Brugman to the influence of Italian and
German.[92]
But the principle of imitation comes chiefly into play in the sphere
of language in changing the form and meaning of words so as to
bring them into agreement with the form and meaning of other
words. When the true history and significance of certain forms have
been forgotten by those who use them, other words with a totally
different history and significance are very likely to be assimilated to
them. When language has once created a particular mould it is very
liable to run all manner of words into it. This is what is meant by the
action of false analogy in speech. Words, forms, and significations
which ought to have been kept apart are erroneously made like one
another; the instinct of imitation and the desire to save trouble
combine to exclude the irregular from language, and to force all
exceptions under a uniform rule. The modern Greek declines
innumerable words which formerly belonged to different declensions
after the type of ταμίας, turning βασιλέας, ἄνδρας, and the like, into
nominatives singular, and in the English which is unchecked by a
literary tradition I comed is already more common than I came.
Analogy is constantly at work throughout the whole domain of
language—in pronunciation, in formal grammar, in syntax, and in
sematology—building up and reconstructing what phonetic decay
and change of meaning have tended to pull down. English is rapidly
forcing all exceptional cases under the rule that throws the accent
back as much as possible; balcóny has become bálcony, and Milton’s
line “O argument blasphémous, false and proud,” would no longer
scan. There is good reason to believe that the vocabulary of the
primitive Aryan was for the most part, if not entirely, accented on
the last syllable; the course of centuries has been continually
thrusting the accent back as much as possible, and Latin and the
Æolic dialects of Greece which illustrate this tendency, only show
their want of conservatism and relative decay. Though the old accent
of pitch has become an accent of stress in most of the modern
European tongues, the same process is still going on; and while
Polish still accents its words on the penultima, the accentuation of
Bohemian is upon the first syllable. The same fact reappears in the
Semitic family of speech, where it can be shown that the penultima
primarily received the accent, and that the accentuation of the
modern Arabic which agrees with that of English is a later
innovation.[93] Greek words like φῡ́ω, θῡ́ω, and τῑ́ω, where the
length of the vowel compensated for the loss of an iota (*φυίω),
were brought under the general rule of the language which made
one vowel before another short,[94] and when Horace addresses the
fountain of Bandusia as “splendidior vĭtro,” the quantity assigned to
vĭtro, a contracted form of vistrum for vid-trum (from the root vid,
“to see”), arises from the mistaken notion that because a naturally
short vowel could be lengthened before a mute followed by a liquid
every vowel in such a position might be treated as indifferently long
or short. So, again, the termination of the Latin nominative plural in
-es was properly short, as may be seen from a comparison with the
Greek; but the long vowel resulting from the combination of this
termination with the final vowel of stems in -i (such as nubi-es) was
extended to other cases, and the nominative plural of consonantal
stems like voc (vox) was accordingly regarded as ending in a long
syllable.
Apart from accent or quantity, however, the pronunciation of
words is largely affected by the influence of analogy. Our English
preference for diphthongal sounds is changing either and neither
into aither and naither, in spite of the fact that the only other word
in the language by which such a pronunciation could be supported is
the misspelt height from high. The Frenchman “gallicizes” the words
he borrows or the proper names he uses just as the Englishman
“anglicizes” his; it is easier for the one to say Londres and Biarri’
than London and Biarritz, and for the other Paris and Marsaels than
Pari’ and Marseies. Up to the last Charles James Fox called Bordeaux
wine “Bordox,” maintaining that it had been domesticated in
England, and ought accordingly to follow English customs. The
action of analogy throws much light on Grimm’s laws respecting the
shifting of sounds in the various branches of the Aryan family, which
will be specially treated in the next chapter. When once a particular
variety of pronunciation has come into vogue it absorbs and kills all
deviating modes of pronunciation as surely as the cardoon in Central
America has killed the native plants in its neighbourhood. We are all
creatures of fashion, and the instinct of imitation is at work from the
moment we first cease to be infants,—“speechless” embryos of
humanity.
In the matter of grammar, a familiar instance of the way in which
analogy can change the current forms of speech is afforded by the
extension of the English perfect in -ed, the last relic of the affixed
dide, the reduplicated past tense of do. The Latin amamini is the
plural masculine of the old middle participle which we find in the
Sansk. bharamâṇas, the Greek τυπτόμενοι, and the Latin alumnus
(alomenus from al-o) or Vertumnus, the “changing” year. But when it
had firmly established itself as a substitute for the second person
plural of the present of the middle-passive voice, with estis
understood, its true origin and meaning came to be forgotten, and
as amamini was conjugated with amamur and amantur, so the
anomalous amemini was conjugated with amemur and amentur, and
amabamini with amabamur and amabantur. The coexistence of the
older and later forms of the third personal pronoun in Greek, σφέ
(Sansk. swa, Lat. se), and ἕ caused the one to be employed as a
plural and the other as a singular, although the pronoun was
originally reflective and of all genders; and the new plural pronoun
was then provided with cases as well as with a dual formed on the
analogy of those of the first and second pronouns. In the case of the
dative alone a difficulty occurred, since here ἡμῖν or ὑμῖν could not
be distinguished in form from σφί(ν) still used as singular by
Herodotus; but the difficulty was overcome by having recourse to
the noun-declension and creating a σφίσι as a parallel to ναῦσι. The
contracted plural accusative πόλεις could not be derived from the
original πολιας (for πολιανς) by any known rule of Greek phonology;
it owes its existence to the habit of making the accusative plural like
the nominative. The whole of the so-called fifth declension in Latin
has grown up from the unconscious blunders of speech. A before m
tended to become e, as in siem for siam, and accordingly by the side
of materiam was heard materiem. The accusative materiem was
then confounded with accusatives like nubem, and so a new
nominative came into being, materies by the side of materia.
Meanwhile the vowel of the accusative case-ending had influenced
the vowel of the other case-endings, and changed the old ablative
materiâ and genitive materiai into materie and materiei. The same
process was next extended to the plural, materiarum, materiabus,
and materias became materierum, materiebus, and materies, and
nothing remained but to assimilate nominative and accusative as in
nouns of the third declension whose accusative plural also
terminated in -es.
Analogy will sometimes alter the whole structural complexion of a
language. The Coptic, formerly an affix-language like Old Egyptian or
the Semitic tongues, has become a prefix-language, denoting by
prefixes the relations of grammar; and this metamorphosis seems
due to the influence of the neighbouring Berber and cognate
dialects. The tendency must have first shown itself in a few
instances, and then by degrees have extended to the whole
language. It has been held that the Aryan conjugation with a vowel
between the root and the suffix, as in the Sanskrit bhav-â-mi or the
Latin (e)s-u-m, has grown up in the same manner, verbs like the
Sanskrit ad-mi, “I eat,” alone surviving as the remains of a past in
which the personal pronoun was attached immediately to the verbal
root. This, however, is very doubtful, the latter class of verbs being
more probably the result of phonetic decay which has obliterated the
connecting vowel, or more correctly the final syllable of the stem.
Syntax has not escaped the all-prevailing action of analogy and
imitation. The relics of English flection are rapidly disappearing
under its influence, and the use of the conjunctive were will soon be
as obsolete as that of be. The relative pronoun was originally a
demonstrative like our that, which drew attention to the idea
contained in the principal clause, but with the extension of its use as
a relative its demonstrative signification was lost, and it came to be
used in instances where the demonstrative could not be employed.
Examples of the power of analogy in changing and extending the
meaning of words are almost needless. The process is going on
before our eyes every day. A new object or a new idea is named
from its likeness to something with which we are familiar. The
Kuriaks call the ox the “Russian elk” (Ruski olehn), just as the
Romans spoke of the elephant as the Luca bos, and we are all
familiar with the significant name of the Sugarloaf Mountain. There
is a long distance from the primary signification of post as something
“placed” or “fixed” to its signification as the arrival of
correspondence, but every stage of the way can be traced and
shown to be the work of analogy. The post fixed in the ground
became a station, and when such stations were established for the
conveyance of messages, news was said to travel “by post.” To
transfer the name “post” from the machinery whereby the news was
carried to the news itself was at once obvious and easy. The foot of
a mountain is as much a metaphorical expression as the arm of the
sea or the arm of law, and every metaphorical expression is an
example of analogy. Three-fourths of our language, indeed, may be
said to consist of worn-out metaphors. In no other way can terms be
found for the spiritual and the abstract. Spirit is itself “the breath,”
the abstract that which is “drawn apart.” Our knowledge grows by
comparing the unknown with the known, and the record of that
increase of knowledge grows in the same way. Things are named
from their qualities, but those qualities have first been observed
elsewhere. The table like the stable originally meant something that
“stands,” but the idea of standing had been noted long before the
first table was invented. The only abstract notion the Tasmanians
had attained was that of resemblance. When they wanted to express
the conception of roundness they had to say “like the moon” or
some other round object, and similarly in the case of other abstract
adjectives.
But as in pronunciation and grammar, so too in the matter of
signification the analogy may sometimes be a wrong one. The men
who coined the term “whale-fishery” were ignorant of the fact that
the whale is a mammal, and that its only resemblance to a fish
consists in its living in the sea. The name of guinea-pig, again, as
applied to the small animal imported from Brazil, is singularly
inappropriate. At other times the process whereby a new idea or
object has been brought into relation with what was already familiar
has been fair and legitimate. Thus the sense of the French canard as
“idle gossip” can be traced back step by step to the primary meaning
of the Low-Latin canardus. The feminine of canard is cane, and just
as cane is the German kahn, “a skiff,” so canardus properly signified
“a small boat.” Then by the force of analogy the words came to
denote “a duck,” and as the duck was frequently used to decoy other
birds by its cry, canard ended in signifying a mere decoy, a mere
empty cry calculated to deceive.
Mythology, as we shall see hereafter, is in large measure based
upon the metaphors of speech. The phænomena of nature were
explained by likening them to those human actions with which
primitive man was acquainted, and when in course of time a higher
level of knowledge had been reached, and the original meaning of
the traditional epithets had been forgotten, they came to be taken
literally and interpreted as referring to beings of a super-human
world. The dawn had been likened to a rosy-fingered maiden, the
sun to a charioteer, and so the myths of Eôs, the ever-fleeing
maiden, and of Phœbus Apollo, the heavenly charioteer, came into
existence. Mythology is not so much a disease of language as a
misunderstanding of its metaphors and a misconception of the
analogical reasoning of our early forefathers.
 Exactly the converse of this are those popular etymologies
whereby words whose meaning is unknown or forgotten are
assimilated to others with which the speakers are familiar. A
gardener has been heard to call asphalt “ashes-spilt,” and thus
render an explanation of the word to his own mind, and the modern
spelling of the German sündfluth is due to the popular belief that the
word, really a compound of sint, “great,” the Anglo-Saxon sin,
“everlasting,” was invented to denote the deluge of Noah, which
punished the “sins” of mankind. Luther still writes sindfluth
(sindefluth), and in his translation of the Bible uses it in other
passages besides those which relate to the Noachian flood (e.g., Ps.
29, 10, and Sirach 39, 22). Proper names have naturally suffered,
especially from the attempt to give a meaning to them. Burgh de
Walter has become Bridgewater and Widder Fjord, “the Creek of
Wethers,” Waterford. The name of Madrid is explained by a popular
legend which makes a boy, pursued by a bear, fly to a tree and cry
to his mother “Madre id, Madre id” (“Mother, he comes”);[95] the
Lepontii, we are told by Pliny,[96] received their title from having
been the companions of Hercules who were “left behind”
(λιπόντες!); and the Kirgises were so named from forty maidens, the
mothers of the race, qyrg being “forty” in Turkic and qyz “a
maiden.”[97] Similarly the modern Greeks have changed the
meaningless Athens into Ἀνθῆναι, “the Flowery,” while Krisa has
become Χρυσό, “the Golden.”[98] Where all other means failed the
name was explained by the clumsy device of turning it into the name
of an individual, and so there arose those eponymous heroes like
Hellen and Asshur from whom tribes and nations were supposed to
have been designated. The same process of etymologizing by the
help of false analogy meets us in literature as well as in popular
speech. The Homeric Poems are full of instances of the fact. In the
Odyssey the old epic epithet ἐπηέτανος, “long lasting” (from ἐπὶ, ἄει,
and τείνω), has come to be derived from ἔτος, which had lost its
initial digamma (ϝετος, Sanskrit vatsas), and is accordingly employed
in the sense of “lasting all the year,” while the Aorist infinitives
χραισμεῖν and ἰδεῖν were taken to be presents and so provided with
the futures χραισμήσω and ἰδήσω. Our own absurd mode of spelling
presents us with parallel cases. Because should, the past tense of
shall, has an l, could, the past tense of can, is given one; and
further, the comparative of forth, has been written and pronounced
farther as if derived from far.
The desire of clearness and emphasis, the second cause of change
in language, is, like analogy, a creative and constructive power, and
is often found at work in company with analogy. The object of
speech is to communicate our thoughts to one another; where,
therefore, our meaning is not clearly grasped, we begin to
pronounce our words more distinctly than usual and to lay greater
stress upon them. The result of this is a clear enunciation of all the
syllables of a word, and sometimes a phonetic addition to the word
itself. In this way we may explain the adventitious dental that has
attached itself to the end of a word like sound, Latin sonus, French
son, or the aspirate which is inserted in the wrong place by persons
who are conscious of a difficulty in pronouncing it in the right place.
So, again, in talking to a foreigner we instinctively raise the voice
and repeat our remarks in a louder tone should he fail to
comprehend them. The more readily our thoughts are understood,
the less need there is of our dwelling upon the sounds which express
them. Hence it is that with the progress of culture and education,
and the consequent advance in quickness of perception, our words
get worn away and slurred over, and a fragment only of the original
word or the original sentence is often sufficient to convey our
meaning. English and French are prominent examples of this fact,
French cutting off its final consonants, and English softening its
harder letters and avoiding the free play of the lips. Classical Italian,
nurtured on the pedantic and metrical pronunciation of literary Latin
and screened by the mountains of Tuscany, cannot, it has been well
said, be spoken rapidly; but if we go to the Bolognese dialect, where
these influences have not been at work, we shall find “A n’ vuoi t’ m’
in parl, S’nor,” doing duty for, “I won’t have you to speak to me
about it, sir.”[99] While the educated Frenchman leaves the negative
to be supplied by the mind when using pas, point, or jamais by
themselves, the uneducated Englishman strengthens his negative by
repeating it. Indeed, the repetition of the negative in order to
emphasize the negation is a mark of most early languages, and runs
parallel with the gesture and gesticulation which characterize the
tongues of savages and barbarians. The muscular effort called forth
by the latter necessarily extends also to the elocution, and a speaker
generally finds that the clearness of his utterances is assisted by the
exercise of the muscles of the arms and face.
Emphasis acts upon the outward sounds of a word as well as upon
its inner meaning, and like analogy, though by the contrary process
of differentiation, tends to build up new grammatical forms. The
English thunder and jaundice go back to an Anglo-Saxon thunor and
a French jaunisse, where the intrusive dental must be referred to the
desire of clearness, since it can hardly be said to facilitate the
pronunciation. So, too, in impregnable and groom, the French
imprenable and Anglo-Saxon guman, we have other instances of the
same striving after distinct and emphatic utterance, and the
extension of the Greek πόλις (Sanskrit puris) into πτόλις, or of
πόλεμος into πτόλεμος must be put down to a similar cause. People
who wish to be very particular in the pronunciation of their words
are apt to say kyind for kind, and the Italian luogho has arisen in no
other way out of the Latin locus. The varying quality of a vowel, or
an apparent exception to Grimm’s laws of letter-change may be
explained by this principle of emphasis. Thus the Greek οἶδα, like the
Sanskrit vêda or the Gothic vait, has a diphthong in the singular,
whereas in the dual and plural the vowel is short (ĭ). This has
resulted from the fact that the primitive Aryan laid the accent on the
first syllable of the word in the singular; the less familiar flections of
the dual and plural, however, were accented, and so preserved the
short vowel of the root from being changed. In the same way the
Old High German perfect laiþ in the singular observes the rule which
makes an Old High German þ answer to an original d; in the plural,
however, where the corresponding Sanskrit form accents the suffixes
and not the root (as in the singular) the rule is violated and we have
lidum, liduþ and lidun. So, too, by the side of the Old High German
brôþar (bruder), answering to a primitive bhrâ´tar, we find môdar
(muther) and fadar (vater) answering to a primitive mâtár and pitár
(pâtár); while the accent of the Vedic saptán and the Greek ἑπτά,
“seven,” shows why the Old High German seban and the Gothic
sibun have b instead of the regular f.[100]
Emphasis enriches the vocabulary, first of all by introducing
synonyms, and then by making a distinction of meaning between
them. To set two synonyms side by side is the best way of giving
clearness and intelligibility to our thoughts. Much of the charm of
our authorized version of the Bible is due to the attempt of the
translators to bring out the meaning of a Greek or Hebrew word by
using two equivalents, one from a Romanic, the other from a
Teutonic source. There comes a time, however, when we begin to
contrast and differentiate the two synonyms; and so love comes to
include much more than its New Testament synonym charity, and
pastor, the synonym of shepherd, is confined to ecclesiastical
language, while custom only allows us to say “much obliged,” and
“very grateful.”[101]
Of a similar nature is the process whereby two varying forms of
the same word become distinguished in use and signification. Thus
the Latin tepor and tempus both go back to an earlier tapas, “heat,”
but the strengthening of the first syllable of the one, and the change
of s into r in the other, caused them to break apart and in course of
time to be employed with a totally different meaning. The difference
of sense brought with it a difference of gender, and thus introduced
a grammatical change. The analogy of other nouns in final -or or -os
preserved the masculine use of tepor, while tempus followed the
gender of neuters like genus. The history of the termination of the
nominative singular of Latin comparatives has been much the same.
This was indifferently -ior or -ios (-ius), like the Greek -ίων and the
Sanskrit -yan from an earlier -yans, and in Valerius Antias[102] we
find prior still used for the neuter in the phrase “senatus-consultum
prior,” while the title of the fourth book of Cassius Hemina’s Annals
was, “Bellum Punicum posterior.” Arbor and robur were originally
identical, and M. Bréal has shown that this was also the case with
cruor and crus.[103] The two latter words both represent the Sanskrit
kravis and the Greek κρέας in the sense of “bloody flesh” or “bloody
limb,” and their differentiation was aided by the introduction of a
new word, caro, in the sense of “flesh.” Caro originally meant simply
“part” or “portion,” a sense in which the Umbrian karu is still
employed in the Engubine Tables,[104] and the Oscan carneis in the
Tabula Bantina. Roots, too, as well as derivatives, may be
differentiated and gradually assume independent meanings. Thus in
Greek, if we follow the usual theory, the old root ar or ara has been
split up into three, ἀρ-, ἐρ-, and ὀρ-, in accordance with the
threefold representation of the Sanskrit ă in European Aryan.
Accordingly by the side of ἀρόω, the Latin arare, the Gothic arjan
(Old English ear), which appropriated to itself the sense of
“ploughing,” we have also ἐρέσσω (remus) in the sense of “rowing,”
and ὄρ-νυμι (orior) in the sense of “rising” to one’s work. This
differentiation of the three roots, however, seems to have come
about after the separation of the several members of the Aryan
group, as we find no trace of it in the Asiatic branch of the family,
and it must, therefore, have really taken place in the fully-formed
words of the European tongues.[105] Greek with its delicate sense of
vocalic difference shows a special tendency towards utilizing vowel
changes for grammatical purposes. Thus the reduplicated syllables in
δίδωμι and δέδωκα were originally identical, but in course of time,
while the sound of ĭ was appropriated to the present tense, the
sound of e came to mark the perfect. In the same way Greek verbs
in -αω, -εω, -οω all go back to the form which we have in the
Sanskrit -ayâmi, but later usage tended to assign a transitive
meaning to the form in -οω, and an intransitive one to that in -εω,
while that in -αω floated between the two. It is probable that the
three Semitic case-endings in u, i, a, which respectively denoted the
nominative, genitive, and accusative, all went back to a primary
indeterminate -a. In the Negro Dinka language certain plurals are
formed by lengthening or sharpening the vowel of the singular, like
rōr, the plural of ror, “wood,” nim, the plural of nom, “head,” līb, the
plural of lyep, “tongue,” or tut, the plural of tuot, “goose;” and since
we find that a verb becomes passive by simply lengthening the final i
of the formative elements (as ran a-tšī tšōl, “the man has been
called,” by the side of ran a-tši tšōl, “the man has called”), it is
possible that the vowel change in all these cases is due to
differentiation for the sake of clearness and emphasis. Such at least
has been the origin of the tones which form so marked a feature in
Chinese. Dr. Edkins has shown that the confusion between words of
different signification occasioned by the loss of various initial and
final letters in pronunciation was obviated by the substitution of
tones, and the effects of phonetic decay have been thus neutralized
by the action of the contrary principle of emphasis.
One of the modes in which this principle comes into play is what
Professor Max Müller has called Dialectic Regeneration. The words
and grammatical forms which have become effete in the literary
dialect, are often replaced by others taken up from the fresh
fountain of “provincial” speech. There is nothing any longer to
attract attention in what has become so prosaic an expression as
“the four cardinal points,” striking as the phrase once was; but when
Carlyle goes to the Scotch and borrows from it the “four airts,” we
are at once arrested by the unusual character of the word, a special
emphasis is laid upon it, and we begin to realize its full meaning. It
is in a period of social revolution, like that of the Norman Conquest
in England, that Dialectic Regeneration is best seen at work on the
literary language. As soon as the latter loses the support of the
educated classes, it fails to withstand the attack of the less favoured
but more deeply rooted dialects which have surrounded it, and, as in
the case of literary Anglo-Saxon with its inflections and learned
terms, it disappears for ever. The unwritten languages of savages
and barbarians are in a continual state of flux and change. Old
words and expressions which have ceased to possess the needed
amount of clearness and emphasis have to make way for new ones.
The slang of the schoolboy, or the cant of thieves and
costermongers, exemplifies the same fact. It is not so much the
desire of revolting against the proprieties of a civilized society, or of
framing a secret jargon which shall be unintelligible to others, that
produces these wild outgrowths of language; it is rather the feeling
that the conventional terms have become mere symbols, or, as
Hobbes said, the counters of wise men, and that the ideas which are
perceived and felt clearly should be expressed with equal clearness
and force. Man is not wholly ruled by the wish to save himself
trouble and attain his object with the least effort; the healthy love of
physical exertion for its own sake is also a powerful motive in human
life. It is only with the growth of civilization and thought that the
exertion is transferred from the muscles to the brain, that words
become so many algebraic signs, and that syntax takes the place of
elocution. It has been often noticed that the tendency of the modern
languages of Europe is towards a monotonous level of both accent
and tone; but it must be remembered that, as long as poetry exists,
there will exist also a tendency in the opposite direction, as well as a
protest against the reduction of all language into a mere reflection of
the dry light of reason. Laziness will not explain everything in speech
any more than it will in the ordinary dealings of mankind. As Sievers
states:—“We even now often find it stated in works on the science of
language, that all phonetic change results from a striving to facilitate
the pronunciation and simplify the articulation; or, in other words,
that change of sound always consists in a weakening of sound and
not in a strengthening of it. We may allow that although many of the
phænomena observable in the history of speech can be brought
under this rule, the general application of the statement is absolutely
false.... The idea of facilitating the pronunciation, if it is to be any
longer maintained, must be regarded as an essentially relative one.
Speaking generally, we must never forget that the different degrees
of difficulty in uttering various sounds are in themselves
extraordinarily slight, and that real difficulties in forming them are
usually experienced only in the case of sounds belonging to a foreign
language.... In short, real difficulties in pronunciation are never
specially felt by the members of a community which speaks a given
language, and with them only a further development of their
language is possible.”
 This brings us to the third and last cause of change of language,
laziness, or, as it has also been termed, the principle of least effort.
As the results of laziness show themselves principally in the
alterations undergone by the sounds of speech, this cause of change
is commonly known under the name of Phonetic Decay.[106] But the
meanings of words as well as the expression of grammatical
relations are as much subject to decay as the sounds of speech; the
outward form of age which can be traced back to the Low Latin
ætaticum and the classical ætas, has suffered no less from the wear
and tear of time than its inward signification, which goes back to a
root meaning “to go.” Like the present strata of the earth which are
the débris of the earlier rocks, the present strata of language are the
worn-out relics of older formations. The power of laziness, more
especially in the shape of phonetic decay, is conspicuous in almost
every word we utter; it is the first agent of linguistic change that
strikes the student, and it has accordingly attracted more than its
due share of attention. The influence of laziness has been insisted
on to the exclusion of the two other equally important causes of
change in speech, and the growth of grammatical consciousness, the
discovery of new grammatical relations and the development of
fresh mental points of view, have even been ascribed to its action.
No doubt its influence is great and far-reaching, but we must be on
our guard against regarding laziness as sufficient of itself to explain
all the phænomena of language. Phonology is rather affected by it
than either morphology or sematology. Owing, however, to the large
place assigned to it in works on comparative philology, it will not be
necessary to dwell upon it here in any great detail. We naturally
seek to make ourselves understood by our neighbours with the least
possible amount of trouble. Muscular and still more mental fatigue is
distasteful to us, and the less we have to exert our vocal organs and
powers of thinking when making our meaning clear to another, the
better satisfied we are sure to be. Hence it happens that we
constantly use words with a very dim appreciation indeed of their full
and exact significance. We select that part of the meaning only
which for some reason or other has made an impression upon our