better? The advantage ought to be, if anywhere, on our side.
The progress of language in every department, accompanying
and representing the advance of the race, on the
whole, in the art of speaking as in other arts, is from
the grosser to the more refined, from the physical
to the moral and intellectual, from the material
All formal Elements once Material.
to the formal. The conversion of compounds into forms, by the
reduction of one of their elements to formative value, is simply
a part of the general process which also creates auxiliaries and
form-words and connectives, all the vocabulary of mind, and all
the figurative phraseology that gives life and vigour to our
speech. If a copula, expressive of the grammatical relation of
predication, could be won only by attenuation of the meaning
of verbs signifying “grow,” “breathe,” “stand,” and the like;
if our auxiliaries of tense and mode all go trace ably back to
words of physical meaning (as have to “seize,” may to “be great
or strong,” shall to “be under penalty,” and so on); if of comes
from the comparatively physical oj, and for from “before, forward
”; if relative pronouns are specialized demonstratives and
interrogatives; if right means etymologically “straight,” and
wrong means “twisted ”; if spirit is “blowing,” and intellect a
“picking out among,” and understanding a “getting beneath,”
and development an “unfolding ”; if an event takes place or
comes to pass, and then drops out of mind and is forgotten (opposite
of gotten)-then it is of no avail to object to the grossness of
any of the processes by which, in earlier language or in later,
the expression of formal relations is won. The mental sense of
the relation expressed is entirely superior to and independent
of the means of its expression. He who, to express the plural of
man, says what is equivalent to man-man or heap»man (devices
which are met with in not a few languages) has just as good a
sense of plurality as he who says men or homines; that sense is
no more degraded in him by the coarseness of the phrase he uses
to signify it than is our own sense of eventuality and of pastness
by the undisguised coarseness of take place and have been. In
short, it is to be laid down with the utmost distinctness and
confidence, as a law of language-growth, that there is nothing
formal anywhere in language which was not once material,
that the formal is made out of the material, by processes which
began in the earliest history of language and are still in action.
We have dropped here the restriction to our own or Indo-European language with which we began, because it is evident that what is true of this family of speech, one of the most highly organized that exist, may also be true of the rest—must be true of them, unless some valid evidence be found to the contrary. The unity of human nature Laws of Change and Growth. makes human speech alike in the character of its beginnings and in the general features of its after-history. Everywhere among men a certain store of expression, body of traditional signs of thought, being given, as used by a certain community, it is capable of increase on certain accordant lines, and only on them. In some languages, and under peculiar circumstances, borrowing is a great means of increase; but it is the most external and least organically important of all. Out-and-out invention (which, so far as we can see, must be of the kind called by us onomatopoetic) is found to play only a very insignificant part in the historical periods of language—clearly because there are other and easier modes of gaining new expression for what needs to be expressed. In the course of phonetic change a word sometimes varies into two (or more) forms, and makes so many words, which are differently turned to account Everything beyond this must be the product of combination; there is no other way, so far as concerns the externals of speech Then, partly as accompanying and aiding this external growth, partly as separate from and supplementing it, there is in all language an internal growth, making no appearance in the audible part of speech, consisting in multiplication of meanings, their modification in the way of precision or comprehension or correctness, the restriction of words to certain uses, and so on. Along with these, too, a constant change of phonetic form constitutes an inseparable part of the life of language. Speech is no more stable with respect to the sounds of which it is composed than with respect to its grammatical forms, its vocabulary, or the body of conceptions signified by it. Even nearly related languages differ as much in their spoken alphabets and the combinations of sounds they admit, and in their uttered forms of words historically the same, as in any other part; and the same is true of local dialects and of class dialects within the same community. Phonetic change has nothing whatever to do with change of meaning, the two are the product of wholly independent tendencies Sometimes, indeed, they chance to coincide, as in the distinction of minúte “small,” and mínute “moment”; but it is only by chance, as the spoken accordance of second in its two meanings (“next” and “sixtieth of a minute”) shows; words that maintain their identity of value most obstinately, like the numerals, are liable to vary indefinitely in form (so four, fidvor, quatuor, τέσσαρ-ες, &c., from an original kwetwor-; five, quinqne, πέντε, coic, &c., from penkwe—while, on the other hand, two and three show as striking an accordance of form as of meaning through all the same languages); what is far the most common is that the word becomes very unlike its former self in both respects, like priest from the Greek πρεσβύτερος (presbyter), literally “older man.” Human convenience is, to be sure, the governing motive in both changes; but it is convenience of two different kinds the one mental, depending on the fact (pointed out above) that a name when once applied belongs to the thing to which it is applied, to the disregard of its etymological connexions, does not need to be changed when the thing changes, and is ready for new application to anything that can be brought into one class with the latter; and the other physical, depending on the organs of speech and their successive movements, by which the sounds that make up the word are produced. Phonetic convenience is economy of effort on the part of those organs; and to no other law than that of economy of utterance have any of the phenomena of phonetic change been found traceable (though it is also to be noted that some phenomena have not hitherto been successfully brought under it, and that the way of effecting this is still unclear). “Euphony,” which used to be appealed to as explanation, is a false principle, except so far as the term may be made an idealized synonym of economy. The ear finds that agreeable which the organs of utterance find facile. Economy in utterance is no isolated tendency; it is the same that plays its part in all other kinds of human action, and in language appears equally in the abbreviation of the sentence by leaving out parts that can be spared without loss of intelhgrbility. It is an insidious tendency, always lying in wait, like gravitation, to pull down what is not sufficiently held up-the holding-up force in language being the faithfulness of tradition, or accurate reproduction by the learner and user of the signs which he has acquired. No generation of men has any intention to speak otherwise than as its predecessor has spoken, or any consciousness that it is doing so; and yet, from generation to generation, words are shortened, sounds are assimilated to one another, and one element passes out of use while a new one is introduced. Abbreviation and assimilation are the most conspicuous departments of phonetic change, and those in which the nature of the governing tendency is most plainly seen. Taken by itself, one sound is as easy as another to the person who has accustomed himself to it from childhood, and those which the young child most easily acquires are not those which in the history of speech are least liable to alteration, it is especially in the combinations and transitions of rapid speaking that the tongue, as it were, finds out for itself easier ways of performing its task, by dropping and slurring and adapting. To trace out the infinitely varied items of this change, to co-ordinate and compare them and discover their reasons, constitutes a special department of language-study, which is treated under the head of Phonetics. It only needs to be pointed out here that phonetic change plays a necessary part in the structural development of language, by integrating compound words through fusion and loss of identity of their component parts, and, what is of yet more importance, by converting them into forms, through disguise of identity of one of the parts and its phonetic subordination to the other part. It is this that turns, for example, the compound god-lake into
