come especially from such mutes as were originally aspirated—that is to say, had an audible bit of an h pronounced after them, before the following sound; the way in which they are often written, as ph, th, ch (German), is a result and evidence of this their origin. A v, too, has in many languages taken the place of an earlier semivowel w. Of the transition of the spirant th into the sibilant s a notable example is offered in our substitution—now become universal except in antiquated and solemn styles—of he loves for he loveth: s as of the third person singular of verbs is rare in Chaucer, and quite unknown a little earlier. An s between vowels, instead of being turned into its own corresponding sonant, z, becomes sometimes the next opener sonant of the same series, namely r: this change prevails very extensively in many tongues, as the Sanskrit, Latin, Germanic; a familiar example of its effect is seen in our were, plural and subjunctive of was, which has retained the original sibilant. A less frequent and regular change puts in place of a letter of one series one belonging to the same class but a different series. Thus, when the English gave up in pronunciation its palatal spirant—still written in so many of our words with gh—while it usually simply silenced it, prolonging or strengthening, by way of compensation, the preceding vowel, as in light, bough, Hugh, it sometimes substituted the labial spirant f as in cough, trough; and, in the latter word, a common popular error, doubtless going back to the time of first abandonment of the proper gh sound, substitutes the lingual spirant, th, pronouncing troth. So the Russians put f for th, turning Theodore into Fedor. Exchanges of the mutes of different organs with one another are not very seldom met with, though not so easy to illustrate with English instances: the pent of pentagon and the quinq of quinquennial are Greek and Latin versions of the same original word, which in our own tongue, moreover, has become five. We often hear persons who have a constitutional or habitual inaptness to pronounce an r, and who turn it into a w, or an l: r and l, indeed, throughout the history of language, are the most interchangeable of sounds. Combination of consonants leads with especial frequency to the assimilation of the one to the other:
