Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/809

PHILOLOGY ^7>TO 773 (pointed out above) that a name when once applied belongs to the thing to Avhich 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 intelligibility. 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 SPEECH SOUNDS. 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-like into the deriva tive godly, the compound love-did into the verbal form loved. And yet one further result sometimes follows : an internal change is wrought by phonetic influence in the body of a word, which change then may in the further history of the word be left as the sole means of distinction between one form and another. It is thus that, in the most recent period, the distinction of led from lead and met from meet and so on has been made ; the added auxi liary which originally made these preterites induced a shortening of the root -vowel, and this was left behind when the auxiliary disappeared by the usual process of abbreviation. It is in the same way that the distinctions of men from man, of tvere from was, of set from sit, with all their analogues, were brought about : by a modification of vowel-sound (Ger. Umlaut) occasioned by the presence in the following syllable of an t-vowel, which in the older stages of the language is still to be seen there. And the distinctions of sing, sang, sung, and song, of bind, bound, band, and bond, are certainly of the same kind, though they go back so far in the history of our family of lan guages that their beginnings are not yet clearly demon strable ; they were in their origin phonetic accidents, inorganic, mere accompaniments and results of external combinations which bore the office of distinction of mean ing and were sufficient to it ; in some of our languages they have been disregarded and effaced, in others they have risen to prominent importance. To regard these internal changes as primary and organic is parallel with assuming the primariness of the formative apparatus of language in general ; like this, it ignores the positive evidence we have of the secondary production of such differences ; they are, like everything else in linguistic structure, the outcome of combination and adaptation. Borrowing, or the taking-in of material out of another Ian- Borrow guage, has been more than once referred to above as some- in s p r times an important element in language-history, though mixing< less deep -reaching and organic than the rest. There is nothing anomalous about borrowing ; it is rather in essen tial accordance with the whole process of language-acquisi tion. All our names were adopted by us because they were already in use by others; and a community is in the same way capable of taking a new name from a community with which it comes in contact as an individual from individuals. Not that it seeks or admits in this way new names for old things ; but it accepts new things along with the names that seem to belong to them. Hence any degree of intercourse between one community and another, leading to exchange of products or of knowledge, is sure to lead also to some borrowing of names ; and there is hardly a language in the world, except of races occupying peculiarly isolated positions, that does not contain a certain amount of foreign material thus won, even as our English has elements in its vocabulary from half the other tongues in the world. The scale of borrowing is greatly increased when one people becomes the pupil of another in respect of its civilization : hence the abundant classical elements in all the European tongues, even the non-Romanic ; hence the Arabic material in Persian and Turkish and Malay ; hence the Chinese in Japanese and Corean ; and, as a further result, even dead languages, like the Greek and Latin and the Sanskrit, become stores to be drawn upon in that learned and conscious quest of new expression which in the school-stage of culture supplements or even in a measure replaces the unconscious growth of natural speech. So, in mixture of communities, which is a highly- intensified form of contact and intercourse, there follows such mixture of speech as the conditions of the case deter mine ; yet not a mixture on equal terms, through all the departments of vocabulary and grammar ; the resulting speech (just as when two individuals learn to speak alike) is essentially that of the one constituent of the new com munity, with more or less material borrowed from that of the other. What is most easily taken in out of another language is the names of concrete things ; every degree of removal f om this involves additional difficulty names of abstract tLings, epithets, verbs, connectives, forms. Indeed, the borrowing of forms in the highest sense, or forms of inflexion, is well-nigh or quite impossible ; no example of it has been demonstrated in any of the historical periods of language, though it is sometimes adventurously assumed as a part of prehistoric growth. How nearly it may be approached is instanced by the presence in English of such learned plurals as phenomena and strata. This extreme resistance to mixture in the department of inflexion is the ground on which some deny the possibility of mixture in