Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/103

ON SOME MINOR PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERFERENCES. 89 treats the case in which the line of action is reversed and leads to what may be called "Assimilation from the rear," or say, for simplicity, Opisthomimesis. Here the mind lags behind the hand and perturbs its action by surviving im- pressions of what has been already written ; iu which, of course, it has the assistance of the eye ; and consequently the perturbation is sometimes more violent, and is felt at a greater distance, than in the preceding cases. Its results, however, although effected in the opposite direction, are naturally similar to those in (1) ; that is to say, (i.) a letter, syllable, or word appears as if assimilated to a preceding one ; e.g. : B'ship ; Sywowyws ; Preterite ; Househould ; " Such words are hillock, Pibroch ( = pibroch) " ; " Six were killed and /ourteen /ounded ( = wounded) " ; but in Occasions imitation extends to duality only (see (3) in fine) : in the case of syllables the interval between the active and passive correlatives may become wider ; " The window was brown ( = broken !) " ; " Inner is former ( = formed) from in; " in the case of words the interval may grow wider still ; " Here -ing is added to form to ( = the) participle " ; " The verb does not agree with both of the subjects, both ( = but) only with one " ; " Again, in doing a certain again ( = action !), we . . . " ; (ii.) a syllable (I met with no instance of a letter or a word) resembling a preceding syllable is introduced or added ; and, rather oddly, all the instances but one involve either m. n, or r ; e.g.: Overer ; Rememember ; Jwmimitable ; Evidew- dence; Sententences ; Mterateration ; "Here -ing is used to denotwgr " ; and in "One is made to succeded the other" there is not only the addition of ed in imitation of what should have been -eed, but this -eed is itself shortened to -ed either by the influence of the coming spurious syllable, or by that of the spelling of precede, etc. [see (5)]. (5) For the species of Interference that falls under this head I can find no better name than " Contamination," a term adopted by German Philologists to denote linguistic phenomena similar to those now to be noticed. The mode of action apparently is that a word or phrase being or about to be written suggests another, and generally a more familiar one, of somewhat similar form or meaning or both, which in return distorts to its own form a part of the word or phrase originally intended to be written : rarely a whole word is distorted into a compound of two familiar words. Thus, to take the mildest instances first, a candidate, as often happened, would spell Tewtonic nine times correctly, but the tenth time he would write Twetonic, through the unconscious influence of the very familiar Twesday, similarly