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.