Emphasis acts upon the outward sounds of a word as well as upon its inner meaning, and like analogy, though by the contrary process of differentiation, tends to build up new grammatical forms. The English thunder and jaundice go back to an Anglo-Saxon thunor and a French jaunisse, where the intrusive dental must be referred to the desire of clearness, since it can hardly be said to facilitate the pronunciation. So, too, in impregnable and groom, the French imprenable and Anglo-Saxon guman, we have other instances of the same striving after distinct and emphatic utterance, and the extension of the Greek πόλις (Sanskrit puris) into πτόλις, or of πόλεμος into πτόλεμος must be put down to a similar cause. People who wish to be very particular in the pronunciation of their words are apt to say kyind for kind, and the Italian luogho has arisen in no other way out of the Latin locus. The varying quality of a vowel, or an apparent exception to Grimm’s laws of letter-change may be explained by this principle of emphasis. Thus the Greek οἶδα, like the Sanskrit vêda or the Gothic vait, has a diphthong in the singular, whereas in the dual and plural the vowel is short (ĭ). This has resulted from the fact that the primitive Aryan laid the accent on the first syllable of the word in the singular; the less familiar flections of the dual and plural, however, were accented, and so preserved the short vowel of the root from being changed. In the same way the Old High German perfect laiþ in the singular observes the rule which makes an Old High German þ answer to an original d; in the plural, however, where the corresponding Sanskrit form accents the suffixes and not the root (as in the singular) the rule is violated and we have lidum, liduþ and lidun. So, too, by the side of the Old High German brôþar (bruder), answering to a primitive bhrâ´tar, we find môdar (muther) and fadar (vater) answering to a primitive mâtár and pitár (pâtár); while the accent of the Vedic saptán and the Greek ἑπτά, “seven,” shows why the Old High German seban and the Gothic sibun have b instead of the regular f.[100]
Emphasis enriches the vocabulary, first of all by introducing synonyms, and then by making a distinction of meaning between them. To set two synonyms side by side is the best way of giving clearness and intelligibility to our thoughts. Much of the charm of our authorized version of the Bible is due to the attempt of the translators to bring out the meaning of a Greek or Hebrew word by using two equivalents, one from a Romanic, the other from a Teutonic source. There comes a time, however, when we begin to contrast and differentiate the two synonyms; and so love comes to include much more than its New Testament synonym charity, and pastor, the synonym of shepherd, is confined to ecclesiastical language, while custom only allows us to say “much obliged,” and “very grateful.”[101]
Of a similar nature is the process whereby two varying forms of the same word become distinguished in use and signification. Thus the Latin tepor and tempus both go back to an earlier tapas, “heat,” but the strengthening of the first syllable of the one, and the change of s into r in the other, caused them to break apart and in course of time to be employed with a totally different meaning. The difference of sense brought with it a difference of gender, and thus introduced a grammatical change. The analogy of other nouns in final -or or -os preserved the masculine use of tepor, while tempus followed the gender of neuters like genus. The history of the termination of the nominative singular of Latin comparatives has been much the same. This was indifferently -ior or -ios (-ius), like the Greek -ίων and the Sanskrit -yan from an earlier -yans, and in Valerius Antias[102] we find prior still used for the neuter in the phrase “senatus-consultum prior,” while the title of the fourth book of Cassius Hemina’s Annals was, “Bellum Punicum posterior.” Arbor and robur were originally identical, and M. Bréal has shown that this was also the case with cruor and crus.[103] The two latter words both represent the Sanskrit kravis and the Greek κρέας in the sense of “bloody flesh” or “bloody limb,” and their differentiation was aided by the introduction of a new word, caro, in the sense of “flesh.” Caro originally meant simply “part” or “portion,” a sense in which the Umbrian karu is still employed in the Engubine Tables,[104] and the Oscan carneis in the Tabula Bantina. Roots, too, as well as derivatives, may be differentiated and gradually assume independent meanings. Thus in Greek, if we follow the usual theory, the old root ar or ara has been split up into three, ἀρ-, ἐρ-, and ὀρ-, in accordance with the threefold representation of the Sanskrit ă in European Aryan. Accordingly by the side of ἀρόω, the Latin arare, the Gothic arjan (Old English ear), which appropriated to itself the sense of “ploughing,” we have also ἐρέσσω (remus) in the sense of “rowing,” and ὄρ-νυμι (orior) in the sense of “rising” to one’s work. This differentiation of the three roots, however, seems to have come about after the separation of the several members of the Aryan group, as we find no trace of it in the Asiatic branch of the family, and it must, therefore, have really taken place in the fully-formed words of the European tongues.[105] Greek with its delicate sense of vocalic difference shows a special tendency towards utilizing vowel changes for grammatical purposes. Thus the reduplicated syllables in δίδωμι and δέδωκα were originally identical, but in course of time, while the sound of ĭ was appropriated to the present tense, the sound of e came to mark the perfect. In the same way Greek verbs in -αω, -εω, -οω all go back to the form which we have in the Sanskrit -ayâmi, but later usage tended to assign a transitive meaning to the form in -οω, and an intransitive one to that in -εω, while that in -αω floated between the two. It is probable that the three Semitic case-endings in u, i, a, which respectively denoted the nominative, genitive, and accusative, all went back to a primary indeterminate -a. In the Negro Dinka language certain plurals are formed by lengthening or sharpening the vowel of the singular, like rōr, the plural of ror, “wood,” nim, the plural of nom, “head,” līb, the plural of lyep, “tongue,” or tut, the plural of tuot, “goose;” and since we find that a verb becomes passive by simply lengthening the final i of the formative elements (as ran a-tšī tšōl, “the man has been called,” by the side of ran a-tši tšōl, “the man has called”), it is possible that the vowel change in all these cases is due to differentiation for the sake of clearness and emphasis. Such at least has been the origin of the tones which form so marked a feature in Chinese. Dr. Edkins has shown that the confusion between words of different signification occasioned by the loss of various initial and final letters in pronunciation was obviated by the substitution of tones, and the effects of phonetic decay have been thus neutralized by the action of the contrary principle of emphasis.
One of the modes in which this principle comes into play is what Professor Max Müller has called Dialectic Regeneration. The words and grammatical forms which have become effete in the literary dialect, are often replaced by others taken up from the fresh fountain of “provincial” speech. There is nothing any longer to attract attention in what has become so prosaic an expression as “the four cardinal points,” striking as the phrase once was; but when Carlyle goes to the Scotch and borrows from it the “four airts,” we are at once arrested by the unusual character of the word, a special emphasis is laid upon it, and we begin to realize its full meaning. It is in a period of social revolution, like that of the Norman Conquest in England, that Dialectic Regeneration is best seen at work on the literary language. As soon as the latter loses the support of the educated classes, it fails to withstand the attack of the less favoured but more deeply rooted dialects which have surrounded it, and, as in the case of literary Anglo-Saxon with its inflections and learned terms, it disappears for ever. The unwritten languages of savages and barbarians are in a continual state of flux and change. Old words and expressions which have ceased to possess the needed amount of clearness and emphasis have to make way for new ones. The slang of the schoolboy, or the cant of thieves and costermongers, exemplifies the same fact. It is not so much the desire of revolting against the proprieties of a civilized society, or of framing a secret jargon which shall be unintelligible to others, that produces these wild outgrowths of language; it is rather the feeling that the conventional terms have become mere symbols, or, as Hobbes said, the counters of wise men, and that the ideas which are perceived and felt clearly should be expressed with equal clearness and force. Man is not wholly ruled by the wish to save himself trouble and attain his object with the least effort; the healthy love of physical exertion for its own sake is also a powerful motive in human life. It is only with the growth of civilization and thought that the exertion is transferred from the muscles to the brain, that words become so many algebraic signs, and that syntax takes the place of elocution. It has been often noticed that the tendency of the modern languages of Europe is towards a monotonous level of both accent and tone; but it must be remembered that, as long as poetry exists, there will exist also a tendency in the opposite direction, as well as a protest against the reduction of all language into a mere reflection of the dry light of reason. Laziness will not explain everything in speech any more than it will in the ordinary dealings of mankind. As Sievers states:—“We even now often find it stated in works on the science of language, that all phonetic change results from a striving to facilitate the pronunciation and simplify the articulation; or, in other words, that change of sound always consists in a weakening of sound and not in a strengthening of it. We may allow that although many of the phænomena observable in the history of speech can be brought under this rule, the general application of the statement is absolutely false.... The idea of facilitating the pronunciation, if it is to be any longer maintained, must be regarded as an essentially relative one. Speaking generally, we must never forget that the different degrees of difficulty in uttering various sounds are in themselves extraordinarily slight, and that real difficulties in forming them are usually experienced only in the case of sounds belonging to a foreign language.... In short, real difficulties in pronunciation are never specially felt by the members of a community which speaks a given language, and with them only a further development of their language is possible.”
This brings us to the third and last cause of change of language, laziness, or, as it has also been termed, the principle of least effort. As the results of laziness show themselves principally in the alterations undergone by the sounds of speech, this cause of change is commonly known under the name of Phonetic Decay.[106] But the meanings of words as well as the expression of grammatical relations are as much subject to decay as the sounds of speech; the outward form of age which can be traced back to the Low Latin ætaticum and the classical ætas, has suffered no less from the wear and tear of time than its inward signification, which goes back to a root meaning “to go.” Like the present strata of the earth which are the débris of the earlier rocks, the present strata of language are the worn-out relics of older formations. The power of laziness, more especially in the shape of phonetic decay, is conspicuous in almost every word we utter; it is the first agent of linguistic change that strikes the student, and it has accordingly attracted more than its due share of attention. The influence of laziness has been insisted on to the exclusion of the two other equally important causes of change in speech, and the growth of grammatical consciousness, the discovery of new grammatical relations and the development of fresh mental points of view, have even been ascribed to its action. No doubt its influence is great and far-reaching, but we must be on our guard against regarding laziness as sufficient of itself to explain all the phænomena of language. Phonology is rather affected by it than either morphology or sematology. Owing, however, to the large place assigned to it in works on comparative philology, it will not be necessary to dwell upon it here in any great detail. We naturally seek to make ourselves understood by our neighbours with the least possible amount of trouble. Muscular and still more mental fatigue is distasteful to us, and the less we have to exert our vocal organs and powers of thinking when making our meaning clear to another, the better satisfied we are sure to be. Hence it happens that we constantly use words with a very dim appreciation indeed of their full and exact significance. We select that part of the meaning only which for some reason or other has made an impression upon our minds, and very often this part of the meaning is merely subsidiary and accidental to the proper signification of the word. But we are too lazy to realize that proper signification, and so pass words on to others the mere shadow and fragment of their former selves. It may often happen that a sense originally imported into a word by the context in which it accidentally found itself becomes appropriated to it to the gradual exclusion of its real signification. The word silly, for example, which once meant “blessed,” like its German cousin selig, from being applied euphemistically to half-witted persons, has entirely lost its true meaning. A word like impertinent is still in process of being changed. Its positive pertinent has hitherto preserved its proper sense, at all events in literature; but the popular mind has already forgotten the meaning of the negative, and only a short while ago a member of Parliament was called to order for describing a remark as “impertinent.” Here the accidental application of a word has caused its primary meaning to fall into neglect. Still more striking is the fate which has befallen words like transpire and eliminate. The newspapers speak of events “transpiring” in absolute disregard of the fact that events can hardly “breathe through,” while eliminate has been used not in the sense of removing out of the way but of bringing in.[107] It is so much easier to guess at the meaning of a word from the context in which it occurs than to trace it back to its real signification, and so long as our use of it is intelligible there is little care among ordinary speakers as to whether that use is correct or not.
In this way general terms come to be restricted to individuals, while words which denote the particular are extended to denote the universal. Deer, which, like the cognate German thier and Latin fera, originally signified wild animals of all kinds, is now confined to a particular species; while, on the other hand, the Latin emere, which properly signified “to take” in general, came to be restricted to the special meaning of taking when we “buy.” The older significations of words are continually decaying and being supplanted by new ones. Those who use them are too lazy to find out their exact significance.
The principle of laziness is equally active in the province of grammar. Here, too, the relations formerly conceived to exist between the several parts of the sentence may be forgotten altogether or replaced by other relations. The inflections of the Anglo-Saxon noun have been almost all lost, and the datives him and whom have become objective cases. Prepositions have taken the place of the case-endings, the adjective no longer “agrees” with its noun, but is now conceived of as a simple attribute, while all remembrance of the dative relation has faded out of the expressions “give me a book,” “send it away.” The subjunctive is fast ceasing to exist, and the modern Englishman troubles himself but little about the difference between be and is or between if I was and if I were.
It is in phonology, however, that the principle of laziness is most active. As far back as we can follow the history of language we see the stronger and harder sounds perpetually changing into weaker and easier ones; and so uniform and constant is this tendency that in the absence of counter-indications we are justified in referring most cases of phonetic change with which we may meet to the operation of decay. Mr. Douse[108] has lately made an ingenious but unsuccessful attempt to assign the phænomena of Grimm’s law to what he terms the principle of least effort, by supposing that the different phonetic systems of the several branches of the Indo-European family were evolved out of the tenues or hard consonants, at a time when these branches were still co-existing dialects of a single language, through the influence of “Reflex Dissimilation.” Reflex dissimilation is explained to be a more complicated and somewhat varying instance of that simple cross compensation which we see exemplified in the Cockney interchange of v and w, or the perverse persistency with which the same persons, who leave out the aspirate where it ought to exist, insert it where it ought to be omitted. In both cross compensation and reflex dissimilation, however, we have a compound action of the two antagonistic principles of laziness and emphasis.
The age of a language is marked by the extent to which it has been affected by phonetic decay, and when we find how large its influence has been upon the Old Egyptian and the Accadian of Chaldæa, as they appear in the earliest monuments we possess, we may form some idea of the length of time that must have elapsed since those languages were first being moulded and fixed. At the same time we must not forget that phonetic decay will act more readily upon some classes of languages than upon others. Wherever there is no clear consciousness of the distinction between root and grammatical suffix, as in our own inflectional family of speech, there we may expect a greater and more rapid amount of change than in agglutinative dialects where the relations of grammar are expressed by independent or semi-independent words. But even the latter cannot escape the law of gradual decay. To pass over the incorporating Basque in which words like dakarkiotezute, “ye eat it for them,” or detzadan, “that I should have them,” have to be decomposed into da, “it” or “him,” ekarri, “to eat,” ki, sign of the dative, o, “for him,” te, sign of the plural, zute, “ye,” and d, “him,” ez (izan), “to be” or “have,” za, sign of the plural, ta, “I,” and n, conjunctive affix, we find Yakute Turkish changing bin + śän (“I + thou”) into biś, “we,”[109] while the written Japanese taka-si and taka-ki, “high,” are pronounced takai. Chinese itself is not exempt from the universal rule. As Dr. Edkins[110] and M. de Rosny have shown, the modern Mandarin dialect has lost numerous initial and final consonants, and words like yi, “one,” and ta, “great,” were once tit and dap. Along the southern bank of the Yang-tsi-kiang and through Chekiang to Fuh-kien the old initials are still preserved, while in the northern provinces no less than three finals have been lost and the tones by which Chinese words of similar form are distinguished from one another are so many compensations for the loss of letters. Here again we have the principle of emphasis endeavouring to repair the damage wrought by the principle of decay.
A literary dialect is naturally less subject to the inroads of decay than an unwritten one. The spelling of words reacts upon their pronunciation and preserves it from extensive alteration. There is a wide chasm between that Tuscan Italian which has been preserved from corruption by the genius of Dante and the modern dialect of Bologna or Naples. In the age of Cicero the cave ne eas of polite society had become cauneas in the language of the people,[111] and how artificial was the attempt of pedants and purists to maintain the older pronunciation, even to the restoration of the final s which had already been dropped by Ennius, appeared pretty plainly as soon as the decline of the Roman empire and the extinction of the literary class deprived it of support. Latin at once fell away into the Romance dialects of modern Europe, just as literary Anglo-Saxon with its inflections and its learned vocabulary disappeared before the Norman Conquest. The language of the Assyrian inscriptions remains almost unaltered throughout the long period of nearly 2,000 years, during which we can watch its fortunes; but this language was the stereotyped one of literature and education, and differed very considerably from the spoken language of the people. The late linguistic character of Hebrew, the extent, that is, to which it has been influenced by phonetic decay as compared with its sister tongues, is an incontrovertible proof of the backward literary condition of its speakers. But even literature and cultivation are unable to preserve a language altogether from decay and change. The pronunciation of the educated slowly changes; words become clipped and shortened in spite of their spelling, and notwithstanding printers and schoolmasters the spelling in the end has to follow the pronunciation. Mr. Alexander Ellis has shown in his “Early English Pronunciation” how widely our modern pronunciation of English has departed from that of Shakspeare’s time, and the spelling of though, through, and enough bears witness to a period when they ended in a guttural aspirate. Our pronunciation is still undergoing change; the vowels are becoming more and more indistinct and merged in a common obscure ĕ; while such contractions as I’ll, I’d, won’t, and can’t can hardly be distinguished from Basque forms like those mentioned above. The educated Englishman speaks, as the French say, with his lips closed; he finds that he can be understood without the trouble of opening and rounding them, and his vowels are accordingly formed in the front rather than in the back part of the mouth. No wonder that he has a difficulty with the French eu; the effort to pronounce it is too great a strain upon the unexercised muscles of the lips, and so the English gentleman who told the waiter not to let the feu go out in his absence found on his return that his friend had been strictly watched and guarded as a dangerous fou.