His Eminence Cardinal Manning, when favouring the writer with some valuable notes on the subject of Aspirates, gave, as his opinion, that the dropping of H’s in England cannot be explained by foreign influences. The Aspirate is put on and put off in certain counties—as in Middlesex and Gloucestershire—with long local traditions; and he believes that, like the Greek digamma, it refuses all submission to criticism.
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH H.
There is something startling in the announcement that were William Shakespeare to hear one of his plays read by a good speaker of our own day, it would be less intelligible to him than if spoken in the Somersetshire dialect. So great is the change in English pronunciation. This fact prepares us for the discovery that great alterations have taken place in the significance of individual letters; and that the phonetic value of letter H has changed also.
Dr Johnson, in 1755, wrote: “Grammarians of the last age directed that an should be used before H, whence it appears that the English anciently aspirated less.”
“The great Doctor uttered many hasty things.”—
Thackeray.
Dr Johnson’s suppressed premiss is negatived by his own protégé, Goldsmith, in whose writings an occurs before every variety of H; a fact which shows that an and the Aspirate were not generally considered to be incompatibles. That their juxtaposition does not of itself offend the modern ear, may be proven by uttering the words “than have” and “they have,” in which the Aspirate is heard to follow the n and the vowel-sound with equal grace and fluency. There are, moreover, many reasons for entertaining an opinion directly opposed to that expressed by the great lexicographer; and for believing the powers of the English H to have been steadily on the decline since the days of primitive English. In all Aryan languages, H has a tendency to mollify and decay; and its powers are always found to be most strongly marked in Germanic tongues that are in nearest historical relation with their common Teutonic ancestor.
Inductively, one is led to believe that the English Aspirate is less strong than formerly. This belief will acquire support from the following argument:—
It will be remembered that prior to the introduction of terminal rhymes, the laws of Prosody were based upon principles slightly different from those of to-day; our ancestors, preferring an identity of consonant-sounds to an assonance of vowels, required that syllables to rhyme should begin with the same letter—the system being known as ALLITERATION. If we bear in mind how much must have depended on the distinctness and strength of the alliterative rhymes of early verse, where the metrical management and rhythmical cadence were far from being irreproachable, we shall readily concede that the bard will have selected for his use the strongest and most distinct rhymes that the language could supply. “Rhymes to the eye,” as they are called, would have been utterly useless, from the fact of poetry being then composed for oral rendering, and the hearers generally ignorant of spelling. It is, therefore, agreeable to reason to conclude that all sounds employed in alliterative rhyming were distinctly audible, strong, and emphatic. Now, on looking over alliterative verses of the seventh to thirteenth centuries, one cannot fail to be struck by the frequent occurrence of rhymed H’s: their proportion being, in many poems, in excess of that of any other letter. Modern poets, it is true, have not unfrequently pressed H into service as an alliterative rhyme, but in so doing they have afforded ample proof of the inefficiency of the modern English Aspirate, when acting in that capacity. One of the best specimens of modern alliterative H-rhymes is that in one of Moore’s American poems:—
“And I said, ‘If there’s peace to be found in the world,