5. Another of their peculiarities is to leave out the ‘g’ in ‘strength’ and ‘length,’ pronouncing these words as if they were written ‘strenth’ and ‘lenth.’ They also omit the ‘d,’ in pronouncing ‘breadth,’ and call it ‘breth.’
6. They give the long sound of ‘e’ to the close ‘i’ in such words as ‘delicious,’ ‘malicious,’ ‘vicious,’ &c., and call them ‘deleecious,’ ‘maleecious,’ ‘veecious.’
7. They pronounce ‘o’ before ‘ld’ like the ‘ow’ in ‘how,’ and they pronounce ‘cold’ and ‘bold’ as if these words rhymed with ‘howled’ or ‘growled.’
[CHAPTER XIII.]
SLANG WORDS AND AMERICANISMS.
No language is, or ever has been, in the strict sense of the word, pure. All languages are continually borrowing and lending—adopting words from foreign sources, and contributing from their own store to that of others. It is now well known that the ancient Greeks borrowed largely from the Oriental tongues, and lent words and forms to Latin. Latin, again, borrowed from Greek, and contributed to form the modern Italian, Spanish, and French. The modern German language is just now strongly affected by a French influence; and French itself, though for the most part Latin, contains many Celtic and not a few Germanic words. Spanish, which is in the main Latin, has a very considerable admixture of Arabic, brought in by the Moors in the eighth century; and English is well known to be made up of Anglo-Saxon, Norman, French, and Latin.
But languages are not only subject to these attacks from without, a process of internal corruption is also set up, and appears in various forms. One of these may be recognised in the principle of contraction. It may be laid down as a rule that words, as they grow older, degenerate in meaning and contract in form. This contraction probably originated in a loose, careless way of speaking, which afterwards affected the written language. Sometimes a letter or syllable is cut off from the beginning of a word; sometimes one is taken from the middle, or from the end. ‘Bus’ is now all we have left (at any rate, in ordinary conversation) of ‘omnibus.’ ‘Fantasy’ has lost its middle syllable, and appears as ‘fancy’ and ‘cab’ does duty for ‘cabriolet.’ One conclusion this result enables us to draw is that the contracted forms are always the more modern. The form ‘courtesy’ existed before ‘curtsy;’ ‘procurator’ preceded ‘proctor;’ and ‘minute’ was known before ‘mite.’ Whether these contractions are to be regarded favourably or otherwise may be a question, but there is no doubt that they are all produced by the operation of a natural law of language which no human power will ever be able to prevent.
When a word is warped or distorted from its original form, either by a vicious or slovenly pronunciation, or from a mistaken notion of its derivation, it is said to be a corruption. One of these corruptions appears in our word ‘surgeon.’ The French ‘chirurgien,’ from which it immediately comes, shows more clearly its Greek origin—χεὶρ (cheir), a hand; and ἔργω (ergo), I work—i.e. a hand-worker, or manual operator. But a careless pronunciation, probably aided by a natural tendency to contraction, has caused the word with us to dwindle down to ‘surgeon.’