Introduction to the study of the history of language

by Herbert A. Strong; Willem Sijbrand Logeman; Benjamin Ide Wheeler

When combined, these two problems yield a compound proportion sum, thus:—

Large: larger }
Large: largely } : : quick: x.

To this, the answer would be quickli-er or quick-er-ly, and logically either answer is perfectly correct; they only differ in the practically all-important, but logically totally indifferent accident that the one happens to be usual, while the other is opposed to the normal usage.

In order to fully realise how readily such forms, whether ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect,’ may be coined, we must likewise bear in mind that for the apprehension of a child our divisions of sentences into words do not exist at all. The sentences which a child learns to understand are, at all events in the first instance, to its conception one and undivided, nay, apparently indivisible aggregates of sound, conveying somehow or another a certain notion. The infant answers to such a catena of sounds as go-to-papa, or don’t-do-that, and run-away, long before it has the faintest conception of the meaning of such sentences as, e.g., go that way. It is only the incessant variations of the surroundings of a word, while that combination of sounds itself remains unaltered, which, by a very gradual process, brings to our consciousness the fact that the whole sentence is made up of separate elements, and enables us to distinguish the word as an unit of expression. This process, however, of the discovery of such units comes about unconsciously and tentatively; whilst by all children and many adult speakers the extent of meaning attached to such units is very vaguely appreciated.

There is, therefore, in the linguistic history of each speaker, a period in which such a sound-group as, e.g., noisier, seems to consist as much or as little of two words as the group more noisy, etc. The question then presents itself, why, at a later period, we distinguish two words in the latter group, while we continue to regard the former group as one? The answer to this is found in the fact that both the sounds, noisy and more, are found to occur frequently alone or amid totally different surroundings; they occur, however, consistently maintaining the same meaning; whilst of noisier, the first part only is used alone, and the sound represented by er—whilst employed with many other words to express a similar variation of idea—can never, like more, serve independently to indicate that variation, unaccompanied by the sound which expresses the thought which it is desired to vary. And the same remarks hold good for other cases.

It would, no doubt, be going too far to assert that the usual division of words in our written language is wholly fanciful and unnatural. But it is nevertheless true that the division is not made in speaking, nor is it always equally present in our consciousness while we are uttering our thoughts. The less educated the speaker—in other words, the less he has been taught to bring reflection into play—the less active and operative is this consciousness.

If, then, we represent the formation of such a word as quicker in the shape of a solution of a proportion problem, the identity between the linguistic and algebraical processes must not be too closely insisted on. Similarly, we must not exaggerate the idea of clearness and distinctness present to the consciousness of the speaker who expresses the idea ‘rapid in movement’ by quick, and a higher degree of rapidity in the movement by the addition of the word more before it, or er after it. The fact is that no comparison is an absolute identity. Both our descriptions of the process by which many of our words arise in our minds, viz. the proportion, and the composition of the two elements, are inexact in some respects; and in some respects one, in other respects the other, will prove less faulty. If in a formation like quick, quicker, it is more likely that the two syllables in quick-er maintain a certain independence of signification, still no such explanation could possibly apply to such a form as brang, heard from a child or a foreigner, instead of brought. No simpler way of describing this process can be found than the equation—

Sing : sang :: ring : rang :: bring : brang.[22]

Moreover, this is doubtless the process adopted by our reasoning in acquiring a foreign language. We are taught that To speak is to be rendered by parler; I speak, by Je parle; I was speaking, by Je parlais, etc.; and our teacher expects (and naturally) that, possessing this knowledge, we shall be able, when he proceeds to inform us that porter means ‘to carry,’ to find the as yet unknown and unheard forms Je porte, Je portais, etc. At a later period, when we have read and spoken the language frequently, we form many similar tenses and persons of many verbs never or rarely encountered previously; and no speaker could certainly affirm whether he owes the utterance of the word to his memory recalling it into renewed consciousness, or to a process of automatic regulation by analogy after the model of other similar and more familiar forms.

From the above examples it may be seen that analogy is productive, not merely of abnormal forms, but also, and even to a larger extent, of normal forms. The operation of Analogy, however, attracts most attention when its influence leads to the formation of unusual forms, and this fact has prevented due credit being given to its full power and importance. It was once usual to speak of all forms employed by any speaker in conformity with normal usage as ‘correct;’ and of others, formed on the model of other examples, but deviating from normal usage, as ‘incorrect;’ in other words, as mistakes, or as formed BY FALSE ANALOGY. From what we have said it will be clear that this last term is wrong and misleading, and can only be applied as expressing that the analogy followed by the speaker in a certain case ought, for some reason or another, not to have been accepted as the norm.