Still it is unnecessary to assert that the participle, as such, denotes these different meanings—such as cause, condition, opposition, etc. These relations are only accidental and occasional. When, however, we have dependent sentences introduced by a temporal conjunction, like quum, since, the accidental relation of this conjunction to the governing sentence may come to attach itself and become permanent; in this case, the conjunction will experience a change of syntactical meaning. Take the case of since, formed by the adverbial genitive suffix es, from sin = sithen (from sið, þ̱am, after that). While, again, from meaning ‘the time that’ (a thing occurred,) has come to denote ‘in spite of the fact that,’ in such phrases as ‘While you pretend that you love me, you act as though you did not.’ In the case of the modern German weil, the temporal signification has completely disappeared; and in the same way prepositions, such as through and by, which possess strictly speaking a local or temporal meaning, pass into a causal meaning.
The instances given above may serve to show the way in which changes are constantly occurring in syntax, and will aid in pointing out how language is constantly aiming at supplying, in an economical fashion, its needs as they successively present themselves.
CHAPTER VIII.
CONTAMINATION.
We have discussed, in Chapter V., the force of analogy and its effect. We have now to study a phenomenon of language which may be called ‘contamination,’ and which, though widely differing from analogy in the most characteristic instances of both, is yet so closely allied to it as to render it a difficult matter to draw any hard and fast line of demarcation between the two.
We call the process ‘contamination’ when two synonymous forms or constructions force themselves simultaneously, or at least in the very closest succession, into our consciousness, so that one part of the one replaces or, it may be, ousts a corresponding part of the other; the result being that a new form arises in which some elements of the one are confused with some elements of the other.
Thus, for instance, to take an imaginary case, a person seeing a book on the table might wish to exclaim, ‘Take that thing away!’ Just, however, as he is uttering the word thing, the consciousness that it is properly called a book forces itself upon him, and he utters the word thook. Of course such a form is a mistake, and a mistake so palpable and, indeed, so absurd that the speaker will at once correct it. Every one, however, who is in the habit of watching closely the utterances of others, and indeed of himself, will be aware that such slips of the tongue are extremely common; and it is clear that, though such formations are, in the first instance, sudden and transitory, and generally travel no further than the individual from whom they proceed, yet they may, by repetition on the part of the same individual, or, it may be, by imitation, conscious or unconscious, on the part of others, end by becoming ‘usual.’
Contamination manifests itself not merely in the form of words, but also in their syntactical combination. In the case of such a curious mixture of two words as that which we took for our example, the very grotesqueness of the result would probably bar the way to the spreading of the word, though, as we shall see, traces are to be found of cases hardly less grotesque than this. In syntactical combinations, however, the results have far more frequently proved permanent; or, in any case, the results do not commonly appear in such jarring contrast to received usage as to challenge immediate correction, and, consequently, instances can be more easily found in literature of syntactical than of verbal contamination; some cases of such contamination pass into language and become ‘usual;’ some are refused admission into normal language and are set down as the peculiarities of the individual writer or speaker, or, it may be, as his mistakes.
We saw that formation by analogy manifests itself as the alteration of one form in compliance with a rule more or less consciously abstracted from a number of examples drawn from a group to which that form does not, strictly speaking, belong. Contamination is the alteration of one form on the model of another synonymous form. The difficulty of distinguishing between the two arises from this—that the contaminating form or construction often derives additional force from being associated with other members of its group, so that it may be doubtful whether the rule or the one synonym gave the impetus to the new formation. Nevertheless, we may lay it down that for analogy we must demand a sufficient number of examples on which to base a rule; while for contamination, a single form or construction may suffice. If we bear in mind these main points of distinction, we shall commonly find no difficulty in deciding to which of the two classes we should refer any particular case.[52]
Among the results of contamination in single words, we must naturally expect that those have the best chance of becoming permanent which least deviate from the correct form; i.e. where the synonymous[53] forms confused resembled each other, and the form due to their contamination consequently bore sufficient resemblance to both to enable it to arise repeatedly in the mouth of several speakers, and, when formed, to escape observation. Thus the word milt (the soft roe of fishes) is a substitute for milk (it appears in Swedish as mjölke); this was probably due to contamination with milt (spleen), which is a different word.[54] Again, the English combination ough is due to the contamination of three distinct forms, viz., ugh (A.S. -uh), -ogh (A.S. -áh), -oogh (A.S. -óh); whilst, at the same time, the loss of the gh has affected the quality of the preceding vowel by the principle of compensation. Thus the word through should have appeared as thrugh, A.S. *ðruh (for ðurh); but it has been altered to through, as if from A.S. *ðrúh, or else to *thurgh (A.S. ðurh), which has been lengthened to thor(ou)gh.[55]