XV.—§ 6. Equidistant and Convergent Changes.

Phonetic shifts are of two kinds: the shifted sound may be identical with one already found in the language, or it may be a new sound. In the former, but not in the latter kind, fresh possibilities of confusions and misunderstandings may arise. Now, in some cases one sound (or series of sounds) marches into a position which has just been abandoned by another sound (or series of sounds), which has in its turn shifted into some other place. A notable instance is the old Gothonic consonant shift: Aryan b, d, g cannot have become Gothonic p, t, k till after primitive p, t, k had already become fricatives [f, þ, x (h)], for had the shift taken place before, intolerable confusion would have reigned in all parts of the vocabulary. Another instructive example is seen in the history of English long vowels. Not till OE. long a had been rounded into something like [ɔ·] (OE. stan, ME. stoon, stone) could a new long a develop, chiefly through lengthening of an old short a in certain positions. Somewhat later we witness the great vowel-raising through which the phonetic value of the long vowels (written all the time in essentially the same way) has been constantly on the move and yet the distance between them has been kept, so that no confusions worth speaking of have ever occurred. If we here leave out of account the rounded back vowels and speak only of front vowels, the shift may be thus represented through typical examples (the first and the last columns show the spelling, the others the sounds):

Middle English. Elizabethan.Present English.
(1) bitebi·təbeitbaitbite
(2) betebe·təbi·tbi·tbeet
(3) betebɛ·təbe·tbi·tbeat
(4) abatea'ba·təə'bæ·tə'beitabate

When the sound of (2) was raised into [i·], the sound of (1) had already left that position and had been diphthongized, and when the sound of (3) was raised from an open into a close e, (2) had already become [i·]; (4) could not become [æ·] or [ɛ·] till (3) had become a comparatively close e sound. The four vowels, as it were, climbed the ladder without ever reaching each other—a climbing which took centuries and in each case implied intermediate steps not indicated in our survey. No clashings could occur so long as each category kept its distance from the sounds above and below, and thus we find that the Elizabethans as scrupulously as Chaucer kept the four classes of words apart in their rimes. But in the seventeenth century class (3) was raised, and as no corresponding change had taken place with (2), the two classes have now fallen together with the single sound [i·]. This entails a certain number of homophones such as had not been created through the preceding equidistant changes.

XV.—§ 7. Homophones.

The reader here will naturally object that the fact of new homophones arising through this vowel change goes against the theory that the necessity of certain distinctions can keep in check the tendency to phonetic changes. But homophones do not always imply frequent misunderstandings: some homophones are more harmless than others. Now, if we look at the list of the homophones created by this raising of the close e (MEG i. 11. 74), we shall soon discover that very few mistakes of any consequence could arise through the obliteration of the distinction between this vowel and the previously existing [i·]. For substantives and verbal forms (like bean and been, beet beat, flea flee, heel heal, leek leak, meat meet, reed read, sea see, seam seem, steel steal), or substantives and adjectives (like deer dear, leaf lief, shear sheer, week weak) will generally be easily distinguished by their position in the sentence; nor will a plural such as feet be often mistaken for the singular feat. Actual misunderstandings of any importance are only imaginable when the two words belong to the same ‘part of speech,’ but of such pairs we meet only few: beach beech, breach breech, mead meed, peace piece, peal peel, quean queen, seal ceil, wean ween, wheal wheel. I think the judicious reader will agree with me that confusions due to these words being pronounced in the same way will be few and far between, and one understands that they cannot have been powerful enough to prevent hundreds of other words from having their sound changed. An effective prevention can only be expected when the falling together in sound would seriously impair the understanding of many sentences.

It is, moreover, interesting to note how many of the words which were made identical with others through this change were already rare at the time or have at any rate become obsolete since: this is true of breech, lief, meed, mete (adj.), quean, weal, wheal, ween and perhaps a few others. Now, obsolescence of some words is always found in connexion with such convergent sound changes. In some cases the word had already become rare before the change in sound took place, and then it is obvious that it cannot have offered serious resistance to the change that was setting in. In other cases the dying out of a word must be looked upon as a consequence of the sound change which had actually taken place. Many scholars are now inclined to see in phonetic coalescence one of the chief reasons why words fall into disuse, see, e.g., Liebisch (PBB XXIII, 228, many German examples in O. Weise, Unsere Mutterspr., 3d ed., 206) and Gilliéron, La faillite de l’étymologie phonétique (Neuveville, 1919—a book whose sensational title is hardly justified by its contents).

The drawbacks of homophones[67] are counteracted in various ways. Very often a synonym steps forward, as when lad or boy is used in nearly all English dialects to supplant son, which has become identical in sound with sun (cf. above p. [120], a childish instance). Very often it becomes usual to avoid misunderstandings through some addition, as when we say the sole of her foot, because her sole might be taken to mean her soul, or when the French say un dé à coudre or un dé à jouer (cf. E. minister of religion and cabinet minister, the right-hand corner, the subject-matter, where the same expedient is used to obviate ambiguities arisen from other causes). Chinese, of course, is the classical example of a language abounding in homophones caused by convergent sound changes, and it is highly interesting to study the various ways in which that language has remedied the resulting drawbacks, see, e.g., B. Karlgren, Ordet och pennan i Mittens rike (Stockholm, 1918), p. 49 ff. But on the whole we must say that the ways in which these phonetic inconveniences are counteracted are the same as those in which speakers react against misunderstandings arising from semantic or syntactic causes: as soon as they perceive that their meaning is not apprehended they turn their phrases in a different way, choosing some other expression for their thought, and by this means language is gradually freed from ambiguity.