But there is another phonetic tendency which is much more universal and infinitely more valuable than the one asserted by Baudouin de Courtenay, namely, the tendency to shorten words. Words get shorter and shorter in consequence of a great many of those changes that we see constantly going on in all languages: vowels in weak syllables are pronounced more and more indistinctly and finally disappear altogether, as when OE. lufu, stānas, sende, through ME. luve, stanes, sende with pronounced e’s, have become our modern monosyllables love, stones, send, or when Latin bonum, homo, viginti have become Fr. bon, on, vingt, and Lat. bona, hominem, Fr. bonne, homme, where the vowel was kept, because it was a or protected by the consonant group, but has now also disappeared in normal pronunciation. Final vowels have been dropped extensively in Danish and German dialects, and so have the u’s and i’s in Russian, which are now kept in the spelling merely as signs of the quality of the preceding consonant. It would be easy to multiply instances. Nor are the consonants more stable; the dropping of final ones is seen most easily in Modern French, because they are retained in spelling, as in tout, vers, champ, chant, etc. In the two last examples two consonants have disappeared, the m and n, however, leaving a trace in the nasalized pronunciation of the vowel, as also in bon, nom, etc. Final r and l often disappear in Fr. words like quatre, simple, and medial consonants have been dropped in such cases as côte from coste, bête from beste, sauf [so·f] from salvo, etc. We have corresponding omissions in English, where in very old times n was dropped in such cases as us, five, other, while the German forms uns, fünf, ander have kept the old consonants; in more recent times l was dropped in half, calm, etc., gh [x] in light, bought, etc., and r in the prevalent pronunciation of warm, part, etc. Initial consonants are more firmly fixed in many languages, yet we see them lost in the E. combinations kn, gn, wr, where k, g, w used to be sounded, e.g. in know, gnaw, wrong. Consonant assimilation means in most cases the same thing as dropping of one consonant, for no trace of the consonant is left, at any rate after the compensating lengthening has been given up, as is often the case, e.g. in E. cupboard, blackguard [kʌbəd, blæga·d].
So far we have given instances of what might be called the most regular or constant types of phonetic change leading to shorter forms; but the same result is the natural outcome of a process which occurs more sporadically. This is haplology, by which one sound or one group of sounds is pronounced once only instead of twice, the hearer taking it through a kind of acoustic delusion as belonging both to what precedes and to what follows. Examples are a goo(d) deal, wha(t) to do, nex(t) time, simp(le)ly, England from Englaland, eighteen from OE. eahtatiene, honesty from honestete, Glou(ce)ster, Worcester [wustə], familiarly pro(ba)bly, vulgarly lib(ra)ry, Febr(uar)y. From other languages may be quoted Fr. cont(re)rôle, ido(lo)lâtre, Neu(ve)ville, Lat. nu(tri)trix, sti(pi)pendium, It. qual(che)cosa, cosa for che cosa, etc. (Cf. my LPh 11. 9.)
The accumulation through centuries of such influences results in those instances of seemingly violent contractions with which every student of historical linguistics is familiar. One classical example has already been mentioned above, E. had, corresponding to Gothic habaidedeima; other examples are lord, with its three or four sounds, which was formerly laverd, and in Old English hlāford; the old Gothonic form of the same word contained indubitably as many as twelve sounds; Latin augustum has in French through aoust become août, pronounced [au] or even ; Latin oculum has shrunk into four sounds in Italian occhio, three in Spanish ojo, and two in Fr. œil; It. medesimo, Sp. mismo and Fr. même represent various stages of the shrinking of Lat. metipsimum; cf. also Fr. ménage from mansion- + -aticum. Primitive Norse ne veit ek hvat ‘not know I what’ has become Dan. noget ‘something,’ often pronounced [no·ð] or [nɔ·ð].
In all these cases the shortening process has taken centuries, but we have other instances in which it has come about quite suddenly, without any intermediate stages, namely, in those stump-words which we have already considered (Ch. IX § [7]; cf. XIV § [12] on corresponding syntactical shortenings).
XVII.—§ 8. Objections. Result.
There cannot therefore be the slightest doubt that the general tendency of all languages is towards shorter and shorter forms: the ancient languages of our family, Sanskrit, Zend, etc., abound in very long words; the further back we go, the greater the number of sesquipedalia. It cannot justly be objected that we see sometimes examples of phonetic lengthenings, as in E. sound from ME. soun, Fr. son, E. whilst, amongst from ME. whiles, amonges; a similar excrescence of t after s is seen in G. obst, pabst, Swed. eljest and others; after n, t is added in G. jemand, niemand (two syllables, while there is nothing added to the trisyllabic jedermann)—for even if such instances might be multiplied, their number and importance is infinitely smaller than those in the opposite direction. (On the seeming insertion of d in ndr, see p. 264, [note]). In some cases we witness a certain reaction against word forms that are felt to be too short and therefore too indistinct (see Ch. XV § [1], XX § [9]), but on the whole such instances are few and far between: the prevailing tendency is towards shorter forms.
Another objection must be dealt with here. It is said that it is only the purely phonetic development that tends to make words shorter, but that in languages as wholes words do not become shorter, because non-phonetic forces counteract the tendency. In modern languages we thus have some analogical formations which are longer than the forms they have supplanted, as when books has one sound more than OE. bēc, or when G. bewegte takes the place of bewog. Further, we have in modern languages many auxiliary words (prepositions, modal verbs) in places where they were formerly not required. That this objection is not valid if we take the whole of the language into consideration may perhaps be proved statistically if we compute the length of the same long text in various languages: the Gospel of St. Matthew contains in Greek about 39,000 syllables, in Swedish about 35,000, in German 33,000, in Danish 32,500, in English 29,000, and in Chinese only 17,000 (the figures for the Authorized English Version and for Danish are my own calculation; the other figures I take from Tegnér SM 51, Hoops in Anglia, Beiblatt 1896, 293, and Sturtevant LCh 175). In comparing these figures it should even be taken into consideration that translations naturally tend to be more long-winded and verbose than the original, so that the real gain in shortness may be greater than indicated.[83]
Next, we come to consider the question whether the tendency towards shorter forms is a valuable asset in the development of languages or the reverse. The answer cannot be doubtful. Take the old example, English had and Gothic habaidedeima: the English form is preferable, on the principle that anyone who has to choose between walking one mile and four miles will, other things being equal, prefer the shorter cut. It is true that if we take words to be self-existing natural objects, habaidedeima has the air of a giant and had of a mere pigmy: this valuation lies at the bottom of many utterances even by recent linguistic thinkers, as when Sweet (H 10) speaks of the vanishing of sounds as “a purely destructive change.” But if we adopt the anthropocentric standard which has been explained above, and realize that what we call a word is really and primarily the combined action of human muscles to produce an audible effect, we see that the shortening of a form means a diminution of effort and a saving of time in the communication of our thoughts. If, as it is said, had has suffered from wear and tear in the long course of time, this means that the wear and tear of people now using this form in their speech is less than if they were still encumbered with the old giant habaidedeima. Voltaire was certainly very wide of the mark when he wrote: “C’est le propre des barbares d’abréger les mots”—long and clumsy words are rather to be considered as signs of barbarism, and short and nimble ones as signs of advanced culture.