LANGUAGE 
 
 ITS NATURE 
 DEVELOPMENT 
 AND ORIGIN 
 
 OTTO JESPERSEN 
 
 PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1922 
 
jT" V 
 

 I 
 
 TO 
 
 VILHELM THOMSEN 
 
 A^Sl^f^ 
 
Olaede, nSr av andres mund 
 jeg hjjTrte de tanker store, 
 
 Glaede over hvert et fund 
 
 jeg selv ved min forsken gjorde. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The distinctive feature of the science of language as conceived 
 nowadays is its historical character : a language or a word is no 
 longer taken as something given once for all, but as a result of 
 previous development and at the same time as the starting-point 
 for subsequent development. This manner of viewing languages 
 constitutes a decisive improvement on the way in which languages 
 were dealt with in previous centuries, and it suffices to mention 
 such words as ' evolution ' and ' Darwinism ' to show that linguistic 
 research has in this respect been in full accordance with tendencies 
 observed in many other branches of scientific work during the last 
 hundred years. Still, it cannot be said that students of language 
 have always and to the fullest extent made it clear to themselves 
 what is the real essence of a language. Too often expressions are 
 used which are nothing but metaphors — in many cases perfectly 
 harmless metaphors, but in other cases metaphors that obscure 
 the real facts of the matter. Language is frequently spoken of 
 as a ' living organism ' ; we hear of the ' life ' of languages, of 
 the ' birth ' of new languages and of the ' death ' of old languages, 
 and the implication, though not always realized, is that a language 
 is a living thing, something analogous to an animal or a plant. 
 Yet a language evidently has no separate existence in the same 
 way as a dog or a beech has, but is nothing but a function of 
 certain living human beings. Language is activity, purposeful 
 activity, and we should never lose sight of the speaking individuals 
 and of their purpose in acting in this particular way. When 
 people speak of the life of words — as in celebrated books \%dth such 
 titles as La vie des mots, or Biographies of Words — they do 
 not always keep in view that a word has no ' life ' of its own : 
 it exists only in so far as it is pronounced or heard or remembered 
 by somsbody, and this kind of existence cannot properly be com- 
 pared with ' life ' in the original and proper sense of that word. 
 The only unimpeachable definition of a word is that it is a human 
 habit, an habitual act on the part of one human individual which 
 has, or may have, the effect of evoking some idea in the mind 
 
 7 
 
8 LANGUAGE 
 
 of another individual. A word thus may be rightly compared 
 with such an habitual act as taking off one's hat or raising one's 
 fingers to one's cap : in both cases we have a certain set of mus- 
 cular activities which, when seen or heard by somebody else, 
 shows him what is passing in the mind of the original agent or 
 what he desires to bring to the consciousness of the other man 
 (or men). The act is individual, but the interpretation presupposes 
 that the individual forms part of a community with analogous 
 habits, and a language thus is seen to be one particular set of 
 human customs of a well-defined social character. 
 
 It is indeed possible to speak of ' life ' in connexion with 
 language even from this point of view, but it will be in a different 
 sense from that in which the word was taken b}' the older school 
 of linguistic science. I shall try to give a biological or biographical 
 science of language, but it will be through sketching the linguistic 
 biology or biography of the speaking individual. I shall give, 
 therefore, a large part to the way in which a child learns his mother 
 tongue (Book II) : my conclusions there are chiefly based on the 
 rich material I have collected during manj' j-ears from direct 
 observation of many Danish children, and particularly^ of my 
 own boy, Frans (see my book Nutid sprog hos born og voxne, Copen- 
 hagen, 1916). Unfortunately, I have not been able to make first- 
 hand observations with regard to the speech of English children ; 
 the English examples I quote are taken second-hand either from 
 notes, for which I am obliged to English and American friends, 
 or from books, chiefly by psychologists. I should be particiilarly 
 happy if my remarks could induce some English or American 
 linguist to take up a systematic study of the speech of children, 
 or of one child. This study seems to me very fascinating indeed, 
 and a linguist is sure to notice many things that would be passed 
 by as uninteresting even by the closest observer among psycholo- 
 gists, but which may have some bearing on the life and development 
 of language. 
 
 Another part of linguistic biology deals \nth the influence 
 of the foreigner, and still another with the changes which the 
 individual is apt independently to introduce into his speech even 
 after he has fully acquired his mother-tongue. Tliis naturallj' 
 leads up to the question whether all these changes introduced by 
 various individuals do, or do not, follow the same line of direction, 
 and whether mankind has on the whole moved forward or not in 
 linguistic matters. The con\action reached through a study cf 
 historically accessible periods of well-knoAMi languages is finally 
 shown to throw some light on the disputed problem of the ultimate 
 origin of human language. 
 
 Parts of my theory of sound-change, and especially mj'^ objections 
 
PREFACE 9 
 
 to the dogma of blind sound-laws, date back to my very first 
 linguistic paper (1886) ; most of the chapters on Decay or Progress 
 and parts of some of the following chapters, as well as the theory 
 of the origin of speech, may be considered a new and revised 
 edition of the general chapters of my Progress in Language (1894). 
 Many of the ideas contained in this book thus are not new with 
 me ; but even if a reader of my previous works may recognize 
 things which he has seen before, I hope he will admit that they 
 have been here worked up with much new material into something 
 like a sj'stem, which forms a fairly comprehensive theory of 
 linguistic development. 
 
 Still, I have not been able to compress into this volume the 
 whole of my pliilosophy of speech. Considerations of space have 
 obliged me to exclude the chapters I had first intended to write 
 on the practical consequences of the ' energetic ' view of language 
 wliich I have throughout maintained ; the estimation of linguistic 
 phenomena implied in that view has bearings on such questions 
 as these : What is to be considered ' correct ' or ' standard ' in 
 matters of pronunciation, spelling, grammar and idiom ? Can (or 
 should) indi%'iduals exert themselves to improve their mother-tongue 
 by enriching it with new terms and by making it purer, more i^recise, 
 more fit to express subtle shades of thought, more easy to handle 
 in speech or in writing, etc. ? (A few hints on such questions may 
 be found in my paper " Energetik der Sprache " in Scientia, 1914.) 
 Is it possible to construct an artificial language on scientific prin- 
 ciples for international use ? (On this question I may here briefly 
 state my conviction that it is extremely important for the whole 
 of mankind to have such a language, and that I(iais scientificallj' 
 and practically very much superior to all previous attempts, 
 Volapiik, Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Latin sine flexione, etc. But 
 I have written more at length on that question elsewhere.) With 
 regard to the sj^stem of grammar, the relation of grammar to 
 logic, and grammatical categories and their definition, I must refer 
 the reader to Sprojefs Logik (Copenhagen, 1913), and to the first 
 chapter of the second volume of my Modern English Grammar 
 (Heidelberg, 1914), but I shall hope to deal with these questions 
 more in detail in a future work, to be called, probably. The Logic 
 of Grammar, of which some chapters have been ready in my 
 drawers for some years and others are in active preparation. 
 
 I have prefixed to the theoretical chapters of this work a short 
 survey of the history of the science of language in order to show 
 how my problems have been previously treated. In this part 
 (Book I) I have, as a matter of course, used the excellent works 
 on the subject by Benfey, Raumer, Delbruck [Einleihing in das 
 Sprachstudium, 1st ed., 1880 ; I did not see the 6th ed., 1908, till 
 
 r 
 
10 LANGUAGE 
 
 my own chapters on the history of linguistics were finished;, 
 Thorasen, Oertel and Pedersen. But I have in nearly every case 
 gone to the sources themselves, and have, I think, found interesting 
 things in some of the early books on linguistics that have been 
 generally overlooked ; I have even pointed out some writers who 
 had passed into undeserved oblivion. My intention has been on 
 the whole to throw into relief the great lines of development 
 rather than to give many details ; in judging the first part of my 
 book it should also be borne in mind that its object primarily is 
 to serve as an introduction to the problems dealt with in tlic rest 
 of the book. Throughout I have tried to look at things with my 
 own eyes, and accordingly my views on a great many points are 
 different from those generally accepted ; it is my hope that an 
 impartial observer will find that I have here and there succeeded 
 in distributing light and shade more justly than my predecessors. 
 
 Wherever it has been necessary I have transcribed words 
 phonetically according to the system of the Association Phonetique 
 Internationale, though without going into too minute distinction 
 of sounds, the object being, not to teach the exact pronunciation 
 of various languages, but rather to bring out clearly the insuffi- 
 ciency of the ordinary spelling. The latter is given throughout in 
 italics, while phonetic symbols have been inserted in brackets [.]. 
 I must ask the reader to forgive inconsistency in such matters 
 as Greek accents. Old English marks of vowel-length, etc., which 
 I have often omitted as of no importance for the purpose of this 
 volume. 
 
 I must express here my gratitude to the directors of the 
 Carlsbergfond for kind support of my work. I want to thank 
 also Professor G. C. ^loore Smith, of the University of Sheffield : 
 not only has he sent me the manuscript of a translation nf 
 most of my Nutidssprog, which he had undertaken of his own 
 accord and which served as the basis of Book II, but he has 
 kindly gone through the whole of this volume, improving and 
 correcting my English style in many passages. His friendship and 
 the untiring interest he has always taken in my work have been 
 extremely valuable to me for a great many years. 
 
 OTTO JESPERSEN. 
 University of Copenhagen, 
 June 1921. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface ........ 7 
 
 Abbreviations of Book Titles, Etc. . . . .13 
 
 Phonetic Symbols . . . . . .16 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Before 1800 ...... 19 
 
 II. Beginxixg of Nineteenth Century . . 32 
 
 III. Middle of Nineteenth Century . . .63 
 
 IV. End of Nineteenth Century . . .89 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 THE CHILD 
 
 V. Sounds . . . . . . .103 
 
 VI. Words ....... 113 
 
 VII. Grammar . . . . . .128 
 
 VIII, Some Fundamental Problems . . . 140 
 
 IX. The Influence of the Child on Linguistic 
 
 Development ...... 161 
 
 X. The Influence of the Child {continued) . . 172 
 
 u 
 
12 
 
 LANGUAGE 
 
 BOOK in 
 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE WORLD 
 
 OBAPTEB FAOE 
 
 XI. The Foreigner . . . . . .191 
 
 XII. Pidgin and Congeners .... 216 
 
 XIII. The Woman . . . . . .237 
 
 XIV. Causes of Change . . . . . 255 
 XV. Causes of Change (continued) . . . 276 
 
 BOOK IV 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE 
 
 XVI. Etymology ...... 305 
 
 XVII. Progress or Decay ? . . . . . 319 
 
 XVIII. Progress ....... 337 
 
 XIX. Origin of Grammatical Elements . . . 367 
 
 XX. Sound Symbolism ..... 396 
 
 XXI. The Origin of Speech . . . . .412 
 
 Index . . . . . . . 4:,3 
 
ABBREVIATIONS OF BOOK TITLES, ETC. 
 
 Bally LV == Ch. Ballj-, Le Langage et la Vie, Gent;ve 1913. 
 
 Benfey Gesch = Th. Benfey, Oeschichte der Sprachwisaenschaft, Miinchen 
 
 1869. 
 Bleek CG = W. H. I. Bleek, Comparative Grammar of South African Languages' 
 
 London 1862-69. 
 Bloonxfield SL = L. Bloomfield, An Introduction to the Study of Language, 
 
 New York 1914. 
 Bopp C = F. Bopp, Conjugationasystem der Sanskritsprache, Frankfurt 1816. 
 AC = Analytical Comparison (see ch. ii, § 6). 
 VG = Vergleichende Orammatik, 2te Ausg., Berlin 1857. 
 Breal M = M. Breal, Melanges de Mythologie et de Linguistique, Paris 1882. 
 Brugmann VG = K. Brugmann, Qrundriss der Vergleichenden Grammatih, 
 Strassburg 1886 fi., 2te Ausg., 1897 £f. 
 KG = Kurze Vergleichende Grammatik, Strassburg 1904. 
 ChE = O. Jespersen, Chapters on English, London 1918. 
 Churchill B = W. Churchill, Beach-la-Mar, Washington 1911. 
 Curtius C = G. Cixrtius, Zur Chronologie der indogerm. Sprachforschung, 
 Leipzig 1873. 
 K = Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung, Leipzig 1885. 
 Dauzat V = A. Dauzat, La Vie du Langage, Paris 1910. 
 
 Ph = La Philosophic du Langage, Paris 1912. 
 Delbrvick E = B. Delbruck, Einleitung in das Sprachstudium, Leipzig 1880 ; 
 5te Aufl. 1908. 
 Grfr = Grundfragen der Sprachforschung, Strassburg 1901. 
 E. = English. 
 
 EDD = J. Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, Oxford 1898 £E. 
 ESt = Englische Sludien. 
 Feist KI = S. Feist, Kultur, Ausbreitung und Herkunft der Jndogermanen, 
 
 Berlin 1913. 
 Fonetik = O. Jespersen, Fonetik, Copenhagen 1897. 
 Fr. == French. 
 Gabelentz Spr = G. v. d. Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft, Leipzig 1891. 
 
 Gr = Chinesische Grammatik, Leipzig 1881. 
 Ginneken LP = J. v. Ginneken, Principes de Linguistique Paychologique 
 
 Amsterdam, Paris 1907. 
 Glencormer = P. Glenconner, The Sayings of the Children, Oxford 1918. 
 Gr. = Greek. 
 Greenough and Kittredge W = J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge, Words 
 
 and their Ways in English Speech, London 1902. 
 Grimm Gr. = J. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2te Ausg., Gottingen 1822. 
 GDS = Geschichte der dexitschen Sprache, 4te Aufl., Leipzig 1880. 
 
 13 
 
14 LANGUAGE \ 
 
 GRM = Oermaniach-Romanische Monataschrift. 
 
 GS = O. Jespersen, Orowth and Structure of the English Language, 3rd ed., 
 
 Leipzig 1919. 
 Hilmer Sch = H. Hilmer, Schallnachahmung, Wortschopfung u. Bedeutungs- 
 
 wandel, Halle 1914. 
 Hirt GDS = H. Hirt, Oeschichte der deutachen Sprache, Miinchen 1919. 
 
 Idg = Die Indogermanen, Strnssburg 1905-7. 
 Humboldt Versch = W. v. Humboldt, Verachiedenheit dea menachlichen 
 
 Sprachbauea (number of pages as in the original edition). 
 IF = Indogermanische Forschungen. 
 
 KZ = Kuhn's Zeitachrift fiir vcrgleichende Sprachforachung. 
 Lasch S = R. Laaoh, Bonder a prachen u. ihre Entstehung, Wien 1907. 
 LPh = O. Jesporsen, Lehrbuch der Phonetik, 3te Aufl., Leipzig 1920. 
 Madvig 1857 = J. N. Madvig, De grammalische Betegnelaer, Copenhagen 1857. 
 
 Kl = Kleine philologiache Schriften, Leipzig 1875. 
 ME. = Middle English. 
 
 MEG = O. Jespersen, Modern English Grammar, Heidelberg 1909, 1914. 
 Meillet DI = A. Meillet, Lea Dialectea Indo-Europeena, Paris 1908. 
 
 Germ. = Caracterea gdm'raux dea Languea Germaniques, Paris 1917. 
 Gr = Aper<^u d'une Histoire de la Langue Grecque, Paris 1913. 
 LI = Introduction d V4tude camp, dea Languea Indo-Europeennea, 
 2e dd., Paris 1908. 
 Meinhof Ham = C. Meinhof, Die hamitischen Sprachen, Haml)urg 1912. 
 
 MSA = Die moderne Sprachforachung in Afrika, Berlin 1910. 
 Meringer L = R. Meringer, Aua dem Leben der Sprache, Berlin 1908. 
 Misteli = F. Misteli, Charakteriatik der haupta, Typen dea Sprachbauea, 
 
 Berlin 1893. 
 MSL = M^moires de la Socidtd de Linguiatique de Paria. 
 Ft. Miiller Gr = Friedrich Miiller, Grundrisa der Spiachwiaaenachaft, '\\'ien 
 
 1876 ff. 
 Max Miiller Ch = F. Max Miiller, Chipa from a German Workahop, vol. iv, 
 
 London 1875. 
 NED = A New Engliah Dictionary, by Murray, etc., Oxford 1884 f5. 
 Noreen UL = A. Noreen, Abriaa der urgermaniachen Lautlehre, Strassburg 
 1894. 
 VS = Vart Spr8k, Lund 1903 ff. 
 Nyrop Gr = Kr. Nyrop, Grammaire Hisiorique de la Langue Fran^aiae, 
 
 Copenhagen 1914 ff. 
 OE. = Old English (Anglo-Saxon). 
 
 Oertel = H. Oertel, Lecturea on the Study of Language, New York 190L 
 OFr. = Old French. 
 ON. = Old Norse. 
 
 Passy Ch = P. Passy, Lea Changementa Phondtiquea, Paris 1890. 
 Paul P = H. Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeachichte, 4te Aufl., Halle 1909. 
 
 Gr = Grundriaa der germanischen Philologie. 
 PBB = Beitrage zur Geachichte der deutachen Sprache (Paul u. Braune). 
 Pedersen GKS = H. Pedersen, Vergl. Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen, 
 
 GSttingen 1909. 
 PhG = O. Jespersen, Phonetische Grundfragen, Leipzig 1904. 
 Porzezinski Spr = V. Porzezinski, Einleitung in die Sprachwiaaenachaft, 
 
 Leipzig 1910. 
 Progr. = O. Jespersen, Progreaa in Language, London 1894. 
 
ABBREVIATIONS OF BOOK TITLES 15 
 
 Rask P = R. Rask [Prisskrift] Undersogelse om det gamie Nordiske Sprogs 
 Oprindehe, Copenhagen 181S. 
 SA = Samlede AJhandlinger, Copenhagen 1834. 
 Raumer Gesch = R. v. Raumer, Genchichte der germanischen Philologte, 
 
 Miinchen 1870. 
 Ronjat = J. Ronjat, Le Developpement du Langage chez un Enjant Bilingue, 
 
 Paris 1913. 
 Sandfeld Jensen S = Kr. Sandfeld Jensen, Sprogvidenskaben, Copenhagen 
 1913. 
 Sprw = Die Sprachwiasenschaft, Leipzig 1915. 
 Saussure LG = F. de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique G6n6rale, Lausanne 
 
 191G. 
 Sayce P = A. H. Sayce, Principles oj Comparative Philology, 2nd ed., London 
 1875. 
 S = Introduction to the Science of Language, London 1880. 
 Scherer GDS = W. Scherer, Zur Oeschichte der deutachen Sprache, Berlin 
 
 1878. 
 Schleicher I, II = A. Schleicher, Sprachvergleichende Vntersuchungen, I-II, 
 Bonn 1848, 1850. 
 Bed. = Die Bedeutung der Sprache, Weimar 1865. 
 C = Compendium der vergl. Grammatik, 4te Aufl., Weimar 1876. 
 D = Die deutsche Sprache, Stuttgart 1S60. 
 Darw. = Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachunasenachaft, 
 
 Weimar 1873. 
 NV = Nomen und Verbum, Leipzig 1865. 
 Schuchardt SID = H. Schuchardt, Slawo-DeiUschea u. Slawo-Italienischea, 
 Graz 1885. 
 KS = Kreolische Studien (Wien, Akademie). 
 Simonyi US = S. Simonyi, Die Ungarische Sprache, Strassburg 1907. 
 Skt. = Sanskrit. 
 Sommer Lat. = F. Sommer, Handbuch der latein- Laul- wid Formenlehre, 
 
 Heidelberg 1902. 
 Stern = Clara and William Stern, Die Kinder sprache, Leipzig 1907. 
 StoSel Int. = C. StoSel, Intensives and Down-toners, Heidelberg 1901. 
 Streitberg Gesch = W. Streitberg, Geschichte der indogerm. Sprachwiasen- 
 schaft, Strassburg 1917. 
 Urg = Urgermanische Grammatik, Heidelberg 1896. 
 Sturtevant LCh = E. H. Sturtevant, Linguistic Change, Chicago 1917. 
 Siitterlin WSG = L. Siitterlin, Das Wesen der sprachlichen Gebilde, Heidel- 
 berg 1902. 
 WW = Werden und Wesen der Sprache, Leipzig 1913. 
 Sweet CP = H. Sweet, Collected Papers, Oxford 1913. 
 H = The History of Language, London 1900. 
 PS = The Practical Study of Languages, London 1899. 
 Tegn^r SM = E. Tegner, Spraketa makt ofver tanken, Stockholm 1880. 
 Vemer = K. Verner, Afhandlinger og Breve, Copenhagen 1903. 
 Wechssler L = E. Wechssler, Giebt es Lautgesetze ? Halle 1900. 
 Whitney G = W. D. Whitney, Life and Growth of Language, London 1875. 
 L = Language and the Study of Language, London 1868. 
 M = Max Mailer and the Science of Language, New York 1892. 
 OLS = Oriental and Linguistic Studies, New York 1873-4. 
 Wundt S = W. Wundt, Die Sprache, Leipzig 1900. 
 
PHONETIC SYMBOLS 
 
 [a'] as in olms. 
 
 [ai] as in tee. 
 
 [au] as in howse. 
 
 [se] as in hat. 
 
 [ei] as in hate. 
 
 [e] as in care ; Fr. tel. 
 
 [a] indistinct vowels. 
 
 [i] as in fill ; Fr. qui. 
 
 fi-] as in feel ; Fr. fille. 
 
 [o] as in Fr. aeau. 
 
 [ou] as in so, 
 
 [d] open o-sounds. 
 
 fu] as in iuU ; Fr. iou. 
 
 [u'j as in fool ; Fr. 6poMsew 
 
 standij before the stressed syllable, 
 indicates length of the preceding sound. 
 [y] as in Fr. vu. 
 
 [a] as in cut. 
 [«] as in Fr. fe«. 
 [ce] as in Fr. sceur. 
 ["] French nasalization. 
 [c] as in G. ich. 
 [x] as in G., Sc. loch. 
 [6] as in this. 
 [j] as in 2/ou. 
 []?] as in thick. 
 [/] as in she. 
 [5] as in measure. 
 ['] in Russian palatalization, in 
 Danish glottal stop. 
 
 16 
 
BOOK I 
 HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE 
 
 17 
 
CHAPTER I 
 BEFORE 1800 
 
 § 1. Antiquity. § 2. Middle Ages and Renaissance. § 3. Eighteenth- 
 century Speculation. Herder. § 4. Jenisch. 
 
 I. — §1. Antiquity. 
 
 The science of language began, tentatively and approximately, 
 when the minds of men first turned to problems like these : How 
 is it that people do not speak every^vhere the same language ? 
 How were words first created ? What is the relation between a 
 name and the thing it stands for ? Why is such and such a person, 
 or such and such a thing, called tJiis and not that ? The first 
 answers to these questions, like primitive answers to other riddles 
 of the universe, were largely theological : God, or one particular 
 god, had created language, or God led all animals to the first man 
 in order that he might give them names. Thus in the Old Testa- 
 ment the diversity of languages is explained as a punishment 
 from God for man's crimes and presumption. These were great 
 and general problems, but the minds of the early Jews were also 
 occupied with smaller and more particular problems of language, 
 as when etymological interpretations were given of such personal 
 names as were not immediately self-explanatory. 
 
 The same predilection for etymology, and a similar primitive 
 kind of etymology, based entirely on a more or less accidental 
 similarity of sound and easily satisfied with any fanciful connexion 
 in sense, is found abundantly in Greek writers and in their Latin 
 imitators. But to the speculative minds of Greek thinkers the 
 problem that proved most attractive was the general and abstract 
 one, Are words natinral and necessary expressions of the notions 
 underlying them, or are they merely arbitrary and conventional 
 signs for notions that might have been equally well expressed by 
 any other sounds ? Endless discussions were carried on about 
 this question, as we see particularly from Plato's Kratylos, and 
 no very definite result was arrived at, nor could any be expected 
 so long as one language only formed the basis of the discussion — 
 even in om* own days, after a centm-y of comparative philology, 
 the question still remains an open one. In Greece, the two catch- 
 words phusei (by nature) and thesei (by convention) for centuries 
 
 19 
 
\E 1800 [cii. I 
 
 divided phuosopners aiiJ grammarians into two camps, while 
 some, like Sokrates in Plato's dialogue, though admitting that 
 in language as actually existing there was no natural connexion 
 between word and thing, still wished that an ideal language might 
 be created in which words and things would be tied together in 
 a perfectly rational wa}' — thus paving the way for Bishop Wilkins 
 and other modern constructors of philosophical languages. 
 
 Such abstract and a priori speculations, however stimulating 
 and clever, hardly deserve the name of science, as this term is 
 understood nowadays. Science presupposes careful observation 
 and systematic classification of facts, and of that in the old Greek 
 writers on language we find very little. The earliest masters in 
 linguistic observation and classification were the old Indian gram- 
 marians. The language of the old sacred hymns had become in 
 many points obsolete, but religion required that not one iota of 
 these revered texts should be altered, and a scrupulous oral tradition 
 kept them unchanged from generation to generation in every 
 minute particular. This led to a wonderfully exact analysis of 
 speech sounds, in wliich every detail of articulation was care- 
 fully described, and to a no less admirable analj'sis of grammatical 
 forms, which were arranged systematically and described in a 
 concise and highly ingenious, though artificial, terminology. The 
 whole manner of treatment was entirely different from the methods 
 of Western grammarians, and when the works of Panini and other 
 Sanskrit grammarians were first made kno'WTi to Europeans in 
 the nineteenth century, they profoundh^ influenced our own lin- 
 guistic science, as witnessed, among other things, by the fact that 
 some of the Indian technical terms are still extensively used, for 
 instance those describing various kinds of compound nouns. 
 
 In Europe grammatical science was slowly and laboriou?^Iy 
 developed in Greece and later in Rome. Aristotle laid the founda- 
 tion of the division of words into " parts of speech " and introduced 
 the notion of case (ptosis). His work in this connexion was 
 continued by the Stoics, many of whose grammatical distinctions 
 and terms are still in use, the latter in their Latin dress, which 
 embodies some curious mistakes, as when genike, " the case of kmd 
 or species," was rendered genitivus, as if it meant "the case of 
 origin," or, worse still, when aitiatike, " the case of object," was 
 rendered accusativus, as if from aitidoniai, ' I accuse.' In later 
 times the philological school of Alexandria was particularly 
 important, the object of research being the interpretation of tl'.e 
 old poets, whose language was no longer instantly intelligible. 
 Details of flexion and of the meaning of words were described 
 and referred to the two categories of analogy or regularity and 
 anomaly or irregularity, but real insight into the nature of language 
 
§1] ANTIQUITY 21 
 
 made very little progress either with the Alexandrians or with 
 their Roman inheritors, and etymology still remained in the 
 childlike stage. 
 
 I. — § 3. Middle Ages and Renaissance. 
 
 Nor did linguistic science advance in the Sliddle Ages. The 
 chief thing then was learning Latin as the common language of 
 the Church and of what little there was of civilization generally ; 
 but Latin was not studied in a scientific spirit, and the various 
 vernacular languages, which one by one blossomed out into 
 languages of literatiure, even less so. 
 
 The Renaissance in so far brought about a change in this, as 
 it widened the horizon, especially by introducing the study of 
 Greek. It also favoured grammatical studies through the stress 
 it laid on correct Latin as represented in the best period of classical 
 literature : it now became the ambition of humanists in all 
 countries to Avrite Latin Uke Cicero. In the following centuries 
 we witness a constantly deepening interest in the various living 
 languages of Eiurope, owing to the growing importance of native 
 hteratures and to increasing facilities of international traffic and 
 communication in general. The most important factor here was, 
 of course, the invention of printing, which rendered it incom- 
 parably more easy than formerly to obtain the means of studjang 
 foreign languages. It should be noted also that in those times 
 the prevalent theological interest made it a much more common 
 thing than nowadays for ordinarj^ scholars to have some know- 
 ledge of Hebrew as the original language of the Old Testament. 
 The acquaintance with a language so different in type from those 
 spoken in Eiu-ope in many ways stimulated the interest in linguistic 
 studies, though on the other hand it proved a fruitful source of 
 error, because the position of the Semitic family of languages 
 was not yet understood, and because Hebrew was thought to be 
 the language spoken in Paradise, and therefore imagined to be 
 the language from which all other languages were descended. 
 All kinds of fanciful similarities between Hebrew and European 
 languages were taken as proofs of the origin of the latter ; every 
 imaginable permutation of sounds (or rather of letters) was looked 
 upon as possible so long as there was a slight connexion in the 
 sense of the two words compared, and however incredible it may 
 seem nowadays, the fact that Hebrew was written from right to 
 left, while we in our writing proceed from left to right, was 
 considered justification enough for the most violent transposition 
 of letters in etymological explanations. And yet all these flighty 
 and whimsical comparisons served perhaps in some measm'e to 
 
22 BEFORE 1800 [cH. i 
 
 pave the way for a more systematic treatment of etymology through 
 collecting vast stores of words from which sober and critical minds 
 might select those instances of indubitable connexion on which a 
 sound science of etymology could eventually be constructed. 
 
 The discovery and publication of texts in the old Gothonic 
 (Germanic) languages, especially Wulfila's Gotliic translation of 
 the Bible, compared with which Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Old 
 German and Old Icelandic texts were of less, though by no means 
 of despicable, account, paved the way for historical treatment 
 of this important group of languages in the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries. But on the whole, the interest in the history 
 of languages in those days was small, and linguistic thinkers thought 
 it more urgent to establish vast treasuries of languages as actually 
 spoken than to follow the development of any one language from 
 century to century. Thus we see that the great philosopher 
 Leibniz, who took much interest in hnguistic pursuits and to whom 
 we owe many judicious utterances on the possibility of a universal 
 language, instigated Peter the Great to have vocabularies and 
 specimens collected of all the various languages of his vast empire. 
 To this initiative taken by Leibniz, and to the great personal 
 interest that the Empress Catherine II took in these studies, we 
 owe, directly or indirectly, the great repertories of all languages 
 then known, first Pallas's lAngiLarum totius orbis vocabtdaria 
 comparativa (1786-87), then Hervas's Catdlogo de las lengnaa 
 de las Tuiziones conocidas (1800-5), and finally Adelung's 
 Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde (1806-17). In spite 
 of their inevitable shortcomings, their uncritical and unequal 
 treatment of many languages, the preponderance of lexical over 
 grammatical information, and the use of biblical texts as their 
 sole connected illustrations, these great works exercised a mighty 
 influence on the linguistic thought and research of the time, and 
 contributed very much to the birth of the hnguistic science of the 
 nineteenth century. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that 
 Hervas was one of the first to recognize the superior importance 
 of grammar to vocabulary for deciding questions of relationship 
 between languages. 
 
 It will be well here to consider the manner in which languages 
 and the teaching of languages were generally viewed during the 
 centuries preceding the rise of Comparative Linguistics. The chief 
 language taught was Latin ; the first and in many cases the only 
 grammar with which scholars came into contact was Latin grammar. 
 No wonder therefore that grammar and Latin grammar came 
 in the minds of most people to be sjmonyms. Latin grammar 
 played an enormous rfile in the schools, to the exclusion of maay 
 subjects (the pupil's own native language, science, history, etc.) 
 
§2] MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE 28 
 
 which we are now beginning to think more essential for the educa- 
 tion of the young. The traditional term for ' secondary school ' 
 was in England ' grammar school ' and in Denmark ' latinskole,' 
 and the reason for both expressions was obviously the same. 
 Here, however, we are concerned with this privileged position of 
 Latin grammar only in so far as it influenced the treatment of 
 languages in general. It did so in more ways than one. 
 
 Latin was a language with a wealth of flexional forms, and 
 in describing other languages the same categories as were found 
 in Latin were applied as a matter of course, even where there was 
 nothing in these other languages which really corresponded to what 
 was found in Latin. In English and Danish grammars paradigms 
 of noun declension were given with such cases as accusative, dative 
 and ablative, in spite of the fact that no separate forms for these 
 cases had existed for centuries. All languages were indiscriminately 
 saddled with the elaborate Latin system of tenses and moods in 
 the verbs, and by means of such Procrustean methods the actual 
 facts of many languages were distorted and misrepresented. 
 Discriminations which had no foundation in reality were never- 
 theless insisted on, while discriminations which happened to be 
 non-existent in Latin were apt to be overlooked. The mischief 
 consequent on this unfortunate method of measuring all grammar 
 after the pattern of Latin grammar has not even yet completely 
 disappeared, and it is even now difficult to find a single grammar 
 of any language that is not here and there influenced by the 
 Latin bias. 
 
 Latin was chiefly taught as a written language (witness the 
 totally different manner in which Latin was pronounced in 
 the different countries, the consequence being that as early as the 
 sixteenth century French and English scholars were imable to 
 understand each other's spoken Latin). This led to the almost 
 exclusive occupation with letters instead of sounds. The fact 
 that all language is primarily spoken and only secondarily veritten 
 do"«Ti, that the real life of language is in the mouth and ear and 
 not in the pen and eye, was overlooked, to the detriment of a real 
 understanding of the essence of language and linguistic develop- 
 ment ; and very often where the spoken form of a language was 
 accessible scholars contented themselves with a reading knowledge. 
 In spite of many efforts, some of which go back to the sixteenth 
 century, but which did not become really powerful till the rise 
 of modern phonetics in the nineteenth century, the fundamental 
 significance of spoken as opposed to \vritten language has not 
 yet been fully appreciated by all linguists. There are still too 
 many writers on philological questions who have evidently never 
 tried to think in sounds instead of thinking in letters and symbols, 
 
24 BEFORE 1800 [cu. i 
 
 and who would probably be sorely puzzled if they were to pro- 
 nounce all the forms that come so glibly to their pens. What 
 Sweet -wTote in 1877 in the preface to his Handbook of Phonetics 
 is perhaps less true now than it was then, but it still contains some 
 elements of truth. " Manj' instances," he said, "might be quoted 
 of the way in which important philological facts and laws have 
 been passed over or misrepresented through the observer's want 
 of phonetic training. Schleicher's failing to observe the Lithua- 
 nian accents, or even to comprehend them when pointed out by 
 Kurschat, is a striking instance." But there can be no doubt 
 that the way in which Latin has been for centuries made the 
 basis of all linguistic instruction is largely responsible for the 
 preponderance of eye-philology to ear-philology in the history of 
 our science. 
 
 We next come to a point which to my mind is very important, 
 because it concerns something which has had, and has justly had, 
 enduring effects on the manner in which language, and especially 
 grammar, is viewed and taught to this day. What was the object 
 of teaching Latin in the Middle Ages and later ? Certainly not 
 the purely scientific one of imparting knowledge for knowledge's 
 own sake, apart from anj' practical use or advantage, simply in 
 order to widen the spiritual horizon and to obtain the joy of pure 
 intellectual understanding. For such a purpose some people "v^ith 
 scientific leanings may here and there take up the study of some 
 out-of-the-way African or American idiom. But the reasons for 
 teaching and learning Latin were not so idealistic. Latin w'as 
 not even taught and learnt solely with the purpose of opening the 
 doors to the old classical or to the more recent religious literature 
 in that language, but chiefly, and in the first instance, because 
 Latin was a practical and highly important means of communication 
 between educated people. One had to learn not only to road 
 Latin, but also to ^vl■ite Latin, if one wanted to maintain no matter 
 how humble a position in the republic of learning or in the hier- 
 archy of the Church. Consequently, grammar was not (even 
 primarily) the science of how words were inflected and how forms 
 were used bj'' the old Romans, but chiefly and essentially the 
 art of inflecting words and of using the forms yourself, if you 
 wanted to write correct Latin. This yoii must say, and these 
 faults you must avoid — such were the lessons imparted in the 
 schools. Grammar was not a set of facts observed but of rules to 
 be observed, and of paradigms, i.e. of patterns, to be follo-wcd. 
 Sometimes this character of grammaticaLrhistruction is expres-sly 
 indicated in the form of the precepts given, as in such memorial 
 verses as this : " Tolle -me, -mi, -mil, -mis. Si declinare domvs vis ! " 
 In other words, grammar was prescriptive rather than descriptive. 
 
§2] MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE 25 
 
 The current definition of grammar, therefore, was " ars bene 
 dicendi et bene scribendi," " I'art de bicn dire et de bicn ecrire," 
 the art of speaking and wi'iting correctly. J. C. ScaHger said, 
 " Grammatici unus finis est recte loqui." To attain to correct 
 diction (' good grammar ') and to avoid faulty diction (' bad 
 grammar '), such were the two objects of grammatical teaching. 
 Now, the same point of view, in which the two elements of ' art ' 
 and of ' correctness ' entered so largely, was applied not only to 
 Latin, but to other languages as well, when the various vernaculars 
 came to be treated grammatically. 
 
 The vocabulary, too, was treated from the same point of view. 
 This is especially evident in the case of the dictionaries issued by 
 the French and Italian Academies. They differ from dictionaries 
 as now usually compiled in being not collections of all and any 
 words their authors could get hold of within the limits of the 
 language concerned, but in being selections of words deserving the 
 recommendations of the best arbiters of taste and therefore fit 
 to be used in the highest literature by even the most elegant or 
 fastidious -svriters. Dictionaries thus understood were less descrip- 
 tions of actual usage than prescriptions for the best usage of 
 words. 
 
 The normative way of viewing language is fraught with some 
 great dangers which can only be avoided through a comprehen- 
 sive knowledge of the historic development of languages and of 
 the general conditions of linguistic psychology. Otherwise, the 
 tendency everywhere is to draw too narrow limits for what is 
 allowable or correct. In many cases one form, or one construc- 
 tion, only is recognized, even where two or more are found in 
 actual speech ; the question which is to be selected as the only good 
 form comes to be decided too often by individual fancy or predilec- 
 tion, where no scientific tests can yet be applied, and thus a form 
 may often be proscribed which from a less narrow point of view 
 might have appeared just as good as, or even better than, the 
 one preferred in the official grammar or dictionary. In other 
 instances, where two forms were recognized, the grammarian 
 wanted to give rules for their discrimination, and sometimes on 
 the basis of a totally inadequate induction he would establish 
 nice distinctions not really warranted by actual usage — distinctions 
 which subsequent generations had to learn at school with the sweat 
 of their brows and which were often considered most important 
 in spite of their intrinsic insignificance. Such unreal or half-real 
 subtle distinctions are the besetting sin of French grammarians 
 from the ' grand siecle ' onwards, while they have played a much 
 less considerable part in England, where people have been on the 
 whole more inclined to let things slide as best they may on the 
 
26 BEFORE 1800 [ch. i 
 
 ' laissez faire ' principle, and where no Academy was ever estab- 
 lished to regulate language. But even in EngUsh rules are not 
 unfrequently given in schools and in newspaper offices which are 
 based on narrow views and hasty generalizations. Because a 
 preposition at the end of a sentence may in some instances be 
 clumsy or unwieldy, this is no reason why a final preposition should 
 always and under all circumstances be considered a grave error. 
 But it is of course easier for the schoolmaster to give an absolute, 
 and inviolable rule once and for all than to study carefulh' all 
 the various considerations that might render a qualification 
 desirable. If the ordinary books on Common Faults in Writing 
 and Speaking English and similar works in other languages have 
 not even now assimilated the teachings of Comparative and 
 Historic Linguistics, it is no wonder that the grammarians of the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with whom we are here 
 concerned, should be in many ways guided by narrow and 
 insufficient views on what ought to determine correctness of spccclh 
 Here also the importance given to the study of Latin was 
 sometimes harmful ; too much was settled by a reference to Latin 
 rules, even where the modern languages really followed rules of 
 their own that were opposed to those of Latin. The learning qf 
 Latin grammar was supposed to be, and to some extent really 
 was, a schooling in logic, as the strict observance of the rules of 
 any foreign language is bound to be ; but the consequence of this 
 was that when questions of grammatical correctness were to be 
 settled, too much importance was often given to purely logical 
 considerations, and scholars were sometimes apt to determine 
 what was to be called ' logical '' in language according to whetlier 
 it was or was not in conformity with Latin usage. This disposition, 
 joined with the unavoidable conservatism of mankind, and more 
 particularly of teachers, would in many ways prove a hindrance 
 to natural developments in a living speech. But we must again 
 take up the thread of the history of linguistic theory. 
 
 I. — §3. Eighteenth-century Speculation. Herder. 
 
 The problem of a natural origin of language exercised sonu of 
 the best-known thinkers of the eighteenth century. Rousfeau 
 imagined the first men setting themselves more or less deliberately 
 to frame a language by an agreement similar to (or forming part 
 of) the corilrat social which according to him was the basis of all 
 social order. There is here the obvious difficulty of imagining 
 how primitive men who had been previously without any speech 
 came to feel the want of language, and how they could agree on 
 what sound was to represent what idea without having already 
 
§8] EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPECULATION 27 
 
 some means of communication. Rousseau's whole manner of 
 putting and of viewing the problem is evidently too crude to be 
 of any real importance in the history of linguistic science. 
 
 Condillac is much more sensible when he tries to imagine how 
 a speechless man and a speechless woman might be led quite 
 natiu-ally to acquire something like language, starting with instinc- 
 tive cries and violent gestures called forth by strong emotions. 
 Such cries would come to be associated with elementary feelings, 
 and new sounds might come to indicate various objects if produced 
 repeatedly in connexion with gestures showing what objects the 
 speaker wanted to call attention to. If these two first speaking 
 beings had as yet very little power to vary their sounds, their 
 child would have a more flexible tongue, and would therefore be 
 able to, and be impelled to, produce some new sounds, the meaning 
 of which his parents would guess at, and which they in their turn 
 would imitate ; thus gradually a greater and greater number of 
 words would come into existence, generation after generation 
 working painfully to enrich and develop what had been already 
 acquired, until it finally became a real language. 
 
 The profoundest thinker on these problems in the eighteenth 
 century was Johann Gottfried Herder, who, though he did little 
 or nothing in the way of scientific research, yet prepared the rise 
 of linguistic science. In his prize essay on the Origin of Language 
 (1772) Herder first vigorously and successfully attacks the orthodox 
 view of his age — a view which had been recently upheld very 
 emphatically by one Siissmilch — that language could not have 
 been invented by man, but was a direct gift from God. One of 
 Herder's strongest arguments is that if language had been framed 
 by God and by Him instilled into the mind of man, we should 
 expect it to be much more logical, much more imbued with pure 
 reason than it is as an actual matter of fact. Much in all existing 
 languages is so chaotic and ill-arranged that it could not be God's 
 work, but must come from the hand of man. On the other hand, 
 Herder does not think that language was really ' invented ' by 
 man — although this was the word used by the Berlin Academy 
 when opening the competition in which Herder's essay gained the 
 prize. Language was not deliberately framed by man, but sprang 
 of necessity from his innermost nature ; the genesis of language 
 according to him is due to an impulse similar to that oi tne mature 
 embryo pressing to be born. Man, in the same way as all animals, 
 gives vent to his feelings in tones, but this is not enough ; it is 
 impossible to trace the origin of human language to these emotional 
 cries alone. However much they may be refined and fixed, without 
 understanding they can never become human, conscious language. 
 Man differs from brute animals not in degree or in the addition of 
 
28 BEFORE 1800 [ch. i 
 
 new powers, but in a totally different direction and development 
 of all powers. Man's inferiority to animals in strength and sureness 
 of instinct is compensated by his wider sphere of attention ; the 
 whole disposition of his mind as an unanalysable entity constitutes 
 the impassable barrier between him and the lower animals. Man, 
 then, shows conscious reflexion when among the ocean of sensa- 
 tions that rush into his soul through all the senses he singles out 
 one wave and arrests it, as when, seeing a lamb, he looks for a dis- 
 tinguishing mark and finds it in the bleating, so that next time 
 when he recognizes the same animal he imitates the sound of 
 bleating, and thereby creates a name for that animal. Thus the 
 lamb to him is ' the bleater,' and nouns are created from verbs, 
 whereas, according to Herder, if language had been the creation 
 of God it would inversely have begun with nouns, as that would 
 have been the logically ideal order of procediue. Another charac- 
 teristic trait of primitive languages is the crossing of various 
 shades of feeling and the necessity of expressing thoughts through 
 strong, bold metaphors, presenting the most motley picture. 
 " The genetic cause lies in the poverty of the human mind and 
 in the flowing together of the emotions of a primitive human 
 being." Another consequence is the wealth of synonyms in 
 primitive language ; " alongside of real poverty it has the most 
 unnecessary superfluity." 
 
 When Herder here speaks of primitive or ' original ' languages, 
 he is thinking of Oriental languages, and especially of Hebrew. 
 " We should never forget," says Edward Sapir,^ " that Herder's 
 time-perspective was necessarily very diflPerent from ours. Wliile 
 we unconcernedly take tens or even himdreds of thousands of 
 years in wliich to allow the products of human civilization to 
 develop. Herder was still compelled to operate with the less than 
 six thousand years that orthodoxy stingily doled out. To us the 
 two or three thousand years that separate our language from the 
 Old Testament Hebrew seems a negligible quantity, when specu- 
 lating on the origin of language in general ; to Herder, however, 
 the Hebrew and the Greek of Homer seemed to be appreciably 
 nearer the oldest conditions than our vernaculars — hence his 
 exaggeration of their ursprilnglichkeit." 
 
 Herder's chief influence on the science of speech, to mj' mind, 
 is not derived directly from the ideas contained in his essay on 
 the actual origin of speech, but rather indirectly tluough the 
 whole of his life's work. He had a very strong sense of the \alue 
 of everything that had grown naturally (das naturwiichsige) ; ho 
 prepared the minds of his comitrymen for the manysided reeep- 
 
 * See his essay on Herder's " Ursprung der spracho " in Modern Philology, 
 5. 117 (1907). 
 
§3] EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPECULATION 29 
 
 tiveness of the Romanticists, who translated and admired the 
 popular poetry of a great many countries, which had hitherto been 
 terrce incognitce ; and he was one of the first to draw attention to 
 the great national value of his own country's medieval literature 
 and its folklore, and thus was one of the spiritual ancestors of 
 Grimm. He sees the close connexion that exists between language 
 and primitive poetry, or that kind of spontaneous singing that 
 characterizes the childhood or youth of mankind, and which is 
 totallj^ distinct from the artificial poetry of later ages. But to" 
 him each language is not only the instrument of literature, but 
 itself literature and poetr3\ A nation speaks its soul in the words 
 it uses. Herder admires his own mother -tongue, which to him 
 is perhaps inferior to Greek, but superior to its neighbours. The 
 combinations of consonants give it a certain measured pace ; it 
 does not rush forward, but walks with the firm carriage of a 
 German. The nice gradation of vowels mitigates the force of 
 the consonants, and the numerous spirants make the German 
 speech pleasant and endearing. Its syllables are rich and firm, 
 its phrases are stately, and its idiomatic expressions are emphatic 
 and serious. Still in some ways the present German language is 
 degenerate if compared with that of Luther, and still more with 
 that of the Suabian Emperors, and much therefore remains to be 
 done in the way of disinterring and revivifying the powerful 
 expressions now lost. Through ideas like these Herder not only 
 exercised a strong influence on Goethe and the Romanticists, 
 but also gave impulses to the linguistic studies of the following 
 generation, and caused many younger men to turn from the 
 well-worn classics to fields of research previously neglected. 
 
 I. — §4. Jenisch. 
 
 Where questions of correct language or of the best usage are 
 dealt with, or where different languages are compared with regard 
 to their eJBficiency or beauty, as is done very often, though more 
 often in dilettante conversation or in casual remarks in literary 
 works than in scientific linguistic disquisitions, it is no far cry to 
 the question, What would an ideal language be like ? But such 
 is the matter-of-factness of modern scientific thought, that probably 
 no scientific Academy in our own days would think of doing what 
 the Berlin Academy did in 1794 when it offered a prize for the 
 best essay on the ideal of a perfect language and a comparison of 
 the best-known languages of Europe as tested by the standard 
 of such an ideal. A Berlin pastor, D. Jenisch, won the prize, and 
 in 1796 brought out his book under the title Philosophisch-kritische 
 vergleichung und niirdigicng von vierzehn dltern und neuern S'prachen 
 
80 BEFORE 1800 [ch. i 
 
 Europens — a book which is even now well worth reading, the 
 more so because its subject has been all but completely neglected 
 in the hundred and twenty years that have since intervened. In 
 the Introduction the author has the following passage, which 
 might be taken as the motto of Wilhelm v. Humboldt, Steinthal, 
 Finck and Byrne, who do not, however, seem to have been 
 inspired by Jenisch : "In language the whole intellectual and 
 moral essence of a man is to some extent revealed. ' Speak, and 
 you are ' is rightly said by the Oriental. The language of the 
 natural man is savage and rude, that of the cultured man is elegant 
 and polished. As the Greek was subtle in thought and sensuously 
 refined in feeling — as the Roman was serious and practical rather 
 than speculative — as the Frenchman is popular and sociable — 
 as the Briton is profound and the German philosophic — so are 
 also the languages of each of these nations." 
 
 Jenisch then goes on to say that language as the organ for 
 communicating our ideas and feelings accomplishes its end if it 
 represents idea and feeling according to the actual want or need 
 of the mind at the given moment. We have to examine in each 
 case the following essential qualities of the languages compared, 
 (1) richness, (2) energy or emphasis, (3) clearness, and (4) euphony. 
 Under the head of richness we are concerned not only with the 
 number of words, first for material objects, then for spiritual and 
 abstract notions, but also with the ease with which new words 
 can be formed (lexikalische bildsamkeit). The energy of a language 
 is shown in its lexicon and in its grammar (simplicity of grammatical 
 structure, absence of articles, etc.), but also in " the characteristic 
 energy of the nation and its original writers." Clearness and 
 definiteness in the same way are shown in vocabulary and grammar, 
 especially in a regular and natural sjmtax. Euphony, finally, 
 depends not only on the selection of consonants and \'owels 
 utilized in the language, but on their harmonious combination, the 
 general impression of the language being more important than any 
 details capable of being analysed. 
 
 These, then, are the criteria by which Greek and Latin and a 
 number of living languages are compared and judged. The author 
 displays great learning and a sound practical knowledge of many 
 languages, and his remarks on the advantages and shortcomings 
 of these are on the whole judicious, though often perhaps too much 
 stress is laid on the literary merits of great WTiters, which have 
 really no intrinsic connexion with the value of a language as such. 
 It depends to a great extent on accidental circumstances whether 
 a language has been or has not been used in elevated literature, 
 and its merits should be estimated, so far as this is possible, inde- 
 pendently of the perfection of its literature. Jenisch's prejudice 
 
§ 4] JENISCH 81 
 
 in that respect is shown, for instance, when he says (p. 36) that 
 the endeavours of Hickes are entirely futile, when he tries to make 
 out regular declensions and conjugations in the barbarous language 
 of Wdlfila's translation of the Bible. But otherwise Jenisch is 
 singularly free from prejudices, as shown by a great number of 
 passages in which other languages are praised at the expense of 
 his own. Thus, on p. 396, he declares German to be the most 
 repellent contrast to that most supple modern language, French, 
 on account of its unnatural word-order, its eternally trailing 
 article, its want of participial constructions, and its interminable 
 auxiliaries (as in ' ich werde geliebt werden, ich wurde geliebt 
 worden sein,' etc.), wdth the frequent separation of these auxiliaries 
 from the main verb through extraneous intermediate words, all 
 of wliich gives to German something incredibly awkward, which 
 to the reader appears as lengthy and diffuse and to the writer as 
 inconvenient and intractable. It is not often that we find an 
 author appraising his own language with such severe impartiality, 
 and I have given the passage also to show what kind of problems 
 confront the man who wishes to compare the relative value of 
 languages as wholes. Jenisch's view here forms a striking contrast 
 to Herder's appreciation of their common mother -tongue. 
 
 Jenisch's book does not seem to have been widely read by 
 nineteenth-century scholars, who took up totally different problems. 
 Those few who read it were perhaps inclined to say with S. Lefmann 
 (see his book on Franz Bopp, Nachtrag, 1897, p, xi) that it is diffi- 
 cult to decide which was the greater fool, the one who put this 
 problem or the one who tried to answer it. This attitude, however, 
 towards problems of valuation in the matter of languages is 
 neither just nor wise, though it is perhaps easy to see how students 
 of comparative grammar were by the very nature of their study 
 led to look down upon those who compared languages from the 
 point of view of aesthetic or literary merits. Anyhow, it seems to 
 me no small merit to have been the first to treat such problems 
 as these, which are generally answered in an off-hand way 
 according to a loose general judgement, so as to put them on a 
 scientific footing by examining in detail what it is that makes us 
 more or less instinctively prefer one language, or one turn or expres- 
 sion in a language, and thus lay the foundation of that inductive 
 sBsthetic theory of language which has still to be developed in a 
 truly scientific spirit. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 § 1. Introduction. Sanskrit. § 2. Friedricli von Schlegel. § 3. Rasmua 
 Rask. § 4. Jacob Grimm. § 5. The Sound Shift. § 6. Franz Bopp. 
 § 7. Bopp continued. § 8. Wilhelm von Humboldt. § 9. Grimm 
 once more. 
 
 II.--§1. Introduction. Sanskrit. 
 
 The nineteenth century witnessed an enormous growth and 
 development of the science of language, which in some respects 
 came to present features totally unknown to previous centuries. 
 The horizon was widened ; more and more languages were described, 
 studied and examined, many of them for their own sake, as they 
 had no important literature. Everj^where a deeper insight was 
 gained into the structures even of such languages as had been 
 for centuries objects of study ; a more comprehensive and more 
 incisive classification of languages was obtained with a deeper 
 understanding of their mutual relationships, and at the same time 
 linguistic forms were not only described and analysed, but also 
 explained, their genesis being traced as far back as historical 
 evidence allowed, if not sometimes further. Instead of contenting 
 itself with stating when and where a form existed and how it looked 
 and was employed, linguistic science now also began to ask why 
 it had taken that definite shape, and thus passed from a purely 
 descriptive to an explanatory science. 
 
 The chief innovation of the begimiing of the nineteenth century 
 was the historical point of view. On the whole, it must be said 
 that it was reserved for that century to apply the notion of history 
 to other things than wars and the vicissitudes of dj'^nasties. and 
 thus to discover the idea of development or evolution as pervading 
 the whole universe. This brought about a vast change in the 
 science of language, as in other sciences. Instead of looking ai such 
 a language as Latin as one fixed point, atid instead of aiming at 
 fixing another language, such as French, in one classical form, 
 the new science viewed both as being in constant flux, as growing, 
 as moving, as continually changing. It cried aloud like Hernclitus 
 
 33 
 
§1] INTRODUCTION. SANSKRIT 83 
 
 " Panta rei," and like Galileo " Eppur si muove." And lo ! the 
 better this historical point of view was applied, the more secrets 
 languages seemed to unveil, and the more light seemed also to be 
 thrown on objects outside the proper sphere of language, such as 
 ethnology and the early history of mankind at large and of 
 particular coimtries. 
 
 It is often said that it was the discovery of Sanskrit that was 
 the real tiu-ning-point in the history of linguistics, and there is 
 some truth in this assertion, though we shall see on the one hand 
 that Sanskrit was not in itself enough to give to those who studied 
 it the true insight into the essence of language and linguistic science, 
 and on the other hand that real genius enabled at least one man 
 to grasp essential truths about the relationships and development 
 of languages even without a knowledge of Sanskrit. Still, it must 
 be said that the first acq[uaintance with this language gave a mighty 
 impulse to linguistic studies and exerted a lasting influence on 
 the way in Avhich most European languages were viewed by scholars, 
 and it will therefore be necessary here briefly to sketch the history 
 of these studies. India was very little known in Europe till the 
 mighty struggle between the French and the English for the mastery 
 of its wealth excited a wide interest also in its ancient culture. 
 It was but natural that on this intellectual domain, too, the French 
 and the English should at first be rivals and that we should find 
 both nations represented in the pioneers of Sanskrit scholarship. 
 The French Jesuit missionary Coeurdoux as early as 1767 sent to 
 the French Institut a memoir in which he called attention to the 
 similarity of many Sanskrit words with Latin, and even compared 
 the flexion of the present indicative and subjunctive of Sanskrit 
 asmi, ' I am,' with the corresponding forms of Latin grammar. 
 Unfortunately, however, his work was not printed till forty years 
 later, when the same discovery had been announced independently 
 by others. The next scholar to be mentioned in this connexion 
 is Sir William Jones, who in 1796 uttered the following memorable 
 words, which have often been quoted in books on the history of 
 hnguistics : " The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, 
 is of a wonderful structure ; more perfect than the Greek, more 
 copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either ; 
 yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinitj^ both in the roots 
 of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have 
 been produced by accident ; so strong, indeed, that no philologer 
 could examine them all three without believing them to have 
 sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer 
 exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for 
 supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic . . . had the same 
 origin with the Sanscrit ; and the old Persian might be added to 
 
 3 
 
34 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 the same family." Sir W. Jones, however, did nothing to carry 
 out in detail the compari«on thus inaugurated, and it was reserved 
 for younger men to follow up the clue he had given. 
 
 II. — § 2. Friedrich von Schlegel. 
 
 One of the books that exercised a great influence on the develop- 
 ment of linguistic science in the beginning of the nineteenth century 
 was Friedrich von Schlegel's Uebcr die sprache und u-fisheit 
 der Indier (1808). Schlegel had studied Sanskrit for some years 
 in Paris, and in his romantic enthusiasm he hoped that the study 
 of the old Indian books would bring about a revolution in European 
 thought similar to that produced in the Renaissance through the 
 revival of the study of Greek. We are here concerned exclusively 
 with his linguistic theories, but to his mind they were inseparable 
 from Indian religion and philosophy, or rather religious and philo- 
 sophic poetry. He is struck by the similarity between Sanskrit 
 and the best-known European languages, and gives quite a number 
 of words from Sanskrit found with iScarcely any change in German, 
 Greek and Latin. He repudiates the idea that these similarities 
 might be accidental or due to borrowings on the side of the Indians, 
 saying expressly that the proof of original relationship between 
 these languages, as well as of the greater age of Sanskrit, lies 
 in the far-reaching correspondences in the whole grammatical 
 structure of these as opposed to many other languages. In this 
 connexion it is noticeable that he is the first to speak of ' com- 
 parative grammar ' (p. 28), but, like Moses, he only looks into this 
 promised land without entering it. Indeed, his method of compari- 
 son precludes him from being the founder of the new science, for 
 he says himself (p. 6) that he will refrain from stating any rules 
 for change or substitution of letters (sounds), and require complete 
 identity of the words used as proofs of the descent of languages. 
 He adds that in other cases, " where intermediate stages are hisitori- 
 cally demonstrable, we may derive giorno from dies, and when 
 Spanish so often has h for Latin /, or Latin p very often becomes / 
 in the German form of the same word, and c not rarely becomes h 
 [by the way, an interesting foreshadowing of one part of the dis- 
 covery of the Germanic sound -shifting], then this may be the 
 foundation of analogical conclusions with regard to other les6 
 evident instances." If he had followed up this idea by establishing 
 similar ' sound-laws,' as we now say, between Sanskrit and other 
 languages, he would have been many years ahead of his time ; 
 as it is, his comparisons are those of a dilettante, and he sometimes 
 falls into the pitfalls of accidental similarities while overlooking 
 the real correspondences. He is also led astray by the idea of a 
 
§2] FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL 35 
 
 particularly close relationship betAveen Persian and German, an 
 idea which at that time was widely spread ^ — we find it in Jenisch 
 and even in Bopp's first book. 
 
 Schlegel is not afraid of surveying, the whole world of human 
 languages ; he divides them into two classes, one comprising 
 Sanskrit and its congeners, and the second all other languages. 
 In the former he finds organic growth of the roots as shown by 
 their capabilitj' of inner change or, as he terms it, ' flexion,' while 
 in the latter class everything is effected by the addition of affixes 
 (prefixes and suffixes). In Greek he admits that it would be 
 possible to believe in the possibility of the grammatical endings 
 (bildungssylben) having arisen from particles and auxiliary 
 words amalgamated into the word itself, but in Sanskrit even 
 the last semblance of this possibility disappears, and it becomes 
 necessary to confess that the structure of the language is formed 
 in a thoroughly organic way through flexion, i.e. inner changes 
 and modifications of the radical sound, and not composed merely 
 mechanically by the addition of words and particles. He admits, 
 however, that affixes in some other languages have brought about 
 something that resembles real flexion. On the whole he finds that 
 the movement of grammatical art and perfection (der gang der 
 bloss grammatischen kunst und ausbildung, p. 56) goes in opposite 
 directions in the two species of languages. In the organic lan- 
 guages, which represent the highest state, the beauty and art of their 
 structure is apt to be lost through indolence ; and German as well 
 as Romanic and modern Indian languages show this degeneracy 
 when compared with the earlier forms of the same languages. 
 In the affix languages, on the other hand, we see that the beginnings 
 are completely artless, but the ' art ' in them grows more and more 
 perfect the more the affixes are fused with the main word. 
 
 As to the question of the ultimate origin of language, Schlegel 
 thinks that the diversity of linguistic structure points to different 
 beginnings. While some languages, such as Manchu, are so inter- 
 woven with onomatopoeia that imitation of natural sounds must 
 have played the greatest role in their formation, this is by no 
 means the case in other languages, and the j)erfection of the oldest 
 organic or flexional languages, such as Sanskrit, shows that they 
 cannot be derived from merely animal sounds ; indeed, they form an 
 additional proof, if any such were needed, that men did not every- 
 where start from a brutish state, but that the clearest and intensest 
 reason existed from the very first beginning. On all these points 
 Schlegel 's ideas foreshadow views that are found in later works ; 
 and it is probable that his fame as a writer outside the philological 
 field gave to his linguistic speculations a notoriety which his often 
 
 » It dates back to Vulcaniiis, 1597 ; see Streitberg, IF 35. 182. 
 
36 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 loose and superficial reasonings would not otherwise have acquired 
 for them. 
 
 Schlegel's bipartition of the languages of the world carries 
 in it the germ of a tripartition. On the .lowest stage of his second 
 class he places Chinese, in which, as he acknowledges, the particles 
 denoting secondary sense modifications consist in monosyllables 
 that are completely independent of the actual word. It is clear that 
 from Schlegel's own point of view we cannot here properly speak 
 of ' affixes,' and thus Chinese really, though Schlegel himself does 
 not say so, falls outside his affix languages and forms a class by 
 itself. On the other hand, his arguments for reckoning Semitic 
 languages among affix languages are very weak, and he seems 
 also somewhat inclined to say that much in their structure re- 
 sembles real flexion. If we introduce these two changes into his 
 system, we arrive at the threefold division found in slightly different 
 shapes in most subsequent works on general linguistics, the first 
 to give it being perhaj)s Schlegel's brother, A. W. Schlegel, who 
 speaks of (1) les langues sans aucune structure grammaticale — 
 under which misleading term he understands Chinese with its 
 unchangeable monosyllabic words ; (2) les langues qui emploient 
 des affixes ; (3) les langues a inflexions. 
 
 Like his brother, A. W. Schlegel places the flexional languages 
 highest and thinks them alone ' organic' On the other hand, he 
 subdivides flexional languages into two classes, synthetic and 
 analytic, the latter using personal pronouns and auxiliaries in 
 the conjugation of verbs, prepositions to supply the want of 
 cases, and adverbs to express the degrees of comparison. While 
 the origin of the synthetic languages loses itself in the darkness 
 of ages, the analytic languages have been created in modern times ; 
 all those that we know are due to the decomposition of sjoithetic 
 languages. These remarks on the division of languages are found 
 in the Introduction to the book Observations sur la langue et 
 la litterature provenQole (1818) and are thus primarily meant to 
 account for the contrast between synthetic Latin and analytic 
 Romanic. 
 
 II. — § 3. Rasmus Rask. 
 
 We now come to the three greatest names among the initiators 
 of linguistic science in the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
 If we give them in their alphabetical order, Bopp, Grimm and 
 Rask, we also give them in the order of merit in which most sub- 
 sequent historians have placed them. The works that constitute 
 their first claims to the title of founder of the new science came 
 in close succession, Bopp's Conjugationssystem in 1816, Rask's 
 Undersf^geUe in 1818, and the first volume of Grimm's Grammatik in 
 
§3] RASMUS RASK 87 
 
 1819. While Bopp is entirely independent of the two others, we 
 shall sec that Grimm was deeply influenced by Rask, and as the 
 latter's contributions to our science began some years before his 
 chief work just mentioned (which had also been finished in manu- 
 script in 1814, thus two years before Bopp's Conjugationssystem), 
 the best order in which to deal with the three men will perhaps 
 be to take Rask first, then to mention Grimm, who in some ways 
 was his pupil, and finally to treat of Bopp : in this way we shall 
 also be enabled to see Bopp in close relation with the subsequent 
 development of Comparative Grammar, on which he, and not 
 Rask, exerted the strongest influence. 
 
 Born in a peasant's hut in the heart of Denmark in 1787, Rasmus 
 Rask was a grammarian from his boyhood. When a copy of the 
 Heimskringla was given him as a school prize, he at once, without 
 any grammar or dictionary, set about establishing paradigms, and 
 so, before he left school, acquired proficiency in Icelandic, as well 
 as in many other languages. At the University of Copenhagen 
 he continued in the same course, constantly widened his linguistic 
 horizon and penetrated into the grammatical structure of the 
 most diverse languages. Icelandic (Old Norse), however, remained 
 his favourite study, and it filled him with enthusiasm and national 
 pride that " our ancestors had such an excellent language," the 
 excellency being measured chiefly by the full flexional system which 
 Icelandic shared with the classical tongues, partly also by the 
 pure, unmixed state of the Icelandic vocabulary. His first book 
 (1811) was an Icelandic grammar, an admirable production when 
 we consider the meagre work done previously in this field. With 
 great lucidity he reduces the intricate forms of the language into 
 a consistent system, and his penetrating insight into the essence 
 of language is seen when he explains the vowel changes, which we 
 now comprise under the name of mutation or umlaut, as due to 
 the approximation of the vowel of the stem to that of the ending, 
 at that time a totally new point of view. This we gather from 
 Grimm's review, in which Rask's explanation is said to be " more 
 astute than true " (" mehr scharfsinnig als w&hr," Kleiner e schriften, 
 7. 515), Rask even sees the reason of the change in the plural 
 blo^ as against the singular bla^ in the former having once ended 
 in -u, which has since disappeared. This is, so far as I know, the 
 first inference ever drawn to a prehistoric state of language. 
 
 In 1814, during a prolonged stay in Iceland, Rask sent down 
 to Copenhagen his most important work, the prize essay on the 
 origin of the Old Norse language {Unders^gelse om det gamle 
 nordiske eller islandske sprogs oprindelse) which for various 
 reasons was not printed till 1818. If it had been published when 
 it was finished, and especially if it had been printed in a language 
 
38 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 better known than Danish, Rask might well have been styled the 
 founder of the modern science of language, for his work contains 
 the best exposition of the true method of linguistic research 
 written in the first half of the nineteenth century and applies 
 this method to the solution of a long series of important questions. 
 Only one part of it was ever translated into another language, 
 and this was unfortunately buried in an appendix to Vater's 
 Vergleichnngstafeln, 1822. Yet Rask's work even now repays 
 careful perusal, and I shall therefore give a brief resume of it^ 
 principal contents. 
 
 Language according to Rask is our principal means of finding 
 out anything about the history of nations before the existence of 
 written documents, for though everything may change in religion, 
 customs, laws and institutions, language generally remains, if not 
 unchanged, yet recognizable even after thousands of years. But 
 in order to find out anything about the relationship of a language 
 we must proceed methodically and examine its whole structure 
 instead of comparing mere details ; what is here of prime importance 
 is the grammatical system, because words are very often taken 
 over from one language to another, but very rarely grammatical 
 forms. The capital error in most of what has been written on 
 this subject is that this important point has been overlooked. 
 That language which has the most complicated grammar is nearest 
 to the source ; however mixed a language may be, it belongs to 
 the same family as another if it has the most essential, most 
 material and indispensable words in common with it ; pronouns 
 and numerals are in this respect most decisive. If in such words 
 there are so many points of agreement between two languages that 
 it is possible to frame rules for the transitions of letters (in other 
 passages Rask more correctly says sounds) from the one language 
 to the other, there is a fundamental kinship between the two 
 languages, more particularly if there are corresponding similarities 
 in their structure and constitution. This is a most important 
 thesis, and Rask supplements it by saying that transitions of 
 sounds are naturally dependent on their organ and manner of 
 production. 
 
 Next Rask proceeds to apply these principles to his task of 
 finding out the origin of the Old Icelandic language. He describee 
 its position in the ' Gothic ' (Gothonic, Germanic) group and 
 then looks round to find congeners elsewhere. He rapidly discards 
 Greenlandic and Basque as being too remote in grammar and 
 vocabulary ; with regard to Keltic languages he hesitates, but 
 finally decides in favour of denying relationship. (He was soon 
 to see his error in this ; see below.) Next he deals at some length 
 with Finnic and Lapp, and comes to the conclusion that the simi- 
 
§3] RASMUS RASK 39 
 
 larities are due to loans rather than to original kinship. But when 
 he comes to the Slavonic languages his utterances have a different 
 ring, for he is here able to disclose so many similarities in funda- 
 mentals that he ranges these languages within the same great 
 family as Icelandic. The same is true with regard to Lithuanian 
 and Lettic, which are here for the first time correctly placed as 
 an independent sub-famih', though closely akin to Slavonic. The 
 comparisons with Latin, and especially with Greek, are even more 
 detailed ; and Rask in these chapters really presents us with a suc- 
 cinct, but on the whole marvellously correct, comparative grammar 
 of Gothonic, Slavonic, Lithuanian, Latin and Greek, besides examin- 
 ing numerous lexical correspondences. He does not yet know any 
 of the related Asiatic languages, but throws out the hint that 
 Persian and Indian may be the remote source of Icelandic through 
 Greek. Greek he considers to be the ' source ' or ' root ' of the 
 Gothonic languages, though he expresses himself -with a degree of 
 uncertainty which forestalls the correct notion that these languages 
 have all of them sprung from the same extinct and unknown 
 language. This view is very clearly expressed in a letter he wrote 
 from St. Petersburg in the same year in which his Unders'^gelse 
 was published ; he here says : " I divide our family of languages 
 in this way : the Indian (Dekanic, Hindostanic), Iranic (Persian, 
 Armenian, Ossetic), Thracian (Greek and Latin), Sarmatian 
 (Lettic and Slavonic), Gothic (Germanic and Skandinavian) 
 and Keltic (Britannic and Gaelic) tribes " (SA 2. 281, dated 
 June 11, 1818). 
 
 This is the fullest and clearest account of the relationships 
 of our family of languages found for many years, and Rask showed 
 true genius in the way in which he saw what languages belonged 
 together and how they were related. About the same time he gave 
 a classification of the Finno-Ugrian family of languages which is 
 pronounced by such living authorities on these languages as Vilhelm 
 Thomsen and Emil Setala to be superior to most later attempts. 
 "\Mien travelling in India he recognized the true position of Zend, 
 about which previous scholars had held the most erroneous views, 
 and his surve}- of the languages of India and Persia was thought 
 valuable enough in 1863 to be printed from his manuscript, forty 
 years after it was written. He was also the first to see that the 
 Dravidian (by him called Malabaric) languages were totally different 
 from Sanskrit. In his short essay on Zend (1826) he also inci- 
 dentally gave the correct value of two letters in the first cunei- 
 form writing, and thus made an important contribution towards 
 the final deciphering of these inscriptions. 
 
 His long tour (1816-23) through Sweden, Finland, Russia, 
 the Caucasus, Persia and India was spent in the most intense study 
 
40 BEGINNING OF NINETEENT^H CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 of a great variety of languages, but unfortunately brought on the 
 illness and disappointments which, together with economic anxieties, 
 marred the rest of his short life. 
 
 When Rask died in 1832 he had written a great number of 
 grammars of single languages, all of them remarkable for their 
 accuracy in details and clear systematic treatment, more parti- 
 cularly of morphology, and some of them breaking new ground ; 
 besides his Icelandic grammar already mentioned, his Anglo-Saxon, 
 Frisian and Lapp grammars should be specially named. Historical 
 grammar in the strict sense is perhaps not his forte, though in a 
 remarkable essay of the year 1815 he explains historically a great 
 many features of Danish grammar, and in his Spanish and Italian 
 grammars he in some respects forestalls Diez's historical explana- 
 tions. But in some points he stuck to erroneous views, a notable 
 instance being his system of old Gothonic ' long vowels,' which 
 was reared on the assumption that modern Icelandic pronunciation 
 reflects the pronunciation of primitive times, while it is really a 
 recent development, as Grimm saw from a comparison of all the 
 old languages. With regard to consonants, however, Rask was 
 the clearer-sighted of the two, and throughout he had this immense 
 advantage over most of the comparative linguists of his age, that 
 he had studied a great many languages at first hand with native 
 speakers, while the others knew languages chiefly or exclusively 
 through the medium of books and manuscripts. In no work of 
 that period, or even of a much later time, are found so many first- 
 hand observations of living speech as in Rask's Retskrivningslcsre. 
 Handicapped though he was in many ways, by poverty and illness 
 and by the fact that he wrote in a language so little known as 
 Danish, Rasmus Rask, through his wide outlook, his critical 
 sagacity and aversion to all fanciful theorizing, stands out as 
 one of the foremost leaders of linguistic science.^ 
 
 II.— §4. Jacob Grimm. 
 
 Jacob Grimm's career was totally different from Rask's. Born 
 in 1785 as the son of a lawyer, he himself studied law and came 
 imder the influence of Savigny, whose view of legal institutions as 
 the outcome of gradual development in intimate connexion with 
 popular tradition and the whole intellectual and moral life of the 
 
 * I have given a life of Ra-sk and an appraisement of his work in the 
 small volume Rasmus Rask (Copenhagen, Gyldendal, 1918). See also Vilh. 
 Thomson, Samlede afhandlinger, 1. 47 ff. and 125 ff. A good and full 
 account of Rask's work is found in Raumer, Gesch. ; of. also Paul, Gr. 
 Recent short appreciations of his genius may be read in Trombetti, 
 Come si fa la critica, 1907, p. 41, Meillet, LI, p. 415, Hirt, Idg, pp. 74 
 and 578. 
 
§4] JACOB GRBIM 41 
 
 people appealed strongly to the young man's imagination. But 
 he was d^a^vn even more to that study of old German popular 
 poetry which then began to bo the fashion, thanks to Tieck and 
 other Romanticists ; and when he was in Paris to assist Savigny 
 with his historico-legal research, the old German manuscripts in 
 the Biblioth^que nationale nourished his enthusiasm for the 
 poetical treasures of the Middle Ages. He became a librarian 
 and brought out his first book, Ueber den altdeutschen meistergesang 
 (1811). At the sr.me time, with his brother Wilhelm as constant 
 companion and fellow-worker, he began collecting popular tradi- 
 tions, of which he published a first instalment in his famous Kinder- 
 und hausmdrchen (1812 ff.), a work whose learned notes and com- 
 parisons may be said to have laid the foundation of the science of 
 folklore. Language at first had only a subordinate interest to 
 him, and when he tried his hand at etymology, he indulged in the 
 wildest guesses, according to the method (or want of method) of 
 previous centuries. A. W. Schlegel's criticism of his early attempts 
 in this field, and still more Rask's example, opened Grimm's eyes 
 to the necessity of a stricter method, and he soon threw himself 
 with great energy into a painstaking and exact study of the oldest 
 stages of the German language and its congeners. In his review 
 (1812) of Rask's Icelandic grammar he writes : " Each individuality, 
 even in the world of languages, should be respected as sacred ; 
 it is desirable that even the smallest and most despised dialect 
 should be left only to itself and to its own nature and in nowise 
 subjected to violence, because it is sure to have some secret advan- 
 tages over the greatest and most highly valued language." Here 
 we meet with that valuation of the hitherto overlooked popular 
 dialects which sprang from the Romanticists' interest in the 
 ' people ' and everything it had produced. Much valuable 
 linguistic work was directly inspired by this feeling and by con- 
 scious opposition to the old philology, that occupied itself exclu- 
 sively with the two classical languages and the upper-class 
 literature embodied in them. As Scherer expresses it {Jacob 
 Grimm, 2te ausg., Berlin, 1885, p. 152) : " The brothers Grimm 
 applied to the old national literature and to popular traditions 
 the old philological virtue of exactitude, which had up to then 
 been bestowed solely on Greek and Roman classics and on the Bible. 
 They extended the field of strict philology, as they extended the 
 field of recognized poetry. They discarded the aristocratic narrow- 
 mindedness with which philologists looked down on unwritten 
 tradition, on popular ballads, legends, fairy tales, superstition, 
 nursery rimes. ... In the hands of the two Grimms philology 
 became national and popular ; and at the same time a pattern was 
 created for the scientific study of all the peoples of the earth and 
 
42 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 for a comparative investigation of the entire mental life of 
 mankind, of which written literature is nothing but a small 
 epitome." 
 
 But though Grimm thus broke loose from the traditions of 
 classical philology, he still carried with him one relic of it, namely 
 the standard by which the merits of different languages were 
 measured. " In reading carefully the old Gothonic (altdeutschen) 
 sources, I was every day discovering forms and perfections which 
 we generally envy the Greeks and Romans when we consider the 
 present condition of our language.". . . " Six hundred years ago 
 every rustic knew, that is to say practised daily, perfections and 
 niceties in the German language of which the best grammarians 
 nowadays do not even dream ; in the poetry of Wolfram von 
 Eschenbach and of Hartmann von Aue, who had never heard of 
 declension and conjugation, nay who perhaps did not even know 
 how to read and write, many differences in the flexion and use of 
 nouns and verbs are still nicely and unerringly observed, which 
 we have gradually to rediscover in learned guise, but dare not 
 reintroduce, for language ever follows its inalterable course." 
 
 Grimm then sets about WTiting his great historical and com 
 parative Deutsche Grammatik, taking the term ' deutsch ' in 
 its widest and hardly justifiable sense of what is now ordinarily 
 called Germanic and which is in this work called Gothonic. The 
 first volume appeared in 1819, and in the preface we see that he 
 was quite clear that he was breaking new ground and introducing 
 a new method of looking at grammar. He speaks of previous 
 German grammars and says expressly that he does not want his 
 to be ranged with them. He charges them with unspeakable 
 pedantry ; they wanted to dogmatize magisterially, while to Grimm 
 language, like everything natural and moral, is an unconscious 
 and unnoticed secret which is implanted in us in youth. Every 
 German therefore who speaks his language naturally, i.e. untaught, 
 may call himself his own living grammar and leave all school- 
 masters' rules alone. Grimm accordingly has no wish to prescribe 
 anything, but to observe what has grown naturally, and very 
 appropriately he dedicates his work to Sa\'igny, who has taught 
 him how institutions grow in the life of a nation. In the new 
 preface to the second edition there are also some noteworthy 
 indications of the changed attitude. " I am hostile to general 
 logical notions in grammar ; they conduce apparently to strict- 
 ness and solidity of definition, but hamper observation, which I 
 take to be the soul of linguistic science. ... As my starting-point 
 was to trace the never-resting (unstillstchende) element of our 
 language which changes with time and place, it became necessary 
 for me to admit one dialect after the other, and I could not even 
 
§4] JACOB GRIMM 48 
 
 forbear to glance at those foreign languages that are ultimately 
 related with ours." 
 
 Here we have the first clear programme of that historical 
 school which has since then been the dominating one in linguistics. 
 But as language according to this new point of view was constantlj'^ 
 changing and developing, so also, during these years, were Grimm's 
 o^vn ideas. And the man who then exercised the greatest influence 
 on him was Rasmus Rask. When Grimm wrote the first edition 
 of his Grammatik (1819), he knew nothing of Rask but the Icelandic 
 grammar, but just before finishing his own volume Rask's prize 
 essay reached him, and in the preface he at once speaks of it in 
 the highest terms of praise, as he does also in several letters of 
 this period ; he is equally enthusiastic about Rask's Anglo-Saxon 
 gi-ammar and the Swedish edition of his Icelandic grammar, neither 
 of which reached him till after his own first volume had been printed 
 off. The consequence was that instead of going on to the second 
 volume, Grimm entirely recast the first volume and brought it 
 out in a new shape in 1822. The chief innovation was the phono- 
 logy or, as he calls it, " Erstes buch. Von den buchstaben," which 
 was entirely absent in 1819, but now ran to 595 pages. 
 
 U.— § 5. The Sound Shift. 
 
 This first book in the 1822 volume contains much, perhaps 
 most, of what constitutes Grimm's fame as a grammarian, notably 
 his exposition of the ' sound shift ' (lautverschiebung), which it 
 has been customary in England since Max Miiller to term ' Grimm's 
 Law.' If any one man is to give his name to this law, a better name 
 would be ' Rask's Lav/,' for all these transitions, Lat. Gr. p=f, 
 t = y> {th), k = h, etc., are enumerated in Rask's Unders^gelse, 
 p. 168, which Grimm knew before he wrote a single word about 
 the sound shift. 
 
 Now, it is interesting to compare the two scholars' treatment 
 of these transitions. The sober-minded, matter-of-fact Rask 
 contents himself with a bare statement of the facts, with just enough 
 well-chosen examples to establish the correspondence ; the way 
 in which he arranges the sounds shows that he saw their parallelism 
 clearly enough, though he did not attempt to bring everything 
 under one single formula, any more than he tried to explain why 
 these sounds had changed.^ Grimm multiplies the examples and 
 
 ^ Only in one subordinate point did Rask make a mistake (b = 6), which 
 is all the more venial as there are extremely few examples of this sound. 
 Bredsdorf? (Aaraageme, 1821, p. 21) evidently had the law from Rask, and 
 gives it in the compreheiisive fonnula which Paul (Gr. 1. 86) misses in Rask 
 and gives as Griram's meritorious improvement on Rask. " The Germanic 
 
44 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 then systematizes the whole process in one formula so as to comprise 
 also the ' second shift ' found in High German alone — a shift 
 well known to Rask, though treated by him in a different place 
 (p. 68 f.)- Grimm's formula looks thus : 
 
 Greek p b f 
 
 Gothic f p b 
 High G. b(v)f p 
 
 t d th I k g ch 
 th t d I h k g 
 d z t I g ch k, 
 
 which may be expressed generally thus, that tenuis (T) becomes 
 aspirate (A) and then media (M), etc., or, tabulated : 
 
 Greek T M A 
 
 Gothic A T M 
 High G. M A T. 
 
 For this Grimm would of course have deserved great credit, 
 because a comprehensive formula is more scientific than a rough 
 statement of facts — if the formula had been correct ; but unfortu- 
 nately it is not so. In the first place, it breaks down in the very 
 first instance, for there is no media in High German corresponding 
 to Gr. p and Gothic / (cf. poils, fotus,Juss, etc.) ; secondly, High 
 German has h just as Gothic has, corresponding to Greek k (cf. 
 kardia, hairto, herz, etc.), and where it has g, Gothic has also g in 
 accordance with rules unknown to Grimm and not explained till 
 long afterwards (by Verner). But the worst thing is that the 
 whole specious generalization produces the impression of regularity 
 and uniformity only through the highly unscientific use of the 
 word ' aspirate,' which is made to cover such phonetically disparate 
 things as (1) combination of stop with following h, (2) combination 
 of stop with following fricative, pf, ts written z, (3) voiceless fricative, 
 /, 5 in G. das, (4) voiced fricative, v, t5 written th, and (5) h. Grimm 
 rejoiced in his formula, giving as it does three chronological stages 
 in each of the three subdivisions (tenuis, media, aspirate) of each of 
 the three classes of consonants (labial, dental,' guttural '). This 
 evidently took hold of his fancy through the mystic power of the 
 number three, which he elsewhere (Gesch 1. 191, cf. 241) finds 
 pervading language generally : three original vowels, a, i, u, three 
 genders, three numbers (singular, dual, plural), three persons, three 
 ' voices ' (genera : active, middle, passive), three tenses (present, 
 preterit, future), three declensions through a, i, u. As there is 
 here an element of mysticism, so is there also in Grimm's highfiown 
 
 family has most often aspirates where Greek has tenues, tenues where it 
 has media}, and again raediaa where it has aspirates, e.g. fod, Gr. pons ; horn, 
 Gr. keras ; ]>rir, Gr. treia ; padde, Gr. batrakhoa ; kone, Gr. gune ; ti, Gr. deka ; 
 bcerer, Gr. pherd ; galde, Gr. kholS ; dtfr, Gr. thura." To the word ' horn ' was 
 appended a foot-note to the effect that h without doubt here originally was 
 the German c/t-sound. This was one year before Grimm stated his law ! 
 
§5] THE SOUND SHIFT 45 
 
 explanation of the whole process from pretended popular psy- 
 chology, which is full of the cloudiest romanticism. " When 
 once the language had made the first step and had rid itself of 
 the organic basis of its sounds, it was hardly possible for it to 
 escape the second step and not to arrive at the third stage,^ 
 through which this development was perfected. . . . It is impossible 
 not to admire the instinct by which the linguistic spirit (sprachgeist) 
 carried this out to the end. A great many sounds got out of joint, 
 but they always knew how to arrange themselves in a different 
 place and to find the new application of the old law. I am not 
 saying that the shift happened without any detriment, nay from 
 one point of view the sound shift appears to me as a barbarous 
 aberration, from which other more quiet nations abstained, but 
 which is connected with the violent progress and craving for freedom 
 which was found in Germany in the beginning of the Middle Ages 
 and which initiated the transformation of Europe. The Germans 
 pressed forward even in the matter of the innermost sounds 
 of their language," etc., with remarks on intellectual progress 
 and on victorious and ruling races. Grimm further says that 
 " die diitte stufe des verschobnen lauts den kreislauf abschliesse 
 und nach ihr ein neuer ansatz zur abweichimg wieder von vorn 
 anheben miisse. Doch eben weil der sprachgeist seinen lauf 
 vollbracht hat, scheint er nicht wieder neu beginnen zu wollen " 
 (GDS 1. 292 f., 299). It would be difficult to attach any clear ideas 
 to these words. 
 
 Grimm's idea of a * kreislauf ' is caused by the notion that the 
 two shifts, separated by several centuries, represent one continued 
 movement, while the High German shift of the eighth century has 
 really no more to do with the primitive Gothonic shift, which took 
 place probably some time before Christ, than has, for instance, 
 the Danish shift in words like gribe, bide, bage, from gripce, bitce, 
 bakce (about 1400), or the still more recent transition in Danish 
 through which stressed t in lid, tyve, etc., sounds nearly like [ts], as 
 in HG. zeit. There cannot possibly be any causal nexus between 
 such transitions, separated chronologically by long periods, with 
 just as little change in the pronunciation of these consonants as 
 there has been in English.^ 
 
 * The muddling of the negatives is Grimm's, not the translator's. 
 
 ■ I am therefore surprised to find that in a recent article {Am. Joum. 
 of Philol. 39. 415, 1918) Collitz praises Grimm's view in preference to Rask's 
 because he saw " an inherent connexion between the various processes of 
 the shifting," which were " subdivisions of one great law in which the formula 
 T : A : M may be used to illustrate the shifting (in a single language) of three 
 different groups of consonants and the result of a double or threefold shifting 
 (in three difierent languages) of a single group of consonants. This great 
 law was unknown to Rask." Collitz recognizes that " Grimm's law will 
 hold good only if we accept the term * aspirate ' in the broad sense in which 
 
46 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 Grimm was anj'thing but a phonetician, and sometimes says 
 things which nowadays cannot but produce a smile, as when he 
 says (Gr 1.3) " in our word schrifl, for instance, we express eight 
 sounds through seven signs, for/ stands for ph " ; thus he earnestly 
 beUeves that sch contains three sounds, a and the ' aspirate * 
 ch=c-}-h 1 Yet through the irony of fate it was on the history of 
 sounds that Grimm exercised the strongest influence. As in other 
 parts of his grammar, so also in the " theory of letters " he gave 
 fuller word lists than people had been accustomed to, and this 
 opened the eyes of scholars to the great regularity reigning in this 
 department of linguistic development. Though in his own etj^mo- 
 logical practice he was far from the strict idea of ' phonetic law ' 
 that played such a prominent role in later times, he thus paved the 
 way for it. He speaks of law at any rate in connexion with the 
 consonant shift, and there recognizes that it serves to curb wild 
 etymologies and becomes a test for them (Gesch 291). The con- 
 sonant shift thus became the law in linguistics, and because it 
 affected a great many words known to everybody, and in a new 
 and surprising way associated well-known Latin or Greek words 
 with words of one's owa mother-tongue, it became popularly the 
 keystone of a new wonderful science. 
 
 Grimm coined several of the terms now generally used in lin- 
 guistics ; thus umlaut and ablaut, ' strong ' and ' weak ' declensions 
 and conjugations. As to the first, we have seen that it was Rask 
 who first understood and who taught Grimm the cause of this 
 phenomenon, which in English has often been designated by 
 the German term, while Sweet calls it ' mutation ' and others better 
 ' infection.' With regard to ' ablaut ' (Sweet : gradation, best 
 perhaps in English apophony), Rask termed it ' omlyd,' a word 
 which he never applied to Grimm's ' umlaut,' thus keeping the two 
 kinds of vowel change as strictly apart as Grimm does. Apophony 
 was first discovered in that class of verbs which Grimm called 
 ' strong ' ; he was fascinated by the commutation of the vowels 
 in springe, sprang, gesprungen, and sees in it, as in birnbambum, 
 something mystic and admirable, characteristic of the old German 
 spirit. He was thus blind to the correspondences found in other 
 languages, and his theory led him astray in the second volume, in 
 which he constructed imaginary verbal roots to explain apophony 
 wherever it was found outside the verbs. 
 
 it is employed by J. Grimm " — but ' broad ' here means ' wrong ' or 
 ' unscientific' There is no kreislauf in the case of initial k = h ; only in 
 a few of the nine series do we find three distinct stages (as in tres, three, drei) ; 
 here we have in Danish three stages, of which the third is a reversal to the 
 first (tre) ; in E. mother we have five stages : t, p, "5, d, (OE. modor) and again 
 5. Is there an "inherent connexion between the various processes of this 
 shifting " too ? 
 
§5] THE SOUND SHIFT 47 
 
 Though Grimm, as we have seen, was by his principles and 
 whole tendency averse to prescribing laws for a language, he is 
 sometimes carried away by his love for mediaeval German, as 
 when he gives as the correct nominative form der boge, though 
 everybody for centuries had said der bogen. In the same way 
 many of his followers would apply the historical method to questions 
 of correctness of speech, and would discard the forms evolved in 
 later times in favour of previously existing forms which were looked 
 upon as more ' organic' 
 
 It will not be necessary here to speak of the imposing work 
 done by Grimm in the rest of his long life, chiefly spent as a professor 
 in Berlin. But in contrast to the ordinary view I must say that 
 what appears to me as most likely to endure is his work on syntax, 
 contained in the fourth volume of his grammar and in monographs. 
 Here his enormous learning, his close power of observation, and 
 his historical method stand him in good stead, and there is much 
 good sense and freedom from that kind of metaphysical systematism 
 which was triumphant in contemporaneous work on classical syntax. 
 His services in this field are the more interesting because he did 
 not himself seem to set much store by these studies and even 
 said that syntax was half outside the scope of grammar. This 
 utterance belongs to a later period than that of the birth of historical 
 and comparative linguistics, and we shall have to revert to it after 
 sketching the work of the third great founder of this science, to 
 whom we shall now turn. 
 
 n.— § 6. Franz Bopp. 
 
 The third, by some accounted the greatest, among the founders of 
 modern linguistic science was Franz Bopp. His life was unevent- 
 ful. At the age of twenty-one (he was born in 1791) he went to Paris 
 to study Oriental languages, and soon concentrated his attention 
 on Sanskrit. His first book, from which it is customary in Germany 
 to date the birth of Comparative Philology, appeared in 1816, while 
 he was still in Paris, under the title Ueber des conjugationssy stent der i.>^ 
 sanskriisprache in vergleichung mit jenem dergriechischen, lateinischen, — 
 persischen mid germanischen sprache, but the latter part of the small 
 volume was taken up with translations from Sanskrit, and for a 
 long time he was just as much a Sanskrit scholar, editing and 
 translating Sanskiit texts, as a comparative grammarian. He 
 showed himself in the latter character in several papers read before 
 the Berlin Academy, after he had been made a professor there in 
 1822, and especially in his famous Vergleichende grammatik des 
 Sanskrit, liend, armenischen, griechischen, lateinischen, litauischen, 
 altslawischeii, gotischen und deutschen, the first edition of which was 
 
48 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 published between 1833 and 1849, the second in 1857, and the 
 third in 1868. Bopp died in 18G7. 
 
 Of Bopp's Conjugationssystem a revised, rearranged and greatly 
 improved English translation came out in 1820 under the title 
 Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic 
 Languages. This was reprinted with a good introduction by 
 F. Techraer in his Internationale zeitschrift fiir allgem. sprachwissen- 
 schaft IV (1888), and in the following remarks I shall quote this 
 (abbreviated AC) instead of, or alongside of, the German original 
 (abbreviated C). 
 
 Bopp's chief aim (and in this he was characteristically different 
 from Rask) was to find out the ultimate origin of grammatical 
 forms. He follows his quest by the aid of Sanslo-it forms, though 
 he does not consider these as the ultimate forms themselves : "I 
 do not believe that the Greek, Latin, and other European languages 
 are to be considered as derived from the Sanskrit in the state in 
 which we find it in Indian books ; I feel rather inclined to consider 
 them altogether as subsequent variations of one original tongue, 
 which, however, the Sanskrit has preserved more perfect than its 
 kindred dialects. But whilst therefore the language of the Brah- 
 mans more frequently enables us to conjecture the primitive form 
 of the Greek and Latin languages than what we discover in the 
 oldest authors and monuments, the latter on their side also may 
 not unfrequently elucidate the Sanskrit grammar " (AC 3). Herein 
 subsequent research has certainly borne out Bopp's view. 
 
 After finding out by a comparison of the grammatical forms 
 of Sanskrit, Greek, etc., which of these forms were identical and 
 what were their oldest shapes, he tries to investigate the ultimate 
 origin of these forms. This he takes to be a comparatively easy 
 consequence of the first task, but he was here too much under the 
 influence of the philosophical grammar then in vogue. Gottfried 
 Hermann {De emendanda ratione Grcecce grmnmaticcB, 1801), 
 on purely logical grounds, distinguishes three things as necessary 
 elements of each sentence, the subject, the predicate, and the copula 
 joining the first two elements together ; as the power of the verb 
 is to attribute the predicate to the subject, there is really only one 
 verb, namely the verb to be. Bopp's teacher in Paris, Silvestre 
 de Sacy, says the same thing, and Bopp repeats : " A verb, in the 
 most restricted meaning of the term, is that part of speech by 
 which a subject is connected with its attribute. According to 
 this definition it would appear that there can exist only one verb, 
 namely, the substantive verb, in Latin esse ; in English, to be. . . . 
 Languages of a structure similar to that of the Greek, Latin, etc., 
 can express by one verb of this kind a whole logical proposition, in 
 which, however, that part of speech which expresses the connexion 
 
§6] FRANZ BOPP 49 
 
 of the subject with its attribute, which is the characteristic function 
 of the verb, is generally entirely omitted or understood. The Latin 
 verb dat expresses the proposition ' he gives,' or ' he is giving ' : 
 the letter t, indicating the third person, is the subject, da expresses 
 the attribute of giving, and the grammatical copula is understood. 
 In the verb potest, the latter is expressed, and potest unites in itself 
 the three essential parts of speech, t being the subject, es the copula, 
 and pot the attribute." 
 
 Starting from this logical conception of grammar, Bopp is 
 inclined to find everywhere the ' substantive verb ' to be in its 
 two Sanski'it forms as and bhu as an integral part of verbal forms. 
 He is not the fii-st to think that terminations, which are now in- 
 separable parts of a verb, were originally independent words ; thus 
 Home Tooke (in Epea pteroenta, 1786, ii. 429) expressly says that 
 " All those common terminations in any language . . . are them- 
 selves separate words with distinct meanings," and explains, for 
 instance, Latin ibo from i, ' go' -\- b, ' will,' from Greek boul- 
 (oTnai) + ' /,' from ego. Bopp's explanations are similar to this, 
 though they do not imply such violent shortenings as that of botil- 
 {omai) to 6. He finds the root Sanski'it as, ' to be,' in Latin perfects 
 like scrip-s-i, in Greek aorists like e-tup-s-a and in futures like tup-s-o. 
 That the same addition thus indicates different tenses does not 
 trouble Bopp greatly ; he explains hsLt.fueram iromfu -\- es -\- am, 
 etc., and says that the root fii " contains, properly, nothing to indi- 
 cate past time, but the usage of language having supplied the want 
 of an adequate inflexion, fui received the sense of a perfect, and 
 fu-eram, which would be nothing more than an imperfect, that 
 of a pluperfect, and after the same manner fu-ero signifies * I shall 
 have been,' instead of ' I shall be ' " (AC 57). All Latin verbal 
 endings containing r are thus explained as being ultimately formed 
 ■with the substantive verb {ama-rem, etc.) ; thus among others the 
 infinitives fac-ere, ed-ere, as well as esse, posse : " £" is properly, in 
 Latin, the termination of a simple infinitive active ; and the root 
 Es produced anciently ese, by adding e ; the s having afterwards 
 been doubled, we have esse. This termination e answers to the 
 Greek infinitive in ai, etnai ..." (AC 58). 
 
 If Bopp found a master-key to many of the verbal endings 
 in the Sanskrit root es, he found a key to many others in the other 
 root of the verb ' to be,' Sanskrit bhu. He finds it in the Latin 
 imperfect da-bam, as well as in the future da-bo, the relation between 
 which is the same as that between er-a7n and er-o. " Bo, bis, bit 
 has a striking similarity with the Anglo-Saxon beo, bys, byth, the 
 future tense of the verb substantive, a similarity which cannot be 
 considered as merely accidental." [Here neither the form nor the 
 function of the Anglo-Saxon la stated quite co^rectl3^] But 
 
 4 
 
50 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. n 
 
 the ending in Latin ama-vi is also referred to the same root ; for 
 the change of the b into v we arc referred to Italian amava, from 
 Lat. amabam ; thus also fui is for fuvi and potui is for pot-vi : 
 " languages manifest a constant effort to combine heterogeneous 
 materials in such a manner as to offer to the ear or eye one 
 perfect whole, like a statue executed by a skilful artist, that 
 wears the appearance of a figure hewn out of one piece of 
 marble " (AC 60). 
 
 The following may be taken as a fair specimen of the method 
 followed in these first attempts to account for the origin of flexional 
 forms : " The Latin passive forms amat-ur, amant-ury would, in 
 some measure, conform to this mode of joining the verb substantive, 
 if the r was also the result of a permutation of an original 8 ; and 
 this appears not quite incredible, if we compare the second person 
 ama-ris with the third amat-ur. Either in one or the other there 
 must be a transposition of letters, to which the Latin language 
 is particularly addicted. If ama-ris, which might have been 
 produced from atna-sis, has preserved the original order of letters, 
 then ama-tur must be the transposition of ama-rui or ama-sut, 
 and ama-ntur that of ama-runt or ama-sunt. If this be the case, 
 the origin of the Latin passive can be accounted for, and although 
 differing from that of the Sanskrit, Greek, and Gothic languages, it 
 is not produced by the invention of a new grammatical form. 
 It becomes clear, also, why many verbs, with a passive form, have 
 an active signification ; because there is no reason why the addi- 
 tion of the verb substantive should necessarily produce a passive 
 sense. There is another way of explaining ama-ris, if it really 
 stands for ama-sis ; the s may be the radical consonant of the 
 reflex pronoun se. The introduction of this pronoun would be 
 particularly adapted to form the middle voice, which expresses 
 the reflexion of the action upon the actor ; but the Greek language 
 exemplifies the facility with which the peculiar signification of 
 the middle voice passes into that of the passive." The reasoning 
 in the beginning of this passage (the only one contained in C) 
 carries us back to a pre-scientific atmosphere, of which there are 
 few or no traces in Rask's writings ; the latter explanation (added 
 in AC) was preferred by Bopp himself in later works, and v/as for 
 many years accepted as the correct one, until scholars found a 
 passive in r in Keltic, where the transition from s to r is not found 
 as it is in Latin ; and as the closely corresponding forms in Keltic 
 and Italic must obviously be explained in the same way, the hypo- 
 thesis of a composition with se was generally abandoned. Bopp's 
 partiality for the abstract verb is seen clearly when he explains 
 the Icelandic passive in -st from s — es (C 132) ; here llask and 
 Gx'imm saw the correct and obvious explanation. 
 
§6] FRANZ BOPP 51 
 
 Among the other explanations given first by Bopp must be 
 mentioned the Latin second person of the passive voice -mini, as 
 in ama-mini, which he takes to be the nominative mascuhne plural 
 of a participle corresponding to Greek -me7ios and found in a different 
 form in Lat. alumnus (AC 51). This explanation is still widely 
 accepted, though not by everybody. 
 
 With regard to the preterit of what Grimm was later to term 
 the ' weak ' verbs, Bopp vacillates between different explanations. 
 In C 118 he thinks the t ov d is identical with the ending of the 
 participle, in which the case endings were omitted and supplanted 
 by personal endings ; the syllable cd after d [in Gothic sok-id-edum ; 
 ' Greek,' p. 119, must be a misprint for Gothic] is nothing but an 
 accidental addition. But on p. 151 he sees in sokidedun, sokidedi, 
 a connexion of sok with the preterit of the verb Tun, as if the Ger- 
 mans were to say sucheiaten, suchetdte ; he compares the English use 
 of did {did seek), and thinks the verb used is G. tun, Goth, tanjan. 
 The theory of composition is here restricted to those forms that 
 contain two d's, i.e. the plural indicative and the subjunctive. In 
 the English edition this twofold explanation is repeated with 
 some additions : d or t as in Gothic sok-i-da and oh-ta originates 
 from a participle found in Sanskr. tyak-ta, likh-i-ta, Lat. -tus, Gr. 
 -tds ; this suffix generally has a passive sense, but in neuter verbs 
 an active sense, and therefore would naturally serve to form a 
 preterit tense with an active signification. He finds a proof of 
 the connexion between this preterit and the participle in the fact 
 that onlj' such verbs as have this ending in the participle form 
 their preterit by means of a dental, while the others (the ' strong ' 
 verbs, as Grimm afterwards termed them) have a participle in an 
 and reduplication or a change of vowel in the preterit ; and Bopp 
 compares the Greek aorist passive etuphth-en, eddth-en, which he 
 conceives may proceed from the participle tuphth-els, doth-eis 
 (AC 37 ff.). This suggestion seems to have been commonly over- 
 looked or abandoned, while the other explanation, from dedi as 
 in English did seek, which Bopp gives p. 49 for the subjunctive and 
 the indicative plural, was accepted by Grimm as the explanation of all 
 the forms, even of those containing only one dental ; in later works 
 Bopp agreed with^ Grimm and thus gave up the first part of his 
 original explanation. The did explanation had been given already 
 by D. von Stade (d. 1718, see Collitz, Das schicache prdtcritum, 
 p. 1) ; Rask (P 270, not mentioned by Collitz) says : " Whence 
 this d or t has come is not easy to tell, as it is not found in Latin and 
 Greek, but as it is evident from the Icelandic grammar that it is 
 closely connected with the past participle and is also found in 
 the preterit subjunctive, it seems clear that it must have been an 
 old characteristic of the past tense in every mood, but was lost 
 
52 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 in Greek when the above-mentioned participles in tos disappeared 
 from the verbs " (cf. Ch. XIX § 12). 
 
 With regard to the vowels, Bopp in AC has the interesting 
 theory that it is only through a defect in the alphabet that Sanskrit 
 appears to have a in so many places ; he believes that the spoken 
 language had often " the short Italian e and o," where a was 
 written. "If this was the case, we can give a reason why, in words 
 common to the Sanskrit and Greek, the Indian akdra [that is, 
 short a] so often corresponds to e and o, as, for instance, asti, he 
 is, ecTTL ; patis, husband, Troat? ; amharas, sky, ofi^po^, rain, 
 etc." Later, unfortunately, Bopp came under the influence of 
 Grimm, who, as we saw, on speculative grounds admitted in the 
 primitive language only the three vowels a, i, u, and Bopp and 
 his followers went on believing that the Sanskrit a represented the 
 original state of language, until the discovery of the ' palatal law ' 
 (about 1880) showed (what Bopp's occasional remark might other- 
 wise easily have led up to, if he had not himself discarded it) that 
 the Greek tripartition into a, e, o represented really % more original 
 state of things. 
 
 II.— §7. Bopp continued. 
 
 In a chapter on the rootS in AC (not found in C), Bopp contrasts 
 the structure of Semitic roots and of our own ; in Semitic languages 
 roots must consist of three letters, neither more nor less, and thus 
 generally contain two syllables, while in Sanskrit, Greek, etc., 
 the character of the root " is not to be determined by the number 
 of letters, but by that of the syllables, of which they contain only 
 one " ; thus a root like i, ' to go,' would be unthinkable in Arabic. 
 The consequence of this structure of the roots is that the inner 
 changes which play such a large part in expressing grammatical 
 modifications in Semitic languages must be much more restricted 
 in our family of languages. These changes were what F. Schlegel 
 termed flexions and what Bopp himself, two years before (C 7), 
 had named " the truly organic way " of expressing relation and 
 mentioned as a wonderful flexibility foimd in an extraordinary 
 degree in Sanskrit, by the side of which composition with the 
 verb ' to be ' is found only occasionally. Now, however, in 1820, 
 Bopp repudiates Schlegel's and his own previous assumption that 
 ' flexion ' was characteristic of Sanslcrit in contradistinction to 
 other languages in which grammatical modifications were expressed 
 by the addition of suffixes. On the contrary, while holding that 
 both methods are emploj'ed in all languages, Chinese perhaps alone 
 excepted, he now thinks that it is the suffix method which is preva- 
 lent in Sanskrit, and that " the only real inflexions . . . possible 
 
§7] FRANZ BOPP 58 
 
 in a language, whose elements are monosj-llables, are the change 
 of their vowels and the repetition of their radical consonants, 
 otherwise called reduplication." It will be seen that Bopp here 
 avoids both the onesidedness found in Schlegel's division of 
 languages and the other onesidedness which we shall encounter 
 in later theories, according to which all grammatical elements are 
 originally independent subordinate roots added to the main root. 
 
 In his Vocalismus (1827, reprinted 1836) Bopp opposes Grimm's 
 theory that the changes for which Grimm had introduced the term 
 ablaut were due to psychological causes ; in other words, possessed 
 an inner meaning from the very outset. Bopp inclined to a 
 mechanical explanation ^ and thought them dependent on the 
 weight of the endings, as shown by the contrast between Sanskr. 
 veda, Goth, vait, Gr. otda and the plural, respectively vidima, vitum, 
 idmen. In this instance Bopp is in closer agreement than Grimm 
 with the majority of younger scholars, who see in apophony 
 (ablaut) an originally non-significant change brought about 
 mechanically by phonetic conditions, though they do not find 
 these in the ' weight ' of the ending, but in the primeval accent ; 
 the accentuation of Sanskrit was not known to Bopp when he 
 wrote his essay. 
 
 The personal endings of the verbs had already been identified 
 with the corresponding pronouns by Scheidius (1790) and Rask 
 (P 258) ; Bopp adopts the same view, only reproaching Scheidius 
 for thinking exclusively of the nominative forms of the pronouns. 
 
 It thus. appears that in his early work Bopp deals with a great 
 many general problems, but his treatment is suggestive rather than 
 exhaustive or decisive, for there are too many errors in details 
 and his whole method is open to serious criticism. A modern 
 reader is astonished to see the facility with which violent changes 
 of sounds, omissions and transpositions of consonants, etc., are 
 gratuitously accepted. Bopp never reflected as deeply as Rask 
 did on what constitutes linguistic kinship, hence in C he accepts 
 the common belief that Persian was related more closely to German 
 than to Sanskrit, and in later life he tried to establish a relationship 
 between the Malayo-Polynesian and the Indo-European languages. 
 But in spite of all this it must be recognized that in his long laborious 
 life he accomplished an enormous amount of highly meritorious 
 work, not only in Sanskrit philology, but also in comparative 
 grammar, in which he graduall}'^ freed himself of his worst methodi- 
 cal errors. He was constantly widening his range of vision, taking 
 into consideration more and more cognate languages. The ingenious 
 way in which he explained the curious Keltic shiftings in initial 
 
 ^ Probably vuider the influence of Humboldt, who wrote to him (Sep- 
 *»mber 1826) : " Absichtlicb grammatisch ist gewiss kein vokalwechael." 
 
54 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 consonants (which had so puzzled Rask as to make him doubt of 
 a connexion of these languages with our family, but which Bopp 
 showed to be dependent on a lost final sound of the preceding word) 
 definitely and irrefutably established the position of those languages. 
 Among other things that might be credited to his genius, I shall 
 select his explanation of the various declensional classes as deter- 
 mined by the final sound of the stem. But it is not part of my 
 plan to go into many details ; suffice it to say that Bopp's great 
 Vergleichemle grammatik served for long years as the best, or really 
 the only, exposition of the new science, and vastly contributed not 
 only to elucidate obscure points, but also to make comparative 
 grammar as popular as it is possible for such a necessarily 
 abstruse science to be. 
 
 In Bopp's Vergleichende grammatik (1. § 108) he gives his classifi- 
 cation of languages in general. He rejects Fr. Schlegel's bipartition. 
 but his growing tendency to explain everything in Aryan grammar, 
 even the inner changes of Sanskrit roots, by mechanical causes 
 makes him modify A. W. Schlegel's tripartition and place our 
 family of languages with the second instead of the third class. 
 His three classes are therefore as follows : I. Languages without 
 roots proper and without the power of composition, and thus with- 
 out organism or grammar ; to this class belongs Chinese, in which 
 most grammatical relations are only to be recognized by the posi- 
 tion of the words. II. Languages with monosyllabic roots, capable 
 of composition and acquiring their organism, their grammar, 
 nearly exclusively in this way ; the main principle of word forma- 
 tion is the connexion of verbal and pronominal roots. To this 
 class belong the Indo-European languages, but also all languages 
 not comprised under the first or the third class. III. Languages 
 with disyllabic roots and three necessary consonants as sole bearers 
 of thB signification of the word. This class includes only the 
 Semitic languages. Grammatical forms are here created not only 
 by means of composition, as in the second class, but also by inner 
 modification of the roots. 
 
 It will be seen that Bopp here expressly avoids both expressions 
 'agglutination' and ' flexion,' the former because it had been used 
 of languages contrasted with Aryan, while Bopp wanted to show 
 the essential identity of the two classes ; the latter because it had 
 been invested with much obscurity on account of Fr. Schlegel's 
 use of it to signify inner modification only. According to Schlegel, 
 only such instances as English drink / drank / drunk are pure 
 flexion, while German trink-c / trank / ge-trunk-en, and still more 
 Greek leip-o I e-lip-on / le-loip-a, besides an element of ' flexion ' 
 contain also affixed elements. It is clear that no language can use 
 ' flexion ' (in Schlegel's sense) exclusively, and consequently this 
 
§7] FRANZ BOPP 55 
 
 cannot be made a principle on which to erect a classification of 
 languages generally. Schlegcl's use of the term ' flexion ' seems 
 to have been dropped by all subsequent writers, who use it so as 
 to include what is actually found in the grammar of such languages 
 as Sanskrit and Greek, comprising under it inner and outer modi- 
 fications, but of course not requiring both in the same form. 
 
 In view of the later development of our science, it is worthy 
 of notice that neither in the brothers Schlegel nor in Bopp do we 
 yet meet with the idea that the classes set up are not onlj' a dis- 
 tribution of the languages found side by side in the world at this 
 time, but also represent so -many stages in historical development ; 
 indeed, Bopp's definitions are framed so as positively to exclude 
 any development from his Class II to Class III, as the character 
 of the underlying roots is quite heterogeneous. On the other hand, 
 Bopp's tendency to explain Aryan endings from originally inde- 
 pendent roots paved the way for the theorj^ of isolation, agglutina- 
 tion and flexion as three successive stages of the same language. 
 
 In his first work (C 56) Bopp had already hinted that in the 
 earliest period known to us languages had already outlived their 
 most perfect state and were in a process of decaj^ ; and in his 
 review of Grimm (1827) he repeats this : " We perceive them in 
 a condition in which they may indeed be progressive syntactically, 
 but have, as far as grammar is concerned, lost more or less of 
 what belonged to the perfect structure, in which the separate 
 members stand in exact relation to each other and in which every- 
 thing derived has still a visible and unimpaired connexion with 
 its source " (Voc. 2), We shall see kindred ideas in Humboldt 
 and Schleicher. 
 
 To sum up : Bopp set about discovering the ultimate origin 
 of flexional elements, but instead of that he discovered Compara- 
 tive Grammai' — " a pen pres comme Christophe Colomb a decouvert 
 TAmerique en cherchant la route des Indes," as A. Meillet puts 
 it (LI 413). A countryman of Rask may be forgiven for pushing 
 the French scholar's brilliant comparison still further : in the 
 same way as Norsemen from Iceland had discovered America 
 before Columbus, without imagining that they w^ere finding the 
 way to India, just so Rasmus Rask through his Icelandic studies 
 had discovered Comparative Grammar before Bopp, ^^■ithout 
 needing to take the circuitous route through Sanskrit. 
 
 n.— § 8. Wilhelm von Humboldt. 
 
 This will be the proper place to mention one of the profoundest 
 thinkers in the domain of linguistics, Wilhelm von Humboldt 
 (1767-1835), who, while playing an important part in the political 
 
5Q BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 world, found time to study a great many languages and to 
 think deeply on many problems connected with philology and 
 ethnography.^ 
 
 In numerous works, the most important of which, Ueber die 
 Kawisprache auf der Insel Jaiua, with the famous introduction 
 '■ Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und 
 ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschen- 
 geschlechts," was published posthumously in 1836-40, Hum- 
 boldt developed his linguistic philosoph}', of which it is not 
 easy to give a succinct idea, as it is largely couched in a 
 most abstruse style ; it is not surprising that his admirer and 
 follower, Heymarm Steinthal, in a series of books, gave as many 
 different interpretations of Humboldt's thoughts, each purporting 
 to be more correct than its predecessors. Still, I believe the 
 following may be found to be a tolerably fair rendering of some 
 of Humboldt's ideas. 
 
 He rightly insists on the importance of seeing in language 
 a continued activity. Language is not a substance or a finished 
 work, but action (Sie selbst ist kein werk, ergon, sondern eine 
 tatigkeit, energeia). Language therefore cannot be defined except 
 genetically. It is the ever-repeated labour of the mind to utilize 
 articulated sounds to express thoughts. Strictly speaking, this 
 is a definition of each separate act of speech ; but truly and essen- 
 tially a language must be looked upon as the totality of such acts. 
 
 * Humboldt'a relation to Bopp'e general ideas is worth studying; see 
 his letters to Bopp, printed as Nachtrag to S. Lefman's Franz Bopp, sein 
 leben und seine wissenschaft (Berlin, 1897), He is (p. 5) on the whole of 
 Bopp's opinion that flexions have arisen through agglutination of syllables, 
 the independent meaning of which was lost ; still, he is not certain that all 
 flexion can be explained in that way, and especially doubts it in the case 
 of ' umlaut,' under which term he here certainly includes ' ablaut,' as 
 seen by his reference (p. 12) to Greek future staid from stello ; he adds that 
 " some flexions are at the same time so insignificant and so widely spread 
 in languages that I should be inclined to call them original ; for example, 
 our i of the dative and m of the same case, both of which by their sharper 
 soimd seem intended to call attention to the peculiar nature of this case, 
 which does not, like the other cases, denote a simple, but a double relation" 
 (repeated p. 10). Humboldt doubts Bopp's identification of the temporal 
 augment with the a privativum. He says (p. 14) that cases often originate 
 from prepositions, as in American languages and in Basque, and that he has 
 always explained our genitive, as in G. 7nanne-s, as a remnant of aua. This 
 is evidently wrong, as the a of aus is a special High German development 
 from t, while the s of the genitive is also found in languages which do not 
 share in this development of t. But the remark is interesting because, apart 
 from the historical proof to the contrary which we happen to possess in this 
 case, the derivation is no whit worse than many of the explanations resorted 
 to by adherents of the agglutinative theory. But Humboldt goes on to say 
 that in Greek and Latin he is not prepared to maintain that one single 
 case is to be explained in this way. Humboldt probably had some influence 
 on Bopp's view of the weak pretei-it, for he is skeptical with regard to the did 
 explanation and inclines to connect the ending with the participle in t. 
 
§8] WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT 57 
 
 For the words and rules, which according to our ordinary notions 
 make up a language, exist really only in the act of connected speech. 
 The breaking up of language into words and rules is nothing but 
 a dead product of our bungling scientific analysis (Versch 41). 
 Nothing in language is static, everything is djTiamic. Language 
 has nowhere any abiding place, not even in writing ; its dead part 
 must continually be re-created in the mind ; in order to exist 
 it must be spoken or understood, and so pass in its entirety into 
 the subject (ib. 63). 
 
 Humboldt speaks continually of languages as more perfect or 
 less perfect. Yet " no language should be condemned or depre- 
 ciated, not even that of the most savage tribe, for each language 
 is a picture of the original aptitude for language " (Versch 304). 
 In another place he speaks about special excellencies even of lan- 
 guages that cannot in themselves be recognized as superlatively 
 good instruments of thought. Undoubtedly Chinese of the old 
 style carries with it an impressive dignity through the immediate 
 succession of nothing but momentous notions ; it acquires a simple 
 greatness because it throws away all unnecessary accessory elements 
 and thus, as it were, takes flight to pure thinking. Malay is rightly 
 praised for its ease and the great simplicity of its constructions. 
 The Semitic languages retain an admirable art in the nice discrimina- 
 tion of sense assigned to many shades of vowels. Basque possesses 
 a particular vigour, dependent on the briefness and boldness of 
 expression imparted by the structure of its words and by their 
 combination. Delaware and other American languages express 
 in one word a number of ideas for which we should require many 
 words. The human mind is always capable of producing something 
 admirable, however one-sided it may be ; such special points decide 
 nothing with regard to the rank of languages (Versch 189 f.). We 
 have here, as indeed continually in Humboldt, a valuation of lan- 
 guages with many brilliant remarks, but on the whole we miss the 
 concrete details abounding in Jenisch's work. Humboldt, as it 
 were, lifts us to a higher plane, where the air may be purer, but 
 where it is also thinner and not seldom cloudier as well. 
 
 According to Humboldt, each separate language, even the most 
 despised dialect, should be looked upon as an organic whole, different 
 from all the rest and expressing the individuality of the people 
 speaking it ; it is characteristic of one nation's psyche, and indi- 
 cates the peculiar way in which that nation attempts to realize 
 the ideal of speech. As a language is thus symbolic of the national 
 character of those who speak it, very much in each language had 
 its origin in a symbolic representation of the notion it stands for ; 
 there is a natural nexus between certain sounds and certain general 
 ideas, and consequently we often find similar sounds used for the 
 
58 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [cii. ii 
 
 same, or nearly the same, idea in languages not otherwise related 
 to one another. 
 
 Humboldt is opposed to the idea of ' general ' or ' universal ' 
 grammar as understood in his time ; instead of this purely deduc- 
 tive grammar he would found an inductive general grammar, 
 based upon the comparison of the different ways in which the same 
 grammatical notion was actually expressed in a variety of lan- 
 guages. He set the example in his paper on the Dual. His own 
 studies covered a variety of languages ; but his works do not give 
 us many actual concrete facts from the languages he had studied ; 
 he was more interested in abstract reasonings on language in general 
 than in details. 
 
 In an important paper, Ueber das Enlstelien der grammatischen 
 Formen uml ihren Einfluss auf die, Ideenentwickelung (1822), he says 
 that language at first denotes only objects, leaving it to the hearer 
 to understand or guess at (hinzudenken) their connexion. By 
 and by the word-order becomes fixed, and some words lose their 
 independent use and sound, so that in the second stage we see 
 grammatical relations denoted through word-order and through 
 words vacillating between material and formal significations. 
 Gradually these become affixes, but the connexion is not yet firm, 
 the joints are still visible, the result being an aggregate, not yet a 
 unit. Thus in the third stage we have something analogous to 
 form, but not real form. This is achieved in the fourth stage, 
 where the word is one, only modified in its grammatical relations 
 through the flexional sound ; each word belongs to one definite 
 part of speech, and form-words have no longer any disturbing 
 material signification, but are pure expressions of relation. Such 
 words as Lat. amavit and Greek epoiesas are truly grammatical 
 forms in contradistinction to such combinations of words and sylla- 
 bles as are found in cruder languages, because we have here a fusion 
 into one whole, which causes the signification of the parts to be 
 forgotten and joins them firmly under one accent. Though Hum- 
 boldt thus thinks flexion developed out of agglutination, he dis- 
 tinctly repudiates the idea of a gradual development and rather 
 inclines to something like a sudden crystallization (see especially 
 Steinthal's ed., p. 585). 
 
 Humboldt's position with regard to the classification of lan- 
 guages is interesting. In his works we continually meet with the 
 terms agglutination ^ and flexion by the side of a new term, ' in- 
 corporation.' This he finds in full bloom in man}' American lan- 
 guages, such as Mexican, where the object ma}' be inserted into 
 the verbal form between the element indicating person and the 
 
 » Humboldt seems to be the inventor of this term (1821; see Streitberg, 
 IF 35. 191). 
 
§8] WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT 59 
 
 root. Now, Humboldt says that besides Chinese, which has no 
 grammatical form, there are three possible forms of languages, 
 the flexional, the agglutinative and the incorporating, but he adds 
 that all languages contain one or more of these forms (Versch 301). 
 He tends to deny the existence of any exclusively agglutinative 
 or exclusively flexional language, as the two principles are gener- 
 ally commingled (132). Flexion is the only method that gives 
 to the word the true inner firmness and at the same time distributes 
 the parts of the sentence according to the necessary interlacing 
 of thoughts, and thus undoubtedly represents the pure principle 
 of linguistic structure. Now, the question is, what language carries 
 out this method in the most consistent way ? True perfection 
 may not be found in any one language : in the Semitic languages 
 we find flexion in its most genuine shape, united with the most 
 refined symbolism, only it is not pursued consistently in all parts 
 of the language, but restricted by more or less accidental laws. 
 On the other hand, in the Sanskritic languages the compact unity 
 of every word saves flexion from any suspicion of agglutination ; 
 it pervades all parts of the language and rules it in the highest 
 freedom (Versch 188). Compared with incorporation and with 
 the method of loose juxtaposition without any real word-unity, 
 flexion appears as an intuitive principle born of true linguistic 
 genius (ib.). Between Sanskrit and Chinese, as the two opposed 
 jDoles of linguistic structure, each of them perfect in the consistent 
 following one principle, we may place all the remaining languages 
 (ib. 326). But the languages called agglutinative have nothing 
 in common except just the negative trait that they are neither 
 isolating nor flexional. The structural diversities of human lan- 
 guages are so great that they make one despair of a fully com- 
 prehensive classification (ib. 330). 
 
 According to Humboldt, language is in continued development 
 under the influence of the changing mental power of its speakers. 
 In this development there are naturally two definite periods, one 
 in which the creative instinct of speech is still growing and active, 
 and another in which a seeming stagnation begins and then an 
 appreciable decline of that creative instinct. Still, the period of 
 decline may initiate new principles of life and new successful 
 changes in a language (Versch 184). In the form-creating period 
 nations are occupied more with the language than with its purpose, 
 i.e. with what it is meant to signify. They struggle to express 
 thought, and this craving in connexion with the inspiring feeling 
 of success produces and sustains the creative power of language 
 (ib. 191). In the second period we witness a wearing-off of the 
 flexional forms. This is found less in languages reputed crude or 
 rough than in refined ones. Language is exposed to the most 
 
60 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. ii 
 
 violent changes when the human mind is most active, for then 
 it considers too careful an observation of the modifications of 
 sound as superfluous. To this may be added a want of perception 
 of the poetic charm inherent in the sound. Thus it is the transi- 
 tion from a more sensuous to a more intellectual mood that works 
 changes in a language. In other cases less noble causes are at 
 work. Rougher organs and less sensitive ears are productive 
 of indifference to the principle of harmony, and finally a prevalent 
 practical trend may bring about abbreviations and omissions of 
 all kinds in its contempt for everything that is not strictly neces- 
 sary for the purpose of being understood. While in the first period 
 the elements still recall their origin to man's consciousness, there 
 is an aesthetic pleasure in developing the instrument of mental 
 activity ; but in the second period language serves only the prac- 
 tical needs of life. In this way such a language as English may 
 reduce its forms so as to resemble the structure of Chinese ; but 
 there will always remain traces of the old flexions ; and English 
 is no more incapable of high excellences than German (Versch 
 282-6). What these are Humboldt, however, does not tell us. 
 
 n. — §9. Grimm Once More. 
 
 Humboldt here foreshadowed and probably influenced ideas 
 to which Jacob Grimm gave expression in two essays written in 
 his old age and which it will be necessary here to touch upon. 
 In the essay on the pedantry of the German language {Ueber das 
 pedantische in der deutschen sprache, 1847), Grimm says that he 
 has so often praised his mother-tongue that he has acquired the 
 right once in a while to blame it. If pedantry had not existed 
 already, Germans would have invented it ; it is the shadowy side 
 of one of their virtues, painstaking accuracy and loyalty. Grimm's 
 essay is an attempt at estimating a language, but on the whole it 
 is less comprehensive and less deep than that of Jenisch. Grimm 
 finds fault with such things as the ceremoniousness with which 
 princes are spoken to and spoken of {Durchlauchtigster, allerhochst- 
 derselbe), and the use of the pronoun Sie in the third person plural 
 in addi-essing a single person ; he speaks of the clumsiness of the 
 auxiliaries for the passive, the past and the future, and of the 
 word-order which makes the Frenchman cry impatiently " J 'attends 
 le verbe." He blames the use of capitals for substantives and other 
 peculiarities of German spelling, but gives no general statement 
 of the principles on which the comparative valuation of different 
 languages should be based, though in many passages we see that 
 he places the old stages of the language very much higher than 
 the language of his own day. 
 
§9] GRIMM ONCE MORE 61 
 
 The essay on the origin of language (1851) is much more 
 important, and may be said to contain the mature expression of 
 all Grimm's thoughts on the philosophy of language. Unfor- 
 tunately, much of it is couched in that high-flown poetical style 
 which may be partly a consequence of Grimm's having approached 
 the exact study of language through the less exact studies of popular 
 poetry and folklore ; this style is not conducive to clear ideas, and 
 therefore renders the task of the reporter very difficult indeed. 
 Grimm at some length argues against the possibility of language 
 having been either created by God when he created man or having 
 been revealed by God to man after his creation. The very imper- \^ 
 
 fections and changeability of language speak against its divine wc- " 
 origin. Language as gradually developed must be the work ol{\iJ\^ 
 man himself, and therein is different from the immutable cries 
 and songs of the lower creation. Nature and natural instinct 
 have no history, but mankind has. Man and woman were created 
 as grown-up and marriageable beings, and there must have been 
 created at once more than one couple, for if there had been only 
 one couple, there would have been the possibility that the one 
 mother had borne only sons or only daughters, further procreation 
 being thus rendered impossible (!), not to mention the moral objec- 
 tions to marriages between brother and sister. How these once 
 created beings, human in every respect except in language, were 
 able to begin talking and to find themselves understood, Grimm 
 does not really tell us ; he uses such expressions as ' inventors ' 
 of words, but apart from the symbolical value of some sounds, 
 such as I and r, he thinks that the connexion of word and sense 
 was quite arbitrary. On the other hand, he can tell us a great 
 deal about the first stage of human speech : it contained only the 
 three vowels a, i, u, and only few consonant groups ; every word 
 was a monosjdlable, and abstract notions were at first absent. 
 The existence in all (?) old languages of masculine and feminine 
 flexions must be due to the influence of women on the formation 
 of language. Through the distinction of genders Grimm says that 
 regularity and clearness were suddenly brought about in every- 
 thing concerning the noun as by a most happy stroke of fortune. 
 Endings to indicate person, number, tense and mood originated 
 in added pronouns and auxiliary words, which at first were loosely 
 joined to the root, but later coalesced with it. Besides, redupli- 
 cation was used to indicate the past ; and after the absorption of 
 the reduplicational syllable the same effect was obtained in German 
 through apophony. All nouns presuppose verbs, whose material 
 sense was applied to the designation of things, as when G. hahn 
 (' cock ') was thus called from an extinct verb hanan, corresponding 
 to Lat. canere, ' to sing.' 
 
62 BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. n 
 
 In what Grimm says about the development of language it is 
 easy to trace the influence of Humboldt's ideas, though they are 
 worked out with great originality. He discerns three stages, 
 the last two alone being accessible to us through historical docu- 
 ments. In the first period we have the creation and growing of 
 roots and words, in the second the flourishing of a perfect flexion, 
 and in the third a tendency to thoughts, which leads to the giving 
 up of flexion as not yet (?) satisfactory. The}' may be compared 
 to leaf, blossom and fruit, " the beauty of human speech did not 
 bloom in its beginning, but in its middle period ; its ripest fruits 
 will not be gathered till some time in the future." He thus sums 
 up his theory of the three stages ; " Language in its earliest form 
 was melodious, but diffuse and straggling ; in its middle form it 
 was full of intense poetical vigour ; in our own days it seeks to 
 remedy the diminution of beauty by the harmony of the whole, and 
 is more effective though it has inferior means." In most places 
 Grimm still speaks of the downward course of linguistic develop- 
 ment ; all the oldest languages of our family " show a rich, pleasant 
 and admirable perfection of form, in which all material and spiritual 
 elements have vividly interpenetrated each other," Mhile in the 
 later developments of the same languages the inner jiower and 
 subtlety of flexion has generally been given up and destroj'ed, 
 though partly replaced by external means and auxiliary words. 
 On the whole, then, the history of language discloses a descent 
 from a period of perfection to a less perfect condition. This is 
 the point of view that we meet with in nearly all linguists ; but 
 there is a new note when Grimm begins vaguely and dimly to see 
 that the loss of flexional forms is sometimes compensated by other 
 things that may be equally valuable or even more valuable ; and 
 he even, without elaborate arguments, contradicts his own main 
 contention when he says that " human language is retrogressive 
 only apparently and in particular points, but looked upon as a 
 whole it is progressive, and its intrinsic force is contmually in- 
 creasing." He instances the English language, which by sheer 
 making havoc of all' old phonetic laws and by the loss of all flexions 
 has acquired a great force and power, such as is found perhaps 
 in no other human language. Its wonderfully happy structure 
 resulted from the marriage of the two noblest languages of Europe ; 
 therefore it was a fit vehicle for the greatest poet of modern times, 
 and may justly claim the right to be called a world's language ; 
 like the English people, it seems destined to reign in future even 
 more than now in all parts of the earth. This enthusiastic panegyric 
 forms a striking contrast to what the next great German scholar with 
 whom we have to deal, Schleicher, says about the same language, 
 which to him shows only " how rapidl}'^ the language of a nation 
 important both in history and literature can decline" (II. 231). 
 
CHAPTER III 
 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 S 1. After Bopp and Grimm. § 2. K, M. Rapp. § 3. J. H. Bredsdorff. 
 § 4. August Schleicher. § 5. Classification of Languages. § 6. Recon- 
 struction. § 7. Curtius, Madvig and Specialists. § 8. Max Miiller and 
 Whitney. 
 
 III. — § 1. After Bopp and Grimm. 
 
 Bopp and Grimm exercised an enormous influence on linguistic 
 thought and linguistic research in Germany and other countries. 
 Long even before their death we see a host of successors following 
 in the main the lines laid down in their work, and thus directly 
 and indirectly they determined the development of this science 
 for a long time. Through their efforts so much new light had 
 been shed on a number of linguistic phenomena that these took 
 a quite different aspect from that which they had presented to the 
 previous generation ; most of what had been written about etymo- 
 logy and kindred subjects in the eighteenth century seemed to the 
 new school utterly antiquated, mere fanciful vagaries of incom- 
 petent blunderers, whereas now scholars had found firm ground 
 on which to raise a magnificent structure of solid science. This 
 feeling was especially due to the undoubted recognition of one 
 great famiiy of languages to which the vast majority of European 
 languages, as well as some of the most important Asiatic languages, 
 belonged : here we had one firmly established fact of the greatest 
 magnitude, which at once put an end to all the earlier whimsical 
 attempts to connect Latin and Greek words with Hebrew roots. 
 As for the name of that family of languages, Rask hesitated between 
 different names, ' European,' ' Sarmatic ' and finally ' Japhetic ' 
 (as a counterpart of the Semitic and the Hamitic languages) ; 
 Bopp at first had no comprehensive name, and on the title-page 
 of his Vergl. grammatik contents himself with enumerating the 
 chief languages described, but in the work itself he says that he 
 prefers the name ' Indo-European,' which has also found wide 
 acceptance, though more in France, England and Skandinavia 
 than in Germany. Humboldt for a long while said ' Sanskritic, 
 but later he adopted ' Indo-Germanic,' and this has been the gener 
 ally recognized name used in Germany, in spite of Bopp's protest 
 who said that ' Indo-klassisch ' would be more to the point ; ' Indo- 
 
 63 
 
64 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iii 
 
 Keltic ' has also been proposed as designating the family through 
 its two extreme members to the East and West. But all these 
 compound names are clumsy without being completely pertinent, 
 and it seems therefore much better to use the short and con- 
 venient term ' the Aryan languages ' : Aryan being the oldest 
 name bj' which any members of the family designated themselves 
 (in India and Persia).^ 
 
 Thanks to the labours of Bopp and Grimm and their co-workers 
 and followers, we see also a change in the status of the study of 
 languages. Formerly this was chiefly a handmaiden to philology 
 — but as this word is often in English used in a sense unknown 
 to other languages and really objectionable, namely as a synonym 
 of (comparative) study of languages, it will be necessary first to 
 say a few words about the terminology of our science. In this 
 book I shall use the word ' philology ' in its continental sense, which 
 is often rendered in English by the vague word ' scholarship,' 
 meaning thereby the study of the specific culture of one nation ; 
 thus we speak of Latin philology, Greek philolog}', Icelandic 
 philology, etc. The word 'linguist,' on the other hand, is not infre- 
 quently used in the sense of one who has merely a practical know- 
 ledge of some foreign language ; but I think I am in accordance 
 with a growing number of scholars in England and America if I 
 call such a man a ' practical Imguist ' and apply the word ' linguist * 
 by itself to the scientific student of language (or of languages) ; 
 ' linguistics ' then becomes a shorter and more convenient name 
 for what is also called the science of language (or of languages). 
 
 Now that the reader understands the sense in which I take 
 these two terms, I may go on to say that the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century witnessed a growing differentiation between philo- 
 logy and linguistics in consequence of the new method introduced 
 by comj)arative and by historical grammar ; it was nothing less 
 than a completely new way of looking at the facts of language 
 and trying to trace their origin. While to the philologist the 
 Greek or Latin language, etc., was only a means to an end, to the 
 linguist it was an end in itself. The former saw in it a valuable, 
 and in fact an indispensable, means of gaining a first-hand know- 
 ledge of the literature which was his chief concern, but the linguist 
 cared not for the literature as such, but studied languages for their 
 own sake, and might even turn to languages destitute of literature 
 because they were able to throw some light on the life of language 
 in general or on forms in related languages. The philologist as 
 such would not think of studying the Gothic of Wulfila, as a know- 
 
 ^ It has been objected to the use of Arj'^an in this wide sense that the 
 name is also vised in the restricted sense of Indian + Iranic ; but no separate 
 name is needed for that small group other than Indo-Iranio. 
 
§1] AFTER BOPP AND GRIMM 65 
 
 ledge of that language gives access only to a translation of parts 
 of the Bible, the ideas of which can be studied much better else- 
 where ; but to the linguist Gothic was extremely valuable. The 
 differentiation, of course, is not an absolute one ; besides being 
 linguists in the new sense, Rask was an Icelandic philologist, 
 Bopp a Sanskrit philologist, and Grimm a German philologist ; 
 but the tendency towards the emancipation of linguistics was very 
 strong in them, and some of their pupils were pure linguists and 
 did no work in philology. 
 
 In breaking away from philology and claiming for linguistics 
 the rank of a new and independent science, the partisans of the 
 new doctrine were apt to think that not only had they discovered 
 a new method, but that the object of their study was different 
 from that of the philologists, even when they were both concerned 
 with language. While the philologist looked upon language as 
 part of the culture of some nation, the linguist looked upon it as 
 a natural object ; and when in the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury philosophers began to divide all sciences into the two sharply 
 separated classes of mental and natural sciences (geistes- und 
 naturwissenschaften), linguists would often reckon their science 
 among the latter.. There was in this a certain amount of pride 
 or boastfulness, for on account of the rapid rise and splendid 
 achievements of the natm-al sciences at that time, it began to be a 
 matter of common belief that they were superior to, and were pos- 
 sessed of a more scientific method than, the other class — the same 
 view that fhids an expression in the ordinary English usage, 
 according to which ' science ' means natural science and the 
 other domains of human knowledge are termed the ' arts ' or the 
 ' humanities.' 
 
 We see the new point of view in occasional utterances of the 
 pioneers of linguistic science. Rask expressly says that " Language 
 is a natural object and its study resembles natural history " 
 (SA 2. 502) ; but when he repeats the same sentence (in Retskrivn- 
 ingslcere, 8) it appears that he is thinking of language as opposed 
 to the more artificial writing, and the contrast is not between 
 mental and natural science, but between art and nature, between 
 what can and what cannot be consciously modified by man — ^it is 
 really a different question. 
 
 Bopp, in his review of Grimm (1827, reprinted Vocalismus, 
 1836, p. 1), says : " Languages are to be considered organic natural 
 bodies, which are formed according to fixed laws, develop as pos- 
 sessing an inner principle of life, and gradually die out because 
 they do not understand themselves any longer [!], and therefore 
 cast off or mutilate their members or forms, which were at first 
 significant, but gradually have become more of an extrinsip mass. 
 
 5 
 
66 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. in 
 
 ... It is not possible to determine how long languages may pre- 
 serve their full vigour of life and of procreation," etc. This is 
 highly figurative language which should not be taken at its face 
 value ; but expressions like these, and the constant use of such 
 words as ' organic ' and ' inorganic ' in speaking of formations in 
 languages, and ' organism ' of the whole language, would tend to 
 widen the gulf between the philological and the linguistic point of 
 view. BojDp himself never consistently followed the naturalistic 
 w'ay of looking at language, but in § 4 of this chapter we shall see 
 that Schleicher was not afraid of going to extremes and building 
 up a consistent natural science of language. 
 
 The cleavage between philology and linguistics did not take 
 ^lace without arousing warm feeling. Classical scholars disliked 
 the intrusion of Sanskrit everywhere ; they did not know that 
 language and did not see the use of it. They resented the way 
 in which the new science wanted to reconstruct Latin and Greek 
 grammar and to substitute new explanations for those which 
 had always been accepted. Those Sanskritists chatted of guna 
 and vrddhi and other barbaric terms, and even ventured to talk 
 of a locative case in Latin, as if the number of cases had not been 
 settled once for all long ago ! ^ 
 
 Classicists were no doubt perfectly right when they reproached 
 comparativists for their neglect of s^mtax, which to them was the 
 most important part of grammar ; they were also in some measure 
 right when they maintained that linguists to a great extent con- 
 tented themselves with a superficial knowledge of the languages 
 compared, which they studied more in grammars and glossaries 
 than in living texts, and sometimes they would even exult when 
 they found proof of this in solecisms in Bopp's Latin translations 
 from Sanskrit, and even on the title-page of Glossarium Sanscritum 
 a Franzisco Bopj^. Classical scholars also looked askance at the 
 growing interest in the changes of sounds, or, as it was then usual 
 to say, of letters. But when they were ajDt here to quote the scrip- 
 tural phrase about the letter that killeth, while the spirit giveth 
 life, they overlooked the fact that Nature has rendered it impos- 
 sible for anyone to penetrate to the mind of am^one else except 
 through its outer manifestations, and that it is consequently 
 impossible to get at the spirit of a language excej^t through its 
 sounds : phonology must therefore form the necessary basis and 
 prerequisite of the scientific study of any group of languages. 
 Still, it cannot be denied that sometimes comparative phonology 
 was treated in such a mechanical way as partly to dehumanize the 
 study of language. 
 
 1 In Lefmann's book ou Bopp.pp. 292 and 299,there are some interesting 
 quotations on this point. 
 
§1] AFTER BOPP AND GRIMM 67 
 
 When we look back at this period in the history of linguistics, 
 there are certain tendencies and characteristics that cannot fail 
 to catch our attention. First we must mention the prominence 
 given to Sanskrit, which was thought to be the unavoidable re- 
 quirement of every comparative linguist. In explaining anything 
 in anj' of the cognate languages the etymologist always turned 
 first to Sanskrit words and Sanskrit forms. This standpoint is 
 found even much later, for instance in Max Miiller's Inaugural 
 Address (1868, Ch. 19) : " Sanskrit certainly forms the only sound 
 foundation of Comparative Philology, and it will always remain 
 the only safe guide through all its intricacies. A comparative 
 philologist without a knowledge of Sanskrit is like an astronomer 
 without a knoAvledge of mathematics." A linguist of a later 
 generation may be excused for agreeing rather with Ellis, who says 
 [Transact. Philol. Soc, 1873-4, 21) : " Almost in our own days 
 came the discovery of Sanskrit, and philology proper began — but, 
 alas ! at the wTong end. Now, here I run great danger of being 
 misunderstood. Although for a scientific sifting of the nature 
 of language I presume to think that beginning at Sanskrit was 
 unfortunate, yet I freely admit that, had that language not been 
 brought into Europe . . . our knowledge of language would have 
 been in a poor condition indeed. . . . We are under the greatest 
 obligations to those distinguished men who have undertaken to 
 unravel its secrets and to show its connexion with the languages 
 of Europe. Yet I must repeat that for the pure science of 
 language, to begin with Sanskrit was as much beginning at the 
 wrong end as it would have been to commence zoology with 
 palseontology — the relations of life with the bones of the dead." 
 
 Next, Bopp and his nearest successors were chiefly occupied 
 with finding likenesses between the languages treated and dis- 
 covering things that united them. This was quite natural in the 
 first stage of the new science, but sometimes led to one-sidedness, 
 the characteristic individuality of each language being lost sight 
 of, while forms from many countries and many times were mixed 
 up in a hotch-potch. Rask, on account of his whole mental equip- 
 ment, was less liable to this danger than most of his contemporaries ; 
 but Pott was evidently right when he warned his fellow-students 
 that their comparative linguistics should be supplemented by 
 separative luiguistics {ZdhlmetJiode, 229), as it has been to a great 
 extent in recent years. 
 
 Still another feature of the linguistic science of those days 
 is the almost exclusive occupation of the student with dead 
 languages. It was quite natural that the earliest comparativists 
 should first give their attention to the oldest stages of the languages 
 compared, since these alone enabled them to prove the essential 
 
68 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iii 
 
 kinship between the different members of the great Aryan family. 
 In Grimm's grammar nearlj' all the space is taken up with Gothic, 
 Old High German, Old Norse, etc., and comparatively little is said 
 about recent developments of the same languages. In Bopp's 
 comparative grammar classical Greek and Latin are, of course, 
 treated carefully, but Modern Greek and the Romanic languages 
 are not mentioned (thus also in Schleicher's Compendhim and in 
 Brugmann's Grammar), such later developments being left to 
 specialists who were more or less considered to be outside the sphere 
 of Comparative Linguistics and even of the science of language 
 in general, though it would have been a much more correct view 
 to include them in both, and though much more could really be 
 learnt of the life of language from these studies than from com- 
 parisons made in the spirit of Bopp. 
 
 The earlier stages of different languages, which were compared 
 by linguists, Avere, of course, accessible only through the medium 
 of writing ; we have seen that the early linguists spoke constantly 
 of letters and not of sounds. But this vitiated their whole outlook 
 on languages. These were scarcely ever studied at first-hand, 
 and neither in Bopp nor in Grimm nor in Pott or Benfey do we find 
 such first-hand observations of living spoken languages as play a 
 great role in the writings of Rask and impart an atmosphere of 
 soundness to his whole manner of looking at languages. If 
 languages were called natural objects, they were not yet studied 
 as such or by truly naturalistic methods. 
 
 When living dialects were studied, the interest constantly 
 centred round the archaic traits in them ; every survival of an old 
 form, every trace of old sounds that had been dropped in the 
 standard speech, was greeted with enthusiasm, and the significance 
 of these old characteristics greatly exaggerated, the general im- 
 pression being that popular dialects were always much more con- 
 servative than the speech of educated people. It was reserved 
 for a much later time to prove that this view is completely 
 erroneous, and that popular dialects, in spite of many archaic 
 details, are on the whole further developed than the various 
 standard languages with their stronger tradition and literary 
 reminiscences. 
 
 m.— §2. K. M. Rapp. 
 
 It was from this archasological point of view only that Grimm 
 encouraged the study of dialects, but he expressly advised students 
 not to carry the research too far in the direction of discriminating 
 minutiae of sounds, because these had little bearing on the history 
 of language as he understood it. In this connexion we may 
 
§2] K. M. RAPP 69 
 
 mention an episode in the history of early linguistics that is sympto- 
 matic. K. M. Rapp brought out his Versuch einer Physiologic 
 der Sprache nebst historischer Entwickelung der ahendldndischen 
 Idiome nach physiologischen Grundsdtzen in four volumes (1836, 
 1839, 1840, 1841). A physiological examination into the nature 
 and classification of speech sounds was to serve only as the basis 
 of the historical part, the grandiose plan of which was to find out 
 how Greek, Latin and Gothic sounded, and then to pursue the 
 destinies of these sound systems through the Middle Ages (Byzan- 
 tine Greek, Old Provencal, Old French, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Old 
 High German) to the present time (Modern Greek, Italian, Spanish, 
 etc., down to Low and High German, with different dialects). 
 To carry out this plan Rapp was equipped with no small knowledge 
 of the earlier stages of these languages and a not contemptible 
 first-hand observation of living languages. He relates how from 
 his childhood he had a " morbidly sharpened ear for all acoustic 
 impressions " ; he had early observed the difference between 
 dialectal and educated speech and taken an interest in foreign 
 languages, such as French, Italian and English. He visited Den- 
 mark, and there made the acquaintance of and became the pupil 
 of Rask ; he often speaks of him and his works in terms of the 
 greatest admiration. After his return he took up the study of 
 Jacob Grimm ; but though he speaks always very warmly about 
 the other parts of Grimm's work, Grimm's phonology disappointed 
 him. " Grimm's theory of letters I devoured with a ravenous 
 appetite for all the new things I had to learn from it, but also with 
 heartburning on account of the equally numerous things that 
 warred against the whole of my previous research with regard to 
 the nature of speech sounds ; fascinated though I was by what 
 I read, it thus made me incredibly miserable." He set to his 
 great task with enthusiasm, led by the conviction that " the his- 
 torical material gives here only one side of the truth, and that the 
 living language in all its branches that have never been committed 
 to writing forms the other and equally important side which is 
 still far from being satisfactorily investigated." It is easy to 
 understand that Rapp came into conflict with Grimm's Buch- 
 stabenlehre, that had been based exclusively on -svritten forms, 
 and Rapp was not afraid of expressing his unorthodox views in 
 what he himself terms " a violent and arrogating tone." No 
 wonder, therefore, that his book fell into disgrace with the leaders 
 of linguistics in Germany, who noticed its errors and mistakes, 
 which were indeed numerous and conspicuous, rather than the new 
 and sane ideas it contained. Rapp's work is extraordinarily little 
 known ; in Raumer's Gesckichte der germanischen Philologie and 
 similar works it is not even mentioned, and when I disinterred it 
 
70 INIIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. hi 
 
 from undeserved oblivion in my Fonetik (1897, p. 35 ; cf. Die 
 neueren Sprachen, vol. xiii, 1904) it was utterly imknown to the 
 German phoneticians of my acquaintance. Yet not only are its 
 phonetic observations ^ deserving of praise, but still more its whole 
 plan, based as it is on a thorough comprehension of the mutual 
 relations of sounds and writing, which led Rapp to use phonetic 
 transcription throughout, even in connected specimens both of 
 living and dead languages ; that this is really the only way in which 
 it is possible to obtain a comprehensive and living understanding 
 of the sound-system of any language (as well as to get a clear 
 perception of the extent of one's own ignorance of it!) has not 
 yet been generally recognized. The science of language would 
 have made swifter and steadier progress if Grimm and his suc- 
 cessors had been able to assimilate the main thoughts of Rapp. 
 
 in.— §3. J. H. Bredsdorff. 
 
 Another (and still earlier) work that was overlooked at the time 
 was the little pamphlet Om Aarsagerne til Sprogenes Forandringer 
 (1821) by the Dane J. H. Bredsdorlf. Bopp and Grimm never 
 really asked themselves the fundamental question. How is it that 
 language changes : what are the driving forces that lead in course 
 of time to such far-reaching differences as those we find between 
 Sanskrit and Latin, or between Latin and French ? Now, this is 
 exactly the question that Bredsdorff treats in his masterly pamphlet. 
 Like Rapp, he was a very good phonetician ; but in the pamphlet 
 that concerns us here he speaks not onl}' of phonetic but of other 
 linguistic changes as well. These he refers to the following causes, 
 which he illustrates with well-chosen examples : (1) IMishearing 
 and misunderstanding ; (2) misrecollection ; (3) imperfection of 
 organs ; (4) indolence : to this he inclines to refer nine-tenths 
 of all those changes in the pronunciation of a language that are 
 not due to foreign influences ; (5) tendency towards analogy : here 
 he gives instances from the speech of children and explains by 
 analogy such phenomena as the extension of s to all genitives, 
 etc. ; (6) the desire to be distinct ; (7) the need of expressing 
 new ideas. He recognizes that there are changes that cannot be 
 brought under any of these explanations, e.g. the Gothonic sound 
 shift (cf. above, p. 43 note), and he emphasizes the many ways in 
 which foreign nations or foreign languages may influence a 
 language. Bredsdorff's explanations may not always be correct ; 
 
 ^ For example, the correct appreciation of Scandinavian o sounds and 
 especially the recognition of syllables without any vowel, for instance, in 
 G. mittel, achmeicheln, E. heaven, little ; this important truth was unnoticed 
 by linguists till Sievers in 1876 called attention to it and Brugmann in 1877 
 used it in a famous article. 
 
§3] J. H. BREDSDORFF 71 
 
 but what constitutes the deep originality of his httle book is the 
 way in which linguistic changes are always regarded in terms of 
 human activity, chiefly of a psychological character. Here he was 
 head and shoulders above his contemporaries ; in fact, most of 
 Bredsdorff's ideas, such as the power of analogy, were the same 
 that sixty years later had to fight so hard to be recognized by 
 the leading linguists of that time.^ 
 
 III. — §4. August Schleicher. 
 
 In Kapp, and even more in Bredsdorff, Ave get a whiff of the 
 scientific atmosphere of a much later time ; but most of the linguists 
 of the twenties and folloAving decades (among whom A. F. Pott 
 deserves to be speciall}^ named) moved in essentially the same 
 grooves as Bopp and Grimm, and it Avill not be necessary here to 
 deal in detail with their work. 
 
 August Schleicher (1821-68) in many ways marks the cul- 
 mination of the first period of Comparative Linguistics, as well 
 as the transition to a new period wdth different aims and, partially 
 at any rate, a new method. His intimate knowledge of many 
 languages, his great power of combination, his clear-cut and alwaj^s 
 lucid exposition — all this made him a natural leader, and made 
 his books for many years the standard handbooks of linguistic 
 science. Unlike Bopp and Grimm, he was exclusively a linguist, 
 or, as he called it himself, ' glottiker,' and never tired of claiming 
 for the science of linguistics (' glottik '), as opposed to philology, 
 the rank of a separate natural science. Schleicher specialized in 
 Slavonic and Lithuanian ; he studied the latter language in its 
 own home and took down a great many songs and tales from the 
 mouths of the peasants ; he was for some years a professor in the 
 University of Prague, and there acquired a conversational know- 
 ledge of Czech ; he spoke Russian, too, and thus in contradis- 
 tinction to Bopp and Grimm had a first-hand knowledge of more 
 than one foreign language ; his interest in living speech is also 
 manifested in his specimens of the dialect of his native town, 
 Volkstiimliches aus Sonneberg. When he was a child his father 
 very severely insisted on the constant and correct use of the edu- 
 cated language at home ; but the boy, perhaps all the more on 
 account of the paternal prohibition, was deeply attracted to the 
 
 ^ A young German linguist, to whom I sent the pamphlet early in 1886, 
 wrote to me : " Wenn man sich den spass machte imd das ding iibersetzte 
 mit der bemerkung, es sei vor vier jahren erschienen, wer wiirde einem 
 nicht trauen ? Merkwiirdig, dass solche sachen so unbemerkt, ' dem kleinen 
 veilchen gleich,' dahinschwinden konncn." A short time afterwards the 
 pamphlet was reprinted with a short preface by Vilh. Thomsen (Copenhagen, 
 1886). 
 
72 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iii 
 
 popular dialect he heard from his playfellows and to the fas- 
 cinating folklore of the old townspeople, which he was later to 
 take down and put into print. In the preface he says that the 
 acquisition of foreign tongues is rendered considerably easier 
 through the habit of speaking two dialects from childhood. 
 
 What makes Schleicher particularly important for the purposes 
 of this volume is the fact that in a long series of publications he 
 put forth not only details of his science, but original and compre- 
 hensive views on the fundamental questions of linguistic theorj', 
 and that these had great influence on the linguistic philosophy of 
 the following decades. He was, perhaps, the most consistent as well 
 as one of the clearest of linguistic thinkers, and his views therefore 
 deserve to be examined in detail and with the greatest care. 
 
 Apart from languages, Schleicher was deeply interested both 
 in philosophy and in natural science, especially botany. From 
 these he fetched many of the weapons of his armoury, and they 
 coloured the whole of his theory of language. In his student days 
 at Tubingen he became an enthusiastic adherent of the philosophy 
 of Hegel, and not even the Darwinian sympathies and views of 
 which he became a champion towards the end of his career made 
 him abandon the doctrines of his youth. As for science, he saj's 
 that naturalists make us understand that in science nothing is 
 of value except facts established tlu"ough strictly objective observa- 
 tion and the conclusions based on such facts — tliis is a lesson that 
 he thinks many of his colleagues would do well to take to heart. 
 There can be no doubt that Schleicher in his practice followed a 
 much more rigorous and sober method than his predecessors, 
 and that his Compendium in that respect stands far above Bopp's 
 Orammar. In his general reasonings on the nature of language, 
 on the other hand, Schleicher did not always follow the strict 
 principles of sober criticism, being, as we shall now see, too 
 dependent on Hegelian philosophy, and also on certain dogmatic 
 views that he had inherited from previous German linguists, 
 from Schlegel downwards. 
 
 The Introductions to Schleicher's two first volumes are entirely 
 Hegelian, though wdth a characteristic difference, for in the first 
 he says that the changes to be seen in the realm of languages are 
 decidedly historical and in no way resemble the changes that we 
 may observe in nature, for " however manifold these may be, they 
 never show anything but a circular course that repeats itself con- 
 tinually " (Hegel), while in language, as in everything mental, we 
 may see new things that have never existed before. One generation 
 of animals or plants is like another ; the skill of animals has no 
 histor}^ as human art has ; language is specifically human and 
 mental : its development is therefore analogous to histor/ for in 
 
§4] AUGUST SCHLEICHER 78 
 
 both we see a continual progress to new phases. In Schleicher's 
 second volume, however, this view is expressly rejected in its 
 main part, because Schleicher now wants to emphasize the natural 
 character of language : it is true, he now says, that language 
 shows a ' werden ' which may be termed history in the wider 
 sense of this word, but which is found in its purest form in 
 nature ; for instance, in the growing of a plant. Language 
 belongs to the natural sphere, not to the sphere of free mental 
 activity, and this must be our starting-point if we would discover 
 the method of linguistic science (ii. 21). 
 
 It would, of course, be possible to say that the method of lin- 
 guistic science is that of natural science, and yet to maintain that 
 the object of linguistics is different from that of natural science, 
 but Schleicher more and more tends to identify the two, and when 
 he was attacked for saying, in his pamphlet on the Darwinian theory, 
 that languages were material things, real natural objects, he wrote 
 in defence Ueher die bedeutung der sprache fiir die naturgeschichte 
 des menschen, which is highly characteristic as the culminating point 
 of the materialistic way of looking at languages. The activity, 
 he says, of any organ, e.g. one of the organs of digestion, or the brain 
 or muscles, is dependent on the constitution of that organ. The 
 different ways in which different species, nay even different indi- 
 viduals, walk are evidently conditioned by the structure of the 
 limbs ; the activity or function of the organ is, as it were, nothing 
 but an aspect of the organ itself, even if it is not always possible 
 by means of the knife or microscope of the scientist to demonstrate 
 the material cause of the phenomenon. What is true of the manner 
 of walking is true of language as well ; for language is nothing 
 but the result, perceptible through the ear, of the action of a com- 
 plex of material substances in the structure of the brain and of 
 the organs of speech, with their nerves, bones, muscles, etc. Anato- 
 mists, however, have not yet been able to demonstrate differences 
 in the structures of these organs corresponding to differences of 
 nationality — to discriminate, that is, the organs of a Frenchman 
 {qud Frenchman) from those of a German {qiid German). Accord- 
 ingly, as the chemist can only arrive at the elements which com- 
 pose the sun by examining the light which it emits, while the 
 source of that light remains inaccessible to him, so must we be 
 content to study the nature of languages, not in their material 
 antecedents but in their audible manifestations. It makes no 
 great difference, however, for " the two things stand to each other 
 as cause and effect, as substance and phenomenon : a philosopher 
 [i.e. a Hegehan] would say that they are identical." 
 
 Now I, for one, fail to understand how this can be what Schleicher 
 believes it to be, "a refutation of the objection that language is 
 
T4 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [cii. iii 
 
 nothing but a consequence of the activity of these organs." The 
 sun exists independently of the human observer ; but there could 
 be no such thing as language if there was not besides the speaker 
 a listener who might become a speaker in his turn. Schleicher 
 speaks continually in his pamphlet as if structural differences in 
 the brain and organs of speech were the real language, and as if 
 it were only for want of an adequate method of examining this 
 hidden structure that we had to content ourselves with stud3dng 
 language in its outward manifestation as audible speech. But 
 this is certainly on the face of it preposterous, and scarcely needs 
 any serious refutation. If the proof of the pudding is in the 
 eating, the proof of a language must be in the hearing and under- 
 standing ; but in order to be heard Avords must first be spoken, 
 and in these two activities (that of producing and that of per- 
 ceiving sounds) the real essence of language must consist, and 
 these two activities are the primarj' (or why not the exclusive ?) 
 object of the science of language. 
 
 Schleicher goes on to meet another objection that may be made 
 to his view of the ' substantiality of language,' namely, that drawn 
 from the power of learning other languages. Schleicher doubts 
 the possibility of learning another language to perfection ; he 
 would admit this only in the case of a man who exchanged his 
 mother-tongue for another in his earliest youth ; '' but then he 
 becomes by that very fact a different being from what he was : 
 brain and organs of speech develop in -another direction." If 
 ]\Ir. So-and-So is said to speak and write German, English and 
 French equally well, Schleicher first inclines to doubt the fact ; 
 and then, granting that the same individual may "be at the same 
 time a German, a Frenchman and an Englishman," he asks us to 
 remember that all these three languages belong to the same family 
 and may, from a broader point of view, be termed species of the same 
 language ; but he denies the possibility of anyone's being equally 
 at home in Chinese and German, or in Arabic and Hottentot, etc., 
 becau.se these languages are totally different in their innermost 
 essence. (But what of bilingual children in Finland, speaking 
 Swedish and Finnish, or in Greenland, speaking Danish and Eskimo, 
 or in Java, speaking Dutch and Malaj^ ?) Schleicher has to admit 
 that our organs are to some extent flexible and capable of acquiring 
 activities that they had not at first ; but one definite function 
 is and remains nevertheless the only natural one, and thus " the 
 possibility of a man's acquiring foreign languages more or less 
 perfectly is no objection to our seeing the material basis of lan- 
 guage in the structure of the brain and organs of si^eech." 
 
 Even if we admit that Schleicher is so far right that in nearly 
 all (or all ?) cases of bilingualism one language comes more naturally 
 
§4] AUGUST SCHLEICHER 75 
 
 than the other, he certainly exaggerates the difference, which is 
 always one of degree ; and at any rate his final conclusion is wrong, 
 for we might with the same amount of justice say that a man who 
 has first learned to plaj' the piano has acquired the structure of 
 brain and fingers peculiar to a pianist, and that it is then unnatural 
 for him also to learn to play the violin, because that would imply 
 a different structure of these organs. In all these cases we have to 
 do with a definite proficiency or skill, which can onlj^ be obtained 
 by constant practice, though of course one man may be better 
 predisposed by nature for it than another ; but then it is also the 
 fact that people who speak no foreign language attain to very 
 different degrees of proficiencj^ in the use of their mother-tongue. 
 It cannot be said too emphaticallj^ that we have here a fundamental 
 question, and that Schleicher's view can never lead to a true con- 
 ception of what language is, or to a real insight into its changes 
 and historical development. 
 
 Schleicher goes on to say that the classification of mankind into 
 races should not be based on the formation of the skull or on the 
 character of the hair, or any such external criteria, as they are by 
 no means constant, but rather on language, because this is a 
 thoroughly constant criterion. This alone would give a perfectly 
 natural system, one, for instance, in which all Turks would be 
 classed together, while otherwise the Osmanli Turk belongs to the 
 ' Caucasian ' race and the so-called Tataric Turks to the ' Mon- 
 golian ' race ; on the other hand, the Magyar and the Basque 
 are not physically to be distinguished from the Indo-European, 
 though their languages are widely dissimilar. According to 
 Schleicher, therefore, the natural system of languages is also the 
 natural system of mankind, for language is closely connected with 
 the whole higher life of men, which is therefore taken into con- 
 sideration in and with their language. In this book I am not con- 
 cerned with the ethnographical division of mankind into races, 
 and I therefore must content myself with saying that the very 
 examples adduced by Schleicher seem to me to militate against 
 his theory that a division of mankind based on language is the 
 natural one : are we to reckon the Basque's son, who speaks nothing 
 but French (or Spanish) as belonging to a different race from his 
 father ? And does not Schleicher contradict himself when on 
 p. 16 he writes that language is " ein vollig constantes merkmal," 
 and p. 20 that it is " in fortwahrender veranderung begriffen " ? 
 So far as I see, Schleicher never expressly says that he thinks that 
 the physical structure conditioning the structure of a man's lan- 
 guage is hereditar5^ though some of his expressions point that way, 
 and that may be what he means by the expression ' constant.' 
 In other places (Darw. 25, Bed. 24) he allows external conditions 
 
76 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iii 
 
 of life to exercise some influence on the character of a language, 
 as when languages of neighbouring peoples are similar (Aryans 
 and Semites, for example, are the only nations possessing flexional 
 languages). On such points, however, he gives only a few hints 
 and suggestions. 
 
 ni.— § 5. Classification of Languages. 
 
 In the question of the classification of languages Schleicher 
 introduces a deductive element from his strong preoccupation with 
 Hegehan ideas, Hegel everywhere moves in trilogies ; Schleicher 
 therefore must have three classes, and consequently has to tack 
 together two of Pott"s four classes (agglutinating and incorporating) ; 
 then he is able philosophically to deduce the tripartition. For 
 language consists in meaning (bedeutung ; matter, contents, root) 
 and relation (beziehung ; form), tertium non datur. As it would 
 be a sheer impossibility for a language to express form only, we 
 obtain three classes : 
 
 I. Here meaning is the only thing indicated by sound ; relation 
 is merely suggested by word-position : isolating languages. 
 
 II. Both meaning and relation are expressed by sound, but 
 the formal elements are visibly tacked on to the root, which is 
 itself invariable : agglutinating languages. 
 
 III. The elements of meaning and of relation are fused together 
 or absorbed into a higher unity, the root being susceptible of 
 inward modification as well as of afl&xes to denote form : flexional 
 languages. 
 
 Schleicher employs quasi-mathematical formulas to illustrate 
 these thi'ee classes : if we denote a root by R, a prefix by p and 
 a suffix by s, and finally use a raised x to denote an inner modifica- 
 tion, we see that in the isolated languages we have nothing but 
 R (a sentence may be represented by R R R R . . .), a word in the 
 second class has the formula R s or p R or p R s, but in the third 
 class we may have p R^ s (or R^ s). 
 
 Now, according to Schleicher the three classes of languages 
 are not only found simultaneously in the tongues of our own 
 day, but they represent three stages of linguistic development ; 
 " to the nebeneinander of the system corresponds the nacheinander 
 of history," Beyond the flexional stage no language can attain ; 
 the symbolic denotation of relation by flexion is the highest 
 accomplishment of language ; speech has here effectually real- 
 ized its object, which is to give a faithful phonetic image of 
 thought. But before a language can become flexional it must 
 have passed through an isolating and an agglutinating period. 
 Is this theory borne out by historical facts ? Can we trace back 
 
§5] CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES 77 
 
 any of the existing flexional languages to agglutination and 
 isolation ? Schleicher himself answers this question in the 
 negative : the earliest Latin was of as good a flexional type as 
 are the modern Romanic languages. This would seem a sort 
 of contradiction in terms ; but the orthodox Hegelian is ready 
 with an answer to any objection ; he has the word of his master 
 that History cannot begin till the human spirit becomes " con- 
 scious of its own freedom," and this consciousness is only possible 
 after the complete development of language. The formation of 
 Language and History are accordingly successive stages of human 
 activity. Moreover, as history and historiography, i.e. literature, 
 come into existence simultaneously, Schleicher is enabled to ex- 
 press the same idea in a way that " is only seemingly paradoxical," 
 namely, that the development of language is brought to a conclusion 
 as soon as literature makes its appearance ; this is a crisis after 
 which language remains fixed ; language has now become a means, 
 instead of being the aim, of intellectual activity. We never meet 
 with any language that is developing or that has become more 
 perfect ; in historical times all languages move only downhill ; 
 linguistic history means decay of languages as such, subjugated 
 as they are through the gradual evolution of the mind to greater 
 freedom. 
 
 The reader of the above survey of previous classifications 
 will easily see that in the matter itself Schleicher adds very little 
 of his own. Even the expressions, which are here given through- 
 out in Schleicher's own words, are in some cases recognizable 
 as identical with, or closely similar to, those of earlier scholars. 
 
 He made one coherent system out of ideas of classification 
 and development already found in others. What is new is the 
 philosophical substructure of Hegelian origin, and there can be 
 no doubt that Schleicher imagined that by this addition he con- 
 tributed very much towards giving stability and durability to 
 the whole system. And yet this proved to be the least stable 
 and durable part of the structure, and as a matter of fact the 
 Hegelian reasoning is not repeated by a single one of those who 
 give their adherence to the classification. Nor can it be said 
 to carry conviction, and undoubtedly it has seemed to most 
 linguists at the same time too rigid and too unreal to have any 
 importance. 
 
 But apart from the philosophical argument the classification 
 proved very successful in the particular shape it had found in 
 Schleicher. Its adoption into two such widely read works as 
 Max Miiller's and Whitney's Lectures on the Science of Language 
 contributed very much to the popularity of the system, though 
 the former's attempt at ascribing to the tripartition a sociological 
 
78 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [cii. iii 
 
 importance by saying that juxtaposition (isolation) is characteristic 
 of the ' family stage,' agglutination of ' the nomadic stage ' and 
 amalgamation (flexion) of the ' political stage ' of human society 
 was hardly taken seriously by anybody. 
 
 The chief reasons for the popularity of this classification are 
 not far to seek. It is easy of handling and appeals to the 
 natural fondness for clear-cut formulas through its specious 
 appearance of regularity and rationality. Besides, it flatters 
 widespread prejudices in so far as it places the two groups 
 of languages highest that are spoken bj^ those nations which 
 have culturally and religiously exercised the deepest influence 
 on the civilization of the world, Aryans and Semites. Therefore 
 also Pott's view, according to which the incorporating or 
 ' polysynthetic ' American languages possess the same char- 
 acteristics that distinguish flexion as against agglutination, only 
 in a still higher degree, is generally tacitly discarded, for obviously 
 it would not do to place some languages of American Indians 
 higher than Sanskrit or Greek. But when these are looked upon 
 as the very flower of linguistic development it is quite natural 
 to regard the modern languages of Western Europe as degenerate 
 corruptions of the ancient more highly flexional languages ; this 
 is in perfect keeping with the prevalent admiration for classical 
 antiquity and with the belief in a far past golden age. Argu- 
 ments such as these may not have been consciously in the minds 
 of the framers of the ordinary classification, but there can be 
 no doubt that they have been unconsciously working in favour 
 of the system, though very little thought seems to be required 
 to show the fallacy of the assumption that high civilization 
 has any intrinsic and necessary connexion with the grammatical 
 construction of the language spoken by the race or nation con- 
 cerned. No language of modern Europe presents the flexional 
 type in a purer shape than Lithuanian, where we find preserved 
 nearly the same grammatical system as in old Sanskrit, yet no 
 one would assert that the culture of Lithuanian peasants is higher 
 than that of Shakespeare, whose language has lost an enormous 
 amount of the old flexions. Culture and language must be appraised 
 separately, each on its own merits and independently of the 
 other. 
 
 From a purely linguistic point of view there are many objections 
 to the usual classification, and it will be well here to bring them 
 together, though this will mean an interruption of the historical 
 survey which is the main object of these chapters. 
 
 First let us look upon the tripartition as purporting a com- 
 prehensive classification of languages as existing side by side 
 without any regard to historic development (the nebeneinander 
 
§5] CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES 79 
 
 of Schleicher). Here it does not seem to be an ideal manner of 
 classifying a great many objects to establish three classes of such 
 different dimensions that the first comprises only Chinese and 
 some other related languages of the Far East, and the third only 
 two families of languages, while the second includes hundreds 
 of unrelated languages of the most heterogeneous character. 
 It seems certain that the languages of Class I represent one definite 
 tj'pe of linguistic structure, and it may be that Arj'an and Semitic 
 should be classed together on account of the similarity of their 
 structure, though this is by no means quite certain and has been 
 denied (by Bopp, and in recent times b}^ Porzezinski) ; but what 
 is indubitable is that the ' agglutinating ' class is made to com- 
 prehend languages of the most diverse tyj)e, even if we follow Pott 
 and exclude from this class all incorporating languages. Finnish 
 is always mentioned as a typically agglutinative language, yet 
 there we meet with such declensional forms as nominative vesi 
 ' water,' toinen ' second,' partitive veitd, toista, genitive veclen, 
 toisen, and such verbal forms as sido-n ' I bind,' sido-t ' thou 
 bindest,' sito-o ' he binds,' and the three corresponding persons 
 in the plural, sido-mme, sido-tte, sito-vat. Here we are far from 
 having one unchangeable root to which endings have been glued, 
 for the root itself undergoes changes before the endings. In 
 Kiyombe (Congo) the perfect of verbs is in many cases formed 
 by means of a vowel change that is a complete parallel to the 
 apophonj' in English drink, drank, thus vanga ' do," perfect vemje, 
 twala ' bring,' perfect twele or twede, etc. {Anthro'pos, ii. p. 761). 
 Examples like these show that flexion, in whatever way we may 
 define this term, is not the prerogative of the Aryans and Semites, 
 but may be found in other nations as well. ' Agglutination ' is 
 either too vague a term to be used in classification, or else, if it 
 is taken strictly according to the usual definition, it is too definite 
 to comprise many of the languages which are ordinarily reckoned 
 to belong to the second class. 
 
 It will be seen, also, that those writers who aim at giving descrip- 
 tions of a variety of human tongues, or of them all, do not content 
 themselves with the usual three classes, but have a greater number. 
 This began with Steinthal, who in various works tried to classify 
 languages partly from geographical, partly from structural points 
 of view, without, however, arriving at any definite or consistent 
 system. Friedi'ich Miiller, in his great Grundriss der Sprachwis- 
 senschaft, really gives up the psychological or structural division of 
 languages, distributing the more than hundied different languages 
 that he describes among twelve races of mankind, characterized 
 chiefly by external criteria that have nothing to do with language. 
 Misteli establishes six main types : I. Incorporating. II. Root- 
 
80 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iii 
 
 isolating. III. Stem-isolating. IV. Affixing (Anreihende). V. Ag- 
 glutinating. VI. Flexional. These he also distributes so as 
 to form four classes : (1) languages with sentence-words : I ; 
 (2) languages with no words : II, III and IV ; (3) languages with 
 apparent words : V ; and (4) languages with real words : VI. 
 But the latter division had better be left alone ; it turns on 
 the intricate question " What constitutes a word ? " and ulti- 
 mately depends on the usual depreciation of ' inferior races ' 
 and corresponding exaltation of our own race, which is alone 
 reputed capable of possessing ' real words.' I do not see why 
 we should not recognize that the vocables of Greenlandic, 
 Malay, Kafir or Finnish are just as ' real ' words as any in 
 Hebrew or Latin. 
 
 Our final result, then, is that the tripartition is insufficient and 
 inadequate to serve as a comprehensive classification of languages 
 actually existing. Nor shall we wonder at this if we see the way 
 in which the theory began historically in an obiter dictum of Fr. v. 
 Schlegel at a time when the inner structure of only a few languages 
 had been properly studied, and if we consider the lack of clearness 
 and definiteness inherent in such notions as agglutination and 
 flexion, which are nevertheless made the corner-stones of the 
 whole system. We therefore must go back to the wise saying 
 of Humboldt quoted on p. 59, that the structural diversities of 
 languages are too great for us to classify them comprehensively. 
 
 In a subsequent part of this work I shall deal -with the 
 tripartition as representing three successive stages in the 
 development of such languages as our own (the nacheinander 
 of Schleicher), and try to show that Schleicher's view is not 
 borne out by the facts of linguistic history, which give us a 
 totally different pictm-e of development. 
 
 From both points of view, then, I think that the classifica- 
 tion here considered deserves to be shelved among the hasty 
 generalizations in which the history of every branch of science 
 is unfortunately so rich. 
 
 in. — §6. Reconstruction. 
 
 Probably Schleicher's most original and important contribution 
 to linguistics was his reconstruction of the Proto-Aryan language, 
 die indogermanische ursprache. The possibility of inferentially 
 constructing this parent language, which to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, 
 Gothic, etc., was what Latin was to ItaUan, Spanish, Fi-ench, 
 etc., was early in his thoughts (see quotations illustrating the 
 gradual growth of the idea in Oertel, p. 39 f.), but it was not 
 till the first edition of his Compendium that he carried it out in 
 
§ 6] RECONSTRUCTION 81 
 
 detail, giving there for each separate chapter (vowels, consonantK, 
 roots, stem-formation, declension, conjugation) first the Proto- 
 Aryan forms and then those actually found in the different languages, 
 from which the former were inferred. This arrangement has the 
 advantage that the reader everywhere sees the historical evolution 
 in the natural order, beginning with the oldest and then proceeding 
 to the later stages, just as the Romanic scholar begins with Latin 
 and then takes in successive stages Old French, Modern French, 
 etc. But in the case of Proto-Aryan this procedure is apt to 
 deceive the student and make him take these primitive forms 
 as something certain, whose existence reposes on just as good 
 evidence as the forms found in Sanskrit literature or in German 
 or English as spoken in our own days. When he finds some forms 
 given first and used to explain some others, there is some danger 
 of his forgetting that the forms given first have a quite different 
 status to the others, and that their only raison d'etre is the desire 
 of a modern linguist to explain existing forms in related languages 
 which present certain similarities as originating from a common 
 original form, which he does not find in his texts and has, there- 
 fore, to reconstruct. But apart from this there can be no doubt 
 that the reconstruction of older forms (and the ingenious device, 
 due to Schleicher, of denoting such forms by means of a preposed 
 asterisk to distinguish them from forms actually found) has been 
 in many waj^s beneficial to historical grammar. Only it may 
 be questioned whether Schleicher did not go too far when he wished 
 to base the whole grammar of all the Arj'an languages on such 
 reconstructions, instead of using them now and then to explain 
 single facts. 
 
 Schleicher even ventured (and in this he seems to have had no 
 follower) to construct an entire little fable in primitive Aryan: 
 see " Eine fabel in indogermanischer ursprache," Beitrdge zur vergl. 
 sprachfoTSchung , 5. 206 (1868). In the introductory remarks he 
 complains of the difficulty of such attempts, chiefi}^ because of 
 the almost complete lack of particles capable of being inferred 
 from the existing languages, but he seems to have entertained 
 no doubt about the phonetic and grammatical forms of the words 
 he employed. As the fable is not now commonly known, I give 
 it here, with Schleicher's translation, as a document of this period 
 of comparative linguistics. 
 
 AVIS AKVASAS KA 
 
 Avis, jasmin varna na a ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vagham 
 garum vaghantam, tam, bharam magham, tam, manum aku 
 bharantam. Avis akvabhjams a vavakat : kard aghnutai mai 
 vidanti manum akvams agantam. 
 
 6 
 
82 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iii 
 
 Akvasas a vavakant : krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant- 
 sva.s : inanus patis varnam avisams karnanti svabhjam gharmam 
 vastram avibhjams ka varna na asti. 
 
 Tat kukruvants avis agrara a bhugat. 
 
 [DAS] SCHAF UND [DIE] ROSSE 
 
 [Ein] schaf, [auf] welchem woUe nicht war (ein gcschorencs 
 schaf) sah rosse, das [einen] schweren wagen fahrend, das [eine] 
 grosse last, das [einen] menschen schnell tragend. [Das] schaf 
 sprach [zu den] rosscn : [Das] herz wird beengt [in] mir (es thut 
 mir herzlich leid), sehend [den] menschen [die] rosse treibend. 
 
 [Die] rosse sprachen : Hore schaf, [das] herz wird beengt [in 
 den] gesehend-habenden (cs thut uns herzlich leid, da wir wissen) : 
 [der] mensch, [der] herr macht [die] wolle [der] schafe [zu einem] 
 warraen kleide [fur] sich und [den] schafen ist nicht wolle (die 
 schafe aber haben keine wolle mehr, sie werden geschorcn ; es 
 geht ihnen noch schlechter als den rossen). 
 
 Dies gehort habend bog (entwich) [das] schaf [auf das] feld 
 (es machte sich aus dem staube). 
 
 The question here naturally arises : Is it possible in the way 
 initiated by Schleicher to reconstruct extinct linguistic stages, 
 and what degree of probability can be attached to the forms thus 
 created by linguists ? The answer certainly must be that in some 
 instances the reconstruction may have a very strong degree of 
 probability, namely, if the data on which it is based are unam- 
 biguous and the form to be reconstructed is not far removed 
 from that or those actually found ; but that otherwise any re- 
 construction becomes doubtful, and naturally the more so according 
 to the extent of the reconstruction (as when a whole text is con- 
 structed) and to the distance in time that intervenes between the 
 known and the unknown stage. If we look at the genitives of 
 Lat. genus and Gr. genos, which are found as generis and genous, 
 it is easy to see that both presuppose a form with <s between two 
 vowels, as we see a great many intervocalic s's becoming r in Latin 
 and disappearing in Greek ; but when Schleicher gives as the 
 prototype of both (and of corresponding forms in the other lan- 
 guages) Ai-yan ganasas, he oversteps the limits of the permissible 
 in so far as lie ascribes to the vowels definite sounds not reallj'' 
 warranted by the known forms. If we knew the modern Scan- 
 dinavian languages and English only, we should not hesitate to 
 give to the Proto-Gothonic genitive of the word for ' mother ' 
 the ending -s, cf. Dan. moders, E. mother'' s ; but G. der mutter 
 suffices to show that the conclusion is not safe, and as a matter 
 of fact, both in Old Norse and in Old English the genitive of this 
 
§ 6] RECONSTRUCTION 88 
 
 word is without an s. An analogous case is presented when 
 Schleicher reconstructs the nom. of the word for ' father ' as 
 patars, because he presupposes -s as the invariable sign of every 
 nom. 8g. masc, although in this particular word not a single one 
 of the old languages has -s in the nominative. All Schleicher's 
 reconstructions are based on the assumption that Primitive Aryan 
 had a very simple structure, only few consonant and fewer vowel 
 sounds, and great regularity in morphology ; but, as we shall see, 
 this assumption is completely gratuitous and was exploded only 
 a few years after his death. Gabelentz (Spr 182), therefore, was 
 right when he said, with a certain irony, that the Aryan ursprache 
 had changed beyond recognition in the short time between 
 Schleicher and Brugmann. The moral to be drawn from all 
 this seems to be that hypothetical and starred forms should be 
 used sparingly and with the extremest caution. 
 
 With regard to inferential forms denoted by a star, the follow- 
 ing note may not be out of place here. Their purely theoretical 
 character is not always realized. An example will illustrate what 
 I mean. If etymological dictionaries give as the origin of F. 
 menage (OF. maisnage) a Latin form ^mattsionaticum, the etymology 
 may be correct although such a Latin word may never at any 
 time have been uttered. The word was framed at some date, 
 no one knows exactly when, from the word which at various 
 times had the forms (ace.) mansionem, *masione, maison, by 
 means of the ending which at first had the form -aticurn (as 
 in viaticum), and finally (through several intermediate stages) 
 became -age ; but at what stage of each the two elements met to 
 make the word which eventually became menage, no one can tell, 
 so that the only thing really asserted is that if the word had been 
 formed at a very early date (which is far from probable) it would 
 have been mnnsionaticum. It would, therefore, perhaps be more 
 correct to say that the word is from mansione -f- -aticurn. 
 
 m.— § 7. Curtius, Madvig, and Specialists. 
 
 Second only to Schleicher among the linguists of those days 
 was Georg Curtius (1820-85), at one time his colleague in the 
 University of Prague. Curtius's special study was Greek, and his 
 books on the Greek verb and on Greek etymology cleared up a 
 great many doubtful points ; he also contributed very much to 
 bridge the gulf between classical philology and Aryan linguistics. 
 His views on general questions were embodied in the book Zur 
 Chronologie der indogermanischen Sprachforschung (1873). While 
 Schleicher died when his fame was at its highest and his theories 
 were seemingly victorious in all the leading circles, Curtius had 
 
8 1 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [en. iii 
 
 the misfortune to see a generation of younger men, including some 
 of his own best disciples, such as Brugraann, advance theories that 
 seemed to him to be in conflict with the most essential principles 
 of his cherished science ; and though he himself, like Schleicher, 
 had always been in favour of a stricter observance of sound- 
 laws than his predecessors, his last book was a polemic against 
 those younger scholffrs who carried the same point to the excess 
 of admitting no exceptions at all, who believed in innumerable 
 analogical formations even in the old languages, and whose re- 
 constructions of primitive forms appeared to the old man as 
 deprived of that classical beauty of the ursprache which was 
 represented in his own and Schleicher's works {Zur Kritik der 
 neuesten Sprachjorschunq , 1885). But this is anticipating. 
 
 If Curtius was a comi^arativist with a sound knowledge of 
 classical philology, Johan Nikolai Madvig was pre-eminently a 
 classical philologist who took a great interest in general linguistics 
 and brought his critical acumen and sober common sense to bear 
 on many of the problems that exercised the minds of his contem- 
 poraries. He was opposed to everything of a vague and mystical 
 nature in the current theories of language and disliked the tendency 
 of some scholars to find dcep-lj'ing mysterious powers at the root 
 of linguistic phenomena. But he probably went too far in his 
 rationalism, for example, when he entirely denied the existence 
 of the sound-symbolism on which Humboldt had expatiated. 
 He laid much stress on the identity of the linguistic faculty in 
 all ages : the first speakers had no more intention than people 
 to-day of creating anything systematic or that would be good 
 for all times and all occasions — they could have no other object 
 in view than that of making themselves understood at the moment ; 
 hence the want of system which we find everywhere in languages : 
 a different number of cases in singular and plural, different endings, 
 etc. Madvig did not escape some inconsistencies, as when he 
 himself would explain the use of the soft vowel a to denote the 
 feminine gender by a kind of sound-symbolism, or when he thought 
 it possible to determine in what order the different grammatical 
 ideas presented themselves to primitive man (tense relation first 
 in the verb, number before case in the noun). He attached too 
 little value to phonological and etymological research, but on 
 the whole his views were sounder than many which were set forth 
 on the same subjects at the time ; his papers, however, were very 
 little known, partly because they were written in Danish, partly 
 because his style was extremely heavy and difficult, and when 
 he finally brought out his Kleine philologische schriften in German 
 (1875), he expressed his regret in the preface at finding that 
 many of the theories he had put forward j'ears before in Danish 
 
§7] CURTIUS, MADVIG, AND SPECIALISTS 85 
 
 had in the meantime been independently arrived at by Whitney, 
 who had had the advantage of expressing them in a world-language. 
 One of the most important features of the period with which 
 we are here dealing is the development of a number of special 
 branches of historical linguistics on a comparative basis. Curtius's 
 work on Greek might be cited as one example ; in the same way 
 there were specialists in Sanskrit (Westergaard and Benfey among 
 others), in Slavonic (IMiklosich and Schleicher), in Keltic (Zeuss), 
 etc. Grimm had numerous followers in the Gothonic or Germanic 
 field, while in Romanic philology there Avas an active and flourishing 
 school, headed by Friedrich Diez, whose Grammatik der romanischen 
 Sprachen and Etymologisches Worterbuch der romanischen Sprachen 
 were perhaps the best introduction to the methodical study of 
 linguistics that anyone could desire ; the writer of these lines 
 looks back with the greatest gratitude to that period of his j'^outh 
 when he had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of these 
 truly classical works. Everything was so well arranged, so care- 
 fully thought out and so lucidly explained, that one had every- 
 where the pleasant feeling that one was treading on firm ground, 
 the more so as the basis of the whole was not an artificially con- 
 structed nebulous ursprache, but the familiar forms and words of 
 an historical language. Here one witnessed the gradual differ- 
 entiation of Latin into seven or eight distinct languages, whose 
 development it was possible to follow century by century in well- 
 authenticated texts. The picture thus displayed before one's 
 eyes of actual linguistic growth in all domains — sounds, forms, 
 word-formation, syntax — and (a very important corollary) of the 
 interdef)endence of these domains, could not but leave a very 
 strong impression — not merely enthusiasm for what had been 
 achieved here, but also a salutary skepticism of theories in other 
 fields which had not a similarly solid basis. 
 
 m.— § 8. Max MtiUer and Whitney. 
 
 Working, as we have seen, in many fields, linguists had now 
 brought to light a shoal of interesting facts affecting a great many 
 languages and had put forth valuable theories to explain these 
 facts ; but most of their work remained difficult of access except 
 to the specialist, and very little was done by the experts to impart 
 to educated people in general those results of the new science 
 which might be enjoyed without deeper study. But in 1861 Max 
 Miiller gave the first series of those Lectures on the Science of 
 Language which, in numerous editions, did more than anything 
 else to popularize linguistics and served to initiate a great many 
 students into our science. In many ways these lectures were 
 
86 MroDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. hi 
 
 excellently adapted for this purpose, for the author had a certain 
 knack of selecting interesting illustrations and of presenting his 
 subject in a way that tended to create the same enthusiasm for 
 it that he felt himself. But his arguments do not bear a close 
 inspection. Too often, after stating a problem, he is found to fly 
 off at a tangent and to forget what he has set out to prove for the 
 sake of an interesting etymology or a clever paradox. He gives an 
 uncritical acceptance to many of Schleicher's leading ideas ; thus, 
 the science of linguistics is to him a physical science and has 
 nothing to do with philology, which is an historical science. If, 
 however, we look at the book itself, we shall find that everything 
 that he counts on to secure the interest of his reader, everything 
 that made his lectures so popular, is really non-naturalistic : all 
 those brilliant exposes of word-history are really like historical 
 anecdotes in a book on social evolution ; they may have some 
 bearing on the fundamental problems, but these are rarely or 
 never treated as real problems of natural science. Nor does he, 
 when taken to task, maintain his view very seriously, but partly 
 retracts it and half-heartedly ensconces himself behind the dictum 
 that everything depends on the definition you give of '' physical 
 science " (see especially Ch 234, 442, 497) — thus calling forth 
 Whitney's retort that " the implication here is that our author 
 has a right at his own good pleasure to lay down such a definition 
 of a physical science as should make the name properly applicable 
 to the study of this particular one among the products of human 
 capacities. ... So he may prove that a whale is a fish, if you only 
 allow him to define what a fish is " (M 23 f.). 
 
 Though Schleicher and Max Miiller in their own day had few 
 followers in defining linguistics as a natural or physical science — 
 the opposite view was taken, for instance, by Curtius (K 154), 
 Madvig and Whitney — there can be no doubt that the naturalistic 
 point of view practically, though perhaps chiefly unconsciously, 
 had wide-reaching effects on the history of linguistic science. It 
 was intimately connected with the problems chiefly investigated 
 and with the way in which they were treated. From Grimm 
 through Pott to Schleicher and his contemporaries we see a growing 
 interest in phonological comparisons ; more and more " sound- 
 laws " were discovered, and those found were more and more 
 rigorously applied, with the result that etymological investigation 
 was attended with a degree of exactness of which former genera- 
 tions had no idea. But as these phonological studies were not, 
 as a rule, based on a real, penetrating insight into the nature 
 of speech-sounds, the work of the etymologist tended more and 
 more to be purely mechanical, and the science of language was 
 to a great extent deprived of those elementa which are more 
 
§8] MAX MULLER AND WHITNEY 87 
 
 intimately connected with the human ' soul.' Isolated vowels 
 and consonants were compared, isolated flexional forms and iso- 
 lated words were treated more and more in detail and explained 
 by other isolated forms and words in other languages, all of them 
 being like dead leaves shaken off a tree rather than parts of a 
 living and moving whole. The speaking individual and the speak- 
 ing community were too much lost sight of. Too often compara- 
 tivists gained a considerable acquaintance with the sound-laws 
 and the grammatical forms of various languages without knowing 
 much about those languages themselves, or at any rate without 
 possessing any degree of familiarity with them. Schleicher was 
 not blind to the danger of this. A short time before his death 
 he brought out an Indogermanische Chrestomathie (Weimar, 1869), 
 and in the preface he justifies his book by saying that " it is of 
 great value, besides learning the grammar, to be acquainted, how- 
 ever slightly, with the languages themselves. For a comparative 
 grammar of related languages lays stress on what is common to 
 a language and its sisters ; consequently, the languages may appear 
 more alike than they are in reality, and their idiosyncrasies may 
 be thrown into the shade. Linguistic specimens form, therefore, 
 an indispensable supplement to comparative grammar." Other 
 and even more weighty reasons might have been adduced, for 
 grammar is after all only one side of a language, and it is certainly 
 the best plan, if one wants to understand and appreciate the 
 position of any language, to start with some connected texts 
 of tolerable length, and only afterwards to see how its forms are 
 related to and may be explained by those of other languages. 
 
 Though the mechanical school of linguists, with whom historical 
 and comparative phonology was more and more an end in itself, 
 prevailed to a great extent, the trend of a few linguists was different. 
 Among these one must especially mention Heymann Steinthal, 
 who drew his inspiration from Humboldt and devoted numerous 
 works to the psychology of language. Unfortunately, Steinthal was 
 greatly inferior to Schleicher in clearness and consistency of 
 thought : " When I read a work of Steinthal's, and even many 
 parts of Humboldt, I feel as if walking through shifting clouds," 
 Max Miiller remarks, with good reason, in a letter {Life, i. 256). 
 This obscurity, in connexion with the remoteness of Steinthal's 
 studies, which ranged from Chinese to the language of the Mande 
 negroes, but paid little regard to European languages, prevented 
 him from exerting any powerful influence on the linguistic thought 
 of his generation, except perhaps through his emphatic assertion 
 of the truth that language can only be understood and explained 
 by means of psychology : his explanation of syntactic attraction 
 paved the way for much in Paul's Prinzipien. 
 
88 MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [en. iii 
 
 The leading exponent of general linguistics after the death of 
 Schleicher was the American William Dwight Whitney, whose 
 books, Language and the Study of Language (first ed. 1867) and 
 its replica, The Life and Growth of Language (1875), were translated 
 into several languages and were hardly less popular than those 
 of his antagonist, Max Miiller. Whitney's style is less brilliant 
 than Max Miiller's, and he scorns the cheap triumphs which the 
 latter gains by the multiplication of interesting illustrations ; 
 he never wearies of running down Miiller's paradoxes and incon- 
 sistencies,^ from which he himself was spared by his greater general 
 solidity and sobriety of thought. The chief point of divergence 
 between them was, as already indicated, that Whitney looked 
 upon language as a human institution that has grown slowly out 
 of the necessity for mutual understanding ; he was opposed to all 
 kinds of mysticism, and words to him were conventional signs — 
 not, of course, that he held that there ever was a gathering of 
 people that settled the meaning of each word, but in the sense 
 of "resting on a mutual understanding or a community of habit," 
 no matter how brought about. But in spite of all differences 
 between the two they are in many respects alike, when viewed from 
 the coign of vantage of the twentieth century : both give expres- 
 sion to the best that had been attained by fifty or sixty years of 
 painstaking activity to elucidate the mysteries of speech, and 
 especially of Aryan words and forms, and neither of them was 
 deeply original enough to see through many of the fallacies of the 
 young science. Consequently, their views on the structure of 
 Proto-Aryan, on roots and their role, on the building-up and decay 
 of the form-system, are essentially the same as those of their con- 
 temporaries, and many of their theories have now crumbled away, 
 including much of what they probably thought firmly rooted for 
 all time. 
 
 1 In numerous papers in North Am. Review and elsewhere, and finally 
 in the pamphlet Max Miiller and the Science of Language, a Criticism (New 
 York, 1892). Miiller's reply to the earlier attacks is foimd in Chips from 
 a Oerman Workshop, vol. iv. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 END OF NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 § 1. Achievements about 1870. § 2. New Discoverieg. § 3. Phonetic Law« 
 and Analogy. § 4. General Tendencies. 
 
 IV. — § 1. Achievements about 1870. 
 
 Ix works of this period one frequently meets with expressions 
 of pride and joy in the wonderful results that had been achieved 
 in comparative linguistics in the course of a few decades. Thus 
 Max Muller writes : " All this becomes clear and intelligible by 
 the light of Comparative Grammar ; anomalies vanish, excep- 
 tions prove the rule, and we perceive more plainly every day 
 how in language, as elsewhere, the conflict between the freedom 
 claimed by each individual and the resistance offered by the 
 community at large establishes in the end a reign of law most 
 wonderful, yet perfectly rational and intelligible " ; and again : 
 " There is nothing accidental, nothing irregular, nothing without 
 a purpose and meaning in any part of Greek or Latin grammar. 
 No one who has once discovered this hidden life of language, 
 no one who has once found out that what seemed to be merely 
 anomalous and whimsical in language is but, as it were, a 
 petrification of thought, of deep, curious, poetical, philosophical 
 thought, will ever rest again till he has descended as far as he 
 can descend into the ancient shafts of human speech," etc. 
 (Ch 41 f.), Whitney says ; " The difference between the old 
 haphazard style of etymologizing and the modern scientific 
 method lies in this : that the latter, while allowing everything 
 to be theoretically possible, accepts nothing as actual which 
 is not proved by sufficient evidence ; it brings to bear upon 
 each individual case a wide circle of related facts ; it im- 
 poses upon the student the necessity of extended comparison 
 and cautious deduction ; it makes him careful to inform himself 
 as thoroughly as circumstances allow respecting the history of 
 every word he deals with " (L 386). And Benfey, in his 
 Geschichte der Sprachwissetischaft (1869, see pp. 562 f. and 596), 
 arrives at the conclusion that the investigation of Aryan languages 
 has already attained a very great degree of certainty, and that 
 the reconstruction of Primitive Aryan, both in grammar and 
 
90 END OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [cii. iv 
 
 vocabulary, must be considered as in the main settled in such 
 a way that only some details are still doubtful ; thus, it is certain 
 that the first person singular ended in -mi, and that this is a 
 phonetic reduction of the pronoun ma, and that the word for 
 ' horse ' was akva. This feeling of pride is certainly in a great 
 measure justified if we compare the achievements of linguistic 
 science at that date with the etymologies of the eighteenth 
 century ; it must also be acknowledged that 90 per cent, 
 of the etjanologies in the best-known Aryan languages which 
 must be recognized as established beyond any reasonable doubt 
 had already been discovered before 1870, while later investi- 
 gations have only added a small number that may be considered 
 firmly established, together with a great many more or less 
 doubtful collocations. But, on the other hand, in the light of 
 later research, we can now see that much of what was then con- 
 sidered firm as a rock did not deserve the implicit trust then 
 placed in it. 
 
 IV. — §2. New Discoveries. 
 
 This is ti'ue in the first place with regard to the phonetic 
 structure ascribed to Proto-Aryan. A series of brilliant dis- 
 coveries made about the year 1880 profoundly modified the 
 views of scholars about the consonantal and still more about 
 the vocalic system of our family of languages. This is parti- 
 cularly true of the so-called palatal law.^ So long as it was 
 taken for granted that Sanskrit had in all essential points pre- 
 served the ancient sound system, while Greek and the other 
 languages represented younger stages, no one could explain why 
 Sanskrit in some cases had the palatals c and j (sounds approxi- 
 mately like the initial sounds of E. chicken and joy) where 
 the other languages have the velar sounds k and g. It M-as now 
 recognized that so far from the distribution of the two classes 
 of sounds in Sanskrit being arbitrary, it followed strict rules, 
 
 1 Who was the discoverer of the palatal law ? This has been hotly 
 discussed, and as the law was in so far anticipated bj' other discoveries of 
 the 'seventies as to be " in the air," it is perhaps futile to try to fix the 
 paternity on any single man. However, it seems now perfectly clear that 
 Vilhelm Thomsen was the first to mention it in his lectures (1875), but 
 unfortunately the full and able paper in which he intended to lay it before 
 the world was delayed for a couple of years and then kept in liis drawers 
 when he heard that Johannes Schmidt was preparing a paper on the same 
 subject : it was printed in 1920 in the second volume of his iSamlede AJhmid- 
 linger (from the original manuscript). Esaias Tegner had found the law 
 independently and had printed five sheets of a book De ariska sprdkens 
 palataler, which he withdrew when he found that Collitz and de Saussure 
 had expressed similar views. Karl Verner, too, had independently arrived 
 at the same results ; see his AJhandlinger og Breve, 109 fi., 305. 
 
§2] NEW DISCOVERIES 91 
 
 though these were not to be seen from Sanskrit itself. Where 
 Sanskrit a following the consonant corresponded to Greek or 
 Latin o, Sanskrit had velar k ov g \ where, on the other hand, 
 it corresponded to Greek or Latin e, Sanskrit had palatal c or j. 
 Thus we have, for instance, c in Sansk. ca, ' and ' = Greek te, 
 Lat. que, but k in kaHa = Lat. coxa ; the difference between 
 the two consonants in a perfect like cakara, ' have done,' is 
 dependent on the same vowel alternation as that of Greek 
 Uloipa; c in the verb pacati, 'cooks,' as against k in the sub- 
 stantive pakas, ' cooking,' corresponds to the vowels in Greek 
 Ugei as against logos, etc. All this shows that Sanskrit itself 
 must once have had the vowels e and o instead of a ; before the 
 front vowel e the consonant has then been fronted or palatalized, 
 as ch in E. chicken is due to the following front vowel, while 
 k has been preserved before o in cock. Sanskrit is thus shown 
 to be in some important respects less conservative than Greek, 
 a truth which was destined profoundly to modify many theories 
 concerning the whole family of languages. As Curtius said, 
 with some resentment of the change in view then taking place, 
 " Sanskrit, once the oracle of the rising science and trusted 
 blindly, is now put on one side ; instead of the traditional ex 
 oriente lux the saying is now in oriente tenebrce " (K 97). 
 
 The new views held in regard to Aryan vowels also resulted 
 in a thorough revision of the theory of apophony (ablaut). The 
 great mass of Aryan vowel alternations were shown to form a 
 vast and singularly consistent system, the main features of which 
 may be gathered from the following tabulation of a few select 
 Greek examples, arranged into three columns, each representing 
 one ' grade ' : 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 III 
 
 (1) petomai 
 
 p6te 
 
 ept6mai 
 
 (s)ekh6 
 
 (s)6khos 
 
 fekhon 
 
 (2) lelp5 
 
 leloipa 
 
 elipon 
 
 (3) peiithomai 
 
 — 
 
 eputh6men 
 
 (4) derkomai 
 
 dedorka 
 
 edrakon 
 
 (5) teino (*tenjo) t6nos tatos 
 
 It is outside our scope to show how this scheme gives us a 
 natural clue to the vowels in such verbs as E. I ride, II rode, III 
 ridden (2), G. I werde, II imrd, III geworden (4), or I binde, II band, 
 III gebunden (5). It will be seen from the Greek examples that 
 grade I is throughout characterized by the vowel e and grade 
 II by the vowel o ; as for grade III, the vowel of I and II has 
 entirely disappeared in (1), where there is no vowel between the 
 
92 END OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iv 
 
 two consonants, and in (2) and (3), where the element found 
 after e and o and forming a diphthong with these has now 
 become a full (syllabic) vowel » and u by itself. In (4) Sanskrit 
 has in grade III a syllabic r {adrQam = Gr. edrakon), while 
 Greek has ra, or in some instances ar, and Gothonic has ur or or 
 according to the vowel of the following syllable. It was this 
 fact that suggested to Brugmann his theory that in (5) Greek a, 
 Lat. in, Goth, nn in the third grade originated in syllabic n, and 
 that tatos thus stood for *tnt6s ; he similarly explained Gr. deka, 
 Lat. decern, Gothic iailiun, E. ten from *deL-m with syllabic m. 
 I do not believe that his theory is entirely correct ; but so 
 much is certain, that in all instances grade III is characterized 
 by a reduction of the vowel that appears in the two other 
 grades as e and o, and there can be no doubt that this reduction 
 is due to want of stress. This being so, it becomes impossible 
 to consider lip the original root-form, which in leip and loip has 
 been extended, and the new theory of apophony thus disposes 
 of the old theory, based on the Indian grammarians' view that 
 the shortest form was the root-form, which was then raised 
 through ' guna ' and ' vrddhi.' This now is reversed, and the 
 fuller form is shown to be the oldest, which in some cases was 
 shortened according to a process paralleled in many living 
 languages. Bopp was right in his rejection of Grimm's theory 
 of an inner, significatory reason for apophony, as apophony is 
 now shown to have been due to a mechanical cause, though a 
 different one from that suggested by Bopp (see above, p. 53) ; 
 and Grimm was also wrong in another respect, because apophony 
 is found from the first in noun-formations as well as in verbs, 
 where Grimm believed it to have been instituted to indicate 
 tense differences, with which it had originally nothing to do. 
 Apophony even appears in other syllables than the root syllable ; 
 the new view thus quite naturally paved the way for skepticism 
 with regard to the old doctrine that Aryan roots were neces- 
 sarily monosyllabic ; and scholars soon began to admit dissyllabic 
 ' bases ' in place of the old roots ; instead of lip, the earliest 
 accessible form thus came to be something like leipo or hipe. 
 In this way the new vowel system had far-reaching consequences 
 and made linguists look upon many problems in a new light. It 
 should be noted, however, that the mechanical explanation of 
 apophony from difference in accent applies only to grade III, in 
 contradistinction to grades I and II ; the reason of the alter- 
 nation between the e of I and the o of II is by no means clear. 
 The investigations leading to the discovery of the palatal 
 law and the new theory of apophony were only a part of the 
 immense labour of a number of able linguists in the 'seventies 
 
§2] NEW DISCOVERIES 98 
 
 and 'eighties, which cleared up many obscure points in Aryan 
 phonology and morphology. One of the most famous dis- 
 coveries was that of the Dane Karl Verner, that a whole series 
 of consonant alternations in the old Gothonic languages was 
 dependent on accent, and (more remarkable still) on the pri- 
 meval accent, preserved in its oldest form in Sanskrit only, and 
 differing from that of modern Gothonic languages in resting in 
 some instances on the ending and in others on the root. When 
 it was realized that the fact that German has t in vater, but d 
 in bruder, was due to a different accentuation of the two words 
 three or four thousand years ago, or that the difference between 
 s and r in E. was and were was connected with the fact that per- 
 fect singulars in Sanskrit are stressed on the root, but plurals on 
 the ending, this served not only to heighten respect for the 
 linguistic science that was able to demonstrate such truths, but 
 also to increase the feeling that the world of sounds was subject 
 to strict laws comparable to those of natural science. 
 
 IV.— § 3. Phonetic Laws and Analogy. 
 
 The ' blind ' operation of phonetic laws became the chief 
 tenet of a new school of ' young-grammarians ' or ' junggram- 
 matiker ' (Brugraann, Delbriick, Osthoff, Paul and others), who 
 somewhat noisily flourished their advance upon earlier linguists 
 and justly roused the anger not only of their own teachers, 
 including Curtius, but also of fellow-students like Johannes 
 Schmidt and Collitz. For some years a fierce discussion took 
 place on the principles of linguistic science, in which young- 
 grammarians tried to prove deductively the truth of their 
 favourite thesis that " Sound-laws admit of no exceptions " 
 (first, it seems, enounced by Leskien), Osthoff wrongly main- 
 tained that sound changes belonged to physiology and analogical 
 change to psychology ; but though that distribution of the two 
 kinds of change to two different domains was untenable, the 
 distinction in itself was important and proved a valuable, 
 though perhaps sometimes too easy instrument in the hands 
 of the historical grammarian. It was quite natural that those 
 who insisted on undeviating phonetic laws should turn their 
 attention to those cases in which forms appeared that did not 
 conform to these laws, and try to explain them ; and thus they 
 inevitably were led to recognize the immense importance of ana- 
 logical formations in the economy of all languages. Such forma- 
 tions had long been known, but little attention had been paid 
 to them, and they were generally termed ' false analogies ' and 
 looked upon as corruptions or inorganic formations found only 
 
94 END OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [cii. iv 
 
 or chiefly in a degenerate age, in which the true meaning and 
 composition of the old forms was no longer understood. Men 
 like Curtius were scandalized at the younger school explaining 
 so many even of the noble forms of ancient Greek as due to this 
 upstart force of analogy. His opponents contended that the 
 name of ' false analogy ' was wrong and misleading : the analogy 
 in itself was perfect an^i was handled with unerring instinct in 
 each case. They likewise pointed out that analogical formations, 
 so far Irom being perversions of a late age, really represented one 
 of the vital principles of language, without which it could never 
 have come into existence. 
 
 One of the first to take the new point of view and to explain 
 it clearly was Hermann Paul. I quote from an early article 
 (as translated by Sweet, CP 112) the following passages, which 
 really struck a new note in linguistic theory : 
 
 " There is one simple fact which should never be left out of 
 sight, namely, that even in the parent Indogermanic language, 
 long before its split-up, there were no longer any roots, stems, 
 and suffixes, but only ready-inade words, which were employed 
 without the slightest thought of their composite nature. And 
 it is only of such ready-made words that the store is composed 
 from which everyone draws when he speaks. He has no stock 
 of stems and terminations at his disposal from which he could 
 construct the form required for each separate occasion. Not 
 that he must necessarily have heard and learnt by heart every 
 form he uses. This would, in fact, be impossible. He is, on the 
 contrary, able of himself to form cases of nouns, tenses of verbs, etc., 
 which he has either never heard or else not noticed specially ; 
 but, as there is no combining of stem and suffix, this can only 
 be done on the pattern of the other ready-made combinations 
 which he has learnt from his fellows. These latter are first 
 learnt one by one, and then gradually associated into groups 
 which correspond to the grammatical categories, but are never 
 clearly conceived as such without special training. This grouping 
 not only greatly aids the memory, but also makes it possible to 
 produce other combinations. And this is what we call analogy." 
 
 " It is, therefore, clear that, while speaking, everj^one is 
 incessantly producing analogical forms. Reproduction by memory 
 and new -formation by means of association are its two indis- 
 pensable factors. It is a mistake to assume a language as given 
 in grammar and dictionary, that is, the whole body of possible 
 words and forms, as something concrete, and to forget that it 
 is nothing but an abstraction devoid of reality, and that the 
 actual language exists only in the individual, from whom it cannot 
 be separated even in scientific investigation, if we will understand 
 
§3] PHONETIC LAWS AND ANALOGY 95 
 
 its nature and development. To comprehend the existence of 
 each separate spoken form, we must not ask ' Is it current in the 
 language '^ * or ' Is it conformable to the laws of the language 
 as deduced by the grammarians ? ' but ' Has he who has just 
 employed it previously had it in his memory, or has he formed 
 it himself for the first time, and, if so, according to what ana- 
 logy ? ' When, for instance, anyone employs the plural milben 
 in Grerman, it may be that he has learnt it from others, or else 
 that he has only heard the singular milbe, but knows that such 
 words as lerche, schwalbe, etc., form their plural lerchen, etc., so 
 that the association milbe-milben is unconsciously suggested to 
 him. He may also have heard the plural milben, but remembers 
 it so imperfectly that he would forget it entirely were it not 
 associated in his mind with a series of similar forms which help 
 him to recall it. It is, therefore, often difficult to determine the 
 share memory and creative fancy have had in each separate 
 case." 
 
 Linguists thus set about it seriously to think of language in 
 terms of speaking individuals, who have learnt their mother- 
 tongue in the ordinary way, and who now employ it in their 
 daily intercourse with other men and women, without in each 
 separate case knowing what they owe to others and what they 
 have to create on the spur of the moment. Just as Sokrates 
 fetched philosophy down from the skies, so also now linguists 
 fetched words and forms down from vocabularies and grammars 
 and placed them where their natural home is, in the minds and 
 on the lips of ordinary men who are neither lexicographers nor 
 grammarians, but who nevertheless master their language with 
 sufficient ease and correctness for all ordinary purposes. Linguists 
 now were confronted with some general problems which had not 
 greatly troubled their predecessors (with the solitary exception 
 of Bredsdorff, whose work was entirely overlooked), namely, 
 What are the causes of changes in language ? How are they 
 brought about, and how should they be classified ? Many 
 articles on these questions appeared in linguistic periodicals about 
 the year 1880, but the profoundest and fullest treatment was 
 found in a masterly book by H. Paul, Prinzipien der Sprack- 
 geschichte, the first edition of which (1880) exercised a very con- 
 siderable influence on linguistic thought, while the subsequent 
 editions were constantly enlarged and improved so as to contain 
 a wealth of carefully sifted material to illustrate the various pro- 
 cesses of linguistic change. It should also be noted that Paul 
 paid more and more attention to syntax, and that this part of 
 grammar, which had been neglected by Bopp and Schleicher 
 and their contemporaries, was about this time taken up by some 
 
96 END OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iv 
 
 of the leading linguists, who showed that the comparative and 
 historical method was capable of throwing a flood of light on 
 syntax no less than on morphology (Delbriick, Ziemer). 
 
 IV.— §4. General Tendencies. 
 
 While linguists in the 'eighties were taking up, as we have 
 scon, a great many questions of vast general importance that had 
 not been treated by the older generation, on the other hand they 
 were losing interest in some of the problems that had occupied 
 their predecessors. This was the case with the question of the 
 ultimate origin of grammatical endings. So late as 1869 Benfey 
 included among Bopp's ' brilliant discoveries ' his theory that 
 the s of the aorist and of the future was derived from the verb 
 as, ' to be,' and that the endings of the Latin imperfect -bam 
 and future -bo were from the synonymous verb fa = Sanskrit 
 bhu (Gesch 377), and the next year Raumer reckons the same 
 theories among Bopp's ' most important discoveries.' But soon 
 after this we see that speculations of this kind somehow go out 
 of fashion. One of the last books to indulge in them to any 
 extent is Scherer's once famous Zur Oeschichte der deutschen 
 Sprache (2nd ed., 1878), in the eighth chapter of which the writer 
 disports himself among primitive roots, endings, prepositions 
 and pronouns, which he identifies and differentiates with such 
 extreme boldness and confidence in his own wild fancies that 
 a sober-minded man of the twentieth century cannot but feel 
 dazed and giddy. The ablest linguists of the new school simply 
 left these theories aside: no new explanations of the same 
 description were advanced, and the old ones were not sub- 
 stantiated by the ascertained phenomena of living languages. 
 So much was found in these of the most absorbing interest that 
 scholars ceased to care for what might lie behind Proto-Aryan ; 
 some even went so far as to deprecate in strong expressions any 
 attempts at what they termed ' glottogonic ' theories. To these 
 matter-of-fact linguists all speculations as to the ultimate origin 
 of language were futile and nebulous, a verdict which might be 
 in no small degree justified by much of what had been written 
 on the subject by quasi-philosophers and quasi-linguists. The 
 aversion to these questions was shown as early as 1866, when 
 La Society de Linguistique was founded in Paris. Section 2 of 
 the statutes of the Society expressly states that " La Societe 
 n'admet aucune communication concernant, soit I'origine du 
 langage, soit la creation d'une langue universelle " — both of them 
 questions Avhich, as they can be treated in a scientific spirit, 
 should not bo left exclusively to dilettanti. 
 
§4] GENERAL TENDENCIES 97 
 
 The last forty j^ears have Avitnessed an extraordinary activity 
 on the part of scholars in investigating all domains of the Aryan 
 languages in the light of the new general views and by the aid 
 of the methods that have now become common property. 
 Phonological investigations have no doubt had the lion's share 
 and have to a great extent been signalized by that real insight 
 into physiological phonetics which had been wanting in earlier 
 linguists ; but very much excellent work has also been done in 
 morphology, syntax and semantics ; and in all these domains 
 much has been gained by considering words not as mere isolated 
 imits, but as parts of sentences, or, better, of connected speech. 
 In phonetics more and more attention has been paid to sentence 
 phonetics and ' sandhi phenomena ' ; the heightened interest in 
 everytliing concerning ' accent ' (stress and pitch) has also led 
 to investigations of sentence-stress and sentence-melody ; the 
 intimate connexion between forms and their use or function in 
 the sentence, in other words their syntax, has been more and 
 more recognized ; and finally, if semantics (the study of the signi- 
 fications of words) has become a real science instead of being a 
 curiosity shop of isolated specimens, this has only been rendered 
 possible through seeing words as connected with other words to 
 form complete utterances. But this change of attitude could 
 not have been brought about unless linguists had studied texts 
 in the different languages to a far greater extent than had been 
 done in previous periods ; thus, naturally, the antagonism formerly 
 often felt between the linguistic and the purely philological study 
 of the same language has tended to disappear, and many scholars 
 have produced work both in their particular branch of linguistics 
 and in the corresponding philology. There can be no doubt that 
 this development has been profitable to both domains of scientific 
 activity. 
 
 Another beneficial change is the new attitude taken with 
 regard to the study of living speech. The science of linguistics 
 had long stood in the sign of Cancer and had been constantly 
 looking backwards — to its own great loss. Now, with the greater 
 stress laid on i)honetics and on the psychology of language, the 
 necessity of observing the phenomena of actual everyday speech 
 was more clearly perceived. Among pioneers in this respect I 
 must specially mention Henry Sweet ; now there is a steadily 
 growing interest in living speech as the necessary foundation of 
 all general theorizing. And with interest comes knowledge. 
 
 It is outside the purpose of this volume to give the history 
 of linguistic study during the last forty years in the same way 
 as I have attempted to give it for the period before 1880, and I 
 must therefore content myself with a few brief rcmajks on 
 
 7 
 
98 END OF NINETEENTH CENTURY [ch. iv 
 
 general tendencies. I even withstand the temptation to try and 
 characterize the two greatest works on general linguistics that 
 have appeared during this period, those by Georg v. d. Gabelentz 
 and Wilhelm Wundt ; important and in many ways excellent 
 as they are, they have not exercised the same influence on con- 
 temporary linguistic research as some of their predecessors. 
 Personally I owe incomparably much more to the former than 
 to the latter, who is much less of a linguist than of a psychologist 
 and whose pages seem to me often richer in words than in fertil- 
 izing ideas. As for the rest, I can give only a bare alphabetical 
 list of some of the writers who during this period have dealt with 
 the more general problems of linguistic change or linguistic 
 theory, and must not attempt any appreciation of their works : 
 Bally, Baudouin de Courtenay, Bloomfield, Breal Delbriick, van 
 Ginneken, Hale, Henrj'-, Hirt, Axel Kock, Meillet Meringer, Noreen, 
 Oertel, Pedersen, Sandfeld (Jensen), de Saussure, Schuchardt, 
 Sechehaye, Streitberg, Sturtevant, Siitterlin, Sweet, Uhlenbeck, 
 Vossler, Wechssler. In the following parts of my work there 
 will be many opportunities of mentioning their views, especially 
 when I disagree with them, for I am afraid it will be impossible 
 always to indicate what I owe to their suggestions. 
 
 In the history of linguistic science we have seen in one period 
 a tendency to certain large sjmtheses (the classification of 
 languages into isolating, agglutinative and flexional, and the 
 corresponding theory of three periods with its corollary touching 
 the origin of flexional endings), and we have seen how these 
 syntheses were later discredited, though never actually disproved, 
 linguists contenting themselves with detailed comparisons and 
 explanations of single words, forms or sounds without troubling 
 about their ultimate origin or about the evolutionary tendencies 
 of the whole system or structure of language. The question may 
 therefore be raised, were Bopp and Schleicher wrong in attempt- 
 ing these large syntheses ? It would appear from the expressions 
 of some modern linguists that they thought that any such com- 
 prehensive generalization or any glottogonic theory were in itself 
 of evil. But this can never be admitted. Science, of its very 
 nature, aims at larger and larger generalizations, more and more 
 comprehensive formulas, so as finally to bring about that " uni- 
 fication of knowledge " of which Herbert Spencer speaks. It was 
 therefore quite right of the early linguists to propound those 
 great questions ; and their failure to solve them in a way that 
 could satisfj' the stricter demands of a later generation should 
 not be charged too heavily against them. It was also quite 
 right of thf^ moderns to reject their premature solutions (though 
 this Avas often done Avithout any adequate examination), but 
 
§4] GENERAL TENDENCIES 99 
 
 it was decidedly wrong to put the questions out of court alto- 
 gether.^ These great questions have to be put over and over 
 again, till a complete solution is found ; and the refusal to face 
 these difficulties has produced a certain barrenness in modern 
 linguistics, which must strike any impartial observer, however 
 much he admits the fertility of the science in detailed investi- 
 gations. Breadth of vision is not conspicuous in modern 
 linguistics, and to my mind this lack is chiefly due to the fact 
 that linguists have neglected all problems connected with a 
 valuation of language. What is the criterion by which one word 
 or one form should be preferred to another ? (most linguists 
 refuse to deal with such questions of preference or of correctness 
 of speech). Are the changes that we see gradually taking place 
 in languages to be considered as on the whole beneficial or the 
 opposite ? (most linguists pooh-pooh such questions). Would it 
 be possible to construct an international language by which 
 persons in different countries could easily communicate with 
 one another ? (most linguists down to the present day have 
 looked upon all who favour such ideas as visionaries and Uto- 
 pians). It is my firm conviction that such questions as these 
 admit of really scientific treatment and should be submitted to 
 serious discussion. But before tackling those of them which 
 fall within the plan of this work, it will be well to deal with some 
 fundamental facts of what is popularly called the ' life ' of language, 
 and first of all with the manner in which a child acquires its 
 mother-tongue. For as language exists only in individuals and 
 means some specific activities of human beings which are not 
 inborn, but have to be learnt by each of them separately from 
 his fellow-beings, it is important to examine somewhat in detail 
 how this interaction of the individual and of the surrounding 
 society is brought about. This, then, will occupy us in Book II, 
 
 ^ " Ea ist besger, bei solchen versuchen zu irren als gar nicht darQber 
 nachzudenken," Curtius, K 145. 
 
BOOK II 
 THE CHILD 
 
CHAPTER V 
 SOUNDS 
 
 § 1. From Screaming to Talking. § 2. First Soimda. § 3. Sound-laws of 
 the Next Stage. § 4. Groups of Sounds. § 5. Mutilations and 
 Reduplications. § 6. CoiTection. § 7. Tone. 
 
 V. — §1. From Screaming to Talking. 
 
 A Danish philosopher has said : " In his whole life man achieves 
 nothing so great and so wonderful as what he achieved when he 
 learnt to talk." When Darwin was asked in which three years 
 of his life a man learnt most, he said : " The first three." 
 
 A child's linguistic development covers three periods — the 
 screaming time, the crowing or babbling time, and the talking 
 time. But the last is a long one, and must again be divided into 
 two periods — that of the " little language," the child's own 
 language, and that of the common language or language of the 
 community. In the former the child is linguistically an indi- 
 vidualist, in the latter he is more and more socialized. 
 
 Of the screaming time little need be said. A child's scream 
 is not uttered primarily as a means of conveying anything to 
 others, and so far is not properly to be called speech. But if 
 from the child's side a scream is not a wajj" of telling anything, 
 its elders may still read something in it and hurry to relieve the 
 trouble. And if the child comes to remark — as it soon will — 
 that whenever it cries someone comes and brings it something 
 pleasant, if only company, it will not be long till it makes use of 
 this instrument whenever it is uneasy or wants something. The 
 scream, which was at first a reflex action, is now a voluntary action. 
 And many parents have discovered that the child has learnt to 
 use its power of screaming to exercise a t^Tannical power over 
 them — so that they have had to walk up and down all night with 
 a screaming child that prefers this way of spending the night to 
 lying quietly in its cradle. The onlj' course is brutally to let the 
 baby scream till it is tired, and persist in never letting it get its 
 desire because it screams for it, but only because what it desires 
 is good for it. The child learns its lesson, and a scream is once 
 more what it was at first, an involuntary, irresistible result of the 
 fact that something is wrong. 
 
 103 
 
104. SOUNDS [CH. V 
 
 Screaming has, however, another side. It is of plij'siological 
 vahie as an exercise of all the muscles and ajipliances whicli are 
 afterwards to be called into play for speech and song. Nurses 
 say — and there may be something in it — that the child who screams 
 loudest as a baby becomes the best singer later. 
 
 Babbling time produces pleasanter sounds which are more 
 adapted for the purposes of speech. Cooing, crowing, babbling — 
 i.e. uttering meaningless sounds and series of sounds — is a delightful 
 exercise like sprawling with outstretched arms and legs or trying 
 to move the tiny fingers. It has been well said that for a long 
 time a child's dearest toy is its tongue — that is, of course, not the 
 tongue only, but the other organs of speech as well, especially 
 the lips and vocal chords. At first the movements of these organs 
 are as uncontrolled as those of the arms, but gradually they become 
 more systematic, and the boy knows what sound he wishes to 
 utter and is in a position to produce it exactly. 
 
 First, then, come single vowels or vowels with a single consonant 
 preceding them, as la, ra, Id, etc., though a baby's sounds cannot 
 be identified with any of om's or written down with our letters. 
 For, though the head and consequently the mouth capacit}' is 
 disprojiortionally great in an infant and grows more rapidly than 
 its limbs, there is still a great difiference between its mouth capacity 
 and that required to utter normal speech-sounds. I have else- 
 where (PhG, p. 81 ff.) given the results of a series of measurings 
 of the jaw in children and adults and discussed the importance 
 of these figures for phonetic theory : while there is no growth of 
 any importance during the talking period (for a child of five may 
 have the same jaw-length as a man of thirty-seven), the growth 
 is enormous during the first months of a child's life : in the case 
 of my own child, from 45 mm. a few daj^s after birth to 60 mm. 
 at three months old and 75 mm. at eleven months, while the 
 average of grown-up men is 99 mm. and of women 93 mm. The 
 consequence is that the sounds of the baby are different from 
 ours, and that even when they resemble ours the mechanism of 
 production may be different from the normal one ; when my son 
 during the first weeks said something like la, I was able to see 
 distinctly that the tip of the tongue was not at all in the position 
 required for our /. This want of congruence between the acoustic 
 manners of operation in the infant and the adult no doubt gives 
 us the key to many of the difficulties that have puzzled previous 
 observers of small children. 
 
 Babbling or crowing begins not earlier than the third week ; 
 it may be, not till the seventh or eighth week. The first sound 
 exercises are to be regarded as muscular exercises pure and simple, 
 as is clear from the fact that deaf-mutes amuse themselves with 
 
§1] FROM SCREAMING TO TALKING 105 
 
 them, although they cannot themselves hear them. But the 
 moment comes when tlie hearing child finds a pleasure in hearing 
 its own sounds, and a most important step is taken when the little 
 one begins to hear a resemblance between the sounds uttered 
 by its mother or nurse and its own. The mother will naturally 
 answer the baby's syllables by repeating the same, and when the 
 baby recognizes the likeness, it secures an inexhaustible source 
 of pleasure, and after some time reaches the next stage, when it 
 tries itself to imitate what is said to it (generally towards the 
 close of the first year). The value of this exercise cannot be 
 over-estimated : the more that parents understand how to play 
 this game with the baby — of saying something and letting the 
 baby say it after, however meaningless the syllable-sequences that 
 they make — the better will be the foundation for the child's later 
 acquisition and command of language. 
 
 v.— § 2. First Sounds, 
 
 It is generally said that the order in which the child learns 
 to utter the different sounds depends on their difficulty : the easiest 
 sounds are produced first. That is no doubt true in the main ; 
 but when we go into details we find that different writers bring 
 forward lists of sounds in different order. All are agreed, however, 
 that among the consonants the labials, j), b and 7/i,*are early sounds, 
 if not the earliest. The explanation has been given that the child 
 can see the working of his mother's lips in these sounds and there- 
 fore imitates her movements. This implies far too much conscious 
 thought on the part of the baby, who utters his ' ma ' or ' mo ' 
 before he begins to imitate anything said to him by his surroundings. 
 Moreover, it has been pointed out that the child's attention is 
 hardly ever given to its mother's mouth, but is steadily fixed 
 on her eyes. The real reason is probably that the labial muscles 
 nsed to produce b or tn are the same that the baby has exercised 
 in sucking the breast or the bottle. It would be interesting to 
 learn if blind children also produce the labial sounds first. 
 
 Along with the labial sounds the baby produces many other 
 sounds — vowel and consonant — and in these cases one is certain 
 that it has not been able to see how these sounds are produced 
 by its mother. Even in the case of the labials we know that 
 what distinguishes m from 6, the lowering of the soft palate, and 
 b from p, the vibrations of the vocal chords, is invisible. Some 
 of the sounds produced by means of the tongue may be too hard 
 to pronounce till the muscles of the tongue have been exercised 
 in consequence of the child having begun to eat more solid things 
 than milk. 
 
106 SOUNDS [CH. V 
 
 By the end of the first year the number of sounds which the 
 little babbler has mastered is already considerable, and he loves 
 to combine long scries of the same syllables, dadadada . . ., 
 nenenene . . . , bygnbygnbygn . . . , etc. That is a game which 
 need not even cease when the child is able to talk actual language. 
 It is strange that among an infant's sounds one can often detect 
 sounds — for instance k, g, h, and uvular r — which the child will find 
 difficulty in producing afterwards when they occur in real words, 
 or which may be unknown to the language which it will some day 
 speak. The explanation lies probably in the difference between 
 doing a thing in play or without a plan — when it is immaterial 
 which movement (sound) is made — and doing the same thing of 
 fixed intention when this sound, and this sound only, is required, 
 at a definite point in the syllable, and with this or that particular 
 sound before and after. Accordingly, great difficulties come to 
 be encountered when the child begins more consciously^ and syste- 
 maticall}' to imitate his elders. Some sounds come without effort 
 and may be used incessantly, to the detriment of others which 
 the child may have been able previously to produce in play ; and 
 a time even comes when the stock of sounds actually diminishes, 
 while particular sounds acquire greater precision. Dancing masters, 
 singing masters and gymnastic teachers have similar experiences. 
 After some lessons the child may seem more awkward than it was 
 before the lessons began. 
 
 The ' little language ' which the child makes for itself by 
 imperfect imitation of the sounds of its elders seems so arbitrary 
 that it may well be compared to the child's first rude drawings 
 of men and animals. A Danish boy named Gustav (1.6)^ called 
 himself [dodado] and turned the name Karoline into [nnn]. Other 
 Danish children made skammel into [gramn] or [gap], elefant into 
 fvat], Karen into [gaja], etc. A few examples from English 
 children: Hilary M. (1.6) called Ireland (her sister) [a'ni], 
 Gordon M. (1.10) called Millicent (his sister) [dadu]. Tony E. 
 (1.11) called his playmate Sheila [dubabud]. 
 
 v.— § 3. Sound-laws of the Next Stage. 
 
 As the child gets away from the peculiarities of his individual 
 ' little language,' his speech becomes more regular, and a linguist 
 can in many cases see reasons for his distortions of normal w^ords. 
 When he replaces one sound by another there is always some 
 common element in the formation of the two sounds, Avhich causes 
 
 ^ In this book the age of a child is indicated by stating the number of 
 years and months completed: 1.6 thus means "in the seventh month of 
 the second year," etc. 
 
§3] SOUND-LAWS OF THE NEXT STAGE 107 
 
 a kindred impression on the ear, though tve may have difficulty 
 in detecting it because we are so accustomed to noticing the 
 difference. There is generally a certain system in the sound 
 substitutions of children, and in many instances we are justified 
 in speaking of ' strictly observed sound-laws.' Let us now look 
 at some of these. 
 
 Children in all countries tend to substitute [t] for [k] : both 
 sounds are produced by a complete stoppage of the breath for the 
 moment by the tongue, the only difference being that it is the 
 back of the tongue which acts in one case, and the tip of 
 the tongue in the other. A child who substitutes t for k will 
 also substitute d for g ; if he says ' tat ' for ' cat ' he will say 
 ' do ' for ' go.' 
 
 i? is a difficult sound. Hilary M. (2.0) has no r's in her speech. 
 Initially they become w, as in [wau] for 'run,' medially between 
 vowels they become I, as in [veli, beli] for ' very, berry,' in conso- 
 nantal combinations they are lost, as in [kai, bA/"] for ' cry, 
 brush.' Tony E. (1.10 to 3.0) for medial r between vowels first 
 substituted d, as in [vedi] for ' very,' and later g [vegi] ; similarly 
 in [mu-gi] for ' Muriel,' [tsegi] for ' carry ' ; he often dropped 
 initial r, e.g. oom for 'room.' It is not unusual for children who 
 use w for r in most combinations to say [t/] for tr and [d5] for dr, 
 as in ' chee,' ' jawer ' for 'tree,' 'drawer.' This illustrates the 
 fact that what to us is one sound, and therefore represented in 
 writing by one letter, appears to the child's ear as different sounds 
 — and generally the phonetician will agree with the child that 
 there are really differences in the articulation of the sound according 
 to position in the syllable and to surroundings, only the child 
 exaggerates the dissimilarities, just as we in writing one and the 
 same letter exaggerate the similarity. 
 
 The two th sounds offer some difficulties and are often imitated 
 as / and v respectively, as in ' frow ' and ' muvver ' for ' throw ' 
 and 'mother'; others say ' ze ' or ' de ' for 'the.' Hilary M. 
 (2.0) has great difficulty with th and s ; th usually becomes [/], 
 [be/, ti/, /ri] for 'Beth,' 'teeth,' 'three'; s becomes [/], 
 e.g. [fran/i/, firm.] for ' Francis,' ' steam ' ; in the same way 
 z becomes [5] as in [Ubs, bou5] for ' loves,' ' Bowes ' ; sw becomes 
 [fw] as in [Ivfirj, fwit] for ' swing,' ' sweet.' She drops I in conso- 
 nantal combinations, e.g. [ki'n, kaim, kok, /ip] for ' clean,' 
 'climb,' 'clock,' 'sleep.' 
 
 Sometimes it requires a phonetician's knowledge to understand 
 the individual sound-laws of a child. Thus I pick out from some 
 specimens given by O'Shea, p. 135 f. (girl, 2.9), the following 
 words : pell (smell), teeze (sneeze), poke (smoke), tow (snow), and 
 formulate the rule : « -f- a nasal became the voiceless stop corre- 
 
108 SOUNDS [cii. V 
 
 spending to the nasal, a kind of assimilation, in vhich the place 
 of articulation and the mouth-closure of the nasals were preserved, 
 and the sound was made unvoiced and non-nasal as the s. In 
 other combinations m and 7i were intact. 
 
 Some further faults are illustrated in Tony E.'s [t/ouz, pAg, 
 pus, taem, pAm, bask, pi'z, nous, ok, es, u'] for clothes, plug, imsh, 
 tram, plum, black, please, nose, clock, yes, you. 
 
 V. — §4. Groups of Sounds. 
 
 Even when a sound by itself can be pronounced, the child 
 often finds it hard to pronounce it when it forms part of a group 
 of sounds. 8 is often drojDped before another consonant, as in 
 ' tummy ' for ' stomach.' Other examples have already been 
 given above, Hilary M. (2.0) had difficulty with Ip and said 
 [haepl] for ' help.' She also said [ointon] for ' ointment ' ; 
 C. M. L. (2.3) said ' sikkums ' for 'sixpence.' Tony E. (2.0) 
 turns grannie into [nsegi]. When initial consonant groups are 
 simplified, it is generally, though not always, the stop that remains : 
 b instead of bl-, br-, k instead of kr-, sk-, skr-, p instead of pi-, pr-, 
 sjir-, etc. For the groups occurring medially and finally no general 
 rule seems possible. 
 
 V. — § 5. Mutilations and Reduplications. 
 
 To begin Avith, the child is unable to master long sequences 
 of syllables ; he prefers monosyllables and often emits them singly 
 and separated by pauses. Even in words that to us are inseparable 
 wholes some children will make breaks between syllables, e.g. 
 Shef-field, Ing-land. But more often they will give only part 
 of the word, generally the last syllable or syllables ; hence we get 
 pet-names like Bet or Beth for Elizabeth and forms like ' tatoes ' 
 for potatoes, ' chine ' for machine, ' tina ' for concertina, ' tash ' 
 for moustache, etc. Hilary M. (1.10) called an express-cart a 
 press-cart, bananas and pyjamas nanas and jamas. 
 
 It is not, however, the production of long sequences of syllables 
 in itself that is difficult to the child, for in its meaningless babbling 
 it may begin very early to pronounce long strings of sounds without 
 any break ; but the difficulty is to remember what sounds have 
 to be put together to bring about exactly this or that word. We 
 grown-up people may experience just the same sort of difficulty 
 if after hearing once the long name of a Bulgarian minister or a 
 Sanskrit book we are required to repeat it at once. Hence we should 
 not wonder at such pronunciations as [pekalout] for petticoat or 
 [efebnt] for elephant (Beth M., 2.C) ; Hilary M. called a caterpillar 
 
§5] MUTILATIONS AND REDUPLICATIONS 109 
 
 a pillarcat. Other transpositions are serreval for several and ocken 
 for uncle ; cf. also ivops for wasp. 
 
 To explain the frequent reduplications found in children's 
 language it is not necessary, as some learned authors have done, 
 to refer to the great number of reduplicated words in the languages 
 of primitive tribes and to see in the same phenomenon in our own 
 children an atavistic return to primitive conditions, on the Hiickelian 
 assumption that the development of each individual has to pass 
 rapidly through the same (' phylogenetic ') stages as the whole 
 lineage of his ancestors. It is simpler and more natural to refer 
 these reduplications to the pleasure always felt in repeating the 
 same muscular action until one is tired. The child will repeat 
 over and over again the same movements of legs and arms, and 
 we do the same when we wave our hand or a handkerchief or when 
 we nod our head several times to signify assent, etc. When we 
 laugh we repeat the same syllable consisting of h and a more or 
 less indistinct vowel, and when we sing a melody without words 
 we are apt to ' reduplicate ' indefiniteh'. Thus also with the 
 little ones. Apart from such words as papa and mamma, to which 
 we shall have to revert in another chapter (VIII, § 9), children 
 will often form words from those of their elders by repeating one 
 syllable ; cf. pt'ff-puff, gee-gee. Tracy (p. 132) records pepe for 
 'pencil,' kaka for 'Carrie,' For a few weeks (1.11) Hilary M. 
 reduplicated whole words, e.g. king-king, ring-ring (i.e. bell), 
 water-water. Tony F. (1.10) uses [touto] for his own name. 
 Hence pet-names like Dodo ; they are extremely frequent in French 
 — for instance, Fifine, Lolotie, Lolo, Mimi ; the name Daudet has 
 arisen in a similar waj^ from Clatidet, a diminutive of Claude. 
 
 It is a similar phenomenon (a kind of partial reduplication) 
 when sounds at a distance affect one another, as when Hilarj' M. 
 (2.0) said [gogi] for doggie, [bobin] for Dobbin, [dezman din] for 
 Jesmond Dene, [baikikl] for bicycle, [kekl] for kettle. Tracy (p. 133) 
 mentions 60^00 for ' bottle,' in which 00 stands for the hollow 
 sound of syllabic I. One correspondent mentions ivhoofing-covgh 
 for ' whooping-cough ' (where the final sound has crept into the 
 first word) and chicken-pops for ' chicken-pox.' Some children 
 say ' aneneme ' for anemone; and in S. L. (4.9) this caused a 
 curious confusion during the recent war: "Mother, there must 
 be two sorts of anenemies, flowers and Germans." 
 
 Dr. Henry Bradley once told me that his youngest child had 
 a difficulty with the name Connie, which was made alternatingly 
 [toni] and [ko^i], in both cases with two consonants articulated 
 at the same point. Similar instances are mentioned in German 
 books on children's language, thus gigarr for ' zigarre,' baibift 
 
110 SOUNDS [en. v 
 
 for ' bleistift,' autobobil (Meringer),^ fotofafieren (Stern), ambam 
 for ' armband,' dan for ' dame,' jpajp for ' patte ' (Ronjat). I 
 have given many Danish examples in my Danish book. Gram- 
 mont's child (see Milangca linguistiques offerts d A. MeiUet, 1902) 
 carried through these changes in a most systematic way. 
 
 V. — §6. Correction. 
 
 The time comes when the child corrects his mistakes — where 
 it said 'tat' it now says 'cat.' Here there are two possibilities 
 which both seem to occur in actual life. One is that the cliild 
 hears the correct sound some time before he is able to imitate it 
 correctly ; he will thus still say t for k, though he may in some 
 way object to other people saying ' turn ' for ' come.' Passy 
 relates how a little French girl would say tosson both for gar^on 
 and cochon; but she protested when anybody else said " C'est 
 un petit cochon " in speaking about a boy, or vice versa. Such 
 a child, as soon as it can produce the new sound, puts it correctly 
 into all the places where it is required. This, I take it, is the 
 ordinary procedure. Frans (my own boy) could not pronounce 
 h and said an, on for the Danish pronouns han, hun ; but when 
 he began to pronounce this sound, he never misplaced it (2.4). 
 
 The other possibility is that the child learns how to pronounce 
 the new sound at a time when its o^^ti acoustic impression is not 
 yet quite settled ; in that case there will be a period during which 
 his use of the new sound is uncertain and fluctuating. When 
 parents are in too great a hurry to get a child out of some false 
 pronunciation, they may succeed in giving it a new sound, but 
 the child will tend to introduce it in places where it does not belong. 
 On the whole, it seems therefore the safest plan to leave it to the 
 child itself to discover that its sound is not the correct one. 
 
 Sometimes a child will acquire a sound or a sound combination 
 correctly and then lose it till it reappears a few months later. 
 In an English family where there was no question of the influence 
 of A-less servants, each child in succession passed through an 7i-Iess 
 period, and one of the children, after pronouncing h correctly, 
 lost the use of it altogether for two or three months. I have 
 had similar experiences viith Danish children. S. L. (ab. 2) said 
 ' bontin ' for bonnet ; but five months earlier she had said bonnet 
 correctly. 
 
 The path to perfection is not alwa3^s a straight one. Tonj- E. 
 in order to arrive at the correct pronunciation of 'please passed 
 through the following stages : (1) [bi-], (2) [bli-j, (3) [pi'z], 
 
 * An American child said atUonohile [otonobi'l] with partial assimilation 
 of m to the point-stop t. 
 
§ 6] CORRECTION 111 
 
 (4) [p\vi-5], (5) [beisk, meis, mais] and several other impossible 
 forms. Tracy (p. 139) gives the following forms through which 
 the boy A. (1.5) had to pass before being able to say pussy : poohch, 
 j)Oofie, poopoohie, poofee. A French child had four forms [nieni, 
 peti, meti, mesi] before being able to say merci correctly (Gram- 
 mont). A Danish child passed through bejab and vamb before 
 pronouncing svamp (' sponge '), etc. 
 
 It is certain that all this while the little brain is working, and 
 even consciously working, though at first it has not sufficient 
 command of speech to say anything about it. Meringer sa^'s that 
 children do not practise, but that their new acquisitions of sounds 
 happen at once without any visible preparation. He may be right 
 in the main with regard to the learning of single sounds, though 
 even there I incline to doubt the possibility of a universal rule ; 
 but Ronjat (p. 55) is certainly right as against Meringer with 
 regard to the way in which children learn new and difficult com- 
 binations. Here they certainly do practise, and are proudly 
 conscious of the happy results of their efforts. When Frans (2.11) 
 mastered the combination fl, he was very proud, and asked his 
 mother : " Mother, can you B&,y fiyve ? " ; then he came to me and 
 told me that he could say bluse and fine, and when asked whether 
 he could saj' blad, he answered : " No, not j'et ; Frans cannot 
 say b-Jad " (with a little interval between the b and the I). Five 
 weeks later he said : " Mother, won't j'ou play upon the klaver 
 (piano) ? " and after a little while, " Frans can say kla so well." 
 About the same time he first misj)ronounced the word manchetter, 
 and then (when I asked what he was sa5ing, without telling him 
 that anything w^as WTong) he gave it the correct sound, and I 
 heard him afterwards in the adjoining room repeat the word to 
 himself in a whisper. 
 
 How well children observe sounds is again seen by the way 
 in which they 'oill correct their elders if they give a pronunciation 
 to Avhich they are not accustomed — for instance, in a verse the3* 
 have learnt by heart. Beth M (2.6) was never satisfied with her 
 parents' pronunciation of " What will you buy me when you get 
 there ? " She always insisted on their gabbling the first M'ords 
 as quickly as they could and then coming out with an emphatic 
 there. 
 
 v.— § 7. Tone. 
 
 As to the differences in the tone of a voice, even a baby shows 
 by his expression that he can distinguish clearly between what 
 is said to him lovingly and what sharply, a long time before he 
 understands a single word of what is said. Many children are 
 
112 SOUNDS [CH. V 
 
 able at a very early age to hit off the exact note in which some- 
 thing is said or sung. Here is a story of a boy of more advanced 
 age. In Copenhagen he had had his hair cut by a Swedish lady 
 and did not like it. When he travelled with his mother to Norway, 
 as soon as he entered tlie house, he broke out with a scream : 
 " Mother, I hope I'm not going to have my hair cut ? " He had 
 noticed the Norwegian intonation, which is very like the Swedish, 
 and it brought an unpleasant association of ideas. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 WORDS 
 
 § 1. Introductory, § 2. First Period. § 3. Father and Mother. § 4. The 
 DeUmitation of Meaning. § 5. Numerals. Time. § 6. Various Diffi- 
 culties. § 7. Shifters. § 8. Extent of Vocabulary. § 9. Siunmary. 
 
 VI. — §1. Introductory. 
 
 In the preceding chapter, in order to simphfy matters, we have 
 dealt with sounds only, as if they were learnt by themselves and 
 independently of the meanings attached to them. But that, of 
 course, is only an abstraction : to the child, as well as to the 
 grown-up, the two elements, the outer, phonetic element, and the 
 inner element, the meaning, of a w^ord are indissolubly connected, 
 and the child has no interest, or very little interest^ in trying to 
 imitate the sounds of its parents except just in so far as these 
 mean something, ffhat words have a meaning, the child will 
 begin to perceive at a very early age. Parents may of course 
 deceive themselves and attribute to the child a more complete 
 and exact understanding of speech than the child is capable of. 
 That the child looks at its father when it hears the word ' father,' 
 may mean at first nothing more than that it follows its mother's 
 glance ; but naturally in this way it is prepared for actually asso- 
 ciating the idea of ' father ' with the sound. If the child learns 
 the feat of lifting its arms when it is asked " How big is the boy ? " 
 it is not to be supposed that the single words of the sentence are 
 understood, or that the child has any conception of size ; he only 
 knows that when this series of sounds is said he is admired if he 
 lifts his arms up : and so the sentence as a whole has the effect 
 of a word of command. A dog has the same degree of under- 
 standing. Hilary M. (1.0), when you said to her at any time the 
 refrain " He greeted me so," from " Here come three knights from 
 Spain," would bow and salute with her hand, as she had seen some 
 children doing it when practising the song. 
 
 The. understanding of what is said always precedes the power 
 of saj'ing the same thing oneself — often precedes it for an extra- 
 ordinarily long time. One father notes that his little daughter 
 of a year and seven months brings what is wanted and understands 
 questions while she cannot say a word. It often happens that 
 
 8 113 
 
114 WORDS [CH. VI 
 
 parents some tine claj' come to regret what they have said in the 
 presence of a child without suspecting how much it understands. 
 " Little pitchers have long ears." 
 
 One can, however, easily err in regard to the range and cer- 
 tainty of a child's understanding. The Swiss philologist Tappolet 
 noticed that his child of six months, when he said '" Where is the 
 window ? " made vague movements towards the window. He 
 made the expeiiment of repeating his question in French — with 
 the same intonation as in German, and the child acted just as it 
 had done before. It is, projjerly si:)eaking, only when the child 
 begins to talk that we can be at all sure what it has really under- 
 stood, and even then it may at times be difficult to sound the 
 depths of the child's conception. 
 
 The child's acquisition of the meaning of words is truly a highly 
 complicated affair. How many things arc comprehended under 
 one word ? The answer is not easy in all cases. The single Danish 
 word keppe covers all that is expressed in English by carpet, rug, 
 blanket, counterpane, curtain (theatrical). And there is still 
 more complication when Ave come to abstract ideas. The child 
 has somehow to find out for himself with regard to his own lan- 
 guage what ideas are considered to hang together and so come 
 under the same word. He hears the word ' chair ' applied to 
 a particular chaii", then to another chair that perhaps looks to 
 him totally different, and again to a third : and it becomes his 
 business to group these together. 
 
 What Stern tells about his own boy is certainly exceptional, 
 perhaps unique. The boy ran to a door and said das ^ (' That ? ' 
 — his way of asking the name of a thing). They told him ' tiir.' 
 He then Avent to two other doors in the room, and each time the 
 performance was repeated. He then did the same with the seven 
 chairs in the room. Stern saj^s, ''As he thus makes sure that 
 the objects that are alike to his eye and to his sense of touch have 
 also the same name, he is on his way to general conceptions." 
 We should, hoAvever, be Avary of attributing general ideas to little 
 children. 
 
 VI.— § 2. First Period. 
 
 In the first jieriod Ave meet the same phenomena in the child's 
 acquisition of Avord-meanings that Ave found in his acquisition of 
 sounds. A child develops conceptions of his OAvn Avhich are as 
 unintelligible and strange to the uninitiated as his sounds. 
 
 Among the child's first passions are animals and pictures of 
 animals, but for a certain time it is quite arbitrary what animals 
 are classed together under a particular name. A child of nine 
 
§2] FIRST PERIOD 115 
 
 months noticed that his grandfather's dog said ' bow-wow ' and 
 fancied that anything not human could say (and therefore should 
 be called) bow-wow — pigs and horses included. A little girl of 
 two called a horse he (Danish hest) and divided the animal kingdom 
 into two groups, (1) horses, including all four-footed things, even 
 a tortoise, and (2) fishes (pronounced iz), including r\ll that moved 
 without use of feet, for example, birds and flies. A boy of 1.8 
 saw a picture of a Danish priest in a ruflf and was told that it was 
 a prcest, which he rendered as beep. Afterwards seeing a jiicture 
 of an aunt with a white collar which recalled the priest's ruff, he 
 said again beep, and this remained the name of the aunt, and even 
 of another aunt, who was called ' other bsej).' These transfer- 
 ences are sometimes extraordinary. A boy who had had a pig 
 drawn for him, the pig being called of, at the age of 1.6 used of 
 
 (1) for a pig, (2) for drawing a pig, (3) for writing in general. 
 Such transferences may seem very absurd, but are not more 
 
 so than some transferences occurring in the language of grown-up 
 persons. The word Tripos passed from the sense of a three-legged 
 stool to the man who sat on a three-legged stool to dispute with 
 candidates for degrees at Cambridge. Then, as it was the duty 
 of ]Mr. Tripos also to provide comic verses, these were called tripos 
 verses, such verses being printed under that name till very near 
 the end of the nineteenth century, though IVIi-. Tripos himself had 
 disappeared long ago. And as the examination list was printed 
 on the back of these verses, it was called the Tripos list, and it 
 was no far cry to saying of a successful candidate, " he stands 
 high on the Tripos," which now came to mean the examination 
 itself. 
 
 But to return to the classifications in the minds of the children. 
 Hilary M. (1.6 to 2.0) used the word daisy (1) of the flower itself, 
 
 (2) of any flower, (3) of an}'- conventional flower in a pattern, 
 (4) of any pattern. One of the first words she said was colour 
 (1.4), and she got into a way of saying it when anything striking 
 attracted her attention. Originally she heard the word of a 
 bright patch of colour in a picture. The word was still in use 
 at the age of two. For some months anything that moved was 
 a fly, every man was a soldier, everybody that was not a man 
 was a baby. S. L. (1.8) used ting (1) for a door, (2) for bricks 
 or building with bricks. The connexion is through the bang 
 of a door or a tumbling castle of bricks, but the name was trans- 
 ferred to the objects. It is curious that at 1.3 she had the word 
 bang for anji:hing dropped, but not bing ; at 1.8 she had both, 
 bing being specialized as above. From books about children's 
 language I quote two illustrations. Ronjat's son used the word 
 papement, which stands for ' kaffemensch,' in speaking about the 
 
IIG WORDS [CH. VI 
 
 grocer's boy who brought coffee ; but as he had a kind of uniform 
 with a flat cap, papement was also used of German and Russian 
 officers in the illustrated papers. Hilde Stern (1.9) used bichu 
 for drawer or chest of drawers ; it originated in the word biicher 
 (books), which was said when her picture-books were taken out 
 of the drawer. 
 
 A warning is, however, necessary. When a grown-up person 
 says that a child uses the same word to denote various things, 
 he is apt to assume that the child gives a word two or three definite 
 meanings, as he does. The process is rather in this way. A child 
 has got a new toy, a horse, and at the same time has heard its 
 elders use the word ' horse,' which it has imitated as well as it 
 can. It now associates the word with the delight of playing with 
 its toy. If the next day it says the same sound, and its friends 
 give it the horse, the child gains the experience that the sound 
 brings the fulfilment of its wish : but if it sets its eye on a china 
 cow and utters the same sound, the father takes note that tlie 
 sound also denotes a cow, while for the child it is perhaps a mere 
 experiment — '" Could not I get my wish for that nice thing fulfilled 
 in the same way ? " If it succeeds, the experiment may very well 
 be repeated, and the more or less faulty imitation of the word 
 ' horse ' thus bj^ the co-operation of those around it may become 
 also firmly attached to ' cow.' 
 
 When Elsa B. (1.10), on seeing the stopper of a bottle in the 
 garden, came out with the word ' beer,' it would be rash to conclude 
 (as her father did) that the word ' beer ' to her meant a ' stopper ' : 
 all we know is that her thoughts had taken that direction, and 
 that some time before, on seeing a stopper, she had heard the 
 word ' beer.' 
 
 Parents sometimes unconsciously lead a child into error about 
 the use of words. A little nephew of mine asked to taste his 
 father's beer, and when refused made so much to-do that the 
 father said, " Come, let us have peace in the house." Next day, 
 under the same circumstances, the boy asked for ' peace in the 
 house,' and this became the family name for beer. Not infre- 
 quently what is said on certain occasions is taken by the child to 
 be the name of some object concerned ; thus a sniff or some sound 
 imitating it may come to mean a flower, and ' hurrah ' a flag. 
 S. L. from an early age was fond of flowers, and at 1.8 used 
 ' pretty ' or ' pretty-pretty ' as a substantive instead of the word 
 ' flower,' which she learnt at 1.10. 
 
 I may mention here that analogous mistakes may occur Avhen 
 missionaries or others write down words from foreign languages 
 with which they are not familiar. In the oldest list of Green- 
 landic words (of 1587) there is thus a word ixmygmah given with 
 
§2] FIRST PERIOD 117 
 
 the signification ' needle ' ; as a matter of fact it means ' my 
 daughter's ' : the Englishman pointed at the needle, but the 
 Eskimo thought he wanted to know whom it belonged to. In an 
 old list of words in the now extinct Polabian language we find 
 ^' scumbe, yesterday, subuda, to-day, jamdigh'a, to-morrow": the 
 questions were put on a Satiirday, and the Slav answered accord- 
 ingly, for subuta (the same word as Sabbath) means Saturday, 
 skumpe 'fasting-day,' and ja nediJa 'it is Sunday.' 
 
 According to Shea (p. 131) "a child Avas greatly impressed 
 with the horns of a buck the first time he saw him. The father 
 used the term ' sheep ' several times while the creature was being 
 inspected, and it was discovered afterwards that the child had 
 made the association between the word and the animal's horns, 
 so now sheep signifies primarily horns, whether seen in pictures 
 or in real life." It is clear that mistakes of that kind will happen 
 more readily if the Avord is said singly than Avhen it is embodied 
 in whole connected sentences : the latter method is on the whole 
 preferable for many reasons. 
 
 VI.— § 3. Father and Mother. 
 
 A child is often faced by some linguistic usage which obliges 
 him again and again to change his notions, widen them, narrow 
 them, till he succeeds in giving words the same range of meaning 
 that his elders give them. 
 
 Frequently, perhaps most frequently, a word is at first for 
 the child a proper name. ' Wood ' means not a wood in general, 
 but the particular picture which has been pointed out to the child 
 in the dining-room. The little girl who calls her mother's black 
 muff ' muff,' but refuses to transfer the word to her own white 
 one, is at the same stage. Naturally, then, the word father when 
 first heard is a proper name, the name of the child's own father. 
 But soon it must be extended to other individuals who have some- 
 thing or other in common with the child's father. One child will 
 use it of all tnen, another perhaps of all men with beards, while 
 ' lady ' is applied to all pictures of faces AAdthout beards ; a third 
 will apply the word to father, mother and grandfather. When 
 the child itself applies the word to another man it is soon corrected, 
 but at the same time it cannot avoid hearing another child call 
 a strange man ' father ' or getting to know that the gardener is 
 Jack's ' father,' etc. The word then comes to mean to the child 
 ' a groA\Ti-up person who goes with or belongs to a little one,' 
 and he will say, " See, there goes a dog with his father." Or, he 
 comes to know that the cat is the kittens' father, and the dog the 
 puppies' father, and next day asks, " Wasps, are they the flies' 
 
118 WORDS [cH. VI 
 
 father, or are they perhaps their mother ? " (as Frans did, 4.10). 
 Finally, by such guessing and drawing conclusions he gains full 
 understanding of the word, and is ready to make acquaintance 
 later with its more remote applications, as ' The King is the 
 father of his people ; Father O'Flynn ; Boyle was the father of 
 chemistry,' etc. 
 
 Difficulties are caused to the child when its father puts him- 
 self on the child's plane and calls his wife ' mother ' just as he 
 calls his own mother ' mother,' though at other moments the 
 child hears him call her 'grandmother' or 'grannie.' Professor 
 Sturtevant writes to me that a neighbour child, a girl of about 
 five years, called out to him, " I saw your girl and your mother," 
 meaning ' your daughter and your wife.' In many families the 
 words ' sister ' (' Sissie ') or ' brother ' are used constantly instead 
 of his or her real name. Here we see the reason why so often such 
 names of relations change their meaning in the history of lan- 
 guages ; G. vetter probably at first meant ' father's brother,' as 
 it corresponds to Latin patruus ; G. base, from ' father's sister,' 
 came to mean also ' mother's sister,' ' niece ' and ' cousin.' The 
 word that corresponds etymologically to our mother has come 
 to mean ' wife ' or ' woman ' in Lithuanian and ' sister ' in 
 Albanian. 
 
 The same extension that we saw in the case of ' father ' now 
 may take place with real proper names. Tony E. (3.5), when a 
 fresh charwoman came, told his mother not to have this Mary : 
 the last charwoman's name was Mary.^ In exactlj' the same way 
 a Danish child applied the name of their servant, Ingeborg, as 
 a general word for servant : " Auntie's Ingeborg is called Ann," 
 etc., and a German girl said viele Aiigiisten for ' manj' girls.' This, 
 of course, is the way in which doll has come to mean a ' toy baby,' 
 and we use the same extension when we say of a statesman that 
 he is no Bismarck, etc. 
 
 VI. — §4. The Delimitation of Meaning. 
 
 The association of a word with its meaning is accomplished 
 for the child by a series of single incidents, and as many words 
 are understood only by the help of the situation, it is natui'al that 
 the exact force of many of them is not seized at once. A boy of 
 4.10, hearing that his father had seen the lung, inquii-ed, " Has 
 he a head at both ends ? " — his conception of a king being derived 
 from playing-cards. Another child was born on what the Danes 
 call Constitution Day, the consequence being that he confused 
 birthday and Constitution Day, and would speak of " my Consti- 
 > Cf. Beach-la-Mar, below, Ch. XII § 1. 
 
§4] THE DELIMITATION OF MEANING 119 
 
 tution Day," and tlien his brother and sister also began to talk of 
 their Constitution DaJ^ 
 
 Hilary M. (2.0) and Murdoch D. (2.6) used dinner, breakfast 
 and tea interchangeabl}^ — the words might be translated ' meal.' 
 Other more or less similar confusions may be mentioned here. 
 Tony F. (2.8) used the term sing for (1) reading, (2) singing, (3) 
 any game in which his elders amused him. Hilary said indifferenth', 
 ' Daddy, sing a story three bears,' and ' Daddy, tell a storj^ three 
 bears.' She cannot remember which is knife and which is fork. 
 Beth M. (2.6) always used can't when she meant won't. It meant 
 simply refusal to do what she did not want to. 
 
 VI. — § 5. Numerals. Time. 
 
 It is interesting to watch the way in which arithmetical notions 
 grow in extent and clearness. Many children learn very early 
 to say one, two, which is often said to them when they learn how 
 to walk ; but no ideas are associated with these syllables. In the 
 same wa3' manj'- children are di'illed to say three when the parents 
 begin with 07ie, two, etc. The idea of plurality is gradually deve- 
 loped, but a child may very well answer two when asked how many 
 fingers papa has ; Frans used the combinations some-two and 
 some-three to express 'more than one ' (2.4). At the age of 2.11 
 he was very fond of counting, but while he always got the first 
 four numbers right, he would skip over 5 and 7 ; and when asked 
 to count the apples in a bowl, he would say rapidly 1-2-3-4, even 
 if there were only three, or stop at 3, even if there were five or 
 more. At 3.4 he counted objects as far as 10 correctly, but might 
 easily pass from 11 to 13, and if the things to be counted were not 
 placed in a row he was apt to bungle by moving his fingers irregu- 
 larly from one to another. When he was 3.8 he answered the 
 question " What do 2 and 2 make ? " quite correctly, but next day 
 to the same question he answered " Three," though in a doubtful 
 tone of voice. This was in the spring, and next month I noted : 
 *' His sense of number is evidently weaker than it was : the open- 
 air life makes him forget this as well as all the verses he knew by 
 heart in the winter." When the next winter came his counting 
 exercises again amused him, but at first he was in a fix as before 
 about any numbers after 6, although he could repeat the numbers 
 till 10 without a mistake. He was fond of doing sums, and had 
 initiated this game himself by asking : " Mother, if I have two 
 apples and get one more, haven't I then three ?" His sense of 
 numbers was so abstract that he was caught by a tricky question : 
 " If you have two eyes and one nose, how man}^ ears have you ? " 
 He answered at once, " Three ! " A child thus seems to think in 
 
120 WORDS [CH. VI 
 
 abstract numbers, and as he learns his numbers as 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., 
 not as one pear, two pears, three pears, one may well be skeptical 
 about the justification for the recommendation made by many 
 pedagogues that at an early stage of the school-life a child should 
 learn to reckon with concrete things rather than with abstract 
 numbers, 
 
 A child will usually be familiar with the sound of higher 
 numerals long before it has any clear notion of Avhat the)'' mean. 
 Frans (3.6) said, " They are coming by a train that is called four 
 thirty-four," and (4.4) he asked, '" How much is tAvice hundred ? 
 Is that a thousand ? " 
 
 A child's ideas of time are necessarily extremely vague to 
 begin with ; it cannot connect verj^ clear or very definite notions 
 with the expressions it constantly hears others emplo}', such as 
 'last Sunday,' 'a week ago,' or 'next year.' The other day I 
 heard a little girl say : " This is where we sat nert time," evidently 
 meaning ' last time.' All observers of children mention the 
 frequent confusion of words like to -morrouy und yesterday, and the 
 linguist remembers that Gothic (jistradagis means ' to-morrow%' 
 though it corresponds formally with E. yesterday and G. gestern. 
 
 VI.— § 6. Various Difficulties. 
 
 Ver}?^ small children will often say up both when they want 
 to be taken up and when they want to be put down on the floor. 
 This generality means nothing else than that they have not yet 
 learnt the word down, and up to them simply is a means to obtain 
 a change of position. In the same way a German child used hut 
 auf for having the hat taken off as well as put on, but Meumann 
 rightly interprets this as an undifferentiated desire to have some- 
 thing happen with the hat. But even with somewhat more 
 advanced children there are curious confusions. 
 
 Hilary M. (2.0) is completely baffled by words of opposite mean- 
 ing. She will say, " Daddy, my pinny is too hot; I must Avarm it 
 at the fire." She goes to the fire and comes back, saying, " That's 
 better ; it's quite cool now." (The same confusion of hot and cold 
 was also reported in the case of one Danish and one German child ; 
 cf. also TracA', p. 134.) One morning while dressing she said, 
 " What a nice windy day," and an hour or two later, before 
 she had been out, " What a nasty windy day." She confuses 
 good and naughty completely. Tony F. (2.5) saA^s, " Turn the 
 dark out." 
 
 Sometimes a mere accidental likeness may prove too nnich 
 tor the child. When Hilary M. had a new doll (2.0) her mother 
 said to her: '' And is that your son ?" Hilary was puzzled, and 
 
§6] VARIOUS DIFFICULTIES 121 
 
 looking out of the window at the sun, said : " No, that's ray sun." 
 It was very difficult to set her out of this confusion.^ Her sister 
 Beth (3.8), looking at a sunset, said : " That's what you call a smi- 
 set ; where Ireland (her sister) is (at school) it's a summerset." 
 About the same time, when staying at Longwoocl Farm, she said : 
 " I suppose if the trees were cut down it would be Shortwood 
 Farm ? " 
 
 An English friend \mtes to me : '' I misunderstood the text, 
 ' And there fell from his eyes as it were scales,' as I knew the word 
 scales only in the sense ' balances.' The phenomenon seemed to 
 me a strange one, but I did not question that it occurred, any 
 more than I questioned other strange phenomena recounted in 
 the Bible. In the lines of the hymn — 
 
 Teach me to live that I may dread 
 The grave as httle as my bed — 
 
 I supposed that the words ' as little as my bed ' were descriptive 
 of my future grave, and that it was my duty according to the 
 hymn to fear the grave." 
 
 Words with several meanings may cause children much diffi- 
 culty. A Somerset child said, " Moses was not a good boy, and 
 his mother smacked 'un and smacked 'un and smacked 'un till 
 she couldn't do it no more, and then she put 'un in the ark of 
 bulrushes."' This puzzled the teacher till he looked at the passage 
 in Exodus : " And when she could hide him no longer, she laid 
 him in an ark of bulrushes." Here, of course, we have technically 
 two different words hide ; but to the child the difficulty is 
 practically as great where we have what is called one and the 
 same word with two distinct meanings, or when a word is used 
 figuratively. 
 
 The word ' cliild ' means two different things, which in some 
 languages are expressed by two distinct words. I remember my 
 own astonishment at the age of nine when I heard my godmother 
 talk of her children. " But you have no children." " Yes, Clara 
 and Eliza." I knew them, of course, but they were grown up. 
 
 Take again the word old. A boy loiew that he was three years, 
 but could not be induced to say ' three years old ' ; no, he is three 
 years new, and his father too is new, as distinct from his grand- 
 mother, who he Icnows is old. A child asked, " Why have 
 grand dukes and grand pianos got the same name ? " (Glen- 
 conner, p. 21). 
 
 When Frans was told (4.4) " Your eyes are running," he was 
 much astonished, and asked, " Are they running away ? " 
 
 1 Cf. below on the disappearance of the word 807i because it sounds like 
 3un (Ch. XV. § 7). 
 
122 WORDS [CH. VI 
 
 Sometimes a child knows a word first in some secondary sense. 
 When a country child first came to Copenhagen and saw a soldier, 
 he said, " There is a tin-soldier " (2.0). Stern has a story about 
 his daughter who was taken to the country and wished to pat 
 the backs of the pigs, but was checked with the words, " Pigs 
 alwaj's lie in dirt," when she was suddenly struck with a new idea ; 
 "Ah, that is why they are called pigs, because they are so dirty : 
 but what would people call them if thej' didn't lie in the dirt ? " 
 History repeats itself : only the other day a teacher wrote to me 
 that one of his pupils had begun his essay with the words : '" Pigs 
 are rightly called thus, for they are such swine." 
 
 Words of similar sound are apt to be confused. Some children 
 have had trouble till mature years with soldier and shoulder, 
 hassock and cassock, diary and dairy. Lady Glenconner WTites : 
 "They almost invariably say 'lemon' [for melon], and if they 
 make an effort to be more correct they still mispronounce it, 
 • Don't say melling.' ' Very well, then, mellum.' " Among other 
 confusions mentioned in her book I may quote Portugal for ' pur- 
 gatory,' I^ng Solomon's three hundred Columbines, David and 
 his great friend Johnson, Cain and Mabel — all of them shoeing 
 how words from spheres beyond the ordinary ken of children are 
 assimilated to more familiar ones. 
 
 Schuchardt has a story of a little coloured bo}^ in the West 
 Indies who said, " It's three hot in this room " : he had heard too= 
 two and literally wanted to 'go one better.' According to Mr. 
 James Payne, a boy for years substituted for the words ' Hallowed 
 be Thy name ' ' Harold be Th}- name.' Many children imagine 
 that there is a i^ole to mark where the North Pole is, and even 
 (like Helen Keller) that polar bears climb the Pole. 
 
 Tliis leads us naturally to what linguists call ' popular ety- 
 mology " — wliich is very frequent with childi'en in all countries. 
 I give a few examples from books. A four-year-old boy had heard 
 several times about his nurse's neuralgia, and finally said : "I 
 don't think it's new ralgia, I call it old ralgia." In this way 
 anchovies are made into hamchotnes, whirlwind into tvorldwind, and 
 holiday into hollorday, a day to holloa. Professor Sturtevant 
 writes : A boy of six or seven had frequently had his ear in-igated ; 
 when similar treatment was applied to his noee, be said that he 
 had been ' nosigated '— he had evidently given his own inter- 
 pretation to the first syllable of irrigate. 
 
 There is an element of ' popular etymology ' in the following 
 joke which was made by one of the Glenconner children when 
 four years old : "I suppose you wag along in the wagonette, the 
 landau lands you at the door, and you sweep off in the brougham " 
 (pronounced broom). 
 
§ 7] SHIFTERS 128 
 
 VI.— § 7. Shifters. 
 
 A class of words which presents grave difficulty to children 
 are those whose meaning differs according to the situation, so 
 that the child hears them now applied to one thing and now to 
 another. That was the case with words like ' father,' and 
 'mother.' Another such word is 'enemy.' When Frans (4.5) 
 played a war-game with Eggert, he could not get it into his head 
 that he was Eggert's enemy : no, it was only Eggert who was the 
 enemy. A stronger case still is ' home.' When a child was asked 
 if his grandmother had been at home, and answered : " No, grand- 
 mother was at grandfather's," it is clear that for him ' at home ' 
 meant merely ' at my home.' Such words may be called shifters. 
 When Frans (3.6) heard it said that ' the one ' (glove) was as 
 good as ' the other,' he asked, "Which is the one, and which is the 
 other ? " — a question not easy to answer. 
 
 The most important class of shifters are the personal pro- 
 nouns. The child hears the word ' I ' meaning ' Father,' then 
 again meaning ' Mother,' then again ' Uncle Peter,' and so on 
 unendingly in the most confusing manner. Many people realize 
 the difficulty thus presented to the child, and to obviate it will 
 speak of themselves in the third person as ' Father ' or ' Grannie ' 
 or ' Mary,' and instead gf saying ' you ' to the child, speak of it 
 by its name. The child's understanding of what is said is thus 
 facilitated for the moment : but on the other hand the child in 
 this way hears these little words less frequently and is slower in 
 mastering them. 
 
 If some children soon learn to say ' I ' while others speak 
 of themselves by their name, the difference is not entirely due 
 to the different mental powers of the children, but must be 
 largely attributed to their elders' habit of addressing them by 
 their name or by the pronouns. But Germans w^ould not be 
 Germans, and philosophers would not be philosophers, if they did 
 not make the most of the child's use of 'I,' in which they see 
 the first sign of self -consciousness. The elder Fichte, we are told, 
 used to celebrate not his son's birthday, but the day on which he 
 first spoke of himself as 'I.' The sober truth is, I take it, that 
 a boy who speaks of himself as ' Jack ' can have just as full and 
 strong a perception of himself as opposed to the rest of the world 
 as one who has learnt the little linguistic trick of saying 'I.' 
 But this does not suit some of the great psychologists, as seen 
 from the following quotation : " The child uses no pronouns ; it 
 speaks of itself in the third person, because it has no idea of its 
 ' I ' (Ego) nor of its ' Not-I,' because it knows nothing of itself 
 nor of others." 
 
124 WORDS [CH. VI 
 
 It is not an uncommon case of confusion for a child to use 
 ' you ' and ' your ' instead of ' I,' ' me,' and ' mine.' The child 
 has noticed that ' will you have ? ' means ' will Jack have ? ' so 
 that he looks on ' you ' as synonymous with his o^^^l name. In 
 some children this confusion may last for some months. It is 
 in some cases connected with an inverted word-order, ' do you ' 
 meaning 'I do' — an instance of ' echoism ' (see below). Some- 
 times he will introduce a further complication by using the per- 
 sonal pronoun of the third person, as though he had started the 
 sentence with ' Jack ' — then ' you have his coat ' means ' I have 
 my coat.' He may even speak of the person addressed as 'I.' 
 ' Will I tell a story ? ' = ' Will you tell a story ? ' Frans was 
 liable to use these confused forms between the ages of two and 
 two and a-half, and I had to quicken his acquaintance with 
 the right usage by refusing to understand him when he used 
 the wrong. Beth M. (2.6) was very jealous about her elder 
 sister touching any of her property, and if the latter sat on 
 her chair, she would shriek out : " That's your chair ; that's 
 your chair." 
 
 The forms / and me are a common source of difficulty to 
 English children. Both Tony E. (2.7 to 3.0) and Hilary M. (2.0) 
 use my for me ; it is apparently a kind of blending of me and / ; 
 e.g. " Give Hilary medicine, make my better," " Maggy is looking 
 at my," " Give it my." See also O'Shea, p. 81 : ' my want to do 
 this or that ; my feel bad ; that is my pencil ; take my to bed.' 
 
 His and her are difficult to distinguish : " An ill ladj', his legs 
 were bad" (Tony E., 3.3). 
 
 C. M. L. (about the end of her second year) constantly' used 
 ivour and ivours for our and ours, the connexion being with ive, as 
 ' your ' with you. In exactly the same way many Danish children 
 say vos for os on account of vi. But all this really falls imdcr our . 
 next chapter. 
 
 VI.— § 8. Extent of Vocabulary. 
 
 The number of words which the child has at command is con- 
 stantly increasing, but not uniformly, as the increase is affected 
 by the child's health and the new experiences which life presents 
 to him. In the beginning it is tolerably easy to count the words 
 the child uses ; later it becomes more difficult, as there are times 
 when his command of speech grows with astonishing rapidity. 
 There is great difference between individual children. Statistics 
 have often been given of the extent of a child's vocabulary at 
 different ages, or of the results of comparing the vocabularies of 
 a number of children. 
 
§8] EXTENT OF VOCABULARY 125 
 
 All American child who was closely observed by his mother, 
 Mrs. Winfield S. Hall, had in the tenth month 3 words, in the 
 eleventh 12, in the twelfth 24, in the thirteenth 38, in the fourteenth 
 48, in the fifteenth 106, in the sixteenth 199, and in the seventeenth 
 232 words {Child Study Monthly, March 1897). During the first 
 month after the same boy was six years old, slips of paper and 
 pencils were distributed over the house and practically every- 
 thing which the child said was written down. After two or three 
 days these were collected and the words were put under their 
 respective letters in a book kept for that purpose. New sets of 
 papers were put in their places and other lists made. In addition 
 to this, the record of his life during the past year was examined 
 and all of his words not already listed were added. In this way 
 his summer vocabulaiy was obtained ; conversations on certain 
 topics were also introduced to give him an opportunity to use 
 words relating to such topics. The list is printed in the Journal 
 of Childhood and Adolescence, January 1902, and is well worth 
 looking through. It contains 2,688 words, apart from proper 
 names and numerals. No doubt the child was really in command 
 of words beyond that total. 
 
 This list perhaps is exceptional on account of the care with 
 which it was compiled, but as a rule I am afraid that it is not wise 
 to attach much importance to these tables of statistics. One is 
 generally left in the dark whether the words counted are those 
 that the child has understood, or those that it has actually used 
 — two entirely different things. The passive or receptive know- 
 ledge of a language always goes far beyond the active or 
 productive. 
 
 One also gets the impression that the observers have often 
 counted up words without realizing the difficulties involved. What 
 is to be counted as a word ? Are /, me, we, us one word or four ? 
 Is teacup a new word for a child who already knows tea and cwp ? 
 And so for all compounds. Is box (= a place at a theatre) the same 
 word as box (= workbox) ? Ai'e the two thats in ' that man that you 
 see ' two words or one ? It is clear that the process of counting 
 involves so much that is arbitrary and uncertain that very little 
 can be built on the statistics arrived at. 
 
 It is more interesting perhaps to determine what words at 
 a given age a child does not know, or rather does not understand 
 when he hears them or when they occur in his reading. I have 
 myself collected such lists, and others have been given me by 
 teachers, who have been astonished at words which their classes 
 did not understand. A teacher can never be too cautious about 
 assuming linguistic knowledge in his pupils — and this applies not 
 only to foreign words, about wliich all teachers are on the alert, 
 
12G WORDS [oil. VI 
 
 but also to what seem to be quite everyday words of the language 
 of the country. 
 
 In connexion with the growth of vocabulary one may ask 
 how many words are possessed by the average grown-up man ? 
 Max Miiller in his Lectures stated on the authority of an English 
 clergyman that an English farm labourer has only about three 
 hundred words at command. This is the most utter balderdash, 
 but nevertheless it has often been repeated, even by such an 
 authority on psychology as Wundt. A Danish boy can easily 
 learn seven hundred English words in the first year of his study 
 of the language — and are we to believe that a grown Englishman, 
 even of the lowest class, has no greater stock than such a beginner ? 
 If you go through the list of 2,000 to 3,000 words used by the Ameri- 
 can boy of six referred to above, you will easily convince yourself 
 that they would far from suffice for the rudest labourer. A Swedish 
 dialectologist, after a minute investigation, found that the vocabu- 
 lary of Swedish peasants amounted to at least 26,000 words, 
 and his view has been confirmed by other investigators. This 
 conclusion is not invalidated by the fact that Shakespeare in his 
 works uses only about 20,000 words and IMilton in his poems 
 only about 8,000. It is easy to see what a vast number of words 
 of daily life are seldom or never required by a poet, especially 
 a poet like Milton, whose works are on elevated subjects. The 
 words used by Zola or Kipling or Jack London would no doubt 
 far exceed those used by Shakespeare and Milton. ^ 
 
 VI. — §9. Summary. 
 
 To sum up, then. There are only very few words that are 
 explained to the child, and so long as it is quite small it will not 
 even understand the explanations that might be given. Some it 
 learns because, when the word is used, the object is at the same 
 time pointed at, but most words it can only learn by drawing 
 conclusions about their meaning from the situation in which they 
 arise or from the context in which they are used. These con- 
 clusions, however, are very uncertain, or they may be correct for 
 the particular occasion and not hold good on some other, to the 
 child's mind quite similar, occasion. Grown-up people are in the 
 same position with regard to words they do not know, but which 
 they come across in a book or newspaper, e.g. demise. The mean- 
 ings of many words are at the same time extraordinarily vague 
 and yet so strictly limited (at least in some respects) that the least 
 deviation is felt as a mistake. Moreover, the child often learns 
 a secondary or figurative meaning of a word before its simple 
 * Cf. the fuller treatment of this question in GS ch. ix. 
 
§ 9] SUMMARY 127 
 
 meaning. But gradually a high degree of accuracy is obtained, 
 the fittest meanings surviving— that is (in this connexion) those 
 that agree best with those of the surrounding society. And thus 
 the individual is merged in society, and the social character of 
 language asserts itself through the elimination of everything that 
 is the exclusive property of one person only. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 GRAMMAR 
 
 § 1. Introductory. § 2. Substantives and Adjectives. § 3. Verbs. § 4. De- 
 grees of Consciousness. § 5. Word-formation. § 6. Word-division. 
 § 7. Sentences. § 8. Negation and Question. § 9. Prepositions and 
 Idioms. 
 
 Vn. — § 1. Introductory. 
 
 To learn a language it is not enough to know so many words. 
 They must be connected according to the particular laws of the 
 particular language. No one tells the child that the plural of 
 ' hand ' is hands, of ' foot ' feet, of ' man ' men, or that the past 
 of ' am ' is ivas, of ' love ' loved ; it is not informed when to say 
 he and when him, or in what order words must stand. How can 
 the little fellow learn all this, Avhich when set forth in a grammar 
 fills many pages and can only be explained by help of many 
 learned words ? 
 
 Many people will say it comes by ' instinct,' as if ' instinct ' 
 were not one of those fine words which are chiefly used to cover 
 over what is not understood, because it says so precious little and 
 seems to say so precious much. But when other people, using a 
 more everyday expression, say that it all ' comes quite of itself,' 
 I must strongly demur : so far is it from ' coming of itself ' that 
 it demands extraordinary labour on the child's part. The count- 
 less grammatical mistakes made by a child in its early j^ears are* 
 a tell-tale proof of the difficulty which this side of language presents 
 to him — especially, of course, on account of the imsystematic 
 character of our flexions and the irregularity of its so-called 
 ' rules ' of syntax. 
 
 ( At first each word has only one form for the cliild, but he 
 poon discovers that growTi-up people use many forms which 
 Resemble one another in different connexions, and he gets a sense 
 of the purport of these forms, so as to be able to imitate them 
 himself or even develop similar forms of his own. These latter 
 fprms are what linguists call analogy-formations : by analogy 
 with ' Jack's hat ' and ' father's hat ' the child invents such as 
 • uncle's hat ' and ' Charlie's hat ' — and inasmuch as these forms 
 arc ' correct,* no one can say on hearing them whether the child 
 
 198 
 
§ 1] INTRODUCTORY 129 
 
 has really invented them or has first heard them used by others. 
 It is just on account of the fact that the forms developed on the 
 spur of the moment by each individual are in the vast majority 
 of instances perfectly identical with those used already by other 
 people, that the principle of analogy comes to have such paramount 
 importance in the life of language, for we are all thereby driven 
 to apply it unhesitatingly to all those instances in which we have 
 no ready-made form handy : without being conscious of it, each 
 of us thus now and then really creates something never heard 
 before by us or anybody else. 
 
 VII. — § 2. Substantives and Adjectives. 
 
 The -s of the possessive is so regular in English that it is not 
 difficult for the child to attach it to all words as soon as the 
 character of the termination has dawned upon him. But at first 
 there is a time with many children in which words are put together 
 without change, so that ' Mother hat ' stands for ' Mother's hat ' ; 
 cf. also sentences like " Baby want baby milk." 
 
 After the 5-form has been learnt, it is occasionally attached to 
 pronouns, as ■i/ou's for ' your,' or more rarely 7'<s or me's for ' my.* 
 
 The -5 is now in English added freely to whole groups of words, 
 as in the King of England's power, where the old construction was 
 the King's jjoioer of England, and in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays 
 (see on the historical development of this group genitive my 
 ChE iii.). In Danish we have exactly the same construction, 
 and Danish children will very frequently extend it, placing the 
 -s at the end of a whole interrogative sentence, e.g., ' Hvem er 
 det da's ? ' (as if in English, ' Who is it then's,' instead of ' Whose 
 is it then ? '). Dr. H. Bradley once wrote to me : " One of your 
 samples of children's Danish is an exact parallel to a bit of child's 
 English that I noted long ago. My son, when a little boy, used 
 to say ' Who is that-'s ' (with a pause before the s) for ' Whom 
 does that belong to ? ' " 
 
 Irregular plurals are often regularized, gooses for ' geese,' 
 tooths, knifes, etc O'Shea mentions one child who inversely 
 formed the plural chieves for chiefs on the analogy of thieves. 
 
 Sometimes the child becomes acquainted with the plural form 
 first, and from it forms a singular. I have noticed this several 
 times with Danish children, who had heard the irregular plural 
 k;(er, ' cows,' and then would say en kef instead of en ko (while 
 others from the singular ko form a regular plural koer). French 
 children will say un chevau instead of un cheval. 
 
 In the comparison of adjectives analogy-formations are 
 frequent vnth. all children, e.g. the littlest, littler, goodest, baddest, 
 
 9 
 
180 GRAMMAR [ch. vii 
 
 splendider, etc. One child is reported as saying quicklier, another 
 as saying qiiickerly, instead of the received more qtiickly. A curious 
 fonaation is " P'raps it was John, but p'rapser it was Marj'." 
 
 O'Shea (p. 108) notices a period of transition when the child 
 may use the analogical form at one moment and the traditional 
 one the next. Thus 8. (4.0) will say better perhaps five times 
 where he says gooder once, but in times of excitement he will 
 revert to the latter form. 
 
 Vn.— § 3. Verbs. 
 
 The child at first tends to treat all verbs on the analogy of 
 love, loved, loved, or kiss, kissed, kissed, thus catched, buyed, frowed 
 for ' caught, bought, threw or thrown,' etc., but gradually it learns 
 the irregular forms, though in the beginning ^^ith a good deal of 
 hesitation and confusion, as done for ' did,' Imnged for ' hung,' 
 etc. O'Shea gives among other sentences (p. 94) : "I drunked 
 my milk." " Budd sivunged on the rings." " Grandpa boughted 
 me a ring." " I caughted- him." " Aunt Ket earned to-day." 
 " He gaved it to me " — in all of which the irregular form has been 
 supplemented \vith the regular ending. 
 
 A little Danish incident may be thus rendered in English. 
 The child (4.G): "I have seed a chestnut." ''Where have you 
 seen it ? " He : "I seen it in the garden." This shows the 
 influence of the form last heard. 
 
 I once heard a French child say "Ha pleuvy " for ' plu ' from 
 ' pleuvoir.' Other analogical forms are prendu for ' pris ' ; a^sire 
 for ' asseoir ' (from the participle assis), se taiser for ' se taire ' 
 (from the frequent injmiction taisez-vous). Similar formations are 
 frequent in all countries. 
 
 vn. — §4. Degrees of Consciousness. 
 
 Do the little brains think about these different forms and their 
 uses ? Or is the learning of language performed as unconsciously 
 as the circulation of the blood or the process of digestion ? Clearly 
 they do not think about grammatical forms in the way piu'sued 
 in grammar-lessons, with all the forms of the same word arranged 
 side by side of one another, Mith rules and exceptions. Still there 
 is much to lead us to believe that the thing does not go of itself 
 without some thinking over. The fact that in lat^r years we 
 speak our language without knowing how we do it, the right words 
 and phrases coming to us no one knows how or whence, is no 
 proof that it was always so. We ride a bicycle without giving 
 a thought to the machine, look around us, talk with a friend, 
 
§4] DEGREES OF CONSCIOUSNESS 181 
 
 etc., and yet there was a time when every movement had to be 
 mastered by slow and painful efforts. There would be nothing 
 strange in supposing that it is the same with the acquisition of 
 language. 
 
 Of course, it would be idle to ask children straight out if they 
 think about these things, and what they think. But now and 
 then one notices something which shows that at an early age 
 they think about points of grammar a good deal. When Frans 
 was 2.9, he lay in bed not kno^nng that anyone was in the next 
 room, and he was heard to say quite plainlj-^ : " Sma haender 
 hedder det — lille hand — sma haender — lille haender, nse sma 
 haender." {" They are called small hands — little hand — small 
 hands — little hands, no, small hands " : in Danish lille is not used 
 with a plural noim.) Similar things have been related to me by 
 other parents, one child, for instance, practising plural forms 
 while turning over the leaves of a picture-book, and another one, 
 who was corrected for saving yiak instead of nikkede (' nodded '), 
 immediately retorted " Stikker stak, nikker nak," thus showing 
 on what analogy he had formed the new preterit. Frequently 
 childi-en, after giving a form which their own ears tell them is 
 wrong, at once correct it : 'I sticked it in — I stuck it in.' 
 
 A German child, not yet two, said : '" Papa, hast du mir 
 was mitgebrino:t — s;ebrungen — gebracht ? " almost at a breath 
 (Gabelentz), and another (2.5) said hausin, but then hesitated 
 and added : " Man kann auch hauser sagen " (Meringer), 
 
 Vn.— §5. Word-formation. 
 
 In the forming of words the child's brain is just as active. 
 In many cases, again, it will be impossible to distinguish between 
 what the child has heard and merely copied and what it has itself 
 fashioned to a given pattern. If a child, for example, uses the 
 word ' kindness,' it is probable that he has heard it before, but 
 it is not certain, because he might equally' well have formed the 
 word himself. If, however, we hear him say ' kindhood,' or 
 ' kindship,' or ' «adeness,' " broadness,' ' stupidness,' wc know 
 for certain that he has made the word up himself, because the 
 resultant differs from the form used in the language he hears 
 aroimd him. A child who does not know the word ' spade ' may 
 call the tool a digger ; he may speak of a lamp as a shine. He 
 may say it sans when the sun is shining (cf . it rains), or ask his 
 mother to sauce his pudding. It is quite natiu-al that the enormous 
 number of nouns and verbs of exactly the same form in English 
 {blossom, care, drink, end, fight, fish, ape, hand, dress, etc.) should 
 induce children to make new verbs according to the same pattern ; 
 
132 GRAMMAR [cii. ^^I 
 
 I quote a few of the examples given by O'Shea : " I am going to 
 basket these apples." " I pailed him out " (took a turtle out of 
 a washtub with a pail). " I needled him " (put a needle through 
 a fly). 
 
 Other words are formed b}'' means of derivative endings, as 
 sorrified, lessoner (O'Shea 32), flyahle (able to fly, Glenconner 3) ; 
 " This tooth ought to come out, because it is crookening the others " 
 (a ten -year-old, told me by Professor Ayres). Compound nouns, 
 too, may be freely formed, such as wind-ship, eye-curtain (O'Shea), 
 a fun-copy of Romeo and Juliet (travesty, Glenconner 19). 
 Bryan L. (ab. 5) said springklers for chrysalises (' because they 
 wake up in the spring '). 
 
 Sometimes a child will make up a new word through ' blend- 
 ing ' two, as when Hilary M. (1.8 to 2) spoke of rubbish = th^ 
 rubhQV to -polish the boots, or of the backet, from bat and racquet. 
 Beth M. (2.0) used breakolate, from fereaHast and chocolate, and 
 Chally as a child's name, a compound of two sisters, Chanty and 
 Sally. 
 
 VII.— §6. Word-division. 
 
 We are so accustomed to see sentences in waiting or print 
 with a little space left after each word, that we have got alto- 
 gether WTong conceptions of language as it is spoken. Here words 
 follow one another without the least pause till the speaker 
 hesitates for a word or has come to the end of what he has to 
 saJ^ ' Not at all ' sounds like ' not a tall.' It therefore requires 
 in many cases a great deal of comparison and analysis on the 
 part of the child to find out Avhat is one and what two or three 
 words. We have seen before that the question ' How big is the 
 boy ? ' is to the child a single expression, beyond his powers of 
 analysis, and to a much later age it is the same \vith other phrases. 
 The child, then, may make false divisions, and either treat a group 
 of words as one word or one word as a group of words. A girl 
 (2 . 6) used the term ' Tanobijeu ' whenever she wished her 
 younger brother to get out of her way. Her parents finall}'^ dis- 
 covered that she had caught up and shortened a phrase that 
 some older children had used — ' 'Tend to j^our own business ' 
 (O'Shea). 
 
 A child, addressing her cousin as ' Aunt Katie,' was told " I 
 am not Aunt Katie, I am merely Katie." Next day she said : 
 " Good-morning, Aunt merelj^-Katie " (translated). A child who 
 had been praised with the words, ' You are a good boy,' said to 
 his mother, "You're a good boy, mother" (2.8). 
 
 Cecil H. (4.0) came back from a party and said that she had 
 been given something very nice to eat. " What was it ? " 
 
§ 6] WORD-DIVISION 133 
 
 " Rats." " No, no." " Well, it was mice then." She had been 
 asked if she would have ' some-ice,' and had taken it to be ' some 
 mice.' S. L. (2.6) constantly used ^ ababana' for 'banana'; 
 the form seems to have come from the question " Will you 
 have a banana ? " but was used in such a sentence as " May I 
 have an ababana ? " Children will often say napple for apple 
 through a misdivision of an-apple, and normous for enormotts ; 
 cf. Ch. X § 2. 
 
 A few examples may be added from children's speech in other 
 countries. Ronjat's child said nesey for ' echelle,' starting 
 from u'ne echelle ; Grammont's child said U7i tarbre, starting 
 
 from cet arbre, and ce nos for ' cet os,' from vn os ; a German child 
 said motel for ' hotel,' starting from the combination ' im (h) otel ' 
 
 (Stern). Many German children say arrhoe, because they take 
 the first syllable of ' diarrhoe ' as the feminine article. A Dutch 
 child heard the phrase ' 'k weet 't niet ' (' I don't know ') , and said 
 " Papa, hij kweet 't niet " (Van Ginneken). A Danish child heard 
 liis father say, '" Jeg skal op i ministeriet " ('' I'm going to the Govern- 
 ment office "), and took the fii'st syllable as min (my) ; consequently 
 he asked, " Skal du i dinisteriet ? " A French child was told that 
 they expected Munkacsy (the celebrated painter, in French pro- 
 nounced as Mon-), and asked his aunt : " Est-ce que ton Kdcsy 
 ne viendra pas ? " Antoinette K. (7.), in reply to " C'est bien, je 
 te felicite," said, " Eh bien, moi je ne te fais pas licite." 
 
 The German ' Ich habe antgewortet ' is obviously on the analogy 
 of angenommen, etc. (Meringer). Danish children not unfrequently 
 take the verb telefonere as two words, and in the interrogative 
 form will place the personal pronoun in the middle of it, ' Tele 
 hun fonerer ? ' (' Does she telephone V) A girl asked to see ele 
 mer fant (as if in English she had said ' ele more phant '). Cf. 
 ' Give me more Jiundier-cap ' for ' Give me a greater handicap ' 
 — in a foot-race (O'Shea 108). 
 
 Vn.— §7. Sentences. 
 
 In the first period the child knows nothing of grammar : it 
 does not connect words together, far less form sentences, but each 
 word stands by itself. ' Up ' means what we should express by 
 a whole sentence, ' I want to get up,' or ' Lift me up ' ; ' Hat ' 
 means ' Put on my hat,' or ' I want to put my hat on,' or ' I have 
 my hat on,' or ' Mamma has a new hat on ' ; ' Father ' can be 
 either ' Here comes Father,' or ' This is Father,' or ' He is called 
 Father,' or ' I want Father to come to me,' or ' I want this or 
 that from Father.' This particular group of sounds is vaguely 
 associated with the mental pictm-e of the person in question, 
 
184 GRAMMAR [ch. vii 
 
 and is uttered at the sight of him or at the mere wish to see him 
 or something else in connexion with him. 
 
 When we say that such a word means what we should express 
 by a whole sentence, this does not amount to saying that the 
 child's ' Up ' is a sentence, or a sentence-word, as many of those 
 who have wiitten about these questions have said. We might 
 just as well assert that clapping our hands is a sentence, because 
 it expresses the same idea (or the same frame of mind) that is 
 otherwise expressed by the whole sentence ' This is splendid.' 
 The word ' sentence ' presupposes a certain grammatical structure, 
 which is wanting in the child's utterance. 
 
 Many investigators have asserted that the child's first utter- 
 ances are not means of imparting information, but always an 
 expression of the child's wishes and requirements. This is cer- 
 tainly somewhat of an exaggeration, since the child quite clearly 
 can make known its joy at seeing a hat or a plaything, or at 
 merely being able to recognize it and remember the word for it ; 
 but the statement still contains a great deal of truth, for without 
 strong feelings a child would not say much, and it is a great 
 stimulus to talk that he very soon discovers that he gets his wishes 
 fulfilled more easily when he makes them known by means of 
 certain sounds. 
 
 Frans (1.7) was accustomed to express his longings in general 
 by help of a long m with rising tone, while at the same time 
 stretching out his hand towards the particular thing that he 
 longed for. This he did, for example, at dinner, when he wanted 
 water. One day his mother said, " Now see if you can say vand 
 (water)," and at once he said what was an approach to the word, 
 and was delighted at getting something to di-ink by that means. 
 A moment later he repeated what he had said, and was inexpressibly 
 delighted to have found the password which at once brought him 
 something to drink. This was repeated several times. Next day, 
 when his father was pouring out water for himself, the boy again 
 said ' van,' ' van,' and was duly rewarded. He had not heard 
 the word during the intervening twenty-four hours, and nothing 
 had been done to remind him of it. After some repetitions (for 
 he only got a few di-ops at a time) he pronounced the word for 
 the first time quite correctly. The daj' after, the same thing 
 occurred ; the word was never heard but at dinner. When he 
 became rather a nuisance with his constant cries for water, his 
 mother said : " Say please " — and immediately came his " Bebe 
 vand " (" Water, please ") — his first attempt to put two words 
 together. 
 
 Later — in this formless period — the child puts more and more 
 words together, often in quite haphazard order : ' My go snow ' 
 
§ 7] SENTENCES 185 
 
 (I want to go out into the snow'), etc. A Danish child of 2.1 
 said the Danish words (imperfectly pronounced, of course) corre- 
 sponding to '"Oh papa lamp mother boom," when his mother had 
 struck his father's lamp with a bang. Another child said " Papa 
 hen corn cap " when he saw his father give corn to the hens out 
 of his cap. 
 
 When Frans was 1 . 10, passing a post-office (which Danes call 
 ' posthouse '), he said of his own accord the Danish words for 
 ' post, house, bring, letter ' (a pause between the successive words) 
 — I suppose that the day before he had heard a sentence in which 
 these words occurred. In the same month, when he had thrown 
 a ball a long way, he said what would be in English ' dat was 
 good.' This was not a sentence which he had put together for 
 himself, but a mere repetition of what had been said to him, clearly 
 conceived as a whole, and equivalent to ' bravo.' Sentences of 
 this kind, however, though taken as units, prepare the way for 
 the understanding of the words ' that ' and ' was ' when they turn 
 up in other connexions. 
 
 One thing which plays a great role in children's acquisition 
 of language, and especially in their early attempts to form sen- 
 tences, is Echoism : the fact that children echo what is said to 
 them. When one is learning a foreign language, it is an excellent 
 method to try to imitate to oneself in silence every sentence which 
 one hears spoken by a native. By that means the turns of phrases, 
 the order of words, the intonation of the sentence are firmly fixed 
 in the memory — so that they can be recalled when required, or 
 rather recur to one quite spontaneously without an effort. What 
 the grown man does of conscious purpose our childi'en to a large 
 extent do without a thought — that is, they repeat aloud what 
 they have just heard, either the whole, if it is a very short sentence, 
 or more commonly the conclusion, as much of it as they can retain 
 in their short memories. The result is a matter of chance — it 
 need not always have a meaning or consist of entu'e words. Much, 
 clearly, is repeated without being understood, much, again, without 
 being more than half understood. Take, for example (translated) : 
 
 Shall I carry you ? — Frans (1.9) : Carry you. 
 
 Shall Mother carry Frans ? — Carry Frans. 
 
 The sky is so blue. — So boo. 
 
 I shall take an umbrella. — Take rella. 
 
 Though this feature in a child's mental history has been often 
 noticed, no one seems to have seen its full significance. One of 
 the acutest observers (Meixmann, p. 28) even says that it has no 
 importance in the development of the child's speech. On the 
 contrary, I think that Echoism exj)lains very much indeed. First 
 let us bear in mmd the mutilated forms of words which a child 
 
13G GRAMMAR [ch. vii 
 
 uses : ^chiiie for machine, 'gar for cigar, Trix for Beatrix, etc. 
 Then a child's frequent use of an indirect form of question rather 
 than direct, ' Why you smoke, Father ? ' which can hardly be 
 explained except as an echo of sentences like ' Tell me why you 
 smoke.' This plays a greater role in Danish than in English, 
 and the corresponding form of the sentence has been frequently 
 remarked by Danish parents. Another feature which is nearlj' 
 constant with Danish children at the age when echoing is habitual 
 is the inverted word order : this is used after an initial adverb 
 {nu kommer hun, etc.), but the child will use it in all cases {kommer 
 hun, etc.). Further, the extremely frequent use of the infinitive, 
 because the child hears it towards the end of a sentence, where 
 it is dependent on a preceding can, or may, or must. ' Not eat 
 that ' is a child's echo of ' You mustn't eat that.' In German 
 this has become the ordinary form of official order : " Nicht 
 hinauslehnen " ("Do not lean out of the window"). 
 
 VII. — §8. Negation and Question. 
 
 Most children learn to say ' no ' before they can say ' j^es ' 
 — simply because negation is a stronger expression of feeling than 
 affirmation. Many little children use nenenene (short i) as a 
 natural expression of fretfulness and discomfort. It is perhaps 
 so natural that it need not be learnt : there is good reason for 
 the fact that in so many languages words of negation begin with 
 n (or m). Sometimes the n is heard without a vowel : it is only 
 the gesture of ' turning up one's nose ' made audible. 
 
 At first the child does not express what it is that it does 
 not want — it merely puts it away with its hand, pushes away, 
 for example, what is too hot for it. But when it begins to express 
 in words what it is that it will not have, it does so often in the 
 form ' Bread no,' often with a pause between the words, as two 
 separate utterances, as when we might say, in our fuller forms of 
 expression : ' Do you offer me bread ? I won't hear of it.' So 
 with verbs : ' I sleep no.' Thus with many Danish children, 
 and I find the same phenomenon mentioned Avith regard to children 
 of different nations. Tracy saj's (p. 136) : " Negation was expressed 
 by an affirmative sentence, with an emphatic no tacked on at 
 the end, exactly as the deaf-mutes do." The blind-deaf Helen 
 Keller, when she felt her little sister's mouth and her mother 
 spelt ' teeth ' to her, answered : " Baby teeth — no, baby eat — 
 no," i.e., bab}^ cannot eat because she has no teeth. In the same 
 way, in German, ' Stul nei nei — schossel,' i.e., I won't sit on the 
 chair, but in your lap, and in French, ' Papa abeie ato non, iaian 
 abeie non,' i.e., Papa n'est pas encore habille, Suzanne n'est pas 
 
§8] NEGATION AND QUESTION 137 
 
 habillee (Stern, 189, 203). It seems thus that this mode of expres- 
 sion will crop up everywhere as an emphatic negation. 
 
 Interrogative sentences come generally rather early — it would 
 be better to say questions, because at ftrst they do not take the 
 form of interrogative sentences, the interrogation being expressed 
 by bearing, look or gesture : when it begins to be expressed by 
 intonation we are on the way to question expressed in speech. 
 Some of the earliest questions have to do with place : ' Where 
 is . . . ? ' The child very often hears such sentences as ' Where 
 is its little nose ? ' which ai-e not really meant as questions ; we 
 may also remark that questions of this type are of great practical 
 importance for the little thing, who soon uses them to beg for 
 something which has been taken away from him or is out of his 
 reach. Other early questions are ' What's that ? ' and ' Who ? ' 
 
 Later — generally, it would seem, at the close of the third year 
 — questions with ' why ' crop up : these are of the utmost impor- 
 tance for the child's understanding of the whole world and its 
 manifold occurrences, and, however tiresome they may be when 
 they come in long strings, no one who wishes well to his child 
 will venture to discourage them. Questions about time, such as 
 ' When ? How long ? ' appear much later, owing to the child's 
 difficulty in acqumng exact ideas about time. 
 
 Children often find a difficulty in double questions, and when 
 asked ' Will you have bro-wTi bread or white ? ' merely answer 
 the last word with ' Yes.' So in reply to ' Is that red or yellow ? ' 
 'Yes' means 'yellow' (taken from a child of 4.11). I think 
 this is an instance of the short memories of children, who have 
 already at the end of the question forgotten the beginning, but 
 Professor Mawer thinks that the real difficulty here is in making 
 a choice : they cannot decide between alternatives : usually they 
 are silent, and if they say ' Yes ' it only means that they do not 
 want to go without both or feel that they must say something. 
 
 Vn.— § 9. Prepositions and Idioms. 
 
 Prepositions are of very late growth in a child's language. 
 Much attention has been given to the point, and Stern has collected 
 statistics of the ages at which various children have first used 
 prepositions: the earliest age is 1.10, the average age is 2.3. 
 It does not, however, seem to me to be a matter of much interest 
 how early an individual word of some particular grammatical 
 class is first used ; it is much more interesting to follow up the 
 gradual growth of the child's command of this class and to see 
 how the first inevitable mistakes and confusions arise in the 
 little brain. Stern makes the interesting remark that when the 
 
138 GRAMMAR [cii. vii 
 
 tendency to use preiDositions first appears, it grows far more 
 rapidly than the power to discriminate one preposition from 
 another ; with his own children there came a time when thej'^ 
 employed the same word as a sort of universal preposition in all 
 relations. Hilda used vo7i, Eva ai(f. I have never observed 
 anything corresponding to this among Danish childi-en. 
 
 All children start by putting the words for the most important 
 concepts together without connective words, so ' Leave go bed- 
 room ' (' Ma}^ I have leave to go into the bedroom ? '), ' Out road ' 
 (' I am going out on the road '). The first use of prepositions is 
 always in set phrases learnt as wholes, like ' go to school,' ' go to 
 pieces,' ' lie in bed,' ' at dinner.' Not till later comes the power 
 of using prepositions in free combinations, and it is then that 
 mistakes appear. Nor is this surprising, since in all languages 
 prepositional usage contains much that is peculiar and arbitrary, 
 chiefly because when we once pass beyond a few quite clear applica- 
 tions of time and place, the relations to be expressed become so 
 vague and indefinite, that logicall}' one preposition might often 
 seem just as right as another, although usage has laid down a 
 fast law that this preposition must be used in this case and that 
 in another. I noted down a great number of mistakes my own 
 boy made in these words, but in all cases I was able to find some 
 synonymous or antonymous expression in which the preposition 
 used would have been the correct one, and which may have been 
 vaguely before his mind. 
 
 The multiple meanings of prepositions sometimes have strange 
 results. A little girl w^as in her bath, and hearing her mother 
 say : " I will wash you in a moment," answered : "No, you must 
 wash me in the bath '" ! She was led astray by the two uses of 
 in. We know of the child at school who was asked " What is an 
 average ? " and said : " What the hen lays eggs on."' Even men 
 of science are similarly led astray by prepositions. It is perfectly 
 natural to say that something has passed over the threshold of 
 consciousness : the metaphor is from the waj^ in which you enter 
 a house by stepping over the threshold. If the metaphor were 
 kept, the opposite situation would be expressed by the statement 
 that such and such a thing is outside the threshold of conscious- 
 ness. But psj'chologists, in the thoughtless way of little children, 
 take under to be always the opposite of over, and so speak of things 
 ' lying under (or below) the threshold of our consciousness,' and have 
 even invented a Latin word for the unconscious, viz. subliminal.^ 
 
 ^ H. Q. Wells writes (Soul of a Bishop, 94) : " He was lugging things 
 now into speech that so far had been scarcely above the threshold of his conscious 
 thought." Here we see the wrong interpretation of the preposition over 
 dragging with it the synonym above. 
 
§9] PREPOSITIONS AND IDIOMS 139 
 
 Children may use verbs with an object which require a pieposi- 
 tion (■ Will you wait me ? '), or which are only used intransitively 
 (' Will you jamj) me ? '), or they may mix up an infinitival with a 
 direct construction (' Could you hear me sneezed ? '). But it is 
 surely needless to multiply' examples. 
 
 When many years ago, in my Progress in Language, I spoke 
 of the advantages, even to natives, of simplicity in linguistic 
 structure, Professor Herman Moller, in a learned review, objected 
 to me that to the adult learning a foreign tongue the chief difficulty 
 consists in " the countless chicaneries due to the tyrannical and 
 capricious usage, whose tricks there is no calculating ; but these 
 offer to the native child no such difficulty as morphology may," 
 and again, in speaking of the choice of various prepositions, which 
 is far from easy to the foreigner, he says : " But any considerable 
 mental exertion on the part of the native child learning its 
 mother-tongue is here, of course, out of the question." Such 
 assertions as these cannot be founded on actual observation ; at 
 anj- rate, it is my experience in listening to children's talk that 
 long after they have reached the point where they make hardly 
 any mistake in pronunciation and verbal forms, etc., they are 
 still capable of using many turns of speech which are utterly 
 opposed to the spirit of the language, and which are in the main 
 of the same kind as those Avhich foreigners are apt to fall into. 
 Many of the child's mistakes are due to mixtures or blendings of 
 two turns of expression, and not a few of them may be logically 
 justified. But learning a language implies among other things 
 learning what you may not say in the language, even though 
 no reasonable ground can be given for the prohibition. 
 
CHAPTER VTII 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS 
 
 § 1. Why is the Native Language learnt so well ? § 2. Natural Ability 
 and Sex. § 3. Mother-tongue and Other Tongue. § 4. Plajing at 
 Language. § 5. Secret Languages. § 6. Onomatopoeia. § 7. Word- 
 inventions. §8. 'Mamma' and 'Papa.' 
 
 Vm.— § 1. Why is the Native Language learnt so well ? 
 
 How does it happen that children in general learn their mother- 
 tongue so well ? That this is a problem becomes clear when we 
 contrast a child's fu-st acquisition of its mother-tongue with the 
 later acquisition of any foreign tongue. The contra^^t is indeed 
 striking and manifold : here we have a quite little child, without 
 experience or prepossessions ; there a bigger child, or it may be 
 a grown-up person with all sorts of knowledge and powers : here a 
 haphazard method of procedure ; there the whole task laid out in 
 a system (for even in the schoolbooks that do not follow the old 
 grammatical system there is a certain definite order of progress 
 from more elementary to more difficult matters) : here no pro- 
 fessional teachers, but chance parents, brothers and sisters, nursery- 
 maids and playmates ; there teachers trained for many years 
 specially to teach languages : here only oral instruction ; there not 
 only that, but reading-books, dictionaries and other assistance. 
 And yet this is the result : here complete and exact command 
 of the language as a native speaks it, however stupid the children ; 
 there, in most cases, even with people otherA^ise highly gifted, a 
 defective and inexact command of the language. On what does 
 this difference depend ? 
 
 The problem has never been elucidated or canvassed from all 
 sides, but here and there one finds a jDartial answer, often given 
 out to be a complete answer. Often one side of the question only 
 is considered, that which relates to sounds, as if the whole problem 
 had been solved when one had fomid a reason for children acquiring 
 a better pronunciation of their mother-tongue than one generally 
 gets in later life of a foreign speech. 
 
 Manj'' people accordingly tell us that chilcb-en's organs of speech 
 are especially flexible, but that this suppleness of the tongue and 
 lips is lost in later life. This explanation, however, does not hold 
 
 no 
 
§1] THE NATIVE LANGUAGE 141 
 
 water, as is shown sufficiently by the countless mistakes in sound 
 made by children. If their organs were as flexible as is pretended, 
 they could learn sounds correctly at once, while as a matter of 
 fact it takes a long time before all the sounds and groups of sounds 
 are imitated with tolerable accm-acy. Suppleness is not some- 
 thing which is original, but something acquired later, and acquired 
 with no small difficulty, and then only with regard to the sounds 
 of one's own language, and not universall3^ 
 
 The same applies to the second answer (given by Bremer, 
 Deutsche Phonetik, 2), namely, that the child's ear is especially 
 sensitive to impressions. The ear also requires development, 
 since at first it can scarcely detect a number of nuances which we 
 gro'UTi-up people hear most distinctly. 
 
 Some people say that the reason why a child learns its native 
 language so well is that it has no established habits to contend 
 against. But that is not right either : as any good observer can 
 see, the process by which the child acquires sounds is pm'sued 
 through a continuous struggle against bad habits which it has 
 acquired at an earlier stage and wliich may often have rooted 
 themselves remarkably fii-mly. 
 
 Sweet (H 19) says among other things that the conditions of 
 learning vernacular sounds are so favourable because the child 
 has nothing else to do at the time. On the contrary, one may say 
 that the child has an enormous deal to do while it is learning the 
 language ; it is at that time active beyond all belief : in a short 
 time it subdues Mdder tracts than it ever does later in a much 
 longer time. The more wonderful is it that along with those 
 tasks it finds strength to learn its mother-tongue and its many 
 refinements and crooked turns. 
 
 Some point to heredity and say that a child learns that language 
 most easily which it is disposed beforehand to learn by its ancestry, 
 or in other words that there are inherited convolutions of the 
 brain which take in this language better than any other. Perhaps 
 there is sometliing in this, but we have no definite, carefully ascer- 
 tained facts. Against the theory stands the fact that the children 
 of immigrants acquire the language of their foster-country to 
 all appearance just as surely and quickly as children of the same 
 age whose forefathers have been in the country for ages. This 
 may be observed in England, in Denmark, and still more in North 
 America. Environment clearly has greater influence than descent. 
 
 The real answer in my opinion (which is not claimed to be 
 absolutely new in every respect) lies partly in the child itself, 
 partly in the behaviour towards it of the people around it. In 
 the fu-st place, the time of learning the mother-tongue is the most 
 favourable of all, namely, the first years of life. If one assumes 
 
142 SOME FUNDA^IENTAL PROBLEMS [ch. viii 
 
 that mental endowment means the capacity for development, 
 without doubt all children are best endowed in their first years : 
 from biith onwards there is a steady decline in the power of grasping 
 what is new and of accommodating oneself to it. With some 
 this decline is a very rapid one — they quickly become fossilized 
 and unable to make a change in their habits ; with others one 
 can notice a happy power of development even in old age ; but 
 no one keeps very long in its full range the adaptability of his 
 first years. 
 
 Further, we must remember that the child has far more 
 abundant opportunities of hearing his mother-tongue than one 
 gets, as a rule, with any language one learns later. He hears it 
 from morning to night, and, be it noted, in its genuine shape, 
 with the right pronunciation, right intonation, right use of words 
 and right syntax : the language comes to him as a fresh, ever- 
 bubbling spring. Even before he begins to say an3'-thing himself, 
 his first understanding of the language is made easier by the habit 
 that mothers and nurses have of repeating the same phrases with 
 slight alterations, and at the same time doing the thing which 
 they are talking about. '" Now we must wash the little face, now 
 we must wash the little forehead, now we must wash the little 
 nose, now we must wash the little chin, now we must wash the 
 little ear," etc. If men had to attend to their children, they would 
 never use so many words — but in that case the child would scarcelj' 
 learn to understand and talk as soon as it does when it is cared 
 for by women. ^ 
 
 Then the child has, as it were, private lessons in its mother- 
 tongue all the year round. There is nothing of the kind in the 
 learning of a language later, when at most one has six hours a 
 week and generally shares them \^^th others. The child has another 
 priceless advantage ; he hears the language in all possible situations 
 and under such conditions that language and situation ever 
 correspond exactly to one another and mutually illustrate one 
 another. Gesture and facial expression harmonize with the words 
 
 * Women know 
 The way to rear up children, (to be just) 
 They know a simple, merry, tender knack 
 Of stringing pretty words that make no sense, 
 And kissing full sense into empty words, 
 Which things are corals to cut life upon, 
 Although such trifles : children learn by such 
 Love's holy earnest in a pretty play 
 And get not over-early solemnized . . . 
 Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well 
 — Mine did, I know — but still with heavier brains, 
 And wills more consciouslj^ responsible, 
 And not as wisely, since less foolishly. 
 
 Elizabeth Browning : Aurora Leigh, 10. 
 
§1] THE NATIVE LANGUAGE 148 
 
 uttered and keep the child to a right understanding. Here there 
 is nothing unnatural, such as is often the case in a language-lesson 
 in later years, when one talks about ice and snow in June or 
 excessive heat in January, And what the child hears is just what 
 immediately concerns him and interests him, and again and again 
 his own attempts at speech lead to the fulfilment of his dearest 
 wishes, so that his command of language has great practical 
 advantages for him. 
 
 Along with what he himself sees the use of, he hears a great 
 deal which does not directly concern him. but goes into the little 
 brain and is stored up there to turn up again later. Nothing is 
 heard but leaves its traces, and at times one is astonished to 
 discover what has been preserved, and with what qKactness. One 
 day, when Frans was 4.11 old, he suddenly said: "Yesterday — 
 isn't there some who say yesterday 1 " (giving yesterday with the 
 correct English pronunciation), and when I said that it was an 
 English word, he went on : " Yes, it is Mrs. B. : she often says 
 like that, yesterday." Now, it was three weeks since that lady 
 had called at the house and talked English. It is a well-known 
 fact that hypnotized persons can sometimes say whole sentences 
 in a language which they do not loiow, but have merely heard in 
 childhood. In books about children's language there are many 
 remarkable accounts of such linguistic memories which had lain 
 buried for long stretches of time. A child who had spent the 
 first eighteen months of its life in Silesia and then came to Berlin, 
 where it had no opportunity of hearing the Silesian pronunciation, 
 at the age of five suddenly came out with a number of Silesian 
 expressions, which could not after the most careful investigation 
 be traced to any other source than to the time before it could talk 
 (Stern, 257 fif.). Grammont has a story of a little French girl, 
 whose nurse had talked French with a strong Italian accent ; the 
 child did not begin to si)eak till a month after this nurse had left, 
 but pronounced many words Avith Italian sounds, and some of 
 these peculiarities stuck to the child till the age of three. 
 
 We may also remark that the baby's teachers, though, regarded 
 as teachers of language, they may not be absolutely ideal, still 
 have some advantages over those one encounters as a rule later in 
 life. The relation between them and the child is far more cordial 
 and personal, just because they are not teachers first and foremost. 
 They are immensely interested in every little advance the child 
 makes. The most awkward attempt meets with sjnnpathy, often 
 vnih. admiration, while its defects and imperfections never expose 
 it to a breath of unkind criticism. There is a Slavonic proverb, 
 " If you wish to talk well, you must murder the language first." 
 But this is very often overlooked by teachers of language, who 
 
144 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [cii. viii 
 
 demand faultless accuracy from the beginning, and often keep 
 their pupils grinding so long at some little part of the subject that 
 their desire to learn the language is weakened or gone for good. 
 There is nothing of this sort in the child's first learning of his 
 language. 
 
 It is here that our distinction between tlie two periods comes 
 in, that of the child's own separate ' little language ' and that 
 of the common or social language. In the first period the little 
 one is the centre of a narrow circle of his own, which waits for 
 each little syllable that falls from his lips as though it were a 
 grain of gold. What teachers of languages in later years would 
 rejoice at hearing such forms as we saw before used in the time 
 of the child's ' little language,' fant or vat or ham for 'elephant ' ? 
 But the mother really does rejoice : she laughs and exults when 
 he can use these syllables about his toj'^-elephant, she throws the 
 cloak of her love over the defects and mistakes in the little one's 
 imitations of words, she remembers again and again what his 
 strange sounds stand for, and her eager sympathy transforms 
 the first and most difficult stej^s on the path of language to the 
 merriest game. 
 
 It Avould not do, however, for the child's ' little language ' and 
 its dreadful mistakes to become fixed. This might easily happen, 
 if the child were never out of the narrow circle of its own family, 
 which knows and recognizes its 'little language.' But this is 
 stopi^cd because it comes more and more into contact with others — 
 uncles and aunts, and especially little cousins and playmates : 
 more and more often it hap]3ens that the mutilated words are not 
 understood, and are corrected and made fun of, and the child 
 is incited in this way to steady improvement : the ' little language ' 
 gradually gives place to the ' common language,' as the child 
 becomes a member of a social group larger than that of his own 
 little home. 
 
 We have now probably found the chief reasons why a child 
 learns his mother-tongue better than even a grown-up person 
 who has been for a long time in a foreign country learns the 
 language of his environment. But it is also a contributory reason 
 that the child's linguistic needs, to begin Avith, are far more limited 
 than those of the man who wishes to be able to talk about any- 
 thing, or at any rate about something. Much more is also lin- 
 guistically required of the latter, and he must have recourse to 
 language to get all his needs satisfied, while the baby is well looked 
 after even if it says nothing but waivaivqwa. So the baby has 
 longer time to store up his impressions and continue his experi- 
 ments, until by trying again and again he at length gets his lesson 
 learnt in all its tiny details, while the man in the foreign country, 
 
§1] THE NATIVE LANGUAGE 145 
 
 who must make himself understood, as a rule goes on trying only 
 till he has acquired a form of speech which he finds natives under- 
 stand : at this point he will generally stop, at any rate as far as 
 pronunciation and the construction of sentences are concerned 
 (while his vocabulary may be largely increased). But this ' just 
 recognizable ' language is incorrect in thousands of small details, 
 and, inasmuch as bad little habits quickly become fixed, the 
 kind of language is produced which we know so well in the case 
 of resident foreigners — who need hardly open their lips before 
 everyone knows they are not natives, and before a practised ear 
 can detect the country they hail from.^ 
 
 Vm.— § 2. Natural Ability and Sex. 
 
 An important factor in the acquisition of language which we 
 have not considered is naturally the individuality of the child. 
 Parents are apt to draw conclusions as to the abilities of their 
 young hopeful from the rapidity with wliich he learns to talk ; 
 but those who are in despair because their Tommy cannot say a 
 single ^v•ord when their neighbours' Harry can saj'^ a great deal 
 may take comfort. SlowTiess in talking may of course mean defi- 
 ciency of ability, or even idiocy, but not necessarily. A child 
 who chatters early may remain a chatterer all his life, and children 
 whose motto is ' Slow and sure ' may turn out the deepest, most 
 independent and most trustworthy characters in the end. There 
 are some children who cannot be made to say a single word for a 
 long time, and then suddenly come out with a whole sentence, 
 which shows how much has been quietly fructifying in their brain. 
 Carlyle was one of these : after eleven months of taciturnity he 
 heard a child cry, and astonished all by sajdng, " What ails wee 
 Jock ? " Edmund Gosse has a similar story of his own childhood, 
 and other examples have been recorded elsewhere (Meringer, 194 ; 
 Stern, 257). 
 
 ^ This is not the place to speak of the way in which prevalent methods 
 of teaching foreign languages can be improved. A slavish copying of the 
 manner in which English children learn English is impracticable, and if 
 it were practicable it would demand more time than anyone can devote 
 to the purpose. One has to make the most of the advantages which the 
 pupils possess over babies, thus, their being able to read, their power of more 
 sustained attention, etc. Phonetic explanation of the new sounds and 
 phonetic transcription have done wonders to overcome difficulties of pro- 
 nunciation. But in other respects it is possible to some extent to assimilate 
 the teaching of a foreign language to the method piu-sued by the child in 
 its first years : one should not merely sprinkle the pupil, but plunge him 
 right down into the sea of language and enable him to swim by himself as 
 soon as possible, relying on the fact that a great deal will arrange itself in 
 the brain without the inculcation of too many special rules and explanations. 
 For details I may refer to my book, How to Teach a Foreign Language {honAon, 
 George Allen and Unwin). 
 
 10 
 
146 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [ch. viii 
 
 The linguistic development of an individual child is not always 
 in a steady rising line, but in a series of waves. A child who 
 seems to have a boundless power of acquiring language suddenly 
 stands still or even goes back for a short time. The cause may be 
 sickness, cutting teeth, learning to walk, or often a removal to 
 new surroundings or an open-air life in summer. Under such 
 circumstances even the word ' I ' may be lost for a time. 
 
 Some children develop very rapidly for some years until they 
 have reached a certain point, where they stop altogether, while 
 others retain the power to develop steadily to a much later age. 
 It is the same with some races : negro children in American schools 
 may, while they are little, be up to the standard of their white 
 schoolfellows, whom they cannot cojtc with in later life. 
 
 The two sexes diflFer very greatly in regard to speech — as in 
 regard to most other things. Little girls, on the average, learn 
 to talk earlier and more quickly than boys ; they outstrip them 
 in talking correctly ; their pronunciation is not spoilt by the many 
 bad habits and awkwardnesses so often found in boys. It has 
 been proved by statistics in many countries that there are far 
 more stammerers and bad speakers among boys and men than 
 among girls and women. The general receptivity of women, their 
 great power of, and pleasure in, imitation, their histrionic talent, 
 if one may so say — all this is a help to them at an early age, so that 
 they can get into other people's way of talking with greater agility 
 than boys of the same age. 
 
 Everytliing that is conventional in language, everything in 
 which the only thing of importance is to be in agreement with 
 those around you, is the girls' strong point. Boys may often 
 show a certain reluctance to do exactly as others do : the pecu- 
 liarities of their ' little language ' are retained by them longer 
 than by girls, and they will sometimes steadily refuse to correct 
 their own abnormalities, which is very seldom the case with girls. 
 Gaucherie and originality thus are two points between which the 
 speech of boys is constantly oscillating. Cf. below, Ch. XIII. 
 
 Vm.— §3. Mother-tongue and Other Tongue. 
 
 The expression " mother-tongue " should not be understood 
 too literally : the language which the child acquires naturally 
 is not, or not alwa}'-^, his mother's language. When a mother 
 speaks with a foreign accent or in a pronounced dialect, her children 
 as a rule speak their language as correctly as other children, or 
 keep only the slightest tinge of their mother's peculiarities. I 
 have seen this very distinctly in many Danish families, in wnich 
 the mother has kept up her Norwegian language all her life, and in 
 
§ 3] MOTHER-TONGUE AND OTHER TONGUE 147 
 
 which the children have spoken pure Danish. Thus also in two 
 families I know, in which a strong Swedish accent in one mother, 
 and an unmistakable American pronunciation in the other, have 
 not prevented the children from speaking Danish exactly as if 
 their mothers had been born and bred in Denmark. I cannot, 
 therefore, agree with Passy, who says that the child learns his 
 mother's sound system (Ch § 32), or with Dauzat's dictum to the 
 same effect (V 20). The father, as a rule, has still less influence ; 
 but what is decisive is the speech of those with whom the child 
 comes in closest contact from the age of three or so, thus frequently 
 servants, but even more eflfoctually playfellows of his own age 
 or rather slightly older than himself, with whom he is constantly 
 thrown together for hours at a time and whose prattle is constantly 
 in his ears at the most impressionable age, while he may not see 
 and hear his father and mother except for a short time every day, 
 at meals and on such occasions. It is also a well-known fact 
 that the children of Danish parents in Greenland often learn the 
 Eskimo language before Danish ; and Meinhof says that German 
 cliildren in the African colonies will often learn the language of 
 the natives earlier than German (MSA 139). 
 
 This is by no means depreciating the mother's influence, which 
 is strong indeed, but chiefly in the first period, that of the child's 
 ' little language.' But that is the time when the child's imitative 
 power is weakest. His exact attention to the minutiae of language 
 dates from the time when he is thrown into a wider circle and 
 has to make himself understood by many, so that his language 
 becomes really identical with that of the community, where 
 formerly he and his mother would rest contented with what they, 
 but hardly anyone else, could understand. 
 
 The influence of children on children cannot be overestimated.^ 
 Boys at school make fun of any peculiarities of speech noticed in 
 schoolfellows who come from some other part of the country. 
 Kipling tells us in Stalky and Co. how Stalky and Beetle carefully 
 kicked McTurk out of his Irish dialect. When I read this, I was 
 vividly reminded of the identical method my new friends applied 
 to me when at the age of ten I was transplanted from Jutland 
 to a school in Seeland and excited their merriment through some 
 Jutlandish expressions and intonations. And so we may say that 
 the most important factor in spreading the common or standard 
 language is children themselves. 
 
 It often happens that children who are compelled at home to 
 talk without any admixture of dialect talk pure dialect when 
 playing with their schoolfellows out of doors. They can keep the 
 
 * Hence, also, the second or third child in a family will, as a rule, learn 
 to speak .more rapidly thtui the eldest. 
 
148 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [en. viii 
 
 two forms of speech distinct. In the same way they can learn 
 two languages less closely connected. At times this results in 
 very strange blcndings, at least for a time ; but many children 
 will easily pass from one language to the other without mixing 
 them up, especially if they come in contact with the two languages 
 in different surroundings or on the lips of different people. 
 
 It is, of course, an advantage for a child to be familiar with 
 two languages : but without doubt the advantage may be, and 
 generally is, purchased too dear. First of all the child in question 
 hardl}' learns either of the two languages as perfectly as he would 
 have done if he had limited himself to one. It may seem, on the 
 surface, as if he talked just like a native, but he does not really 
 command the fine points of the language. Has any bilingual child 
 ever developed into a great artist in speech, a poet or orator ? 
 
 Secondly, the brain effort required to master two languages 
 instead of one certainly diminishes the child's power of learning 
 other things which might and ought to be learnt. Schuchardt 
 rightly remarks that if a bilingual man has two strings to his bow, 
 both are rather slack, and that the three souls which the ancient 
 Roman said he possessed, owing to his being able to talk three 
 different languages, were probably very indifferent souls after all. 
 A native of Luxemburg, where it is usual for children to talk 
 both French and German, says that few Luxemburgers talk both 
 languages perfectly. " Germans often say to us : ' You speak 
 German remarkably well for a Frenchman,' and French people 
 will say, ' They are Germans who speak our language excellently.' 
 Nevertheless, we never speak either language as fluently as the 
 natives. The worst of the system is, that instead of learning 
 things necessary to us we must spend our time and energy in 
 learning to express the same thought in two or three languages 
 at the same time." ^ 
 
 VIII.— §4. Playing at Language. 
 
 The child takes delight in making meaningless sounds long 
 after it has learnt to talk the language of its elders. At 2 . 2 Frans 
 amused himself with long series of such sounds, uttered with the 
 most confiding look and proper intonation, and it was a joy to 
 him when I replied with similar sounds. He kept up this game 
 for years. Once (4.11) after such a performance he asked me: 
 " Is that English ? "— " No."—" Why not ? "— " Because I under- 
 stand English, but I do not understand what you say." An 
 hour later he came back and asked : " Father, do you know all 
 languages ? " — " No, there are many I don't know." — " Do you 
 * I translate this from Ido, see The International Language, May 1912. 
 
§4] PLAYING AT LANGUAGE 149 
 
 know German ? " — " Yes." (Frans looked rather crestfallen : 
 the servants had often said of his invented language that he 
 was talking German. So he went on) " Do you know 
 Japanese?" — "No." — (Delighted) "So remember when I say 
 something you don't understand, it's Japanese." 
 
 It is the same everywhere. Hawthorne writes : " Pearl mumbled 
 something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human language, 
 but was only such gibberish as children ni'^y be heard amusing 
 themselves with, by the hour together " {The Scarlet Letter, 173). 
 And R. L. Stevenson : " Children prefer the shadow to the substance. 
 When they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter 
 senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because they 
 are making believe to speak French" {Virginibus P., 236; cf. 
 Glenconner, p. 40; Stern, pp. 76, 91, 103). Meringer's boy (2.1) 
 took the music-book and sang a tune of his own making with 
 incomprehensible words. 
 
 Children also take delight in varying the sounds of real words, 
 introducing, for instance, alliterations, as " Sing a song of sixpence, 
 A socket full of sj^e," etc, Frans at 2 . 3 amused himself by rounding 
 all his vowels (o for a, y for i), and at 3.1 by making all words of 
 a verse line he had learnt begin with d, then the same words begin 
 with t. O'Shea (p. 32) says that " most children find pleasure 
 in the production of variations upon some of their familiar words. 
 Their purpose seems to be to test their ability to be original. The 
 performance of an unusual act affords pleasure in linguistics as in 
 other matters. H., learning the word dessert, to illustrate, plays 
 with it for a time and exhibits it in a dozen or more variations — 
 dissert, dishert, desot, des^sert, and so on." 
 
 Rhythm and rime appeal strongly to the children's minds. 
 One English observer says that " a child in its thii'd year will 
 copy the rhythm of songs and verses it has heard in nonsense 
 words." The same thing is noted by Meringer (p. 116) and 
 Stern (p. 103). Tony E. (2.10) suddenly made up the rime 
 " My mover, I lov-er," and Gordon M. (2 . 6) never tired of repeating 
 a phrase of his own composition, " Custard over mustard." A 
 Danish girl of 3.1 is reported as having a "curious knack of 
 twisting all words into rimes : bestemor hestemor prestemor, 
 Gudrun sludriin pludrun, etc." 
 
 Vin.— § 5. Secret Languages. 
 
 Children, as we have seen, at first employ play-language for 
 its own sake, with no arriere-pensee, but as they get older they 
 may see that such language has the advantage of not being under- 
 stood by their elders, and so they may develop a ' secret language ' 
 
150 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [ch. viii 
 
 consciously. Some such languages are confined to one school, 
 others may be in common use among children of a certain age 
 all over a country. ' M-gibberish ' and ' S-gibberish ' consist 
 in inserting m and s, as in goming mout tomdaym or gosings outs 
 tosdays for ' going out to-day ' ; ' Marrowskying ' or ' Hospital 
 Greek ' transfers the initial letters of words, as renty oj plain for 
 ' plenty of rain,' flutterby for ' butterfly ' ; ' Ziph ' or ' Hypernese ' 
 (at Winchester) substitutes wa for the first of two initial consonants 
 and inserts p or g, making ' breeches ' into wareexhepes and ' penny ' 
 into jjegennepy. From my own boyhood in Denmark I remember 
 two languages of this sort, in which a sentence like ' du er et lille 
 asen ' became dupii erper efpet lil2nllepe apasenpen and durbe erbe 
 erbe lirbelerbe arbeserbe respectively. Closely corresponding lan- 
 guages, with insertion of p and addition of -erbse, are found in 
 Germany ; in Holland we find ' de schoone Mei ' made into depe 
 schoopoonepe Meipei, besides an -erwi-iaal with a variation in 
 which the ending is -erf. In France such a language is called 
 javanais ; ' je vais bien ' is made into je-de-que vais-dai-qai bien- 
 den-qen. In Savoy the cowherds put deg after each syllable and 
 thus make ' a-te kogneu se va9hi ' (' as-tu connu ce vacher 1 ' in 
 the local dialect) into a-degd te-dege ko-dego gnu-deg^i se-dege va-dega 
 chi-degi ? Nay, even among the Maoris of New Zealand there 
 is a similar secret language, in which instead of ' kei te, haere au 
 ki reira ' is said te-kei te-i-te te-haere-te-re te-a te-u te-ki te-re-te-i-te-ra. 
 Human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.^ 
 
 Vm. — § 6. Onomatopoeia. 
 
 Do children really create new words ? This question has been 
 much discussed, but even those who are most skeptical in that 
 respect incline to allow them this power in the case of words which 
 imitate sounds. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the 
 majority of onomatopoeic words heard from children are not their 
 own invention, but are acquired by them in the same way as 
 other words. Hence it is that such words have different forms 
 in different languages. Thus to English cockadoodledoo corresponds 
 French coquerico, German kikeriki and Danish kykeliky, to E. 
 quack-quack, F. cancan, Dan. raprap, etc. These words are an 
 imperfect representation of the birds' natural cry, but from their 
 likeness to it they are easier for the child to seize than an entirely 
 arbitrary name such as duck. 
 
 But, side by side with these, children do invent forms of their 
 own, though the latter generally disappear quickly in favour of the 
 
 ^ I have collected a bibliographical list of such ' secret languages ' in 
 Nord. Tidaskrijt J. Filologi, 4r. vol. 5. 
 
§ 6] ONOMATOPCEIA 151 
 
 traditional forms. Thus Frans (2.3) had coined the word vakvak, 
 which his mother liad heard sometimes without understanding what 
 he meant, when one day he pointed at some crows while repeating 
 the same word ; but when his mother told him that these birds 
 were called krager, he took hold of this word with eagerness and 
 repeated it several times, evidently recognizing it as a better name 
 than his own. A little boy of 2 . 1 called soda-water ft, another boy 
 8aid ging or gingging for a clock, also for the railway train, while 
 his brother said dann for a bell or clock; a little girl (1.9) said 
 2)ooh (whispered) for ' match, cigar, pipe,' and gagag for ' hen,' etc. 
 When once formed, such words may be transferred to other 
 things, where the sound plays no longer any role. This may be 
 illustrated through two extensions of the same word buom or bom, 
 used by two children first to express the sound of something falling 
 on the floor ; then Ellen K. (1.9) used it for a ' blow,' and finally 
 for anything disagreeable, e.g. soap in the eyes, while Kaare G. (1 . 8), 
 after seeing a plate smashed, used the word for a broken plate and 
 afterwards for anything broken, a hole in a dress, etc., also when a 
 button had come off or when anything else was defective in any way. 
 
 Vin.— §7. Word-inventions. 
 
 Do children themselves create words — apart from onomatopoeic 
 words ? To me there is no doubt that they do. Frans invented 
 many words at his games that had no connexion, or very little 
 connexion, with existing words. He was playing with a little 
 twig when I suddenly heard him exclaim : " This is called lampe- 
 tine" but a little while afterwards he said lanketine, and then 
 again lampetine, and then he said, varying the play, " Now it is 
 kluatine and traniklualalilua " (3.6). A month later I write: 
 '■ He is never at a loss for a self-invented word ; for instance, when 
 he has made a figure with his bricks which resembles nothing 
 whatever, he will say, ' That shall be lindam.' " When he played 
 at trains in the garden, there were many stations with fanciful 
 names, and at one time he and two cousins had a word kukukounen 
 which they repeated constantly and thought great fun, but whose 
 inner meaning I never succeeded in discovering. An English 
 friend writes about his daughter : " When she was about two 
 and a quarter she would often use some nonsense word in the 
 middle of a perfectly intelligible sentence. When you asked her 
 its meaning she would explain it by another equally unintelli- 
 gible, and so on through a series as long as you cared to make 
 it." At 2.10 she pretended she had lost her bricks, and when 
 you showed her that they were just by her, she insisted that 
 th'ey were not ' bricks ' at all, but mtims. 
 
152 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [ch. viii 
 
 In all accounts of children's talk you find words which cannot 
 be referred back to the normal language, but which have cropped 
 up from some unsounded depth of the child's soul. I give a few 
 from notes sent to me by Danish friends : goi ' comb,' putput 
 ' stocking, or any other piece of garment,' i-a-a ' chocolate,' 
 gon ' water to drink, milk ' (kept apart from the usual word vavd 
 for water, which she used only for water to wash in), hesh ' news- 
 paper, book.' Some such words have become famous in psycho- 
 logical literature because they were observed by Darwin and 
 Taine. Among less famous instances from other books I may 
 mention tibu ' bird ' (Striimpel), adi ' cake ' (Ament), be'lum-be'lum 
 ' toy with two men turning about,' wakaJca ' soldier,' nda ' jar,' 
 pamma ' pencil,' bium ' stocking ' (Meringer). 
 
 An American correspondent writes that his boy was fond of 
 pushing a stick over the carpet after the manner of a carpet- 
 sweeper and called the operation jazing. He coined the word 
 borkens as a name for a particular sort of blocks with which he 
 was accustomed to play. He was a nervous child and his imagina- 
 tion created objects of terror that haunted him in the dark, and to 
 these he gave the name of Boons. This name may, however, be 
 derived from baboons. Mr. Harold Palmer tells me that his 
 daughter (whose native language was French) at an early age 
 used ['fu'we] for ' soap ' and [de'det/] for ' horse, wooden horse, 
 merry -go -round . ' 
 
 Dr. F, Poulsen, in his book Bejser og rids (Copenhagen, 1920), 
 says about his two-year-old daughter that when she gets hold 
 of her mother's fur-collar she will pet it and lavish on it all kinds 
 of tender self -invented names, such as apu or a-fo-me-me. The latter 
 word, " which has all the melodious euphony and vague signification 
 of primitive language," is applied to anything that is rare and 
 funny and worth rejoicing at. On a summer day's excursion there 
 was one new a-fo-me-me after the other. 
 
 In spite of all this, a point on which all the most distinguished 
 investigators of children's language of late years are agreed is 
 that children never invent words. Wundt goes so far as to say 
 that " the child's language is the result of the child's environment, 
 the child being essentially a passive instrument in the matter " 
 (S 1. 196) — one of the most wTong-headed sentences I have ever 
 read in the works of a great scientist. Meumann says : " Preyer 
 and after him almost every careful observer among child-psycholo- 
 gists have strongly held the view that it is impossible to speak 
 of a child inventing a word." Similarly Meringer, L 220, Stern, 
 126, 273, 337 ff., Bloomfield, SL 12. 
 
 These investigators seem to have been led astray by expressions 
 such as ' shape out of nothing,' ' invent,' ' original creation ' 
 
§ 7] WORD-INVENTIONS 153 
 
 (UrschCpfung), and to have taken this doctrinaire attitude in 
 partial defiance of the facts they have themselves advanced. 
 Expressions like those adduced occur over and over again in their 
 discussions, and Meumann says openly : " Invention demands a 
 methodical proceeding with intention, a conception of an end to 
 be realized." Of course, if that is necessary it is clear that we 
 can speak of invention of words in the case of a chemist seeking 
 a word for a new substance, and not in the case of a tiny child. 
 But are there not many inventions in the technical world, which 
 we do not hesitate to call inventions, which have come about 
 more or less by chance ? Wasn't it so probably with gunpowder ? 
 According to the story it certainly was so with blotting-paper : 
 the foreman who had forgotten to add size to a portion of writing- 
 paper was dismissed, but the manufacturer who saw that the paper 
 thus spoilt could be turned to account instead of the sand hitherto 
 used made a fortune. So according to Meumann blotting-paper 
 has never been ' invented.' If in order to acknowledge a child's 
 creation of a word we are to postulate that it has been produced 
 out of nothing, what about bicycles, fountain-j)ens, type\vriters — 
 each of which was something existing before, carried just a little 
 further ? Ai'e they on that account not inventions ? One would 
 think not, when one reads these ^v^iters on children's language, 
 for as soon as the least approximation to a word in the normal 
 language is discovered, the child is denied both ' invention ' and 
 ' the speech-forming faculty ' ! Thus Stern (p. 338) says that 
 his daughter in her second year used some words which might 
 be taken as proof of the power to create words, but for the fact 
 that it was here possible to show how these ' new ' words had grown 
 out of normal words. Eisckei, for instance, was used as a verb 
 meaning ' go, walk,' but it originated in the words eins, zwei (one, 
 two) which were said when the child Avas taught to walk. Other 
 examples are given comparable to those mentioned above (106, 115) 
 as mutilations of the first period. Now, even if all those words 
 given by myself and others as original inventions of children 
 could be proved to be similar perversions of ' real ' words (which 
 is not likely), I should not hesitate to speak of a word-creating 
 faculty, for eischei, ' to walk,' is both in form and still more in 
 meaning far enough from eins, zwei to be reckoned a totally 
 new word. 
 
 We can divide words ' invented ' by children into three classes : 
 
 A. The child gives both sound and meaning. 
 
 B. The gro\\Ti-up people give the sound, and the child the 
 
 meaning. 
 
 C. The child gives the sound, grown-up people the meaning. 
 
15 i SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [cii. viii 
 
 But the three classes cannot always be kept apart, especially 
 when the child imitates the grown-up person's sound so badly or 
 seizes the meaning so imperfectly that very little is left of what 
 the grown-up person gives. As a rule, the self-created words 
 will be very short-lived ; still, there are exceptions. 
 
 O'Shea's account of one of these words is very instructive. 
 " She had also a few words of her own coining which were attached 
 spontaneously to objects, and these her elders took up, and they 
 became fixed in her vocabulary for a considerable period. A word 
 resembling Ndobbin was employed for every sort of thing which 
 she used for food. The word came originally from an accidental 
 combination of sounds made while she was eating. By the aid 
 of the people about her in responding to this term and repeating 
 it, she ' selected ' it and for a time used it purpose fulh^ She 
 employed it at the outset for a specific article of food ; then her 
 elders extended it to other articles, and this aided her in making 
 the extension herself. Once started in this process, she extended 
 the term to many objects associated with her food, even objects 
 as remote from her original experience as dining-room, high-chair, 
 kitchen, and even apple and plum trees " (O'Shea, 27). 
 
 To Class A I assign most of the words already given as the 
 child's creations, whether the child be great or small. 
 
 Class B is that which is most sparsely represented. A child 
 in Finland often heard the well-knoTvn line about King Karl 
 (Charles XII), " Han stod i rok och damm " (" He stood in smoke 
 and dust "), and taldng ro to be the adjective meaning ' red,' imagined 
 the remaining syllables, which he heard as Tcordamm, to be the 
 name of some piece of garment. This amused his parents so much 
 that kordamm became the name of a dressing-gowTi in that family. 
 
 To Class C, where the child contributes only the sound and 
 the older people give a meaning to what on the child's side was 
 meaningless — a process that reminds one of the invention of 
 blotting-paper — belong some of the best-known words, which 
 require a separate section. 
 
 Vni.— §8. 'Mamma' and 'Papa.' 
 
 In the nurseries of all countries a little comedy has in all ages 
 been played — the baby lies and babbles his ' mamama ' or 
 ' amama ' or ' papapa ' or * apapa ' or ' bababa ' or ' ababab ' 
 without associating the slightest meaning with liis mouth-games, 
 and his grown-up friends, in their joy over the precocious child, 
 assign to these syllables a rational sense, accustomed as thej' are 
 themselves to the fact of an uttered sound having a content, a 
 thought, an idea, corresponding to it. So we get a whole class 
 
§8] *MAM1\IA' AND 'PAPA' 155 
 
 of words, distinguished by a simplicity of sound-formation — never 
 two consonants together, generally the same consonant repeated 
 with an a between, frequently also with an a at the end — words 
 found in many languages, often in different forms, but with 
 essentially the same meaning. 
 
 First we have words for ' mother.' It is very natural that 
 the mother who is greeted by her happy child with the sound 
 ' mama ' should take it as though the child were calling her ' mama,' 
 and since she frequently comes to the cradle when she hears the 
 sound, the child himself does learn to use these syllables when 
 he wants to call her. In this way they become a recognized word 
 for the idea ' mother ' — now with the stress on the first syllable, 
 now on the second. In French we get a nasal vowel either in 
 the last syllable only or in both syllables. At times we have only 
 one syllable, ma. When once these syllables have become a regular 
 word they follow the speech laws which govern other words ; thus 
 among other forms we get the German muhme, the meaning of which 
 (' aunt ') is explained as in the words mentioned, p. 118. In very early 
 times ma in our group of languages was supplied with a termination, 
 so that we get the form underlying Greek meter, Lat. mater (whence 
 Fr. mere, etc.), our own mother, G. mutter, etc. These words 
 became the recognized grown-up words, while mama itself was 
 only used in the intimacy of the family. It depends on fashion, 
 however, how ' high up ' mama can be used : in some countries 
 and in some periods children are allowed to use it longer than 
 in others. 
 
 The forms mama and ma are not the only ones for ' mother.' 
 The child's am has also been seized and maintained by the grown- 
 ups. The Albanian word for ' mother ' is ama, the Old Norse 
 M'ord for ' grandmother ' is amma. The Latin am-ita, formed from 
 am with a termination added, came to mean ' aunt ' and became 
 in OFr, ante, whence E. aunt and Modern Fr. iante. In Semitic 
 languages the words for ' mother ' also have a vowel before m : 
 Assyrian ummu, Hebrew '^m, etc. 
 
 Baba, too, is found in the sense ' mother,' especially in Slavonic 
 languages, though it has here developed various derivative mean- 
 ings, 'old woman,' 'grandmother,' or 'midwife.' In Tonga we 
 have hama ' mother.' 
 
 Forms with n are also found for ' mother ' ; so Sanskrit nana, 
 Albanian nane. Here we have also Gr. nanne ' aunt ' and Lat. 
 nonna ; the latter ceased in the early Middle Ages to mean ' grand- 
 mother ' and became a respectful way of addressing women of a 
 certain age, whence we know it as nun, the feminine counterpart 
 of ' monk.' From less known languages I may mention Green- 
 landic a\na-na 'mother,' ^ana 'grandmother.' 
 
156 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [ch. viii 
 
 Now we come to words meaning ' father,' and quite natm-allj', 
 where tlic sound-groups containmg m have already been inter- 
 preted in the sense ' mother,' a word for ' father ' will be sought 
 in the syllables with -p. It is no doubt frequently noticed in the 
 nursery that the bab}^ says mama where one expected papa, and 
 vice versa ; but at last he learns to deal out the syllables ' rightly,' 
 as we say. The history of the forms papa, pappa and pa is analo- 
 gous to the history of the m syllables already traced. We have 
 the same extension of the sound by tr in the word pater, which 
 according to recognized laws of sound-change is found in the 
 French pere, the English father, the Danish fader, the German 
 vaier, etc. Philologists no longer, fortunately^ derive these words 
 from a root pa ' to protect,' and see therein a proof of the ' highly 
 moral spirit ' of our aboriginal ancestors, as Fick and others did. 
 Papa, as we Imow, also became an honourable title for a reverend 
 ecclesiastic, and hence comes the name which we have in the 
 form Pope. 
 
 Side by side with the p forms we have forms in b — Italian 
 babbo, Bulgarian babd, Serbian bdba, Turkish baba. Beginning 
 with the vowel we have the Semitic forms ab, abu and finally abba, 
 which is well known, since through Greek abbas it has become the 
 name for a spiritual father in all European languages, our form 
 being Abbot. 
 
 Again, we have some names for ' father ' with dental soimds : 
 Sanskrit lata, Russian lata, tyatya, Welsh tat, etc. The English 
 dad, now so miiversal, is sometimes considered to have been bor- 
 rowed from this Welsh Avord, which in certain connexions has an 
 initial d, but no doubt it had an independent origin. In Slavonic 
 languages ded is extensively used for ' grandfather ' or ' old man.' 
 Thus also deite, teite in German dialects. Tata ' father ' is found 
 in Congo and other African languages, also {tatta) in Negro- 
 English (Surinam). And just as words for ' mother ' change their 
 meaning from ' mother ' to ' aunt,' so these forms in some lan- 
 guages come to mean ' uncle ' : Gr. theios (whence Italian zio), 
 Lithuanian dede, Russian dyadya. 
 
 With an initial vowel we get the form atta, in Greek used in 
 addressing old people, in Gothic the ordinary word for ' father,' 
 which with a termination added gives the proper name Attila, 
 originally ' little father ' ; with another ending we have Russian 
 otec. Outside our own family of languages we find, for instance, 
 Magyar atya, Turkish ata, Basque aita, Greenlandic a'ta-ta ' father,' 
 while in the last-mentioned language a-ta means ' grandfather.' ^ 
 
 ^ I subjoin a few additional examples. Basque aita ' father,' ama 
 ' mother,' anaya ' brother ' {Zeitsch. f. rom. Phil. 17, 146). Manchu a77ia 
 ' father,' ewe ' mother ' (the vowel relation aa in haha ' man,' hehe ' woman,' 
 
§8] 'MAMMA' AND 'PAPA' 157 
 
 The nurse, too, comes in for her share in these names, as she 
 too is greeted by the child's babbling and is tempted to take it 
 as the child's name for her ; thus we get the German and Scandi- 
 navian amme, Polish niania, Russian nyanya, cf. our Nanny. 
 These words cannot be kept distinct from names for ' aunt,' cf. 
 amita above, and in Sanskrit we find mama for ' uncle.' 
 
 It is perhaps more doubtful if we can find a name for the 
 child itself which has arisen in the same way ; the nearest example 
 is the Engl, babe, baby, German bube (with u as in mnhme above) ; 
 but babe has also been explained as a word derived normally from 
 OFr. bavbe, from Lat. balbvs ' stammering.' When the name 
 Bab or Babs (Babbe in a Danish famil}') becomes the pet-name 
 for a little girl, this has no doubt come from an interpretation 
 put on her own meaningless sounds. Ital. bambo {bambino) cer- 
 tainly belongs here. We may here mention also some terms for 
 ' doll,' Lat. 'pupa or puppa, G. puppe ; with a derivative ending 
 we have Fr. poupee, E. pupjjet (Chaucer, A 3254, popelote). These 
 words have a rich semantic development, cf. jjw^a (Dan. pnppe, 
 etc.) ' chrysalis,' and the diminutive Lat. pt'^'V'i^^vs, pupilla, which 
 was used for ' a little child, minor,' whence E. pt(pil ' disciple,' 
 but also for the little child seen in the eye, whence E. (and other 
 languages) pupil, ' central opening of the eye.' 
 
 A child has another main interest — that is, in its food, the 
 breast, the bottle, etc. In many countries it has been observed 
 that very early a child uses a long m (without a vowel) as a sign 
 that it wants something, but we can hardly be right in supposing 
 that the sound is originallj'' meant by children in this sense. They 
 do not use it consciously till they see that gro'mi-up people on 
 hearing the sound come up and find out what the child wants. 
 And it is the same with the developed forms which are uttered 
 by the child in its joy at getting something to eat, and which are 
 therefore interpreted as the child's expression for food : am, mam, 
 mammam, or the same words with a final a — that is, really the same 
 groups of sounds which came to stand for ' mother.' The deter- 
 mination of a particular form to a particular meaning is always 
 due to the adults, who, however, can subsequently teach it to the 
 child. Under this heading comes the sound ham, which Taine 
 observed to be one child's expression for hunger or thirst (h mute ?), 
 and similarly the word mum, meaning ' something to eat,' invented, 
 
 Gabelentz, S 389). Kutenai pw ' brother's daughter,' papa ' grandmother 
 (said by male), grandfather, grandson,' pat\ 'nephew,' ma 'mother,' nana 
 ' younger sister' (of girl), aZnaria ' sisters,' tite 'mother-in-law,' titu 'father' 
 (of male) — (Boas, Kutenai Tales, Bureau of Am. Ethnol. 59, 1918). Cf, 
 also Sapir, "Kinship Terms of the Kootenay Indians " {Amer. Anthropologist, 
 vol. 20). In the same writer's Yana Terms oj Relationship (Univ. of Cali- 
 fornia, 1918) there seems to be very little from this source. 
 
158 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [ch. viii 
 
 as we are told, by Darwin's son and often uttered with a rising 
 intonation, as in a question, ' Will you give me something to eat ? ' 
 Lindner's child (1.5) is said to have used papj) for everything 
 eatable and mem or mom for anything drinkable. In normal 
 language we have forms like Sanslmt mdmsa (Gothic mimz) and 
 mas " flesh,' our own meat (which formerly, like Dan. mad, meant 
 any kind of food), German mus ' jam ' (whence also gemiise), and 
 finally Lat. mandere and mandurare ' to chew ' (whence Fr. manger) 
 — all developments of this childish ma{m.). 
 
 As the child's first nourishment is its mother's breast, its joyous 
 mamama can also be taken to mean the breast. So we have the 
 Latin mamma (with a diminutive ending mammilla, whence 
 Fr. mamelle), and with the other labial sound Engl, pap, Nor- 
 wegian and Swed. dial, pappe, Lat. papilla; with a different vowel, 
 It. poppa, Fr. poupe, ' teat of an animal, formerly also of a woman ' ; 
 with b, G. biibbi, obsolete E. bubby ; with a dental, E. teat (G. zitze), 
 Ital. tetta, Dan. titte, Swed. dial, tatte. Further we have words 
 like E. pa]} ' soft food,' Latin papare ' to eat,' orig. ' to suck,' 
 and some G. forms for the same, pappen, pampen, pampfen. 
 Perhaps the beginning of the word milk goes back to the baby's 
 m,a applied to the mother's breast or milk ; the latter half may 
 then be connected with Lat. lac. In Greenlandic we have amama 
 ' suckle.' 
 
 Inseparable from these words is the sound, a long m or am, 
 which expresses the child's delight over something that tastes 
 good ; it has by-forms in the Scotch nyam or nyamnyam, the English 
 seaman's term yam ' to eat,' and with two dentals the French 
 nanan ' sweetmeats.' Some linguists will have it that the I^atin 
 amo ' I love ' is derived from this am, which expresses pleasurable 
 satisfaction. When a father tells me that his son (1.10) vjses 
 the wonderful words nanana^i for ' chocolate ' and jajajaja for 
 picture-book, we have no doubt here also a case of a grown 
 person's interpretation of the originally meaningless sounds of 
 a child. 
 
 Another meaning that grown-up people may attach to syllables 
 uttered by the child is that of ' good-bye,' as in English tata, which 
 has now been incorporated in the ordinary language.^ Stern 
 probably is right when he thinks that the French adieu would 
 not have been accepted so commonly in Germany and other 
 countries if it had not accommodated itself so easily, esj^ecially 
 in the form commonly used in German, ade, to the chiild's natural 
 word. 
 
 * Tata 18 also used for ' a walk ' (to go out for a ta-ta, or to go out ta-tas) 
 and for ' a hat ' — meanings that may very well have developed from the 
 child's saying these syllables when going out or preparing to go out. 
 
§8] 'MAMMA' AND 'PAPA' 159 
 
 There are some words for ' bed, sleep ' which clearly belong 
 to this class: Tuscan nanna 'cradle,' Sp. hacer la nana 'go to 
 sleep,' E. bye-bye (possibly associated with good-bye, instead of 
 which is also said byebye) ; Stern mentions baba (Berlin), beibei 
 (Russian), 6060 (Malay), but bischbisch, which he also gives here, 
 is evidently (like the Danish visse) imitative of the sound used for 
 hushing. 
 
 Words of this class stand in a way outside the common words 
 of a language, owing to their origin and their being continually 
 new-created. One cannot therefore deduce laws of sound-change 
 from them in their original shape ; and it is equally wrong to use 
 them as evidence for an original kinship between different families 
 of language and to count them as loan-words, as is frequently 
 done (for example, when the Slavonic baba is said to be borrowed 
 from Turkish). The English yapa and inam{m)a, and the same 
 words in German and Danish, Italian, etc., are almost always 
 regarded as borrowed from French ; but Cauer rightly points out 
 that Nausikaa {Odyssey 6. 57) addresses her father as -pappa fil, 
 and Homer cannot be suspected of borrowing fi'om French. Still, 
 it is true that fashion may play a part in deciding how long children 
 may be permitted to say papa and mamma, and a French fashion 
 may in this respect have spread to other European countries, 
 especially in the seventeenth century. We may not find these 
 words in early use in the literatures of the different countries, but 
 this is no proof that the words were not used in the nursery. As 
 soon as a word of this class has somewhere got a special application, 
 this can very well pass as a loan-word from land to land — as we 
 saw in the case of the words 0660^ and pope. And it may be 
 granted with respect to the primary use of the words that there 
 are certain national or quasi-national customs which determine 
 what grown people expect to hear from babies, so that one nation 
 expects and recognizes papa, another dad, a third atta, for the 
 meaning 'father.' 
 
 When the child hands something to somebody or reaches out 
 for something he will generally say something, and if, as often 
 happens, this is ta or da, it will be taken by its parents and others 
 as a real word, different according to the language they speak ; 
 in England as there or thanks, in Denmark as tak ' thanks ' ^ or 
 tag ■ take,' in Germany as da ' there,' in France as tiens ' hold,' 
 in Russia as day ' give,' in Italy as to, (= togli) ' take.' The 
 form te in Homer is interpreted by some as an imperative of 
 teino 'stretch.' These instances, however, are slightly different 
 
 ^ The Swede Bolin says that his child said tatt-tatt, which he interprets 
 as tack, even when handing something to others. 
 
160 SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS [ch. viii 
 
 ill character from those discussed in the main part of this 
 chapter.! 
 
 * The views advanced in § 8 have some points in contact with the remarks 
 found in Stern's ch. xix, p. 300, only that I lay more stress on the arbitrary 
 interpretation of the child's meaningless syllables on the part of the grown- 
 ups, and that I cannot approve his theory of the ni syllables as ' centripetal ' 
 and the p syllables as ' centrifugal affective-volitional natural sounds.' 
 Paul (P § 127) says that the nursery-language with its bowwow, papa, mama, 
 etc., " is not the invention of the children ; it is handed over to them just 
 as any other language " ; he overlooks the share children have themselves 
 in these words, or in some of them ; nor are they, as he says, formed by 
 tlie grown-ups with a purely pedagogical purpose. Nor can I find that 
 Wundt's chapter " Angebliche worterfindung des kindes " (S 1. 273-287) 
 contains decisive arguments. Curtius (K 88) thinks that Gr, pater was 
 first shortened into pa and this then extended into pdppa — but certainly 
 it is rather the other way round. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD ON 
 LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT 
 
 § 1. Conflicting Views. § 2. Meringer. Analogy. § 3. Herzog's Theory of 
 Sound Changes. § 4. Gradual Shiftings. § 5. Leaps. § 0. Assimila< 
 tions, etc. § 7. Stump-words. 
 
 IX.— § 1. Conflicting Views. 
 
 We all know that in historical times languages have been con- 
 stantly changing, and we have much indirect evidence that in 
 prehistoric times they did the same thing. But when it is 
 asked if these changes, unavoidable as they seem to be, are to be 
 ascribed primarily to childi'en and their defective imitation of 
 the speech of their elders, or if children's language in general 
 plays no part at all in the history of language, we find linguists 
 expressing quite contrary views, without the question having 
 ever been really thoroughly investigated. 
 
 Some hold that the child acquires its language with such per- 
 fection that it cannot be held responsible for the changes recorded 
 in the historj' of languages : others, on the contrary, hold that 
 the most important source of these changes is to be found in the 
 transmission of the language to new generations. How undecided 
 the attitude even of the foremost linguists may be towards the 
 question is perhaps best seen in the views expressed at different 
 times by Sweet. In 1882 he reproaches Paul with paying attention 
 only to the shiftings going on in the pronunciation of the same 
 individual, and not acknowledging " the much more potent cause 
 of change which exists in the fact that one generation can learn 
 the sounds of the preceding one by imitation only. It is an open 
 question whether the modifications made by the individual in a 
 sound he has once learnt, independently of imitation of those 
 around him, are not too infinitesimal to have any appreciable 
 effect " (CP 153). In the same spirit he asserted in 1899 that 
 the process of learning our own language in childhood is a very 
 slow one, " and the results are always imperfect. ... If languages 
 were learnt perfectly by the children of each generation, then 
 languages would not change : English children would still speak 
 a language as old at least as ' Anglo-Saxon,' and there would be 
 
 11 161 
 
162 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [ch. ix 
 
 no such languages as French and Italian. The changes in languages 
 are simjily slight mistakes, -which in the course of generations 
 completely alter the character of the language " (PS 75). But 
 only one year later, in 1900, he maintains that the child's imitation 
 " is in most cases practically perfect " — " the main cause of 
 sound-change must therefore be sought elsewhere. The real 
 cause of sound-change seems to be organic shifting — failure to hit 
 the mark, the result either of carelessness or sloth ... a slight 
 deviation from the pronunciation learnt in infancy may easily 
 pass unheeded, especially by those who make the same change 
 in their own pronunciation" (H 19 f.). By the term "organic 
 shifting " Sweet evidently, as seen from his preface, meant shifting 
 in the pronunciation of the adult, thus a modification of the sound 
 learnt ' perfectly ' in childhood. Paul, who in the first edition 
 (1880) of his Prhizijnen ch)' SjirachgescMchte did not mention 
 the influence of children, in all the following editions (2nd, 1886, 
 p. 58 ; 3rd, 1898, p. 58 ; 4th, 1909, p. 63) expressly says that 
 " die hauptveranlassung zum lautwandel in der iibertragung der 
 laute auf neue individuen liegt,'"' while the shiftings within the 
 same generation are very slight. Paul thus modified his view in 
 the opposite direction of Sweet ^ — and did so under the influence 
 of Sweet's criticism of his own first view ! 
 
 When one finds scholars expressing themselves in this manner 
 and giving hardly any reasons for their \'iews, one is tempted to 
 believe that the question is perhaps insoluble, that it is a mere 
 toss-up, or that in the sentence " children's imitation is nearly 
 perfect " the stress may be laid, according to taste, now on the word 
 nearly, and now on the word perfect. I am, however, convinced that 
 we can get a little farther, though only by breaking up the question, 
 instead of treating it as one vague and indeterminate whole. 
 
 IX.— §2. Meringer. Analogy. 
 
 Among recent writers Meringer has gone furthest into the 
 question, adhering in the main to the general view that, just as 
 in other fields, social, economic, etc., it is grown-up men who 
 take the lead in new developments, so it is grown-up men, and 
 not women or children, Avho carry things forAvard in the field of 
 
 ^ The same inconsistency is found in Dauzat, who in 1910 thought that 
 nothing, and in 1912 that nearly everything, was due to imperfect imitation 
 by the child (V 22 £E., Ph 63, cf. 3). Wechssler (L p. 86) quotes passages 
 from Bremer, Passy, Rousselot and Wallensk6ld, in which the chief cause 
 of soimd changes is attributed to the child ; to these niight be added Storm 
 (Phonetische Studien, 5. 200) and A. Thomson (IF 24, 1909, p. 9), probably 
 also Crammont {Mdl. linguist. 61). Many writers seem to imagine that 
 the question is settled when they are able to adduce a certain number of 
 parallel changes in the pronvmciation cf some child and in the historical 
 evolution of languages. 
 
§2] MERINGER. ANALOGY 103 
 
 language. In one place he justifies his standpoint by a reference 
 to a special case, and I will take this as the starting-point of my 
 own consideration of the question. He saj^s : " It can be shown 
 by various examples that they [changes in language] are decidedly 
 not due to children. In Ionic, Attic and Lesbian Greek the 
 words for 'hundreds ' are formed in -kosioi {diakosioi, etc.), while 
 elsewhere (in Doric and Boeotian) they appear as -kdtioi. How 
 does the o arise in -kosioi ? It is generally said that it comes 
 from in the ' tens ' in the termination -konta. Can it be children 
 who have formed the words for hundreds on the model of the 
 words for tens, children under six years old, who are just learning 
 to talk ? Such children generally have other things to attend 
 to than to practise themselves in numerals above a hundred." 
 Similar formations are adduced from Latin, and it is stated that 
 the personal pronouns are especially subject to change, but children 
 do not use the jDcrsonal pronouns till an age when they are already 
 in firm possession of the language. Meringer then draws the 
 conclusion that the share which children take in bringing about 
 linguistic change is a very small one. 
 
 Now, I should like fii'st to remark that even if it is possible to 
 point to certain changes in language which cannot be ascribed 
 to little children, this proves nothing with regard to the very 
 numerous changes which lie outside these limits. And next, 
 that all the cases here mentioned are examples of formation by 
 analogy. But from the very nature of the case, the conditions 
 requisite for the occurrence of such formations are exactly the 
 same in the case of adults and in that of the children. For what 
 are the conditions ? Some one feels an impulse to express some- 
 thing, and at the moment has not got the traditional form at 
 command, and so is driven to evolve a form of his own from the 
 rest of the linguistic material. It makes no difference whether 
 he has never heard a form used by other people which expresses 
 what he wants, or whether he has heard the traditional form, 
 but has not got it ready at hand at the moment. The method of 
 procedure is exactly the same whether it takes place in a three- 
 year-old or in an eighty-three -year-old brain : it is therefore 
 senseless to put the question whether formations by analogy are 
 or are not due to children. A formation by analogy is by 
 definition a non-traditional form. It is therefore idle to ask if 
 it is due to the fact that the language is transmitted from generation 
 to generation and to the child's imperfect repetition of what has 
 been transmitted to it, and Meringer 's argument thus breaks 
 down in every respect. 
 
 It must not, of course, be overlooked that children naturally 
 come to invent more formations by analogy than grown-up people, 
 
1G4 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHH.D [cii, ix 
 
 because the latter in many cases have heard the older forms so 
 often that they find a place in their speech without any effort 
 being required to recall them. But that does not touch the 
 problem under discussion ; besides, formations by analogy are 
 unavoidable and indispensable, in the talk of all, even of the 
 most 'grown-up': one cannot, indeed, move in language without 
 having recourse to forms and constructions that are not duectly 
 and fully transmitted to us : speech is not alone reproduction, 
 but just as much new-production, because no situation and no 
 impulse to communication is in every detail exactly the same 
 as what has occurred on earlier occasions. 
 
 IX.— § 3. Herzog's Theory of Sound Changes. 
 
 If, leaving the field of analogical changes, we begin to inquire 
 whether the purely phonetic changes can or must be ascribed to 
 the fact that a new generation has to learn the mother-tongue 
 by imitation, we shall first have to examine an interesting theory 
 in which the question is answered in the affirmative, at least with 
 regard to those phonetic changes which are gradual and not 
 brought about all at once ; thus, when in one particular language 
 one vowel, say [e], is pronounced more and more closely till 
 finally it becomes [i*], as has happened in E. see, formerly pro- 
 nounced [se-] with the same vowel as in G. see, now [si']. E. 
 Herzog maintains that such changes happen through transference 
 to new generations, even granted that the children imitate the 
 sound of the grown-up people perfectly. For, it is said, children 
 with their little mouths cannot produce acoustically the same 
 sound as adults, except by a different position of the speech- 
 organs ; this position they keep for the rest of their lives, so that 
 when they are grown-up and their mouth is of full size they produce 
 a rather different sound from that previously heard — which altered 
 sound is again imitated by the next generation with yet another 
 position of the organs, and so on. This continuous play of 
 generation v. generation may be illustrated in this way : 
 
 Articulation corresponding to Sound. 
 
 fyoung Al SI 
 
 1st generation|^j^ ^ ^^ 
 
 fyoung A2 
 2nd generation|^j^ A2 
 
 S2 
 
 S2 
 
 S3 
 
 S3 
 
 S4,etc.i 
 
 » See E. Herzog, Streitfragen der roman. philologie, i. (1904), p. 57 — I 
 modify his symbols a little. 
 
 « 1 J.- fyoung A3 
 
 3rd generation|^j^ ^3 
 
§ 3] HERZOG'S THEORY OF SOUND CHANGES 165 
 
 It is, however, easy to prove that this theory cannot be correct. 
 (1) It is quite certain that the increase in size of the mouth is 
 far less important than is generally supposed (see my Fonetik, 
 p. 379 fif., PhG, p. 80 ff. ; cf . above, V § 1). (2) It cannot be proved 
 that people, after once learning one definite way of producing a 
 sound, go on producing it in exactly the same way, even if the 
 acoustic result is a different one. It is much more probable that 
 each individual is constantly adapting himself to the sounds heard 
 from those around him, even if this adaptation is neither as 
 quick nor perhaps as perfect as that of children, who can very 
 rapidly accommodate their speech to the dialect of new surround- 
 ings : if very far-reaching changes are rare in the case of grown-up 
 people, this proves nothing against such small adaptations as 
 are here presupposed. In favour of the continual regulation of 
 the sound thi-ough the ear may be adduced the fact that adults 
 who become perfectly deaf and thus lose the control of sounds 
 through hearing may come to speak in such a way that their 
 words can hardly be understood by others. (3) The theory in 
 question also views the relations between successive generations 
 in a way that is far removed from the realities of life : from the 
 wording one might easilj^ imagine that there were living together 
 at any given time only individuals of ages separated by, say, 
 thirty years' distance, while the truth of the matter is that a 
 child is normally surrounded by people of all ages and learns its 
 language more or less from all of them, from Grannie down to 
 little Dick from over the way, and that (as has already been 
 remarked) its cliief teachers are its own brothers and sisters and 
 other playmates of about the same age as itself. If the theory 
 were correct, there would at any rate be a marked difference 
 in vowel-sounds between anyone and his grandfather, or, still 
 more, great-grandfather : but nothing of the kind has ever been 
 described. (4) The chief argument, however, against the theory 
 is this, that were it true, then all shiftings of sounds at all times 
 and in all languages would proceed in exactly the same direction. 
 But this is emphatically contradicted bj' the history of language. 
 The long a in English in one period was rounded and raised into 
 o, as in OE. sfan, na, ham, which have become stone, no, home ; 
 but when a few centuries later new long a's had entered the 
 language, they followed the opposite direction towards e, now 
 [ei], as in name, male, take. Similarly in Danish, where an old 
 stratum of long a's have become d, as in dl, gas, while a later stratum 
 tends rather towards [ae], as in the present pronunciation of gade, 
 hale, etc. At the same time the long a in Swedish tends towards 
 the rounded pronunciation (cf . Fr. dme, pas) : in one sister language 
 wo thus witness a repetition of the old shifting, in the other a 
 
106 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [cii. ix 
 
 teudcnuy in the opposite direction. And it is the same with all 
 those languages which we can pui'sue far enough back : they all 
 present the same picture of varying vowel shiftings in different 
 directions, which is totally incompatible with Herzog's view. 
 
 IX.— § 4. Gradual Shiftings. 
 
 Wo shall do well to put aside such artificial theories and look 
 soberly at the facts. When some sounds in one century go one 
 way, and in another, another, while at times they remain long 
 unchanged, it all rests on this, that for human habits of this sort 
 there is no standard measure. Set a man to saw a hundred logs, 
 measuring No. 2 by No. 1, No. 3 by No. 2, and so on, and you will 
 see considerable deviations from the original measure — perhaps 
 all going in the same direction, so that No. 100 is very much 
 longer than No. 1 as the result of the sum of a great many small 
 deviations — perhaps all going in the opposite direction ; but it 
 is also possible that in a certain series he was inclined to make 
 the logs too long, and in the next series too short, the two sets 
 of deviations about balancing one another. 
 
 It is much the same with the formation of speech sounds : 
 at one moment, for some reason or other, in a particular mood, 
 in order to lend authority or distinction to our words, we may 
 happen to lower the jaw a little more, or to thrust the tongue a 
 little more forward than usual, or inversely, under the influence 
 of fatigue or laziness, or to sneer at someone else, or because we 
 have a cigar or potato in our mouth, the movements of the jaw 
 or of the tongue may fall short of what they usually are. We 
 have all the while a sort of conception of an average pronunciation, 
 of a normal degree of opening or of protrusion, which Ave aim 
 at, but it is nothing very fixed, and the only measure at our dis- 
 posal is that we are or are not understood. What is understood 
 is all right : what does not meet this requirement must be repeated 
 with greater correctness as an answer to ' I beg 5"our pardon ? ' 
 
 Everyone thinks that he talks to-day just as he did yesterdaj', 
 and, of course, he does so in nearly every point. But no one knows 
 if he pronounces his mother-tongue in every resjaect in the same 
 manner as he did twenty years ago. May we not suppose that what 
 happens with faces happens here also ? One lives with a friend day 
 in and day out, and he appears to be just what he was years ago, but 
 someone who returns home after a long absence is at once struck 
 by the changes which have gradually accumulated in the interval. 
 
 Changes in the sounds of a language are not, indeed, so rapid 
 as those in the appearance of an individual, for the simple reason 
 that it is not enough for one man to alter his pronunciation, 
 
§ 4] GRADUAL SHIFTINGS 167 
 
 many must co-opcratc : the social nature and social aim of lan- 
 guage has the natural consequence that all must combine in the 
 same movement, or else one neutralizes the changes introduced 
 by the other ; each individual also is continually under the influ- 
 ence of his fellows, and involuntarily fashions his pronunciation 
 according to the impression he is constantl}' receiving of other 
 people's sounds. But as regards those little gradual shif tings of 
 sounds which take place in spite of all this control and its con- 
 servative influence, changes in which the sound and the articulation 
 alter simultaneously, I cannot see that the transmission of the 
 language to a new generation need exert any essential influence : 
 we may imagine them being brought about equally well in a society 
 which for hundreds of years consisted of the same adults who 
 never died and had no issue. 
 
 IX.— §5. Leaps. 
 
 While in the shiftings mentioned in the last paragraphs 
 articulation and acoustic impression went side by side, it is 
 different with some shiftings in which the old sound and the new 
 resemble one another to the ear, but differ in the position of the 
 organs and the articulations. For instance, when [}?] as in E. 
 tkich becomes [f] and [6] as in E. mother becomes [v], one can 
 hardly conceive the change taking place in the pronunciation of 
 people who have learnt the right sound as children. It is verj'' 
 natural, on the other hand, that children should imitate the 
 harder sound by giving the easier, which is very like it, and which 
 they have to use in many other words : forms like fru for through, 
 wiv, muvver for tvith, mother, are frec[uent in the mouths of children 
 long before they begin to make their apj)earance in the speech 
 of adults, where they are now beginning to be very frequent in 
 the Cockney dialect. (Cf. MEG i. 13. 9.) The same transition is 
 met with in Old Fr., where we have inuef from modu, nif from 
 nidu, fief irom feodu, self, now soif, from site, estrif (E. strife) from 
 stridh, glaive from gladiu, parvis from paradis, and possibly avoidre 
 from adulteru, poveir, now pouvoir, from potere. In Old Gothonic 
 we have the transition from p to f before I, as in Goth. ]>laqus= 
 MHG. vlach, Goth. plaihmi= OB.G. flehan, y>liuhan=011G. fliohan ; 
 cf. also E. file, G. feile=0'N. y>el, OE. pengel and fengel 'prince,' 
 and probably G. finster, cf . OHG. dinstar (with d from ]>), OE. '\>eostre. 
 In Latin we have the same transition, e.g. in fumus, corresponding 
 to Sansk. dhumds, Gr. thumos} 
 
 * In Russian Marfa, Fyodor, etc., we also have/ corresponding to original 
 ]?, but in this case it is not a transition within one and the same language, 
 but an imperfect imitation on the part of the (adult !) Russians of a sound 
 in a foreign language (Greek th) which was not found in their own language. 
 
168 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [en. ix 
 
 The change from the back-open consonant [x] — the sound in 
 G. buch and Scotch loch — to /, which has taken place in enough, 
 cough, etc., is of the same kind. Here clearly we have no gradual 
 passage, but a jump, which could hardly take place in the case 
 of those who had already learnt how to pronounce the back 
 sound, but is easily conceivable as a case of defective imitation 
 on the part of a new generation. I suppose that the same remark 
 holds good with regard to the change from ho to p, which is found 
 in some languages, for instance, Gr. hijypos, corresponding to Lat. 
 equus, Gr. he2)omai=Lsit. sequor, he2)ar='Lsit. jecur ; Rumanian 
 apa from Lat. aqua, Welsh ma]), 'son ' = Gaelic mac, pedzvar=li'. 
 cathir, 'four,' etc. In Franco I have heard children say [pizin] 
 and [pidin] for cuisine. 
 
 IX. — §6. Assimilations, etc. 
 
 There is an important class of sound changes which have 
 this in common with the class just treated, that the changes take 
 place suddenly, without an intermediate stage being possible, as 
 in the changes considered in IX §4. I refer to those cases 
 of assimilation, loss of consonants in heavy groups and trans- 
 position (metathesis), with which students of language are familiar 
 in all languages. Instances abound in the speech of all children ; 
 see above, V §4. 
 
 If now we dared to assert that such pronunciations are never 
 heard from people who have passed their babyhood, we should 
 here have foimd a field in which children have exercised a great 
 influence on the development of language : but of course we 
 cannot say anything of the sort. Any attentive observer can 
 testify to the frequency of such mispronunciations in the speech 
 of grown-up people. In many cases they are noticed neither by 
 the speaker nor by the hearer, in many they may be noticed, but 
 are considered too unimportant to be corrected, and finally, in 
 some cases the speaker stops to repeat what he wanted to say in 
 a corrected form. Now it would not obviously do, from their 
 frequency in adult speech, to draw the inference : " These changes 
 are not to be ascribed to children," because from their frequent 
 appearance on the lips of the children one could equally well infer : 
 "They are not to be ascribed to groT\Ti-up people." When we 
 find in Latin impotens and immeritus with m side by side with 
 indignus and insolitus with n, or when English handkerchief is 
 pronounced with [T^k] instead of the original [ndk], the change 
 is not to be charged against children or growii-up people exclu- 
 sively, but against both parties together : and so when t is lost 
 in ivaistcoat [weskat], or postman or castle, or A* in asked. There 
 
§ G] ASSBIILATIONS 169 
 
 is certainly this difference, that when the change is made by older 
 people, we get in the speech of the same individual first the heavier 
 and then the easier form, while the child may take up the easier 
 pronunciation first, because it hears the [n] before a lip consonant 
 as [m], and before a back consonant as [y], or because it fails 
 altogether to hear the middle consonant in waistcoat, 2^ost'man, 
 castle and asked. But all this is clearly of purely theoretical 
 interest, and the result remains that the influence of the two 
 classes, adults and children, cannot possibly be separated in this 
 domain.^ 
 
 IX.— §7. Stump-words. 
 
 Next we come to those changes which result in what one may 
 call 'stump- words.' There is no doubt that words may undergo 
 violent shortenings both by children and adults, but here I believe 
 we can more or less definitel}^ distinguish between their respective 
 contributions to the development of language. If it is the end 
 of the word that is kept, while the beginning is drojDped, it is 
 probable that the mutilation is due to children, who, as we have 
 seen (VII §7), echo the conclusion of what is said to them and 
 forget the beginning or fail altogether to apprehend it. So we 
 get a number of mutilated Christian names, w^hich can then be 
 used by groA^Ti-up people as pet-names. Examples are Bert for 
 Herbert or Albert, Bella for Ai*abella, Sander for Alexander, Lottie 
 for Charlotte, Trix for Beatrix, and with childlike sound-substitu- 
 tion Bess (and Bet, Betty) for Elizabeth. Similarly in other 
 languages, from Danish I may mention Bine for Jakobine, Line 
 for Karoline, Sti^ie for Kristine, Dres for Andres : there are many 
 others. 
 
 If this way of shortening a word is natural to a child who 
 hears the word for the first time and is not able to remember 
 the beginning when he comes to the end of it, it is quite different 
 when others clip words which they know perfectly well : they 
 will naturally keep the beginning and stop before they are half 
 through the word, as soon as they are sure that their hearers 
 understand what is alluded to. Dr. Johnson was not the only 
 one who " had a way of contracting the names of his friends, as 
 Beauclerc, Beau ; Boswell, Bozzy ; Langton, Lanhj ; Murphy, 
 Miir ; Sheridan, Sherry ; and Goldsmith, Goldy, which Gold- 
 
 ^ Reduplications and assimilations at a distance, as in Fr. tante from 
 the older ayUe (whence E. aunt, from Lat. amita) and porpentine (frequent 
 in this and analogous forms in Elizabethan writers) for porcupme (porkepine, 
 porkespine) are different from the ordinary assimilations of neighbouring 
 sounds in occurring much less frequently in the speech of adults than in 
 children ; of., however, below, Ch. XV 4. 
 
170 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [ch. ix 
 
 smitli resented" (Boswell, Life, cd. P. Fitzgerald, 1900, i. 48G). 
 Tliackeray eonstantly says Pen for Aithur Pendennis, Cos for 
 Costigan, Fo for Foker, Pop for Popjoy, old Col for Colchicuni. 
 In the beginning of the last century Najioleon Bonaparte was 
 generally called Nap or Boney ; later we have such shortened 
 names of jDublic characters as Dizzy for Disraeli, Pam for Palmerston , 
 Labby for Labouchere, etc. These evidently are due to adults, 
 and so are a great many other clippings, some of which have 
 completely ousted the original long words, such as mob for mobile, 
 brig for brigantine, fad for fadaise, cab for cabriolet, navvy for 
 navigator, while others are still felt as abbreviations, such as 
 plioto for photogi'aj^h, ^;«6 for public-house, caps for capital letters, 
 spec for speculation, sov for sovereign, ze2'> for Zeppelin, divvy 
 for dividend, hip for hypochondria, the Cri and the Pavvy for the 
 Criterion and the Pavilion, and many other clippings of words 
 which are evidently far above the level of very small children. 
 The same is true of the abbreviations in which school and college 
 slang abounds, words like Gym(nastica), V7idergrad{uate), trig- 
 (onometry), Za6(orator3^), wio/nc(ulation), ^re2>(aration), the Giiv 
 for the governor, etc. The same remark is true of similar 
 clippings in other languages, such as kilo for kilogram, G. ober 
 for oberkellner, French om/o(crate), reac(tionnaire), college terms 
 like desse for descriptive (geometric d.), philo for philosophic, 
 ^jrew for premier, seu for second ; Danish numerals like tres 
 for tresindstyve (60), halvfjerds(in.dBiy\e), ytr5(indstyve). We are 
 certainly justified in extending the principle that abbreviation 
 through throwing away the end of the word is due to those who 
 have previous!}^ mastered the full form, to the numerous instances 
 of shortened Christian names like Fred for Frederick, Em for 
 Emily, Alec for Alexander, Di for Diana, Vic for Victoria, etc. 
 In other languages we find similar clippings of names more or 
 less carried through systematically, e.g. Greek Zeiixis for Zeuxippos, 
 Old High German Wolfo for Wolfbrand, Wolfgang, etc., Icelandic 
 Sigga for Sigridr, Siggi for SigurSr, etc. 
 
 I see a corroboration of my theory in the fact that there are 
 hardly an}^ family names shortened by throwing away the begin- 
 ning : children as a rule have no use for family names.^ The 
 rule, however, is not laid down as absolute, but only as holding 
 in the main. Some of the exceptions are easily accounted for. 
 'Cello for violoncello undoubtedly is an adults' word, originating 
 
 ^ Karl Sund<^n, in his diligent and painstaking book on Elliptical Words 
 ?n Modern Ei^glish (Upsala, 1904) [i.e. clipped proper names, for common 
 names are not treated in the long lists given], mentions only two examples 
 of surnames in which the final part is kept (Bart for Islebart, Piggy for 
 Guineapig, from obscure novels), though he has scores of examples in which 
 the beginning is preserved. 
 
§ 7] STUMP-WORDS 171 
 
 in Fiance or Italy : but here evidently it would not do to take 
 the beginning, for then there would be confusion with violin 
 (violon). Phone for telephone : the beginning might just as well 
 stand for telegraph. Van for caravan : here the beginning would 
 be identical with car. Bus, which made its appearance immediately 
 after the first omnibus was started in the streets of liondon 
 (1829), probably was thought expressive of the sound of these 
 vehicles and suggested bustle. But bacco {baccer, baccy) for tobacco 
 and taters for potatoes belong to a diJBferent sphere altogether : 
 they are not clippings of the usual sort, but purely phonetic 
 developments, in which the first vowel has been dropped in rapid 
 pronunciation (as in / s'pose), and the initial voiceless stop has 
 then become inaudible ; Dickens similarly writes HicJcerlerly as 
 a vulgar pronunciation of particularly.^ 
 
 1 It is often said that stress is decisive of what part is left out in word- 
 chppings, and from an a priori point of view this is what we should expect. 
 But as a matter of fact we find in many instances that sj'Uables with weak 
 stress are preserved, e.g. in JV/ac(donald), Pen{denni8), the Cri, Vic, Nap, 
 Nat for Nathaniel (orig. pronounced with [t], not [p]), Val for Percival, 
 Tru, etc. The middle is never kept as such wnth omission of the beginning 
 and the ending ; Liz (whence Lizzy) has not arisen at one stroke from Eliza- 
 beth, but mediately through Eliz. Somo of the adults' clippings originate 
 through abbreviations in writing, thus probably most of the college terms 
 {exam, trig, etc.), thus also journalists' clippings like ad for advertisement, 
 par for paragraph ; cf. also caps for capitals. On stump -words see also 
 below, Ch. XIV, §§8 and 9. 
 
I 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CKlLD—continned 
 
 § 1. Confusion of Words. § 2. Metanalysis. § 3. Shif tings of Meanings. 
 § 4. Differentiations. § 5. Summary. § 6. Indirect Influence. § 7. 
 New Languages. 
 
 X.— § 1. Confusion of Words. 
 
 Some of the most typical childish sound-substitutions can hardly 
 be supposed to leave any traces in language as permanently 
 spoken, because they are always thoroughly corrected by the 
 children themselves at an early age ; among these I reckon the almost 
 universal pronunciation of t instead of k. When, therefore, we 
 do find that in some words a t has taken the place of an earlier 
 Jc, we must look for some more specific cau.se of the change : but 
 this ma3% in some cases at any rate, be found in a tendency of 
 children's speech which is totally independent of the inabilitj' 
 to pronounce the sound of k at an early age, and is, indeed, in 
 no way to be reckoned among phonetic tendencies, namely, the 
 confusion resulting from an association of two words of similar 
 sound (cf. above, p. 122). This, I take it, is the explanation of 
 the word mate in the sense ' husband or wife,' which has replaced 
 the earlier 7nake : a confusion was here natural, because the word 
 mate, ' companion,' was similar not only in sound, but also in 
 signification. The older name for the ' soft roe ' of fishes was 
 milk (as Dan. mcelk, G. milch), but from the fifteenth centurj^* 
 milt has been substituted for it, as if it were the same organ as 
 the milt, ' the spleen.* Children will associate words of similar 
 sound even in cases where there is no connecting link in their 
 significations ; thus we have bat for earlier bak, bakke (the animal, 
 vespertilio), though the other word bat, ' a stick,' is far removed 
 in sense. 
 
 I think we must explain the following cases of isolated sound - 
 substitution as due to the same confusion with unconnected words 
 in the minds of children hearing the new words for the first time : 
 trunk in the sense of ' proboscis of an elephant,' formerly trnmp, 
 from Fr. trompe, confused with trunk, ' stem of a tree ' ; stark- 
 naked, formerly start-naked, from start, ' tail,' confused with stark, 
 ' stiff ' ; ve7it, ' air-hole,' from Fr. fente, confused with vent, 
 
 173 
 
§1] CONFUSION OF WORDS 173 
 
 ' breath ' (for this v cannot be due to the Southern dialectal transi- 
 tion from /, as in vat from fat, for that transition does not, as a rule, 
 take place in French loans) ; cocoa for cacao, confused with coco- 
 nut : match, from Fr. meche, by confusion with the other match ; 
 chine, 'rim of cask,' from chime, cf, G. kimme, 'border,' confused 
 with chine, ' backbone.' I give some of these examples with a 
 little diffidence, though I have no doubt of the general principle 
 of childish confusion of unrelated words as one of the sources of 
 irregularities in the development cf sounds. 
 
 These substitutions cannot of course be separated from 
 instances of ' popular etymology,' as when the phrase to cnny 
 favour was substituted for the former to curry favel, where favel 
 means ' a fallow horse,' as the t3^pe of fraud or duplicity (cf. G. 
 den fahlen hengst reiten, 'to act deceitfully,' einen avf einem 
 fahlen pferde ertappen, ' to catch someone lying '). 
 
 X.— §2. Metanalysis. 
 
 We now come to the phenomenon for which I have ventured 
 to coin the term ' metanalysis,' by Avhich I mean that words or 
 word-groups are by a new generation analyzed differently from 
 the analysis of a former age. Each child has to find out for himself, 
 in hearing the connected speech of other people, where one word 
 ends and the next one begins, or what belongs to the kernel and 
 what to the ending of a word, etc. (VII §6). In most cases he 
 will arrive at the same analysis as the former generation, but now 
 and then he will put the boundaries in another place than formerlj^ 
 and the new analysis may become general. A naddre (the ME. 
 form for OE. an ncedre) thus became an adder, a napron became 
 an apron, an naiiger : an auger, a numpire : an umpire ; and in 
 psychologically the same way an ewte (older form evete, OE. efete) 
 became a newt : metanalj^sis accordingly sometimes shortens and 
 sometimes lengthens a word. Riding as a name of one of the three 
 districts of Yorkshire is due to a metanalysis of North Thriding 
 (ON. yridjungr, ' third part '), as well as of East Thriding, West 
 Thriding, after the sound of th had been assimilated to the 
 preceding t. 
 
 One of the most frequent forms of metanalj^sis consists in the 
 subtraction of an s, which originally belonged to the kernel of a 
 word, but is mistaken for the plural ending ; in this way we have 
 pea instead of the earlier peas, pease, cherry for ME. cherris, Fr. 
 cerise, asset from assets, Fr. assez, etc, Cf. also the vulgar Chinee, 
 Portuguee, etc.^ 
 
 * See my MEG ii. 6. 6, and my paper on ' Subtraktionsdannelser," in 
 Festskrijt til Vilh. Thomsen, 1894, p. 1 ff. 
 
174 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [en. x 
 
 The influence of a new generation is also seen in those cases 
 in which formerly separate words coalesce into one, as when he 
 breakfasts, he breakfasted, is said instead of he breaks fast, he broke 
 fast ; cf, vouchsafe, don (third person, vouchsafes, dovs), instead of 
 I'owc/t safe, do on (third person, vouches safe, does on). Here, too, 
 it is not probable that a person who has once learnt the real form 
 of a word, and thus knows where it begins and where it ends, 
 should have subsequentl}- changed it : it is much more likelj' that 
 all such changes originate with children who have once made 
 a wrong analysis of what they have heard and then go on repeating 
 the new forms all their lives. 
 
 X.— § 3. Shiftings of Meanings. 
 
 Changes in the meaning of words are often so gradual that 
 one cannot detect the different steps of the process, and changes 
 of this sort, like the corresponding changes in the sounds of M-ords, 
 are to be ascribed quite as much to people already acquainted 
 with the language as to the new generation. As examples we 
 may mention the laxity that has changed the meaning of somi, 
 which in OE. meant ' at once,' and in the same way of presently, 
 originally ' at present, now,' and of the old a7i07i. Dinner comes 
 from OF. disner, which is the infinitive of the verb which in other 
 forms was desjeun, whence modern French dtjeune (Lat. *desje- 
 junare) ; it thus meant ' breakfast,' but the hour of the meal 
 thus termed was gradually shifted in the course of centuries, so 
 that now we may have dinner twelve hours after breakfast. When 
 picture, which originally meant ' painting,' came to be applied to 
 drawings, photographs and other images ; when hard came to 
 be used as an epithet not only of nuts and stones, etc., but of words 
 and labour ; when fair, besides the old sense of ' beautiful,' 
 acquired those of ' blond ' and ' morally just ' ; when meat, from* 
 meaning all kinds of food (as in siveetmeats, meat and drink), came 
 to be restricted practically to one kind of food (butcher's meat) ; 
 when the verb grow, which at first w&s used onlj- of plants, came 
 to be used of animals, hairs, nails, feelings, etc., and, instead of 
 implying always increase, might even be combined with such a 
 predicative as smaller and smaller ; when pretty, from the meaning 
 'skilful, ingenious,' came to be a general epithet of approval 
 (cf. the modern American, a cunning child=' sweet '), and, besides 
 meaning good-looking, became an adverb of degree, as in pretty 
 bad : neither these nor countless similar shiftings need be ascribed 
 to any influence on the part of the learners of English ; they can 
 easily be accounted for as the product of innumerable small 
 extensions and restrictions on the part of the users of the language 
 after they have once acquired it. 
 
§3] SHIFTINGS OF MEANINGS 175 
 
 But along with changes of this sort we have others that have 
 come about with a leap, and in ^hich it is imi)ossible to find 
 intermediate stages betAveen two seemingly heterogeneous meanings, 
 as when bead, from meaning a ' prayer,' comes to mean ' a per- 
 forated ball of glass or amber.' In these cases the change is occa- 
 sioned by certain connexions, where the whole sense can only be 
 taken in one way, but the syntactical construction admits of 
 various interpretations, so that an ambiguity at one point gives 
 occasion for a new conception of the meaning of the word. The 
 phrase to count your beads originally meant ' to count j'our 
 prayers,' but because the prayers were reckoned by little balls, 
 the word beads came to be transferred to these objects, and lost 
 its original sense. ^ It seems clear that this misapprehension could 
 not take place in the brains of those who had already associated 
 the word with the original signification, while it was quite natural 
 on the part of children \Aho heard and understood the jDhrase 
 as a whole, but unconsciously analyzed it differently from the 
 previous generation. 
 
 There is another word which also meant ' prayer ' originally, 
 but has lost that meaning, viz. boon ; through such phrases as 
 ' ask a boon ' and ' grant a boon ' it came to be taken as meaning 
 ' a favour ' or ' a good thing received.' 
 
 Orient was frequently used in such connexions as ' orient 
 pearl ' and ' orient gem,' and as these were lustrous, orient became 
 an adjective meaning ' shining,' without any connexion with the 
 geographical orient, as in Shakespeare, Venus 981, "an orient 
 drop " (a tear), and ]\Iilton, PL i. 546, " Ten thousand banners 
 rise into the air. With orient colours waving." 
 
 There are no connecting links between the meanings of ' glad ' 
 and ' obliged,' ' forced,' but when fain came to be chiefly used 
 in combinations like ' he was fain to leave the country,' it was 
 natm-al for the younger generation to interpret the whole plu'ase 
 as implying necessity instead of gladness. 
 
 We have similar phenomena in certain sjTitactical changes. 
 When me thinks and me likes gave place to / think and / like, the 
 chief cause of the change was that the cliild heard combinations 
 like Mother thinks or Father likes, where mother and father can 
 be either nominative or accusative-dative, and the construction 
 is thus sjTitactically ambiguous. This leads to a ' shunting ' of 
 the meaning as well as of the construction of the verbs, which must 
 
 ^ Semantic changes through ambiguous syntactic combinations have 
 recently been studied espeeiallj' by Carl Collin ; see his Semasioloffiska stucUer, 
 1906, and Le Developpement de Sens du Suffixe -ATA, Lund, 1918, ch. iii 
 and iv, Collin there treats especially of tTie transition from abstract to 
 concrete nouns ; he does not, as I have done above, speak of the role of 
 the younger generation in such changes. 
 
176 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [cii. x 
 
 have come about in a new brain which was not originally acquainted 
 with the old construction. 
 
 As one of the factors bringing about changes in meaning many 
 scholars mention forgetfulness ; but it is important to keep in 
 ■view that what happens is not real forgetting, that is, snapping 
 of threads of thought that had already existed within the same 
 consciousness, but the fact that the new individual never develops 
 the threads of thought which in the elder generation bound one 
 word to another. Sometimes there is no connexion of ideas in 
 the child's bram : a word is viewed quite singly as a whole and 
 isolated, till later perhaps it is seen in its etymological relation. 
 A little girl of six asked when she was born. " You were born on 
 the 2nd of October." " Why, then, I was born on my birthday ! " 
 she cried, her eyes beaming with joy at this wonderfully happy 
 coincidence. Origmally Fare well was only said to some one going 
 away. If noAv the departing guest says Farewell to his friend 
 Avho is staying at home, it can only be because the word Farewell 
 has been conceived as a fixed formula, without any consciousness 
 of the nieaning of its parts. 
 
 Sometimes, on the other hand, new connexions of thought 
 arise, as when we associate the word bound with bi7id in the phrase 
 ' he is bound for America.' Our ancestors meant ' he is ready to 
 go ' (ON. bui7in, ' ready '), not ' he is under an obligation to go.' 
 The establishment of new associations of this kind seems naturally 
 to take place at the moment when the young mind makes 
 acquaintance with the word : the phenomenon is, of course, closely 
 related to "popular etj-mology " (see Ch. VI §6). 
 
 X.— §4. Differentiations. 
 
 Linguistic ' splittings ' or differentiations, whereby one word 
 becomes two, may also be largely due to the trani^mission of the 
 language to a new generation. The child may hear two pronuncia- 
 tions of the same word from different people, and then associate 
 these with different ideas. Thus Paul Passy learnt the word 
 meule in the sense of ' grindstone ' from his father, and in the 
 sense of ' haycock ' from his mother ; now the former in both 
 senses pronounced [moel], and the latter in both [mol], and the 
 child thus came to distinguish [moel] ' grindstone ' and rmDll 
 ' haycock ' (Ch 23). ■' 
 
 Or the child may have learnt the word at two different periods 
 of its life, associated with different spheres. This, I take it, may 
 be the reason why some speakers make a distinction betAvecn 
 two pronunciations of the word medicine, in two and in three 
 syllables : they take [medsin], but study [mcdisin]. 
 
§ 4] DIFFERENTIATIONS 177 
 
 Finally, the cliild can itself split words. A friend wiites : " I 
 remember that when a schoolboy said that it was a good thing that 
 the new Headmaster was Dr. Wood, because he would then know 
 when boys were ' shamming,' a schoolfellow remarked, ' Wasn't 
 it funny ? He did not know the difference between Doctor and 
 Docter.' " In Danish the Japanese are indiscriminately called 
 either Japaneme or Japanesernc ; now, I once overheard my bay 
 (6. 10) lecturing his playfellows : •'" Japaneserne, that is the soldiers 
 of Japan, but Japaneme, that is students and children and such- 
 like." It is, of course, possible that he may have heard' one 
 form originally when showTi some pictiu-es of Japanese soldiers, 
 and the other on another occasion, and that this may have been 
 the reason for his distinction. However this may be, I do not 
 doubt that a number of differentiations of words are to be ascribed 
 to the transmission of the language to a new generation. Others 
 may have arisen in the speech of adults, such as the distinction 
 between off and of (at first the stressed and unstressed form of 
 the same preposition), or between tJiorough and through (the former 
 is still used as a preposition in Shakespeare : " thorough bush, 
 thorough brier "). But complete differentiation is not established 
 till some individuals from the very first conceive the forms as 
 two indej)endent words. 
 
 X.— §5. Summary. 
 
 Listead of saying, as previous writers on these questions have 
 done, either that children have no influence or that they have 
 the chief influence on the development of language, it will be 
 seen that I have divided the question into many, going through 
 various fields of linguistic change and asking in each what may 
 have been the influence of the child. The result of this investigation 
 has been that there are certain fields in which it is both impossible 
 and really also irrelevant to separate the share of the child and 
 of the adult, because both will be apt to introduce changes of that 
 kind ; such are assimilations of neighbouring sounds and di'oppings 
 of consonants in groups. Also, with regard to those very gradual 
 shiftings either of sound or of meaning in which it is natural 
 to assume many intermediate stages through which the sound or 
 signification must have passed before arriving at the final 
 result, childi'en and adults must share the responsibility for the 
 change. Clippings of words occur in the s^Deech of both classes, 
 but as a rule adults will keep the beginning of a word, while very 
 small children will perceive or remember only the end of a word 
 and use that for the whole. But finally there are some kinds of 
 changes which must wholly or chiefly be charged to the account 
 
 12 
 
178 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [ch. x 
 
 of children : such are those leaps in sound or signification in wliich 
 intermediate stages are out of the question, as well as confusions 
 of similar words and misdi visions of words, and the most violent 
 differentiations of words. 
 
 I wish, however, here to insist on one point which has, I 
 think, become more and more clear in the course of our disquisition, 
 namely, that we ought not really to put the question like this : 
 Are linguistic changes due to children or to grown-up people ? 
 The important distinction is not really one of age, which is evidently 
 one of degree only, but that between the first learners of the sound 
 or word in question and those who use it after having once learnt 
 it. In the latter case we have mainly to do with infinitesimal 
 glidings, the results of which, when summed up in the course of 
 long periods of time, may be very considerable indeed, but in 
 which it will always be possible to detect intermediate linLs 
 connecting the extreme points. In contrast to these changes 
 occurring after the correct (or original) form has been acquired 
 by the individual, we have changes occurring simultuneously with 
 the first acquisition of the word or form in question, and thus 
 due to the fact of its transmission to a new generation, or, to 
 speak more generally, and, indeed, more correctly, to new indi- 
 viduals. The exact age of the learner here is of little avail, as will 
 be seen if we take some examples of metanal5'sis. It is highly 
 probable that the first users of forms like a pea or a cherry, instead 
 of a pease and a cherries, were little children ; but a Chinee and 
 a Portuguee are not necessarily, or not pre-eminently, children's 
 words : on the other hand, it is to me indubitable that these forms 
 do not spring into existence in the mind of someone who has 
 previously used the forms Chinese and Portuguese in the singular 
 number, but must be due to the fact that the forms the Chinese 
 and the Portuguese (used as plurals) have been at once apprehended 
 as made up of Chinee, Portuguee -{- the plural ending -s b}^ a 
 person hearing them for the first time ; similarly in all the other 
 cases. We shall see in a later chapter that the adoption (on the 
 part of children and adults alike) of sounds and words from a 
 foreign tongue presents certain interesting points of resemblance 
 Avith these instances of change : in both cases the innovation 
 begins when some individual is first made acquainted with 
 linguistic elements that are new to him. 
 
 X. — § 6. Indirect Influence. 
 
 We have hitherto considered what elements of the language 
 may be referred to a child's first acquisition of language. But 
 we have not yet done with the part which children play in 
 
§G] INDIRECT INFLUENCE 179 
 
 linguistic development. There are two things which must be 
 sharjily distinguished from the phenomena discussed in the pre- 
 ceding chai)ter — the first, that growii-up people in many cases 
 catch up the words and forms used by children and thereby give 
 them a jiower of survival which they would not have otherwise ; 
 the second, that grown-up people alter their own language so as 
 to meet children half-way. 
 
 As for the first point, we have already seen examples in which 
 mothers and nurses have found the baby's forms so pretty that 
 they have adopted them themselves. Generally these forms are 
 confined to the family circle, but they may under favourable circum- 
 stances be propagated further. A special case of the highest 
 interest has been fully discussed in the section about words of 
 the mamma-clsiss. 
 
 As for the second point, gro\vn-up people often adapt their 
 speech to the more or less imaginary needs of their children by 
 pronouncing words as they do, saying dood and turn for ' good ' and 
 ' come,' etc. This notion clearly depends on a misunderstanding, 
 and can only retard the acquisition of the right pronunciation ; 
 the child understands good and come at least as well, if not better, 
 and the consequence may be that when he is able himself to pro- 
 nounce [g] and [k] he may consider it immaterial, because one 
 can just as well say [d] and [t] as [g] and [k], or may be bewil- 
 dered as to which words have the one sound and which the other. 
 It can only be a benefit to the child if all who come in contact 
 with it speak from the first as correctly, elegantly and clearh^ as 
 possible — not, of course, in long, stilted sentences and with many 
 learned book-words, but naturally and easil}^ When the child 
 makes a mistake, the most effectual way of correcting it is certainly 
 the indirect one of seeing that the child, soon after it has made 
 the mistake, hears the correct form. If he says ' A waps stinged 
 me ' : answer, ' It stung you : did it hurt much when the wasp 
 stung you ? ' etc. No special emphasis even is needed ; next 
 time he will probably use the correct form. 
 
 But many parents are not so wise ; they will say stinged them- 
 selves when once they have heard the child say so. And nurses 
 and others have even developed a kind of artificial nursery 
 language which they imagine makes matters easier for the little 
 ones, but which is in many respects due to erroneous ideas of how 
 children ought to talk rather than to real observation of the way 
 children do talk. Many forms are handed over traditionally from 
 one nurse to another, such as totties, tootems or tootsies for ' feet ' 
 (from trotters ?), toothy -peg for ' tooth,' tummy or t^imtum for 
 * stomach,' tootleums for ' babies,' shooshoo for ' a fly.' I give a 
 connected specimen of this nursery language (from Egerton, 
 
180 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [ch. x 
 
 Keynotes, 85) : " Didsum was denn 1 Oo did ! Was urns de 
 prettiest itta sweetums denn ? Oo was. An' did um put 'em in 
 a nasty shawl an' joggle 'em in an ole pufif-puff, um did, was a 
 shame ! Hitchy cum, hitchy cum, hitchy cum hi. Chinaman no 
 likey me." This reminds one of pidgin-English, and in a later 
 chapter we shall see that that and similar bastard languages are 
 partly due to the same mistaken notion that it is necessary to 
 corrupt one's language to be easily understood by children and 
 inferior races. 
 
 Very frequently mothers and nurses talk to children in 
 diminutives. When many of these have become established in 
 ordinary speech, losing their force as diminutives and displacing 
 the proper words, this is another result of nursery language. The 
 phenomenon is widely seen in Romance languages, where auricula, 
 Ft. oreille, It. orecchio, displaces auris, and avicdlus, Fr. oiseau. 
 It. uccello, displaces avis ; we may remember that classical Latin 
 had already oculus, for ' eye.' ^ It is the same in Modern Greek. 
 An example of the same tendency, though not of the same formal 
 means of a diminutive ending, is seen in the English bird (originally 
 = ' young bird ') and rabbit (originally = ' j'oung rabbit '), which 
 have displaced fowl and coney. 
 
 A very remarkable case of the influence of nursery language 
 on normal speech is seen in many coimtries, viz. in the displacing 
 of the old word for ' right ' (as opposed to left). The distinction 
 of right and left is not easy for small children : some children in 
 the upper classes at school only know which is which by looking 
 at some wart, or something of the sort, on one of their hands, and 
 have to think every time. Meanwhile mothers and nurses will 
 frequently insist on the use of the right (dextera) hand, and when 
 they are not understood, will think they make it easier for the 
 child by saying ' No, the right hand,' and so it comes about that 
 in many languages the word that originally means ' correct ' is 
 used with the meaning ' dexter.' So we have in English right, 
 in German recht, which displaces zeso, Fr. droit, which displaces 
 desire ; in Spanish also la derecha has begun to be used instead 
 of la diestra ; similarly, in Swedish den vackra handen instead 
 of hogra, and in Jutlandish dialects den kjon hand instead of 
 hojre. 
 
 X.— § 7. New Languages. 
 
 In a subsequent chapter (XIV § 5) we shall consider the theory 
 that epochs in which the changes of some language proceed at a 
 
 * I know perfectly well that in these and in other similar words there 
 were reasons for the original word disappearing as unfit (shortness, possibility 
 of mistakes through similarity with other words, etc.). What interests 
 me here is the fact that the substitute is a word of the nursery. 
 
§7] NEW LANGUAGES 181 
 
 more rapid pace than at others are due to the fact that in times 
 of fierce, widely extended wars many men leave home and remain 
 abroad, either as settlers or as corpses, while the women left behind 
 have to do the field-work, etc., and neglect their homes, the conse- 
 quence being that the children are left more to themselves, and 
 therefore do not get their mistakes in speech corrected as much 
 as usual. 
 
 A somewhat related idea is at the bottom of a theory advanced 
 as early as 1886 by the American ethnologist Horatio Hale (see 
 "The Origin of Languages," in the American Association for the 
 Advancement of Science, XXXV, 1886, and "The Development of 
 Language," the Canadian Institute, Toronto, 1888). As these 
 papers seem to have been entirely unnoticed by leading philolo- 
 gists, I shall give a short abstract of them, leaving out what appears 
 to me to be erroneous in the light of recent linguistic thought and 
 research, namely, his application of the theory to explain the 
 supposed three stages of linguistic development, the monosyllabic, 
 the agglutinative and the flexional. 
 
 Hale was struck with the fact that in Oregon, in a region not 
 much larger than France, we find at least thirty different families 
 of languages living together. It is impossible to believe that 
 thirty separate communities of speechless precursors of man should 
 have begun to talk independently of one another in thirty distinct 
 languages in this district. Hale therefore concludes that the 
 origin of linguistic stocks is to be found in the language-making 
 instinct of very young children. When two children who are 
 just beginning to speak are thrown much together, they sometimes 
 invent a complete language, sufficient for all purposes of mutual 
 intercourse, and yet totally unintelligible to their parents. In 
 an ordinary household, the conditions under which such a language 
 v/ould be formed are most likely to occur in the case of twins, 
 and Hale now proceeds to mention those instances — five in all — 
 that he has come across of languages framed in this manner by 
 young children. He concludes : "It becomes evident that, to 
 ensure the creation of a speech which shall be a parent of a new 
 language stock, all that is needed is that two or more young children 
 should be placed by themselves in a condition where they will be 
 entirely, or in a large degree, free from the presence and influence 
 of their elders. They must, of course, continue in this condition 
 long enough to grow up, to form a household, and to have 
 descendants to whom they can communicate their new speech." 
 
 These conditions he finds among the hunting tribes of America, 
 in which it is common for single families to wander off from the 
 main band. " In modern times, when the whole country is occu- 
 pied, their flight would merely carry them into the territory of 
 
182 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [cii. x 
 
 another tribe, among whom, if well received, they would quickly 
 be absorbed. But in the primitive period, when a vast uninhabited 
 region stretched before them, it would be easy for them to find 
 some sheltered nook or fruitful valley. ... If under such circum- 
 stances disease or the casualties of a hunter's life should carry 
 off the parents, the survival of the children would, it is evident, 
 depend mainly upon the nature of the climate and the ease with 
 which food could be procured at all seasons of the year. In 
 ancient Europe, after the present climatal conditions were estab- 
 lished, it is doubtful if a family of children under ten years of 
 age could have lived through a single winter. We are not, 
 therefore, surprised to find that no more than four or five language 
 stocks are represented in Europe. ... Of Northern America, 
 east of the Rocky Mountains and north of the tropics, the same 
 may be said. . . . But there is one region where Nature seems 
 to offer herself as the willing nurse and bountiful stepmother 
 of the feeble and unprotected . . . California. Its wonderful 
 climate (follows a long description). . . . Need we wonder that, 
 in such a mild and fruitful region, a great number of separate 
 tribes were found, speaking languages which a careful investigation 
 has classed in nineteen distinct linguistic stocks ? " In Oregon, 
 and in the interior of Brazil, Hale finds similar climatic conditions 
 with the same result, a great number of totally dissimilar lan- 
 guages, while in Australia, whose climate is as mild as that of 
 any of these regions, we find hundreds, perhaps thousands, of 
 petty tribes, as completely isolated as those of South America, 
 but all speaking languages of the same stock — because "the other 
 conditions are such as would make it impossible for an isolated 
 group of young children to sm*vive. The whole of Australia 
 is subject to severe droughts, and is so scantily provided with 
 edible products that the aborigines are often reduced to the 
 greatest straits." 
 
 This, then, is Hale's theory. Let us now look a little closer 
 into the proofs adduced. They are, as it will be seen, of a twofold 
 order. He invokes the language-creating tendencies of young 
 childi-en on the one hand, and on the other the geographical 
 distribution of linguistic stocks or genera. 
 
 As to the first, it is true that so competent a psychologist as 
 Wundt denies the possibility in very strong terms.^ But facts 
 certainly do not justify this foregone conclusion. I must first 
 refer the reader to Hale's own report of the five instances known 
 
 ^ " Einige namentlich in der altern litteratiir vorkommende angaben 
 iiber kinder, die sich zusammen aufwachsend eine eigene sprache gebildet 
 liaben sollen, sind wohl ein fiir allemal in das gebiet der fabel zu verweisen " 
 (S 1. 286). 
 
§7] NEW LANGUAGES 188 
 
 to him. Unfortunately, the linguistic material collected by him 
 is so scanty that we can form only a very imperfect idea of the 
 languages which he says children have developed and of the 
 relation between them and the language of the parents. But 
 otherwise his report is very instructive, and I shall call special 
 attention to the fact that in most cases the children seem to have 
 been ' spoilt ' by their parents ; this is also the case with regard 
 to one of the families, though it does not appear from Hale's 
 own extracts from the book in which he found his facts (G. 
 Watson, Universe of Language, N.Y., 1878). 
 
 The only word recorded in this case is nl-si-boo-a for ' car- 
 riage ' ; how that came into existence, I dare not conjecture ; 
 but when it is said that the syllables of it were sometimes so 
 repeated that they made a much longer word, this agrees very 
 well with what I have myself observed with regard to ordinary 
 children's playful word-coinages. In the next case, described by 
 E. R. Hun, M.D., of Albany, more words are given. Some of 
 these bear a strong resemblance to French, although neither the 
 parents nor servants spoke that language ; and Hale thinks that 
 some person may have " amused herself, innocently enough, by 
 teaching the child a few words of that tongue." This, however, 
 does not seem necessary to explain the words recorded. Feu, 
 pronounced, we are told, like the French word, signified ' fire, 
 light, cigar, sun ' : it may be either E. fire or else an imitation of 
 the sound /^ without a vowel, or [fa'] used in blowing out a candle 
 or a match or in smoking, so as to amuse the child, exactly as 
 in the case of one of my little Danish friends, who used Jff as the 
 name for ' smoke, steam,' and later for ' funnel, chimney,' and 
 finally anything standing upright against the sky, for instance, 
 a flagstaff. Petee-petee, the name which the Albany girl gave to 
 her brother, and which Dr. Hun derived from F. petit, may be 
 just as well from E. pet or petty ; and to explain her word for 
 ' I,' ma, we need not go to F, moi, as E. me or my may obviously 
 be thus distorted by an j' child. Her word for 'not' is said to 
 have been ne-pas, though the exact pronunciation is not given. 
 This cannot have been taken from the French, at any rate not 
 from real French, as ne and pas are here separated, and ne is more 
 often than not pronounced without the vowel or omitted altogether ; 
 the girl's word, if pronounced something like ['nepa*] may be 
 nothing else than an imperfect childish pronunciation of never, 
 cf. the negroes' form nebher. Too, ' all, everj^thing,' of course 
 resembles Fr. tout, but how should anj'one have been able to teach 
 this girl, who did not speak any intelligible language, a French 
 word of this abstract character ? Some of the other words admit 
 of a natural explanation from English : go-go, ' delicacy, as sugar, 
 
184 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [ch. x 
 
 candy or dessert,' is probably goody-goody, or a reduplicated form 
 of good ; deer, ' money,' may be from dear, ' expensive ' ; odo, 
 ' to send for, to go out, to take away,' is evidently out, as in ma 
 odo, ' I want to go out ' ; gaan, ' God,' must be the English word, 
 in spite of the difference in pronunication, for the child would never 
 think of inventing this idea on its own accord ; pa-7na, ' to go to 
 sleep, pillow, bed,' is from by-bye or an independent word of the 
 wamwa-class ; 7nea, ' cat, fur,' of course is imitative of the sound 
 of the cat. For the rest of the words I have no conjectiues to 
 offer. Some of the derived meanings are curious, though perhaps 
 not more startling than many found in the speech of ordinary 
 children ; pajM and mamma separately had their usual signification, 
 but papa-mamma meant ' church, prayer-book, cross, priest ' : 
 the parents were punctual in church observances ; gar odo, 
 ' horse out, to send for the horse,' came to mean ' pencil and 
 paper,' as the father used, when the carriage was wanted, to write 
 an order and send it to the stable. In the remaining three cases 
 of ' invented ' languages no specimens are given, except shindikik, 
 ' cat.' In all cases the children seem to have talked together 
 fluently when by themselves in their own gibberish. 
 
 But there exists on record a case better elucidated than Hale's 
 five cases, namely that of the Icelandic girl Saeunn. (See Jonasson 
 and Eschricht in Dansh Maanedsskrift, Copenhagen, 1858.) She 
 was born in the beginning of the last century on a farm in 
 Hiinavatns-syssel in the northern part of Iceland, and began early 
 to converse with her twin brother in a language that was entirely 
 unintelligible to their surroundings. Her parents were disquieted, 
 and therefore resolved to send away the brother, who died soon 
 afterwards. They now tried to teach the girl Icelandic, but 
 soon (too soon, evidently !) came to the conclusion that she could 
 not learn it, and then they were foolish enough to learn her 
 language, as did also her brothers and sisters and even some of 
 their friends. In order that she might be confirmed, her elder 
 brother translated the catechism and acted as interpreter between 
 the parson and the girl. She is described as intelligent — she 
 even composed poetry in her own language — but shy and dis- 
 trustful. Jonasson gives a few specimens of her language, some 
 of which Eschricht succeeds in interpreting as based on Icelandic 
 words, though strangely disfigured. The language to Jonasson, 
 who had heard it, seemed totally dissimilar to Icelandic in sounds 
 and construction ; it had no flexions, and lacked pronouns. 
 The vocabulary was so limited that she very often had to supple- 
 ment a phrase by means of nods or gestures ; and it was difficult 
 to carry on a conversation with her in the dark. The ingenuity 
 of some of the compounds and metaphors is greatly admired by 
 
§7] NEW LANGUAGES 185 
 
 Jonasson, though to the more sober mind of Eschricht they appear 
 rather childish or primitive, as when a ' wether ' is called mepok-ill 
 from ine (imitation of the sound) + pok, ' a little bag ' (Icel. 
 poki) 4" itt, ' to cut.' The only complete sentence recorded is 
 ' Dirfa offo nonona uhuh,' which means : ' Sigurdur gets up 
 extremely late.' In his analysis of the whole case Eschricht 
 succeeds in stripping it of the mystical glamour in which it evidently 
 appeared to Jonasson as well as to the girl's relatives ; he is 
 undoubtedly right in maintaining that if the parents had persisted 
 in only talking Icelandic to her, she would soon have forgotten 
 her own language ; he compares her words with some strange 
 disfigurements of Danish which he had observed among children 
 in his own family and acquaintanceship. 
 
 I read this report a good many years ago, and afterwards I 
 tried on two occasions to obtain precise information about similar 
 cases I had seen mentioned, one in Halland (Sweden) and the 
 other in Finland, but without success. But in 1903, when I was 
 lecturmg on the language of children in the University of CoiDcn- 
 hagen, I had the good fortune to hear of a case not far from 
 Copenhagen of two children speaking a language of their own. 
 I investigated the case as well as I could, by seeing and hearing 
 them several times and thus checking the words and sentences 
 which their teacher, who was constantly with them, kindly took 
 down in accordance with my directions. I am thus enabled to 
 give a fairly full account of their language, though unfortunately 
 my investigation was interrupted by a long voyage in 1904. 
 
 The boys were twins, about five and a half years old when I 
 saw them, and so alike that even the people who were about them 
 every day had difficulty in distinguishing them from each other. 
 Their mother (a single woman) neglected them shamefully when 
 they were quite small, and they were left very much to shift for 
 themselves. For a long time, while their mother was ill in a 
 hospital, they lived in an out-of-the-way place with an old woman, 
 who is said to have been very deaf, and who at any rate troubled 
 herself very little about them. When they were four years old, 
 the parish authorities discovered how sadly neglected they were 
 and that they spoke quite unintelHgibly, and therefore sent them 
 to a ' children's home ' in Seeland, where they were properly 
 taken care of. At first they were extremely shy and reticent, 
 and it was a long time before they felt at home with the other 
 children. When I first saw them, they had in so far learnt the 
 ordinary language that they were able to understand many every- 
 day sentences spoken to them, and could do what they were 
 told (e.g. ' Take the footstool and put it in my room near the 
 stove '), but they could not speak Danish and said very little 
 
18G THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [en. x 
 
 in the presence of anybody else. When they were b}' themselves 
 they conversed pretty freely and in a completely unintelligible 
 gibberish, as I had the opportunity to convince myself when 
 standing behind a door one day when they thought they were 
 not observed. Afterwards I got to be in a way good friends with 
 them — they called me pij-ma, py being their word for 'smoke, 
 smoking, pipe, cigar,' so that I got my name from the chocolate 
 cigars which I used to ingratiate myself with them — and then I 
 got them to repeat words and jjhrases which their teacher had 
 written out for me, and thus was enabled to write down everything 
 phonetically. 
 
 An analysis of the sounds occurring in their words showed 
 me that their vocal organs were perfectly normal. Most of the 
 words were evidently Danish words, however much distorted and 
 shortened ; a voiceless I, which does not occur in Danish, and 
 which I write here Ih, was a very frequent sound. This, combined 
 with an inclination to make many words end in -jp, was enough 
 to disguise words very eftectuall}^ as when sort (black) was made 
 Ihop. I shall give the children's pronunciations of the names of 
 some of their new playfellows, adding in brackets the Danish 
 substratum : lliep (Svend), Ihip (Vilhelm), lip (Elisabeth), lop 
 (Charlotte), hap (Mandse) ; similarly the doctor was called dop. 
 In many cases there was phonetic assimilation at a distance, as 
 when milk (mselk) was called be.p, flower (blomst) bop, light (lys) 
 Ihtjlh, sugar (sukker) Iholh, cold (kulde) Ihulh, sometimes also idh, 
 bed (seng) scejs, fish (fisk) se-is. 
 
 I subjoin a few complete sentences : nina enaj una enaj hceva 
 mad enaj, ' we shall not fetch food for the young rabbits ' : nina 
 rabbit (kanin), enaj negation (nej, no), repeated several times in 
 each negative sentence, as in Old English and in Bantu languages, 
 una young (unge). Bap ep dop), ' Mandse has broken the hobby- 
 horse,' literally ' Mandse horse piece.' Hos ia bov Ihalh, ' brother's 
 trousers are wet, Maria,' literally ' trousers Maria brother water.' 
 The words are put together without any flexions, and the word 
 order is totally different from that of Danish. 
 
 Only in one case was I unable to identify words that I under- 
 stood either as ' little language ' forms of Danish words or else 
 as soimd-imitations ; but then it must be remembered that they 
 spoke a good deal that neither I nor any of the people about them 
 could make anything of. And then, unfortunately, when I began 
 to study it, their language was already to a great extent ' human- 
 ized ' in comparison to what it was when they first came to the 
 children's home. In fact, I noticed a constant progress during 
 the short time I observed the boys, and in some of the last 
 sentences I have noted, I even find the genitive case employed. 
 
§7] NEW LANGUAGES 187 
 
 The idiom of these twins cannot, of course, be called an inde- 
 pendent, still less a complete or fully developed language ; but 
 if they were able to produce something so different from the 
 language spoken around them at the beginning of the twentieth 
 century and in a civilized country, there can to my mind be no 
 doubt that Hale is right in his contention that children left to 
 themselves even more than these were, in an uninhabited region 
 where they were still not liable to die from hunger or cold, would 
 be able to develop a language for their mutual understanding 
 that might become so different from that of their parents as really 
 to constitute a new stock of language. So that we can now pass 
 to the other — geographical — side of what Hale advances in favour 
 of his theory. 
 
 So far as I can see, the facts here tally very well with the 
 theory. Take, on the one hand, the Eskimo languages, spoken 
 with astonishingly little variation from the east coast of Greenland 
 to Alaska, an immense stretch of territory in which small children 
 if left to themselves would be sure to die very soon indeed. Or 
 take the Finnish-Ugrian languages in the other hemisphere, exhibit- 
 ing a similar close relationship, though spread over wide areas. 
 And then, on the other hand, the American languages already 
 adduced by Hale. I do not pretend to any deeper knowledge of 
 these languages ; but from the most recent works of very able 
 specialists I gather an impression of the utmost variety in 
 phonetics, in grammatical structure and in vocabulary ; see 
 especially Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber, " The Native 
 Languages of California," in the American AntJirojJologisf, 1903. 
 Even where recent research seems to establish some kind of kinship 
 between families hitherto considered as distinguished stocks (as 
 in Dixon's interesting paper, " Linguistic Relationships within the 
 Shasta -Achoraawi Stock," XV Congi-es des Americanistes, 1906) 
 the similarities are still so incomplete, so capricious and generally 
 so remote that they seem to support Hale's explanation rather 
 than a gradual splitting of the usual kind. 
 
 As for Brazil, I shall quote some interesting remarks from 
 C. F. P. V. Martins, Beitrdge zur Ethnographie u. Sprachenkunde 
 Amerika's, 1867, i. p. 46 : " In Brazil we see a scant and unevenly 
 distributed native population, uniform in bodily structure, tempera- 
 ment, customs and manner of living generally, but presenting a 
 really astonishing diversity in language. A language is often 
 confined to a few mutually related individuals ; it is in truth a 
 family heirloom and isolates its speakers from all other people 
 so as to render any attempt at understanding impossible. On 
 the vessel in which we travelled up the rivers in the interior of 
 Brazil, we often, among twenty Indian rowers, could count only 
 
188 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD [ch. x 
 
 three or four that were at all able to speak together . . . they 
 sat there side by side dumb and stupid." 
 
 Hale's theory is worthy, then, of consideration, and now, at 
 the close of our voyage round the world of children's language, 
 we have gained a post of vantage from which we can overlook 
 the whole globe and see that the peculiar word-forms which children 
 use in their ' little language ' period can actually throw light 
 on the distribution of languages and groups of languages over 
 the great continents. Yes, 
 
 Scorn not the little ones ! You oft will find 
 They reach the goal, when great ones lag behind. 
 
BOOK III 
 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE WORLD 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 THE FOREIGNER 
 
 § 1. The Substratum Theory. § 2. French u and Spanish h. § 3. Gothonic 
 and Keltic. § 4. Etruscan and Indian Consonants. § 5. Gothonic 
 Sound-shift. § 6. Natural and Specific Changes. § 7. Power of 
 Substratum. § 8. Types of Race-mixture. § 9. Summary. § 10. 
 General Theory of Loan-words. § 11. Classes of Loan-words. 
 § 12. Influence on Grammar. § 13. Translation-loans. 
 
 XI.— § 1. The Substratum Theory. 
 
 It seems evident that if we wish to find out the causes of linguistic 
 change, a fundamental division must be into — 
 
 (1) Changes that are due to the transference of the language 
 to new individuals, and 
 
 (2) Changes that are independent of such transference. 
 
 It may not be easy in practice to distinguish the two classes, 
 as the very essence of the linguistic life of each individual is a 
 continual give-and-take between him and those around him ; 
 still, the division is in the main clear, and will consequently be 
 followed in the present work. 
 
 The first class falls again naturally into two heads, according 
 as the new individual does not, or does already, possess a language. 
 With the former, i.e. with the native child learning his ' mother- 
 tongue,' we have dealt at length in Book II, and we now proceed to 
 an examination of the influence exercised on a language through its 
 transference to individuals w^ho are already in possession of another 
 language — let us, for the sake of shortness, call them foreigners. 
 
 While some earlier scholars denied categorically the existence 
 of mixed languages, recent investigators have attached a very 
 great importance to mixtui'cs of languages, and have studied 
 actually occurring mixtures of various degrees and characters 
 with the greatest accuracy : I mention here only one name, that 
 of Hugo Schuchardt, who combines profundity and width of 
 knowledge with a truly philosophical spirit, though the form of 
 his numerous scattered writings makes it difficult to gather a just 
 idea of his views on many questions. 
 
 Many scholars have recently attached great importance to the 
 subtler and more hidden influence exerted by one language on 
 another in those cases in which a population abandons its original 
 
 191 
 
192 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 language and adopts that of another race, generally in consequence 
 of military conquest. In these cases the theorj'^ is that people 
 keep many of their speech-habits, especially with regard to articula- 
 tion and accent, even while using the vocabulary, etc., of the new 
 language, which thus to a large extent is tinged by the old language. 
 There is thus created what is now generally termed a substratvm 
 underlying the new language. As the original substratum modify- 
 ing a language which gradually spreads over a large area varies 
 according to the character of the tribes subjugated in different 
 districts, this would account for many of those splittings-up of 
 languages which we witness everywhere. 
 
 Hirt goes so far as to think it possible by the help of exist- 
 ing dialect boundaries to determine the extensions of aboriginal 
 languages (Idg 19). 
 
 There is certainl}' something very plausible in this manner of 
 viewing linguistic changes, for we all know from practical everyday 
 experience that the average foreigner is apt to betray his nation- 
 ality as soon as he opens his mouth : the Italian's or the German's 
 English is just as different from the 'real thing' as, inverselj% the 
 Englishman's Italian or German is difl^erent from the Italian or 
 German of a native : the place of articulation, especially that of 
 the tongue-tip consonants, the aspiration or want of aspiration 
 of p, t, k, the voicing or non-voicing of b, d, g, the diphthongization 
 or monophthongization of long vowels, the syllabification, various 
 peculiarities in quantity and in tone-movements — all such things 
 are apt to colour the whole acoustic impression of a foreigner's 
 speech in an acquired language, and it is, of course, a natural 
 supposition that the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe and Asia 
 were just as liable to transfer their speech habits to new languages 
 as their descendants are nowadays. There is thus a priori a strong 
 probability that linguistic substrata have exercised some influence 
 on the development of conquering languages. But when we 
 proceed to apply this natural inference to concrete examples of 
 linguistic history, we shall see that the theory does not perhaps 
 suffice to explain everything that its advocates would have it 
 explain, and that there are certain difficulties which have not 
 always been faced or ajspraised according to their real value. A 
 consideration of these concrete examples will naturally lead up to 
 a discussion of the general principles involved in the substratum 
 theory. 
 
 XI.— § 2. French u and Spanish h. 
 
 First I shall mention Ascoli's famous theory that French [y] 
 for Latin u, as in dur, etc., is due to Gallic influence, cf. Welsh 
 i in din from dun, which presupposes a transition from u to [y]. 
 
§2] FRENCH U AND SPANISH H 198 
 
 Ascoli found a proof in the fact that Dutch also has the pronuncia- 
 tion [y], e.g. in duur, on the old Keltic soil of the Belgie, to which 
 Schuchardt (SID 126) added his observation of [y] in dialectal 
 South German (Breisgau), in a district in which there had formerly 
 been a strong Keltic element. This looks very convincing at 
 first blush. On closer inspection, doubts arise on many points. 
 The French transition cannot with certainty be dated very early, 
 for then c in cure would have been palatalized and changed as 
 c before i (Lenz, KZ 39. 46) ; also the treatment of the vowel 
 in French words taken over into English, where it is not identified 
 with the native [y], but becomes [iu], is best explained on the as- 
 sumption that about 1200 a.d. the sound had not advanced farther 
 on its march towards the front position than, say, the Swedish 
 ' mixed-round ' sound in hus. The district in which [y] is foimd 
 for u is not coextensive with the Keltic possessions ; there were 
 very few Kelts in what is now Holland, and inversely South German 
 [y] for u does not cover the whole Keltic domain ; [y] is found 
 outside the French territory proper, namely, in Franco-Proven9al 
 (where the substratum was Ligurian) and in Proven9al (where there 
 were very few Galli ; cf. Wechssler, L 113). Thus the province 
 of [y] is here too small and there too large to make the argument 
 conclusive. Even more fatal is the objection that the Gallic 
 transition from u to y is very uncertain (Pedersen, GKS 1. § 353). 
 So much is certain, that the fronting of u was not a common Keltic 
 transition, for it is not found in the Gaelic (Goidelic) branch.^ 
 On the other hand, the transition from [u] to [y] occurs elsewhere, 
 independent of Keltic influence, as in Old Greek (cf . also the Swedish 
 sound in hus) : wli}'' cannot it, then, be independent in French ? 
 Another case adduced by Ascoli is initial h instead of Latin 
 / in the country anciently occupied by the Iberians. Now, Basque 
 has no / sound at all in any connexion ; if the same aversion to 
 /had been the cause of the Spanish substitution of h for/, we should 
 expect the substitution to have been made from the moment when 
 Latin was first spoken in Hispania, and we should expect it to be 
 found in all positions and connexions. But what do we find 
 instead ? First, that Old Spanish had / in many cases where modern 
 Spanish has h (i.e. really no sound at all), and this cannot be 
 
 ^ Cf. against the assumption of Keltic influence in this instance Meyer* 
 Liibke, Die Romanischen Sprachen, Kultur der Gegenwart, p. 457, and Ett- 
 majer in Streit berg's Gesch. 2. 265. H. Mutschmanu, Phonology of the North- 
 Eastern Scotch Dialect, 1909, p. 53, thinks that the fronting of tt in Scotch 
 is similar to that of Latin u on GaUic territory, and like it is ascribable to 
 the Keltic inhabitants : he forgets, however, that the corresponding fronting 
 is not found in the Keltic spoken in Scotland. Moreover, the complicated 
 Scotch phenomena cannot be compared with the French transition, for 
 the sound of [u] remains in many cases, and [i] generally corresponds to 
 earlier [o], whatever the explanation may be. 
 
 13 
 
194 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 altogether ascribed to ' Latinizing scribes.' On the contrary, the 
 transition f >h seems to have taken place many centuiics after the 
 Roman invasion, since the Spanish-speaking Jews of Salonika, 
 who emigrated from Spain about 1500, have to this day preserved 
 the / sound among other archaic traits (see F. Hanssen, Span. 
 Gramm. 45 ; Wiener, Modern Philology, June 1903, p. 205). And 
 secondly, that / has been kept in certain connexions ; thus, before 
 [w], as in fui,fuiste, fue, etc., before r and I, as in fnito, flor, etc. 
 This certainly is inexplicable if the cause of /> h had been the want 
 of power on the part of the aborigines to produce the / sound at 
 all, while it is simple enough if we assume a later transition, taking 
 place possibly at first between two vowels, with a subsequent 
 generalization of the /-less forms. Diez is here, as not infrequently, 
 more sensible than some of his successors (see Gramm. d. roman. 
 spr., 4th ed., 1. 283 f., 373 f.). 
 
 XL— § 3. Gothonic and Keltic. 
 
 Feist (KI 480 fE.: cf. PBB 36. 307 ff., 37. 112 fE.) applies the 
 substratum theory to the Gothonic (Germanic) languages. The 
 Gothons are autochthonous in northern Europe, and very little 
 mixed with other races ; they must have immigrated just after 
 the close of the glacial period. But the arrival of Aiyan (Indo- 
 germanic) tribes cannot be placed earlier than about 2000 B.C. ; 
 they made the original inhabitants give up their own language. 
 The nation that thus Aryanized the Gothons cannot have been 
 other than the Kelts ; their supremacy over the Gothons is proved 
 by several loan-words for cultural ideas or state offices, such as 
 Gothic reiks 'king,' andbahts 'servant.' The Aryan language 
 which the Kelts taught the Gothons was subjected in the process 
 to considerable changes, the old North Europeans pronouncing 
 the new language in accordance with their previous speech habits p 
 instead of taking over the free Aryan accent, they invariably stressed 
 the initial syllable, and they made sad havoc of the Arjan flexion. 
 The theory does not bear close inspection. The number of 
 Keltic loan-words is not great enough for us to infer such an over- 
 powering ascendancy on the part of the Kelts as would force the 
 subjected population to make a complete surrender of their own 
 tongue. Neither in number nor in intrinsic significance can these 
 loans be compared with the French loans in English : and yet 
 the Normans did not succeed in substituting their own language 
 for English. Besides, if the theory were true, we should not merely 
 see a certain number of Keltic loan-words, but the whole speech, 
 the complete vocabulary as well as the entire grammar, would be 
 Keltic ; yet as a matter of fact there is a wide gulf between Keltic 
 
§8] GOTHONIC AND KELTIC 195 
 
 and Gothonic, and many details, lexical and grammatical, in the 
 latter group resemble other Aryan languages rather than Keltic. 
 The stressing of the first syllable is said to be due to the aboriginal 
 language. If that were so, it would mean that this population, 
 in adopting the new speech, had at once transferred its own habit 
 of stressing the first sj'llable to all the new words, very much as 
 Icelanders are apt to do nowadays. But this is not in accordance 
 with well established facts in the Gothonic languages : we know 
 that when the consonant shift took place, it found the stress on the 
 same syllables as in Sanskrit, and that it was this stress on many 
 middle or final syllables that afterwards changed many of the shifted 
 consonants from voiceless to voiced (Verner's law).^ This fact in 
 itself suffices to prove that the consonant shift and the stress shift 
 cannot have taken place simultaneously, and thus cannot be due 
 to one and the same cause, as supposed by Feist. Nor can the 
 havoc wrought in the old flexions be due to the inability of a new 
 people to grasp the minute nuances and intricate system of another 
 language than its own ; for in that case too we should have some- 
 thing like the formless ' Pidgin English ' from the very beginning, 
 whereas the oldest Gothonic languages still preserve a great 
 many old flexions and subtle s\Titactical rules which have since 
 disappeared. As a matter of fact, many of the flexions of primitive 
 Aiyan were much better preserved in Gothonic languages than 
 in Keltic. 
 
 XI. — §4. Etruscan and Indian Consonants. 
 
 In another place in the same work (KI 373) Feist speaks of 
 the Etruscan language, and says that this had only one kind of 
 stop consonants, represented by the letters h (c), t, jp, besides the 
 aapirated stops kh, th, i^Ji, which in some instances correspond to 
 Latin and Greek tenues. This, he says, reminds one very strongly 
 of the sound system of High German (oberdeutschen) dialects, 
 and more particularly of those spoken in the Alps. Feist here 
 (and in PBB 36. 340 fE.) maintains that these sounds go back to 
 a Pre-Gothonic Alpine population, which he identifies with the 
 ancient Rhsetians ; and he sees in this a strong support of a 
 linguistic connexion between the Rhaetians and Etruscans. He 
 finds further striking analogies between the Gothonic and the 
 Armenian soimd systems ; the predilection for voiceless stops 
 and aspirated sounds in Etruscan, in the domain of the ancient 
 Rhsetians and in Asia Minor is accordingly ascribed to the speech 
 habits of one and the same aboriginal race. 
 
 ^ Curiously enough, Feist uses this argument himself against Hirt in 
 his earlier paper, PBB 37. 121. 
 
19C THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 Here, too, there are many points to which I must take exception. 
 It is not quite certain that the usual interpretation of Etruscan 
 letters is correct ; in fact, much may be said in favour of the 
 hypothesis that the letters rendered p, t, k stand really for the 
 sounds of b, d, g, and that those transcribed ph, th, kh (or Greek <f), 
 d", x) represent ordinary p, t, k. However this may be, Feist 
 seems to be speaking here almost in the same breath of the first (or 
 common Gothonic) shift and of the second (or specially High Ger- 
 man) shift, although they are separated from each other by several 
 centuries and neither cover the same geographical ground nor lead 
 to the same phonetic result. Neither Armenian nor primitive 
 Gothonic can be said to be averse to voiced stops, for in both we 
 find voiced 6, d, g for the old 'mediae aspiratae.' And in both 
 languages the old voiceless stops became at first probably not 
 aspirates, but simply voiceless spirants, as in English /ather, thing, 
 and Scotch loc^^. Further, it should be noted that we do not find 
 the tendency to unvoice stops and to pronounce affricates either 
 in Rhseto-Romanic (Ladin) or in Tuscan Italian ; both languages 
 have unaspirated p, t, k and voiced b, d, g, and the Tuscan 
 pronunciation of c between two vowels as [x], thus in la casa 
 [la xa'sa], but not in a casa = [akka'sa], could not be termed 
 ' aspiration ' except by a non-phonetician ; this pronunciation 
 can hardly have anything to do with the old Etruscan language. 
 
 According to a theory which is very widely accepted, the 
 Dravidian languages exerted a different influence on the Aryan 
 languages when the Aryans first set foot on Indian soil, in making 
 them adopt the ' cacuminal ' (or ' inverted ') sounds d, t, n with 
 dh and th, which were not found in primitive Arj^an. But even 
 this theory does not seem to be quite proof against objections. 
 It is easy to admit that natives accustomed to one place of articula- 
 tion of their d, t, n will unconsciously produce the d, <, w of a new 
 language they are learning in the same place ; but then they will 
 do it everywhere. Here, however, both Dravidian and Sanskrit 
 possess pure dental d, t, n, pronounced with the tip of the tongue 
 touching the upper teeth, besides cacuminal ^, t, n, in which it 
 touches the gum or front part of the hard palate. In Sanskrit 
 we find that the cacuminal articulation occurs only under very 
 definite conditions, chiefly under the influence of r. Now, a trilled 
 tongue-point r in most languages, for purely physiological reasons 
 which are easily accounted for, tends to be pronounced further 
 back than ordinary dentals ; and it is therefore quite natural 
 that it should spontaneously exercise an influence on neighbouring 
 dentals by drawing them back to its own point of articulation. 
 This may have happened in India quite independently of the occur- 
 rence of the same sounds in other vernaculars, just as we find 
 
§4] ETRUSCAN AND INDIAN CONSONANTS 197 
 
 the same influence very pronouncedly in Swedish and in East 
 Norwegian, where d, t, n, s are cacuminal (supradental) in such 
 words as bord, kort, barn, forst, etc. According to Grandgent 
 {Neuere Sprachen, 2. 447), d in his own American English 
 is pronounced further back than elsewhere before and after r, 
 as in dry, hard ; but in none of these cases need we conjure 
 up an extinct native population to account for a perfectly 
 natural development. 
 
 XI.— § 5. Gothonic Sound-shift. 
 
 Since the time of Grimm the Gothonic consonant changes 
 have harassed the minds of linguists ; they became the sound- 
 shift and were considered as something sui generis, something out 
 of the common, which required a different explanation from all 
 other sound-shifts. Several explanations have been offered, to 
 some of which we shall have to revert later ; none, however, has 
 been so popular as that which attributes the shift to an ethnic 
 substratum. This explanation is accepted by Hirt, Feist, Meillet 
 and others, though their agreement ceases when the question is 
 asked : What nationality and what language can have been the 
 cause of the change ? While some cautiously content themselves 
 with saying that there must have been an original population, 
 others guess at Kelts, Finns, Rhaetians or Etrurians — all fascinating 
 names to minds of a speculative turn. 
 
 The latest treatment of the question that I have seen is by 
 K. Wessely (in Anthropos, XII-XIII 540 ff., 1917). He assumes 
 the following different substrata, beginning with the most recent : 
 a Rhseto-Romanic for the Upper-German shift, a Keltic for the 
 common High-German shift, and a Finnic for the first Germanic 
 shift with the Vernerian law. This certainly has the merit of neatly 
 separating soimd-shifts that are chronologically apart, except 
 with regard to the last-mentioned shift, for here the Finns are 
 made responsible for two changes that were probably separated 
 by centuries and had really no traits in common. It is curious to 
 see the transition from p to f and from t to p — both important 
 elements of the first shift — here ascribed to Finnic, for as a matter 
 of fact the two sounds/ and J? are not found in present-day Finnish, 
 and were not found in primitive Ugro -Finnic.^ 
 
 1 Feist, on the other hand (PBB 36. 329), makes the Kelts responsible 
 for the shift from p to /, because initial p disappears in Keltic : but dis- 
 appearance is not the same thing as being changed into a spirant, and there 
 is no necessity for assuming that the sound before disappearing had been 
 changed into /. Besides, it is characteristic of the Gothonic shift that it 
 affects all stops equally, without regard to the place of articulation, while 
 the Keltic change affects only the one sound p. 
 
198 THE FOREIGNER [en. xi 
 
 When Wcssely thinks that the change discovered by Verner 
 is also due to Finnic influence, his reasons are two : an alleged 
 parallelism with the Finnic consonant change which he terms 
 ' Setala's law,' and then the assumption that such a shift, conditioned 
 by the place of the accent, is foreign to the Aryan race (p. 643). 
 When, however, we find a closely analogous case only four hundred 
 years ago in English, where a number of consonants were voiced 
 according to the place of the stress,^ are we also to say that it is 
 foreign to the Anglo-Saxon race and therefore presupposes some 
 non-Arj^an substratum ? As a matter of fact, the parallelism 
 between the English and the old Gothonic shift is much closer 
 than that between the latter and the Finnic consonant-gradation : 
 in English and in old Gothonic the stress place is decisive, while 
 in the Finnic shift it is very doubtful ^^'hether stress goes for any- 
 thing ; in both English and old Gothonic the same consonants are 
 afifccted (spirants, in English also the combinations [if, ks], but 
 otherwise no stops), while in Finnic it is the stops that are primarily 
 affected. In old Gothonic, as in English, the change is simply 
 voicing, and we have nothing corresponding to the reduction of 
 double consonants and of consonant groups in Finnic pcr^^^n / papin, 
 otta I otat, kukka I kukan, parempi / paremman, jalka / jalan, etc. 
 On the whole, Wessely's paper shows how much easier it is to 
 advance hypotheses than to find truths. 
 
 XI. — § 6. Natural and Specific Changes. 
 
 Meillet (MSL 19. 164 and 172 ; cf. Bulletin 19. 50 and Germ. 18) 
 thinks that we must distinguish between such phonetic changes 
 as are natural, i.e. due to universal tendencies, and such as are 
 peculiar to certain languages. In the former class he includes 
 the opening and the voicing of intervocalic consonants ; there 
 is also a natural and universal tendency to shorten long words 
 and to slur the pronunciation towards the end of a word. In the 
 latter class (changes which are peculiar to and characteristic of 
 a particular language) he reckons the consonant shifts in Gothonic 
 and Armenian, the weakening of consonants in Greek and in 
 Iranian, the tendency to unround back vowels in English and 
 Slav. Such changes can only be accounted for on the supposition 
 of a change of language : they must be due to people whose own 
 language had habits foreign to Aryan. Unfortimately, Meillet 
 cannot tell us hoAv to measure the difference between natural and 
 
 ^ ME. knowlechc, stones [sto-nes], off, with [wij>] become MnE. knowledge, 
 stones [stounz], of [ov, ev], with [wi5], etc. ; cf. also posse-ss, discern with [z], 
 exert with [gz], but exercise with [ks]. See my Studier over eng. kasus, 1891, 
 178 ff., now MEG i. 6. 5 fi., and (for the phonetic explanation) LPh p. 121. 
 
§0] NATURAL AND SPECIFIC CHANGES 199 
 
 peculiar shifts ; he admits that they cannot always be clearly 
 separated ; and A\'hen he says that there are some extreme cases 
 ' relativcment nets,' such as those named above, I must confess 
 that I do not see whj' the change from the sliarp tenuis, as in Fr. 
 p, t, k, to a slightly aspirated sound, as in English {Bulletin 19. 50),^ 
 or the relaxing of the closure which finally led to the sounds of 
 [f , y>, x], should be less ' natural ' than a hundred other changes 
 and should require the calling in of a deus ex mackina in the shape 
 of an aboriginal population. The imrounding of E. w in Jmt, etc., 
 to which he alludes, began about 1600 — what ethnic substratum 
 does that postulate, and is any such requii'cd, more than for, say, 
 the diphthongizing of long a and o ? 
 
 Meillet (MSL 19. 172) also says that there are certain speech 
 sounds which are, as it were, natural and are found in nearly all 
 languages, thus p, t, k, n, m, and among the vowels a, i, u, while other 
 sounds are found only in some languages, such as the two English 
 th sounds or, among the vowels, Fr. u and Russian y. But when 
 he infers that sounds of the former class are stable and remain 
 unchanged for many centuries, whereas those of the latter are apt 
 to change and disappear, the conclusion is not borne out by actual 
 facts. The consonants p, t, k, n, m are said to have remained 
 unchanged in many Aryan languages from the oldest times till 
 the present day — that is, only initially before vowels, which is a 
 very important reservation and really amounts to an admission 
 that in the vast majority of cases these sounds are just as unstable 
 as most other things on this planet, especially if we remember that 
 notlung could well be more unstable than k before front vowels, 
 as seen in It. [t/] and Sp. [)?] in cielo, Fr. [s] in del, and [/] in 
 chien, Eng. and Swedish [t/] in chin, kind, Norwegian [c] in kind, 
 Russian [t/] in cetyre ' four ' and [s] in sto ' hundred,' etc. As 
 an example of a typically unstable sound Meillet gives bilabial /, 
 and it is true that this sound is so rare that it is difficult to find 
 it represented in any language ; the reason is simply that the upper 
 teeth normally protrude above the lower jaw, and that consequently 
 the lower lip articulates easily against the upper teeth, with the 
 natural result that where we should theoretically expect the bilabial 
 / the labiodental / takes its place. And s, which is found almost 
 universally, and should therefore on Meillet 's theory be very stable, 
 is often seen to change into h or [x] or to disappear. On the whole, 
 then, we see that it is not the 'naturalness ' or universality of a 
 
 ^ Sharp tenues and aspirated tenues may alternate even in the life of 
 one individual, as I have observed in the case of my own son, who at the 
 age of 1.9 used the sharp French sounds, but five months later substituted 
 strongly aspirated p, t, I:, with even stronger aspiration than the usual Danish 
 Bounds, which it took him ten or eleven months to learn with perfect certainty. 
 
200 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 consonant so much as its position in the syllable and word that 
 decides the question ' change or no change.' The relation between 
 stability and naturalness is seen, perhaps, most clearly in such an 
 instance as long [a] : this sound is so natural that English, from 
 the oldest Aryan to present-day speech, has never been without 
 it ; yet at no time has it been stable, but as soon as one class of 
 words with long [a*] is changed, a new class steps into its shoes : 
 (1) Aryan mater, now mother; (2) lengthening of a short a before 
 n : gas, brdhta, now goose, brought ; (3) levelling of ai : stun, now 
 sto7ie ; (4) lengthening of short a : cdld, now cold ; (5) later lengthen- 
 ing of a in open syllable : name, now [neim] ; (6) mod. carve, calm, 
 path and others from various sources ; and (7) vulgar speech is now 
 developing new levellings of diphthongs in [ma-1, pa- (a)] for mile, 
 power. 
 
 XI.— § 7. Power of Substratum. 
 
 V. Brondal has made the attempt to infuse new blood into 
 the substratum theory through his book, Substrater eg Laan i 
 Romansk og Germansk (Copenhagen, 1917). The effect of a sub- 
 stratum, according to him, is the establishment of a ' constant 
 idiom,' working "without regard to place and time " (p. 76) and 
 changing, for instance, Latin into Old French, Old French into 
 Classical French, and Classical French into Modern French. His 
 task, then, is to find out certain tendencies operating at these 
 various yjeriods ; these are ascribed to the Keltic substratum, 
 and Brondal then passes in review a great many languages spoken 
 in districts where Kelts are known to have lived in former times, 
 in order to find the same tendencies there. If he succeeds in this 
 to his own satisfaction, it is only because the ' tendencies ' estab- 
 lished are partly so vague that they will fit into any language, 
 partly so ill -defined phonetically that it becomes possible to press 
 different, nay, in some cases even directly contrary movements 
 into the same class. But considerations of space forbid me to 
 enter on a detailed criticism here. I must content myself with 
 taking exception to the principle that the effect of the ethnic 
 substratum may shoAv itself several generations after the speech 
 substitution took place. If Keltic ever had ' a finger in the pie,' 
 it must have been immediately on the taking over of the new 
 language. An influence exerted in such a time of transition may 
 have far-reaching after-effects, like anjthing else in history, but 
 this is not the same thing as asserting that a similar modification 
 of the language may take place after the lapse of some centuries 
 as an effect of the same cause. Suppose we have a series of manu- 
 scripts, A, B, C, D, etc., of which B is copied from A, C from B, 
 
§7] POWER OF SUBSTRATUM 201 
 
 etc., and that B has an error which is repeated in all the following 
 copies ; now, if M suddenly agrees with A (which the copyist has 
 never seen), we infer that this reading is independent of A, In the 
 same way with a language : each individual learns it from his contem- 
 poraries, but has no opportunity of hearing those who have died 
 before his o^^•n time. It is possible that the transition from a to cb 
 in Old English (as in feeder) is due to Keltic influence, but when 
 we find, many centuries later, that a is changed into fae] (the present 
 sound) in words which had not cb in OE., e.g. crab, hallow, act, it is 
 impossible to ascribe this, as Brondal does, to a ' constant Keltic 
 idiom ' working through many generations who had never sjDoken 
 or heard any Keltic. ' Atavism,' which skips over one or more 
 generations, is unthinkable here, for words and sounds are nothing 
 but habits acquired by imitation. 
 
 So far, then, our discussion of the substratum theory has brought 
 us no ver}'' positive results. One of the reasons why the theories 
 put forward of late j^ears have been on the whole so unsatisfactory 
 is that they deal with speech substitutions that have taken place 
 so far back that absolutely nothing, or practically nothing, is known 
 of those displaced languages which are supposed to have coloured 
 languages now existing. ^Vllat do we know beyond the mere 
 name of Ligurians or Veneti or Iberians ? Of the Pre-Germanic 
 and Pre-Keltic peoples we know not even the names. As to the 
 old Kelts who play such an eminent role in all these speculations, 
 we know extremely little about their language at this distant date, 
 and it is possible that in some cases, at any rate, the Kelts may have 
 been only comparatively small armies conquering this or that 
 country for a time, but leaving as few linguistic traces behind 
 them as, say, the armies of Napoleon in Russia or the Cimbri and 
 Teutoni in Italy. Linguists have turned from the ' glottogonic ' 
 speculations of Bopp and his disciples, only to indulge in dia- 
 lectogonic speculations of exactly the same visionary type. 
 
 XI. — § 8. Types of Race-mixture. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to suppose that the conditions, 
 and consequently the linguistic results, are always the same, 
 whenever two different races meet and assimilate. The chief 
 classes of race-mixture have been thus described in a valuable 
 paper by George Hempl {Transactions of the American Philological 
 Association, XXIX, p. 31 ff., 1898). 
 
 (1) The conquerors are a comparatively small body, who become 
 the ruling class, but are not numerous enough to impose their 
 language on the country. They are forced to learn the language 
 of their subjects, and their grandchildren may come to know that 
 
202 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 language better than they know the language of their ancestors. 
 The language of the conquerors dies out, but bi^queaths to the native 
 language its terms pertaining to government, tjie aimy, and those 
 other spheres of life that the conquerors had specially under their 
 control. Historic examples are the cases of the Goths in Italy 
 and Spain, the Franks in Gaul, the Normans in France and the 
 Norman-French in England. Of course, the greater the number 
 of the conquerors and the longer they had been close neighbours 
 of the people they conquered, or maintained the bonds that united 
 them to their mother-country, the greater was their influence. 
 Thus the influence of the Franks on the language of France was 
 greater than that of the Goths on the language of Spain, and the 
 influence of the Norman-French in England was greater still. Yet 
 in each case the minority ultimately succumbed. 
 
 (2a) The conquest is made by many bodies of invaders, who 
 bring with them their whole households and are followed for a long 
 period of time by similar hordes of their kinsmen. The conquerors 
 constitute the upper and middle classes and a part of the lower 
 classes of the new community. The natives recede before the 
 conquerors or become their slaves : their speech is regarded as 
 servile and is soon laid aside, except for a few terms pertaining 
 to the humbler callings, the names of things peculiar to the country 
 and place-names. Examples : Angles and Saxons in Britain 
 and Europeans in America and Australia, though in the last case 
 we can hardly speak of race-mixture between the natives and the 
 immigrants. 
 
 (26) A more powerful nation conquers the people and annexes 
 its territory, which is made a province, to which not only governors 
 and soldiers, but also merchants and even colonists are sent. These 
 become the upper class and the influential part of the middle class. 
 If centuries pass and the province is still subjected to the direct 
 influence of the ruling country, it will more and more imitate* 
 the speech and the habits and customs of that country. Such 
 was the history of Italy, Spain and Gaul under the Romans ; 
 similar, also, is the story of the Slavs of Eastern Germany and of 
 the Dutch in New York State ; such is the process going on to-day 
 among the French in Louisiana and among the Germans in their 
 original settlements in Penns3ivania. 
 
 (3) Immigrants come in scattered bands and at different 
 times ; they become servants or follow other humble callings. 
 It is usually not to their advantage to associate with their fellow- 
 countrjTuen, but rather to mingle with the native population. 
 The better they learn to speak the native tongue, the faster they 
 get on in the world. If their children in their dress or speech 
 betray their foreign origin, they are ridiculed as ' Dutch ' or Irish, 
 
§8] TYPES OF RACE-MIXTURE 203 
 
 or whatever it may be. They therefore take pains to rid themselves 
 of all traces of their alien origin and avoid using the speech of their 
 parents. In this way vast numbers of newcomers may be assimi- 
 lated year by j'ear till they constitute a large part of the new race, 
 while their language makes practically no impression on the lan- 
 guage of the country. This is the storj' of what is going on in all 
 parts of the United States to-day. 
 
 It will be seen that in classes 1 and 3 the speech of the natives 
 prevails, while in the two classes comprised under 2 it is that of 
 the conqueror which eventually triumphs. Further, that, in all 
 cases except type 26, that language prevails which is spoken by 
 what is at the time the majority. 
 
 Somid substitution is found in class 3 in the case of foreigners 
 who come to America after they have learnt to speak, and of the 
 children of foreigners who keep up their original language at home. 
 If, hoAvever, while they are still young, they are chiefly thrown 
 with English-speaking people, the}- usually gain a thorough mastery 
 of the English language ; thus most of the children, and practically 
 all of the grandchikh-en, of immigrants, by the time they are grown- 
 up, speak English without foreign taint. Their origin has thus 
 no permanent influence on their adopted language. The same 
 thing is true when a small ruling minority drops its foreign speech 
 and learns that of the majority (class 1), and practically also 
 (class 2a) when a native minority succumbs to a foreign majority, 
 though here the ultimate language may be slightly influenced 
 by the native dialect. 
 
 It is different with class 26 : when a whole population comes 
 in the course of centuries to surrender its natural speech for that 
 of a ruling minority, sound substitution plaj^s an important part, 
 and to a great extent determines the character and future of the 
 language. Hempl here agrees with Hirt in seeing in this fact 
 the explanation of much (N.B, not all !) of the difference between 
 the Romanic languages and of the difference between natural 
 High German and High German spoken in Low German territory, 
 and he is therefore not surprised when he is told by Nissen that 
 the dialects of modern Italy correspond geographically pretty 
 closely to the non -Latin languages once spoken in the Peninsula. 
 But he severely criticizes Hirt for going so far as to explain the 
 differentiation of Aryan speech by the theory of soimd substitution. 
 Hirt assumes conditions like those in class 1, and yet thinks that 
 the results would be like those of class 2a. " It is essential to Hirt's 
 theory that the conquering bodies of Indo-Europeans should be 
 small compared with the number of the people they conquered. . . . 
 If we wish to prove that the differentiation of Indo-European 
 speech was like the differentiation of Romance speech, we must 
 
204 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 be able to show that the conditions under which the differentiations 
 took place were alike or equivalent. But even a cursory examina- 
 tion of the manner in which the Romance countries were Romanized 
 . . . will make it clear that no parallel could possibly be drawn 
 between the conditions under which the Romance languages 
 arose and those that we can suppose to have existed while the 
 Indo-European languages took shape." Hempl also criticizes the 
 way in which the Germanic consonant-shift is supposed by Hirt 
 to be due to sound-substitution : when instead of the original 
 
 t th d dh 
 
 Germanic has 
 
 V y t 5, 
 
 these latter sounds, on Hirt's theory, must be either the native 
 sounds that the conquered people substituted for the original 
 sounds, or else they have developed out of such sounds as the natives 
 substituted. If the first be true, we ask ourselves why the con- 
 quered people did not use their t for the Indo-European t, instead 
 of substituting it for d, and then substituting ]> for the Indo-Euro- 
 l^ean t. If the second supposition be true, the native population 
 introduced into the language sounds very similar to the original 
 t, ill, d, dh, and all tlie change from that slightly variant form 
 to the one that we find in Germanic was of subsequent development 
 — and must be explained by the usual methods after all. 
 
 I have dwelt so long on Hempl's paper because, in spite of its 
 (to my mind) fundamental importance, it has been generally over- 
 looked by supporters of the substratum theory. To construct 
 a true theory, it will be necessary to examine the largest possible 
 number of facts with regard to race-mixture capable of being 
 tested by scientific methods. In this connexion the observations 
 of Lenz in South America and of Puscariu in Rumania are espe-* 
 cially valuable. The former found that the Spanish spoken in Chile 
 was greatly influenced in its sounds by the speech of the native 
 Araucanians (see Zeitschr. f. roman. Philohgie, 17. 188 If., 1893). 
 Now, what were the facts in regard to the population speaking 
 this language ? The immigrants were chiefly men, who in many 
 cases necessarily married native women and left the care of their 
 children to a great extent in the hands of Indian servants. As 
 the natives were more warlike than in many other parts of 
 South America, there was for a very long time a continuous 
 influx of Spanish soldiers, many of whom, after a short time, 
 settled down peacefully in the country. More Spanish soldiers, 
 indeed, arrived in Chile in the course of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centimes than in the whole of the rest of 
 
§8] TYPES OF RACE-MIXTURE 205 
 
 South America, Accordingly, by the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century the Indians had been either driven back or else assimi- 
 lated, and at the beginning of the War of Liberation early in 
 the nineteenth century Chile was the only State in which there 
 was a uniform Spanish-speaking population. In the greater part 
 of Chile the popiilation is denser than anywhere else in South 
 America, and this population speaks nothing but Spanish, while 
 in Peru and Bolivia nearlj' the whole rural population still speaks 
 more or less exclusively Keshua or Aimard, and these languages 
 are also used occasionally, or at any rate understood, by the whites. 
 Chile is thus the only country in which a real Spanish people's 
 dialect could develop. (In Hempl's classification this would be 
 a ty]Dical case of class 2a.) In the other Spanish American coun- 
 tries the Spanish-speakers are confined to the upper ruling class, 
 there being practically no lower class with Spanish as its mother- 
 tongue, except in a couple of big cities. Thus we understand that 
 the Peruvian who has learnt his Spanish at school has a purer 
 Castilian pronunciation than the Chilean ; yet, apart from pro- 
 nunciation, the educated Chilean's Spanish is much more correct 
 and fluent than that of the other South Americans, whose language 
 is stiff and vocabulary scanty, because they have first learnt some 
 Indian language in cliildhood. Lenz's Chileans, who have often 
 been invoked by the adherents of the unlimited substratum theory, 
 thus really serve to show that sound substitution takes place 
 only under certain well-defined conditions. 
 
 Puscariu (in Prinzipienfragen der romanischen Sprachwissen- 
 schaft, Beihefte zur Zschr. f. rom. Phil., 1910) says that in a Saxon 
 village which had been almost completely Rumanianized he had 
 once talked for hours with a peasant without noticing that he 
 was not a native Rumanian : he was, however, a Saxon, who spoke 
 Saxon with his wife, but Rumanian with his son, because the 
 latter language was easier to him, as he had acquired the Rumanian 
 basis of articulation. Here, then, there was no sound substitution, 
 and in general we may say that the less related two languages 
 are, the fewer will be the traces of the original language left on 
 the new language (p. 49). The reason must be that people who 
 naturally speak a closely related language are easily understood 
 even when their acquired speech has a tinge of dialect : there is thus 
 no inducement for them to give up their pronunciation. Puscariu 
 also found that it was much more difficult for him to rid himself 
 of his dialectal traits in Rumanian than to acquire a correct pro- 
 nunciation of German or French. He therefore disbelieves in a 
 direct influence exerted by the indigenous languages on the forma- 
 tion of the Romanic languages (and thus goes much further than 
 Hempl). All these languages, and particularly Rumanian, during 
 
206 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 the first centuries of the IMiddle Ages underwent radical trans- 
 formations not paralleled in the thousand years ensuing. This 
 may have been paitly due to an influence exerted by ethnic mixture 
 on the whole character of the young nations and through that also 
 on their language. But other factors have certainly also plaj'ed 
 an important role, especially the grouping round new centres 
 with other political aims than those of ancient Rome, and conse- 
 quent isolation from the rest of the Romanic peoples. Add to this 
 the very important emancipation of the ordinary conversational 
 language from the j'oke of Latin. In the first Christian centuries 
 the influence of Latin was so overpowering in official life and in 
 the schools that it obstructed a natural development. But soon 
 after the third century the educational level rapidly sank, and 
 political events broke the power not only of Rome, but also of its 
 language. The speech of the masses, which had been held in fetters 
 for so long, now asserted itself in full freedom and with elemental 
 violence, the result being those far-reaching changes by which 
 the Romanic languages are marked ofiE from Latin. Language 
 and nation or race must not be confounded : witness Rumania, 
 whose language shows very few dialectal variations, though the 
 populations of its different provinces are ethnically quite distinct 
 (ib. p. 51). 
 
 XI.— §9. Summary. 
 
 The general impression gathered from the preceding investiga- 
 tion must be that it is impossible to ascribe to an ethnic substratum 
 all the changes and dialectal differentiations which some linguists 
 explain as due to this sole cause. Many other influences must 
 have been at work, among which an interruption of intercourse 
 created by natural obstacles or social conditions of various kinds 
 would be of prime importance. If we take ethnic substrata as* 
 the main or sole source of dialectal differentiation, it will be hard 
 to account for the differences between Icelandic and Norwegian, 
 for Iceland was very sparsely inhabited when the ' land-taking ' 
 took place, and still harder to account for the very great diver- 
 gences that we Avitness between the dialects spoken in the Faroe 
 Islands. A mere turning over the leaves of Bennike and Kris- 
 tensen's maps of Danish dialects (or the corresponding maps of 
 France) will show the impossibility of explaining the crisscross of 
 boundaries of various phonetic phenomena as entirely due to 
 ethnical differences in the aborigines. On the other hand, the speech 
 of Russian peasants is said to be remarkably free from dialectal 
 divergences, in spite of the fact that it has spread in compara- 
 tively recent times over districts inhabited by populations with 
 
§ 9] SUMMARY 207 
 
 languages of totally different types (Finnic, Turkish, Tataric). I 
 thus incline to think that soimd substitution cannot have pro- 
 duced radical changes, but has only played a minor part in the 
 development of languages. There are, perhaps, also interesting 
 things to be learnt from conditions in Finland. Here Swedish 
 has for many centuries been the language of the ruling minority', 
 and it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that Finnish 
 attained to the dignity of a literary language. The sound sj'stems 
 of Swedish and Finnish are extremely unlike : Finnish lacks many 
 of the Swedish sounds, such as b, d (wliat is ^vritten d is either 
 mute or else a kind of weak r), g and /. No word can begin with 
 more than one consonant, consequently Swedish strand and skrdd- 
 dare, ' tailor,' are represented in the form of the loan-words ranta 
 and rddtdli. Now, in spite of the fact that most Swedish-speaking 
 people have probably spoken Finnish as children and have had 
 Finnish servants and playfellows to teach them the language, 
 none of these peculiarities have influenced their Swedish : what 
 makes them recognizable as hailing from Finland (' finska 
 brytningen ') is not simplification of consonant groups or substitu- 
 tion of 'p for 6, etc., but such small things as the omission of the 
 ' compound tone,' the tendencj^ to lengthen the second consonant 
 in groups like ns, and European (' back ') u instead of the Swedish 
 mixed vowel. 
 
 But if sound substitution as a result of race -mixture and of 
 conquest cannot have played any very considerable part in the 
 differentiation of languages as wholes, there is another domain 
 in which sound substitution is very important, that is, in the shape 
 which loan-words take in the languages into which they are intro- 
 duced. However good the pronunciation of the first introducer 
 of a word may have been, it is clear that when a word is extensively 
 used by people with no intimate and fii'st-hand knowledge of the 
 language from which it was taken, most of them will tend to pro- 
 nounce it with the only sounds with which they are familiar, those 
 of their own language. Thus we see that the English and Rus- 
 sians, who have no [y] in their own speech, substitute for it the 
 combination [ju, iu] in recent loans from French. Scandinavians 
 have no voiced [z] and [5] and therefore, in such loans from French 
 or English as kusine, budget, jockey, etc., substitute the voiceless 
 [s] and [/j], or [sj]. The English will make a diphthong of the 
 final vowels of such words as bouquet, beau [bukei, bou], and will 
 slur the r of such French words as boulevard, etc. The same trans- 
 ference of speech habits from one's native language also affects 
 such important things as quantitj^, stress and tone : the English 
 have no final short stressed vowels, such as are found in bouquet, 
 beau ; hence their tendency to lengthen as well as diphthongize 
 
208 THE FOREIGNER [cii. xi 
 
 these sounds, while the French will stress the final syllable of 
 recent loans, such as jury, reporter. These phenomena are so uni- 
 versal and so well known that they need no further illustration. 
 The more familiar such loan-words are, the more unnatural 
 it would be to pronounce them with foreign sounds or according 
 to foreign rules of quantity and stress ; for this means in each 
 case a shunting of the whole speech-apparatus on to a different 
 track for one or two words and then shifting back to the original 
 ' basis of articulation ' — an effort that many speakers are quite 
 incapable of and one that in any case interferes with the natural 
 and easy flow of speech. 
 
 XI.— § 10. General Theory of Loan-words. 
 
 In the last paragraphs we have already broached a very im- 
 portant subject, that of loan-words. ^ No language is entirelj' 
 free from borrowed words, because no nation has ever been com- 
 pletely isolated. Contact with other nations inevitably leads to 
 borrowings, though their number may vary very considerably. 
 Here we meet with a fundamental principle, first formulated by 
 E. Windisch (in his paper " Zur Theorie der Mschsprachen und 
 Lehnworter," Verh. d. sdchsischeyi Qesellsch. d. Wissensch., XLIX, 
 1897, p. 107 ff.) : " It is not the foreign language a nation learns 
 that turns into a mixed language, but its own native language 
 becomes mixed under the influence of a foreign language." When 
 we try to learn and talk a foreign tongue we do not introduce into 
 it words taken from our own language ; our endeavour will always 
 be to speak the other language as purely as possible, and generally 
 we are painfully conscious of every native word that we intrude 
 into phrases framed in the other tongue. But what we thus avoid 
 in speaking a foreign language we very often do in our own. 
 Frederick the Great prided himself on his good French, and in his 
 French writings we do not find a single German word, but whenever 
 he wrote German his sentences were full of French words and 
 phrases. This being the general practice, we now understand 
 why so few Keltic words were taken over into French and 
 English. There was nothing to induce the ruling classes to learn 
 
 * I use the terms loan-words and borrowed ivords because thej' are con- 
 venient and firmly established, not because they are exact. There are two 
 essential respects in which linguistic borrowing differs from the borrowing 
 of, say, a knife or money : the lender does not deprive himself of the use 
 of the word any more than if it had not been borrowed by the other partj', and 
 the borrower is under no obligation to return the word at any future time. 
 Linguistic ' borrowing ' is really nothing but imitation, and the only way 
 in which it differs from a child's imitation of its parents' speech is that here 
 something is imitated which forms a part of a speech that is not imitated 
 as a whole. 
 
§10] GENERAL THEORY OF LOAN-WORDS 209 
 
 the language of the inferior natives : it could never be fashionable 
 for them to show an acquaintance with a desi^ised tongue by using 
 now and then a Keltic word. On the other hand, the Kelt would 
 have to learn the language of his masters, and learn it well ; and 
 he would even among his comrades like to show off his knowledge 
 by interlarding his speech with words and turns from the language 
 of his betters. Loan-words always show a superiority of the nation 
 from whose language they are borrowed, though this superiority 
 may be of many different kinds. 
 
 In the first place, it need not be extensive : indeed, in some 
 of the most typical cases it is of a very partial character and 
 touches only on one very special point. I refer to those instances 
 in which a district or a people is in possession of some special 
 thing or product wanted by some other nation and not produced 
 in that country. Here quite naturally the name used by the natives 
 is taken over along with the thing. Obvious examples are the 
 names of various drinks : ivine is a loan from Latin, tea from Chinese, J 
 coffee from Arabic, chocolate from Mexican, and punch from Hin- ^' 
 dustani. A certain type of carriage was introduced about 1500 
 from Hungary and is known in most European languages by its 
 Magj'ar name : E. coach, G. kutsche, etc. Moccasin is from 
 Algonquin, bamboo from Malay, tulip and turban (ultimately the 
 same word) from Persian. A slightly different case is when some 
 previously unknown plant or animal is made known through some 
 foreign nation, as when Ave have taken the name of jasmine from 
 Persian, chimpanzee from some African, and tapir from some 
 Brazilian language. It is characteristic of all words of this kind 
 that only a few of them are taken from each foreign language, 
 and that they have nearly all of them gone the round of all 
 civilized languages, so that they are now known practically all 
 over the world. 
 
 Other loan-words form larger groups and bear witness to the 
 cultural superiority of some nation in some one specified sphere 
 of activity or branch of knowledge : such are the Arabic words 
 relating to mathematics and astronomy {algebra, zero, cipher, ^ 
 azimuth, zenith, in related fields turiff, alkali, alcohol), the Italian 
 words relating to music {piano, allegro, andante, solo, soprano, 
 etc.) and commerce {bank, bankrupt, balance, traffic, ducat, florin) 
 — one need not accumulate examples, as everybody interested in 
 the subject of this book will be able to supply a great many from 
 his own reading. The most comprehensive groups of this kind 
 are those French, Latin and Greek \7ords that have flooded the< 
 M'hole world of Western civilization from the Middle Ages and 
 the Renaissance and have given a family-character to all those 
 parts of the vocabularies of otherwise different languages which 
 
 14 
 
210 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 are concerned with the highest intellectual and teclmical activities. 
 See the detailed discussion of these strata of loan-words in English 
 in GS ch. v and vi. 
 
 When one nation has imbibed for centuries the cultural influ- 
 ence of another, its language may have become so infiltrated with 
 words from the other language that these are found in most sen- 
 tences, at any rate in nearly every sentence deaUng with things 
 above the simplest material necessities. The best-known examples 
 are English since the influx of French and classical words, and 
 Turkish with its wholesale importations from Arabic. Another 
 example is Basque, in wliich nearly all expressions for religious 
 and spiritual ideas are Romanic. Basque is naturally very poor 
 in words for general ideas ; it has names for special kinds of trees, 
 but ' tree ' is arbolia, from Spanish drhol, ' animal ' is animale, 
 ' colour ' colore, ' plant ' planta or landare, ' flower ' lore or lili, 
 ' thing ' gauza, ' time ' dembora. Thus also many of its names 
 for utensils and garments, weights and measures, arms, etc., arc 
 borrowed ; ' king ' is errege, ' law ' lege, lage, ' master ' maisu, 
 etc. (See Zs. J. roman. Phil, 17. 140 fl.) 
 
 In a great many cases linguistic borrowing must be considered 
 a necessity, but this is not alwaj's so. When a nation has once 
 got into the habit of borrowing words, people will very often use 
 foreign words where it would have been 2:)erfectly possible to ex- 
 press their ideas by means of native speech-material, the reason 
 for going out of one's own language being in some cases the desire to 
 / be thought fashionable or refined through interlarding one's speech 
 with foreign words, in others simply laziness, as is very often the 
 case when people are rendering thoughts they have heard or read 
 in a foreign tongue. Translators are responsible for the great 
 majority of these intrusive words, which might have been avoided 
 by a resort to native composition or derivation, or very often by 
 turning the sentence a little differently from the foreign text. 
 The most thoroughgoing speech mixtures are due much less to 
 real race-mixture than to continued cultural contact, especially 
 of a literary character, as is seen very clearly in English, where 
 the Romanic element is only to a very small extent referable to 
 the Norman conquerors, and far more to the peaceful relations 
 of the following centuries. That Greek and Latin words have 
 come in through the medium of literature hardlj' needs sajdng. 
 Many of these words are superfluous : " The native words cold, 
 cool, chilly, icy, frosty, might have seemed sufiicient for all pur- 
 poses, without any necessity for importing frigid, gelid and algid, 
 which, as a matter of fact, are found neither in Shakespeare nor 
 in the Authorized Version of the Bible nor in the poetical works 
 of Milton, Pope, Cowper and Shelley " (GS § 136). But on the 
 
§10] GENERAL THEORY OF LOAN- WORDS 211 
 
 other hand it cannot be denied that the imported words have in 
 many instances enriched the language through enabling its users 
 to obtain greater variety and to find expressions for many subtle 
 shades of thought. The question of the value of loan-words can- 
 not be dismissed offhand, as the ' purists ' in many countries are 
 inclined to imagine, with the dictum that foreign words should be 
 shunned like the plague, but requires for its solution a careful 
 consideration of the merits and demerits of each separate foreign 
 term viewed in connexion with the native resources for expressing 
 that particular idea. 
 
 XI.— § 11. Classes of Loan-wor5s. 
 
 It is quite natural that there should be a much greater inclina- 
 tion everywhere to borrow " full ' words (substantives, adjectives, 
 notional verbs) than ' empty ' words (pronouns, prepositions, 
 conjunctions, auxiliary verbs), to which class most of the ' gram- 
 matical ' words belong. But there is no hard-and-fast limit between 
 the two classes. It is rare for a language to take such words as 
 numerals from another language ; j-et examples are found here 
 and there — thus, in connexion with special games, etc. Until 
 comparatively recenth% dicers and backgammon-players counted 
 in England by means of the French words ace, deuce, tray, cater, 
 cinque, size, and with the English game of lawn tennis the English 
 way of counting (fifteen love, etc.) has been lately adoj)ted in 
 Russia and to some extent also in Denmark. In some parts of 
 England Welsh numerals were until comparatively recent times 
 used in the counting of sheep. Cattle-drivers in Jutland used to 
 count from 20 to 90 in Low German learnt in Hamburg and Holstein, 
 where they sold their cattle. In this case the clumsiness and want 
 of perspicuity of the Danish expressions {halvtredsindstyve for Low 
 German fofdix, etc.) may have been one of the reasons for preferring 
 the German words ; in the same way the clumsiness of the Eskimo 
 way of counting (" third toe on the second foot of the fourth man," 
 etc.) has favoured the introduction into Greenlandic of the Danish 
 words for 100 and 1,000 : with an Eskimo ending, tintritigdlit and 
 tusintigdlit. Most Japanese numerals are Chinese. And of course 
 million and milliard are used in most civilized countries. 
 
 Prepositions, too, are rarely borrowed bj' one language from 
 another. Yet the Latin (Ital.) per is used in English, German 
 and Danish, and the French a in the two latter languages, and both 
 are extending their domain beyond the commercial language in 
 which they were first used. The Greek kata, at first also commercial, 
 has in Spanish found admission into the ordinary language and 
 has become the pronoun cada ' each.' 
 
212 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 Personal and demonstrative pronouns, articles and the like are 
 scarcely over taken over from one language to another. They are 
 so definitely woven into the innermost texture of a language that 
 no one would think of giving them up, however much he might 
 like to adorn his speech with words from a foreign source. If, 
 therefore, in one instance we find a case of a language borrowing 
 words of this kind, we are justified in thinking that exceptional 
 causes must have been at work, and such really proves to be the 
 case in English, which has adopted the Scandinavian forms they, 
 them, their. It is usual to speak of English as being a mixture of 
 native Old English (' Anglo-Saxon ') and French, but as a matter 
 of fact the French influence, powerful as it is in the vocabulary 
 and patent as it is to the eyes of everybody, is superficial in com- 
 parison with the influence exercised in a much subtler way by the 
 Scandinavian settlers in the North of England. The French 
 influence is different in extent, but not in kind, from the French 
 influence on German or the old Gothonic influence on Finnic ; 
 it is perhaps best compared with the German influence on Danish 
 in the Middle Ages. But the Scandinavian influence on English 
 is of a different kind. The number of Danish and Norwegian 
 settlers in England must have been very large, as is shown by 
 the number of Scandinavian place-names ; yet that does not 
 account for everything. A most important factor was the great 
 similarity of the two languages, in spite of numerous points of 
 difference. Accordingly'' , when their fighting was over, the invaders 
 and the original population would to some extent be able to make 
 themselves understood by one another, like people talking two 
 dialects of the same language, or like students from Copenhagen 
 and from Lund nowadays. Many of the most common words 
 were absolutely identical, and others differed only slightly. Hence 
 it comes that in the Middle English texts we find a great many 
 double forms of the same word, one English and the other Scandi- 
 navian, used side by side, some of these doublets even surviving 
 till the present day, though now differentiated in sense (e.g. whole, 
 hale ; no, nay ; from, fro ; shirt, shirt), while in other cases one 
 only of the two forms, either the native or the Scandinavian, has 
 survived ; thus the Scandinavian sister and egg have ousted the 
 English sweostor and ey. We find, therefore, a great many words 
 adopted of a kind not usually borrowed ; thus, everyday verbs and 
 adjectives like take, call, hit, die, ill, ugly, wrong, and among sub- 
 stantives such non-technical ones as fellow, sky, skin, wing, etc. 
 (For details see my GS ch. iv.) All this indicates an intimate fusion 
 of the two races and of the two languages, such as is not provided 
 for in any of the classes described by Hempl (above, § 8). In 
 most speech-mixtures the various elements remain distinct and can 
 
§11] CLASSES OF LOAN-WORDS 213 
 
 be separated, just as after shuffling a pack of cards you can pick 
 out the hearts, spades, etc. ; but in the case of English and Scandi- 
 navian we have a subtler and more intimate fusion, very much 
 as when you put a lump of sugar into a cup of tea and a few minutes 
 afterwards are quite unable to say which is tea and which is sugar. 
 
 XI.— § 12. Influence on Grammar. 
 
 The question has often been raised whether speech-mixture 
 affects the grammar of a language wliich has borrowed largely 
 from some other language. The older view is expressed pointedly 
 by Whitney (L 199) : " Such a thing as a language with a mixed 
 grammatical apparatus has never come under the cognizance of 
 linguistic students : it ^\ ould be to them a monstrosity ; it seems 
 an impossibility." This is an exaggeration, and cannot be justified, 
 for the simple reason that the vocabulary of a language and its 
 ' grammatical apparatus ' cannot be nicely separated in the way 
 presupposed : indeed, much of the borrowed material mentioned 
 in our last paragraphs does belong to the grammatical apparatus. 
 But there is, of course, some truth in Whitney's dictum. When 
 a word is borrowed it is not as a rule taken over with all the elaborate 
 flexion which may belong to it in its original home ; as a rule, 
 one form only is adopted, it may be the nominative or some other 
 case of a noun, the infinitive or the present or the naked stem of 
 a verb. This form is then either used unchanged or with the end- 
 ings of the adopting language, generally those of the most ' regular ' 
 declension or conjugation. It is an exceptional case when more 
 than one flexional form is taken over, and this case does not occur 
 in really popular loans. In learned usage we find in older Danish 
 such case-flexion as gen. Christi, dat. Christo, by the side of nom. 
 Christus, also, e.g., i theatro, and still sometimes in German we 
 have the same usage : e.g. mit den pronominibus. In a somewhat 
 greater number of instances the plural form is adopted as well as 
 the singular form, as in English fu7igi, formulce, phenomena, sera- 
 pJiim, etc., but the natural tendency is always towards using the 
 native endings, funguses, formulas, etc., and this has prevailed in 
 all popular words, e.g. ideas, circuses, museums. As the formation 
 of cases, tenses, etc., in different languages is often very irregular, 
 and the distinctive marks are often so intimately connected with 
 the kernel of the word and so unsubstantial as not to be easily 
 distinguished, it is quite natural that no one should think of 
 borrowing such endings, etc., and applying them to native words. 
 Schuchardt once thought that the English genitive ending s had 
 been adopted into Indo-Portuguese (in the East Indies), where gober- 
 nadors casa stands for ' governor's house,' but he now explains the 
 
214 THE FOREIGNER [ch. xi 
 
 form more correctly as originating in the possessive pronoun su : 
 gobernaclor su casa (clem g. sein haus, Sitzungsber. der preuss. 
 Akademie, 1917, 524). 
 
 It was at one time commonly held that the English plural 
 ending s, Mhich in Old English was restricted in its application, 
 owes its extension to the influence of French. This theory, I believe, 
 was finally disposed of by the six decisive arguments I brought 
 forAvard against it in 1891 (reprinted in ChE § 39). But after what 
 has been said above on the Scandinavian influence, I incline to think 
 that E. Classen is right in thinking that the Danes count for some- 
 thing in bringing about the final victory of -s over its competitor 
 -n, for the Danes had no plural in -n, and -s reminded them of 
 their own -r {Mod. Language Rev. 14. 94 ; cf. also -s in the third 
 person of verbs, Scand. -r). Apart from this particular point, 
 it is quite natural that the Scandinavians should have exercised 
 a general levelling influence on the English language, as many 
 niceties of grammar would easily be sacrificed where mutual in- 
 telligibility was so largely brought about by the common vocabu- 
 lary. Accordingly, we find that in the regions in which the Danish 
 settlements were thickest the wearing away of grammatical forms 
 was a couple of centuries in advance of the same process in the 
 southern parts of the country. 
 
 Derivative endings certainly belong to the ' grammatical 
 apparatus ' of a language ; yet many such endings have been 
 taken over into another language as parts of borrowed words 
 and have then been freely combined with native speech-material. 
 The phenomenon is extremely frequent in English, where Ave have, 
 for instance, the Romanic endings -ess {shepherdess, seeress), -ment 
 {endearment, bewilderment), -age {mileage, cleavage,, shortage), -ance 
 {hindrance, forbearance) and many more. In Danish and German 
 the number of similar instances is much more restricted, yet we 
 have, for instance, recent words in -isme, -ismns and -ianer ; cf. 
 also older words like bageri, bdckerei, etc. It is the same with pre- 
 fixes : English has formed many words with de-, co-, inter-, pre-, 
 anli- and other classical prefixes : de-anglicize, co-godfather, inter- 
 marriage, at pre-war prices, anti-slavery, etc. (quotations in my 
 GS § 124 ; cf . MEG ii. 14. 66). Ex- has established itself in many 
 languages : ex-king, ex-roi, ex-konge, ex-kdnig, etc. In Danish 
 the prefix be-, borrowed from German, is used very extensively 
 with native words : bebrejde, bebo, bebygge, and tliis is not the only 
 German prefix that is productive in the Scandinavian languages. 
 
 With regard to syntax, very little can be said except in a 
 general way : languages certainly do influence each other syn- 
 tactically, and those who knoAv a foreign language only imper- 
 fectly are apt to transfer to it methods of construction from their 
 
§12] INFLUENCE ON GRAMMAR 215 
 
 own tongue. Many instances of this have been collected by 
 Sehuchardt, SID. But it is doubtful whether these syntactical 
 influences have the same permanent effects on any language as tho.se 
 exerted on one's own language by the habit of translating foreign 
 works into it : in this purely literary way a great many idioms 
 and turns of phrases have been introduced into English, German 
 and the Scandinavian languages from French and Latin, and into 
 Danish and Swedish from German. The accusative and infinitive 
 construction, which had only a very restricted use in Old English, 
 has very considerably extended its domain through Latin influence, 
 and the so-called ' absolute construction ' (in my own grammatical 
 terminology called ' duplex subjunct ') seems to be entirely due to 
 imitation of Latin syntax. In the Balkan tongues there are some 
 interesting instances of sjTitactical agreement between various 
 languages, which must be due to oral influence through the neces- 
 sity imposed on border peoples of passing continually from one 
 language to another : the infinitive has disappeared from Greek, 
 Rumanian and Albanian, and the definite article is placed after 
 the substantive in Rumanian, Albanian and Bulgarian. 
 
 XI.— § 13. Translation-loans. 
 
 Besides direct borrowings we have also indirect borro^^ings or 
 ' translation loan-words,' words modelled more or less closely on 
 foreign ones, though consisting of native speech-material. I take 
 some examples from the very full and able paper " Notes sur les 
 Caiques Lingiiistiques " contributed by Kr. Sandfeld to the Fest- 
 schrift Vilh. Thomsen, 1912 : cedificatio : G. erbauung, Dan. 
 opbyggelse ; ceqmlibrium : G. gleichgewicht, Dan. ligevsegt ; bene- 
 ficium : G. wohltat, Dan. velgerning ; conscientia : Goth, mij'wissi, 
 G. gewissen, Dan. samvittighed, Swed. samvete, Russ. soznanie ; 
 omnipoteyis : E. almighty, G. allmachtig, Dan. almsegtig ; arriere- 
 2}ensee : hintergedanke, bagtanke ; bien-Ure : wohlsein, velva?re ; 
 exposition : austellung, udstilling ; etc. Sandfeld gives manj'' 
 more examples, and as he has in most instances been able to give 
 also corresponding words from various Slavonic languages as well 
 as from jMagyar, Finnic, etc., he rightly concludes that his collec- 
 tions serve to throw light on that community in thought and ex- 
 pression which Bally has well termed " la mentalite europeenne." 
 (But it will be seen that English differs from most European lan- 
 guages in having a much greater propensity to swallowing foreign 
 words raw, as it were, than to translating them.) 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS 
 
 § 1. Beacli-la-Mar. § 2. Grammar. § 3. Sounds. § 4. Pidgin. § 5. Grammar, 
 etc. § 0. General Theory. § 7. Mauritius Creole. § 8. Chinook Jar- 
 gon. §9. Chinook continued. §10. Makeshift Languages. §11. 
 Romanic Languages. 
 
 XII.— § 1. Beach-la-Mar. 
 
 As a first typical example of a whole class of languages now 
 found in manj^ j)arts of the world where people of European 
 civilization have come into contact with men of other races, we 
 may take the so-called Beach-la-mar (or Beche-le-mar, or Beche 
 de mer English) ; ^ it is also sometimes called Sandalwood 
 English. It is spoken and understood all over the Western 
 Pacific, its spread being largely due to the fact that the practice 
 of ' blackbirding ' often brought together on the same plantation 
 many natives from different islands with mutually incompre- 
 hensible languages, whose only means of communication was 
 the broken English they had picked up from the whites. And 
 now the natives learn this language from each other, while 
 in many places the few Europeans have to learn it from the 
 islanders. " Thus the native use of Pidgin-English la3's down 
 the rules by which the Europeans let themselves be guided when 
 learning it. Even Englishmen do not find it quite easy at the 
 beginning to understand Pidgin-English, and have to learn it 
 before they are able to speak it properly " (Landtman). 
 
 * The etymology of this name is rather curious : Portuguese bidio de m<xr, 
 from bicho 'worm.' the name of the sea slug or trepang, which is eaten as a 
 luxury by the Chinese, was in French modified into beche dc mer, 'sea- 
 spade ' ; this b}' a second popular et\'mology was made into English 
 beach-la-mar as if a compound of beach. 
 
 My sources are H. Schuchardt, KS v. (Wiener Academic, 1883) ; id. in 
 ESt xiii. 158 ff., 1889; W. Churchill, Beach-la-Mar, the Jargon or Trade 
 Speech of the Western Pacific (Carnfgie Institution of Washington, 1911); 
 Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark (Mills & Boon, London, 1911 ?), 
 G. Landtman in Neuphilologischc Mitlleilungen (Helsingfors, 1918, p. 62 fi. 
 Landtman calls it " the Pidgin-English of British New Guinea," where he 
 learnt it, though it really differs from Pidgin-English proper ; see below) ; 
 *' The Jargon English of Torres Straits " in Reports of the Cambridge 
 Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. iii. p. 25 1 ff., Cambridge, 
 1907. 
 
 216 
 
§1] BEACH-LA-MAR 217 
 
 I shall now try to give some idea of the structure of this 
 lingo. 
 
 The vocabulary is nearly all English. Even most of the 
 words which ultimately go back to other languages have been 
 admitted only because the English with whom the islanders were 
 thrown into contact had previously adopted them into their own 
 speech, so that the islanders Mere justified in believing that they 
 were really English. This is true of the Spanish or Portuguese 
 savvy, 'to know/ and inckaninny, 'child' or 'little one' (a 
 favourite in manj' languages on account of its symbolic sound ; 
 see Ch. XX § 8), as well as the Amerindian tomahawk, which in the 
 whole of Australia is the usual word for a small axe. And if we 
 find in Beach-la-mar the two Maori words tajm or taboo and 
 kai, or more often kaikai, ' to eat ' or ' food,' thej- have probably 
 got into the language through English — we know that both are 
 very extensively used in Australia, while the former is known all 
 over the civilized world. Likkilik or liklik, ' small, almost,' is said 
 to be from a Polynesian word liki, but may be really a perversion 
 of Engl, little. Landtman gives a few words from unknown 
 languages used by the Kiwais, though not derived from their 
 own language. The rest of the words found in my sources are 
 English, though not alwaj's pure English, in so far as their 
 signification is often curiously distorted. 
 
 Nusipepa means ' a letter, any written or printed document,' 
 mary is the general term for 'woman ' (of, above, p. 118), j^isupo 
 (peasoup) for all foreign foods which are preserved in tins ; 
 squareface, the sailor's name for a' square gin-bottle, is extended 
 to all forms of glassware, no matter what the shape. One of 
 the earliest seafarers is said to have left a bull and a cow on one 
 of the islands and to have mentioned these two words together ; 
 the natives took them as one word, and now hullamacow or p^du- 
 makau means ' cattle, beef, also tinned beef ' ; pulomokau is 
 now given as a native word in a dictionary of the Fijian 
 language.^ Bulopenn, which means ' ornament,' is said to be 
 nothing but the English blue paint. All this shows the purely 
 accidental character of many ' of the linguistic acquisitions of 
 the Polynesians. 
 
 As the vocabulary is extremely limited, composite expres- 
 sions are sometimes resorted to in order to express ideas for 
 which we have simple words, and not unfrequentlj'" the devices 
 used appear to us very clumsy or even comical. A piano is 
 called ' big fellow bokus (box) you fight him he cry,' and a 
 
 ^ Similarly the missionary Q. Brown thought that tobi was a native 
 word of the Duke of York Islands for ' wash,' till one day he accidentally 
 discovered that it was their pronunciation of English soap. 
 
218 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [cH. xii 
 
 concertina ' little fellow bokus you shove him he cry, you pull 
 him he cit.' Womati he got Jaminil {'family') inside means 
 'she is with child.' Inside is also used extensively about mental 
 states : jump inside ' be startled,' inside tell himself ' to con- 
 sider,' inside bad ' grieved or sorry,' feel inside ' to know,' feel 
 another kind inside ' to change one's mind.' 3hj throat he fast 
 ' I was dumb.' He took daylight a long time ' lay awake.' Bring 
 fellow belong make open bottle ' bring me a corkscrew.' Water 
 belong stink ' perfumery,' The idea of being bald is thus ex- 
 pressed : grass belong head belong him all he die finish, or with 
 another variant, coconut belong him. grass no sfojy, for coconut is 
 taken from English slang in the sense ' head ' (Schuchardt has 
 the sentence : You no savvy that fellow white man coconut belong 
 him no grass ?). For ' feather ' the combination grass belong 
 pigeon is used, pigeon being a general term for any bird. 
 
 A man who wanted to borrow a saw, the word for which he 
 had forgotten, said : ' You give me brother belong tomahawk, 
 he come he go.' A servant who had been to Queensland, where 
 he saw a train, on his return called it ' steamer he walk about 
 along bush.' Natives who watched Landtman when he en- 
 closed letters in envelopes named the latter ' house belong letter.' 
 Many of these expressions are thus picturesque descriptions made 
 on the spur of the moment if the proper word is not known. 
 
 Xn.— §2. Grammar. 
 
 These phrases have already illustrated some points of the 
 very simple grammar of this lingo. Words have only one form, 
 and what is in our language expressed by flexional forms is 
 either left unexpressed or else indicated by auxiliary words. 
 The plural of nouns is like the singular (though the form men 
 is found in my texts alongside of man) ; when necessary, the 
 plural is indicated by means of a prefixed all : all he talk ' they 
 say ' (also him fellow all ' they ') ; all man ' everj'^body ' ; a more 
 indefinite plural is plenty man or full up man. For ' we ' is 
 said me two fella or me three fellow, as the case may be ; me two 
 fellow Lagia means ' I and Lagia.' If there are more, me 
 altogether man or me plenty man may be said, though we is also 
 in use. Fellow [fella] is a much-vexed word ; it is required, or 
 at any rate often used, after most pronouns, thus, that fellow hat, 
 this fellow knife, me fellow, you fellow, him fellow (not he fellow) ; 
 it is found very often after an adjective and seems to be required 
 to prop up the adjective before the substantive : big fellotv 
 name, big felloio tobacco, another fellow man. In other cases no 
 fellow is used, and it seems difficult to give definite rules ; after 
 
§2] GRAMMAR 219 
 
 a numeral it is frequent : two fellow men {man ?), three fellow 
 bottle. There is a curious employment in ten fellow ten one 
 fellow, which means 101. It is used adverbially in that man he 
 cry big felloiv ' he cries loudly.' 
 
 The genitive is expressed by means of belong (or belong-a, 
 long, along), which also serves for other prepositional relations. 
 Examples : tail belong him, pappa belong me, wife belong you, 
 belly belong me walk about too much (I was seasick), me savvee talk 
 along white man ; rope along bush means liana. Missis ! man 
 belong bullamacoiv him stop (the butcher has come). What for 
 you wipe hands belong-a you on clothes belong esseppoon ? (spoon, 
 i.e. napkin). Cf. above the expressions for ' bald.' Piccaninny 
 belong banana ' a yoimg b. plant.' Belong also naturally means 
 ' to live in, be a native of ' ; boy belong island, he belong Burri- 
 burrigan. The preposition along is used about many local rela- 
 tions (in, at, on, into, on board). From such combinations as 
 laugh along (1. at) and he speak along this fella the transition is 
 easy to cases in which alo7ig serves to indicate the indirect 
 object : he give'm this fella Eve along Adam, and also a kind of 
 direct object, as in fight alonga him, you gammon along me (deceive, 
 lie to me), and with the form belong : he puss-puss belong this 
 fellow {puss-puss orig. a cat, then as a verb to caress, make 
 love to). 
 
 There is no distinction of gender : that woman he brother belong 
 me = ' she is my sister ' ; he (before the verb) and him (in all 
 other positions) serve both for he, she and it. There is a 
 curious use of 'm, um or em, in our texts often written him, after 
 a verb as a ' vocal sign of warning that an object of the verb is 
 to follow,' no matter what that object is. 
 
 Churchill says that " in the adjective comparison is un- 
 known ; the islanders do not know how to think comparatively — 
 at least, they lack the form of Avords by which comparison may 
 be indicated ; this big, that small is the nearest they can come 
 to the expression of the idea that one thing is greater than 
 another." But Landtman recognizes more big and also more 
 better : ' no good make him that fashion, more better make 
 him all same.' The same double comparative I find in another 
 place, used as a kind of verb meaning ' ought to, had better ' : 
 more better you come out. Too simply means ' much ' : he savvy 
 too much ' he knows much ' (praise, no blame), he too much talk. 
 A synonjon is plenty too much. Schuchardt gives the explanation 
 of this trait : " The white man was the teacher of the black 
 man, who imitated his manner of speaking. But the former 
 would constantly use the strongest expressions and exaggerate 
 in a manner that he would only occasionally resort to in speaking 
 
220 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [ch. xii 
 
 to his own countrymen. He did not say, ' You are very lazy,' 
 but ' You are too lazy,' and this will account for the fact that 
 ' very ' is called too much in Beach-la-mar as well as tumussi 
 in the Negro-English of Surinam " {Spr. der Saramakkaneger, 
 
 p. iv). 
 
 Verbs have no tense-forms ; when required, a future may 
 be indicated by means of by and by : brother belong-a-me by 
 and by he dead (my br. is dying), bymby all men lavgh along that 
 boy ; he small now, bymbye he big. It may be qualified by 
 additions like bymby one time, bymby little bit, bymby big bit, and 
 may be used also of the ' postpreterit ' (of futurity relative to a 
 past time) : by and by boy belong island he speak. Another way of 
 expressing the future is seen in that woynan he dose np born (!) 
 him piccaninny ' that woman will shortly give birth to a child.' 
 The usual sign of the perfect is been, the only idiomatic form of 
 the verb to be : you been take me alotuj three year ; I been look 
 round before. But finish may also be used : 7ne look him finish 
 (I have seen him), he kaikai all finish (he has eaten it all up). 
 
 Where we should expect forms of the verb ' to be,' there is 
 either no verb or else stop is used : no water stop (there is no 
 water), rain he slop (it rains), iivo white men stoj) Matupi (live in), 
 other day plenty money he stop ( . . . I had . . . ). For ' have ' 
 they say got. My belly no got kaikai (I am hungry), he got good 
 hand (is skilful). 
 
 XII.— §3. Sounds. 
 
 About the phonetic structure of Beach-la-mar I have very 
 little information ; as a rule the words in my sources are spelt 
 in the usual English Avay. Churchill speaks in rather vague terms 
 about difficulties which the islanders experience in imitating the 
 English sounds, and especially groups of consonants : " Any 
 English word which on experiment proved impracticable to the 
 islanders has undergone alteration to bring it within the scope 
 of their familiar range of sounds or has been rejected for some 
 facile sjaionym." Thus, according to him, the conjunction if 
 could not be used on account of the /, and that is the reason 
 for the constant use of suppose {s'pose, pose, posum = s'pose 
 him) — but it may be allowable to doubt this, for as a matter of 
 fact / occurs very frequently in the language — for instance, in the 
 well-worn words fellow and finish. Suppose probably is pre- 
 ferred to if because it is fuller in form and less abstract, and there- 
 fore easier to handle, while the islanders have many occasions 
 to hear it in other combinations than those in which it is an 
 equivalent of the conjunction. 
 
§ 3] SOUNDS 221 
 
 Landtman says that with the exception of a few sounds 
 {j, ch, and th as in nothing) the Kiwai Papuans have little diffi- 
 culty in pronouncing English words. 
 
 Schuchardt gives a little more information about pronunci- 
 ation, and instances esterrong — strong, esseppoon= spoon, essauce- 
 jien — saucep>an, pellate = plate, coverra = cover, miUit = milk, 
 bock-kiss = box (in Churchill bokus, bokkis) as mutilations due 
 to the native speech habits. He also gives the following letter 
 from a native of the New Hebrides, communicated to him by 
 R. H. Codrington ; it shows many sound substitutions : 
 
 3Iisi Kamesi Arelu Joii no kaniu ruki mi Mi no ruki iou Jou 
 riiku Mai Poti i ko Mae tete Vakaromala mi raiki i tiripi Ausi 
 p>arogi ion i rukauti Mai Poti mi nomoa kaikai mi angikele nau 
 Poti mani Mae i kivi iou Jamu Vari koti iou kivi tamu te p>ci^o 
 paraogi mi i penesi nomoa te Pako. 
 
 Oloraiti Ta, Mataso. 
 
 This means as much as : 
 
 Mr. Comins, (How) are you ? You no come look me ; me 
 no look you ; you look my boat he go Mae to-day. Vakaromala 
 me like he sleep house belong you, he look out my boat, me no 
 more kaikai, me hungry now, boat man Mae he give you yam 
 very good, you give some tobacco belong (here = to) me, he 
 finish, no more tobacco. 
 
 All right Ta, Mataso. 
 
 There are evidently many degrees of approximation to the 
 true English sounds. 
 
 This letter also shows the characteristic tendency to add a 
 vowel, generally a short i, to words ending in consonants. This 
 is old, for I find in Defoe's Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 
 (1719, p. 211) : " All those natives, as also those of Africa, when 
 they learn English, they always add two E's at the end of the 
 words where we use one, and make the accent upon them, as 
 makee, takee and the like." (Note the un-phonetic expressions !) 
 Landtman, besides this addition, as in belongey, also mentions 
 a more enigmatic one of lo to words ending in vowels, as clylo for 
 ' cry ' (cf. below on Pidgin). 
 
 Xn.— § 4. Pidgin. 
 
 I now turn to Pidgin-English. As is well known, this is the 
 name of the jargon which is very extensively used in China, and 
 to some extent also in Japan and California, as a means of com- 
 munication between English-speaking people and the yellow 
 
222 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [cii. xii 
 
 population. The name is derived from the Chinese distortion 
 of the Engl, word business. Unfortunately, the sources available 
 for ri(lgin-Engli.sh as actually spoken in the East nowadays are 
 neither so full nor so exact as those for Beach-la-mar, and the 
 following sketch, therefore, is not quite satisfactory.^ 
 
 Pidgin-English must have developed pretty soon after the 
 first beginning of commercial relations between the English and 
 Chinese. In Engl. Stiidien, 44. 298, Prick van Wely has printed 
 some passages of C. F. Noble's Voyafje to the East Indies in 1747 
 and 1748, in which the Chinese are represented as talking to the 
 writer in a " broken and mixed dialect of English and Portu- 
 guese," the specimens given corresponding pretty closely to the 
 Pidgin of our OAvn days. Thus, he no cari Chinamayi's Joss, hap 
 oter Joss, which is rendered, ' that man does not worship our 
 god, but has another god ' ; the Chinese are said to be unable to 
 pronounce r and to use the word chin-chin for compliments and 
 jpickenini for ' small.' 
 
 The latter word seems now extinct in Pidgin proper, though 
 we have met it in Beach-la-mar, but Joss is still very frequent 
 in Pidgin : it is from Portuguese Deiis, Deos (or Span. Dios) : 
 Joss-house is a temple or church, Joss-pidgin religion, Joss-pidgin 
 man a clergyman, topside Joss-pidgin man a bishop. Chin-chin, 
 according to the same source, is from Chinese tsHng-ts'ing, 
 Pekingese ch'ing-ch'ing, a term of salutation answering to ' thank 
 you, adieu,' but the English have extended its sphere of appli- 
 cation very considerably, using it as a noun meaning ' saluta- 
 tion, compliment,' and as a verb meaning " to worship (by bow- 
 ing and striking the chin), to reverence, adore, implore, to 
 deprecate anger, to wish one something, invite, ask " (Leland). 
 The explanation given here within parentheses shows how the 
 Chinese word has been interpreted by popular etymology, and 
 no doubt it owes its extensive use partly to its sound, which has 
 taken the popular fancy. Chin-chin joss means religious worship 
 of any kind. 
 
 Simpson says : " Many of the words in use are of unknown 
 origin. In a number of cases the English suppose them to be 
 
 ^ There are many specimens in Charles G. Leland, Pidgin- English Sing- 
 Song, or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect, with a Vocabulary 
 (5th ed., London, 1900), but they make the impression of being artificially 
 made-up to amuse the readers, and contain a much larger proportion of 
 Chinese words than the rest of my sources would warrant. Besides various 
 articles in newspapers I have used W. Simpson, " China's Future Place in 
 Philology " (AlacmiUan's Magazine, November 1873) and Dr. Legge's article 
 " Pigeon Englisli " in Chajnbcrs's Encyclopcedia. 1901 (s.v. China). The 
 chapters devoted to Pidgin in Karl Lentzner's Dictionary of the Slang- 
 English of Australia and of some Mixed Languages (Halle, 1892) give little else 
 but wholesale reprints of passages from some of the sources mentioned above. 
 
§4] PIDGIN 223 
 
 Chinese, Avhile the Chinese, on the other hand, take them to be 
 English."' Some of tliese, liowcver, admit now of explanation, 
 and not a few of them point to India, where the ICnglish have 
 learnt them and brought them further East. Thus chit, chitty, 
 ' a letter, an account,' is Hindustani chitthl ; godoion ' ware- 
 house ' is an English popular interpretation of Malay gadonrj, 
 from Tamil gidangi. Chowchow seems to be real Chinese and to 
 mean ' mixed preserves,' but in Pidgin it has acquired the vsider 
 signification of ' food, meal, to eat,' besides having various other 
 applications : a chowchow cargo is an assorted cargo, a ' general 
 shop ' is a chowchow shop. Cumshaw ' a present ' is Chinese. 
 But tiffin, which is used all over the East for ' lunch,' is really 
 an English word, pro])erly tiffing, from the slang verb to tiff, to 
 drink, esp. to drink out of meal-times. In India it was applied 
 to the meal, and then reintroduced into England and believed 
 to be a native Indian word. 
 
 Xn.— § 5. Grammar, etc. 
 
 Among points not found in BeacJi-la-mar I shall mention 
 the extensive use of piecee, which in accordance with Chinese 
 grammar is required between a numeral and the noun indicating 
 what is counted ; thus in a Chinaman's description of a three- 
 masted screw steamer with two funnels : " Thlee piecee bam- 
 boo, two piecee puff-pufF, walk-along inside, no can see " (walk- 
 along — the engine). Side means any locality : he belongey 
 China-side now (he is in China), topside above, or high, bottom- 
 side below, farside bej^ond, this-side here, allo-side around. In 
 a similar way time (pronounced tim or teem) is used in that-tim 
 then, when, what-iim when ? one-tim once, only, ttvo-tim twice, 
 again, nother-tim again. 
 
 In one respect the Chinese sound system is accountable for 
 a deviation from Beach-la-mar, namely in the substitution 
 of I for r: loom, all light for 'room, all right,' etc., ivhile the 
 islanders often made the inverse change. But the tendency to 
 add a vowel after a final consonant is the same : makee, too 
 muchee, etc. The enigmatic termination lo, which Landtman found 
 in some words in New Guinea, is also added to some words ending 
 in vowel sounds in Pidgin, according to Leland, who instances 
 die-lo, die ; in his texts I find the additional examples biiy-lo, say-lo, 
 2)ay-lo, hear-lo, besides wailo, or wijlo, which is probably from aicay ; 
 it means 'go away, away with you! go, depart, gone.' Can it 
 be the Chinese sign of the i^ast tense la, lao, generalized ? 
 
 Among usual expressions must be mentioned number one 
 {numpa one) ' first-class, excellent,' catchee ' get, possess, hold, 
 
224 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [ch. xii 
 
 bring,' etc., ijloper {plopa) ' proper, good, nice, correct ' : you 
 belong lAoper ? ' are you well ? ' 
 
 Another word which was not in use among the South Sea 
 islanders, namely have, in the form hab or hap is often used in 
 Pidgin, even to form the perfect. Belong (belongy) is nearly 
 as frequent as in Beach-la-mar, but is used in a different way : 
 ' My belongy Consoo boy,' ' I am the Consul's servant.' ' You 
 belong clever inside,' 'you are intelligent.' The usual way of 
 asking the price of something is ' how much belong ? ' 
 
 XII.— § 6. General Theory. 
 
 Lingos of the same type as Beach-la-mar and Pidgin-English 
 are found in other parts of the world where whites and natives 
 meet and have to find some medium of communication. Thus 
 a Danish doctor living in Belgian Congo sends me a few speci- 
 mens of the ' Pidgin ' spoken there : to indicate that his master 
 has received many letters from home, the ' boy ' will say, 
 " Massa catch plenty mammy-book " {mammy meaning ' woman, 
 Avife '). Breeze stands for air in general ; if the boy wants to 
 say that he has pumped up the bicj'cle tjTes, he will say, 
 " Plenty breeze live for inside," live being here the general term 
 for 'to be ' (Beach-1. stop) ; ' is your master in ? ' becomes 
 ' JMassa live ? ' and the ans^^'er is ' he no live ' or ' he live for 
 hup ' (i.e. he is upstairs). If a man has a stomach-ache he will 
 say ' he hurt me for belly plenty too much ' — too much is thus 
 used exactly as in Beach-la-mar and Chinese Pidgin. The 
 similarity of all these jargons, in spite of unavoidable smaller 
 differences, is in fact very striking indeed. 
 
 It may be time now to draw the moral of all this. And first 
 I want to point out that these languages are not ' mixed 
 languages ' in the proper sense of that term. Churchill is not 
 right when he says that Beach-la-mar " gathered material from 
 every source, it fused them all." As a matter of fact, it is 
 English, and nothing but English, with very few admixtures, 
 and all of these are such words as had previously been 
 adopted into the English speech of those classes of the popu- 
 lation, sailors, etc., with whom the natives came into contact : 
 the}' were therefore justified in their belief that these words 
 formed part of the English tongue and that what they learned 
 themselves was real English. The natives really adhere to 
 Windisch's rule about the adoption of loan-words (above, XI § 10). 
 If there are more Chinese words in Pidgin than there are Poly- 
 nesian ones in Beach-la-mar, this is a natural consequence 
 of the fact that the Chinese ci^•ilization ranked incomparably 
 
§6] GENERAL THEORY 225 
 
 much higher than the Polynesian, and that therefore the 
 Enghsh living in China would adopt tliesc words into their own 
 speech. Still, their number is not very large. And we have 
 seen that there are some words which the Easterners must 
 naturally suppose to be English, while the English think that 
 they belong to the vernacular, and in using them each party 
 is thus under the delusion that he is rendering a service to the 
 other. 
 
 This leads me to my second point : those deviations from 
 correct English, those corruptions of pronunciation and those 
 simplifications of grammar, which have formed the object of 
 this short sketch, are due just as much to the English as to the 
 Easterners, and in many points they began with the former 
 rather than with the latter (of, Schuchardt, Auf anlass des 
 Volapilks, 1888, 8; KS 4. 35, SID 3G ; ESt 15. 292), From 
 Schuchardt I take the follo\\ing quotation : " The usual question 
 on reaching the portico of an Indian bmigalow is. Can missus see ? 
 — it being a popular superstition amongst the Europeans that 
 to enable a native to understand English he must be addressed 
 as if he were deaf, and in the most infantile language." This 
 tendency to meet the ' inferior races ' half-way in order to facili- 
 tate matters for them is by Churchill called " the one supreme 
 axiom of international philology : the proper way to make a 
 foreigner understand what you would say is to use broken 
 English. He speaks it himself, therefore give him what he uses." 
 We recognize here the same mistaken notion that we have seen 
 above in the language of the nursery, where mothers and others 
 will talk a curious sort of mangled English which is believed to 
 represent real babytalk, though it has many traits which are 
 pm-ely conventional. In both cases these more or less artificial 
 perversions are thought to be an aid to those who have not yet 
 mastered the intricacies of the language in question, though the 
 ultimate result is at best a retardation of the perfect acquisition 
 of correct speech. 
 
 My view, then, is that Beach-la-mar as well as Pidgin is 
 English, only English learnt imperfectly, in consequence jmrtly 
 of the difficulties always inherent in learning a totally different 
 language, partly of the obstacles put in the way of learning by 
 the linguistic behaviour of the English-speaking people them- 
 selves. The analogy of its imperfections with those of a baby's 
 speech in the first period is striking, and includes errors of pro- 
 nunciation, extreme simplification of grammar, scantiness of 
 vocabulary, even to such peculiarities as that the word too is 
 apprehended in the sense of ' very much,' and such phrases as 
 you better go, etc. 
 
 15 
 
226 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [ch. xii 
 
 Xn.— §7. Mauritius Creole. 
 
 The view here advanced on the character of these ' Pidgin ' 
 languages is corroborated when we see that other languages under 
 similar circumstances have been treated in exactly the same w^ay 
 as English. With regard to French in the island of Mauritius, 
 formerly He de France, we are fortunate in possessing an ex- 
 cellent treatment of the subject by M. C. Baissac {ttude sur le 
 Patois Creole Mauricien, Nancy, 1880 ; cf. the same writer's Le 
 Folk-lore de Vile-Maurice, Paris, 1888, I^t^s litteratures populaires, 
 tome xxvii). The island was uninhabited when the French 
 occupied it in 1715 ; a great many slaves were imported from 
 Madagascar, and as a means of intercourse between them and 
 their French masters a French Creole language sprang up, which 
 has survived the English conquest (1810) and the subsequent 
 wholesale introduction of coolies from India and elsewhere. The 
 paramount element in the vocabulary is French ; one may read 
 many pages in Baissac's texts without coming across any foreign 
 words, apart from the names of some indigenous animals and 
 plants. In the i)honetic structure there are a few all-pervading 
 traits : the front-round vowels are replaced by the corresponding 
 unrounded vowels or in a few cases by [u], and instead of [/, 5] 
 we find [s, z] ; thus ir^ heureux, ine plime une plume, saldne 
 chacun(e), zize juge, zunu genou, suval cheval : I replace Baissac's 
 notation, which is modelled on the French spelling, by a more 
 phonetic one according to his own indications ; but I keep his 
 final e miiet. 
 
 The grammar of this language is as simple as possible. Sub- 
 stantives have the same form for the two numbers : di, sural 
 deux chevaux. There is no definite article. The adjective is 
 invariable, thus also sa for ce, cet, cette, ces, ceci, cela, celui, 
 celle, ceux, celles. Mo before a verb is ' I.' before a substantive 
 it is possessive : mo koni I laiow, mo lakaze my house ; in the 
 same way to is you and your, but in the tliird person a dis- 
 tinction is made, for li is he or she, but his or her is so, and 
 here we have even a plural, zaute from ' les autres,' which form 
 is also used as a jjlural of the second person : mo va alle av zaut, 
 1 shall go with yoii. 
 
 The genitive is expressed by word-order without any pre- 
 position : lakase so papa his father's house ; also with so before the 
 nominative : so piti ppa Azor old Azor's child. 
 
 The form in which the French words have been taken over 
 presents some curious features, and in some cases illustrates the 
 difficulty the blacks felt in separating the words which they 
 heard in the French utterance as one continuous stream of 
 
§7] MAURITIUS CREOLE 227 
 
 sounds. There is evidently a disinclination to begin a word with 
 a vowel, and sometimes an initial vowel is left out, as bitation 
 habitation, tranz4 etranger, but in other cases z is taken from 
 the French plural article : zozo oiseau, zistoire, zenfan, zimaze 
 image, zalfan elephant, zanimo animal, or n from the French 
 indefinite article : name ghost, nabi (or zabi) habit. In many 
 cases the whole Fi'ench article is taken as an integral part of the 
 word, as Urat rat, Uroi, licien chien, latahe table, Ure heure (often 
 as a conjunction ' when ') ; thus also with the plural article 
 lizii from les yeux, but without the plural signification : ine 
 lizii an eye. Similarly ene lazoie a goose. Words that are often 
 used in French with the so-called partitive article keep this ; thus 
 disel salt, divin wine, duri rice, ene dipin a loaf ; here also we 
 meet with one word from the French plural : ine dizij an egg, 
 from des ceufs. The French mass- word with the partitive article 
 du momle has become dimunde or dumune, and as it means 
 ' people ' and no distinction is made between plural and singular, 
 it is used also for ' person ' : ijie vi4 dimunde an old man. 
 
 Verbs have only one form, generally from the French infi- 
 nitive or past participle, which in most cases would fall together 
 {manze = manger, mange ; kuri = courir, couru) ; this serves 
 for all persons in both numbers and all moods. But tenses are 
 indicated by means of auxiliary words : va for the future, ii 
 (from ite) for the ordinary past, and fine for the perfect : mo 
 manzi I eat, mo va manzi, I shall eat, mo ti manze I ate, mo 
 fine manzi I have eaten, mo fine fini I have finished. Further, 
 there is a curious use of apre to express what in English are called 
 the progressive or expanded tenses : mo apre manzi I am eating, 
 mo ti apre manzi I was eating, and of pour to express the imme- 
 diate future : mo pour manzi I am going to eat, and finally an 
 immediate past may be expressed by Jik : mo fik manzi I have 
 just been eating (je ne fais que de manger). As these may be 
 combined in various ways {mo va fine manze I shall have eaten, 
 even mo ti va fik manzi I should have eaten a moment ago, etc.), 
 the language has really succeeded in building up a very fine and 
 rich verbal system with the simplest possible means and with 
 perfect regularity. 
 
 The French separate negatives have been combined into one word 
 each : napa not (there is not), narien nothing, and similarly nek only. 
 
 In many cases the same form is used for a substantive or 
 adjective and for a verb : mo soif, mo faim I am thirsty and 
 hungry ; U content so madame he is fond of his wife. 
 
 C6te (or d cote) is a preposition ' by the side of, near,' but 
 also means ' where ' : la case dcote U resti ' the house in which he 
 lives ' ; of. Pidgin side. 
 
328 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [ch. xii 
 
 In all this, as will easily be seen, there is very little French 
 grammar ; this will he especially evident when we compare the 
 French verbal system ^nth its many intricacies : difference 
 according to person, number, tense and mood with their endings, 
 changes of root-vowels and stress-place, etc., with the im- 
 changed verbal root and the invariable auxiliary syllables of 
 the Creole. But there is really as little in the Creole dialect of 
 Malagasy grammar, as I have ascertained b}' looking through 
 G. W. Parker's Grammar (London, 1883) : both nations in form- 
 ing this means of communication have, as it were, stripped them- 
 selves of all their previous grammatical habits and have spoken 
 as if their minds were just as innocent of grammar as those of 
 very small babies, whether French or Malagasy. Thus, and 
 thus only, can it be explained that the grammar of this variety 
 of French is for all practical purposes identical with the grammar 
 of those two varieties of English which we have previously ex- 
 amined in this chapter 
 
 No one can read Baissac's collection of folk-tales from 
 Mauritius without being often struck with the felicity and even 
 force of this language, in spite of its inevitable naivetd and of the 
 childlike simplicity of its constructions. If it were left to itself 
 it might develop into a really fine idiom without abandoning 
 any of its characteristic traits. But as it is, it seems to be con- 
 stantly changing through the influence of real French, which is 
 more and more taught to and imitated by the islanders, and the 
 day may come when most of the features described in this rapid 
 sketch will have given place to something which is less original, 
 but will be more readily understood by Parisian globe-trotters 
 who may happen to visit the distant island. 
 
 Xn.— § 8. Chinook Jargon. 
 
 The view here advanced may be further put to the test if 
 we examine a totally different language developed in another 
 part of the world, viz. in Oregon. I give its history in an 
 abridged form from Hale.^ When the first British and American 
 trading ships appeared on the north-w-est coast of America, towards 
 the end of the eighteenth century, they found a great number of 
 distinct languages, the Nootka, Nisqually, Chinook, Chihailish and 
 
 1 See An International Idiom. A Manual of the Oregon Trade Language, 
 or Chinook Jargon, by Horatio Hale (London, 1890). Besides this I have 
 used a Vocabulary of the Jargon or Trade Language of Oregon [by Lionnet] 
 published by the Smithsonian Institution (1853), and George Gibbs, A 
 Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon (Smithsonian Inst., 1863). Lionnet spells 
 the words according to the French fashion, while Gibbs and Hale spell them 
 in the English way. I have given them with the continental values of the 
 vowels in accordance with the indications in Hale'a glossary. 
 
§8] CHINOOK JARGON 229 
 
 others, all of them harsh in pronunciation, complex in structure, 
 and each spoken over a very limited space. The traders learnt 
 a few Nootka words and the Indians a few English words. 
 Afterwards the traders began to frequent the Columbia River, 
 and naturally attempted to communicate with the natives there 
 by means of the words which they had found intelligible at 
 Nootka. The Chinooks soon acquired these words, both Nootka 
 and English. When later the white traders made permanent 
 establishments in Oregon, a real language was required ; and 
 it was formed by drawing upon the Chinook for such words as 
 were requisite, numerals, pronouns, and some adverbs and other 
 words. Thus enriched, ' the Jargon,' as it now began to be 
 styled, became of great service as a means of general intercourse. 
 Now, French Canadians in the service of the fur companies were 
 brought more closely into contact with the Indians, hunted with 
 them, and lived with them on terms of familiarity. The con- 
 sequence was that several French words were added to the slender 
 stock of the Jargon, including the names of various articles of 
 food and clothing, implements, several names of the parts of the 
 body, and the verbs to run, sing and dance, also one conjunction, 
 'puis, reduced to pi. 
 
 " The origin of some of the words is rather whimsical. The 
 Americans, British and French are distinguished by the terms 
 Boston, Kinchotsh (King George), and pasaiuks, which is presumed 
 to be the word Frangais (as neither /, r nor the nasal n can be 
 pronounced by the Indians) with the Cliinook plural termination 
 uJcs added. . . . ' Foolish ' is expressed by pelton or pilton, derived 
 from the name of a deranged person, one Archibald Pelton, whom 
 the Indians saw at Astoria ; his strange appearance and actions 
 made such an impression upon them, that thenceforward anyone 
 behaving in an absurd or irrational manner " was termed pelton. 
 
 The phonetic structure is very simple, and contains no sound 
 or combination that is not easy to Englishmen and Frenchmen 
 as well as to Indians of at least a dozen tribes. The numerous 
 harsh Indian velars either disappear entirely or are softened to h 
 and k. On the other hand, the d, /, r, v, z of the English and 
 French become in the mouth of a Chinook t, j), I, w, s. Examples : 
 
 Chinook 
 
 thliakso 
 
 yakso 
 
 hair 
 
 etsghot 
 
 itsJiut 
 
 black bear 
 
 tkalaitanam 
 
 kalaitan 
 
 arrow, shot, bullet 
 
 ntshaika 
 
 nesaika 
 
 we 
 
 mshaika 
 
 mesaika 
 
 we 
 
 thlaitshka 
 
 klaska {tlaska) 
 
 they 
 
 tkhlon 
 
 klon (tlun) 
 
 three 
 
280 
 
 PID 
 
 GIN AND CONGENE] 
 
 RS [CH. 
 
 English : 
 
 handkercki 
 cry 
 fire 
 dry 
 
 lef hakatshum (kenke^him) 
 klai, kalai (kai) 
 paia 
 tlai, delai 
 
 handkerchief 
 cry, mourn 
 fire, cook, ripe 
 dry 
 
 French : 
 
 courir 
 la bouche 
 le mouton 
 
 kuli 
 
 labus (labush) 
 lemuto 
 
 run 
 
 mouth 
 sheep 
 
 The forms in parentheses are those of the French glossary 
 (1853). 
 
 It will be noticed that many of the French words have the 
 definite article affixed (a trait noticed in many words in the 
 French Creole dialect of Mauritius). More than half of the words 
 in Hale's glossary beginning with I have this origin, thus labutai 
 bottle, lakloa cross, lamie an old woman (la vieille), lapnshet fork 
 (la fourchette), latld noise (faire du train), lulu finger, lejaub (or 
 diaub, yaub) devil (le diable), lema hand, liplet missionary (le 
 pretre), litd tooth. The plural article is found in lisdp egg (les 
 oeufs) — the same word in which Mauritius French has also 
 adopted the pliu'al form. 
 
 Some of the meanings of English words are rather curious ; 
 thus, kol besides ' cold ' means ' winter,' and as the j'ears, as with 
 the old Scandinavians, are reckoned by winters, also ' year.' 
 Sun {son) besides ' sun ' also means ' day.' Spos (often pro- 
 nounced pas), as in Beach-la-mar, is a common conjunction, * if, 
 when.' 
 
 The grammar is extremely simple. Nouns are invariable ; 
 the plural generally is not distinguished from the singular ; 
 sometimes haiu (ayo) ' much, many ' is added by way of em- 
 phasis. The genitive is shown by position only : kahta nem 
 maika papa? (lit., what name thou father) what is the name of 
 your father ? The adjective precedes the noun, and com- 
 parison is indicated by periphrasis. ' I am stronger than thou ' 
 would be weke maika skukiim kahkwa naika. lit. ' not thou 
 strong as I.' The superlative is indicated by the adverb haids 
 ' great, very ' : haids oilman okuk kanim, that canoe is the 
 oldest, lit., very old that canoe, or (according to Gibbs) by elip 
 ' first, before ' : elip klosh ' best.' 
 
 The numerals and pronouns are from the Chinook, but the 
 latter, at any rate, are very much simplified. Thus the pronoun 
 for ' we ' is nesaika, from Chinook ntshaika, which is the ex- 
 clusive form, meaning ' we here,' not including the person or 
 persons addressed. 
 
 Like the nouns, the verbs have only one form, the tense being 
 left to be inferred from the context, or, if strictly necessary, 
 
§8] CHINOOK JARGON 281 
 
 being indicated by an adverb. The future, in the sense of 
 ' about to, ready to,' may be expressed by tike, which means 
 properly ' wish,' as naika papa tike mimalus {mimelust) my 
 father is about to die. The verb 'to be ' is not expressed : 
 maika pelton, thou art foohsh. 
 
 There is a much-used verb mdmuk, which means ' make, do, 
 work ' and forms causatives, as mamuk chako ' make to come, 
 bring,' mamxik mimalus ' lull.' With a noun : mamuk lalam 
 (Ft. la rame) ' make oar,' i.e. ' to row,' mamuk pepe (make paper) 
 ' write,' mamuk po (make blow) ' fire a gun.' 
 
 There is only one true preposition, kojm, which is used in 
 various senses — to, for, at, in, among, about, etc. ; but even 
 this may generally be omitted and the sentence remain intelli- 
 gible. The two conjunctions spos and pi have already been 
 mentioned. 
 
 Xn. — § 9. Chinook continued. 
 
 In this way something is formed that may be used as a 
 language in spite of the scantiness of its vocabulary. But a 
 good deal has to be expressed by the tone of the voice, the look 
 and the gesture of the speaker. " The Indians in general," 
 says Hale (p. 18), " are very sparing of their gesticulations. No 
 languages, probably, require less assistance from this source than 
 theirs. . . . We frequently had occasion to observe the sudden 
 change produced when a party of the natives, who had been 
 conversing in their own tongue, were joined by a foreigner, with 
 whom it was necessary to speak in the Jargon. The coun- 
 tenances, which had before been grave, stolid and inexpressive, 
 were instantly hghted up with animation ; the low, monotonous 
 tone became lively and modulated ; every feature was active ; 
 the head, the arms and the whole body were in motion, and 
 every look and gesture became instinct with meaning." 
 
 In British Columbia and in parts of Alaska this larguage is 
 the prevailing medium of intercourse between the whites and 
 the natives, and there Hale thinks that it is likely to live " for 
 hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years to come." The 
 language has already the beginning of a literature : songs, 
 mostly composed by women, who sing them to plaintive native 
 tunes. Hale gives some lyrics and a sermon preached by Mr. 
 Eells, who has been accustomed for many years to preach to 
 the Indians in the Jargon and who says that he sometimes even 
 thinks in this idiom. 
 
 Hale counted the words in this sermon, and found that to 
 express the whole of its " historic and descriptive details, its 
 
232 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [ch. xii 
 
 arguments and its appeals," only 97 different words were re- 
 quired, and not a single grammatical inflexion. Of these words, 
 65 were from Amerindian languages (46 Chinook, 17 Nootka, 
 2 Salish), 23 English and 7 French. 
 
 It is very instructive to go through the t^xts given by Hale 
 and to compare them with the real Chinook text analysed in 
 Boas's Hamlbook of American Indian Languages (Washington, 
 1911, p. 666 ff.) : the contrast could not be stronger between 
 simplicity carried to the extreme point, on the one hand, and 
 an infinite complexity and intricacy on the other. But though 
 it must be admitted that astonishingly much can be expressed 
 in the Jargon by its very simple and few means, a European 
 mind, while bewildered in the entangled jumble of the Chinook 
 language, cannot help missing a great many nuances in the 
 Jargon, where thoughts are reduced to their simplest formula 
 and where everj^thing is left out that is not strictly necessary 
 to the least exacting minds. 
 
 XII.— § 10. Makeshift Languages. 
 
 To sura up, this Oregon trade language is to be classed 
 together with Beach-la-mar and Pidgin-English, not perhaps 
 as ' bastard ' or ' mongrel ' languages — such expressions taken 
 from biology always convey the \vrong impression that a 
 langur.ge is an ' organism ' and had therefore better be avoided — 
 but rather as makeshift languages or minimum languages, 
 means of expression which do not serve all the purposes of 
 ordinary languages, but may be used as substitutes where fuller 
 and better ones are not available. 
 
 The analogy between this Jargon and the makeshift languages 
 of the East is closer than might perhaps aj^pear at first blush, 
 only we must make it clear to ourselves that Enghsh is in the 
 two cases placed in exactly the inverse position. Pidgin and 
 Beach-la-mar are essentially English learnt imperfectly by the 
 Easterners, the Oregon Jargon is essentially Chinook learnt im- 
 perfectly by the English. Just as in the East the English not only 
 suffered but also abetted the yellows in their corruption of the 
 English language, so also the Amerindians met the English 
 half-way through simplifying their own speech. If in Polynesia 
 and China the makeshift language came to contain some Poh'- 
 nesian and Chinese words, they were those which the English 
 themselves had borrowed into their own language and which 
 the yellows therefore must think formed a legitimate part of 
 the language they wanted to speak ; and in the same w^ay the 
 American Jargon contains such words from the Eiu-opean 
 
§10] MAKESHIFT LANGUAGES 288 
 
 languages as had been previously adopted by the reds. If the 
 Jargon embraces so many French t^rms for the various parts 
 of the body, one concomitant reason probably is that these 
 names in the original Chinook language presented special diffi- 
 culties through being specialized and determined by possessive 
 affixes (my foot, for instance, is lekxeps, thy foot tdmeps, its 
 foot Jelaps, our (dual inclusive) feet tetxaps, your (dual) feet 
 temtaps ; I simpliiy the notation in Boas's Handbook, p. 58G), 
 so that it was incomparablj'^ easier to take the French lepi and 
 use it unchanged in all cases, no matter what the number, and 
 no matter who the possessor was. The natives, who had learnt 
 such words from the French, evidently used them to other 
 whites under the impression that thereby they could make them- 
 selves more readily understood, and the British and American 
 traders probably imagined them to be real Chinook ; anyhow, 
 their use meant a substantial economy of mental exertion. 
 
 The cliief point I want to make, however, is with regard to 
 grammar. In all these languages, both in the makeshift 
 English and French of the East and in the makeshift Amerindian 
 of the North- West, the grammatical structure has been simpli- 
 fied very miich beyond what we fold in any of the languages 
 involved in their making, and simplified to such an extent that 
 it may be expressed in very few words, and those nearly the 
 same in all these languages, the chief rule being common to them 
 all, that substantives, adjectives and verbs remain alwaj^s un- 
 changed. The vocabularies are as the poles asunder — in the East 
 English and French, in America Chinook, etc. — but the morphology 
 of all these languages is practically identical, because in all of 
 them it has reached the vanishing-point. This shows conclu- 
 sively that the reason of this simplicity is not the Chinese sub- 
 stratum or the influence of Chinese grammar, as is so often 
 believed. Pidgin-English cannot be described, as is often done, 
 as Enghsh with Chinese pronunciation and Chinese grammar, 
 because in that case we should expect Beach-la-mar to be quite 
 different from it, as the substratum there would be jMelanesian, 
 which in many ways differs from Chinese, and further we should 
 expect the Mauritius Creole to be French with Malagasy pro- 
 nunciation and Malagasy grammar, and on the other hand the 
 Oregon trade language to be Chinook with English pronunciation 
 and English grammar — but in none of these cases would this 
 description tally with the obvious facts. We might just as well 
 say that the speech of a two-year-old child in England is 
 English with Chinese grammar, and that of the two-year-old 
 French child is French modelled on Chinese grammar : the 
 truth on the contrary, is that in all these seemingly so different 
 
284 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [ch. xii 
 
 cases the aame mental factor is at work, namely, imperfect 
 mastery of a language, which in its initial stage, in the child 
 with its first language and in the grown-up with a second 
 language learnt by imperfect methods, leads to a superficial 
 knowledge of the most indispensable words, with total disregard 
 of grammar. Often, here and there, this is combined with a 
 wish to express more than is possible with the means at hand, 
 and thus generates the attempts to express the inexpressible by 
 means of those more or less ingenious and more or less comical 
 devices, with paraphrases and figurative or circuitous designa- 
 tions, which we have seen first in the chapters on children's 
 language and now again in Beach-la-mar and its congeners. 
 
 Exactly the same characteristics are found again in the 
 lingua geral Brazilica, which in large parts of Brazil serves as 
 the means of communication between the whites and Indians 
 or negroes and also between Indians of different tribes. It 
 " possesses neither declension nor conjugation " and " places 
 words after one another without grammatical flexion, with dis- 
 regard of nuances in sentence structure, but in energetic brevity," 
 it is "easy of pronunciation," with many vowels and no hard con- 
 sonant groups — in all these respects it differs considerably from the 
 original Tupi, from which it has been evolved by the Europeans.^ 
 
 Finally, I would point the contrast between these makeshift 
 languages and slang : the former are an outcome of linguistic 
 poverty ; they are born of the necessity and the desire to make 
 oneself understood where the ordinary idiom of the individual 
 is of no use, while slang expressions are due to a linguistic exu- 
 berance : the individual creating them knows perfectly well the 
 ordinary words for the idea he wants to express, but in youthful 
 playfulness he is not content with what is everybody's property, 
 and thus consciously steps outside the routine of everyday 
 language to produce something that is calculated to excite 
 merriment or even admiration on the part of his hearers. The 
 results in both cases may sometimes show related features, for 
 some of the figurative expressions of Beach-la-mar recall certain 
 slang words by their bold metaphors, but the motive force in 
 the two kinds is totally different, and where a comic effect is 
 produced, in one case it is intentional and in the other unintentional. 
 
 Xn. — § 11. Romanic Languages. 
 
 When Schuchardt began his studies of the various Creole 
 languages formed in many parts of the world where EurojDeans 
 
 * See Martius, Beitr. zur Ethnogr. und Sprachenkunde Amerikas (Leipzig, 
 1867), i. 364 fl. and ii 23 £f. 
 
§11] ROMANIC LANGUAGES 285 
 
 epealdng various Romanic and other languages had come into 
 contact with negroes, Poljmesians and other races, it was with 
 the avowed intention of throwing light on the origin of the 
 Romanic languages from a contact between Latin and the lan- 
 guages previously spoken in the countries colonized by the 
 Romans. We may now raise the question whether Beach-la- 
 mar — to take that as a typical example of the kind of languages 
 dealt Avith in this chapter — is likely to develop into a language 
 which to the English of Great Britain will stand in the same 
 relation as French or Portuguese to Latin. The answer cannot 
 be doubtful if we adhere tenaciously to the points of view already 
 advanced. Development into a separate language would be 
 imaginable only on condition of a complete, or a nearly com- 
 plete, isolation from the language of England (and America) — 
 and how should that be effected nowadays, with our present 
 means of transport and communication ? If such isolation were 
 indeed possible, it would also result in the breaking off of com- 
 munication between the various islands in which Beach-la-mar 
 is now spoken, and that would probably entail the speedy ex- 
 tinction of the language itself in favour of the Polynesian language 
 of each separate island. On the contrary, what will probably 
 happen is a development in the opposite direction, by which the 
 English of the islanders will go on constantly improving so as to 
 approach correct usage more and more in every respect : better 
 pronunciation and syntax, more flexional forms and a less scanty 
 vocabulary — in short, the same development that has already 
 to a large extent taken place in the English of the coloured popu- 
 lation in the United States. But this means a gradual extinction 
 of Beach-la-mar as a separate idiom tlirough its complete absorp- 
 tion in ordinary English (cf. above, p. 228, on conditions at 
 Mauritius). 
 
 Do these ' makeshift languages,' then, throw any light on 
 the development of the Romanic languages ? They may be 
 compared to the very first initial stage of the Latin language as 
 spoken by the barbarians, many of whom may be supposed to 
 have mutilated Latin in very much the same way as the Pacific 
 islanders do English. But by and by they learnt Latin much 
 better, and if now the Romanic languages have simplified the 
 grammatical structure of Latin, this simplification is not to be 
 placed on the same footing as the formlessness of Beach-la-mar, 
 for that is complete and has been achieved at one blow : the 
 islanders have never (i.e. have not yet) learnt the English form- 
 system. But the inhabitants of France, Spain, etc., did learn 
 the Latin form system as well as the syntactic use of the forms. 
 This is seen by the fact that when French and the other languages 
 
236 PIDGIN AND CONGENERS [cH. xii 
 
 began to be written down, there remained in them a large quantity 
 of forms and syntactic applications that agree with Latin but 
 have since then become extinct : in its oldest written form, 
 therefore, French is very far from the amorphous condition of 
 Beach-la-mar : in its nouns it had many survivals of the Latin 
 case system (gen. pi. corresponding to -orum ; an oblique case 
 different from the nominative and formed in various ways ac- 
 cording to the rules of Latin declensions), in the verbs we find an 
 intricate system of tenses, moods and persons, based on the 
 Latin flexions. It is true that these had been already to some 
 degree simplified, but this must have happened in the same 
 gradual way as the further simplification that goes on before 
 our very eyes in the written documents of the following cen- 
 turies : the distance from the first to the tenth century must have 
 been bridged over in very much the same way as the distance 
 between the tenth and the twentieth ccnturj'. No catacl3'sm 
 such as that through which English has become Beach-la-mar 
 need on any account be invoked to explain the perfectly natural 
 change from Latin to Old French and from Old French to 
 Modern French. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE WOMAN 
 
 § 1. Women's Languages. § 2. Tabu. § 3. Competing Languages. § 4. Sans- 
 krit Drama. § 5. Conservatism. § 6. Phonetics and Grammar 
 § 7. Choice of Words. § 8. Vocabulary. § 9. Adverbs. § 10. Periods, 
 § 11. General Characteristics. 
 
 Xin.— § 1. Women's Languages. 
 
 There are tribes in which men and women are said to speak totally 
 different languages, or at any rate distinct dialects. It will be 
 worth our while to look at the classical example of this, which is 
 mentioned in a great many ethnographical and linguistic works, 
 viz. the Caribs or Caribbeans of the Small Antilles. The first to 
 mention their distinct sex dialects was the Dominican Breton, who, 
 in his Dictionnaire Carazbe-franQais (1664), says that the Caribbean 
 chief had exterminated all the natives except the women, who had 
 retained part of their ancient language. This is repeated in many 
 subsequent accounts, the fullest and, as it seems, most reliable 
 of which is that by Rochefort, who spent a long time among the 
 Caribbeans in the middle of the seventeenth century : see his 
 H istoire natureUe et morale lies lies Antilles (2c ed., Rotterdam, 1665, 
 jD. 449 ff.). Here he says that " the men have a great many expres- 
 sions peculiar to them, which the Avomen understand but never 
 pronounce themselves. On the other hand, the women have words 
 and phrases which the men never use, or they would be laughed 
 to scorn. Thus it happens that in their conversations it often 
 seems as if the women had another language than the men. . . . The 
 savage natives of Dominica say that the reason for this is that when 
 the Caribs came to occupy the islands these were inhabited by 
 an Arawak tribe which they exterminated completely, with the 
 exception of the women, whom they married in order to populate 
 the country. Now, these w" .nen kept their own language and taught 
 it to their ^^aughters. . . . But tu<.'igh the boys understand 
 the speech of their mothers and sisters, they nevertheless follow 
 their fathers and brothers and conform to their speech from the 
 age of five or six. ... It is asserted that the^ is some similarity 
 between the speech of the continental Arawaks and that of the 
 Carib women. But the Carib men and women on the continent 
 
 237 
 
238 THE WOMAN [ch. xin 
 
 apeak the same language, as they have never corrupted their 
 natural speech by marriage with strange women." 
 
 This evidently is the account wliich forms the basis of ever^'- 
 tliing that has since been written on the subject. But it will be 
 noticed that Rochefort does not really speak of the speech of the 
 two sexes as totally distinct languages or dialects, as has often 
 been maintained, but only of certain differences within the same 
 languaere. If we go through the comparatively full and evidently 
 careful glossary attached to his book, in which he d(>notes the 
 words peculiar to the men by the letter H and those of the women 
 by F, we shall see that it is only for about one-tenth of the vocabu- 
 lary that such special words have been indicated to him, though the 
 matter evident!}' interested him very much, so that he would make 
 all possible efforts to elicit them from the natives. In liis lists, 
 words special to one or the other sc.x are found most frequently 
 in the names of the various degrees of kinship ; thus, ' my father ' 
 in the speech of the men in youmdan, in that of the women nou- 
 kduchili, though both in addressing him saj' bdha ; ' my grand- 
 father ' is iidinoulou and ndrgoicti respectively, and thus also for 
 maternal uncle, son (elder son, younger son), brother-in-law, wife, 
 mother, grandmother, daughter, cousin — all of these are different 
 according as a man or a woman is speaking. It is the same with 
 the names of some, though far from all, of the different parts of 
 the body, and with some more or less isolated words, as friend, 
 enemy, joy, work, war, house, garden, bed, poison, tree, sun, moon, 
 sea,, earth. This list comprises nearly every notion for which 
 Rochefort indicates separate words, and it Avill be seen that there 
 are innumerable ideas for which men and women use the same 
 word. Further, we see that where th(;re are differences these do 
 not consist in small deviations, such as different prefixes or suffixes 
 added to the same root, but in totally distinct roots. Another 
 point is very important to my mind : judging by the instances 
 in which plural forms are given in the lists, the words of the two 
 sexes are inflected in exactly the same way ; thus the grammar is 
 common to both, from which we may infer that we hav^e not 
 really to do with two distinct languages in the proper sense of 
 the word. 
 
 Now, some light may probably be thrown on the problem of 
 this women's language from a custom mentioned in some of the 
 old books written by travellers who have visited these islands. 
 Rochefort himself (p. 497) very briefly says that " the women do 
 not eat till their husbands have finished their meal," and Lafitau 
 (1724) says that women never eat in the company of their husbands 
 and never mention them by name, but must wait upon them as 
 their slaves ; with this Labat agrees. 
 
§ 2] TABU 380 
 
 Xm.— § 2. Tabu. 
 
 The fact that a wife is not allowed to mention the name of 
 her husband makes one think that we have here simply an in- 
 stance of a custom found in various forms and in var^'ing degrees 
 throughout tne world — what is called verbal tabu : under certain 
 circumstances, at certain times, in certain places, the use of one or 
 more definite words is interdicted, because it is superstitiously 
 believed to entail certain evil consequences, such as exasperate 
 demons and the like. In place of the forbidden words it is therefore 
 necessary to use some kind of figurative paraphrase, to dig up an 
 otherwise obsolete t^rm, or to disguise the real word so as to render 
 it more innocent. 
 
 Now as a matter of fact we find that verbal tabu was a common 
 practice with the old Caribs : when they were on the war-path 
 they had a great number of mysterious words which women were 
 never alloAved to learn and which even the young men might not 
 pronounce before passing certain tests of bravery and patriotism ; 
 these war-words are described as extraordinarily difficult (" un 
 baragoin fort difficile," Rochefort, p. 450). It is easy to see that 
 when once a tribe has acquired the habit of using a whole set of 
 terms under certain frequently recurring circumstances, while 
 others are at the same time strictly interdicted, this may naturally 
 lead to so many words being reserved exclusively for one of the 
 sexes tliat an observer may be tempted to speak of separate 
 ' languages ' for the two sexes. There is thus no occasion to believe 
 in the story of a wholesale extermination of all male inhabitants 
 by another tribe, though on the other hand it is easy to understand 
 how such a m\i;h may arise as an explanation of the linguistic 
 diflference between men and women, when it has become strong 
 enough to attract attention and therefore has to be accounted for 
 
 In some parts of the world the connexion between a separate 
 women's language and tabu is indubitable. Thus among the 
 Bantu people of Africa. With the Zulus a wife is not allowed to 
 mention the name of her father-in-law and of his brothers, and if 
 a similar word or even a similar syllable occurs in the ordinary 
 language, she must substitute something else of a similar meaning. 
 In the royal family the difficult}' of understanding the women's 
 language is further increased by the Avoman's being forbidden 
 to mention the names of her husband, his father and grandfather 
 as well as his brothers. If one of these names means something 
 like " the son of the bull,'*' each of these words has to be avoided, 
 and all kinds of paraphrases have to be used. According to Kranz 
 the interdiction holds good not only for meaning elements of the 
 name, but even for certain sounds entering into them ; thus, if 
 
240 THE WOMAN [ch. xiii 
 
 the name contains the sound 2, amanzi ' water ' has to be altered 
 into amandabi. If a woman were to contravene tliis rule she 
 would be indicted for sorcery and put to death. The substitutes 
 thus introduced tend to be adopted by others and to constitute a 
 real women's language. 
 
 With the Chiquitos in Bolivia the difference between the grammars 
 of the two sexes is rather curious (see V, Henry, " Sur le parler 
 des hommes et le parler des femmes dans la langue chiquita," Revue 
 de linguistique, xii. 305, 1879). Some of Henry's examples may 
 be thus summarized : men indicate by the addition of -tii that a 
 male person is spoken about, while the women do not use this 
 suffix and thus make no distinction between ' he ' and ' she,' ' hia ' 
 and ' her.' Thus in the men's speech the following distinctions 
 would be made : 
 
 He went to his house : yeboiii ti n-ipoostii. 
 He went to her house : yebotii ti n-ipooa. 
 She went to his house : yebo ti n-ipoostii. 
 
 But to express all these different meanings the women would have 
 only one form, viz. 
 
 yebo ti n-ipoos, 
 
 which in the men's speech would mean only ' She went to her 
 house.' 
 
 To man}' substantives the men prefix a vowel which the women 
 do not employ, thus o-])etas 'turtle,' u-tumokos ' dog,' i-pis 'wood.' 
 For some very important notions the sexes use distinct words ; thus, 
 for the names of kinship, ' ray father ' is iyai and isupu, ' my mother * 
 ipaJci and ijjapa, ' my brother ' tsaruki and icibausi respectively. 
 
 Among the languages of California, Yana, according to Dixon 
 and &oeber [The American Anthropologist, n.s. 5. 15), is the 
 only language that shows a difference in the words used hy men 
 and women — apart from tenns of relationship, Mhere a distinction 
 according to the sex of the speaker is made among many Californian 
 tribes as well as in other parts of the world, evidentlj^ " because 
 the relationship itself is to them different, as the sex is different." 
 But in Yana the distinction is a linguistic one, and curiouslj^ enough, 
 the few specimens given all present a trait found already in the 
 Chiquito forms, namely, that the forms spoken by women are shorter 
 than those of the men, which appear as extensions, generally by 
 suffixed -{n)a, of the former. 
 
 Tt is surely needless to multiply instances of these customs, which 
 are found among many wild tribes ; the curious reader may be 
 referred to Lasch, S. pp. 7-13, and H. Ploss and M. Bartels, Das Weib 
 in der Natur und Volkerkunde (9th ed., Leipsig, 1908). The latter 
 
§ 2] TABU 241 
 
 says that the Suaheli system is not carried through so as to replace 
 the ordinar}' language, but the Suaheli have for every object which 
 they do not care to mention by its real name a symbolic word under- 
 stood by everybody concerned. In especial such symbols are used 
 by women in their mysteries to denote obscene things. The words 
 chosen are cither ordinar}' names for innocent things or else taken 
 from the old language or other Bantu languages, mostly Kiziguha, 
 for among the Waziguha secret rites play an enormous r61e. Bartels 
 finally says that with us, too, women have scjiarate names for 
 everj'thing connected with sexual life, and he thinks that it is the 
 same feeling of shame that underlies this custom and the inter- 
 diction of pronouncing the names of male relatives. This, however, 
 does not explain everything, and, as already indicated, superstition 
 certainly has a large share in this as in other forms of verbal tabu. 
 See on this the very full account in the third volume of Frazer's 
 The Golden Bough. 
 
 Xni.— § 3. Competing Languages. 
 A difference between the language spoken by men and that 
 spoken by women is seen in many countries where two languages 
 are struggling for supremacy in a peaceful way — thus without any 
 question of one nation exterminating the other or the male part 
 of it. Among German and Scandinavian immigrants in America 
 the men mix much more with the English-spealdng population, 
 and therefore have better opportunities, and also more occasion, to 
 learn English than their wives, who remain more within doors. 
 It is exactly the same among the Basques, where the school, the 
 military service and daily business relations contribute to the 
 extinction of Basque in favour of French, and where these factors 
 operate much more strongly on the male than on the female popula- 
 tion : there are families in which the wife talks Basque, while 
 the husband does not even understand Basque and does not allow 
 his children to learn it (Bornecque et Miihlen, Les Provinces fran- 
 Qaises, 5.3). Vilhelm Thomsen informs me that the old Livonian 
 language, which is now nearly extinct, is kept up with the 
 greatest fidelity by the women, while the men are abandoning it 
 for Lettish. Albanian women, too, generally know only Albanian, 
 while the men are more often bilingual. 
 
 Xm.— § 4. Sanskrit Drama. 
 There are very few traces of real sex dialects in our Arj'^an lan- 
 guages, though we have the very curious rule in the old Indian 
 drama that women talk Prakrit (jjrdJcrta, the natural or vulgar 
 language) while men have the privilege of talking Sanskrit {sam- 
 
 16 
 
242 THE WOMAN [ch. xiii 
 
 skrta, the adorned language). The distinction, however, is not 
 one of SOX really, but of rank, for Sanskrit is the language of gods, 
 kings, princes, brahmans, ministers, chamberlains, dancing-masters 
 and other men in superior positions and of a very few women of 
 special religious importance, while Prakrit is spoken by men of an 
 inferior class, like shopkeepers, law officers, aldermen, bathmen, 
 fishermen and policemen, and by nearly all women. The difference 
 between the two ' languages ' is one of degree only : they are two 
 strata of the same language, one higher, more solemn, stifi and 
 archaic, and another lower, more natural and familiar, and this easy, 
 or perhaps we should say slipshod, style is the only one recognized 
 for ordinary women. The difference may not be greater than that 
 between the language of a judge and that of a costermonger in a 
 modern novel, or between Juliet's and her nurse's expressions 
 in Shakespeare, and if all women, even those we should call the 
 ' heroines ' of the plays, use only the lower stratum of speech, the 
 reason certainly is that the social position of women was so inferior 
 that they ranked only with men of the lower orders and had no 
 share in the higher culture which, with the refined language, was 
 the privilege of a small class of selected men. 
 
 Xin.— §5. Conservatism. 
 
 As Prakrit is a ' younger ' and ' worn-out ' form of Sanskrit, 
 the question here naturally arises : What is the general attitude 
 of the two sexes to those changes that are constantly going on 
 in languages ? Can they be ascribed exclusively or predominantly 
 to one of the sexes ? Or do both equall}^ participate in them ? 
 An answer that is very often given is that as a rule women are more 
 conservative than men, and that they do nothing more than keep 
 to the traditional language which they have, learnt from their 
 parents and hand on to their children, while innovations are due , 
 to the initiative of men. Thus Cicero in an often-quoted passage 
 says that when he hears his mother-in-law Loelia, it is to him as 
 if he heard Plautus or Ncevius, for it is more natural for women to 
 keep the old language uncorrupted, as they do not hear many 
 people's way of speaking and thus retain what they have fii-st learnt 
 (De oratore, III. 45). This, however, does not hold good in every 
 respect and in every people. The French engineer, Victor Renault, 
 who lived for a long time among the Botocudos (in South America) 
 and compiled vocabularies for two of their tribes, speaks of the 
 ease with which he could make the savages who accompanied him 
 invent new words for anything. " One of them called out the 
 word in a loud voice, as if seized by a sudden idea, and the others 
 would repeat it amid laughter and excited shouts, and then it 
 
§ 5] CONSERVATISM 248 
 
 was universally adopted. But the curious thing is that it was 
 nearly always the women who busied themselves in inventing new 
 words as well as in composing songs, dirges and rhetorical essays. 
 The word-formations here alluded to are probably names of objects 
 that the Botocudos had not known previously ... as for horse, 
 krainejoune, ' head-teeth ' ; for ox, po-kekri, ' foot-cloven ' ; for 
 donkey, mgo-jonne-orone, ' beast with long ears.' But well-known 
 objects which have already got a name have often similar new 
 denominations invented for them, which are then soon accepted by 
 the family and community and spread more and more " {v. Mar- 
 tins, Beitr. zur Ethnogr. u. Sprachenkunde Amerikas, 1867, i. 330). 
 
 I may also quote what E. R. Edwards says in his Etude phonHique 
 de la langue japonaise (Leipzig, 1903, p. 79) : " In France and in 
 England it might be said that women avoid neologisms and are 
 careful not to go too far away from the written forms : in Southern 
 England the sound ^vlitten wh [a\.] is scarcely ever pronounced 
 except in girls' schools. In Japan, on the contrary, women are 
 less conservative than men, whether in pronunciation or in the 
 selection of words and expressions. One of the chief reasons is 
 that women have not to the same degree as men undergone the 
 influence of the written language. As an example of the liberties 
 which the women take may be mentioned that there is in the 
 actual pronunciation of Tokyo a strong tendency to get rid of 
 the sound {w), but the women go further in the word atashi, which 
 men pronounce watashi or watakshi, ' I.' Another tendency noticed 
 in the language of Japanese women is pretty widely spread among 
 French and English women, namely, the excessive use of intensive 
 words and the exaggeration of stress and tone-accent to mark 
 emphasis. Japanese women also make a much more frequent use 
 than men of the prefixes of politeness o-, go- and mi-." 
 
 Xm. — § 6. Phonetics and Grammar. 
 
 In connexion with some of the phonetic changes which have 
 profoundly modified the English sound system we have express 
 statements by old grammarians that women had a more advanced 
 pronunciation than men, and characteristically enough these 
 statements refer to the raising of the vowels in the direction 
 of [i] ; thus in Sir Thomas Smith (1567), who uses expressions like 
 " mulierculee qusedam delicatiores, et nonnulli qui volunt isto 
 modo viJeri loqui urbanius," and in another place " fceminse 
 qusedam delicatiores," further in Mulcaster (1582)^ and in Milton's 
 
 ^ " Ai is the man's diphthong, and sonndeth full : et, the woman's, 
 and soundeth finish [i.e. fineish] in the same both sense, and vse, a woman 
 is deintie, and Jeinteth soon, the man fainteth not bycause he is nothing daintie." 
 Thus what is now distinctive of refined as opposed to vulgar pronunciation 
 was then characteristic of the fair sex. 
 
244 THE WOMAN [cir. xiii 
 
 teacher, Alexander Gill (1G21), who speaks about "nostra Mopsse, 
 qua} quidcra ita omnia attenuant." 
 
 In France, about 1700, women were inclined to pronounce e 
 instead of a; thus Alemand (1688) mentions BarnaM as " fa9on 
 de prononcer male " and Bernabe as the pronunciation of " les 
 gens polis et delicats . . . les dames surtout "; and Grimarcst (1712) 
 speaks of " ces marchandes du Palais, qui au lieu de viadame, 
 boulevart, etc., prononccnt medeme, boulevert " (Thurot i. 12 and 9). 
 
 There is one change characteristic of many languages in which 
 it seems as if women have played an important part even if they 
 are not solely responsible for it : I refer to the weakening of the old 
 fully trilled tongue-point r. I have elsewhere (Fonetik, p. 417 £f.) 
 tried to show that this weakening, which results in various sounds 
 and sometimes in a complete omission of the sound in some positions, 
 is in the main a consequence of, or at any rate favoured by, a 
 change in social life : the old loud trilled point sound is natural and 
 justified when life is chiefly carried on out-of-doors, but indoor 
 life prefers, on the whole, less noisy speech habits, and the more 
 refined this domestic life is, the more all kinds of noises and even 
 speech sounds will be toned down. One of the results is that this 
 original r sound, the rubadub in the orchestra of language, is no 
 longer allowed to bombard the ears, but is softened down in various 
 ways, as we see chiefly in the great cities and among the educated 
 classes, while the rustic population in many countries keeps up 
 the old sound with much greater conservatism. Now we find that 
 women are not unfrequently mentioned in connexion with this 
 reduction of the trilled r ; thus in the sixteenth century in France 
 there was a tendency to leave off the trilling and even to go further 
 than to the present English untrilled point r by pronouncing [z] 
 instead, but some of the old grammarians mention this pronuncia- 
 tion as characteristic of women and a few men who imitate women 
 (Erasmus : mulierculse Parisinse ; Sylvius : mulierculae . . . Parrhisinae^ 
 et earum modo quidam parum viri ; Pillot : Parisinse mulierculae 
 . . . adeo delicatulae sunt, ut pro _2)ere dicantpese). In the ordinary 
 language there are a few remnants of this tendency; thus, when 
 by the side of the original chaire we now have also the form chaise, 
 and it is worthy of note that the latter form is reserved for the 
 everydaj'' signification (Engl, chair, seat) as belonging more naturally 
 to the speech of women, while chaire has the more special significa- 
 tion of ' pulpit, professorial chair.' Now the same tendency to 
 substitute [z] — or after a voiceless sound [s] — for r is found in our 
 owTi days among the ladies of Christiania, who will say gznelig 
 for gruelig andfsygtelig ior frygtelig (Brekke, Bidrag til dansknorshens 
 lydlcere, 1881, p. 17 ; I have often heard the sound myself). And 
 even in far-off Siberia we find that the Chuckchi women will say 
 
§6] PHONETICS AND GRA]\IMAR 243 
 
 nidzaJc or nizah for the male nirak ' two,' zerka for r'erka ' walrus,* 
 etc. (Nordqvist ; see fuller quotations in my Fonetik, p. 431). 
 
 In present-day Englis^h there are said to be a few dJfTerences 
 in pronunciation between the two sexes ; thus, according to Daniel 
 Jones, soft is pronounced with a long vowel [soft] bj' men and with 
 a short vowel [soft] by women ; similarly [geel] is said to be a 
 special ladies' pronunciation of girl, which men usually pronounce 
 [gal] ; cf. also on ivh above, p. 243. So far as I have been able to 
 ascertain, the pronunciation [//uldran] for [t/ildron] children is 
 much more frequent in women than in men. It may also be that 
 women are more inclined to give to the word waistcoat the full 
 long sound in both syllables, while men, who have occasion to 
 use the word more frequently, tend to give it the historical form 
 [weskot] (for the shortening compare breakfast). But even if such 
 observations were multiplied — as probably they might easily be 
 by an attentive observer — they would be only more or less isolated 
 instances, without any deeper significance, and on the whole we 
 must say that from the phonetic j)oint of view there is scarcely 
 any difference between the speech of men and that of women : the 
 two sexes speak for all intents and purposes the same language. 
 
 Xm.— § 7. Choice of Words. 
 
 But when from the field of phonetics we come to that of vocabu- 
 lary and style, we shall find a much greater number of difiPerences, 
 though they have received very little attention in linguistic works. 
 A few have been mentioned by Greenough and Kittredge : " The 
 use of common in the sense of ' vulgar ' is distinctly a feminine 
 peculiarity. It would sound effeminate in the speech of a man. So, 
 in a less degree, with person for ' woman,' in contrast to ' lady.' 
 Nice for ' fine ' must have originated in the same way " (W, p. 54). 
 
 Others have told me that men will generally say ' It's very 
 good of you,' where women will say ' It's very kind of you.' 
 But such small details can hardly be said to be really characteristic 
 of the two sexes. There is no doubt, however, that women in all 
 countries are shy of mentioning certain parts of the human body 
 and certain natural functions by the direct and often rude denomina- 
 tions which men, and especially young men, prefer when among 
 themselves. Women vnW therefore invent innocent and euphemistic 
 words and paraphrases, which sometimes may in the long run come 
 to be looked upon as the plain or blunt names, and therefore in their 
 turn have to be avoided and replaced by more decent words. 
 
 In Pinero's The Gay Lord Quex (p. 116) a lady discovers some 
 French novels on the table of another lady, and says : " This is 
 a little — h'm — isn't it ? " — she does not even dare to say the word 
 
246 THE WOMAN [ch. xiii 
 
 * indecent,' and has to express the idea in inarticulate language. 
 The word ' naked ' is paraphrased in the following description 
 by a woman of the work of girls in ammunition works : " They 
 have to take off every stitch from their bodies in one room, and 
 run in their innocence and nothing else to another room where 
 the special clothing is " (Bennett, The Pretty Lady, 176). 
 
 On the other hand, the old-fashioned prudery which prevented 
 ladies from using such words as legs and trousers (" those manly 
 garments which are rarely mentioned by name," says Dickens, 
 Dombey, 335) is now rightly looked upon as exaggerated and more 
 or less comical (cf. my GS § 247). 
 
 There can be no doubt that women exercise a great and universal 
 influence on linguistic development through their instinctive 
 shrinking from coarse and gross expressions and their preference 
 for refined and (in certain spheres) veiled and indirect expressions. 
 In most cases that influence will be exercised privately and in the 
 bosom of the family ; but there is one historical instance in which 
 a group of women worked in that direction publicly and collectively ; 
 I refer to those French ladies who in the seventeenth century gathered 
 in the H6tel de Rambouillet and are generally known under the 
 name of Precieuses. They discussed questions of spelling and 
 of purity of pronunciation and diction, and favoured all kinds 
 of elegant paraphrases by which coarse and vulgar worda might 
 be avoided. In many ways this movement was the counterpart 
 of the literary wave which about that time was inundating Europe 
 under various names — Gongorism in Spain, Marinism in Italy, 
 Euphuism in England ; but the Precieuses went f lu-ther than their 
 male confreres in desiring to influence everyday language. When, 
 however, they used such expressions a«, for ' nose,' ' the door of the 
 brain,' for ' broom ' ' the instrument of cleanness,' and for ' shirt ' 
 ' the constant companion of the dead and the living ' (la com- 
 pagne perpetuelle des morts et des vivants), and many others, their, 
 affectation called down on their heads a ripple of laughter, and 
 their endeavours would now have been forgotten but for the im- 
 mortal satire of IMoliere in Les Precieuses ridicules and Lcs Femmes 
 savantes. But apart from such exaggerations the feminine point 
 of view is unassailable, and there is reason to congratulate those 
 nations, the English among them, in which the social position of 
 women has been high enough to secure greater purity and freedom 
 from coarseness in language than would have been the case if 
 men had been the sole arbiters of speech. 
 
 Among the things women object to in language must be specially 
 mentioned anything that smacks of swearing ^ ; where a man will 
 
 * There are great differences with regard to swearing between different 
 nations ; but I think that in those countries and in those circles in which 
 
§7] CHOICE OF WORDS 247 
 
 say " He told an infernal lie," a womton will rather say, " He told 
 a most dreadful fib." Such euphemistic substitutes for the simple 
 word ' hell ' as ' the other place,' ' a very hot ' or ' a very uncom- 
 fortable place ' probabl}' originated with women. They will also 
 use ever to add emphasis to an interrogative pronoun, as in 
 " Whoever told you that ? " or " Whatever do you mean ? " 
 and avoid the stronger ' who the devil ' or ' what the dickens.' 
 For surprise we have the feminine exclamations ' Good gracious,' 
 ' Gracious me,' ' Goodness gracious,' ' Dear me ' by the side of the 
 more masculine ' Good heavens,' ' Great Scott.' ' To be sure ' is said 
 to be more frequent with women than with men. Such instances 
 might be multiplied, but these may suffice here. It will easilj' be 
 seen that we have here civilized counterparts of what was above 
 mentioned as sexual tabu ; but it is worth noting that the interdic- 
 tion in these cases is ordained by the women themselves, or perhaps 
 rather by the older among them, while the young do not "always 
 willingly comply. 
 
 Men will certainly with great justice object that there is a danger 
 of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to 
 content ourselves ^dth women's expressions, and that vigour and 
 vividness count for something. Most boys and many men have 
 a dislike to some words merelj' because they feel that they are used 
 by everybody and on every occasion : they want to avoid what is 
 commonplace and banal and to replace it by new and fresh ex- 
 pressions, whose very newness imparts to them a flavour of their 
 OA\Ti. Men thus become the chief renovators of language, and 
 to them are due those changes by which we sometimes see one 
 term replace an older one, to give wa}^ in turn to a still newer one, and 
 so on. Thus we see in English that the old verb weorpan, corre- 
 sponding to G. werfen, was felt as too weak and therefore supplanted 
 by cast, which was taken from Scandinavian ; after some centuries 
 cast was replaced by the stronger thro^v, and this now, in the parlance 
 of boys especially, is gi^ing way to stronger expressions like chuck 
 and fling. The old verbs, or at any rate cast, may be retained in 
 certain applications, more particularly in some fixed combinations 
 and in figurative significations, but it is now hardly possible to say, 
 as Shakespeare does, " They cast their caps up." Many such 
 innovations on their first appearance are counted as slang, and 
 some never make their -wa,y into received speech ; but I am not 
 in this connexion concerned with the distinction between slang 
 
 swearing is common it is found much more extensively among men than 
 among women : this at any rate is true of Denmark. There is, however, a 
 general social movement against 8\\eaiing. and now there are many men 
 who never swear. A friend wiites to me: "The best English men haidly 
 swear at all. ... I imagine some of our fashionable women now swear as 
 much as the men they consort with." 
 
248 THE WOMAN [ch. xiii 
 
 and recognized language, except in so far as the inclination or 
 disinclination to invent and to use slang is undoubtedly one of the 
 "human secondary sexual characters." This is not invalidated 
 by the fact that quite recently, with the rise of the feminist move- 
 ment, many j'oung ladies have begun to imitate their brothers in 
 that as well as in other respects. 
 
 Xm.— §8. Vocabulary. 
 
 This trait is indissolubly connected with another : the vocabulary 
 of a woman as a rule is much less extensive than that of a man. 
 Women move preferably in the central field of language, avoiding 
 everything that is out of the way or bizarre, while men will often 
 either coin new words or expressions or take up old-fashioned ones, 
 if by that means they are enabled, or think they are enabled, to 
 find a more adequate or precise expression for their thoughts. 
 Woman as a rule follows the main road of language, where man is 
 often inclined to turn aside into a narrow footpath or even to strike 
 out a new path for himself. Most of those who are in the habit 
 of reading books in foreign languages will have experienced a much 
 greater average difficulty in books written by male than by female 
 authors, because they contain man}' more rare words, dialect words, 
 technical terms, etc. Those who want to learn a foreign language 
 will therefore always do well at the first stage to read many ladies' 
 novels, because they will there continually meet ■with just those 
 everyday words and combinations which the foreigner is above 
 all in need of, what may be termed the indispensable small-change 
 of a language. 
 
 Tliis may be partlj^ explicable from the education of women, 
 which has up to quite recent times been less comprehensive and 
 technical than that of men. But this does not account for every- 
 thing, and certain experiments made by the American professor 
 Jastrow would tend to show that we hav^e here a trait that is inde- 
 pendent of education. He asked twenty-five university students 
 of each sex, belonging to the same class and thus in possession of 
 the same preliminary training, to write do\Mi as rapidly as possible a 
 hundred words, and to record the time. Words in sentences were 
 not allowed. There were thus obtained 5,000 words, and of these 
 many were of course the same. But the community of thought 
 was greater in the women ; while the men used 1,375 different 
 words, their female class-mates used only 1,123. Of 1,266 unique 
 words used, 29-8 per cent, were male, only 20-8 per cent, female. 
 The group into which the largest number of the men's words fell 
 was the animal kingdom ; the group into which the largest number 
 of the women's words fell was wearing apparel and fabrics ; while 
 
§ 8] VOCABULARY 249 
 
 the men used only 53 words belonging to the class of foods, the 
 women used 179. " In general the feminine traits revealed by 
 this study are an attention to the immediate surroundings, to the 
 finished product, to the ornamental, the individual, and the con- 
 crete ; wliile the masculine preference is for the more remote, the 
 constructive, the useful, the general and the abstract." (See 
 Havelock Ellis, 3Ian and Wotnan, 4th ed., London, 1904, 
 p. 189.) 
 
 Another point mentioned by Jastrow is the tendency to select 
 words that rime and alliterative words ; both these tendencies 
 were decided]}- more marked in men than in -women. This sbo-ws 
 what we may also notice in other ways, that men take greater 
 interest in words as such and in their acoustic properties, while 
 women pay less attention to that side of words and merely take 
 them as they are, as something given once for all. Thus it comes 
 that some men are confirmed punsters, while women are generally 
 slow to see any point in a pun and scarcely ever perpetrate one 
 themselves. Or, to get to something of greater value : the science 
 of language has very few votaries among women, in spite of the 
 fact that foreign languages, long before the reform of female educa- 
 tion, belonged to those things which women learnt best in and out 
 of schools, because, like music and embroidery, they were reckoned 
 among the specially feminine ' accomplishments.' 
 
 Woman is linguistically quicker than man : quicker to learn, 
 quicker to hear, and quicker to answer. A man is slower : he 
 hesitates, he chews the cud to make sure of the taste of words, and 
 thereby comes to discover similarities with and differences from 
 other words, both in sound and in sense, thus preparing himself 
 for the appropriate use of the fittest noun or adjective. 
 
 Xm.— § 9. Adverbs. 
 
 While there are a few adjectives, such as pretty and nice, that 
 might be mentioned as used more extensively^ by women than by 
 men, there are greater differences -with regard to adverbs. Lord 
 Chesterfield wrote {The World, December 5, 1754) : " Not contented 
 with enricliing our language by words absolutely new, my fair 
 countrjn^omen have gone still farther, and improved it by the 
 application and extension of old ones to various and very different 
 significations. They take a word and change it, like a guinea into 
 shillings for pocket-money, to be employed in the several occasional 
 purposes of the day. For instance, the adjective vast and its 
 adverb vastly mean anything, and are the fashionable words of the 
 most fashionable people. A fine woman ... is vastly obliged, or 
 vastly ofifended, vastly glad, or vastly sorry. Large objects are 
 
 / 
 
250 THE WOMAN [ch. xm 
 
 vastly great, small ones are vastly little ; and I had lately the 
 pleasure to hear a fine woman {jronounce, by a happy metonymy, 
 a very small gold snuff-box, that was produced in company, 
 to be vastly pretty, because it was so vastly little." Even if 
 that particular adverb to wliich Lord Chesterfield objected has 
 now to a great extent gone out of fashion, there is no doubt 
 that he has here touched on a distinctive trait : the fondness of 
 women for hj^erbole will very often lead the fashion with regard 
 to adverbs of intensitj', and these are very often used with disregard 
 of their proper meaning, as in German riesir/ klcin, English avfully 
 pretty, terribly nice, French rudement joli, affreusement dtlicienx, 
 Danish rcedsom morsom (horribly amusing), Russian strast' kakoy 
 lovkiy (terribly able), etc. Quite, also, in the sense of ' very,' as 
 in ' she was quite charming ; it makes me quite angry,' is, accord- 
 ing to Fitzedward Hall, due to the ladies. And I suspect that jxist 
 sweet (as in Barrie : " Grizol thought it was just sweet of him ") 
 is equally characteristic of the usage of the fair sex. 
 
 There is another intensive which has also something of the 
 eternally feminine about it, namely so. I am indebted to Stoffel 
 (Int. 101) for the following quotation from Punch (January 4, 
 1896) : " This little adverb is a great favourite with ladies, in con- 
 junction vaih. an adjective. For instance, they are very fond of 
 using such exjjressions as ' He is so charming ! ' 'It is so lovely ! ' 
 etc." Stoffel adds the following instances of strongly intensive 
 so as highly characteristic of ladies' usage : ' Thank you so much ! ' 
 ' It was so kind of you to think of it ! ' ' That's so like you ! ' 
 ' I'm so glad you've come ! ' ' The bonnet is so lovely ! ' 
 
 The explanation of this characteristic feminine usage is, I think, 
 that women much more often than men break oft' without finishing 
 their sentences, because they start talking without having thought 
 out what they are going to say ; the sentence ' I'm so glad you've 
 come ' reall}' requires some complement in the shape of a clause 
 vrith that, ' so glad that I really must kiss you,' or, ' so glad that I 
 must treat you to something extra,' or whatever the consequence 
 may be. But very often it is difficult in a hurry to hit upon some- 
 thing adequate to say, and ' so glad that I cannot express it ' 
 frequently results in the inexpressible remaining unexpressed, and 
 when that experiment has been repeated time after time, the lin- 
 guistic consequence is that a strongly stressed so acquires the force 
 of • very much indeed.' It is the same Math sttch, as in the 
 following two extracts from a modern novel (in both it is a lady 
 who is speaking) : " Poor Kitty ! she has been in such a state of 
 mind," and " Do you know that you look such a duck this afternoon. 
 . . . This hat suits you so — vou are such a grande dame in it." 
 Exactly the same thing has happened with Danish sd and sddan, 
 
§9] ADVERBS 251 
 
 G. so and solch ; also with French iellemetit, though there x>erhaps 
 not to the same extent as in EngHsh. 
 
 We have the same phenomenon with to a degree, which properly 
 requires to be supplemented with something that tells us what 
 the degree is, but is frequently left by itself, as in ' His second 
 marriage was irregular to a degree.* 
 
 Xm.— § 10. Periods. 
 
 Tlie frequency with which women thus leave their exclamatory 
 sentences half-finished might be exemplified from many passages 
 in our novelists and dramatists. I select a few quotations. 
 The first is from the beginning of Vanity Fair : " This almost caused 
 Jemima to faint with terror. ' Well, I never,' said she. ' What 
 an audacious ' — emotion prevented her from completing either 
 sentence." Next from one of Hankin's plays. "Mrs. Eversleigh : 
 I must say ! (but words fail her)." And finally from Compton 
 Mackenzie's Poor Relations : " ' The trouble you must have taken,' 
 Hilda exclaimed." These quotations illustrate types of sentences 
 which are becoming so frequent that they would seem soon to 
 deserve a separate chapter in modern grammars, ' Did you ever ? * 
 ' Well, I never ! ' being perhaps the most important of these 
 ' stop-short ' or ' pull-uj) ' sentences, as I think they might be 
 termed. 
 
 These sentences are the linguistic sjTnptoms of a peculiarity 
 of feminine psychology which has not escaped observation. Mere- 
 dith says of one of his heroines : " She thought in blanks, as girls 
 do, and some women," and Hardy singularizes one of his by calling 
 her " that novelty among women — one who finished a thought 
 before beginning the sentence which was to convey it." 
 
 The same point is seen in the typical way in which the two 
 sexes build up their sentences and periods ; but here, as so often 
 in this chapter, we cannot establish absolute differences, but 
 only preferences that may be broken in a great many instances 
 and yet are characteristic of the sexes as such. If we compare 
 long periods as constructed by men and by women, we shall in the 
 former find many more instances of intricate or involute structures 
 with clause within clause, a relative clause in the middle of a con- 
 ditional clause or vice versa, T\ith subordination and sub-subordina- 
 tion, while the typical form of long feminine periods is that of 
 co-ordination, one sentence or clause being added to another on the 
 same plane and the gradation between the respective ideas being 
 marked not grammatically, but emotionally, by stress and intona- 
 tion, and in writing by underlining. In learned terminology we 
 may say that men are fond of hypotaxis and women of parataxis. 
 
252 THE WOMAN [ch. xiii 
 
 Or we may use the simile that a male period is often like a set of 
 Chinese boxes, one ^nthin another, while a feminine period is like 
 a set of pearls joined together on a string of ancls and similar words. 
 In a Danish comedy a young girl is relating what has happened 
 to her at a ball, when she is suddenly interrupted by her brother, 
 who has slyly taken out his watch and now exclaims : " I declare ! 
 you have said and then fifteen times in less than two and a half 
 minutes." 
 
 Xm. — § 11. General Characteristics. 
 
 The greater rapidity of female thought is shoATO linguistically, 
 among other tnings, by the frequency with which a woman will use 
 a pronoun like he or she, not of the person last mentioned, but 
 of somebody else to whom her thoughts have already wandered, 
 while a man with his slower intellect will tliink that she is still 
 moving on the same path. The difference in rapidity of perception 
 has been tested experimentally by Romanes : the same paragraph 
 was presented to various well-educated persons, who were asked 
 to read it as rapidly as they could, ten seconds being allowed for 
 twenty lines. As soon as the time was up the ])aragraph was 
 removed, and the reader immediately wTote down all that he or 
 she could remember of it. It was found that women were usually 
 more successful than men in this test. Not only were they able 
 to read more quickly than the men, but they were able to give a 
 better account of the paragraph as a whole. One lady, for instance, 
 could read exactly four times as fast as her husband, and even 
 then give a better account than he of that small portion of the 
 paragraph he had alone been able to read. But it was found that 
 this rapidity was no jjroof of intellectual power, and some of the 
 slowest readers were highly distinguished men. Ellis {Man and W. 
 195) explains this in this way : with the quick reader it is as though 
 every statement were admitted immediately and without inspection 
 to fill the vacant chambers of the mind, while with the slow reader 
 every statement undergoes an instinctive process of cross-examina- 
 tion ; every new fact seems to stir up the accumulated stores of 
 facts among which it intrudes, and so impedes rapidity of mental 
 action. 
 
 This reminds me of one of Swift's " Thoughts on Various Sub- 
 jects " : " The common fluency of speech in many men, and most 
 women, is owing to the scarcity of matter, and scarcity of w ords ; for 
 whoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will 
 be apt in speaking to hesitate upon the choice of both : whereas 
 common speakers have only one set of ideas, and one set of words 
 to clothe them in ; and these are always ready at the mouth. So 
 
§11] GENERAL CIURACTERISTICS 253 
 
 people come faster out of a church when it is almost empty, than 
 when a crowd is at the door " {Works, Dubhn, 1735, i. 305). 
 
 The volubihty of women has been the subject of innumerable 
 jests : it has given rise to popular proverbs in many countries,^ as 
 well as to Aurora Leigh's resigned " A woman's function plainly 
 is — to talk " and Oscar Wilde's sneer, " Women are a decorative 
 sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingl3^" 
 A woman's thougiit is no sooner formed than uttered. Says Rosa- 
 lind, " Do you not know I am a woman ? when I think, I must 
 speak " {As You Like It, in. 2. 264). And in a modern novel a 
 young girl says : " I talk so as to find out what I think. Don't 
 j'ou ? Some things one can't judge of till one hears them spoken " 
 (Housman, John of Jingalo, 346). 
 
 The superior readiness of speech of women is a concomitant 
 of the fact that their vocabulary is smaller and more central than 
 tJiat of men. But this again is connected with another indubitable 
 fact, that women do not reach the same extreme points as men, 
 but are nearer the average in most respects. Havelock Ellis, 
 who establishes this in various fields, rightly remarks that the 
 statement that geniiis is imdeniably of more frequent occurrence 
 among men than among women has sometimes been regarded 
 by women as a slur upon their sex, but that it does not appear 
 that women have been equally anxious to find fallacies in the 
 statement that idiocy is more common among men. Yet the 
 two statements must be taken together. Genius is more common 
 among men by virtue of the same general tendency by which idiocy 
 is more common among men. The two facts are but two aspects 
 of a larger zoological fact — the greater variability of the male 
 {Man mvi. IF. 420). 
 
 In language we see this very clearly : the highest linguistic 
 genius and the lowest degree of linguistic imbecility are very 
 rarely found among women. The greatest orators, the most 
 famous literary artists, have been men ; but it may serve as a 
 sort of consolation to the other sex that there are a much greater 
 number of men than of women who cannot put two words together 
 intelligibly, who stutter and stammer and hesitate, and are unable 
 to find suitable expressions for the simplest thought. Between 
 these two extremes the woman moves with a sure and supple tongue 
 which is ever ready to find words and to pronounce them in a clear 
 and intelligible manner. 
 
 1 " Ou femme y a, silence n'y a." "Deux femmes font un plaid, troia 
 un grand caquet, quatre un plein march^." " Due donne e un' oca fanno 
 una fiera " (Venice). " The tongue is the sword of a woman, and she 
 never lets it become rusty" (China). "The North Sea vn\\ sooner be found 
 wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word" (Jutland). 
 
254 THE WOMAN [ch. xiii 
 
 Nor are the reasons far to seek why such differences should have 
 developed. They are mainly dependent on the division of labour 
 enjoined in primitive tribes and to a great extent also among more 
 civilized peoples For thousands of years the work that especially 
 fell to men was such as demanded an intense display of energy 
 for a comparatively short period, mainly in war and in hunting. 
 Here, however, there was not much occasion to talk, nay, in many 
 circumstances talk might even be fraught with danger. And when 
 that rough work was over, the man would either sleep or idle his 
 time away, inert and torpid, more or less in silence. Woman, 
 on the other hand, had a number of domestic occupations which 
 did not claim such an enormous output of spasmodic energy. To 
 her was at first left not only agriculture, and a great deal of other 
 work which in more peaceful times was taken over by men ; but 
 also much that has been till quite recently her almost exclusive 
 concern — the care of the children, cooking, brewing, baking, sewing, 
 washing, etc., — things which for the most part demanded no deep 
 thought, which were performed in company and could well be 
 accompanied with a lively chatter. Lingering effects of this state 
 of things are seen still, though great social changes are going on 
 in our times Avhich may eventually modify even the linguistic 
 relations of the two sexes. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 CAUSES OF CHANGE 
 
 § 1. Anatomy. § 2. Geography. § 3. National Psychology. § 4. Speed of 
 Utterance. § 5. Periods of Rapid Change. § 6. The Ease Theory. 
 § 7. Sounds in Connected Speech. § 8. Extreme Weakenings. § 9. The 
 Principle of VaUie. §10. Application to Case System, etc. §11. Stress 
 Phenomena. § 12. Non-phonetic Changes. 
 
 XIV.— § 1. Anatomy. 
 
 In^ accordance with the programme laid down in the opening 
 paragraph of Book III, we shall now deal in detail with those 
 linguistic changes which are not due to transference to new 
 individuals. The chapter on woman's language has served as 
 a kind of bridge between the two main divisions, in so far as the 
 first sections treated of those women's dialects which were, or 
 were supposed to be, due to the influence of foreigners. 
 
 Many theories have been advanced to explain the indubitable 
 fact that languages change in course of time. Some scholars 
 have thought that there ought to be one fundamental cause 
 working in all instances, while others, more sensibly, have 
 maintained that a variety of causes have been and are at work, 
 and that it is not easy to determine which of them has been 
 decisive in each observed case of change. The greatest attention 
 has been given to phonetic change, and in reading some theorists 
 one might almost fancy that sounds were the only thing change- 
 able, or at any rate that phonetic changes were the only ones in 
 language which had to be accounted for. Let us now examine 
 some of the theories advanced. 
 
 Sometimes it is asserted that sound changes must have their 
 cause in changes in the anatomical structure of the articulating 
 organs. This theory, however, need not detain us long (see the 
 able discussion in Oertel, p. 194 £f.), for no facts have been 
 alleged to support it, and one does not see why small anatomical 
 variations should cause changes so long as any teacher of 
 languages on the phonetic method is able to teach his pupils 
 practically every speech sound, even those that their own native 
 language has been without for centuries. Besides, many phonetic 
 changes do not at all lead to new sounds being developed or old 
 
 ,255 
 
256 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xiv 
 
 ones lost, but 8imj)ly to the old sounds being used in new places 
 or disused in some of the places where they were formerly found. 
 Some tribes have a custom of mutilating their lips or teeth, 
 and that of course must have caused changes in their pro- 
 nunciation, which are said to have persisted even after the 
 custom was given up. Thus, according to Mcinhof (MSA 
 60) the Yao women insert a big wooden disk within the upper 
 lip, which makes it impossible for them to pronounce [f], and 
 as it is the women that teach their children to speak, the soimd 
 of [f] has disappeared from the language, though now it is 
 beginning to reappear in loan-words. It is clear, however, that 
 such customs can have exercised only the very slightest influence 
 on language in general. 
 
 XIV.— §2. Geography. 
 
 Some scholars have believed in an influence exercised by climatic 
 or geographical conditions on the character of the sound sj'stem, 
 instancing as evidence the harsh consonants found in the languages 
 of the Caucasus as contrasted with the pleasanter sounds heard 
 in regions more favoured by nature. But this influence cannot 
 be established as a general rule. "The aboriginal inhabitants 
 of the north-west coast of America foimd subsistence relatively 
 easy in a country abounding in many forms of edible marine life ; 
 nor can they be said to have been subjected to rigorous chmatic 
 conditions ; yet in phonetic harshness their languages rival those 
 of the Caucasus. On the other hand, perhaps no people has 
 ever been subjected to a more forbidding physical environment 
 than the Eskimos, yet the Eskimo language not only impresses 
 one as possessed of a relatively agreeable phonetic system when 
 compared with the languages of the north-west coast, but may even 
 be thought to compare favourably with American Indian languages 
 generally " (Sapir, American Anthrojjologist, XIV (1912), 234). 
 It would also on this theory be difficult to account for the 
 very considerable linguistic changes which have taken place in 
 historical times in many countries whose climate, etc., cannot 
 during the same period have changed correspondingly. 
 
 A geographical theory of sound -shifting was advanced by 
 Heinrich Meyer-Benfey in Zeitschr. f. deutsches Altcrt. 45 (1901), 
 and has recently'- been taken up by H, Collitz in Amer. Journal 
 of Philol. 39 (1918), p. 413. Consonant shifting is chiefly found 
 in mountain regions ; this is most obvious in the High German 
 shift, which started from the Alpine district of Southern Germany. 
 After leaving the region of the high mountains it gradually 
 decreases in strength ; yet it keeps on extending, with steadily 
 
§2] GEOGRAPHY 257 
 
 diminishing energy, over part of the area of the Franconian dialects. 
 But having reached the plains of Northern German}', the movement 
 stops. The same theory applies to languages in which a similar 
 shifting is found, e.g. Old and Modern Armenian, the Soho lan- 
 guage in South Africa, etc. " However strange it may appear 
 at the first glance," says Collitz, " that certain consonant changes 
 should depend on geographical surroundings, the connexion is 
 easily understood. The change of media to tenuis and that of 
 tenuis to affricate or aspirate are linked together by a common 
 feature, viz. an increase in the intensity of expiration. As the 
 common cause of both these shiftings we may therefore regard 
 a change in the manner in which breath is used for pronunciation. 
 The habitual use of a larger volume of breath means an increased 
 activity of the lungs. Here we have reached the point where 
 the connexion with geographical or chmatic conditions is clear, 
 because nobody will den}- that residence in the mountains, especially 
 in the high mountains, stimulates the lungs." 
 
 When this theory was first brought to my notice, I wrote a 
 short footnote on it (PhG 176), in which I treated it with perhaps 
 too little respect, merely mentioning the fact that my countrymen, 
 the Danes,, in their flat country were developing exactly the same 
 shift as the High Germans (making p, t, k into strongly aspirated 
 or afifricated sounds and unvoicing b, d, g) ; I then asked ironically 
 whether that might be a consequence of the indubitable fact that 
 an increasing number of Danes every summer go to Switzerland 
 and Norway for their holidays. And even now, after the theory 
 has been endorsed by so able an advocate as Collitz, I fail to 
 see how it can hold water. The induction seems faulty on both 
 sides, for the shift is foimd among peoples li\ang in plains, and 
 on the other hand it is not shared by all mountain peoples — for 
 example, not by the Italian and Ladin speaking neighbours of 
 the High Germans in the Alps. Besides, the physiological explana- 
 tion is not impeccable, for walking in the mountains affects the 
 way in which we breathe, that is, it primarilj- affects the lungs, 
 but the change in the consonants is primarily one not in the lungs, 
 but in the glottis ; as the connexion between these two things 
 is not necessary, the whole reasoning is far from being cogent. 
 At any rate, the theory can only with great difficulty be applied 
 to the first Gothonic shift, for how do we know that that started 
 in mountainous regions ? and who Icnows whether the sounds 
 actually found as /, ]> and h for original p, f, k, had first been 
 aspirated and affricated stops ? It seems much more probable 
 that the transition was a direct one, through slackening and opening 
 of the stoppage, but in that case it has nothing to do with the 
 lungs or way of breathing. 
 
 17 
 
258 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xiv 
 
 XIV.— § 3. National Psychology. 
 
 We are much more Ukely to ' burn,' as the children sa}', when, 
 instead of looking for the cause in such outward circumstances, we 
 try to find it in the psychology of those who initiate the change. 
 But this does not amount to endorsing all the explanations of 
 this kind which have found favour with linguists. Thus, since 
 the times of Grimm it has been usual to ascribe the well-known 
 consonant shift to psychological traits believed to be characteristic 
 of the Germans. Grimm says that the sound shift is a consequence 
 of the progressive tendency and desire of liberty found in the 
 Germans (GDS 292) ; it is due to their courage and pride in 
 the period of the great migration of tribes (ib. 306) : '* When 
 quiet and morality returned, the sounds remained, and it may 
 be reckoned as evidence of the superior gentleness and modera- 
 tion of the Gothic, Saxon and Scandinavian tribes that they 
 contented themselves with the first shift, while the wilder force 
 of the High Germans was impelled to the second shift." (Thus 
 also Westphal.) Curtius finds energy and juvenile vigour in 
 the Germanic sound shift (KZ 2. 331, 1852). Mullenhof saw in 
 the transition from p, t, k to f, ]>, h & sign of weakening, the 
 Germans having apparently lost the power of pronouncing the 
 hard stops ; while further, the giving up of the aspirated ph, ih, kh, 
 bhy clh, gh was due to enervation or indolence. But the succeeding 
 transition from the old b, d, g to p, t, k showed that they had 
 afterwards pulled themselves together to new exertions, and 
 the regularity with which all these changes were carried through 
 evidenced a great steadiness and persevering force {Deutsche AlUr- 
 tumsk. 2. 197). His disciple Wilhelm Scherer saw in the whole 
 history of the German language alternating periods of rise and 
 decline in popular taste ; he looked upon sound changes from 
 the aesthetic point of view and ascribed the (second) consonant 
 shift to a feminine period in which consonants were neglected 
 because the nation took pleasure in vocalic sounds. 
 
 XIV.— § 4. Speed o£ Utterance. 
 
 Wundt gives a different though somewhat related explanation 
 of the Germanic shift as due to a " revolution in culture, as 
 the subjugation of a native population through warlike immi- 
 grants, with resulting new organization of the State " (S 1. 424) : 
 this increased the speed of utterance, and he tries in detail to 
 show that increased speed leads naturallj'' to just those changes 
 in consonants which are found in the Gothonic shift (1. 420 ff.). 
 But even if we admit that the average speed of talking (tempo 
 
§4] SPEED OF UTTERANCE 259 
 
 der rede) is now probably greater than formerly, the whole theory 
 is built up on so man}'- doubtful or even manifestly incorrect 
 details both in linguistic history and in general phonetic theory 
 that it cannot be accepted. It does not account for the actual 
 facts of the consonant shifts ; moreover, it is difficult to see why 
 such phenomena as this shift, if they were dependent on the speed 
 of utterance, should occur only at these particular historical times 
 and within comparatively ntirrow geographical limits, for there 
 is much to be said for the view that in all periods the speech 
 of the Western nations has been constantly gaining in rapidity 
 as life in general has become accelerated, and in no period prob- 
 ably more than during the last century, which has witnessed no 
 radical consonant shift in any of the leading civilized nations. 
 
 XIV.— § 5. Periods of Rapid Change. 
 
 All these theories, different though they are in detail, have 
 this in common, that they endeavour to explain one particular 
 change, or set of changes, from one particular psychological trait 
 supposed to be prevalent at the time when the change took place, 
 but they fail because we are not able scientifically to demonstrate 
 any intimate connexion between the pronunciation of particular 
 sounds and a certain state of mind, and also because our knowledge 
 of the fluctuations of collective psychology is still so very imperfect. 
 But it is interesting to contrast these theories with the explanation 
 of the very same sound shifts mentioned in a previous chapter 
 (XI), and there shown to be equally unsatisfactory, the explanation, 
 namely, that the fundamental cause of the consonant shift is to 
 be found in the peculiar pronimciation of an aboriginal population. 
 In both cases the Gothonic shifts are singled out, because since 
 the time of Grimm the attention of scholars has been focused 
 on these changes more than on any others — they are looked upon 
 as changes sui generis, and therefore requiring a special explanation, 
 such as is not thought necessary in the case of the innumerable 
 minor changes that fill most of the pages of the phonological 
 section of any historical grammar. But the sober truth seems 
 to be that these shifts are not difi!erent in kind from those that 
 have made, say, Fr, seve, frere, chien, del, faire, changer out of 
 Lat. sapa, fratrem, canem, kcelum, fakere, cambiare, etc., or those 
 that have changed the English vowels in fate, feet, fight, foot, out 
 from what they were when the letters which denote them still 
 had their 'continental' values. Our main endeavour, therefore, 
 must be to find out general reasons why sounds should not 
 always remain unchanged. This seems more important, at any 
 rate as a preliminary investigation, than attempting offhand 
 
260 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xiv 
 
 to assign particular reasons why in such and such a century 
 this or that sound was changed in some particular way. 
 
 If, however, we find a particular period especially fertile in 
 linguistic changes (phonetic, morphological, semantic, or all at 
 once), it is quite natural that we should turn our attention to 
 the social state of the community at that time in order, if possible, 
 to discover some specially favouring circumstances. I am thinking 
 especially of two kinds of condition which may operate. In the 
 first place, the influence of parents, and grown-up people generallj', 
 ma}' be less than usual, because an unusual number of parents 
 may be away from home, as in great wars of long duration, 
 or may have been killed off, as in the great plagues ; cf . also what 
 was said above of children left to shift for themselves in certain 
 favoured regions of North America (Ch. X § 7). Secondly, there 
 may be periods in which the ordinary restraints on linguistic 
 change make themselves less felt than usual, because the whole 
 community is animated by a strong feeling of independence and 
 wants to break loose from social ties of many kinds, including 
 those of a powerful school organization or literary tradition. 
 This probably was the case with North America in the latter 
 half of the eighteenth century, when the new nation wished to 
 manifest its independence of old England and therefore, among 
 other things, was inclined to throw overboard that respect for 
 linguistic authority which under normal conditions makes for 
 conservatism. If the divergence between American and British 
 English is not greater than it actually is, this is probably due 
 partly to the continual influx of immigrants from the old country, 
 and parti}' to that increased faciUty of communication between 
 the two countries in recent times which has made mutual lin- 
 guistic influence possible to an extent formerly undreamt-of. 
 But in the case of the Romanic languages both of the conditions 
 mentioned were operating : during the centuries in which they 
 were framed and underwent the strongest differentiation, wars with 
 the intruding ' barbarians ' and a series of destructive plagues 
 kept away or killed a great many growTi-up people, and at the 
 same time each country released itself from the centralizing in- 
 fluence of Rome, which in the first centuries of the Christian era 
 had been very powerful in keeping up a fairly uniform and con- 
 servative pronunciation and phraseology throughout the whole 
 Empire.^ There were thus at that time various forces at work 
 which, taken together, are quite sufficient to explain the wide 
 
 * The uniformitj'^ in the speech of the whole Roman Empire during the 
 first centuries of our Christian era was kept up, among other things, through 
 the habit of removing soldiers and officials from one country to the other. 
 This ceased later, each district being left to shift more or less for itself. 
 
§5] PERIODS OF RAPID CHANGE 261 
 
 divergence in linguistic structure that separated French, Proven9al, 
 Spanish, etc., from classical Latin (cf. above. XI § 8, p. 206). 
 
 In the history of English, one of the periods most fertile in 
 change is the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries : the wars with 
 France, the Black Death (which is said to have killed off about 
 one-third of the population) and similar pestilences, insurrections 
 like those of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, civil wars like those of 
 the Ro.ses, decimated the men and made home-life difficult and 
 unsettled. In the Scandinavian languages the Viking age is prob- 
 ably the period that witnessed the greatest linguistic changes 
 — if I am right, not, as has sometimes been said, on account of 
 the heroic character of the period and the violent rise in self- 
 respect or self-assertion, but for the more prosaic reason that 
 the men were absent and the women had other things to attend 
 to than their childi'en's linguistic education. I am also inchned 
 to think that the unparalleled rapidity \vith which, during the 
 last hundred years, the vulgar speech of Enghsh cities has been 
 differentiated from the language of the educated classes (nearly 
 all long vowels being shifted, etc.) finds its natural explanation 
 in the unexampled misery of child-life among industrial workers 
 in the first half of the last century — one of the most disgraceful 
 blots on our overpraised ci\'ilization. 
 
 XIV.— § 6. The Ease Theory. 
 
 If we now turn to the actuating principles that determine 
 the general changeability of human speech habits, we shall find 
 that the moving power everywhere is an impetus starting from 
 the individual, and that there is a curbing power in the mere fact 
 that language exists not for the individual alone, but for the 
 whole community. The whole history of language is, as it w^ere, 
 a tug-of-war between these two principles, each of which gains 
 victories in turn. 
 
 First of all we must make up our minds with regard to the 
 disputed question whether the changes of language go in the 
 direction of greater ease, in other words, whether they manifest 
 a tendency towards economy of effort. The prevalent opinion 
 among the older school was that the chief tendency was, in 
 Whitney's words, " to make things easy to our organs of speech, 
 to economize time and effort in the work of expression " (L 28). 
 Curtius very emphatically states that " Bequemlichkeit ist und 
 bleibt der hauptanlass des lautwandels unter alien umstanden " 
 {Griech. etym. 23 ; cf. C 7). But Leskien, Sievers, and since them 
 other recent writers, hold the opposite view (see quotations and 
 summaries in Oertel 204 f., Wechssler L 88 f.), and their view has 
 
2C2 CAUSES OF CHANGE [cii. xiv 
 
 prevailed to the extent that Siitterlin (WW 33) characterizes 
 the old view as "empty talk," "a wrong scent," and "worthless 
 subterfuges now rejected by our science." 
 
 Such strong words may, however, be out of place, for is it so very 
 foolish to think that men in this, as in all other respects, tend to 
 follow ' the line of least resistance ' and to get off with as little 
 exertion as possible ? The question is only whether this universal 
 tendency can be shown to prevail in those phonetic changes which 
 are dealt with in linguistic history. 
 
 Sutterlin thinks it enough to mention some sound changes in 
 which the new sound is more difficult than the old ; these being 
 admitted, he concludes (and others have said the same thing) 
 that those other instances in which the new sound is evidently 
 easier than the old one cannot be explained by the principle of ease. 
 But it seems clear that this conclusion is not valid : the correct 
 inference can only be that the tendency towards ease may be 
 at work in some cases, though not in all, because there are other 
 forces which may at times neutralize it or prove stronger than 
 it. We shall meet a similar all-or-nothing fallacy in the chapter 
 on Sound Sj^mbolism. 
 
 Now, it is sometimes said that natives do not feel any difficulty 
 in the sounds of their own language, however difficult these may 
 be to foreigners. This is quite true if we speak of a conscious 
 perception of this or that sound being difficult to produce ; but 
 it is no less true that the act of speaking always requires some 
 exertion, muscular as well as psychical, on the part of the speaker, 
 and that he is therefore apt on many occasions to speak with 
 as little effort as possible, often with the result that his voice is 
 not loud enough, or that his words become indistinct if he does 
 not move his tongue, lips, etc., with the required precision or 
 force. You maj^ as well say that when once one has learnt the art 
 of writing, it is no longer any effort to form one's letters properlj' ; 
 and yet how many written commimications do we not receive 
 in which many of the letters are formed so badly that we can 
 do little but guess from the context what each form is meant for ! 
 There can be no doubt that the main direction of change in the 
 development of our written alphabet has been towards forms 
 requiring less and less exertion — and similar causes have led to 
 analogous results in the development of spoken sounds. 
 
 It is not alwa3'S easy to decide which of two articulations is 
 the easier one, and opinions may in some instances differ — we may 
 also find in two neighbouring nations opjjosite phonetic develop- 
 ments, each of which may perhaps be asserted by speakers of the 
 language to be in the direction of greater ease. " To judge of 
 the difficulty of muscular activity, the muscular quantity at play 
 
§6] THE EASE THEORY 2G8 
 
 cannot serve as an absolute measure. Is [cl] absolutely more^ 
 awkward to produce than [5] ? When a man is running full tilt, 
 it is under certain circumstances easier for him to rush against 
 the wall than to stop suddenly at some distance from it : when 
 the tongue is in motion, it may be easier for it to thrust itself 
 against the roof of the mouth or the teeth, i.e. to form a stop (a 
 plosive), than to halt at a millimetre's distance, i.e. to form a 
 fricative " (Vcrner 78). In the same sense I wrote in 1904 : " Many 
 an articulation which obviously requires greater muscular move- 
 ments is yet easier of execution than another in which the 
 movement is less, but has to be carried out with greater precision : 
 it requires less effort to chip wood than to operate for cataract " 
 (PhG 181). 
 
 In other cases, however, no such doubt is possible : [s], [f] or 
 [x] require more muscular exertion than [h], and a replacement 
 of one of them by [h] therefore necessarily means a lessening of 
 effort. Now, I am firmly convinced that whenever a phonologist 
 finds one of these oral fricatives standing regularly in one language 
 against [h] in another, he will at once take the former sound to 
 be the original and [h] to be the derived sound : an indisputable 
 indication that the instinctive feeling of all linguists is still in 
 favour of the view that a movement towards the easier sound 
 is the rule, and not the exception. 
 
 In thus taking up the cudgels for the ease theory I am not 
 afraid of hearing the objection that I ascribe too great power 
 to human laziness, indolence, inertia, shirking, easygoingness, 
 sloth, sluggishness, lack of energy, or whatever other beautiful 
 synonyms have been invented for ' economy of effort ' or 
 ' following the line of least resistance.' The fact remains that 
 there is such a ' tendency ' in all human beings, and by taking it 
 into account in explaining changes of sound we are doing nothing 
 else than ajaplying here the same principle that attributes many 
 simplifications of form to ' analogy ' : we see the same psycho- 
 logical force at work in the two different domains of phonetics and 
 morphology. 
 
 It is, of course, no serious objection to this view that if this 
 had been always the direction of change, speaking must have 
 been uncommonly troublesome to our earliest ancestors ^ — who 
 says it wasn't ? — or that " if certain combinations were really 
 irksome in themselves, why should they have been attempted 
 at all ; why should they often have been maintained so long ? " 
 (Oertel 204) — as if people at a remote age had been able to compare 
 consciousl}'^ two articulations and to choose the easier one ! 
 
 * " Dass unsere altesten vorfahren sich das sprechen erstaunlich unbequem 
 gemacht haben," Delbriick, E 155. 
 
264 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xiv 
 
 Neither in language nor in any other activity has mankind at once 
 hit upon the best or easiest expedients. 
 
 XIV.— § 7. Sounds in Connected Speech. 
 
 In the great majority of linguistic changes we have to consider 
 the ease or difficulty, not of the isolated sound, but of the sound 
 in that particular conjunction with other sounds in which it occurs 
 in words. ^ Thus in the numerous phenomena comprised under 
 the name of assimilation. There is an interesting account in the 
 Proceedings of the Philological Society (December 17, 1886) of a 
 discussion of these problems, in which Sweet, while maintaining 
 that " cases of saving of efiort were very rare or non-existent " 
 and that " all the ordinary sounds of language were about on a 
 par as to difficulty of production," said that assimilation " sprang 
 from the desire to save space in articulation and secure ease of 
 transition. Thus 'pn became 'pm, or else ww." But in both these 
 changes there is saving of effort, for in the former the movement 
 of the tip of the tongue required for [n], and in the latter the move- 
 ment of the soft palate required for [p], is done away with ^ ; 
 the term " saving of space " can have no other meaning than 
 economy of muscular energy. And the same is true of what 
 Sweet terms " saving of time," which he finds efEected by dropping 
 superfluous soimds, especially at the end of words, e.g. [g] after 
 {rf\ in E. sing. Here, of course, one articulation (of the velum) 
 is saved — and this need not even be accompanied by the saving 
 of any time, for in such cases the remaining soimd is often lengthened 
 so as to make up for the loss.* 
 
 If, then, all assimilations are to be counted as instances of 
 saving of effort, it is worth noting that a great many phonetic 
 
 ^ Sometimes appearances may be deceptive r when [nr, mr] become 
 [ndr, mbr], it looks on the paper as if something had been added and as 
 if the transition therefore militated against the principle of ease : in reality, 
 the old and the new combinations require exactly the same amoimt of 
 muscular activity, and the change simply consists in want of precision in 
 the movement of the velum palati, which comes a fraction of a second too 
 Boon. If anything, the new group is a trifle easier than the old. See LPh 
 6. 6 for explanation and examples (E. thunder from }l>unor sb.,}7M?2nan vb. ; 
 timber, cf. Goth, tlmrian, G. zimmer, etc.). 
 
 2 This is rendered most clear by my ' analphabetic ' notation (a means 
 lips, /^ tip of tongue, c soft palate, velum palati, and € glottis ; stands 
 for closed position, 1 for approximation, 3 for open position) ; the three 
 sound combinations are thus analysed (cf. my Lekrbtich der Phonetik) : 
 
 3 0(0 03 
 
 3 3 3 
 3 3 3 3 
 
 1 3 1 11 
 
 ' The only clear cases of saving of time are those in which long soxmds 
 are shortened, and even they must be looked upon as a saving of effort. 
 
§7] SOUNDS IN CONNECTED SPEECH 265 
 
 changes which are not always given under the heading of assimila- 
 tion should really be looked upon as such. If Lat. saponem yields 
 Fr. savon, this is the result of a whole series of assimilations : first 
 [p] becomes [b], because the vocal vibrations continue from the 
 vowel before to the vowel after the consonant, the opening of 
 the glottis being thus saved ; then the transition of [b] to [v] 
 between vowels may be considered a partial assimilation to the 
 open lip position of the vowels ; the vowel [o] is nasalized in conse- 
 quence of an assimilation to the nasal [n] (anticipation of the low 
 position of the velum), and the subsequent dropping of the conso- 
 nant [n] is a clear case of a different kind of assimilation (saving 
 of a tip movement) ; at an early stage the two final sounds of 
 saponem had disappeared, first [m] and later the indistinct vowel 
 resulting from e : whether we reckon these disappearances as 
 assimilations or not, at any rate they constitute a saving of effort. 
 All droppings of soimds, whether consonants (as t in E. castle, post- 
 man, etc.) or vowels (as in E. p'rhaps, business, etc.), are to be 
 viewed in the same light, and thus by their enormous number in 
 the history of all languages form a strong argument in favour of 
 the ease theory. 
 
 There is one more thing to be considered which is generally 
 overlooked. In such assimilations as It. otto, sette, from octo, 
 septem, a greater ease is effected not only by the assimilation as 
 such, by which one of the consonants is dropped — for that would 
 have been obtained just as well if the result had been occo, seppe — 
 but also by the fact that it is the tip action which has been re- 
 tained in both cases, for the tip of the tongue is much more flexible 
 and more easily moved than either the lips or the back of the tongue. 
 On the whole, many soimd changes show how the tip is favoured 
 at the cost of other organs, thus in the frequent transition of 
 final -m to -w, found, for instance, in old Gothonic, in Mddle 
 English, in ancient Greek, in Balto-Slavic, in Finnish and in 
 Cliinese. 
 
 In the discussion referred to above Sweet was seconded by 
 Lecky, who said that " assimilations vastly multiplied the number 
 of elementary sounds in a language, and therefore could not be 
 described as facilitating pronunciation." This is a great exaggera- 
 tion, for in the vast majoritj^ of instances assimilation introduces 
 no new sounds at all (see, for instance, the lists in my LPh ch. xi.). 
 Lecky was probably thinking of such instances as when [k, g] 
 before front vowels become [t/, d,^] or similar combinations, or 
 when mutation caused by [i] changes [u, o] into [y,0], which sounds 
 were not previously found in the language. Here we might perhaps 
 say that those individuals who for the sake of their own ease 
 introduced new sounds made things more difficult for coming 
 
26C CAUSES OF CHANGE [cii. xiv 
 
 generations (though even that is not quite certain), and the 
 case would then be analogous to that of a man who has learnt 
 a foreign ex])ression for a new idea and then introduces it into 
 his own language, thus burdening his countrymen with a new 
 word instead of thinking how the same idea might have been 
 rendered by means of native speech-material — in both cases a 
 momentary alleviation is obtained at the cost of a permanent 
 disadvantage, but neither case can be alleged against the \'iew 
 that the prevalent tendency among human beings is to prefer 
 the easiest and shortest cut. 
 
 XIV. — §8. Extreme Weakenings. 
 
 When this lazy tendency is indulged to the full, the result 
 is an indistinct protracted vocal murmur, Avith here and there 
 possibly one or other sound (most often an s) rising to the surface : 
 think, for instance, of the way in which we often hear grace said, 
 prayers mumbled and other similar formulas muttered inarticulately, 
 with half-closed lips and the least possible movement of the rest 
 of the vocal organs. This is tolerated more or less in cases in 
 which the utterance is hardly meant as a communication to any 
 human being ; otherwise it will generally be met with a request 
 to repeat what has been said, the social curb being thus applied 
 to the easygoing tendencies of the individual. Now, as a matter 
 of fact, there are in every language a certain number of Avord- 
 forms that can only be explained by this very laziness in pro- 
 nouncing, which in extreme cases leads to complete unintelligibility. 
 
 Russian sudar' {gosudar'), ' sir^' is colloquially shortened into a 
 mere s, which may in subservient speech be added to almost any 
 word as a meaningless enclitic. And curiously enough the same 
 sound is used in exactly the same way in conversational Spanish, 
 as buenos for bueno ' good,' only here it is a Aveakening of senor 
 (Hanssen, ^Span. gramm. 60) : thus two entirely different words, 
 from identical psychological motives, yield the same result in 
 two distant countries. Fr. monsieur, instead of [m5sjoe'r], a 
 might be expected, sounds [mosjo] and extremely frequently 
 [msj0] and even [psJ0], with a transition not otherwise found in 
 French. Madame before a name is very often shortened into 
 [mam] ; in English the same word becomes a single sound in 
 yes'm. The weakening of mistress into miss and the old-fashioned 
 mus for master also belong here, as do It. forms for signore, signora : 
 gnor si, gnor no, gnora si, sor Luigi, la sora sposa, and S]). usted 
 ' you ' for vuestra merced. Formulas of greeting and of politeness 
 are liable to similar truncations, e.g. E. hoir d{e) do, Dan. [gda'J or 
 even [da'] for goddag, G. [gmoin, gmo] for guten morgen, [na"mt] 
 
§8] EXTREME WEAKENINGS 267 
 
 for guten abend ; Fr. s'il vous i)lait often becomes [siuple, splc], 
 and the synonymous Dan. var sa god is shortened into vcersgo, of 
 which often only [sgo'] remains. In Russian poiwlar speech some 
 small words are frequently inserted as a vague indication that 
 the utterance or idea belongs to some one else : griu, grit, grim, 
 gril, various mutilated forms of the verb govoriV ' say,' mol from 
 rnolviV ' speak,' de from dejati (Boyer et Speranski, Manuel 293 ff.) ; 
 cp. the obsolete E. co, quo, for quoth. In all the Balkan languages 
 a particle vre is extensively used, which Hatzidakis has explained 
 from the vocative of OGr. moros. Modern Gr. tha is now a particle 
 of futurity, but originates in thend, from iliBei, ' he will ' + na from 
 hina, 'that.' These examples must suffice to show that we have 
 here to do with a universal tendency in all languages. 
 
 XIV.— § 9. The Principle ol Value. 
 
 To explain such deviations from normal phonetic development 
 some scholars have assumed that a word or form in frequent use 
 is liable to suffer exceptional treatment. Thus Vilhelm Thomsen, 
 in his brilliant paper (1879) on the Romanic verb andare, andar, 
 anar, aller, which he explains convincingly from Lat. ambulare, 
 says that this verb " belongs to a group of words which in all 
 languages stand as it were without the pale of the laws, that is, 
 words which from their frequent employment are exposed to 
 far more violent changes than other words, and therefore to some 
 extent follow paths of their owti." ^ Schuchardt {Ueber die lautge- 
 setze, 1885) turned upon the ' young grammarians,' Paul among 
 the rest, who did not recognize this principle, and said that one 
 word (or one sound) may need 10,000 repetitions in order to be 
 changed into another one, and that consequently another word, 
 which in the same time is used only 8,000 times, must be behindhand 
 in its phonetic development. Quite apart from the fact that 
 this number is evidently too small (for a moderately loquacious 
 woman will easily pronounce such a word as he half a dozen times 
 as often as these figures every year), it is obvious that the reasoning 
 must be Avrong, for were frequency the only decisive factor, G. 
 morgen would have been treated in every other connexion exactly 
 as it is in guten morgen, and that is just what has not happened. 
 Frequency of repetition would in itself tend to render the habitude 
 firmly rooted, thus really capable of resisting change, rather than 
 the opposite ; and instead of the purely mechanical explanation 
 from the number of times a word is repeated, we must look for 
 
 1 In the reprint in Samlede AJhandlinger, ii. 417 (1920), a few lines are 
 added in which Thomsen fully accepts the explanation which I gave as far 
 back as 1886. 
 
268 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xiv 
 
 a more psychological explanation. This naturally must be found 
 in the ease with which a word is understood in the given connexion 
 or situation, and especially in its worthlessness for the purpose 
 of communication. Worthlessness, however, is not the moving 
 power, but merely the reason why less restraint than usual is 
 imposed on the ever-present inclination of speakers to minimize 
 effort. A parallel from another, though cognate, sphere of human 
 activity may perhaps bring out my point of view more clearly. 
 The taking off of one's hat, combined with a low bow, served from 
 the first to mark a more or less servile submissiveness to a prince 
 or conqueror ; then the gesture was gradually' weakened, and a 
 slight raising of the hat came to be a polite greeting even between 
 equals ; this is reduced to a mere touching of the hat or cap, 
 and among friends the slightest movement of the hand in the 
 direction of the hat is thought a sufficient greeting. When, how- 
 ever, it is important to indicate deference, the full ceremonial 
 gesture is still used (though not to the same extent by all nations) ; 
 otherwise no value is attached to it, and the inclination to spare 
 oneself all unnecessary exertion has caused it to dAvindle down 
 to the slightest muscular action possible. 
 
 The above instances of the truncation of everyday formulas, 
 etc., illustrate the length to which the ease princif)le can be carried 
 when a word has little significatory value and the intention of 
 the speaker can therefore be vaguely, but sufficiently, understood 
 if the proper sound is merely suggested or hinted at. But in most 
 words, and even in the words mentioned above, when they are to 
 bear their full meaning, the pronunciation cannot be slurred to the 
 same extent, if the speaker is to make himself understood. It is con- 
 sequently his interest to pronoimce more carefully', and this means 
 greater conservatism and slower phonetic development on the whole. 
 
 There are naturally many degrees of relative value or worth- 
 lessness, and words may vary accordingl3\ An illustration may 
 be taken from my own mother -tongue : the two words rigtig nok, 
 literally ' correct enough,' are pronounced ['recti 'nok] or ['regdi 'nok] 
 when keeping their full signification, but ^^hen they are reduced 
 to an adverb with the same imjDort as the weakened English 
 certainly or {it is) true (that), there are various shortened pronun- 
 ciations in frequent use : ['rectnog, 'regdnog, 'regnog, 'renog, 'renog]. 
 The worthlessness may affect a whole plirase, a word, or merely 
 one syllable or sound. 
 
 XIV. — § 10. Application to Case System, etc. 
 
 Our principle is important in many domains of linguistic 
 history. If it is asked why the elaborate Old English system of 
 
§10] APPLICATION TO CASE SYSTEM 2G9 
 
 cases and genders has gradually disappeared, an answer that will 
 meet with the approval of most linguists of the ordinary school is 
 (in the words of J. A. H. Murray) : " The total loss of grammatical 
 gender in English, and the almost complete disappearance of cases, 
 are purely phonetic phenomena " — supplemented, of course, by 
 the recognition of the action of analogy, to which is due, for instance, 
 the levelling of the nom. and dative plural OE. stanos and slamim 
 under the single form stones. The main explanation thus is the 
 following : a phonetic law, operating without regard to the signi- 
 fication, caused the OE. unstressed vowels -a, -e, -u to become 
 merged in an obscure -e in Middle English ; as these endings were 
 very often distinctive of cases, the Old English cases were con- 
 sequently lost. Another phonetic law was operating similarly 
 by causing the loss of final -n, which also played an important 
 rdle in the old case system. And in this way phonetic laws and 
 analogy have between them made a clean sweep of it, and we need 
 look nowhere else for an explanation of the decaj^ of the old 
 declensions. 
 
 Here I beg to differ : a ' phonetic law ' is not an explanation, 
 but something to be explained ; it is nothing else but a mere 
 statement of facts, a formula of correspondence, which says nothing 
 about the cause of change, and we are therefore justified if we 
 try to dig deeper and penetrate to the real psychology of speech. 
 Now, let us for a moment suppose that each of the terminations 
 -a, -e, -u bore in Old English its own distinctive and sharply 
 defined meaning, which was necessary to the right understanding 
 of the sentences in which the terminations occurred (something 
 like the endings found in artificial languages like Ido). Would 
 there in that case be any probability that a phonetic law tending 
 to their levelling could ever have succeeded in establishing itself 1 
 Most certainly not ; the all -important regard for intelligibility 
 would have been sure to counteract any inclination towards a slurred 
 pronunciation of the endings. Nor would there have been any 
 occasion for new formations by analogy, as the formations were 
 already sufficiently analogous. But such a regularity was very 
 far from prevailing in Old English, as will be particularly clear 
 from the tabulation of the declensions as printed in my Chapters 
 on English, p. 10 ff. : it makes the whole question of causality appear 
 in a much clearer light than would be possible by any other 
 arrangement of the grammatical facts : the cause of the decay 
 of the Old English apparatus of declensions lay in its manifold 
 incongruities. The same termination did not always denote the 
 same thing : -u might be the nom. sg. masc. {sunu) or fem. {duru), 
 or the ace. or the dat., or the nom. or ace. pi. neuter {hofn) ; -a 
 might be the nom. sg. masc. (guma), or the dat. sg. masc. {stina), 
 
270 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xiv 
 
 or the gen. sg. fern, (dura), or the nom. pi. masc. or fem., or 
 finally the gen. pi. ; -an might be the ace. or dat. or gen. sg. or 
 the nom. or ace. pi., etc. If we look at it from the point of view 
 of function, we get the same picture ; the nom. pi., for instance, 
 might be denoted by the endings -as, -an, -a, -e, -u, or by mutation 
 without ending, or by the unchanged kernel ; the dat. sg. by 
 -e, -an, -re, -um, by mutation, or the unchanged kernel. The 
 whole is one jumble of inconsistency, for many relations plainly 
 distinguished from each other in one class of words were but 
 imperfectly, if at all, distinguishable in another class. Add to 
 this that the names used above, dative, accusative, etc., have 
 no clear and definite meaning in the case of Old English, any 
 more than in the case of kindred tongues ; sometimes it did not 
 matter which of two or more cases the speaker chose to employ : 
 some verbs took indifferently now one, now another case, and 
 the same is to some extent true with regard to prepositions. No 
 wonder, therefore, that speakers would often hesitate which of 
 two vowels to use in the ending, and would tend to indulge in the 
 universal inclination to pronounce weak syllables indistinctly 
 and thus confuse the formerly distinct vowels a, i, e, u into the 
 one neutral vowel [a], which might even be left out without 
 detriment to the clear understanding of each sentence. ^ The 
 only endings that were capable of withstanding this general rout 
 were the two in s, -as for the plural and -es for the gen. sg. ; 
 here the consonant was in itself more solid, as it were, than the 
 other consonants used in case endings (n, m), and, which is more 
 decisive, each of these terminations was confined to a more 
 sharply limited sphere of use than the other endings, and the 
 functions for which they served, that of the plural and that of 
 the genitive, are among the most indispensable ones for clearness 
 of thought. Hence we see that these endings from the earliest 
 period of the English language tend to be applied to other* 
 classes of nouns than those to which they were at first confined 
 {-as to masc. o stems . . .), so as to be at last used with practically 
 all nouns. 
 
 If explanations like Murray's of the simplification of the 
 English case system are widely accepted, while views like those 
 attempted here will strike most readers of linguistic works as 
 unfamiliar, the reason ma}^ partly at any rate, be the usual 
 arrangement of historical and other grammars. Here we first 
 have chapters on phonology, in which the facts are tabulated, 
 
 * The above remarks are condensed from the argiunent in ChE 38 ff. 
 Note also what is said below (Ch. XiX § 13) on the loss of Lat. final -s in the 
 Romanic languages after it had ceased to be necessary for the grammatical 
 understanding of eentencea. 
 
§10] APPLICATION TO CASE SYSTEM 271 
 
 each vowel being dealt with separately, no matter what its function 
 is in the flexional system ; then, after all the sounds have been 
 treated in this way, we come to morphology (accidence, formenlehre), 
 in which it is natural to take the phonological facts as granted 
 or already known : these therefore come to be looked upon as 
 primary and morphology as secondary, and no attention is 
 paid to the value of the sounds for the purposes of mutual under- 
 standing. 
 
 But ever3'day observations show that sounds have not always 
 the same value. In ordinary conversation one may frequently 
 notice how a proper name or technical term, when first introduced, 
 is pronounced with particular care, while no such pains is taken 
 when it recurs afterwards : the stress becomes weaker, the un- 
 stressed vowels more indistinct, and this or that consonant may 
 be dropped. The same principle is shown in all the abbreviations 
 of proper names and of long words in general which have been 
 treated above (Ch IX § 7) : here the speaker has felt assured 
 that his hearer has understood what or who he is talking about, 
 as soon as he has pronounced the initial syllable or syllables, 
 and therefore does not take the trouble to pronounce the rest of 
 the word. It has often been pointed out (see, e.g., Curtius K 72) 
 that stem or root syllables are generally better preserved than 
 the rest of the word : the reason can only be that they have 
 greater importance for the understanding of the idea as a whole 
 than other syllables. ^ But it is especially when we come to 
 examine stress phenomena that we discover the full extent of 
 this principle of value, 
 
 XIV.— § 11. Stress Phenomena. 
 
 vStress is generally believed to be de^iendent exclusively on 
 the force with which the air -current is expelled from the lungs, 
 hence the name of ' expiratory accent ' ; but various observa- 
 tions and considerations have led me to give another definition 
 (LPh 7. 32, 1913) : stress is energy, intensive muscular activity not 
 
 ^ Against this it has been urged that Fr. oncle has not pi-eserved the 
 stem syllable of Lat. avunculus particularly well. But this objection is 
 a little misleading. It is quite true that at the time when the word was 
 first framed the syllable av- contained the main idea and -unculus was only 
 added to impart an endearing modification to that idea (' dear little uncle ') ; 
 but after some time the semantic relation was altered ; avus itself passed out 
 of use, while avunculus was handed down from generation to generation as a 
 ready-made whole, in which the ordinary speaker was totally unable to 
 suspect that av- was the really significative stem. He consequenth' treated 
 it exactly as any other polj'syllablo of the same structure, and avun- 
 (phonetically [awuj, auu»j]) was naturally made into one syllable. Nothing, 
 of course, can be protected by a sense of its significance imless it is still 
 felt as significant. That hardly needs Baying. 
 
272 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xiv 
 
 of one organ, but of all the speech organs at once. To pronounce 
 a ' stressed ' syllable all organs are exerted to the utmost. The 
 muscles of the lungs are strongly innervated ; the movements 
 of the vocal chords are stronger, leading on the one hand in 
 voiced sounds to a greater approximation of the vocal chords, 
 with less air escaping, but greater am})litude of \'ibrations and 
 also greater risings or fallings of the tone. In voiceless sounds, 
 on the other hand, the vocal chords are kept at greater distance 
 (than in unstressed syllables) and accordingly allow more air to 
 escape. Tn the upper organs stress is charact(!rized by marked 
 articulations of the velum palati, of the tongue and of the lips. 
 As a result of all this, stressed syllables are loud, i.e. can be heard 
 at great distance, and distinct, i.e. easy to perceive in all their 
 components. Unstressed syllables, on the contrary, are pro- 
 duced with less exertion in every way : in voiced sounds the 
 distance between the vocal chords is greater, which leads to the 
 peculiar ' voice of miirmur ' ; but in voiceless sounds the glottis 
 is not opened very ^\^de. In the upper organs we see corresponding 
 slack movements ; thus the velum does not shut off the nasal cavity 
 very closely, and the tongue tends towards a neutral position, 
 in which it moves very little either up and down or backwards 
 and forwards. The lips also are moved with less energy, and the 
 final result is dull and indistinct sounds. Noav, all this is of the 
 greatest importance in the historj' of languages. 
 
 The psychological importance of various elements is the chief, 
 though not the only, factor that determines sentence stress (see, for 
 instance, the chapters on stress in my LPh xiv. and ]\IEG v.). Now, 
 it is well known that sentence stress plaj's a most important role in 
 the historical development of any language ; it has determined 
 not onlj' the difference in vowel between [woz] and [wgz], both 
 written \vas, or between the demonstrative [(5aet] and the relative 
 [Sat], both written that, but also that between one and an or a, 
 originally the same word, and between Fr. moi and me, toi and te 
 — one might give innumerable other instances. Value also plays 
 a not unimportant role in determining which syllable among 
 several in long words is stressed most, and in some languages 
 it has re\'olutionized the whole stress system. This happened with 
 old Gothonic, whence in modern German, Scandinavian, and in 
 the native elements of English we have the prevalent stressing of 
 the root syllable, i.e. of that syllable which has the greatest 
 psychological value, as in ^wishes, be-speak, etc. 
 
 Now, it is generally said that if double forms arise like one and 
 an, moi and me, the reason is that the sounds were found under 
 ' different phonetic conditions ' and therefore developed differently, 
 exactly as the difference between an and a or between Fr. Jol 
 
§11] STRESS PHENOMENA 278 
 
 and Joa is due to the same word being placed in one instance before 
 a word beginning \vith a vowel and in the otlier before a consonant, 
 that is to say, in different external conditions. But it won't do 
 to identify the two things : in the latter case wo really have some- 
 thing external or mechanical, and here we may rightl}' use 
 the expression ' phonetic condition,' but the difference between 
 a strongly and a weakly stressed form of the same word depends 
 on something internal, on the very soul of the word. Stress is 
 not what the usual A\ay of marking it in writing and printing might 
 lead us to think — something that hangs outside or above the 
 word — but is at least as important an element of the word as 
 the ' speech sounds ' which go to make it up. Stress alternation 
 in a sentence cannot consequently he reckoned a ' phonetic 
 condition ' of the same order as the initial sound of the next word. 
 If we say that the different treatment of the vowel seen in one 
 and an or moi and me is occasioned by varying degrees of stress, 
 we have ' explained ' the secondary sound change only, but not 
 the primary change, which is tliat of stress itself, and that 
 change is due to the different significance of the word under varying 
 circumstances, i.e. to its varying value for the pm-poses of the 
 exchange of ideas. Over and above mechanical principles we 
 have here and elsewhere psychological principles, which no one 
 can disregard with impunity. 
 
 XIV.— § 12. Non-phonetic Changes. 
 
 Considerations of ease play an important part in all depart- 
 ments of language development. It is impossible to draw a sharp 
 line between phonetic and sjoitactic phenomena. We have what 
 might be termed prosiopesis when the speaker begins, or thinks 
 he begins, to articulate, but produces no audible sound till one 
 or two syllables after the beginning of what he intended to say. 
 This phonetically is ' aphesis,' but in many cases leads to the 
 omission of whole words ; this may become a regular speech habit, 
 more particularly in the case of certain set phrases, e.g. (Good) 
 morning / (Do you) see ? / (Will) that do ? / (I shall) see you 
 again this afternoon ; Fr. {na.)tiirellement / (Je ne me) rappelle 
 plus, etc. 
 
 On the other hand, we have aposiopesis if the s^jeaker does 
 not finish his sentence, either because he hesitates which word 
 to employ or because he notices that the hearer has ahead}' caught 
 his meaning. Hence such syntactic shortenings as at Braum's 
 (house, or shop, or whatever it may be), which may then be 
 extended to other places in the sentence ; the grocer's was closed 
 / St. PauVs is very grand, etc. Similar abbreviations due to 
 
 18 
 
274 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xiv 
 
 the natural disinclination to use more circumstantial expressions 
 than are necessary to convey one's meaning are seen when, instead 
 of my straw hat, one says simply rny straw, if it is clear to one's 
 hearers that one is talking of a hat ; thus clay comes to be used 
 for clay pipe, return for return ticket ('We'd better take returns') 
 the Ilaymarket for the Haymarket Theatre, etc. Sometimes these 
 shortenings become so common as to be scarcel}' any longer felt 
 as such, e.g. rifle, landau, bugle, for rifle gun, landau carriage, bugle 
 horn (further examples MEG ii. 8. 9). In Maupassant {Bel Ami 
 81) I find the following scrap of conversation which illustrates 
 the same principle in another domain : " Voila six mois que je 
 suis employe aux bureaux du chemin de fer du Nord." " Mais 
 comment diable n'as-tu pas trouve mieux qu'une place d' employe 
 au Nord ? " i 
 
 The tendency to economzie effort also manifests itself when 
 the general ending -er is used instead of a more specific expression : 
 sleeper for sleeping-car ; bedder at college for bedmaker ; speecher, 
 footer, brekker (Harrow) for S2)eech-day, football, breakfast, etc. 
 Thus also when some nomi or verb of a vague or general meaning 
 is used because one will not take the trouble to tliink of the exact 
 expression required, very often thing (sometimes extended thingum- 
 bob, cf. Dan. tingest, G. dingsda), Fr. chose, machin (even in place 
 of a personal name) ; further, the verb do or fix (this especially 
 in America). In some cases this tendency' may permanently 
 affect the meaning of a common noun which has to serve so 
 often instead of a specific name that at last it acquires a special 
 signification ; thus, corii in England = ' wheat,' in Ireland = ' oats,' 
 in America = ' maize,' deer, orig. ' animal,' Fr. herbe, now ' grass,' 
 etc. As many people, either from ignorance or from carelessness, 
 are far from being precise in thought and expression — they " Mean 
 not, but blunder round about a meaning " — words come to be 
 applied in senses unknouii to former generations, and some of 
 these senses may gradually become fixed and established. In 
 some cases the final result of such want of precision may even be 
 beneficial ; thus English at first had no means of expressing 
 futurity in verbs. Then it became more and more customary 
 to say ' he will come,' which at first meant ' he has the will 
 to come,' to express his future coming apart from his volition 
 — thus, also, ' it will rain,' etc. Similarly ' I shall go,' which 
 
 * Compare also the results of the same principle seen in writing. In 
 a letter a proper name or technical term when first introduced is probably 
 written in full and very distinctly, while afterwards it is either written 
 carelessly or indicated by a mere initial. Any shorthand-writer knows 
 how to utilize this principle systematically. 
 
§12] NON-PHONETIC CHANGES 275 
 
 originally meant ' I am obliged to go,' was used in a less 
 accurate way, where no obligation was thought of, and thus 
 the language acquired something which is at any rate a make- 
 shift for a future tense of the verb. But considerations of space 
 prevent me from diving too deeply into questions of semantic 
 change. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 CAUSES OF CHANGE— continued 
 
 § 1. Emotional Exaggerations. § 2. Euphony. § 3. Organic Influences. 
 § 4. Lapses and Blendinga. § 5. Latitude of Correctnees. § 6. Equi- 
 distant and Convergent Changes. § 7. Homophones. § 8. Signifi- 
 cative Sounds preserved. § 9. Divergent Changes and Analogy. 
 § 10. Extension of Sound Laws. § 11. Spreading of Sound Change. 
 § 12. Reaction. § 13. Sound Laws and Etymological Science. § 14. 
 Conclusion. 
 
 XV. — § 1. Emotional Exaggerations. 
 
 In the preceding chapter we have dwelt at gretit length on those 
 changes which tend to render articulations easier and more con- 
 venient. But, inij^ortant as they are, these are not the only changes 
 that speech sounds undergo : there are other moods than that 
 of ordinary listless everyday conversation, and they may lead to 
 modifications of pronunciation which are different from and may 
 even be in direct opposition to those mentioned or hinted at above. 
 Thus, anger or other violent emotions may cause emphatic utter- 
 ance; in which, e.g., stops may be much more strongly aspirated 
 than they are in usual quiet parlance ; even French, which has 
 normally unaspirated (' sharp ') [t] and [k], under such circum- 
 stances ma}'- aspirate them strongly — ' Mais taisez-vcns done ! ' 
 Military commands are characterized by peculiar emphasizings, 
 even in some cases di.stortions of sounds and words. Pomposity 
 and consequential airs are manifested in the treatment of speech 
 sounds as well as in other gestui-es. Irony, scoffing, banter, 
 amiable chaffing — each different mood or temper leaves its traces 
 on enunciation. Actors and orators will often use stronger articu- 
 lations than are strictly necessary to avoid those misunderstand- 
 ings or that unintelligibility which may ensue from slipshod or 
 indistinct pronunciation.^ In short, anyone who will take careful 
 note of the wa}'- in which people do reallj^ talk \^^ll find in the most 
 everyday conversation as well as on more solemn occasions the 
 greatest variety of such modilBcations and deviations from what 
 might be termed ' normal ' pronunciation ; these, however, pass 
 
 * " His pronunciation of some words is so distinct that an idea crossed 
 m« once that he might be an actor " (Shaw, Caahcl Byron'a Profession, 60). 
 
 976 
 
§1] KMOTIONAL EXAGGERATIONS 277 
 
 unnoticed under ordinary circumstances, when the attention is 
 directed exclusively to the contents and general purport of the 
 spoken words. A vowel or a consonant will be made a trifle 
 shorter or longer than usual, the lips will open a little too much, 
 an [e] will approach [ve] or [i], the off-glide after a final [t] will 
 sound nearly as [s], the closure of a [d] will be made so loosely 
 that a little air will escape and the somid therefore will be approxi- 
 mately a [6] or -h weak fricative point [r], etc. Most of these 
 modifications are so small that they cannot be represented by 
 letters, even by those of a ver}'^ exact phonetic alphabet, but they 
 exist all the same, and are by no means insignificant to those who 
 want to understand the real essence of speech and of linguistic 
 change, for life is built up of such minutiae. The great majority 
 of such alterations are of coiu-se made quite unconsciously, but 
 by the side of these we must recognize that there are some 
 individuals who more or less consciously affect a certain mode of 
 enunciation, either from artistic motives, because they think it 
 beautiful, or simply to ' show off ' — and sometimes such pro- 
 nunciations may set the fashion and be widely imitated 
 (cf. below, p. 292). 
 
 Tender emotions may lead to certain lengthenings of soimds. 
 The intensifying effect of lengthening was noticed by A. Gill, 
 Milton's teacher, in 1621, see Jiriczek's reprint, p. 48 : " Atque vt 
 Hebraei, ad ampliorem vocis alicuius significationem, sj^llabas 
 adaugent [cf. here below, Ch. XX § 9] ; sic nos syllabarum tempora : 
 vt, gret [the diseresis denotes vowel-length] magnus, greet ingens ; 
 moiistrus prodigiosum, monstrus valde prodigiosum, moonstrus 
 prodigiosum adeo vt hominem stupidet." Cf. also the lengthening 
 in the exclamation God ! , by novelists sometimes \vritten Gawd 
 or Gord. But it is cm-ious that the same emotional lengthening 
 will sometimes affect a consonant (or first part of a diphthong) 
 in a position in which otherwise we always have a short quantity ; 
 thus, Danish clergjinen, when speaking with unction, will lengthen 
 the [1] of glcede 'joy,' wliich is ridiculed b}' comic wTiters through 
 the unphonetic spelling ge-lcede ; and in the same way I find in 
 Kapling [Stalky 119) : "We'll make it a be-antiful house," and in 
 0. Henry {Roads of Destiny 133) : " A regular Paradise Lost for 
 elegance of scenery and be-yooty of geography." I suppose that 
 the spellings ber-luddy and bee-luddy, whicli I find in recent novels, 
 are meant to indicate the pronunciation [bl"-Adi], thus the exact 
 counterpart of the Dani.sh example. An unstressed vowel before 
 the stressed syllable is similarly lengthened in " Dee-lightful 
 couple ! " (Shaw, Doctor's Dilemma 41) ; American girl students 
 will often say ['dili/] for delicious. 
 
278 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xv 
 
 XV.— § 2. Euphony. 
 
 It was not uiicomDion in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
 turies to ascribe phonetic changes to a desire for euphony, a view 
 which is represented in Bopp's earliest works. But as early as 
 1821 Bredsdorff says that " people will always find that euphonious 
 which they are accustomed to hear : considerations of euphony 
 consequently will not cause changes in a language, but rather 
 make for keeping it unchanged. Those changes which are gener- 
 ally supposed to be based on euphony are due chiefly to conveni- 
 ence, in some instances to care of distinctness." This is quite 
 true, but scarcely the whole truth. Euphony depends not only 
 on custom, but even more on ease of articulation and on ease of 
 perception : what requires intricate or difficult movements of 
 the organs of speech will always be felt as cacophonous, and so 
 will anything that is indistinct or blurred. But nations, as well 
 as individuals, have an artistic feeling for these things in different 
 degrees, and that may influence the phonetic character of a lan- 
 guage, though joerhaps chiefly in its broad features, while it may 
 be difficult to point out anj' particular details in phonological 
 history which have been thus worked upon. There can be no 
 doubt that the artistic feeling is much more develoi^ed in the French 
 than in the English nation, and Ave find in French fewer obscure 
 vowels and more clearly articulated consonants than in English 
 (cf. also my remarks on French accent, GS § 28). 
 
 XV. — § 3. Organic Influences. 
 
 Some modifications of speech sounds are due to the fact that 
 the organs of speech are used for other purposes than that of 
 speaking. We all know the effect of someone trying to sjoeak 
 with his mouth full of food, or with a cigar or a pipe hanging 
 between his lips and to some extent impeding their action. 
 Various emotions are expressed by facial movements which may 
 interfere with the production of ordinary speech sounds. A child 
 that is crying speaks differently from one that is smiling or laugh- 
 ing. A smile requires a retraction of the corners of the mouth 
 and a partial opening of the lips, and thus impedes the formation 
 of that lip-closure which is an essential part of the ordinary [m] ; 
 hence most people when smiling will substitute the labiodental m, 
 which to the ear greatly resembles the bilabial [m]. A smile will 
 also often modify the front-round vowel [y] so as to make it 
 approach [i]. Sweet may be right in supposing that " the habit 
 of speaking with a constant smile or grin " is the reason for tne 
 Cockney unrounding of the vowel in [nau] for no. Schuchardt 
 
§8] ORGANIC INFLUENCES 279 
 
 (Zs. f. rom. Phil. 5. 314) says that in Andalusian quia ! instead 
 of ai ! the lips, under the influence of a certain emotion, are drawn 
 scoitingly aside. Inversely, the rounding in Josu ! instead of Jesu I 
 is due to wonder (ib. ) ; and exactly in the same way we have 
 the surprised or pitying exclamation jeses ! from Jesus in Danish, 
 Compare also the rounding in Dan. and G. [n0-] for [ne-, nc-] [nej, 
 nein). Lundell mentions that in Swedish a caressing lilla van 
 often becomes hjlla von, and I have often observed the same 
 rounding in Dan. min lille ven. Schuchardt also mentions an 
 Italian [/] instead of [s] under the influence of pain or anger {mi 
 duole la tefta ; ti do tino fchiuffo) ; a Danish parallel is the frequent 
 [/luS'ar] for sludder 'nonsense.' We are here verging on the 
 subject of the symbolic value of speech sounds, which will occupy 
 us in a later chapter (XX). 
 
 Observe, too, how people will pronounce under the influence 
 of alcohol : the tongue is not under control and is incapable of 
 acciu'ately forming the closure necessary for [t], which therefore 
 becomes [r], and the thin rill necessary for [s], which therefore 
 comes to resemble [J] ; there is also a general tendency to run 
 soimds and syllables together. ^ 
 
 XV. — § 4. Lapses and Blendings. 
 
 All these deviations are due to influences from what is outside 
 the sphere of language as such. But we now come to something 
 of the greatest importance in the life of language, the fact, namely, 
 that deviations from the usual or normal pronunciation are very 
 often due to causes inside the language itself, either by lingering 
 reminiscences of what has just been spoken or by anticipation of 
 something that the speaker is just on the point of pronouncing. 
 The process of speech is a very complicated one, and while one 
 thing is being said, the mind is continually active in preparing 
 what has to be said next, arranging the ideas and fashioning the 
 linguistic expression in all its details. Each word is a succession 
 of sounds, and for each of these a complicated set of orders has 
 to be issued from the brain to the various speech organs. Some- 
 times these get mixed up, and a command is sent down to one 
 organ a moment too early or too late. The inclination to make 
 mistakes naturally increases with the number of identical or 
 
 ^ Dickena, D. Cop. 2. 149 neverbe^rer, 150 I'mafraid you'renorwell (ib. 
 also r for n : Amigoarawaysoo, Goori = Good night). | Our Mut. Fr. 602 
 lerrers. | Thackeray, Newc. 163 Whas that ? | Anstey, Vice V. 328 s7mpper, 
 I s/jpose, wharriplease, say tharragain. | Meredith, R. Feverel 272 Nor a 
 bir of it. I Walpole, Duch. of Wrex. 323-4 nonshensh, Wash the matter ? | 
 Galsworthy, In Chanc. 17 cnvsh, un«Atood'm. Cf. also Fija van Draat, 
 Est 34. 363 ff. 
 
280 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xv 
 
 similar sounds in close proximity. This is well known from those 
 * jaw-breaking * tongue-tests with which people amuse them- 
 selves in all countries and of which I need give only one typical 
 specimen : 
 
 She Bells sea8hell8 on tho seashore , 
 The shells she polls are seashells, I'm sure, 
 For if she sells seashells on the seashore, 
 Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells. 
 
 K the mind is occupied with one sound while another is being 
 pronounced, and thus either runs in advance of or lags behind 
 what should be its immediat^i business, the linguistic result may 
 be of various kinds. The simplest case of influencing is assimila- 
 tion of two contiguous sounds, which we have already considered 
 from a different point of view. Next we have assimilative in- 
 fluence on a sound at a distance, as A\hen we lapse into she shells 
 instead of sea shells or she sells ; such is Fr. chercher for older 
 sercher (whence E. search) from Lat. circare, Dan. and G. vulgar 
 ferfant for sergeant ; a curious mixed case is the prommciation of 
 transition as [tr3en'si58n] : the normal development is [troen'zi/an], 
 but the voice-articulation of the two hissing sounds is reversed 
 (possibly under accessory influence from the numerous words in 
 which we have [traen.s] with [s], and from words ending in [ijon], 
 such as vision, division). Further examples of such assimilation 
 at a distance or consonant-harmonization (malmsey from malvesie, 
 etc.) maj^ be foimd in my LPh 11. 7, where there are also examples 
 of the corresponding harmonizings of vowels : Fr. camarade. It. 
 uguale, Braga/iza, from camerade, eguale, Brigantia, etc. In Ugro- 
 Finnic and Turkish this harmony of vowels has been raised to 
 a principle pervading the whole structure of the language, as 
 seen, e.g., most clearly in the varying plural endings in Yakut 
 agalar, asdldr, ogolor, dorolor, ' fathers, bears, children, muzzles.' 
 
 What escaj^es at the ^vrong place and causes confusion maj' 
 be a part of the same word or of a following word • as examples 
 of the latter case may be given a few of the lapses recorded in 
 Meringer and Maj^er's Versprechen und Verlesen (Stuttgart, 1895) : 
 instead of saying Lateinisches lehmvort Ikleringer said Laten- 
 isches . . . and then corrected himself ; paster noster instead of 
 pater iwster ; wenn das wesser . . . wetter icieder besser ist. This 
 phenomenon is termed in Danish at bakke snagvendt (for snakke 
 bagvendt) and in English Spoonerism, from an Oxford don, W. A. 
 Spooner, about whom many comic lapses are related (" Don't 
 you ever feel a half-warmed fish " instead of " half-formed 
 wish "). 
 
 The simplest and most frequently occurring cases in which 
 the order for a sound is issued too early or too late are those trans- 
 
§4] LAPSES AND BLENDINGS 381 
 
 positions of two sounds which the linguists term ' metathcses.' 
 They occur most frequently with s in connexion with a stop (icasp, 
 waps ; ask, ax) and with r (chiefly, perhaps exclusively, the trilled 
 form of the sound) and a vowel {third, OE. yridda). A more com- 
 plicated instance is seen in Fr. trisor for tisor, thesaiinim. If the 
 mind does not realize how far the vocal organs have got, the result 
 may be the skipping of some sound or sounds ; this is particularly 
 likely to happen when the same somid has to be repeated at some 
 little distance, and we then have the phenomenon termed ' hap- 
 lology,' as in eighteen, OE. eahtatiene, and in the frequent pronun- 
 ciation probly for probably, Fr. contrdle, idolatrie for contrerole, 
 idololutrie, Lat. stipendium for stlpipendium, and numerous similar 
 instances in every language (LPh II. 9). Sometimes a sound may 
 be skipped because the mind is confused through the fact that 
 the same sound has to be pronounced a little later ; thus the old 
 Gothonic word for ' bird ' (G. vogel, OE. fugol ; E. fowl with a 
 modified meaning) is derived from the verb fly, OE. fleogan, and 
 originally had some form like *flyglo (OE. had an adj. flugol) ; in 
 recent times flugelman (G. fliigelmann) has become fugleman. 
 It. has Federigo for Frederigo — thus the exactly opposite result of 
 what has been brought about in trisor from the same kind of mental 
 confusion. 
 
 When words are often repeated in succession, sounds from 
 one of them will often creep into another, as is seen very often in 
 numerals : the nasal which was found in the old forms for 7, 9 
 and 10 and is still seen in E. seven, nine, ten, has no place in the 
 word for 8, and accordingly we have in the ordinal ON. sjaundi, 
 dtti, niundi, tiundi, but already in ON. we find dttandi by the side 
 of dtii, and in Dan. the present-day forms are syvende, ottende, 
 niende, tiende ; in the same way OFr. had sedme, uidme, noefme, 
 disme (which have all now disappeared with the exception of dtme 
 as a substantive). In the names of the months we had the same 
 formation of a series in OFr. : septembre, octembre, novembre, decem- 
 bre, but learned influence has reinstated octobre. G. elf for older 
 eilf owes its vowel to the following zwelf ; and as now the latter 
 has given way to zwolf (the vowel being rounded in consequence 
 of the to) many dialects count zehn, olf, zivolf. Similarly, it seems 
 to be due to their frequent occurrence in close contact with the 
 verbal forms in -no that the Italian plural pronouns egli, elle are 
 extended with that ending : eglino amano, elleno dicono. Diez 
 compares the curious Bavarian wo-st bist, dem-st gehorst, etc., in 
 which the personal ending of the verb is transferred to some 
 other word with which it has nothing to do (on this phenomenon 
 see Herzog, Streitfragen d. roman. phil. 48, Buergel Goodwin, 
 Umgangsspr. in Sildbayem 99). 
 
282 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xv 
 
 In speaking, the mind is occupied not only with the words 
 one is already pronouncing or knows that one is going to 
 pronounce, but also with the ideas which one has to ex- 
 press but for which one has not yet chosen the linguistic 
 form. In many cases two synonyms will rise to the con- 
 sciousness at the same time, and the hesitation between them 
 will often result in a compromise which contains the head 
 of one and the tail of another word. It is evident that this 
 process of blending is intimatelj' related to those we have just 
 been considering ; see the detailed treatment in Ch. XVI § 6. 
 
 Syntactical blends are very frequent. Hesitation between 
 different from and other than will result in different than or another 
 from, and similarly we occasionally find another to, different to, 
 contrary than, contrary from, opposite from, anywhere than. After 
 a clause introduced by hardly or scarcely the normal conjunction 
 is when, but sometimes we find than, because that is regular after 
 the synonymous nx) sooner. 
 
 XV. — §5. Latitude of Correctness. 
 
 It is a natural consequence of the essence of human speech 
 and the way in which it is transmitted from generation to genera- 
 tion that we have everywhere to recognize a certain latitude of 
 correctness, alike in the significations in which the words may 
 be used, in syntax and in pronunciation. The nearer a speaker 
 keeps to the centre of what is established or usual, the easier will 
 it be to understand him. If he is ' eccentric ' on one point or 
 another, the result may not always be that he conveys no idea 
 at all, or that he is misunderstood, but often mereh'' that he is 
 understood with some little difficulty, or that liis hearers have a 
 momentary feeling of something odd in his choice of words, or 
 expressions or pronunciation. In many cases, when someone 
 has overstepped the boundaries of what is established, his hearers 
 do not at once catch his meaning and have to gather it from the 
 whole context of what follows : not unfrequently the meaning 
 of something yovi have heard as an incomprehensible string of 
 syllables will suddenly flash upon you without your knowing how 
 it has happened. Msunderstandings are, of course, most liable 
 to occur if words of different meaning, which in themselves would 
 give sense in the same collocation, are similar in sound : in that 
 case a trifling alteration of one sound, which in other words would 
 create no difficulty at all, may prove pernicious. Now, what is 
 the bearing of these considerations on the question of sound 
 changes ? 
 
 The latitude of correctness is very far from being the same in 
 
§5] LATITUDE OF CORRECTNESS 288 
 
 different languages. Some sounds in each language move within 
 narrow boundaries, while others have a much larger field assigned 
 to them ; each language is punctilious in some, but not in all 
 points. Deviations which in one language would be considered 
 trifling, in another would be intolerable perversions. In German, 
 for instance, a wide margin is allowed for the (local and individual) 
 pronunciation of the diphthong written en or du (in evh, trdume) : 
 it may begin with [o] or [oe] or even [se, a], and it may end in [i], 
 or the corresponcUng rounded vowel [y], or one of the mid front 
 vowels, rounded or not, it does not matter much ; the diphthong 
 is recognized or acknowledged in many shapes, while the similar 
 diphthong in English, as in toy, voice, allows a far less range of 
 variation (for other examples see LPh 16. 22). 
 
 Now, it is very important to keep in mind that there is an in- 
 timate connexion between phonetic latitude and the significations 
 of words. If there are in a language a great many pairs of words 
 which are identical in sound except for, say, the difference between 
 [e*] and [i'] (or between long and short [i], or between voiced [b] 
 and voiceless [p], or between a high and a Ioav tone, etc.), then 
 the speakers of that language necessarily will make that distinction 
 with great precision, as otherwise too many misunderstandings 
 would result. If, on the other hand, no mistakes worth speaking 
 of would ensue, there is not the same inducement to be careful. 
 In English, and to a somewhat lesser degree in French, it is easy 
 to make up long lists of pairs of words where the sole difference 
 is between voice and voicelessness in the final consonant {cab cap, 
 bad bat, frog frock, etc.) ; hence final [b] and [p], [d] and [t], [g] 
 and [k] are kept apart conscientiously, while German possesses 
 very few such pairs of words ; in German, consequently, the 
 natural tendency to make final consonants voiceless has not been 
 checked, and all final stopped consonants have now become voice- 
 less. In initial and medial position, too, there are very few ex- 
 amples in German of the same distinction (see the lists, LPh 6. 78), 
 and this circumstance makes us understand why Germans are 
 so apt to efface the difference between [b, d, g] and [p, t, k]. On 
 the other hand, the distinction between a long and a short vowel is 
 kept much more effectively in German than in French, because 
 in German ten or twenty times as many words would be liable to 
 confusion through pronouncing a long instead of a short vowel 
 or vice versa. In French no two words are kept apart by means 
 of stress, as in English or Grcrman ; so the rule laid dowTi in 
 grammars that the stress falls on the final sj^Uable of the word is 
 very frequently broken through for rhythmic and other reasons. 
 Other similar instances might easily be advanced. 
 
284 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xv 
 
 XV. — § 6. Equidistant and Convergent Changes. 
 
 Phonetic shifta are of two kinds : the sliifted 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 possi- 
 bilities of confusions and misunderstandings may arise. Now, in 
 some cases one sound (or series of sounds) marches into a position 
 wliich 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 : Aiyan 6, 
 d, g cannot have become Gothonic j), t, k till after primitive ^, t, k 
 had already become fricatives [f, ^p, 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 [o*] (OE. stan, ME. stoon, stone) could 
 a new long a develop, chiefly througii lengthening of an old short 
 a in certain positions. Somewhat later we w itness the great vowel- 
 raising through which the phonetic value of the long vowels 
 (written all the time in essentially the same way) has been con- 
 stantly 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. 
 
 Klizabotban. 
 
 Present English. 
 
 
 , -' ^ 
 
 beit 
 
 bait bite 
 
 bit 
 
 bit beet 
 
 be-t 
 
 bit beat 
 
 a'bae-t 
 
 a' beit abat 
 
 (1) bite bi-ta 
 
 (2) bete be-to 
 
 (3) bete beta 
 
 (4) abate a'ba'ta 
 
 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 (aj-] or [e] till 
 (3) had become a comparatively close e sound. The four vowels, 
 as it were, climbed the ladder witliout ever reaching each other — 
 a climbing which took centuries and in each case implied inter- 
 mediate 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 centur}' class (3) was raised, 
 
§0] EQUIDISTANT AND CONVERGENT CHANGES 285 
 
 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 b}^ 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 sub- 
 stantives and adjectives (like deer dear, leaf lief, shear sheer, week 
 weak) will generall}' 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 puce, 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 Avill be few and far between, and one understands 
 that they camiot 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 
 
28G CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xv 
 
 one of the chief reasons why words fall into disuse, see, e.g., 
 Liebisch (PBB XXIII, 228, many German examples in 0. Wcise, 
 Unsere Mutterspr., 3d ed., 206) and Giilieron, La faillite de V ety- 
 mologic phonitique (Neuveville, 1919 — a book vihose sensational 
 title is hardly justified by its contents). 
 
 The drawbacks of homophones ^ 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 sim (cf. above p. 120, a childish 
 instance). Very often it becomes usual to avoid mismiderstand- 
 ings 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 
 IVench say un di a coudre or un di a 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). Cliinese, 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 draw- 
 backs, see, e.g., B. Karlgren, Ordet och pennan i Mittens rike (Stock- 
 holm, 1918), p. 49 ff. But on the whole we must say th'at the ways 
 in which these phonetic inconveniences are counteracted are the 
 same as those in which speakers react against misunderstandings 
 arising from semantic or sjTitactic causes : as soon as they perceive 
 that their meaning is not apprehended they tiu-n their phrases in 
 a different way, choosing some other expression for their thought, 
 and by this means language is gradually freed from ambiguity. 
 
 * The inconveniences arising from having many homophones in a language 
 are eloquently set forth by Robert Bridges, On English Homophones (S.P.L., 
 Oxford, 1919) — but I would not subscribe to all the Laureate's views, least 
 of all to his practical suggestions and to his unjustifiable attacks on some 
 very meritorious English phoneticians. He seems also to exaggerate the« 
 dangers, e.g. of the two words know and no having the same soimd, when 
 he says (p. 22) that unless a vowel like that in law be restored to tPte negative 
 no, " I should judge that the verb to know is doomed. The third person 
 singular of its present tense is nose, and its past tense is new, and the whole 
 inconvenience is too radical and perpetual to be received all over the world." 
 But surely the role of these words in connected speech is so different, and 
 is nearly always made so clear by the context, that it is very difficult to 
 imagine real sentences in which there would be any serious change of mis- 
 taking know for no, or knows for nose, or knew for new. I repeat : it is not 
 homophonj'^ as such — the phenomenon shown in the long lists lexicographers 
 can draw up of words of the same sound — that is decisive, but the chances 
 of mistakes in connected speech. It has been disputed whether the loss 
 of Gr. humeis, ' ye,' was due to its identity in sound with hemeis, ' we ' ; 
 Hatzidakis says that the new formation eseis is earlier than the falling 
 together of e and u [y] in the sound [i]. But according to Dieterich and 
 C. D. Buck {Classical Philology, 9. 90, 1914) the confusion of u and i or e 
 dates back to the second century. Anyhow, all confusion is now obviated, 
 for both the first and the second persons pi. have new forms which are 
 unambiguous : emeia and eaeia or *ef«. 
 
§8] SIGNIFICATIVE SOUNDS PRESERVED 287 
 
 XV.— § 8. Significative Sounds preserved. 
 
 My contention that the signiticative side of language has in 
 so far exercised an influence on phonetic development that the 
 possibility of many misunderstandings may effectually check 
 the coalescence of two hitherto distinct somids should not be 
 identified with one of the tenets of the older school (Curtius in- 
 cluded) against which the ' young grammarians ' raised an 
 emphatic protest, namely, that a tendency to preserve signi- 
 ficative sounds and syllables might produce exceptions to the 
 normal com-se of phonetic change. Delbriick and his friends may 
 be right in much of what they said against Cm'tius — for instance, 
 when he explained the retention of i in some Greek optative forms 
 thi'ough a consciousness of the original meaning of this suffix ; but 
 their denial was in its way just as exaggerated as his affirmation. 
 It cannot justly be urged against the influence of signification that 
 a preservation of a sound on that account would only be imagin- 
 able on the supposition that the speaker was conscious of a 
 threatened sound change and wanted to avoid it. One need not 
 suppose a speaker to be on his guard against a ' sound law ' : 
 the only tiling required is that he should feel, or be made to feel, 
 that he is not understood when he speaks indistinctly ; if on that 
 account he has to repeat his words he will natm-ally be careful 
 to pronomice the sound he has skipped or slurred, and may even 
 be tempted to exaggerate it a little. 
 
 There do not seem to be many quite unimpeachable examples 
 of words which have received exceptional phonetic treatment to 
 obviate misunderstandings arising from homophony ; other explana- 
 tions (analogy from other forms of the same word, etc.) can gener- 
 ally be alleged more or less plausibly. But this does seem to be 
 the easiest explanation of the fact that the E. preposition on has 
 always the full vowel [o], though in nine cases out of ten it is weakly 
 stressed and though all the other analogous prepositions {to, for, 
 of, at) in the corresponding weak positions in sentences are gener- 
 ally pronounced -with the ' neutral ' vowel [a]. But if on were 
 similarly pronomiced, ambiguity would very often result from its 
 phonetic identity -with the weak forms of the extremely frequent 
 little words an (the indefinite article) and and (possibly also in), 
 not to mention the great number of [anjs in words like drunken, 
 shaken, deepen, etc., where the forms without -e?i also exist. With 
 the preposition upon the same considerations do not hold good, 
 hence the frequency of the pronunciation [apan] in weak position. 
 Considerations of clearness have also led to the disuse of the for- 
 merly frequent form o (o') which was the ' natural ' development 
 of each of the two prepositions on and of. The form written a 
 
288 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xv 
 
 survives only in some fossilized combinations like ashore ; in 
 several others it has now disappeared [set the clock going, formerly 
 a-going, etc.). 
 
 Sometimes, when all ordinary words are affected by a certain 
 sound change, some words prove refractory because in their case 
 the old sound is found to be more expressive than the new one. 
 When the long E. [i'] was diphthongized into [ai], the words pipe 
 and ivhine ceased to be good echoisms, but some dialects have 
 peep ' complain,' which keeps the old sound of the former, and 
 the Irish say wheen (Joj'ce, English as we speak it in Ireland, 103). 
 In squeeze the [i"] sound has been retained as more expressive — 
 the earlier form was squize; and the same is the case with some 
 words meaning ' to look narrowly ' : peer, peek, keek, earlier pire, 
 pike, kike (cf. Dan. pippe, kikke, kige, G. kieken).^ In the same 
 way, when the old [a*] was changed into [c, ei], the word gape 
 ceased to be expressive (as it is still in Dan. gabe), but in popular 
 speech the tendency to raise the vowel was resisted, and the old 
 somid [ga"p] persisted, spelt garp as a London form in 1817 (Ellis, 
 EEP V. 228) and still common in many dialects (see gaup, garp 
 in EDD); Professor Hempl told me that [gap] was also a common 
 pronunciation in America. In the chapter on Sound S3'mbolism 
 (XX) we shall see some other instances of exceptional phonetic 
 treatment of symbolic words (especially tiny, teeny, little, cuckoo). 
 
 XV.— § 9. Divergent Changes and Analogy. 
 
 Besides equidistant and convergent sound changes we have 
 divergent changes, through which sounds at one time identical 
 have separated themselves later. This is a mere consequence of 
 the fact that it is rare for a sound to be changed equally in all 
 positions in which it occurs. On the contrary, one must admit 
 that the vast majority of sound changes are conditioned by some 
 such circumstance as influence of neighboiu-ing soimds, position 
 as initial, medial or final (often with subdivisions, as position 
 between vowels, etc.), place in a strongly or weakly stressed 
 S3llable, and so forth. One may take as examples some familiar 
 instances from French : Latin c (pronounced [k]), is variously 
 treated before o {corpus> corps), a {cane7n> chien), and e [centum 
 > cent) ; in amicum> ami it has totally disappeared. Lat. a 
 
 ^ The NED has not arrived at this explanation; it says : '^ Peer ia not 
 a phonetic development of pire, and cannot, so far as is at present known, 
 be formally identified with that word " ; " the verbs keek, peek, and peep 
 are app. closely allied to each other. Kike and pike, na earlier forms of 
 keek and peek, occur in Chaucer ; pepe, peep is of later appearance. . . . 
 The phonetic relations between the forms pike, peek, jyeak, are as yet un- 
 explained. " 
 
§9] DIVERGENT CHANGES AND ANALOGY 289 
 
 becomes e in a stressed open syllable {natum> ne), except before 
 a nasal {aniat > aivie) ; but after c we have a different treatment 
 {cancm> chien) , and in a close syllable it is kept {arborem 
 > arbre) ; in weak syllables it is kept initially {amorem> amour), 
 but becomes [a] (spelt e) finally {bona> bonne). This enumeration 
 of the chief rules will serve to show the far-reaching differentia- 
 tion which in this way may take place among words closely 
 related as parts of the same paradigm or family of words ; 
 thus, for Lat. atno, amas, amaf, atnamus, amatis, amant we get 
 OFr. am, aimes, aime, amons, amez, aiment, until the discrepancy 
 is removed through analogy, and we get the regular modern 
 forms aime, aimes, aime, aimoi^s, aimez, aiment. The levelling ten- 
 dency, however, is not strong enough to affect the initial a in 
 amour and amant, which are felt as less closel}'' connected with 
 the verbal forms. Wliat were at first only small differences may 
 in com'se of time become greater through subsequent changes, as 
 when the difference between /eeZ and felt, keep and kept, etc., which 
 was originall}' one of length only, became one of vowel quality 
 as well, through the raising of long [e"] to [i'], while short [e] was 
 not raised. And thus in many other cases. Different nations 
 differ greatly in the degree in which they permit differentiation of 
 cognate words ; most nations resent any differentiation in initial 
 sounds, wliile the Kelts have no objection to ' the same word ' 
 having as manj^ as four different beginnings (for instance t-, d-, 
 71-, nil-) according to circumstances. In Icelandic the word for 
 ' other, second ' has for centuries in different cases assumed 
 such different forms as annarr, onnur, o'brum, a^rir, forms which 
 in the other Scandinavian languages have been levelled down. 
 
 It is a natural consequence of the manner in which phono- 
 logy is usually investigated and represented in manuals of historical 
 grammar — which start with some old stage and follow the various 
 changes of each sound in later stages — that these divergent changes 
 have attracted nearly the sole attention of scholars ; this has 
 led to the prevalent idea that sound laws and analogy are the two 
 opposed principles in the life of languages, the former tending 
 always to destroy regularity and harmony, and the latter recon- 
 structing what would without it be chaos and confusion.^ 
 
 * See, for instance, the following strong expressions : " Une langue 
 est sans cesse rongee et menac^e de ruine par Taction des lois phon^tiques, 
 qui, livr^es k elles-memes, op6rei'aient avec une rdgularit^ fatale et d^eagre- 
 geraient le syat^me grammatical. . . . Heureusement I'analogie (c'est ainsi 
 qu'on d6signe la tendance inconsciente A conserver ou reorder ce que lea 
 lois phon6tiques menacent ou d^truisent) a peu k peu effac6 ces differences . . . 
 il s'agit d'une perp^tuelle degradation due aux changements phon^tiques 
 aveugles, et qui est toujours ou pr^venue ou r^par^e par une reorganisation 
 parallele du aysttme " (Bally, LV 44 f.). 
 
 19 
 
290 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xv 
 
 This view, however, is too rigorous and does not take into 
 account the manysidedness of linguistic life. It is not every 
 irregularity that is due to the operation of phonetic laws, as we 
 have in all languages many survivals of the confused manner in 
 which ideas were arranged and expressed in the mind of primitive 
 man. On the other hand, there are many phonetic changes which 
 do not increase the number of existing iiTcgularities, but make 
 for regularity and a simpler system through abolisliing phonetic 
 distinctions which had no semantic or functional value ; .such 
 are, for instance, those convergent changes of unstressed vowels 
 which have simplified the English flexional system (Ch. XIV § 10 
 above). And if we were in the habit of looking at linguistic change 
 from the other end, tracing present sounds back to former sounds 
 instead of beginning with antiquitj', we should see that convergent 
 changes are just as frequent as divergent ones. Indeed, many 
 changes may be counted under both heads ; an a, which is dis- 
 sociated from other a's through becoming e, is identified with 
 and from henceforth shares the destiny of other e's, etc. 
 
 XV. — § 10. Extension of Sound Laws. 
 
 If a phonetic change has given to some words two forms without 
 any difference in signification, the same alternation may be ex- 
 tended to other cases in which the sound in question has a different 
 origin (' phonetic analog}'' '). An undoubted instance is the un- 
 historic r in recent English. When the consonantal [r] was 
 di'opped finally and before a consonant while it was retained before 
 a vowel, and words like better, here thus came to have two forms 
 [beta, hia] and [betar (of), liiar (^n 6e'8)] better off, here and there, 
 the same alternation Avas transferred to words like idea, drama 
 [ai'dia, dra-ma], so that the sound [r] is now ver}' frequently inserted 
 before a word beginning with a vowel : Vd iio idea-r-of this, a 
 drama-Y-of Ibsen (many references MEG i. 13. 42). In French 
 final t and s have become mute, but are retained before a vowel : 
 il est [e] venu, il est [et] arrive ; les [le] femmes, les [lez] hommes ; 
 and now vulgar speakers will insert [t] or [z] in the wrong 
 place between voAvels : pa-t assez, fallai-t ecrire, avant-z-hier, 
 moi-z-aiLSsi ; this is called ' cuir ' or ' velours.' 
 
 In course of time a ' phonetic law ' maj* undergo a kind of 
 metamorphosis, being extended to a greater and greater number 
 of combinations. As regards recent times we are sometimes 
 able to trace such a gradual development. A case in point is 
 the dropping of [j] in [ju'] after certain consonants in English 
 [see MEG i. 13, 7). It began with r as in true, rude ; next came 
 I when preceded by a consonant, as in bhie, clue ; in these cases 
 
§10] EXTENSION OF SOUND LAWS 291 
 
 [j] is never heard. But after I not preceded by another consonant 
 there is a good deal of vacilhition, thus in Luci/, absolute ; after 
 [s, z] as in Siisan, resume there is a strong tendency to suppress [j], 
 though this pronunciation has not yet prevailed,^ and after [t, d,n], 
 as in tune, due, new, the suppression is in Britain only found in vulgar 
 speakers, while in some parts of the United States it is heard from 
 educated speakers as well. In the speech of the.se the sound law 
 may be said to attack any [ju-] after any point consonant, while 
 it will have to be formulated in various less comprehensive t^rms 
 for British speakers belonging to older or younger generations. 
 It is extremely difficult, not to say impossible, to reconcile such 
 occurrences with the orthodox ' young grammarian ' theory of 
 sound changes being due to a sliifting of the organic feeling or 
 motor sensation (verschiebung des bewegungsgefiihls) which is 
 supijosed to have necessarily taken place wherever the same sound 
 was under the same phonetic conditions. For what are here the 
 same phonetic conditions ? The position after r, after I com- 
 binations, after I even when standing alone, after all point con- 
 sonants ? Each generation of EngUsh speakers will give a 
 different answer to this question. Now, it is highly probable that 
 many of the comprehensive prehistoric sound changes, of which 
 we see only the final result, while possible intermediate stages 
 evade our inquiry, have begun in the same modest way as the 
 transition from [ju] to [u] in English : with regard to them we 
 are in exactly the same position as a man who had heard only 
 such speakers as say consistently [tru*, ru'd, blu", lu'si, su'zn, 
 ri'zum, tun, du', nu] and who would then naturally suppose 
 that [j] in the combination [ju*] had been dropped all at once 
 after any point consonant. 
 
 XV.— § 11. Spreading of Sound Change. 
 
 Sound laws (to retain provisionallj'^ that firmly established 
 term) have by some linguists, who rightly reject the comparison 
 with natural laws (e.g. Meringer), been compared rather with the 
 ' laws ' of fashion in dress. But I think it is important to make 
 a distinction here : the comparison with fashions throws no light 
 whatever on the question how sound changes originate — it can tell 
 us nothing about the first impulse to drop [j] in certain positions 
 before [u*] ; but the compaiison is valid when we come to consider 
 the question how such a change when first begun in one individual 
 spreads to other individuals. While the former question has been 
 
 ^ Some speakers will say [su'] in Susan, supreme, superstition, but will 
 take care to pronounce [sju*] in suit, sue. Others are more consistent one 
 way or the other. 
 
292 CAUSES OF CHANGE [cii. xv 
 
 dealt with at some length in the preceding investigation, it now 
 remains for us to say something about the latter. The spreading 
 of phonetic change, as of any other linguistic change, is due to 
 imitation, conscious and unconscious, of the speech habits of 
 other people. We have already met with imitation in the chapters 
 dealing with the child and with the influence exerted by foreign 
 languages. But man is apt to imitate throughout the whole of 
 his life, and this statement applies to his language as much as to 
 his other habits. What he imitates, in tliis as in other fields, is 
 not always the best ; a real valuation of what would be linguis- 
 tically good or preferable does not of course enter the head of 
 the ' man in the street.' But he may imitate what he thinks 
 pretty, or funny, and especially what he thinks characteristic of 
 those people whom for some reason or other he looks up to. 
 Imitation is essentially a social phenomenon, and if people do not 
 always imitate the best (the best thing, the best pronunciation), 
 they will generalh^ imitate ' their betters,' i.e. those that are 
 superior to them — in rank, in social position, in wealth, in every- 
 thing that is thought enviable. What constitutes this superiority 
 cannot be stated once for all ; it varies according to surroundings, 
 age, etc. A schoolboy may feel tempted to imitate a rough, swag- 
 gering boy a year or two older than himself rather than his teachers 
 or parents, and in later life he may find other people worthy of 
 imitation, according to his occupation or profession or individual 
 taste. But when he does imitate he is apt to imitate everything, 
 even sometimes things that are not worth imitating. In this way 
 Percy, in Henry IV, Second Part, ii. 3. 24 — 
 
 was indeed the glasse 
 Wherein the noble j'outh did dresse themselues. 
 He had no legges, that practic'd not his gate, 
 And speaking thicke ^ (which Nature made hia blemish) 
 Became the accents of the valiant. 
 For those that could speake low and tardily, 
 Would turne their owne perfection to abusee, 
 To seeme like him. So that in speech, in gate . . . 
 He was the marke, and glasse, coppy, and booke. 
 That fashion'd others. 
 
 The spreading of a new pronunciation through imitation must 
 necessarily take some time, though the process may in some 
 instances be fairly rapid. In some historical instances we are 
 able to see how a new sound, taking its rise in some particular part 
 of a country, spreads graduallj^ like a wave, until finally it has 
 pervaded the whole of a linguistic area. It cannot become uni- 
 versal all at once ; but it is evident that the more natural a new 
 
 * I.e. " With confused and indistinct articulation ; also, with a husky 
 or hoarse voice " — NED. 
 
§11] SPREADING OF SOUND CHANGE 298 
 
 mode of pronunciation seems to members of a particular speech 
 community, the more readily will it be accepted and the more 
 rapid will be its diffusion. Very often, both when the new pro- 
 nunciation is easier and when there are special psychological 
 inducements operating in one definite direction, the new form 
 may originate independently in different individuals, and that of 
 course will facilitate its acceptation by others. But as a rule a 
 new pronunciation does not become general except after manj' 
 attempts : it may have arisen many times and have died out 
 again, until finall}'^ it finds a fertile soil in which to take firm root. 
 It may not be superfluous to utter a warning against a fallacy which 
 is found now and then in linguistic works : when some Danish 
 or English document, say, of the fifteenth century contains a 
 spelling indicative of a pronunciation which we should call 
 ' modern,' it is hastily concluded that j^eople in those days spoke 
 in that respect exactly as they do now, whatever the usual spelling 
 and the testimony of m.uch later grammarians may indicate to 
 the contrarj'. But this is far from certain. The more isolated 
 such a spelling is, the greater is the probability that it shows 
 nothing but an individual or even momentary deviation from 
 what was then the common pronunciation — the first swallow ' who 
 found Avith horror that he'd not brought spring.' 
 
 XV.— § 12. Reaction. 
 
 Even those who have no linguistic training will have some 
 apperception of sounds as such, and will notice regular correspon- 
 dences, and even occasionally exaggerate them, thereby produc- 
 ing those ' hj'percorrect ' forms which are of specially frequent 
 occurrence when dialect speakers try to use the ' received stan- 
 dard ' of their country. The psychology of this process is well 
 brought out by B. I. Wheeler, who relates {Transact. Am. Philol. 
 Ass. 32. 14, 1901 ; I change his symbols into my own phonetic 
 notation) : " In my o^m native dialect I pronounced new as [nu*]. 
 I have found mj'self in later years inclined to say [nju], especially 
 Avhen speaking carefulh^ and particularly in public ; so also 
 [tju'zdi] Tuesday. There has developed itself in connexion with 
 these and other words a dual sound-image [u* : ju"] of such validity 
 that whenever [u*] is to be formed after a dental [alveolar] ex- 
 plosive or nasal, the alternative [ju'] is likely to present itself and 
 create the effect of momentary uncertainty. Less frequently than 
 in new, Tuesday, the [j] intrudes itself in tvne, duty, due, dew, tumour, 
 tube, tutor, etc. ; but under special provocation I am liable to use 
 it in any of these, and have even caught myself, when in a mood 
 of uttermost precision, passing beyond the bounds of the imitative 
 
294 CAUSES OF CHANGE [cii. xv 
 
 adoption of the new sound into self-annexed territory, and creat- 
 ing [dju'] do and [tjir] two." One more instance from America 
 may bo given : "In the dialect of Missouri and the neighbouring 
 States, final a in such words as America, Arizona, Nevada becomes 
 y — Americy, Arizony, Nevady. All educated people in that region 
 carefully correct this vulgarism out of their speech ; and many 
 of them carry the correction too far and say Missoura, jjraira, etc." 
 (Sturtevant, LCH 79). Similarly, many Ii-ish people, noticing 
 that refined English has [i] in many cases where they have [e*] 
 {tea, sea, please, etc.) adopt [i] in these words, and tran.sfcr it 
 erroneously to words like great, pear, bear, etc. (MEG i. 11. 73) ; 
 they may also, when correcting their own ar into er, in such words 
 as learn, go too far and speak of derning a stocking (Joyce, English 
 as we speak it in Ireland, 93). Cf. from England such forms as 
 ruing, certing, for rni7i, certain. 
 
 From Germany I may mention that Low German speakers 
 desiring to talk High German are apt to say zeller instead of teller, 
 because High German in many words has z for their t {zaJil, zahm, 
 etc.), and that those who in their native speech have j for g 
 (Berlin, etc., eine jute jebratene jans ist eine jute jabe jottes) 
 will sometimes, when trying to talk correctly, say getzt, gahr for 
 jetzt, jahr.^ 
 
 It will be easily seen that such hypercorrect forms are closely 
 related to those ' spelling pronunciations ' which become frequent 
 M'hen there is much reading of a language whose spelling is not 
 accurately phonetic ; the nineteenth century saw a great number 
 of them, and their number is likelj'' to increase in this century — 
 especially among social upstarts, who are always fond of showing 
 off their new-gained superioritj'^ in this and similar wa3'^s. But 
 they need not detain us here, as being really foreign to our subject, 
 the natural development of speech sounds. I only wish to point 
 out that many forms which are apparently due to influence from' 
 spelling may not have their origin exclusively from that source, 
 but may be genuine archaic forms that have been preserved 
 through purely oral tradition by the side of more worn-down 
 forms of the same word. For it must be admitted that two or 
 three forms of the same word may coexist and be used according 
 to the more or less solemn style of utterance employed. Even 
 
 ^ Even in speaking a foreign language one may unconsciously apply 
 phonetic correspondences ; a countryman of mine thus told me that he 
 once, in his anger at being charged an exorbitant price for something, ex- 
 claimed : " Das sind doch unhlaue preise ! " — coining in the hurrjr the word 
 unblaue for the Danish ublu (shameless), because the negative prefix un- 
 corresponds to Dan. u-, and aw very often stands in German where Dan. 
 has u {haus = hus, etc.). On hearing his own words, however, he imme- 
 diately saw his mistake and burst out laughing 
 
§ 12] REACTION 295 
 
 among savages, who are unacquainted with the art of writing, 
 we are told that archaic forms of speech are often kept up and 
 remembered as parts of old songs only, or as belonging to solemn 
 rites, cults, etc. 
 
 XV.— § 13. Sound Laws and Etymological Science. 
 
 In this and the preceding chapter I have tried to pass in review 
 the various circumstances which make for changes in the phonetic 
 structure of languages. My treatment is far from exhaustive and 
 may have other defects ; but I want to point out the fact that 
 nowhere have I found any reason to accept the theory that sound 
 changes always take place according to rigorous or ' blind ' laws 
 admitting no exceptions. On the contrary, I have found many 
 indications that complete consistency is no more to be expected 
 from human beings in pronunciation than in any other sphere. 
 
 It is verj' often said that if sound laws admitted of exceptions 
 there would be no possibility of a science of etymology. Thus 
 Curtius wrote as early as 1858 (as quoted by Oertel 259) : "If 
 the history of language really showed such sporadic aberrations, 
 such pathological, wholly irrational phonetic malformations, we 
 should have to give up all etymologizing. For only that which 
 is governed by law and reducible to a coherent system can form 
 the object of scientific investigation ; whatever is due to chance 
 may at best be guessed at, but will never yield to scientific infer- 
 ence." In his practice, however, Curtius was not so strict as his 
 followers. Leskien, one of the recognized leaders of the ' young 
 grammarians,' says {DekUnation, xxvii) : " If exceptions are 
 admitted at will (abweichungen), it amounts to declaring that 
 the object of examination, language, is inaccessible to scientific 
 comprehension." Since then, it has been rejDeated over and over 
 again that without strict adherence to phonetic laws etymological 
 science is a sheer impossibility, and sometimes those who have 
 doubted the existence of strict laws in phonology have been looked 
 upon as obscurantists adverse to a scientific treatment of lan- 
 guage in general, although, of course, they did not believe that 
 everything is left to chance or that they were free to put forward 
 purely arbitrary exceptions. 
 
 There are, however, many instances in which it is hardly 
 possible to deny etymological connexion, though ' the phonetic 
 laws are not observed,' Is not Gothic azgo vnth its voiced conso- 
 nants evidently ' the same word ' as E. ash, G. asche, Dan. aske, 
 with their voiceless consonants ? G. neffe with short vowel must 
 nevertheless be identical with MHG. neve, OHG. nevo ; E. pebble 
 with OE. papol ; rescue with ME. rescoive ; fiagon with Fr. fiacon, 
 
29G CAUSES OF CHANGE [en. xv 
 
 though each of these words contains deviations from what wo 
 find in other cases. It is hard to keep apart two similar forms 
 for ' heart,' one with initial gh in Skt. hrd and Av. zered-, and 
 another with initial k in Gr. kardia, ker, Lat. cor, Goth, hairto, 
 etc. The Greek ordinals Mbdomis, dgdoos have voiced consonants 
 over against the voiceless combinations in hejUd, okio, and yet 
 cannot be separated from them. All this goes to show (and many 
 more cases might be instanced) that there are in everj'^ language 
 words so similar in sound and signification that thej'^ cannot be 
 separated, though they break the ' sound laws ' : in such cases, 
 where etjnnologies are too palpable, even the strictest scholars 
 momentarilj' forget their strictness, maybe with great reluctance 
 and in the secret hope that some day the reason for the deviation 
 may be discovered and the principle thus be maintained. 
 
 Instead of exacting strict adherence to sound laws everywhere 
 as the basis of any etymologizing, it seems therefore to be in better 
 agi'eement with common sense to say : whenever an etymology 
 is not palpably e\ddent, whenever there is some difficulty because 
 the compared words are cither too remote in sound or in sense or 
 belong to distant periods of the same language or to remotely 
 related languages, your etymologj'' cannot be reckoned as j^^oved 
 unless you have shown by other strictly parallel cases that the 
 sound in question has been treated in exactly the same way in the 
 same language. This, of course, appUes more to old than to modern 
 periods, and we thus see that while in living languages accessible 
 to direct observation we do not find sound laws observed without 
 exceptions, and though we must suppose that, on account of the 
 essential similarity of human psj'^chology, conditions have been 
 the same at all periods, it is not imreasonable, in giving etj-mo- 
 logies for words from old periods, to act as if sound changes followed 
 strict laws admitting no exceptions ; this is simplv a matter of 
 proof, and really amounts to this : where the matter is doubt- 
 ful, we must require a great degree of j^robability in that field 
 which allows of the simplest and most easilj^ controllable formulas, 
 nameh' the phonetic field. For here "\\e have comparatively 
 definite phenomena and are consequent!}' able with relative ease 
 to compute the possibilities of change, while this is infinitely more 
 difficult in the field of significations. The possibilities of semantic 
 change are so manifold that the only thing generally required 
 when the change is not obvious is to show some kind of parallel 
 change, which need not even have taken place in the same lan- 
 guage or group of languages, while with regard to somids the 
 corresponding changes must have occurred in the same language 
 and at the same period in order for the evidence to be sufficient to 
 establish the etymology in question. 
 
§ 18] SOUND LAWS AND ET\^IOLOGICAL SCIENCE 297 
 
 It would perhaps be best if linguists entirely gave up the habit 
 of speaking about phonetic ' laws,' and instead used some such 
 expression as phonetic formulas or rules. But if we are to keep 
 the word ' law,' we may with some justice think of the use of 
 that word in juridical parlance. Wlien we read such phrases as : 
 tliis assumption is against phonetic laws, or, phonetic laws do not 
 allow us this or that etymology, or, the wTiter of some book under 
 review is guilty of many transgressions of established phonetic 
 laws, etc., such expressions cannot help suggesting the idea that 
 phonetic laws resemble jjaragraphs of some criminal law. We 
 may formulate the principle in something like the following way : 
 If in the etjanologies you propose you do not observe these rules, 
 if, for instance, you venture to make Gr, kaleo = E. call in sjjite 
 of the fact that Gr. Jc in other words corresponds to E. h, then 
 you incur the severest punishment of science, your etymology is 
 rejected, and you yourself are put outside the pale of serious 
 students. 
 
 In another respect phonetic laws may be compared with what 
 we might call a Darwinian law in zoology, such as this : the fore- 
 limbs of the common ancestor of mammals have developed into 
 flippers in whales and into hands in apes and men. The simi- 
 larity between both kinds of laws is not inconsiderable. A micro- 
 scopic examination of whales, even an exact investigation by 
 means of the eye alone, will reveal innumerable little deviations : 
 no two flippers are exactly alike. And in the same ^^ay no two 
 persons speak in exactly the same wa3^ But the fact that w'e 
 cannot in detail account for each of these nuances should not 
 make us doubt that they are developed in a perfectlj^ natural 
 wa,y, in accordance with the great law of causality, nor should we 
 despair of the possibility of scientific treatment, even if some 
 of the flippers and some of the sounds are not exactly w'hat we 
 should expect. A law of fore-limb development can only be 
 deduced through such observation of many flippers as will single 
 out what is tj'pical of whales' flippers, and then a comparison 
 with the typical fore-limbs of their ancestors or of their congeners 
 among existing mammals. And in the same way we do not find 
 laws of phonetic development until, after leaving what can be 
 examined as it were microscopically, we go on telescopically to 
 examine languages which are far removed from each other in 
 space or time : then small differences disappear, and we discover 
 nothing but the great lines of a regular evolution which is the 
 outcome of an infinite number of small movements in many 
 different directions. 
 
298 CAUSES OF CHANGE [en. xv 
 
 XV.— §14. Conclusion. 
 
 It has been one of the leading thought.s in tlic two chapters 
 devoted to the causes of linguistic change that phonetic changes, 
 to be fully understood, should not be isolated from other changes, 
 foi' in actual linguistic life we witness a constant interplay of 
 sound and sense. Not only should each sound change be always 
 as far as possible seen in connexion with other sound changes 
 going on in the same period in the same language (as in the great 
 vowel-raising in English), but the effects on the speech material 
 as a whole should in each case be investigated, so as to show what 
 homophones (if any) were produced, and what danger they 
 entailed to the understanding of natural sentences. Sounds 
 should never be isolated from the words in which the}^ occur, nor 
 M'ords from sentences. No hard-and-fast boundary can be drawn 
 between phonetic and non-phonetic changes. The psychological 
 motives for both kinds of changes are the same in many cases, 
 and the way in which both kinds spread through imitation is 
 absolutely identical : what was said on this subject above (§11) 
 applies without the least qualification to any linguistic change, 
 whether in sounds, in grammatical forms, in s\aitax, in the signi- 
 fication of words, or in the adoption of ne^v \^•o^ds and dropping 
 of old ones. 
 
 We shall here finally very briefly consider something which 
 pla5''3 a certain part in the development of language, but which 
 has not been adequately dealt with in what precedes, namely, 
 the desire to play with language. We have already met with 
 the effects of playfulness in one of the chapters devoted to children 
 (p. 148) : here we shall see that the same tendency is also powerful 
 in the language of grown-up people, though most among young 
 people. There is a certain exuberance which will not rest con- 
 tented with traditional expressions, but finds amusement in the 
 creation and propagation of new words and in attaching new 
 meanings to old words : this is the exact opposite of that linguistic 
 poverty which we found was at the bottom of such minimum 
 languages as Pidgin-English. We find it in the wealth of pet- 
 names which lovers have for each other and mothers for their 
 children, in the nicknames of schoolboys and of ' pals ' of later 
 life, as well as in the perversions of ordinarj' words which at times 
 become the fashion among small sets of people who are constantly 
 thrown together and have plenty of spare time ; cf. also the ' little 
 language ' of kSwift and Stella. Most of these forms of speech 
 have a narrow range and have only an ephemeral existence, but 
 in the world of slang the same tendencies are constantly at work. 
 
 Slang words are often confused with vulgarisms, though the 
 
§14] CONCLUSION 299 
 
 two things arc really different. The vulgar tongue is a class 
 dialect, and a vulgarism is an element of the normal speech of 
 low-class people, just as ordinarj?^ dialect words are elements of 
 the natural speech of peasants in one particular district ; slang 
 words, on the other hand, are words used in conscious contrast 
 to the natural or normal speech : they can be found in all classes 
 of society in certain moods, and on certain occasions when a speaker 
 wants to avoid the natural or normal word because he thinks it 
 too flat or uninteresting and wants to achieve a different effect 
 by breaking loose from the ordinary expression. A vulgarism is 
 what will present itself at once to the mind of a person belonging 
 to one particular class ; a slang word is something that is wilfully 
 substituted for the first word that will present itself. The dis- 
 tinction will perhaps appear most clearly in the case of grammar : 
 if a man saj's the^n boys instead of those boys, or knowed instead of 
 kneiv, these are the normal forms of his language, and he knows 
 no better, but the educated man looks doMH upon these forms 
 as vulgar. Inverselj', an educated man may amuse himself now 
 and then by using forms which he perfectly well knoA\s are not 
 the received forms, thus vnmk from wink, collode from collide, 
 'pranght from preach (on the analogy of taught) ; " We handshook 
 and ca^idlestuck, as somebody said, and went to bed " (H. James). 
 But, of course, slang is more productive in the lexical than in the 
 grammatical portion of language. And there is something that 
 makes it difficult in practice always to keep slang and vulgar speech 
 apart, namely, that when a person wants to leave the beaten path 
 of normal language he is not alwa3'8 particular as to the source 
 whence he takes his unusual words, and he may therefore some- 
 times take a vulgar word and raise it to the dignity of a slang word. 
 
 A slang word is at first individual, but may through imitation 
 become fashionable in certain sets ; after some time it may either 
 be accepted by everybody as part of the normal language, or else, 
 more frequently, be so hacknej'^ed that no one finds pleasure in 
 using it any longer. 
 
 Slang words may first be words from the ordinary language 
 used in a different sense, generally metaphorically. Sometimes 
 we meet with the same figurative expression in the slang of various 
 countries, as when the ' head ' is termed the upper story {upper 
 loft, upperivorks) in English, >er^'er5/e etage in Danish, and oberstiibchen 
 in German ; more often different images are chosen in different 
 languages, as when for the same idea we have nut or chump in 
 English and pcere (' pear ') in Danish, coco or ciboule (or bovle) in 
 French. Slang words of this character may in some instances give 
 rise to expressions the origin of which is totally forgotten. In old 
 alang there is an expression for the tongue, the red rag ; this is 
 
800 CAUSES OF CHANGE [ch. xv 
 
 shortened into the rag, and I suspect that the verb U> rag, ' to scold, 
 rate, talk severely to ' (" of obscure origin," NED), is simply from 
 this substantive (of. to jaw). 
 
 Secondly, slang words may be words of the normal language 
 used in their ordinary signification, but more or less modified in 
 regard to form. Thus we have many shortened forms, exam, quad, 
 pub, for examination, quadrangle, imhlic-hoiise, etc. Not unfre- 
 quently the shortening process is combined with an extension, 
 some ending being more or less arbitrarily substituted for the latter 
 part of the word, as when football becomes footer, and Rvgby foot- 
 ball and Association football become Rugger and Soaker, or when 
 at Cambridge a freshman is called a fresher and a bedmaker a 
 bedder. 
 
 In schoolboys' slang (Harrow) there is an ending -agger which 
 may be added instead of the latter part of anj' ^\■ord ; about 1885 
 Prince Albert Victor when at Cambridge ^^•as nicknamed the Prag- 
 ger ; an Agnostic was called a Nogger, etc. I strongly suspect that 
 the word swagger is formed in the same way from swashbncMer. 
 Another schoolboys' ending is -g : fog, seg, lag, for ' first, second, 
 last,' gag at Winchester for ' gathering ' (a special kind of Latin 
 exercise). Charles Lamb mentions from Christ's Hospital crvg for 
 ' a quarter of a loaf,' evidently from crust ; sag — sovereign, snag 
 = snail (old), sivig = swill ; words \i\ie fag, -peg away, and others are 
 perhajDS to be explained from the same tendenc3\ Ai'nold Bennett 
 in one of his books says of a schoolboy that his vocabulary com- 
 prised an extraordinary number of words ending in gs : foggs, 
 seggs, for first, second, etc. It is interesting to note that in French 
 argot there are similar endings added to more or less mutilated 
 words : -ague, -eque, -oque (Sainean, L' Argot ancien, 1907, 50 and 
 esi^ecially 57). 
 
 There is also a peculiar class of roundabout expressions iji 
 which the speaker avoids the regular word, but hints at it in a 
 covert way by using some other word, generally a proper name, 
 which bears a resemblance to it or is derived from it, reallj'' or 
 seemingly. Instead of saying ' I want to go to bed,' he will say, 
 ' I am for Bedfordshire,' or in German ' leh gehe nach Bethle- 
 hem ' or ' nach Bettingen,' in Danish ' g& til Slumstrup, Sov- 
 strup, Hvilsted.' Thus also 'send a person to Birching-lane,' 
 i.e. to whip him, ' he has been at Hammersmith,' i.e. has been 
 beaten, thrashed; 'you are on the highway to Needham,' i.e. 
 on the high-road to povertv, etc. (Cf. my paper on " Punning or 
 Allusive Phrases " in Nord. Tidsslr. f. Fil. 3 r. 9. 66.) 
 
 The language of poetry is closely related to slang, in so far as 
 both strive to avoid commonplace and everydaj' expressions. 
 The difference is that where slang looks only for the striking or 
 
§14] CONCLUSION 801 
 
 unexpected expression, and therefore often is merely eccentric 
 or funny (sometimes only would-be comic), poetry looks higher 
 and craves abiding beauty — beauty in thought as well as 
 beauty in form, the latter obtained, among other things, by 
 rhythm, alliteration, rime, and harmonious variety of vowel 
 sounds. 
 
 In some coimtries these forms tend to become stereotyped, 
 and then may to some extent kill the poetic spirit, poetry becoming 
 artificiality instead of art ; the later Skaldic poetry may serve 
 as an illustration. Where there is a strong literary tradition — 
 and that may be found even where there is no WTitten literature — 
 veneration for the old literature handed down from one's ancestors 
 will often lead to a certain fossilization of the literary language, 
 which becomes a shrine of archaic expressions that no one uses 
 naturally or can master without great labour. If this state of 
 things persists for centuries, it results in a cleavage between the 
 spoken and the WTitten language which cannot but have the most 
 disastrous effects on all higher education : the conditions pre- 
 vailing nowadaj'-s in Greece and in Southern India may serve as 
 a warning. Space forbids me more than a bare mention of this 
 topic, which would deserve a much fuller treatment ; for details 
 I may refer to K. Krumbacher, Das Problem der 7ietigriechischen 
 tSchriftspracke, Munich, 1902 (for the other side of the case see 
 G. N. Hatzidakis, Die S2irachfrage in Oriechenland, Athens, 1905) 
 and G. V. Ramamurti, A Memorandum on Modern Telngn 
 Madras, 1913. 
 
BOOK IV 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 ETYMOLOGY 
 
 § 1. Achievements. §2. Doubtful Cases. §3. Facts, not Fancies. §4. Hope. 
 § 5. Requirements. § 6. Blendings. § 7. Echo Words. § 8. Some 
 Conjunctions. § 9. Object of Etymology. § 10. Reconstruction. 
 
 XVI. — § 1. Achievements. 
 
 Few things have been more often quoted in works on linguistics 
 than Voltaire's mot that in etymology vowels count for nothing 
 and consonants for very little. But it is now said just as often 
 that the satire might be justlj' levelled at the pseudo-scientific 
 etymologj^ of the eighteenth centur}-, but has no application to our 
 own times, in which etjanology knows how to deal with both 
 vowels and consonants, and — it should be added, though it is 
 often forgotten — with the meanings of words. One often comes 
 across outbursts of joy and pride in the achievements of modern 
 etymological science, like the following, which is quoted here instar 
 omnium. : " Nowadays etymology has got past the period of more 
 or less ' happy thoughts ' (giiicklichen einfalle) and has developed 
 into a science in which, exactly as in any other science, serious 
 persevering work must lead to reliable results " (H. Schroder, 
 Ablautstuclien, 1910, X; cf. above, Max Miiller and Whitney, p. 89). 
 There is no denying that much has been achieved, but it is 
 equally true that a skeptical mind cannot fail to be struck with 
 the uncertainty of many proposed explanations : very often 
 scholars have not got beyond ' happy thoughts,' manj'^ of which 
 have not even been happy enough to have been accepted by 
 anybod}' except their first ijerpetrators. From English alone, 
 which for twelve hundred years has had an abundant written 
 literature, and which has been studied by manj^ eminent linguists, 
 who have had many sister-languages with Avhich to com- 
 pare it, it would be an easy matter to compile a long list of 
 words, well-known words of everyday occurrence, which etymo- 
 logists have had to give up as beyond their powers of solution 
 (fit, put, pull, cut, rouse, pun, fun, job). And equally perplexing 
 are many words now current all over Europe, some of them 
 comparatively recent and yet completely enigmatic : race, baron, 
 baroque, rococo, zinc. 
 
 20 305 
 
806 ETY^IOLOGY [ch. xvi 
 
 XVI.— § 2. Doubtful Cases. 
 
 Or let us take a word of that class which forms the staple 
 subject of etymological disquisitions, one in which the semantic 
 side is literally as clear as simshine, namely the word for ' sun.' 
 Here Ave have, among others, the following forms : (1) sun, OE. 
 sunne, Goth, sunno; (2) Dan., Lat, sol, Goth, sauil, Gr, helios ; 
 (3) OE. sigel, scegl, Goth, sugil ; (4) OSlav. slutitce, Russ. solnce 
 (now with mute /). That these forms are related cannot be 
 doubted, but their mutual relation, and their relation to Gr. selene, 
 which means 'moon,' and to OE. sivegel 'sky,' have never been 
 cleared up. Holthausen derives sunno from the verb sinnan ' go ' 
 and OE. sigel from the verb sigan ' descend, go down ' — but is 
 it really probable that our ancestors should have thought of the 
 sun primarily as the one that goes, or that sets ? The word south 
 (orig. *sun]> ; the n as in OHG. sund is still kept in Dan. senden) 
 is generally explained as connected with sun, and the meaning 
 ' suimy side ' is perfectly natural ; but now H. Schroder thinks 
 that it is derived from a word meaning ' right ' (OE. sv)ii>re, orig. 
 ' stronger,' a comparative of the adj. found in G. geschwind), 
 and he says that the south is to the right when you look at the 
 sun at sumise — Avhich is j)erfectly true, but why should people 
 have thought of the south as being to the right when they wanted 
 to speak of it in the afternoon or evening ? 
 
 Let me take one more example to show that om* present methods, 
 or perhaps our present data, sometimes leave us completely in the 
 Im'ch with regard to the most ordinaiy words. We have a series 
 of words which may all, Avithout any formal difficulties, be referred 
 to a root-form seqw-. Their significations are, respectively — 
 
 (1) 'say,' E, say, OE. secgan, ON. segja, G. sagen, Lith. sahjti. 
 
 To this is referred Gr. ennepe, enispein, Lat. inseque 
 and possibly inquamS 
 
 (2) ' shoAv, point out,' OSlav. sociti, Lat. signum. 
 
 (3) ' see,' E. see, OE. seon, Goth, saihwan, G. sehen, etc. 
 
 (4) ' folloAv,' Lat. sequor, Gr. hepomai, Ski-, sdcate. Here 
 
 belongs Lat. socius, OE. secg 'man,' orig. 'foUoAver.' 
 NoAA', are these four groups ' etj-mologically identical ' ? 
 Ophiions differ Avidely, as may be seen from C. D. Buck, " Words 
 of Speaking and Saying " {Am. Journ. of Philol. 36. 128, 1915). 
 They may be thus tabulated, a comma meaning supposed identity 
 and a dash the opposite : 
 
 1, 2-3, 4 Kluge, Talk, Torp. 
 1, 2, 3-4 Brugmann. 
 1, 2, 3, 4 Wood, Buck.i 
 
 ' With regard to Lat. signum it should be noted that it is by others 
 explained as coming from Lat. secure and as meaning a notch. 
 
§2] DOUBTFUL CASES 307 
 
 For the transition in meaning from ' see ' to ' say ' we are 
 referred to such words as observe, notice, G. bemerkung, while in 
 G. anweisen, and still more in Lat. dico, there is a similar transition 
 from 'show' to 'say.' Wood derives the signification 'follow' 
 from 'point out,' through 'show, guide, attend.' With regard 
 to the relation between 3 and 4, it has often been said that to see 
 is to follow with the eyes. In short, it is possible, if you take 
 some little pains, to discover notional ties between all four groups 
 which may not be so very much looser than those between other 
 words which everybody thinks related. And yet ? I cannot see 
 that the knowledge we have at present enables us, or can enable 
 us, to do more than leave the mutual relation of these groups an 
 open question. One man's guess is just as good as another's, or 
 one man's yes as another man's no — if the comiexion of these 
 words is ' science,' it is, if I may borrow an expression from the 
 old archaeologist Samuel Pegge, scientia ad libitum. Personal 
 predilection and individual taste have not been ousted from 
 etymological research to the extent many scholars would have 
 us believe. 
 
 Or we may perhaps say that among the etymologies found in 
 dictionaries and linguistic journals some are solid and fii'm as 
 rocks, but others are liquid and fluctuate like the sea ; and finally 
 not a few are in a gaseous state and blow here and there as the 
 wind listeth. Some of them are no better than poisonous gases, 
 from which may Heaven preserve us ! ^ 
 
 XVI.— § 3. Facts, not Fancies. 
 
 As early as 1867 IMichel Breal, in an excellent article (reprinted 
 in M 267 ff.), called attention to the dangers resulting from the 
 general tendency of comparative linguists to " jump intermediate 
 steps in order at once to mount to the earliest stages of the lan- 
 guage," but his warning has not taken effect, so that etjrmologists 
 in dealing with a word found only in comparatively recent times 
 will often try to reconstruct what might have been its Proto- 
 Aryan form and compare that with some word found in some 
 other language. Thus, Falk and Torp refer G. krieg to an Aryan 
 primitive form *greigho-, *grtgho-, which is compared with Irish 
 
 ^ It is, of course, impossible to say how great a proportion of the 
 etymologies given in dictionaries should strictly be classed under each of 
 the following heads : (1) certain, (2) probable, (3) possible, (4) improbable, 
 (5) impossible — but I am afraid the first two classes would be the least 
 numerous. Meillet (Gr 59) has some excellent remarks to the same effect ; 
 according to him, " pour une etymologie sure, les dictionnaires en offrent 
 plus de dix qui sont douteuses et dont, en appliquant une m^thode rigoureuse, 
 on ne saurait fair© la preuve." 
 
808 ETYMOLOGY [ch. xvi 
 
 brig 'force.' But the German word is not found in use till the 
 middle period ; it is peculiar to German and unknown in related 
 languages (for the Scandinavian and probably also the Dutch 
 words are later loans from Germany). These writers do not take 
 into account how improbable it is that such a word, if it were 
 really an old traditional word for this fundamental idea, should 
 never once have been recorded in any of the old documents of the 
 whole of our family of languages. What should we think of the 
 man who would refer boche, the French nickname for ' German ' 
 which became current in 1914, and before that time had only been 
 used for a few years and known to a few people onlj% to a Proto- 
 Aryan root-form ? Yet the method in both cases is identical ; 
 it presupposes what no one can guarantee, that the words in 
 question are of those which trot along the royal road of language 
 for century after century without a single side-jump, semantic 
 or phonetic. Such words are the favourites of linguists because 
 they have always behaved themselves since the days of Noah ; 
 but others are full of the most unexpected pranks, which no 
 scientific ingenuity can discover if we do not happen to know the 
 historical facts. Think of grog, for example. Admiral Vernon, 
 known to sailors by the nickname of " Old Grog " because he wore 
 a cloak of grogram (this, by the way, from Fr. gros grain), in 1740 
 ordered a mixture of rum and water to be served out instead 
 of pure rum, and the name was transferred from the person 
 to the drink. If it be objected that such leaps are found 
 only in slang, the answer is that slang words very often become 
 recognized after some time, and who knows but that may 
 have been the case with krieg just as well as with many a 
 recent word ? 
 
 At any rate, facts weigh more than fancies, and whoever wants 
 to establish the etj-mology of a w'ord must first ascertain all the 
 historical facts available with regard to the place and time of 
 its rise, its earliest signification and syntactic construction, its 
 diffusion, the sjiionyms it has ousted, etc. Thus, and thus only, 
 can he hope to rise above loose conjectiu'es. Here the great 
 historical dictionaries, above all the Oxford New English Dictionary, 
 render invaluable service. And let me mention one model article 
 outside these dictionaries, in which Hermann I\Ioller has in my 
 opinion given a satisfactory solution of the riddle of G. ganz : 
 he explains it as a loan from Slav komcl ' end,' used especially 
 adverbially (perhaps with a preposition in the form v-konec or 
 v-konc) ' to the end, completel.y ' ; Slav c = G. z, Slav k pronounced 
 essentially as South G. g ; the gradual spreading and various 
 significations and derived forms are accounted for with very great 
 learning {Zs. f. D. Alt. 36. 326 ff.). It is curious that this article 
 
§3] FACTS, NOT FANCIES 809 
 
 should have been generally overlooked or neglected, though the 
 •vvTiter seems to have met all the legitimate requirements of a 
 scientific etymology. 
 
 XVI.— § 4. Hope. 
 
 I have endeavoured to fulfil these requirements in the new 
 explanation I have given of the word liope (Dan. hahe, Swed. 
 hoppas, G. hoffen), now used in all Gothonic tongues in exactly 
 the same signification. Etymologists are at variance about this 
 word. Kluge connects it with the OE. noun hyht, and from that 
 form infers that Gothonic *koj)6n stands for *Jmq6n, from an Arj'an 
 root kug ; he sa3-s that a connexion with Lat. cupio is scarcely 
 possible. Walde likewise rejects connexion between cupio and 
 either Jiojye or Goth. Imgjan. To Falk and Torp hope has probably 
 nothing to do with hylit, but probably with cupio, which is derived 
 from a root *kup = kvap, found in Lat. vapor ' steam,' and with 
 a secondary form *kiih, in hope, and "^kvab in Goth, af-hwapjan 
 ' choke ' — a wonderful medlej' of significations. H. Moller 
 {Indoeur.-Semit. sammenlignende Glossar 63), in accordance with 
 his usual method, establishes an Aryo-Semitic root '*k-ii-, meaning 
 ' ardere ' and transferred to ' ardere amore, cupiditate, desiderio,' 
 the root being extended with h- : pi- in hope and cupio, with gh- 
 in Goth, hugs, and with g- in OE. hyht. Surely a typical example 
 of the perplexitj- of our et3aiiologists, who disagree in everything 
 except just in the one thing which seems to me extremely doubtful, 
 that hope with the present spiritual signification goes back to 
 common Aryan. Now, what are the real facts of the matter ? 
 Simply these, that the Vvord hope turns up at a comparatively 
 late date in historical times at one particular spot, and from there 
 it gradually spreads to the neighboming countries. In Denmark 
 {hah, hdbe) and in Sweden [hopp, hoppas) it is first found late in the 
 Middle Ages as a religious loan from Low German hopie, hopen. 
 High German hoffen is found very rarely about 1150, but does 
 not become common till a hundred j-ears later ; it is undoubtedly 
 taken (with sound substitution) from Low German and moves 
 in Germany from north to south. Old Saxon has the subst. to-hopa, 
 which has probably come from OE., where we have the same 
 form for the subst., to-hopa. This is pretty common in religious 
 prose, but in poetry it is found only once (Boet.) — a certain indi- 
 cation that the word is recent. The subst. without to is com- 
 paratively late (iElfric, ab. 1000). The verb is found in rare 
 instances about a hundred years earlier, but does not become 
 common till later. Now, it is important to notice that the verb in 
 the old period never takes a direct object, but is always comiected 
 
310 ETYMOLOGY [ch. xvi 
 
 with the prciDosition to (compare the subst.), even in modern 
 usage we have to Jwpe to, for, in. Similarly in G. , w here the phrase 
 was auj elwas hojfen ; later the verb took a genitive, then a pronoun 
 in the accusative, and finally an ordinarj' object ; in biblical 
 language we find also zu gott hojfen. Now, I would connect our 
 Avord with the form hopu, found twice as part of a compoimd in 
 Beoivulf (450 and 764), where ' refuge ' gives good sense : hopan to, 
 then, is to ' take one's refuge to,' and to-hojia ' refuge.' This verb 
 I take to be at first identical with hop (the only OE. instance I 
 know of tliis is .^Ifric, Horn. 1. 202 : hoppode ongean his drlhten). 
 We have also one instance of a verb onhupian (Cura Past. 441) 
 ' di-aw back, recoil,' which agrees with ON. Iiojia ' move back- 
 wards ' (to the quotations in Fritzner may be added Laxd. 49, 15, 
 peir Osvigssynir hopudu undan).^ The original meaning seems 
 to have been ' bend, ciu"b, bow, stoop,' either in order to leap, 
 or to flee, from something bad, or towards something good ; 
 cf. the subst. hip, OE. hype, Goth, hups, Dan. hofte, G. hiifte, Lat. 
 cubitus, etc. (Holthausen, Aiujlia Beibl., 1904, 350, deals with 
 these words, but does not connect them with hop, -hopu, or hope.) 
 The transition from bodily movement to the spiritual ' hope ' may 
 have been favoured by the existence of the verb OE. hogian 
 ' think,' but is not in itself more difficult than with, e.g., Lat. 
 ex{s)ultare 'leap up, rejoice,' or Dan. lide pa 'lean to, confide in, 
 trust,' tillid ' confidence, reliance ' ; and a new word for ' hope ' 
 was required because the old luen (Goth, wens), vb. wenan, had 
 at an early age acquired a more general meaning ' opinion, 
 probability/ vb. ' suppose, imagine.' The difficulty that the 
 word for ' iiope ' has single or short p (in Swed., however, pp), 
 while Jtop, OE. hoppian, has double or long p, is no serious 
 hindrance to our etymology, because the gemination may easily 
 be accounted for on the principle mentioned below (Ch. XX 
 § 9), that is, as giving a more vivid expression of the rapid^ 
 action. 
 
 XVL— § 5. Requirements. 
 
 It is, of course, impossible to determine once for all by hard- 
 and-fast rules how gi-eat the correspondence must be for us to 
 recognize two words as ' etymologically identical,' nor to say 
 to which of the tAvo sides, the phonetic and the semantic, we 
 should attach the gi-eater importance. With the rise of historical 
 phonology the tendency has been to require exact correspondence 
 in the former respect, and in semantics to be content with 
 more or less easily fomid parallels. One example v,'\\\ shoAv hoAV 
 
 ^ Westphalian also has happen ' zuriickweichen,' ESt. 64. 88. 
 
§ 5] REQUIREMENTS 811 
 
 particular many scholars are in matters of sound. The word mit 
 (OE. hnutu, G. miss, ON. knot, Dan. m^d) is by Paul declared " not 
 related to Lat. mix " and by Kluge " neither originally akin ■with 
 nor borrowed from Lat. mix," while the NED does not even mention 
 nux and thus must think it quite impossible to connect it with 
 the English word. We have here in two related languages two 
 words resejnbling each other not only in sound, but in stem- 
 formation and gender, and possessing exactly the same signification, 
 which is as concrete and definite as possible. And yet we are 
 bidden to keep them asunder ! Fortunately I am not the first 
 to protest against such barbarity : H. Pedersen (KZ n.f. 12. 251) 
 explains both words from *dmih-, which by metathesis has 
 become *knud-, while Falk and Torp as well as Walde think 
 the latter form the original one, which in Latin has been 
 shifted into *dnuk-. WHiich of these views is correct (both may 
 be wi-ong) is of less importance than the ^ictory of common 
 sense over phonological pedantry. 
 
 There are two explanations which have had very often to do 
 duty where the phonological correspondence is not exact, namely 
 root- variation (root-expansion with determinatives) and apophony 
 (ablaut). Of the former Uhlenbeck (PBB 30. 252) says : " The 
 theorj'' of root determinatives no doubt contains a kernel of truth, 
 but it has only been fatal to etymological science, as it has drawn 
 the attention from real correspondences between well-substantiated 
 words to delusive similarities between hj^pothetical abstractions." 
 Apophony inspires more confidence, and in many cases offers fully 
 reliable explanations ; but this principle, too, has been often 
 abused, and it is difficult to find its true limitations. Many special 
 applications of it appear questionable , thus, when G. stumm, Dan. 
 stum, is explained as an apophonic form of the adj. stam, Goth. 
 stamms, from which we have the verb stammer, G. stommeln, Dan. 
 stamme : is it really probable that the designation of muteness 
 should be taken from the word for stammering 1 This appears 
 especially improbable when we consider that at the time when 
 the nev! word stumm made its appearance there was already another 
 word for ' mute,' namely ditmm, dumb, the word which has been 
 preserved in English. I therefore propose a new et^nnology : 
 stumm is a blending of the two synonyms stiU{e) and dum{b), made 
 up of the beginning of the one and the ending of the other word ; 
 through adopting the initial st- the word was also associated with 
 stump, and we get an exact correspondence between dumm, dum, 
 stumm, stum, applied to persons, and dumpf, stumpf, Dan. dump, 
 stump, applied to things. Note that in those languages (G., Dan.) 
 in which the new word stum{m) was used, the unchanged dum{m) 
 was free to develop the new sense ' stupid ' (or was the creation 
 
312 ETYMOLOGY [cir. xvi 
 
 of stum occasioned by the old word tending already to acquire 
 this secondary meaning ?), while dumb in English stuck to the 
 old signification. 
 
 XVI.— § 6. Blendings. 
 
 Blendings of synonyms play a much greater role in the develop- 
 ment of language than is generally recognized. Many instances 
 may be heard in everyday life., most of them being immediately 
 corrected by the speaker (see above, XV § 4), but these momentary 
 lapses cannot be separated from other instances which are of 
 more permanent value because they are so natural that they will 
 occur over and over again until speakers will hardly feel the blend 
 as anything else than an ordinary word. M. Bloomfield (IF 4. 71) 
 saj's that he has been many years conscious of an irrepressible 
 desire to assimilate the two verbs quench and squelch in both 
 directions by forming squench and quelch, and he has found the 
 former word in a negro story by Page. The expression ' irre- 
 pressible desire ' struck me on reading this, for I have myself in 
 my Danish speech the same feeling whenever I am to speak of 
 tending a patient, for I nearly' always say phsse as a result of 
 wavering between ^^Zeje |jJ?ai9] and passe. Man}' examples may be 
 found in G. A. Bergstrom, On Blendings of Synonymous or Cognate 
 Expressions in English, Lund, 1900, and Louise Pound, Blends, 
 Their Relation to English Word Formation, Heidelberg, 1914. But 
 neither of these two \\Titers has seen the full extent of this principle 
 of formation, which explains many words of greater importance 
 than those nonce words which are found so plentifully in Miss 
 Pound's paper. Let me give some examples, some of them new, 
 some already found by others : 
 
 blot = 6Zemish, bla,ck -f- spof, pZo/, dot ; there is also an 
 
 obsolete s'plot. 
 blunt = blind -}- stunt. 
 
 crouch = cringe, crook, crawl, fcrowk -f couch, 
 flush = fla,sh -\- hlusJi. 
 frush = frog + thrush (all three names of the same di-sease 
 
 in a horse's foot). 
 glaze (Shakespeare) — glare -\- gaze. 
 good-bye = good-night, (/ooff-morning + godbye (God be with 
 
 ye). 
 
 knoll = knell + toll. 
 
 scroll = scroiv -f roll. 
 
 slash = slay, sling, sht -{■ gash, dash. 
 
 slender = slight {slim) -{- tender. 
 
§G] BLENDIXGS 313 
 
 Such blends are especially frequent in words expressive of 
 sounds or in some other way symbolical, as, for instance : 
 
 flurry = flhig, flow and many other j^-words + hurry (note 
 
 also scurry), 
 gruff = qruxw, grhw -\- rough, 
 slide = sZip + gZ/(Ze. 
 troll — trill + roll (in some senses perhaps rather from 
 
 /read, /rundle + roll), 
 twirl = twist ~ ivhirl. 
 
 In slang blends abound, e.g. : 
 
 tosh (Harrow) = tub + wash. (Sometimes explained as 
 
 toe-wash.) 
 blarmed = bhmed, 6?essed and other 6/-words + darned 
 
 (damned). 
 be danged = (famned + hanged. 
 I swow = sive^r + \ow. 
 brunch = 6reakfast + \unch (so also, though more rarely 
 
 br upper (...-}- supper), tunch (tea + hmch), tupper 
 
 = ten, + supper).'^ 
 
 XVI.— § 7. Echo-words. 
 
 ]\Iost etymologists are verj' reluctant to admit echoism ; thus 
 Diez rejects onomatopoeic origin of It. pisciare, Fr. _2:)?<sser — an 
 echo-word if ever there was one — and says, " One can easily go too 
 far in supposing onomatopoeia : as a rule it is more advisable to 
 build on existing words " ; this he does by deriving this verb from 
 a non-existing ^pipisare, 2^ipsare, from pi2M ' pipe, tube.' Falk 
 and Toi'p refer dumj) (Dan. dumpe) to Swed. dimpa, a Gothonic 
 root demp, supposed to be an extension of an Aryan root dhen : 
 thus the}^ are too deaf to hear the sound of the heavy fall expressed 
 by um{p), cf. Dan. bumpe, bums, plumpe, skumpe, j^impe, and 
 similar words in other languages. 
 
 It may be fancy, but I think I hear the same sound in Lat. 
 2)lumbum, which I take to mean at first not the metal, but the 
 plummet that was dumped or plumped into the water and was 
 denominated from the sound ; as this was generally made of lead, 
 the word came to be used for the metal. Most etymologists take 
 it for granted that plumbum is a loan-word, some being honest 
 enough to confess that they do not know from what language, 
 while others without the least scruple or hesitation say that it 
 was taken from Iberian : our ignorance of that language is so 
 
 * Lewis Carrol's * portmanteau words ' are, of course, famous. 
 
314 ETYMOLOGY [ch. xvi 
 
 deep that no one can enter an expert's protest against such a 
 supposition.^ But if my h_Aq)othosis is right, the words plummet 
 (from OFr. plommet, a diminutive of p)lomb) as ^^ell as the verb 
 Fr. plonger, whence E. plunge, from Lat. *plumbicare, are not 
 only derivatives from j^l^onbitm (the only thing mentioned by other 
 scholars), but also echo-words, and they, or at any rate the verb, 
 must to a great extent owe their diffiision t-o their felicitously 
 sjnnbolic sound. In a novel I find : " Plump went the lead " — 
 showing how this sound is still found adequate to express the 
 falling of the lead in sounding. The NED says under the verb 
 plum]^ : " Some have compared L. plumbare ... to throw the 
 lead-line . . . but the approacli of form between j^J^nihar and the 
 LG. plump-j^hmj} group seems merely fortuitous " (!). I see 
 sound s3'mbolism in all the words plump, while the NED will only 
 allow it in the most obvious cases. From the sound of a body 
 plumping into the water we have interesting developments in the 
 adverb, as in the following quotations : I said, plump out, that 
 I couldn't stand any more of it (Bernard Shaw) | The famous 
 diatribe against Jesuitism points plumb in the same direction 
 (Morley) [ fall plum into the jaws of certain critics (Swift) | Nollie 
 was a plumb little idiot (Galsworthy). In the last sense ' entirely ' 
 it is especiallj^ frequent in America, e.g. They lost their senses, 
 plumb lost their senses (Churchill) | she's plum crazy, it's plum 
 bad, etc. Related words for fall, etc., are plop, phut, plunk, 
 plounce. Much might also be said in this connexion of various 
 pop and 606 words, but I shall refrain. 
 
 XVI.— §8. Some Conjunctions. 
 
 Sometimes obviouslj- correct etjnnologies yet leave some psycho- 
 logical points unexplained. One of my pet theories concerns some 
 adversative conjunctions. Lat. sed has been supplanted by 
 magis : It. ma, Sp. ma,^, Fr. mais. The transition is easily accounted 
 for ; from ' more ' it is no far cr}' to ' rather ' (cf. G. viehnehr), 
 which can readily be emploj-ed to correct or gainsay what has 
 just been said. The Scandinavian word for ' but ' is me7i, which 
 came into use in the fifteenth century and is explained as a blending 
 
 * Speculation has been rife, but without any generally accepted results, 
 as to the relation between plnmbiitn and words for the same metal in cognate 
 languages : Gr. molibos, molubdos and similar forms, Ir. luaide, E. lead (G. 
 lot, ' plummet, half an ounce '), Scand. bly, OSlav. olovo, OPruss. alwis ; see 
 Curtius, Prellwitz, Boisacq, Hirt Idg. 686, Schrtuler Sprachvergl. u. Vrgesch., 
 3d. ed., ii. 1. 9.5 ; Herm. Mdller, Sml. Olossar 87, says that molibos and 
 plumbum are extensions of the root m-l ' mollis esse ' and explains the differ- 
 ence between the initial sounds by referring to multum : comp. plus — certainly 
 most ingenious, but not convincing. Some of these words may originally 
 have been echo-words for the plumping plummet. 
 
§8] SOME CONJUNCTIONS 315 
 
 of meden in its shortened form men (now mens) ' while ' and Low 
 German me)i " but,' which stands for older niwan, from the negative 
 ni and loan ' wanting ' ; the meaning has developed through that 
 of ' except ' and the sound is easily understood as an instance of 
 assimilation. The same phonetic development is foimd in Dutch 
 maar, OFris. mar, from en ivare ' were not,' the same combination 
 which has yielded G. nur. Thus we have four different ways of 
 getting to expressions for ' but,' none of which presents the least 
 difficulty to those familiar \Aith the semantic ways of words. But 
 why did these various nations seize on new words ? Weren't the 
 old ones good enough ? 
 
 Here I must call attention to two features that are common 
 to these new conjunctions, first their syntactic position, which 
 is invariably in the beginning of the sentence, while such synony- 
 mous words as Lat. autem and G. aher may be placed after one 
 or more words ; then their phonetic agi'eement in one point : magis, 
 men, maar all begin with m. Now, both these features are found 
 in two words for ' but,' about whose etymological origin I can 
 find no information, Finnic mutta and Santal menkkan, as well as 
 in me, which is used in the Ancrene Riwle and a few other early 
 I\Dddle English texts and has been dubiously connected with the 
 Scandinavian (and French ?) word. How are we to explain these 
 curious coincidences ? I think by the nature of the sound [m], 
 which is produced when the lips are closed while the tongue rests 
 passiveh' and the soft palate is lowered so as to allow air to escape 
 through the nostrils — in short, the position which is typical of 
 anybody who is quietly thinking over matters without as yet 
 saying anything, with the sole difference that in his case the vocal 
 chords are passive, while they are made to vibrate to bring forth 
 an m. 
 
 Now, it Yeiy often happens that a man wants to say something, 
 but has not yet made up his mind as to what to say ; and in this 
 moment of hesitation, while thoughts are in the process of con- 
 ception, the lungs and vocal chords will often be prematurely 
 set going, and the result is [m] (sometimes preceded by the cor- 
 responding voiceless sound), often written hm or h'm, which thus 
 becomes the interjection of an unshaped contradiction. Not 
 infrequently this [m] precedes a real word ; thus M'yes (written 
 in this way by Shaw, Misalliance 154, and Merrick, Conrad 179) 
 and Dan. mja, to mark a hesitating consent. 
 
 This will make it clear why words beginning with m are so 
 often chosen as adversative conjiinctions : people begin with this 
 sound and go on with some word that gives good sense and which 
 happens to begin witli m : mais, maar. The Dan. men in the 
 mouth of some early speakers is probably this [m], sliding into 
 
310 ETYMOLOGY [cH. xvi 
 
 the old conjunction en, just as myes is w + y^ ', while other original 
 users of men may have been thinking of men = meden, and others 
 again of Low German rtien : these three et}Tnologies are not 
 mutually destructive, for all three origins may have concurrently 
 contributed to the pojDuIaritj' of men. Modern Greek and Serbian 
 ma are generally explained as direct loans from Italian, but may 
 be indigenous, as may also dialectal Rumanian ma in the same 
 sense, for in the hesitating [m] as the initial soimd of objections 
 we have one of those touches of nature which make the whole 
 world kin.^ 
 
 XVL— § 9. Object of Etymology. 
 
 What is the object of etymological science 1 " To determine 
 the true signification of a word," answers one of the masters of 
 etymological research (Walde, Lat. et. Worterb. xi). But surely 
 in most cases that can be achieved without the help of etymology. 
 We know the true sense of hundreds of words about the etymology 
 of which we are in complete ignorance, and we should know exactly 
 what the word grog means, even if the tradition of its origin had 
 been accidentally lost. Many people still believe that an account 
 of the origin of a name throws some light on the essence of the 
 thing it stands for ; when they want to define say ' religion ' or 
 ' civilization,' they start b^'^ stating the (real or supposed) origin 
 of the name — but surely that is superstition, though the first framers 
 of the name ' etymology ' (from Gr. etumon ' true ') must have had 
 the same idea in their heads. Etymologj' tells us ncthing about 
 the things, nor even about the present meaning of a word, but 
 only about the way in which a word has come into existence. 
 At best, it tells us not what is true, but what has been true. 
 
 The overestimation of etymology is largely attributable to 
 the " conviction that there can be nothing in language that had 
 not an intelligible purpose, that there is nothing that is now 
 irregular that was not at first regular, nothing irrational that was 
 not originall}' rational " (Max Miiller) — a conviction which is still 
 found to underlie many utterances about linguistic matters, but 
 which readers of the present volume will have seen is erroneous 
 in many M'ays. On the whole, Max Miiller naively gives expression 
 to what is imconsciously at the back of much that is said and 
 believed about language ; thus, when he says (L 1. 44) : " I must 
 ask you at present to take it for granted that everything in language 
 had originallj' a meaning. As language can have no other object 
 but to express our meaning, it might seem to follow almost by 
 
 ^ I have discussed this more in detail and added other »n-words of a 
 somewhat related character in Studier tillegnade E. Tegnir, 1918, p. 49 fit. 
 
§9] OBJECT OF ET\nVIOLOGY 317 
 
 necessity that language should contain neither more nor less than 
 what is required for that purpose." Yes, so it would if language 
 had been constructed by an omniscient and omnipotent being, 
 but as it was developed by imperfect human beings, there is every 
 possibility of their having failed to achieve their purpose and 
 having done either more or less than was required to express 
 their meaning. It would be wrong to say that language (i.e. 
 speaking man) created first what was strictly necessarj', and after- 
 wards what might be considered superfluous ; but it would be 
 equally wrong to say that linguistic luxuries were always created 
 before necessaries ; yet that view would probably be nearer the 
 truth than the former. Much of what in former ages was felt 
 to be necessary to express thoughts was afterwards felt as pedantic 
 crisscross and gradually eliminated ; but at all times many things 
 have been found in language that can never have been anything 
 else but superfluous, exactly as many people use a great many 
 superfluous gestm'es which are not in the least significant and in 
 no way assist the comprehension of their intentions, but which 
 they somehow feel an impulse to perform. In language, as in 
 life generally, we have too little in some respects, and too much 
 in others. 
 
 XVI. — § 10. Reconstruction. 
 
 Kluge somewhere (PBB 37. 479, 1911) says that the establish- 
 ment of the common Aryan language is the chief task of our 
 modern science of linguistics (to my mind it can never be more 
 than a fragment of that task, which must be to understand the 
 nature of language), and he thinks optimistically that " recon- 
 structions with their reliable methods have taken so firm root 
 that we are convinced that we know the common Aryan grund- 
 sprache just as thoroughly as any language that is more or less 
 authenticated through literature." This is a palpable exaggera- 
 tion, for no one nowadays has the com-age of Schleicher to print 
 even the smallest fable in Proto-Ai-yan, and if by some miraculous 
 accident we were to find a text wTitten in that language we may 
 be sure it would puzzle us just as much as Tokharian does. 
 
 Reconstruction has two sides, an outer and an inner. With 
 regard to sounds, it seems to me that very often the masters of 
 linguistics treat us to reconstructed forms that are little short 
 of impossible. This is not the place to give a detailed criticism 
 of the famous theory of ' nasalis sonans,' but I hope elsewhere 
 to be able to state why I think this theory a disfiguring ex- 
 crescence on linguistic science : no one has ever been able to find 
 in any existing language such forms as mnto with stressed syllabic 
 
318 ETYMOLOGY [en. xvi 
 
 [n], given as the old form of our word movlh (Falk and Torp even 
 give stmnto in order to connect the word with Gr. stoma), or as 
 dhntom (\\ hence Lat. centum, etc.) or bhnjhnties or gnmskete 
 (Brugmann). Not only are these forms phonetically impossible, 
 but the theor}- fails to explain the transitions to the forms actually 
 existing in real languages, and everything is much easier if we 
 assume forms like [Am, An] with some vowel like that of P]. 7m-. 
 The use in Proto- Aryan reconstructions of non -syllabic i and u also 
 in some respects invites criticism, but it will be better to treat 
 these questions in a special paper. 
 
 Semantic reconstruction calls for little comment here. It is 
 evident from the nature of the subject that no such strict rules 
 can be given in this domain as in the domain of sound ; but now- 
 adays scholars are more realistic than formerly. Most of them 
 will feel satisfied when moo7i and rnontJi are associated with words 
 having the same two significati{»ns in related languages, without 
 indulging in explanations of both from a root me ' to measure ' ; 
 and when our daughter has been connected with Gr. thvgdter, 
 Skt. duhitdr and corresponding words in other languages, no attempt 
 is made to go beyond the meaning common to these words 
 ' daughter ' and to speculate what had induced our ancestors to 
 bestow that word on that particular relation, as when Lassen 
 derived it fi*om the root duh ' to milk ' and pictured an idyllic 
 family life, in which it was the business of the young girls to milk 
 the co\\s, or when Fick derived the same word from the root dheugh 
 ' to be useful ' (G. taugen : ' wie die magd, maid von mogen '), as 
 if the daughters were the only, or the most, efficient members 
 of the family. Unfortunately, such speculations are still found 
 lingering in many recent handbooks of high standing : Kluge 
 hesitates w'hether to assign the word mutter, another, to the root 
 ma in the sense ' mete out ' or in the sense found in Sanskrit ' to 
 form,' used of the foetus in the womb. A resigned acquiescence 
 in inevitable ignorance and a sense of reality should certainly be 
 characteristics of future etymologists. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 PROGRESS OR DECAY? 
 
 § 1. Linguistic Estimation. §2. Degeneration? §3. Appreciation of Modern 
 Tongues. § 4. The Scientific Attitude. § 5. Final Answer. § 6. 
 Sounds. § 7. Shortenings. § 8. Objections. Result. § 9. Verbal 
 Forms. § 10. Sj^nthesis and Analysis. § 11. Verbal Concord. 
 
 XVn.— § 1. Linguistic Estimation. 
 
 The common belief of linguists that one form or one expression 
 is just as good as another, provided they are both found in actual 
 use, and that each language is to be considered a perfect vehicle 
 for the thoughts of the nation speaking it, is in some ways the 
 exact counterpart of the conviction of the Manchester school of 
 economics that everything is for the best in the best of all possible 
 worlds if only no artificial hindrances are put in the way of free 
 exchange, for demand and supply will regulate everything better 
 than any Government would be able to. Just as economists were 
 blind to the numerous cases in which actual wants, even crying 
 wants, Avere not satisfied, so also linguists were deaf to those in- 
 stances which are, however, obvious to whoever has once turned 
 his attention to them, in which the very structure of a language 
 calls forth misunderstandings in everyday conversation, and in 
 which, consequently, a word has to be repeated or modified or 
 expanded or defined in order to call forth the idea intended by 
 the speaker : he took his stick — no, not John's, but his own ; 
 or : I mean you in the plural (or, you all, or you girls) ; no, a 
 box on the ear ; un de a jouer, non i^as un de a coudre ; nein, ich 
 meine Sie personlich (with very strong stress on Sie), etc. Every 
 careful writer in any language has had the experience that on 
 re-reading his manuscript he has discovered that a sentence which 
 he thought perfectly clear when he wrote it lends itself to mis- 
 understanding and has to be put in a different way ; sometimes 
 he has to add a clarifying parenthesis, because his language is 
 defective in some respect, as when Edward Carpenter {Art o/ 
 Creation 171), in speaking of the deification of the Babe, writes: 
 "It is not likely that Man — the human male — left to himself 
 would have done this ; but to woman it was natural," thus avoiding 
 the misunderstanding that he was speaking of the whole species, 
 
 319 
 
820 PROGRESS OR DECAY? [ch. xvii 
 
 comprising both sexes. Herbert Spencer writes : " Charles had 
 recently obtained — a post in the Post Office I Avas about to say, 
 but the cacophony stopped me ; and then I was about to say, 
 an office in the Post Office, which is nearly as bad ; let me say — 
 a place in the Post Office " {Autobiogr. 2. 73 — but of course the 
 defect is not really one of sound, as implied by the expression 
 ' cacophonj',' but one of signification, as both words post and 
 office are ambiguous, and the attempted collocation would therefore 
 puzzle the reader or hearer, because the same word A\ouId have 
 to be apprehended in two different senses in close succession). 
 Similar instances might be alleged from any language. 
 
 No language is perfect, but if we admit this truth (or truism), 
 we must also admit by implication that it is not unreasonable 
 to investigate the relative value of different languages or of different 
 details in languages. When comparative linguists set themselves 
 against the narrowmindedness of classical scholars who thought 
 Latin and Greek the only A\orthy objects of stud}^ and emphasized 
 the value of all, even the least literary languages and dialects, 
 they were primarily' thinking of their value to the scientist, who 
 finds something of interest in each of them, but they had no idea 
 of comparing the relative value of languages from the point of 
 view of their users — and yet the latter comparison is of much 
 greater importance than the former. 
 
 XVII.— §2. Degeneration? 
 
 People will often use the expressions ' evolution ' rnd ' develop- 
 ment ' in connexion Avith language, but most linguists, when taken 
 to task, will maintain that these expressions as applied to languages 
 should be used without the implication which is commonly attached 
 to them when used of other objects, namel}^ that there is a pro- 
 gressive tendency towards something better or nearer perfection. ' 
 They will say that ' evolution ' means here simply changes going 
 on in languages, without any judgment as to the value of these 
 changes. 
 
 But those who do pronounce such a judgment ncarl}' always 
 take the changes as a retrogressive rather than a progressive 
 development : " Tongues, like governments, have a natural ten- 
 dency to degeneration," said Dr. Samuel Johnson in the Pi-eface 
 to his Dictionary, and the same lament has been often repeated 
 since his time. This is quite natural : people have always had 
 a tendency to believe in a golden age, that is, in a remote past 
 gloriously different to the miserable present. Why not, then, 
 have the same belief with regard to language, the more so because 
 one cannot fail to notice things in contemporary speech which 
 
§2] DEGENERATION? 321 
 
 (superficially at any rate) look like corruptions of the ' good old ' 
 forms ? Everything ' old ' thus comes to be considered ' good.' 
 Lowell and others think they have justified many of the commonly 
 reviled Americanisms if they are able to show them to have existed 
 in England in the sixteenth century, and similar considerations 
 are met with everywhere. The same frame of mind finds support 
 in the usual grammar-school admiration for the two classical 
 languages and their literatures. People were taught to look 
 down upon modern languages as mere dialects or patois and to 
 worship Greek and Latin ; the richness and fullness of forms found 
 in those languages came naturally to be considered the very beau 
 ideal of linguistic structm-e. Bacon gives a classical expression 
 to this view when he declares " ingenia prior um seculorum nostris 
 fuisse multo acutiora et subtiliora " {De augm. scient}). To men 
 fresh from the ordinary grammar-school training, no language 
 would seem really respectable that had not four or five distinct 
 cases and three genders, or that had less than five tenses and as 
 many moods in its verbs. Accordingly, such poor languages as 
 had either lost much of their original richness in grammatical 
 forms {e.g. French, English, or Danish), or had never had any, so 
 far as one knew {e.g. Chinese), were naturally looked upon with 
 sometliing of the pity bestowed on relatives in reduced circum- 
 stances, or the contempt felt for foreign paupers. It is well known 
 how in West-Em-opean languages, in English, German, Danish, 
 Swedish, Dutch, French, etc., obsolete forms were artificially kept 
 alive and preferred to younger forms by most grammarians ; but 
 we see exactly the same point of view in such a language as Magyar, 
 where, under the influence of the historical studies of the grammarian 
 Revai, the belief in the excellence of the ' veneranda antiquitas ' 
 as compared with the corruj)tion of the modern language has 
 been prevalent in schools and in literature. (See Simony i US 259 ; 
 cf. on Modern Greek and Telugu above, p. SOL) 
 
 Comparative linguists had one more reason for adopting this 
 manner of estimating languages. To what had the great victories 
 won by their science been due ? Whence had they got the material 
 for that magnificent edifice which had proved spacious enough 
 to hold Hindus and Persians, Lithuanians and Slavs, Greeks, 
 Romans, Germans and Kelts ? Surely it was neither from 
 Modern English nor Modern Danish, but from the oldest stages of 
 each linguistic group. The older a linguistic document was, the 
 
 1 Quoted here from John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character 
 and a Philosophical Language, 1668, p. 448 : Wilkins there subjects Bacon's 
 saying to a crushing criticism, laying bare a great many radical deficiencies 
 in Latin to bring out the logical advantages of his own artificial ' philo- 
 sophical ' language. 
 
 21 
 
322 PROGRESS OR DECAY? [ch. xvii 
 
 more valuable it was to the first generation of comparative linguists. 
 An English form like had was of no great use, but Gothic habaide- 
 deima was easily picked to pieces, and each of its several elements 
 lent itself capitally to comparison with Sanskiit, Lithuanian and 
 Greek. The linguist was chiefly dependent for his material on 
 the old and archaic languages ; his interest centred round their 
 fuller forms : what wonder, then, if in his opinion those languages 
 were superior to all others ? What wonder if by comparing had 
 and habaidedeima he came to regard the English form as a mutilated 
 and worn-out relic of a splendid original ? or if, noting the change 
 from the old to the modern form, he used strong language and 
 spoke of degeneration, corruption, depravation, decUne, phonetic 
 decay, etc. ? 
 
 The view that the modern languages of Europe, Persia and 
 India are far inferior to the old languages, or the one old language, 
 from which they descend, we have already encountered in the 
 historical part of this work, in Bopp, Humboldt, Grimm and their 
 followers. It looms very large in Schleicher, according to whom 
 the history of language is all a Decline and Fall, and in Max Miiller, 
 who says that " on the whole, the history of all the Aryan languages 
 is nothing but a gradual process of decay." Nor is it yet quite 
 extinct. 
 
 XVn.— § 3. Appreciation of Modern Tongues. 
 
 Some scholars, however, had an indistinct feeling that this 
 unconditional and wholesale depreciation of modcx-n languages 
 could not contain the whole truth, and I have collected various 
 passages, nearly always of a perfunctory or incidental character, 
 in which these languages are partly rehabilitated. Humboldt 
 (Versch 284) speaks of the modern use of auxiliary verbs and 
 prepositions as a convenience of the intellect which may even in 
 some isolated instances lead to greater definiteness. On Grimm 
 see above, p. 62. Rask (SA 1. 191) says that it is possible that the 
 advantages of simplicity may be greater than those of an 
 elaborate linguistic structure. Madvig turns against the uncritical 
 admiration of the classical languages, but does not go fuither 
 than sajing that the modern analj^tical languages are just as 
 good as the old sjTithetic ones, for thoughts can be expressed in 
 both with equal clearness. Ki-auter {Archiv f. nen. spr. 57. 204) 
 says : " That decay is consistent with clearness and precision 
 is shown by French ; that it is not fatal to poetry is seen in the 
 language of Shakespeare." Osthoff {Schriftspr. u. Volksmundart, 
 1883, 13) protests against a one-sided depreciation of the language 
 of Lessing and Goethe in favour of the language of Wulfila or 
 
§8] APPRECIATION OF MODERN TONGUES 328 
 
 Otfried, or vice versa : a language possesses an inestimable charm 
 if its phonetic s\''3tem remains unimpaired and its etymologies 
 are transparent ; but pliancy of the material of language and 
 flexibility to express ideas is really no less an advantage ; every- 
 thing depends on the point of view : the student of architecture 
 has one point of view, the people who are to live in the house 
 another. 
 
 Among those who thus half-heartedly refused to accept the 
 downhill theory to its full extent must be mentioned Whitney, 
 many passages in whose writings show a certain hesitation to 
 make up his mind on this question. When speaking of the loss 
 of old forms he says that " some of these could well be spared, 
 but others were valuable, and their relinquishment has impaired 
 the power of expression of the language." To phonetic corruption 
 we owe true grammatical forms, which make the wealth of every 
 inflective language ; but it is also destructive of the very edifice 
 which it has helped to build. He speaks of " the legitimate 
 tendency to neglect and eliminate distinctions which are practically 
 unnecessary," and will not admit " that we can speak our minds 
 any less distinctly than our ancestors could, with all their apparatus 
 of inflexions " ; gender is a luxury which any language can well 
 afford to dispense with, but language is impoverished by the 
 obliteration of the subjunctive mood. The giving up of grammatical 
 endings is akin to wastefulness, and the excessive loss in English 
 makes truly for decay (L 31, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, 85 ; G 51, 105, 104). 
 
 XVn.— § 4. The Scientific Attitude. 
 
 Why are all such expressions either of depreciation or of partial 
 appreciation of the modern languages so utterly unsatisfactory ? 
 One reason is that they are so vague and dependent on a general 
 feeling of inferiority or the reverse, instead of being based on a 
 detailed comparative estimation of real facts in linguistic structure. 
 If, therefore, we want to arrive at a scientific answer to the question 
 " Decay or progress ? " we must examine actual instances of changes, 
 but must take particular care that these instances are not chosen 
 at random, but are typical and characteristic of the total structure 
 of the languages concerned. What is wanted is not a comparison 
 of isolated facts, but the establishment of general laws and ten- 
 dencies, for only through such can we hope to decide whether 
 or no we are justified in using terms like ' development ' and 
 ' evolution ' in linguistic history. 
 
 The second reason why the earlier pronouncements quoted 
 above do not satisfy us is that their authors nowhere raise the 
 question of the method by which linguistic value is to be measured, 
 
824 PROGRESS OR DECAY ? [ch. xvii 
 
 by what standard and what tests the comparative merits of 
 languages or of forms are to be ascertained. Those linguists 
 who looked upon language as a product of nature were by that 
 very fact precluded from establishing a rational basis for deter- 
 mining linguistic values ; nor is it possible to find one if we look 
 at things from the one-sided point of view of the linguistic historian. 
 An almost comical instance of this is found when Curtius {Sprach- 
 wiss. u. cluss. phil. 39) saj's that the Greek accusative poda is 
 better than Sanskrit padam, because it is possible at once to see 
 that it belongs to the third declension. What is to be taken into 
 account is of course the interests of the speaking community, 
 and if we consistently consider language as a set of human actions 
 with a definite end in view, namely, the communication of thoughts 
 and feelings, then it becomes easy to find tests bj^ which to measure 
 linguistic values, for from that point of view it is evident that 
 
 THAT LANGUAGE RANKS HIGHEST ^VHICH GOES FARTHEST IN THE 
 ART OF ACCOaiPLISHING MUCH WITH LITTLE MEANS, OR, IN OTHER 
 WORDS, W^HICH IS ABLE TO EXPRESS THE GREATEST AMOUNT OF 
 MEANING WT;TH THE SIMPLEST MECHANISM. 
 
 The estimation has to be thoroughly and frankly anthropo- 
 centric. This may be a defect in other sciences, in which it is 
 a merit on the part of the investigator to be able to abstract 
 himself from human considerations ; in linguistics, on the contrary, 
 on account of the very nature of the object of study, one must 
 constantly look to the human interest, and judge everj'thing from 
 that, and from no other, point of view. Otherwise we run the 
 risk of going astray in all directions. 
 
 It will be noticed that my formula contains two requirements : 
 it demands a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of effort. 
 Efficiency means expressiveness, and effort means bodily and 
 mental labour, and thus the formula is simply one of modern 
 energetics. But unfortimately we are in possession of no method 
 by wliich to measure either expressiveness or effort exact Ij-, and 
 in cases of conflict it may be difficult to decide to which of the 
 two sides we are to attach the greater importance, how great a 
 surplus of efficiency is required to counterbalance a surplus 
 of exertion, or inversely. Still, in many cases no doubt can 
 arise, and we are often able to state progress, because there 
 is either a clear gain in efficiency or a diminution of exertion, 
 or both. 
 
 There is one objection wliich is likely to present itself to many 
 of my readers, namely, that natives handle their language without 
 the least exertion or effort (cf. XIV § 6, p. 262). Madvig (1857, 
 73 ff. = Kl 260 ff.) admits that a simplification in linguistic structure 
 will make the language easier to learn for foreigners, but denies 
 
§4] THE SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE 325 
 
 that it means increased ease for the native. Similarly Wechssler 
 (L 149) says that " dcr begrifif der schwierigkeit und unbequemheit 
 fiir die einheimischen nicht existiert." I might quote against 
 him his countryman Gabclentz, who expressly says that the diffi- 
 culties of the German languages are felt by natives, a view that 
 is endorsed by Schuchardt in various places.^ To my mind there 
 is not the slightest doubt that different languages differ very 
 much in easiness even to native speakers. In the chapters devoted 
 to cliildren we have already seen that the numerous mistakes 
 made by them in every possible way testify to the labour involved 
 in learning one's own language. This labour must naturally be 
 greater in the case of a highly complicated linguistic structure 
 with man}^ rules and still more exceptions to the rules, than in 
 languages constructed simply and regularly. 
 
 Nor is the difficulty of correct speech confined to the first 
 mastering of the language. Even to the native who has spoken 
 the same language from a child, its daily use involves no small 
 amount of exertion. Under ordinary circumstances he is not 
 conscious of any exertion in speaking ; but such a want of con- 
 scious feeling is no proof that the exertion is absent. And it is 
 a strong argument to the contrary that it is next to impossible 
 for you to speak correctly if you are suffering from excessive 
 mental work ; you will constantly make slips in grammar and 
 idiom as well as in pronunciation ; you have not the same com- 
 mand of language as under normal conditions. If you have to 
 speak on a difficult and unfamiliar subject, on which you would 
 not like to say anything but what is to the point or strictlj'' justi- 
 fiable, you will sometimes find that the thoughts themselves claim 
 so much mental energy that there is none left for speaking with 
 elegance, or even with complete regard to grammar : to your 
 own vexation you will have a feeling that your plu-ases are confused 
 and your language incorrect. A pianist may practise a difficult 
 piece of music so as to have it " at his fingers' ends " ; under 
 ordinary circumstances he will be able to play it quite mechanically, 
 without ever being conscious of effort ; but, nevertheless, the 
 effort is there. How great the effort is appears when some 
 day or other the musician is ' out of humoiu',' that is, when 
 his brain is at work on other subjects or is not in its usual 
 working order. At once his execution will be stumbling and 
 faulty. 
 
 1 Cf. also what Paul says (P 144) about one point in German grammar 
 (strong and weak forms of adjectives) : " But the difficulty of the correct 
 mamtenance of the distinction is shown in numerous offences made by 
 writers against the rules of grammar " — of course, not only by writers, but 
 by ordinary speakers as well. 
 
826 PROGRESS OR DECAY? [ch. xvii 
 
 XVn.— § 5. Final Answer. 
 
 I may here anticipate the reisultfi of the followhig investigation 
 and say that in all those instances in which we are able to examine 
 the history of any language for a sufficient length of time, we 
 find that languages have a progressive tendency. But if languages 
 progress towards greater perfection, it is not in a bee-line, nor 
 are all the changes we witness to be considered steps in the right 
 direction. The only thing I maintain is that the sum total of these 
 changes, when we compare a remx)te period with the jiT^sent time, 
 shows a surplus of progressive over retrogressive or indifferent changes, 
 so that the structure of modern languages is nearer perfection 
 than that of ancient languages, if we take them as wholes instead 
 of picking out at random some one or other more or less signifi- 
 cant detail. And of course it must not be imagined that pro- 
 gress has been achieved through deliberate acts of men conscious 
 that they were improving their mother-tongue. On the contrary, 
 many a step in advance has at first been a slip or even a 
 blunder, and, as in other fields of human activity, good results 
 have only been won after a good deal of bungling and ' muddling 
 along.' ^ My attitude towards this question is the same as that 
 of Leslie Stephen, who writes in a letter {Life 454) : " I have a 
 perhaps unreasonable amount of belief, not in a millennium, but 
 in the world on the whole blundering rather forwards than 
 backwards," 
 
 Schleicher on one occasion used the fine simile : " Our words, 
 as contrasted with Gothic words, are like a statue that has been 
 rolling for a long time in the bed of a river till its beautiful limbs 
 have been worn ofif, so that now scarcely anjrthing remains but a 
 polished stone cylinder with faint indications of what it once was " 
 (D 34). Let us turn the tables by asking : Suppose, however, 
 that it would be quite out of the question to place the statue on 
 a pedestal to be admired ; what if, on the one hand, it was not 
 ornamental enough as a work of art, and if, on the other hand, 
 human well-being was at stake if it was not serviceable in a rolhng- 
 mill : which would then be the better — a rugged and unwieldy 
 statue, making difficulties at every rotation, or an even, smooth, 
 easygoing and well-oiled roller ? 
 
 After these preliminary considerations we may now proceed 
 to a comparative examination of the chief differences between 
 ancient and modern stages of our Western European languages. 
 
 1 It has often been pointed out how Great Britain has ' blundered ' 
 into creating her world-wide Empire, and Gretton, in The King's Govern- 
 ment (1914), applies the same view to the development of governmental 
 institutions. 
 
§ 6] SOUNDS 327 
 
 XVn.— § 6. Sounds. 
 
 The student who goes through the chapters devoted to sound 
 changes in historical and comparative grammars will have great 
 difficulty in getting at any great lines of development or general 
 tendencies : everything seems just haphazard and fortuitous ; a 
 long i is here shortened and there diphthongized or lowered into e, 
 etc. The history of sounds is dependent on surroundings in many, 
 though not in all circumstances, but surroundings do not always 
 act in the same way ; in short, there seem to be so many con- 
 flicting tendencies that no universal or even general rules can be 
 evolved from all these ' sound laws,* Still less would it seem 
 possible to state anything about the comparative value of the 
 forms before and after the change, for it does not seem to matter 
 a bit for the speaking community whether it says stdn as in Old 
 English or sto7ie as now, and thus in innumerable cases. Nay, 
 from one point of view it may seem that any change militates 
 against the object of language (cf. Wechssler L 28), but this is 
 true only of the very moment when the change sets in while people 
 are accustomed to the old sound (or the old signification), and 
 even then the change is only injurious provided it impedes under- 
 standing or renders understanding less easy, which is far from 
 always being the case. 
 
 There is one scholar who has asserted the existence of a uni- 
 versal progressive tendency in languages, or, as he calls it, a 
 humanization of language, namely Baudouin de Courtenay {Ver- 
 menschlichung der Sprache, 1893). He is chiefly thinking of the 
 somid system,^ and he maintains that there is a tendency towards 
 eliminating the innermost articulations and using instead sounds 
 that are formed nearer to the teeth and lips. Thus some back 
 (postpalatal, velar) consonants become p, b, while others develop 
 into s sounds ; cf . Slav slovo ' word ' with Lat. clvx), etc. Baudouin 
 also mentions the frequent palatalization of back consonants, as in 
 French and Italian ce, ci, ge, gi, but as this is due to the influence 
 of the following front vowel, it should not perhaps be mentioned 
 as a universal tendency of human language. It is further said 
 that throat sounds, which play such a great role in Semitic languages, 
 have been discarded in most modern languages. But it may be 
 objected that sometimes throat sounds do develop in modern 
 periods, as in the Danish ' st0d ' and in English dialectal bu'er for 
 
 ^ In the realm of significations he sees the ' humanization ' of language 
 exclusively in the development of abstract terms. An important point 
 of disagreement between Baudouin and myself is in regard to morphology, 
 where he sees only ' oscillations ' in historical times, in which he is unable 
 to discover a continuous movement in any definite direction, while I main- 
 tain that languages here manifest a definite progressive tendency. 
 
328 PROGRESS OR DECAY ? [ch. xvii 
 
 butter, etc. A universal tendency of sounds to move away from 
 the throat cannot be said to be firml}' established ; but for our 
 purpose it is more important to sa}'' that even were it true, the 
 value of such a tendency for the speaking community would not 
 be great enough to justify us in speaking of progress towards a 
 truly ' human ' language as opposed to the more beastlike language 
 of our primeval ancestors. It is true that Baudouin (p. 25) says 
 that it is possible to articulate in the front and upper part with 
 less effort and with greater precision than in the interior and 
 lower parts of the speaking apparatus, but if this is true with regard 
 to the mouth proper, it cannot be maintained with regard to the 
 vocal chords, where very important effects may be produced in the 
 most precise way by infinitely little exertion. Thus in no single 
 point can I see that Baudouin de Courtenay has made out a strong 
 case for his conception of ' humanization of language.' 
 
 XVn.— § 7. Shortenings. 
 
 But there is another phonetic tendency which is much more 
 universal and infinitely more valuable than the one asserted by 
 Baudouin de Courtenay, namel}?-, 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 indis- 
 tinctly and finally disappear altogether, as when OE. Ivfu, stdnas, 
 sende, through ME. luve, stanes, sende with pronounced e's, have 
 become our modern monosjilables 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 kejDt, 
 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 w'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 con- 
 sonants 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 I often disappear in Fr. words like quaire, simple, 
 and medial consonants have been dropped in such cases as cote 
 from coste, bete from beste, saiif [so'f] from salvo, etc. We have 
 corresponding omissions in English, where in very old times n 
 was dropped in such cases as tis, five, other, while the German 
 
§7] SHORTENINGS 829 
 
 forms inis, fiinf, ander have kept the old consonants ; in more 
 recent times I was dropped in half, calm, etc., gh [x] in ligJit, bought, 
 etc., and r in the prevalent pronunciation of varm, part, etc. Initial 
 consonants are more firmly fixed in many languages, yet we see 
 them lost in the E. combinations kn, gn, ivr, where k, g, w used to 
 be sounded, e.g. in kjioiv, gnatu, urong. 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 compen- 
 sating lengthening has been given up, as is often the case, e.g. in 
 E. cupboard, blackguard [kAbod, blsega'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 sporadicallj\ This is haplology, by which one 
 sound or one group of sounds is jjronounced 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, ivha{t) to do, nex{t) time, simp{le)ly, England 
 from Englalaiul, eighteen from OE. eahtatiene, honesty from 
 honestete, Glou{ce)ster, Worcester [wusta], familiarly pro{ba)bly, 
 vulgarly lib{ra)ry, Febr{uar)y. From other languages may be 
 quoted Fr. cont{re)r6le, ido(lo)ldtre, Neu{ve)ville, Lat. nu{tri)trix, 
 8ti{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 hldford ; the old Gothonic form of the same word 
 contained indubitably as manj^^ as twelve sounds ; Latin augustum 
 has in French through aoust become aout, pronounced [au] or even 
 [u] ; Latin ocidum has shrunk into four sounds in Italian occhio, 
 three in Sjpanish ojo, and two in Fr. ceil ; It, medesimo, Sp. mismo 
 and Fr. 7neme represent various stages of the shrinking of 
 Lat. metipsimum ; cf. also Fr. menage from mansion- + -aticum 
 Primitive Norse ne veit ek hvat ' not know I what ' has 
 become Dan. noget ' something,' often pronounced [no""6] or 
 [no-6]. 
 
 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). 
 
880 PROGRESS OR DECAY? [ch. xvii 
 
 XVII.— §8. Objections. Result. 
 
 There cannot tlierefore 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 some- 
 times examples of phonetic lengthenings, as in E. sovnd from ME. 
 soun, Fr. son, E. whiht, amorigst from ME. u-hiles, amonges ; a 
 similar excrescence of t after s is seen in G. obsi,jjabst, Swcd. eljest 
 and others ; after n, t is added in G.jemand, nicviand (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 tlie opposite direction. 
 (On the seeming insertion of d in ndr, see p. 264, note). In some 
 cases wc Avitness a certain reaction against \^ord 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 coimteract the tendency. 
 In modem 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. bcc, or when G. beiregtc takes the 
 place of beicog. Further, we have in modern languages many auxili- 
 ary 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 
 Tegner SM 51, Hoops in Anglia, Beiblait 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. ^ 
 
 ^ On the other hand, it is not, perhaps, fair to count the number of 
 syllables, as these may vary very considerably, and some languages favour 
 syllables with heavy consonant groups unkno^vn in other tongues. The 
 most rational measure of length wo\ild be to coimt the numbers of distinct 
 (not sounds, but) articulations of separate speech organs — but that task 
 is at any rate beyond my powers. 
 
§8] OBJECTIONS. RESULT 881 
 
 Next, wo come to consider the question whether the tendencj' 
 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 Jiabaidedeima : 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, Jiabaidedeima has 
 the air of a giant and had of a mere pigmy : this valuation lies 
 at the bottom of many utterances ev^en 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 effeet, we see that the shorten- 
 ing 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 habai- 
 dedeirna. Voltaire was certainly very wide of the mark when 
 he wrote : " C'est le propre des barbares d'abreger 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. 
 
 Though I thus hold that the development towards shorter 
 forms of expression is on the whole progressive, i.e. beneficial, I 
 should not like to be too dogmatic on this point and assert that 
 it is always beneficial : shortness may be carried to excess and 
 thus cause obscurity or difi&culty of understanding. This may 
 be seen in the telegraphic stjde as well as in the literary style of 
 some writers too anxious to avoid prolixity (some of Pope's lines 
 might be quoted in illustration of the classical : brevis esse laboro, 
 obscurus fio). But in the case of the language of a whole com- 
 munity the danger certainly is very small indeed, for there will 
 always be a natural and wholesome reaction against such excessive 
 shortness. There is another misunderstanding I want to guard 
 against when saying that the shortening makes on the whole 
 for progress. It must not be thought that I lay undue stress 
 on this point, which is after all chiefly concerned with a greater 
 or smaller amount of physical or muscular exertion : this should 
 neither be underrated ncr overrated ; but it will be seen that 
 neither in my former work nor in this does the consideration of 
 this point of mere shortness or length take up more than a fraction 
 of the space allotted to the more psychical sides of the question, 
 
332 PROGRESS OR DECAY? [en. xvii 
 
 to which we shall now turn our attention and to which I attach 
 much more importance. 
 
 XVII.— § 9. Verbal Forms. 
 
 We may here recur to Schleicher's example, E. had and Gothic 
 habaidedeima. It is not only in regard to economy of muscular 
 exertion that the former carries the day over the latter. Had 
 corresponds not only to habaidedeima, but it unites in one short 
 form everything expressed by the Gothic habaida, habaides, habai- 
 dedu, habaideduts, habaidedum, habaideduy, habaidedun, habaidedjau, 
 habaidedeis, habaidedi, habaidedeiwa, habaidedeits, habaidedeima, 
 habaldedeiy, habaidedeina — separate forms for two or three persons 
 in three numbers in two distinct moods ! It is clear, therefore, 
 that the English form saves a considerable amount of brainwork 
 to all English-speaking people — not only to children, who have 
 fewer forms to learn, but also to adults, who have fewer forms 
 to choose between and to keep distinct whenever they open their 
 mouths to speak. Someone might, perhaps, say that on the 
 other hand English people are obliged always to join personal 
 pronouns to their verbal forms to indicate the person, and that 
 this is a draAvback counterbalancing the advantage, so that the 
 net result is six of one and half a dozen of the other. This, how- 
 ever, would be a very suj)erficial objection. For, in the fii'st place, 
 the personal pronouns are the same for all tenses and moods, but 
 the endings are not. Secondly, the possession of endings does 
 not exempt the Goths from having separate personr.l pronouns ; 
 and whenever these are used, as is very often the case in the first 
 and second persons, those parts of the verbal endings which 
 indicate jDersons are superfluous. They are no less superfluous 
 in those extremely numerous cases in which the subject is either 
 separately expressed by a noun or is understood from the preceding 
 proposition, thus in the vast majority of the cases of the third 
 person. If we compare a few pages of Old English prose with a 
 modern rendering we shall see that in spite of the reduction in 
 the latter of the person-indicating endings, personal pronouns are 
 not required in any great number of sentences in which they were 
 dispensed with in Old English. So that, altogether, the numerous 
 endings of the older languages must be considered uneconomical. 
 If Gothic, Latin and Greek, etc., biu-den the memory by the num- 
 ber of their flexional endings, they do so even more b}'' the many 
 irregularities in the formation of these endings. In all the lan- 
 guages of this t3'^pe, anomaly and flexion invariablj^ go together. 
 The intricacies of verbal flexion in Latin and Greek are well known, 
 and it requires no small amount of mental energy to master the 
 
§9] VERBAL FORMS 888 
 
 various modes of forming the present stems in Sanskrit — to take 
 onlj' one instance. Many of these irregularities disappear in 
 course of time, chiefly, but not exchisively, through analogical 
 formations, and though it is true that a certain number of new 
 irregularities may come into existence, their number is relatively 
 small when compared with those that have been removed. Now, 
 it is not only the forms themselves that are irregular in the early 
 languages, but also their uses : logical simplicity prevails much 
 more in Modern English syntax than in either Old Enghsh or 
 Latin or Greek. But it is hardly necessary to point out that 
 gro\^^ng regularity in a language means a considerable gain to all 
 those who learn it or speak it. 
 
 It has been said, however, by one of the foremost authorities 
 on the history of English, that " in spite of the many changes 
 which this system [i.e. the complicated sj^stem of strong verbs] 
 has undergone in detail, it remains just as intricate as it was in 
 Old English " (Bradley, The Making of English 51). It is true 
 that the way in which vowel change is utilized to form tenses 
 is rather complicated in Modern English [drink drank, give gave, 
 hold held, etc.), but otherwise an enormous simplification has taken 
 place. The personal endings have been discarded with the ex- 
 ception of -s in the third person singular of the present (and the 
 obsolete ending -est in the second person, and then this has been 
 regularized, thou sangest having taken the place of y>u sunge) ; the 
 change of vowel in ic sang, fu sunge, we sungon in the indicative 
 and ic sunge, we sungen in the subjunctive has been given up, 
 and so has the accompan;ying change of consonant in many cases. 
 Thus, instead of the following forms, ceosan, ceose, ceosep, ceosay>, 
 ceosen, cea^, curon, cure, curen, coren, we have the following modern 
 ones, which are both fewer in number and less irregular : choose, 
 chooses, chose, chosen — certainly an advance from a more to a less 
 intricate system (cf. GS § 178). 
 
 An extreme, but by no means unique example of the simpli- 
 fication foimd in modern languages is the English cut, which can 
 serve both as present and past tense, both as singular and plural, 
 both in the first, second and third persons, both in the infinitive, 
 in the imperative, in the indicative, in the subjunctive, and as a 
 past (or passive) participle ; compare with this the old languages 
 with their separate forms for different tenses, moods, numbers 
 and persons ; and remember, moreover, that the identical form, 
 without any inconvenience being occasioned, is also used as a 
 noun (a cut), and you will admire the economy of the living tongue. 
 A characteristic featm-e of the structure of languages in their 
 early stages is that each form contains in itself several minor 
 modifications whicii are often in the later stages expressed separately 
 
884 PROGRESS OR DECAY? [ch. xvii 
 
 by means of auxiliary words. Such a word as Latin cantavisset 
 unites into one inseparable whole the equivalents of six ideas : 
 (1) 'sing,' (2) pluperfect, (3) that indefinite modification of the 
 verbal idea which we term subjunctive, (4) active, (5) third person, 
 and (6) singular. 
 
 XVn.— § 10. Synthesis and Analysis. 
 
 Such a form, therefore, is much more concrete than the forms 
 found in modern languages, of which sometimes two or more 
 have to be combined to express the composite notion which was 
 rendered formerly by one. Now, it is one of the consequences 
 of this change that it has become easier to express certain minute, 
 but by no means unimportant, shades of thought by laying extra 
 stress on some particular element in the speech-group. Latin 
 cantaveram amalgamates into one indissoluble whole what in E. 
 / Jiad sung is anal3-8ed into three components, so that you can at 
 will accentuate the personal element, the tim.e element or the 
 action. Now, it is possible (who can affirm and who can deny it ?) 
 that the Romans could, if necessary, make some difference in 
 speech between cantaveram (non saltaveram) ' I had sung,' and 
 cantaverdm (non cantabam), ' I had sung ' ; but even then, if it 
 was the personal element which was to be emphasized, an ego 
 had to be added. Even the possibility of laying stress on the 
 temporal element broke down in forms like scripsi, minui, sum, 
 audiam, and innumerable others. It seems obvious that the 
 freedom of Latin in this respect must have been inferior to that of 
 English. Moreover, in English, the three elements, ' I,' ' had,' and 
 ' sung,' can in certain cases be arranged in a different order, and 
 other words can be inserted between them in order to modify 
 and qualify the meaning of the sentence. Note also the concise- 
 ness of such answers as " Who had sung ? " "I had." " "S'^Tiat 
 had you done ? " " Sung." " I believe he has enjoyed himself." 
 "I know he has." And contrast the Latin "Cantaveram et 
 saltaveram et luseram et riseram " with the English " I had sung 
 and danced and played and laughed." What would be the Latin 
 equivalent of " Tom never did and never will beat me " ? 
 
 In such cases, analysis means suppleness, and sjmthesis means 
 rigidity ; in analytic languages you have the power of kaleidosco- 
 pically arranging and rearranging the elements that in sjTithetic 
 forms like cantaveram are in rigid connexion and lead a Siamese- 
 twin sort of existence. The synthetic forms of Latin verbs remind 
 one of those languages all over the world (North America, South 
 America, Hottentot, etc.) in which such ideas as 'father' or 
 ' mother ' or ' head ' or ' eye ' carmot be expressed separately, 
 
§10] SYNTHESIS AND ANALYSIS 885 
 
 but only in connexion with an indication of whose father, etc., 
 one is speaking about : in one language the verbal idea (in the 
 finite moods), in the other the nominal idea, is necessarily fused 
 with the personal idea. 
 
 XVII.— § 11. Verbal Concord. 
 
 This formal inseparability of subordinate elements is at the 
 root of those rules of concord wliich play such a large role in the 
 older languages of our Aryan family, but which tend to disappear 
 in the more recent stages. By concord we mean the fact that a 
 secondary word (adjective or verb) is made to agree with the 
 primary word (substantive or subject) to which it belongs. Verbal 
 concord, by which a verb is governed in number and person by 
 the subject, has disappeared from spoken Danish, where, for 
 instance, the present tense of the verb meaning ' to travel ' is 
 uniformly rejser in all persons of both numbers ; while the written 
 language till towards the end of the nineteenth century kept up 
 artificially the plural rejse, although it had been dead in the spoken 
 language for some three hundred years. The old flexion is an 
 article of luxury, as a modification of the idea belonging properly 
 to the subject is here transferred to the predicate, where it has 
 no business ; for when we say ' maendene rejse ' (die manner reisen), 
 we do not mean to imply that they undertake several journeys 
 (cf. Madvig Kl 28, Nord. tsk. /. filol., n.r. 8. 134). 
 
 By getting rid of this superfluity, Danish has got the start 
 of the more archaic of its Aryan sister-tongues. Even English, 
 which has in most respects gone farthest in simplifjdng its flexional 
 system, lags here behind Danish, in that in the present tense of 
 most verbs the third person singular deviates fi'om the other 
 persons by ending in -s, and the verb he preserves some other 
 traces of the old concord system, not to speak of the form in -st 
 used with thou in the language of religion and poetry. Small 
 and unimportant as these survivals may seem, still they are in 
 some instances impediments to the free and easy expression of 
 thought. In Danish, for instance, there is not the slightest diffi- 
 culty in saying ' enten du eller jeg har uret,' as har is used both 
 in the first and second persons singular and plural. But when 
 an Englishman tries to render the same simple sentiment he ia 
 baffled ; ' either you or I are \\Tong ' is felt to be incorrect, and 
 so is ' either you or I am wrong ' ; he might saj'- ' either you are 
 wrong, or I,' but then this manner of putting it, if grammatically 
 admissible (with or without the addition of am), is somewhat stiff 
 and awkward ; and there is no perfectly natiu-al way out of the 
 difficulty, for Dean Alford's proposal to say ' either you or I is 
 
386 PROGRESS OR DECAY [ch. xvii 
 
 Avrong ' {The Queen's Engl. 155) is not to be recommended. The 
 advantage of having verbal forms that are no respecters of persons 
 is seen directly in such perfectly natural expressions as ' either 
 you or I must be wrong,' or ' either you or I may be wrong,' 
 or ' either you or I began it ' — and indirectly from the more or 
 less artificial rules of Latin and Greek grammars on this point ; 
 in the following passages the Gordian knot is cut in different waj's : 
 
 Shakespeare LLL v. 2. 346 Nor God, nor I, deligJits in perjur'd 
 men | id. As i. 3. 99 Thou and I am one | Tennyson Poet. W. 369 
 For whatsoever knight against us came Or I or he have easily over- 
 thrown I Galsworthy D 30 Am I and all women really what they 
 think us ? | Shakespeare H4B iv. 2. 121 Heauen, and not wee, 
 haue safely fought to day (Folio, where the Quarto has : God, 
 and not wee, hath. . . .) 
 
 The same difificulty often appears in relative clauses ; Alford 
 (I.e. 152) calls attention to the fact of the Prayer Book reading 
 " Thou art the God that doeth wonders," whereas the Bible version 
 runs " Thou art the God that doest wonders." Compare also : 
 
 Shakespeare As ni. 5. 55 'Tis not her glasse, but you that 
 flatters her | id. Meas. ii. 2. 80 It is the law, not I, condemne your 
 brother | Carlyle Fr. Rev. 38, There is none but you and I that has 
 the people's interest at heart (translated from : II n'y a que vous 
 et moi qui aimions le peuple). 
 
 In all such cases the construction in Danish is as easy and 
 natm-al as it generally is in the English preterit : "It was not her 
 glass, but you that flattered her." The disadvantage of having 
 verbal forms wliich enforce the indication of person and number 
 is perhaps seen most strikingly in a French sentence like this 
 from Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe (7. 221) : " Ce mot, naturelle- 
 ment, ce n'est ni toi, ni moi, qui pouvons le dire " — the verb agrees 
 with that which cannot be the subject (we) ! For what is meant 
 is really : ' celui qui pent le dire, ce n'est ni moi ni toi.' 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 PROGRESS 
 
 § 1, Xominal Forms. § 2. Irregularities Original. § 3. Syntax. § 4. Ob- 
 jections. § 5. Word Order. § 6. Gender. § 7. Nominal Concord. 
 § 8. The English Genitive. § 9. Bantu Concord. § 10. Word Order 
 Again. § 11. Compromises. § 12. Order Beneficial ? § 13. Word 
 Order and Simplification. § 14. Summary. 
 
 XVm.— § 1. Nominal Forms. 
 
 In the flexion of substantives and adjectives we see phenomena 
 corresponding to those we have just been considering in the verbs. 
 The ancient languages of our family have several forms where 
 modern languages content themselves with fewer ; forms originally 
 kept distinct are in course of time confused, either through a 
 phonetic obliteration of differences in the endings or through 
 analogical extension of the functions of one form. The single 
 form good is now used where OE. used the forms god, godne, gode, 
 godum, godes, godre, godra, goda, godan, godena ; Ital. uomo or 
 French hornme is used for Lat. homo, hominem, homini, homine 
 — nay, if we take the spoken form into consideration, Fr. [om] 
 corresponds not only to these Latin forms, but also to homines, 
 hominibus. Where the modern language has one or two cases, 
 in an earlier stage it had three or four, and still earlier seven or 
 eight. The difficulties inherent in the older system cannot, however, 
 he measured adequately by the number of forms each word is 
 susceptible of, but are multiplied by the numerous differences 
 in the formation of the same case in different classes of declension ; 
 sometimes we even find anomalies which affect one word only. 
 
 Those who would be inclined to maintain that new irregularities 
 may and do arise in modern languages which make up for what- 
 ever earlier irregularities have been discarded in the course of 
 the historical development will do well to compile a systematic 
 list of all the flexional forms of two different stages of the same 
 languages, arranged exactly according to the same principles : 
 this is the only way in which it is possible really to balance losses 
 and profits in a language. This is what I have done in my 
 Progress in Language §111 ff. (reprinted in ChE §9 ff.), where 
 I have contrasted the case systems of Old and Modern English : 
 
 22 337 
 
888 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 the result is that the former system takes 7 (+ 3) pages, and the 
 latter only 2 pages. Those pages, with their abbreviations and 
 tabulations, do not, perhaps, offer very entertaining reading, but 
 I think thej' are more illustrative of the real tendencies of language 
 than cither isolated examples or abstract reasonings, and thej'' 
 cannot fail to convince any impartial reader of the enormous gain 
 achieved through the changes of the intervening nine hundred 
 years in the general structure of the English language. 
 
 For our general purposes it will be -worth our while here to 
 quote what Friedrich Miiller (Gr i. 2. 7) says about a totally 
 different language : " Even if the Hottentot distinguishes ' he,' 
 ' she ' and ' it,' and strictly separates the singular from the plural 
 number, yet by bis expressing ' he ' and ' she ' by one sound in 
 the third person, and by another in the second, ho manifests that 
 he has no percej)tion at all of our two grammatical categories of 
 gender and number, and consequently those elements of his lan- 
 guage that run porallel to our signs of gender and number must 
 be of an entirely different nature." Fr. Miiller should not 
 perhaj)s throw too many stones at the poor Hottentots, for his 
 own native tongue is no better than a glass house, and we might 
 mth equal justice say, for instance : " As the Germans express 
 the plural number in different manners in words like gott — gotter, 
 hand — hdnde, vater — vdter, frau—Jrauen, etc., they must be en- 
 tirely lacking in the sense of the category of number." Or let 
 us take such a language as Latin ; there is nothing to show that 
 dominus bears the same relation to do7nini as verbum to verba, 
 urbs to urbes, mensis to menses, cornu to cormia, fnictas to fructus, 
 etc. ; even in the same M'ord the idea of plurality is not expressed 
 by the same method for all the cases, as is shown by a com- 
 parison of dominus — domini, dominam — dominos, domino— dominis, 
 domini — dominorum. Fr. Muller is no doubt wrong in saying 
 that such anomalies preclude the speakers of the language from 
 conceiving the notion of plurality ; but, on the other hand, it 
 seems evident that a language in which a difference so simple 
 even to the understanding of very young children as that between 
 one and more than one can only be expressed by a complicated 
 apparatus must rank lower than another language in which this 
 difference has a single expression for all cases in Mhich it occurs. 
 In this respect, too, Modern English stands higher than the oldest 
 English, Latin or Hottentot. 
 
 XVin.— §2. Irregularities Original. 
 
 It was the belief of the older school of comparativists that 
 each case had originally one single ending, which was added to 
 
§2] IRREGULARITIES ORIGINAL 339 
 
 all nouns indifferently (e.g. -as for the genitive sg.), and that the 
 irregularities found in the existing oldest languages were of later 
 growth ; the actually existing forms were then derived from the 
 supposed unity form by all kinds of phonetic tricks and dodges. 
 Now people have begun to see that the primeval language cannot 
 have been quite uniform and regular (see, for instance, Walde 
 in Streitberg's Qesch., 2. 194 ff.). If we look at facts, and not 
 at imagined or reconstructed forms, we are forced to acknowledge 
 that in the oldest stages of our family of languages not only did 
 the endings present the spectacle of a motley variety, but the 
 kernel of the word was also often subject to violent changes in 
 different cases, as when it had in different forms different accentua- 
 tion and (or) different apophony, or as when in some of the most 
 frequently occurring words some cases were formed from one 
 ' stem ' and others from another, for instance, the nominative 
 from an r stem and the oblique cases from an n stem. In the 
 common word for ' water ' Greek has preserved both stems, nom. 
 hudor, gen. hudatos, where a stands for original [anj. Whatever 
 the origin of this change of stems, it is a phenomenon belonging 
 to the earlier stages of our languages, in which we also sometimes 
 find an alteration between the r stem in the nominative and a 
 combination of the n and the r stems in the other cases, as in 
 Lat. jeciir ' liver,' jecinoris ; iter ' voyage,' itineris, which is 
 supposed to have sup]5lnnted iiinis, formed like feminis iroia femur. 
 In the later stages we always find a simplification, one single form 
 running through all cases ; tliis is either the nominative stem, as 
 in E. water, G. wasser (corresponding to Gr. hudor), or the oblique 
 case-stem, as in the Scandinavian forms, Old Norse vatn, Swed. 
 vatten, Dan. vand (corresponding to Gr. hudat-), or finally a con- 
 taminated form, as in the name of the Swedish lake Vdttern 
 (Noreen's explanation), or in Old Norse and Dan. skarn ' dirt,' 
 which has its r from a form like the Gr. skor, and its n from a 
 form like the Gr. genitive shatos (older [skantos]). The simplification 
 is carried furthest in English, where the identical form icater is 
 not only used unchanged where in the older languages difl'erent 
 case forms would have been used (' the M-ater is cold,' ' the surface 
 of the water,' ' he fell into the water,' ' he swims in the water '), 
 but also serves as a verb (' did you water the flowers ? '), and 
 as an adjunct as a quasi-adjective (' a water melon,' ' water 
 plants '). 
 
 In most cases irregularities have been done away with in the 
 waj'' here indicated, one of the forms (or stems) being generalized ; 
 but in other cases it may have happened, as Kretschmer supposes 
 (in Gercke and Nolde, Einleit. in die Altertumswiss, I, 501) that 
 irregular flexion caused a word to go out of use entirely ; thus 
 
340 PROGRESS [en. xviii 
 
 in Modern Greek M^^ar was supplanted by suhoti} j)?iriar by pegadi, 
 h&dor by nerd, oils by aphti (= olion), kHon by skulli ; this possibly 
 also accounts for commando taking the place of Lat. jnbeo. 
 
 Some scholars maintain that the medieval languages were 
 more regular than their modern representatives ; but if we look 
 more closely into ^^'hat they mean, we shall see that they are not 
 speaking of any regularity in the sense in which the word has here 
 been used — the only regularity which is of importance to the 
 speakers of the language — but of the regular correspondence of 
 a language with some earlier language from which it is derived. 
 This is particularly the case with E. Littrc, who, in his essays on 
 L'Histoire de la Langiie Frangaise, was full of enthusiasm for Old 
 French, but chiefly for the fidelity with which it had preserved 
 some features of Ijatin. There was thus the old distinction of 
 two cases : nom. sg. murs, ace, sg. mur, and in the plural inversely 
 nom. mur and ace. murs, with its exact correspondence with Latin 
 murus, murum, pi. muri, muros. When this ' regie de Ts ' was 
 discovered, and the use or omission of s, which had hitherto been 
 looked upon as completely arbitrary in Old French, v/as thus 
 accounted for, scholars were apt to consider this as an admirable 
 trait in the old language which had been lost in modern French, 
 and the same view obtained with regard to the case distinction 
 found in other words, such as OFr. nom. maire, ace. majevr, or 
 nom. emperere, ace. empereur, corresponding to the Latin forms 
 with changing stress, major, majdrem, imjJerdtor, hnperatdrem, 
 etc. But, however interesting such things may be to the historical 
 linguist, there is no denying that to the users of French the modern 
 simpler flexion is a gain as compared with this more complex 
 system, " Des sprachhistorikers freud ist des sprachbrauchers 
 leid," as Schuchardt somewhere shrewdlj^ remarks. 
 
 XVni.— § 3. Syntax. 
 
 There were also in the old languages many irregularities in 
 the syntactic use of the cases, as when some verbs governed the 
 genitive and others the dative, etc. Even if it may be possible 
 in many instances to account historically for these uses, to the 
 speakers of the languages they must have apjjeared to be mere 
 caprices which had to be learned separately for each verb, and it 
 is therefore a great advantage when they have been gradually 
 done away with, as has been the case, to a great extent, even in 
 a language like German, which has retained many old case forms. 
 Thus verbs like entbekren, vergessen, bediirfen, u'ahrnehmen, which 
 formerly took the genitive, are now used more and more with the 
 ^ Thus also the corresponding Lat. jecur by ficatum, Fr. foie. 
 
§3] SYKTAX 341 
 
 simple accusative — a simplification ■\\iucli, among other things, 
 makes the construction of sentences in the passive voice easier 
 and more regular. 
 
 The advantage of discarding the old case distinctions is seen 
 in the ease Mdth which English and French speakers can say, 
 e.g., 'with or without my hat,' or 'in and round the church,' 
 while the correct German is ' mit meinem hut oder ohnc densclben ' 
 and ' in der kirche und uin dieselbe ' ; Wackernagel writes : 
 " Was in ihm und um ihn und iiber ihm ist." When the preposi- 
 tions arc followed by a single substantive without case distinction, 
 German, of course, has the same simple construction as English, 
 e.g. ' mit oder ohne geld,' and sometimes even good ^vl■iters will 
 let themselves go and write ' um und neben dem hochaltare ' 
 (Goethe), or ' Hire tochter wird meine frau mit oder gegen ihren 
 willen ' (these examjjles from Curme, German Grammar 191). 
 Cf. also : ' Ich kann deinem bruder nicht helfen und ihn unter- 
 stUtzen.' 
 
 Many extremely convenient idioms unknown in the older 
 synthetic languages have been rendered possible in English through 
 the doing away with the old case distinctions, such as : Genius, 
 demanding bread, is given a stone after its possessor's death (Shaw) 
 (cf . my ChE § 79) | he was offered, and declined, the office of 
 poet-laureate (Gosse) | the lad was spoken highly of | I love, and 
 am loved hy, my wife | these laws my readers, whom I consider 
 as my subjects, are bound to believe in and to obey (Fielding) | 
 he was heathenishly inclined to believe in, or to worship, the 
 goddess Nemesis (id.) | he rather rejoiced in, than regretted, lus 
 bruise (id.) | many a dim had she talked to, and turned away 
 from her father's door (ThackerajO | their earthly abode, which 
 has seen, and seemed almost to S3anpathize in, all their honour 
 (Ruskm). 
 
 XVm.— §4. Objections. 
 
 Against my view of the superiority of languages with few 
 case distinctions, Arwid Johannson, in a very able article (in 
 IF I, see especially p. 247 f.), has adduced a certain number of 
 ambiguous sentences from German : 
 
 Soweit die deutsche zunge klingt und gott im himmel 
 liedersingt [is gott nominative or dative ?) | Seinem landsmann, 
 dem er in seiner ganzen bildung ebensoviel verdankte, wie 
 Goethe (nominative or dative ?) | Doch wiirde die gesellschaft 
 der Indierin (genitive or dative ?) lastig gewesen sein | Dar- 
 in hat Caballero wohl nur einen konkurrenten, die Eliot, 
 welche freilich die spanische dichterin nicht ganz erreicht | Nur 
 
842 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 Diopeithes feindet insgeheim dich an und die schwester des 
 Kimon und dein weib Tclesippa. (In the last tAvo sentences 
 what is the subject, and what the object ?) 
 
 According to Johannson, these passages show the disadvantages 
 of doing away with formal distinctions, for the sentences would 
 have been clear if each separate case had had its distinctive sign ; 
 " the greater the wealth of forms, the more intelligible the 
 speech." And they show, he says, that such ambiguities will 
 occur, even where the strictest rules of word order are observed. 
 I shall not urge that this is not exactly the case in the last sen- 
 tence if die schwester and dein weib are to be taken as accusatives, 
 for then an should have been placed at the very end of the sen- 
 tence ; nor that, in the last sentence but one, the mention of 
 George Eliot as the ' konkurrcnt ' of Fernan Caballero seems to 
 show a partiality to the Spanish authoress on the part of the 
 writer of the sentence, so that the reader is prepared to take 
 welche as the nominative case ; freilich would seem to point in the 
 same direction. But these, of course, are only trifling objections ; 
 the essential point is that we must grant the truth of Johannson 's 
 contention that we have here a flaw in the German language ; 
 the defects of its grammatical system may and do cause a certain 
 number of ambiguities. Neither is it difficult to find the reasons 
 of these defects by considering the structure of the language in 
 its entirety, and by translating the sentences in question into a 
 few other languages and comparing the results. 
 
 First, with regard to the formal distinctions between cases, 
 the really weak point cannot be the fe-vviiess of these endings, 
 for in that case we should expect the same sort of ambiguities 
 to be very common in English and Danish, where the formal 
 case distinctions are considerably fewer than in German ; but as 
 a matter of fact such ambiguities are more frequent in German 
 than in the other two languages. And, however paradoxical it 
 may seem at first sight, one of the causes of this is the greater 
 wealth of grammatical forms in German. Let us substitute 
 other words for the ambiguous ones, and we shall see that the 
 amphibology will nearly always disappear, because most other 
 words will have different forms in the two cases, e.g. : 
 
 Soweit die deutsche zunge klingt und dem allmdchtigen 
 (or, der allmdchtige) lieder singt | Seinem landsmann, dem er 
 ebensoviel verdankte, wie dem grossen dichter (or, der grosse 
 dichter) | Doch wiirde die gesellschaft des Indiers (or, dem 
 Indier) lastig gewesen sein | Darin hat Calderon wohl nur 
 einen konkurrcnten, Shakesijcare, wekher freilich rfen span- 
 
§4] OBJECTIONS 848 
 
 iachen dichter nicht erreicht (or, deri . . . der spanische dich- 
 ter . . .) \ Niir Diopeithes feindct dich insgehoim an, und der 
 bruder des Kimon und sein freund T. (or, den bruder . . . 
 seinen freund). 
 
 It is this very fact that countless sentences of this sort are 
 perfectly clear which leads to the employment of similar construc- 
 tions even where the resulting sentence is by no means clear ; 
 but if all, or most, words were identical in the nominative and 
 the dative, like gott, or in the dative and genitive, \\kc der Indierin, 
 constructions like those used would be impossible to imagine in 
 a language meant to be an intelligible vehicle of thought. And 
 so the ultimate cause of the ambiguities is the inconsistency' in the 
 formation of the several cases. But this inconsistency is found 
 in all the old languages of the Arj'an farail}' : cases which in one 
 gender or with one class of stems are kept perfectly distinct, 
 are in others identical. I take some examples from Latin, because 
 this is perhaps the best known language of this type, but Gothic 
 or Old Slavonic would show inconsistencies of the same kind. 
 Domini is genitive singular and nominative plural (corresponding 
 to, e.g., verbi and verba) ; verba is nominative and accusative pi. 
 (corresponding to domini and dominos) ; domino is dative and 
 ablative ; domince gen. and dative singular and nominative plural ; 
 ie is accusative and ablative ; qui is singular and plural ; qum 
 singular fem. and plural fem. and neuter, etc. Hence, while patres 
 filios amunt or patres filii amant are i)erfectly clear, patres consules 
 amant allows of two interpretations ; and in how many wa3's 
 cannot such a proposition as Horativs et Yirgilius poetce Yarii 
 amid erant be construed ? Menenii patris munus may mean 
 ' the gift of father Menenius,' or ' the gift of Menenius's father ' ; 
 expers illius periculi either ' free from that danger ' or ' free from 
 (sharing) that person's danger ' ; in an infinitive construction 
 with two accusatives, the only way to know which is the subject 
 and wliich the object is to consider the context, and that is not 
 always decisive, as in the oracular response given to the ^Eacide 
 P}Trhus, as quoted by Cicero from Ennius : " Aio te, iEacida, 
 Romanes vincere pos.se." Such drawbacks seem to be inseparable 
 from the structure of the highly flexional Aryan languages ; although 
 they are not logical consequences of a wealth of forms, yet his- 
 torically they cling to those languages which have the greatest 
 number of grammatical endings. And as we are here concerned 
 not with the question how to construct an artificial language 
 (and even there I should not ad\ase the adoption of many case 
 distinctions), but with the valuation of natural languages as 
 actually existing in their earlier and modern stages, we cannot 
 
QU PROGRESS [CH. xviii 
 
 accept Johannson's verdict : " The greater the wealth of forms, 
 the more intelligible the speech." 
 
 XVm.— § 5. Word Order. 
 
 If the German sentences quoted above are ambiguous, it is 
 not only on account of the want of clearness in the forms employed, 
 but also on account of the German rules of word order. One rule 
 places the verb last in subordinate sentences, and in two of the 
 sentences there would be no ambiguity in principal sentences : 
 Die deutsche zunge klingt und singt cjott im himmel licder ; or, 
 Die deutsche zunge klingt, und gott im himmel singt lieder | Sie 
 erreicht freilich nicht die spanische dichterin ; or, Die spanische 
 dichtcrin erreicht sie freilich nicht. In one of the remaining sen- 
 tences the ambiguity is caused by the rule that the verb must be 
 placed immediately after an introductory subjunct : if we omit 
 doch the sentence becomes clear : Die gesellschaft der Indierin 
 uilrde liistig gewesen sein, or, Die gesellschaft iiiirde der Indierin 
 lastig gewesen sein. Here, again we see the ill consequences of 
 inconsistency of linguistic structure ; some of the rules for word 
 position serve to show grammatical relations, but in certain cases 
 they have to give waj'^ to other rules, which counteract this useful 
 pm-pose. If you change the order of words in a German sentence, 
 you will often find that the meaning is not changed, but the result 
 will be an unidiomatic construction (bad grammar) ; whWe in 
 English a transposition will often result in perfectly good grammar, 
 only the meaning will be an entirely different one from the original 
 sentence. This does not amount to saying that the German rules 
 of position are useless and the English ones all useful, but only 
 to sa3dng that in English word order is utilized to express difference 
 of meaning to a far greater extent than in German. ' 
 
 One critic cites against me " one example, which figures in 
 almost every Rhetoric as a violation of clearness : And thus the 
 son the fervid sire address' d" and he adds : '" The use of a separate 
 form for nominative and accusative would clear up the ambiguity 
 immediately." The retort is obvious : no doubt it would, but 
 so would the use of a natural word order. Word order is just as 
 much a part of English grammar as case-endings are in other 
 languages ; a violation of the rules of word order may cause the 
 same Avant of intelligibility as the use of dominum instead of 
 dominus would in Latin. And if the example is found in almost 
 every English Rhetoric, I am glad to say that equallj'- ambiguous 
 sentences are \evy rare indeed in other English books. Even in 
 poetry, where there is such a thing as poetic licence, and where 
 the exigencies of rhj^thm and rime, as well as the fondness for 
 
§5] WORD ORDER 345 
 
 archaic and out-of-the-way expressions, will often induce deviations 
 from the word order of prose, real ambiguity will very seldom 
 arise on that account. It is true that it has been disputed which 
 is the subject in Graj^'s line : 
 
 Aiid all the air a solemn stillness holds, 
 
 but then it does not matter much, for the ultimate understanding 
 of the line must be exactly the same whether the air holds stillness 
 or stillness holds the air. In ordinary language we may find 
 similar collocations, but it is worth saying with some emphasis 
 that there can never be any doubt as to which is the subject and 
 which the object. The ordinary word order is, Subject-Verb- 
 Object, and where there is a deviation there must always be some 
 special reason for it. This may be the wish, especially for the 
 sake of some contrast, to throw into relief some member of the 
 sentence. If this is the subject, the purpose is achieved by 
 stressing it, but the word order is not affected. But if it is the 
 object, this may be placed in the very beginning of the sentence, 
 but in that case English does not, like German and Danish, require 
 inversion of the verb, and the order consequently is, Object-Sub- 
 ject-Verb, which is perfectly clear and unambiguous. See, for 
 instance, Dickens's sentence: ''Talent, Mr. Micawber has; capital, 
 Mr. Micawber has not," and the following passage from a recent 
 novel : " Even Royalty had not quite their glow and glitter ; 
 Royalty you might see any day, driving, bowing, smiling. The 
 Queen had a smile for every one ; but the Duchess no one, not 
 even Lizzie, ever saw." Thus, also, in Shakespeare's : 
 
 Things base and vilde, holding no quantity, 
 
 Loue can transpose to forme and dignity {Mids. i. 1. 233), 
 
 and in Longfellow's translation from Logau : 
 
 A blind man is a poor man, and blind a poor man is ; 
 For the former seeth no man, and the latter no man sees. 
 
 The reason for deviating from the order, Subject-Verb-Object, 
 may again be purely grammatical : a relative or an interrogative 
 pronoun must be placed first ; but here, too, English grammar 
 precludes ambiguity, as witness the following sentences : This 
 picture, which surpasses Mona Lisa | This picture, Mhich Mona 
 Lisa surpasses | What picture surpasses Mona Lisa ? | What 
 picture does not IMona Lisa surpass ? In German (dieses bild, 
 welches die M. L. iibertrifi't, etc.) all four sentences would be 
 ambiguous, in Danish the two last would be indistinguishable ; 
 but English shows that a small number of case forms is not 
 incompatible with perfect clearness and perspicuity. If the famous 
 
346 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 oracular answer {Henry VI, 2nd Part, i. 4. 33), " The Duke yet 
 liucs, that Henry shall depose," is ambiguous, it is only because 
 it is in verse, where you expect inversions : in ordinary prose it 
 could be understood only in one way, as the word order would 
 be reversed if Henry was meant as the object. 
 
 XVm.— § 6. Gender. 
 
 Besides case distinctions the older Aryan languages have a 
 rather complicated system of gender distinctions, which in many 
 instances agrees with, but in many others is totally independent 
 of, and even may be completely at war with, the natural distinc- 
 tion between male beings, female beings and things without sex. 
 This grammatical gender is sometimes looked upon as something 
 valuable for a language to possess ; thus Schroeder {Die formale 
 Unterschcidung 87) says : " The formal distinction of genders 
 is decidedly an enormous advantage which the Arj^an, Semitic 
 and Egyptian languages have before all other languages." Aasen 
 {Norsk Qrammatik 123) finds that the preservation of the old 
 genders gives vividness and variety to a language ; he therefore, 
 in constructing his artificial Norwegian ' landsmaal,' based it 
 on those dialects which made a formal distinction between the 
 masculine and feminine article. But other scholars have recog- 
 nized the disadvantages accruing from such distinctions ; thus 
 Tegner (SM 50) regrets the fact that in Swedish it is impossible 
 to give such a form to the sentence ' sin make ma man ej svika ' 
 as to make it clear that the admonition is applicable to both 
 husband and wife, because make, ' mate,' is masculine, and maka 
 feminine. In Danish, where mage is common to both sexes, no 
 such difficulty arises. Gabelentz (Spr 234) says : " Das gramma- 
 tische geschlecht bringt es weiter mit sich dass wir deutschen nie 
 eine frauensperson als einen menschen und nicht leicht einen 
 mann als eine person bezeichnen." 
 
 As a matter of fact, German gender is responsible for many 
 difficulties, not only when it is in conflict with natural sex, as when 
 one may hesitate whether to use the pronoun es or sie in reference 
 to a person just mentioned as das mddchen or das iveib, or er or 
 sie in reference to die schildxcache, but also when sexless things 
 are concerned, and er might be taken as either referring to the 
 man or to der stuhl or to der wald just mentioned, etc. In France, 
 grammarians have disputed without end as to the propriety or 
 not of referring to the (feminine) word personnes by means of the 
 pronoun ils (see Nyrop, Kongriiens 24, and Gr. iii. § 712) : "Les 
 personnes que vous attendiez sont tons logis ici." As a negative 
 pronoun personne is now frankly masculine : ' personne n'est mal- 
 
§ 6] GENDER 847 
 
 heureux.' With gens the old feminine gender is still kept up when 
 an adjective precedes, as in les bonnes gens, thus also toutes les 
 bonnes gens, but when the adjective has no separate feminine 
 form, schoolmasters prefer to say tous les honnetes gens, and the 
 masculine generally prevails when the adjective is at some distance 
 from ge)is, as in the old school -example, Instruits par I' experience, 
 toutes les vieilles gens sont soupgonneux. There is a good deal of 
 artificiality in the strict rules of grammarians on this point, and 
 it is therefore good that the Arrete ministericl of 1901 tolerates 
 greater liberty ; but conflicts are unavoidable, and will rise quite 
 naturally, in any language that has not arrived at the perfect 
 stage of complete genderlessness (which, of course, is not identical 
 with inability to express sex-differences). 
 
 Most English pronouns make no distinction of sex : /, you, 
 we, they, who, each, somebody, etc. Yet, when we hear that 
 Finnic and Magj-ar, and indeed the vast majority of languages 
 outside the Aryan and Semitic world, have no separate forms 
 for he and she, our first thought is one of astonishment ; we fail 
 to see how it is possible to do without this distinction. But if 
 we look more closely we shall see that it is at times an inconvenience 
 to have to specify the sex of the person spoken about. Coleridge 
 {Anima Poetce 190) regretted the lack of a pronoun to refer to 
 the word person, as it necessitated some stiff and strange construc- 
 tion like ' not letting the person be aware wherein offence had 
 been given,' instead of ' wherein he or she has offended.' It 
 has been said that if a genderless pronoun could be substituted 
 for he in such a proposition as this : ' It would be interesting if 
 each of the leading poets would tell us what he considers his best 
 work,' ladies would be spared the disparaging implication that 
 the leading poets were all men. Similarly there is something 
 incongruous in the following sentence found in a German review 
 of a book : " Was Maria und Fritz so zueinander zog, war, dass 
 jeder von ihnen am anderen sah, wie er ungliicklich war." Any- 
 one who has written much in Ido will have often felt how convenient 
 it is to have the common-sex pronouns lu (he or she), singlu, altru, 
 etc. It is interesting to see the different ways out of the difficulty 
 resorted to in actual language. First the cumbrous use of he 
 or she, as in Fielding TJ 1. 174, the reader's heart (if he or she 
 have any) j i\Iiss Muloch H. 2. 128, each one made his or her 
 comment.^ Secondly, the use of he alone : If anybody behaves 
 in such and such a manner, he will be punished (cf. the wholly 
 
 1 This ungainly repetition is frequent in the Latin of Roman law, e.g. 
 Digest. IV. 5. 2, Qui qiiceve . . . capite diminuti diminutce esse dicentur, 
 In eoa easve . . . iudicium dabo. | XLIII. 30, Qui quceve, in potestate Lucii 
 Titii eat, si is cave apud te est, dolov© male tuo factum est quominus apud 
 
348 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 unobjectionable, but not alwa5's applicable, formula : Whoever 
 behaves in such and such a manner will be punished). This use 
 of he has been legalized by the Act 13 and 14 Vict., cap. 21. 4 : 
 " That in all acts words importing the masculine gender shall be 
 deemed and taken to include females." Third, the sexless but plural 
 form they may be used. If you try to put the phrase, ' Does 
 anybody prevent you 1 ' in another way, beginning with ' Nobody 
 prevents you,' and then adding the interrogatory formula, you 
 will perceive that ' does he ' is too definite, and ' does he or she ' 
 too clumsy ; and j^ou will therefore naturally say (as Thackeray 
 does, P 2. 260), " Nobody prevents you, do they ? " In the same 
 manner Shakespeare writes [Lucr. 125): "Everybody to rest 
 themselves betake." The substitution of the plural for the 
 singular is not wholly illogical ; for everybody is much the same 
 thing as ' all men,' and nobody is the negation of ' all men ' ; but the 
 phenomenon is extended to cases where this explanation will not 
 hold good, as in G. Eliot, M. 2. 304, I shouldn't like to punish any 
 one, even if they'd done me wrong. (For many examples from 
 good writers sec my MEG. ii. 5, 56.) 
 
 The English interrogative who is not, like the quis or quc& of 
 the Romans, limited to one sex and one number, so that our 
 question ' Who did it ? ' to be rendered exactly in Latin, would 
 require a combination of the four : Quis hoc fecit ? Quce hoc 
 fecit ? Qui hoc fecerunt ? Qiice hoc fecertint ? or rather, the 
 abstract nature of who (and of did) makes it possible to express 
 such a question much more indefinitely in English than in any 
 highly fiexional language ; and indefiniteness in many cases means 
 greater precision, or a closer correspondence between thought and 
 expression. 
 
 XVIII.— § 7. Nominal Concord. 
 
 We have seen in the case of the verbs how widely diffused in 
 all the old Aryan languages is the phenomenon of Concord. It 
 is the same with the nouns. Here, as there, it consists in secondary 
 words (here chiefly adjectives) being made to agree with principal 
 words, but while with the verbs the agreement was in number and 
 person, here it is in number, case and gender. This is well known 
 in Greek and Latin ; as examples from Gothic may here be given 
 Luk. 1. 72, gamunan triggivos ivtihaizos seinaizos, ' to remember 
 
 te esset, ita eum eamvc exhibeas. | XI. 3, Qvii servurn scrvam alicnum alienam 
 recepisse persuasisseve quid ei dicitur dolo malo, quo eum earn deteriorem 
 faceret, in eum, quanta ea res exit, in duplum iudiciiun dnbo. I owe these 
 and some other Latin examples to my late teacher. Dr. O. Siesbye. From 
 French, Nyrop (Kongruens, p. 12) gives some corresponding examples: 
 tous ceux et ioutcs cellea qui, ayant 6t6 orphelins, avaient eu une onfance 
 malheureuse (Philippe), and from Old French : Lors domia congie A ceua 
 et a ccles que il avoit rescous (Villehardouin). 
 
§7] NOMINAL CONCORD 849 
 
 His holy covenant,' and 1. 15, allans dagans vnsarcms, 'all our 
 days.' The EngHsh translation shows how English has discarded 
 this trait, for there is notliing in the forms of {his), holy, all and 
 our, as in the Gothic forms, to indicate what substantive they 
 belong to. 
 
 Wherever the same adjectival idea is to be joined to two 
 substantives, the concordless junction is an obvious advantage, 
 as seen from a comparison of the English ' my wife and children ' 
 with the French ' ma femme et mes enfants,' or of ' the local press 
 and committees ' with ' la presse locale et les comites locaux.' 
 Try to translate exactly into French or Latin such a sentence as 
 this : " What are the present state and wants of mankind ? " 
 (Ruskin). Cf. also the expression ' a verdict of wilful murder 
 against some person or persons tmknown,' where some and unknown 
 belong to the singular as well as to the plural forms ; Fielding 
 wi-ites {TJ 3. 65) : " Some particular chapter, or perhaps chapters, 
 may be obnoxious.'' Where an English editor of a text will write : 
 " Some (indifferently singular and j)lural) word or words wanting 
 here," a Dane will write : " Et (sg.) eller flere (pi.) ord (indifferent) 
 mangier her." These last examples may be taken as proof that 
 it might even in some cases be advantageous to have forms in 
 the substantives that did not show number ; still, it must be 
 recognized that the distinction between one and more than one 
 rightly belongs to substantival notions, but logically it has as 
 little to do with adjectival as with verbal notions (cf. above, Ch. 
 XVII § 11). In ' black spots ' it is the spots, but not the qualities 
 of black, that we count. And in ' two black spots ' it is of course 
 quite superfluous to add a dual or plural ending (as in Latin duo, 
 duce) in order to indicate once more what the word hvo denotes 
 sufficiently, namely, that we have not to do with a singular. 
 Compare, finally, E. to the father and mother, Fr. au pere et a la 
 mere, G. zu deni vater und der mutter {zum voter und zur mutter). 
 If it is admitted that it is an inconvenience whenever you 
 want to use an adjective to have to put it in the form corresponding 
 in case, number and gender to its substantive, it may be thought 
 a redeeming feature of the language which makes this demand 
 that, on the other hand, it allows you to place the adjective at some 
 distance from the substantive, and yet the hearer or reader will 
 at once connect the two together. But here, as elsewhere in 
 ' energetics,' the question is whether the advantage counter- 
 balances the disadvantage ; in other words, whether the fact that 
 you are free to place your adjective where you will is worth the 
 price you pay for it in being always saddled with the heavy apparatus 
 of adjectival flexions. Why should you want to remove the 
 adjective from the substantive, which naturally must be in your 
 
850 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 thought when you are thinking of the adjective 1 There is one 
 natural cmploj'ment of the adjective in which it has very often 
 to stand at some distance from the substantive, namely, when it 
 is predicative ; but then the example of German shows the needless- 
 ness of concord in that case, for while the adjunct adjective is 
 inflected (ein guter mensch, eine gute frau, ein gutes buch, gvte 
 bucher) the predicative is invariable like the adverb (der mensch 
 ist gut, die frau ist gut, das buch ist giit, die bucher sind gut). It 
 is chiefly in poetry that a Latin adjective is placed far from its 
 substantive, as in Vergil : " Et bene apud memores vetcris stat 
 gratia facti " (J5n. IV. 539), where the form shows that veteris 
 is to be taken with facti (but then, where does 6ene belong ? it 
 might be taken with memores, slat or facti). In Horace's well- 
 known aphorism : " .^quam memento rebus in arduis servare 
 mentem," the flexional form of cequam allows him to place it first, 
 far from mentem, and thus facilitates for him the task of building 
 up a perfect metrical line ; but for the reader it would certainly 
 be preferable to have had cequam mentem together at once, instead 
 of having to hold his attention in suspense for five words, till 
 finally he comes upon a word with which to connect the adjective. 
 There is therefore no economizing of the energy of reader or hearer. 
 Extreme examples may be found in Icelandic skaldic poetry, in 
 which the poets, to fulfil the requirements of a highly complicated 
 metrical system, entailing initial and medial rimes, very often 
 place the words in what logically must be considered the worst 
 disorder, thereby making their poem as difficult to understand 
 as an intricate chess-problem is to solve — and certainly coming 
 short of the highest poetical form. 
 
 XVm.— § 8. The English Genitive. 
 
 If we compare a group of Latin words, such as opera virorum 
 omnium bonorum veterum, v,ith a corresponding group in a few other 
 languages of a less flexional t5'-pe ; OE, ealra godra ealdra manna 
 weorc ; Danish alle gode gamle mcends vcerker ; Modern English 
 all good old men's works, we perceive by analyzing the ideas ex- 
 pressed by the several words that the Romans said really : ' work,' 
 plural, nominative or accusative -j- ' man,' plural, masculine, 
 genitive + ' all,' plural, genitive -f ' good,' plural, masculine, 
 genitive -f ' old,' pliu-al, masculine, genitive. Leaving opera out 
 of consideration, we find that plural number is expressed fom' 
 times, genitive case also fom" times, and masculine gender twice ; ^ 
 
 ^ If instead of omnium veterutn I had chosen, for instance, muliorum 
 antiquorum, the meaning of mascuUne gender would have been rendered 
 four times : for languages, especially the older ones, are not distinguished 
 by consistency. 
 
§8] THE ENGLISH GENITIVE 851 
 
 in Old English the signs of number and case are found four times 
 each, while there is no indication of gender ; in Danish the plural 
 number is marked four times and the case once. And finally, 
 in Modern English, we find each idea expressed once onlj'^ ; and 
 as nothing is lost in clearness, this method, as being the easiest and 
 shortest, must be considered the best. Mathematically the different 
 ways of rendering the same thing might be represented by the 
 formulas : anx + bnx + cnx = (an -f bn + cn)x = (a+b+c)nx. 
 
 This unusual faculty of ' parenthesizing ' causes Danish, 
 and to a still greater degree English, to stand outside the definition 
 of the Aiyan family of languages given by the earlier school of 
 linguists, according to wliich the Aryan substantive and adjective 
 can never be without a sign indicating case. Schleicher (NV 52C) 
 says : " The radical difference between Magyar and Indo-Germanic 
 (Aryan) words is brought out distinctly by the fact that the post- 
 positions belonging to co-ordinated nouns can be dispensed with 
 in all the nouns except the last of the series, e.g. a jd embernek, 
 ' dem guten menschen ' (a for az, demonstrative pronoun, article ; 
 j6, good ; ember, man, -nek, -nak, postposition with pretty much 
 the same meaning as the dative case), for az-nak (annak) jd-nak 
 ember-nek, as if in Greek you should say to ayad'o dv^pwrrco. An 
 attributive adjective preceding its noun alwaj^s has the form of 
 the pure stem, the sign of plurality and the postposition indicating 
 case not being added to it. Magyars say, for instance, Hunyady 
 Mdtyds m,agyar kirdly-nak (to the Hungarian king Mathew Hun- 
 yady), -nak belonging here to all the preceding words. Nearly 
 the same thing takes place where several words are joined together 
 by means of ' and.' " 
 
 Now, this is an exact parallel to the English group genitive 
 in cases like ' all good old men's works,' ' the King of England's 
 power,' ' Beaumont and Fletcher's plays,' ' somebody else's 
 turn,' etc. The way in which this group genitive has developed 
 in comparatively recent times may be summed up as follows 
 (see the detailed exposition in my ChE ch. iii.) : In the oldest 
 English -s is a case-ending, like all others foimd in fiexional lan- 
 guages ; it forms together with the body of the noun one indivi- 
 sible whole, in which it is sometimes impossible to tell where the 
 kernel of the word ends and the ending begins (compare endes 
 from e7ide and heriges from here) ; only some words have this 
 ending, and in others the genitive is indicated in other waj's. As 
 to syntax, the meaning or function of the genitive is complicated 
 and rather vague, and there are no fixed rules for the position of 
 the genitive in the sentence. 
 
 In coiu-se of time we witness a gradual development towards 
 greater regularity and precision. The partitive, objective, descrip- 
 
352 PROGRESS [CH. xviii 
 
 tive and some other functions of the genitive become obsolete ; 
 the genitive is invariably put immediatelj'' before the word it 
 belongs to ; irregular forms disaj^pear, the s ending alone sur\iving 
 as the fittest, so that at last we have one definite ending with one 
 definite function and one definite position. 
 
 In Old English, when several words belonging together were 
 to be put in the genitive, each of them had to take the genitive 
 mark, though this was often different in different words, and thus 
 we had combinations like anes reades mannes, ' a red man's ' | y>cere 
 godlican lufe, ' the godlike love's ' j ealra godra ealdra manna 
 weorc, etc. Now the s used everywhere is much more independent, 
 and may be separated from the principal word by an adverb like 
 else or by a prepositional group like of England, and one s is 
 sufficient at the end even of a long group of words. Here, then, we 
 see in the full light of comparatively recent history a giving uj) 
 of the old flexion with its inseparability of the constituent elements 
 of the word and with its strictness of concord ; an easier and 
 more regular s3"stem is developed, in which the ending leads a 
 more independent existence and may be compared with the 
 ' agglutinated ' elements of such a language as Magyar or even 
 with the ' empty words ' of Chinese grammar. The direction of 
 this development is the direct ojoposite of that assumed by 
 most linguists for the development of languages in prehistoric 
 times. 
 
 XVIII.— § 9. Bantu Concord. 
 
 One of the most characteristic traits of the history of English 
 is thus seen to be the gradual getting rid of concord as of some- 
 thing superfluous. Where concord is found in our family of 
 languages, it certainly is an heirloom from a jDrimitive age, and 
 strikes us now as an outcome of a tendency to be more explicit 
 than to more advanced people seems strictly necessary. It is 
 on a par with the ' concord of negatives,' as we might term the 
 emphasizing of the negative idea by seemingly redundant repeti- 
 tions. In Old English it was the regular idiom to say : nnn man 
 ?iyste wan J-ing, ' no man not-knew nothing ' ; so it was in 
 Chaucer's time : he weuere yet wo vileynye we sayde In all his 
 h-f unto wo manner wight ; and it survives in the vulgar speech 
 of our own daj's : there was wiver wobody else gen (gave) me 
 wothin ' (George Eliot) ; whereas standard Modern English is 
 content with one negation : no man knew anything, etc. That 
 concord is really a primitive trait (though not, of course, found 
 equally distributed among all ' primitive peoples ') will be seen 
 also by a rapid glance at the structure of the South African group 
 
§9] 
 
 BANTU CONCORD 
 
 858 
 
 of languages called Bantu, for here we find not only repetition of 
 negatives, but also other phenomena of concord in specially- 
 luxuriant growth. 
 
 I take the following examples chiefly from W. H. I. Bleek's 
 excellent, though unfortunately unfinished, Comparative Grammar, 
 though I am well aware that expressions like si-m-tanda (we love 
 him) " are never used by natives with this meaning without being 
 determined by some other expression " (Torrend, p. 7). The 
 Zulu word for ' man ' is umuntu ; every word in the same or a 
 following sentence ha\ang anj^ reference to that word must begin 
 with something to remind j-ou of the beginning of umuntu. This 
 will be, according to fixed rules, either mu or u, or w or m. In 
 the following sentence, the meaning of which is ' our handsome 
 man (or woman) appears, we love him (or her),' these reminders 
 (as I shall term them) are printed in italics : 
 
 umuntw weiu omwchle wyabonakala, simtanda (1) 
 man ours handsome appears, we love. 
 
 If, instead of the singular, we take the corresponding plural 
 abmtu, ' men, people ' (whence the generic name of Bantu), the 
 sentence looks quite different : 
 
 a6antu 6etu aftachle ftayabonakala, sifeatanda (2). 
 
 In the same way, if we successively take as our starting-point 
 ilizive, ' country,' the corresponding plural amazwe, ' countries,' 
 isizwe, 'nation,' izizice, 'nations,' intombi, 'girl,' izintombi, 
 ' girls,' we get : 
 
 tZizive 
 
 /etu 
 
 eZ/chle 
 
 Ziyabonakala, 
 
 siZe'tanda 
 
 (5) 
 
 airuvLwe 
 
 etu 
 
 amochle 
 
 ayabonakala, 
 
 siit-'atanda 
 
 (6) 
 
 isizwe 
 
 setu 
 
 estchle 
 
 siyabonakala, 
 
 sisj'tanda 
 
 (7) 
 
 izizwe 
 
 zetu 
 
 ezichle 
 
 ziyabonakala. 
 
 sizz'tanda 
 
 (8) 
 
 iwtombi 
 
 yetu 
 
 enchle 
 
 iyabonakala , 
 
 siyitanda 
 
 (9) 
 
 izivXomhi 
 
 zeiu 
 
 ezmchle 
 
 ziyabonakala. 
 
 sizitanda 
 
 (10) 
 
 (girls) 
 
 our 
 
 handsome 
 
 appear. 
 
 we love.^ 
 
 
 In other words, every substantive belongs to one of several 
 classes, of which some have a singular and others a plural meaning ; 
 each of these classes has its own prefix, by means of which the 
 concord of the parts of a sentence is indicated. (An inhabitant 
 
 ^ The change of the initial sound of the reminder belonging to the 
 adjective is explained through composition with a ' relative particle ' a ; 
 au becoming o, and ai, e. The numbers within parentheses refer to the 
 numbers of Bleek's classes. Similar sentences from Tonga are found in 
 Torrend's Compnr. Or. p. 6 f. 
 
 28 
 
854 PROGRESS [cH. xvm 
 
 of the country of L/ganda is called mwganda, pi. ftaganda or waganda ; 
 the language spoken there is Zwganda.) 
 
 It will he noticed that adjectives such as ' handsome ' or 
 ' ours ' take different shapes according to the word to which they 
 refer ; in the Zulu Lord's Prayer ' thy ' is found in the following 
 forms : Zako (referring to igama, ' name,' for ilig&ma,, 5), fcako, 
 (w6wkumkani, ' kingdom,' 14), yako (mtando, ' will,' 9). So also 
 the genitive case of the same noun has a great many different 
 forms, for the genitive relation is expressed by the reminder of 
 the governing word + the ' relative particle ' a (which is com- 
 bined with the following sound) ; take, for instance, inkosi, ' chief, 
 king': 
 
 umuntn it'enkosi, ' the king's man ' (1 ; we for w -\- a -\- i). 
 
 a6antu 6enkosi, ' the king's men ' (2). 
 
 ilizwe Zenkosi, ' the king's country ' (5). 
 
 amazwe enkosi, ' the king's countries ' (6). 
 
 isizwe senkosi, ' the king's nation ' (7). 
 
 wA;wtanda kwenkosi, ' the king's love ' (15). 
 
 Livingstone says that these apparently redundant repetitions 
 " impart energy and perspicuity to each member of a proposition, 
 and prevent the possibility of a mistake as to the antecedent." 
 These prefixes are necessary to the Bantu languages ; still , Bleek 
 is right as against Livingstone in speaking of the repetitions as 
 cumbersome, just as the endings of Latin multorum virorum 
 antiquorum are cumbersome, however indispensable they may 
 have been to the contemporaries of Cicero. 
 
 These African phenomena have been mentioned here chiefly 
 to show to what lengths concord may go in the speech of some 
 primitive peoples. The prevalent opinion is that each of these 
 prefixes (umu, aba, Hi, etc.) was originally an independent word, 
 and that thus words like umuntu, ilizwe, were at first compounds* 
 like E. steamship, where it would evidently be possible to imagine 
 a reference to this word by means of a repeated ship (our ship, 
 which ship is a great ship, the ship appears, we love the ship) ; 
 but at any rate the Zulus extend this principle to cases that would 
 be parallel to an imagined repetition of friendship by means of the 
 same ship, or to referring to steamer by means of the ending er 
 (Bleek 107). Bleek and others have tried to find out by an 
 analysis of the words making up the different classes what may 
 have been the original meaning of the class-prefix, but very often 
 the connecting tie is extremely loose, and in manj^ cases it seems 
 that a word might with equal right have belonged to another 
 class than the one to which it actually belongs. The connexion 
 also frequently seems to be a derived rather than an original one, 
 
§9] BANTU CONCORD 855 
 
 and much in this class-division is just as arbitrary as the reference 
 of Aryan nouns to each of the three genders. In several of the 
 classes the words have a definite numerical value, so that they go 
 together in pairs as corresponding singular and plural nouns ; but 
 the existence of a certain number of exceptions shows that these 
 numerical values cannot originally have been associated with the 
 class prefixes, but must be due to an extension by analogy 
 (Bleek 140 ff.). The starting-point may have been substantives 
 standing to each other in the relation of ' person ' to ' people,' 
 'soldier' to 'army,' 'tree' to 'forest,' etc. The prefixes of 
 such words as the latter of each of these pairs will easily acquire 
 a certain sense of plurality, no matter what they may have meant 
 originall)', and then they will lend themselves to forming a kind 
 of plural in other nouns, being either put instead of the prefix 
 belonging properly to the noun (amazive, ' countries,' 6 ; t7/zwe, 
 'country,' 5), or placed before it {ma-luto, 'spoons,' 6, Zwto, 
 'spoon,' 11). 
 
 In some of the languages " the forms of some of the prefixes 
 have been so stronglj^ contracted as almost to defy identification." 
 (Bleek 234). All the prefixes probably at first had fuller forms 
 than appear now. Bleek noticed that the ma- prefix never, except 
 in some degraded languages, had a corresponding ma- as jDarticle, 
 but, on the contrary, is followed in the sentence by ga-, ya-, or 
 a-, and mu- (3) generally has a corresponding particle gu-. Now, 
 Sir Harry Johnston [The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, 2. 891) has 
 found that on Mount Eldon and in Kavirondo there are some very 
 archaic forms of Bantu languages, in which giimu- and gama- 
 are the commonly used forms of the mu- and ma- prefixes, as well 
 as baba- and bnhu- for ordinary ba-, bu- ; he infers that the original 
 forms of mu-, wa- were ngumu-, ngama-. I am not so sure that 
 he is right when he says that these prefixes were originally " words 
 which had a separate meaning of their own, either as directives 
 or demonstrative pronouns, as indications of sex, weakness, little- 
 ness or greatness, and so on " — for, as we shall see in a subsequent 
 chapter, such grammatical instruments may have been at first 
 inseparable parts of long words — parts which had no meaning 
 of their own — and have acquired some more or less vague gram- 
 matical meaning through being extended gradually to other words 
 with which they had originally nothing to do. The actual 
 irregularity in their distribution certainly seems to point in that 
 direction. 
 
 XVm.— § 10. Word Order Again. 
 
 Mention has already been made here and there of word order 
 and its relation to the great question of simpUfication of gram- 
 
856 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 matical structure ; but it will be well in this place to return to the 
 subject in a more comprehensive way. The theory of word order 
 has long been the Cinderella of linguistic science : how many even 
 of the best and fullest grammars are wholly, or almost wholly, silent 
 about it ! And yet it presents a great many problems of high 
 importance and of the greatest interest, not onl}' in those languages 
 in which word order has been extensively utilized for grammatical 
 purposes, such as English and Chinese, but in other languages 
 as well. 
 
 In historical times we see a gradual evolution of strict rules 
 for word order, while our general impression of the older stages 
 of our languages is that words were often placed more or less at 
 random. This is what we should naturally expect from primitive 
 man, Avhose thoughts and words are most likely to have come to 
 him rushing helter-skelter, in wild confusion. One cannot, of 
 course, apply so strong an expression to languages such as 
 Sanskrit, Greek or Gothic ; still, compared with our modern 
 languages, it cannot be denied that there is in them much more 
 of what from one point of view is disorder, and from another 
 freedom. 
 
 This is especially the case with regard to the mutual position 
 of the subject of a sentence and its verb. In the earliest times, 
 sometimes one of them comes first, and sometimes the other. 
 Then there is a growing tendencj^ to place the subject first, and 
 as this position is found not only in most European languages 
 but also in Chinese and other languages of far-away, the phe- 
 nomenon must be founded in the very nature of human thought, 
 though its non-prevalence in most of the older Aryan languages 
 goes far to show that this particular order is only natural to 
 developed human thought. 
 
 Survivals of the earlier st^te of things are found here and 
 there ; thus, in German ballad style : " Kam ein schlanker bursclf 
 gegangen." Bat it is well worth noticing that such an arrange- 
 ment is generally avoided, in German as well as in the other modern 
 languages of Western Eiu'ope, and in those cases where there is 
 some reason for placing the verb before the subject, the speaker 
 still, as it were, satisfies his grammatical instinct by putting a 
 kind of sham subject before the verb, as in E. there comes a time 
 when . . ., Dan. der kommer en tid da . . ., G. €5 kommt eine 
 zeit wo . . ., Fr. il arrive un temps oh. . . . 
 
 In Keltic the habitual word order placed the verb first, but 
 little by little the tendency prevailed to introduce most sentences 
 by a periphrasis, as in ' (it) is the man that comes,' and as that 
 came to mean merel}' ' the man comes,' the word order Subject- 
 Verb was thus brought about circuitously. 
 
§10] WORD ORDER AGAIN 857 
 
 Before this particular word order, Subject-Verb, was firmly 
 established in modern Gothonic languages, an exception obtained 
 wherever the sentence began with some other word than the 
 subject ; this might be some important member of the proposition 
 that was placed first lor the sake of emphasis, or it might be some 
 unimportant little adverb, but the rule was that the verb should 
 at any rate have the second place, as being felt to be in some way 
 the middle or central part of the whole, and the subject had then 
 to be content to be placed after the verb. This was the rule in 
 Middle English and in Old French, and it is still strictly followed 
 in German and Danish : Gestern kam das schiff \ Pigen gav jeg 
 kagen, ikke dretigen. Traces of the practice are still found in 
 English in parenthetic sentences to indicate wjio is the speaker 
 (' Oh, yes,' said he), and after a somewhat long subjunct, if there 
 is no object (' About this time died the gentle Queen Elizabeth '), 
 where this word order is little more than a styhstic trick to avoid 
 the abrupt effect of ending the sentence with an isolated verb 
 like died. Otherwise the order Subject-Verb is almost universal 
 in English. 
 
 XVm.— §11. Compromises. 
 
 The inverted order, Verb -Subject, is used extensively in many 
 languages to express questions, wishes and invitations. But, as 
 already stated, this order was not originally peculiar to such 
 sentences. A question was expressed, no matter how the words 
 were arranged, b}^ pronouncing the whole sentence, or the most 
 important part of it, in a peculiar rising tone. This manner of 
 indicating questions is, of course, still kept up in modern speech, 
 and is often the only thing to show that a question is meant 
 (' John ? ' I ' John is here ? '). But although there was thus a 
 natural manner of expressing questions, and although the inverted 
 word order was used in other sorts of sentences as well, yet in 
 course of time there came to be a connexion between the two 
 things, so that putting the verb before the subject was felt as 
 implying a question. The rising tone then came to be less neces- 
 sary, and is much less marked in inverted sentences like ' Is John 
 here ? ' than in sentences with the usual word order : ' John 
 is here ? ' 
 
 Now, after this method of indicating questions had become 
 comparatively fixed, and after the habit of thinking of the subject 
 first had become all but universal, these two principles entered 
 into conflict, the result of which has been, in English, Danish 
 and French, the establishment in some cases of various kinds of 
 compromise, in which the interrogatory word order has formally 
 
358 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 carried the day. while really the verb, that is to say the verb wliich 
 means something, is placed after its subject. In English, this is 
 attained by means of the auxiliary do : instead of Shakespeare's 
 " Came he not home to-night ? " {Ro. ii. 4. 2) we now say, " Did 
 he not (or. Didn't he) come home to-night ? " and so in all cases 
 where a similar arrangement is not already brought about by the 
 presence of some other auxiliary, ' Will he come ? ', ' Can he 
 come ? ', etc. Where we have an interrogatory pronoun as a 
 subject, no auxiliary is required, because the natural front position 
 of the pronoun maintains the order Subject- Verb (Who came ? | 
 What hajjpened ?). But if the pronoun is not the subject, do 
 is required to establish the balance between the two principles 
 (Who(m) did you see ? | What does he say ?). 
 
 In Danish, the verb mon, used in the old language to indicate 
 a weak necessity or a vague futurity, fulfils to a certain extent 
 the same office as the English do ; up to the eighteenth century 
 mon was really an auxiliary verb, followed by the infinitive : ' Mon 
 han komme ? ' ; but now the construction has changed, the 
 indicative is used with mon : ' Mon han kommer ? ', and mx)n is 
 uo longer a verb, but an interrogatory adverb, which serves the 
 purpose of placing the subject before the verb, besides making 
 the qnestion more indefinite and vague : ' Kommer han ? ' means 
 ' Does he come ? ' or ' Will he come ? ' but ' Mon han kommer ? ' 
 means ' Does he come (Will he come), do you think ? ' 
 
 French, finally, has developed two distinct forms of compromise 
 between the conflicting principles, for in ' Est-ce que Pierre bat 
 Jean ? ' est-ce represents the interrogatory and Pierre bat the usual 
 word order, and in ' Pierre bat-il Jean ? ' the real subject is placed 
 before and the sham subject after the verb. Here also, as in 
 Danish, the ultimate result is the creation of ' empty words,' or 
 interrogatory adverbs : est-ce-que in every respect except in spelling 
 is one word (note that it does not change with the tense of the 
 main verb), and thus is a sentence prefix to introduce questions ; 
 and in popular speech we find another empty word, namely ti 
 (see, among other scholars, G. Paris, Melanges ling. 276). The 
 origin of this ti is very curious. While the t of Latin amat, etc., 
 coming after a vowel, disappeared at a very early period of the 
 French language, and so produced il aime, etc., the same t was 
 kept in Old French wherever a consonant protected it,^ and so 
 gave the forms est, sont, fait (from fact, for facit), font, chantent, 
 etc. From est-il, fait-il, etc., the t Avas then by analogy reintro- 
 duced in aime-t-il, instead of the earlier aime il. Now, towards 
 the end of the IMiddle Ages, French final consonants were as a rule 
 
 ^ This protecting consonant was dropped in pronunciation at a later 
 period. 
 
§11] COMPROMISES 359 
 
 dropped in speech, except when followed immediately by a word 
 beginning with a vowel. Consequently, while / is mute in sentences 
 like ' Ton frere dit \ Tes fr^res disent,' it is sounded in the corre- 
 sponding questions, ' Ton frdre dit-il ? Tes fr^res diaent-iU ? ' 
 As the final consonants of il and Us are also generally dropped, 
 even by educated speakers, the difference between interrogatory 
 and declarative sentences in the spoken language depends solely 
 on the addition of ti to the verb : written phonetically, the pairs 
 will be : 
 
 [to frer di — t5 frer di ti] 
 
 [te frcr diz — te fre"r di'z ti]. 
 
 Now, popular instinct seizes upon this ti as a convenient sign 
 of interrogative sentences, and, forgetting its origin, uses it even 
 with a feminine subject, turning ' Ta soeur di(t) ' into the question 
 ' Ta soem- di ti ? ', and in the first person : ' Je di ti ? ' ' Nous 
 dison ti ? ' ' Je vous fais-ti tort ? ' (Maupassant). In novels this 
 is often ^vi'itten as if it were the adverb y : C'est-y pas vrai ? | Je 
 suis t'y bete ! | C'est-y vous le monsieur de I'Academie qui va 
 avoir cent ans ? (Daudet). I have dwelt on this point because, 
 besides showing the interest of many problems of word order, it also 
 throws some light on the sometimes unexpected ways by which 
 languages must often travel to arrive at new expressions for gram- 
 matical categories. 
 
 It was mentioned above that the inverted order, Verb-Subject, 
 is used extensively, not only in questions, but also to express 
 wishes and invitations. Here, too, we find in English compromises 
 with the usual order, Subject-Verb. For, apart from such formulas 
 as ' Long live the King ! ' a wish is generally expressed by means 
 of may, which is placed first, while the real verb comes after the 
 subject : ' Maj'- she be happy ! ', and instead of the old ' Go we ! ' 
 we have now ' Let us go ! ' -with us, the virtual subject, placed 
 before the real verb. When a pronoun is wanted with an impera- 
 tive, it used to be placed after the verb, as in Shakespeare : ' Stand 
 thou forth ' and ' Fear not tJiou,' or in the Bible : ' Turn ye unto 
 him,' but now the usual order has prevailed : ' You try ! ' ' You 
 take that seat, and somebody fetch a few more chairs ! ' But if 
 the auxiliary do is used, we have the compromise order : ' Don't 
 you stir ! ' 
 
 XVm.— § 12. Order Beneficial ? 
 
 I have here selected one point, the place of the subject, to 
 illustrate the growing regularity in word order ; but the same 
 tendency is manifested in other fields as well : the place of the 
 object (or of two objects, if we have an indirect besides a direct 
 
360 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 object), the place of the adjunct adjective, the place of a eub- 
 orclinate adverb, which by coming regularly before a certain 
 case may become a preposition ' governing ' that case, etc. It 
 cannot be denied that the tendency towards a more regular word 
 order is universal, and in accordance with the general trend of 
 this inquiry we must next ask the question : Is this tendency a 
 beneficial one ? Does the more regular word order found in 
 recent stages of our languages constitute a progress in linguistic 
 structure ? Or should it be deplored because it hinders freedom 
 of movement ? 
 
 In answering this question we must first of all beware of 
 letting our judgment be run away with by the word ' freedom.' 
 Because freedom is desirable elsewhere, it does not follow that 
 it should be the best thing in this domain ; just as above we did 
 not allow ourselves to be imposed on by the phrase ' wealth of 
 forms,' so here we must be on our guard against the word ' free ' : 
 what if we turned the question in another way : Which is preferable, 
 order or disorder ? It may be true that, viewed exclusively from 
 the standpoint of the speaker, freedom would seem to be a great 
 advantage, as it is a restraint to him to be obliged to follow strict 
 rules ; but an orderly arrangement is decidedly in the interest 
 of the hearer, as it very considerably facilitates his understanding 
 of what is said ; it is therefore, though indirectly, in the interest of 
 the speaker too, because he naturally speaks for the purpose 
 of being understood. Besides, he is soon in his turn to become 
 the hearer : as no one is exclusively hearer or speaker, there can 
 be no real conflict of interest between the two. 
 
 If it be urged in favour of a free word order that we owe a 
 certain regard to the interests of poets, it must be taken into con- 
 sideration, first, that we cannot all of us be poets, and that a 
 regard to all those of us who resemble Moliere's M. Joixrdain in 
 speaking prose without being aware of it is perhaps, after all, more 
 important than a regard for those very few who are in the enviable 
 position of writing readable verse ; secondly, that a statistical 
 investigation would, no doubt, give as its result that those poets 
 who make the most extensive use of inversions are not among the 
 greatest of their craft ; and, finally, that so many methods are 
 found of neutralizing the restraint of word order, in the shape of 
 particles, passive voice, different constructions of sentences, etc., 
 that no artist in language need despair. 
 
 So far, we have scarcely done more than clear the ground before 
 answering our question. And now we must recognize that there 
 are some rules of word order which cannot be called beneficial 
 in any way ; they are like certain rules of etiquette, in so far as 
 one can see no reason for their existence, and yet one is obliged to 
 
§12] ORDER BENEFICIAL? 801 
 
 bow to them. Historians may, in some cases, be able to account 
 for their origin and show that they had a raison d'etre at some 
 remote period ; but the circumstances that called them into exist- 
 ence then have passed away, and they are now felt to be restraints 
 with no concurrent advantage to reconcile us to their observance. 
 Among rules of this class we may reckon those for placing the 
 French pronouns now before, and now after, the verb, now with 
 the dative and now with the accusative first, 'elle me le donne | elle 
 le lui donne | donnez-Ze moi \ ne me le donnez pas.' And, again, 
 the rules for placing the verb, object, etc., in German subordinate 
 clauses otherwise than in main sentences. That the latter rules 
 are defective and are inferior to the English rules, which are the 
 same for the two kinds of sentences, was pointed out before, when 
 we examined Johannson's German sentences (p. 341), but here 
 we may state that the real, innermost reason for condemning them 
 is their inconsistency : the same rule does not apply in all cases. 
 It seems possible to establish the important principle that the 
 more consistent a rule for word order is, the more useful it is in 
 the economy of speech, not only as facilitating the understanding 
 of what is said, but also as rendering possible certain thorough- 
 going changes in linguistic structure. 
 
 XVm.— § 13. Word Order and Simplification. 
 
 This, then, is the conclusion I arrive at, that as simplification 
 of grammatical structure, abolition of case distinctions, and so 
 forth, alwaj'^s go hand in hand with the development of a fixed 
 word order, tliis cannot be accidental, but there must exist a 
 relation of cause and effect between the two phenomena. Which, 
 then, is the prius or cause ? To my mind undoubtedly the fixed 
 word order, so that the grammatical simplification is the posterivs 
 or effect. It is, however, by no means uncommon to find a half- 
 latent conception in people's minds that the flexional endings were 
 fij-st lost ' by phonetic decay,' or ' through the blind operation 
 of sound laws,' and that then a fixed word order had to step in 
 to make up for the loss of the previous forms of expression. But 
 if this were true we should have to imagine an intervening period 
 in which the mutual relations of words were indicated in neither 
 way ; a period, in fact, in which speech was unintelligible and 
 consequently practically useless. The theory is therefore untenable. 
 It follows that a fixed word order must have come in first : it 
 would come quite gradually as a natural consequence of greater 
 mental development and general maturity, when the speaker's 
 ideas no longer came into his mind helter-skelter, but in orderly 
 sequence. If before the establishment of some sort of fixed 
 
862 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 word order any tendency to slur certain final consonants or vowels 
 of grammatical importance had manifested itself, it could not 
 have become universal, as it would have been constantly checked 
 by the necessity that speech should be intelligible, and that there- 
 fore those marks which showed the relation of different words 
 should not be obliterated. But when once each word was placed 
 at the exact spot where it properly belonged, then there was no 
 longer anything to forbid the endings being weakened by assimila- 
 tion, etc., or being finally dropped altogether. 
 
 To bring out my view I have been obliged in the preceding 
 paragraph to use expressions that should not be taken too literally ; 
 I have spoken as if the changes referred to were made ' in the 
 lump,' that is, as if the word order was first settled in every 
 respect, and after that the endings began to be dropped. The 
 real facts are, of course, much more complicated, changes of one 
 kind being interwoven with changes of the other in such a w&y as 
 to render it difficult, if not impossible, in any particular case to 
 discover which was the prius and which the posterius. We are 
 not able to lay our finger on one spot and say : Here final m or 
 n was dropped, because it was now rendered superfluous as a case- 
 sign on account of the accusative being invariably placed after 
 the verb, or for some other such reason. Nevertheless, the essential 
 truth of my hypothesis seems to me unimpeachable. Look at 
 Latin final s. Cicero {Oral. 48. 161) expressly tells us, what is 
 corroborated by a good many inscriptions, that there existed a 
 strong tendency to drop final s ; but the tendency did not prevail. 
 The reason seems obvious ; take a page of Latin prose and try 
 the effect of striking out all final s's, and you will find that it will 
 be extremely difficult to determine the meaning of many passages ; 
 a consonant playing so important a part in the endings of nouns 
 and verbs could not be left out without loss in a language possessing 
 so much freedom in regard to word position as Latin. Conse- 
 quently it was kept, but in course of time word position became 
 more and more subject to laws ; and when, centm'ies later, after 
 the splitting up of Latin into the Romanic languages, the tendency 
 to slur over final s knocked once more at the door, it met no longer 
 with the same resistance : final s disappeared, first in Italian and 
 Rumanian, then in French, where it was kept till about the end 
 of the Middle Ages, and it is now beginning to sound a retreat in 
 Spanish ; see on Andalusian Fr. Wulflf, Un Chapitre de Phonetique 
 Andalouse, 1889. 
 
 The main line of development in historical times has, I take 
 it, been the following : first, a period in which words were placed 
 somewhere or other according to the fancy of the moment, but 
 many of them provided with signs that would show their mutual 
 
§13] WORD ORDER AND SIMPLIFICATION 868 
 
 relations ; next, a period with retention of these signs, combined 
 with a growing regularity in word order, and at the same time in 
 many connexions a more copious employment of prepositions ; 
 then an increasing indistinctness and finally complete dropping 
 of the endings, word order (and prepositions) being now sufficient 
 to indicate the relations at fu-st sho^vn by endings and similar 
 means. 
 
 Viewed in this light, the transition from freedom in word 
 position to greater strictness must be considered a beneficial 
 change, since it has enabled the speakers to do away with more 
 circumstantial and clumsy linguistic means. Schiller says : 
 
 Jeden anderen mei-ster erkennt man an dem, was er ausspricht ; 
 Was er weise verschweigt, zeigt mir den meister des stils. 
 
 (Every other master is known by what he says, but the master 
 of style by what he is wisely silent on.) What style is to the 
 individual, the general laws of language are to the nation, and we 
 must award the palm to that language which makes it possible 
 " to be wisely silent " about things which in other languages have 
 to be expressed in a troublesome way, and which have often to 
 be expressed over and over again {viTorum omniMm honorum 
 vetenim, ealra godra ealdra manna). Could any linguistic expedient 
 be more worthy of the genus homo sapiens than using for different 
 purposes, with different significations, two sentences like ' John 
 beats Henry ' and ' Henry beats John,' or the four Danish ones, 
 ' Jens slaar Henrik — Henrik slaar Jens — slaar Jens Henrik ? — 
 slaar Henrik Jens ? ' (John beats Henry — H. beats J. — does J. 
 beat H. ? — does H. beat J. ?), or the Chinese use of 6i in different 
 places (Ch. XIX § 3) ? Cannot this be compared with the ingenious 
 Arabic system of numeration, in which 234 means something 
 entirely different from 324, or 423, or 432, and the ideas of *' tens " 
 and " hundreds " are elegantly suggested by the order of the 
 characters, not, as in the Roman system, ponderously expressed ? 
 Now, it should not be forgotten that this system, " where more 
 is meant than meets the ear," is not only more convenient, but 
 also clearer than flexions, as actually found in existing languages, 
 for word order in those languages which utilize it grammatically 
 is used much more consistently than any endings have ever been 
 in the old Aryan languages. It is not true, as Johannson would 
 have us believe, that the dispensing with old flexional endings was 
 too dearly bought, as it brought about increasing possibilities of 
 misunderstandings ; for in the evolution of languages the dis- 
 carding of old flexions goes hand in hand with the development 
 of simpler and more regular expedients that are rather less liable 
 than the old ones to produce misunderstandings. Johannson 
 
864 PROGRESS [cH. XVIII 
 
 writes : " In contrast to Jesperscn I do not consider that the 
 masterly expression is the one which is ' A^isely silent,' and conse- 
 quently leaves the meaning to be partly guessed at, but the one 
 which is able to impart the meaning of the speaker or -wTiter clearly 
 and perfectly " — but here he seems rather wide of the mark. For, 
 just as in reading the arithmetical symbol 234 we are perfectly 
 sure that two hundred and thirty-four is meant, and not three 
 hundred and forty-two, so in reading and hearing ' The boy hates 
 the girl ' we cannot have the least doubt who hates whom. After 
 all, there is less guesswork in the grammatical understanding of 
 English than of Latin ; cf. the examples given above, Ch. XVIII § 4, 
 p. 343. 
 
 The tendency toAvards a fixed word order is therefore a pro- 
 gressive one, directly as well as indirectl3^ The substitution of 
 word order for flexions means a victory of spiritual over material 
 agencies. 
 
 XVm.— § 14. Summary. 
 
 We may here sum up the results of our comparison of the 
 main features of the grammatical structures of ancient and 
 modern languages belonging to our family of speech. We have 
 found certain traits common to the old stages and certain others 
 characteristic of recent ones, and have thus been enabled to 
 establish some definite tendencies of development and to find 
 out the general direction of change ; and we have sho^oTi reasons 
 for the conviction that this development has on the whole and 
 in the main been a beneficial one, thus justifjdng us in speaking 
 about ' progress in language.' The points in wliich the superiority 
 of the modern languages manifested itself were the following : 
 
 (1) The forms are generally shorter, thus involving less 
 muscular exertion and requiring less time for their enunciation. 
 
 (2) There are not so many of them to burden the memory. 
 
 (3) Their formation is much more regular. 
 
 (4) Their syntactic use also presents fewer irregularities. 
 
 (5) Their more analytic and abstract character facilitates 
 expression by rendering possible a great many combinations and 
 constructions which were formerly impossible or unidiomatic. 
 
 (6) The clumsy repetitions known under the name of concord 
 have become superfluous. 
 
 (7) A clear and unambiguous understanding is secured through 
 a regular word order. 
 
 These several advantages have not been won all at once, and 
 languages differ very much in the velocity with which they have 
 been moving in the direction indicated ; thus High German is 
 in many respects behindhand as compared with Low German ; 
 
§ 14] SUMMARY 305 
 
 European Dutch as compared with African Dutch ; Swedish as 
 compared with Danish ; and all of them as compared with English ; 
 further, among the Romanic languages we see considerable varia- 
 tions in this respect. What is maintained is chiefly that there 
 is a general tendency for languages to develop along the lines here 
 indicated, and that this development may truly, from the anthropo- 
 centric point of view, which is the only justifiable one, be termed 
 a progressive evolution. 
 
 But is tliis tendency really general, or even universal, in the 
 world of languages ? It wll easily be seen that my examples 
 have in the main been taken from comparativelj^ few languages, 
 those with which I myself and presumably most of my readers 
 are most familiar, all of them belonging to the Gothonic and 
 Romanic branches of the Aryan famil}'. Would the same theory 
 hold good with regard to other languages ? Without pretending 
 to an intimate knowledge of the history of many languages, I 
 yet dare assert that my conclusions are confirmed by all those 
 languages whose history is accessible to us. Colloquial Irish and 
 Gaelic have in many ways a simpler grammatical structure than 
 the Oldest Irish. Russian has got rid of some of the complications 
 of Old Slavonic, and the same is true, even in a much higher degree, 
 of some of the other Slavonic languages ; thus, Bulgarian has 
 greatly simplified its nominal and Serbian its verbal flexions. The 
 grammar of spoken Modern Greek is much less complicated than 
 that of the language of Homer or of Demosthenes. The structure 
 of Modern Persian is nearly as simple as English, though that of 
 Old Persian was highly complicated. In India we witness a 
 constant simplification of grammar from Sanskrit through Prakrit 
 and Pah to the modern languages, Hindi, Hindostani (Urdu), 
 Bengali, etc. Outside the Aryan world we see the same movement : 
 Hebrew is simpler and more regular than AssjTian, and spoken 
 Arabic than the old classical language, Koptic than Old Egyptian. 
 Of most of the other languages we are not in possession of written 
 records from very early times ; still, we may afiu-m that in Turkish 
 there has been an evolution, though rather a slow one, of a similar 
 kind ; and, as we shall see in a later chapter, Chinese seems to 
 have moved in the same direction, though the nature of its ^\Titing 
 makes the task of penetrating into its history a matter of extreme 
 difficulty. A comparative study of the numerous Bantu languages 
 spoken all over South Africa justifies us in thinking that their 
 evolution has been along the same lines : in some of them the 
 prefixes characterizing various classes of nouns have been reduced 
 in number and in extent (cf. above, § 9). Of one of them we have 
 a grammar two hundred years old, by Brusciotto b. Vetralla 
 (re-editesd by H. Grattan Guirmess, London, 1882). A comparison 
 
860 PROGRESS [ch. xviii 
 
 of his description with the language now spoken in the same 
 region (Mpongwe) shows that the class signs have dwindled down 
 considerably and the number of the classes has been reduced 
 from 16 to 10. In short, though we can only prove it with regard 
 to a minority of the multitudinous languages spoken on the globe, 
 this minority embraces all the languages known to us for so long 
 a period that we can talk of their history, and we may, therefore, 
 confidently maintain that what may be briefly termed the 
 tendency towards grammatical simplification is a universal fact 
 of linguistic history. 
 
 That this simplification is progressive, i.e. beneficial, was 
 overlooked by the older generation of linguistic thinkers, because 
 they saw a kosmos, a beautiful and well-arranged world, in the 
 old languages, and missed in the modern ones several things that 
 they had been accustomed to regard with veneration. To some 
 extent they were right : every language, when studied in the 
 right spirit, presents so many beautiful points in its systematic 
 structure that it may be called a ' kosmos.' But it is not in 
 ever}'^ way a kosmos ; like everything human, it presents fine 
 and less fine features, and a comparative valuation, such as the 
 one here attempted, should take both into consideration. There 
 is undoubtedly an exquisite beauty in the old Greek language, 
 and the ancient Hellenes, with their artistic temperament, knew 
 how to turn that beauty to the best account in their literary 
 productions ; but there is no less beauty in many modern languages 
 — though its appraisement is a matter of taste, and as such evades 
 scientific inquiry. But the aesthetic point of view is not the 
 decisive one : language is of the utmost importance to the whole 
 practical and spiritual life of mankind, and therefore has to be 
 estimated by such tests as those applied above ; if that is done, 
 we cannot be blind to the fact that modern languages as wholes 
 are more practical than ancient ones, and that the latter present 
 so many more anomalies and irregularities than our present-day 
 languages that we may feel inclined, if not to apply to them 
 Shakespeare's line, "Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms," 
 yet to think that the development has been from something nearer 
 chaos to something nearer kosmos. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS 
 
 § 1. The Old Theory. § 2. Roots. § 3. Structure of Chinese. § 4. History 
 of Chinese. § 5. Recent Investigations. § 6. Roots Again. § 7. The 
 Agglutination Theory. § 8. Coalescence. § 9. Flexional Endings. 
 § 10. Validity of the Theory. § 11. Irregularity Original. § 12. 
 Coalescence Theory dropped. § 13. Secretion. § 14. Extension of 
 Suffixes. § 15. Tainting of Suffixes. § 16. The Classifying Instinct. 
 § 17. Character of Suffixes. § 18. Brugmann's Theory of Gender. 
 § 19. Final Considerations. 
 
 XIX.— § 1. The Old Theory. 
 
 What has been given in the last two chapters to clear up the 
 problem " Decay or progress ? " has been based, as will readily 
 be noticed, exclusively on easily controllable facts of linguistic 
 history. So far, then, it has been very smooth sailing. But 
 now we must venture out into the open sea of prehistoric 
 speculations. Our voyage will be the safer if we never lose 
 sight of land and have a reliable compass tested in known 
 waters. 
 
 In our historical survey of linguistic science we have already 
 seen that the prevalent theory concerning the prehistoric develop- 
 ment of our speech is this : an originally isolating language, 
 consisting of nothing but formless roots, passed through an 
 agglutinating stage, in which formal elements had been de- 
 veloped, although these and the roots were mutually independent, 
 to the third and highest stage found in flexional languages, 
 in which formal elements penetrated the roots and made insepar- 
 able unities with them. We shall now examine the basis of this 
 theory. 
 
 In the beginning was the root. This is " the result of strict 
 and careful induction from the facts recorded in the dialects of 
 the different members of the family" (Whitney L 260). "The 
 firm foundation of the theory of roots lies in its logical necessity 
 as an inference from the doctrine of the historical growth of gram- 
 matical apparatus " (Whitney G 200). " An instrumentality can- 
 not but have had rude and simple beginnings, such as, in language, 
 the so-called roots . . . such imperfect hints of expression as 
 we call roots " (Whitney, Views of L. 338). These are really 
 
868 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 three different statements : induction from the facts, a logical 
 inference from the doctrine about grammatical apparatus (i.e. 
 the usually accepted doctrine, but on what is that built up except 
 on the root theory ?), and the a pri)ri argument that an ' instru- 
 mentality ' must have simple beginnings. Even granted that 
 these three arguments given at different times, each of them in 
 turn as the sole argument, must be taken as supplementing each 
 other, the three-legged stool on which the root theory is thus made 
 to sit is a very shaky one, for none of the three legs is very solid, 
 as we shall soon have occasion to see. 
 
 XIX.— § 2. Roots. 
 
 In the beginning was the root — but what was it like ? Bopp 
 took over the conception of root from the Indian grammarians, 
 and like them was convinced that roots were all monosyllabic, 
 and that view was accepted by his followers. These latter at 
 times attributed other phonetic qualities to these roots, e.g. that 
 they always had a short vowel (Curtius C 22). I quote from a 
 very recent treatise (Wood, " Indo-European Root-formation," 
 Journal of Germ. Philol. 1. 291) : "I range myself with those who 
 believe that IE. roots were monosyllabic . . . these roots began, 
 for the most part, with a vowel. The vowels certainly were the 
 first utterances,^ and though we cannot make the beginning of 
 IE. speech coeval with that of human speech, we may at least 
 assume that language, at that time, was in a very primitive 
 state." 
 
 The number of these roots was not very great (Curtius, I.e. ; 
 Wood 294). This seems a natural enough conclusion when we 
 picture the earliest speech as the most meagre thing possible. 
 
 These few short monosj^llabic roots were real words — this is 
 a necessary assumption if we are to imagine a root stage as a real* 
 language, and it is often expressly stated ; Curtius, for instance, 
 insists that roots are real and independent w^ords (C 22, K 132) ; 
 cf. also Whitney, who says that the root VAK " had also once 
 an independent status, that it was a word " (L 255). We shall 
 see afterwards that there is another possible conception of what 
 a ' root ' is ; but let us here grant that it is a real word. The 
 question whether a language is possible which contains nothing 
 but such root words was always answered aflfirmatively by a 
 reference to Chinese — and it will therefore be well here to 
 give a short sketch of the chief structural features of that 
 language. 
 
 ^ Why ao ? Did sheep and cows also begin with vowels only, adding 
 6 ard m afterwards to make up their bah and moo ? 
 
§3] STRUCTURE OF CHINESE 309 
 
 XIX.— § 3. Structure of Chinese. 
 
 Each word consists of one syllable, neither more nor less. 
 Each of these monosyllables has one of four or five distinct musical 
 tones (not indicated here). The parts of speech are not distin- 
 guished : ta means, according to circumstances, great, much, 
 magnitude, enlarge. Grammatical relations, such as number, 
 person, t<?nse, case, etc., are not expressed by endings and similar 
 expedients ; the word in itself is invariable. If a substantive is 
 to be taken as plural, this as a rule must be gathered from the 
 context ; and it is only when there is any danger of misunder- 
 standing, or when the notion of plurality is to be emphasized, 
 that separate words are added, e.g. ki 'some,' hi 'number.' The 
 most important part of Chinese grammar is that dealing with 
 word order : ta knok means ' great state(s),' but kuok ta ' the 
 state is great,' or, if placed before some other word which can 
 serve as a verb, * the greatness (size) of the state ' ; tsi niu ' boys 
 and girls,' but niu tsi ' girl (female child),' etc. Besides words 
 properly so called, or as Chinese grammarians call them ' full 
 words,' there are several ' empty words ' serving for grammatical 
 purposes, often in a wonderfullj- clever and ingenious way. Thus 
 ci has besides other functions that of indicating a genitive relation 
 more distinctly than would be indicated by the mere position of 
 the words ; yniii (people) lik (power) is of itself sufficient to signify 
 ' the power of the people,' but the same notion is expressed more 
 explicitly by 7ni7i ci lik. The same expedient is used to indicate 
 different sorts of connexion : if ci is placed after the subject of 
 a sentence it makes it a genitive, thereby changing the sentence 
 into a kind of subordinate clause : wang poo min = ' the kmg 
 protects the people ' ; but if you say wang ci pao min yeu (is like) 
 fu (father) ci pao ts'i, the whole may be rendered, by means of the 
 English verbal noun, ' the king's protecting the people is like the 
 father's protecting his child.' Further, it is possible to change 
 a whole sentence into a genitive ; for instance, wang pao min ci 
 tao (manner) k'o (can) kien (see, be seen), ' the manner in which 
 the king protects (the manner of the king's protecting) his people 
 is to be seen ' ; and in j^et other positions ci can be used to join 
 a word-group consisting of a subject and verb, or of verb and 
 object, as an adjunct (attribute) to a noun ; we have particij)les 
 to express the same modification of the idea : wang pao ci min 
 ' the people protected by the king * ; pao min ci wang ' a king pro- 
 tecting the people.' Observe here the ingenious method of dis- 
 tinguishing the active and passive voices by strictly adhering to 
 the natural order and placing the subject before and the object 
 after the verb. If we put i before, and ku after, a single word, it 
 
 24 
 
870 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 means ' on account of, because of ' (cf. E. for . . . 's sake) ; if 
 we place a whole sentence between these ' brackets,' as we might 
 term them, they are a sort of conjunction, and must be translated 
 ' because.' ^ 
 
 XIX.— § 4. History o! Chinese. 
 
 These few examples will give some faint idea of the Chinese 
 language, and — if the whole older generation of scholars is to 
 be trusted — at the same time of the primeval structure of our 
 own language in the root-stage. But is it absolutely certain that 
 Chinese has retained its structure unchanged from the very first 
 period ? By no means. As early as 1861, R. Lepsius, from a 
 comparison of Chinese and Tibetan, had derived the conviction 
 that " the monosyllabic character of Chinese is not original, but 
 is a lapse (!) from an earlier polysyllabic structure." J. Edkins, 
 while still believing that the structure of Chinese represents " the 
 speech first used in the Avorld's grey morning " {The Evolution of 
 the Chinese Language, 1888), was one of the foremost to examine 
 the evidence offered hy the language itself for the determination 
 of its earlier pronunciation. This, of course, is a much more com- 
 plicated problem in Chinese than in our alphabetically written 
 languages ; for a Chinese character, standing for a complete word, 
 may remain unchanged while the pronunciation is changed in- 
 definitely. But by means of dialectal pronunciations in om* own 
 day, of remarks in old Chinese dictionaries, of transcriptions of 
 Sanskrit words made by Chinese Buddhists, of rimes in ancient 
 poetry, of phonetic or partly phonetic elements in the word-char- 
 acters, etc., is has been possible to demonstrate that Chmese 
 pronunciation has changed considerablj^ and that the direction 
 of change has been, here as elsewhere, towards shorter and easier 
 word-forms. Above all, consonant groups have been simplified.* 
 
 In 1894 I ventured to offer my mite to these investigations 
 by suggesting an explanation of one phenomenon of pronuncia- 
 tion in present-day Chinese. I refer to the change sometimes 
 wrought in the meaning of a word b}'^ the adoption of a different 
 tone. Thus loayig with one tone is ' king,' with another ' to become 
 king'; lao with one is 'work,' with another 'pay the work'; 
 tsung with one tone means ' follow,' with another ' follower,' 
 and vnih. a third ' footsteps ' ; tshi with one tone is ' wife,' with 
 another ' marry ' ; had is 'good,' and had is ' love.' Nay, meanings 
 so different as ' acquire ' and ' give ' {sheu) or ' buy ' and ' sell ' 
 (mai) are only distinguished by the tones. Edkins and V. Henry 
 
 ^ The examples taken from Gabelentz's Orammar and an article in 
 Teclimor's Intermit. Zeitschrift I. 
 
§4] HISTORY OF CHINESE 871 
 
 {Le Musion, Louvain, 1882, i. 435) have attempted to explain this 
 from gestures ; but this is palpably wrong. In the Danish dialect 
 spoken in Sundeved, in southernmost Jutland, two tones are dis- 
 tinguished, one high and one low (see articles by N. Andersen 
 and m3''self in Dania, vol. iv.). Now, these tones often serve to 
 keep words or forms of words apart that but for the tone, exactly 
 as in Cliinese, would be perfect homophones. Thus na with the 
 low tone is ' fool,' but with the high tone it is either the plural 
 ' fools ' or else a verb ' to cheat, hoax ' ; ri ' ride ' is imperative 
 or infinitive according to the tone in which it is uttered ; jem in 
 the low tone is ' home ' and in the high ' at home ' ; and so on 
 in a great many words. There is no need, however, in this language 
 to resort to gestures to explain these tonic differences : the low 
 tone is found in words originally monosyllabic (compare standard 
 Danish nar, rid, hjeni), and the high tone in words originally 
 dissyllabic (compare Danish narre, ride, hjemme). The tones belong- 
 ing formerly to two syllables are now condensed on one syllable. 
 Although, of course, Chinese tones cannot in every respect be 
 paralleled with Scandinavian ones, we may provisionally con- 
 jecture that the above-mentioned pairs of Chinese words were 
 formerly distinguished by derivative syllables or flexional endings 
 (see below, p. 373) which have now disappeared without leaving 
 any traces behind them except in the tonas. This hypothesis 
 is perhaps rendered more probable by what seems to be an estab- 
 lished fact — that one of the tones has arisen through the dropping 
 of final stopped consonants {p, t, k). 
 
 However this may be, the death-blow was given to the dogma 
 of the primitiveness of Chinese speech by Ernst Kuhn's lecture 
 Ueher Herkitnjt und Sprache der Trausgangetischen Volker (Munich, 
 1883). He compares Chinese with the surrounding languages of 
 Tibet, Burmah and Siam, which are certainly related to Chinese 
 and have essentially the same structure ; they are isolating, have 
 no flexion, and word order is their chief grammatical instrument. 
 But the laws of word order prove to be different in these several 
 languages, and Kuhn draws the incontrovertible conclusion that 
 it is impossible that any one of these laws of word position should 
 have been the original one ; for that would imply that the other 
 nations have changed it without the least reason and at a risk 
 of terrible confusion. The only likely explanation is that these 
 differences are the outcome of a former state of greater freedom. 
 But if the ancestral speech had a free word order, to be at all 
 intelligible it must have been possessed of other grammatical 
 appliances than are now found in the derived tongues ; in other 
 words, it must have indicated the relations of words to each other 
 by something like our derivatives or flexions. 
 
372 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [en. xix 
 
 To the result thus established by Kuhn, that Chinese cannot 
 have had a fixed word order from the beginning, wo seem also 
 to be led if we ask the question, Is primitive man likely to have 
 arranged his words in this way ? A Chinese sentence, according 
 to Gabelentz (Spr 426), is arranged with the same logical pre- 
 cision as the direction on an English envelope, where the most 
 specific word is placed first, and each subsequent word is like a 
 box comprising all that precedes — only that a Chinaman would 
 reverse the order, beginning with the most general word and then 
 in due order specializing. Now, is it probable that primitive man, 
 that xmkempt, savage being, who did not yet deserve the proud 
 generic name of honio sapiens, but would be better termed, if not 
 fio7no insipiens, at best ho7no incipiens — is it probable that this 
 urmensch, who was little better than an unmensch, should have 
 been able at once to arrange his words, or, what amounts to the 
 same thing, his thoughts, in such a perfect order ? I incline to 
 believe rather that logical, orderly thinking and speaking have 
 only been attained by mankind after a long and troublesome 
 struggle, and that the grammatical expedient of a fixed word 
 order has come to Chinese as to European languages through 
 a gradual development in which other, less logical and more 
 material grammatical appliances have in course of time been 
 given up. 
 
 We have thus arrived at a conception of Chinese which is toto 
 ccbIo removed from the view formerly current. The Chinese lan- 
 guage can no longer be adduced in supj^ort of the hj^jothesis that 
 our Aryan languages, or all human languages, started at first as 
 a grammarless speech consisting of monosyllabic root-words. 
 
 XIX.— § 5. Recent Investigations. 
 
 I have rex)rinted the above sketch of Chinese, with a few very^ 
 insignificant verbal changes, as I wrote it about thirty years ago, 
 because I think that the main reasoning is just as valid now as 
 then, and because everything I have since then read about this 
 interesting language has only confirmed the opinion I ventured 
 to express after what was certainly a very insufficient study. 
 Chinese pronunciation, including its tones, may now be studied 
 in two excellent books, dealing with two different dialects — Daniel 
 Jones and K^\^ng Tong Woo, A Cantonese Phonetic Header, London, 
 1912, and Bemhard Karlgren, A Mandarin Phonetic Reader in 
 the Pekinese Dialect, Upsala, Leipzig and Paris, 1917 (Archives 
 d'jfitudes Orientales, vol. 13). Karlgren is also the author of 
 Etudes sur la Phonologic Chinoiae (ib. vol. 15, 1915-19), in which 
 he deals with the history of Chinese sounds and the reconstruction 
 
§5] RECENT INVESTIGATIONS 378 
 
 of the old pronunciation in a thoroughly scholarly manner on the 
 basis of an intimate knowledge of spoken and wTitten Chinese, 
 and in Ordet och pennan i mittens rike (Stockholm, 1918), he has 
 given a masterly popular sketch of the structure of the Chinese 
 language and its system of wiiting. 
 
 Of the greatest importance for oiu* purposes is the same 
 scholar's recent brilUant discovery of a real case distinction in 
 the oldest Chinese. In classical Chinese there are four pronouns 
 of the first person (I, we) which have always been considered as 
 absolutely sjTionj'mous. But Karlgren shows that the two of 
 them wliich occur as the usual forms in Confucius's conversations 
 are so far from being used indiscriminately that one is nearly 
 always a nominative and the other an objective case ; the excep- 
 tions are not numerous and are easily explained. The present 
 Mandarin pronunciation of the first is [u], of the second either 
 [uo] or [i]o]. But if we go back to the sixth century of our 
 era we are able with certainty to say that the pronunciation of 
 the former wa^ [t^uo], and of the latter [r/a]. This, then, consti- 
 tutes a real declension. Now, in the second person Karlgren is 
 also able to point out a distinction of two pronouns, though not 
 quite so clearly marked as in the first person, the objective showing 
 here a greater tendency to encroach on the nominative (Karlgren 
 here ingeniouslj' adduces the parallel from our languages that 
 the fii'st person has retained the suppletive system ego : me, while 
 the second uses the same stem tu : te). The oldest Chinese thus 
 has the following case flexion : 
 
 l8t Per. 2nd Per. 
 
 Nom. T^uo niiwo 
 
 Obj. ■j^a niia 
 
 (See " Le Proto-chinois, langue flexionnelle," Journal Asiatique, 
 1920, 206 ff.).^ 
 
 XIX.— § 6. Roots Again. 
 
 To return to roots. The influence of Indian grammar on 
 European linguists Avith regard to the theory of roots extended 
 also to the meanings assigned to roots, which were all of them 
 
 * I must also mention A. Conrady, Eiyie indochinesische Causativ-denomi- 
 nativ-bildung (Leipzig, 1896), in which Lepsius's theory is carried a great 
 step further and it is demonstrated with very great learning that many of 
 the tone relations (as well as modifications of initial sounds) of Chinese 
 and kindred languages find their explanation in the previous existence of 
 prefixes which are now extinct, but which can still be pointed out in Tibetan. 
 Though I ought, therefore, to have spoken of prefixes instead of ' flexional 
 endings ' above, p. 371, the essence of the contention that prehistoric Chinese 
 must have had a polysyllabic and non -isolating structure is thus borne out 
 by the researches of competent specialists in this field. 
 
374 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 of verbal character, and nearly always highly general or abstract, 
 such as ' breathe, move, be sharp or quick, blow, go,' etc. The 
 impossibility of imagining anybody expressing himself by means 
 of a language consisting exclusively of such abstracts embarrassed 
 people much less than one would expect : Chinese, of course, has 
 plenty of words for concrete objects. 
 
 The usual assumption was that there was one definite root 
 period in which all the roots were created, and after which this 
 form of activity ceased. But Whitney demurred to this (M 36), 
 saying that E. preach and cost may be considered new roots, though 
 ultimately coming from Lat. prce-dicare and con-stare : these 
 old compounds are felt as units, " reducing to the semblance of 
 roots elements that are really derivative or compound." As 
 Whitney goes no further than to establish the semblance of new 
 roots, he might be taken as an adherent rather than as an opponent 
 of the theory he objects to. But, as a matter of fact, new words 
 are created in modern languages, and if they form the basis of 
 derived words, we may really speak of new roots (pun — punning, 
 punster ; fun — funny ; etc.). Why not say that we have a French 
 root roul in router, rovlement, roulaye, roulier, rouleau, roulette, 
 roulis ? This only becomes unjustifiable if we think that the 
 establishment of this root gives us the ultimate explanation of 
 these words ; for then the linguistic historian steps in with the 
 objection that the words have been formed, not from a root, but 
 from a real word, A\'hich is not even in itself a primary word, but 
 a derivative, Lat. rotula, a diminutive of rota ' wheel.' (I take 
 this example from Breal M 407). To the i)oj)ular instinct sorrow 
 and sorry are undoubtedly related to one another, and we may 
 say that they contain a root sorr- ; but a thousand jears ago 
 the}' had nothing to do with one another, and belonged to different 
 roots : OE. sorg ' care ' and sdrig ' wounded, afflicted.' If all* 
 traces of Latin and Greek were lost, a linguist would have no 
 more scruples about connecting scene with see than most illiterate 
 Englishmen have now. AVho will vouch that manj- Aryan roots 
 may hot have originated at various times through similar pro- 
 cesses as these new roots preach, cost, ro2il, sorr, see ? 
 
 The proper definition of a root seems to be : what is common 
 to a certain number of words felt by the popular instinct of the 
 speakers as etymologically belonging together. In this sense we 
 may of course speak of roots at an}' stage of an}' language, and 
 not only at a hypothetical initial stage. In some cases these 
 roots may be used as separate words (E. preach, fun, etc., Fr. 
 roul = what is spelt roule, roules, roulent) ; in other cases this is 
 impossible (Lat. am in atno, amor, amicus ; E. sorr) ; in many 
 cases because the common element cannot, for phonetic reasons, 
 
§6] ROOTS AGAIN 875 
 
 be easily pronounced, as when E. drinh, drank, drunk or sit, sat, 
 seat, set are naturally felt to belong together, though it is impossible 
 to state the root excejot in some formula like dr.nk, s.t, where the 
 dot stands for some vowel. Similar considerations may be adduced 
 with regard to the consonants if we want to establish what is felt 
 to be common in give and gift {gi-\- labiodental spirant) or in speak 
 and speech, etc. ; but this need not detain us here. 
 
 In my view, then, the root is something real and important, 
 though not alwaj's tangible. And as its form is not always easy 
 to state or pronounce, so must its meaning, as a rule, be somewhat 
 vague and indeterminate, for what is common to several ideas 
 must of course be more general and abstiact than either of the 
 more special ideas thus connected ; it is also natural that it will 
 oiten be necessary to state the signification of a root in terms 
 of verbal ideas, for these are more general and abstract than 
 nominal ideas. But roots thus conceived belong to anj' and all 
 periods, and we must cease to speak of the earliest period of 
 human speech as ' the root period.' 
 
 XIX.— § 7. The Agglutination Theory. 
 
 According to the received theory (see above, § 1) some of the 
 roots became gradually attached to other roots and lost their 
 independence, so as to become finally formatives fused with the 
 root. This theory, generally called the agglutination theory, 
 contains a good deal of truth ; but we can onl}^ accept it with 
 three important pro%asos, namely, first, that there has never been 
 one definite period in which those languages which are now 
 fiexional were wholly agglutinative, the process of fusion being 
 liable to occur at an}'- time ; second, that the component parts 
 which become formatives are not at first roots, but real words ; 
 and third, that this process is not the only one by which forma- 
 tives may develop : it may be called the rectilinear process, but 
 by the side of that we have also more circuitous coiu"ses, which 
 are no less important in the life of languages for being less 
 obvious. 
 
 In the process of coalescence or integration there are many 
 possible stages, with may be denominated figuratively by such 
 expressions as that two words are placed together (that is — in non- 
 figurative language — pronounced after one another), tied together, 
 loiit together, glued together (' agglutinated '), soldered together, 
 welded together, fused together or amalgamated. What is really 
 the most important part of the process is the degree in which one 
 of the comi^onents loses its independence, phonetically and 
 semantically. 
 
arc ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch, xix 
 
 As ' agglutination ' is thus only one intermediate stage in 
 a continuous process, it would be better to have another name 
 for the whole theory of the origin of formatives than ' the agglu- 
 tination theory,' and I propose therefore to use the term ' coales- 
 cence theory.' The usual name also fixes the attention too 
 exclusively on the so-called agglutinative languages, and if we 
 take the formatives of such a language as Turkish, as in sev-mek 
 ' to love,' sev-il-mek ' to be loved,' sev-dir-mek ' to cause to love,' 
 sev-dir-il-mek ' to be made to love,' sev-ish-mek ' to love one 
 another,' sev-ish-dir-il-mek ' to be made to love one another ' — 
 who will vouch that these formatives were all of them originally 
 independent words ? Those who are most competent to have 
 an opinion on the matter seem nowadays inclined to doubt it 
 and to reject much of what was current in the description of these 
 languages given bj' the earlier scholars ; see, especially, the inter- 
 esting final chapter of V. Granbech, Forsttidier til tyrkisk lydhistorie 
 (KobenhaATi, 1902). 
 
 XIX.— §8. Coalescence. 
 
 The various degrees of coalescence, and the coexistence at the 
 same linguistic period of these various degrees, may be illustrated 
 by the old example, English un-tru-th-jid-ly, and by German iin- 
 be-stimm-bar-keit. Let us look a little at each of these formatives. 
 The only one that can still be used as an independent word is 
 ful{\). From the collocation in ' I have my hand full of peas ' 
 the transition is easy to ' a handful of peas,' where the accentual 
 subordination of full to ha7id paves the waj^ for the combination 
 becoming one word instead of two : this is not accomplished till 
 it becomes possible to put the plural sign at the end {handfxds, 
 thus also basket fuls and others), while in less familiar combinations^ 
 the s is still placed in the middle {bucketsful, two donkeysjid of 
 children, see MEG ii. 2. 42). In these substantives -Jul keeps its 
 full vowel [u]. But in adjectival compounds, such as peaceful, 
 aivful, there is a colloquial pronunciation with obscured or omitted 
 vowel [-fal, -fl], in which the phonetic connexion with the full word 
 is thus weakened ; the semantic connexion, too, is loosened when 
 it becomes possible to form such words as dreadful, bashful, in which 
 it is not possible to use the definition ' full of . . .' Here, then, 
 the transition from a word to a derivative suffix is complete. 
 
 English -hood, -head in childhood, maidenhead also is originallj' an 
 independent word, found in OE. and ME. in the form had, meaning 
 ' state, condition,' Gothic haidus. In German it has two forms, 
 •heit, as in freiheit, and -keit, whose k was at first the final sound of 
 the adjective in ewigkeit, MHG. eivecheit, but was later felt as part 
 
§8] COALESCENCE 877 
 
 of the suffix and then transferred to cases in which the stem had 
 no k, as in tapferkeit, ehrbarkeit. 
 
 The suffix -ly is from lik, which was a substantive meaning 
 'form, appearance, body' ('a dead body' in Dan. lig, E. Itch in 
 lichgate) ; manlik thus is ' having the form or appearance of a 
 man ' ; the adjective like originally was ge-Uc ' having the same 
 appearance with ' (as in Lat, con-fcnm-is). In compounds -lik 
 was shortened into -hj : in some cases we still have com}3eting forms 
 like gentlemanlike and gentlemanly. The ending was, and is still, 
 used extensively in adjectives ; if it is now also used to turn 
 adjectives into adverbs, as in truthful-ly, luxurious-ly, this is a 
 consequence of the two OE. forms, adj. -He and adv. -lice, having 
 phonetically fallen together. 
 
 It ma}' perhaps be doubtful whether the G. suffix -bar (OHG. 
 -bari, OE. bcere) was ever really an independent word, but its 
 connexion with the verb beran, E. bear, camiot be doubted : 
 friichtbar is what bears fruit (cf. OE. ceppelbcere ' bearing apples '), 
 but the connexion was later loosened, and such adjectives as ehrbar, 
 kostbar, offenhar have little or nothing left of the original meaning 
 of the suffix. The two prefixes in our examples, wi- and be-, 
 are differentiated forms of the old negative ne and the preposition 
 by, and the only affix in our two long words which is thus left 
 unexplained is -th, which makes true into tr^^tJl and is found also 
 in length, health, etc. 
 
 XIX.— § 9. Flexional Endings. 
 
 There can be no doubt, therefore, that some at an}- rate of our 
 suffixes and prefixes go back to independent words which have been 
 more or less weakened to become derivative formatives. But does 
 the same hold good Avith those endings which we are accustomed 
 to term flexional endings ? The answer certainly must be in the 
 affirmative — with regard to some endings. 
 
 Thus the Scandinavian passive originates in a coalescence of 
 the active verb and the pronoun sik : Old Norse (yeir) finna sik 
 (' they find themselves ' or ' each other '), gradually becomes one 
 word (yeir) finna^k, later finnast, finnaz, Swedish {de) finnas, Dan. 
 (de) findes ' they are found.' In Old Icelandic the pronoun is 
 still to some extent felt as such, though formally an indistinguish- 
 able part of the verb ; thus combinations like the following are very 
 frequent: Bolli kvaz yessu r&6a vilja = kva'S sik vilja; "Bolli dixit 
 se velle : B. said that he would have his own way " (Laxd. 55). In 
 Danish a distinction can sometimes be made between a reflexive 
 and a purely passive employment : de slds with a short vowel is 
 ' they fight (one another),' but with a long vowel ' they are beaten.' 
 
378 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 A similar coalescence is taking place in Russian, where sja ' himself ' 
 (myself, etc.) dwindles down to a sufl&xeds : kazalos ' it showed itself , 
 turned out.' 
 
 A similar case is the Romanic future : It. finiro, Sp. finire, 
 Fr. finirai, from finire habeo (finir ho, etc.), originally ' I have to 
 finish.' Before the coalescence was complete, it was jDOssible to 
 insert a pronoun, Old Sp. cantar-te-M ' I shall sing to you.' 
 
 A third case in point is the suffixed definite article, if we are 
 allowed to consider that as a kind of flexion : Old Norse mannenn 
 {manninn) accusative ' the man,' landet (landit) ' the land ' ; Dan. 
 nianden, landet, from mann, land -{-the demonstrative pronoun enn, 
 neuter et. Rumanian domnnl ' the lord,' from Lat. dominu{m) 
 illu{m), is another example. 
 
 XIX.— § 10. Validity of the Theory. 
 
 Now, does this kind of explanation admit of universal applica- 
 tion — in other words, were all our derivative affixes and flexional 
 endings originally independent words before they were ' glued ' 
 to or fused with the main word ? This has been the prevalent, one 
 might almost say the orthodox, view of all the leading linguists, 
 who may be mustered in formidable array in defence of the 
 agglutination theorJ^^ 
 
 Against the universahty of this origin for formatives I adduced 
 in my former work (1894, p. 66 f., cf. Kasus, 1891, p. 36) four 
 reasons, which I shall here restate in a different order and in a 
 fuller form. 
 
 (1) Nothing can be proved with regard to the ultimate genesis 
 of flexion in general from the adduced examples, for in all of them 
 the elements were already fulh^ flexional before the coalescence 
 (cf. ON. finnask, fannsk ; It. finird, finirai, finira ; ON. ma'^renn, 
 mannenn, mansens, etc.). What they show, then, is really nothing 
 but the growth of new flexional formations on an old flexional 
 soil, and it might be imagined that the fusion would not have taken 
 place, or not so completely, if the minds of the speakers had not 
 been alread}"^ prepared to accept formations of this character. 
 I do not, however, attach much importance to this argument, and 
 turn to those that are more cogent. 
 
 (2) The number of actual forms proved beyond a doubt to 
 
 1 Madvig Kl 170, Max Miiller L 1. 271, Whitney OLS 1. 283, G 124, Paul 
 P Ist ed. 181, repeated in the following editions, see 4th, 1909, 350 and 347, 
 349; Brugmann VG 1889, 2. 1 (but in 2nd ed. this has been struck out in 
 favour of hopeless skepticism), Schuchardt, Anlaas d. Volapuks 11, Gabelentz 
 Spr 189, Tegner SM 53, Sweet, New Engl. Or. § 559, Storm, Engl. Phil. 673, 
 Rozwadowski, Wortbildung u. Worthed., Uhlenbeck, Karakt. d. bask. Qramm. 
 24, Siitterlin WGS 1902, 122, Porzezinski, Spr 1910, 229. 
 
§10] VALIDITY OF THE THEORY 379 
 
 have originated through coalescence is comparatively small. It is 
 true that not a few derivative S3'llables were originally independent ; 
 still, if we compare them with the number of those for which no 
 such origin has been proved or even proposed, we find that the 
 proportion is very small indeed. In the list of English suffixes 
 enumerated in Sweet's Grammar, only eleven can be traced back 
 to independent words, while 74 are not thus explicable. Anyone 
 going through the countless suffixes enumerated in the second 
 volume of Brugmann's Vergleichende Grammatik will, I think, 
 be struck with the impossibility of any great number of them being 
 traced back to words in the same way as hood, etc., above : their 
 forms and, still more, their vague spheres of meaning, and on the 
 whole their maimer of application, distinctly speak against such 
 an origin. 
 
 As to real flexional endings traceable to words, theii- number 
 is even comparatively smaller than that of derivative suffixes ; 
 the three or four instances named above are everywhere appealed 
 to, but are there so many more than these ? And are they 
 numerous enough to justify so general an assertion ? IMy impres- 
 sion is that the basis for the induction is very far from sufficient. 
 
 (3) This argument is strengthened when we are able to point 
 out instances in which, as a matter of fact, flexional endings have 
 arisen in a way that is totally opposed to the agglutinative, which 
 then must renounce all claims to be the only possible way for a 
 language to arrive at flexional formatives. See below (§ 13) on 
 Secretion. 
 
 (4) Assuming the theory to be true, we should expect much 
 greater regularity, both in formal (morphological) and in semantic 
 (syntactic) respect than we actually find in the old Aryan languages ; 
 for if one defuiite element was added to signify one definite modifi- 
 cation of the idea, we see no reason why it should not have been 
 added to all words in the same way. As a matter of fact, the 
 Romanic future, the Scandinavian passive voice and definite article 
 present much greater regularity than is found in the flexion of 
 nouns and verbs in old Aryan, 
 
 XIX.— § 11. Irregularity Original. 
 
 It will be objected that the irregularity which we find in these 
 old languages is of later growth, and that, in fact, flexion, as 
 Schuchardt says, is "anomal gewordene agglutination." Whitney 
 said that '' each suffix has its distinct meaning and office, and is 
 applied in a whole class of analogous words " (L. 254), and in reading 
 Schleicher's Compendium one gains the impression that the old 
 Aryan sounds and forms were like a regiment of well -trained soldiers 
 
380 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 marching along in the best military style, wliile all irregularities 
 were the result of later decay in each language separately. But 
 the trend of the whole scientific development of the last fifty years 
 has been in the direction of demonstrating more and more irregu- 
 larity in the original forms : where formerly only one ending was 
 assumed for the same case, etc., now several are asr^umed. (See, e.g., 
 Walde in Streitberg's Oesch., 2. 194, Thumb, ib. 2. 69.) And as 
 with the forms, so also with the meanings and applications of the 
 forms, Madvig as early as 1857 (p. 27. Kl 202) had seen that the 
 signification of the grammatical forms must originally have been 
 extremely vague and fluctuating, but most scliolars went on imagin- 
 ing that each case, each tense, each mood had originally stood for 
 something quite settled and definite, until gradually the progress of 
 linguistics made away with that conception point by point. In place 
 of the belief that the original Arj-an verb had a definite system of 
 tense forms, it is now generally assumed that different ' aspects ' 
 ('aktionsarten'), somewhat like those of Slav verbs, were indicated, 
 and that the notion of ' time ' differences was only afterwards 
 developed out of the notion of aspect : but if we compare the 
 divisions and definitions of these aspects given by various scholars, 
 Me see how essentially vague this notion is ; instead of being a 
 model system of nice logical distinctions, the original condition 
 must rather have been one in which such notions as duration, 
 completion, result, beginning, repetition A^ere indistinctly found 
 as germs, from which such ideas as perfect and imperfect, past 
 and present, were finally evolved with greater and greater clearness. 
 Similar remarks apply to moods. All attempts at finding 
 out, deductivel}' or inductively, the fundamental notion (grund- 
 begriff) attached to such a mood as the subjunctive have failed : 
 it is impossible to establish one original, sharply circumscribed 
 sphere of usage, from which all the various, partly conflicting, 
 usages in the actually existing languages can be derived. The 
 usual theory is that there existed one true subjunctive, charac- 
 terized by long thematic vowels -e-, -a-, -6-, and distinct from that 
 an optative, characterized \>y a formative -ie- : -j-,i and that these 
 two were fused in Latin. But, as Oertel and Morris have shown 
 in their valuable article " An Examination of the Theories regarding 
 the Nature and Origin of Indo-European Inflection " {Harvard 
 Studies in Classical Philol. XVI, 1905) it is probably safer to assume 
 for the Indo-European period substantial identity of meaning 
 
 ^ Two explanations of this formative element were given by the old 
 school: according to Schleicher C §290, it was the root ja of tlie relative 
 pronoun ; according to Curtius and others it was the root i ' to go,' Greek 
 Jcr-o-i-mi being analyzed as ' I go to bear,' whence, by an easy (?) transition, 
 ' I should like to bear,' etc. 
 
§11] IRREGULARITY ORIGINAL 381 
 
 in the modal formatives ie : I and the long thematic vowels -e-, -a-, 
 -0-, which were then continued undifferentiated in Latin, while on 
 the one hand the Germanic branch has practically discarded the 
 forms with long thematic vowel and confined itself to the t suflSx, 
 and on the other hand two branches, Greek and Indo-Iranic, 
 have availed themselves of the formal difference and separated a 
 ' subjunctive ' and an ' optative ' mood. 
 
 XIX.— § 12. Coalescence Theory dropped. 
 
 In the historical part I have already mentioned some instances 
 of coalescence explanations of Aryan forms which have been aban- 
 doned by most scholars, such as the theory that the r of the Latin 
 passive is a disguised se, which would agree very well with the 
 Scandinavian passive, but falls to the ground when one remembers 
 that corresponding forms arc found in Keltic, where the transition 
 from s to r is otherwise unknown : these forms are now believed 
 to be related to some r forms found in Sanskrit, but there not 
 possessed of any passive signification, this latter being thus a 
 comparatively late acquisition of Keltic and Italic : these two 
 branches turning an existing, non-meaning consonant to excellent 
 use in their flexional sj^stem and generalizing it in the new 
 application. 1 
 
 The explanation of the ' weak ' Gothonic preterit from a 
 coalescence of did {loved = love did) was long one of the strong- 
 holds of the agglutination theory, Bopp's original collocation of 
 these forms with other forms which could not be thus explained 
 (see above 51) having passed into oblivion. Now we have Collitz's 
 comprehensive book Das schuxiche Prdteritum, 1912, in which the 
 formative consonant is shown to have been Aryan t, and the close 
 correspondence not only with the passive participle, but also with 
 the verbal nouns in -ti is duly emj^hasized. 
 
 The impossibility of explaining the Latin perfect in -vi from 
 composition with fui has been demonstrated by Mcrguet (see Walde 
 in Streitberg's Gesch., 2. 220). Instead of this rectilinear explana- 
 tion, scholars now incline to assume an intricate play of various 
 analogical influences starting from a pre-ethnic perfect in w in 
 isolated instances. 
 
 Many have explained the case ending -8 as a coalesced demon- 
 strative pronoun sa or, as it is now given, so ; the difficulty that the 
 same s denotes now the nominative and now the genitive ^^as got over 
 
 ^ Cf. Sommor, Lat. 528, and on Armenian and Tokharian r forma MSL 
 18. 10 ff. and Feist KI 455. But it must not be overlooked that H. Pedersen 
 (KZ 40. 166 ff.) has revived and strengthened the old theory that r in Italic 
 and Keltic is an original se. 
 
3S2 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 by Curtius (C 12) by the assumption that sa was added at two distinct 
 periods, and that each period made a different use of the addition, 
 though Curtius does not tell us how one or the other function could 
 be evolved from such a pronoun. The latest attempt at explana- 
 tion, which reaches me as I am writing this chapter, is by Hermann 
 Holler (ICZ 49. 219) : according to him the common Aryan and 
 Semitic nominative ended in o and the genitive in e, but to this was 
 added in the masculine, and more rarely in the feminine, the pronoun 
 s as a definite article, so that the primitive form corresponding to 
 Lat. lupus meant ' the wolf ' and lupu ' (a) wolf ' ; later the s-less 
 form was given up, and lupus came to be used for both ' the wolf ' 
 and ' wolf ' (similarly presumably in the genitive, if we translate 
 the presumed original forms into Latin lupis ' the wolf's ' and 
 hipi ' (a) wolf's,' later lupi in both functions). In Semitic, inversely, 
 an element m, corresponding to the Aryan accusative ending, 
 was added as an indefinite article, the w-less form thus becoming 
 definite, but in the oldest Babylonian-AssjTian the distinction has 
 been given up, and the form in m is (like the Latin form in s) used 
 both definitely and indefinitely. Ingenious as these constructions 
 are, the whole theory seems to me highly artificial, and it is difficult 
 to imagine that both Aryans and Semites, after ha\dng evolved 
 such a valuable distinction as that between ' the wolf ' and ' a 
 wolf,' expressed by simple means, should have wilfully given it 
 up — to evolve it again in a later period.^ Fortunately one is 
 allowed to confess one's ignorance of the origin of the case 
 endings s and m, but if I were on pain of death to choose 
 between Holler's hypothesis and the suggestion thrown out by 
 Humboldt (Versch 129), that the light (high-pitched) s symbolized 
 the living (personal) and active (the subject), and the dark (low- 
 pitched) m the lifeless (neutral) and passive (the object), I should 
 certainly prefer the latter explanation. 
 
 Hirt (GDS 37) also thinks that the s found in Arj^an cases 
 is an originally independent word, only he thinks that this se, 
 so was not originally a demonstrative pronomi, but the particle, 
 which with the extension i is foimd in Gothic sai ' ecce,' and as 
 it can thus be compared with the particle c in Lat. Iiic, it is clear 
 that it might be added in all cases — and as a matter of fact Hirt 
 finds it in six different cases in the singular and in all cases in the 
 plural except the genitive. Hirt makes no attempt at explaining 
 how these various case-forms have come to acquire the signification 
 (function) with which we find them in the oldest documents ; 
 " the s element had nothing to do with the denotation of an}' case, 
 number or gender, and only after it had been added to some cases 
 
 * If s was a definite article, why should it be used only with some stems 
 and not with others ? ^Vhy should neuters never require a definite article 7 
 
§12] COALESCENCE THEORY DROPPED 888 
 
 and not to others could it come to be distinctive of cases " (p. 39). 
 In other words, liis explanation explains just nothing at all. The 
 same is true with regard to the ' particles ' 07n or em, e, o, i, which 
 he thinks were added in other cases, and when he ends (p. 42) 
 by sa3dng that " this must be sufficient to give a glimpse of the 
 way in which Aryan flexion originated," the only thing we have 
 really seen is the haphazard waj- in which this flexion is formed, 
 and the impossibility at present of arriving at a fully satisfactory 
 explanation of these things. I should especially demur to the two 
 suppositions underlying Hirt's theory that Aryan had at one 
 period a completely flexionless structure, and that the same sound 
 when occurring in various cases must have had the same origin : 
 it seems much more probable to me that the s of the nominative 
 and the s of the genitive were not at first identical. ^ 
 
 That item of the coalescence theory which probably appealed 
 most to the fancy of scholars and laymen alike was the explanation 
 of the personal endings in the verbs from the personal pronouns : 
 we have an m in the first person of the mi-verbs (esmi) and in the 
 pronoun me, etc., and we have a t in the third person (esti) and 
 in a third-person pronoun or demonstrative (to) ; it is, therefore, 
 quite natural to think that esmi is simply the root es 'to be ' -j- the 
 pronoun mi ' I,' and esti es -f- the other pronoun, and to extend 
 this view to the other persons. And yet not even this has been 
 allowed to stand unchallenged by later disrespectful linguists, 
 headed by A. H. Sayce (Techmer's Zeitschr. /. allg. Sprwiss. i. 22) 
 and Hirt. As a matter of fact, the theory is based exclusively 
 on the above-mentioned correspondence in the first and third 
 persons singular, while the dual and plural endings do not at ail 
 agi-ee -wdth the corresponding personal pronouns and the endings 
 of the second person can only be compared with the pronoun 
 through the employment of phonological tricks unworthy of a 
 scientific linguist. Even in the first person the correspondence 
 is not complete, for besides -mi we have other endings : -m, which 
 cannot be very well considered a shortened -mi (and which agrees, 
 
 ^ While it is difficult to see the relation between a demonstrative pronoun 
 or a deictic particle and genitival function, it would be easy enough to under- 
 stand the latter if we started from a possessive pronoun (ejus, suus), and, 
 curiously enough, we find this very sound s used as a sign for the genitive 
 in two independent languages, starting from that notion. In Indo-Portuguese 
 we have gohernadors casa ' governor's house,' from gobernador su casa (above, 
 Ch. XI § 12, p. 213), and in the Sovith-African ' Taal ' the usual expression 
 for the genitive is by means of syn, which is generally shortened into se (s) 
 and glued enclitically to the substantive, even to feminines and plurals : 
 Marie-se boek ' Maria's book,' di goivweneur se hond ' the governor's dog ' 
 (H. Meyer, Die Sprache der Buren, I90I, p. 40, where also the confusion 
 with the adjective ending -s, in Dutch spelt -sch, is mentioned. For the 
 construction compare G. dem voter sein hut and others from various languages ; 
 cf. the appendix on E. Bill Stumps his mark in ChE 182 f.). 
 
38i ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 as Saycc remarks, much more closely with the accusative ending 
 of nouns), -o and -a, neither of which can be explained from any 
 kno^^•n pronoun. There is thus nothing for it except to say, as 
 Brugmann does (KG § 770) : " The origin of the personal endings 
 is not clear"; of, also ISIisteli 47: "The relations between personal 
 endings and the independent personal pronouns must be much 
 more evident to justify this view. . . . The Aryan language 
 offers direct evidence against the assumption that a sentence has 
 been thus drawn together, because it uses in the verbal forms of 
 the first and third person sg. pronominal stems which are otherwise 
 employed only as objects, and, moreover, would here place the 
 subject after the predicate, though in sentences it observes the 
 opposite order." Meillet expresses himself ver}' categorically 
 {Bulletin de la Soc. de Ling. 1911, 143) : "Scarcely any linguist 
 who has studied Aryan languages would venture to affirm that 
 *-»nt of the type Gr. femi is an old personal pronoun." 
 
 The impression left on us bj^ all these cases is that many 
 of the earlier explanations by agglutination have proved imsatis- 
 factory, and that linguists are nowadays inclined either to leave 
 the forms entirely unexplained or else to admit less rectilinear 
 developments, in which we see the speakers of the old languages 
 groping tentatively after means of expression and finding them 
 only by devious and circuitous courses. It is, of coiu-se, difficult 
 to classify such explanations, and the agglutination or coalescence 
 theory has to be supplemented by various other kinds of 
 explanation ; but I tliink one of these, which has not received 
 its legitimate share of attention, is important and distinctive 
 enough to have its own name, and I propose to terra it the 
 ' secretion ' theory. 
 
 XIX.— § 18. Secretion. 
 
 By secretion I understand the phenomenon that one integral 
 portion of a word comes to acquire a grammatical signification 
 Avhich it had not at first, and is then felt as something added to 
 the word itself. Secretion thus is a consequence of a ' metanalysis ' 
 (above, Ch. X § 2) ; it shows its full force when the element 
 thus secreted comes to be added to other words not originally 
 possessing tliis element. 
 
 A clear instance is offered in the history of some English posses- 
 sive pronouns. In Old English min and pin the n is kept through- 
 out as part and parcel of the words themijelves, the other cases 
 ha\ing such forms as mine, minitm, minre, exactly as in Gorman 
 mein, meine, meinem, meiner, etc. But in ^Middle English the 
 endings wore gradually dropped, and min and pin for a short time 
 
§ 13] SECRETION 385 
 
 became the only forms. Soon, however, n was dropped before 
 substantives beginning with a consonant, but was retained in 
 other positions {my father — mine uncle, it is mine) ; then the 
 former form was transferred also to those cases in which the pro- 
 noun was used (as an adjunct) before words beginning with vowels 
 {my father, my uncle — ^it is mine). The distinction between my 
 and mine, thy and thine, which was originally a purely phonetic 
 one, exactly like that between a and an {a father, an uncle), gradu- 
 ally acquired a functional value, and now serves to distinguish an 
 adjunct from a principal (or, to use the terms of some grammars, 
 a conjoint from an absolute form) ; 7ny came to be looked upon as 
 the proper form, while the 7i of mine was felt as an ending serving 
 to indicate the function as a principal word. That this is really 
 the instinctive feeling of the people is shown by the fact that in 
 dialectal and vulgar speech the same n is added to his, her, your 
 and their, to form the new pronouns hisn, hern, yourn, theirn : 
 " He that prigs what isn't hisn, when he's cotch'd, is sent to 
 prison. She that prigs what isn't hern, At the treadmill takes 
 a turn." 
 
 Another instance of secretion is -en as a plural ending in E. 
 oexn, G. ochsen, etc. Here originally n belonged to the word in 
 all cases and all numbers, just as much as the preceding s ; ox 
 was an n stem in the same way as, for instance, Lat. (homo), 
 homi^iem, homiwis, etc., or Gr. kuow, kuwa, kuwos, etc., are n stems. 
 In Gothic n is foimd in most of the cases of similar n stems. 
 In OE. the nom. is oxa, the other cases in the sg. oxan, pi. oxan 
 {oxen), oxnum, oxena, but in ME. the w-less form is found throughout 
 the singular (gen. analogicallj'' oxes), and the plural only kept -n. 
 Thus also a great many other words, e.g. (I give the plural forms) 
 apen, haren, sterren (stars), tungen, siden, eyen, which all of them 
 belonged to the n declension in OE. When -en had thus become 
 established as a plural sign, it was added analogically to words 
 which were not originally n stems, e.g. ME, caren, synnen, treen 
 (OE. cara, synna, treoio), and this ending even seemed for some 
 time destined to be the most usual plural ending in the South 
 of England, until it was finally supplanted by -5, which had been the 
 prevalent ending in the North ; eyen, foen, shoen were for a time in 
 competition Avith eyes, foes, shoes, and now -n is only found in oxen 
 (and children). In German to-day things are very much as they 
 were in Southern ME. : -en is kept extensively in the old n stems 
 and is added to some words which had formerly other endings, e.g. 
 hirten, soldaten, thaten. The result is that now plmality is indicated 
 by an ending which had formerly no such function (which, indeed, 
 had no function at all) ; for if we look upon the actual language, 
 oxen (G. ochsen) is = ox {ochs) singular -|- the plural ending -en ; 
 
 25 
 
88G ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 only we must not on any account imagine that the form was 
 originally thus welded together (agglutinated) — and if in G. soldaten 
 we may speak of -en being glued on to soldat, this ending is not, 
 and has never been, an independent word, but is an originally 
 insignificative part secreted by other words. 
 
 A closely similar case is the plural ending -er. The consonant 
 originally was s, as seen, for instance, in the Gr. and Lat. nom. 
 genos, genus, gen. Gr. gene{s)os, genous, Lat. generis for older 
 genesis. In Gothonic languages s, m accordance with a regular 
 soimd shift in this case, became r (through z) whenever it was 
 retained, but in the nom. sg. it was dropped, and thus we have 
 in OE. sg. lamb, lambe, lambes, but in the pi. lambru, lambrum, 
 lambra. In English only few words show traces of this flexion, 
 thus OE. did, pi. cildru, ME. child, childer, whence, with an added 
 -en, our modern children. But in German the class had much more 
 vitality, and we have not only words belonging to it of old, like 
 lamm, pi. Idmmer, rind, rinder, but also gradually more and more 
 words which originally belonged to other classes, but adopted this 
 ending after it had become a real sign of the plural number, thus 
 worter, biicher. 
 
 There is one trait that should be noticed as highly characteristic 
 of these instances of secretion, that is, that the occurrence of the 
 endings originating in this way seems from the first regulated 
 by the purest accident, seen from the point of view of the speakers : 
 they are found in some words, but not in others, whereas the 
 endings treated of under the heading Coalescence are added much 
 more uniformly to the whole of the vocabulary. But as a simi- 
 larly irregular or arbitrary distribution is met with in the case 
 of nearly all fiexional endings in the oldest stages of languages 
 belonging to our family of speech, the probability is that most 
 of those endings which it is impossible for us to trace back to 
 their first beginnings have originated through secretion or similar 
 processes, rather than through coalescence of independent words 
 or roots. 
 
 XIX.— § 14. Extension o£ Suffixes. 
 
 A special subdivision of secretion comj^rises those cases in 
 which a suffix takes over some sound or sounds from words to which 
 it was added. Clear instances are found in French, where in 
 consequence of the mutescence of a final consonant some suffixes 
 to the popular instinct must seem to begin with a consonant, 
 though originally this did not belong to the suffix. Thus laitier, 
 at first formed from lait -f ^^r, now came to be apprehended as 
 = lai{t) + tier, and cabaretier as cabare{t) -f- tier, and the new 
 
§14] EXTENSION OF SUFFIXES 887 
 
 suffix was then used to form such new words as bijoutier, ferblantier, 
 cafetier and others. In the same way we have tabatiere, where 
 we should expect tabaquiere, and the predilection for the extended 
 form of the suffix is evidently strengthened by the syllable division 
 in frequent formations like ren-tier, por-tier, por-tiere, charpen-tier. 
 In old Gothonic we have similar extensions of suffixes, when instead 
 of -ing we get -liiig, starting from words like OHG. ediling from edili, 
 ON. vesUng from vesall, OE. lytling from lytel, etc. Consequently 
 we have in English quite a number of words with the extended 
 enchng : duckling, gosling, hireling, iinderling, etc. In Gothic 
 some words formed with -assus, such as ]>iudin-assus 'kingdom,' 
 were apprehended as formed with -nassus, and in all the related 
 languages the suffix is onl}'- knowTi with the initial n ; thus in E. 
 -ness : hardness, happiness, eagerness, etc. ; G. -keit with its k from 
 adjectives in -tchas already been mentioned (376). From criticism, 
 Scotticism, we have ivitti-cism, and Milton has ivitticaster on the 
 analogy of criticaster, where the suffix of course is -aster, as in 
 poetaster. Instead of -ist we also find in some cases -nist : 
 tobacconist, lutenist (cf. botan-ist, mechan-ist). 
 
 To form a new word it is often sufficient that some existing 
 word is felt in a vague way to be made up of something + an ending, 
 the latter being subsequently added on to another word. In 
 Fr. merovingien the v of course is legitimate, as the adjective is 
 derived from Merovee, Merowig, but this word was made the starting- 
 point for the word designating the succeeding dynasty : carlovingien, 
 where v is simply taken over as part of the suffix ; nowadays his- 
 torians try to be more ' correct ' and prefer the adjective carolin- 
 gien, which was iinknown to Littre. Oligarchy is olig + archy, but for 
 the opposite notion the word p oligarchy or polygarchy was framed 
 from poly and the last two syllables of oli-garchy, and though now 
 scholars have made polyarchy the usual form, the word with the 
 intrusive g was the common form two hundred years ago in English, 
 and corresponding forms are found in French, Spanish and other 
 languages. Judgmatical is made on the pattern of dogmatical, 
 though there the stem is dogmat-. In jocular German schwach- 
 matikus ' valetudinarian,' we have the same suffix Avith a 
 different colouring, taken from rheumatikus (thus also Dan. 
 svagmatiker). Swift does not hesitate to speak of a sextumvirate, 
 which suggests triumvirate better than sexvirate would have done ; 
 and Bernard Shaw once writes " his equipage (or autopage) " — 
 evidently starting from the popular, but erroneous, belief that 
 equipage is derived from Lat. equus and then dividing the word 
 equi + page. Cf. Scillonian from Scilly on account of Devoniaji 
 as if this were Dev + onian instead of Devon -f ian. 
 
388 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [en. xix 
 
 XIX.— § 15. Tainting of Suflaxes. 
 
 It will be seen that in some of these instances the suffix has 
 appropriated to itself not only part of the sound of the stem, but 
 also part of its signification. This is seen very clearly in the case 
 of dmndelier, in French formed from chandelle ' candle ' with the 
 suffix -ier, of rather vague signification, ' anything connected with, 
 or ha\ang to do with ' ; in English the word is used for a hanging 
 branched frame to hold a number of lights ; consequently a similar 
 apparatus for gas-burners was denominated gaselier {gasalier, 
 gasoUer), and with the introduction of electricity the formation 
 has even been extended to electrolier. Vegetarian is from the stem 
 veget- with added -ari-an, which ending has no special connexion 
 with the notion of eating or food, but recently we have seen the 
 new words fruitarian and nutarian, meaning one whose food consists 
 (exclusively or chiefly) in fruits and nuts. Cf. solemncholy, which 
 according to PajTie is in use in Alabama, framed evidently on 
 melancholy, analj^zed in a way not approved bj^ Greek scholars. 
 The whole ending of septentrionalis (from the name of the constella- 
 tion Septem triones, the seven oxen) is used to form the opposite : 
 meridi-onalis. 
 
 A similar case of ' tainting ' is found in recent English. The 
 NED, in the article on the suffix -eer, remarks that " in many of 
 the words so formed there is a more or less contemptuous implica- 
 tion," but does not explain this, and has not remarked that it is 
 found only in words ending in -teer (from words in -t). I think 
 this contemptuous implication starts from garreteer and crotcheteer 
 (perhaps also pamphleteer and privateer) ; after these were formed 
 the disparaging words sonneteer, pulpiteer. During the war (1916, 
 I think) the additional word profiteer ^ came into use, but did not 
 find its way into the dictionaries till 1919 (Cassell's). And only 
 the other day I read in an American publication a new word of 
 the same calibre : " Against patrioteering , against fraud and violence 
 . . . JVIr. Mencken has always nobly and bravely contended." 
 
 XIX.— § 16. The Classifying Instinct. 
 
 Man is a classifying animal : in one sense it ma}^ be said that the 
 whole process of spealdng is nothing but distributing phenomena, 
 
 1 Cf. Lloyd George's speech at Dundee (The Times, July 6, 1917): '* The 
 Government will not permit the burdens of the country to be increased 
 by what is called ' profiteering.' Although I have been criticized for 
 using that word, I believe on the whole it is a rather good one. It is profit- 
 eer-ing as distinguished from profit-ing. Profiting is fair recompense for 
 services rendered, either in production or distribution ; profiteering is an 
 extravagant recompense given for services rendered. I believe that unfair 
 in peace. In war it is an outrage." 
 
§16] THE CLASSIFYING INSTINCT 389 
 
 of which no two arc alike in every respect, into different classes on 
 the strength of perceived similarities and dissimilarities. In the 
 name-giving process we witness the same ineradicable and very use- 
 ful tendency to see likenesses and to express similarity in the pheno- 
 mena through similarity in name. Professor Hempl told me that 
 one of his little daughters, when they had a black kitten which 
 was called Nig (short for Nigger), immediately christened a gray 
 kitten Grig and a bro^\^l one Brownig. Here we see the genesis 
 of a suffix through a natural process, which has little in common 
 with the gradual weakening of an originally independent word, 
 as in -hood and the other instances mentioned above. In children's 
 speech similar instances are not unfrequent (cf. Ch. VII § 5) ; 
 Meringer L 148 mentions a child of 1.7 who had the following 
 forms : aiign, ogn, agn, for ' augen, ohren, haare.' How many words 
 formed or transformed in the same way must we require in order 
 to speak of a suffix ? Shall we recognize one in Romanic leve, 
 greve (cf. Fr. grief), which took the place of leve, grave ? Here, 
 as Schuchardt aptly remarks, it was not only the opposite signi- 
 fication, but also the fact that the words were frequently uttered 
 shortlj'- after one another, that made one word influence the other. 
 
 The classifying instinct often manifests itself in bringing words 
 together in form which have something in common as regards 
 signification. In this way we have smaller classes and larger 
 classes, and sometimes it is impossible for us to say in what way 
 the likeness in form has come about : we can only state the fact that 
 at a given time the words in question have a more or less close 
 resemblance. But in other cases it is easy to see which word of 
 the group has influenced the others or some other. In the examples 
 I am about to give, I have been more concerned to bring together 
 words that exhibit the classifying tendency than to try to find out 
 the impetus which directed the formation of the several groups. 
 
 In OE. we have some names of animals in -gga : frogga, stugga, 
 docga, wicga, now frog, stag, dog, loig. Savour and flavour go 
 together, the latter (OFr. flaur) having its v from the former. 
 Groin, I suppose, has its diphthong from loin ; the older form was 
 grine, grynd(e). Claw, paw (earlier powe, OFr. 'pol). Rim, brim. 
 Hook, nook. Gruff, rough {tough, bluff, huff— miff, tiff, whiff). Fleer, 
 leer, jeer. Tivig, sprig. Munch, crunch {lunch). Without uttering 
 or muttering a ivord. The trees were loiiped and toitped. In old 
 Gothonic the word for ' eye ' has got its vowel from the word 
 for ' ear,' with which it was frequently collocated : augo{n), 
 auso{n), but in the modern languages the two words have again 
 been separated in their phonetic development. In French I 
 suspect that popular instinct will class the words air, terre, mer 
 together as names of what used to be termed the ' elements,' in 
 
390 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 spite of the different spelling and origin of the sounds. In Russian 
 koQot'' ' griffe ' (claw), nogot'' ' ongle ' (fingernail), and hkoV 
 ' coiide ' (elbow), three names of parts of the body, go together in 
 flexion and accent (Boyer et Speranski, Manuel de la I. russe 33). 
 So do in Latin calez ' gnat ' and jmlex ' flea.' Atrox, feror. A 
 great many examples have been collected by M. Bloomfield, " On 
 Adaptation of Suffixes in Congeneric Classes of Substantives " 
 {Am. Journal of Philol. XII, 1891), from which I take a few. A 
 considerable number of designations of parts of the body were 
 formed with heteroclitic declension as r-n stems (cf. above, XVIII 
 § 2): 'liver,' Or. hepar, hepatos, 'udder,' Gr. outhar, authatos, 
 ' thigh,' Lat. femur, feminis, further Aryan names for blood, wing, 
 viscera, excrement, etc. Other designations of parts of the body 
 w^ere partly assimilated to this class, having also n stems in the 
 oblique cases, though their nominative was formed in a different w ay . 
 Words for ' right ' and ' left ' frequently influence one another 
 and adopt the same ending, and so do opposites generally : 
 Bloomfield explains the t in the Gothonic word corresponding to 
 E. white, where from Sanskr. we should expect th, Qveta, as due to 
 the word for ' black ' ; Goth, hweits, swaris, ON. hvitr, svartr, etc. 
 A great many names of birds and other animals appear with the 
 same ending, Gr. cjlaux ' owl,' kokkux ' cuckoo,' korax ' crow,' ortux 
 ' quail,' aix ' goat,' alopex ' fox,' bomhux ' silkworm,' lunx ' lynx ' and 
 many others, also some plant-names. Names for winter, summer, 
 day, evening, etc., also to a great extent form groups. In a subse- 
 quent article (in IF vi. 60 ff.) Bloomfield pursues the same line of 
 thought and explains likenesses in various words of related signi- 
 fication, in direct opi30sition to the current explanation through 
 added root-determinatives, as due to blendings (cf. above, Ch. XVII 
 § 0). In Latin the inchoative value of the verbs in -esco is due 
 to the accidentally inherent continuous character of a few verbs 
 of the class : adolesco, senesco, cresco ; but the same suffix is also 
 found in the oldest words for ' asking, wishing, searching,' re- 
 tained in E. ask, loish, G. forsclien, which thus become a small 
 group linked together by form and meaning alike. 
 
 XIX.— § 17. Character of Suffixes. 
 
 There seems undoubtedly to be something accidental or hap- 
 hazard in most of these transferences of sounds from one \Aord 
 to another through which groups of phonetically and scmantically 
 similar words are created ; the process works misystematically, 
 or rather, it consists in spasmodic efforts at regularizing something 
 which is from the start utterly unsystematic. But where condi- 
 tions are favourable, i.e. where the notional connexion is patent 
 
§17] CHARACTER OF SUFFIXES 891 
 
 and the phonetic element is such that it can easily be added to many 
 words, the group will tend constantly to grow larger within the 
 natural boundaries given by the common resemblance in signification. 
 I have no doubt that the vast majority of our formatives, such 
 as suffixes and flexional endings, have arisen in this way through 
 transference of some part, which at first was unmeaning in itself, 
 from one word to another in which it had originally no business, 
 and then to another and another, taking as it were a certain colouring 
 from the words in which it is found, and gradually acquiring a more 
 or less independent signification or function of its own. In long 
 words, such as were probably frequent in primitive speech, and which 
 were to the minds of the speakers as unanalyzable as marmalade 
 or crocodile is to Englishmen nowadays, it would be perhaps most 
 natural to keep the beginning unchanged and to modify the final 
 syllable or syllables to bring about conformity with some word 
 with, which it was associated ; hence the prevalence of suffixes in 
 our languages, hence also the less systematic character of these 
 suffixes as compared with the prefixes, most of which have origin- 
 ated in independent Avords, such as adverbs. What is from the 
 merely phonetic jjoint of view the ' same ' suffix, in different lan- 
 guages may have the greatest variety of meaning, sometimes no 
 discernible meaning at all, and it is in many cases utterly imjDossible 
 to find out why in one particular language it can be used with one 
 stem and not with another. Anyone going through the collections 
 in Brugmann's great Grammar will be struck with this purely 
 accidental character of the use of most of the suffixes — a fact 
 which would be simply unthinkable if each of them bad originally 
 one definite, well -determined signification, but which is easy to 
 account for on the hypothesis here adopted. And then many of 
 them are not added to ready-made words or ' roots,' but form 
 one indivisible whole with the initial part of the word ; cf., for 
 instance, the suffix -le in English squabble, struggle, ivriggle, babble, 
 mumble, bustle, etc. 
 
 XIX.— § 18. Brugmann's Theory of Gender. 
 
 As I have said, man is a classifAnng animal, and in his language 
 tends to express outwardly class distinctions which he feels more 
 or less vaguely. One of the most important of these class di\4sions, 
 and at the same time one of the most difficult to explain, is that of 
 the three ' genders ' in our Aryan languages. If we are to believe 
 Brusmann, we have here a case of what I have in this work termed 
 secretion. In his well-known paper, " Das Nominalgeschlecht 
 in den indogermanischen Sprachen " (in Techmer's Zs. f. allgem. 
 Sprachwissensch. 4. 100 ff., cf. also his reply to Roethe's criticism, 
 
392 ORIGIN OF GRAM3IATICAL ELEMENTS [cii. xix 
 
 PBB 15. 522) he puts the question : How did it come about that 
 the old Arj'ans attached a definite gender (or sex, gepchlecht) to 
 words meaning foot, head, house, town, Gr. po^^s, for instance, 
 being mascuHne, kepJiale feminine, oikos masculine, and polis 
 feminine ? The generally accepted explanation, according to ^\hich 
 the imagination of mankind looked upon lifeless things as living 
 beings, is, Brugmann says, unsatisfactory ; the masculine and 
 feminine of grammatical gender are merely unmeaning forms and 
 have nothing to do with the ideas of masculinity and femininity ; 
 for even where there exists a natural difference of sex, language 
 often employs only one gender. So in German we have der hase, 
 die mans, and der weibliche liase is not felt to be self -contradictory. 
 Again, in the historj' of languages we often find words which change 
 their gender exclusively on account of their form. Thus, in German, 
 many words in -e, such as traube, niere, wade, wliich were formerly 
 masculine, have now become feminine, because the great majority 
 of substantives in -e are feminine {erde, elire, farbe, etc.). Nothing 
 accordingly hinders us from supposing that grammatical gender 
 originally had nothing at all to do with natural sex. The cpiestion, 
 therefore, according to Brugmann, is essentially reduced to this : 
 How did it come to pass that the suffix -a was used to designate 
 female beings ? At first it had no connexion with femininity, wit- 
 ness Lat. aqua ' water ' and hundreds of other words ; but among 
 the old words with that ending there happened to be some denoting 
 females : mama ' mother ' and gena ' woman ' (compare E. quean, 
 queen). Now, in the history of some suffixes we see that, without 
 any regard to their original etymological signification, they may 
 adopt something of the radical meaning of the words to \Ahich 
 they are added, and transfer that meaning to new formations. In 
 this way mama and gena became the starting-point for analogical 
 formations, as if the idea of female was denoted by the ending, 
 and new words were . f oi^med, e.g. Lat. dea 'goddess' from dens 
 ' god,' equa ' mare ' from eqims ' horse,' etc. The suffix -ie- or -i- 
 probably came to denote feminine sex by a similar process, possibly 
 from Skr. strl ' woman," which may have given a fem. *iilql ' she- 
 wolf ' to *n-lqos ' wolf.' The above is a summary of Brugmann's 
 reasoning ; it may interest the reader to know that a closely similar 
 point of view had, several years pre\aously, been taken by a far- 
 seeing scholar in respect to a totally different language, namely 
 Hottentot, where, according to Blcek, CG 2. 118-22, 202-9. a 
 class division which had originally nothing to do with sex has 
 been employed to distinguish natural sex. I transcribe a few of 
 Bleek's remarks : " The apparent sex-denoting character which 
 the classification of the nouns now has in the Hottentot language 
 was evidently imparted to it after a division of the nouns into 
 
§18] BRUGMANN'S THEORY OF GENDER 893 
 
 classes ^ had taken place. It probably arose, in the first instance, 
 from the possibly accidental circumstance that the nouns indica- 
 ting (respectiveh^) man and woman were formed with different 
 derivative suffixes, and consequently belonged to different classes 
 (or genders) of nouns, and that these sufTixes thus began to indicate 
 the distinction of sex in nouns where it could be distinguished " 
 (p. 122). "To assume, for example, that the sulTfix of the m. sg. 
 (-p) had originally the meaning of ' man,' or the fem. sg. (-s) 
 that of ' woman,' \\ould in no way explain the peculiar division 
 of the nouns into classes as we find it in Hottentot, and would be 
 opposed to all that is probable regarding the etymology of these 
 suffixes, and also to the fact that so many nouns are included in 
 the sex-denoting classes to which the distinction of sex can only 
 be applied by a great effort. ... If the word for ' man ' were 
 formed with one suffix (-p), and the word indicating ' woman ' 
 (be it accidentally or not) by another (-5), then other nouns would 
 be formed with the same suffixes, in analogy with these, until 
 the majority of the nouns of each sex were formed with certain 
 suffixes which would thus assume a sex-denoting character " (p. 298), 
 Brugmann's view on Aryan gender has not been unchallenged. 
 The weakest points in his arguments are, of course, that there are 
 so few old naturally feminine words in -a and -i to take as starting- 
 points for such a thoroughgoing modification of the grammatical 
 sj'stem, and that Brugmann was unable to give any striking ex- 
 planation of the concord of adjectives and pronouns with words 
 that had not these endings, but w^hich were nevertheless treated as 
 masculines and feminines respectively It would lead us too far 
 here f o give any minute account of the discussion which arose on 
 these points ; ^ one of the most valuable contributions seems to 
 me Jacobi's suggestion {Comjpositum u. Nebensatz, 1897, 115 ff.) 
 that the origin of grammatical gender is not to be sought in the 
 noun, but in the pronoun (he finds a parallel in the Dravidian 
 languages) — but even he does not find a fully satisfactory explana- 
 tion, and the Aryan gender distinction reaches back to so remote 
 an antiquity, thousands of years before any literary tradition, that 
 we shall most probably never be able to fathom all its m5^steries. 
 Of late years less attention has been given to the problem of the 
 feminine, which presented itself to Brugmann, than to the distinc- 
 tion between two classes, one of which was characterized by the 
 
 ^ Bleek is here thinking of classes like those of the Bantu languages, 
 which have nothing to do with sex. 
 
 * For bibliography and criticism see Wheeler in Journ. of Germ. Philol. 
 2. 628 ff., and especially Josselin de Jong in Tijdschr. v. Ned. Taal- en Letterk. 
 29. 21 fi., and the same writer's thesis De Waardeerlngsonderscheiding van 
 levend en levenloos iyi het Indogermaansch, vergel. m. hetzelfde verschijnsel i7i 
 Algonkin-kden (Leiden, 1913). Cf, also Hirt GDS 45 ff. 
 
394 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS [ch. xix 
 
 use of a nominative in -s, wliich is now looked upon as a ' transi- 
 tive-active ' case, and the other by no ending or by an ending 
 -m, vvFiieh is the same as was used as the accusative in the first 
 class (an ' intransitive-passive ' case), and an attempt has been 
 made to see in the distinction something analogous to the division 
 found in Algonkin languages between a class of ' living ' and 
 another of ' lifeless ' things — though these two terms are not to be 
 taken in the strictly scientific sense, for primitive men do not reason 
 in the same way as we do, but ascribe or deny ' life ' to things 
 according to criteria which we have great difficult}' in apprehending. 
 This would mean a twofold division into one class comprising the 
 historical masculines and feminines, and another comprising the 
 neuters. 
 
 As to the feminine, we saw two old endings characterizing that 
 gender, a and i. With regard to the latter, I venture to throw 
 out the suggestion that it is connected with diminutive suffixes 
 containing that vowel in various languages : on the whole, the 
 sound [i] has a natural affinity with the notion of small, slight, 
 insignificant and weak (sec Ch. XX § 8). In some African languages 
 we find two classes, one comprising men and big things, and the 
 other women and small things (jMeinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten 
 23), and there is nothing unnatural in the supposition that similar 
 views may have obtained with om" ancestors. This would naturally 
 account for Skr. vrk-i ' she-wolf ' (orig. little wolf, ' wolfy ') from 
 Skr. irJcas, napt-i, Lat. neptis, G. nichte, Skr. dev-i ' goddess,' etc. 
 But the feminine -a is to me just as enigmatic as, say, the d of 
 the old ablative 
 
 XIX.— § 19. Final Considerations. 
 
 The ending -a serves to denote not only female beings, but 
 also abstracts, and if in later usage it is also applied to males, as 
 in Latin nauta 'sailor,' auriga 'charioteer,' this is only a derived 
 use of the abstracts denoting an actiWty, sailoring, driving, etc., 
 just as G. die wache, besides the activity of watching, comes to 
 mean the man on guard, or asjuslice (Sp. eljusticia) conaes to mean 
 ' judge.' The original sense of Antonius collega fait Ciceronis 
 was ' A. was the co-election of C (Osthoff, Verbum in d. Nominal- 
 compos., 1878, 263 ff., Delbriick, Syni. Forsch. 4. 6). 
 
 The same -a is finally used as the plural ending of most neuters, 
 but. as is now universally admitted (see cspeciallj' Johannes Schmidt, 
 Die Pluralbildungen der iiuiogerm. Netitra, 1889), the ending here 
 was originally neither neuter nor plural, but, on the contrary, 
 feminine and singular. The forms in -a are properly collective 
 formations like those found, for instance, in Lat. opera, gen. opercB, 
 
§19] FINAL CONSIDERATIONS 895 
 
 ' work,' comp. opus ' (a piece of) work' ; Lat. terra ' earth,' comp. 
 Oscan terinn ' plot of ground ' ; pugna ' boxing, fight,' comp. 
 pugnus ' fist.' This explains among other things the peculiar 
 s^Titactic phenomenon, which is found regularly in Greek and 
 sporadically in Sanskrit and other languages, that a neuter plural 
 subject takes the verb in the singular. Greek toxa is often used 
 in speaking of a single bow ; and the Latin poetic use of guttura, 
 colla, ora, where only one person's throat, neck or face is meant, 
 points similarly to a period of the past when these words did not 
 denote the plural. We can now see the reason of this -a being 
 in some cases also the plural sign of masculine substantives : 
 Lat. loca from locus, joca from jocus, etc. ; Gr. sita from sitos. 
 Joh. Schmidt refers to similar plural formations in Arabic ; and as 
 we have seen (Ch. XIX § 9), the Bantu plural prefixes had probably 
 a similar origin. And we are thus constantly reminded that lan- 
 guages must often make the most curious detours to arrive at a 
 grammatical expression for things which appear to us so self-evident 
 as the difference between he and she, or that between one and 
 more than one. Expressive simplicity' in linguistic structure 
 is not a primitive, but a derived qualitj'. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 SOUND SYMBOLISM 
 
 § 1. Sound and Sense. § 2. Instinctive Feeling. § 3. Direct Imitation. 
 § 4. Originator of tlie Sound. § 5. Movement. § 6. Things and 
 Appearances. § 7. States of Mind. § 8. Size and Distance. § 9. 
 Length and Strength of Words and Sounds. § 10. General Con- 
 siderations. § 11. Importance of Suggestiveness. § 12. Ancient and 
 Modern Times. 
 
 XX.— § 1. Sound and Sense. 
 
 The idea that there is a natural correspondence bet\\een sound 
 and sense, and that -words acquire their contents and value through 
 a certain sound symbolism, has at all times been a favourite one 
 with linguistic dilettanti, the best-known examples being found 
 in Plato's Kratylos. Greek and Latin grammarians indulge in 
 the wildest hypotheses to explain the natural origin of such and 
 such a word, as when Nigidius Figulus said that in pronouncing 
 vos one puts forward one's lips and sends out breath in the direction 
 of the other person, while this is not the case with nos. With 
 these early wiiters, to make guesses at sound sj-mbohsm was the 
 only way to et3''mologize ; no wonder, therefore, that we with 
 our historical methods and our wider range of knowledge find 
 most of their explanations ridiculous and absurd. But this does 
 not justify us in rejecting any idea of sound sjTnbolism : abusus 
 non tollit usum ! 
 
 Humboldt (Versch 79) says that " language chooses to designate 
 objects by sounds which partly in themselves, partly in comparison 
 with others, produce on the ear an impiession resembling the effect 
 of the object on the mind ; thus stehen, stdtig, starr, the impression 
 of firmness, Sanskrit U ' to melt, diverge,' that of liquidity or 
 solution (des zerfliessenden). ... In this way objects that 
 produce similar impressions are denoted by words with essentially 
 the same sounds, thus wehen, ivind, uvlke, ivirren, u-nnsch, in all 
 of which the vacillating, wavering motion with its confused im- 
 pression on the senses is expressed through . . . u\" MacUdg's 
 objection (1842, 13 = Kl 64) that we need only compare four of 
 the words Humboldt quotes with the corresponding words in the 
 very nearest sister-language, Danish blcese, vind, sky, <cnske, to 
 
 396 
 
§1] SOUND AND SENSE 897 
 
 see how wrong this is, seems to me a Httle cheap : Humboldt 
 himself expressly assumes that much of primitive sound symbolism 
 may have disappeared in course of time and warns us against 
 making this kind of explanation a ' constitutive principle,' 
 wliich would lead to great dangers ("so setzt man sich grossen 
 gefabren aus und verfolgt einen in jeder riicksicht scliliipfrigen 
 pfad "). Moreover bl<xse (E. bloic, Lat. flare) is just as imitative 
 as tcind, vind : no one of course would pretend that there was 
 only one way of expressing the same sense perception. Among 
 Humboldt's examples icolke and unnsch are doubtful, but I do 
 not see that this affects the general truth of his contention that 
 there is something like sound symbolism in some words. 
 
 NjTop in his treatment of this question (Gr I.V § 545 f.) repeats 
 Madvig's objection that the same name can denote various objects, 
 that the same object can be called by different names, and that 
 the significations of words are constantly changing ; fvn-ther, that 
 the same gi'oup of sounds comes to mean different things according 
 to the language in which it occurs. He finally exclaims : " How 
 to explain [by means of sound symbolism] the difference in 
 signification between mums, nurus, durus, fwus, etc. 1 " 
 
 XX.— § 2. Instinctive Feeling. 
 
 Yes, of course it would be absm'd to maintain that all words 
 at all times in all languages had a signification corresponding 
 exactly to their sounds, each sound having a definite meaning 
 once for all. But is there really much more logic in the opposite 
 extreme, which denies any kind of sound symbolism ^ {apart from 
 the small class of evident echoisms or ' onomatopoeia ') and sees 
 in our words only a collection of Avholly accidental and irrational 
 associations of sound and meaning ? It seems to me that the 
 conclusion in this case is as false as if you were to infer that because 
 on one occasion X told a lie, he therefore never tells the truth. 
 The correct conclusion would be : as he has told a lie once, we 
 cannot always trust him ; we must be on our guard with him — 
 but sometimes he may tell the truth. Thus, also, sounds may in 
 some cases be symbolic of their sense, even if they are not so in 
 all words. If linguistic historians are averse to admitting sound 
 symbolism, this is a natural consequence of their being chiefly 
 occupied with words which have undergone regular changes in 
 sound and sense ; and most of the words which form the 
 staple of linguistic books arc outside the domain of sound 
 sj'^mbolism. 
 
 ^ " Inner and essential connexion between idea and word . . . there 
 is none, in any language upon earth," saj's Whitney L 32. 
 
898 SOUND SYMBOLISM [cii. xx 
 
 There is no denying, however, that there are words which we 
 feel instinctively to be adequate to express the ideas they stand 
 for, and others the sounds of which are felt to be more or less 
 incongruous with their signification. Future linguists will have 
 to find out in detail what domains of human thought admit, and 
 what domains do not admit, of congruous expression through 
 speech sounds, and further what sounds are suitable to express 
 such and such a notion, for though it is clear — to take onl}' a few 
 examples — that there is little to choose between apple and pomme, 
 or between window and fenster, as there is no sound or sound group 
 that has any natural affinitj'' with such thoroughly concrete and 
 composite ideas as those expressed by these words, j^et on the 
 other hand everybody must feel that the word roll, rouler, rulle, 
 rollen is more adequate than the corresponding Russian word 
 kataV, katiV. 
 
 It would be an interesting task to examine in detail and 
 systematically what ideas lend themselves to symbolic presenta- 
 tion and what sounds are chosen for them in different languages. 
 That, however, could only be done on the basis of many more 
 examples than I can find space for in this work, and I shall, 
 therefore, only attempt to give a preliminary enumeration of the 
 most obvious classes, with a small fraction of the examples I have 
 collected.^ 
 
 XX.— § 3. Direct Imitation. 
 
 The simplest case is the direct imitation of the sound, thus 
 clink, dank, ting, tinkle of various metallic sounds, splash, bubble, 
 sizz, sizzle of sounds produced by water, bow-wow, bleat, roar of 
 sounds produced by animals, and snort, sneeze, snir,ger, smack, 
 whisper, grunt, grumble of sounds produced by human beings. 
 Examples might easily be multiplied of such ' echoisms ' or 
 ' onomatopoeia ' proper. But, as our speech-organs are not 
 capable of giving a perfect imitation of all ' unarticulated ' sounds, 
 the choice of speech-sounds is to a certain extent accidental, and 
 different nations ha\e chosen different combinations, more or 
 less conventionalized, for the same sounds ; thus cock-a-doodle-doo, 
 Dan. kykeliky, Sw. kukeliku, G. kikeriki, Fr. coquelico,ioT the sound 
 of a cock ; and for whisper : Dan. hviske, ON. kvisa, G. fliistern, 
 Fr. chuchoter, Sp. susurar. The continuit}"- of a sound is frequently 
 indicated by Z or r after a stopped consonant : rattle, rumble, jingle, 
 clatter, chatter, jabber, etc. 
 
 ^ I have learnt very little from the discussion which followed Wundt'a 
 remarks on the subject (S 1. 312-347); see Delbnick Grfr 78 £E., Siitterlin 
 WSG 29 fi., Hilmer Sch 10 ff. 
 
§4] ORIGINATOR OF THE SOUND 899 
 
 XX.— § 4. Originator of the Sound. 
 
 Next, the echoic word designates the being that produces the 
 sound, thus the birds cuckoo and peeweet (Dan, vibe, G. kibitz, 
 Fr. pop, dix-huit). 
 
 A special subdivision of particular interest comprises those 
 names, or nicknames, which are sometimes popularly given to 
 nations from words continually occurring in their speech. Thus 
 the Fi'ench used to call an Englishman a god-damn (godon), and in 
 China an English soldier is called a-says or I -says. In Java a 
 Frenchman is called orang-deedong (orang ' man '), in America 
 ding-doyig, and during the Napoleonic wars the French were called 
 in Spain didones, from dis-donc ; another name for the same nation 
 is ivi-wi (Australia), man-a-iciwi (in Beach-la-mar), or out-men 
 (New Caledonia). In Eleonore Christine's Jammersminde 83 I 
 read, " Ich habe zwei ^mrZe mi franQo gefangen," and correspond- 
 ingly Goldsmith ^vl'ites (Globe ed, 624) : "Damn the French, the 
 parle vous, and all that belongs to them. What makes the bread 
 rising ? the parle vous that devour us." In Rovigno the sur- 
 rounding Slavs are called cuje from their exclamation cuje ' listen, 
 I say,' and in Hungary German visitors are called vigec (from 
 ivie ghVs ?), and customs officers vartajnszli (from ivarV a bissl). 
 Round Panama everything native is called spiggoty, because in the 
 early days the Panamanians, when addressed, used to reply, " No 
 spiggoty [speak] Inglis," In Yokohama an English or American 
 sailor is called Damuralsu H'to from ' Damn your eyes ' and 
 Japanese H'to ' people.' ^ 
 
 XX.— § 5. Movement. 
 
 Thirdly, as sound is always produced by some movement and 
 is nothing but the impression which that movement makes on the 
 ear, it is quite natural that the movement itself may be expressed 
 by the word for its sound : the two are. in fact, inseparable. Note, 
 for instance, such verbs as bubble, splash, clash, crack, peck. Human 
 actions may therefore be denoted by such words as to bang the 
 door, or (with slighter sounds) to tap or rap at a door. Hence 
 also the substantives a tap or a rap for the action, but the sub- 
 stantive may also come to stand for the implement, as when from 
 the verb to hack, * to cut, chop off, break up hard earth,' we have 
 the noun hack, ' a mattock or large pick.' 
 
 Then we have words expressive of such movements as are not 
 to the same extent characterized by loud sounds ; thus a great 
 
 1 Schuchardt, KS 5. 12, Zs. J. rom. Phil. 33. 458, Churchill B 53, Sand- 
 feld-Jensen, Nationaljitlelsen 14, Lentzner, Col. 87, Simonyi US 157, The 
 Outlook, January 1910, New Quarterly Mag., July 1879. 
 
400 SOUND SYMBOLISM [cir. xx 
 
 many words beginning with ^-combinations, fi- : flow, flag (Dan. 
 flagre), flake, flutter, flicker, fling, flit, flurry, flirt ; si- : slide, slip, 
 slive ; gl- : glide. Hence adjectives like fleet, slippery, glib. Sound 
 and sight may have been originall}' combined in such expressions 
 for an uncertain walk as totter, dodder, dialectical teeter, titter, dither, 
 but in cases of this kind the audible element may be wanting, and 
 the word may come to be felt as symbolic of the movement as such. 
 This is also the case with many exi^ressions for the sudden, rapid 
 movement by which we take hold of something ; as a short vowel, 
 suddenly interrupted by a stopped consonant, serves to express 
 the sound produced by a very rapid striking movement (pat, tap, 
 knock, etc.), similar sound combinations occur frequently for the 
 more or less noiseless seizing of a thing (with the teeth or with 
 the hand) : snap, snack, snatch, catch, Fr. hajjper, attraper, gripper, 
 E. grip, Dan. hapse, na2Jpe, Lat. capio, Gr. kapto, Armenian kap 
 ' I seize,' Turk kapmak (mak infin. ending), etc. (I shall only 
 mention one derivative meaning that may develop from this group : 
 
 E. sruick ' a hurried meal,' in Swift's time called a S7iap {Journ. 
 to Stella 270) ; cf. G. schnapps, Dan. snaps ' glass of spirits.') 
 
 F. chase and catch are both derived from two dialectically different 
 French forms, ultimately going back to the same late Latin verb 
 captiare, but it is no mere accident that it was the form ' catch ' 
 that acquired the meaning ' to seize,' not found in French, for it 
 naturally associated itself with snatch, and especially'' with the 
 now obsolete verb latch ' to seize.' 
 
 There is also a natural connexion between action and sound 
 in the word to tickle, G. kiizeln, ON. kitla, Dan. kilde (d mute), 
 Nubian killi-kilU, and similar forms (Schuchardt, Nubisch. u. 
 Bask. 9), Lat. titillare ; cp. also the word for the kind of laughter 
 thus produced : titter, G. kichern. 
 
 XX.— § 6. Things and Appearances. 
 
 Further, we have the extension of s5^mbolical designation to 
 things ; here, too, there is some more or less obvious association 
 of what is only visible with some sound or sounds. This has been 
 specially studied by Hilmer, to whose book (Sch) the reader is 
 referred for numerous examples, e.g. p. 237 ff., knap 'a thick stick, 
 a knot of wood, a bit of food, a protuberance, a small hill ; knop 
 ' a boss, stud, button, loiob, a wart, pimple, the bud of a flower, 
 a promontory,' with the variants knob, kniip. . . . Hilmer's 
 word-lists from German and English comprise 170 pages ! 
 
 There is also a natural association between high tones (sounds 
 with very rapid vibrations) and light, and inverselj'^ between low 
 tones and darkness, as is seen in the frequent use of adjectives 
 
§6] THINGS AND APPEARANCES 401 
 
 like * light ' and ' dark ' in speaking of notes. Hence the vowel 
 [i] is felt to be more appropriate for light, and [u] for dark, as 
 seen most clearly in the contrast between gleam, glimmer, glitter 
 on the one hand and gloom on the other (Zangwill somewhere 
 writes : " The gloom of night, relieved only by the gleam from 
 the street-lamp ") ; the word light itself, which has now a diphthong 
 which is not so adequate to the meaning, used to have the vowel 
 [i] like G. Held ; for the opposite notions we have such words as 
 G. dunkel, Dan. mulm, Gr. amolgds, skdtos, Lat. obscurus, and with 
 another 'dark' vowel E. miirhj, Dan. mork. 
 
 XX.— § 7. States o£ Mind. 
 
 From this it is no far cry to words for corresponding states 
 of mind : to some extent the very same words are used, as gloom 
 (Dowden ^vrites : " The good news was needed to cast a gleam 
 on the gloom that encompassed Shelley ") ; hence also glum, 
 glumpy, glumpish, grumpy, the dumps, sulky. If E. moody and 
 sullen have changed their significations (OE. modig 'high-spirited,' 
 ME. solein ' solitary '), sound sjTnbolism, if I am not mistaken, 
 counts for something in the change ; the adjectives now mean • 
 exactly the same as Dan. mut, but. 
 
 If grumble comes to mean the expression of a mental state of 
 dissatisfaction, the connexion between the sound of the word and 
 its sense is even more direct, for the verb is imitative of the sound 
 produced in such moods, cf. mumble and grunt, gruntle. The 
 name of Mrs. Grundy is not badly chosen as a representative of 
 narrow-minded conventional morality. 
 
 A long list might be given of symbolic expressions for dislike, 
 disgust, or scorn ; here a few hints only can find place. First we 
 have the same dull or dump (back) vowels as in the last paragraph ; 
 blunder, bungle, bung, clumsy, humdrum, humbug, strum, slum, 
 slush, slubber, sloven, muck, mud, muddle, mug (various words, 
 but all full of contempt), juggins (a silly person), numskull (old 
 numps, nup, nupson), dunderhead, gull, scug (at Eton a dirty or 
 untidy boy). . . . Many words begin with si- (we have already 
 seen some) : slight, slim, slack, sly, sloppy, slipslop, slubby, slattern, 
 slut, slosh. . . . Initial labials are also frequent.^ After the 
 vowel we have very often the sound [/] or [t/], as in trash, tosh, 
 slosh, botch, patch ; cf . also G. kitsch (bad picture, smearing), 
 patsch{e) (mire, anything worthless), quatsch (silly nonsense), 
 putsch (riot, political coup de main). E. bosh (nonsense) is said 
 to be a Turkish loan-word ; it has become popular for the same 
 
 ^ F, for instance, in fop, Joozy, Jogy, fogram (old), all of them more or 
 less variants of fool. 
 
 26 
 
402 SOUND SYMBOLISM [ch. xx 
 
 reason for which the French nickname boche for a German was 
 widely used during the World War. Let me finally mention the 
 It. derivative suffix -accio, as in j^overaccio (miserable), acqvaccia 
 (bad water), and -uccio, as in cavalluccio (vile horse). 
 
 XX. — § 8. Size and Distance. 
 
 The vowel [i], especially in its narrow or thin variety, is par- 
 ticularly appropriate to express what is small, weak, insignificant, 
 or, on the other hand, refined or dainty. It is found in a great 
 many adjectives in various languages, e.g. little, petit, piccolo, 
 piccino, Magy. kis, E. wee, tiny (by children often pronounced 
 teeny [ti'ni]), slim, Lat. minor, minimus, Gr. mikros ; further, in 
 numerous words for small children or small animals (the latter 
 frequently used as endearing or depreciative words for children), 
 e.g. child (formerly with [i*] sound), G. kind, Dan. pilt, E. kid, 
 chit, imp, slip, pigmy, midge, Sp. chico, or for small things : bit, 
 chip, whit, Lat. quisquilice, mica, E. tip, pin, chink, slit. . . . The 
 same vowel is found in diminutive suffixes in a variety of languages, 
 as E. -y, -ie {Bobby, baby, auntie, birdie), Du. -ie, -je (koppie ' little 
 hill '), Gr. -i- (paid-i-on 'little boy'), Goth, -ein, pronounced [in] 
 {gumein ' little man '), E. -kin, -ling, Swiss German -li, It. -ino, 
 Sp. -ico, -ito, -illo. . . . 
 
 As smallness and weakness are often taken to be characteristic 
 of the female sex, I suspect that the Aryan feminine suffix -i, as 
 in Skr. vrki 'she-wolf,' napti 'niece,' originally denotes smallness 
 (' wolfy '), and in the same way we find the vowel i in many 
 feminine suffixes ; thus late Lat. -itta (Julitta, etc., whence Fr. -ette, 
 Henriette, etc.), -ina (Carolina), fmiher G. -in (konigin), Gr. -issa 
 {basilissa ' queen '), whence Fr. -esse, E. -ess. 
 
 The same vowel [i] is also symbolical of a very short time, as- 
 in the phrases in a jiff, jiffy, Sc. in a clink, Dan. i en svip ; and 
 correspondingly we have adjectives like quick, swift, vivid and 
 others. No wonder, then, that the Germans feel their word for 
 ' lightning,' blitz, singularly appropriate to the effect of light and to 
 the shortness of duration.^ 
 
 It has often been remarked ^ that in corresponding pronouns 
 and adverbs the vowel i frequently indicates what is nearer, and 
 other vowels, especially a or u, what is farther off ; thus Fr. ci, la, 
 
 ^ The preceding paragraphs on the .symbolic value of i are an abstract 
 of a paper which will be printed in Philologica, vol. i. 
 
 * Benfey Gesch 791, Misteh 5.39, Wundt S I. 331 (but his examples from 
 out-of-the-way languages must be used with caution, and curiously enough 
 he thinks that the phenomenon is limited to primitive languages and is not 
 found in Semitic or Aryan languages), GRM 1. 638, Simonyi US 255, Meinhof, 
 Ham 20. 
 
§8] SIZE AND DISTANCE 408 
 
 E. here, there, G. dies, das, Low G. dit, dat, Magy. ez, emez ' this,* 
 az, amaz ' that,' itt ' here,' ott ' there,' Malay iki ' this,' ika ' that, 
 a little removed,' iku ' yon, farther away.' In Hamitic languages 
 i symbolizes the near and u what is far away. We may here 
 also think of the word zigzag as denoting movement in alternate 
 turns here and there ; and if in the two E. pronouns this and that 
 the old neuter forms have prevailed (OE. m. yes, se, f. Ipeos, seo, 
 n. yis, ycet) the reason (or one of the reasons) may have been that 
 a characteristic difference of vowels in the two contrasted pronouns 
 was thus secured. 
 
 XX.— § 9. Length and Strength of Words and Sounds. 
 
 Shorter and more abrupt forms are more appropriate to certain 
 states of mind, longer ones to others. An imperative may be 
 used both for command and for a more or less humble appeal or 
 entreaty ; in Magyar dialects there are short forms for command : 
 irj, dolgozz ; long for entreaty : irjdl, dolgozzdl (Simonyi US 359, 214). 
 Were Lat. die, due, fac, fer used more than other imperatives in 
 commands ? The fact that they alone lost -e might indicate that 
 this was so. On the other hand the imperatives es, este and i had 
 to yield to the fuller (and more polite) esto, estate, vade, and 
 scito is always said instead of sci (Wackernagel, Gott. Ges. d. 
 Wiss., 1906, 182, on the avoidance of too short forms in general). 
 Other languages, which have only one form for the imperative, 
 soften the commanding tone by adding some word like please, 
 bitte. 
 
 An emotional effect is obtained in some cases by lengthening 
 a word by some derivative syllables, in themselves unmeaning ; 
 thus in Danish words for ' lengthy ' or ' tiresome ' : langsommelig, 
 kedsommelig, evindelig for lang{som), kedelig, evig. (Cf. Ibsen, 
 Ndr vi dffde vaguer 98 : Du er kanske ble't ked af dette evige 
 samliv med mig. — Evige ? Sig lige sa godt : evindelige.) In the 
 same way the effect of splendid is strengthened in slang : splen- 
 diferous, splendidous, splendidious, splendacious. A long word like 
 aggravate is felt to be more intense than vex (Coleman) — and that 
 may be the reason why the long word acquires a meaning that is 
 strange to its etymology. Atid " to disburden one's self of a sense 
 of contempt, a robust full-bodied detonation, like, for instance, 
 platitudinous, is, unquestionably, very much more serviceable 
 than any evanescing squib of one or two syllables " (Fitzedward 
 Hall). Cf. also multitudinous, multifarious. 
 
 We see now the emotional value of some ' mouth-filling ' words, 
 some of which may be considered symbolical expansions of existing 
 words (what H. Schroder terms ' streckforraen '), though others 
 
404 SOUND SYMBOLISM [cii. xx 
 
 cannot be thus explained ; not unfrequently the effect of length 
 is combined with some of the phonetic effects mentioned above. 
 Such words are, e.g., sluhberdegullion ' dirty fellow,' rumbustious 
 ' boisterous,' rumgum'ption, rumfustian, rumbullion (of. rum- 
 puncheon 'cask of rum' as a term of abuse in Stevenson, Treas. 
 I si. 48, "the cowardly son of a rum-puncheon"), rmnpallioii 
 ' villain,' rapscallion, ragamuffin ; sculduddery ' obscenity ' ; can- 
 tankerous ' quarrelsome,' U.S. also rantankerous (cf. cankerous, 
 rancorous) ; skilUgalee ' miserable gruel,' flabbergast ' confound,' 
 catawampous (or -ptious) ' fierce ' ("a high-soimding word with no 
 very definite meaning," NED) ; Fr. hurluberlu ' crazy ' and the 
 sjTionymous Dan. tnmmelumsk, Norw. tullerusk. 
 
 In this connexion one may mention the natural tendency to 
 lengthen and to strengthen single sounds under the influence of 
 strong feeling and in order to intensify the effect of the spoken 
 word ; thus, in ' it's very cold ' both the diphthong [ou] and the [1] 
 may be pronounced extremely long, in ' terribly dull ' the [1] is 
 lengthened, in ' extremely long ' either the vowel [o] or the [t^] 
 (or both) may be lengthened. In Fr. ' c'etait horrible ' the trill 
 of the [r] becomes very long and intense (while the same effect 
 is not generally possible in the corresponding English word, because 
 the English [r] is not trilled, but pronounced by one flap of the 
 tip). In some cases a lengthening due to such a psj^chological 
 cause may permanently alter a word, as when Lat. totus in It. 
 has become tutto (Fr. tout, toute goes back to the same form, while 
 Sp. todo has preserved the form corresponding to the Lat, single 
 consonant). An interesting collection of such cases from the 
 Romanic tongues has been published by A. J. Carnoy {Mod. Philol. 
 15. 31, July 1917), who justly emphasizes the symbolic value of 
 the change and the special character of the words in which it 
 occurs (pet-names, children's words, ironic or derisive words, 
 imitative words . . .). He says : " While to a phonetician the 
 phenomenon would seem capricious, its apportionment in the 
 vocabulary is quite natural to a psychologist. In fact, reduplica- 
 tion, be it of syllables or of consonants, generall}'' has that character 
 in languages. One finds it in perfective tenses, in intensive or 
 frequentative verbs, in the plural, and in collectives. In most 
 cases it is a reduplication of syllables, but a lengthening of vowels 
 is not rare and the reinforcement of consonants is also found. 
 In Chinook, for instance, the emotional words, both diminutive 
 and augmentative, are expressed by increasing the stress of con- 
 sonants. It is, of course, also well known that in Semitic the 
 intensive radical of verbs is regularl}^ formed by a reduplication 
 of consonants. To a stem qatal, e.g., answers an intensive : Eth. 
 qattala, Hebr. qittel. Cf. Hebr. shibbar ' to cut in small pieces ' 
 
§9] LENGTH AND STRENGTH OF WORDS 405 
 
 [cf. below], hillech ' to walk,' qibber ' to bury many,' etc, Cf. 
 Brockelmann, Vergl. Gramm., p. 244." 
 
 I add a few more examples from Misteli (428 f.) of this Semitic 
 strengthening : the first vowel is lengthened to express a tendency 
 or an attempt : qatala jaqtulu ' kill ' (in the third person masc, 
 the former in the prefect-aorist, the latter in the imperfect- 
 durative, where ja, ju is the sign of the third person m.), qatala 
 juqdtilu ' try to kill, fight ' ; faXara jufXaru ' excel in fame,' 
 fdXara jufdXiru ' try to excel, vie,' Through lengthening 
 (doubling) of a consonant an intensification of the action is denoted : 
 Hebr. sd^ar jisbor ' zerbrechen,' Hbber jeSabber ' zerschmettern,' 
 Arab, daraba jadrubu ' strike,' (f,arraba jwjarribii ' beat violently, 
 or repeatedly ' ; sometimes the change makes a verb into a causative 
 or transitive, etc. 
 
 I imagine that we have exactly the same kind of strengthening 
 for psychological (symbolical) reasons in a number of verbs where 
 Danish has pp, tt, kk by the side of b, d, g (spirantic) : pippe pibe, 
 stritte stride, snitte snide, sk^tte shpde, splitte splide, skrikke skrige, 
 lukke luge, hikke hige, sikke sige, kikke kige, prikke prige (cf. also 
 sproekke sprcenge). Some of these forms are obsolete, others 
 dialectal, but it would take us too far in this place to deal with 
 the words in detail. It is customary to ascribe this gemination to 
 an old n derivative (see, e.g., Brugmann VG 1. 390, Streitberg Urg 
 pp. 135, 138, Noreen UL 154), but it does not seem necessary to 
 conjure up an n from the dead to make it disappear again imme- 
 diately, as the mere strengthening of the consonant itself to 
 express symbolically the strengthening of the action has nothing 
 mmatural in it. Cf. also G. placken by the side of plagen. The 
 opposite change, a weakening, may have taken place in E. flag 
 (cf . OFr. flaquir, to become flaccid), flabby, earlier flappy, drib from 
 drip, slab, if from OFr. esclape, clod by the side of clot, and possibly 
 cadge, bodge, grudge, smudge, wliich had all of them originally -tch. 
 But the common modification in sense is not so easily perceived 
 here as in the cases of strengthening. 
 
 I may here, for the curiosity of the thing, mention that in 
 a ' language ' coined by two English children (a vocabulary of 
 which was communicated to me by one of the inventors through 
 IVIiss I. C. Ward, of the Department of Phonetics, University 
 College, London) there was a word bal which meant ' place,' but 
 the bigger the place the longer the vowel was made, so that with 
 three different quantities it meant ' village,' ' town ' and ' city ' 
 respectively. The word for ' go ' was dudu, " the greater the 
 speed of the going, the more quickly the word was said — [doe'dce*] 
 walk slowly." Cf. Humboldt, ed, Steinthal 82 : " In the southern 
 dialect of the Guarani language the suffix of the perfect yma is 
 
406 SOUND SYMBOLISM [ch. xx 
 
 pronounced more or less slowly according to the more or less 
 remoteness of the past to be indicated." 
 
 XX. — § 10. General Considerations. 
 
 Sound symbolism, as we have considered it in tliis chapter, 
 has a very wide range of application, from direct imitation of 
 perceived natural sounds to such small quantitative changes of 
 existing non-symbolic words as ma}' be used for purely gram- 
 matical purposes. But in order to obtain a true valuation of this 
 factor in the life of language it is of importance to keep in view the 
 following considerations : 
 
 (1) No language utilizes soimd symbolism to its full extent, 
 but contains numerous words that are indifferent to or may even 
 jar with symbolism. To express smallness the vowel [i] is most 
 adequate, but it would be absurd to say that that vowel always 
 implies smallness, or that smallness is always expressed by words 
 containing that vowel : it is enough to mention the words biq and 
 small, or to point to the fact that thick and thin have the same 
 vowel, to repudiate such a notion. 
 
 (2) Words that have been symbolically expressive may cease 
 to be so in consequence of historical development, either phonetic 
 or semantic or both. Thus the name of the bird crow is not now 
 so good an imitation of the sound made by the bird as OE. crawe 
 was (Dan. krage, Du. kraai). Thus, also, the verbs whine, 'pipe 
 were better imitations when the voAvel was still [i] (as in Dan. 
 hvinc, pibe). But to express the sound of a small bird the latter 
 word is still pronounced with the vowel [i] either long or short 
 (peep, pip), the word having been constantly renewed and as it 
 were reshaped by fresh imitation ; cf. on Irish wheen and dialectal 
 peep, XV § 8. Lat. pipio originally meant any ' peeping bird,' 
 but when it came to designate one particular kind of birds, it was 
 free to follow the usual trend of phonetic development, and so 
 has become Fr. pigeon [pi.50], E. pigeon [pidgin]. E. cuckoo has 
 resisted the change from [u] to [a] as in cut, because people have 
 constantly heard the sound and fashioned the name of the bird 
 from it. I once heard a Scotch lady say [kAku*], but on my inquiry 
 she told me that there were no cuckoos in her native place ; hence 
 the word had there been treated as any other word containing the 
 short [u]. The same word is interesting in another way ; it has 
 resisted the old Gothonic consonant-shift, and thus has the same 
 consonants as Skt, kokiWi, Gr. kokkux, Lat. cuculus. On the 
 general preservation of significative sounds, cf. Ch. XV § 8. 
 
 (3) On the other hand, some words have in coiu*se of time 
 become more expressive than they were at first ; we have some- 
 
§10] GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 40V 
 
 thing that may be called secondary echoisra or secondary symbolism. 
 The verb patter comes from pater (= paternoster), and at first meant 
 to repeat that prayer, to mumble one's prayers ; but then it was 
 associated with the homophonous verb patter ' to make a rapid 
 succession of pats ' and came mider the influence of echoic words 
 like prattle, chatter, jabber ; it now, like these, means ' to talk rapidly 
 or glibly 'and is to all intents a truly symbolical word ; cf . also the 
 substantive patter ' secret lingo, speechif3dng, talk.' Husky may 
 at first have meant only " full of husks, of the nature of a husk " 
 (NED), but it could not possibly from that signification have 
 arrived at the now current sense ' dry in the throat, hoarse ' if it 
 had not been that the sound of the adjective had reminded one 
 of the sound of a hoarse voice. Dan. pojt ' poor drink, vile stuS ' 
 is now felt as expressive of contempt, but it originates in Poitou, 
 an innocent geographical name of a kind of wine, like Bordeaux ; 
 it is now coimected with other scornful words like sprojt and dojt. 
 In E. little the symbolic vowel i is regularly developed from 
 OE. y, lytel, whose i/ is a mutated u, as seen in OSax. luttil ; u also 
 appears in other related languages, and the word thus originally 
 had nothing s3anbolical about it. But in Gothic the word is leitils 
 {ei, sounded [i]) and in ON. litinn, and here the vowel is so difficult 
 to account for on ordinary principles that the NED in despair 
 thinks that the two words are "radically miconnected." I have 
 no hesitation in supposing that the vowel i is due to sound sym- 
 bolism, exactly as the smaller change introduced in modern E. 
 ' leetle,' with narrow instead of wide (broad) [i]. In the word 
 for the opposite meaning, much, the phonetic development may 
 also have been influenced by the tendency to get an adequate 
 vowel, for normally we should expect the vowel [i] as in Sc. mickle, 
 from OE. micel. In E. quick the vowel beat adapted to the idea 
 has prevailed instead of the one found in the old nom. forma 
 cioiccu, cucu from cwicu (inflected civicne, cwices, etc.), while in the 
 word ividu, wudu,, which is phonetically analogous, there was no 
 such inducement, and the vowel [u] has been preserved : wood. 
 The same prevalence of the symbolic i is noticed in the Dan. adj. 
 kvik, MLG. quik, while the same word as subst. has become Dan. 
 kvcBg, MLG. quek, where there was no symbolism at work, as it 
 has come to mean ' cattle.' I even see symbolism in the preserva- 
 tion of the k in the Dan. adj. (as against the fricative in kvceg), 
 because the notion of ' quick " is best expressed by the short [i], 
 interrupted by a stop ; and may not the same force have been 
 at work in this adjective at an earlier period ? The second k in 
 OE. cwicu, ON. kvikr as against Goth, qius, Lat. vivus, has not 
 been sufficiently explained. An [i], symbolic of smallness, has been 
 introduced in some comparatively recent E. words : tip from top. 
 
408 SOUND SYMBOLISM [ch. xx 
 
 trip ' small flock ' from troop, sip ' drink in small quantities ' from 
 sup, sop. 
 
 Through changes in meaning, too, some words have become 
 symbolically more expressive than they were formerly ; thus the 
 agreement between sound and sense is of late growth in miniature, 
 which now, on account of the i, has come to mean ' a small picture,' 
 while at first it meant ' image painted with minium or vermilion,' 
 and in pittance, now ' a scanty allowance,' formerly any pious 
 donation, whether great or small. Cf. what has been said above 
 of sullen, moody, catch. 
 
 XX. — § 11. Importance of Suggestiveness. 
 
 The suggestiveness of some words as felt by present-day 
 speakers is a fact that must be taken into account if we are to 
 understand the realities of language. In some cases it may have 
 existed from the very first : these words sprang thus into being 
 because that shape at once expressed the idea the speaker wished 
 to communicate. In other cases the suggestive element is not 
 original : these words arose in the same waj^ as innumerable others 
 whose sound has never carried any suggestion. But if the sound 
 of a word of this class was, or came to be, in some way suggestive 
 of its signification — say, if a word containing the vowel [ij in a 
 prominent place meant ' small ' or something small — then the sound 
 exerted a strong influence in gaining popular favour to the word ; 
 it was an inducement to people to choose and to prefer that 
 particular word and to cease to use words for the same notion 
 that were not thus favoured. Sound symbolism, we may say, 
 makes some words more fit to survive and gives them considerable 
 help in their struggle for existence. If we want to denote a little 
 child by a word for some small animal, we take some word like 
 kid, chick, kitten, rather than bat or 2>^({l or sing, though these may 
 in themselves be smaller than the animal chosen. 
 
 It is quite true that Fr. rouler, our roll, is derived from Lat. 
 rota ' wheel ' + a diminutive ending -id-, but the word would 
 never have gained its immense popularity, extending as it does 
 through English, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages, 
 if the sound had not been eminently suggestive of the sense, so 
 suggestive that it seems to us now the natural expression for that 
 idea, and we have difficulty in realizing that the ^^■ord has not 
 existed from the ver}' dawn of speech. Or let me take another 
 example, in which the connexion between sound and sense is even 
 more 'fortuitous.' About a hundred years ago a member of 
 Congress, Felix Walker, from Buncombe Count}', North Carolina, 
 made a long and tedious speech. " Many members left the hall. 
 
§11] IMPORTANTE OF SUGGESTIVENESS 409 
 
 Very naively he told those who remained that they might go too ; 
 he should speak for some time, but ' he was only talking for 
 Buncombe,' to please his constituents." Now buncombe [buncome, 
 bunkum) has become a widely used word, not only in the States, 
 but all over the English-speaking world, for political speaking or 
 action not resting on conviction, but on the desire of gaining the 
 favour of electors, or for any kind of empty ' clap-trap ' oratory ; 
 but does anybody suppose that the name of ]\Ir, Walker's constitu- 
 ency would have been thus used if he had happened to hail from 
 Annapolis or Philadelphia, or some other place with a name incapable 
 of tickling the popular fancy in the same way as Buncombe does ? 
 (Cf. above, p. 401 on the suggostiveness of the short u.) In a 
 similar way hullaballoo seems to have originated from the Irish 
 village Ballyhooly (see P. W. Joyce, English as ice speak it in 
 Ireland) and to have become popular on account of its suggestive 
 sound. 
 
 In loan-words we can often see that they have been adopted 
 less on accoimt of any cultural necessity (see above, p. 209) than 
 because their sound was in some way or other suggestive. Thus 
 the Algonkin (Natick) word for ' chief,' mugquomp, is used in the 
 United States in the form of mugivump for a ' great man ' or ' boss,' 
 and especially, in political life, for a man independent of parties 
 and thinking himself superior to parties. Now, no one would 
 have thought of going to an Indian language to express such a 
 notion, had not an Indian word presented itself which from its 
 uncouth sound lent itself to purposes of ridicule. Among other 
 words whose adoption has been favoured by their soimds I may 
 mention jungle (from Hindi jangal, associated more or less closely 
 with jumble, tumble, bundle, bungle) ; bobbery, in slang ' noise, 
 squabble,' " the Anglo-Indian colloquial representation of a common 
 exclamation of Hindus when in surprise or grief — Bap-re ! or 
 Bap-re Bap ' Father ! ' " (Hobson-Jobson) ; amuck ; and U.S. 
 bunco ' swindling game, to swindle,' from It. banco. 
 
 XX.— § 12. Ancient and Modern Times. 
 
 It will be seen that our conception of echoism and related 
 phenomena does not carry us back to an imaginary primitive 
 period : these forces are vital in languages as we observe them 
 day by day. ^Linguistic writers, however, often assume that 
 soimd symbolism, if existing at all, must date back to the earliest 
 times, and therefore can have no reality nowadays. Thus Benfey 
 (Gesch 288) turns upon de Brosse, who had found rudeness in 
 Fr. rude and gentleness in Fr. doux, and says : " As if the sounds 
 of such words, which are distant by an infinite length of time from 
 
410 SOUND SYMBOLISM [ch. xx 
 
 the time when language originated, were able to contribute ever 
 80 little to explain the original designation of things." (But 
 Benfey is right in saying that the impression made by those two 
 French words may be imaginary ; as examples they are not par- 
 ticularly well chosen.) Siitterlin (WW 14) says : " It is bold to 
 search for such correspondence as still existing in detail in the 
 language of our own daj^s. For words like liebe, siiss on the one 
 hand, and zorn, hass, hart on the other, which are often alleged 
 by dilettanti, prove nothing to the scholar, because their form 
 is young and must have had totally different sounds in the period 
 when language was created." 
 
 Similarly de Saussure (LG 104) gives as one of the main prin- 
 ciples of our science that the tie between sound and sense is 
 arbitrary or rather motiveless (immotive), and to those who would 
 object that onomatopoetic words are not arbitrary he says that 
 " they are never organic elements of a linguistic system. Besides, 
 they are much less numerous than is generally supposed. Such 
 words as Fr. fouet and glas may strike some ears with a suggestive 
 ring ; ^ but they have not had that character from the start, as is 
 sufficiently proved if we go back to their Latin forms (fouet derived 
 from fagus ' beech,' glas = classicum) ; the quality possessed by, 
 or rather attributed to, their actual sounds is a fortuitous result 
 of phonetic development." 
 
 Here we see one of the characteristics of modern linguistic 
 science : it is so preoccupied with etymology, with the origin of 
 words, that it pays much more attention to what words have 
 come from than to what they have come to be. If a word has 
 not always been suggestive on account of its sound, then its actual 
 suggestiveness is left out of account and may even be declared 
 to be merely fanciful. I hope that this chapter contains throughout 
 what is psychologically a more true and linguistically a more 
 fruitful view. 
 
 Though some echo words may be very old, the great majority 
 are not ; at any rate, in looking up the earliest ascertained date 
 of a goodly number of such words in the NED, I have been struck 
 by the fact of so many of them being quite recent, not more than 
 a few centuries old, and some not even that. To some extent 
 
 * I must confess that I find nothing sjonbolical in gins and very little 
 in fotiet (though the verb fouetier has something of the force of E. tvhip). 
 On the whole, much of what people ' hear ' in a word appears to me fanciful 
 and apt to discredit reasonable attempts at gaining an insight into the 
 essence of sound symbolism ; thus E. Lerch's ridiculous remark on G. loch 
 in GRM 7. 101 : " loch malt die bewegung, die der anblick eines solchen 
 im beschauer au8l6st, durch eine entsprechende bewegung der sprachwerk- 
 zcuge, beginnend mit der liquida zur bezeichnung der rundung und endend 
 mit dem gutturalen ch tief hinten in der gurgel." 
 
§12] ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES 411 
 
 their recent appearance in \^Titing may be ascribed to the general 
 character of the old literature as contrasted with our modern 
 literature, which is less conventional, freer in many ways, more 
 true to life with its infinite variety and more true, too, to the 
 spoken language of every day. But that cannot account for 
 everything, and there is every probability that this class of words 
 is really more frequent in the spoken language of recent times 
 than it was formerly, because people speak in a more vivid and 
 fresh fashion than their ancestors of hundreds or thousands of 
 years ago. The time of psychological reaction is shorter than it 
 used to be, life moves at a more rapid rate, and people are less 
 tied dovra to tradition than in former ages, consequently they are 
 more apt to create and to adopt new words of this particular type, 
 which are felt at once to be significant and expressive. In all 
 languages the creation and use of echoic and symbolic words seems 
 to have been on the increase in historical times. If to this we 
 add the selective process through which words which have only 
 secondarily acquired symbolical value survive at the cost of less 
 adequate expressions, or less adequate forms of the same words, 
 and subsequently give rise to a host of derivatives, then we may 
 say that languages in course of time grow richer and richer in 
 s3anbolic words. So far from believing in a golden primitive age, 
 in which everything in language was expressive and immediately 
 intelligible on account of the significative value of each group of 
 sounds, we arrive rather, here as in other domains, at the con- 
 ception of a slow progressive development towards a greater 
 number of easy and adequate expressions — expressions in which 
 sound and sense are united in a marriage-union closer than was 
 ever known to our remote ancestors. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH 
 
 § 1. Introduction. § 2. Former Theories. § 3. Method. § 4. Sounds. 
 § 5. Grammar. § (^ Units. § 7. Irregularities. § 8. Savage 
 Tribes. § 9. Law of Development. § 10. Vocabulary. § 11. Poetry 
 and Prose. § 12. Emotional Songs. § 13. Primitive Singing. 
 § 14. Approach to Language. § 15. The Earliest Sentences. 
 § 16. Conclusion. 
 
 XXI.— § 1. Introduction. 
 
 Much of what is contained in the last chapters is preparatory 
 to the theme which is to occupy us in this chapter, the ultimate 
 origin of human speech. We have already seen the feeling with 
 which this subject has often been regarded by eminent linguists, 
 the feeling which led to an absolute taboo of the question in the 
 French Societe de linguistique (p. 96). One may here quote 
 Whitney : " No theme in linguistic science is more often and 
 more voluminously treated than this, and by scholars of everj' 
 grade and tendency ; nor any, it may be added, with less i^rofitable 
 result in proportion to the labour expended ; the greater part of 
 what is said and written upon it is mere windy talk, the assertion 
 of subjective views which commend themselves to no mind save 
 the one that produces them, and which are apt to be offered with 
 a confidence, and defended with a tenacity, that are in inverse 
 ratio to their acceptableness. This has given the whole question 
 a bad repute among sober-minded philologists " (OLS 1. 279). 
 
 Nevertheless, linguistic science cannot refrain for ever from 
 asking about the whence (and about the whither) of linguistic 
 evolution. And here we must first of all realize that man is not 
 the only animal that has a ' language,' though at present we know 
 very little about the real nature and expressiveness of the languages 
 of birds and mammals or of the signalling system of ants, etc. 
 The speech of some animals may be more like our language than 
 most people are willing to admit — it may also in some respects 
 be even more perfect than human language precisely because it 
 is unlike it and has developed along lines about which we can know 
 nothing ; but it is of little avail to speculate on these matters. What 
 is certain is that no race of mankind is without a language which 
 
 il2 
 
§ 1] INTRODUCTION 41 S 
 
 in everything essential is identical in character with our own, 
 and that there are a certain number of circumstances which have 
 been of signal importance in assisting mankind in developing 
 language (cf. Gabelentz Spr 294 ff.)- 
 
 First of all, man has an upright gait ; this gives him two limbs 
 more than the dog has, for instance : he can carry things and yet 
 jabber on ; he is not reduced to defending himself by biting^ but 
 can use his mouth for other purposes. Feeding also takes less 
 time in his case than in that of the cow, who has little time for any- 
 thing else than chewing and a moo now and then. The sexual 
 life of man is not restricted to one particular time of the year, 
 the two sexes remain together the whole year round, and thus 
 sociability is promoted ; the helplessness of babies works in the 
 same direction through necessitating a more continuous family 
 life, in which there is also time enough for all kinds of sports, in- 
 cluding play with the vocal organs. Thus conditions have been 
 generally favourable for the development of singing and talking, 
 but the problem is, how could soimds and ideas come to be connected 
 as thej^ are in language ? 
 
 What method or methods have we for the solution of this ques- 
 tion ? With very few exceptions those v\ ho have written about our 
 subject have conjured up in their imagination a primitive era, and 
 then asked themselves : How would it be possible for men or man- 
 like beings, hitherto unfurnished with speech, to acquire speech as 
 a means of commimication of thought ? Not only is this method 
 followed, so to speak, instinctively by investigators, but we are 
 even positively told (by Marty) that it is the only method possible. 
 In direct opposition to this assertion, I think that it is chiefly and 
 principally due to this method and to this way of putting the 
 question that so little has yet been done to solve it. If we are 
 to have any hope of success in our investigation we must try new 
 methods and new ways — and fortunately there are ways which 
 lead us to a point from wliich we may expect to see the world of 
 primitive language revealed to us in a new light. But let us first 
 cast a rapid glance at those theories which have been advanced 
 b}'' followers of the speculative or a priori method. 
 
 XXI.— § 2. Former Theories. 
 
 One theory is that primitive words were imitative of sounds : 
 man copied the barking of dogs and thereby obtained a natural 
 word with the meaning of ' dog ' or ' bark.' To tnis theory, nick- 
 named the bow-woio theory, Kenan objects that it seems rather 
 absurd to set up this chronological sequence : first the lower animals 
 are original enough to cry and roar ; and then comes man, making 
 
414 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 a lanpfuage for himself by imitating his inferiors. But surely man 
 would imitate not onl}' the cries of inferior animals, but also those 
 of his fellow-men, and the salient point of the theory is this : sounds 
 which in one creature were produced without any meaning, but 
 which were characteristic of that creature, could by man be used 
 to designate the creature itself (or the movement or action produc- 
 tive of the sound). In this way an originally unmeaning sound 
 could in the mouth of an imitator and in the mind of someone 
 hearing that imitation acquire a real meaning. In the chapt<^r 
 on Sound Sjinbolism I have tried to show how from the rudest 
 and most direct imitations of this kind we may arrive through 
 many gradations at some of the subtlest effects of human speech, 
 and how imitation, in the widest sense we can give to this word — 
 a wider sense than most advocates of the theory seem able to 
 imagine — is so far from belonging exclusively to a primitive age 
 that it is not extinct even yet. There is not much of value in Max 
 Miiller's remark that " the onomatopoeic theory goes very smoothly 
 as long as it deals with cackling hens and quacking ducks ; but 
 round that poultry-yard there is a high wall, and we soon find 
 that it is behind that wall that language really begins " {Life 2. 97), 
 or in his other remark that " words of this kind (cuckoo) are, like 
 artificial flowers, without a root. They are sterile, and unfit to 
 express anything beyond the one object which they imitate " 
 (ib. 1. 410). But cuckoo may become cuckold(FT. cocu). and from 
 cock are derived the names Miiller himself mentions, Fr. coquet, 
 coquetterie, cocart, cocarde, coquelicot. . . . Echoic words may be 
 just as fertile as any other part of the vocabula^3^ 
 
 Another theory is the int-erjectional, nicknamed the pooh-pooh, 
 theory : language is derived from instinctive ejaculations called 
 forth by pain or other intense sensations or feelings. The adherents 
 of this theory generally take these interjections for granted, with- 
 out asking about the way in which they have come into existence. 
 Darwin, however, in The Expression of the Emotions, gives purely 
 physiological reasons for some interjections, as when the feeling 
 of contempt or disgust is accompanied by a tendency " to blow 
 out of the mouth or nostrils, and this produces sounds like pooh or 
 pish." Again, " when anyone is startled or suddenly astonished, 
 there is an instantaneous tendency, likewise from an intelligible 
 cause, namely, to be ready for prolonged exertion, to open the 
 mouth widely, so as to draw a deep and rapid inspiration. When 
 the next full expiration follows, the mouth is slightly closed, and 
 the lips, from causes hereafter to be discussed, are somewhat 
 protruded ; and this form of the mouth, if the voice be at all 
 exerted, produces . . . the sound of the vowel o. Certainly a 
 deep sound of a prolonged Oh ! may be heard from a whole crowd 
 
§2] FORMER THEORIES 415 
 
 of people immediately after witnessing any astonisliing spectacle. 
 Tf, together with sm'prise, pain be felt, there i.s a tendency to con- 
 tract all the muscles of the body, including those of the face, and 
 the lips will then be drawn back ; and this vi'ill perhaps account 
 for the sound becoming higher and assuming the character of 
 Ah ! or Ach ! " 
 
 To the ordinary inter jectional theory it may be objected that 
 the usual interjections are abrupt expressions for sudden sensations 
 and emotions ; they are therefore isolated in relation to the speech 
 material used in the rest of the language. " Between interjection 
 and word there is a chasm wide enough to allow us to say that the 
 interjection is the negation of language, for interjections are 
 employed only when one either cannot or will not speak " (Benfey 
 Gesch 295). This ' chasm ' is also shown phonetically by the fact 
 that the most spontaneous interjections often contain sounds 
 which are not used in' language proper, voiceless vowels, inspira- 
 tory sounds, clicks, etc., whence the impossibility properly to 
 represent them by means of our ordinary alphabet : the spellings 
 pooh, pish, whew, tut are very poor renderings indeed of the natural 
 sounds. On the other hand, many interjections are now more 
 or less conventionalized and are learnt like any other words, con- 
 sequently with a different form in different languages : in pain a 
 German and a Seelander will exclaim au, a Jutlander aiis, a French- 
 man ahi and an Englishman oh, or perhaps ow. Kipling writes 
 in one of his stories : " That man is no Afghan, for they weep 
 ' Ai ! Ai ! ' Nor is he of Hindustan, for they weep ' Oh ! Ho ! ' 
 He weeps after the fashion of the white men, who say, ' Ow ! Ow ! ' " 
 
 A closely related theory is the nativistic, nicknamed the ding- 
 dong, theory, according to which there is a mystic harmony between 
 soimd and sense : " There is a law which runs through nearly 
 the whole of natiire, that everything which is struck rings. Each 
 substance has its peculiar ring." Language is the result of an 
 instinct, a " faculty peculiar to man in his primitive state, by which 
 every impression from without received its vocal expression from 
 within " — a faculty which " became extinct when its object was 
 fulfilled." This theory, which Max Mixller propounded and after- 
 wards wisely abandoned, is mentioned here for the curiosity of the 
 matter only. 
 
 Noire started a fourth theory, nicknamed the yo-he-ho : under 
 any strong muscular effort it is a relief to the system to let breath 
 come out strongly and repeatedly, and by that process to let the 
 vocal chords vibrate in different ways ; when primitive acts were 
 performed in common, the}' would, therefore, naturally be accom- 
 panied with some sounds which would come to be associated with 
 the idea of the act performed and stand as a name for it ; the 
 
416 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 first words would accordingly mean something like ' heave ' or 
 ' haul.' 
 
 Now, these theories, here imperfectly reproduced each in a few 
 lines, are mutually antagonistic : thus Noire thinks it possible to 
 explain the origin of speech without sound imitation. And yet 
 what should prevent our combining these several theories and asing 
 them concmrently ? It would seem to matter very little whether 
 the first word uttered by man was bow-wow or pooh-pooh, for the 
 fact remains that he said both one and the other. Each of the three 
 chief theories enables one to explain parts of language, but still 
 only parts, and not even the most important parts — the main 
 body of language seems hardly to be touched by any of them. 
 Again, with the exception of Noire's theory-, they are too 
 individualistic and take too little account of language as a 
 means of human intercourse. Moreover, they all tacitly assume 
 that up to the creation of language man had remained mute or 
 silent ; but this is most improbable from a physiological point 
 of view. As a rule we do not find an organ already perfected 
 on the first occasion of its use ; it is only by use that an organ 
 is developed. 
 
 XXI.— § 3. Method. 
 
 So much for the results of the first method of approaching 
 the question of the origin of speech, that of trying to picture to 
 oneself a speechless mankind and speculating on the way in which 
 language could then have originated. We shall now, as hinted 
 above (p. 413), indicate the ways in which it is possible to supple- 
 ment, and even in some measure to supplant, this speculative 
 or deductive method by means of inductive reasonings. These 
 can be based on three fields of investigation, namely : 
 
 (1) The language of children ; 
 
 (2) The language of primitive races, and 
 
 (3) The history of language. 
 
 Of these, the third is the most fruitful source of information. 
 
 First, as to the language of children. Some biologists maintain 
 that the development of the individual follows on the whole the 
 same course as that of the race ; the embryo, before it arrives at 
 full maturity, will have passed through the same stages of develop- 
 ment which in countless generations have led the whole species 
 to its present level. It has, therefore, occurred to many that the 
 acquisition by mankind at large of the faculty of speech may 
 be mirrored to us in the process by which any child learns to 
 communicate its thoughts by means of its vocal organs. Accord- 
 
§3] METHOD 417 
 
 ingly, children's language has often been invoked to furnish illus- 
 trations and parallels of the i)rocess gone through in the formation 
 of primitive language. But many writers have been guilty of an 
 erroneous iiiference in applying this principle, inasmuch as they have 
 taken all their examples from a child's acquisition of an already 
 existing language. The fallacy will be evident if we suppose for 
 a moment the case of a man endeavouring to arrive at the evolution 
 of music from the manner in which a child is nowadays taught to 
 play on tlie piano. Manifestly, the modern learner is in quite 
 a different position to primitive man, and has quite a different 
 task set him : he has an instrument ready to hand, and melodies 
 already composed for him, and finally a teacher \^ho understands 
 how to draAv these tunes foi'th from the instrument. It is the same 
 thing with language ; the task of the child is to learn an existing 
 language, that is, to connect certain sounds heard on the lips of 
 others with the same ideas that the speakers associate with them, 
 but not in the least to frame anything new. No ; if we are seeking 
 some parallel to the primitive acquisition of language, we must 
 look elsewhere and turn to baby language as it is spoken in the first 
 year of life, before the cliild has begun to ' notice ' and to make 
 out what use is made of language by grown-up people. Here, 
 in the child's first purposeless murmuring, crowing and babbling, 
 we have real nature sounds ; here we may expect to find some 
 clue to the infancy of the language of the race. And, again, we 
 must not neglect the way children have of creating new words 
 never heard before, and often of attaching a sense to originally 
 meaningless conglomerations of sound. 
 
 As for the languages of contemporary savages, we may in some 
 instances take them as t\-pical of more primitive languages than 
 those of civilized nations, and therefore as illustrating a linguistic 
 stage that is nearer to that in which speech originated. Still, 
 inferences Trom such languages should be used with great caution, 
 for it should never be forgotten than even the most backward 
 race has many centuries of linguistic evolution behind it, and that 
 the conditions therefore may, or must, be very different from those 
 of primeval man. The so-called primitive languages Avill therefore 
 in the following sections be only invoked to corroborate conclusions 
 at which it is possible to arrive from other data. 
 
 The third and most fruitful source from which to gather in- 
 formation of value for our investigation is the history of language 
 as it has been considered in previous chapters of this work. While 
 the propounders of the theories of the origin of speech mentioned 
 above made straight for the front of the lion's den, we are like 
 the fox in the fable, who noticed that all the traces led into the den 
 and not a single one came out ; we will therefore try and steal 
 
 27 
 
418 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 into the den from behind. They thought it logically correct, 
 nay necessary, to begin at the beginning ; let us, for variety's 
 sake, begin with languages accessible at the present day, and let 
 us attempt from that starting-point step by step to trace the 
 backward path. Perhaps in this way we may reach the very 
 first beginnings of speech. 
 
 The method I recommend, and which I think I am the first 
 to employ consistently, is to trace our modern twentieth-century 
 languages as far back in time as liistory and our materials will 
 allow us ; and then, from this comparison of present English with 
 Old English, of Danish with Old Norse, and of both with ' Common 
 Gothonic,' of French and Italian with Latin, of modern Lidian 
 dialects with Sanskrit, etc., to deduce definite laws for the develop- 
 ment of languages in general, and to try and find a system of lines 
 which can be lengthened backwards beyond the reach of history. 
 If we should succeed in discovering certain qualities to be generally 
 typical of tlie earlier as opposed to the later stages of languages, 
 we shall be justified in concluding that the same qualities obtained 
 in a still higher degree in the earliest times of all ; if we are able 
 witliin the historical era to demonstrate a definite direction of 
 linguistic evolution, we must be allowed to infer that the direction 
 was the same even in those primeval periods for which we have 
 no documents to guide us. But if the change witnessed in the 
 evolution of modern speech out of older forms of speech is thus 
 on a larger scale projected back into the childhood of mankind, 
 and if by tlfis process we arrive fina.llv at uttered sounds of such 
 a description that they can no longer be called a real language, 
 but something antecedent to language — why, then the problem 
 Avill have been solved ; for transformation is something we can 
 imdcrstand, Avhile a creation out of nothing can never be compre- 
 hended by human understanding. 
 
 This, then, will be the object of the foUoAving rapid sketch : 
 to search the several departments of the science of language for 
 general laws of evolution — most of them have already been dis- 
 cussed at some length in the preceding chapters — then to magnify 
 the changes observed, and thus to form a picture of the outer 
 and inner structui'e of some sort of speech more primitive than the 
 most primitive language accessible to direct observation. 
 
 XXI.— § 4. Sounds. 
 
 First, as regards the piu-ely phonetic side of language, we 
 observe overyuhere the tendency to make pronunciation more 
 easy, so as to lessen the muscular effort ; difficult combinations 
 of sounds are discarded, those only being retained which are 
 
§4] SOUNDS 419 
 
 pronoiuiced with ease (see Ch. XIV § 6 ff.). IModern research has 
 shown tliat the Proto-Ai-yan sound-system was much more com- 
 pHcated than was imagined in the reconstructions of the middle 
 of the nineteenth century. In most languages now onl}' such 
 somids are used as are produced by expiration, while inbreathed 
 sounds and clicks or suction-stops are not found in connected 
 speech. In civilized languages we meet with such sounds only 
 in interjections, as when an inbreathed voiceless I (generally with 
 rhythmic variations of strength and corresponding small move- 
 ments of the tongue) is used to express delight in eating and drink- 
 ing, or when the click inadequately spelt tut is used to express 
 imi)atience. In some very primitive South African languages, 
 on the other hand, clicks are found as integral parts of words ; 
 and Bleek has rendered it probable that in former stages of these 
 languages they were in more exten-si^'e use than now. We may 
 l^erhaps draw the conclusion that primitive languages in general 
 were rich in all kinds of difficult sounds. 
 
 The following point is of more far-reaching consequence. In 
 some languages we find a gradual disappearance of tone or pitch 
 accent ; this has been the case in Danish, whereas Norwegian 
 and Swedish have kept the old tones ; so also in Russian as com- 
 pared with Serbo-Croatian. In the works of old Indian, Greek 
 and Latin grammarians we have express statements to the effect 
 that pitch accent played a prominent part in those languages, 
 and that the intervals used must have been comparatively greater 
 than is usual in our modern languages. In modern Greek and in 
 the Romanic languages the tone element has been obscured, and 
 now ' stress ' is heard on the sj^llable where the ancients noted 
 only a liigh or a low tone. About the languages spoken nowadays 
 by savage tribes we have generallj' very little information, as most 
 of those who have made a first-hand study of such languages 
 have not been trained to observe and to describe these delicate 
 points ; still, there is of late years an increasing number of observa- 
 tions of tone accents, for instance in African languages, which 
 may justify us in thinking that tone plays an important part in 
 many primitive languages.* 
 
 ^ It may not be superfluous expressly to point out that there is no con- 
 tradiction between what is said here on the disappearance of tones and the 
 remarks made above (Ch. XIX § 4) on Chinese tones. There the change 
 wrought in the meaning of a word by a mere change of tone was explained on 
 the principle that the difference of meaning was at an earlier stage expressed 
 by affixes, the tone that is now concentrated on one syllable belonging 
 formerly to two syllables or perhaps more. But this evidently presupposes 
 that each syllable had already some tone of its own — and that is what in 
 this chapter is taken to be the primitive state. Word-tones were originally 
 frequent, but meaningless ; afterwards they were dropped in some languages, 
 while in others they were utilized for sense-distinguishing purposes. 
 
430 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 So much for word tones ; now for the sentence melody. It 
 is a well-known fact that the modulation of sentences is strongly 
 influenced by the effect of intense emotions in causing stronger 
 and more rapid raisings and sinkings of the tone. " All passionate 
 language does of itself become musical — with a finer music than 
 the mere accent ; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes 
 a chant, a song " (Carlyle). " The sounds of common conversation 
 have but little resonance ; those of strong feeling have much 
 more. Under rising ill-temper the voice acquires a metaUic ring. 
 . . , Grief, unburdening itself, uses tones approaching in timbre 
 to those of chanting ; and in his most pathetic passages an elo- 
 quent speaker similarly falls into tones more vibratory than those 
 common to him. . . . While calm speech is comparatively mono- 
 tonous, emotion makes use of fifths, octaves, and even wider 
 intervals " (H. Spencer). 
 
 Now, it is a consequence of advancing civilization that passion, 
 or, at least, the expression of passion, is moderated, and we must 
 therefore conclude that the speech of unci\'ilized and primitive 
 men was more passionately agitated than oms, more like music 
 or song. This conclusion is borne out by what we hear about the 
 speech of many savages in our own days. European travellers 
 very often record their impression of the speech of different tribes 
 in expressions like these : " pronouncing whatever they spoke in 
 a very singing manner," " the singing tone of voice, in common 
 conversation, was frequent," " the speech is very much modulated 
 and resembles singing," " highly artificial and musical," etc. 
 
 These facts and considerations all point to the conclusion that 
 there once was a time when all speech was song, or rather when 
 these two actions were not yet differentiated ; but perhaps this 
 inference cannot be established inductively at the present stage 
 of linguistic science with the same amount of certainty as the ' 
 statements I am now going to make as to the nature of primitive 
 speech. 
 
 As we have seen above (Ch. XVII § 7), a great many of the 
 changes going on regularly from century to century, as well as some 
 of the sudden changes which take place now and then in the 
 history of each language, result in the shortening of words. This 
 is seen everywhere and at all times, and in consequence of this 
 universal tendency we find that 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. We have 
 seen also how the current theory, according to which every language 
 started with monosyllabic roots, fails at every point to account 
 for actual facts and breaks down before the established truths of 
 linguistic history. Just as the history of religion does not pass 
 
§4] SOUNDS 421 
 
 from the belief in one god to the belief in many gods, but inversely 
 from polytheism towards monotheism, so language proceeds from 
 original polysyllabism towards monosyllabiem : if the development 
 of language took the same course in prehistoric as in historic times, 
 we see, by projecting the teaching of history on a larger scale back 
 into the darkest ages, that early words must have been to present 
 ones Vvhat the plesiosaurus and gigantosaurus are to present-day 
 reptiles. The outcome of this phonetic section is, therefore, that 
 we must imagine primitive language as consisting (chiefly at least) 
 of very long words, full of difficult sounds, and sung rather than 
 spoken. 
 
 XXI. — §5. Grammar. 
 
 Can anything be stated about the grammar of primitive lan- 
 guages ? Ye.s, I think so, if we continue backwards into the past 
 the lines of evolution resulting from the investigations of previous 
 chapters of this volume. Ancient languages have more forms 
 than modern ones ; forms originally kept distinct are in course 
 of time confused, either phonetically or analogically, alike in 
 substantives, adjectives and verbs. 
 
 A characteristic feature of the structure of languages in their 
 early stages is that each form of a word (whether verb or noun) 
 contains in itself several minor modifications which, in the later 
 stages, are expressed separately (if at all), that is, by means of 
 auxiliary verbs or prej)ositions. Such a word as Latin cantavisset 
 unites in one inseparable whole the equivalents of six ideas : 
 (1) 'sing,' (2) pluperfect, (3) that indefinite modification of the 
 verbal idea which we term subjunctive, (4) active, (5) third per- 
 son, and (6) singular. The tendency of later stages is towards 
 expressing such modifications analytically ; but if we accept the 
 terms ' synthesis ' and ' analysis ' for ancient and recent stages, 
 we must first realize that there exist many gradations of both : 
 in no single language do we find either synthesis or analysis carried 
 out with absolute purity and consistency. Everywhere we find 
 a more or less. Latin is synthetic in comparison with French, 
 French analytic in comparison with Latin ; but if we were able 
 to see the direct ancestor of Latin, say two thousand years before 
 the earliest inscriptions, we should no doubt find a language so 
 sjTithetic that in comparison with it Cicero's would have to be 
 termed highly analytic. 
 
 Secondly, we must not from the term ' synthesis,' which etymo- 
 logically means ' composition ' or ' putting together,' draw the 
 conclusion that synthetic forms, such as we find, for instance, in 
 Latin, consist of originally Independent elements put together 
 
422 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 and thus in their turn presuppose a previous stage of analysis. 
 Whoever does not share the usual opinion that all flexional forms 
 have originated through coalescence of separate words, but sees 
 as we have seen (in Ch. XIX) also the reverse process of inseparable 
 portions of words gaining greater and greater independence, will 
 perhaps do well to look out for a better and less ambiguous word 
 than synthesis to describe the character of primitive speech. What 
 in the later stages of languages is analyzed or dissolved, in the earlier 
 stages was unanalj'zable or indissoluble ; ' entangled ' or ' com- 
 plicated ' would therefore be better renderings of our impression 
 of the first state of things. 
 
 XXI.— § 6. Units. 
 
 But are the old forms really less dissoluble than their modern 
 equivalents ? This is repeatedly denied even by recent writers, 
 on whom my words in Progress, p. 117, cannot have made much 
 impression, if thej- have read them at all ; and it will therefore 
 be necessary to take up this cardinal point. Let me begin with 
 quoting what others have said. " Historically considered, the 
 Latin amat is really two words, as much as its English representative, 
 the final t being originally a pronoun signifying ' he,' ' she ' or 
 ' it,' and it is only reasons of practical convenience that prevent 
 us from writing am at or ama t as two and heloves as one word. 
 . . . The really essential difference between amat and he loves is 
 that in the former the pronominal element is expressed b}' a suffix, 
 in the latter by a prefix " (Sweet PS 274, 1899). " It is purely 
 accidental that the Latin form is not written am-av-it. To the 
 unsophisticated Frenchman il a aim6 is neither less nor more one 
 unit than amavit to a Roman. . . . When the locution il a aime 
 sprang up, each element of it was still to some extent felt separatelj- ; 
 but after it had become a fixed formula the elements were fused 
 together into one whole. As a matter of fact, uneducated French 
 people have not the least idea whether it is one or three words 
 they speak" (Siitterlin WGS 11, 1902). "In some modern lan- 
 guages the personal pronoun is, just as in archaic Greek, beginning 
 to be amalgamated with verbs so as to become a mere termination 
 {sic : desinence ; prefix must be what is meant) : Fr. ydon\ tu-don', 
 il-don' (je donne, tu donnes, il donne) and E. i-giv\ we giv', you-giv\ 
 they-giv\ correspond exactlj^ to Gr. dido-mi, dido-si, dido-ti, only 
 that the personal particle is in a different place " (Dauzat V 155, 
 1910). " If French were a savage language not jet reduced to 
 writing, a travelling linguist, hearing the present tense of the verb 
 aimer pronounced by the natives, would transcribe it in the follow- 
 ing way : jem, tu em. Hem, nouzimon, vouzimi, ilzem. He would be 
 
§G] UNITS 428 
 
 struck particularly with the agglutination of the pronominal 
 subject and the verb, and would never feel tempted to draw up 
 a paradigm without pronouns : ai7ne, aimes, aime, aimons, etc., 
 in which traditional spelling makes us believe. . . . He would 
 even, through a comparison of Hem and ilzem, be led to establish 
 a tendency to incorporation, as the only sign of the plural is a z 
 infixed in'the verbal complex " (Bally LV 43, 1913). 
 
 In these utterances two questions are really mixed together, 
 that of the origin of Aryan flexional forms and that of the actual 
 status of some forms in various languages. As to the former 
 question, we have seen (p. 383) how very uncertain it is that amat 
 and didosi, etc., contain pronouns. As to the latter question, 
 it is quite true that we should not let the usual spelling be decisive 
 when it is asked whether we have one or two or three words ; but 
 all these writers strangely overlook the really important criteria 
 which we possess in this matter. Balh-'s traveller could only have 
 arrived at his result by listening to grammar lessons in which the 
 three persons of the verb were rattled off one after the other, for 
 if he had taken his forms from actual conversation he would have 
 come across numerous instances in which the forms occurred 
 without pronouns, first in the imperative, aime, aimons, aimez, then 
 in collocations like celin qni aime, ceux qui aiment, in which there 
 is no infix to denote the plural ; in le mari aime, les maris aiment, 
 and innumerable similar groups there is neither pronoun nor infix. 
 If he were at first inclined to take ilaaime as one word, he would 
 on further acquaintance with the language discover that the ele- 
 ments were often separated : il na pas aimA, il nous a tonjours 
 aim^s, etc. Similarly with the English forms adduced : / never 
 give, you always give. This is the crucial point : the French and 
 English combinations are two (three) words because the elements 
 are not always placed together ; Lat. amat, amavit, are each of 
 them only one word because they can never be divided, and in the 
 same way we never find anything placed between am and o in 
 the first person, amo. These forms are as inseparable as E. loves, 
 but E. heloves is separable because both he and loves can stand 
 alone, and can also, in certain combinations, though now rarely, 
 be transposed : loves he. Some writers would compare French 
 combinations like il te le disait with verbal forms in certain Amerin- 
 dian languages, in which subject and direct and indirect object 
 are alike ' incorporated ' in a ' polysynthetic ' verbal form ; it is 
 quite true that these French pronominal forms can never be used 
 by themselves, but only in conjunction with a verb ; still, the French 
 pronouns are more independent of each other than the elements 
 of some other more primitive languages. In the first place, this 
 is shown by the possibility of varying the pronunciation : il te 
 
424 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 le disaii may be either [itlodize] or [itoldizc] or even more solemnly 
 [iltaladize] ; secondly, by the regularity of these joined pronominal 
 forms, for they are always the same, whatever the verb may be ; 
 and lastly, by their changing places in certain cases : it It disait- 
 il ? dis-lt-lui, etc. 
 
 Nor can it be said that English forms like ht's—he is (or he has), 
 I'd = / had (or / tvould), hell = he will show a tendency towards 
 ' entangling,' for however closely together these forms are gener- 
 ally pronounced, each of them must be said to consist of two words, 
 as is shown by the possibility of transposition (Is he ill ?) and of 
 intercalation of other words (I never had) ; it is also noteworthy 
 that the same short forms of the verbs can be added to all 
 kinds of words (the water '11 be . . ., the sea'd been calm). In 
 the forms dojit, won't, can't there is something like amalgama- 
 tion of the verbal with the negative idea. Still, it is important 
 to notice that the amalgamation only takes place with a few 
 verbs of the auxiliary class. In saying ' I don't write ' the full 
 verb is not touched by the fusion, and is even allowed to be 
 unchanged in cases w^here it would have been inflected if no 
 auxiliary had been used ; compare / write, he writes, I wrote with 
 the negative / don't write, he doesnt urite, I didnH icrite. It will 
 be seen, especially if we take into account the colloquial or vulgar 
 form for the third person, he don't write, that the general movement 
 here as elsewhere is really rather in the direction of ' isolation ' 
 than of fusion ; for the verbal form write is stripped of all signs 
 of person and tense, the person being indicated separately (if at 
 all), and the tense sign being joined to the negation. So also in 
 interrogative sentences ; and if that tendency which can be observed 
 in Elizabethan English had prevailed by using the combination 
 / do ivrite in positive statements, even where no special emphasis 
 is intended, English verbs (except a few auxiliaries) would have 
 been entirely stripped of those elements which to most gram- 
 marians constitute the very essence of a verb, namely, the marks 
 of person, number, tense and mood, write being the universal 
 form, besides the quasi-nominal forms writing and uritten. 
 
 Now, it is often said that the history of language shows a sort 
 of gyration or movement in spirals, in wliich synthesis is followed 
 by analysis, this by a new synthesis (flexion), and this again by 
 analysis, and so forth. Latin amabo (which according to the old 
 theory was once ama -f some auxiliar}') has been succeeded by 
 amare habeo, which in its turn is fused into amerd, aimerai, and the 
 latter form is now to some extent giving way to^'e vats aimer. But 
 this pretended law of rotation is only arrived at by considering a 
 comparatively small number of phenomena, and not by viewing 
 the successive stages of the same language as wholes and drawing 
 
§6] UNITS 425 
 
 general inferences as to their typically distinctive characters (cf. 
 above, p. 337). If for every two instances of new flexions springing 
 up we see ten older ones discarded in favour of analysis or isolation, 
 are we not entitled to the generalization that flexion or indissolu- 
 bility tends to give way to anah'sis ? We should beware of being 
 under the same delusion as a man who, in walking over a moun- 
 tainous countrj', thinks that he goes down just as many and just 
 as lona: hills as he goes up, while on the contrary each ascent is 
 higher than the preceding descent, so that finally he finds himself 
 unexpectedly many thousand feet above the level from which 
 he started. 
 
 The direction of movement is towards flexionless languages 
 (such as Chinese, or to a certain extent IModevn English) with 
 freely combinable elements ; the starting-point was flexional 
 languages (such as Latin or Greek) ; at a still earlier stage we must 
 suppose a language in which a verbal form might indicate not only 
 six things, like cantainsset, but a still larger number, in which verbs 
 were perhaps modified according to the gender (or sex) of the sub- 
 ject, as they are in Semitic languages, or according to the object, 
 as in some Amerindian languages, or according to whether a man, 
 a woman, or a person who commands respect is spoken to, as in 
 Basque. But that amounts to the same thing as saying that the 
 border-line between word and sentence was not so clearly defined 
 as in more recent times ; cantavisset is really nothing but a sentence- 
 word, and the same holds good to a still greater extent of the sound 
 conglomerations of Eskimo and some other North American lan- 
 guages. Primitive linguistic units must have been much more 
 complicated in point of meaning, as well as much longer in point 
 of sound, than those with which we are most familiar. 
 
 XXI.— § 7. Irregularities. 
 
 Another point of great importance is this : in early languages 
 we find a far greater number of irregularities, exceptions, anomalies, 
 than in modern ones. It is true that we not unfrequently see new 
 irregularities spring up, where the formations were formerly 
 regular ; but these instances are very far from counterbalancing 
 the opposite class, in which words once irregularly inflected become 
 regular, or are given up in favour of regularly inflected words, 
 or in which anomalies in S3aitax are levelled. The tendency is 
 more and more to denote the same thing by the same means in 
 every case, to extend the ending, or whatever it is, that is used in 
 a large class of words to express a certain modification of the central 
 idea, until it is used in all other words as well. 
 
 Comparative linguistics did not attain a scientific character 
 
426 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 till the principle was established that the relationsliip of two lan- 
 guages had to be determined by a thoroughgoing conformity in 
 the most necessary parts of language, namely (besides grammar 
 proper) pronouns and numerals and the most indispensable of 
 nouns and verbs. But if this domain of speech, by preserving 
 religiously, as it were, the old tradition, affords infallible criteria 
 of the near or remote relationship of different languages, may we 
 not reasonably expect to find in the same domain some clue to the 
 oldest grammatical system used by our ancestors ? What sort 
 of system, then, do we find there ? We see such a declension as 
 /, we, we, us : the several forms of the ' paradigm ' do not at all 
 resemble each other, as they do in more recently developed de- 
 clensions. We find masculines and feminincs, such a.s father, mother, 
 man, wife, bull, cow ; Avhile such methods of derivation as are seen 
 in count, countess, he-bear, she-bear, belong to a later time. We 
 meet with degrees of comparison like good, better, ill, worse, while 
 regular forms like hajypy, hajypitr, big, bigger, prevail in all the 
 younger strata of languages. We meet with verbal flexion such 
 as appears in am, is, was, been, which forms a striking contrast 
 to the more modern method of adding a mere ending while leaving 
 the body of the word unchanged. In an interesting book, Vom 
 Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen (1899), H. OsthofiE 
 has collected a very great number of examples from the old Aryan 
 languages of different stems supplementing each other, and has 
 pointed out that this phenomenon is characteristic of the most 
 necessary ideas occurring every moment in ordinary conversation : 
 I take at random a few of the best-known of his examples : Fr. 
 aller, je vais, j'irai, Lat. fero, tuli, Gr. horao, opsomai, eidon, Lat. 
 bonus, melior, optimus. Osthoff fully agrees with me that we have 
 here a trait of primitive jDsychology : our remote ancestors were 
 not able to see and to express what was common to these ideas ; 
 their minds were very uns3^stematic, and separated in their lin- 
 guistic expressions things which from a logical point of view are 
 closely related : much of their grammar, therefore, was really of 
 a lexical character. 
 
 XXI.— § 8. Savage Tribes. 
 
 If now it is asked whether the conclusions we have thus arrived 
 at are borne out by a consideration of the languages of savage 
 or primitive races nowadays, the answer is that these cannot be 
 lumped together; there are among them many different types, 
 even with regard to grammatical structure. But the more these 
 languages are studied and the more accuratel}^ their structure is 
 described, the more also students perceive intricacies and anomalies 
 
§8] SAVAGE TRIBES 427 
 
 in their grtammari Gabelentz (Spr 386) says that the casual 
 observer has no idea how manifold and how nicely circumscribed 
 grammatical categories can be, even in the seemingly crudest lan- 
 guages, for ordinary grammars tell us nothing about that. P. W. 
 Schmidt (Die Stellung der Pygmdenvolker, 1910, 129) says that 
 whoever, from the low culture of the Andamanese, would expect 
 to find their language very simple and poor in expressions would 
 be strangely deceived, for its mechanism is highly complicated, 
 with man}' prefixes and suffixes, which often conceal the root itself. 
 Meinhof (MSA 136) mentions the multiplicity of plural formations 
 in African languages, Vilhelm Thomsen, in speaking of the Santhal 
 (Khervarian) language, says that its grammar is capable of express- 
 ing a multiplicity of vvances which in other languages must be 
 expressed by clumsy circumlocutions ; the native speakers go 
 beyond what is necessary through requiring expressions for many 
 subordinate notions, the language having, so to speak, only one 
 fine gold-balance, on which everything, even the simplest and 
 commonest things, must be weighed by the adding-up of a whole 
 series of minutiae. Curr speaks about the erroneous belief in the 
 simplicity of Australian languages, which on the contrary have 
 a great number of conjugations, etc. The extreme difficulty and 
 complex structure of Eskimo and of many Amerindian languages 
 is so notorious that no words need be wasted on them here. And 
 the forms of the Basque verb are so manifold and intricate that we 
 understand how Larramendi, in his legitimate pride at having 
 been the first to reduce them to a system, called his grammar 
 El Imposible Vencido, ' The Impossible Overcome.' At Beam 
 they have the story that the good God, wishing to punish the devil 
 for the temptation of Eve, sent him to the Pays Basque with the 
 command that he should remain there till lie had mastered the lan- 
 guage. At the end of seven years God relented, finding the punish- 
 ment too severe, and called the devil to him. The devil had no 
 sooner crossed the bridge of Castelondo than he found he had for- 
 gotten all that he had so hardly learned. 
 
 What is here said about the languages of wild tribes (and of 
 the Basques, who are not exactly savages, but whose language 
 is generally taken to have retained many primeval traits) is in 
 exact keeping with everything that recent study of primitive 
 man has brought to light : the life of the savage is regulated to the 
 minutest details through ceremonies and conventionalities to be 
 observed on every and any occasion ; he is restricted in what he 
 may eat and drink and when and how ; and all these, to our mind, 
 irrational prescriptions and innumerable jirohibitions have to be 
 observed with the most scrupulous, nay religious, care : it is the 
 same with all the meticulous rules of his language. 
 
428 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 XXI. — § 9. Law o! Development. 
 
 So far, then, from subscribing to Whitney's dictum that " the 
 law of simplicity of beginnings applies to language not less natur- 
 ally and necessarily than to other instrumentalities " (G 226), 
 we are drawn to the conclusion that primitive language had a super- 
 abundance of irregularities and anomalies, in sjTitax and word- 
 formation no less than in accidence. It was capricious and fanciful, 
 and displayed a luxuriant growth of forms, entangled one with 
 another like the trees in a primeval forest. " Rien n'entre mieux 
 dans les esprits grossicrs que les subtilites des langues " (Tarde, 
 Lois de V imitation 285). Human minds in the early times dis- 
 ported themselves in long and intricate words as in the wildest 
 and most wanton play. Nothing could be more beside the mark 
 than to suppose that grammatical and logical categories were in 
 primitive languages generally in harmony (as is supposed, e.g., by 
 Sweet, New Engl. Grammar § 543) : primitive speech cannot have 
 been distinguished for logical consistency ; nor, so far as w's 
 can judge, was it simple and facile : it is much more likely 
 to have been extremely clumsy and un^vieldy. Renan rightly 
 reminds us of Turgot's wise sa^ang : " Des hommes gros.siers ne 
 font rien de simple. II faut des hommes perfectionnes pour y 
 arriver." 
 
 We have seen in earlier chapters that the old theory of the 
 three stages through which human language was supposed alwaj's 
 to proceed, isolation, agglutination and flexion, was built up 
 on insufficient materials ; but while we feel tempted totally to 
 reverse this sj'^stem, we must be on our guard against establishing 
 too rigid and too absolute a system ourselves. It would not do 
 simply to reverse the order and sa}^ that flexion is the oldest stage, 
 from which language tends through an agglutinative stage towards 
 complete isolation, for flexion, agglutination and isolation do not 
 include all possible structural types of speech. The possibilities 
 of development are so manifold, and there are such innumerable 
 ways of arriving at more or less adequate expressions for human 
 thought, that it is next to impossible to compare languages of 
 different families. Even, therefore, if it is probable that English, 
 Finnish and Chinese are all simplifications of more complex lan- 
 guages, we cannot say that Chinese, for instance, at one time 
 resembled English in structure and at some other time Finnish. 
 English was once a flexional language, and is still so in some 
 respects, while in others it is agglutinative, and in others again 
 isolating, or nearly so. But we may perhaps give the following 
 formula of what is our tot^l imi^ression of the whole preceding 
 inquiry : 
 
§9] LAW OF DEVELOPMENT 429 
 
 The evolution of language shows a progressive ten- 
 dency FROM inseparable IRREGULAR CONGLOMERATIONS TO 
 FREELY AND REGULARLY COMBINABLE SHORT ELEMENTS. 
 
 The old system of historical linguistics may be likened to an 
 enormous pyramid ; only it is a pitj' that it should have as its 
 base the small, square, strong, smart root word, and suspended 
 above it the unwieldy, lumbering, ill-proportioned, flexion-encum- 
 bered sentence-vocable. Structures of this sort may with some 
 adroitness be made to stand ; but their equilibrium is unstable, 
 and sooner or later they will inevitably tumble over. 
 
 XXI.— § 10. Vocabulary. 
 
 On the lexical side of language we find a development parallel 
 to that noticed in grammar ; and, indeed, if we go deep enough 
 into the question, we shall see that it is really the very same 
 movement that has taken place. The more advanced a language 
 is, the more developed is its power of expressing abstract or 
 general ideas. Everywhere language has first attained to ex- 
 pressions for the concrete and special. In accounts of the languages 
 of barbarous races we constantly come across such phrases as 
 these : " The aborigines of Tasmania had no words representing 
 abstract ideas ; for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree, 
 etc., they had a name ; but they had no equivalent for the 
 expression ' a tree ' ; neither could they express abstract qualities, 
 such as ' hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, round ' " ; or, 
 The Mohicans have words for cutting various objects, but none 
 to convey cutting simply. The Zulus have no word for ' cow,' 
 but words for ' red cow,' ' white cow,' etc. (Sayce S 2. 5, cf. 
 I. 121). In Bakairi (Central Brazil) "each parrot has its special 
 name, and the general idea ' parrot ' is totally unknown, as well 
 as the general idea ' palm.' But they know precisely the qualities 
 of each subspecies of parrot and palm, and attach themselves so 
 much to these numerous particular notions that they take no interest 
 in the common characteristics. They are choked in the abundance 
 of the material and cannot manage it economically. They have 
 only small coin, but in that they must be said to be excessively 
 rich rather than poor " (K. v. d. Steinen, Unter den Naturvolkem 
 Brasiliens, 1894, 81). The Lithuanians, like many primitive 
 tribes, have many special, but no common names for various 
 colours : one word for gray in spealdng about wool and geese, 
 one about horses, one about cattle, one about the hair of men and 
 some animals, and in the same way for other colours (J. Schmidt, 
 Kritik d. Sonantentheorie 37). Many languages have no word 
 for ' brother,' but words for ' elder brother ' and ' younger brother ' ; 
 
430 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 others have different words according to whose (person and ninnber) 
 father or brother it is (see, e.g., the paradigm in Gabclentz 8pr 421), 
 and the same applies in many languages to names for various 
 parts of the body. In Cherokee, instead of one word for ' washing ' 
 we find different words, according to what is washed : kuhiwo 
 " I wash myself,' hdestula ' I wash my head,' tsestula ' I wash 
 the head of somebody else,' kttkusxco ' I wash my face,' tsekuswo 
 ' I wash the face of somebody else,' takasula ' I wash my hands 
 or feet,' takunkela ' I wash my clothes,' takuiega ' I wash dishes,' 
 tsejmvu ' I wash a child,' kowela ' I wash meat ' (see, hoAvever, the 
 criticism of Hewitt, Am. Anthropologist, 1893, 398). Primitive 
 man did not see the wood for the trees. ^ 
 
 In some Amerindian languages there are distinct series of 
 numerals for various classes of objects ; thus in Kwakiatl and 
 Tsimoshian (Sapir, Language and Environment 239) ; similarly 
 the Melanesians have special words to denote a definite number- 
 of certain objects, e.g. a buku niu ' two coconuts,' a bum ' ten 
 coconuts,' a koro ' a himdred coconuts,' a selavo ' a thousand 
 coconuts,' a uduudu 'ten canoes,' a bola 'ten fishes,' etc. (Gabe- 
 lentz, Die melan. Spr. 1. 23). In some languages the numerals 
 are the same for all classes of objects counted, but require after 
 them certain class-denoting words varjdng according to the 
 character of the objects (in some respects comparable to the 
 English twenty Jiead of cattle, Pidgin piecey ; cf . Yule and 
 Burnell, Hobson-Jobson s.v. Numerical Affixes). This reminds 
 one of the systems of weights and measures, which even in 
 civilized countries up to a comparatively recent period varied 
 not only from country to country, sometimes even from district 
 to district, but even in the same country according to the 
 things weighed or measm-ed (in England stone and ton still vary 
 in this way). 
 
 In old Gothonic poetry we find an astonishing abundance of 
 words translated in our dictionaries by ' sea,' ' battle,' ' sword,' 
 ' hero,' and the like : these may certainly be considered as relics 
 of an earlier state of things, in which each of these words had its 
 separate shade of meaning, which was subsequently lost and which 
 it is impossible now to determine with certainty. The nomenclature 
 of a remote past was undoubtedly constructed upon similar 
 principles to those which are still preserved in a word-group like 
 horse, mare, stallion, foal, colt, instead of he-horse, she-horse, young 
 horse, etc. This sort of grouping has only survived in a few cases 
 in which a lively interest has been felt in the objects or animals 
 concerned. We may note, however, the different terms employed 
 
 ^ On the lack of abstract and general terms in savage languages, see 
 also Ginneken LP 108 and the works there quoted. 
 
§10] VOCABULARY 431 
 
 for essentially the same idea in a fioch of sheep, a pack of wolves, 
 a herd of cattle, a beuy of larks, a covey of partridges, a shoal of 
 iish. Primitive language could show a far greater number of 
 instances of this description, and, so far, had a larger vocabulary 
 than later languages, though, of com-se, it lacked names for a 
 great number of ideas that were outside the sphere of interest 
 of unci\'ilized people. 
 
 There was another reason for the richness of the vocabulary 
 of primitive man : his superstition about words, which made 
 him avoid the use of certain words under certain circumstances — 
 during war, when out fishing, during the time of the great cultic 
 festivals, etc. — because he feared the anger of gods or demons 
 if he did not religiously observe the rules of the linguistic tabu. 
 Accordingly, in many cases he had two or more sets of words for 
 exactly the same notions, of which later generations as a rule 
 preserved only one, unless they differentiated these words by 
 utilizing them to discriminate objects that were similar but not 
 identical. 
 
 XXI.— § 11. Poetry and Prose. 
 
 On the whole the development of languages, even in the matter 
 of vocabulary, must be considered to have taken a beneficial course ; 
 still, in certain respects one may to some extent regret the conse- 
 quences of this evolution. Wliile our words are better adapted 
 to express abstract things and to render concrete things with 
 definite precision, they are necessarily comparatively colourless. 
 The old words, on the contrary, spoke more immediately to the 
 senses — they were manifestly more suggestive, more graphic and 
 pictorial : while to express one single thing we are not unfrequently 
 obliged to piece the image together bit by bit, the old concrete 
 words ^\ ould at once present it to the hearer's mind as a whole ; 
 they were, accordingly, better adapted to poetic purposes. Nor 
 is this the only point in which we see a close relationship between 
 primitive words and poetry. 
 
 If by a mental effort we transport ourselves to a period in 
 which language consisted solely of such graphic concrete words, 
 we shall discover that, in spite of their number, they -would not 
 suflSce, taken all together, to cover everytliing that needed ex- 
 pression ; a wealth in such words is not incompatible with a 
 certain poverty. They would accordingly often be required to 
 do service outside of their proper sphere of application. That a 
 figurative or metaphorical use of words is a factor of the utmost 
 importance in the life of all languages is indisputable ; but I 
 am probably right in thinking that it played a more prominent 
 
482 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 part in old times than now. In the course of ages a great many 
 metaphors have lost their freshness and vividness, so that nobody 
 feels them to be metaphors any longer. Examine closely such a 
 sentence as this : " He came to look upon the low ebb of morals 
 as an outcome of bad taste" and you will find that nearly every 
 word is a dead metaphor.^ But the bettor stocked a language 
 is with those ex-metaphors which have become regular expressions 
 for definite ideas, the less need there is for going out of one's way 
 to find new metaphors. The expression of thought therefore 
 tends to become more and more mechanical or prosaic. 
 
 Primitive man, however, on account of the nature of his language, 
 was constantly reduced to using words and phrases figuratively : 
 he was forced to express his thoughts in the language of poetry. 
 The speech of modern savages is often spoken of as abounding 
 in similes and all kinds of figurative phrases and allegorical 
 expressions. Just as in the literature transmitted to us poetry 
 is found in every country to precede prose, so poetic language 
 is on the whole older than prosaic language ; lyrics and cult songs 
 come before science, and Oehlenschlager is right when he sings 
 (in N. Meller's translation) : 
 
 Thus Nature drove us ; warbling rose 
 
 Man's voice in verse before he spoke in prose. 
 
 XXI.— § 12. Emotional Songs. 
 
 If we noAV try to sum up what has been inferred about primi- 
 tive speech, we see that by our backward march we arrived at 
 a language whose units had a very meagre substance of thought, 
 and this as specialized and concrete as possible ; but at the same 
 time the jihonetic body was ample ; and the bigger and longer 
 the words, the thinner the thoughts ! Much cry and little wool ! 
 No period has seen less taciturn people than the first framers of 
 speech ; primitive speakers were not reticent and reserved beings, 
 but youthful men and women babbling merrily on, without being 
 so very particular about the meaning of each word. They did 
 not narrowly weigh every syllable — what were a couple of syllables 
 more or less to them ? They chattered away for the mere pleasure 
 of chattering, resembling therein many a mother of our own time, 
 who will chatter away to baby without measuring her words or 
 looking too closely into the meaning of each ; na}', who is not 
 a bit troubled by the consideration that the little deary does not 
 understand a single word of her affectionate eloquence. But 
 
 ^ Of course, if instead of look upon and outcoine we had taken the corre- 
 sponding terms of Latin root, consider and result, the metaphors would 
 have been still more dead to the natural linguistic instinct. 
 
§12] EMOTIONAL SONGS 433 
 
 primitive speech — and we return here to an idea thrown out above — 
 still more resembles the speech of little baby himself, before he 
 begins to frame his own language after the pattern of the grown- 
 ups ; the language of our remote forefathers was like that ceaseless 
 humming and crooning with which no thoughts are as yet con- 
 nected, which merely amuses and delights the little one. Language 
 originated as play, and the organs of speech were first trained in 
 this singing sport of idle hours. 
 
 Primitive language had no great store of ideas, and if we consider 
 it as an instrument for expressing thoughts, it was clumsy, un- 
 wieldy and ineffectual ; but M'hat did that matter ? Thoughts 
 were not the first things to press forward and crave for ex- 
 pression ; emotions and instincts were more primitive and far 
 more powerful. But what emotions were most powerful in pro- 
 ducing germs of speech ? To be sm-e not hunger and that which 
 is connected with hunger : mere individual self-assertion and 
 the struggle for material existence. This prosaic side of life was 
 only capable of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections, 
 howls of pain and grunts of satisfaction or dissatisfaction ; but 
 these are isolated and incapable of much further development ; 
 they are the most immutable portions of language, and remain 
 now at essentially the same standpoint as thousands of years ago. 
 
 If after spending some time over the deep metaphysical specula- 
 tions of a number of German linguistic philosophers j'ou turn to 
 men like Madvig and Whitne}'', 5'^ou are at once agreeably im- 
 pressed by the sobriet}^ of their reasoning and their superior clearness 
 of thought. But if you look more closely, you caimot help thinldng 
 that they imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image 
 as serious and well-meaning men endowed with a large share of 
 common-sense. By their laying such great stress on the com- 
 munication of thought as the end of language and on the benefit 
 to primitive man of being able to speak to his fellow-creatures 
 about matters of vital importance, they leave you with the im- 
 pression that these " first framers of speech " were sedate citizens 
 with, a strong interest in the purely business and matter-of-fact 
 side of life ; indeed, according to Madvig, women had no share 
 in the creating of language. 
 
 In opposition to this rationalistic view I should like, for once 
 in a way, to bring into the field the opposite \dew : the genesis 
 of language is not to be sought in the prosaic, but in the poetic 
 side of life ; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but 
 merry play and youthful hilarity. And among the emotions 
 which were most powerful in eliciting outbursts of music and of 
 song, love must be placed in the front rank. To the feeling of love, 
 which has left traces of its vast influence on countless points in 
 
 28 
 
484 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 the evolution of organic nature, are due not only, as Darwin has 
 shown, the magnificent colours of birds and flowers, but also many 
 of the things that fill us with joy in human life ; it inspired many 
 of the first songs, and through them was instrumental in bringing 
 about human language. In primitive speech I hear the laughing 
 cries of exultation when lads and lasses vied with one another 
 to attract the attention of the other sex, when everybody sang 
 his merriest and danced his bravest to lure a pair of eyes to throw 
 admiring glances in his direction. Language was born in the 
 courting days of mankind ; the first utterances of speech I fancy 
 to myself like something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss 
 upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale.^ 
 
 XXL— § 13. Primitive Singing. 
 
 Love, however, was not the only feeling -sAliich tended to call 
 forth primitive songs. Any strong emotion, and more particularly 
 any pleasurable excitement, might result in song. Singing, like 
 any other sort of play, is due to an overflow of energy, which is 
 discharged in " unusual vivacity of every kind, including vocal 
 vivacity." Out of the full heart the mouth sings ! vSavages 
 will sing whenever they are excited : exploits of war or of the 
 chase, the deeds of their ancestors, the coming of a fat dog, any 
 incident " from the arrival of a stranger to an earthquake " is 
 turned into a song ; and most of these songs are composed extem- 
 
 ^ From tlie experience I had with my previous book. Progress, from 
 which this chapter has, with some alterations and amphfications, passed 
 into this vohime, I feel impelled here to warn those critics who do me the 
 honour to mention my theory of the origin of language, not to look upon it 
 as if it were contained simply in my remarks on primitive love-songs, etc., 
 and as if it were based on a priori considerations, like the older speculative 
 theories. What I may perhaps claim as my original contribution to the 
 solution of this question is the inductive method based on the three sources 
 of information indicated on p. 416, and especially on the ' backward ' con- 
 sideration of the history of language. Some critics think they have 
 demolished my view by simply representing it as a romantic dream of a 
 primitive golden age in which men had no occupation but courting and 
 singing. I have never believed in a far-off golden age, but rather incline 
 to believe in a progressive movement from a very raw and barbarous age 
 to something better, though it must be said that our own age, with its national 
 wars, world wars and class wars, makes one sometimes ashamed to think 
 how little progress our so-called civilization has made. But primitive ages 
 were probably still worse, and the only thing I have felt bold enough to 
 maintain is that in those days there were some moments consecrated to 
 youthful hilarity, and that this gave rise, among other merriment, to vocal 
 play of such a character as closely to resemble what we may infer from the 
 known facts of linguistic history to have been a stage of language earlier 
 than any of those accessible to us. There is no ' romanticism ' (in a bad 
 sense) in such a theory, and it can only bo refuted by showing that the view 
 of language and its development on which it is based is erroneous from 
 beginning to end. 
 
§18] PRIMITIVE SINGING 485 
 
 pore. " Wlicn rowing, the Coast negroes sing eitlier a description 
 of some love intrigue or the praise of some woman celebrated for her 
 beauty." The Malay's beguile all then* leisure hours with the 
 repetition of songs, etc. " In singing, the East African contents 
 himself \vith imjjrovising a few words without sense or rime and 
 repeats them till they nauseate." (These quotations, and many 
 others, are found in Herbert Spencer's Essay on the Origin of 
 Musky with his Postscript.) The reader of Karl Bucher's pains- 
 taking work Arbeit %ind Rhytlimus (2te aufl. 1899) will know from 
 liis numerous examples and illustrations what an enormous idle 
 rhythmic singing plays in the dail}' life of savages all over the 
 world, how each land of work, especially if it is doTie by many 
 jointly, has its ovm. kind of song, and how nothing is done except 
 to the sound of vocal music. In many instances savages are 
 mentioned as very expert in adapting the subjects of their songs 
 to current events. Nor is this sort of singing on every and any 
 occasion confined to savages ; it is found wherever the indoor 
 life of ci\'ilization has not killed all open-air hilarity ; formerly 
 in our Western Europe people sang much more than they do now. 
 The Swedish peasant Jonas Stolt (ab. 1820) WTites : "I have 
 known a time when yoimg people were singing from morning till 
 eve. Then they were carolling both out- and indoors, behind the 
 plough as well as at the threshing-floor and at the spinning-wheel. 
 This is all over long ago : nowadays there is silence everywhere ; 
 if someone were to try and sing in our days as we did of old, people 
 would term it bawling." 
 
 The first things that were expressed in song were, to be sure, 
 neither deep nor wise ; how could you expect it ? Note the 
 frequency with which we are told that the songs of savages consist 
 of or contain totally meaningless syllables. Thus we read about 
 American Indians that " the native word which is translated 
 ' song ' does not suggest any use of words. To the Indian, the 
 music is of primal importance ; words may or may not accompany 
 the music. When words are used in song, they are rarelj' employed 
 as a narrative, the sentences are not apt to be complete " (Louise 
 Pound, Mod. Lang. Ass. 32. 224), and similarly : " Even where 
 the slightest vestiges of epic poetry are missing, lyiic poetry of 
 one form or another is always present. It may consist of the 
 musical use of meaningless sj'llables that sustain the song ; or 
 it may consist largely of such syllables, with a few interspersed 
 ■v^ords suggesting certain ideas and certain feelings ; or it may 
 rise to the expression of emotions connected with warlike deeds, 
 with religious feeling, love, or even to the praise of the beauties of 
 nature " (Boas, International Jonm. Amer. Ling. 1. 8). The 
 magic incantations of the Greenland Eskimo, according to 
 
430 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 W. Thalbitzer, contain many incomprehensible words never used 
 outside these songs (but have they ever been real words ?), and 
 the same is said about the mystic religious formulas of Maoris 
 and African negroes and many other tribes, as well as about the 
 old Roman hymns of the Arval Brethren. The mere joy in sonorous 
 combinations here no doubt counts for very much, as in the 
 splendid but meaningless metrical lists of names in the Old 
 Norse Edda, and in many a modern refrain, too. Lot me give 
 one example of half (or less than half) understood strings of 
 syllables fiom "The Oath of the Canting Crew" (1749, Farmer's 
 Musa Pedestris, 51) : 
 
 No dimber, dambler, angler, dancer, 
 
 Prig of cackler, prig of prancer ; 
 
 No swigman, swaddler, clapper-dudgeon, 
 
 Cadge-gloak, curtal, or curmudgeon ; 
 
 No whip-jack, palliard, patrico ; 
 
 No jarkman, be he high or low ; 
 
 No dummerar or romany . . . 
 
 Nor any other will I suffer. 
 
 In the cultic and ceremonial songs of savage tribes in many 
 parts of the world this is a prominent trait : it seems, indeed, 
 to be universal. Even with us the thoughts associated with 
 singing are generally neither very clear nor very abstruse ; like 
 humming or whistling, singing is often nothing more than an 
 almost automatic outcome of a mood ; and " What is not worth 
 saying can be sung." Besides, it has been the case at all times 
 that things transient and trivial have found readier expression 
 than Socratic wisdom. But the frivolous use tuned the instrument, 
 and rendered it little by little more serviceable to a multiplicity 
 of purposes, so that it became more and more fitted to express 
 everj'-thing that touched human souls. 
 
 Men sang out their feelings long before they were able to speak 
 their thoughts. But of course we must not imagine that " singing " 
 means exactly the same thing here as in a modern concert hall. 
 When we say that speech originated in song, what we mean is 
 merely that our comparatively monotonous spoken language and 
 our highly developed vocal music are differentiations of primitive 
 utterances, which had more in them of the latter than of the 
 former. These utterances were at first, like the singing of birds 
 and the roaring of many animals and the crying and crooning 
 of babies, exclamative, not communicative — that is, they came 
 forth from an inner craving of the individual without an}' thought 
 of any fellow-creatures. Our remote ancestors had not the slight^est 
 notion that such a thing as communicating ideas and feelings to 
 someone else was possible. They little suspected that in singing 
 
§18] PRIMITIVE SINGING 437 
 
 as nature prompted them they were paving the way for a 
 language capable of rendering minute shades of thought ; just 
 as thej- could not suspect that out of their coarse pictures of 
 men and animals there should one day grow an art enabling men 
 of distant coimtrics to speak to one another. As is the art of 
 writing to primitive painting, so is the art of speaking to primitive 
 singing. And the development of the two vehicles of com- 
 munication of thought presents other curious and instructive 
 parallels. Li primitive picture-^Titing, each sign meant a whole 
 sentence or even more — the image of a situation or of an incident 
 being given as a whole ; this developed into an ideographic 
 WTiting of each word b}' itself ; this system was succeeded by 
 S3'llabic methods, which had in their turn to give place to alpha- 
 betic wziting, in which each letter stands for, or is meant to 
 stand for, one sound. Just as here the advance is due to a further 
 analysis of language, smaller and smaller units of speech being 
 progressively represented by single signs, in an exactly similar 
 way, though not quite so unmistakably, the history of language 
 shows us a progressive tendency towards analyzing into smaller 
 and smaller imits that which in the earlier stages Avas taken as an 
 inseparable whole. 
 
 One point must be constantlj' kept in mind. Althougli we 
 now regard the communication of thought as the main object 
 of speaking, there is no reason for thinking that this has always 
 been the case ; it is ix?rfectl3^ possible that s^jeech has developed 
 from something wliich had no other purpose than that of exercising 
 the muscles of the mouth and throat and of amusing oneself and 
 others by the production of i^leasant or possibly only strange 
 sounds. The motives for uttering sounds may have changed 
 entirely in the course of centuries without the speakers being at any 
 point conscious of this change within them. 
 
 XXI.— § 14. Approach to Language. 
 
 We get the first approach to language proper when com- 
 municativeness takes precedence of exclamativeness, when sounds 
 are uttered in order to ' tell ' fellow-creatures something, as 
 when birds warn their young ones of some imminent danger. In 
 the case of human language, communication is infinitely more 
 full and rich and elaborate ; the question therefore is a very 
 complex one : How did the association of sound and sen.se come 
 about ? How did that which originallj' was a jingle of meaningless 
 sounds come to be an instrument of thought ? How did man 
 become, as Hnmboldt has somewhere defined him, " a singing 
 creature, only associating thoughts with the tones " ? 
 
438 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 111 the case of aji onomatopoetic or echo-word like boiv-wow 
 and an interjection like pooh-pooh the association was easy and 
 direct ; such words were at once emploj'ed and understood as 
 signs for the corresponding idea. But this was not the case with 
 the great bulk of language. Here association of sound with sense 
 must have been arrived at by devious and circuitous ways, which 
 to a great extent evade inquiry and make a detailed exposition 
 impossible. But this is in exact conformity with very much 
 that has taken place in recent periods ; as we have learnt in previous 
 chapters, it is only by indirect and roundabout ways that many 
 Avords and grammatical expedients have acquired the meanings 
 they now have, or have acquired meaning where they originally 
 had none. Let me remind the reader of the word grog (p. 308), 
 of interrogative particles (p. 358), of word order (p. 356), of 
 many endings (Ch. XIX § 13 £E.), of tones (Ch. XIX §5), of the 
 Frencli negative pas, of vowel -alternations like those in drink, 
 drank, drunk, or in foot, feet, etc. Language is a complicated 
 affair, and no more than most other human inventions has it 
 come about in a simple way : mankind has not moved in a 
 straight line towards a definitely perceived goal, but has muddled 
 along from moment to moment and has thereby now and then 
 stumbled on some happj^ expedient which has then been retained 
 in accordance with the principle of the sur\aval of the fittest. 
 
 We may perhaps succeed in forming some idea of the most 
 primitive process of associating sound and sense if we call to mind 
 what was said above on the signification of the earliest words, 
 and try to fathom what that means. The first words must have 
 been as concrete and specialized in meaning as possible. Now, 
 what are the words whose meaning is the most concrete and the 
 most specialized ? Without any doubt proper names — that is, 
 of course, proper names of the good old Ijind, borne by and denoting 
 only one single individual. How easily might not such names 
 spring up in a primitive state such as that described above ! 
 In the songs of a particular individual there would be a constant 
 recurrence of a particular series of sounds sung with a particular 
 cadence ; no one can doubt the possibility of such individual 
 habits being contracted in olden as well as in present times. 
 Suppose, then, that " in the spring time, the onlj^ prettj- ring 
 time " a lover was in the habit of addressing his lass " with a hey, 
 and a ho, and a hey nonino." His comrades and rivals woald 
 not fail to remark this, and would occasionally banter him by 
 imitating and repeating his " hey-and-a-ho-and-a-hey-nonino." 
 But when once this had been recognized as what Wagner Avould 
 term a ])orson'8 ' leitmotiv,' it would be no far cry from mimicking 
 it to using the " hey-and-a-ho-and-a-hey-nonino " as a sort of 
 
§14] APPROACH TO LANGUAGE 489 
 
 nickname for the man concerned ; it might be employed, for 
 instance, to signal liis arrival. And when once proper names 
 had been bestowed, common names (or nouns) \\ould not be slow 
 in following ; we see the transition from one to the other class in 
 constant operation, names originally used exclusively to denote 
 an individual being used metaphorically to connote that person's 
 most characteristic peculiarities, as when we say of one man that 
 he is a ' Croesus ' or a ' Vanderbilt ' or ' Rockefeller,' and of 
 another that he is ' no Bismarck.' A German schoolboy in 
 the 'eighties said in his history lesson that Hannibal swore he 
 would always be a Frenchman to the Romans. This is, at least, 
 one of the ways in which language arrives at designations of such 
 ideas as 'rich,' 'statesman' and 'enemy.' From the proper 
 name of Ccesar we have both the Russian tsar' and the German 
 kaiser, and from Karol (Charlemagne) Russian koroV ' king ' 
 (also in the other Slav languages) and Magyar kirdly. Besides 
 being designations for persons, proper names may also in some 
 cases come to mean tools or other objects, originally in most cases 
 probably as a term of endearment, as when in thieves' slang a 
 crowbar or lever is called a betty or jemmy ; E. derrick and dirk, 
 as well as G. dietrich, Dan. dirk, Swed. dyrk, is nothing but 
 Dietrich {Derrick, Theodoricus), and thus in innumerable instances. 
 In the Ecole polytechnique in Paris there are many words of the 
 same character : bacha ' cours d'allemand ' from a teacher, M. 
 Bacharach, borius ' bretelles ' from General Borius, malo ' ^peron ' 
 from Captain Malo, etc. (MSL 15. 179). Pamphlet is from Pamphilet, 
 originally Pamphilus seu de Amore, the name of a popular 
 booklet on an erotic subject. Compare also the history of the 
 words bluchers, jack (boot-jack, jack for turning a spit, a pike, etc., 
 also jacket), pantaloon, hansom, boycott, to burke, to name only 
 a few of the best-loiov^Ti examples. 
 
 XXI.— § 15. The Earliest Sentences. 
 
 Again, we saw above that the further back we went in the 
 history of known languages, the more the sentence was one indis- 
 soluble whole, in which those elements which we are accustomed 
 to think of as single words were not yet separated. Now, the 
 idea that language began with sentences, not with words, appears 
 to Whitney {Am. Journ. of Philol. 1. 338) to be, "if capable of 
 any intelligent and intelligible statement, a fortiori, too wild and 
 baseless to deserve respectful mention " (cf. also Mad\ig Kl 85). 
 But the absurdity appears only if we think of sentences like those 
 found in our languages, consisting of elements (words) capable 
 of being used in other combinations and there forming other 
 
440 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [ch. xxi 
 
 sentences: this seems to be what Gabelentz (Spr 351) imagines; 
 but it is not so wild to imagine as the first beginning something 
 which can be translated into our languages by means of a sentence, 
 but which is not ' articulated ' in the same way as such a sentence ; 
 we translate or explain the dental click (' tut ') by means of the 
 sentence ' that is a pity,' but the interjection is not in other 
 respects a grammatical ' sentence.' Or we may take an illustration 
 from the modern use of a telegraphic code : if suzaw means ' I 
 have not received your telegram,' or sem2io ' reserve one single 
 room and bath at first-class hotel ' — we have unanalyzable wholes 
 capable of being rendered in complete sentences, but not in every 
 way analogous to these sentences. 
 
 Now, it is just units of this character (though not, of course, 
 with exactly the same kind of meaning as the two code words) 
 whose genesis Ave can most easily imagine on the supi)Osition of 
 a primitive period of meaningless singing. If a certain number 
 of people have together witnessed some incident and have 
 accompanied it with some sort of impromptu song or refrain, the 
 two ideas are associated, and later on the same song will tend to 
 call forth in the memor}^ of those who were present the idea of the 
 whole situation. Suppose some dreaded enemy has been defeated 
 and slain ; the troop will dance round the dead body and strike 
 up a chant of triumph, say something like ' Tarara-boom-de-ay ! ' 
 This combination of sounds, sung to a certain melodj', will now 
 easily become what might be called a proper name for that particular 
 event ; it might be roughly translated, ' The terrible foe fi'om 
 beyond the river is slain,' or ' We have killed the dreadful man 
 from beyond the river,' or, ' Do you remember when we killed 
 him ? ' or something of the same sort. Under slightly altered 
 circumstances it may become the proper name of the man who 
 slew the enemy. The development can now proceed further by 
 a metaphorical transference of the expression to similar situations 
 (' There is another man of the same tribe : let us kill him as wo 
 did the first ! ') or by a blending of two or more of these projDer- 
 narae melodies. How this kind of blending may lead to the de- 
 velopment of something like derivative affixes maj^ be gathered 
 from our chapter on Secretion ; it may also result in parts of 
 the whole melodic utterance being disengaged as something more 
 like our ' words.' From the nature of the subject it is impossible 
 to give more than hints, but I seem to see ways by which primitive 
 ' lieder ohne worte ' may have become, first, indissoluble rigmaroles, 
 with something like a dim meaning attached to them, and then 
 gradually combinations of word-like smaller units, more and more 
 capable of being analyzed and combined with others of the same 
 kind. Anyhow, this theory seems to explain better than any 
 
§15] THE EARLIEST SENTENCES 441 
 
 other the great part which fortuitous coincidence and irregularity 
 always play in that part of any language which is not immediately 
 intelligible, thus both in lexical and grammatical elements. 
 
 Primitive iuan came to attach meaning to what were originally 
 rambling sequences of syllables in pretty much the same way 
 as the child comes to attach a meaning to many of the words he 
 hears from his elders, the whole situation in which they are heard 
 giving a clue to their interpretation. The difference is that in 
 the latter case the speaker has already associated a meaning with 
 the sound ; but from the point of view of the hearer this is com- 
 paratively immaterial : the savage of a far-distant age hearing 
 some syllables for the first time and the child hearing them nowa- 
 days are in essentially the same position as to their interpreta- 
 tion. Parallels are also found in the words of the mamma class 
 (Ch. VIII § 9), in which hearers give a signification to something 
 pronounced unintentionall}', the same syllables being then capable 
 of serving afterwards as real words. If one of our forebears on 
 some occasion accidentally produced a secjuence of sounds, and 
 if the people around him were seen (or heard) to respond apprecia- 
 tively, he would tend to settle on the same string of sounds and 
 repeat it on similar occasions, and in this way it would gradually 
 become ' conventionalized ' as a symbol of what was then fore- 
 most in his and in their minds. As in agriculture primitive man 
 reaped before he sowed, so also in his vocal outbm-sts he first 
 reaped understanding, and then discovered that by intentionally 
 sowing the same seed he was able to call forth the same result. 
 And as with corn, he would slowly and graduall}^ b}' weeding 
 out (i.e. by not using) what was less useful to him, improve the 
 quality, till finally he had come into possession of the marvellous, 
 though far from perfect, instrument which we now call our 
 language. The development of our ordinary speech has been 
 largely an intellectualization, and the emotional quality which 
 played the largest part in primitive utterances has to some 
 extent been repressed ; but it is not extinct, and still gives a 
 definite colouring to all passionate and eloquent speaking and to 
 poetic diction. Language, after all, is. an art — one of the finest 
 of arts. 
 
 XXI.— § 16. Conclusion. 
 
 Language, then, began with half-musical unanalyzed expressions 
 for individual beings and solitary events. Languages comi^osed 
 of, and evolved from, such words and quasi -sentences are clumsy 
 and insufficient instruments of thought, being intricate, capricious 
 and difficult. But from the beginning the tendency has been 
 
442 THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH [en. xxi 
 
 one of progress, slow and fitful progress, but still progress towards 
 gi'cater and greater clearness, regularity, ease and j)liancy. No 
 one language has arrived at perfection ; an ideal language would 
 always ex])ress the same thing by the same, and similar things 
 by similar means ; any irregularity or ambiguity would be banished ; 
 sound and sense would be in perfect harmony ; any number of 
 delicate shades of meaning could be expressed with equal ease ; 
 poetry and prose, beauty and truth, thinking and feeling would 
 be equally provided for : the human spirit would Jiave found a 
 garment combining freedom and gracefulness, fitting it closely 
 and yet allowing full plaj' to any movement. 
 
 But, however far our present languages are from that ideal, 
 we. must be thankful for what has been achieved, seeing that — 
 
 Language is a perpetual orphic song, 
 Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng 
 Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were. 
 
INDEX 
 
 a Sanskrit, 52; -a in foni., 392; 
 in pi., 394 
 
 abbot, 15G 
 
 ablaut, see apophony 
 
 abstract terms, 429 
 
 accent, see stress and tone 
 
 accusative, name, 20 
 
 actors, 276 
 
 adaptation of suffixes, 38G f. 
 
 adjective flexion, 129 ; concord, 348 f. 
 
 African languages, see Bantu 
 
 agglutination, 54, 58, 76, 376 ; ag- 
 glutination theory, 367 ff., 376 fi. 
 
 agreement, see concord 
 
 ambiguities, 319, 341 ff. 
 
 America, race mixtures, 203 ff. 
 
 American English, 260 
 
 American Indian languages, 57, 181, 
 187, 229, 233, 256, 334, 425, 427, 
 430 
 
 analogy, 70, 93 f., 129 f., 162 f., 289 
 
 analytic languages, 36, 334 ff., 422 ff. 
 
 anatomical causes of change, 255 
 
 aphesis, 273 
 
 apophony, 46, 53, 91 ff., 311 
 
 aposiopesis, 273 
 
 appreciation of languages, 29 ff., 
 57 f., 60, 62, 319 £E.; formula, 324 
 
 archaic forms, 294 
 
 Armenian, 195 f. 
 
 article, 378 
 
 Aryan, name, 63 f. ; languages, pas- 
 sim 
 
 as, root, 49 
 
 AscoH, 192 ff. 
 
 assimilation, 109, 168 f., 264 f., 280 
 
 auxihary words, 358 
 
 babe, 157 
 bacco, 171 
 
 back-formations, 173, 178 
 Balkan tongues, agreements, 215 
 Bantu, 239, 352 ff., 365 
 -bar, suffix, 377 
 Basque, 210, 427 
 Baudouin de Courtenay, 327 
 Bavarian ivost bist, 281 
 Beach-la-Mar, 216 ff. 
 head, 175 
 hhu, root, 49 
 
 bilinguism, 147 ff. 
 
 biographical or biological science of 
 
 language, 8 
 blending, 132, 281 f., 311, 312 f., 390 
 Bloomfield, 390 
 boon, 175 
 Bopp, 47 fi'., 56 n. 
 borrowing of words, 208 
 hound, 176 
 bow-wow theory, 413 
 boys, 146 
 
 Bredsdorff, 43 n., 70 
 Bridges, 286 
 BrOndal, 200 
 
 Brugmann, 92 f. ; on gender, 391 
 Mibe, 157 
 buncombe, 409 
 
 cacuminals, 196 
 
 Caribbean, 237 ff. 
 
 Carlyle, 145 
 
 case-system, English, 268 ff. ; in old 
 languages, 337 ff. ; importance, 
 341 
 
 catch, 400 
 
 ch becomes /, 168 
 
 changes, causes of, 255 ff. 
 
 child, 103 fi. ; sounds, 105 ; under- 
 standing, 113; classification of 
 things, 114 f.; vocabulary, 124; 
 grammar, 128 ff. ; sentences, 133 ; 
 echoism, 135 ; why learns so well, 
 140 ; influence of other children, 
 147 ; word-invention, 151 ff. ; 
 influence of, 161 ff. ; indirect in- 
 fluence, 178 ; new languages, 
 180 ff. 
 
 Chinese, 36, 54, 57, 286, 369 ff. 
 
 Chinook, 228 flf. 
 
 classification of languages, 35 f., 54, 
 76 ff. 
 
 classifying instinct, 388 
 
 clicks, 415, 419 
 
 climate, 256 
 
 clippings, see stump-words 
 
 coalescence of words, 174, 376 ff. 
 
 Coeurdoux, 33 
 
 CoUitz, 45 n., 257, 381 
 
 concord, verbal, 335 ; nominal, 348 ; 
 in Bantu, 352 ff. 
 
 4«3 
 
444 
 
 INDEX 
 
 concrete words, 429 
 
 Ckindillac, 27 
 
 confusion of words, 122, 172 
 
 congeneric groups, 389 f. 
 
 conjugation, see verb 
 
 consciousness, 130; threshold of, 138 
 
 consonant-shift, 43 fi'., 195, 197, 204, 
 
 250. 258 f. 
 contamination, see blending 
 convergent changes, 284 f. 
 copula, 48 f. 
 
 correctness, latitude of, 282 ff. 
 creation of new words, 151 ff. 
 Creole, 2261?. 
 cuckoo, 406 
 
 cultural loan-words, 209 
 curry favour, 173 
 curtailing of words, 108, 1G9 £., 
 
 328 f. 
 Curtius, 83, 94 
 
 •d in loved, 51, 381 
 
 Darwin, 414 
 
 dead languages, 67 
 
 decay, 55, 59, 62, 77, 319 ff. 
 
 declension, see case-system 
 
 Delbriick, 93, 96 
 
 dialect, study of, 68 ; spoken by 
 
 children, 147 
 Diez, 85 
 
 differentiations, 176, 272 
 diminutives, 180, 402 
 ding-dong theory, 415 
 divergent changes, 288 
 doublets, 272 
 
 Dravidian influence on Indian, 19G 
 drunken speech, 279 
 dump, 313 
 
 e original in Aryan, 52, 91 
 
 ease theory, 261 ff. 
 
 echoism, 135 ; cf. echo-words 
 
 echo-words, 313, 398 ff. 
 
 economizing of effort, see ease-theory 
 
 effort in speaking, 261 fi., 324 ff. 
 
 eglino, 281 
 
 emotion, influence on sound, 276 
 
 -en. in plural, 385 
 
 ending, see flexion, suffix 
 
 English, Grimm's appreciation, 62 ; 
 foreign influence, 202, 210, 212 ff. ; 
 rapid change, 261 ; case-system, 
 268 ff. ; future tense, 274 ; vowel- 
 shift, 243, 284 ; word-order, 344 f. ; 
 genitive, 350 
 
 entangling, 422 
 
 equidistant changes, 284 
 
 •er in plural, 386 
 
 estimation of languages, see appre- 
 ciation 
 
 Etruscan, 195 
 
 etymology, sound laws, 295 ; prin- 
 ciples, 305 ff. ; object of, 316 ; 
 etymology of rag, 300 ; of sun, 
 my, see, 306 ; of krieg, 307 ; of 
 grog, ganz, 308; of hope, 309; of 
 nut, atumm, 311 ; of mais, maar, 
 men, 315 ; of moon, daughter, 
 mother, 318 
 
 euphemism, 245 ff. 
 
 euphony, 278 
 
 exceptions to sound-laws, 296 ff. 
 
 exertion in speaking, 261 ff., 324 ff. 
 
 expressive sounds preserved, 288 
 
 extension of sound laws, 290 ; of 
 suffixes, 386 ff. 
 
 extra-lingual influences, 278 
 
 / for th, 167 ; in enough, etc., 168 ; 
 
 in Spanish, 193 
 fable in Proto-Aiyan, 81 
 fain, 175 
 
 fashion in language, 291 
 father, 117 
 Feist, 194 ff. 
 feminine, 391 ff. ; in -i, 394, 402 ; 
 
 cf. woman 
 Finnic, 197 f., 207 
 flexion, 35, 54 f., 58 f., 76 ff., 79; 
 
 origin of, 377 ff. 
 foreign languages, mistakes in noting 
 
 down, 116 f. ; influence of, 191 ff. 
 forgetfulness, 176 
 forms, number of, 332, 337 ; origin 
 
 of, 49, 58, 377 ff. 
 French influence on English, 202, 
 
 209, 214 ; pronouns and verbs, 
 
 422 f. 
 frequency, influence on phonetic 
 
 development, 267 
 ■ful, suffix, 376 
 
 Gabelentz, 98, 369 
 
 ganz, 308 
 
 gape, 288 
 
 gender, 346 f., 391ft". 
 
 general and specific terms, 274, 
 429 f. 
 
 genitive, name, 20 ; group, 351 ; 
 s in, 382, 383 n. 
 
 geographical distribution of lan- 
 guages, 187 ; influence on change, 
 256 
 
 German language, appreciation of, 
 29, 31, 60; sound-shift, 43 ff., 
 195 f., 283 ; forms, 341 ff. ; word- 
 order, 344 
 
 Germanic, see Gothonic 
 
 gibberish, 149 f. 
 
 girls, 146 
 
 gleam, gloom, 401 
 
 glottogonic theoriea abandoned, 96 
 
INDEX 
 
 445 
 
 Qothonic (Germanic, Teutonic), 42 ; 
 sound-shift, see consonant-shift 
 
 gradation, see apophony 
 
 grammar, children's, 128 ff. ; foreign 
 influence, 213 ; of primitive lan- 
 guages, 421 
 
 grammatical elements, origin, 48, 
 58, 61 
 
 Greek linguistic speculation, 19 f. ; 
 vowels, 91 ; personal pronouns, 
 286 n. ; Modern Greek, 301 
 
 Grimm, 37, 40 ff., 60 ff. 
 
 Grimm's Law, 43 f. ; see consonant- 
 shift 
 
 grog, 308 
 
 group genitive, 129, 351 ; groups of 
 words with similar meaning, 389 
 
 h for / in Spanish, 193 ; for 3, etc., 
 
 263 
 habaidedeima, 322, 329, 331 f. 
 Hale, 181 ff. 
 haplology, 281, 329 
 harmony of vowels, 280 
 Hebrew, 21 
 Hegel, 72 f. 
 Hempl, 201 ff. 
 Herder, 27 f. 
 hereditary aptness for a language, 
 
 75, 141 
 Hermann, 48 
 Hervas, 22 
 Herzog, 164 f. 
 hide, 121 
 
 Hirt, 192, 203 f., 382 f. 
 historical point of view, 32, 42 
 homophones, 285 f. 
 ■hood, suffix, 376 
 hope, 309 
 
 humanization of language, 327 f. 
 Humboldt, 55 ff. 
 hypercorrect forms, 294 
 
 I, the pronoun, 123 f. 
 
 i denoting small, feminine, near, 402 
 
 idioms, 139 
 
 imitation, 291 ff. ; of somids, 398, 
 413 f. 
 
 imperative, 403 
 
 incorporation, 58, 79, 425 
 
 Indian grammarians, 20 ; cacuminals, 
 196 ; of. Amex'ican Indian, San- 
 skrit 
 
 indirect ways of obtaining expres- 
 sions, 438 
 
 indissoluble expressions of several 
 ideas, 334, 422 ft., 428 ff. 
 
 Indo-European (Indo-Germanic), see 
 Aryan 
 
 indolence, see ease-theory 
 
 inflexion, see flexion 
 
 interjections, 414 
 
 interrogative sentences, 137 ; par- 
 ticles, 358 
 
 invention of words, 151 ff. 
 
 irregularities in old languages, 338 f., 
 379, 425 
 
 isolating languages, 36, 76, 366 £f. 
 
 Japanese, 243 
 jaw-breakers, 280 
 jaw-measurements, 104 
 Jenisch, 29 H. 
 Johannson, 341 ff. 
 Jones, William, 33 
 [ju], 290 f. 
 
 Karlgren, 372 f. 
 
 Keltic languages, 38, 39, 53 ; sub- 
 stratum, 192 ff. 
 Kuhn, 371 
 kw becomes p, 168 
 
 languages, rise of new, 180 ff. 
 
 language-teaching, 145 
 
 lapses, 279 
 
 Latin, study of, 22 f. ; influence, 209, 
 
 215; forms, 334, 338 f., 343; 
 
 word-order, 350 
 latitude of correctness, 282 
 law as applied to sound -changes, 
 
 297 
 leaps in phonetic development, 167 ; 
 
 in meanings, 175 
 Leibniz, 22 
 lengthening, emotional, 277, 403 ; 
 
 of words, 330 
 Lenz, 204 
 Lepsius, 370 
 Leskien, 93 
 
 life as applied to language, 7 
 lingua geral, 234 
 linguistics, position of, 64 f., 73, 86, 
 
 97 
 little, 407 
 
 little language, 103, 106, 144, 147 
 living languages, study of, 97 
 loan-words, sound-substitution, 207 ; 
 
 general theory, 208 ; culture, 
 
 209; classes, 211 ; with symbolic 
 
 sounds, 409 
 loss of sounds, 108, 168, 328 f. 
 love-songs, 433 f. 
 Luxemburg, bilinguism in, 148 
 •ly, suffix, 377 
 
 m in adversative conjunctions, 314 ff.; 
 
 case-ending, 382 
 ma, maar, 314 f. 
 Madvig, 84, 433 
 magis, mais, 314 f. 
 makeshift languages, 232 ff. 
 
446 
 
 INDEX 
 
 mamma y 154 ff. 
 
 man and woman, 142, 237 ff. 
 
 Mauritius Creole, 22G ff. 
 
 meaning, delimitation of, 118 f.; 
 worda of opposite meaning, 120; 
 words with several meanings, 
 121 ; shifting of meaning, 174 ; 
 cf. semantic changes 
 
 meaningless gibberish, 149 f.; sing- 
 ing, 43G 
 
 Meillet, 55, 198 f. 
 
 memory, children's, 143 
 
 men, 315 
 
 mental states, worda for, 401 
 
 Meringer, lG2f., 280, 291 
 
 metanalysis, 173 
 
 metaphors, 431 
 
 metathesis, 108, 281 
 
 Meyer-Benfey, 256 
 
 milk, 158 
 
 Misteli, 79 
 
 misunderstandings, 282, 286 f., 319 
 
 mixed languages, 191 ff. 
 
 modem languages, study of, 68 ; 
 compared with ancient, 322 ft. 
 
 Mailer, H., 139, 308, 382 
 
 mon, 358 
 
 monosyllabic languages, 36, 307 U, 
 
 month, 318 
 
 moods, 380 
 
 moon, 318 
 
 mother, 155, 318 
 
 mother-tongue, 146 
 
 movement, words denoting, 399 
 
 mountains, linguistic changes in, 
 256 f. 
 
 mouth-filling words, 403 
 
 Miiller, Friedrich, 79, 338 
 
 Midler, Max, 88 ff., 414 
 
 Murray, 269 
 
 iTiutation, 37, 46 
 
 mutilation of lips, 256 ; of words, 266 
 
 my, 384 f. 
 
 -n in mine, 384 f. 
 
 names of relations, 118 ; proper, 439 
 
 nasalis sonans, 92, 317 f. 
 
 national psychology, 258 
 
 negation, 136 ; redundant, 352 
 
 neo -grammarians, see young-gram- 
 marians 
 
 new languages, 180 ff. 
 
 Noir6, 415 
 
 nominal forms, 337 ff. ; concord, 
 348 ff. 
 
 number in verbs, 335 ; in pronouns, 
 347 ; in nouns, 129, 349, 355, 385, 
 394 f. 
 
 numerals, 119 ; borrowed, 211 ; in sue* 
 cession, 281 ; distinct for various 
 classes, 430 
 
 nursery language, 179 
 nui, 311 
 
 original in Arj'^an, 52, 91 
 
 old languages compared with modern, 
 
 322 ff. 
 on, 287 
 oncle, 271 n. 
 
 onomatopa?ia, 150, 313, 398 ff. 
 opposite meaning, 120 
 order of words, see word-order 
 organism, language as an, 7, 65 
 organs of speech, used for other 
 
 purposes, 278 ; development, 410, 
 
 430 
 orient, 175 
 origin of language, 26 ff., 61, 412 ff. ; 
 
 of grammatical elements, 367 ft". 
 Osthoff, 93 
 ox, oxen, 385 
 
 palatal law, 90 f. 
 
 Panini, 20 
 
 pap, 158 
 
 papa, 154 ff. 
 
 parenthesizing, 350 f. 
 
 passive, Scandinavian, 50, 377 ; 
 Latin, 50, 381 
 
 patter, 407 
 
 Paul, 94 f., 102 
 
 periods of rapid change, 259 
 
 personal forms in verbs, 53, 335, 383 
 
 pet-names, 108, 109 
 
 philology, 04 f., 97 
 
 phonetic laws, see sound changes, 
 sound laws 
 
 Pidgin-Enghsh, 221 ff. 
 
 pittance, 408 
 
 Plato, 19, 390 
 
 playfulness, 148, 298 f., 432 ff. 
 
 plumbum, plummet, plunge, 313 f. 
 
 plural, sec number 
 
 poetry, 300, 431 f. 
 
 polysynthetic, 423, 425 
 
 pooh-pooh theor}', 414 
 
 2iope, 156 
 
 popular etymology, 122 
 
 portmanteau words, 313 
 
 possessive pronouns, 384 f. 
 
 prepositions, 137 f. ; borrowed, 211 
 
 prescriptive grammar, 24 
 
 preterit, weak, 61, 381 
 
 primitive languages, 417 ff. 
 
 progressive tendency, 319 ff. 
 
 pronouns, 123; borrowed, 212; pos- 
 sessive, 384 ; French, 422 
 
 proper names, 436 
 
 prosiopesis, 273 
 
 Proto- Aryan, 80 f., 90 f. 
 
 punning phrases, 300 
 
 pupil, 157 
 
INDEX 
 
 447 
 
 puppet, 157 
 Puscaiiu, 205 
 
 question, 137 ; word-order and aux- 
 iliaries, 357 fE. 
 quick, 407 
 
 r in Latin passive, 381 ; soiuid of r 
 
 weakened, 24-t ; r- and n- stems, 
 
 339, 390 
 race and language, 75 ; race-mixture, 
 
 201 ff. 
 rapidity of change, 259 
 Rapp, 68 ff. 
 Kask, 3Gff., 43, 46 
 rational, everything originally r., 316 
 reaction against change, 293 
 reconstruction, 80 ff., 317 
 reduplication, 109, 169 
 relationship between languages, 38, 
 
 53; terms of, 117, 154 ff. 
 right, 180 
 roll, 374, 408 
 Romanic languages, 202, 205 f., 
 
 234 ff., 260; future, 378 
 root-determinatives, 311 
 roots, 52, 367 ff., 373 ff. 
 Rousseau, 26 
 
 * in passive, 50, 377, 381 ; case- 
 ending, 213, 381 ff. ; in English 
 plural, 214 ; in Russian and 
 Spanish, 266 ; Latin disappears, 
 362 
 
 Sandfeld, 215 
 
 Sanskrit, 33, 67 ; vowels, 52, 90 f. ; 
 consonants, 90 f., 196 ; drama, 
 241 f. 
 
 savages, languages of, 417, 426 ff. 
 
 saving of effort, of space, of time, 
 264 
 
 Scandinavian influence on English, 
 212, 214; passive, 50, 377; 
 article, 378 
 
 Scherer, 96 
 
 Schlegel, A. W., 36 
 
 Schlegel, F., 34 f. 
 
 Schleicher, 71 ff. 
 
 Schuchardt, 191, 213, 219, 267 
 
 scorn, words expressive of, 401 
 
 Scotch, 193 n. 
 
 screaming, 103 
 
 secondary echoism, 406 
 
 secret languages, 149 f. 
 
 secretion, 384 ff. 
 
 semantic changes, 174 f., 274 ff. 
 
 Semitic, 36, 52 
 
 sentences, 133 ; the earliest, 439 ff. ; 
 sentence stress, 272 
 
 separative linguistics, 67 
 
 seqw; 306 f. 
 
 sex, 146, 237 ff. ; cf. gender 
 shifters, 123 
 
 shortening, 328 f. ; cf. stump-words, 
 signification, how apprehended, 
 
 113 ff. ; cf. semantic changes 
 significative sounds preserved, 267 f., 
 
 271, 287 
 similarities cause confusion, 120 f. 
 simplification, 332 ff, 
 singing, 420, 432 ff. 
 slang, 247, 299 f. 
 small, words for, 402 
 smile, 278 
 so, 250 
 
 Societe de Lingnistique, 96, 412 
 son, E., 120, 286 
 songs, primitive, 420, 432 ff. 
 sound changes, passim ; see especially 
 
 161 ff., 191 ff., 242 ff., 255 ff. 
 sound laws, 93; in children, 100 f. ; 
 
 extension and metamorphosis, 
 
 290 ; destructive, 289 ; spreading, 
 
 291 ; in the science of etymology, 
 295 ff. 
 
 sound-shift, Gothonic, see consonant- 
 shift 
 special terms in primitive speech, 
 
 429 ff. 
 speed of utterance, 258 
 spelling pronunciations, 294 
 splitting, see differentiation 
 Spoonerism, 280 
 
 stable and unstable soimds, 199 f. 
 Steinthal, 79, 87 
 strengthening of somids, 404 f. 
 stress, Aryan, 93 ; Gothonic, 195 ; 
 
 nature and influence of, 271 ff. 
 stumm, 311 
 
 stump-words, 108, 169 f. 
 substantive, see nominal and flexion 
 substratum theory, 191 ff. 
 subtraction, 173 
 suffixes, origin, 376 f. ; extension, 
 
 386 f. ; tainting, 388 
 suggestiveness, 408 ; cf. symbolism 
 suppletivwesen, 426 
 Sweet, 97, 161, 264 
 syllables, number of, 330 
 symbolism, 396 ff. 
 syntax, 66, 95 ; foreign influence, 
 
 214; blends, 282; simplification, 
 
 340 
 synthetic languages, 36, 334 ff., 
 
 421 f. 
 
 ta, 159 
 
 tabu, 239 ff., 431 
 
 tainting of suffixes, 388 
 
 tata, 158 
 
 ■teer, suffix, 388 
 
 Telugu, 301 
 
44d 
 
 INDEX 
 
 tempo, 258 
 
 Teutonic, see Cothonic 
 
 th becomes/, v, 167 
 
 they for he or she, 347 
 
 this and that, 403 
 
 Thomsen* 90 n., 267, 427 
 
 threshold, under the, 138 
 
 ti, 358 f. 
 
 time, a child's conception of, 120 
 
 tone, 111; in Chinese, 369, 370 ; in 
 
 Danish dialect, 371 ; in primitive 
 
 languages, 419 
 Tooke, Home, 49 
 translation-loans, 215 
 translators introduce foreign words, 
 
 210 
 tripos, 115 
 twins having separate language. 
 
 185 f. 
 
 «, French, 192 ff. ; English, 290 f. 
 umlaut, 37 
 
 understanding, a baby's, 113f. 
 units of language, 422 
 
 value, influence on phonetic develop- 
 ment, 266 ff. 
 
 verb, substantive, 48 ; flexional 
 forms, 130 ; simplification, 332 ff. ; 
 concord, 335 
 
 verbal character of roots, 374 f. 
 
 Verner, 93; Verner's Law, 195, 
 197 f. 
 
 vocabulary, extent of, 124 ff. ; in 
 
 primitive speech, 429 
 voicing of consonants, in Gothonic 
 
 and English, 198 ; symbolic, 405 
 vowel-harmony, 280 
 vowels, number of Aryan, 44, 52, 91 
 vulgar speech, 261, 299 
 
 wars, influence on language, 260 
 
 weak preterit, 51, 381 
 
 weakening of words, 266 
 
 Wossely, 197 
 
 Wheeler, 293 
 
 Whitney, 88, 323, 367 
 
 Windisch, 208 
 
 women as language teachers, 142 ; 
 
 women's language, 237 ff. 
 word, what constitutes one. 125, 
 
 422 f. 
 word-division, a 32, 173 f. 
 word-formation, 131 ; of. invention, 
 
 suffixes 
 word-order, 344 ff., 355 ff. ; in 
 
 Chinese, 369 ff. 
 worthless words or sounds, 266 ff. 
 Wundt, 98, 258 
 
 yesterday, 120 
 yo-he-ho theory, 415 
 you for /, 124 
 5'oung-grammaiians, 93 
 
 Zulu, see Bantu 
 
 Printed in Oreat Britain by 
 
 UNWIN BnOTHEKB, LIMITED WOKI-NG AND LOMDON 
 
/ 
 
 Y 
 
 '<;»? 
 
 RETURN 
 TO 
 
 CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
 
 202 Main Library 
 
 642-3403 
 
 LOAN PERIOD 1 
 HOME USE 
 
 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 1 -month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405 
 
 6-month loans may be recharged by bringing books to Circulation Desk 
 
 Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due dote 
 
 DUE 
 
 AS STAMPED BELOW | 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■^Ktl I' IB '■'/■■ 
 
 
 
 oEAfc ulHki '^ 
 
 
 
 JUN 2 5 1978 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 i-'.^. i\:. - ' 7/ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 FORM NO. DD 6, 40m, < 
 
 yj^ UNIVERSITY OF 
 BERKEI 
 
 CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 
 .EY, CA 94720 
 
U.C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UBRA^Y ^