Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/454

Rh hydrogen and one of oxygen will make water, and they will make nothing else at any time or at any place the world over. Phonetic laws, however, do not hold true universally. They are often curiously hmited in the area to which they apply. In ancient Greek, for example, the sound -s- between two vowels, which had been handed down from the original language whence Greek and the sister languages are derived, regularly disappears; in Latin, on the other hand, it changes into -r-; thus an original genitive of a neuter substantive we find represented in Greek by, a form which comparison with other languages shows to be traceable to an earlier *genes-os, preceding the separation of the languages, while the same original stem with a different vowel in the ending appears in Latin as gener-is. Similarly an early *euso appears in Greek as, in Latin as uro. This disappearance of original intervocalic s pervades all Greek dialects-the apparent exceptions come under the heading of analogical change; with a very few exceptions similarly explicable Latin intervocalic s has become r. But Latin was originally limited to a very small part even of Italy, and the next neighbours of the Latins on the east and south-the Sabines, Campanians and Samnites—retained this intervocalic s without changing it into r. On the other hand, the neighbours to the north-east-the Umbrians in and beyond the Apennines—shared in this rhotacism. Yet the Celts, who bordered on the Umbrians along the Po, and who spoke a language in many respects very closely akin to the dialects of Italy, in this regard agree rather with Greek than the Italic languages. In Latin, again, the period of action of the law which changed intervocalic s into r did not in all probability exceed the century from 450 to 350 So unlike, indeed, are phonetic laws to the laws of natural science in universality that an opponent of the dogma which declares that phonetic laws have no exceptions has compared them with the laws of fashion. The comparison is not so outrageous as it may seem at first sight. For in language there are two kinds of sound change, that which is unconscious, universal at a given time and within a given area, and, on the other hand, that which belongs only to a particular class or clique, deviates consciously from the pronunciation of the majority, is therefore not universal, and exercises no permanent influence on the language. The second kind of sound change corresponds exactly to the laws of fashion; it is in fact one of them. Such sound changes are the pronunciation of the English ending -ing as -in', which was fashionable in the middle of the 19th century. This had, though probably without the knowledge of those who used it, an historical justification in the earlier forms from which most of the English words now ending in -ing are descended, and which survive in numerous local dialects. A similar conventional mispronunciation was the lisp affected by some would-be artistic persons at a somewhat later period. Belonging to an entirely different social stratum, and now equally obsolete, was the London pronunciation of the first half of the 19th century typified in Tony and Sam Weller’s treatment of v and w in the Pickwick Papers. This, however, made a much nearer approach to being a genuine dialect peculiarity. It undoubtedly pervaded the pronunciation of the lower classes in London at one time; had it survived it might conceivably have spread over a wider and wider area until it embraced the whole population of England. A later change, that of the diphthong ai into ei (so that day, daily are pronounced dy, dyly), has spread from Essex and the East End of London over a large part of London and of the adjacent counties, and is still widening its range both geographically and socially. The history of these sound changes has not yet been investigated in detail with the thoroughness which it deserves.

There is, then, a part of sound change which is a matter of fashion and which is conscious. This sound change appears frequently in the pronunciation of individuals who have migrated from one part of a country to another. In many parts of Scotland, for example, the prepositions with and of appear in dialect only in the forms wi’ and o’, which were originally the unaccented forms. In the conscious attempts to pronounce them as they appear in literary English, the educated Scotsman, if he remains in his native place, as a rule pronounces them as with (with the final sound unvoiced as it appears in the Scottish legal preposition outwith) and as off, the final sound here also being unvoiced. If he migrates to England or to Australia he will probably in course of time adopt the pronunciation with a voiced final Sound. In the course of years habit will become second nature, and in this respect the speaker's pronunciation will become identical with that of his neighbours. It is clear, however, that changes of this nature cannot take place on a large scale. If a large number of persons migrate in a body and continue to live in close intercourse with one another and but little in contact with the outside world, changes such as take place in the pronunciation of the individual emigrant do not occur. There can be no imitation of alien sounds, for there are none; no greater effort to be intelligible is required, for the audience has not changed. Hence it has been often remarked that a population which history shows to have remained undisturbed for very long periods in the same geographical situation manifests but little change in its language. Thus in Arabia and Lithuania the population has remained practically unmixed in the same habitat for thousands of years, with the result that the languages spoken there remain at the present day the most archaic members of the linguistic families to which they respectively belong.

From what has been said it will be obvious that a phonetic law is only an observed uniformity in the treatment of a sound or a combination of sounds within a linguistic area at a given time. In the definition the term linguistic area is a very variable quantity. Thus it is a phonetic law that a sound of the original Indo-European language, the precise pronunciation of which cannot be determined, but which was at any rate a palatal sound (k), appears in the Indo-European group (Sanskrit, Zend, Old Persian, with their descendants), in Armenian, in Balto-Slavonic and Albanian, in the form of a sibilant, while in Greek, the Italic dialects, Germanic and Celtic, it appears as a k-sound (see ). Here the linguistic area is extremely wide, and it is clear that the difference between the two groups of languages must be dated back to a very early period. Again, it is a phonetic law of Greek that the original combination st- at the beginning of words is retained in Greek. How then are we to explain the existence side by side of 01-éfyos and ? The former apparently complies with the law, the latter does not. The former has by its side the verb , while is supported only by the rare. Yet the forms of the verb and substantive found in the Germanic languages leave no doubt that the forms without s- represent an extremely old form, for the English thatch could not have changed its original t- into th- if it had been preceded by s-, the law being as strict for English as for Greek that initial st- remains unchanged. On the other hand, a phonetic law may be limited to a very small area. Thus in the dialect of Eretria, and nowhere else within the area of the Ionic dialect of ancient Greek, do we find the change of the sound which appears elsewhere in Greek as -- between vowels into --: for  (acc. sing.), for  (3rd pl. subjunctive). Why this change should take place here and nowhere else we do not know, although it may be conjectured that the cause was a mixture with immigrants speaking a different dialect, a mixture which ancient tradition supported. Undoubtedly such mixtures are the chief conditions of phonetic change, the effect of which is universal. The manner in which the change takes place is that the basis of articulation, the method in which the sound is produced, becomes changed Thus along the “Highland line” in Scotland, where the English and Gaelic-speaking populations had their linguistic frontier for centuries, the wh- of English, the Anglo-Saxon hw-, becomes universally f-, wha? becoming fa? white, fite, &c., f being the sound which it was most easy to substitute for the difficult hw-. The history of Spanish in the different communities of South America excellently illustrates this point. After the discovery of America there was a large influx of Spaniards into Chile, who ultimately, and chiefly by intermarriage, incorporated amongst them a considerable element from amongst the native Araucanian Indians. The result has been