Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/823

 LANGUAGES.] PHILOLOGY 787 of the peculiarities of its neighbours to the right and left. In Old English the Kentish dialect, for instance, in some respects goes with West Saxon against Mercian, in others with Mercian against West Saxon, sometimes West Saxon and Mercian combine against Kentish, and sometimes each of them stands by itself, as the following table will show. West Saxon. Icoht (laid hicrdc d&l gylden field Kentish. hilpd Icdht ded h iorde del gelden fcld Mercian. helped (he) helps. Uht ded hiorde dsel gylden failed light. deed. (shep-)herd. deal. golden. (he) falls. weorpeS (he) throws. If the inhabitants of the old kingdoms of AVessex, Kent, and Mercia had separately left their English abodes and wandered back to different parts of the Continent after their dialects had developed in the way illustrated above, would not their dialects have gradually developed into independent languages exhibiting the same characteristic features of mutual relationship as those found in the Indo-Germanic idioms 1 x It remains to give a short review of the main character istics of Indo-Germanic, both phonetic and structural. A. Phonology. The consonant system of the Aryan parent-language was chiefly characterized by the prevalence of stopped (explosive) sounds and the scarcity of spirants. The only representatives of the latter class were s, and in a few cases z, while there is no trace of sounds so common in modern languages as the English /, th, sh, or the German ch. Besides stops and spirants the system comprised nasals, liquids, and semi-vowels. The stops were either voiceless (surd), like the English p, t, k, or voiced (sonant), like the English b,d,g, and either pure (unaspirated) or aspirated. By combining these two distinctions we arrive at four chief varieties of stops, which are generally thus symbolized : p, ph, b, bh for the labial, t, th, d, dh for the dental class, &c. Here the p, t, k denote unaspirated voiceless stops, ph, th, kh their aspirates; b, d, g voiced stops, and bh, dh, gh their aspirates. In pronouncing these sounds English readers should be careful not to give the Aryan p, t, k the value of the English p, t, k, be cause these are always slightly aspirated. The true unaspirated sound is still found in the Romance and the Slavonic languages, in modern Greek, &c. The aspirates ph, th, kh should be sounded with a strong escape of breath after the explosion of the stop, inserting a distinct h between the initial p, t, k and the following sound (as is often done in Irish pronunciation ; initial p, t, k in Danish may also be taken as examples). In the so-called medire b, d, g the voice should always be distinctly audible, as in French, or in English medial b, d, g (initial b, d, g in English are often voiceless). The pronunciation of the voiced aspirates bh, dh, gh is a very vexed question, as these sounds have disappeared from all the living Aryan languages except the modern Indian dialects, and these seem to show differences in the pronunciation of the aspirates which have not yet been sufficiently cleared up. The old Indian grammarians made their aspirates out to be voiced stops followed by a corresponding, that is voiced, aspiration, and this description seems to correspond with the observations of Mr Alex. Ellis, 2 who found that in the Benares pronunciation of Sanskrit bha, dha, gha are distinguished from ba, da, ga merely by a somewhat stronger pronunciation of the vowel. It seems, however, that another pro nunciation exists in the west, and that bha, for instance, in Bombay is actually pronounced as a distinctly voiced b followed by a common h ; the voice is broken off simultaneously with the opening of the lips, so that no vocalic sound is inserted between the b and the h. If this pronunciation was not original in Aryan, it seems to have come in at an early period ; for it would be extremely difficult to explain the transition of original bh, dh, gh into the Greek voiceless 1 A detailed history of the different views expressed with regard to the mutual relationships of the Indo-Germanic languages has been given by 0. Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Calturgeschichte, p. 66 sq. ; cp. especially Jon. Schmidt, Die Verwandschaftsverhdltnisse der indog. Spmchen, Vienna, 1872 ; A. Fick, Die ehemaKge Sprach- einheit der Jndogcrmanen Europus, Gottingen, 1873 (reviewed by Schmidt, in Jenaer Literatitrzeitung, 1874, p. 201 sq.); A. Leskien. J)/e Deklination im Slavisch- Litauischen und Germanischen, Leipsic, 1876 (Introduction); Paul, Principien der Sprachgeschichte, ch. xii. ; K. Bnigniann, &quot; Zur Frage nach den Verwandtschaftsverhaltnissen der, iixlog. Sprachen,&quot; in Techmer, Internationale Zeitschrift filr allgem. Sprachwissenschftft, i. (1884), p. 226 sq. 2 On Early English Pronunciation, iv. p. 1135 sq. aspirates &amp;lt;f&amp;gt;, 0, x (as in Greek &amp;lt;jxpu, originally pronounced p-hero, compared with Sanskrit bhdrdmi), unless we start from a voiceless aspiration. With regard to their positions, the labials p, ph, b, bh do not seem to have differed from the common European labials of the present day. The so-called dentals t, th, d, dh were really dental, that is, formed by touching the lower rim or back of the upper teeth with the tip of the tongue (in the pronunciation of the English t, d the tongue is raised towards the upper gums). This purely dental pronunciation is still preserved in most of the Asiatic and some European languages. The supradental class represented in the Indian languages by the so-called cerebrals or linguals f, th, d, dh seems not to have existed in primitive Aryan, but was most prob ably imported into Indian from the Dravidian idioms of southern India, where these sounds are very common. Of back consonants Aryan possessed two distinct parallel sets, now generally symbolized by k 1, kh 1 , g 1 , gh ] and k 2 , kh*, g 1 , gh- respectively. 3 They may be characterized as front and back gutturals, or possibly as palatals and gutturals proper (compare the Semitic distinction of D and p). The distinction of the two series is best preserved in the Asiatic languages and Litu-Slavic, where the front gutturals or palatals passed into spirants, while the back gutturals (at least originally) retained their character of explosives. In the other languages the difference is less clearly marked, as will be seen from the following table of correspondences. 4 Aryan. Sans. Zend. Ann. Slav. : Lith. Greek. Lat. Irish. Germ. fci | g s g sz K c c, ch h (g) y 1 j ts ) z i 7 g ) k ghl, h z, dz 1

x *,g [ g i-2 1 ft, t k,c(X,*) k, kh k,f,c k K,w (r) q, c c,ch hu ,h(u;g) g% 1 g, j -I k I ) _ y(/3,5) g ) i 9 8*8 gh,h r^ (&amp;gt; 9 t 9 * !^ z xW h,g j y &amp;lt;?) Of nasals there were four, corresponding to the four classes of stops, Nasals m, n, and two guttural ones, which may be written T? 1 and rf ; the and latter only occur before the corresponding explosives. Of liquids we liquids, find r and I in the individual languages, but frequently interchang ing. It has been assumed, therefore, that Aryan had only one sound instead of the two, which was afterwards developed into either r or I. There seems to be sufficient reason, however, to believe that the later distinction of rand Z was founded on some parallel distinction in Aryan ; most probably we have to assume the coexistence of two varieties of r-sounds ; the one which, at a later period, passed into ? may have been a distinct trilled r, while the second, the ante cedent of I, may have been an un trilled variety. We find a similar distinction in the semi-vowels y and w, each of which must have Semi- had two distinct varieties. The first variety of y is in Greek vowels, represented by, the second by f, as in 6 s, vyov, compared with Sanskrit yds and yugdm, &c. ; from these correspondences it would seem that the first y was a real semi-vowel, like the English y that is, a non-syllabic i and the second a more spirant sound, like the North-German j. As to the w, the existence of a double sound Other seems to follow from the different way in which initial v is treated conson- in Sanskrit reduplication ; compare perfects like uvaca, 3d plural ucus ants, with vardrdha, pi. vavrdhus. 5 Here the transition of v into u points to a semi-vocalic pronunciation, as in English u The other sound, which remains unaltered, may have been more like the spirant English v. The sound of the sibilant s cannot be fixed exactly ; it may have been dental cither like the French- s, or more supra- dental as in English. The voiced z is of extremely rare occur rence ; it was confined to combinations of a sibilant with a voiced mute, such as zd, zdh, zcj ; compare, for instance, Aryan mizdho-, 3 This fact was first discovered by Ascoli, C orsi di glottologia, 1870, p. 51 sq., and Fick, Die ehem. Sprachcinheit der Indo-germancn Europas, p. 3 sq. ; cp. also Joh. Schmidt, in Jenaer Lit.-Zeitung, 1874, p. 201 sq., and Zeitschr. f. rergl. Sprachf., xxv. p. 1 sq. ; H. Hiibsch- inann, in Zeitschr. f. vergl. Sprachf., xxiii. pp. 20 sq., 385 sq., xxiv. p. 372 sq. ; H. Moller, Die palatalreihe der indog. Grundxprache im Germanischen, Leipsic, 1875 ; H. Collitz, in Bezzenberger s fieitr., iii. p. 177 sq. ; F. Kluge, Beitragc zur Geschichte der german. Conjugation, Strasburg, 1879, p. 42 sq. 4 The voiceless aspirates are left out here because they are hardly frequent enough to enable us to make out exact rules of correspondence. It may be noticed here that in Sanskrit and Greek the old aspirates have been replaced by the corresponding unaspirated sounds (that is, b, d, &amp;lt;7 )t /and TT, r, % respectively) whenever they were followed by another aspirate. See especially Grassniann, in Zeitschr. f. vergl. Sprachf., xii. p. 81 sq. 5 Compare also the parallel of Sanskrit iydja, perfect of yaj, and Greek afo/xai. ayios, with initial . The discovery of the two y-sounds was first made by G. Schulze, Ueber das Verhaltniss des f zu den ent- sprechenden Lauten der verwandten Sprachen, Gottingen, 1867.