Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/112

90 history of language. Each constituent of the spoken alphabet requires, in order to its production, a certain kind and amount of effort on the part of the various organs concerned in articulate utterance. Some of them call for greater change from the quiescent condition of the organs, and so are in themselves harder to utter, than others. And again—what is of far higher importance in phonology—some are much harder to utter than others in connection with one another; the changes of position and mode of action of the articulating organs which they imply are more difficult of production and combination. Thus, it is perfectly practicable to arrange the sounds composing the word friendly in such ways as to give very harsh combinations, which, although we may make shift to utter them by a great effort, we should ordinarily and properly call unpronounceable: for example, nfdrely, lrefdny, yrfdnle. And our word itself, easy as it seems to us, would be deemed harsh and unpronounceable by many a race and nation of men. It is all a question of degree, of the amount of labour to which we are willing to subject our articulating organs in speaking. Hosts of series of sounds may be made up which, though not unutterable by dint of devoted and vehement exertion, never appear in actual speech, because they are practically too hard; their cost is greater than their value; the needs of speech can be supplied without resorting to them. And half the languages in the world have sounds and combinations of sounds which other tongues eschew as being harder than they choose to utter. No word that a community has once formed and uttered is incapable of being kept unchanged in their use; yet use breeds change in all the constituents of every language: each sound in a word exercises an assimilating influence over the others in its neighbourhood, tending to bring them into some other form which is more easily uttered in connection with itself. The seat of "euphony," as we somewhat mistakenly term it, is in the mouth, not in the ear; words are changed in phonetic structure, not according to the impression they make upon the organs of hearing, but according to the action which they call for in the organs of speaking; physiological, not acoustic relations determine how sounds shall pass into one another in the process of linguistic growth.