Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/120

98 And a similar rule of permutation holds good also among the consonants of the two other series, the palatal and labial: k, kh, g; p, ph, b—the whole, with certain variations and exceptions, of which we do not need here to take account. This intricate method of correspondence without identity is generally styled, after its discoverer, "Grimm's Law of Permutation of Consonants;" it is a fact of prime consequence in the history of the group of languages to which ours belongs, and, at the same time, one of the most remarkable and difficult phenomena of its class which the linguistic student finds anywhere offered him for explanation. Nor has any satisfactory explanation of it been yet devised; while, nevertheless, we have no reason to believe it of a nature essentially different from other mutations of sound, of equally arbitrary appearance, though of less complication and less range, which the history of language everywhere exhibits. The Armenian, for example, has converted its ancient surd mutes prevailingly into sonants, and its sonants into surds; the cockney drops his initial h’s, and aspirates his initial vowels: neither of these, any more than the permutation of consonants in the Germanic languages, is referable to a tendency toward ease of utterance, in any of its ordinary modes of action; yet no sound linguist would think of doubting that all the three phenomena are alike historical in their nature, results of the working out of tendencies which existed and operated in the minds of those who spoke the several languages in which they have made their appearance.

We need give but a moment's attention to another process of linguistic change, whereby not letters, parts of words, formative elements, alone are lost, but whole words, signs of ideas, disappear from among the stores of expression of a language. This, too, is always and everywhere going on. Evidence of it is to be seen in the obsolete and obsolescent material found recorded on almost every page of our dictionaries, and still more abundantly in the monuments of our literature, of periods to which our dictionaries do not pretend to go back, among the works of the earliest English writers; and, above all, in the Anglo-Saxon literature. As