Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/409

X.] 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.

Two opposing possibilities, therefore, interfere with the directness of the etymologist's researches, and cast doubt on his conclusions. On the one hand, forms apparently unconnected may turn out to be transformations of the same original: since, for example, the French évêque and the English bishop, words which have no common phonetic constituent, are yet both descended, within no very long time, from the Greek episkopos; since our alms comes from the Greek eleēmosunē; since our sister and the Persian χāhar are the same word; since the Latin filius has become in Spanish hijo; and so on. On the other hand, what is of not less importance in its bearing upon the point we are considering, he must be equally mindful that an apparent coincidence between two words which he is comparing may be accidental and superficial only, covering radical diversity. How easy it is for words of different origin to arrive at a final identity of form, as the result of their phonetic changes, is evident enough from the numerous homonyms in our own language, to which we have more than once had occasion to refer. Thus, sound in "safe and sound" comes from one Germanic word, and sound in "Long Island Sound" from another; while sound, 'noise,' is from the Latin sonus. So we have a page of a book from the Latin pagina, and a page in waiting from the Greek paidion, 'a little boy;' we have cleave, 'to stick together,' from the Anglo-Saxon clifian; and cleave, 'to part asunder,' from the Anglo-Saxon clufan; and numberless other instances of the same kind. Fortuitous coincidences of sound like these, in words of wholly independent derivation, are not less liable to occur between the vocables of different languages than between those of the same language; and they do so occur. It is, further, by no means infrequently the case that, along with a coincidence, or a near correspondence, or a remoter analogy, of sound, there is also an analogy, or correspondence, or coincidence, of meaning—one so nearly resembling that which would be