Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/49

I.] in language, and also the most natural, inevitable, and legitimate. Even the bigoted purist cannot object to it, or wish it otherwise: conservatism here would be the conservatism of ignorance, opposing itself to the progress of civilization and enlightenment. Along with it, too, comes its natural counterpart, the dropping out of use and out of memory of words and meanings of words and phrases which circumstances have made it no longer desirable to maintain in existence; which denote the things of a by-gone time, or, by the substitution of more acceptable expressions, have become unnecessary and otiose.

But there are also all the time going on in our language changes of another and a more questionable character, changes which affect the form rather than the content of speech, and are in a sense unnecessary, and therefore stoutly opposed by the authority of exact tradition; yet which have hitherto shown themselves not less inevitable than the others. We have seen that the transmission of language is by tradition. But traditional transmission is by its inherent nature defective. If a story cannot pass a few times from mouth to mouth and maintain its integrity, neither can a word pass from generation to generation and keep its original form. Very young children, as every one knows, so mutilate their words and phrases that only those who are most familiar with them can understand what they say. But even an older child, who has learned to speak in general with tolerable correctness, has a special inaptness to utter a particular sound, and either drops it altogether or puts another and nearly related one in its place. There are certain combinations of consonants which it cannot manage, and has to mouth over into more pronounceable shape. It drops a syllable or two from a long and cumbrous word. It omits endings and confounds forms together: me, for instance, has to do duty in its usage for me, my, and I; and eat, to stand for all persons, tenses, and numbers of the verb. Or, again, having learned by prevailing experience that the past sense in a verb is signified by the addition of a d, it imagines that, because it says I loved, it must also say I bringed; or else, perhaps, remembering I sang from I sing, it says I brang.