Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/64

42 seem, could possibly maintain that, when some individual mind has formed a conception or drawn a deduction, or when some individual ingenuity has brought forth a product of any of the modes of activity of which man is capable, language itself spontaneously extrudes a word for its designation! He who sees is likewise he who says; the ingenuity that could find the thing was never at a loss to devise also its appellation.

But the case is not otherwise with those gradual changes which bring about the decay of grammatical structure, or the metamorphosis of phonetic form, in a language. Though they go on in a more covert and unacknowledged way than the augmentations of a vocabulary, they are due to the action of the same forces. If we write knight, and pronounce it nīt, while our ancestors spelled the word cniht, and made its every letter distinctly audible (giving the i our short i-sound, as in pin)—just as the Germans even now both write and speak the same word knecht—we know that it is not because, by any force inherent in the word itself, the fuller form grew into the simpler, but because the combination kn, as initial, was somewhat difficult for men's organs to utter, and therefore began to lose its k, first, in the mouths of careless and easy speakers; and the corruption went on gaining in popularity, until it became the rule of our speech to silence the mute before the nasal in all such words (as in knife, knit, gnat, gnaw, etc.); because, moreover, the sound of the guttural h after a vowel became unpopular, men's organs shrinking from the effort of producing it, and was finally got rid of everywhere (being either left out entirely, as in nigh, ought, or turned into f, as in laugh, cough); while, at the same time, the loss of this consonant led to a prolongation of the vowel i, which was changed into the diphthongal sound we now give it; in company, too, with so many other of the "long i's" of the older language, that our usual name at present for the diphthong is "long i." And so in all the multitude of similar cases. There is no necessity, physiological or other, for the rustic's saying kău for cow; only the former is a lazy drawling utterance, which opens the mouth less widely than the latter. A precisely