Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/78

56 which it represents, by omission of connectives, by inversion of the more usual order of arrangement, but most of all by unity of accent: this last is the chief outward means of composition; it converts two entities into one, for the nonce, by subordinating the one of them to the other. Our common talk is strewn with such words, and so gradual is the transition to them from the mere collocations of the phrase, that there are couples, like mother-tongue, well-known, which we hardly know whether to write separately, as collocations only, or with a hyphen, as loose compounds; others, like dial-plate, well-being, usage so far recognizes for compounds that they are always written together, sometimes with the hyphen and sometimes without; others yet, like godlike, herself are so grown together by long contact, by habitual connection, that we hardly think of them as having a dual nature. And even more than this: we have formed some so close combinations that it costs us a little reflection to separate them into their original parts. Of such a character is forehead, still written to accord with its derivation, as a name for the fore part of the head, but so altered in pronunciation that, but for its spelling, its origin would certainly escape the notice of nineteen-twentieths of those who use it. Such, again, is fortnight, altered both in pronunciation and in spelling from the fourteen nights out of which it grew. Such, once more, is our familiar verb breakfast. We gave this name to our morning meal, because it broke, or interrupted, the longest fast of the day, that which includes the night's sleep. 'We said at first breāk fâst—"I broke fast at such an hour this morning;" he, or they, who first ventured to say I breakfasted were guilty of as heinous a violation of grammatical rule as he would be who should now declare I takedinnered, instead of I took dinner; but good usage came over to their side and ratified their blunder, because the community were minded to give a specific name to their earliest meal and to the act of partaking of it, and therefore converted the collocation breākfâst into the real compound brĕakfast.

Yet once more, not only are those words in our language of composite structure, of which at first sight, or on second