Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/91

III.] is historical, an endeavour to trace backward—even to the beginning, if the recorded evidence permit—the processes by which our own speech, or human speech in general, has become what it is, and to discover the rationale of those processes, the influences under which they have been carried on, and the ends which they have been intended to subserve. We took up first, accordingly, the process of combination of old material in language into new forms, and exhibited its universal agency in the production of the present constituents of speech. Not only are words put together to form what to our sense are and still remain ordinary compounds, but such compounds are further fused into a deceitful likeness to simple vocables; or, what is of yet more frequent occurrence and more important bearing, one of their members sinks to a subordinate position, and becomes a suffix, without recognized separate signification. This, it was claimed, is the way in which all formative elements, all signs of grammatical categories, have originated; and as every word in our language either contains, or has contained and been deprived of, a formative element, or more than one, the process of composition is one whose range and importance in linguistic history cannot easily be over-estimated.

But the same examples on which we relied to show how, and how extensively, words are compounded together and forms produced, have shown us not less clearly that mutilation and loss of the elements employed by language, and of the compounds and forms into which they enter, are also constant accompaniments of linguistic growth. "All that is born must die" seems a law almost as inexorable in the domain of speech as in that of organic life. We have next to turn our attention to the principles underlying this department of linguistic change, and to some of the modes of its action and the effects which it produces.

And the first and most important principle which we have to notice, the one which lies at the bottom of nearly all phonetic change in language, is the tendency, already alluded to and briefly illustrated in our first lecture, to make the work of utterance easier to the speaker, to put a more facile in the stead of a more difficult sound or combination