Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/95

III.] beginning. No sooner have men coined a word than they have begun—not, of course, with deliberate forethought, but spontaneously, and as it were unconsciously—to see how the time and labour expended in its utterance could be economized, how any complicated and difficult combination of sounds which it presented could be worked over into a shape better adapted for fluent utterance, how it could be contracted into a briefer form, what part of it could be spared without loss of intelligibility.

Thus—to recur to some of our former illustrations—as soon as we are ready to forego our separate memory of the constituents of such compounds as breāk-fâst, fōre-hĕad, fourteen-night, that we may give a more concentrated attention to the unity of signification which we confer upon them, we begin to convert them into brĕakfast, fŏre'd, fôrtnĭt. And the case is the same with all those combinations out of which grow formative elements and forms. While we have clearly in mind the genesis of god-like, father-like, and so forth, we are little likely to mutilate either part of them: our apprehension of the latter element as no longer coördinate with the former, but as an appendage to it, impressing upon it a modification of meaning, and our reduction of the subordinate element to ly, thus turning the words into godly and fatherly, are processes that go hand in hand together, each helping the other.

This brings us to a recognition of the important and valuable part played by the tendency to ease of utterance, and by the phonetic changes which it prompts, in the construction of the fabric of language. If a word is to be taken fully out of the condition of constituent member of a compound, and made a formative element, if a compound is thus to be converted into a form, or otherwise fused together into an integral word, it must be by the help of some external modification. Our words thankful, fearful, truthful, and their like, are, by our too present apprehension of the independent significance of their final syllable, kept out of the category of pure derivatives. Phonetic corruption makes the difference between a genuine form-word, like godly, and a combination like godlike, which is far less plastic and adaptable to the varying needs of practical use; it makes the