Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/203

Rh a barbarous people, a man of authority and influence, whether by physical defect or from some other cause, commits a fault in articulation. It is imitated, in the family first, and then among the relatives and neighbors. The peculiarity of pronunciation spreads, and is more marked as it spreads; and if nothing occurs to interfere with it, a phonetic change is accomplished. But is there anything fatal in that? The change is very like those which take place in costume, or armor, or in the house; a historic fact, having neither more nor less of the character of fatality than other historical facts. It is true that if we go back to the initial cause we find on final analysis a movement of the vocal organs; but in what act of our life are not our organs the final motive? To assume fatality, it would be necessary to suppose that on a certain day the organs of speech of all the individuals of a group should be modified in the same manner.

There is a reason why the phenomena of language should be specially subject to imitation. Being a medium of communication, it would lack its essential condition if it varied as between one person and another, and would lose its right to be. Hence the necessity of a uniform pronunciation. But this is clearly a matter of social necessity, not of a physical fatality.

A phonetic change may be adopted; or it may be rejected, after a longer or shorter struggle; for peoples are composed of individuals who are not all of the same age, or of the same sex, or of equal education or social position. In the sixteenth century the Parisians were agreed in pronouncing s as r and conversely r as s; Paris became Pasis, and oiseau (bird) became oireau. The poet Marot made this matter the subject of a satire. The usage was contested as a ridiculous affectation, and went out, but not without leaving vestiges. The thick utterance of the incredibles of the Directory is another example of a merely passing fashion.

These fluctuations explain the otherwise incomprehensible variations of geographical maps of dialects. If we make linguistic charts of France in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and sixteenth centuries, we shall find boundaries changing, one province growing larger, another smaller, and reverse changes perhaps taking place in the following period. Revolutions occur much like those of political power, but the two do not always coincide.

Phonetic changes may therefore be tracked. The interchange of s and r is thus traced from its beginning in Roussillon northward through France, till it reached the Norman islands; a second substitution of Germanic consonants, which established a difference between High German on one side and Low Dutch, English, and Scandinavian on the other, passed from south to north to the fifty-first and fifty-second degrees of latitude. The fact is thus explained