Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/191

Rh we thus account by physical similarity for the existence of a kind of natural alphabet common to mankind, we must look to other causes to determine the selection of sounds used in different languages, and to account for those remarkable courses of change which go on in languages of a common stock, producing in Europe such variations of one original word as pater, father, vater, or in the islands of Polynesia offering us the numeral 5 under the strangely-varied forms of lima, rima, dima, nima, and hima. Changes of this sort have acted so widely and regularly, that since the enunciation of Grimm's law their study has become a main part of philology. Though their causes are as yet so obscure, we may at least argue that such wide and definite operations cannot be due to chance or arbitrary fancy, but must be the result of laws as wide and definite as themselves.

Let us now suppose a book to be written with a tolerably correct alphabet, for instance an ordinary Italian book, or an English one in some good system of phonetic letters. To suppose English written in the makeshift alphabet which we still keep in use, would be of course to complicate the matter in hand with a new and needless difficulty. If, then, the book be written in a sufficient alphabet, and handed to a reader, his office will by no means stop short at rendering back into articulate sounds the vowels and consonants before him, as though he were reading over proofs for the press. For the emotional tone just spoken of has dropped out in writing down the words in letters, and it will be the reader's duty to guess from the meaning of the words what this tone should be, and to put it in again accordingly. He has moreover to introduce emphasis, whether by accent or stress, on certain syllables or words, thereby altering their effect in the sentence; if he says, for example, 'I never sold you that horse,' an emphasis on any one of these six words will alter the import of the whole phrase. Now, in emphatic pronunciation two distinct processes are to be remarked. The effect produced by changes in loudness and duration of words is directly imitative; it is a mere gesture made with