PROCESSES OE CHANGE IN PRONUNCIATION. 191 



value which remains present to the mind. It would be a mistake 

 to judge of the perfection of a language by the degree to which it 

 has preserved the constituent elements of its words. The language 

 performs greater services the further it is removed from its primary 

 origin. A word is most perfect when it has reached the condition 

 of a simple sign, letting the idea be perceived clearly without ob- 

 scurity or refraction. Under all these considerations the laws of 

 phonetics are not blind. It may be remarked, for example, that 

 substantives change more readily than adjectives, participles, or ad- 

 verbs, because the substantive passes more promptly to the state of 

 a simple sign. 



It is affirmed by M. Brugmanu that the change in pronunciation 

 starts in the organs before it affects the words ; but we can not accept 

 it except in pathological cases. A child born with defective organs 

 will hear and pronounce particular sounds wrong; but this fault, 

 recognized as arising from some deficiency of conformation, has 

 no influence on the development of the language. No matter 

 whether it is corrected or not, nobody imitates it. Minute changes, 

 on the contrary, which in the beginning modify the articulations so 

 slightly that their influence can hardly be perceived, are the impor- 

 tant ones, because they are contagious and keep growing larger. It 

 is by changes of this kind, continuing and increasing from genera- 

 tion to generation, that words become shortened, syllables and 

 letters are lost out of them, and the pronounced word becomes so 

 different from the spelled one as to excite remark. In nothing else 

 do we find better illustrated what a modern writer calls the little 

 forces — forces which in the course of ages have differentiated the 

 words of half a dozen languages from their native origins, and have 

 marked the distinctions between the Germanic tongues. 



If these changes originated primarily in modifications of the 

 organs, the sounds undergoing the transformations would disappear 

 from the language. Yet we find that the same sounds which are reg- 

 ularly transformed in a larger proportion of words are still maintained 

 in some. Hence the cause of the changes can not be found in modi- 

 fications of the organs. We still pronounce h in the same way and 

 with the same organs as in the Roman period, although in many of 

 the words in which it once figured it has become ch. 



We may obtain some light as to the origin of these phonetic 

 changes by studying a similar phenomenon in writing. The hiero- 

 glyphics on the earliest Egyptian monuments are veritable draw- 

 ings of definite objects. The same signs are found on more recent 

 monuments, but traced as in a current hand, in which the engraver 

 or scribe only indicated the contours. It is very evident that the 

 hand of the scribes had undergone no modification, and that their 



