1861.] 359 [Combination?. 



real/ or del/,'' &c. Prof. Grimm objects to Rask's views of the pronun- 

 ciation of these diphthongs ; he says page 258 in a foot-note : " His 

 (Prof. Rask's) reason that the pronunciation kj=zk^ is proved by the 

 Ags. cealf, cielf is unstable, since ea is produced from a, even when 

 it is not preceded by a 7c, as in eald.^' Still, supposing even that 

 ca and eo did not sound 7/a and i/o, as a general thing, and that they 

 were regular diphthongs composed of the voweJs e and a or o, there 

 is no reason at all, why we should not admit the hardenina; of e into 

 // before k, preparatory to the change of this latter letter into t fol- 

 lowed by s/t.] 



Latin c, before i and e, when imported by the French into England, 

 was equivalent to s, and it remained s, when it Wc\s not followed by 

 another vowel, e. g , centre, civil. 



§ 38. Each nation seems to have a particular fondness for some one 

 of the sounds produced by assibilation ; so the Italians fancy Uh and 

 (Izh, and to some small extent ts and dz, the French and Portuguese 

 sh and s, the Spanish tsli and tli, the Wallachians and Germans ts, 

 and the English Uh and dzli. This fondness the latter show by 

 changing the pronunciation of the French 8h=:ch into tsh, and the 

 French z7i=J, gc, into dzh. In French, c is found assibilated into 

 ch=sh, only before a, and in such words where there was originally 

 an a in Latin, e. (/., cheval (cabalus), chemin (Ital. camino), chef 

 (caput) ; but before e and ^ it is reduced into s. The reason of this 

 is, that the sibilation of c before e and i commenced in the Latin 

 language itself, and about the sixth and seventh centuries after Christ 

 this was universally pronounced ts. In the French the initial t was 

 dropped, and c before e and i was pronounced .s. With G it was 

 different; this continued firm and unchanged to a very late period in 

 the Latin language, and, at the time, when the Latin c had already 

 become assibilated into tn, g still preserved its character as a soft 

 guttural consonant, even before i and e. Towards the close of the 

 Latin language, according to Prof Diez, I, page 248, 249, 2d edit., 

 it passed over into <:/y=r//', and thence into dzh in the Italian, and 

 probably also in the early French language, where it speedily lost its 

 initial d, and thus became zh. In this transformation it was attended 

 by the Latin y=j, with which it frequently interchanged ; thus, both 

 Ital. giorno and French yo?<?7?ee are derived from the \j^t. diurnum ; 

 and in the Middle-age Latin we find viadius, instead of majus. G 

 before e and i and j were thus early considered as homogeneous 

 sounds, and continued to be treated as such in the French, where 

 both are pronounced zh. From the French this sound was imported 



