SIGNIFICANCK OF KRRORS IN SPKKCH. 37 



attempted, is usually too o-reat to contend against the accus- 

 tomed imitativeness of language, and therefore few of such 

 forms sur\nve. They are striking examples, however, of the 

 effect of the purposeful mind in language, and lead us directly 

 to the lines of development where the change of the meanings 

 of words and forms is due to mental action. 



The expression of new developed meanings, be thej^ higher 

 or lower, is attained by gradually adapting old meanings to 

 new ideas in the same words, building compounds, appealing 

 to the mimetic value of certain sounds, appropriating varia- 

 tions of form produced by decreased effort and transferring 

 forms from one meaning to another under some analogy in 

 character. These are mental acts. They form the controlling 

 element in ling-uistic development, although, owing to the fact 

 that the phonetic form is physical and representable in writing 

 and therefore more within our power for exact study, these 

 psychological motives are often lost sight of. For our present 

 purposes these mental operations, through and by which 

 Increasing Significance is obtained in language, may be con- 

 sidered as Differentiative and Analogical. 



The differentiative process is illustrated in its simpler ope- 

 ration by the word sfory. The mechanical process of decreas- 

 ing effort produced the variation ' storic from histo'ric, then 

 accented on the second syllable. At first a mere mispronun- 

 ciation, the variation, now spelled story, was soon appropriated 

 to express a needed differentiation of the old idea of /listorv 

 into what we now distinguish by these two words. So, bulge 

 and bilge were originally mere variants of pronunciation, now 

 words of distinctive meaning. Under the same process we 

 notice the vulgar discrimination of or)icry from its original 

 ordinary, and a tendency to apply phone to the instrument and 

 its use, but not in such a phrase as " the telephone company." 



More intricate and far-reaching is the operation of the dif- 

 ferentiative motive in the development of English grammar. 

 The early grammatical idea of the Indo-European languages 

 required all the words of a sentence, except particles, to show 



