CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



lose old ones : thus, 'plain' has usurped the sense 

 of 'ugly;' 'fast,' of 'dissipated;' 'gallantry,' of 

 ' licentiousness.' To trace such transitions in the 

 meaning of words is one of the most interesting 

 and instructive studies. It has been treated by 

 numerous writers in regard to English ; among 

 others by Archbishop Trench on Tlie Study of 

 Words. 



2. Changes in form. One obvious change of 

 this kind in English is the shifting of the accent 

 a syllable forward. It is not long since everybody 

 said reve'nue and balco'ny ; now everybody says 

 re' venue and balcony. It is held incorrect to 

 accent ally on the first syllable ; yet many do so, 

 being guided by the analogy of the language, 

 which seldom has the accent on the final syllable ; 

 and there can be little doubt that a'lly will in the 

 end triumph over ally 7 . 



Since Anglo-Saxon times, and even since the 

 days of Chaucer, the vowel sounds of English 

 have been greatly altered. The investigations of 

 Mr Ellis lead him to the conclusion that the 

 Towel letters were pronounced by Chaucer's con- 

 temporaries pretty much as they continue to be 

 pronounced in broad Scotch. 



But a more striking change is the dropping of 

 sounds altogether out of words. This change is 

 very much disguised by the conservative effect of 

 writing, which tends to preserve the spelling of 

 words, although the pronunciation has altered. 

 Johnson's Dictionary did much to stereotype the 

 spelling of the English language, although it has not 

 been completely successful recently : e. g. emper- 

 our,' 'arithmetick/are now .' emperor,' 'arithmetic,' 

 and 'honour' is on the inevitable road to 'honor.' 

 The essential thing, however, are the spoken 

 words, and they are constantly suffering curtail- 

 ment whether the spelling alter or not. Thus, in 

 soften, the / was originally pronounced, but it is 

 now considered formal and old-fashioned to do so. 

 Nearly all our silent letters, as they are called, 

 were at one time heard, as in psalm, wrought. In 

 words like knee, there was, in the primary forms, 

 a vowel after the silent letter k(e)nee as we see 

 in the corresponding Latin genu. This vowel 

 vanishing, the k becomes difficult to pronounce, 

 and is left silent in standard English, though still 

 heard in Scotch and other dialects. Mistress, as 

 a courtesy title, has dwindled into Misses for a 

 married woman, with a kind of diminutive, Miss, 

 for a young woman. 



This curtailing of language has for its cause 

 the natural tendency to economise exertion 

 laziness, in short. We instinctively seek to save 

 our time and breath, and make as short work as 

 possible vith a word, provided it still conveys 

 its meaning distinctly. Hence the vowel of an 

 unaccented syllable becomes gradually shorter 

 and more indistinct, until at last it is dropped 

 altogether, and two syllables are pronounced as 

 one, as in the instance just given of knee ; know is 

 a case of the same thing, as is seen from the old 

 word ken, which is from the same root. But in this 

 process the result is often not all gain in the way 

 of ease ; for the coalescence of syllables frequently 

 causes combinations of consonants difficult of 

 utterance. A great many of the existing clusters 

 of consonants in the languages of civilised nations 

 are distinctly traceable to this kind of coalescence 

 (debitum, debit, debt), and it is believed that all of 

 them orginated in that way, and that the primitive 



form of all tongues was what we still see among 

 barbarous peoples (e. g. Kamehameha, the name 

 of the late king of Hawaii), where every consonant 

 is accompanied by a vowel. 



This 'phonetic decay,' this wearing away and 

 crumpling up of words for the sake of shortness, 

 is strikingly seen in tracing the transition of 

 Anglo-Saxon into modern English. Thus dceg 

 becomes day ; fceger, fair ; hlaford, lord ; hlafdige, 

 lady : wif-man, woman ; niht (with the guttural 

 h pronounced, as in Scotch), ni(gh)t ; weorold, 

 world ; Eofor-ivic, York. One marked tendency 

 or law may be observed in all this namely, the 

 tendency to drop or soften down the rough gut- 

 turals. Although it is generally by leaving out artic- 

 ulations that ease is sought, the same end is some- 

 times attained by inserting anomalous ones ; thus, 

 on borrowing the French genre, we have made 

 it gender, because it is more easy in passing from 

 n to er to take d by the way. In the same way b 

 is brought in as a bridge of transition in slumber, 

 from Anglo-Saxon slumerianj in humble, from 

 Latin humilis ; in dissemble, from similis. The 

 Greek word ambrosia would have been amrosia, 

 if the Greeks could have tolerated r after m, for 

 the word is from a, negative, and the root that we 

 see in Latin mors, death, and means ' undying.' 



The Latin tongue, in being transformed into 

 French, has suffered severe degradation. Pater 

 became pere ; frater, frere j presbyter, first prestre, 

 and then pretre ; magister, maistre, mat ire. The 

 termination -atus dwindled away to / : e. g. amatus 

 = aim/, privatus = prive". Before the inhabitants- 

 of Gaul began to learn the language of their con- 

 querors, the Romans, they spoke Celtic. No\v r 

 such combinations as sp, st, are unknown in that 

 language ; and therefore, to make them pronounce- 

 able, the Gauls prefixed e, and turned sperare 

 into tsperer, stabilire into establir (English estab- 

 lish) and then into e"tablir. This peculiar habit, 

 together with the change of -atus, -ata, -atum, 

 into /, or /<?, shews at once how epe"e, a sword, 

 grew out of Latin spatha or spata, a blade of any 

 kind (English spade). 



It is manifest at a glance, even from the few 

 examples given, that the curtailments that words 

 undergo do not take place by chance or caprice, 

 but in a more or less regular and uniform way. 

 These uniformities in phonetic change and decay 

 are among the most important of the laws of the 

 life of language, which it is the business of phil- 

 ology to study. 



It may seem strange to speak of decay as life ; 

 yet it is just as much a part of the life of language 

 as waste of the tissues is in the life of the animal 

 body. But the important part it plays will be 

 best understood by considering it along with the 

 counter-process namely, the building up of new 

 words from old material. 



WORD-BUILDING. 



When we have to speak frequently about a 

 thing that has no single name, as ' the top of the 

 house,' ' a road provided with rails,' ' a ring for 

 the ear,' ' a boat moved by steam,' we put the two 

 words together without the connectives, and say 

 ' house-top,' ' rail-road,' ' ear-ring,' ' steam-boat/ 

 What constitutes a perfect compound in such a 

 case is the sinking of the accent of one of the 

 parts. We can bring together the two words ocean 



