July 2, 1888.] 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



191 



the time of Shakespeare or at more remote dates, yet we 

 may still hope to recognise some at any rate among the 

 peculiarities which distinguished the English of past times 

 from the English of to-day. The circumstance noted by 

 the old writer above quoted, that foreign languages retain 

 their form — as Norman among " Englischemen that speketh 

 hit aright " — may direct us in the seaixh for the older forms 

 of our familiar English, and enable us often to select 

 between the various sounds given to the same word in 

 different places at the present time. 



Thus, when we remember that in many parts of the old 

 British settlements in America English was almost in the 

 position of a foreign tongue, requiring to be carefully 

 guarded against undue change, we see that in America, 

 even as it is now, the Englishman may seek for old forms of 

 pronunciation which have long since died out in England 

 itself. This is, of course, exactly the reverse of what 

 Englishmen generally expect to find in America, and of the 

 interpretation which they place on what they actually find. 

 "When Dickens noticed the pronunciation " air " for " are," 

 which was commoner in America in 1844: than it is 

 now (though it is still heard there), he took it for gi-anted 

 that it was a corruption. But in reality this is the old 

 way, or rather a once widely prevalent way, of pronouncing 

 the word ; in outlying parts of England it is still very 

 frequently heaid. Jn like manner the .strange sound of the 

 " e " in the words " very," " American," &c., which we hear 

 in New England and elsewhere, though not exactly the 

 original sound, is probably nearer to it than that more 

 usu.ally heard in the States, and always heard in England. 



We find here a sort of rule for obtaining the best infor- 

 mation about the original character of any doubtful sound. 

 We seek for it where the circumstances have been .such that 

 change would be least likelj' to occur. We can never be 

 quite sure that no change has taken place, but we know 

 where and how changes occur most freely and frequently, 

 and where, on the other hand, the circumstances favour 

 stability of pronunciation. For example, America to-day, 

 regarded as a whole, is far less likely to show the original 

 pronunciation of English words than one of the old colonies 

 would have been had it retained its colonial character until 

 now. A portion of the St.ates where circumstances favour 

 constant intercommunication is less likely to retain old 

 forms than some region where the inhabitants live for the 

 most part in the place of their birth, and neither see nor 

 heiir much of their fellow-countrymen at a distance. England 

 itself would be the place where the ruling form of the 

 English language would differ most from the original, pre- 

 cisely as the central stem of a tree extends farther from the 

 trunk than any others. Yet in parts of England we may 

 expect to find useful evidence of the old forms of English, 

 while in old English literature we recogni.se evidence of 

 another kind which may be exceedingly useful, if only we 

 can ascertain just what sounds the letters emjjloyed in 

 spelling different words were intended to represent. In 

 Scotland, however, and in Ireland, we should have an even 

 better chance of finding ancient forms of speech and of pro- 

 nunciation, and so much the better chance as we went 

 fiirther from the centres of population, to which changes 

 introduced in the original home of the language would most 

 leadily spread. 



There are some interesting considerations to which an 

 application of this general principle (that old forms survive 

 longest in out-of the-way corners) seems to lead. This iield 

 of inquiry has been much less surveyed than many might 

 imagine, who know only of the immense amount of labour 

 which has been devoted to the study of the English lan- 

 guage and its history. In nearly all researches into this 

 subject, it has been taken for granted, if not aptually 



asserted, that the language has progressed steadily from 

 form to form. In reality, even so far as the written lan- 

 guage, or the language of the better educated, has leen 

 concerned, this is far from jepiesenting the truth ; but it is 

 still farther fiom tl.at, as regards the language spoken by 

 the English people. 



As 1 have said, we find at the very outset of our inquiry 

 a difhculty arising fiom our inability to determine what 

 sounds the various letteis. and especially the vowels, in old 

 books and documents were intended to lepresent. Spelling 

 in old times was a free-and-ea.sy matter. Yet we must .sup- 

 pose a writer, even though he altered his spelling of a word 

 half-a-dozen times in the course of as many pages (or per- 

 haps as many .sentences), yet pronounced it always in one 

 way. What, then, are we to understand when we find (for 

 example) the word which we spell "great," spelled grat, 

 grate, great, greate, gret, grete, greet, greete, grayt, griiyte, 

 and so forth, by one and the same writer, in one and the 

 same chapter] At first it seems difficult to answer. But 

 so soon as we remember that in the first place he must h.ave 

 pronounced the word in one way (except possibly that 

 according to its position before a vowel or a consonant it 

 may have been deprived or not of seme faint trace of the 

 sound originally represented by the final " e "), while there 

 must have been some recognised limit in his day to the 

 sounds which the letters a, e, ca, ce, ay, itc, could represent, 

 we see that in this very multiplicity of spelled forms of a 

 single word we have a means of determining both the 

 jironunciation of words, and the force of the dilferent 

 letters in the spelling of the period. To take for ex- 

 ample this particular word " great," from such evidence 

 as the above spellings afford wo may be sure the 

 word was pronounced in the writer's time nearly 

 if not exactly as now ; and further, that while " e " repre- 

 sented generally in the spelling of his time the sound of "a" 

 in "fate," "a" had already lost the "ah" sound (as in 

 "far"), which originally belonged to it. We might be 

 doubtful if, as in the quotation above from English of the 

 fourteenth century, we only found the spelling "greet"; 

 this might rejiresent the same sound as in <Hir word so 

 spelled now. And in like manner "grayt" might rejiresent 

 a sound rhyming to "rite." Nor would "great" help us 

 alone, for the pronunciation mii;ht have been such (so far as 

 this spelling could tell us) as to make the word rhyme with 

 "heat" and "feat" of to-day. But the pronunciation of 

 "great "as at present is the only one which corresponds 

 nearly enough with all the spellings to be admissible as the 

 sound they were all, no doubt, intended to represent. 



A single case such as this starts a long series of inquiries. 

 If "ea," for example, represented satisfiictorily in that 

 writer's day the sound of " ea " in " great," may not other 

 words spelled at that time with "ea," and still retaining 

 that spelling, have been similarly pronounced 1 If they 

 retained that old pronunciation until after the time when 

 the spelling of words began to be settled as a matter of 

 custom rather than convenience, then, though the pro- 

 nunciation might change, the spelling would remain. 



Let us turn to a few words thus spelled : — 



AVe smile at Pat when he talks of the " say " and " fay," 

 "raison"and " saison," and so forth. Doufjtless it would 



social converse 



be wrong so to pronounce these words in 

 with persons of culture. Yet when we find that these 

 words were spelled " sea " and " tea," " reason " and 

 " season," at a time when " e " had still its proper .sound as 

 of "a "in "fate," while "ea" did duty for a somewhat 

 longer "a" sound, we may suspect that the Irishman of 

 to-day simply retains a pronunciation which we liave lost. 

 This view is confirmed when we consider that Ita is the 

 same word which in French is represented by l/i-c, almost 



