8(3 



♦ KNO^VLEDGE ♦ 



[Jan-. 1, 188r.. 



Valierero liave tlieir four lower front teeth knocked out, 

 and the upper ones partially filed away, and it is probably 

 owing to this fact that the language possesses sounds 

 similar to the English hard and soft th and dh sounds. 

 The Dinka langnnge is without sibilants, owing to 

 similar mutilations of the teeth, and it has neither h 

 nor ch, possessing instead «</ and;///, as in Arabic. Neither 

 the ilohawks, Senekas. Onnndangos, Oneidas. Cayugas, 

 nor Tnscai'oras have any laliials : and the same is true of 

 the Hurons, in common with other American tribes. 

 Several langu:iges do not distinguish between /.: aiid ;/, 

 ,"nd the hard sound of r/ as in c/o, and the soft sound as 

 in (jem, as well as ,:; soft as in soup, although freqvient in 

 Kafir, ai'e unknown in the Bechuana alphabet. The 

 dialect of the Society Islands is without gutturals, and 

 their nearest approach to the name of Captain Cook was 

 Tiife. Although dentals seem to be common to every 

 language, d is not lised iu Chinese nor in several American 

 dialects. )S is unknown to the natives of Attstralia, and 

 its place in several Polynesian languages is taken by /;. 

 while it is entirely absent in Rarotongan. Sanscrit has 

 no soft sibilants, nor short e and o, Greek has neither 

 w nor /, Lntin no soft sibilants, nor hard aspirates th, 

 pli, and ch, and so on. 7?, a diilicult letter to indi- 

 viduals and nations, is never pronounced in Chinese, nor 

 by the Hurons, Mexicans, Othomi, and other American 

 peoples. It is absent from the Kafir langtiage, and from 

 several Polynesian tongues : it is most frequently repre- 

 sented by I. Thtis in Chinese, Christ is Ki-li-sse-tu, 

 while in some of the Pohntesian dialects it is Kalaisi. 



In many cases it seems to be the fault of hearing, 

 which is not sufficiently fine to discriminate between cer- 

 "tain sotuids, and thus leads to difficulties in pronuncia- 

 tion. Thus, according to Mr. A. J. Ellis, Sir John 

 Herschel heard the same vowel in spurt, assert, hird, 

 rirtac, dove, ovoi,, doiihle, hlood : but I hear a very 

 different sound in the first four to the soitnd of the second 

 fotir, and thus divide them into two groups. On the 

 other hand, Sheridan and Smart distinguished between 

 the vowels in hird and ivorl-, and in whirl'd and world, 

 whereas I hear the same vowel in all fotir words, 

 unless they are pronounced by Scotch people. Webster 

 apparently did not distinguish between the sounds 

 tl and cj, and gl and dl in English; for he says in 

 his dictionary dear and clean are pronounced tlear and 

 than ; (jlorij as dlorij. Similarly in the Sandwich Islands, | 

 /• and t seem to be conftised. For the same word that 

 Protestant missionaries will write with a /,-, the French ' 

 missionaries will spell with a /. The Hawaian does not I 

 distinguish between /.■ and /, Ic and g, <j and d, t and (7, 

 p and li, I and /■, and the word which in one of its dialects 

 is lioJci, in others is hoi, hela, tea. In Hawaian the English 

 word steel becomes Irila. As an instance of the omission 

 of r and the interchange of f/ and d I have heard 

 children say I'^grjij for cradle. In .such cases it is possible 

 that both the hearing and the vocal organs are at fault, 

 and the same maj- be true of a personal instance 1 can 

 quote. My eldest sister informs me that when I was 

 aboat seventeen months old she tried to teach mc to sing 

 these lines : — 



Farmer went to market, 



Up-a-gee-whoa ! up-a-gee-whoa ! 



But the nearest approach I cotild make to this important 

 jjhrase wr.s. 



Mangy, mangy, mangy, 



Tbbababo, I'bbababo, 



the "ng ' being pronounced as a soft nasal. Thus the 

 rhythm and some of the vowel sounds were caught and 

 reprodxiced ; but the consonants were beyond me. 



The letter / does not exist either in Sanscrit or in 

 the less-cultiv.ited Finnish, and many English children 

 find it difficult to pronounce ; my brother, when a little 

 boy, substituted tli for/, as, thilthy fur filthy, and ap|ia- 

 rently he could not hear the difference between the two 

 sounds, for he always stoutly maintained thp^t he pro- 

 nounced these words rightly ; so much so, indeed, that 

 our first and almost our only quarr^ds were on this point. 

 Children nlso frecjuently substitute t for /.', and also for f, 

 as tat and tittoi for cat and kitten, toottie for foot, in 

 which examiile we also see the tendency' common to 

 many languages to make words end with a vowel. 



In various Japanese, American, inid African dialects I 

 does not exist ; nor is it fotmd in the Cuneiform inscri])- 

 tions, nor in Zend. It is represented by r, n, and even 

 d, as German l:i)id, Anglo-Saxon did, English iDtll, from 

 the Sanscrit -iiiar, to rub. Children sometimes say grass, 

 ritten, dound, for glass, little, round, and such individual 

 jiectiliarities of pronunciation are legion. Conversely 

 from the example given above, th is frequently ehf,nged 

 into / by children and vulgarly, as niifiin for nothing. 

 Childreii not only frequently end their words with added 

 voweLs, but they also insert vowels between two con- 

 sonants, similarly a Hawaian would pronounce cat), calia ; 

 and Appleyard* gives the following Kafir adaptations of 

 English words — hapitizesha, to b.iptise ; igolidc, gold ; 

 inhamela, camel ; ibere, bear ; vmperisite, priest ; iherilce, 

 kirk'; umposile, apo.stle ; isvgile, .sugar ; ama-Ngezi, 

 Engli.sh. 



The tendency to which I have just r^^f erred to imke 

 no distinction between stich sotinds as 7.: and t has led 

 Prof. Max Miillerf to make the following remarks, which 

 are of great interest from a jiliilological point cf view. 

 He says : — 



If colonies started to-morrow from the Hawaian Islands, wliat 

 took place thousands of years ago when the Hindus, Greeks, and 

 Romans left their common home, would take place again. One 

 colony would elaborate the indistinct, half-guttural, hnlf-dental 

 articulation of their ancestors into a pure guttural ; another into a 

 pure dental ; a third into a labial .... without attenuating cir- 

 cumstances. I cannot conceive of a real /; degenerating into /, or 

 t into 2>. I can conceive different definite sounds arising out cf 

 one indelinite sound, and those who have visited the Polynesian 

 Islands describe the fact as taking place at the present day. 



These remarks form a natural introduction to the 

 explanation of Grimm's Law. The phonetic law, which 

 Prof. Mex Miiller was the first to call Grimm's Law, 

 applies to nearly the whole cou.sonantal strticture of the 

 Aryan langtnges. There are three chief points of 

 contact of vocal organs which produce consonants — the 

 guttural h, the dental t, and the labiri p. Each of these 

 may be uttered hard with explosive force, h, t, p, or 

 softly g, d, b, and are liable in certain languages to be 

 aspirated, as in Sanskrit, where the system is complete, 

 and we have M, th, pli, gh, dli, bh. In old Greek the hard 

 aspirated checks \, c {th as in both), and existed, but 

 in later Greek they dwindled down to gh, dh, bh, which 

 do not require so great r.u effort in )ironunci;-tion. In 

 Latin there are no real. aspirates, their places having been 

 taken by the corresjionding breathings h aiul /. Grimnt's 

 Law is a statement of the fact that — 1. If the same 

 roots or words exist in Sanskrit, Greek, L:itin, 

 Celtic, Slavonic, Lithuanian, Gothic, and High- 

 German, then wherever the Hindus and Greeks pro- 

 nounced an aspirate, the Goths and Low Germans 

 generallv, the Saxons, Anglo - Saxons, Frisians, 



» " Kafir Language,' p. 89. 



f "Lectures on the Science of Languase," ed. 1871. 

 pp. 190-200. 



Vol. IL 



