LINGUISTIC DISCUSSIONS. 



By George R. Howell. 



[Read before the Albany Institute, March 28, 1883.] 



I have used the title of this paper as a means of introduction, for 

 your consideration, of some thoughts, mainly on the pronunciation, 

 changes and growth, of the English language. It makes no pretension to 

 a formal treatise, but is rather a collection of notes made during many- 

 years' reading, and as they are connected with our mother tongue, they 

 may be supposed not to be without interest to us all. In a sort of dis- 

 cursive way we shall pluck what fruit best suits our convenience from 

 the broad field of our language and its literature. And first, in this quest 

 of an hour's entertainment, if you please, we will consider some of differ- 

 ing and the unsettled pronunciations in this present stage of the 

 language. It should be laid down dogmatically and categorically as an 

 axiom, that the nation that has a written language should pay some 

 respect to its letters as constant symbols of sound. Formed as the 

 English language is of a low German and a dialect of the French, modi- 

 fied by Scandinavian influences with modern additions from the Latin 

 and Greek, it is more or less subject to the laws that govern the struct- 

 ure and pronunciations of these several languages. Thus from the low 

 German we obtain the broad sound of a as in all *; from the French the 

 short sound of a as in matter. And in many cases we can on this 

 principle refer the origin of the words containing these vowel sounds to 

 their respective source in France or Germany. There is one class of 

 words, those ending in ougli, whose pronunciation cannot be ac- 

 counted for by this method. Bough and rough are both of Saxon ori- 

 gin, and the only apology we can offer a foreigner for the existence of 

 such anomalies is that the spelling of them was begun m times of 

 ignorance. It was the printer, not the mass of readers, nor even of 

 writers, who began to demand uniformity in spelling. And at first 

 even they spelled phonetically with a wide margin, and a given word 

 was apt to masquerade under as many forms as the ingenuity of the 

 printer could devise. These apologies for the irregularities of pro- 

 nunciation may, with a good conscience, be given by the upright man, 

 in a large number of words coming into the language from different 

 national sources, or receiving their external shape in the chaotic or 



• By this I do not mean that the higrh German ^ves to a the sound of that letter in avoe : but 

 that words having that sound in English are of low German origin. 



