136 
On the Letter * r.* 
such forms as plaintz, spiritz, maundementz, in 14*^ century writers, 
and porz— ports in La?. Br., make it highly probable — to say the 
least — that at an earlier period our ancestors sounded this letter like 
ts, as the Germans do now). So here we have this change of r into 
z taking place on a large scale : a considerable portion of the French 
nation by common consent effecting this change. And our observant 
countryman detects them in the act: they do this somtyme." 
May it not be that this somtyme " gradually expanded into all 
way," and then from this z the sound passed — by a sufficiently easy 
transition — into that deep guttural which the Parisians pronounce 
now whenever they name their native city ? Of course it may be 
objected that Palsgrave described the same sound which we now hear 
from a Parisian as a kind of z ; but he does not say " a kind of 
or use any such qualifying phrase ; and he was a man accustomed 
to note pronunciation very closely. Moreover there is at least one 
word in the language which testifies in his favour. From the Greek 
and Latin cathedra comes the French chaier, chayere, chaire. This 
in Palsgrave's time appears to have been the form of the word, and 
from this our chair is derived ; but one pronunciation of the word 
was — so it would seem — chaize, and this form has now driven the 
earlier one altogether out of the French language. Itself only used 
in the sense of pulpit in the latter part of the 17*^ century (see Cot- 
grave), it has now altogether supplanted the older chaire. The ex- 
istence of the word in its present form increases the probability of 
the accuracy of Palsgrave's observation. But if he can be shown to 
be in error, and no z ever existed as a stepping-stone between the 
true sound of r and the present guttural ; the Hebrew language will 
at least furnish a parallel instance in such a pair of words as did 
(m'rat) and toj^D (maghat) = he polished, there not being — so far as 
I am aware — any intermediate form with ^ as the second radical and 
claiming kindred with these two. 
Nor must it be forgotten that this Parisian " burr " is nearly iden- 
tical with, or at least closely akin to, the gutturals still existing in 
German (as in noch, nicht, Tag), and some one or more of which 
once existed in our own tongue. This we know from the orthogra- 
phy itself; for doubtless some sound is represented by the h, hh, ?, 
or gh, in riht, rihht, ry\t, right, since, when the orthography of a 
language is unsettled, it is inconceivable that unpronounced letters 
should habitually be written ; ' and it is notable that in the rhymes of 
Chaucer and of Early English poems generally, these letters play an 
important part, it being a rare exception if a word containing gh 
rhymes with one without gh. Some sound therefore is represented 
by the gh in these words, and it was doubtless a guttural ; and it is 
this sound which is turned into an r in many words in the Devon- 
shire dialect. Nothing can be more erroneous than to suppose that 
we have simply an r inserted in such cases, witness the following : — 
