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English Language
 English Language
Description, Variation and Context
Second Edition
Jonathan Culpeper
Paul Kerswill
Ruth Wodak
Tony McEnery
Francis Katamba
© Jonathan Culpeper, Paul Kerswill, Ruth Wodak, Tony McEnery and Francis Katamba 2009,
2018
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written
permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright
Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This edition first published 2018 by
PALGRAVE
Palgrave in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England,
company number 785998, of 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United
Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978–1–137–57182–3 paperback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to
conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Studying the English Language
Jonathan Culpeper, Ruth Wodak and Paul Kerswill
Part 1 English: Structure
Edited by Jonathan Culpeper
2 Phonetics
Kevin Watson
3 Phonology
Sam Kirkham and Claire Nance
4 Morphology: Word Structure
Francis Katamba
5 Grammar: Words (and Phrases)
Geoffrey Leech
6 Grammar: Phrases (and Clauses)
Geoffrey Leech
7 Grammar: Clauses (and Sentences)
Geoffrey Leech
8 Text Linguistics
Paul Chilton and Christopher Hart
9 Semantics
Daniël Van Olmen and Panos Athanasopoulos
10 Pragmatics
Jonathan Culpeper and Gila A. Schauer
Part 2 English: History
Edited by Jonathan Culpeper
11 Standard English and Standardization
Paul Kerswill and Jonathan Culpeper
12 The History of English Spelling
Jonathan Culpeper and Dawn Archer
13 Phonological Change
Francis Katamba and Paul Kerswill
14 Lexical Change
Sebastian Hoffmann
15 Semantic Change
Willem B. Hollmann
16 Grammatical Change
Willem B. Hollmann
Part 3 English Speech: Regional and Social Variation
Edited by Paul Kerswill
17 Regional Variation in English Accents and Dialects
Kevin Watson
18 Language and Social Class
Paul Kerswill
19 Language and Ethnicity
Arfaan Khan
20 Pidgins and Creole Englishes
Mark Sebba
21 World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca
Mark Sebba and Luke Harding
22 Discourse on Language: Attitudes to Diversity
Johann W. Unger
Part 4 English Writing: Style, Genre and Practice
Edited by Jonathan Culpeper
23 Speech, Writing and Discourse Type
Andrew Wilson
24 Language in Newspapers
Elena Semino
25 Language in Advertisements
Greg Myers
26 Language in Literature: Stylistics
Mick Short
27 Literacy Practices
David Barton and Karin Tusting
28 New Technologies: Literacies in Cyberspace
Uta Papen
Part 5 English: Style, Communication and Interaction
Edited by Ruth Wodak
29 Structures of Conversation
Greg Myers
30 Language, Reality and Power
Norman Fairclough
31 Politeness in Interaction
Jonathan Culpeper and Claire Hardaker
32 Gender and Language
Jane Sunderland
33 Language and Sexuality
Paul Baker
34 Bad Language
Tony McEnery and Robbie Love
35 Language and Politics
 Ruth Wodak
36 Business Communication
Veronika Koller
Part 6 English: Learning and Teaching
Edited by Jonathan Culpeper
37 First Language Acquisition
Andrew Hardie and Silke Brandt
38 Languages and Literacies in Education
Roz Ivanič and Diane Potts
39 TESOL and Linguistics
Martin Bygate
Part 7 English: Investigating
Edited by Jonathan Culpeper
40 The Corpus Method
Vaclav Brezina and Dana Gablasova
41 Methods for Researching English language
Tineke Brunfaut and Alison Sealey

Appendix: The IPA Chart

Bibliography
Index
Preface to the Second Edition
Further editions are a wonderful opportunity – an
opportunity to make things even better than they were the
first time around. In this task, we have been assisted by
feedback from generations of students and also a bevy of
conscien-tious reviewers. I cannot thank them enough. This
second edition preserves the key features of the first: a
particular vision about what the study of the English
language encompasses; accessibility for first year
undergraduate readers upwards; an infusion of cutting edge
research; and attention to fields of enquiry that have come to
prominence in only recent decades. We have been able to
boost quality by making innumerable additions, and even in
some cases rewriting entire chapters. Moreover, we have
plugged some holes observed in the first edition. Foremost
among these was the deficit regarding methods. Hence, in
this second edition, two chapters are devoted specifically to
that.
Regarding people, we have enriched the volume further
with new expertise from the Department of Linguistics and
English Language at Lancaster University. New chapter
authors include (in order of appearance): Sam Kirkham,
Claire Nance, Christopher Hart, Daniël Van Olmen, Panos
Athanasopoulos, Luke Harding, Johnny Unger, Karin Tusting,
Claire Hardaker, Robbie Love, Silke Brandt, Diane Potts,
Vaclav Brezina, Dana Gablasova, Alison Sealey and Tineke
Brunfaut. The editorial team has changed too. I have led the
entire enterprise. Ruth Wodak and Paul Kerswill continued to
edit their original sections, and of course revised the
chapters which they had written or co-written. The others,
Tony McEnery and Francis Katamba, stepped down as
editors of this second edition, though I retained their names
on the cover in recognition of their contribution to the first
edition. John Heywood, who played a part in tidying up the
bibliography of the first edition, has acted as a trusty
assistant, deploying his eagle-eyes in spotting micro
problems in various chapters and culling items from the
chapters to bolster the index. Finally I would like to thank
Paul Stevens for his enthusiasm for this second edition (in
fact, it had been his idea), Cathy Scott for helping smooth the
journey towards its publication, and Georgia Park for her
super-efficient and helpful oversight of the closing
production phase.
JONATHAN C ULPEPER

Lancaster University, 2017

Acknowledgements
The authors and publisher wish to thank the following for
permission to use copyright material:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd., for the figure ‘Regional Varieties
of English’ in The Dialects of England, 2nd edition, by Peter
Trudgill (Blackwell: Oxford, 1999).
Brad Shorr and Word Sell Inc., for the cartoon ‘Fire Hydrant
and Mailbox’ © Word Sell Inc./ Brad Shorr.
British Museum, for an image of The Franks Casket © British
Museum.
Cambridge University Press, for permission to use the
following tables and figures: ‘The Phases of the GVS’ from
‘Phonology and morphology’ by Roger Lass, in A History of
the English Language, edited by Richard Hogg and David
Denison (2006); ‘Vowels in Received Pronunciation, Popular
London and Cockney showing the Diphthong Shift in
Cockney’ and ‘Wells’s (1982) lexical sets’ in Accents of
English, by John C. Wells (1982); ‘The Variable by Class and
Style in Norwich’ in The Social Differentiation of English in
Norwich, by Peter Trudgill (1974); Figure 5.1 from J.
Cheshire, P. Kerswill and A. Williams, ‘Phonology, grammar
and discourse in dialect convergence’, in Dialect Change:
Convergence and Divergence in European Languages, edited
by Peter Auer, Frans Kinskens and Paul Kerswill (2005).
Carcanet Press Ltd., for the poem ‘Flying Crooked’, by
Robert Graves, in Complete Poems in One Volume, edited by
Patrick Quinn (Carcanet Poetry, 2000).
Fallon London and Skoda Auto UK, for kind permission to
reproduce the text of the advertisement ‘The Climb’
(Director: Martin Krejci, Writer: Emma Thomas and Agency:
Fallon London, 2017).
Getty/ Pool Interagences, for the image ‘Leaders from the
European Union (EU) and Mediterranean States are
Gathering in the Spanish City of Barcelona on Sunday for a
Two-Day Euromed Summit in Barcelona, Spain on November
28 2005’.
Guardian News and Media Ltd., for the article entitled
‘Bullied teacher wins £230,000’, by Rebecca Smithers,
published 5 October 2002 © Guardian News and Media Ltd.
2002.
International Phonetic Association, for the IPA Chart © 2015
International Phonetic Association
(wwww.internationalphoneticassociation.org).
John Benjamins Publishing Company, for permission to use
the following figures: ‘Concrete elements of a linguistic
market’ and ‘The formation, adaptation and generation
process of the habitus’, both from The Discursive
Construction of the Scots Language, by Johann Unger
(2013).
Merriam-Webster Inc., for the entry ‘shlumpadinka’ from the
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary © 2008 by Merriam-
Webster, Incorporated (www.merriam-webster.com).
Sage, for the table ‘Discursive strategies for positive self-
and negative other- representation’ from ‘The discourse-
historical approach’, by Reisigl and Wodak, in Methods of
Critical Discourse Studies, 2nd edition, edited by R. Wodak
and M. Meyer (London: Sage, 2009).
Taylor and Francis, for the table ‘The use of ain’t for auxiliary
verbs be and have’ from J. Cheshire, Dialects of English:
Studies in Grammatical Variation, edited by P. Trudgill and J.
Chambers (New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 54-73.
Telegraph Media Group Ltd., for the article entitled ‘Actors
say they are alarmed by obsession with regional accents’, by
Chris Hastings in The Daily Telegraph, 31 October 2004.
United Syndication Incorporated, for the ‘Peanuts’ cartoon
strip © 1971 United Syndication Inc.
Introduction
CHAPTER 1

Studying the English Language

JONATHAN CULPEPER, RUTH WODAK AND PAUL KERSWILL
What does the study of the English language involve? Any
book on the English language must address this question, as
the answer will determine its contents. This, however, is a
very tricky question to answer. A glance at the contents lists
of other books on the English language will find variation,
and sometimes quite dramatic variation. Perhaps it may
seem self-evident and unproblematic to you that studying the
English language is simply that – studying any aspect of the
English language. However, ‘the English language’ is not in
itself a neatly identifiable entity: what counts as English is
not straightforward. Consider the view, ‘English is the
language of England’. As we shall see in this book, the roots
of English are not in England at all, but in the old dialects of
what is now north-western Germany. Once it became
established in Britain, it was relatively restricted
geographically: in the sixteenth century there were
approximately 3 million speakers of English, nearly all
indeed based in England. However, today there are well over
300 million native speakers of English, not to mention a
further 300 million regularly speaking it as a second
language (i.e., in addition to their native language), and the
huge number of people learning it as a foreign language,
mainly to communicate with other non-native speakers of
English (there are more Chinese people learning English
than there are native speakers of English in the United
States!). Thus, most English is produced, heard and read
outside England. Take the example of the Egyptian airline
pilot landing at Frankfurt airport in Germany, and talking to
air traffic control in English. For that pilot, English is the
language used for communication in that context – it has
nothing to do with England (except for its distant historical
connection). English has emerged as a global lingua franca,
that is, a language used throughout the world as a means of
facilitating communication between speakers of different
languages. Consider the view, ‘English has a common core of
words and structures that are recognized as being English’.
In fact, not everybody would recognize the same things as
being English, something which we will discuss and illustrate
in Chapter 11. One might appeal to some notion such as
Standard English, claiming it represents the common core.
However, most English is spoken: accents vary and, in a
global perspective, they vary widely. At best we can say that
certain groups of English accents tend to share certain
features. And there is the issue of what is meant by
‘standard’. Appeals to such notions frequently slide from talk
of a uniform set of features to talk of a set of features which
a particular group considers best. For example, while it may
indeed be possible to identify a set of standard grammatical
and spelling features for British written English, that set
would not be the same for American written English. So,
which Standard English should we follow? Answers to that
question typically involve the social evaluation of language
(e.g., British people tend to think that the British ‘standard’
is ‘best’).
To study anything requires that there be an object to study.
If we cannot agree about what constitutes English, how can
we study it? The answer is simply to accept that there are
various views as to what counts as English. Although there is
often considerable agreement within these views, flowing
from them are different conceptions as to the boundaries of
English, how the language is constituted, and also how we
might study it. These views fall into three groups, the second
of which contains a number of notable subgroups (our use of
the word ‘English’ below denotes a language that might be
labelled as such by a community of people):
1 The folk view. In fact, we have already touched on folk
views about English in our first paragraph. There, we
expressed beliefs about English in quotation marks. Many
such beliefs have a prescriptive quality – they are beliefs
about how English should be. For example, people tend to
believe that English pronunciation, or at least the best
English pronunciation, should reflect spelling. As we shall
see in Chapters 2 and 12, nobody speaks English in a way
which corresponds with spelling in a simple manner: even
Queen Elizabeth II herself would not pronounce the <d> of
the word and in the phrase ‘fish and chips’, and it is in fact
speakers of less prestigious regional accents (in England, at
least) who would pronounce the <r> in words like sort.
Studying English from the point of view of folk beliefs and
‘correctness’ not only involves examining the truth of a
particular belief (i.e., whether it is a myth), but also
considers the real effects that having that belief in the first
place can have on the language, its social contexts and the
people who speak it. We will do this at various points in this
book.
2 The academic views. These can be considered under four
headings:
• The comparative view. In this perspective, any study
that reveals similarities or differences between English
and another language can contribute to an understanding
of how it is constituted (i.e., its distinctive nature). Many
studies focus on formal structures (e.g., the grammar,
semantics and phonology) of English in comparison with
those of other languages, but it is also possible to study
the use of language in English-speaking countries or
cultures and contrast it with the use of language
elsewhere (contrasting, for example, how people are
‘polite’ in different languages and cultures).
• The variational view. In this perspective, any study that
considers the nature of the varieties of English can
contribute to an understanding of how it is constituted.
Such varieties can be distinguished synchronically (i.e.,
how they vary at one point in time – for example, how
they make up different accents or written genres) or
diachronically (how they vary over time, thus feeding
into the history of English). It is worth noting here that
English, as with other languages, is made up of its own
distinctive varieties, especially spoken varieties (e.g.,
accents), and has its own distinctive history.
• The structural view. In this perspective, any study that
considers the nature of the specific structures (e.g.,
words, sounds) of English can contribute to an
understanding of how it is constituted. This view is a
relatively weak view of the study of English in the sense
that some of the phenomena discussed may also be
characteristics of other languages. Thus, for example, a
study of nouns using English data (perhaps for reasons of
convenience) may reveal certain characteristics of English
nouns, but it may well be the case that at least some of
those characteristics are shared with other languages. In
this respect, this view differs from the comparative view.
• The social (context) view. In this perspective, any study
that considers the nature of the specific social contexts in
which English occurs (and with which it interacts) can
contribute to an understanding of how English is
constituted. Here, the focus is on the use of English and
its associated social contexts, including both how English
is shaped by the social contexts and how English shapes
social contexts. For example, there are linguistic
differences which relate to the formality of a situation (a
job interview vs. family chat) and the roles speakers have
(the defendant vs. the judge). As speakers, we can
completely change the context through our choice of
words – for example, the decision to swear could reduce
formality (and have other far-reaching consequences).
This view is also a relatively weak view of the study of
English in the sense that some of the social and
interactive phenomena discussed may also be the same
for other languages.
3 The educational view. For millions of people around the
world, studying English does not mean enhancing one’s
abstract understanding of English, as with academic views,
but enhancing one’s ability to put it into practice – to speak
it, write it and understand it. ‘It’ here, as propagated in
textbooks and educational materials, is usually a standard
written English and a prestigious accent (e.g., received
pronunciation). Enhancing readers’ abilities in this way is not
the prime focus of this book. However, it is important to note
that a further academic perspective pertains here, namely,
studying the teaching and learning of English, particularly,
but not exclusively, in educational contexts. We will address
this area in the final section of this book.
All the above views overlap. Note, for example, that the
academic study of folk views could be considered a
subcategory of the social (context) view. Our book does not
espouse one particular view, but embraces all of them. That
way, we hope that our understanding of English is enriched.
Where does English language study take place? Addressing
this question can help reveal other things about the subject.
In the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand, it
typically takes place in departments of English, English
literature, linguistics, or linguistics and English language; in
other countries, it also appears in departments of English
linguistics or English philology. These labels reflect two
pertinent issues. The first issue concerns a terminological
problem: does the word ‘English’ encompass English
literature, English language or both? Some departments
labelled ‘English’ are relatively little concerned with
language, focusing mainly on English literature in terms of
literary theory. This does not mean simply analysing a certain
body of texts, but considering who wrote them, who they are
written for, the social and political contexts in which they
were written, and so on. There is no denying that English
literature is worth studying, if only on the grounds that the
works studied are generally considered to have cultural
value. However, English literature accounts for only a
relatively small proportion of the language that people
consider to be English – it can hardly represent the English
language as a whole. The language of English literature is
represented in this volume (see Chapter 26), as are the many
other varieties that comprise the English language.
The second issue concerns the relationship between
English and linguistics. Linguistics, in its broadest definition,
is the study of language or languages, along with phenomena
pertinent to language(s). So, linguistics as a discipline is
clearly broader than the study of English language. Most
obviously, it is not primarily focused on language that people
would label English. Moreover, it is focused on the
fundamental – and in some cases perhaps even universal –
mechanisms of language, often drawing theoretical backing
from cognitive or social sciences. Consider, for example, the
fact that research has revealed that bilinguals store the
lexical inventories of the languages they speak in different
parts of the brain. This runs counter to what one might
imagine to be a more efficient arrangement, whereby
particular concepts (e.g., a ‘table’) are straightforwardly
‘hot-wired’ to one ‘lexicon’ (or dictionary) containing all the
possible words (in the languages known to the particular
speaker) for each concept. This fact in itself has no particular
bearing on the nature of English, or indeed any other specific
language: it is an insight into a general linguistic mechanism.
Having said that, to study the English language is also to
study a language. In our view, it is impossible to study the
English language without also doing linguistics. We need to
be aware of how language works in general, and we need to
be able to evaluate our frameworks and tools for language
analysis in particular, if we are going to investigate a
language and in particular to address the issue of why it is as
it is. We should stress that we are not attempting to cover all
of linguistics as a discipline, but rather we emphasize areas
of linguistics pertinent to the study of the English language.

The upcoming chapters

The chapters are organized under seven major headings. The
first group appears under ‘English: Structure’. This section
includes many of the traditional areas of linguistics relating
to, for example, English phonology, grammar and semantics.
One of the functions of these chapters in Part 1 is to provide
you with a basis in language description, which will set you
up for later chapters in the book that draw upon aspects of
that description. The second group, Part 2 under ‘English:
History’, addresses diachronic variation in English; in other
words, the history of English. This is organized according to
linguistic area, rather than periods in the history of English,
for the reason that this better suits the focus of this book.
The following two groups of chapters appear under ‘English
Speech: Regional and Social Variation’ in Part 3 and ‘English
Writing: Style, Genre and Practice’ in Part 4. These focus on
synchronic variation in English. The chapters dealing with
genre and practice pave the way for a transition to Part 5
and the next group of chapters, which appear under ‘English:
Style, Communication and Interaction’. Here, the focus is on
the use of English in social context(s). The penultimate group
of chapters, in Part 6 under ‘English: Learning and
Teaching’, considers the learning and teaching of English,
both outside and inside educational contexts. The final group
of chapters, in Part 7 under ‘English: Investigating’, focuses
on the methods we need to research English.
The chapters are written so that they should be
understandable by a first year undergraduate, but there is
plenty of potential for the content of the chapters to support
courses pitched at more senior undergraduates, or even as
preliminary steps for postgraduates, to whom the research-
led nature of the chapters should appeal. With a few
exceptions, each chapter has the same structure. In
particular, chapters typically conclude on a more research-
oriented note. Each chapter contains one or more boxes,
which may be of two kinds. Advances Boxes are like an
aside. If you decided to skip them, the rest of the text would
still make perfect sense. They are pitched at a somewhat
higher-level readership, or at least contain a particularly
close focus that you would not expect in an introductory text.
They are designed to give readers a sense of controversies
and debates, complications and problems, further research,
and so on. Illustration Boxes contain extended examples
(or a set of shorter examples), additional examples (plus,
optionally, some analysis of them), and sometimes further
elaboration on an issue. Each chapter ends with some
recommendations for further readings. Regarding
terminology, technical terms are emboldened at their first
mention, where you will also find a definition, description or
discussion of the term. All these terms are included in the
index.
 PART 1

English: Structure
EDITED BY JONATHAN CULPEPER
CHAPTER 2

Phonetics
KEVIN WATSON
2.1 Introduction
One of the first things we human beings do when we are
born is make noise, and we rarely stop. As soon as we begin
to master our native language, we turn our gurgles and cries
into meaningful utterances and begin to talk. It is fitting,
then, that we begin this book about the English language by
exploring the primary medium through which humans
communicate: speech. The study of speech belongs in the
branch of linguistics called phonetics. Phoneticians study
how speech sounds are produced by speakers and perceived
by listeners, and how sound travels through the air. In this
chapter, we will focus on speech production, by situating
ourselves in the realm of articulatory phonetics. An
understanding of how speech works is crucial for many
aspects of English language study. For example, before we
can understand how sounds pattern together in English and
in other languages, or investigate how speech varies across
different regions of a country, or think about how speech is
different from writing, we must have a thorough
understanding of what speech is, how it works and how we
can describe it. Furthermore, an understanding of speech
production is also vital to many professional applications of
linguistics. Speech therapists, for example, cannot diagnose
and treat patients with speech difficulties without a detailed
knowledge of the workings of the vocal tract, speech
technologists working in spoken language recognition cannot
make computers interact with human talkers without
understanding how the speech signal travels through the air,
and forensic phoneticians cannot pass judgement on issues
of speaker identity in criminal cases without an
understanding of how speech varies. Knowledge of phonetics
is the cornerstone of these activities.
The main aim of this chapter is to provide the background
and technical terminology necessary to understand how
speech is made and how linguists describe it. By
investigating how the consonants and vowels of English are
articulated, we will see exactly why speech has been called
‘the most highly skilled muscular activity that human beings
ever achieve’ (Laver, 1994: 1). Readers should note that the
Appendix of this book contains a comprehensive display of
phonetic symbols, as produced by the International
Phonetics Association (IPA). This IPA chart is not for the
beginner; instead, this chapter will provide introductory lists,
and we will build on those in the following two chapters.
However, the chart puts together all that we use and more. It
may also prove useful for those wishing to explore other
languages.

2.1.1 Making and hearing noise

All noise travels through the air to the human ear in the
same way. When noise is generated, air particles close to its
source vibrate. These particles nudge neighbouring particles,
which nudge neighbouring ones, and so on, until they run out
of energy and stop vibrating. The vibrations are picked up by
the human eardrum and perceived as sound. When someone
talks, the air particles close to the mouth vibrate, and affect
neighbouring particles, and this chain is eventually picked up
by a listener.
Sounds are perceived differently according to how the air
particles vibrate. If you were to blow a stream of air across
the top of an empty milk bottle, for example, you would
produce a sound with a fairly low pitch. Fill the milk bottle
half full with water and do the same, however, and the pitch
would be higher. Each time, the source – the stream of air –
is exactly the same, but the space in which the air vibrates is
a different shape. Speech production works on the same
principles. Speech sounds differ when the space inside the
mouth differs. For example, dentists typically ask patients to
‘say aahh’. This ensures the patient’s tongue moves to the
lower back region of their mouth and creates lots of space
further forward. If a dentist asked a patient to ‘say eee’, the
tongue would be further forward and this would create a
much smaller space in the mouth, generating a different
sound (and also, unhelpfully for the dentist, obstructing the
teeth).
In order to be able to understand and describe how the
shape inside the mouth changes during the production of
sounds, we must examine the workings of the vocal
apparatus used in speech production. We begin to do this in
the next section.

2.1.2 The human vocal tract

Studying phonetics requires you to get intimate with your
vocal tract – the parts of the body used for producing speech.
You will already be perfectly familiar with some of these
parts, but others will be new to you. We will take each part in
turn, starting from the front of the mouth where you will find
the more familiar pieces of your anatomy.
Figure 2.1 illustrates the parts of the vocal tract we will
consider here. First, right at the front of the mouth, we have
the lips. The lower lip moves upwards and downwards
according to the movement of the lower jaw. Next are the
teeth. The teeth near the very front of the mouth are used in
speech production but, of course, the teeth extend further
back along the sides of the mouth too. Moving further back,
we start to reach the parts of the vocal tract that cannot
easily be seen without a mirror. Try putting the tip of your
tongue at the front of your mouth, so that it is touching the
back of your top teeth. Move it slowly backwards, so that it
strokes the roof of your mouth as it goes. Quite soon, before
you move your tongue very far, you will feel a hard bump,
which, when you move over it, will feel like your tongue is
going down a hill and rolling onto the roof of your mouth.
This bump is the alveolar ridge. Continuing to move the tip
of your tongue backwards, you will feel what most people
know as the roof of the mouth. This is the hard area behind
the alveolar ridge, which is called the hard palate. It is
slightly curved, and you can feel this curve as you move your
tongue over it. If you move the tip of your tongue even
further back, beyond the hard palate, you will suddenly feel a
patch of soft tissue. This is the velum (it is also called the
soft palate). Further back from the velum is the uvula, a
fleshy cone-shaped pendulum which stops bits of food going
up the nose during swallowing and is also used for speech.
Next is what most people call ‘the throat’: the pharynx. The
top of the pharynx, near the velum, splits into the oral cavity
(the mouth) and the nasal cavities (the nose). The velum
acts like a valve to control the flow of air into the nasal
cavity. When the velum is raised, it blocks access to the nose
and air is directed into the mouth. When the velum is
lowered, air is free to enter the nasal passages. Near the
bottom of the pharynx is the larynx, made of cartilage,
muscle and tissue. The front part of the larynx, which is
usually more protruded in males than females, is sometimes
called the ‘Adam’s apple’. Inside the larynx are the vocal
folds (or vocal cords), which are ligament-covered
membranes that open and close to modify the size of the
space between them (which is called the glottis). The vocal
folds act to modulate air as it is pushed out from the lungs.
We will revisit the larynx in some detail in Section 2.2.

FIGURE 2.1 The human vocal tract

We have left until last the most mobile of all articulators –

the tongue. In phonetics, the tongue is usually divided up
into a number of sections, as Figure 2.2 shows.
The tongue root is furthest back, opposite the pharynx.
Further forward is the back of the tongue, which can make
contact with the velum. Then we have the front of the
tongue, approximately under the hard palate. The blade of
the tongue, also called the lamina, sits between the front and
the tip, also called the apex, which is furthest forward. We
will revisit these terms in Section 2.2, and see that particular
parts of the tongue are involved in making particular sounds.

2.1.3 Writing speech down

In Section 2.1.1, we encountered the sound that dentists
often ask patients to make, which was written as ‘aahh’. It
should be obvious that writing down the sound in this way is
not very helpful because it is not very accurate and is open to
interpretation. Indeed, using the conventions of English
spelling to record pronunciation is fraught with problems.
One such problem is that the same speech sound can be
spelled in a number of different ways. For example, the first
sound of the word fish is [f], which is straightforwardly
spelled with the letter <f>. However, consider the words
affect and bluff, which have one [f] sound each, but are
spelled with not one but two <f> letters. Furthermore,
consider the words cough and trough or Phillip and graph,
which all have [f] sounds in their pronunciation but no letter
<f> in their spelling. Another problem is that the same letter
or combination of letters can represent different sounds. For
example, in the word cough the letters <gh> represent the
[f] sound. However, in the word ‘ghost’, the same letters
represent the [ɡ] sound. Plenty more examples abound in
English: compare the words script and receipt – in the
former the letters <pt> are pronounced as the sounds [pt],
but in the latter the [p] sound is missing.

FIGURE 2.2 The tongue

 Another problem is related to English speakers rather than
English spelling. Take, for example, the words finger and
singer. Everyone pronounces the word finger with a [ɡ]
sound in the middle and, if you come from the north of
England, singer may be pronounced in this way too.
However, if you come from the south of England, singer will
probably not have a [ɡ] sound. Of course, when you write
singer and finger, the letter <g> is always present. This is
because spoken English is highly variable, for a variety of
reasons, including regional accent (see Chapter 17).
However, written English, on the whole, does not vary to the
same degree, because it is governed by the rules of standard
spelling (see Chapter 12).
These complications mean we cannot rely on the spelling
system when we are trying to represent a speaker’s
pronunciation. In linguistics, another system is used to
represent the sounds of language: the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA consists of a range of
symbols – some similar to ordinary letters and some more
distinct – which allow us to write down sounds accurately.
The main principle behind the IPA is that one symbol
represents one sound. This means that, unlike in English
spelling, whenever a particular symbol is used it always
represents the same speech sound. In the case of finger vs.
singer above, we can say that if you are from the north of
England you might pronounce finger as [fɪŋɡə] and singer as
[sɪŋɡə], in each case pronouncing [ɡ]. But if you are from the
south of England, you might pronounce finger as [fɪŋɡə],
with [ɡ], but singer as [sɪŋə], with no [ɡ].

ILLUSTRATION BOX 2.1

What’s a ghoti?
One of the most well-known examples of the problematic nature of English
spelling, often attributed to the playwright George Bernard Shaw, is the fact
that the word fish could reasonably be spelt <ghoti>. This works because the
<f> of fish sounds the same as the <gh> in cough, the <i> is the same as the
<o> in women, and the <sh> is the same as the <ti> in motion. We can show
this more clearly using symbols from the IPA:
 As you will see in the examples above, there is a
convention in linguistics to use angle brackets < > when
referring to letters. In phonetics, square brackets [ ] are used
to distinguish letters from speech sounds. Thus, we can say
that although the words rice and pass end with different
letters, <ce> and <ss>, they are spoken with the same final
sound, [s]. Throughout this chapter, where appropriate, we
will continue to represent IPA symbols using square
brackets.

2.2 Initiating speech

We saw in Section 2.1.1 that noise is generated by
manipulating a flow of air. The first thing we must do when
we talk, then, is initiate the airflow. To do this, we breathe in,
and then we slowly exhale as we speak. This initiates a
pulmonic airstream, so called because it begins in the
lungs. The airstream makes its way through the larynx and
towards the nose and mouth. The outwards direction of the
airflow means it is called egressive. The egressive pulmonic
airstream is used for speech in all languages of the world,
and English is no exception. For a good discussion of other
airstream mechanisms, see Rogers (2000: 251–60) and Laver
(1994: ch. 6).
When the air has left the lungs, the first obstacles it hits
are the larynx and vocal cords, and in the remainder of this
section we will examine their roles.

2.2.1 Voicing
When the air from the lungs reaches the larynx, it is affected
in different ways according to the size of the glottis (which,
recalling Section 2.1.2, is the name given to the space in-
between the vocal folds). If the glottis is open, meaning the
vocal folds are wide apart, air can flow freely from the lungs
up towards the mouth. This is the case for normal breathing.
It is also the case for speech sounds such as the first ones in
see, she and fee, which are called voiceless sounds. If the
glottis is narrow, meaning the vocal folds are close together,
the airflow forces its way through the gap and causes the
vocal folds to knock together and vibrate. You can feel this
vibration if you put your fingers on your Adam’s apple and
say ‘aahh’ (and compare it, for example, with a long ‘sss’
sound, in which there will be no vibration). Sounds produced
when the vocal folds are vibrating are called voiced sounds.
The different positions of the vocal folds for voiceless and
voiced sounds are shown in Figure 2.3.

FIGURE 2.3 The position of the vocal folds for breathing and the
production of voiceless sounds (left) and for the production of voiced
sounds (right)

2.2.2 Pitch
Each voice quality described above was a result of the type
of constriction in the glottis. The larynx has another function
which is not related to the type of constriction, but instead to
how fast the vocal folds vibrate: the creation of pitch. When
the vocal folds vibrate quickly, they produce a high pitch.
Conversely, when the vocal folds vibrate slowly, a low pitch is
produced. Pitch is also connected to the size of the larynx.
For example, on the whole, the male larynx is larger than
that of the female, and one result of this is that male
speakers typically have a lower pitch than female speakers.
ADVANCES BOX 2.1

The vocal folds and voice quality

As well as being wide apart and close together, the vocal folds have a
number of intermediate states which can be used to modify what is called a
speaker’s voice quality. Three quite common voice qualities in English
are: whisper, creaky voice and breathy voice.
You probably already know what the voice quality of ‘whisper’ is like. It is
Exploring the Variety of Random
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approaching to tones, or as irregular vibrations, nearly, yet not quite, changed into regular or
isochronous vibrations.”[150]
The number of possible vowel-sounds is almost infinite. The vocal chamber of resonance is almost
infinitely variable in the forms it may assume, and it is in these forms, as we have seen, that we must
find the origin of the vowels and their nuances of sound. In Prince L.-L. Bonaparte’s alphabet, as given
in Mr. A. J. Ellis’s “Early English Pronunciation,” seventy-five vowel-sounds (exclusive of ḷ and ṛ) are
distinguished from one another, ten of which occur in no actual language, and of the remaining sixty-
five, fifty occur each in less than nine European dialects. For practical purposes, however, it is necessary
to analyze the formation of those vowels only which are heard most usually in spoken language, always
remembering that the nuances of which these are capable are nearly unlimited, and that the same
speaker is constantly varying what he intends and believes to be the same vowel-sound. Speaking
generally, we may say that in pronouncing the vowels we invariably raise the tongue towards the palate,
but not so as to touch it—as in the case of the consonants—the lips being passive in some instances,
and rounded in others. It is needless to note that in phonology, as in all other departments of the
science of language, the Italian pronunciation of the vowels must be adopted. Our erroneous
pronunciation of the vowel-symbols is not one of the least important reasons for urging a reform of
English spelling.
The three fundamental vowels, round which all the others group themselves, are a, i, and u; and
though it is not necessary to hold that these were the first vowel-sounds articulated by man, it is
necessary to regard them, for analytical purposes, as the primary elements to which the rest may be
ultimately referred. According to Winteler, these three vowels must be arranged in a straight line, of
which i forms one end and u the other, a standing in the middle.
In forming a the tongue is in a more constrained position than in the case of any other vowel; it lies
flat and retracted, while the lips are wide open. Helmholtz makes its inherent tone b″ flat. Owing to the
constrained position of the tongue, this vowel is more liable to be modified than any other; the “neutral”
a is scarcely ever heard, produced as it is by the gradual narrowing of the movement of the tongue
from the back of the mouth, where the obscure a of father is heard, to the front of the mouth, where
we get the broad ä of pair. This neutral a which may be heard in the Italian ămātă is not the “natural”
sound it is sometimes called; different parts of the mouth must be modified to create it, occasioning the
nasal sound we perceive in moaning if the mouth remains passive, or the shrill ä of the new-born child,
if the nasal orifice is closed by the elevation of the soft palate.[151] The belief that language was once in
a stage in which the neutral a was the only vowel known is contradicted by the facts of phonology.
A stronger effort of articulation is required for i and u. The lips must be slightly opened, the larynx
raised, and the tongue pushed upward, so that its front approaches the hard palate, if we want to
produce i, the natural pitch of which is said to be d⁗. The movement of the tongue from the back to the
front of the mouth, with a gradual narrowing of the air passage, forms both the i of mill, and the i of
meal.[152] As we shall see, the position of the tongue in forming i approaches that required for forming
the palatals, and thus explains the relationship that exists between them. For u the tongue is raised
towards the soft palate, the larynx lowered, and the lips rounded; hence the connection between this
vowel and the labials. Its connection with the gutturals, as illustrated by the change of werra into
guerre, or vespa into guêpe, is explained by the position of the tongue, which approaches the soft
palate in forming u, and touches it in forming k or g. The rounded shape of the mouth needed by u, as
compared with its narrow neck-like appearance needed by i, strengthens the deep partial tones, and
dulls the sharp ones, thus occasioning the converse effect of i. In fact, u is essentially the vowel of the
bass, i of the soprano. The inherent tone of u is f.
It is obvious that an almost endless series of modifications may be made in the primary vowels by
slight changes in the position of the organs by which they are produced. Between a and i stands e;
between i and u, o. In pronouncing e the tongue is less raised than in pronouncing i; for o, the back of
the tongue is less raised and the lips more widely opened than for u. In o, however, as in u, the lips
have to come into play; hence it is that these two sounds are so frequently weakened to e and i,
whereas the converse change never takes place. In e and i we have a simple and not a double action.
According to Helmholtz, the inherent pitch of o is b′ flat, of e, b‴ flat or f′.
But e and o may again undergo considerable change. If while pronouncing close e (as in the French
été or German see) we round the lips, the sound is produced which is represented by ö in Middle and
Southern German and eu in French, the short sound of which may be heard in the German böcke. It
lies, it will be observed, between e and o, and its inherent pitch is c‴ sharp. Closely related to this ö is
the German ü, French u. This sound is produced by rounding the lips when the organs of speech are in
position for pronouncing i, which explains the use of ü and i as rhyming equivalents in German poetry. Ü
consequently lies between i and u, though, from another point of view, it may be described as standing
furthest from a in a series of which ö forms the centre. The inherent pitch of ü is g‴.
Besides o, we have also the sound heard long in words like bought or aúgust, and short in words like
not and augúst, formed by slightly depressing the tongue, widening the air-passage, and rounding the
lips to a less extent than in the case of o.
Other vowel-sounds which may be noticed are the e of the French prêtre, German väter, whose
natural pitch is made g″ or d‴, the closely related open e (ä) of the English pair, the short a of English
closed syllables like hat or happy, the short e of the English men, and the short i of the English hit, pill.
These short vowels are in great measure due to the little use made of the lips in articulation, and the
compensatory exercise of the tongue, which characterize modern English. It is small wonder that we
experience so much difficulty in pronouncing ö and ü, when even our u is uttered with lips scarcely at
all rounded. On the other hand, whenever we find these sounds in a language, we may conclude that
we have to do with a speech which gives the lips their full share in articulation. Sievers would call those
vowels passive in which all the organs of speech needed for their clear pronunciation are not brought
into play, fully pronounced vowels being termed active.[153]
The same lazy pronunciation of cultivated English which has almost dispensed with the service of the
lips is the cause of the increasing preponderance of the so-called neutral vowel heard in such words as
but, virtue, dove, bird, oven. Except in affected pronunciation we may detect it in most unaccented
syllables, especially if they happen to be final; thus we have diligĕnce, muttŏn, ăgainst, finăl, evĭl,
valuăblĕ. So, too, as Professor Max Müller remarks, “town sinks to Paddingtŏn, ford to Oxfŏrd.” He
believes it to be pronounced with non-sonant or whispered breath.[154] Mr. A. J. Ellis would make it
voice in its least modified form; and Mr. Sweet regards it as a mere voice-glide. The “indistinct” vowel
heard in Arabic words by travellers seems to be identical with it. Its existence in a language is a sign of
age and decay; meaning has become more important than outward form, and the educated intelligence
no longer demands a clear pronunciation in order to understand what is said. The participation of all the
organs of speech in the creation of vowel-sounds is, on the contrary, a mark of linguistic freshness and
youth. When we find both tongue and lips equally active in the formation of u and i, we may feel pretty
sure that we are in the presence of an uncultivated dialect. Vowels formed by combining the position of
the tongue required for u with that of the lips required for i are extremely rare in Aryan speech; an
exceptional instance is to be met with in the Russian jery (y).
But we must never forget the infinite capability of modification possessed by a vowel. The same
vowel-sound of the same word is not only apt to be pronounced differently by two natives of the same
country, but even by the speaker himself at different times, particularly if his attention has been
directed to his pronunciation of the sound in question. It is true that the shades of difference between
the sounds may be so fine as to escape all but the specially trained ear; but this does not prove them to
be any the less real. Putting aside quantity, accent, emphasis, or accidental alteration in the vocal
organs, it is difficult to pronounce the same word twice over in exactly the same way, so far, at least, as
its vowels are concerned. It is not wonderful, therefore, that it is in their vowels that dialects soonest
and most easily alter, and that the vowel-system is the best guide in mapping out the several stages in
the history of a language. Of course the character of a vowel-sound is materially affected by its position
in a word, or by the consonants with which it is associated; the pronunciation of the same vowel varies
in a closed or an open syllable. Long and short vowels, too, differ not only quantitatively, but
qualitatively also. Every vowel has both its own peculiar pitch and a pitch dependent on the length of
the vocal chords. The peculiar pitch is the result of the resonance-chamber in which the vowel is
formed. The high pitch of i is due to the narrow air-passage in the front of the mouth in which it is
produced, while the lowered pitch of a and u is caused in the one case by the greater size of the
resonance-chamber, and in the other by the narrow opening of the lips. The same pitch may be
produced by different modifications of the same resonance-chamber. Thus the French eu in fleur,
produced by slightly raising the front part of the tongue and rounding the lips, has the same pitch as
the English e in err, produced without any rounding of the lips at all.
But we have not yet finished with the vowels. The mouth is not the only agent concerned with their
production. Brücke[155] asserts that the bones of the skull itself participate in the vibration caused by
the utterance of the high-pitched vowels. However this may be, the larynx, the posterior wall of the
pharynx, and the velum pendulum, or soft palate, with the uvula attaching to it, have all to do with the
creation of vowel-sounds. Czermak has proved by experiment that the velum pendulum changes its
place with each vowel that is uttered, rising successively for the pronunciation of a, e, o, u, and i. The
nasal orifice, too, is closed during the pronunciation of some vowels, and more or less open during that
of others. A and e were the only two vowels which a young man named Leblanc, whose larynx was
completely closed, was able to utter; while, on the other hand, experiment has shown that with i, o,
and u the passage to the nose is shut, slightly open with e, and considerably open with a. From this it
will be seen that the term “nasal vowel” is a misnomer. Nasal vowels, in fact, are produced by dropping
the uvula, and so allowing the air to vibrate freely through the cavities which connect the nose with the
pharynx. So far from a passage of the air through the nose being necessary, we may even increase the
nasal twang by stopping the nostrils. The strength of the nasalization depends on the distance of the
velum pendulum, or soft palate, from the tongue; and in languages like French, in which much use is
made of nasalized vowels, the vowel is frequently followed by a true guttural nasal. It has often been
noticed that French, in spite of its strong tendency to nasalize the vowels, has no nasalized i or u. The
cause of this deficiency is very simple. A nasalized vowel requires a free passage for the air from the
pharynx to the nose; but this is rendered almost impossible in the formation of i, where the tongue is
raised so high as to send most of the air through the mouth however much depressed the velum may
be, as well as in the formation of u, where the tongue is pushed backward towards the soft palate itself.
A nasal i, however, occurs in Portuguese, and probably also in the Sanskrit simha, “lion.”
Every vowel-sound, then, demands three main conditions for its production—the exspiration of air
from the lungs, the vibration of the vocal chords, and the formation of a chamber of resonance by the
organs of speech. The three conditions must co-exist if we are to have a simple vowel of definite
quality, though the exspiration of air need not last beyond the moment at which the vowel-sound is
formed. But the position of the organs of articulation both before and after its formation occasions
important differences in the manner in which it is introduced or ceases to be heard. In quick and lively
utterance, the energy with which the stream of air is emitted makes it difficult for each exspiration to be
exactly simultaneous with the corresponding vibration of the vocal chords, while if the exspiration is
weak, the vocal chords are apt for a moment not to vibrate. In order to give the chords on the one side
the resisting power requisite in energetic exspiration, and on the other side to make them vibrate
without delay in weak exspiration, the windpipe must be contracted for a second, thus checking the
outflow of breath and causing the chords to vibrate in unison. The sonant breath so produced is the
spiritus lenis of our old school-grammars, the slight noise produced by the check given in the throat to
the uprush of air from the lungs. The noise may easily be detected in whispering, or in the
pronunciation of a word like ’ear, when a special effort is made to prevent it from degenerating into
year, and the fact that it is a noise will explain the dislike felt by the sensitive Greek to what the
grammarians term a hiatus. The spiritus lenis varies according as it is the result of a compression of the
chordæ vocales alone, or of the false chordæ vocales as well; but it is doubtful whether we can treat it
as a distinct consonant and not rather as the pure tone of the voice. Perhaps it should most strictly be
called a glide. It readily passes into the non-sonant aspirate or spiritus asper, by allowing the breath to
pass through the throat without check or hindrance. The glottis, indeed, is in the latter case slightly
narrowed and the larynx stiffened, but the difference between the rough and soft aspirates is that the
one is a continuous sound, the other a checked breath. The vocal chords are brought together while the
breath is passing through the throat, and since their movement may be either quick or gradual the hard
aspirate or h may correspondingly vary in character. As Czermak first pointed out, the more usual hard
aspirate is that produced by the gradual compression of the vocal chords when they remain for a
moment in a given contracted position.[156]
The same causes which produce the spiritus lenis or the spiritus asper at the beginning of the vowel-
sound produce similar results at its end. It may terminate with a weak breathing, a firm breathing, or a
non-sonant aspirate. In the case of a weak breathing the exspiration either ceases before the vocal
chords have begun to vibrate, thus resulting in a long vowel, or at the very moment at which the
windpipe is opened to admit the passage of air, the result being a short vowel. The weak breathing
answers to what may be called the neutral vocalic utterance, so rarely heard in language, when the
vowel-sound is introduced without either the soft or hard aspirate, the windpipe being merely narrowed
sufficiently to set the vocal chords in motion at the same moment that the exspiration takes place. The
firm breathing corresponds with the spiritus lenis, and is due to a sudden check given to the vibrating
voice. Examples of it occur in words like no! bah! uttered abruptly, or where we wish to divide two
similar vowels one from the other. The non-sonant aspirate is produced by continuing the exspiration for
a while after the opening of the windpipe, and may be heard in final vowels which are at once short and
strongly accented. The non-sonant aspirate is sometimes combined with the firm breathing, especially
in Danish, where such words as ti, nei, are pronounced with a double exspiratory effort, the second
consisting of a non-sonant breath of more or less strength, jerked up, as it were, after the vowel.
Now, let us stop for a moment to remind ourselves of the distinction between sonant and non-sonant.
Non-sonant or surd sounds (also called “hard” and “breathed”) are breath as modified by the organs of
speech; sonants, “soft” or “voiced” sounds, are voice similarly modified, voice being breath when played
upon by the vibrating chordæ vocales in its passage through the partially closed glottis. Voice,
therefore, continues to be heard without interruption as long as we have a succession of sonants
following one upon the other; the transition or “glide” from one sonant to another consisting simply in
the change of position assumed by the organs of speech. In pronouncing the sound al, all that happens
in passing from a to l is a transference of the tongue from the position required for forming a to the
position required for forming l; voice continues without interruption. Now it is clear that while voice is
passing from a to l, neither pure a nor pure l can be sounded, though the time occupied by its passage
(that is, by the change in the position of the tongue) is so infinitesimally small that the sound or sounds
actually produced cannot be heard, and all we can be conscious of is a modification of a at its end or of
l at its beginning. If we have two successive vowels, each belonging to a different syllable, a separate
effort of exspiration is needed for both, and the transition-sounds are apt to escape notice from the
weakening of the exspiration during the interval between the two efforts; but if the vowels do not
belong to distinct syllables, the result is wholly different. Diphthongs, as we term them, consist in the
combination of two simple vowels, usually short, into a single syllable pronounced, therefore, with a
single exspiratory effort, and with the stronger accent on the first vowel. The sound we hear is
produced while the organs of speech are being changed from the position required for the one vowel to
the position required for the other. We have only to sing the diphthongs ai or au on a long note to hear
a distinct i and u at the end of each, and the Sanskrit grammarians discovered more than two thousand
years ago that the diphthongs ê and ô were really combinations of a + i and a + u. The primary
condition of the existence of a diphthong is the rapid transition from one of the component vowels to
the other, and this renders the true resolution of a diphthongal sound so extremely difficult except to
the specially trained ear. Once acquainted with the two component vowels, we can easily determine the
intermediate or transition sounds in which the diphthong really consists; but written documents rarely
do acquaint us accurately with them. Diphthongs whose second element is e or o have sometimes been
termed “imperfect” and considered of younger origin than those whose second element is i or u,
because of their greater fulness of tone and consequent inappropriateness to the unaccented place in
the compound; but such a view does not seem to be correct. It appears certain, however, that
languages show a tendency to form diphthongs the longer they live and the greater the extent to which
they have been affected by phonetic decay. English is a prominent example of this tendency; our vowels
are all becoming diphthongs; even the first personal pronoun I (ai) has become one, and already we
hear aither and naither more frequently than either (eether) and neither. The so-called long vowels
which occur in such words as say, no, he, are all diphthongal, and some of the local dialects have
carried the tendency even further than the literary language.
The existence of triphthongs has been disputed, and no doubt most of the alleged cases, such as iei
or ieu in the Romance idioms, are either dissyllables or consist of a semi-vowel followed by a diphthong.
But, as Sievers remarks:[157] “the transition from the first to the second component element of a
diphthong may be so prolonged that even the transition sounds themselves may be distinctly heard.” As
for semi-vowels, they differ from the first element of a diphthong only in having lost the accent and
being followed by a strongly accented vowel. Hence they come to assume the function of sonant
consonants. Hence, too, the necessity that the vowels in which they originate should possess less
fulness of tone than the vowels by which they are immediately followed. We may have yá and wá, but
hardly ᵃᵢ and ᵃᵤ. Naturally i and u most readily pass into semi-vowels, partly from their comparatively
weak tone, partly from the compression of the air-passage needed to produce them, partly from the
similar position of the organs of speech in forming the spirants y and w. These spirants, as we shall see,
are not to be confounded with the semi-vowels y and w.
A vowel, then, is the quality or timbre of voice as modified by the tongue and lips, and consists of the
forms assumed by the vibrating air as it passes through the windpipe and vocal chords. But the tongue
and lips naturally tend towards the same position whatever be the vowel sounded. A man who has been
accustomed to give his tongue a particular position in pronouncing i will give it much the same position
in pronouncing e, for we must never forget that there is an almost infinite number of i’s or e’s varying
with the slight changes of position of the tongue and lips when placed for enunciating those vowels.
According to the greater or less use made of the lips in speaking will be the character of all the vowel-
sounds of a language. The vowels, consequently, fall into systems, and in investigating the phonology of
a dialect, we have to inquire not only what vowels it possesses, but more particularly what system these
fall into. The basis of English vowel pronunciation is the passive position of the lips, just as in the
Holstein dialect it is the withdrawal and flattening of the tongue. Sievers states, that in speaking the
dialect of Lower Hesse the tongue must be relaxed and in a position of the slightest possible tension;
while, on the contrary, in the Saxon dialects the whole tongue must be tense, the throat stiffened and
the exspiration energetic. “Hence the hard, somewhat screaming impression made by this dialect in
contrast with the dull, almost heavy and negative character of the Hessian.”[158]
But it is time to turn from the vowels to the consonants, the skeleton, as it were, of articulate
utterance. A language could consist wholly of vowels; indeed, a Polynesian dictionary contains numbers
of words which have not a single consonant in them, and children frequently mark the differences
between words rather by the vowels than by the consonants they contain. The earliest systems of
writing other than ideographic are syllabaries and not alphabets, while alphabets like the Sanskrit
ascribe an “inherent” vowel to each of their consonants. But though vowels are indispensable to an
organized language, it by no means follows that they were equally indispensable to the first attempts at
speech. As a matter of fact, a preponderance of vowels such as characterizes the Polynesian dialects is
a sign of phonetic decay and linguistic old age. “Consonants,” says Professor Max Müller, “are much
more apt to be dropped than to sprout up between two vowels.” If we had only the Greek μέρμερος or
the Latin memor before us, we should have no idea that they have lost an initial sibilant; in fact, this
only becomes apparent when we compare the Sanskrit smar, “to remember.” The endeavour sometimes
made to reduce the Parent-Aryan alphabet to a small number of simple and easily pronounced
consonants, is founded on the fallacy that the results of a phonetic analysis of the words we utter and a
reduction of the sounds they contain into their leading types, is identical with the primitive alphabet of
the Aryan race. On the contrary, the sounds of a language become more simplified and clearly marked
the longer it continues to be spoken, and the primitive Aryan alphabet, instead of being a simple list of
primary sounds, from which all that are harsh or indistinct have been carefully eliminated, must really
have resembled the existing alphabets of barbarous or semi-barbarous tribes, and included a large
variety of consonants, many of which we should find it extremely difficult to reproduce.
 Consonants may be divided, in the first place, into hard and soft, or, as they are more usually termed,
surd and sonant. A surd consonant consists of checked breath, a sonant consonant of checked voice. If,
in the second place, either breath or voice is completely checked in its passage through the organs of
speech, an explosive or momentary (also called a stopped or mute) consonant is heard at the moment
the check is removed; if the check is not complete, and the organs of speech only approximate so that
the breath cannot escape without friction, a fricative (spirant, “unstopped”) or continuous consonant is
the result. Where a spirant or fricative is immediately preceded by an explosive, a double sound or
affricative is the result (e.g. German pf, Armenian t’š); where the spirant follows the explosive we have
the aspirated letters, which will be spoken of hereafter. Among the continuous consonants must be
ranked the nasals, produced by dropping the uvula and so allowing some of the breath to make its way
to the nostrils through the pharynx, and the trills produced by the vibration of the uvula, the lips, or
more commonly the tongue. Distinct from the nasals and the trills are the central continuous
consonants (h, ch, y, English r, w, wh, and the sibilants) formed by lifting the centre and point of the
tongue to the centre and front of the palate, and the lateral continuous consonants (l, and, according to
Bell, English th, f, v), in forming which the breath is allowed to escape along the edges of the tongue. A
further cross division will be into liquids, gutturals, dentals, palatals, labio-dentals, and labials, to which
may be added the linguals or cacuminals (cerebrals) of Sanskrit.
The Liquids.—Among the liquids should properly be reckoned only those kinds of r and l which stand
to the spirant r and l in the same relation that the vowel i stands to the spirant y. In forming the vowels,
as we have seen, the tongue assumes a dorsal position, that is, some part of its back is raised towards
the palate; in forming the liquids, on the other hand, the tongue has either an oral (central) or a lateral
position, the liquid r requiring the articulation of the centre and tip, the liquid l that of the sides. But
there are several kinds of r, which may be classed as cacuminal, spirant, alveolar or dental, uvular or
guttural, and laryngeal. The cacuminal r is the purest liquid r that we hear, inasmuch as it is wholly
untrilled, and is especially common in cultivated English. In order to produce it, the front surface of the
tongue is hollowed out into a spoon-like shape and raised towards the hard palate behind the alveolar
teeth-roots of the upper jaw, while the edge of the tongue is stiffened and kept free from any sort of
vibration. It will be clear from this how closely allied this cacuminal r is to the vowels, and we can easily
understand the readiness with which it combines with a vowel-sound when we remember that it may be
formed in almost any part of the hard palate, while the lips have free play during its creation.
Corresponding to the cacuminal r is the spirant (or “buzzed”) r, which also occurs plentifully in English
as in such words as try or dry. The mouth is completely closed by the tongue when sounding t or d, and
if in passing to the position needed for r the tongue is not removed from the palate quickly enough, or
the exspiration is not sufficiently strong, a slight fricative sound like that of sh is produced which results
in the spirant r. As for the dental or alveolar r, all that is requisite to produce it is to raise the front part
of the tongue, at the same time slightly arching its extreme edges, and so obtaining a constricted or
“squeezed” chamber of resonance between the side of the tongue and the alveolars. This r may be
untrilled, but in German it is more frequently a trilled one. The trill is caused by the force of the
exspiration which strikes the thin hollowed edge of the tongue in an outward direction, the tongue the
moment after returning to its former position like a piece of india-rubber. If the two edges of the front
part of the tongue be pressed against the teeth, the tip of the tongue between them being alone
allowed free play, and accordingly vibrating in a very small and narrow space, a sound is heard
approaching that of s or sh. The stronger the uprush of breath and the vibration it occasions, the
plainer will be the sibilated sound; indeed, a genuine sibilant can even attach itself to the liquid, as in
the Polish rz. The uvular or guttural r is supposed by Sievers to be a modern substitution for the trilled
alveolar r. At any rate it is produced by lifting the back of the tongue to the soft palate and forming a
deep groove along the middle of it, in which the uvula can vibrate freely. The groove, however, is
frequently left wholly or nearly unformed, the consequence being a very grating character acquired by
the r, which then passes over into the sonant guttural spirant heard in sounding the modern Greek γ.
The laryngeal r was first observed and described by Brücke, who makes it arise from sinking the voice
so that the vocal chords cease to vibrate audibly, and merely produce intermittent and explosive
sounds.
 Each kind of l is formed in the same way, by raising the tip of the tongue and so closing the orifice of
the mouth, at the same time allowing the breath to pass along the two sides of the tongue in successive
oscillations produced by the vibrations of the elastic edges of the tongue. We may distinguish the
cacuminal l in which the tip of the tongue is bent backwards as in the cacuminal r; the alveolar l with
the edge of the tongue laid against the alveolars; the dental or interdental l in which the flattened
surface of the tongue fills up the space between the two sides of the mouth; and the dorsal l (as in the
Spanish llano) in which the tip of the tongue presses against the lower incisors, while the centre of the
tongue is raised towards the alveolars of the upper teeth. The best-known variety of the cacuminal l is
that of the Welsh ll formed by pressing the flattened tip of the tongue against the gums of the upper
teeth and allowing the breath to escape on its right side. The same sound is heard in the Icelandic hl
and l before a t, and also in Cheroki,[159] though in Icelandic the tongue is pressed against both sides
of the mouth. A half-sonant, spirant l may be heard when the exspiration is strong; a surd l often occurs
at the end of a word or after surd consonants (particularly t and s). The sound of the l may be made
clearer or obscurer by raising or depressing the front part of the tongue, and so narrowing or enlarging
the space between its edges and the teeth, and since the vowels may be pronounced with the tip of the
tongue on the palate, they may readily pass into l by simply broadening the surface of the tongue.
We have already seen that the tongue is not the only organ of speech which may be “trilled.” In the
Arabic grhain (‫)غ‬, the Northumberland burr and the French Provençal r, grasseyé, the uvula which lies
along the back of the tongue towards the teeth is very distinctly made to vibrate. “If,” Mr. A. J. Ellis
says, “the tongue is more raised and the vibration indistinct or very slight, the result is the English r in
more, poor, while a still greater elevation of the tongue produces the r heard after palatal vowels, as
hear, mere, fire. These trills are so vocal that they form distinct syllables, as surf, serf, fur, fir, virtue,
honour, and are with difficulty separable from the vowels.” The lips, too, may be trilled, the result being
brh, a sound constantly heard from children.
The Nasals.—The characteristic of a nasal is, as the name declares, the participation of the nose in
producing the sound. The breath passes through the nose rather than through the mouth. Sometimes,
however, all that happens is the removal of the membrane which separates the nasal orifice from the
pharynx; this alone is indispensable to the formation of a nasal letter. Hence its resemblance to a vowel,
the buccal tube being alike silent in both cases. If we try to converse when walking uphill we shall find
that the nasals are longest heard. These nasals must be classified as labial, dental, palatal, and guttural,
according to the part of the speaking apparatus in which the current of air is checked in its exit, and it
will be best to treat them along with the other sounds formed in the same part. It should be noted,
however, that the so-called surd nasal which we hear in hm! has really, as Sievers remarks, not the
slightest similarity to a nasal, but approximates to the aspirates or breathings.
The traditional division of the consonants into labial, dental, palatal, cerebral (cacuminal) and
guttural, though not scientifically precise, is yet too familiar to be disregarded, and we shall therefore
follow it so far as is possible. We must, however, remember at starting the primary distinction between
the two classes of letters, called variously hard and soft, tenues and mediæ, surds and sonants, as well
as between those called momentary (explosive) and continuous or checks and fricatives. What this
distinction consists in has already been explained.
The Labials.—The labials may be subdivided into pure labials, with the formation of which the lips
only have to do, and the labio-dentals, in the formation of which the teeth also participate. In
pronouncing the surd p, the sonant b, the nasalized m, or the middle German w, the lips are either
wholly or (as in wh) almost wholly closed. B only differs from p in being pronounced with voice instead
of breath, the voice partly preceding, partly following the check occasioned by the closure of the lips. As
in all sonant letters, the exspiration is less forcible than in the case of surd letters. The labio-dentals f
and v are merely modifications of the rough and soft aspirates by pressing the lower lip against the
upper teeth. When the lips are brought together without any interference of the teeth the spiritus lenis
becomes the German w as heard in a word like Quelle. Our wh, or rather hw, and w are continuous
sounds, the lips being slightly opened, the back of the tongue raised, and the breath passing over its
central part.
 The Dentals.—The articulation needed for the dentals is partly oral, partly alveolar, partly dorsal. The
common principle, however, involved in the formation of them all is the same; the tongue must be
brought against the teeth. The so-called cerebral or cacuminal dentals of Sanskrit and the Dravidian
tongues (ṭ, ḍ, ṭh, ḍh) are due to oral articulation, the tongue being made convex and the lower surface
raised towards the palate. The English t and d are also said to be cerebral, though the tip of the tongue
is not bent very sharply backwards in forming them. Alveolar articulation is needed for the dentals when
they have to be pronounced with the edge of the flattened tongue pressed against the alveolars of the
upper teeth, while in dorsal articulation the point of the tongue is simply turned back against the lower
teeth, its convex being at the same time lifted to the palate. It is in this way that the Bohemian dorsal t
is formed. The dorsal dentals may be varied by raising the back of the tongue nearer to the mouth or
the throat, the tip either resting behind the lower teeth or being raised to the upper alveolars. Besides
the surd dental t and sonant dental d, we have also a series of dental spirants which bear the same
relation to t and d that f and v bear to p and b. By slightly opening the teeth and stopping the aperture
with the extended edges of the tongue we produce the interdental sounds heard in breath or think and
breathe or then. The first th (or thorn þ) differs from the second (ð)[160] in being pronounced with the
rough breathing instead of the soft breathing. They stand midway between an oral and a dorsal
articulation. How readily they may pass into the labio-dentals f and v is clear at a glance; we have only
to raise the lower lip a little and curl back the tongue, and our th becomes an f. Equally readily, as we
shall see, is the passage from them to a sibilant. We seldom meet with an interdental consonant;
Sievers, however, states that they exist in Servian and Armenian, where they regularly represent the
whole class of dentals.
The Palatals.—The palatals come next. They stand between the dentals and gutturals, and are formed
by throwing the middle of the tongue, raised as it were into a hump, against that part of the roof of the
mouth where the hard palate begins. The sound (ch) heard in the English church or the Italian cielo is
now held to be, not a palatal, but a dental (t followed by sh), and we must go to the Sanskrit (ch) as
still pronounced to find a type of the whole palatal series. It “is formed most easily,” says Professor Max
Müller, “if we place the tongue and teeth in the position for the formation of sh in sharp, and then stop
the breath by complete contact between the tongue and the back of the teeth.” It will be seen from this
that the true ch is not a double letter, a compound of t and sh or s, but a single consonant which ought
to be denoted by a single character. The Sanskrit palatal ch may have had the same pronunciation as
the Armenian t‘ sh,[161] as Sievers thinks, or it may have been equivalent to ky. However this may be, it
is plain from the great extent of the “chamber of resonance” in which the palatals are formed—the
whole of the hard palate being available for the purpose—that a large number of palatal sounds is
possible. They may range, in fact, from ky to tsh. The guttural k passes easily enough into the
palatalized ky, as may be seen from the pronunciation of kind and cow as kyind and kyow, not
unfrequently heard in English; indeed, all that is requisite for the transition is for the front part of the
tongue to assume the position needed for y, while the back part is in that needed for k. In the northern
dialects of Jutland j is heard after k and g when followed by œ, e, o, and ö. The German “soft” guttural
aspirate or palatal spirant in words like ich, licht, is the result of the spiritus asper passing the middle of
the tongue when raised against the hard palate, y in you or yet being due to a softening of the breath,
the organs of speech remaining unchanged. The palatal sibilants will have to be considered separately.
The Gutturals.—Putting aside the cerebrals, which have been treated under the head of the dentals,
we now come to the gutturals, usually an important class of sounds in savage idioms. First of all we
have the tenuis k, produced by bringing the root of the tongue against the soft palate, together with the
deeper k heard in the Semitic koph or Georgian q. Next is the media g, to create which breath has to be
changed into voice. Then will come the guttural nasal ng (as in sing), and the continuous ch and g
heard in the German nach and Tage. The sound heard in nach or the Scotch loch is formed by raising
the tongue against the soft palate or uvula, and so checking the uprush of breath, its sonant
representative being the g of Tage. The result of only slightly checking the uprush of breath in the latter
case is the passage of the guttural into a semi-vowel. This sonant g is the γ of modern Greek; it
sometimes takes the place of the uvular r, though this office more properly belongs to the sonant g of
Armenian pronounced further back in the mouth. The surd ch may be similarly modified by a posterior
pronunciation, and so become the Armenian xe, the Russian x, the Polish ch, and the deep ch of the
Swiss.
The Sibilants.—The main division of sibilated sounds is into the surd s and sh, and the sonant z and j.
When the centre and tip of the tongue are raised to the centre and front of the palate, the breath or
spiritus asper is modified into s (as in sin), the voice or spiritus lenis into z (as in zeal or rise). When the
tongue is turned back with its lower surface against the alveolars of the upper teeth, less of the palate
being covered than is required for s and z, breath becomes sh (as in sharp), voice j (as in azure,
pleasure, French jamais). The ordinary German s is a dorsal one, the current of air being allowed to
pass between the upper alveolars and the lower surface of the uplifted tongue; in North German
dialects, however, we frequently meet with an alveolar s, formed in much the same way as the alveolar
r. The same s also occurs in English, as well as a cacuminal s distinguished by a more pronounced
retraction of the tip of the tongue and narrower space between it and the palate. The palatal ś, found in
Russian, for instance, before the weak vowels (e, i, &c.), only differs from the dorsal s in the more
retracted position of the tongue. Sh (j) can be modified in three ways. The channel formed in the
tongue when pronouncing s may be so diminished as to allow the breath to strike against the lips, or
the lips may form with it an approximately rectangular aperture, or, thirdly, the left (or more rarely the
right) side of the tongue may be pressed against the palate, causing the breath to strike against the
lips, which are generally raised a little on the side. Sievers declares that he has sometimes heard this
unilateral sh in England. However this may be, all three modifications of sh may combine with the
dorsal, alveolar, cacuminal, and palatal positions of the tongue to produce the cacuminal sh of English
(identical, probably, with the Sanskrit ś), the palatal mouillé ś and ć of Polish and Russian, the alveolar
sh of the North German dialects, and the dorsal sh of the Middle and Southern German dialects. It is
one of the many evils of our defective and misleading mode of spelling that the surd sh, though a single
sound, is represented by two letters, and so cannot be distinguished from the aspirated sh (as in gas-
hole), which is really a double sound.
These aspirated sounds consist, as we have seen, of an explosive followed by a spirant, and they
occupied an important place in the older languages of our Aryan family of speech. A large number of
roots contain them, and the Brahmans still pronounce each part of the compound sound distinctly, ph
and th, for instance, being pronounced as in our up-hill and ant-hill. The compound nature of the sound
caused sometimes the one element in it, sometimes the other, to fall away. Thus, to a Sanskrit
tubhy(am) corresponds a Latin tibi, and the Latin mihi and Sanskrit mahyam presuppose an earlier
mabhyam, mabhi. The Athenian tendency to false aspiration which has produced the initial aspirate of
ὑδώρ (Latin unda, udus) or ἵππος (Latin equus) has also occasionally affected the labial tenuis. φῦσα
and its kindred, for instance, answer to the Latin pustula, the Lithuanian pústi, “to blow;” ἄφνος is the
Sanskrit apnas, the Latin ops, and κεφαλὴ is the Sanskrit kapâla, the Latin caput. A curious metathesis
of the aspiration may take place in both Sanskrit and Greek. In Sanskrit a final aspirated media before a
following tenuis loses its aspirate, which is transferred to the initial of the root, provided that be g, d, or
b (as bhut-karoti, “he who knows acts,” for budh-karoti); and in Greek we find θρίξ becoming τριχὸς,
τρέχω becoming θρέξω.
But it must be remembered that it is only the surd explosives (or tenues) that properly can thus be
combined with the rough breathing (h). A difficulty occurs in the case of the sonant explosives (or
mediæ); and it is a grave question whether we ought to transcribe gha, dha, and bha by the side of
kha, tha, and pha. In Greek, at any rate, we have only aspirated tenues, and while τ’ followed by an
aspirate is written θ, this is never the case with δ’. At the same time, the existence of aspirated mediæ
was recognized by the Prâtiśâkhyas by the side of the aspirated tenues, and the accuracy of the
Prâtiśâkhyas is confirmed by the requirements of etymology.
Closely connected with the sibilants are the palatal and guttural sounds, already noticed, heard in the
German ich, tage, and acht. The palatal ch, written χ by Sievers, jh by Sweet; is of two kinds. What
Sievers calls χ,[162] heard in the German ich, Icelandic hjarta, and sometimes in such words as our hue,
is formed on the hard palate near the soft palate by the front part of the tongue. On the other hand, χ,
[163] as in the Dutch g before e and i, is formed in the hollow of the arch. The guttural sonant heard in
the North German tage, or the modern Greek γ, is formed between the back of the tongue and the
middle of the soft palate, the tongue being lifted up towards the front of the mouth. As already
remarked, it sometimes represents the uvular r; thus, Mr. Sweet says, “when the passage (of the voice)
is widened so as to remove all buzzing, the sound of (gh)[162] no longer suggests (kh)[163] or (g), but
rather a weak (r) sound.” Further back in the mouth is formed the Armenian sonant g, corresponding to
χ.[163] The ch of acht, again, may be divided into two varieties. Ch,[162] formed, as stated above,
between the back of the tongue and the middle of the soft palate, is the guttural spirant usual in
German after a, o, and u, and heard in Scotch loch. Further back is formed ch,[163] common in Swiss
and other South German dialects. We have also ch,[163] noted by Mr. Sweet in Scotch after e and i,
formed between the back of the tongue and the place where the hard palate begins. It thus comes very
near χ.[164]
Distinct from the exspiratory sounds, whether vowels or consonants, which have now been passed in
review, are sounds formed either by inspiration or simply by the air in the mouth itself. Winteler[165]
describes certain Swiss dialects which make use of inspiratory sounds to disguise the voice, and the
clicks characteristic of the South African languages are examples of sounds produced without either
taking in or emitting breath. The Kafirs have borrowed the three easiest clicks (the dental, the cerebral,
and the lateral) from their Hottentot neighbours,[166] and there are reasons for thinking that the
Hottentots themselves borrowed in turn from the more primitive Bushmen. At all events, the labial and
compound dental clicks are wanting in Hottentot, and the Bushman fables put what Dr. Bleck calls “a
most unpronounceable click,” which does not occur otherwise in any of the dialects, into the mouth of
the hare, the anteater, and the moon.[167] These inarticulate clicks, thus adapted to the purposes of
articulate speech, bridge over the gulf between the latter and the cries of animals, and we may see in
them a survival of those primæval utterances out of which language was born. Traces of what may thus
be termed the germs of language on its phonetic side are met with here and there all over the globe.
Thus Haldeman describes at least three clicks heard in Texan, Chinook, and other North American
languages, t in the Anadahhas of Texas, for instance, being followed by “an effect as loud as
spitting.”[168] According to Klaproth, clicks occur in Circassian; and Bleek states that two clicks are
distinguished in the ǀikhe language of Guatemala—one somewhat resembling the Hottentot dental click,
and the other the Hottentot palatal combined with some guttural. Mr. Whitmee has heard a click in
certain dialects spoken by the Negritos of Melanesia. Clicks are also known among the Gallas; and Miss
Lloyd has found a little boy from Lake Ngami using clicks resembling those of Nama Hottentot. Clicks
are formed by placing the tongue or lips in the position required by an explosive, and then sucking out
the air between the organs thus brought into play, the result being the “cluck” or “smack” with which
grooms are accustomed to encourage a horse, but in combination with the explosive for which the
organs of speech were set. According to Mr. Sweet, the labial click is an ordinary kiss; the dental click,
“the interjection of impatience ordinarily written ‘tut.’”[169] In Káfir the clicks are not pure, as in
Bushman—that is to say, they are always accompanied by an exspiratory consonant, which is formed at
the same moment as the click. This affords an additional reason for thinking that the Káfir clicks are not
survivals from the original condition of speech, but loans from another people, which have been
attached by way of ornament to the existing exspiratory sounds of the language. Of the same nature as
the clicks are the implosives peculiar to Saxon German, where no distinction is made between d and t,
or b and p. Similar sounds are heard in Georgian and the Armenian of Tiflis, and they must have
characterized ancient Accadian, since no distinction is made in writing between final d and t, g and k, or
b and p. These implosives are due to compression of the air between the closed glottis and the organs
of speech when in position for an explosive, by forcing the glottis upwards. No sound is emitted until
the sound is fully formed, when the final or transition sound is curiously modified.
We have hitherto dealt with the individual sounds in the same fashion as the lexicographer deals with
individual words. But just as a word is really but one of the elements of a sentence, and to be
thoroughly understood must be treated as such, individual sounds are but the elements of which
syllables are composed. Whatever may be the nature of a sound when regarded apart and by itself, it is
necessarily much modified when combined in actual speech with other sounds. The syllable, and not the
single sound, is the starting-point of phonetic utterance.
A syllable must contain either a vowel or a semi-vowel, by which are meant such inspiratory
utterances as that heard in the interjection ’m, or the vocalic r and l of Slavonic and other tongues. One
of the first achievements of the phonograph has been to show that an open syllable like ga can be
pronounced either backwards or forwards indifferently when once the organs of speech are in position;
and not only so, but that when the waves of air set in motion by the pronunciation of a word are
reversed, the word will be reproduced backwards—əsoshiéshun (association), for instance, becoming
nushéshiosə.
Mr. Sweet has pointed out that syllables are divided by the stress. Speech has to be carried on by a
succession of exspirations or puffs of breath, and naturally the force with which the breath is emitted
gradually diminishes during the continuance of the exspiration. Only in special cases—the interjections,
for example—the force increases instead of diminishing. When the exspiration is spent, and a new
breath is taken, a new syllable begins. Wherever, therefore, the stress is laid we must place the
beginning of a new syllable. In “a name” the stress is on the nasal, where accordingly the syllable
begins; in “an aim” it is, on the contrary, on the diphthong.
The passage from one sound to another, as has already been noticed, consists of a series of
infinitesimal intermediate sounds, corresponding with the series of positions assumed by the vocal
organs in passing from one position to another. These intermediate sounds have been conveniently
termed “glides” by Mr. Ellis, and they play an important part in the formation of syllables. Glides are of
two kinds, as the organs of speech may either be moved from one position to another in the shortest
possible time, or be shifted, on the way, towards another position needed for the production of a third
sound. Thus, in the syllable ki we have the immediate glide required for the transition from k to i; in the
syllable qui, the indirect glide from k to i through the position needed for u. A glide may, of course, be
described as either initial or final; in ki, the glide of k is being final, that of i initial. Some of the so-called
consonants and vowels are really glides. The neutral vowel (ə) is termed the “voice-glide” by Mr. Sweet,
as “produced by emitting voice during the passage to or from a consonant.” It may begin a word, as in
“against,” and in English is very frequently replaced by a liquid, as in the words “little,” “possible.” It is
also found plentifully in the Semitic languages, the Hebrew sh’wa, for instance, being simply the neutral
vowel or voice-glide. In words like “follow,” when pronounced rapidly, we may hear it labialized. A
diphthong, again, is a combination of a full vowel with a glide-vowel either before or after it, though the
glide-vowels may be prolonged into full vowels without destroying the diphthong, by equalizing the
stress upon the two elements of which it is made up. These glide-vowels (like the consonantal glides)
are produced by putting the vocal organs into position for pronouncing a particular vowel, but not
letting voice sound until this position is being shifted to that required by the full vowel which forms the
second part of the compound, and reversing the process when the full vowel forms the first part.
Consonantal glides (y, w, r, l, m, n) are illustrated by the sound of y in you, and of r in here, and in a
common South-country pronunciation of words like red.[170] According to Mr. Sweet, the aspirate h is a
consonant in the glottis, but “a voiceless glide-vowel in the mouth.”[171]
At all events it is often difficult to distinguish the rough breathing from the glide which easily develops
into it by the help of a little additional stress. This glide may be detected after mediæ, tenues, and s,
whether initial or final, as in our cold (when pronounced emphatically), pack, and big. The Irish and
Danish aspirated consonants are formed by laying a separate stress on the glide apart from the stress
laid upon the preceding consonant. The aspirated letters of Greek and Sanskrit, described above, are of
course different, as here we have a combination of two independent sounds, though the latter of these
(h) is in Mr. Sweet’s eyes a mere glide-vowel in the mouth.
Glides may be absent where two consonants formed in the same part of the vocal organs are united
together (e.g. and, its), or even where they are formed in different parts. This is especially the case
with English. Wherever homorganic sounds are produced, the vocal organs pass at once from the
position required for the first to that required for the second, without first falling back into the “position
of indifference.” Where an explosive is followed by a nasal, a sudden opening of the velum pendulum is
substituted for the usual “explosion,” as first pointed out by Kudelka.
Syllables may differ one from the other in respect of pitch or tone, of stress, and of quantity. Pitch or
tone is but little noticed by Englishmen, since with us it serves merely a logical or emotional purpose,
such as the expression of surprise or the asking of a question, but in some languages, Chinese or
Swedish or Lithuanian, for example, every word has its own separate tone, which helps to distinguish it
from other words. This, too, was the case in Vedic Sanskrit, and in ancient Greek and Latin, what we
call the Greek accents being really the marks of the pitch at which words were pronounced. Pitch or
tone depends on the rapidity of the vibrations of sound, and may be either rising, level, or falling. The
rising tone is that indicated by the acute accent. Tone may also be compound, marked in Greek by the
circumflex. The compound or circumflex is heard when the tone of a vowel is again raised after it has
already passed the moment of its greatest intensity, and it may therefore be described as composed of
the acute and the grave, or of the rising and the falling. It may be noticed in Lithuanian as well as in
several German dialects, such as the Thuringian, which have a singing character, and when it falls upon
a diphthong the second element of the diphthong is distinctly raised in pitch. Naturally it is usually
found with diphthongs and long vowels, but short vowels combined with a liquid may also carry the
circumflex. In Greek it commonly implies a contraction, the circumflex resulting from the coalescence of
a vowel which has the acute accent with one which has the grave.[172]
The Vedic system of accentuation best exhibits the fundamental character of accent of pitch. The
udâtta or acute denotes the highest pitch reached by the voice in a group of syllables or words. In the
syllable immediately preceding the voice naturally sinks to its lowest, thus producing the anudâtta, or
grave tone. After the udâtta, however, the voice falls gradually; consequently the syllable which follows
has the swarita or circumflex accent, and it is only the next syllable to that which is again anudâtta.
But the tone is regulated by three different conditions, which sometimes act antagonistically. It may
be either a syllable-tone, determined by the relative force with which the syllables of a word can be
uttered, dependent on the nature of the sounds of which they are composed; or a word-tone,
determined in great measure by the meaning, and serving to distinguish words from one another; or a
sentence-tone, mostly determined by logic or the feelings. The Greek accents, like the Vedic ones, were
used to denote all three varieties of tone; while the acute and the circumflex sometimes represent the
syllable-accent (as in θῖνα, ἔτυπον), sometimes the word-accent (as in νυμφή, νύμφα, ποδῶν), the
grave, as Sievers remarks, “is a concession to the requirements of the sentence-tone.” Similarly in Vedic
Sanskrit, the udâtta which ordinarily indicates the word-accent, falling as it does upon the syllable
(commonly the flection) to which the signification caused the attention to be chiefly directed, seems
also to have indicated the sentence-tone, since the verb of the principal clause has no accent whatever
attached to it. Previously, however, both in Greek and Sanskrit the accents denoted the word-tone, and
the remarkable agreement between the accentuation of the two languages enables us to restore in
great measure the accentuation of the undivided parent-speech. It cannot be an accident, for instance,
which makes the numeral seven (saptán, ἑπτά) oxyton in both languages, and the numeral five
(pánchan, πέντε) paroxyton, or places the acute accent on the last syllable of adjectives in -us; the
accentuation in each instance must have been that of the Parent-Aryan. Where the accentuation of the
two languages differs, it can generally be explained by the disturbing influence of analogy. Thus while
there is so remarkable an agreement between the accentuation of Vedic and Greek nouns, there is next
to none between that of the verbs. But an explanation of this is forthcoming. The verb of the principal
clause in the Veda loses its accent, as has just been remarked, unless it stand at the beginning of the
sentence; in fact, it is regarded as an enclitic, and throws its tone back upon the preceding word
however many syllables it may contain. Now in Greek a rule gradually grew up forbidding the accent to
be placed further back than the antepenultimate; the accent, accordingly, which in the case of verbal
forms of more than two syllables would have been on the last syllable of the preceding word in the
Veda fell on the penultima of the corresponding verbal form itself in Greek. The accentuation which thus
fixed itself in the verb of the principal clause was extended by analogy to the verb of the subordinate
clause, and eventually to verbal forms of less than three syllables; φημι, εἰμι, and ἐστι, however,
remained unaccented to bear witness to the process whereby the Greek language had changed the
original accentuation of the Aryan verb.[173] This, like the accentuation of the noun, was mostly (and
probably at the outset altogether) on the flection-suffix to which it called attention, and thus marked
out the symbols that expressed the grammatical relations of the sentence. In the Semitic languages, on
the contrary, the primitive accentuation was on the penultima, though there may possibly have been an
earlier time when it was upon the ultima.[174] The tendency to throw back the accent set in early in
Aryan speech; in Latin, as in the Æolic dialect of Greece, it was uniformly as near the beginning of a
word as possible, and the preservation of the original pitch-accent in Lithuanian is one of the most
curious marks of archaism in that most conservative of West-Aryan tongues.
In Aryan the word-tone, we have seen, was primarily used in the service of grammar. In Chinese,
Siamese, and other Taic languages, however, its use is lexical rather than grammatical; here it serves to
distinguish the senses of words which would otherwise be pronounced in the same way. Dr. Edkins has
shown that modern Mandarin Chinese is an exceedingly decayed speech; its initial consonants have
been worn away; and all its final consonants reduced to the same monotonous nasal. To prevent the
confusion that would thus have been occasioned in a monosyllabic language, where the possible
number of different syllables denoting words was limited even before the corroding action of phonetic
decay, tones were adapted to the expression of meaning, and as old letters disappeared new tones
came into existence. To create a new tone, says Dr. Edkins, requires about 1,200 years.
The sentence-tone is inseparable from speech even of the most lifeless character. Each sentence has
its own key, and the several parts of it their own pitch. The tone rises when we ask a question, it falls
when we answer it, it reaches the “level” point of neutrality when we speak in monotone. But there are
dialects and languages in which monotone is either acute or grave. “Thus in Scotch the rising tone is
often employed monotonously, not only in questions but also in answers and statements of facts. In
Glasgow Scotch the falling tone predominates.”[175] In French, too, the rising tone is often used in
making statements of fact.
Quite distinct from accent of pitch is accent of stress, though the close connection between the two
may be gathered from the fact that in modern Greek the stress accent regularly answers to the acute
and circumflex of the ancient language. Much of this regularity, however, may be due to the same
pedantic revival which has resuscitated the dialect of Plato and Thucydides and substituted it for the
“modern Greek” spoken half a century ago. Stress is the force with which the different syllables of
words are uttered, and increased force is naturally accompanied by increased pitch. Stress, in fact,
corresponds to syllable-tone and word-tone, emphasis—the stress of a sentence—corresponding to
sentence-tone. Like pitch, it may be regarded as either rising, level, or falling. Stress, however, differs
from pitch in its variability; there is no gradual fall, but a tendency “to sway to and fro,” as Mr. Sweet
expresses it. Rising stress may consequently be of varying degrees of force and falling stress of
weakness, level stress, even in French, being practically unknown. Stress and pitch together give to
speech its rhythmic character, and make it the lyric utterance in which man expresses his thoughts and
his emotions. Where the rhythm is regular we have poetry and song, where it is irregular the language
of ordinary prose. Stress is the great conservator of language; the chief counterpoise to the action of
phonetic decay. The accented syllable will be preserved though all the other syllables by which it is
surrounded may disappear in pronunciation, just as the idea upon which emphasis is laid will hold out
successfully against the attacks of age and forgetfulness. Winteler[176] has laid down the law that in
accented syllables, liquids, nasals, and spirants are always long after a short vowel if followed by a
consonant (e.g. man̄ ly, Germ. al̄ t.)
The loss of the accent of pitch in modern English and the consequent extension of the accent of
stress have made us less observant of quantity than the grammarians of India or the poets of ancient
Greece. All syllables, however, may be classed as long, half-long, or short, due to the duration of the
force with which they are uttered. According to Brücke, the duration needed for the production of a long
vowel is to that needed for the production of short vowels in the proportion of five to three, but Sievers
remarks that this only applies to the oratorical pronunciation of modern literary German. In any case,
the length of the same vowel may vary according to circumstances; it is long, for instance, in the
English sīz (seize), short in sĭs (cease). Several of the Scotch dialects possess no long vowels at all,
while in French most vowels are half-long, distinctly short accented vowels being final, as in oui.[177]
Like vowels, consonants, too, may be long or short. In our own language final consonants are long after
short vowels (as hill), short after long vowels (as heel), and l and the nasals are lengthened before
sonants (as build), shortened before surds (as built). Short final consonants after short vowels make the
pronunciation appear clipped, as in German words like mann.
Accent has considerable influence upon quantity. On the one side short vowels may be lengthened
and pure vowels converted into diphthongs by the accent falling upon them. This is partly the origin of
the Sanskrit guṇa and vṛiddhi, according to which a simple ă is raised to â, an ĭ to ê (ai) and ai (âi), and
an u to o (au) and au (âu).[178] The lengthening of short vowels in Hebrew in a “pause,” that is at the
end of a sentence, is another example. In the German dialects monosyllables which end in a consonant
frequently have their vowel changed into a diphthong by the accent, the original vowel appearing again
as soon as an additional syllable is added. In our own English the short vowel of a monosyllable which
ends in a sonant frequently becomes half-long when accented (compare fog with fóggy, god with
góddess). On the other side, the absence of the accent may bring with it a diminution of quantity. Thus
a diphthong may be shortened by being pronounced in the same period of time as is required for the
pronunciation of a short vowel, or may even be reduced to the short vowel which lies midway between
the two elements of which the diphthong consists. A short vowel, again, may be reduced to a vocalic
consonant like the Slavonic r. Since much movement of the lips in speaking implies an energetic
enunciation, shortened syllables are naturally pronounced with passive lips. To this fact we must ascribe
the numerous short syllables of modern cultivated English.
There is but little difference between a long or “strong” consonant and a doubled one. In the first
case, the position of the vocal organs for pronouncing the consonant is retained with gradually
decreasing force, until it is suddenly shifted to the position needed for the following vowel; in the
second case it is shifted back again, when the force required to produce it is half spent. Strictly
speaking, therefore, the consonant cannot be said to be doubled; there is simply a break or pause in
the utterance of it, the force necessary to produce it being renewed before it has been fully exhausted.
In English, French, German, or Slavonic the double consonants have become long ones; to find them
still pronounced we must turn to Italian, Swedish, Finnic, or Magyàr. Analogous to a double consonant is
the combination of a sonant with a surd, when assimilation does not take place, as in has to do or has
seen. In Sanskrit and Greek aspirated letters could not be doubled, Sanskrit permitting only kkh, tth,
and pph, and Greek only κχ, τθ, and πφ; hence it seems plain that there was either no glide or a glide
practically inaudible.
It is obvious that the combination of a consonant and a vowel admits of an almost infinite series of
variations according as the formation of the one or other sound is made prominent in pronunciation.
The consonant may, as it were, swallow up the vowel; on the other hand, the vocal organs may be
shifted to form the vowel while they are still in the act of forming the consonant. Hence arise mouillé
and labialized letters. If the front part of the tongue be raised and the lips opened while a consonant is
being uttered, a palatalized or mouillé letter is the result, of which the Italian gl and gn, the Spanish ll
and ñ, or the Portuguese lh and nh, may be regarded as examples. Still better examples, according to
Sievers, are combinations of consonants with an original i in many Slavonic languages (e.g. Russian
nikto). Certain consonants are incapable of being mouillé; gutturals, for instance, in whose formation
the back part of the tongue plays so prominent a part can only be so by becoming palatals. Labialized
sounds are those in which the lips are rounded while the pronunciation of a consonant is in process.
Labials and gutturals show the same fondness for this labialization or “rounding,” that the palatals and
dentals do for mouillation; and a comparison of the derived languages proves that the primitive Aryan
speech must have possessed a row of labialized or “velar” gutturals—kw, gw, ghw—of which the Latin
qu and our own cw, qu are descendants. There is nothing to show that these velar gutturals were ever
developed out of the simple gutturals; so far back as we can go in the history of Indo-European speech
the two classes of guttural exist side by side, and the groups of words containing them remain unallied
and unmixed. Γυνή and queen (quean) must be separated from γένος, genitrix, kinder, and other
derivations of the root which we have in the Sanskrit janâmi, the Greek γίγνομαι, γείνομαι, and the Latin
gigno; and the labialized quies can have nothing to do with the Greek κεῖμαι and κώμη (κύμη), our own
home and ham-let.[179] Both rounding and mouillation may be combined, as in the Danish kyst, pynte,
and when occurring at the end of a word may frequently be explained from the analogy of cases in
which the word is followed by a syllable beginning with u and i. Such an explanation, however, is more
likely to be true of mouillation than of rounding; indeed, an i or y sound is very apt to develop itself
after consonants in affected pronunciation, as in the English kyind, duke (for dook), or the Greek ζορκάς
(δyορκας) for δορκάς and the Magyàr ágy, “bed.” Conversely a palatal i or y may develop a dental
sonant before it: thus the Italian diacere comes from the Latin jacere, the Low Latin madius from
majus,[180] and the Greek ζειά (δyειά) and ζυγόν (δyυγόν) from yava and jugum (Sansk. yugam). In
these instances we may trace the influence of emphasis; the parasitic letter is due to the attempt to
speak with greater distinctness and solemnity.
But whether it be emphasis or the other two causes of change described in an earlier chapter, the
pronunciation of sounds, like the meaning they convey, is in a constant state of flux. Nowhere is the
dogma of Herakleitus, πάντα ῥεῖ, truer than in the history of speech. No two people pronounce exactly
alike, nor does the same person always pronounce the same word or group of words in exactly the
same way. Apart from the changes undergone by the pronunciation of words according to the sounds of
the other words with which they may be associated, it is difficult to pronounce the same word when
uttered singly twice in precisely the same way. The very effort to do so produces modification of the
sound. Such shades of difference in utterance, however, are imperceptible to any but an unusually
sensitive ear; it is only when the difference becomes considerable that it attracts notice. It then
constitutes what we may term a variety, and such varieties we may hear sometimes from the lips of a
single individual, sometimes from the members of a family, sometimes from those who live in daily
contact and under the same conditions of life. The faculty of imitation is strong within us, and a
particular pronunciation once started soon spreads, as it were instinctively, amongst those who are
much together. It has often been observed how like the members of a family are to each other, not only
in general appearance and manner, but still more in the use of similar expressions and idioms and the
pronunciation of sounds. It is the same with schools, and to a less degree with universities to which the
students come with their habits of phonetic utterance more or less formed: it has been said that the
handwriting betrays the school at which the man has been educated; it may be said with equal justice
that the mode of speaking does so too. In a savage state of existence, where tribe-life and village-life
are on the one hand strict and intense, and the husband on the other hand sees but little of his wife
and children, the conditions favourable to the growth of varieties in pronunciation are more numerous
than among civilized men. The language of the nursery becomes in time the language of the tribe.
This phonetic variety may be broadly stated as mainly due to differences in the structure of the vocal
organs. Putting aside imitation and analogy, putting aside, too, all wilful and conscious changes of
pronunciation such as those enumerated on page 205, a particular sound or a particular way of
pronouncing a sound may be easier to one speaker than to another. Very slight differences in the
physical formation of the organs of speech may produce the most important consequences. And when a
habit of pronunciation has once been fixed, it is difficult to alter it. The child who is learning to speak
will as readily learn Chinese as English, the Japanese r as the Northumberland burr; it is quite another
matter when the attempt to catch the sounds of a new language has to be made in adult years.
Climate and food have, doubtless, an important effect in producing changes in the formation of the
vocal organs; but at present we have no means of knowing the nature and extent of their influence.
Professor March remarks of the change of i to g in Anglo-Saxon,[181] that “the movement (of
consonants to vowels) is sometimes reversed, as when a nation moves northward, or northern peoples
mix with a vowel-speaking race.” The Rev. W. Webster has drawn attention to the nasal twang which
distinguishes not only American English, but American Spanish, Portuguese, and French as well; and
which seems to be due to the dryness and the extremes of the American climate, while he further
suggests climatic influences for the origin of the loss of the aspirate in Spanish words like hijo,
pronounced ijo, the Latin filius, which in the fourteenth century still had f, and for the intensification of
the aspirate in the corresponding Gascon words. We are all well acquainted with the hoarseness and
roughness that exposure to the atmosphere lends to the voice, and the exercise and strength that a
mountainous region gives to the lungs produce their effect in the vigour with which sounds are uttered.
In cold countries the respiration is accelerated, while the air being denser contains a larger volume of
oxygen.[182] The prognathism of the lower and older races of men, again, must have considerably
modified their powers of utterance. “The lower jaw,” says Dr. Rolleston, “which in every well-marked
variety of the human species contributes very importantly towards the making up of its distinctive
character, was in the brachycephalous Briton usually a very different bone from the lower jaw of his
Silurian predecessor.”[183] The strange fashions, too, which lead the savage to mutilate and deform his
person, have frequently a very direct bearing upon phonology. Thus the loss and confusion of the labials
and the excessive nasalization in the languages of the natives of the Pacific coast of America must be
traced to the rings that are worn through the nostrils and lips of the people.[184] The Otyi-herero of
South Africa is lisping in consequence of the custom of knocking out the four lower teeth, and partly
filing off the upper front ones, to which also Professor Max Müller suggests the occurrence of the
English, th and dh in the language may be due, and the Dinkas, who, like all the negroes of the White
River, extract the front teeth of the lower jaw, have no sibilants.[185]
Whatever may be the causes which bring about varieties in pronunciation, certain it is that they are
as continually making their appearance as varieties in the realm of natural history. Where they are
unrestrained by the conservative tendencies of literature and education, they soon spread from the
individual and the household and become species or dialects. The dialect itself may in course of time
assume so marked a character of its own, and be so widely spoken as to be accounted a separate
language; and will stand to the varieties and species destined to grow out of it in the relation of a genus
to its species. But with this further development phonology has little to do.
It is otherwise with the changes which result in the rise of a new dialect. Comparative philology is
based on the recognition that the same word will be represented by different combinations of sounds in
a group of allied dialects or languages, and that each combination will be governed by a fixed phonetic
law. An English h, for example, will answer to a Greek and Latin k, an English t to a German z and a
Sanskrit d. When once a sound is given in a language, we may know the sounds which must correspond
to it in the cognate languages. Now and then, of course, subordinate laws will interfere with the
working of the general law; but unless such an interference can be proved, we must never disregard the
general law for the sake of an etymological comparison, however tempting. To compare the Greek θεός
with the Latin deus and the Sanskrit devas, rests upon almost as unstable a foundation as the old
derivation of whole from ὅλος, and call from καλέω.[186] We must never forget that the laws of
phonology are as undeviating in their action as the laws of physical science, and where the spelling
does not mislead us will display themselves in every word of genuine growth. Even the vowels cannot
be changed and shifted arbitrarily; they, too, follow definite laws of development, and though it is not
yet possible to state their equivalence in the several languages of a single family with the same
precision as in the case of the consonants, we may feel quite sure that this is the fault of our ignorance
and not of the facts themselves.
It was the great Grimm who, following in the wake of Rask, first formulated the empiric law of that
regular Lautverschiebung, or shifting of sounds, in our Indo-European family of speech which has since
gone under his name. Since his time the law has been the subject of much discussion and examination;
[187] his statements have been amended and amplified, and an endeavour made to apply the same law

to the vowels that has been applied to the consonants. The following table[188] exhibits the equivalence
of sounds in the Aryan family of speech:—

Oscan Modern
Church
Sanskrit. Zend. Greek. Latin. and Gothic. English. High Lithuanian. Gaulish.
Slavonic. I
Umbrian. German.
K ś (ç) ç κ c k h, g h, g h, g sz s c
Kw }
k, ch, p k, ch, p κ, π, τ qu, c, v p hv, f(p), h wh, f w, f k, p k, p p
(K²)}
G j, sh z, sh γ g g k k, ch k, ch ż z g
Gw }
g, j, k g, j, zh, k β, γ[189] [g]v, b b kv qu, c qu, k g g b? b
(G²)}
 GH h z χ h, g h g g, y g z z g
G Hw }
[g] h g, j, zh χ, φ v, gv, g ? g, v? g, w? g, w? g g b?
(G H²)}
T t t τ t t th, d d, th d, t t t t
D d d δ d, l d t t z, ss, sz d d d
DH [d] h d θ f, d, b[190] f d d t, th d d d
P p p π p p f, b f, b f, b p p ...
B b b? β b b p? p? pf?, f? b b b
BH [b] h b φ f, b f b b b b b b
NG ṅ ñ γ ng ng ng ng ng ng -n ng
N n n ν n n n n n n n, -n n
M m m μ m m m m m m m, -n m
R r, l r ρ, λ r, l r, l r, l r, l r, l r, l r, l r, l
Y y y y, ζ, δ j j j y j j j j
V v v ϝ, υ, ῾ v v v w w v v v
S s h, s σ, ῾ s, r s, r, z s, z s, r s, r s s, ch s
A a a ε ĕ e e — — e e —
A² â, a — ο ŏ, ĕ — — — — o, à o —
A³ a, i, u, î, û — α, ο a, o — a — — a a —
 â â ᾱ, ω ā, ō — — — — — — —
I i i ῑ i i i — — i i —
U u u ῠ u, o, i u u, au — — u u, o, ŭ —

Some of the changes of sound recorded in the above table are as old as the undivided Aryan speech
itself. They go back to the dialects that existed in the earliest period of which our materials allow us to
know. Instead of clinging, with Fick, to a genealogical tree, and deriving the Aryan languages of Europe
and Asia from two parent-stems, Western and Eastern Aryan, and these again from a single Ursprache
or primitive speech, it is better to follow J. Schmidt in tracing the later languages to co-existent dialects,
which by the loss or absorption of intermediate dialects and the migration of the speakers became more
and more distinct and divergent one from the other. It is, of course, quite possible that the speakers of
the most western of these dialects moved across the Ural range into Europe in a compact body, and
there settled for a while in a district westward of a line drawn from Königsberg to the Crimea, where the
beech grew, and that it was from this second home of the Aryan race that the waves of European
emigrants successively broke off. Certainly Professor Fick seems to have shown the common possession
of certain phonetic peculiarities, such as the vowel e, by the Western as distinguished from the Eastern
Aryans, and the Eastern or Indic branch of the family clearly once formed a single whole which
subsequently divided into Iranian and Hindu. Unfortunately the position of Armenian and the allied
dialects is still a matter of doubt; and there are scholars who would regard them as a link between the
European and the Asiatic sections of the Aryan group. But Fick labours hard, and apparently with
success, to prove that the Aryan dialects of Asia Minor, such as we know them from glosses and
inscriptions, belonged to the European, not the Asiatic section, while Armenian, on the other side, is an
Iranian tongue. Fick’s conclusion is confirmed by the evidence of the cuneiform inscriptions. Up to the
eighth century B.C. Armenia was still inhabited by tribes who spoke non-Aryan languages, and it was
only a century previously that the Medes had first forced their way into the country regarded by the
agglutinative Accadians as the cradle of their race, but which was afterwards to be the seat of the Aryan
Medes. Eastward of the Halys there was nothing Aryan until long after the occupation of Armenia by the
new-comers.
We have certain proof that the series of changes which resulted in the formation of High German took
place subsequently to the overthrow of the Roman Empire. Latin words for instance like (via) strata or
campus, adopted by the Teutons during the era of their wars with Rome, are found in both Low and
High German in the very forms which the application of Grimm’s law would require them to have were
they native words. Thus strata, Low German strata, our street, becomes straza in Old High German,
campus, our camp, similarly becomes kamph, kampf. The Hessians were called Catti in Roman times,
and though now High Germans, had the same ancestors as the Batavi, from whom the modern Dutch
draw their descent, while the Malbergian glosses show the language of the Franks to have been Low
German, although the Franconians of to-day, who are descended from the same stock as the Suabians
and Ripuarians, speak High German. Here, at any rate, we have an instance of a series of varieties
finally resulting in a new language in historical times.
It must not be supposed that all the changes of pronunciation that serve to distinguish one branch of
the Aryan stock from another took place simultaneously. On the contrary, they were slow and gradual;
first one and then another new fashion in sounding words sprang up and became general: when once
the new pronunciation had, from any cause, taken a firm hold of the community, analogy caused every
word to be submitted to its influence, unless special reasons, such as accent, stood in the way, until in
course of time the process of shifting the sounds was completed. An instructive illustration of this
shifting of sounds has lately been going on almost under our eyes. In the Samoan Islands of the Pacific
only fifteen years ago k was an unknown sound except in one small island of the group, where it
replaced t. Since then it has practically disappeared from all of them, and t has taken its place. What
makes the rapidity of the change the more extraordinary is that the speakers of the language live on
separate islands, and that intercourse between them is less intimate now, according to Mr. Whitmee,
than it was in the days of heathenism. And yet in spite of books and schools, in spite of education and
every effort to check it, the change has come about. The natives will ridicule the foreigner who
pronounces in the new fashion, they will themselves take pains to sound the k when reading aloud or
making a set speech, but in conversation it has ceased to be heard. The tendency to put k for t seems
to be irresistible; it is in the air, like an epidemic, and the spelling, so recently introduced, no longer
represents the common pronunciation of the people.[192]
We must be on our guard against thinking that the sounds represented by the same letter of the
alphabet in different languages are really identical. We have seen of what numberless variations each
sound that we utter is capable, and it does not follow that because the Sanskrit cha and the English
church are written with the same palatal ch, that therefore they are to be pronounced alike. And what is
true of the consonants is still more true of the vowels. There is much to show that the European scale
of three short vowels—ă, ĕ, ŏ—is more primitive than the Indic single vowel ă, in which three distinct
vowel-sounds of the parent-speech have coalesced, but we cannot infer from this that the three vowel-
sounds of the parent-speech were actually ă, ĕ, and ŏ. Indeed, when we remember that the Greek
ἕκατον (for ἕν-καντον) corresponds to the Latin centum, while ferentis is represented by φέροντος, it is
quite clear that the Latin ĕ must have developed out of one or more sounds which were distinct from it.
In dealing with the hypothetical Parent-Aryan it is best, with Brugman, to symbolize these three
primitive vowels as a¹, a², and a³.[193] It is possible that some at least of the earlier sounds out of
which more than one articulate sound have afterwards developed, were of a vague indeterminate
character, not properly-formed vowel utterances. Professor Max Müller[194] quotes authorities to prove
that in the Sandwich Islands k and t are undistinguished, and that “it takes months of patient labour to
teach a Hawaian youth the difference between k and t, g and d, l and r.”[195] The confusion between k
and t, however, has already been explained by the similar fact observed in Samoan where the sound
has actually changed within the last fifteen years, a distinctly-articulated k becoming an equally
distinctly-articulated t. But even in English we find people saying a cleast instead of at least, while at
Paris and elsewhere the lower classes say amikié for amitié, charkier for charretier, crapu for trapu.[196]
So in the old Paris argot j’équions stood for j’étais, and in Canada the uneducated part of the population
says mékier for métier, moikié for moitié. Bleek, again, writes of the Setshuana dialects: “One is
justified to consider r in these dialects as a sort of floating letter, and rather intermediate between l and
r, than a decided r sound.”[197] To these instances of confusion between two consonants which
Professor Max Müller believes to be “a characteristic of the lower stages of human speech,” may be
added the fluctuation between two forms of the same sound in the North German dialects, where no
distinction is made between surd and sonant mediæ, as well as in many of the Armenian dialects.[198]
But we must bear in mind that this childlike inability to distinguish between sounds may be due to two
very different causes. It may be a result either of the sound being formed at the neutral point, as it
were, intermediate between two distinct sounds, or of the ear being unable to discriminate between
different articulations. The latter cause is analogous to colour-blindness, and has most to do with the
imperfections of childish utterance or the substitution of r for l so often heard; the other cause is of a
purely phonetic character, and takes us back to the time when man was gradually fashioning the
elements of articulate speech. This infantile state of language had probably been long left behind by the
cultivated speakers of the Parent-Aryan; indeed, the very existence of the three vowels marked a₁, a₂,
and a₃, would imply that such was the fact. If there was any confusion in the pronunciation of their
words it would have to be ascribed rather to sound-blindness than to imperfection of utterance.
The regular action of Grimm’s law may be interfered with by the influence of other laws, just as in
physical science the regular action of the law of attraction may be interfered with from time to time.
Foremost among these disturbing agencies is the accent. K. Verner has shown[199] that the position of
the accent has occasioned that apparent disregard of Grimm’s law in the Teutonic languages which has
produced mutter and vater (O. H. G. muotar and fatar) by the side of bruder (O. H. G. brôpar), sieben
(Goth. sibun) by the side of fünf (Anglo-Saxon fîf), schwieger (O. H. G. swigar = ἑκυρὰ, so-cru-s) by the
side of heil (Greek καλός), or such a curious change in the conjugation of the same verb as the Anglo-
Saxon lîðe,“I sail,” but liden, “sailed.” The same cause has brought about the varying representation of
an original ſ now by s, and now by z or r. In the Veda, bhrâtar is accented on the first syllable, like the
Greek φράτηρ, mâtár and pitár on the last, again like the Greek μητήρ and πατήρ. Sieben answers to
the Vedic saptán, the Greek ἑπτά, whereas fünf is the Vedic pánchan and Greek πέντε. Schwieger
similarly goes back to the Vedic ´swa´srû´, Greek ἑκυρά, just as the O. H. G. snura from snuza goes
back to the Vedic snushâ´, Greek νυός, in contradistinction to nase, nose, the Vedic nâ´sa, the
Lithuanian nósis. If we turn to the verb, we find that in Anglo-Saxon, whereas the present lîðe, “(I) sail,”
corresponds with a Vedic bhédâmi, and the singular of the past tense lâð with a Vedic bibhéda, the
plural of the preterite lidon corresponds with a Vedic bibhidús.[200]
There are other influences besides that of the accent which may change and mar the face of words.
Although every change takes place in strict accordance with phonetic laws, and is consequently capable
of explanation, the occurrence of the changes is more or less sporadic and arbitrary. That is to say, they
may act upon one word and not upon its neighbour. In should or would, for instance, l has been
assimilated to d, but in fold and cold it still maintains its existence. Such changes may be either
independent or dependent on the action of surrounding sounds. The diversification of the Teutonic a
into e and o, or the transition of the Latin ĭ and ŭ into Romanic e and o are instances of independent
change. So, too, the modern English pronunciation of the vowels with passive lips, and the consequent
loss of the intermediate vowels ü and ö, is another example of the same facts. Wherever, indeed, these
intermediate vowel-sounds exist, we may feel sure that the lips take an active part in articulation. In all
these cases the change happens in the formation of the sound, uninfluenced by the neighbourhood of
other sounds. The extension of a simple vowel into a diphthong may also be brought under this head,
though the presence of the circumflex accent seems to have much to do with it. On the other hand,
changes in the dentals, the passage of z into r and r into l, or the transition from a guttural to a palatal
and a dental, are all examples of purely independent change. When we find an Aryan kw (k²) and gw
becoming ch and j in Sanskrit or τ in Greek, we merely see the gradual forward movement of the
tongue, which is moved with less exertion towards its tip than towards its root. The change of Aryan kw
and gw into p and b in Greek (as in πίσυρες and βίος[201]) is held by Sievers to be due to a sudden
“leap” in the articulation, k and g partially assimilating the second part of each compound into p and b,
and then falling away altogether.
Most of the changes recorded in Grimm’s law may be brought under the head of independent change.
No doubt the transition of g, d, b, into k, t, and p in German is partially dependent upon the accent, but
the growth of an aspirate out of a tenuis, as exemplified in the Irish pronunciation of English, is
probably due to nothing but an increase in the energy and duration with which our breath is expired.
The want of the stress accent brings about the shortening and loss of final vowels, the tonic accent, on
the other hand, tending to lengthen them.
The changes caused by the action of one sound upon another may be divided into those which are
due to assimilation, and those that are not. In either case the time occupied in pronouncing the
changed sound remains the same as it was before; it is only in cases of independent change that it may
differ. Assimilation is effected in one of two ways. The relative positions of the vocal organs needed for
the pronunciation of two sounds may be made to approximate, as in the reduction of ai (a + i) to e, or
the time that elapses between the pronunciation of two sounds may be reduced or destroyed
altogether, as when supmus becomes summus. Where the change is not due to assimilation, it will be
found to depend on an alteration in the time needed for the formation of two or more sounds.
Assimilation may be regressive, progressive, or reciprocal. Regressive assimilation is where a sound is
assimilated to that which follows it, as in ἕννυμι for ϝεσ-νυμι, from the root vas, or ποσσί, for ποδ-σι
(ποδ-σϝ-ι), and γράμμα for γράφ-μα(τ). Progressive assimilation is the converse of this, as in στέλλω for
στελ-yω, μᾶλλον for μαλ-ιον, mellis for melv-is, or the Æolic ἔστελλα for ἔστελ-σα. Regressive
assimilation largely preponderates in our Aryan languages, progressive assimilation in the Ural-Altaic
ones; and it is very possible that Sievers is right[202] in tracing this contrast to the difference of the
accentuation, which in Ural-Altaic falls upon the first syllable of the word, while in the parent-Aryan it
fell for the most part on the final syllable. Böhtlingk[203] says, very appositely: “An Indo-Germanic word
is a real whole of such a kind that the speaker has uttered the whole word, as it were, in spirit, as soon
as he has pronounced the first syllable. Only in this way can it be explained how a syllable (or sound) is
modified in order to assist the pronunciation of the syllable (or sound) that follows it. A member of the
Ural-Altaic race forces out the first syllable of a word—that part of it, namely, which has the accent—
little caring for the fortune of the rest; on this he next strings in more or less rude fashion a few more
significant syllables, only thinking of a remedy at the moment when he first feels the want of one.” As
for reciprocal assimilation, an example of it may be found in the reduction of ai to e quoted above,
where both sounds influence one another.
Assimilation may be either complete or partial. There are sounds which can never be thoroughly
assimilated to each other, bn, for instance, can never at once become nn, only mn. Partial regressive
assimilation meets us very frequently in the classical languages; e.g., λεκ-τός from the root λεγε,
ἤνυσμαι from ἀνυτ-, δόγμα from δοκ-; partial progressive assimilation is rarer; e.g., πάσχω for πάσκω
from παθ-σκω.
The changes dependent on the presence of a second sound, which are not due to assimilation, are
necessarily produced by varying the time needed for pronunciation. Of these the most striking is
metathesis. Metathesis must be referred rather to a mental than to a phonetic origin. Our thought and
will outstrip our pronunciation, the result being that the sound which ought to follow is made to
precede, or else the vocal organs are shaped prematurely for the formation of a sound which ought to
be heard later, the consequence being that the sound which should come first has to come last.
Metathesis, in fact, is similar to the rapidity, or rather relaxation, of thought which leads us sometimes
to write or speak a word which belongs to a subsequent part of the sentence; and it may be of two
kinds: either the place of two sounds may be simply inverted, or the second sound may be made to
precede the first by two or three syllables. How easily the first case can happen is shown by the
phonograph, where each syllable that has been uttered can be reproduced backward by merely turning
the handle of the machine the wrong way. R and l are the most subject to metathesis, then the nasals;
the other consonants vary according to their relationship to the vowels. More regular than metathesis
are the insertion and omission of consonants, as in ἀν-δ-ρὸς, ἄ-μ-β-ροτος, τέτυφθε for τέτυφσθε,
rêmus for resmus. Somewhat different are the insertion and omission of vowels, the first of which goes
under the technical name of Swarabhakti. This name was imported from the Hindu grammarians by
Johannes Schmidt,[204] to mark the growth of a short or reduced vowel from a liquid or nasal, when
accompanied by another consonant. Thus ănman, “name,” became ănă-man, and then, by the loss of
the first vowel and the compensatory lengthening of the second, nômen and nâmâ. Swarabhakti is,
however, incompatible with the acute accent. We may find examples of it in the slow pronunciation
which in English turns umbrella into umbĕrella, and Henry into Henĕry.[205] Prosthesis, or prothesis, the
insertion of a short vowel at the beginning of a word before two consonants, is another illustration of
Swarabhakti. There are many nations which find a difficulty in pronouncing two consonants at the
beginning of a word. Thus the Bengali calls the English school yschool, the Arab says Iflatún for Platon,
and the Ossete uses a for the same purpose. In other cases, one of the consonants is dropped
altogether, as so frequently by children and systematically by the natives of Polynesia. In Latin
inscriptions and MSS. later than the fourth century we find forms like istatuam, ispirito, just as in the
Romanic tongues we have estar and espée (épée) for stare and spada, or in Welsh ysgol from schola,
yspryd from spiritus. According to Wentrup,[206] a is often used as a prothetic vowel in Sicilian;
Lithuanian has forms like iszkadà, German “schade,” and Basque and Hungarian prefix a similar aid to
the pronunciation. No trace of a prothetic vowel can be found in Latin; in Greek, however, such vowels
are very plentiful. Thus we have ἄσταχυς by the side of στάχυς, ἐχθές by the side of χθές, ἰγνύη by the
side of γόνυ, Ὀβριαρευς by the side of Βριαρεύς. In Greek, too, as in other languages where prothesis
occurs, the complementary vowel may be inserted before a liquid, more especially r, as well as before a
strictly double consonant, e.g., ἀμύνω by the side of μύνη, ἐρυθρός by the side of ruber, ὀρέγω by the
side of rego. Even the digamma may perhaps take the prefix as in the Homeric ἔεδνον. But it is
probable that no other single consonant does so, the apparent exceptions being really explained by the
loss of a consonant which once existed along with the one that is left. Ὀκέλλω, for instance,
presupposes ὀ-κϝέλλω (Latin pellere), Ἀπόλλων presupposes Α-κϝολιων, “the son of the revolving one”
(Sanskrit char, Greek πέλομαι). In other cases we are dealing not with a prothetic vowel, but with a part
of the primitive root: ὄνομα, for example, is shown by the Irish aimn and Old Prussian emnes to be
more original than the Sanskrit nâmâ or the Latin nomen, and to stand for an earlier an-man; and ὄνυξ,
the Latin unguis, the Irish inga, is earlier in form than the Sanskrit nakha and the English nail (nagel)
[207]. We may discover a tendency in Greek to adapt the prothetic vowel to that of the root, though it is
hardly so regular as in Zend roots beginning with r, where we find i-rith for rith, but u-rud for rud.
Sanskrit, like Latin, shows an inclination rather to drop initial vowels than to add them, but even in
Sanskrit, Curtius has pointed out[208] the Vedic i-raj-yâmi from raj (rego) and i-radh, “to seek to obtain,”
from râdh. As for the loss of a vowel, it is too familiar to every one to need any illustration.
More akin to metathesis is epenthesis, which closely resembles the Teutonic umlaut. Epenthesis is
especially plentiful in Greek, where κτέν-yω becomes κτείνω, χερ-ιων χείρων, λόγοσι λόγοις, ἐλαν-ϝω
ἐλαύνω, νερϝον νεῦρον. Probably λέγει for λεγειτ is to be explained as resulting from the epenthesis of ι
(λεγειτ for λεγετι), just as λέγεις stands for an earlier λεγεσι. Epenthesis thus presupposes a mouillation
or labialization in which the articulation of the consonant is absorbed, as it were, by that of the i and u.
The greater the participation of the lips and tongue in the formation of these vowels, the greater will be
the tendency towards epenthesis.
Lastly, we have to consider the lengthening of vowels, either by way of compensation or before
certain consonants. By compensation is meant the additional force with which a vowel is pronounced
after the loss of a consonant which followed or preceded it. Thus in Greek the loss of the digamma in
βασιλεϝ-ος produced the Ionic βασιλῆος on the one side and the Attic βασίλεως on the other, just as the
loss of the yod in πολιy-ος similarly produced πολῆος and πόλεως. So, too, πάνς became πᾶς, δαιμονς
δαίμων, ἐφαν-σα ἔφηνα, rĕs-mus rémus, pĕds pês, exăgmen exâmen, măgior mâjor. In certain cases
the vowel was raised into a diphthong, as in φέρουσι for φεροντι, τιθείς for τιθενς, ἔστειλα for έστελσα.
But a vowel may also be lengthened before liquids, nasals, and spirants when combined with another
consonant. If the grave or the circumflex accent fall upon the preceding vowel, the tendency is to
lengthen the vowel at the expense of the sonant or spirant following. Hence it is, that whereas in our
English tint, or hilt, where the vowel has the acute, the nasal and liquid are long; in kind and mild, on
the other hand, where the vowel is circumflexed, it is the vowel (or rather the diphthong) that is long.
The vowel, again, may be lengthened to compensate for the loss of a double letter. Thus in Latin we
find vīlicus by the side of villicus, from villa, and whereas the grammarians lay down that when ll is
followed by i, single l must be written, we find millia in the famous inscription of Ancyra. So, too, the
inscriptions vary between Amulius and Amullius, Polio and Pollio, and good MSS. have loquella, medella,
instead of loquēla, medēla.
There is another fact to be remembered when we are looking for the application of Grimm’s law—a
fact which the law itself ought to bring to our minds. Different languages have different phonetic
tendencies; the same sound is not equally affected by phonetic decay in two different dialects or
modified in the same way; each language has phonetic laws and phænomena peculiar to itself. Thus, in
Greek, σ between two vowels is lost, in Latin it becomes r; in Greek a nasal preserves, or perhaps
introduces, the vowel a, in Latin it prefers the vowel e. Because τ between vowels becomes σ in Greek,
or sr in Latin is changed into br (as in cerebrum for ceresrum, κέρας, śiras), we are not justified in
expecting similar changes in other tongues. In fact we have only to look at the table of sound-changes,
known as Grimm’s law, to see that it is just because two languages do not follow the same course of
phonetic modification that a scientific philology is possible.
To speak of Grimm’s law being “suspended,” of “exceptions to Grimm’s law,” and the like, is only to
show an ignorance of the principles of comparative philology. Grimm’s law is simply the statement of
certain observed phonetic facts, which happen invariably, so far as we know, unless interfered with by
other facts which, under given conditions, equally happen invariably. The accidental has little place in
phonology, at all events in an illiterate and uncultivated age. Literature and education are no doubt
disturbing forces: a writer may borrow a word without modifying its sound according to rule; and the
word may be adopted into the common speech through the agency of the schoolmaster; but such
words are mere aliens and strangers, never truly naturalized in their new home, and the philologist
must treat them as such. Native words, as well as words which, though borrowed from abroad, have
been borrowed by the people and so given a native stamp, undergo, and must undergo, all those
changes and shiftings of sound which meet us in Grimm’s law, in the phonetic laws peculiar to individual
languages, or in any other of the generalizations under which we sum up the phænomena of spoken
utterance. False analogy, it is true, may divert a word from the path it would naturally have taken; one
word may be assimilated to another regardless of its real etymology, or words whose real origin has
been forgotten may be modified so as to convey a new meaning to the speaker. But, in such cases, the
worst that could happen would be the loss of the true etymology; Grimm’s law would still hold good,
and the originals of the existing sounds would be those demanded by the regular Lautverschiebung. So
far as the present form of a word like Shotover (for château vert) is concerned, it is to the mere
phonologist, as to the ordinary speaker, a compound of shot and over, and in comparing these two
words with allied words in other languages the prescribed letter-change holds good. It is only the
comparative philologist, who has to deal with the psychological as well as with the phonetic side of
language, that needs to know more, and to determine that Shotover is not what it professes to be, but
the product of a more or less conscious imagination. In most cases of analogy we have to do with
mental as opposed to phonetic assimilation, and they fall, therefore, under sematology, the science of
meanings, rather than under phonology, the science of sounds. No doubt we find instances of analogy,
like the Greek accusative βεβαῶτα, modelled after the nominative βεβαώς,[209] or the Latin genitives
diei, dierum, modelled after the accusative diem for diam, but such instances fall under the laws and
conditions of that phonetic assimilation which has been already described. Let us hold fast to the fact
that the generalizations, the chief of which are summed up in the formula known as Grimm’s law, are at
once uniform and unvarying. If an etymology is suggested, which violates these generalizations, that
etymology must be rejected, however plausible or attractive. It is upon the fixed character of these
generalizations that the whole fabric of scientific philology rests.
Necessarily similar generalizations may be made in the case of other languages which, like the Aryan,
can be grouped into single families of speech; nay, they must be made before we are justified in
grouping them together, or in comparing and explaining their grammar and vocabulary. It is not always,
however, that the changes of sound are so marked and violent as in the Indo-European. A group of
allied languages may be as closely related to one another as the modern Romanic dialects of Europe,
and various causes may have combined to give a stability and fixity to their phonology which has made
it change but slightly in the course of centuries. This is the case with the Semitic dialects, whose laws of
sound-change are extremely simple. Practically the sound shiftings are confined to the sibilants, where
the equivalence of sounds is as follows:—

Assyrian. Hebrew. Ethiopic. Arabic. Aramaic.

s (sh) s (sh) s, ´s sh, s, th ´s, s, th
´s ´s s, ´s s, sh ´s
ts ts ts ts, ds, dhs ts, dh, ’e
z z z z, dh z, d[210]
 One or two other general laws of phonetic change may be laid down for special members of the
Semitic group; thus, in Assyrian, s before a dental becomes l, and kh is dropped when it answers to the
Arabic and Ethiopic weak kh. In the Babylonian dialect, again, k took the place of g, and the n of the
other dialects is sometimes replaced by r in Aramaic.
But the Semitic idioms are dialects rather than languages, so intimate is the connection between
them, so slight the differences by which they are separated. It is quite otherwise if we turn to a group
like the Malayo-Polynesian, where the word oran, “man,” may be represented in the different dialects by
rang, olan, lan, ala, la, na, da, and ra.[211] But here, too, the law of equivalence is fixed and
determinate: the Samoan s is changed into h in Tongan and Maori, while the Maori k is dropped in
Samoan.
Equally extensive is the series of changes undergone by sounds in the Ugro-Finnic tongues, and when
the law of sound-shifting has been determined not only for the Ugro-Finnic division of the Turanian
family, but for the whole Turanian family, comprising Turkish, Mongol, and Mandshu, we may expect it
to include a far larger number of changes of sound than that summed up in Grimm’s law. So far as the
Ugro-Finnic dialects are concerned, M. de Ujfálvy, in continuance of the investigations of Riedl,[212] has
been able to lay down the following rules for the phonetic permutations observable in these idioms: (1)
The Finnish and Bulgar k becomes kh in Ostiak, Vogul, and Old Magyár, and h in modern Magyár; (2) k
= ts; (3) k or g = s, z, ṣ, j, ts, &c.; (4) Finnish ks = Votiak hs (earlier ht); (5) Finnish kl, pl = Lapp vl;
(6) Medial Finnish k and h = Bulgar and Ugrian v and f; (7) Initial Finnish h disappears in Livonian and
Lapp (in Lapp also becomes v before a dental); (8) Finnish h = s, ṣ, ts, sy, ts (c), ẓ, tsy, &c.; (9) Finnish
and Bulgar k, g, h = Lapp and Ostiak ng, n = Magyar g; (10) Medial Finnish nk = Lapp gg; (11) Finnish
nt = Lapp dd; (12) gy, ny = y, v; (13) t = s (Finnish t = s, ṣ, sy, ts, z, ẓ, &c.); (14) Finnish s, h = Ostiak
and Vogul t; (15) Finnish p = Votiak b = Magyar b, f; (16) Finnish t = Magyar s, z, ts; (17) Finnish m =
Lapp bm; (18) Lapp dn = Finnish nn or n; (19) Finnish mb = Lapp bb; (20) Finnish kk, tt, pp = Vêpse
and Livonian k, t, p; (21) Finnish k, t, p = Vêpse and Livonian g, d, b. This list of phonetic equivalents
will make it clear that the original phonology of the Ugro-Finnic group is generally best represented by
Suomi or Finnish; in some cases, however, Vêpse (or Tchude) is more archaic than Finnish, and in one
case, that of the change of t into s, Ostiak and Vogul are more primitive than Suomi. Vêpse, again,
shows that the long vowels of Suomi are due to contraction. Within Suomi itself kk, tt, and pp, after a
liquid are softened into simple k, t, and p. The diphthongal consonants of Magyár (ly, my, ty, &c.), are
the result of a contraction of a consonant and a vowel or diphthong following. The changes undergone
by sounds within the Ugro-Finnic group may be summed up as a whole in the two formulæ: (1) The
Finnish hard explosives are represented by soft explosives in the other languages of the group; (2)
spirants, and the sounds derived from them, answer in the allied dialects to the explosives of Finnish. As
for the Samoied idioms, similar phonetic permutations may be discovered in them also. In the Yurak
dialect h = s, ng = nr, and k = ts; in Tavghi k and t tend to become g and d; in Yenissei dd = md (nt,
nd, ntt, ltt), gg = rk (rg) or nk, and tt = bt, while in Ostiak-Samoied and Kamassinche the hard
explosives pass into the soft g, d, b.[213]
Quite as regular as the permutations of sounds in the Finnic group is the law of sound-change
discovered by Bleek to exist in the Bâ-ntu or Kafir family. The following table gives it for the principal
members of the group:—

Kafir. Setshuana. Herero. Ki-suahili. Ki-nika. Mpongwe. Bunda.

k kh, h k k, g k, g k, g k
ng k ng ng ng ng ng
t r, s t t h r, ty t
d l, r t nd nd nd, l nd, r
p p, f, h p p v, h v b
b b, p v b, w b, ’ v —
s ts, s t, ty s, k s, dz z, k , ’ s, k
z ts, l, r z, h z, dz z, ts dz, g, s sh, g
 f f , h, s s f f w f
v b, r s f f — f
l l, r r l’ r, l l, nl l
n n n n n n n
m m m m m m m

The Bâ-ntu law of sound-shifting has the advantage over its Aryan analogue, that it deals with
actually existing sounds which can still be heard and noted by the scientifically trained ear, whereas
many of the Aryan languages and sounds recorded in Grimm’s law are now extinct. The Aryan
philologist, accordingly, has to assume that the spelling of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic words is a
fair approximation to their pronunciation. It is upon this assumption that the whole fabric of historical
grammar is built; nay, comparative philology itself, which began with the comparison of allied forms and
words in the classical languages of India and Europe, is also based upon it. The assumption offers little
difficulty to the Italian, whose spelling accurately represents his pronunciation, or to the German, who
writes pretty much as he speaks; but it need not be pointed out how strange and unnatural it seems to
the Englishman. English spelling, under the guidance of the printers, has become a mere system of
marks and symbols, arranged upon no principle, selected with no rational purpose, each of which by a
separate effort of the memory is associated with some sound or word.
For the scientific philologist, no less than for the practical teacher, a return to the phonetic spelling of
our English language is of the highest importance. What the philologist wishes to know is not how
words are spelt, but how they are pronounced, and this end can be obtained only by means of an
alphabet in which all the chief sounds of the language are represented, and each character represents
but one sound. No doubt the practical man does not want the alphabet required by the phonologist,
who must denote every shade of sound and have separate symbols for the sounds heard not in English
only, but in other languages as well, but the alphabet of the practical man should be based on that of
the phonologist. The reformed alphabet should be one which would enable the child or the foreigner to
recognize at once the sound of the word he is reading, and the philologist to determine the
pronunciation of the writer.
Thanks to Messrs. Ellis, Pitman, and others, the question of reforming our English spelling has not
only been brought before the public, but the conditions under which it is practicable have been
discussed and ascertained, and the merits of rival schemes put to the test. The sounds of the English
language have been analyzed, and the great work of Mr. A. J. Ellis on the “History of English
Pronunciation” has shown how our absurd and anomalous spelling grew up. At the present time we
have in the field the phonology of Mr. Pitman—an alphabet of thirty-eight letters—a large proportion of
which have new forms; the palæotype and glossic of Mr. Ellis, the former retaining the type now used
by the printers, but enlarging the alphabet by turning the letters, and similar devices, the latter by its
likeness to the present spelling intended to bridge over the passage from the present or “Nomic” mode
of spelling to the reformed one; the narrow and the broad Romic of Mr. Sweet, the second an
adaptation of the first to practical use; the ingenious system of Mr. E. Jones, which by the employment
of optional letters for the same sound contrives to introduce little apparent difference in the spelling of
English words; and several other English and American systems that have been proposed, more
especially the reformed alphabet of the American Philological Association, together with the transitional
alphabet intended to lead on to it. Some of these are true phonetic alphabets, words spelt in them
varying according to the pronunciation of the writer, others are merely attempts to reform the present
spelling of English words by making it more consistent, and bringing it more into harmony with their
actual pronunciation. Such attempts would only substitute a less objectionable mode of spelling for the
existing one, a mode of spelling, too, that would in course of time become as stereotyped and far
removed from the pronunciation of the day as is the present system. With such attempts, therefore, the
scientific philologist can have but little sympathy; his efforts must rather be directed towards the
establishment of a phonetic alphabet, based on a thorough analysis of English sounds and conformed to
practical requirements.
 The question of spelling reform is nothing new. Mr. Ellis has brought to light a MS. written in 1551 by
John Hart of Chester, and entitled “The Opening of the unreasonable writing of our inglish toung:
wherin is shewed what necessarili is to be left, and what folowed for the perfect writing therof.” This the
author followed up by a published work in 1569, called “An Orthographie, conteyning the due order and
reason, howe to write or painte thimage of mannes voice, most like to the life or nature.”[214] The
object of this, he says, “is to vse as many letters in our writing, as we doe voyces or breathes in our
speaking, and no more; and neuer to abuse one for another, and to write as we speake.” Hart, however,
it would seem, tried to amend the pronunciation as well as the spelling of English. The year before
(1568) Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary of State in 1548, and successor of Burleigh, had published at the
famous press of Robert Stephens in Paris, a work, “De recta et emendata linguæ anglicæ scriptione,
dialogus.” In this he had suggested a reformed alphabet of thirty-four characters, c being used for ch, ð
for th (in then), and θ for th (in think), long vowels being indicated by a diæresis. In 1580 came
another book in black letter on the same subject, by William Bullokar. His alphabet consisted of thirty-
seven letters, most of which have duplicate forms, and in which c’, g’, and v’, represent s, j, and v. He
composed a primer and a short pamphlet in the orthography he advocated. In 1619, Dr. Gill, head-
master of St. Paul’s School, published his “Logonomia Anglica,” which was quickly followed by a second
edition in 1621. His alphabet contained forty characters, and, as might be expected from his position,
his attempt to reform English spelling was a more scholarly one than those of his predecessors. He
found a rival in the Rev. Charles Butler, an M.A. of Magdalen College, Oxford, who brought out at
Oxford, in 1633, “The English Grammar, or the Institution of Letters, Syllables, and Words in the English
Tongue.” He printed this phonetically, according to his own system, as well as another book, “The
Feminine Monarchy or History of the Bees” (Oxford, 1634). “These,” says Mr. Ellis, “are the first English
books entirely printed phonetically, as only half of Hart’s was so presented. But Meigret’s works were
long anterior in French.” Butler represents the final e mute by ’. In 1668 Bishop Wilkins published his
great work, the “Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language.” In this he has a good
treatise on phonetics, in which he probably made use of an important work on the physiological nature
of sounds, brought out by John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, in 1653;[215] and he
has transcribed the Lord’s Prayer and Creed in his phonetic alphabet of thirty-seven letters. After Bishop
Wilkins the matter rested for a while; but in 1711 the question of reforming English spelling was once
more raised, this time, however, in a practical direction. Dean Swift appealed to the Prime Minister to
appoint a commission for “the Ascertaining, Correcting, and Improving of the English Tongue.”[216] His
appeal, however, was without effect; and the next to apply himself to the subject was Benjamin
Franklin, who, in 1768, put forth “A Scheme for a New Alphabet and reformed mode of Spelling, with
Remarks and Examples concerning the same, and an Enquiry into its Uses.” Franklin embodied his views
in a letter to Miss Stephenson (dated September 20th, 1768), written in his phonetic alphabet, and
intended to meet objections to the proposed reform. It is curious to find the wholly mistaken objection
already put forward that “all our etymologies would be lost” by a reform of spelling.
But spelling reformers have not been confined to England. Ninety years ago a reform of Dutch
spelling was successfully carried out, though the result was unsatisfactory, as might have been expected
from the ignorance of phonology that existed at the time. Spanish spelling has recently undergone
revision on the part of the Academy; and even German, which seems to the Englishman so far
advanced on the road towards perfection, is in process of reformation. The work was begun by
Schleicher, who not only struck out the aphonic h and other useless letters, but even emulated the
Emperor Claudius by inventing a new character. A committee was lately appointed by the Minister of
Education to decide upon such changes of spelling as seemed to them desirable, and a thorough-going
system of reform, with a new alphabet, like that of Mr. Pitman, has been inaugurated through the
exertions of Dr. Frikke and others.[217]
Of scientific alphabets, also, the phonologist has now his choice. Putting aside Melville Bell’s “Visible
Speech,” in which each character symbolizes by lines the action of the vocal organs in forming the
sound it represents, the best are the well-known “Standard” and “Missionary Alphabets” of Lepsius and
Max Müller, the alphabets of Ellis and Prince L-L. Bonaparte, and the alphabet of Sweet. Max Müller’s
alphabet is founded on that of Sir W. Jones, and he brings with justice the charge against Lepsius’s
“Standard Alphabet” that its physiological analysis is sometimes wrong, and that many of its characters
have been found too complicated for use. Sweet’s alphabet has the advantage of avoiding new type, of
having special signs for voice and whisper, for quantity and stress, force, pitch, and glide, and of
indicating by a full stop the place of a “force-impulse.” Prince L-L. Bonaparte’s alphabet, however, as
edited by Ellis, is the most complete; indeed, out of his 385 characters, there occur a few which have
not been detected in any known language. The two last alphabets will be found in the Appendix to the
present chapter.
It is possible that the phonograph may hereafter assist us in constructing a more perfect alphabet
than is now possible. Just as Melville Bell’s letters have a physiological origin, so the letters of the
alphabet of the future may be derived from the forms assumed by sounds on the sensitive plate of the
phonograph. The phonautograph had already informed us that every sound we utter has a distinct
shape and pattern; it only remained to apply this fact practically by the invention of the phonograph.
The phonautograph as constructed by Barlow, Léon Scott, and König, is made to record the sounds of
the human voice by the help either of a pencil or of a gas-flame. The pencil is set in motion by a thin
membrane, against which sounds and words are spoken, and draws on a cylinder covered with sand the
curves which delineate the sounds uttered. When a gas-flame is employed, the forms assumed by it
take the place of those drawn on the sand. In Edison’s phonograph the fact that the form of every
sound can thus be imprinted on a tangible substance has been utilized for the reproduction of speech. A
plate of tin-foil is folded round a revolving cylinder indented from one end to the other with a spiral
groove. As the cylinder revolves the groove is kept constantly beneath a needle, which is attached to a
membrane or sounding-board, against which the voice is impinged through a conical aperture: with
each sound that is uttered the needle presses the tin-foil into the furrow below, imprinting upon it at the
same time the form of the sound. By reversing the process the needle is made to travel once more over
the indented tin-foil, and the sounding-board being thus set in motion reproduces the sounds originally
spoken. Before the tin-foil is thus reduced to its original smoothness, a cast of it may be taken, and at
any subsequent period another piece of tin-foil may receive the impression of the cast, and so
reproduce the words which first caused the indentations. It is needless to point out the assistance which
the phonograph is likely to render to phonology. It is still, of course, new and faulty, and unable, for
instance, to reproduce sibilants; but it cannot fail to be improved and become almost as perfect a
speaking-machine as the human throat itself. Already it has contributed some facts of importance to
phonetic science. Thus we find that all sounds may be reproduced backwards by simply beginning with
the last forms indented on the tin-foil, sociability, for example, becoming ytilibaishos. Diphthongs and
double consonants may be reversed with equal clearness and precision, so that bite, which the
phonograph pronounces bâ-eet, becomes tee-âb In this way we have learnt that the ch of cheque is
really a double letter, the reversed pronunciation of the word being kesht.
The problem of reproducing human speech has thus been approached more successfully from the
physical and acoustic side than from the physiological side, where it was attacked by Faber, Kempelen,
and others. They attempted to construct instruments in which the vocal organs could be represented
with the greatest exactness attainable, the lungs being replaced by a pair of bellows, the trachea by a
hollow tube, and so on. But though these instruments spoke, it was not in human speech, or anything
like it. The utmost they could do was to imitate the first utterances of a child, or the imperfect and
laboured syllables of one who is learning a foreign tongue.
Nevertheless, it is not in the organs of the human voice any more than in the mechanism of a lifeless
instrument that we have to discover the source and creator of speech. All that the vocal organs can do
is to supply the skeleton into which the mind breathes the breath of life. Unmeaning sounds do not
constitute language: until a signification has been put into them, the sounds that have been described
and analyzed are no better than the singing of the birds, the stirring of the trees, or even the dead
utterances of a machine. Phonology, like anatomy, deals only with the dry bones which have yet to be
clothed upon with living flesh.
But by its very nature a science of meanings, sematology, as it has been named, can never have the
same certitude, the same exactness, as a science of sounds. The laws of sematology are far less distinct
and invariable; significant change cannot be reduced to the same set of fixed rules as phonetic change.
The phenomena with which sematology deals are too complicated, too dependent on psychological
conditions; the element of chance or conscious exertion of will seems to enter into them, and it is often
left to the arbitrary choice of an individual to determine the change of meaning to be undergone by a
word. Still this meaning must be accepted by the community before it can become part of language;
unless it is so accepted it will remain a mere literary curiosity in the pages of a technical dictionary. And
since its acceptance by the community is due to general causes, influencing many minds alike, it is
possible to analyze and formulate these causes, in fact, to refer significant change to certain definite
principles, to bring it under certain definite generalizations. Moreover, it must be remembered that the
ideas suggested by most words are what Locke calls “mixed modes.” A word like just or beauty is but a
shorthand note suggesting a number of ideas more or less associated with one another. But the ideas
associated with it in one mind cannot be exactly those associated with it in another; to one man it
suggests what it does not to another. So long as we move in a society subjected to the same social
influences and education as ourselves we do not readily perceive the fact, since the leading ideas called
up by the word will be alike for all; but it is quite otherwise when we come to deal with those whose
education has been imperfect as compared with our own. A young speaker often imagines that he
makes himself intelligible to an uneducated audience by using short and homely words; unless he also
suits his ideas to theirs, he will be no better understood than if he spoke in the purest Johnsonese. If
we are suddenly brought into contact with experts in a subject we have not studied, or dip into a book
on an unfamiliar branch of knowledge, we seem to be listening to the meaningless sounds of a foreign
tongue. The words used may not be technical words; but familiar words and expressions will bear
senses and suggest ideas to those who use them which they will not bear to us. It is impossible to
convey in a translation all that is meant by the original writer. We may say that the French juste
answers to the English just, and so it does in a rough way; but the train of thoughts associated with
juste is not that associated with just, and the true meaning of a passage may often depend more on the
associated thoughts than on the leading idea itself. Nearly every word, in fact, may be described as a
complex of ideas which is not the same in the minds of any two individuals, its general meaning lying in
the common ideas attached to it by all the members of a particular society. The significations, therefore,
with which the comparative philologist has to concern himself, are those unconsciously agreed upon by
a body of men, or rather the common group of ideas suggested by a word to all of them alike. Here,
again, some general causes must be at work which may yet be revealed by a careful analysis. The
comparative philologist has not to trouble himself, like the classical philologist, with discovering the
exact ideas connected with a word by some individual author; it is the meaning of words as they are
used in current speech, not as they illustrate the idiosyncrasies of a writer, which it is his province to
investigate.
“The genealogies of words,” says Pott,[218] “are the genealogies of concepts.” As in phonology we
have the growth or decay of sounds, so in sematology we have the growth or decay of ideas. The three
principles of linguistic change, imitation, emphasis and laziness, are incessantly at work on the
meanings as well as upon the sounds of words. Analogy is ever lending them new senses, and the
metaphorical senses may come to be used to the utter forgetfulness of the original one. The Latin who
spoke of his “mind” or “soul” as animus had altogether forgotten that at the outset animus was merely
the “wind” or “breath.” Here analogy or imitation is helped by laziness, which makes us forget a little-
used meaning. Impertinent has almost lost its prior and proper signification, and our children will have
to seek it in the records of an obsolescent literature. But a dead meaning may again rise to life; the
early meaning of a word, whether recovered from books or from the fresh spring of a local dialect, may
once more impress itself upon a community anxious to emphasize and mark out an idea by an
unfamiliar term.
Professor Whitney[219] has summed up significant change under the two heads of specialization of
general terms and generalization of special terms, but a more thorough-going attempt to determine its
laws and distinguish its causes has been made by Pott.[220] First of all, he points out, words may be
more accurately defined either by widening or by narrowing their signification. While in the Neo-Latin
languages caballus, “a nag,” has taken the wider meaning of “horse” in general, under the form of
cavallo or cheval, the modern Greek ἄλογον is no longer the “irrational beast,” but is narrowed into the
specific sense of “horse.” Like our deer, which once meant “wild animals” generally (German thier), so
emere has narrowed its primary signification of “taking” into the special one of “buying.” But, on the
other hand, when we speak of “going to town,” it is not “town” in general or any town whatsoever that
is meant, but London alone.
Then, secondly, there is metaphor, with its ceaseless play upon speech. Language is the treasure-
house of worn-out similes, a living testimony to the instinct of man to find likeness and resemblance in
all he sees. The Tasmanians, who had no general terms, had yet the power of seeing resemblances
between things: though they could not form the concept “round,” they said “like the moon” or some
other round object. All the words which have a spiritual or moral meaning go back to a purely sensuous
origin: Divus, Deus, Dieu was once “the bright sky;” soul was nothing but the “heaving” sea. It is only
by likening such ideas to the objects of sense that we can imagine them at all, or convey a hint of our
meaning to others. The vocabulary of a language on its significant side grows by metaphor and analogy.
We have only to take a word like post, once the Latin positum, “what is fixed” or “placed,” and trace it
through its many derived meanings of “stake,” “position,” “office,” “station,” “public medium of
correspondence,” and “receptacle for letters,” to see how endless are the shades of colour which a
single word may catch from those with which it is associated. To know the idioms of a language and the
conditions under which its speakers live, is often to know the history of the changes in signification
undergone by its vocabulary. The mere expression “send to the post” gave to the word post its last
meaning of a building in which letters are deposited and sorted, and the conditions of schoolboy life are
a clue to many of the metaphorical uses of words which bear quite another meaning in school life from
what they do in ordinary language. Where else but in a country of examinations could “pass” signify to
go through an examination with success? Each craft, each industry has its own store of technical words,
many of which are merely words in common use employed in particular senses intelligible only to those
who belong to it.
Words, thirdly, will vary in meaning according to their application to persons or things, to what is
good or bad, great or small. What a difference there is, for instance, between a “beautiful woman” and
a “beautiful picture,” “a fine day” and “a fine fellow.” Silly, again, is simply the German selig, “blessed,”
and such is still its meaning in Spenser’s “silly sheep;” but in modern English it has long lost its
favourable sense, and is used only in an unfavourable one. Diminutives, originally the symbols of
affection, have in many cases become the symbols of contempt, while “childishness” is as much a
compliment when applied to a child as it is the reverse when applied to a man.
In the fourth place, words change their signification according to their use as active or passive, as
subjects or as objects. “The sight of a thing” has a very different meaning from “the enjoyment of a
sight,” as different, in fact, as is the meaning of venerandus when applied to the object of veneration or
to his admirer. The passive has been evolved from the middle τύπτομαι, “I beat myself” passing
gradually into “I am beaten.” In English we may say indifferently “a matter is reflected,” or “a matter
reflects itself,” after the usage of French. Similarly a neuter verb may be regarded as an active followed
by the reflective pronoun; our “to be silent,” or “to walk,” for example, are the French “se taire,” “se
promener.”
Fifthly, an idea may be expressed either by a compound or periphrasis, or by a single word. The Latin
nepos is the French petit fils, our “ninety” the French quatre-vingt-dix. The Taic languages of Further
India preserve the primitive habit of denoting a new idea by comparing it with some other to which it
stands in the relation of species to genus. Thus in Siamese “a heifer” is lúk nghoa, “child (of a) bull;” “a
lamb” is lúk-ké, “child (of a) sheep,” much as in English inkstand is “a stand for ink.” It is only by
comparison that an object can be known, its limits marked and determined; it is equally only by
comparison that an idea can be defined and made intelligible. But when this has once been done, there
is no longer any need of setting genus and species side by side in speech and thought; to do so is but a
survival of the early machinery of language. The fact that the derivatives of the Aryan speaker are
replaced by compounds, or rather antithetic words, in Taic, shows not only the mental superiority of the
former, but also the fundamental contrast that exists between the two modes of thought. Collectives
imply no small power of abstraction, and the collectives formed by antithesis in Taic are as much a proof
of it as the existence of our “contentment” by the side of the Siamese arói chái, literally “pleasant
heart.”
In the sixth place, we must always keep steadily in view the relativity of ideas and of the words which
denote them. The same word may be applied in a variety of senses, the particular sense which it bears
being determined by the context. The manifold shades of meaning of which each word is capable, the
different associations of ideas which it may excite, give rise to varieties of signification which in course
of time develop into distinct species. Hence come the idioms that form the characteristic feature of a
dialect or language, and make exact translation into another language so impossible. Hence, too, that
diversification of synonyms which causes words like womanly and feminine gradually to assume
different meanings, and prevent us from saying “I am very obliged,” or “I am much tired.”
Seventhly and lastly, change of signification may follow in the wake of change of pronunciation or the
introduction of new words. Phonetic decay may cause the old form of a word to be forgotten, and so
allow it to assume the new meaning which has gradually been evolved out of its earlier one. This is the
history of most of those inflections which can be traced back to independent words, such as the sign of
the past tense in English, once the reduplicated perfect of do. The signification of jeopardy has travelled
far from that of jeu parti, but preparation had first been made by the change of pronunciation. There
are many myths and mythological beings which owe their existence to the same cause. It was not till
Promêtheus had lost all resemblance in outward name to the pramanthas or “fire-machine” of India that
he borrowed his attributes from προμήδομαι, and became the wise benefactor of mankind, the gifted
seer of the future, whose brother was Epimêtheus, or “Afterthought.” It is the same with the legends
that group themselves round the distorted name of a locality. The nose of brass or gilt which adorns
Brasenose College at Oxford could never have come into existence until the old Brasinghouse or
“Brewery” had been transformed, and the phœnix that stands in the centre of the Phœnix Park at
Dublin, would have been impossible without the assistance of Saxon lips, which turned the Irish fion
uisg or “fine water” into phœnix. But change of pronunciation is especially serviceable in increasing the
wealth of a language by producing two co-ordinate forms out of a single original one. In course of time
the two forms assume different meanings, due to the different contexts in which they may be used, and
when once all memory of the original identity has perished, the distinction of meaning becomes fixed
and permanent, and tends to grow continually sharper. In the second century b.c. a Latin writer could
still use prior as a neuter, prios or prius as a masculine; but a time soon came when prior was classed
exclusively with other masculine nouns in -or or -tor, prius with neuter nouns like genus. So, again, the
Latin infinitive active amare and the infinitive passive amari were at the outset one and the same—the
dative singular of a verbal noun in -s (amas-), and one verb, fio, the Greek φυ(ι)ω, continued to the last
to preserve a recollection of the fact by the length of the final syllable in fieri or fiesei, “to become.” But
the shortening of final syllables which characterizes Latin was early at work, and out of the dative
amasei soon originated the two co-existing forms amase (amare) and amasi (amari). For a while they
were used indifferently, but when the distinction that exists between the German waren zu haben and
the English “were to be had” came to make itself felt, one form remained the property of the active,
while the other was appropriated to the passive. But a consciousness of the origin of amari seems to
have long survived in the language, since there was a tendency to associate it more closely with the
other forms of the passive voice by affixing to it the characteristic of the passive, r (amarier). What is
here effected by the diversification of the same word, may also be effected by the diversification of two
synonyms, one of which has come from abroad. Sometimes both may come from abroad, but at
different times, the result being that whereas one of them has been naturalized in the language, the
other is but the nurseling of a learned age. Priest and presbyter, for instance, have both descended
from the same source, and were once identical in meaning. But not only may the old words of a dialect
be thus affected by new comers, the foreign words may even succeed in destroying the native ones
altogether. The same natural selection which has wellnigh extirpated many of the native plants of
Central America in the presence of the imported cardoon, is also at work in language. Our Old English
sicker has had to give way before sure, the Old French sëur, Provençal segur, Latin securus, and the
Latin equus has been replaced in the Romanic dialects by caballus, “a nag.” Caballus is at once an
example of the way in which the meaning of a word may be widened, and of the operation of natural
selection in the field of speech.
 The etymologist must keep before him the laws both of phonology and of sematology before he can
venture to group words together and refer them to a common root. For the etymologist is not merely a
historian, or student of historical grammar; above and beyond the words which can be traced back, step
by step, to their early forms, by the help of contemporaneous records, there are many more, the
derivation of which has to be constructed much in the same way that a palæontologist reconstructs a
fossil animal by the help of a single bone. The task is often a difficult and a delicate one, and the best
trained scholars may sometimes fail. The result of false analogy may be regarded as an organic form, or
a foreign word, conformed possibly to the genius of the language which has borrowed it, may be
mistaken for a native. The præ-Aryan populations of Greece or of Britain must have left some remains
of their languages in the vocabulary of Greek and Keltic, and Greek and Keltic words which have been
counted as Aryan may, after all, be but aliens. Apart from these dangers, there is further the double one
of assuming a connection between ideas which have nothing to do with one another, and of separating
ideas which start from a common source. On the one hand, we are apt to judge of primitive man by
ourselves, and to fancy that the ideas which we associate together were equally associated together by
him. On the other hand, we have only to turn to the Ugrian idioms, with their greater transparency and
openness to analysis to see the passage of one signification in a root into another of a wholly different
kind, accompanied by a modification of the vowel. Thus karyan is “to ring,” and “to lighten;” kar-yun
and kir-yun, “to cry,” but kir-on, “to curse;” kah-isen, koh-isen, kuh-isen, “to hit,” “stamp;” käh-isen,
köh-isen, “to roar;” keh-isen, kih-isen, “to boil.”[221] We have here the same symbolization of a change
of meaning by a change of vowel as in the Greek perfect δέδωκα by the side of the present δίδωμι.
The four facts to be remembered in etymology are thus summarized by Professor Max Müller.[222] (1.)
The same word takes different forms in different languages. Each language or dialect has its peculiar
phonetic laws and tendencies; because a particular interchange of sounds takes place in one language it
does not follow that it does so in another. In Greek, for instance, s between two vowels is lost, in Latin
it becomes r. Our English two is the same word, so far as origin is concerned, as the German zwei, the
Latin and Greek duo, the Sanskrit dwi; the English silly is the German selig, “blessed.” As words are
carried down the stream of time, they change in both outward form and inward meaning, and this
change is in harmony with the physiological and psychological peculiarities of the particular people that
uses them. (2.) The same word, again, takes different forms in one and the same language. Brisk,
frisky, and fresh all come from the same fountain-head, and bank and bench are the differentiated
forms of which banquet is the Romanized equivalent. So, too, in French noël and natal are but forms of
the same word of different ages, like naïf and native, chétif and captif. Then (3) different words take
the same form in different languages. The Greek καλέω and the English call have as little connection as
the Latin sanguis and the Mongol sengui, “blood,” or the modern Greek mati for ὀμμάτιον, and the
Polynesian mata, “an eye.” To compare words of different languages together because they agree in
sound is to contravene all the principles of scientific philology; agreement of sound is the best possible
proof of their want of connection, since each language has its own phonology and consequently
modifies the forms of words in a different fashion. The comparison even of roots is a dangerous
process, not to be indulged in unless the grammar of the languages to which they belong has been
shown to be of common origin. What we call roots are only the hypothetical types to which we can
reduce the words of a certain group of tongues; they are, therefore, merely the expression of the
phonetic laws common to all the members of the group. But it does not follow that the selected
phonetic laws which all the members of a certain group of tongues have in common are the same as
the phonetic laws of another language or another group. Roots, moreover, owing to their shortness,
their vagueness, and their consequent simplicity, are necessarily limited in number, while the ideas they
convey are so wide and general as to cover an almost infinite series of derived meanings; to say nothing
of the probability that many of them are to be traced to imitations of natural sounds. (4.) Different
words, in the fourth place, may take the same form in one and the same language. The French feu,
“fire,” is the Latin focus; feu, “late,” the Low Latin fuitus (from fui). So too the English page, in the
sense of a servant, comes ultimately from the Greek παίδιον, page, in the sense of a leaf of a book,
from the Latin pagina. An arbitrary and antiquated spelling may often keep up a distinction between
such words in writing when in speaking all distinction has long since disappeared. The French sang,
cent, sans, sent, s’en, the English sow, sew, so, are respectively pronounced in the same way. That no
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