I have preferred to take up in some detail the analysis of our hesitation in using a locution like “Whom did you see?” and to point to some of the English drifts, particular and general, that are implied by this hesitation than to discuss linguistic change in the abstract. What is true of the particular idiom that we started with is true of everything else in language. Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, every grammatical element, every locution, every sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration, molded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the life of language. The evidence is overwhelming that this drift has a certain consistent direction. Its speed varies enormously according to circumstances that it is not always easy to define. We have already seen that Lithuanian is to-day nearer its Indo-European prototype than was the hypothetical Germanic mother-tongue five hundred or a thousand years before Christ. German has moved more slowly than English; in some respects it stands roughly midway between English and Anglo-Saxon, in others it has of course diverged from the Anglo-Saxon line. When I pointed out in the preceding chapter that dialects formed because a language broken up into local segments could not move along the same drift in all of these segments, I meant of course that it could not move along identically the same drift. The general drift of a language has its depths.At the surface the current is relatively fast. In certain features dialects drift apart rapidly. By that very fact these features betray themselves as less fundamental to the genius of the language than the more slowly modifiable features in which the dialects keep together long after they have grown to be mutually alien forms of speech. But this is not all. The momentum of the more fundamental, the pre-dialectic, drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases. In many such cases it is perfectly clear that there could have been no dialectic interinfluencing.
These parallelisms in drift may operate in the phonetic as well as in the morphological sphere, or they may affect both at the same time. Here is an interesting example. The English type of plural represented byfoot:feet,mouse:miceis strictly parallel to the GermanFuss:Füsse,Maus:Mäuse. One would be inclined to surmise that these dialectic forms go back to old Germanic or West-Germanic alternations of the same type. But the documentary evidence shows conclusively that there could have been no plurals of this type in primitive Germanic. There is no trace of such vocalic mutation (“umlaut”) in Gothic, our most archaic Germanic language. More significant still is the fact that it does not appear in our oldest Old High German texts and begins to develop only at the very end of the Old High German period (circa 1000 A.D.). In the Middle High German period the mutation was carried through in all dialects. The typical Old High German forms are singularfuoss, pluralfuossi;[145]singularmus, pluralmusi. The corresponding Middle High German forms arefuoss,füesse;mus,müse. Modern GermanFuss:Füsse,Maus:Mäuseare the regular developments of these medieval forms. Turning to Anglo-Saxon, we find that our modern English forms correspond tofot,fet;mus,mys.[146]These forms are already in use in the earliest English monuments that we possess, dating from the eighth century, and thus antedate the Middle High German forms by three hundred years or more. In other words, on this particular point it took German at least three hundred years to catch up with a phonetic-morphological drift[147]that had long been under way in English. The mere fact that the affected vowels of related words (Old High Germanuo, Anglo-Saxono) are not always the same shows that the affection took place at different periods in German and English.[148]There was evidently some general tendency or group of tendencies at work in early Germanic, long before English and German had developed as such, that eventually drove both of these dialects along closely parallel paths.
How did such strikingly individual alternations asfot:fet,fuoss:füessedevelop? We have now reachedwhat is probably the most central problem in linguistic history, gradual phonetic change. “Phonetic laws” make up a large and fundamental share of the subject-matter of linguistics. Their influence reaches far beyond the proper sphere of phonetics and invades that of morphology, as we shall see. A drift that begins as a slight phonetic readjustment or unsettlement may in the course of millennia bring about the most profound structural changes. The mere fact, for instance, that there is a growing tendency to throw the stress automatically on the first syllable of a word may eventually change the fundamental type of the language, reducing its final syllables to zero and driving it to the use of more and more analytical or symbolic[149]methods. The English phonetic laws involved in the rise of the wordsfoot,feet,mouseandmicefrom their early West-Germanic prototypesfot,foti,mus,musi[150]may be briefly summarized as follows:
It will be instructive to set down a table of form sequences, a kind of gross history of the wordsfoot,feet,mouse,micefor the last 1500 years:[155]
It will not be necessary to list the phonetic laws that gradually differentiated the modern German equivalents of the original West Germanic forms from their English cognates. The following table gives a rough idea of the form sequences in German:[156]
We cannot even begin to ferret out and discuss all the psychological problems that are concealed behind these bland tables. Their general parallelism is obvious. Indeed we might say that to-day the English and German forms resemble each other more than does either set the West Germanic prototypes from which each is independently derived. Each table illustrates the tendency to reduction of unaccented syllables, the vocalic modification of the radical element under the influence of the following vowel, the rise in tongue position of the long middle vowels (Englishotou,etoi; Germanotouotou,üetoü), the diphthongizing of the old high vowels (Englishitoeitoai; English and Germanutooutoau; Germanütoöütooi). These dialectic parallels cannot be accidental. They are rooted in a common, pre-dialectic drift.
Phonetic changes are “regular.” All but one (English table, X.), and that as yet uncompleted, of the particular phonetic laws represented in our tables affect all examples of the sound in question or, if the phonetic change is conditional, all examples of the same sound that are analogously circumstanced.[159]An example of the first type of change is the passage in English of all old longi-vowels to diphthongalaiviaei. The passage could hardly have been sudden or automatic, but it was rapid enough to prevent an irregularity of development due to cross drifts. The second type of change is illustrated in the development of Anglo-Saxon longoto longe, viaö, under the influence of a followingi. In the first case we may say thataumechanically replaced longu, in the second that the old longo“split” into two sounds—longo, eventuallyu, and longe, eventuallyi. The former type of change did no violence to the old phonetic pattern, the formal distribution of sounds into groups; the latter type rearranged the pattern somewhat. If neither of the two sounds into which an old one “splits” is a new sound, it means that there has been a phonetic leveling, that two groups of words, each with a distinct sound or sound combination, have fallen together into one group. This kind of leveling is quite frequent in the history of language. In English, forinstance, we have seen that all the old longü-vowels, after they had become unrounded, were indistinguishable from the mass of longi-vowels. This meant that the longi-vowel became a more heavily weighted point of the phonetic pattern than before. It is curious to observe how often languages have striven to drive originally distinct sounds into certain favorite positions, regardless of resulting confusions.[160]In Modern Greek, for instance, the voweliis the historical resultant of no less than ten etymologically distinct vowels (long and short) and diphthongs of the classical speech of Athens. There is, then, good evidence to show that there are general phonetic drifts toward particular sounds.
More often the phonetic drift is of a more general character. It is not so much a movement toward a particular set of sounds as toward particular types of articulation. The vowels tend to become higher or lower, the diphthongs tend to coalesce into monophthongs, the voiceless consonants tend to become voiced, stops tend to become spirants. As a matter of fact, practically all the phonetic laws enumerated in the two tables are but specific instances of such far-reaching phonetic drifts. The raising of English longotouand of longetoi, for instance, was part of a general tendency to raise the position of the long vowels, just as the change ofttossin Old High German was part of a general tendency to make voiceless spirants of the old voiceless stopped consonants. A single sound change, even if there is no phonetic leveling, generally threatens to upset the old phonetic pattern because it brings about a disharmony in the grouping of sounds. To reëstablish the old patternwithout going back on the drift the only possible method is to have the other sounds of the series shift in analogous fashion. If, for some reason or other,pbecomes shifted to its voiced correspondentb, the old seriesp,t,kappears in the unsymmetrical formb,t,k. Such a series is, in phonetic effect, not the equivalent of the old series, however it may answer to it in etymology. The general phonetic pattern is impaired to that extent. But iftandkare also shifted to their voiced correspondentsdandg, the old series is reëstablished in a new form:b,d,g. The pattern as such is preserved, or restored.Provided thatthe new seriesb,d,gdoes not become confused with an old seriesb,d,gof distinct historical antecedents. If there is no such older series, the creation of ab,d,gseries causes no difficulties. If there is, the old patterning of sounds can be kept intact only by shifting the oldb,d,gsounds in some way. They may become aspirated tobh,dh,ghor spirantized or nasalized or they may develop any other peculiarity that keeps them intact as a series and serves to differentiate them from other series. And this sort of shifting about without loss of pattern, or with a minimum loss of it, is probably the most important tendency in the history of speech sounds. Phonetic leveling and “splitting” counteract it to some extent but, on the whole, it remains the central unconscious regulator of the course and speed of sound changes.
The desire to hold on to a pattern, the tendency to “correct” a disturbance by an elaborate chain of supplementary changes, often spread over centuries or even millennia—these psychic undercurrents of language are exceedingly difficult to understand in terms of individual psychology, though there can be no denial of their historical reality. What is the primary cause of the unsettlingof a phonetic pattern and what is the cumulative force that selects these or those particular variations of the individual on which to float the pattern readjustments we hardly know. Many linguistic students have made the fatal error of thinking of sound change as a quasi-physiological instead of as a strictly psychological phenomenon, or they have tried to dispose of the problem by bandying such catchwords as “the tendency to increased ease of articulation” or “the cumulative result of faulty perception” (on the part of children, say, in learning to speak). These easy explanations will not do. “Ease of articulation” may enter in as a factor, but it is a rather subjective concept at best. Indians find hopelessly difficult sounds and sound combinations that are simple to us; one language encourages a phonetic drift that another does everything to fight. “Faulty perception” does not explain that impressive drift in speech sounds which I have insisted upon. It is much better to admit that we do not yet understand the primary cause or causes of the slow drift in phonetics, though we can frequently point to contributing factors. It is likely that we shall not advance seriously until we study the intuitional bases of speech. How can we understand the nature of the drift that frays and reforms phonetic patterns when we have never thought of studying sound patterning as such and the “weights” and psychic relations of the single elements (the individual sounds) in these patterns?
Every linguist knows that phonetic change is frequently followed by morphological rearrangements, but he is apt to assume that morphology exercises little or no influence on the course of phonetic history. I am inclined to believe that our present tendency to isolate phonetics and grammar as mutually irrelevantlinguistic provinces is unfortunate. There are likely to be fundamental relations between them and their respective histories that we do not yet fully grasp. After all, if speech sounds exist merely because they are the symbolic carriers of significant concepts and groupings of concepts, why may not a strong drift or a permanent feature in the conceptual sphere exercise a furthering or retarding influence on the phonetic drift? I believe that such influences may be demonstrated and that they deserve far more careful study than they have received.
This brings us back to our unanswered question: How is it that both English and German developed the curious alternation of unmodified vowel in the singular (foot,Fuss) and modified vowel in the plural (feet,Füsse)? Was the pre-Anglo-Saxon alternation offotandfötian absolutely mechanical matter, without other than incidental morphological interest? It is always so represented, and, indeed, all the external facts support such a view. The change fromotoö, latere, is by no means peculiar to the plural. It is found also in the dative singular (fet), for it too goes back to an olderfoti. Moreover,fetof the plural applies only to the nominative and accusative; the genitive hasfota, the dativefotum. Only centuries later was the alternation ofoandereinterpreted as a means of distinguishing number;owas generalized for the singular,efor the plural. Only when this reassortment of forms took place[161]was the modern symbolic value of thefoot:feetalternation clearly established. Again, we must not forget thatowas modified toö (e)in all manner of other grammatical and derivative formations. Thus, a pre-Anglo-Saxonhohan(laterhon) “to hang” correspondedto ahöhith,hehith(laterhehth) “hangs”; todom“doom,”blod“blood,” andfod“food” corresponded the verbal derivativesdömian(laterdeman) “to deem,”blödian(laterbledan) “to bleed,” andfödian(laterfedan) “to feed.” All this seems to point to the purely mechanical nature of the modification ofotoötoe. So many unrelated functions were ultimately served by the vocalic change that we cannot believe that it was motivated by any one of them.
The German facts are entirely analogous. Only later in the history of the language was the vocalic alternation made significant for number. And yet consider the following facts. The change offotitofötiantedated that offötitoföte,föt. This may be looked upon as a “lucky accident,” for iffotihad becomefote,fotbefore the-ihad had the chance to exert a retroactive influence on theo, there would have been no difference between the singular and the plural. This would have been anomalous in Anglo-Saxon for a masculine noun. But was the sequence of phonetic changes an “accident”? Consider two further facts. All the Germanic languages were familiar with vocalic change as possessed of functional significance. Alternations likesing,sang,sung(Anglo-Saxonsingan,sang,sungen) were ingrained in the linguistic consciousness. Further, the tendency toward the weakening of final syllables was very strong even then and had been manifesting itself in one way and another for centuries. I believe that these further facts help us to understand the actual sequence of phonetic changes. We may go so far as to say that theo(andu) could afford to stay the change toö(andü) until the destructive drift had advanced to the point where failure to modify the vowel would soon result in morphological embarrassment. At a certainmoment the-iending of the plural (and analogous endings withiin other formations) was felt to be too weak to quite bear its functional burden. The unconscious Anglo-Saxon mind, if I may be allowed a somewhat summary way of putting the complex facts, was glad of the opportunity afforded by certain individual variations, until then automatically canceled out, to have some share of the burden thrown on them. These particular variations won through because they so beautifully allowed the general phonetic drift to take its course without unsettling the morphological contours of the language. And the presence of symbolic variation (sing,sang,sung) acted as an attracting force on the rise of a new variation of similar character. All these factors were equally true of the German vocalic shift. Owing to the fact that the destructive phonetic drift was proceeding at a slower rate in German than in English, the preservative change ofuotoüe(utoü) did not need to set in until 300 years or more after the analogous English change. Nor did it. And this is to my mind a highly significant fact. Phonetic changes may sometimes be unconsciously encouraged in order to keep intact the psychological spaces between words and word forms. The general drift seizes upon those individual sound variations that help to preserve the morphological balance or to lead to the new balance that the language is striving for.
I would suggest, then, that phonetic change is compacted of at least three basic strands: (1) A general drift in one direction, concerning the nature of which we know almost nothing but which may be suspected to be of prevailingly dynamic character (tendencies, e.g., to greater or less stress, greater or less voicing of elements); (2) A readjusting tendency which aims to preserveor restore the fundamental phonetic pattern of the language; (3) A preservative tendency which sets in when a too serious morphological unsettlement is threatened by the main drift. I do not imagine for a moment that it is always possible to separate these strands or that this purely schematic statement does justice to the complex forces that guide the phonetic drift. The phonetic pattern of a language is not invariable, but it changes far less readily than the sounds that compose it. Every phonetic element that it possesses may change radically and yet the pattern remain unaffected. It would be absurd to claim that our present English pattern is identical with the old Indo-European one, yet it is impressive to note that even at this late day the English series of initial consonants:
corresponds point for point to the Sanskrit series:
The relation between phonetic pattern and individual sound is roughly parallel to that which obtains between the morphologic type of a language and one of its specific morphological features. Both phonetic pattern and fundamental type are exceedingly conservative, all superficial appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Which is more so we cannot say. I suspect that they hang together in a way that we cannot at present quite understand.
If all the phonetic changes brought about by the phonetic drift were allowed to stand, it is probable thatmost languages would present such irregularities of morphological contour as to lose touch with their formal ground-plan. Sound changes work mechanically. Hence they are likely to affect a whole morphological group here—this does not matter—, only part of a morphological group there—and this may be disturbing. Thus, the old Anglo-Saxon paradigm:
could not long stand unmodified. Theo—ealternation was welcome in so far as it roughly distinguished the singular from the plural. The dative singularfet, however, though justified historically, was soon felt to be an intrusive feature. The analogy of simpler and more numerously represented paradigms created the formfote(compare, e.g.,fisc“fish,” dative singularfisce).Fetas a dative becomes obsolete. The singular now hadothroughout. But this very fact made the genitive and dativeo-forms of the plural seem out of place. The nominative and accusativefetwas naturally far more frequently in use than were the corresponding forms of the genitive and dative. These, in the end, could not but follow the analogy offet. At the very beginning of the Middle English period, therefore, we find that the old paradigm has yielded to a more regular one:
The starred forms are the old nucleus around which the new paradigm is built. The unstarred forms are notgenealogical kin of their formal prototypes. They are analogical replacements.
The history of the English language teems with such levelings or extensions.Elderandeldestwere at one time the only possible comparative and superlative forms ofold(compare Germanalt,älter,der älteste; the vowel following theold-,alt-was originally ani, which modified the quality of the stem vowel). The general analogy of the vast majority of English adjectives, however, has caused the replacement of the formselderandeldestby the forms with unmodified vowel,olderandoldest.Elderandeldestsurvive only as somewhat archaic terms for the older and oldest brother or sister. This illustrates the tendency for words that are psychologically disconnected from their etymological or formal group to preserve traces of phonetic laws that have otherwise left no recognizable trace or to preserve a vestige of a morphological process that has long lost its vitality. A careful study of these survivals or atrophied forms is not without value for the reconstruction of the earlier history of a language or for suggestive hints as to its remoter affiliations.
Analogy may not only refashion forms within the confines of a related cluster of forms (a “paradigm”) but may extend its influence far beyond. Of a number of functionally equivalent elements, for instance, only one may survive, the rest yielding to its constantly widening influence. This is what happened with the English-splural. Originally confined to a particular class of masculines, though an important class, the-splural was gradually generalized for all nouns but a mere handful that still illustrate plural types now all but extinct (foot: feet,goose:geese,tooth:teeth,mouse:mice,louse:lice;ox:oxen;child:children;sheep:sheep,deer:deer).Thus analogy not only regularizes irregularities that have come in the wake of phonetic processes but introduces disturbances, generally in favor of greater simplicity or regularity, in a long established system of forms. These analogical adjustments are practically always symptoms of the general morphological drift of the language.
A morphological feature that appears as the incidental consequence of a phonetic process, like the English plural with modified vowel, may spread by analogy no less readily than old features that owe their origin to other than phonetic causes. Once thee-vowel of Middle Englishfethad become confined to the plural, there was no theoretical reason why alternations of the typefot:fetandmus:mismight not have become established as a productive type of number distinction in the noun. As a matter of fact, it did not so become established. Thefot:fettype of plural secured but a momentary foothold. It was swept into being by one of the surface drifts of the language, to be swept aside in the Middle English period by the more powerful drift toward the use of simple distinctive forms. It was too late in the day for our language to be seriously interested in such pretty symbolisms asfoot:feet. What examples of the type arose legitimately, in other wordsviapurely phonetic processes, were tolerated for a time, but the type as such never had a serious future.
It was different in German. The whole series of phonetic changes comprised under the term “umlaut,” of whichu:üandau:oi(writtenäu) are but specific examples, struck the German language at a time when the general drift to morphological simplification was not so strong but that the resulting formal types (e.g.,Fuss:Füsse;fallen“to fall”:fällen“to fell”;Horn“horn”:Gehörne“group of horns”;Haus“house”:Häuslein“little house”) could keep themselves intact and even extend to forms that did not legitimately come within their sphere of influence. “Umlaut” is still a very live symbolic process in German, possibly more alive to-day than in medieval times. Such analogical plurals asBaum“tree”:Bäume(contrast Middle High Germanboum:boume) and derivatives aslachen“to laugh”:Gelächter“laughter” (contrast Middle High Germangelach) show that vocalic mutation has won through to the status of a productive morphologic process. Some of the dialects have even gone further than standard German, at least in certain respects. In Yiddish,[162]for instance, “umlaut” plurals have been formed where there are no Middle High German prototypes or modern literary parallels, e.g.,tog“day”:teg“days” (but GermanTag:Tage) on the analogy ofgast“guest”:gest“guests” (GermanGast:Gäste),shuch[163]“shoe”:shich“shoes” (but GermanSchuh:Schuhe) on the analogy offus“foot”:fis“feet.” It is possible that “umlaut” will run its course and cease to operate as a live functional process in German, but that time is still distant. Meanwhile all consciousness of the merely phonetic nature of “umlaut” vanished centuries ago. It is now a strictly morphological process, not in the least a mechanical phonetic adjustment. We have in it a splendid example of how a simple phonetic law, meaningless in itself, may eventually color or transform large reaches of the morphology of a language.
Languages, like cultures, are rarely sufficient unto themselves. The necessities of intercourse bring the speakers of one language into direct or indirect contact with those of neighboring or culturally dominant languages. The intercourse may be friendly or hostile. It may move on the humdrum plane of business and trade relations or it may consist of a borrowing or interchange of spiritual goods—art, science, religion. It would be difficult to point to a completely isolated language or dialect, least of all among the primitive peoples. The tribe is often so small that intermarriages with alien tribes that speak other dialects or even totally unrelated languages are not uncommon. It may even be doubted whether intermarriage, intertribal trade, and general cultural interchanges are not of greater relative significance on primitive levels than on our own. Whatever the degree or nature of contact between neighboring peoples, it is generally sufficient to lead to some kind of linguistic interinfluencing. Frequently the influence runs heavily in one direction. The language of a people that is looked upon as a center of culture is naturally far more likely to exert an appreciable influence on other languages spoken in its vicinity than to be influenced by them. Chinese has flooded the vocabularies of Corean, Japanese, and Annamite for centuries, but has received nothing in return. In the western Europe of medieval and modern times French has exercised a similar, thoughprobably a less overwhelming, influence. English borrowed an immense number of words from the French of the Norman invaders, later also from the court French of Isle de France, appropriated a certain number of affixed elements of derivational value (e.g.,-essofprincess,-ardofdrunkard,-tyofroyalty), may have been somewhat stimulated in its general analytic drift by contact with French,[164]and even allowed French to modify its phonetic pattern slightly (e.g., initialvandjin words likevealandjudge; in words of Anglo-Saxon originvandjcan only occur after vowels, e.g.,over,hedge). But English has exerted practically no influence on French.
The simplest kind of influence that one language may exert on another is the “borrowing” of words. When there is cultural borrowing there is always the likelihood that the associated words may be borrowed too. When the early Germanic peoples of northern Europe first learned of wine-culture and of paved streets from their commercial or warlike contact with the Romans, it was only natural that they should adopt the Latin words for the strange beverage (vinum, Englishwine, GermanWein) and the unfamiliar type of road (strata [via], Englishstreet, GermanStrasse). Later, when Christianity was introduced into England, a number of associated words, such asbishopandangel, found their way into English. And so the process has continued uninterruptedly down to the present day, each cultural wave bringing to the language a new deposit of loan-words. The careful study of such loan-words constitutes an interesting commentary on the history of culture. One can almost estimate the rôle which variouspeoples have played in the development and spread of cultural ideas by taking note of the extent to which their vocabularies have filtered into those of other peoples. When we realize that an educated Japanese can hardly frame a single literary sentence without the use of Chinese resources, that to this day Siamese and Burmese and Cambodgian bear the unmistakable imprint of the Sanskrit and Pali that came in with Hindu Buddhism centuries ago, or that whether we argue for or against the teaching of Latin and Greek our argument is sure to be studded with words that have come to us from Rome and Athens, we get some inkling of what early Chinese culture and Buddhism and classical Mediterranean civilization have meant in the world’s history. There are just five languages that have had an overwhelming significance as carriers of culture. They are classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. In comparison with these even such culturally important languages as Hebrew and French sink into a secondary position. It is a little disappointing to learn that the general cultural influence of English has so far been all but negligible. The English language itself is spreading because the English have colonized immense territories. But there is nothing to show that it is anywhere entering into the lexical heart of other languages as French has colored the English complexion or as Arabic has permeated Persian and Turkish. This fact alone is significant of the power of nationalism, cultural as well as political, during the last century. There are now psychological resistances to borrowing, or rather to new sources of borrowing,[165]that were not greatly alive in the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance.
Are there resistances of a more intimate nature to the borrowing of words? It is generally assumed that the nature and extent of borrowing depend entirely on the historical facts of culture relation; that if German, for instance, has borrowed less copiously than English from Latin and French it is only because Germany has had less intimate relations than England with the culture spheres of classical Rome and France. This is true to a considerable extent, but it is not the whole truth. We must not exaggerate the physical importance of the Norman invasion nor underrate the significance of the fact that Germany’s central geographical position made it peculiarly sensitive to French influences all through the Middle Ages, to humanistic influences in the latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and again to the powerful French influences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seems very probable that the psychological attitude of the borrowing language itself towards linguistic material has much to do with its receptivity to foreign words. English has long been striving for the completely unified, unanalyzed word, regardless of whether it is monosyllabic or polysyllabic. Such words ascredible,certitude,intangibleare entirely welcome in English because each represents a unitary, well-nuanced idea and because their formal analysis (cred-ible,cert-itude,in-tang-ible) is not a necessary act of the unconscious mind (cred-,cert-, andtang-have no real existence in English comparable to that ofgood-ingoodness). A word likeintangible, once it is acclimated, is nearly as simple a psychological entity as any radical monosyllable (sayvague,thin,grasp). In German, however, polysyllabic words strive to analyze themselves into significant elements. Hence vast numbers of French and Latin words, borrowed at the height of certain culturalinfluences, could not maintain themselves in the language. Latin-German words likekredibel“credible” and French-German words likereussieren“to succeed” offered nothing that the unconscious mind could assimilate to its customary method of feeling and handling words. It is as though this unconscious mind said: “I am perfectly willing to acceptkredibelif you will just tell me what you mean bykred-.” Hence German has generally found it easier to create new words out of its own resources, as the necessity for them arose.
The psychological contrast between English and German as regards the treatment of foreign material is a contrast that may be studied in all parts of the world. The Athabaskan languages of America are spoken by peoples that have had astonishingly varied cultural contacts, yet nowhere do we find that an Athabaskan dialect has borrowed at all freely[166]from a neighboring language. These languages have always found it easier to create new words by compounding afresh elements ready to hand. They have for this reason been highly resistant to receiving the linguistic impress of the external cultural experiences of their speakers. Cambodgian and Tibetan offer a highly instructive contrast in their reaction to Sanskrit influence. Both are analytic languages, each totally different from the highly-wrought, inflective language of India. Cambodgian is isolating, but, unlike Chinese, it contains many polysyllabic words whose etymological analysis does not matter. Like English, therefore, in its relation to French and Latin, it welcomed immense numbers of Sanskrit loan-words, many of which are in common use to-day. There was no psychological resistance to them. Classical Tibetan literature was a slavish adaptation of HinduBuddhist literature and nowhere has Buddhism implanted itself more firmly than in Tibet, yet it is strange how few Sanskrit words have found their way into the language. Tibetan was highly resistant to the polysyllabic words of Sanskrit because they could not automatically fall into significant syllables, as they should have in order to satisfy the Tibetan feeling for form. Tibetan was therefore driven to translating the great majority of these Sanskrit words into native equivalents. The Tibetan craving for form was satisfied, though the literally translated foreign terms must often have done violence to genuine Tibetan idiom. Even the proper names of the Sanskrit originals were carefully translated, element for element, into Tibetan; e.g.,Suryagarbha“Sun-bosomed” was carefully Tibetanized intoNyi-mai snying-po“Sun-of heart-the, the heart (or essence) of the sun.” The study of how a language reacts to the presence of foreign words—rejecting them, translating them, or freely accepting them—may throw much valuable light on its innate formal tendencies.
The borrowing of foreign words always entails their phonetic modification. There are sure to be foreign sounds or accentual peculiarities that do not fit the native phonetic habits. They are then so changed as to do as little violence as possible to these habits. Frequently we have phonetic compromises. Such an English word as the recently introducedcamouflage, as now ordinarily pronounced, corresponds to the typical phonetic usage of neither English nor French. The aspiratedk, the obscure vowel of the second syllable, the precise quality of theland of the lasta, and, above all, the strong accent on the first syllable, are all the results of unconscious assimilation to our English habits of pronunciation. They differentiate ourcamouflageclearlyfrom the same word as pronounced by the French. On the other hand, the long, heavy vowel in the third syllable and the final position of the “zh” sound (likezinazure) are distinctly un-English, just as, in Middle English, the initialjandv[167]must have been felt at first as not strictly in accord with English usage, though the strangeness has worn off by now. In all four of these cases—initialj, initialv, final “zh,” and unaccentedaoffather—English has not taken on a new sound but has merely extended the use of an old one.
Occasionally a new sound is introduced, but it is likely to melt away before long. In Chaucer’s day the old Anglo-Saxonü(writteny) had long become unrounded toi, but a new set ofü-vowels had come in from the French (in such words asdue,value,nature). The newüdid not long hold its own; it became diphthongized toiuand was amalgamated with the nativeiwof words likenewandslew. Eventually this diphthong appears asyu, with change of stress—dew(from Anglo-Saxondeaw) likedue(Chauceriandü). Facts like these show how stubbornly a language resists radical tampering with its phonetic pattern.
Nevertheless, we know that languages do influence each other in phonetic respects, and that quite aside from the taking over of foreign sounds with borrowed words. One of the most curious facts that linguistics has to note is the occurrence of striking phonetic parallels in totally unrelated or very remotely related languages of a restricted geographical area. These parallels become especially impressive when they are seen contrastively from a wide phonetic perspective. Here are a few examples. The Germanic languages as a whole have not developed nasalized vowels. Certain UpperGerman (Suabian) dialects, however, have now nasalized vowels in lieu of the older vowel + nasal consonant (n). Is it only accidental that these dialects are spoken in proximity to French, which makes abundant use of nasalized vowels? Again, there are certain general phonetic features that mark off Dutch and Flemish in contrast, say, to North German and Scandinavian dialects. One of these is the presence of unaspirated voiceless stops (p,t,k), which have a precise, metallic quality reminiscent of the corresponding French sounds, but which contrast with the stronger, aspirated stops of English, North German, and Danish. Even if we assume that the unaspirated stops are more archaic, that they are the unmodified descendants of the old Germanic consonants, is it not perhaps a significant historical fact that the Dutch dialects, neighbors of French, were inhibited from modifying these consonants in accordance with what seems to have been a general Germanic phonetic drift? Even more striking than these instances is the peculiar resemblance, in certain special phonetic respects, of Russian and other Slavic languages to the unrelated Ural-Altaic languages[168]of the Volga region. The peculiar, dull vowel, for instance, known in Russian as “yeri”[169]has Ural-Altaic analogues, but is entirely wanting in Germanic, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian, the nearest Indo-European congeners of Slavic. We may at least suspect that the Slavic vowel is not historically unconnected with its Ural-Altaic parallels. One of the most puzzling cases of phonetic parallelism is afforded by a large number of American Indian languages spoken west of the Rockies. Even at the mostradical estimate there are at least four totally unrelated linguistic stocks represented in the region from southern Alaska to central California. Nevertheless all, or practically all, the languages of this immense area have some important phonetic features in common. Chief of these is the presence of a “glottalized” series of stopped consonants of very distinctive formation and of quite unusual acoustic effect.[170]In the northern part of the area all the languages, whether related or not, also possess various voicelessl-sounds and a series of “velar” (back-guttural) stopped consonants which are etymologically distinct from the ordinaryk-series. It is difficult to believe that three such peculiar phonetic features as I have mentioned could have evolved independently in neighboring groups of languages.
How are we to explain these and hundreds of similar phonetic convergences? In particular cases we may really be dealing with archaic similarities due to a genetic relationship that it is beyond our present power to demonstrate. But this interpretation will not get us far. It must be ruled entirely out of court, for instance, in two of the three European examples I have instanced; both nasalized vowels and the Slavic “yeri” are demonstrably of secondary origin in Indo-European. However we envisage the process in detail, we cannot avoid the inference that there is a tendency for speech sounds or certain distinctive manners of articulation to spread over a continuous area in somewhat the same way that elements of culture ray out from a geographical center. We may suppose that individual variations arising at linguistic borderlands—whether by the unconscious suggestive influence of foreign speech habitsor by the actual transfer of foreign sounds into the speech of bilingual individuals—have gradually been incorporated into the phonetic drift of a language. So long as its main phonetic concern is the preservation of its sound patterning, not of its sounds as such, there is really no reason why a language may not unconsciously assimilate foreign sounds that have succeeded in worming their way into its gamut of individual variations, provided always that these new variations (or reinforced old variations) are in the direction of the native drift.
A simple illustration will throw light on this conception. Let us suppose that two neighboring and unrelated languages, A and B, each possess voicelessl-sounds (compare Welshll). We surmise that this is not an accident. Perhaps comparative study reveals the fact that in language A the voicelessl-sounds correspond to a sibilant series in other related languages, that an old alternations:shhas been shifted to the new alternationl(voiceless):s.[171]Does it follow that the voicelesslof language B has had the same history? Not in the least. Perhaps B has a strong tendency toward audible breath release at the end of a word, so that the finall, like a final vowel, was originally followed by a marked aspiration. Individuals perhaps tended to anticipate a little the voiceless release and to “unvoice” the latter part of the finall-sound (very much as thelof English words likefelttends to be partly voiceless in anticipation of the voicelessness of thet). Yet this finallwith its latent tendency to unvoicing might never have actually developed into a fully voicelesslhad not the presence of voicelessl-sounds in A acted as an unconsciousstimulus or suggestive push toward a more radical change in the line of B’s own drift. Once the final voicelesslemerged, its alternation in related words with medial voicedlis very likely to have led to its analogical spread. The result would be that both A and B have an important phonetic trait in common. Eventually their phonetic systems, judged as mere assemblages of sounds, might even become completely assimilated to each other, though this is an extreme case hardly ever realized in practice. The highly significant thing about such phonetic interinfluencings is the strong tendency of each language to keep its phonetic pattern intact. So long as the respective alignments of the similar sounds is different, so long as they have differing “values” and “weights” in the unrelated languages, these languages cannot be said to have diverged materially from the line of their inherent drift. In phonetics, as in vocabulary, we must be careful not to exaggerate the importance of interlinguistic influences.
I have already pointed out in passing that English has taken over a certain number of morphological elements from French. English also uses a number of affixes that are derived from Latin and Greek. Some of these foreign elements, like the-izeofmaterializeor the-ableofbreakable, are even productive to-day. Such examples as these are hardly true evidences of a morphological influence exerted by one language on another. Setting aside the fact that they belong to the sphere of derivational concepts and do not touch the central morphological problem of the expression of relational ideas, they have added nothing to the structural peculiarities of our language. English was already prepared for the relation ofpitytopiteousby such a native pair asluckandlucky;materialandmaterializemerelyswelled the ranks of a form pattern familiar from such instances aswideandwiden. In other words, the morphological influence exerted by foreign languages on English, if it is to be gauged by such examples as I have cited, is hardly different in kind from the mere borrowing of words. The introduction of the suffix-izemade hardly more difference to the essential build of the language than did the mere fact that it incorporated a given number of words. Had English evolved a new future on the model of the synthetic future in French or had it borrowed from Latin and Greek their employment of reduplication as a functional device (Latintango:tetigi; Greekleipo:leloipa), we should have the right to speak of true morphological influence. But such far-reaching influences are not demonstrable. Within the whole course of the history of the English language we can hardly point to one important morphological change that was not determined by the native drift, though here and there we may surmise that this drift was hastened a little by the suggestive influence of French forms.[172]
It is important to realize the continuous, self-contained morphological development of English and the very modest extent to which its fundamental build has been affected by influences from without. The history of the English language has sometimes been represented as though it relapsed into a kind of chaos on the arrival of the Normans, who proceeded to play nine-pins with the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Students are more conservative today. That a far-reaching analytic development may take place without such external foreigninfluence as English was subjected to is clear from the history of Danish, which has gone even further than English in certain leveling tendencies. English may be conveniently used as ana fortioritest. It was flooded with French loan-words during the later Middle Ages, at a time when its drift toward the analytic type was especially strong. It was therefore changing rapidly both within and on the surface. The wonder, then, is not that it took on a number of external morphological features, mere accretions on its concrete inventory, but that, exposed as it was to remolding influences, it remained so true to its own type and historic drift. The experience gained from the study of the English language is strengthened by all that we know of documented linguistic history. Nowhere do we find any but superficial morphological interinfluencings. We may infer one of several things from this:—That a really serious morphological influence is not, perhaps, impossible, but that its operation is so slow that it has hardly ever had the chance to incorporate itself in the relatively small portion of linguistic history that lies open to inspection; or that there are certain favorable conditions that make for profound morphological disturbances from without, say a peculiar instability of linguistic type or an unusual degree of cultural contact, conditions that do not happen to be realized in our documentary material; or, finally, that we have not the right to assume that a language may easily exert a remolding morphological influence on another.
Meanwhile we are confronted by the baffling fact that important traits of morphology are frequently found distributed among widely differing languages within a large area, so widely differing, indeed, that it is customary to consider them genetically unrelated. Sometimeswe may suspect that the resemblance is due to a mere convergence, that a similar morphological feature has grown up independently in unrelated languages. Yet certain morphological distributions are too specific in character to be so lightly dismissed. There must be some historical factor to account for them. Now it should be remembered that the concept of a “linguistic stock” is never definitive[173]in an exclusive sense. We can only say, with reasonable certainty, that such and such languages are descended from a common source, but we cannot say that such and such other languages are not genetically related. All we can do is to say that the evidence for relationship is not cumulative enough to make the inference of common origin absolutely necessary. May it not be, then, that many instances of morphological similarity between divergent languages of a restricted area are merely the last vestiges of a community of type and phonetic substance that the destructive work of diverging drifts has now made unrecognizable? There is probably still enough lexical and morphological resemblance between modern English and Irish to enable us to make out a fairly conclusive case for their genetic relationship on the basis of the present-day descriptive evidence alone. It is true that the case would seem weak in comparison to the case that we can actually make with the help of the historical and the comparative data that we possess. It would not be a bad case nevertheless. In another two or three millennia, however, the points of resemblance are likely to have become so obliterated that English and Irish, in the absence of all but their own descriptive evidence, will have to be set down as “unrelated” languages. Theywill still have in common certain fundamental morphological features, but it will be difficult to know how to evaluate them. Only in the light of the contrastive perspective afforded by still more divergent languages, such as Basque and Finnish, will these vestigial resemblances receive their true historic value.
I cannot but suspect that many of the more significant distributions of morphological similarities are to be explained as just such vestiges. The theory of “borrowing” seems totally inadequate to explain those fundamental features of structure, hidden away in the very core of the linguistic complex, that have been pointed out as common, say, to Semitic and Hamitic, to the various Soudanese languages, to Malayo-Polynesian and Mon-Khmer[174]and Munda,[175]to Athabaskan and Tlingit and Haida. We must not allow ourselves to be frightened away by the timidity of the specialists, who are often notably lacking in the sense of what I have called “contrastive perspective.”
Attempts have sometimes been made to explain the distribution of these fundamental structural features by the theory of diffusion. We know that myths, religious ideas, types of social organization, industrial devices, and other features of culture may spread from point to point, gradually making themselves at home in cultures to which they were at one time alien. We also know that words may be diffused no less freely than cultural elements, that sounds also may be “borrowed,” and that even morphological elements may be taken over. We may go further and recognize that certain languages have, in all probability, taken on structural featuresowing to the suggestive influence of neighboring languages. An examination of such cases,[176]however, almost invariably reveals the significant fact that they are but superficial additions on the morphological kernel of the language. So long as such direct historical testimony as we have gives us no really convincing examples of profound morphological influence by diffusion, we shall do well not to put too much reliance in diffusion theories. On the whole, therefore, we shall ascribe the major concordances and divergences in linguistic form—phonetic pattern and morphology—to the autonomous drift of language, not to the complicating effect of single, diffused features that cluster now this way, now that. Language is probably the most self-contained, the most massively resistant of all social phenomena. It is easier to kill it off than to disintegrate its individual form.