Wilson Philological Lectures on Sanskrit and the Derived Languages c6.18

c6.18

You will thus see how minute and laborious these operations are. The difficulty is increased when we have to pronounce two or more consonants together. We have first to put the organs of speech into one position, and immediately afterwards into another, without leaving the first. Accurate pronunciation therefore requires great effort, and since, according to an observation of Locke, labour for labour's sake is against nature, the tendency always exists of making as little effort as is consistent with the necessity of making oneself understood. Hence सुह is transformed to सुह i. e. only the quantity of breath necessary to pronounce व is let off, and the effort of forming a complete and close contact is saved; कदलकम् become कअलअम्, and thence केळं and केळें, where also you will see that the contact is avoided; अप् becomes अप्, in which case we find that the effort involved in the change from one position of the vocal organs to another is economized, though the pressure which the organs exert upon each other in the pronunciation of a conjunct continues the same, i. e. we have a conjunct as before, but the two members are assimilated. This is further changed to आप in which the pressure is avoided, but the shortening of the time which this would involve is obviated by lengthening the preceding vowel. This tendency to phonetic decay is so powerful that if not counteracted it would in the short space of a few generations render a language entirely unintelligible to its former speakers. Children, in their first essays at speech, often mispronounce words, and if they were left to themselves, the language of a country would undergo very great transformation in a short time. But at home and in schools they are taught to speak the language of their parents correctly, and this result is averted. Education, therefore, is an agency which arrests the progress of decay. Another check is afforded by the necessity of making oneself intelligible. If a man is careless about his language he will not be understood. He has therefore necessarily to endeavour to speak as other people do. The feeling of society is also arrayed against the corruption of a language. The speech which does not approach the received standard is branded as vulgar. The tendency to corruption is greatly diminished when a language comes to have a literature. Some races are very careful about their speech, and preserve it in a comparatively pure condition; there are others which corrupt it greatly. But even in the case of the former, accidents in its history may transform the idiom considerably. If one race comes in contact with another, and gives it its language, it is sure to be greatly corrupted. The alien race cannot catch the pronunciation properly, or its vocal organs may be naturally so constituted or its previous vocal habits may be of such a nature as to render the sounds of the language difficult or impossible to be imitated. If there were no schools and colleges for teaching English to us, we should corrupt the language of our rulers so greatly as to render ourselves perfectly unintelligible to them. The native sentry's challenge हुकुम डर for "who comes there" would be a puzzle to the scientific philologist.