has since been. But this is true of the form only; it is not true of the sounds of the words written in the Bible. They have changed so greatly that it is not too much to say that the Bible as read now by you and me, would be barely intelligible to its translators. Here, then, the form of the word has in each case been fixed by printing; but the great principle of incessant change has been operating all the while on the sounds of the language, and will continue to operate as long as English is a spoken language. This is the reason of the so-called 'arbitrary' character of English spelling. The sounds do not now correspond regularly to their symbols, the letters of the alphabet. But they did correspond at the time when printing came in; not perhaps entirely, for it is probable that our fathers, like ourselves, had more vowel-sounds than the vowel-symbols which they had to express them; but at least they corresponded very much more than they do now. Bear in mind, then, that the same symbol does not always represent the same sound; and that the changes of the form are not necessarily any measure of the change in the sound of a word. When we are examining the history of dead languages we have only the form to work upon; we cannot tell how it sounded when spoken; and we are therefore obliged to assume that the form and sound regularly corresponded; that a, for example, was always sounded as we sound it in 'father,' and had not also the further sounds which it has in 'fate' or 'fat.' It is to be hoped that we are right in our assumption. In any case the possible varieties in the sounds of the consonants are but slight; the vowels are more likely to vary.

23. Now what has the general direction of consonantal change been in England? We have seen consonants dropped off at the end of words -s and n from nouns-s and th from verbs; and we have good reason for believing that this was greatly

due to the language being learnt and spoken by the Normans when they were coalescing with the English. What is the obvious explanation? Clearly that the Normans had no mind to trouble themselves with learning English grammar; and that the breaking down of the English inflections was the readiest way to mutual intelligibility. We have seen phenomena of the same sort where the Danes were established—not quite the same changes, but the same result; Norman and Dane alike got something which gave them less trouble. But, quite apart from these foreign influences, we saw changes going on in the English itself. We saw the old form of the plural 3rd person (nt) changed into nors or th. What was the cause of this? When we find changes similar to our own in widely distant languages, not only Teutonic, but Scandinavian (in which then and t are lost altogether) and Greek (where they are represented by s); when we find nt preserved in Latin, but gradually wasted in French, Italian, &c., the offshoots of Latin; we can have no doubt that the cause is a general one, and no other sufficient cause presents itself but that which is characteristic of all human action-the desire to do what is to be done with the least expenditure of energy. This desire is not consciously felt in all action; but if not, it is present unconsciously; and, in language, man instinctively endeavours to make his utterance as easy as possible, consistently with being intelligible. This common cause will act in many different ways, of which I will only point out some of the most important.

24. (i.) People will substitute an easier sound for a sound or combination of sounds which they find difficult; or they will drop the sound altogether. The change of nt, which we have just been considering, is an example of this; and the unanimity with which it was changed, though in different ways, is a good proof that such a com

bination was universally found disagreeable at the end of a word. Even the Latin, though it had regunt in the present, had a weaker form in partial use for the perfect-rexērunt and rexēre. There is no difficulty in pronouncing the sounds nt together, when one ends a syllable and the other begins one; they occur so without being changed in all languages; we have pantos in Greek; conter is the French corruption of computare, but it is changed no further; firmamentum is an example of one of the commonest kinds of derivative nouns in Latin. Our firmament and others of the class do not strike us as difficult; they show that even at the end of a word the sound is not insuperably difficult. We see from it that the weakening of nt in such a position is only a general tendency of language, not an invariable rule.

25. The reason of the different treatment of the noun and the verb is twofold. First, when berent was weakened into beren, or bereth, or bere, no confusion arose, because each person of the plural was distinguished by the nominative case which went with it; but if the termination of a derived noun like 'firmament' be lost, the whole character of the word is in danger of perishing. Secondly, the personal suffixes of the verb were much more used than any one formative suffix like -ment; therefore it was more important to have an easy form for them; they were rubbed away, as we may say, under the wear and tear of daily use. The difference in these two cases illustrates what I said above; speech is to be made as easy as possible within the limits of intelligibility. When it is consciously felt that further change would make a word unintelligible, it generally remains unchanged; but even this limitation is often exceeded. French especially gives us numerous examples of pairs of words originally quite distinct which have come into the same form by a long process of corruption. Thus, the old French dû (obligation) is con

tracted from deü, which can be traced back to de(b)u(tus), a barbarous participle of debeo; du, the genitive of the article, is for deu = del = de le, where le represents Latin ille. These words when written

are distinguished by the accentual mark.

26. Some sounds seem to be felt more difficult than others in most, if not all, the languages of Europe. Thus gutturals pass into labials occasionally; but the contrary change is hardly found. These changes, however, are not numerous in any language. As a rule we find the same sounds altered in different ways in different languages; or different sounds objected to in different languages. These two kinds of change produced in the beginning the differences of the languages; which differences afterwards increased according as the languages, once separated, varied their forms still further, each in its own way, and also increased their stock of words by borrowing from different sources.

27. Of the first kind take the changes of k (c) in French and in Italian; in French, it is changed into ch (pronounced sh) only before a; so camera becomes chambre, though sometimes the a may change afterwards into i or e as in chien (canis) or chemin (caminus). We have already seen how this change spread into England, where it acted without distinction of the following vowel as in child. In Italian, on the contrary, it is not before a, but before i ore that the change into ch (pronounced tch) occurs, as in cicerone; the original of the title was certainly called 'Kikero.' In English we let the sound sink to in the combination where the Italian has ch; it is a shame to say how we miscall Cicero; and 'castrum' has suffered further change in Ciren-cester, Glou-cester, &c.; in some cases we keep the tch sound, as in child, chest. Every one of these different changes has the same origin; they all arise from not raising up the tongue sufficiently toward the back part of the palate; it is

raised toward the middle part instead; and this is a less constrained position.

28. S is a sound which has been found difficult in many languages, especially in the middle or at the end of a word. The Greeks in particular commonly dropped it altogether, or at the beginning of a word changed it into h. The Latins changed it into r—not quite the which we sound in England, but that which you hear in France, and to a less degree in Scotland, a 'trilled' letter, as it is technically called, made by laying the fore part of the tongue very loosely along the palate, and then making it vibrate by a sharp breath (Ch. VIII., 19). The position of the mouth for s is very similar; but the tongue is held more firmly. The change has been very frequent in the Scandinavian languages; it was also found in Frisian, and in Saxon, both on the Continent and in England. Thus iron in Old English was isen; and our commonest verbs show the same change: art is for ast, are for ase; the root of the verb was as, then es, as you see in Latin es-t: were is for wese, the root being vas 'to dwell:' cp. the German wesen. But this distaste for s did not lead to its loss from any of these languages; it was merely superseded by other sounds in different degrees.

29. Instances of the second kind of substitution, which arises from different sounds being disliked by different peoples, are tolerably familiar. I have already spoken of the French dislike of h (Ch. I., 20). It has either been dropped altogether, as in avoir (habere) or retained in spelling without being sounded. The French also disliked p and b in the middle of a word; so that Latin ripa became rive: avoir is from habere, as I have just said. Every one knows how much a German or a Frenchman dislikes the two sounds which we now represent by th, the sound of th in 'thin,' and of dh in 'then.' To us they seem perfectly simple and natural sounds. On the other hand, we cannot