IX. The following words were not admitted into the main class chiefly on account of their unimportance. bin, bin = been. yawl (boat), yawl (howl). coup, coo. lamb, lam (bang). loaf, loaf (v. laufen). nag (pony), nag (to gnaw), knag. ode, owed. oxide, ox-eyed. pax, packs. pants, pants (fr. pant). broke (v. of broker), broke (fr. prose, pros (and cons). break). sink (var.), cinque. swayed, suède (kid). ternary, turnery. tea, tee (starting point). cheap, cheep. tool, tulle. wo! woe. hol hoe. The facts of the case being now sufficiently supplied by the above list, I will put my attitude towards those facts in a logical sequence under separate statements, which thus isolated will, if examined one by one, avoid the confusion that their interdependence might otherwise occasion. The sequence is thus: 1. Homophones are a nuisance. 2. They are exceptionally frequent in English. 3. They are self-destructive, and tend to become obsolete. 4. This loss impoverishes the language. 5. This impoverishment is now proceeding owing to the prevalence of the Southern English standard of speech. 6. The mischief is being worsened and propagated by the phoneticians. 7. The Southern English dialect has no claim to exclusive preference. 1. That homophones are a nuisance. An objector who should plead that homophones are not a nuisance might allege the longevity of the Chinese language, composed, I believe, chiefly of homophones distinguished from each other by an accentuation which must be delicate difficult and precarious. I remember that Max Müller [1864] instanced a fictitious sentence ba bà bâ bá, 'which (he wrote) is said to mean if properly accented The three ladies gave a box on the ear to the favourite of the princess.' This suggests that the bleating of sheep may have a richer significance than we are accustomed to suppose; and it may perhaps illustrate the origin as well as the decay of human speech. The only question that it raises for us is the possibility of distinguishing our own homophones by accentuation or by slight differentiation of vowels; and this may prove to be in some cases the practical solution, but it is not now the point in discussion, for no one will deny that such delicate distinctions are both inconvenient and dangerous, and should only be adopted if forced upon us. I shall assume that common sense and universal experience exonerate me from wasting words on the proof that homophones are mischievous, and I will give my one example in a note1; but it is a fit place for some general remarks. The objections to homophones are of two kinds, either scientific and utilitarian, or æsthetic. The utilitarian objec 1 The homophones sun = son. There is a Greek epigram on Homer, wherein, among other fine things, he is styled, Ἑλλάνων βιοτῇ δεύτερον ἀέλιον which Mackail translates a second sun on the life of Greece'. But second son in English means the second male child of its parents. It is plain that the Greek is untranslatable into English because of the homophone. The thing cannot be said. Donne would take this bull by the horns, pretending or thinking that genuine feeling can be worthily carried in a pun. So that in his impassioned 'hymn to God the Father', deploring his own sinfulness, his climax is But swear by thyself that at my death Thy Sonne the only poetic force of which seems to lie in a covert plea of pitiable imbecility. Dr. Henry Bradley in 1913 informed the International Historical Congress that the word son had ceased to be vernacular in the dialects of many parts of England. 'I would not venture to assert (he adds) that the identity of sound with sun is the only cause that has led to the widespread disuse of son in dialect speech, but I think it has certainly contributed to the result.' Utilitarian tions are manifest, and since confusion of words is not objections confined to homophones, the practical inconvenience that is sometimes occasioned by slight similarities may properly be alleged to illustrate and enforce the argument. I will give only one example. not confined to homophones. Esthetic O I The telephone, which seems to lower the value of differentiating consonants, has revealed unsuspected likenesses. For instance the ciphers, if written somewhat phonetically as usually pronounced, are thus: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 nawt wun too three fawr faiv six sev'n eit nain by which it will be seen that the ten names contain eight but only eight different vowels, o and 4 having the same vowel aw, while 5 and 9 have ai. Both these pairs caused confusion; the first of them was cured by substituting the name of the letter O for the name of the zero cipher, which happens to be identical with it in form,' and this introduced a ninth vowel sound ou (=owe), but the other pair remained such a constant source of error, that persons who had their house put on the general telephonic system would request the Post Office to give them a number that did not contain a 9 or a 5; and it is pretty certain that had not the system of automatic dialling, which was invented for quite another purpose, got rid of the trouble, one of these two ciphers would have changed its name at the Post Office. In the effect of uniformity it may be said that utilitarian objections. and æsthetic considerations are generally at one; and this blank statement must here suffice, for the principle could not be briefly dealt with: but it follows from it that the proper æsthetic objections to homophones are never clearly separable from the scientific. I submit the following considerations. Any one who seriously attempts to write well-sounding English will be aware how delicately sensitive our ear is to the repetition of sounds. He will often have found it necessary to change some unimportant word because its accented vowel recalled and jarred with another which was perhaps as far as two or three lines removed from it: nor does there seem to be any rule for this, since apparently similar repetitions do not always offend, and may even be 1 There is a coincidence of accidents-that the Arabic sign for zero is the same with our letter O, and that the name of our letter O (=owe) is the same as the present tense of ought, which is the vulgar name (for nought) of the Arabic zero, and that its vowel does not occur in the name of any cipher. agreeable. The relation of the sound to the meaning is indefinable, but in homophones it is blatant; for instance the common expression It is well could not be used in a paragraph where the word well (= well-spring) had occurred. Now, this being so, it is very inconvenient to find the omnipresent words no and know excluding each other: and the same is true of sea and see; if you are writing of the sea then the verb to see is forbidden, or at least needs some handling. I see the deep's untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strewn: here seaweeds is risky, but I see the sea's untrampled floor would have been impossible: even the familiar The sea saw that and fled is almost comical, especially because 'sea saw' has a most compromising joint-tenant in the children's rocking game See saw Margery daw. The awkwardness of these English homophones is much increased by the absence of inflection, and I suppose it was the richness of their inflections which made the Greeks so indifferent (apparently) to syllabic recurrences that displease us: moreover, the likeness in sound between their similar syllables was much obscured by a verbal accent which respected the inflection and disregarded the stem, whereas our accent is generally faithful to the root.1 This sensitiveness 1 Wherever this is not so-as in rhétoric, rhetorical, rhetorician, cómpany, companion, &c.—we have a greater freedom in the use of the words. Such words, as Dr. Bradley points out, giving Canada, Canádian as example, are often phonetic varieties due to an imported foreign syntax, and their pronunciation implies familiarity with literature and the written forms: but very often they are purely the result of our native syllabising, not only in displacement of accent (as in the first example above) but also by modification of the accented vowel according to its position in the word, the general tendency being to make long vowels in monosyllables and in penultimate accents, but short vowels in antepenultimate accents. Thus come such differences of sound between opus and opera, omen and ominous, virus and virulent, miser and miserable, nation and national, patron and patronage, legal and legislate, grave and gravity, globe and globular, grade and gradual, genus and general, female and feminine, fable and fabulous, &c. In such disguising of the root-sound the main effect, as Dr. Bradley says, is the power to free the derivative from an intense meaning of the root; so that, to take his very forcible example, the adjective Christian, the derivative of Christ, has by virtue of its shortened vowel been enabled to carry a much looser signification than it could have acquired had it been phonetically indissociable from the intense signification of the name Christ. This freedom of the derivative from the root varies indefinitely in different words, and it Punnage. to the sound of syllables is of the essence of our best English, and where the effect is most magical in our great poets it is impossible to analyse. Once become sensible of such beauty, and of the force of sounds, a writer will find himself in trouble with no and know. These omnipresent words are each of them essentially weakened by the existence of the other, while their proximity in a sentence is now damaging. It is a misfortune that our Southern dialect should have parted entirely with all the original differentiation between them; for after the distinctive k of the verb was dropped, the negative still preserved (as it in some dialects still preserves) its broad open vowel, more like law than toe or beau, and unless that be restored I should judge that the verb to know is doomed. The third person singular of its present tense is nose, and its past tense is new, and the whole inconvenience is too radical and perpetual to be received all over the world. We have an occasional escape by using nay för no, since its homophone neigh is an unlikely neighbour; but that can serve only in one limited use of the word, and is no solution. In talking with friends the common plea that I have heard for homophones is their usefulness to the punster. Why! would you have no puns?' I will not answer that question; but there is no fear of our being insufficiently catered for; whatever accidental benefit be derivable from homophones, we shall always command it fully and in excess; look again at the portentous list of them! And since the essential jocularity of a pun (at least when it makes me laugh) lies in a humorous incongruity, its farcical gaiety may be heightened by a queer pronunciation. I cannot pretend to judge a sophisticated taste; but, to give an example, if, as I should urge, the o of the word petrol should be preserved, as it is now universally spoken, not having yet degraded into petr❜l, a future squire will not be disqualified from airing his wit to his visitors by saying, as he points to his old stables, 'that is where I store-my petrel', and when the joke had been illustrated in Punch, its folly would sufficiently distract the patients in a dentist's waiting-room for years to come, in spite of gentlemen and chauffeurs continuing to say petrol, as very much complicates my present lesser statement of the literary advantage of phonetic variety in inflexions and derivatives. The examples above are all Latin words, and since Latin words came into English through different channels, these particular vowels can have different histories. |