It appears from these examples that by far the greatest part in this kind of assimilation is played by the vowel i-the weakest of all: a fact which is certainly surprising. Corssen1 gives the analogy of ä, ö, ü in German, which are commonly produced by an i in the following syllable: e.g. mann, männlich: and he concludes that i, thin though it be, requires for its pronunciation a considerable tension of the organs of speech, differing herein much from e. This explanation is most unsatisfactory. It is this effort required in pronunciation, and nothing else, which is the mark of a strong vowel: and yet nothing can be plainer than the fact that i is weaker than a, o, or u. And certainly no such tension is absolutely required to sound the i, though greater power may accidentally be applied to it, as it may also to e. The truth is that the real cause of the change is not the influence of the i: the real cause is the natural tendency of every vowel to grow weaker in Latin: the only lends a helping hand, determining how far the change should operate-in this case to the utmost possible limit, sometimes giving an additional impulse to the vowel affected, which might otherwise have resisted the primary tendency, as difficilis, mentioned above. In a word, it is only a modifying, at most an auxiliary cause of the change: and this is in. accordance with the view of Assimilation which I have given. Corssen gives some interesting examples of a produced by assimilation in the late popular-Latin: e.g. ansar for anser, parantalia, &c.: and he points out how a in this way appears sometimes in the Romance languages, e.g. marchand from late Latin marcator, sauvage from salvaticus (silua). It seems to me unquestionable, that this a, so produced, was not the full sound (ah) in Latin: though it may have become so in the descendants of the Latin, all of which, as has been pointed out, were subjected to foreign influences. It may have been (a), but more probably the neutral vowel3. It is observable, that in almost 3 See page 84. 1 II. 380. 2 II. 373. CH. VII. Apparent influence of the vowel i. CH. VII. all cases this a precedes an r, or l, that is, just the two sounds before which the neutral vowel is most common in England, e.g. altar, fatal. Less frequent in its operation: acts principally as a bar to further change. III. DISSIMILATION. This principle has of course a less wide field than that which we have just considered. The same sound is less likely to occur twice in inconvenient proximity, than different sounds. Like Assimilation, it is sometimes an auxiliary cause of new change, sometimes it prevents the. regular process of change. Its operation is restricted to some of the places in which either by regular substitution, or by the loss of a letter, or by the resolution of a semivowel into a vowel, or by the addition of suffixes to roots or bases, or by two of these causes combined, the same vowel-sound occurred twice. It acts, I say, only. in some of these places, because the most obvious method was to let the two vowels so meeting coalesce into one long vowel and this often took place. For example, when sequ-ontur was tending to become sequ-untur by the regular substitution of u for o, since the double u would have been difficult to pronounce, the two often coalesced, and (q being rarely written after the loss of its peculiar attendant u) the result was sec-untur, when the tendency to weaken o to u in these forms had become too strong and too universal to be resisted. But the natural dislike to such a transformation is seen in the fact that the old spelling sequontur was still retained even in the Augustan age, side by side with the new. Similarly we find in indifferent use equos and ecus, aequom and aecum, quom and cum, &c. In all these cases this retention of the o, this bar to the regular change, is due to the principle of Dissimilation. In some instances no doubt this principle was aided by another cause. If the weakening of o to u had taken place, and the two vowels had then coalesced, there would often have resulted much confusion. Thus uoltus would have been allowed to sink into ultus; uolnus into ulnus, &c. Here therefore there was all the more need for letting the natural tendency to Dissimilation `act fully. Corssen gives as examples of this bar, beside the wellknown uolt, uolcanus, &c., the cases where original o is retained in the suffix -olus, which generally sank'to -ulus; as friuolus, Scaeuola, &c.1 The combination uu seems to have only been tolerated when another vowel followed, in which case the second u was of course really the semivowel v, and there was no real meeting of identical sounds, e. g. in illuuies. The meeting of i with occurred more frequently: e.g. from the resolution of ei into i, as petiei, petii; uieis, uiis. Here the combination was allowed, because contraction would in such cases have produced immense confusion: but where possible it was permitted. Thus when De-is became Diis by weakening, it was at once shortened into Dis; and genitives like Vergilii were also contracted, except when a poet found the older form more convenient. To avoid the double i, the radical vowel of viac was long kept at e, e.g. proiecere, traiecere, &c., found in Lucretius and Virgil; and when the e had sunk to i, the difficulty was avoided by dropping one of the vowels, as obicio, adicio, &c.3 3 But when the difficult combination arose from the meeting of the end of a nominal base with a case-suffix, or even a new formative suffix, then dissimilation stepped in and prevented the occurrence of the sound. One of the two vowels became e; thus ali-inus became alienus. Similarly when e would naturally have sunk to i in the last syllable of the root, it was retained, as in abietis, not 3 At a somewhat late time, if we may judge from poetry. Thus Virgil (Aen. vi. 420) has obicit offam (=obyicit), but Lucan (Ix. 188) Pompeiumque deis obicit. Yet in Virgil we find reice scanned as a dissyllable, which could not be if each i was heard. CH. VII. CH. VII. abiitis, and Anienis from Anio (n), though from cardo(n) we have cardinis. So also in the formation of a secondary noun we see the same influence. Although before -tat bases in o regularly allow the o to sink into i (as from uero-, ueritat-), yet if i precedes, the o does not sink below e, as in pie-tat-, uarie-tat-, and many others'. The root AG is frequently used to form a sort of causal verb2; in which case the vowel naturally sinks to i, or is altogether lost, e.g. leuigare, pur(i)gare, obiurigare and iur(i)gium. But when i precedes, this vowel was kept at e, as uariegare. Lastly, the older form of the genitives ipsius, illius, &c. is to be accounted for on this principle. We have seen the u occurring in forms like corporus (p. 165), a weakening of Graeco-Italian -os. But this u regularly sank to i, and consequently we might have expected to find ipsiis or ipsis: the change was prevented by the preceding i. Finally, the combination ee is avoided in eeis by the forms eis or ieis, both in the nom. and the dat. or abl. plural. And the only reason, apparently, why we find the one relic of the older form of the present participle, so often mentioned, euntem, is that if the usual weakening took place in it, we should have a double e sound. These, with a few others of the same class, are the main examples of Dissimilation—a principle which (as will have been observed) acts almost exclusively in hindering weakening, which but for it would, on the analogy of similar forms, have certainly taken place. 1 Corssen, L. 310. 2 So apparently in A.S. we have eád-ig-an, to make happy, from cád, happiness, fand-ig-an, to cause to find, to search out, tempt. 3 In Plautus, Trin. 68, ed. Brix, though Fleckeisen reads obiurgito, not so well, I think. CH. VII. IV. Loss. This vowels. Perhaps produced by greater freedom of the accent at an period. I return for a short time to the Greek. As the last 1. Loss of Greek two forms of change had little effect on the vigorous vowel-system of the Greek, it is only natural that it should have suffered still less from loss. Indeed the only class of words in which a vowel is dropped with any regularity is in those verbs which formed their continuous stem by reduplication. In these the radical vowel commonly fell out. Many of the cases have been already mentioned; as γί-γ(ε)ν-ομαι, μί-μ(ε)νω, πί-π(ε)τ-ω πέ-φ(ε)ν-ω, &c. loss is one reason for believing that the accent in Greek was not originally regulated by the length of the last syllable, but was free to fall, as was natural, on whatever syllable more especially modified the original idea-here earlier therefore on the first: for had it been on the radical syllable always, as would be necessary under the later lawe.g. μ-μévw, it is almost inconceivable that the accented vowel should have been suffered to drop. It is quite true that this view is not free from objection, though less so, as I think, than any other. For example, it may be asked how it happened that, if the accent was always on the reduplicated syllable, the vowel was yet regularly weakened to . We may answer that it is less remarkable that an accentuated vowel should be weakened than that it should be lost: but this answer allows the difficulty. It is hardly conceivable that the accent should have been originally on the radical syllable, and remained there after the reduplication sufficiently long to allow the new syllable to be weakened regularly, and then-after the importance of that syllable had so far faded out of the consciousness of P. E. 19 |