Entries from April 2007 ↓

An Epoch in History, by P. H. Eley. Published ©1904.

This is Bill’s first book as a PM. It’s an interesting little self-published memoir of a man who went as part of the American teaching corps when the US took control of the Philippines. There are a few descriptions of Philippine society, including a visit to a leper colony. It’s a quick read, but don’t read too fast or you’ll miss the brief mention of Hawaiian “surf-shooting.”

Man is the only animal with the powers of laughter, a privilege which was not bestowed on him for nothing. Let us then laugh while we may, no matter how broad the laugh may be, and despite of what the poet says about “the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind.” The mind should occasionally be vacant, as the land should sometimes lie fallow, and for precisely the same reason.–Egerton Smith.

Related in: Book of Wise Sayings, Selected Largely from Eastern Sources, by William Alexander Clouston. London, Hutchinson & Co., 1893.

12. The Expulsion of Gutturals.–(i) Not only did the Normans help us to an easier and pleasanter kind of sentence, they aided us in getting rid of the numerous throat-sounds that infested our language. It is a remarkable fact that there is not now in the French language a single guttural. There is not an h in the whole language. The French write an h in several of their words, but they never sound it. Its use is merely to serve as a fence between two vowels–to keep two vowels separate, as in la haine, hatred. No doubt the Normans could utter throat-sounds well enough when they dwelt in Scandinavia; but, after they had lived in France for several generations, they acquired a great dislike to all such sounds. No doubt, too, many, from long disuse, were unable to give utterance to a guttural. This dislike they communicated to the English; and hence, in the present day, there are many people–especially in the south of England–who cannot sound a guttural at all. The muscles in the throat that help to produce these sounds have become atrophied–have lost their power for want of practice. The purely English part of the population, for many centuries after the Norman invasion, could sound gutturals quite easily–just as the Scotch and the Germans do now; but it gradually became the fashion in England to leave them out.

14. The Story of the GH.–How is it, then, that we have in so many words the two strongest gutturals in the language–g and h–not only separately, in so many of our words, but combined? The story is an odd one. Our Old English or Saxon scribes wrote–not light, might, and night, but liht, miht, and niht. When, however, they found that the Norman-French gentlemen would not sound the h, and say–as is still said in Scotland–licht, &c., they redoubled the guttural, strengthened the h with a hard g, and again presented the dose to the Norman. But, if the Norman could not sound the h alone, still less could he sound the double guttural; and he very coolly let both alone–ignored both. The Saxon scribe doubled the signs for his guttural, just as a farmer might put up a strong wooden fence in front of a hedge; but the Norman cleared both with perfect ease and indifference. And so it came to pass that we have the symbol gh in more than seventy of our words, and that in most of these we do not sound it at all. The gh remains in our language, like a moss-grown boulder, brought down into the fertile valley in a glacial period, when gutturals were both spoken and written, and men believed in the truthfulness of letters–but now passed by in silence and noticed by no one.

From: A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, By JMD Meiklejohn, published 1887. (Bookp(h)ile.)