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Consonant Shift

Yes these are consonants ??

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mothysan
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22 views1 page

Consonant Shift

Yes these are consonants ??

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mothysan
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Consonant Shift (Marks 10)

The consonant-shift is important to the modern philologist, in so far as it is the clearest and least
ambiguous criterion of the Germanic languages: a word with a shifted consonant is Germanic, and a
word with an unshifted consonant in any of the Germanic languages must be a loan-word; whereas the
shifted stress is no such certain criterion, chie y because many words had always had the stress on the
rst syllable. But if we ask about the intrinsic importance of the two changes, that is, if we try to look at
matters from the point of view of the language itself, or rather the speakers, we shall see that the
second change is really the more important one. It does not matter much whether a certain number of
words begin with a p or with a /, but it does matter, or at any rate it may matter, very much whether the
language has a rational system of accentuation or not.

There is no hesitation in saying that the old stress-shift has left its indelible mark on the structure of the
language and has in uenced it more than any other phonetic change. The signi cance of the stress
shift will, perhaps, appear most clearly if we compare two sets of words in modern English. The
original Arian stress system is still found in numerous words taken in recent times from the classical
languages, thus ‘family’, ‘familiar’, ‘familiarity’ or ‘photograph’, ‘photographer’, ‘photographic’, The
shifted Germanic system is shown in such groups as ‘love’, ‘lover’, ‘loving’, ‘lovingly’, ‘lovely’, ‘loveliness’,
‘loveless’, ‘lovelessness’, or ‘king’, ‘kingdom’, ‘kingship’, ‘kingly’, ‘kingless’, etc. As it is characteristic of all
Arian languages that suf xes play a much greater role than pre xes, word-formation being generally
by endings, it follows that where the Germanic stress system has come into force, the syllable that is
most important has also the strongest stress, and that the relatively insigni cant modi cations of the
chief idea which are indicated by formative syllables are also accentually subordinate.

This is, accordingly, a perfectly logical system, corresponding to the principal rule observed in
sentence stress, viz. that the stressed words are generally the most important ones. As, moreover, want
of stress tends everywhere to obscure vowel-sounds, languages with moveable accent are exposed to
the danger that related words, or different forms of the same word, are made more different than they
would else have been, and their connexion is more obscured than is strictly necessary; compare, for
instance, the two sounds in the rst syllable of ‘family’ and ‘familiar’, or the different treatment of the
vowels in ‘photograph’, ‘photographer’ and ‘photographic’.

The phonetic clearness inherent in the consistent stress system is certainly a linguistic advantage, and
the obscuration of the connexion between related words is generally to be considered a drawback.
The language of our forefathers seems therefore to have gained considerably by replacing the
movable stress by a xed one.
fi
fi
fl
fi
fi
fl
fi
fi
fi
fi

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