--- On Fri, 12/19/08, Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:52 AM, Abhijit Menon-Sen > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > At 2008-12-18 11:40:27 -0800, [email protected] > wrote: > > > > > > If you are nostalgic about my outbursts of > linguistic pedantry on > > > Silk, we can go into why the 'h' in > 'hour', 'honour' and 'honest' are > > > silent, and why this is not the case with > 'history' or 'hippopotamus'. > > > > Yes! Do tell. > Yes, please! I think you guys are just rooting for IG and I to start one of *those* arguments. You know, the ones where we unleash spates of tautology on subjects no one else cares about, the rest of the list falls asleep, and then the two of us decide that we had been in agreement since the beginning. It's been a while we've done that. OK, so you talked me into it. Before I get to the question of the aspirated/non-aspirated 'h', let's start with some exposition. First of all, evolutionary theory applies. The most successful languages share characteristics with successful biological species - if we define success by numbers (of speakers and vocabulary/ individuals) and longevity (of the species or the language, not the individual). The most obvious of these shared characteristics are - the ability to adapt at the optimal rate (not too fast, not too slow), which permits useful adaptations to be passed on, and weeds out useless or bad adaptations before they can cause widespread damage. - a large number of contemporaneous diverse forms (phenotypes in biology, dialects and regional/cultural usage variants in language). - accretion of vestigial structures with no obvious utility. Just as we understand the presence of the coccyx in humans by seeing it as the remnant of a lost tail, we make sense of idiosyncratic English spellings and usages by looking at their Greek, Latin, French, Old English or other antecedents. An important non-obvious characteristic is that no species or language remains successful forever. Either a species evolves to the point that it becomes a recognisably new one (e.g., homo habilis diverges from the australopithecines / Romance languages diverge from Vulgar Latin) or it is supplanted by a more successful species (homo neanderthalensis overtaken by homo sapiens / Latin replaced by French and then by English as the dominant language of trade and diplomacy). So - long story short, change = good, stagnation = bad, right? But language is inextricably linked to social, political and cultural structures. A powerful cultural meme throughout history propagates the notion that linguistic change is a symptom of degeneration and decline. This is unavoidable, because language is a social marker (accents, dialects, regional idioms). Lower status groups strive to emulate higher staus groups. (As Aelfric's Colloquy put it, back in the 10th century, "Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú taéce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelaérede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ," or "We kids ask you, master, to teach us to speak correctly, because we're ignorant and speak badly.") Institutions and mechanisms are created to preserve linguistic prestige (the Académie française, and the OED, to name two). Over time, however, even these institutions must change to remain relevant. In this context, let's re-examine the silent 'h' question. Both 'history' and 'hippopotamus' entered Middle English via Latin, from the original Greek, that is, from the Greek 'historia', meaning history or narrative, and 'hippopotamos' meaning river horse. Middle English (ME) broadly refers to the forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the 1470s, from which point a form of London-based English became dominant, thanks to the introduction of the printing press by William Caxton. These 'imports' retained the aspirated 'h' from the original language(s). 'Hospital' 'hour' and 'honour' entered ME via French, from Latin origins. In spoken French, most words imported from Latin turned the initial 'h' into the h muet, or "mute h". When the words were imported into English, the h remained silent. However, there was a twist in the tale in the case of 'history'. French replaced Latin as the lingua franca across Europe and its colonies from the 17th century onward. During this time, the educated class in Britain and specifically in England adopted 'frenchified' pronunciations. Many direct Latin import words, including history, which had hitherto been pronounced with an aspirated h, suddenly became 'mute h' words. This was reflected in the number of 'An History...' book titles between the 1600s and the mid-1800s. At this point, there was a resurgence of English chauvinism (precipitated by the emergence of the global British Empire and the predominantly English-speaking United States) which started eroding the 'frenchification' process, and by the early 1900s, 'a history' with a clearly aspirated h was once again prevalent. 'Upper class' English, though, retained various inconsistencies such as continuing to drop the h in historic, but voicing it in history. And that's the story of the elusive h. Coming to the subject of the proper use of 'decimate': there are three kinds of predominant language shifts: - sound and pronunciation - vocabulary and meaning - morphology and syntax The 'history' example falls into the first category. The 'decimate' example falls into the second. Honestly, I don't much care about the 'a history' versus 'an history' issue. I don't think it makes much of a difference to the meaning of what one is trying to communicate. In the case of 'decimate', there are two meanings - one which is correct but endangered, and the other, which is wrong but spreading. It may be an uphill battle, but in the interests of clarity, I tend to favour a protection of the endangered species approach. Keeping the nuanced meaning of the word adds more depth and richness to the language, which in turn improves our ability to communicate ideas, and that something worth fighting for, in my opinion. cheers, Divya
