History of the English Language and Literature 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 247 and the Germans do now; but it gradually became the fashion in England to leave them out. 13. The Expulsion of Gutturals.—(ii) In some cases the guttural disappeared entirely; in others, it was changed into or represented by other sounds. The ge at the beginning of the passive (or past) participles of many verbs disappeared entirely. Thus gebróht, gebóht, geworht, became brought, bought, and wrought. The g at the beginning of many words also dropped off. Thus Gyppenswich became Ipswich; gif became if; genoh, enough.—The guttural at the end of words—hard g or c—also disappeared. Thus halig became holy; eordhlic, earthly; gastlic, ghastly or ghostly. The same is the case in dough, through, plough, etc.—the guttural appearing to the eye but not to the ear.—Again, the guttural was changed into quite different sounds—into labials, into sibilants, into other sounds also. The following are a few examples:— (a) The guttural has been softened, through Norman-French influence, into a sibilant. Thus rigg, egg, and brigg have become ridge, edge, and bridge. (b) The guttural has become a labial—f—as in cough, enough, trough, laugh, draught, etc. (c) The guttural has become an additional syllable, and is represented by a vowel-sound. Thus sorg and mearh have become sorrow and marrow. (d) In some words it has disappeared both to eye and ear. Thus makëd has become made. 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— 248 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. 15. The Letters that represent Gutturals.—The English guttural has been quite Protean in the written or printed forms it takes. It appears as an i, as a y, as a w, as a ch, as a dge, as a j, and—in its more native forms—as a g, a k, or a gh. The following words give all these forms: hail, day, fowl, teach, HISTORY OF THE GRAMMAR OF ENGLISH.
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