Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    shall be growths by slow increments of change. Advance a step, make the little gain secure, then another step, and so on until the continent and world is ours. In politics this steady, unwearied, slow advance is the reason England ' is what she is and we are what we are as nations. And precisely so in language ! There must not be any sudden cataclysms or revolutions. The fonetik fok are crazy, and only to be likened to the French topsyturvyists of 1793. They would be the destroyers of true progress, and if there were the slightest danger of this wild com¬ munism being translated into fact, they should every one be gibbeted, body and soul. To destroy the literary pro¬ duct of all time, which phoneticists would do, is a crime against every element of civilization, for which no punish¬ ment would be too great. But there is no real danger from these foolish people. If it pleases them to dream their dreams and live in an impossible world, indifferent to the savage needs and binding duties of this one, we may smile and pass on. It is strange, however, that as intellectual as they are, they cannot see one absolutely fatal objection to their theory, which is this : The spoken language is not only not uni¬ form as regards its sounds in any one city, State, or nation, but the sounds never remain the same in any one place or as spoken by any people for a considerable length of time. It is probably a literal truth that no sound is the same when made by any two persons, or at two different times. Within large limits, both of time and place, these differ¬ ences are trivial and might be ignored, but the far-traveler, and the long-liver find the differences too intolerable for any unvarying symbols. Hence it is that if a set of symbols were made today for all the sounds used by the people of New York, they would not suit the Chicago or Denver folk, and none of them would be satisfied next year. Thus it is that the written and printed language must always remain practically a different language from the spoken one. This is the lesson taught by Grimm’s law, Verner’s
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