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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    of the actual or possible civilization of a race than this fact. Grimm was a German who used the word Ich a hun¬ dred times a day and surely several times every NacJit and every Woch, and yet he began his law with a consideration of the progress forward, from the back of the tongue, of the gutturals, to the dentals and to the labials,—i.c., only of the mutes or stops—ignoring the first journey from the pharynx and root of the tongue to the middle and front of the mouth. This seems unaccountable. In English we have wisely utterly stopped all these Ich, Nacht, and Woch throaty abominations, just as the Germans, high or low, had previously discarded numerous indescribable glottal buzzes, pharyngeal clucks, gurgles, coughs, and hawkings, of peoples “pawing to get their hinder parts free” from animalian progenitors, and vainly trying to swallow, vomit, or hawk out their makeshift of language from pharyngeal or esophageal depths. The significance of Grimm’s law is that, although he began in the middle of the process, and not at its begin¬ ning as he should have done, when he did catch sight of it the progress of phonation consisted in the least possible interruption of pure tone, and that progressively by parts of the mouth more and more towards the front—i.e., the point of the tongue, the front teeth and the lips. Some modifications and checkings and stoppings of vowel-sounds there must be because the continuous tones are insufficient for the creation of the large number of sounds and words required in thought-expression. But English, par excel¬ lenceproves that the modifications by the pharynx and root of the tongue are not only unnecessary but are artis¬ tically abominable. Parenthetically, I may note two morbid variations, or two impasses, which English phonologic evolution and good sense have avoided, and we may therefore believe that in the progress of civilized phonology, these bad experiments will never be repeated. The French never do anything that they do not overdo it, and hence their language evo-
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