speech habits, and secondly and less importantly, of conscious regulations or judgments with respect to certain specific habits. For his instinctive speech habits no person is responsible and over them no person exerts control. They come as the consequence of long and repeated experience, and their particular character is determined by the human circumstances in which each person happens to be placed during the early years in which he acquires his mother tongue. But conscious regulations and judgments are different matters. Almost every person is compelled to make some of these regulations or judgments. Some persons make more than others, and certain speakers almost completely reconstruct their speech to bring it into accord with an approved model. Whatever changes or judgments of this kind are made, are made in the interests of correctness. We must now consider some of the grounds upon which these judgments are based for the purpose of placing upon them a reasonable valuation as elements in the life of the language. The assurance of correctness will ordinarily be found to rest upon an appeal to analogy, or to logic, or to etymology, or to authority, or finally to that diffused social force which may be best designated as the morals of speech. Each of these ideas must now be examined in turn in a chapter of its own. IX ANALOGY As a process in the development of the English language, analogy has been of the greatest importance. The psychological conditions determining analogy in language are present in all human actions. They are, briefly, the common impulse of mankind to perform similar actions、 in similar ways by adapting a new action to an older one. When cars for railway trains were first built, they were made as much like wagons and carriages as possible. The first automobiles were also made like carriages, and even their names were analogical, for they were known as horseless carriages. The first experimenters in the constructing of aeroplanes, although they had no human exploit of this kind to follow as a model, nevertheless found in the flying of birds the analogy for their experimentations. The flight of man was thought of in terms of the winging of birds. Analogy in language has not been quite so obvious as these imitative acts in the physical world, but it has operated in much the same way. The constructive elements out of which language is made are not very numerous, and in the building up of speech they are employed again and again. In the grammar of the English language it is customary to define eight of these constructive elements, known as the eight parts of speech. But these eight parts of speech are not all equally significant from the structural point of view. The inter jection, for example, is of very slight importance, and the adjective is less important than the noun, the adverb than the verb, the conjunction than the preposition. Within their several groups, and especially in those groups that are functionally important in constructing the sentence, there has been in the history of the language a very marked tendency to make the words of the language conform to the same type. The nouns, for example, which perform one very important function, have tended also to take on one form, have tended towards greater and greater regularity. They have thereby acquired certain marks which, repeated in practically all nouns, have become the distinguishing characteristics of nouns. Thus in Modern English the surest way of testing whether a noun is a noun would be to make a plural of it by、 adding s. This has become the almost universal analogical mark of the noun. The word stone may be either an adjective, as in a stone house, or a verb, as in to stone a cat, or a noun, as in to throw a stone. But only one of these functions carries with it the possibility of adding the idea of plurality to the word by the appending of an s. So also the verb, the second important functional element in the language, has appropriated to itself certain peculiar marks which have tended to become distinguishing、 for all verbs. When the characteristic verbal functions of verbs are expressed in the language, the tendency is always to express them in the same way. Perhaps the most important single function of verbs, apart from the fundamental logical idea of action, is the expression of tense. For this purpose the English language uses prevailingly the ending d or ed, and one of the surest ways of telling whether a word is a verb or not would be to see if a past tense can be made for it by adding d or ed. If one wanted to make a new verb out of a word that had never been used as a verb before, one would make the past tense of this verb by adding d or ed. Just as the making of plurals by the adding of s is the most general analogical characteristic of nouns, so then the making of past tenses by the addition of d or ed is the most general analogical characteristic of verbs. But the curious thing about these orderly habits of analogy in the language is that though they have moved generally in the direction of uniformity, they have always į stopped short of complete uniformity. Most nouns form their plurals in s in English, but not all nouns do so.、 Some nouns make no change at all in the plural, like sheep, some nouns have no ending but instead have a change of the radical vowel, like feet, and there are still other irregular plurals, like children and cherubim and alumni and phenomena that call for special explanations. So also in the verb. The commonest way of making a past tense is to add d or ed, but the irregular verbs do not make their past tense in that way. Some verbs, like went for the past tense of go, even employ an entirely different word for the past tense. It would be just as easy to make a past tense goed as a past tense hoed or showed. And from the point of view of the general comfort and convenience of the language, and in the light also of the common human tendency as otherwise exhibited in analogy to perform similar actions in similar ways, it seems a little strange that the language has permitted these irregular and unusual forms to exist. It may seem even more than strange. It may seem untidy and reprehensible. Having started and carried well along an orderly and systematic way of expressing plural number in nouns and past tense in verbs, why should not the language have continued the good work and have made all words expressing these functions of the language conform to the same type?) And this query would apply not only to nouns and verbs, but it would be as much in point with reference to any other of the more or less regular habits of the language. The answer to this question might carry one very far into the dark and mysterious recesses of human nature.、 Perhaps after all it is only the theoretical side of human、 nature that takes delight in a perfect system. Perhaps in the work and play of daily life, a certain amount of irregularity, of untidiness, and generous carelessness is more pleasing than a formal perfection would be. Leaving these general questions for private speculation, however, we may more profitably consider the bearings of analogy upon the matter of correctness in language. And the first conclusion we must come to is that analogy can have no compelling power in determining correctness. We have already pointed out that certain obvious analogical forms are not only not correct, but are emphatically incorrect. Thus a past tense of go as goed is common enough in children's English, and children in making this form follow a natural analogy. So also they make a plural foots or sheeps most reasonably and analogically, yet no person would give these forms the stamp of correctness, except the mad reformer who accepted as a principle of correctness the rule that analogy must be followed without hesitation or exception. But this principle would soon land one in manifest absurdity. It might be sound enough as a theoretical principle, but in language a rule that is not valid practically has very little meaning. To carry out |