The spread
of education may profoundly modify them, but the spoken language of
the people will ever continue to devise new variations and to initiate
developments of its own. Even the "standard" language is continually
losing old words and admitting new ones, as was noted long ago by
Horace; and our so-called "standard" pronunciation is ever
imperceptibly but surely changing, and never continues in one stay.
In the very valuable _Lectures on the Science of Language_ by
Professor F. Max Mueller, the second Lecture, which deserves careful
study, is chiefly occupied by some account of the processes which he
names respectively "phonetic decay" and "dialectic regeneration";
processes to which all languages have always been and ever will be
subject.
By "phonetic decay" is meant that insidious and gradual alteration in
the sounds of spoken words which, though it cannot be prevented, at
last so corrupts a word that it becomes almost or wholly unmeaning.
Such a word as _twenty_ does not suggest its origin. Many might
perhaps guess, from their observation of such numbers as _thirty,
forty_, etc.
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