with stress on the first or the second syllable, as he felt inclined. But later generations have become more limited in their practice. We can now stress these words only on the first syllable. The analogies of English stress started this change, probably first among the simpler class of speakers, and the pressure of general imitation and acceptance later made it compulsory. And all the words of French origin ending in -ant have been similarly reconstructed in accordance with English analogies. Could anything seem more absurd from the French point of view than the English pronunciation of a word like defiant? When one observes what has happened in the earlier periods of the language, it does not seem improbable that chauffeur and garage will also be anglicized in pronunciation. Our general conclusion is, therefore, that though analogy has been and still is a very powerful systematizing force in the development of the language, this force has been exerted with little reference to conscious impulses toward correctness. It has indeed been most effective on those lower levels of the speech where the thought of correctness or incorrectness does not arise. It has thus produced laws or rules of the language of very wide extent. On the other hand, analogy as a principle determining individual instances of correctness or incorrectness cannot be conclusive, for analogy can be made to justify uses which all speakers would regard as incorrect as readily as those which might be brought forward as correct. It follows therefore that no matter what the weight of analogy in favor of a particular usage may be, if the usage is not otherwise acceptable in the common practice of the language, if it has not the living feeling for native idiom back of it, then analogy counts for nothing. X ETYMOLOGY THE term "etymology" has several different meanings. In the one most generally current, the word refers to the✔ origins and derivations of words. Thus the etymology of the verb transfer is its origin from the two Latin elements represented by the two syllables of the English word. An etymological dictionary is a book which discusses the words of a language primarily from this point of view of their origins and derivations. A second meaning of etymology is now less general and has become somewhat archaic. In this sense, etymology is one of the divisions of grammar, especially Latin grammar, and it refers particularly to that part of grammar which treats of the forms and inflections of words. The two main divisions of grammar in this conception would therefore be etymology, treating of the variations in the forms of individual words, and syntax, treating of words as they appear in a context for the expression of thought. Instead of the word "etymology" in this grammatical sense, however, the more modern custom prefers simply the term "inflections," or "accidence," or the more learned term "morphology." Morphology means the study of the forms of words, and parallel to this term the modern grammarian employs also the term "phonology," the study of the sounds of language. The three main divisions of the study of language would thus be designated as phonology, morphology, and syntax. Neither of these two meanings, however, suggested the use of the word etymology as the title for this chapter. There is still a third sense of the term which may be called its philosophical sense, and this is the sense in which the word is here employed in the consideration of etymology and correctness. This third sense may be most readily approached by looking at the word from the point of view of the first meaning of the term " etymology." According to its linguistic derivation the word is made up of two Greek elements, the one meaning “truth,” the 、 other the source of the syllables -logy, that common suffix in English words of Greek origin, psychology, geology and so on, which means "branch of knowledge." The whole term may therefore be expanded as "the. branch of knowledge which treats of truth." Now the quest of truth as revealed in the causes and principles of things has been most commonly regarded as the special province of philosophy, and if etymology is the branch of knowledge which treats of truth, it becomes thereby a philosophical subject. The philosopher of the present day, however, does not think of his subject as being nothing more nor less than etymology, the pursuit of truth through the study of words. To find this philosophical aspect of etymology most fully presented, one must turn back to the beginnings of philosophy among the philosophers of ancient Greece. With the Greeks the main questions concerned with the origin and nature of language arose in the dis-、 cussion of the meanings of words. In general there were two camps of opposing philosophers, one maintaining that words exist by nature and that there is a natural and necessary connection between words and the things which they name, the other maintaining that words exist only by convention and that there is no real connection between the object named by a word and the word itself. According to this second view, a horse might just as well be called a man, or a man be called by the name for a horse. According to the first view, if we only knew the final truth about the word "horse" or the word "man," we should see then that they were absolutely and inescapably the proper words for the objects which they name. This question seemed important to the Greeks because it was a part of their general search for truth, part of their science of philosophy. For if words exist by nature, that is, if the word is in itself a truthful record of the thing for which it stands because it is an essential part of the thing, then the truth of the various objects of thought and speech can be determined by knowing the meanings of the words that name them. Ultimate and final truth can thus be reached through the study of words, for the truth of the word and the truth of the object of thought would in the end be the same thing. The problem would be of course to find what the true form of a word is and to separate the true word from its untrue corruptions and contaminations. The questions raised by these ideas of the natural and the conventional meanings of words are entertainingly discussed by Plato in his dialogue Cratylus. In this dialogue Plato, under the disguise of the character Socrates, seems to have taken a half way position between the naturalists and conventionalists. He gives a great many etymologies of words after the easy going fashion of the philosophers of the day, but Plato realized that wild guessing is not etymologizing. He gives four dif ferent explanations for the name Apollo, a word which he says has been regarded as hard and mysterious. Instead of finding it hard, Plato embarrasses his reader by presenting him with a choice of four etymologies. But obviously there could not be four ultimately true meanings of the name Apollo. Discussing another word, Plato gives an explanation and then adds, "This is a good notion, and to prevent any other getting into our head, let us go on to the next word." In all this Plato seems to be ridiculing the reckless and fantastic etymologizing of his time. Nevertheless he seems to have believed in a necessary connection between words and the objects. named by them, and he devotes a considerable part of his dialogue to showing how this connection could exist. He expressed likewise the belief that many words which originally expressed clearly the objects of thought for which they stood, that is, which originally existed by nature, became obscured by time and thus named their objects only by convention. The task of the philosopher was to see beyond this obscuration to the harmony which existed in the primitive identity of word and thought. It may seem that these discussions of the ancient world are very far removed from the practicalities of living English today. But in reality the questions involved still have an important bearing upon language. We do not think now of etymology as the branch of knowledge which shall reveal the truth of all things, but the problem of determining the right meanings of words is still with us. When in doubt, how shall we know what a word ought to mean? And is it possible to assume that a word has a necessary and inherent meaning, the discovery of which will remove all doubt both concerning |