Impatience of nuancing is the group _whence_, _whither_, _hence_,

_hither_, _thence_, _thither_. They could not persist in live usage

because they impinged too solidly upon the circles of meaning

represented by the words _where_, _here_ and _there_. In saying

_whither_ we feel too keenly that we repeat all of _where_. That we add

to _where_ an important nuance of direction irritates rather than

satisfies. We prefer to merge the static and the directive (_Where do

you live?_ like _Where are you going?_) or, if need be, to overdo a

little the concept of direction (_Where are you running to?_).

Now it is highly symptomatic of the nature of the drift away from word

clusters that we do not object to nuances as such, we object to having

the nuances formally earmarked for us. As a matter of fact our

Vocabulary is rich in near-synonyms and in groups of words that are

psychologically near relatives, but these near-synonyms and these groups

do not hang together by reason of etymology. We are satisfied with

_believe_ and _credible_ just because they keep aloof from each other.

_Good_ and _well_ go better together than _quick_ and _quickly_. The

English vocabulary is a rich medley because each English word wants its

own castle. Has English long been peculiarly receptive to foreign words

because it craves the staking out of as many word areas as possible, or,

conversely, has the mechanical imposition of a flood of French and Latin

loan-words, unrooted in our earlier tradition, so dulled our feeling for

the possibilities of our native resources that we are allowing these to

shrink by default? I suspect that both propositions are true. Each feeds

on the other. I do not think it likely, however, that the borrowings in

English have been as mechanical and external a process as they are

generally represented to have been. There was something about the

English drift as early as the period following the Norman Conquest that

welcomed the new words. They were a compensation for something that was

weakening within.

VIII

LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL PRODUCT: PHONETIC LAW

I have preferred to take up in some detail the analysis of our

hesitation in using a locution like "Whom did you see?" and to point to

some of the English drifts, particular and general, that are implied by

this hesitation than to discuss linguistic change in the abstract. What

is true of the particular idiom that we started with is true of

everything else in language. Nothing is perfectly static. Every word,

every grammatical element, every locution, every sound and accent is a

slowly changing configuration, molded by the invisible and impersonal

drift that is the life of language. The evidence is overwhelming that

this drift has a certain consistent direction. Its speed varies

enormously according to circumstances that it is not always easy to

define. We have already seen that Lithuanian is to-day nearer its

Indo-European prototype than was the hypothetical Germanic mother-tongue

five hundred or a thousand years before Christ. German has moved more

slowly than English; in some respects it stands roughly midway between

English and Anglo-Saxon, in others it has of course diverged from the

Anglo-Saxon line. When I pointed out in the preceding chapter that

dialects formed because a language broken up into local segments could

not move along the same drift in all of these segments, I meant of

course that it could not move along identically the same drift. The

general drift of a language has its depths. At the surface the current

is relatively fast. In certain features dialects drift apart rapidly. By

that very fact these features betray themselves as less fundamental to

the genius of the language than the more slowly modifiable features in

which the dialects keep together long after they have grown to be

mutually alien forms of speech. But this is not all. The momentum of the

more fundamental, the pre-dialectic, drift is often such that languages

long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar

phases. In many such cases it is perfectly clear that there could have

been no dialectic interinfluencing.

These parallelisms in drift may operate in the phonetic as well as in

the morphological sphere, or they may affect both at the same time. Here