There is something startling in the announcement that were William
Shakespeare to hear one of his plays read by a good speaker of our own
day, it would be less intelligible to him than if spoken in the
Somersetshire dialect. So great is the change in English pronunciation.
This fact prepares us for the discovery that great alterations have
taken place in the significance of individual letters; and that the
phonetic value of letter H has changed also.
Dr Johnson, in 1755, wrote: “Grammarians of the last age directed that
_an_ should be used before H, whence it appears that the English
anciently aspirated less.”
“The great Doctor uttered many hasty things.”—
_Thackeray._
Dr Johnson’s suppressed premiss is negatived by his own _protégé_,
Goldsmith, in whose writings _an_ occurs before every variety of H; a
fact which shows that _an_ and the Aspirate were not generally
considered to be incompatibles. That their juxtaposition does not of
itself offend the modern ear, may be proven by uttering the words “_than
have_” and “_they have_,” in which the Aspirate is heard to follow the
_n_ and the vowel-sound with equal grace and fluency. There are,
moreover, many reasons for entertaining an opinion directly opposed to
that expressed by the great lexicographer; and for believing the powers
of the English H to have been steadily on the decline since the days of
primitive English. In all Aryan languages, H has a tendency to mollify
and decay; and its powers are always found to be most strongly marked in
Germanic tongues that are in nearest historical relation with their
common Teutonic ancestor.
Inductively, one is led to believe that the English Aspirate is less
strong than formerly. This belief will acquire support from the
following argument:—
It will be remembered that prior to the introduction of terminal rhymes,
the laws of Prosody were based upon principles slightly different from
those of to-day; our ancestors, preferring an identity of
consonant-sounds to an assonance of vowels, required that syllables to
rhyme should _begin_ with the same letter—the system being known as
ALLITERATION. If we bear in mind how much must have depended on the
distinctness and strength of the alliterative rhymes of early verse,
where the metrical management and rhythmical cadence were far from being
irreproachable, we shall readily concede that the bard will have
selected for his use the strongest and most distinct rhymes that the
language could supply. “Rhymes to the eye,” as they are called, would
have been utterly useless, from the fact of poetry being then composed
for oral rendering, and the hearers generally ignorant of spelling. It
is, therefore, agreeable to reason to conclude that all sounds employed
in alliterative rhyming were distinctly audible, strong, and emphatic.
Now, on looking over alliterative verses of the seventh to thirteenth
centuries, one cannot fail to be struck by the frequent occurrence of
rhymed H’s: their proportion being, in many poems, in excess of that of
any other letter. Modern poets, it is true, have not unfrequently
pressed H into service as an alliterative rhyme, but in so doing they
have afforded ample proof of the inefficiency of the modern English
Aspirate, when acting in that capacity. One of the best specimens of
modern alliterative H-rhymes is that in one of Moore’s American poems:—
“And I said, ‘If there’s peace to be found in the world,
A _h_eart that is _h_umble might _h_ope for it _h_ere.’”
But the alliteration is scarcely appreciable, unless the rendering be
accompanied by undue aspiratory efforts. Whenever we hear a run of words
rhyming alliteratively in H, it is highly probable that only half the
pleasure we experience is conveyed to us by ear, and that the other half
is of a subjective nature, and arises from our _knowing_ the letter H to
enter into the formation of the words, and the alliteration would be
almost lost to us were we ignorant of their orthography. Hence, it is
rather from an association of ideas, than from an effect produced on the
organs of hearing, that we derive the pleasure; and the modern H,
indicating as it does merely a like modification in the phonation of the
several vowels to which it is prefixed, cannot be regarded as having a
_distinct sound_ of its own, nor, consequently, as constituting a
perfect alliterative rhyme. Do not the mute H’s of the following words
give results nearly as satisfactory as the H’s in the above quotation?—
The _h_eir that is _h_onest will _h_onour the _h_our!
Considering, then, the faintness and the nature of the Aspirate of
to-day, and its insufficiency for purposes of alliteration, we seem at
liberty to conclude that the Anglo-Saxon and Early English H, so much
affected of the early poets, was stronger than our own, and had, in all
probability, retained much of the pristine power of its Teutonic
harshness.
That the sound of the Anglo-Saxon H bore a resemblance to that of an
unvocalized _y_ (see page 37), is made manifest by the free interchange
of _h_ and _y_ in ancient MSS. The substitution of surds for sonants,
and _vice versâ_, is common to the early stages of the development of
all orthographical codes.
Mr Ellis, whose researches have thrown great light on these matters,
gives as his opinion—
_In Anglosaxon, a final_ h _was equal to the_ ch _of lo_ch_, or German
da_ch_. In the thirteenth century the sound of_ H _seems to have been
very uncertain, and in the fourteenth it was lost in those words
before which a vowel was elided. In the sixteenth it was pronounced or
not, differently from the present custom._[4]
There exists a belief—perhaps on no very firm foundation—that the
Normans could not, or would not, aspirate their H’s; and the idea gains
some support in the period of decadence of the strong English H having
commenced subsequently to the Norman invasion. It is, however, not easy
to understand how these Norsemen should have learned to entirely abandon
the use of H in consequence of a century and a half’s residence in
Neustria. Salesbury, a Welsh linguist, exhumed by Mr Ellis, implies
moreover that, as late as the sixteenth century, the French still
aspirated at least _some_ of their H’s, and Littré, in his admirable
dictionary, declares the Norman Aspirate to be in a state of good
preservation (“_très-nettement conservé_”) in our own day. The old Norse
H had been, according to Rask, Grimm, and Ellis, a vigorous and thriving
aspirate; Rapp gives it as having been equal to _kh_. But presuming
that, prior to the Invasion, the Normans had become droppers of H’s,
would enable one to account for the unsettled state of the English H in
the thirteenth century, when English reappeared as a national speech
(1258). Also, according to this latter view, a habit of not aspirating
would have been greatly in vogue for a time, and for a Saxon to have
dropped his H’s would have been equivalent to an announcement of good
breeding and aristocratic acquaintances, or of his being in the habit of
frequenting the court and other haunts of the Norman nobility. But when
the language of the vanquished began to overcome that of the conqueror,
the Aspirate must have entered upon a new era, and H’s again have
prevailed in the land. Still the new H had not the vigour of the old
one—the guttural of the Anglo-Saxon. In the fourteenth century, as
mentioned by Mr Ellis, its employment was subject to various rules; and
this will have probably been the period during which the first mute H’s
received public recognition, being tolerated as a sort of compromise or
concession made to an aristocracy little partial to H’s. Throughout the
remaining centuries there have been rules of some sort governing—though
very laxly—the employment of the Aspirate. But the powers of H were
gradually, surely, and steadily waning, until, at length, its strong
guttural sound finally and completely evanesced towards the latter half
of last century.
Presuming that the reader consents to recognise the antique origin, the
unbroken line of descent, and the rough, sturdy ancestry of our English
H, it may be interesting to notice that in 1847 appeared the second
edition of a critical work on the English Language,[5] written in German
(by a fellow of Cambridge), purporting among other things to prove to
the omniscient Teuton, that in England the aspiration of H’s is
altogether a modern invention, a fanciful outcome of recent orthoepical
dogmatism; and that by good speakers it is practically ignored.
Concerning this writer, Mr Ellis says, “His principal argument is the
retention of _an_, _mine_, _thine_, &c., before words beginning with H,
in the authorised version of 1611. The lists of words with mute H given
by Palgrave, Salesbury, &c., were of course unknown to him. If, however,
he had been aware of the loose manner in which H is inserted and omitted
in Layamon, the ‘Genesis and Exodus,’ Prisoner’s Prayer, and other
writings of the thirteenth century, he would doubtless have considered
his point established. In practice, I understand from a gentleman who
conversed with him, he omitted the H altogether.”