is almost comical, especially because 'sea saw' has a most
compromising joint-tenant in the children's rocking game
See saw Margery daw.
The awkwardness of these English homophones is much increased by the
absence of inflection, and I suppose it was the richness of their
inflections which made the Greeks so indifferent (apparently) to
syllabic recurrences that displease us: moreover, the likeness in
sound between their similar syllables was much obscured by a verbal
accent which respected the inflection and disregarded the stem,
whereas our accent is generally faithful to the root.[10] This
sensitiveness to the sound of syllables is of the essence of our best
English, and where the effect is most magical in our great poets it is
impossible to analyse.
[Footnote 10: Wherever this is not so--as in _rhétoric_, _rhetórical_,
_rhetorícian_, _cómpany_, _compánion_, &c.--we have a greater freedom
in the use of the words. Such words, as Dr. Bradley points out,
giving _Cánada_, _Canádian_ as example, are often phonetic varieties
due to an imported foreign syntax, and their pronunciation implies
familiarity with literature and the written forms: but very often
they are purely the result of our native syllabising, not only in
displacement of accent (as in the first example above) but also by
modification of the accented vowel according to its position in the
word, the general tendency being to make long vowels in monosyllables
and in penultimate accents, but short vowels in antepenultimate
accents. Thus come such differences of sound between _opus_ and
_opera_, _omen_ and _ominous_, _virus_ and _virulent_, _miser_ and
_miserable_, _nation_ and _national_, _patron_ and _patronage_,
_legal_ and _legislate_, _grave_ and _gravity_, _globe_ and
_globular_, _grade_ and _gradual_, _genus_ and _general_, _female_
and _feminine_, _fable_ and _fabulous_, &c. In such disguising of the
root-sound the main effect, as Dr. Bradley says, is the power to free
the derivative from an intense meaning of the root; so that, to take
his very forcible example, the adjective Christian, the derivative of
Christ, has by virtue of its shortened vowel been enabled to carry
a much looser signification than it could have acquired had it been
phonetically indissociable from the intense signification of the
name Christ. This freedom of the derivative from the root varies
indefinitely in different words, and it very much complicates my
present lesser statement of the literary advantage of phonetic variety
in inflexions and derivatives.
The examples above are all Latin words, and since Latin words came
into English through different channels, these particular vowels can
have different histories.]
Once become sensible of such beauty, and of the force of sounds,
a writer will find himself in trouble with _no_ and _know_. These
omnipresent words are each of them essentially weakened by the
existence of the other, while their proximity in a sentence is now
damaging. It is a misfortune that our Southern dialect should have
parted entirely with all the original differentiation between them;
for after the distinctive _k_ of the verb was dropped, the negative
still preserved (as it in some dialects still preserves) its broad
open vowel, more like _law_ than _toe_ or _beau_, and unless that be
restored I should judge that the verb _to know_ is doomed. The third
person singular of its present tense is _nose_, and its past tense
is _new_, and the whole inconvenience is too radical and perpetual
to be received all over the world. We have an occasional escape by
using _nay_ for _no_, since its homophone _neigh_ is an unlikely
_neigh_bour; but that can serve only in one limited use of the word,
and is no solution.
[Sidenote: Punnage.]
In talking with friends the common plea that I have heard for
homophones is their usefulness to the punster. 'Why! would you have
no puns?' I will not answer that question; but there is no fear of
our being insufficiently catered for; whatever accidental benefit
be derivable from homophones, we shall always command it fully and
in excess; look again at the portentous list of them! And since the
essential jocularity of a pun (at least when it makes me laugh) lies
in a humorous incongruity, its farcical gaiety may be heightened by
a queer pronunciation. I cannot pretend to judge a sophisticated
taste; but, to give an example, if, as I should urge, the _o_ of the
word _petrol_ should be preserved, as it is now universally spoken,
not having yet degraded into _petr'l_, a future squire will not be
disqualified from airing his wit to his visitors by saying, as he
points to his old stables, 'that is where I store my petrel', and when
the joke had been illustrated in _Punch_, its folly would sufficiently
distract the patients in a dentist's waiting-room for years to come,
in spite of gentlemen and chauffeurs continuing to say _petrol_, as
they do now; nor would the two _petr'ls_ be more dissimilar than the
two _mys_.
[Sidenote: Play on words.]
Puns must of course be distinguished from such a play on words as John
of Gaunt makes with his own name in Shakespeare's _King Richard II_.
_K._ What comfort man? How is't with aged Gaunt?
_G._ O, how that name befits my composition!
Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old, &c.
where, as he explains,
Misery makes sport to mock itself.
This is a humorous indulgence of fancy, led on by the associations
of a word; a pun is led off by the _sound_ of a word in pursuit of
nonsense; though the variety of its ingenuity may refuse so simple a
definition.
[Sidenote: An indirect advantage of homophones.]
It is true that a real good may sometimes come indirectly from a word
being a homophone, because its inconvenience in common parlance may
help to drive it into a corner where it can be retained for a special
signification: and since the special significance of any word is its
first merit, and the coinage of new words for special differentiation
is difficult and rare, we may rightly welcome any fortuitous means for
their provision. Examples of words specialized thus from homophones
are _brief_ (a lawyer's brief), _hose_ (water-pipe), _bolt_ (of door),
_mail_ (postal), _poll_ (election), &c.[11]
[Footnote 11: It would follow that, supposing there were any expert
academic control, it might be possible to save some of our perishing
homophones by artificial specialization. Such words are needed, and
if a homophone were thus specialized in some department of life or
thought, then a slight differential pronunciation would be readily
adopted. Both that and its defined meaning might be true to its
history.]