Note 63 — Chapter XIV · CAUSES OF CHANGE

Against this it has been urged that Fr. oncle has not preserved the stem syllable of Lat. avunculus particularly well. But this objection is a little misleading. It is quite true that at the time when the word was first framed the syllable av- contained the main idea and -unculus was only added to impart an endearing modification to that idea (‘dear little uncle’); but after some time the semantic relation was altered; avus itself passed out of use, while avunculus was handed down from generation to generation as a ready-made whole, in which the ordinary speaker was totally unable to suspect that av- was the really significative stem. He consequently treated it exactly as any other polysyllable of the same structure, and avun- (phonetically [awuŋ, auuŋ]) was naturally made into one syllable. Nothing, of course, can be protected by a sense of its significance unless it is still felt as significant. That hardly needs saying.