Note 67 — Chapter XV · CAUSES OF CHANGE—continued

The inconveniences arising from having many homophones in a language are eloquently set forth by Robert Bridges, On English Homophones (S.P.E., Oxford, 1919)—but I would not subscribe to all the Laureate’s views, least of all to his practical suggestions and to his unjustifiable attacks on some very meritorious English phoneticians. He seems also to exaggerate the dangers, e.g. of the two words know and no having the same sound, when he says (p. 22) that unless a vowel like that in law be restored to the negative no, “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.” But surely the rôle of these words in connected speech is so different, and is nearly always made so clear by the context, that it is very difficult to imagine real sentences in which there would be any serious change of mistaking know for no, or knows for nose, or knew for new. I repeat: it is not homophony as such—the phenomenon shown in the long lists lexicographers can draw up of words of the same sound—that is decisive, but the chances of mistakes in connected speech. It has been disputed whether the loss of Gr. humeîs, ‘ye,’ was due to its identity in sound with hemeîs, ‘we’; Hatzidakis says that the new formation eseîs is earlier than the falling together of e and u [y] in the sound [i]. But according to Dieterich and C. D. Buck (Classical Philology, 9. 90, 1914) the confusion of u and i or e dates back to the second century. Anyhow, all confusion is now obviated, for both the first and the second persons pl. have new forms which are unambiguous: emeîs and eseîs or seîs.