Homophony

“ Our modern art of homophony is like that in having but a single melody at each moment of the piece; but it differs from the ancient in the important particular of a harmonic support for the melody tones composed of "chords in key." This harmonic accompaniment rules everything in modern music. It is within the power of the composer to confirm the obvious meaning of the melody tone by supporting it with the chord which would most readily suggest itself, within the narrowest limitations in the concept of key ”

“ Second root liṅ, “ to look ”: Old Jav. dĕliṅ, “ to look ”, Bis. hiliṅ, “ to look carefully at ”, Mal. kěrliṅ, “ to give a side-long glance ”.
Third root liṅ, “ word, sound ” : Old Jav. liṅ, wěliṅ, “ to speak ”, Gayo liṅ, “ word, sound ”, Karo aliliṅ, “ echo ”.
Homophonies that run through so many languages may be ascribed to Original IN.
59. An homophony deserving of particular notice is to be found among the words of form, to wit that one and the same word is at once a demonstrative pronoun (or, if weakened, an article) and a locative preposition. ”

“ That homophones are self-destructive and tend to become obsolete.
For the contrary contention, namely, that homophones do not destroy themselves, there is prima facie evidence in the long list of survivors, and in the fact that a vast number of words which have not this disadvantage are equally gone out of use.
Causes of obsolescence.
Words fall out of use for other reasons than homophony, therefore one cannot in any one case assume that ambiguity [pg 25] of meaning was the active cause: indeed the mere familiarity of the sound might prolong a word's life ”

“ Every lover of poetry is aware of the large share which the mere sound of the words contributes to its beauty. This is true even when we abstract from rhythm, which we shall neglect for the time being, and think only of euphony, alliteration, assonance, and rime. There is a joy truly surprising in the mere repetition of vowels and consonants. For myself, I find a pleasure in the mere repetition of vowels and consonants all out of proportion to what, a priori, I should be led to expect from so slight a cause. ”

“ This is true also of many other words without the adoption of signs or characters to represent [33] sound, or the names of things, any adequate expression of facts or ideas is impossible. It thus came about that when pictures of objects or symbols of ideas obtained a fixed and permanent sign for the sound in any language phonetism began.
Among the confusions which appear at this stage are the homophones; relics of that primitive stage in speech, the monosyllabic, when few sounds were used to express many things. As an example in modern English, we have such words as pair, pare and pear ”

“ The delicacy of his ear as to sounds is shown by the changes of the verse-music,—which is made up of accent, pause, and rhythm,—to fit the varying feeling of the work. If the student will scan the lines and reduce them to musical expression,—leaving out, of course, the quality of pitch, he can easily corroborate this. [B]
This is in two-beat rhythm: [C]
The first syllable of "Jesu" is the anacrusis; the measure of the metre begins with the first accent. Whether this system of verse-notation or that of the usual scansion be followed, the meaning of the changing forms will be made plain. ”

“ The reader here will naturally object that the fact of new homophones arising through this vowel change goes against the theory that the necessity of certain distinctions can keep in check the tendency to phonetic changes. But homophones do not always imply frequent misunderstandings: some homophones are more harmless than others. ”

“ Again, both song and dance have proved supremely important to the development of the homophonic style (one melody, with accompaniment not itself melodic) . In the case of song the reason is obvious. A song rendered by a solo voice, with instrumental accompaniment, naturally takes the homophonic style, since it would be highly artificial to make the subordinate element in the combination as prominent as the chief one. Dance is less inevitably homophonic than song; indeed many dances, as we shall see, are to a greater or less degree polyphonic ”

“ The best evidence of the obsolescence of any word is that it should still be frequently heard in some proverb or phrase, but never out of it. The homophonic condition is like that of aural and oral, of which it is impossible to make practical use.14 We speak of an aural surgeon and of oral teaching, but out of such combinations the words have no sense. It happens that oral teaching must be aural on the pupil's side, but that only adds to the confusion. ”

“ But since if all words were alike in sound there would be no spoken language, the differentiation of the sound of words is of the essence of speech, and it follows that the more homophones there are in any language, the more faulty is that language as a scientific and convenient vehicle of speech. This will be illustrated in due course: the actual condition of English with respect to homophones must be understood and appreciated before the nature of their growth and the possible means of their mitigation will seem practical questions. ”

“ The function makes us unconscious of the instrument, all the more as it is an indispensable and almost invariable one. The sense of euphony accordingly attaches itself rather to another and more variable quality; the tune, or measure, or rhythm of speech. The elementary sounds are prescribed by the language we use, and the selection we may make among those sounds is limited; but the arrangement of words is still undetermined, and by casting our speech into the moulds of metre and rhyme we can give it a heightened power, apart from its significance. ”

“ The vowel sound is so intimately linked with the consonant—the con-sonant, implying this intimate relation in its very name—that it seemed extremely difficult to give it individual recognition. To set off the mere labial beginning of the sound by itself, and to recognize it as an all-essential element of phonation, was the feat at which human intelligence so long balked. The germ of great things lay in that analysis. It was a process of simplification, and all art development is from the complex to the simple. ”

“ Not only should each sound change be always as far as possible seen in connexion with other sound changes going on in the same period in the same language (as in the great vowel-raising in English) , but the effects on the speech material as a whole should in each case be investigated, so as to show what homophones (if any) were produced, and what danger they entailed to the understanding of natural sentences. Sounds should never be isolated from the words in which they occur, nor words from sentences. No hard-and-fast boundary can be drawn between phonetic and non-phonetic changes. ”

“ Through the movements of the soft-palate, tongue, lower jaw and lips, the shape and size of the mouth can, within certain limits, be changed at will. As every vowel-sound requires a peculiar form of the resonating cavity for its production, it will be easily understood that each vowel-sound of which the human voice is capable can be made by a proper adjustment of the movable parts of the vocal organs. As all singing-tone is vocal or vowel in its character, the production of the various vowel-sounds takes precedence in the study of vocal music. ”

“ I was persuaded that rhymes where the consonant sounds correspond while the vowel sounds merely approximate—like wreck and make, gone and son—are the counterpart on the one hand of assonances upon the other, in which the vowels correspond but not the consonants; that their relation to perfect rhymes is exactly that of minor to major harmonies, and that they relieve the ear in a long-rhymed poem, no less than the latter in a musical composition. ”

“ You know they have no vowels, except some that have the a, but always joined to some articulation: their attempt to supply that defect by points give them but very imperfect and indistinct ideas of vocal and articulate sounds, and of their important distinction. But even languages most alphabetical, if the expression may be allowed, could not probably transmit by writing a compleat idea of their own sounds and pronunciation from any one age or people to another. Sounds are to us infinite and variable, and we cannot transmit by one sense the ideas and objects of another. ”

“ The Mutes are those consonants that admit of no sound without the aid of a vowel. They are b, d, k, p, q, t, and c and g hard.
The Semi-vowels are those consonants that can be sounded imperfectly by themselves. They are f, h, j, l, m, n, r, s, v, x, z, and c and g soft.
Four of the semi-vowels are called LIQUIDS; viz., l, m, n, and r. They are called liquids because they unite so readily with other sounds, or flow into them.
OF SYLLABLES AND WORDS. A Syllable is a sound, or a combination of sounds, uttered by a single impulse of the voice: it may have one or more letters; as a, bad, bad-ness. ”

“ The pitches of the breath consonants are absolutely fixed in each individual pronunciation, while those of spoken vowels can be varied indefinitely within the compass of each voice by tightening the vocal chords in various ways and shortening their vibrating portions· the tighter and shorter the vibrating body, the quicker its vibrations, and the higher the tone. But when a vowel is whispered or breathed nothing is heard but the resonance of the con figurative passages, especially in the mouth, and the pitches of these resonant cavities are as fixed as those of the breath consonants ”

“ It is an interesting chapter in English phonology to trace the tortuous course of a given sound, say a, through its various mutations from the Anglo-Saxon period down to the present time. Our vowels, especially, have changed and interchanged to an extent which is simply astonishing. The average scholar who has not made a special study of our English language has absolutely no conception of the radical nature and vast extent of the change and development [Pg 18] of English sounds. Take as an illustration our vowel e. ”

“ It is because the different positions of the mouth resound to different overtones. While some vowel is sung we hold different resonators to the ear until we find the overtones. They must be the cause of the vowelizing of the tone sung. To prove it we take a tuning-fork vibrating the note of that vowel's overtone as found by the resonator, and, holding it in front of the mouth, we shape the mouth until it resounds to the tuning-fork. Keeping the mouth in this position, we sound the vocal chords, and the result is the vowel, thus proving that that particular overtone is its stamp. ”

“ A vowel is voice freely emitted through the throat and mouth without interruption, and modified only by the different positions assumed by the tongue. The essence of a vowel is the quality or timbre of the voiced breath, and this quality, as we have already seen, is due to the varying forms taken by the vibrating vocal chords when played upon by the breath. Necessarily, however, the quality of the voice as it leaves the throat must be always the same, since the throat is a musical instrument which possesses its own peculiar tone. ”

“ Through its power to bind flowing action into solid form, the life-ether is related to the sound-ether in the same way as the articulated word formed by human speaking is related to the mere musical tone. The latter by itself is as it were fluid. In human speech this fluidity is represented by the vowels. With a language consisting only of vowels man would be able to express feelings, but not thoughts. To let the word as carrier of thought arise out of sound, human speech possesses the consonants, which represent the solid element in it. ”

“ Elegance and refinement of speech depend largely on the correct pronunciation of the vowel sounds. The vowel a, which is sounded in seven different ways in the English language, presents the greatest difficulty. Many people recognize at most, only the sound of a in at, ate, all, far, and mortal respectively. They ignore the sound as in air, and the shorter quantity of the Italian a in ask, giving the sound of a in ate to the former and of a in at or a in all or a in far to the latter. ”

“ We register the sounds of a language by mastering and registering the movements of the organs of speech that produce them. Alphabetical symbols are at best but very imperfect pictures of sound-groups: they are used inconsistently in most cases: and in any case even the most perfect phonetic alphabet cannot give a true and exact picture of the countless sounds in speech—sounds which require to be constantly denoted anew in every language. We can only succeed at all in registering such sounds, when we are able to closely observe the sounds uttered by living individuals. ”

“ A language can tolerate only a certain number of ambiguities arising from words of the same sound having different significations, and therefore the extent to which a language has utilized some phonetic distinction to keep words apart, has some influence in determining the direction of its sound-changes. In French, and still more in English, it is easy to enumerate long lists of pairs of words differing from each other only by the presence or absence of voice in the last sound ”

“ That is to say: whereas, in the Indo-European and other tongues, the radical vowel is as essential a part of the root as any other, even though more liable than the consonants to phonetic alteration, in the Semitic, on the other hand, the vocalization of the radical consonants is almost solely a means of grammatical flexion. Only the consonants of the root are radical or significant elements ”

“ The only question that it raises for us is the possibility of distinguishing our own homophones by accentuation or by slight differentiation of vowels; and this may prove to be in some cases the practical solution, but it is not now the point in discussion, for no one will deny that such delicate distinctions are both inconvenient and dangerous, and should only be adopted if forced upon us. I shall assume that common sense and universal experience exonerate me from wasting words on the proof that homophones are mischievous, and I will give my one example in a note8 ”