Page:The Making of Latin.djvu/26

were also their rulers), the Etruscans and of their somewhat more distant neighbours the Greeks of Cumæ in Campania, did not use , as the Greeks and Etruscans did, to mean w; so they saw no reason for the cumbrous , and wrote simply to mean f.

All this story of the sign is important for the study of the beginnings of civilisation at Rome. But it tells us very little, if anything, that we did not know about Latin as a language; though of course, if we had not known what the sound of in Latin was, we should welcome the evidence of the spelling wh as showing that it was a sound ‘with an h in it,’ ie. (§§ 25, 52) that it was Breathed. And for the study of Etruscan, of which we still know only a little, the evidence is important.

This example will serve to show that the history of the signs of the alphabet in which a language is written is something quite distinct from the history of the language; and it is the history of the language which governs Etymology, and with which this book is concerned.

Note ii

The body of principles which have been briefly explained here (§§ 10-23) is the work of what used to be called the ‘new school’ of Philologists of whom Karl Brugmann of Leipzig who died in 1919 was the greatest. They made Philology an exact science, because their discovery of the invariability of Phonetic Law made it for the first time possible to apply strict tests to any proposed derivation. We ask now, does the suggested derivation accord with the known Phonetic Laws of the language concerned? Or, if it seems to make an exception to any one of them, can the reason for such an exception be found, for instance, in the influence of Analogy? Or, if it involves our recognising a new Phonetic Law, are there any forms which would contradict the new Law and for which no explanation can be found? For example, it was once supposed that the forms of the Latin Passive contained the word sē; amor ‘I am loved’ was derived from “amo sē.” Not to mention a host of other obvious objections