The Greek and Latin languages abound with interjections, which are used by the orators and poets with great effect. To gratify the Athenians, as they behold their once proud enemy humbled to the dust, and draining the cup of affliction to the very last dregs, Æschylus, in his “Persai,” employs almost every form of ejaculation in which abject misery can be expressed.
The English language is preëminently a language of small words. It has more monosyllables than any other modern tongue, a peculiarity which gives it a strikingly direct and straightforward character, equally removed from the indirect French and the intricate, lumbering German. Its fondness for this class of words is even greater than that of the Anglo-Saxon. Not a few of our present monosyllables, such as the verbs “to love,” “bake,” “beat,” “slide,” “swim,” “bind,” “blow,” “brew,” were, in the Anglo-Saxon, dissyllables. The English language, impatient of all superfluities, cuts down its words to the narrowest possible limits,--lopping and condensing, never expanding. Sometimes it cuts off an initial syllable, as in “gin” for “engine,” “van” for “caravan,” “prentice” for “apprentice,” “’bus” for “omnibus,” “wig” for “periwig”; sometimes it cuts off a final syllable or syllables, as in “aid” for “aidedecamp,” “prim” for “primitive,” “cit” for “citizen,” “grog” for “grogram,” “pants” for “pantaloons,” “tick” for (pawnbroker’s) “ticket”; sometimes it strikes out a letter, or letters, from the middle of a word, or otherwise contracts it, as in “last” for “latest,” “lark” for “laverock,” “since” for “sithence,” “fortnight” for “fourteen nights,” “lord” for “hlaford,” “morning” for “morrowning,” “sent” for “sended,” “chirp” for “chirrup” or “cheer up,” “fag” for “fatigue,” “consols” for “consolidated annuities.” The same abbreviating processes are followed, when English words are borrowed from the Latin. Thus we have the monosyllable “strange” from the trisyllable _extraneus_; “spend” from _expendo_; “scour” from _exscorio_; “stop” from _obstipo_; “funnel” from _infundibulum_; “ply” from _plico_; “jetty” from _projectum_; “dean” from _decanus_; “count” from _computo_; “stray” from _extravagus_; “proxy” from _procurator_; “spell” from _syllabare_, etc. Not only are single Latin words thus maimed when converted into English, and their letters changed, transposed, or omitted, but often two English words are clipped and squeezed into one word. Thus from “proud” and “dance” we have “prance”; from “grave” and “rough” we have “gruff”; from “scrip” and “roll” comes “scroll”; from “tread,” or “trot,” and “drudge,” we have “trudge.” Even in the construction of its primitive monosyllables the English language manifests the same economy, and forms words of a totally different meaning by the simple change of a vowel; as, bag, beg, big, bog, bug; bat, bet, bit, bot, but; ball, bell, bill, boll, bull; or, again, by the change of the first letter; as, fight, light, might, night, right, tight,--dash, hash, lash, gash, rash, sash, wash. The final “ed” of our participles is rapidly disappearing, as a distinct syllable. Not content with suppressing half the letters of our syllables, and half the syllables of our words, we clip our vowels, in speaking, shorter than any other people, so that our language threatens to become a kind of stenology, or algebraic condensation of thought,--a pemmican of ideas. Voltaire said that the English gained two hours a day by clipping their words. The same love of brevity has shown itself in rendering the final _e_ in English always mute. In Chaucer the final _e_ must often be sounded as a separate syllable, or the verse will limp. To the same cause we owe such expressions as “ten _o_’clock,” instead of “_of_ the clock,” or “_on_ the clock,” and the hissing _s_, so offensive to foreign ears. The old termination of the verb, _th_, has given way to _s_ in the third person singular, and _en_ to a single letter in the third person plural.