'Secularization,' in
like manner, owes its birth to the long and weary negotiations which
preceded the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Whenever it proved difficult
to find anywhere else compensation for some powerful claimant, there
was always some abbey or bishopric which with its revenues might be
seized, stripped of its ecclesiastical character, and turned into a
secular possession. Our manifold points of contact with the East, the
necessity that has thus arisen of representing oriental words to the
western world by means of an alphabet not its own, with the manifold
discussions on the fittest equivalents, all this has brought with it
the need of a word which should describe the process, and
'transliteration' is the result.
We have long had 'assimilation' in our dictionaries; 'dissimilation'
has as yet scarcely found its way into them, but it speedily will. [It
has already appeared in our books on language. [Footnote: See Skeat's
_Etym. Dict_. (s. v. _truffle_). Pott (_Etym. Forsch_. vol. ii. p. 65)
introduced the word 'dissimilation' into German.]] Advances in
philology have rendered it a matter of necessity that we should possess
a term to designate a certain process which words unconsciously undergo,
and no other would designate it at all so well. There is a process of
'assimilation' going on very extensively in language; the organs of
speech finding themselves helped by changing one letter for another
which has just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not
'a_df_iance,' but 'a_ff_iance,' not 're_n_ow_m_,' as our ancestors did
when 'renom' was first naturalized, but 're_n_ow_n_'; we say too,
though we do not write it, 'cu_b_board' and not 'cu_p_board,'
'su_t_tle' and not 'su_b_tle.
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