56 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



to go into the details of this process of the transformation of an indi- 

 vidual phonetic peculiarity into a social one, we will doubtless not be 

 far wrong in assuming that uniformity is at first brought about by a 

 process of unconscious imitation, mutual to some extent, among the 

 younger speakers of a restricted locality, later, perhaps, by the half- 

 conscious adoption of the new speech peculiarity by speakers of neigh- 

 boring localities, until, finally, it has spread either over the entire area 

 in which the language is spoken or over some definite portion of it. 

 In the former case the historic continuity of the language as a unit is 

 preserved, in the latter a dialectic peculiarity has asserted itself. In 

 the course of time other phonetic peculiarities spread that serve to 

 accentuate the dialectic division. However, the ranges of operation of 

 the different phonetic laws need not be coterminous, so that a network 

 of dialectic groupings may develop. At least some of the dialects will 

 diverge phonetically more and more, until in the end forms of speech 

 will have developed that deserve to be called distinct languages. It can 

 not be denied that, particularly after a considerable degree of diverg- 

 ence has been attained, other than purely phonetic characteristics 

 develop to accentuate a difference of dialect, but every linguistic student 

 is aware of the fact that the most easily formulated and, on the whole, 

 the most characteristic differences between dialects and between lan- 

 guages of the same genetic group are phonetic in character. 



True, some one will say, changes of a purely phonetic character can 

 be shown to be of importance in the history of language, but what of 

 changes of a grammatical sort ? Are they not of equal or even greater 

 importance? Strange as it may seem at first blush, it can be demon- 

 strated that many, perhaps most, changes in grammatical form are at 

 last analysis due to the operation of phonetic laws. Inasmuch as these 

 phonetic laws affect the phonetic form of grammatical elements as well 

 as of other linguistic material, it follows that such elements may get 

 to have a new bearing, as it were, brought about by their change in 

 actual phonetic content; in certain cases, what was originally a single 

 grammatical element may in this way come to have two distinct forms, 

 in other cases two originally distinct grammatical elements may come 

 to have the same phonetic appearance, so that if circumstances are 

 favorable, the way is paved for confusion and readjustment. Briefly 

 stated, phonetic change may and often does necessitate a readjustment 

 of morphologic groupings. It will be well to give an example or two 

 from the history of the English language. In another connection we 

 have had occasion to briefly review the history of the words foot and 

 feet. We saw that there was a time when these words had respectively 

 the form fot and foti. The final i-vowel of the second word colored, 

 by a process of assimilation which is generally referred to as " umlaut," 

 the o of the first syllable and made it o, later unrounded to e ; the final 



