HUMAN SPEECH 57 



i, after being dulled to an e, finally dropped off altogether. The form 

 fdti thus step by step developed into the later fet, which is the normal 

 Anglo-Saxon form. Note the result. In fdti and other words of its 

 type the plural is expressed by a distinct suffix -i, in fet, as in modern 

 English feet, and in words of corresponding form it is expressed by an 

 internal change of vowel. Thus an entirely new grammatical feature 

 in English, as also in quite parallel fashion in German, was brought 

 about by a series of purely phonetic changes, in themselves of no gram- 

 matical significance whatever. 



Such grammatical developments on the basis of phonetic changes 

 have occurred with great frequency in the history of language. In the 

 long run, not only may in this way old grammatical features be lost 

 and new ones evolved, but the entire morphologic type of the language 

 may undergo profound modification. A striking example is furnished 

 again by the history of the English language. It is a well-known 

 feature of English that absolutely the same word, phonetically speaking, 

 may often, according to its syntactic employment, be construed as verb 

 or as noun. Thus we not only love and Jciss, but we also give our love 

 or a hiss, that is, the words love and hiss may be indifferently used to 

 predicate or to denominate an activity. There are so many examples 

 in English of the formal, though not syntactic, identity of noun stem 

 and verb stem that it may well be said that the English language is 

 on the way to become of a purely analytic or isolating type, more or 

 less similar to that of Chinese. And yet the typical Indogermanic 

 language of earlier times, as represented say by Latin or Greek, always 

 makes a rigidly formal, not merely syntactic, distinction between these 

 fundamental parts of speech. If we examine the history of this truly 

 significant change of type in English, we shall find that it has been 

 due at last analysis to the operation of merely phonetic laws. The 

 original Anglo-Saxon form of the infinitive of the verb hiss was cyssan, 

 while the Anglo-Saxon form of the noun hiss was cyss. The forms in 

 early middle English times became dulled to hissen and Jciss, respect- 

 ively. Final unaccented -ft later regularly dropped off, so that the 

 infinitive of the verb came to be hisse. In Chaucer's day the verb and 

 the noun were still kept apart as hisse and hiss, respectively; later on, 

 as a final unaccented -e regularly dropped off, hisse became hiss, so 

 that there ceased to be any formal difference between the verb and 

 noun. The history of the Anglo-Saxon verb lufian " to love " and 

 noun liifu "love" has been quite parallel; the two finally became con- 

 fused in a single form lav, modern English love. Once the pace has 

 been set, so to speak, for an interchange in English between verbal and 

 nominal use of the same word, the process, by the working of simple 

 analogy, is made to apply also to cases where in origin we have to deal 

 with only one part of speech ; thus we may not only have a sick stomach, 



