58 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



but we may stomach an injury (noun becomes verb), and conversely 

 we may not only write up a person, but he may get a write up (verb 

 becomes noun). It has, I hope, become quite clear by this time how 

 the trivial changes of pronunciation that are necessitated by the very 

 process of speech acquirement may, in due course of time, profoundly 

 change the fundamental characteristics of language. So also, if I 

 may be pardoned the use of a simile, may the slow erosive action of 

 water, continued through weary ages, profoundly transform the char- 

 acter of a landscape. If there is one point of historic method rather 

 than another that the scientific study of language may teach other 

 historical sciences, it is that changes of the greatest magnitude may 

 often be traced to phenomena or processes of a minimal magnitude. 



On the whole, phonetic change may be said to be a destructive or at 

 best transforming force in the history of language. Eeference has 

 already been made to the influence of analogy, which may, on the con- 

 trary, be considered a preservative and creative force. In every lan- 

 guage the existing morphological groups establish more or less definite 

 paths of analogy to which all or practically all the lexical material is 

 subjected ; thus a recently acquired verb like to telegraph in English is 

 handled in strict analogy to the great mass of old verbs with their vary- 

 ing forms. Such forms as he walks and he laughs set the precedent 

 for he telegraphs, forms like walking and laughing for telegraphing. 

 Without such clear-cut grooves of analogy, indeed, it would be impos- 

 sible to learn to speak, a corollary of which is that there is a limit to 

 the extent of grammatical irregularity in any language. When, for 

 some reason or other, as by the disintegrating action of phonetic laws, 

 too great irregularity manifests itself in the morphology of the lan- 

 guage, the force of analogy may assert itself to establish comparative 

 regularity, that is, forms which belong to ill-defined or sparsely repre- 

 sented morphologic groups may be replaced by equivalent forms that 

 follow the analogy of better-defined or more numerously represented 

 groups. In this way all the noun plurals of English, if we except a 

 few survivals like feet and oxen, have come to be characterized by a 

 suffixed -s; the analogical power of the old -s plurals was strong enough 

 to transform all other plurals, of which Anglo-Saxon possessed several 

 distinct types. The great power exerted by analogy is seen in the 

 persistence with which children, whose minds are naturally unbiased 

 by tradition, use such forms as foots and he swimmed. Let us not 

 smile too condescendingly at the use of such forms ; it may not be going 

 too far to say that there is hardly a word, form, or sound in present-day 

 English which was not at its first appearance looked upon as incorrect. 



The disintegrating influence of phonetic change and the leveling 

 influence of analogy are perhaps the two main forces that make for 

 linguistic change. The various influences, however, that one language 



