584 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



latter may be said to operate regardless of particular times and 

 places, while a phonetic law is merely a generalized statement of a 

 process that took place in a restricted area within a definite period 

 of time. The real difficulty in the iniderstanding of phonetic change 

 in language lies not in the fact of change itself, nor in the regularity 

 with which such change proceeds in all cases affected, but, above all, 

 in the fact that phonetic changes are not merely individual, but social 

 phenomena; in other words, that the speech of all the members of a 

 community in a given time and place undergoes certain regular 

 phonetic changes. Without here attemptmg to go into the details 

 of this process of the transformation of an individual phonetic pe- 

 culiarity into a social one, we mil 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 neighboring 

 localities, untU, finally, it has spread either over the entire area in 

 which the language is spoken or over some definite i:>ortion 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 net- 

 work of dialectic groupings may develop. At least some of the 

 dialects wUl diverge phonetically more and more, until in the end 

 forms of speech will have developed that deserve to be called dis- 

 tinct languages. It can not be denied that, particularly after a con- 

 siderable degree of divergence 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 languages 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 dem- 

 onstrated 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 dis- 

 tinct forms, in other cases two originally distinct grammatical ele- 



