VABIETIES OF HUMAN SPEECH— SAPIR. 585 



ments may come to have the same phonetic appearance, so that if 

 circumstances are favorable, the way is paved for confusion and re- 

 adjustment. Briefly stated, phonetic change may and often does 

 necessitate a readjustment of morphologic groupmgs. It wUl 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 midfeet. We saw that there was a time when 

 these words had respectively the form, fot aiidfdti. The fmal -i-vowel 

 of the second word colored, by a process of assimilation which is gen- 

 erally referred to as "umlaut," the o of the first syllable and made it o, 

 later unrounded to e; the final i, after bemg dulled to an e, finally 

 dropped off altogether. The form foti thus step by step developed 

 into the Itxterfet, which is the normal Anglo-Saxon form. Note the 

 result. In foti and other words of its type the plural is expressed 

 by a distinct suffix -i, in fet, as in modern English /g6'^, and in words 

 of corresponding form it is expressed by an internal change of vowel. 

 Thus an entu'ely new grammatical feature in English, as also m 

 quite parallel fashion in German, was brought about by a series of 

 purely phonetic changes, hi themselves of no grammatical 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 entu'e morphologic ty]3e 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, pho- 

 netically speaking, may often, according to its syntactic employ- 

 ment, be construed as verb or as noun. Thus, we not only love and 

 Jciss, but we also give our love or a kiss, that is, the words love and Mss 

 may be indifl'erently used to predicate or to denomhiatc 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 isolathig type, more or less similar to that of Chinese. 

 And yet the typical Indogcrmanic language of earlier times, as rep- 

 resented say by Latin or Greek, always makes a rigidly f(H-mal, 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 origmal Anglo-Saxon 

 form of the infinitive of the verb Iciss was cyssan, while the Anglo- 

 Saxon form of the noun kiss was cyss. The forms in early middle Eng- 

 lish times became dulled to kissen and kiss, respectively. Final unac- 

 cented -n later regularly dropped off, so that the infinitive of the verb 



