586 ANNUAL REPOKT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



came to be Jcisse. In Chaucer's day the verb and the noun were 

 still kept apart as kisse and Tciss, respectively; later on, as a final 

 unaccented -e regularly dropped off, Msse became Jciss, so that there 

 ceased to be any formal difference between the verb and noun. The 

 history of the Anglo-Saxon verb lujian" to love " and noun lufu "love" 

 has been quite parallel;. the two finally became confused m a smgle 

 form luv, modern English love. Once the pace has been set, so to 

 speak, for an interchange in English between verbal and nommal 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, 

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

 we may not only wi'ite 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 acquu-ement 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 

 character 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 magni- 

 tude 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. Reference has 

 ah'eady 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 recentl}'' acquired verb like to telegraph in English is 

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

 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 coroUary of wliich 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 itseK to establish comparative 

 regularity — that is, forms which belong to ill-defined or spai*sely 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 V\ke.feet and oxen, have come to be characterized by a 



