VARIETIES OF HUMAN SPEECH SAPIR. 587 



suffixe<l -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 &s foots and lie simmmed. 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 

 may exert upon another, generally summe<l up ui the wonl "borrowing, ' ' 

 are also apt to be of importance. As a rule such influence is limited 

 to the taking over or borrowhig of certain words of one language by 

 another, the phonetic form of the foreign word almost always adapt- 

 ing itself to the phonetic system of the borrowing language. Besides 

 this very obvious sort of influence, there are more subtle ways in which 

 one language may influence another. It is a very noteworthy phe- 

 nomenon that the languages of a continuous area, even if genetically 

 unrelated and however much they may differ among themselves from 

 the point of view of morphology, tend to have similar phonetic sys- 

 tems or, at any rate, tend to possess certain distinctive phonetic traits 

 in common. It can not be accidental, for instance, that both the 

 Slavic languages and some of the neighboring but absolutely um-elated 

 Ural-Altaic languages (such as the Cheremiss of the Volga region) have 

 in common a peculiar dull vowel, known in Russian as yeri, an<l also a 

 set of palatalized or so-called ' 'sof t" consonants alongside a parallel set 

 of unpalatalized or so-called "hard" consonants. Similarly, we find 

 thatChinese and Siamese have in common with theunre'lated Amiamite 

 and certain other languages of Farther India a system of musical 

 accent. A third very striking example is aft'orded by a large number 

 of American Indian linguistic stocks reaching along the Pacific coast 

 from southern Alaska well into California and beyontl, which have in 

 common peculiar voiceless Z-sounds and a set of so-called "fortis" 

 consonants with cracked acoustic effect. It is obvious that in all 

 these cases of comparatively uniform phonetic areas, embracing at the 

 same time diverse linguistic stocks and types of morpholog}', we must 

 be dealing with some sort of phonetic influence that one language 

 may exert upon another. It may also be shown, though })arha})s less 

 frequently, that some of the morphologic traits of one language may 

 be adopted by a neighboring, sometimes quite unrelate<l, language, 

 or that certain fundamental grammatical features are spread among 

 several unrelated hnguistic stocks of a continuous area. One example 

 of this sort of influence will serve for many. The French express the 



