Chapter VII: Part 7

But the drift away from _whom_ has still other determinants. The words _who_ and _whom_ in their interrogative sense are psychologically related not merely to the pronouns _which_ and _what_, but to a group of interrogative adverbs--_where_, _when_, _how_--all of which are invariable and generally emphatic. I believe it is safe to infer that there is a rather strong feeling in English that the interrogative pronoun or adverb, typically an emphatic element in the sentence, should be invariable. The inflective _-m_ of _whom_ is felt as a drag upon the rhetorical effectiveness of the word. It needs to be eliminated if the interrogative pronoun is to receive all its latent power. There is still a third, and a very powerful, reason for the avoidance of _whom_. The contrast between the subjective and objective series of personal pronouns (_I_, _he_, _she_, _we_, _they_: _me_, _him_, _her_, _us_, _them_) is in English associated with a difference of position. We say _I see the man_ but _the man sees me_; _he told him_, never _him he told_ or _him told he_. Such usages as the last two are distinctly poetic and archaic; they are opposed to the present drift of the language. Even in the interrogative one does not say _Him did you see?_ It is only in sentences of the type _Whom did you see?_ that an inflected objective before the verb is now used at all. On the other hand, the order in _Whom did you see?_ is imperative because of its interrogative form; the interrogative pronoun or adverb normally comes first in the sentence (_What are you doing?_ _When did he go?_ _Where are you from?_). In the "whom" of _Whom did you see?_ there is concealed, therefore, a conflict between the order proper to a sentence containing an inflected objective and the order natural to a sentence with an interrogative pronoun or adverb. The solution _Did you see whom?_ or _You saw whom?_[135] is too contrary to the idiomatic drift of our language to receive acceptance. The more radical solution _Who did you see?_ is the one the language is gradually making for.

[Footnote 135: Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as when _You saw whom?_ is equivalent to _You saw so and so and that so and so is who?_ In such sentences _whom_ is pronounced high and lingeringly to emphasize the fact that the person just referred to by the listener is not known or recognized.]

These three conflicts--on the score of form grouping, of rhetorical emphasis, and of order--are supplemented by a fourth difficulty. The emphatic _whom_, with its heavy build (half-long vowel followed by labial consonant), should contrast with a lightly tripping syllable immediately following. In _whom did_, however, we have an involuntary retardation that makes the locution sound "clumsy." This clumsiness is a phonetic verdict, quite apart from the dissatisfaction due to the grammatical factors which we have analyzed. The same prosodic objection does not apply to such parallel locutions as _what did_ and _when did_. The vowels of _what_ and _when_ are shorter and their final consonants melt easily into the following _d_, which is pronounced in the same tongue position as _t_ and _n_. Our instinct for appropriate rhythms makes it as difficult for us to feel content with _whom did_ as for a poet to use words like _dreamed_ and _hummed_ in a rapid line. Neither common feeling nor the poet's choice need be at all conscious. It may be that not all are equally sensitive to the rhythmic flow of speech, but it is probable that rhythm is an unconscious linguistic determinant even with those who set little store by its artistic use. In any event the poet's rhythms can only be a more sensitive and stylicized application of rhythmic tendencies that are characteristic of the daily speech of his people.

We have discovered no less than four factors which enter into our subtle disinclination to say "Whom did you see?" The uneducated folk that says "Who did you see?" with no twinge of conscience has a more acute flair for the genuine drift of the language than its students. Naturally the four restraining factors do not operate independently. Their separate energies, if we may make bold to use a mechanical concept, are "canalized" into a single force. This force or minute embodiment of the general drift of the language is psychologically registered as a slight hesitation in using the word _whom_. The hesitation is likely to be quite unconscious, though it may be readily acknowledged when attention is called to it. The analysis is certain to be unconscious, or rather unknown, to the normal speaker.[136] How, then, can we be certain in such an analysis as we have undertaken that all of the assigned determinants are really operative and not merely some one of them? Certainly they are not equally powerful in all cases. Their values are variable, rising and falling according to the individual and the locution.[137] But that they really exist, each in its own right, may sometimes be tested by the method of elimination. If one or other of the factors is missing and we observe a slight diminution in the corresponding psychological reaction ("hesitation" in our case), we may conclude that the factor is in other uses genuinely positive. The second of our four factors applies only to the interrogative use of _whom_, the fourth factor applies with more force to the interrogative than to the relative. We can therefore understand why a sentence like _Is he the man whom you referred to?_ though not as idiomatic as _Is he the man (that) you referred to?_ (remember that it sins against counts one and three), is still not as difficult to reconcile with our innate feeling for English expression as _Whom did you see?_ If we eliminate the fourth factor from the interrogative usage,[138] say in _Whom are you looking at?_ where the vowel following _whom_ relieves this word of its phonetic weight, we can observe, if I am not mistaken, a lesser reluctance to use the _whom_. _Who are you looking at?_ might even sound slightly offensive to ears that welcome _Who did you see?_

[Footnote 136: Students of language cannot be entirely normal in their attitude towards their own speech. Perhaps it would be better to say "naïve" than "normal."]

[Footnote 137: It is probably this _variability of value_ in the significant compounds of a general linguistic drift that is responsible for the rise of dialectic variations. Each dialect continues the general drift of the common parent, but has not been able to hold fast to constant values for each component of the drift. Deviations as to the drift itself, at first slight, later cumulative, are therefore unavoidable.]

[Footnote 138: Most sentences beginning with interrogative _whom_ are likely to be followed by _did_ or _does_, _do_. Yet not all.]

We may set up a scale of "hesitation values" somewhat after this fashion:

Value 1: factors 1, 3. "The man whom I referred to." Value 2: factors 1, 3, 4. "The man whom they referred to." Value 3: factors 1, 2, 3. "Whom are you looking at?" Value 4: factors 1, 2, 3, 4. "Whom did you see?"

We may venture to surmise that while _whom_ will ultimately disappear from English speech, locutions of the type _Whom did you see?_ will be obsolete when phrases like _The man whom I referred to_ are still in lingering use. It is impossible to be certain, however, for we can never tell if we have isolated all the determinants of a drift. In our particular case we have ignored what may well prove to be a controlling factor in the history of _who_ and _whom_ in the relative sense. This is the unconscious desire to leave these words to their interrogative function and to concentrate on _that_ or mere word order as expressions of the relative (e.g., _The man that I referred to_ or _The man I referred to_). This drift, which does not directly concern the use of _whom_ as such (merely of _whom_ as a form of _who_), may have made the relative _who_ obsolete before the other factors affecting relative _whom_ have run their course. A consideration like this is instructive because it indicates that knowledge of the general drift of a language is insufficient to enable us to see clearly what the drift is heading for. We need to know something of the relative potencies and speeds of the components of the drift.

It is hardly necessary to say that the particular drifts involved in the use of _whom_ are of interest to us not for their own sake but as symptoms of larger tendencies at work in the language. At least three drifts of major importance are discernible. Each of these has operated for centuries, each is at work in other parts of our linguistic mechanism, each is almost certain to continue for centuries, possibly millennia. The first is the familiar tendency to level the distinction between the subjective and the objective, itself but a late chapter in the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system of syntactic cases. This system, which is at present best preserved in Lithuanian,[139] was already considerably reduced in the old Germanic language of which English, Dutch, German, Danish, and Swedish are modern dialectic forms. The seven Indo-European cases (nominative genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, instrumental) had been already reduced to four (nominative genitive, dative, accusative). We know this from a careful comparison of and reconstruction based on the oldest Germanic dialects of which we still have records (Gothic, Old Icelandic, Old High German, Anglo-Saxon). In the group of West Germanic dialects, for the study of which Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are our oldest and most valuable sources, we still have these four cases, but the phonetic form of the case syllables is already greatly reduced and in certain paradigms particular cases have coalesced. The case system is practically intact but it is evidently moving towards further disintegration. Within the Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English period there took place further changes in the same direction. The phonetic form of the case syllables became still further reduced and the distinction between the accusative and the dative finally disappeared. The new "objective" is really an amalgam of old accusative and dative forms; thus, _him_, the old dative (we still say _I give him the book_, not "abbreviated" from _I give to him_; compare Gothic _imma_, modern German _ihm_), took over the functions of the old accusative (Anglo-Saxon _hine_; compare Gothic _ina_, Modern German _ihn_) and dative. The distinction between the nominative and accusative was nibbled away by phonetic processes and morphological levelings until only certain pronouns retained distinctive subjective and objective forms.

[Footnote 139: Better, indeed, than in our oldest Latin and Greek records. The old Indo-Iranian languages alone (Sanskrit, Avestan) show an equally or more archaic status of the Indo-European parent tongue as regards case forms.]

In later medieval and in modern times there have been comparatively few apparent changes in our case system apart from the gradual replacement of _thou_--_thee_ (singular) and subjective _ye_--objective _you_ (plural) by a single undifferentiated form _you_. All the while, however, the case system, such as it is (subjective-objective, really absolutive, and possessive in nouns; subjective, objective, and possessive in certain pronouns) has been steadily weakening in psychological respects. At present it is more seriously undermined than most of us realize. The possessive has little vitality except in the pronoun and in animate nouns. Theoretically we can still say _the moon's phases_ or _a newspaper's vogue_; practically we limit ourselves pretty much to analytic locutions like _the phases of the moon_ and _the vogue of a newspaper_. The drift is clearly toward the limitation, of possessive forms to animate nouns. All the possessive pronominal forms except _its_ and, in part, _their_ and _theirs_, are also animate. It is significant that _theirs_ is hardly ever used in reference to inanimate nouns, that there is some reluctance to so use _their_, and that _its_ also is beginning to give way to _of it_. _The appearance of it_ or _the looks of it_ is more in the current of the language than _its appearance_. It is curiously significant that _its young_ (referring to an animal's cubs) is idiomatically preferable to _the young of it_. The form is only ostensibly neuter, in feeling it is animate; psychologically it belongs with _his children_, not with _the pieces of it_. Can it be that so common a word as _its_ is actually beginning to be difficult? Is it too doomed to disappear? It would be rash to say that it shows signs of approaching obsolescence, but that it is steadily weakening is fairly clear.[140] In any event, it is not too much to say that there is a strong drift towards the restriction of the inflected possessive forms to animate nouns and pronouns.

[Footnote 140: Should _its_ eventually drop out, it will have had a curious history. It will have played the rôle of a stop-gap between _his_ in its non-personal use (see footnote 11, page 167) and the later analytic of _it_.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 140 refers to Footnote 132, beginning on line 5142.]

How is it with the alternation of subjective and objective in the pronoun? Granted that _whom_ is a weak sister, that the two cases have been leveled in _you_ (in _it_, _that_, and _what_ they were never distinct, so far as we can tell[141]), and that _her_ as an objective is a trifle weak because of its formal identity with the possessive _her_, is there any reason to doubt the vitality of such alternations as _I see the man_ and _the man sees me_? Surely the distinction between subjective _I_ and objective _me_, between subjective _he_ and objective _him_, and correspondingly for other personal pronouns, belongs to the very core of the language. We can throw _whom_ to the dogs, somehow make shift to do without an _its_, but to level _I_ and _me_ to a single case--would that not be to un-English our language beyond recognition? There is no drift toward such horrors as _Me see him_ or _I see he_. True, the phonetic disparity between _I_ and _me_, _he_ and _him_, _we_ and _us_, has been too great for any serious possibility of form leveling. It does not follow that the case distinction as such is still vital. One of the most insidious peculiarities of a linguistic drift is that where it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it innocuous by washing the old significance out of it. It turns its very enemies to its own uses. This brings us to the second of the major drifts, the tendency to fixed position in the sentence, determined by the syntactic relation of the word.

[Footnote 141: Except in so far as _that_ has absorbed other functions than such as originally belonged to it. It was only a nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.]

We need not go into the history of this all-important drift. It is enough to know that as the inflected forms of English became scantier, as the syntactic relations were more and more inadequately expressed by the forms of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradually took over functions originally foreign to it. _The man_ in _the man sees the dog_ is subjective; in _the dog sees the man_, objective. Strictly parallel to these sentences are _he sees the dog_ and _the dog sees him_. Are the subjective value of _he_ and the objective value of _him_ entirely, or even mainly, dependent on the difference of form? I doubt it. We could hold to such a view if it were possible to say _the dog sees he_ or _him sees the dog_. It was once possible to say such things, but we have lost the power. In other words, at least part of the case feeling in _he_ and _him_ is to be credited to their position before or after the verb. May it not be, then, that _he_ and _him_, _we_ and _us_, are not so much subjective and objective forms as pre-verbal and post-verbal[142] forms, very much as _my_ and _mine_ are now pre-nominal and post-nominal forms of the possessive (_my father_ but _father mine_; _it is my book_ but _the book is mine_)? That this interpretation corresponds to the actual drift of the English language is again indicated by the language of the folk. The folk says _it is me_, not _it is I_, which is "correct" but just as falsely so as the _whom did you see_? that we have analyzed. _I'm the one_, _it's me_; _we're the ones_, _it's us that will win out_--such are the live parallelisms in English to-day. There is little doubt that _it is I_ will one day be as impossible in English as _c'est je_, for _c'est moi_, is now in French.

[Footnote 142: Aside from the interrogative: _am I?_ _is he?_ Emphasis counts for something. There is a strong tendency for the old "objective" forms to bear a stronger stress than the "subjective" forms. This is why the stress in locutions like _He didn't go, did he?_ and _isn't he?_ is thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis.]

How differently our _I_: _me_ feels than in Chaucer's day is shown by the Chaucerian _it am I_. Here the distinctively subjective aspect of the _I_ was enough to influence the form of the preceding verb in spite of the introductory _it_; Chaucer's locution clearly felt more like a Latin _sum ego_ than a modern _it is I_ or colloquial _it is me_. We have a curious bit of further evidence to prove that the English personal pronouns have lost some share of their original syntactic force. Were _he_ and _she_ subjective forms pure and simple, were they not striving, so to speak, to become caseless absolutives, like _man_ or any other noun, we should not have been able to coin such compounds as _he-goat_ and _she-goat_, words that are psychologically analogous to _bull-moose_ and _mother-bear_. Again, in inquiring about a new-born baby, we ask _Is it a he or a she?_ quite as though _he_ and _she_ were the equivalents of _male_ and _female_ or _boy_ and _girl_. All in all, we may conclude that our English case system is weaker than it looks and that, in one way or another, it is destined to get itself reduced to an absolutive (caseless) form for all nouns and pronouns but those that are animate. Animate nouns and pronouns are sure to have distinctive possessive forms for an indefinitely long period.

Meanwhile observe that the old alignment of case forms is being invaded by two new categories--a positional category (pre-verbal, post-verbal) and a classificatory category (animate, inanimate). The facts that in the possessive animate nouns and pronouns are destined to be more and more sharply distinguished from inanimate nouns and pronouns (_the man's_, but _of the house_; _his_, but _of it_) and that, on the whole, it is only animate pronouns that distinguish pre-verbal and post-verbal forms[143] are of the greatest theoretical interest. They show that, however the language strive for a more and more analytic form, it is by no means manifesting a drift toward the expression of "pure" relational concepts in the Indo-Chinese manner.[144] The insistence on the concreteness of the relational concepts is clearly stronger than the destructive power of the most sweeping and persistent drifts that we know of in the history and prehistory of our language.

[Footnote 143: _They_: _them_ as an inanimate group may be looked upon as a kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more properly belongs.]

[Footnote 144: See page 155.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 144 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 4795.]

The drift toward the abolition of most case distinctions and the correlative drift toward position as an all-important grammatical method are accompanied, in a sense dominated, by the last of the three major drifts that I have referred to. This is the drift toward the invariable word. In analyzing the "whom" sentence I pointed out that the rhetorical emphasis natural to an interrogative pronoun lost something by its form variability (_who_, _whose_, _whom_). This striving for a simple, unnuanced correspondence between idea and word, as invariable as may be, is very strong in English. It accounts for a number of tendencies which at first sight seem unconnected. Certain well-established forms, like the present third person singular _-s_ of _works_ or the plural _-s_ of _books_, have resisted the drift to invariable words, possibly because they symbolize certain stronger form cravings that we do not yet fully understand. It is interesting to note that derivations that get away sufficiently from the concrete notion of the radical word to exist as independent conceptual centers are not affected by this elusive drift. As soon as the derivation runs danger of being felt as a mere nuancing of, a finicky play on, the primary concept, it tends to be absorbed by the radical word, to disappear as such. English words crave spaces between them, they do not like to huddle in clusters of slightly divergent centers of meaning, each edging a little away from the rest. _Goodness_, a noun of quality, almost a noun of relation, that takes its cue from the concrete idea of "good" without necessarily predicating that quality (e.g., _I do not think much of his goodness_) is sufficiently spaced from _good_ itself not to need fear absorption. Similarly, _unable_ can hold its own against _able_ because it destroys the latter's sphere of influence; _unable_ is psychologically as distinct from _able_ as is _blundering_ or _stupid_. It is different with adverbs in _-ly_. These lean too heavily on their adjectives to have the kind of vitality that English demands of its words. _Do it quickly!_ drags psychologically. The nuance expressed by _quickly_ is too close to that of _quick_, their circles of concreteness are too nearly the same, for the two words to feel comfortable together. The adverbs in _-ly_ are likely to go to the wall in the not too distant future for this very reason and in face of their obvious usefulness. Another instance of the sacrifice of highly useful forms to this impatience of nuancing is the group _whence_, _whither_, _hence_, _hither_, _thence_, _thither_. They could not persist in live usage because they impinged too solidly upon the circles of meaning represented by the words _where_, _here_ and _there_. In saying _whither_ we feel too keenly that we repeat all of _where_. That we add to _where_ an important nuance of direction irritates rather than satisfies. We prefer to merge the static and the directive (_Where do you live?_ like _Where are you going?_) or, if need be, to overdo a little the concept of direction (_Where are you running to?_).

Now it is highly symptomatic of the nature of the drift away from word clusters that we do not object to nuances as such, we object to having the nuances formally earmarked for us. As a matter of fact our vocabulary is rich in near-synonyms and in groups of words that are psychologically near relatives, but these near-synonyms and these groups do not hang together by reason of etymology. We are satisfied with _believe_ and _credible_ just because they keep aloof from each other. _Good_ and _well_ go better together than _quick_ and _quickly_. The English vocabulary is a rich medley because each English word wants its own castle. Has English long been peculiarly receptive to foreign words because it craves the staking out of as many word areas as possible, or, conversely, has the mechanical imposition of a flood of French and Latin loan-words, unrooted in our earlier tradition, so dulled our feeling for the possibilities of our native resources that we are allowing these to shrink by default? I suspect that both propositions are true. Each feeds on the other. I do not think it likely, however, that the borrowings in English have been as mechanical and external a process as they are generally represented to have been. There was something about the English drift as early as the period following the Norman Conquest that welcomed the new words. They were a compensation for something that was weakening within.

VIII

LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL PRODUCT: PHONETIC LAW

I have preferred to take up in some detail the analysis of our hesitation in using a locution like "Whom did you see?" and to point to some of the English drifts, particular and general, that are implied by this hesitation than to discuss linguistic change in the abstract. What is true of the particular idiom that we started with is true of everything else in language. Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, every grammatical element, every locution, every sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration, molded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the life of language. The evidence is overwhelming that this drift has a certain consistent direction. Its speed varies enormously according to circumstances that it is not always easy to define. We have already seen that Lithuanian is to-day nearer its Indo-European prototype than was the hypothetical Germanic mother-tongue five hundred or a thousand years before Christ. German has moved more slowly than English; in some respects it stands roughly midway between English and Anglo-Saxon, in others it has of course diverged from the Anglo-Saxon line. When I pointed out in the preceding chapter that dialects formed because a language broken up into local segments could not move along the same drift in all of these segments, I meant of course that it could not move along identically the same drift. The general drift of a language has its depths. At the surface the current is relatively fast. In certain features dialects drift apart rapidly. By that very fact these features betray themselves as less fundamental to the genius of the language than the more slowly modifiable features in which the dialects keep together long after they have grown to be mutually alien forms of speech. But this is not all. The momentum of the more fundamental, the pre-dialectic, drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases. In many such cases it is perfectly clear that there could have been no dialectic interinfluencing.

These parallelisms in drift may operate in the phonetic as well as in the morphological sphere, or they may affect both at the same time. Here is an interesting example. The English type of plural represented by _foot_: _feet_, _mouse_: _mice_ is strictly parallel to the German _Fuss_: _Füsse_, _Maus_: _Mäuse_. One would be inclined to surmise that these dialectic forms go back to old Germanic or West-Germanic alternations of the same type. But the documentary evidence shows conclusively that there could have been no plurals of this type in primitive Germanic. There is no trace of such vocalic mutation ("umlaut") in Gothic, our most archaic Germanic language. More significant still is the fact that it does not appear in our oldest Old High German texts and begins to develop only at the very end of the Old High German period (circa 1000 A.D.). In the Middle High German period the mutation was carried through in all dialects. The typical Old High German forms are singular _fuoss_, plural _fuossi_;[145] singular _mus_, plural _musi_. The corresponding Middle High German forms are _fuoss_, _füesse_; _mus_, _müse_. Modern German _Fuss_: _Füsse_, _Maus_: _Mäuse_ are the regular developments of these medieval forms. Turning to Anglo-Saxon, we find that our modern English forms correspond to _fot_, _fet_; _mus_, _mys_.[146] These forms are already in use in the earliest English monuments that we possess, dating from the eighth century, and thus antedate the Middle High German forms by three hundred years or more. In other words, on this particular point it took German at least three hundred years to catch up with a phonetic-morphological drift[147] that had long been under way in English. The mere fact that the affected vowels of related words (Old High German _uo_, Anglo-Saxon _o_) are not always the same shows that the affection took place at different periods in German and English.[148] There was evidently some general tendency or group of tendencies at work in early Germanic, long before English and German had developed as such, that eventually drove both of these dialects along closely parallel paths.

[Footnote 145: I have changed the Old and Middle High German orthography slightly in order to bring it into accord with modern usage. These purely orthographical changes are immaterial. The _u_ of _mus_ is a long vowel, very nearly like the _oo_ of English _moose_.]

[Footnote 146: The vowels of these four words are long; _o_ as in _rode_, _e_ like _a_ of _fade_, _u_ like _oo_ of _brood_, _y_ like German _ü_.]

[Footnote 147: Or rather stage in a drift.]

[Footnote 148: Anglo-Saxon _fet_ is "unrounded" from an older _föt_, which is phonetically related to _fot_ precisely as is _mys_ (i.e., _müs_) to _mus_. Middle High German _ue_ (Modern German _u_) did not develop from an "umlauted" prototype of Old High German _uo_ and Anglo-Saxon _o_, but was based directly on the dialectic _uo_. The unaffected prototype was long _o_. Had this been affected in the earliest Germanic or West-Germanic period, we should have had a pre-German alternation _fot_: _föti_; this older _ö_ could not well have resulted in _ue_. Fortunately we do not need inferential evidence in this case, yet inferential comparative methods, if handled with care, may be exceedingly useful. They are indeed indispensable to the historian of language.]

How did such strikingly individual alternations as _fot_: _fet_, _fuoss_: _füesse_ develop? We have now reached what is probably the most central problem in linguistic history, gradual phonetic change. "Phonetic laws" make up a large and fundamental share of the subject-matter of linguistics. Their influence reaches far beyond the proper sphere of phonetics and invades that of morphology, as we shall see. A drift that begins as a slight phonetic readjustment or unsettlement may in the course of millennia bring about the most profound structural changes. The mere fact, for instance, that there is a growing tendency to throw the stress automatically on the first syllable of a word may eventually change the fundamental type of the language, reducing its final syllables to zero and driving it to the use of more and more analytical or symbolic[149] methods. The English phonetic laws involved in the rise of the words _foot_, _feet_, _mouse_ and _mice_ from their early West-Germanic prototypes _fot_, _foti_, _mus_, _musi_[150] may be briefly summarized as follows:

[Footnote 149: See page 133.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 149 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 4081.]

[Footnote 150: Primitive Germanic _fot(s)_, _fotiz_, _mus_, _musiz_; Indo-European _pods_, _podes_, _mus_, _muses_. The vowels of the first syllables are all long.]

1. In _foti_ "feet" the long _o_ was colored by the following _i_ to long _ö_, that is, _o_ kept its lip-rounded quality and its middle height of tongue position but anticipated the front tongue position of the _i_; _ö_ is the resulting compromise. This assimilatory change was regular, i.e., every accented long _o_ followed by an _i_ in the following syllable automatically developed to long _ö_; hence _tothi_ "teeth" became _töthi_, _fodian_ "to feed" became _födian_. At first there is no doubt the alternation between _o_ and _ö_ was not felt as intrinsically significant. It could only have been an unconscious mechanical adjustment such as may be observed in the speech of many to-day who modify the "oo" sound of words like _you_ and _few_ in the direction of German _ü_ without, however, actually departing far enough from the "oo" vowel to prevent their acceptance of _who_ and _you_ as satisfactory rhyming words. Later on the quality of the _ö_ vowel must have departed widely enough from that of _o_ to enable _ö_ to rise in consciousness[151] as a neatly distinct vowel. As soon as this happened, the expression of plurality in _föti_, _töthi_, and analogous words became symbolic and fusional, not merely fusional.

[Footnote 151: Or in that unconscious sound patterning which is ever on the point of becoming conscious. See page 57.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 151 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 1797.]

2. In _musi_ "mice" the long _u_ was colored by the following _i_ to long _ü_. This change also was regular; _lusi_ "lice" became _lüsi_, _kui_ "cows" became _küi_ (later simplified to _kü_; still preserved as _ki-_ in _kine_), _fulian_ "to make foul" became _fülian_ (still preserved as _-file_ in _defile_). The psychology of this phonetic law is entirely analogous to that of 1.

3. The old drift toward reducing final syllables, a rhythmic consequence of the strong Germanic stress on the first syllable, now manifested itself. The final _-i_, originally an important functional element, had long lost a great share of its value, transferred as that was to the symbolic vowel change (_o_: _ö_). It had little power of resistance, therefore, to the drift. It became dulled to a colorless _-e_; _föti_ became _föte_.

4. The weak _-e_ finally disappeared. Probably the forms _föte_ and _föt_ long coexisted as prosodic variants according to the rhythmic requirements of the sentence, very much as _Füsse_ and _Füss'_ now coexist in German.

5. The _ö_ of _föt_ became "unrounded" to long _e_ (our present _a_ of _fade_). The alternation of _fot_: _foti_, transitionally _fot_: _föti_, _föte_, _föt_, now appears as _fot_: _fet_. Analogously, _töth_ appears as _teth_, _födian_ as _fedian_, later _fedan_. The new long _e_-vowel "fell together" with the older _e_-vowel already existent (e.g., _her_ "here," _he_ "he"). Henceforward the two are merged and their later history is in common. Thus our present _he_ has the same vowel as _feet_, _teeth_, and _feed_. In other words, the old sound pattern _o_, _e_, after an interim of _o_, _ö_, _e_, reappeared as _o_, _e_, except that now the _e_ had greater "weight" than before.

6. _Fot_: _fet_, _mus_: _müs_ (written _mys_) are the typical forms of Anglo-Saxon literature. At the very end of the Anglo-Saxon period, say about 1050 to 1100 A.D., the _ü_, whether long or short, became unrounded to _i_. _Mys_ was then pronounced _mis_ with long _i_ (rhyming with present _niece_). The change is analogous to 5, but takes place several centuries later.

7. In Chaucer's day (circa 1350-1400 A.D.) the forms were still _fot_: _fet_ (written _foot_, _feet_) and _mus_: _mis_ (written very variably, but _mous_, _myse_ are typical). About 1500 all the long _i_-vowels, whether original (as in _write_, _ride_, _wine_) or unrounded from Anglo-Saxon _ü_ (as in _hide_, _bride_, _mice_, _defile_), became diphthongized to _ei_ (i.e., _e_ of _met_ + short _i_). Shakespeare pronounced _mice_ as _meis_ (almost the same as the present Cockney pronunciation of _mace_).

8. About the same time the long _u_-vowels were diphthongized to _ou_ (i.e., _o_ of present Scotch _not_ + _u_ of _full_). The Chaucerian _mus_: _mis_ now appears as the Shakespearean _mous_: _meis_. This change may have manifested itself somewhat later than 7; all English dialects have diphthongized old Germanic long _i_,[152] but the long undiphthongized _u_ is still preserved in Lowland Scotch, in which _house_ and _mouse_ rhyme with our _loose_. 7 and 8 are analogous developments, as were 5 and 6; 8 apparently lags behind 7 as 6, centuries earlier, lagged behind 7.

[Footnote 152: As have most Dutch and German dialects.]

9. Some time before 1550 the long _e_ of _fet_ (written _feet_) took the position that had been vacated by the old long _i_, now diphthongized (see 7), i.e., _e_ took the higher tongue position of _i_. Our (and Shakespeare's) "long _e_" is, then, phonetically the same as the old long _i_. _Feet_ now rhymed with the old _write_ and the present _beat_.

10. About the same time the long _o_ of _fot_ (written _foot_) took the position that had been vacated by the old long _u_, now diphthongized (see 8), i.e., _o_ took the higher tongue position of _u_. Our (and Shakespeare's) "long _oo_" is phonetically the same as the old long _u_. _Foot_ now rhymed with the old _out_ and the present _boot_. To summarize 7 to 10, Shakespeare pronounced _meis_, _mous_, _fit_, _fut_, of which _meis_ and _mous_ would affect our ears as a rather "mincing" rendering of our present _mice_ and _mouse_, _fit_ would sound practically identical with (but probably a bit more "drawled" than) our present _feet_, while _foot_, rhyming with _boot_, would now be set down as "broad Scotch."

11. Gradually the first vowel of the diphthong in _mice_ (see 7) was retracted and lowered in position. The resulting diphthong now varies in different English dialects, but _ai_ (i.e., _a_ of _father_, but shorter, + short _i_) may be taken as a fairly accurate rendering of its average quality.[153] What we now call the "long _i_" (of words like _ride, bite, mice_) is, of course, an _ai_-diphthong. _Mice_ is now pronounced _mais_.

[Footnote 153: At least in America.]

12. Analogously to 11, the first vowel of the diphthong in _mouse_ (see 8) was unrounded and lowered in position. The resulting diphthong may be phonetically rendered _au_, though it too varies considerably according to dialect. _Mouse_, then, is now pronounced _maus_.

13. The vowel of _foot_ (see 10) became "open" in quality and shorter in quantity, i.e., it fell together with the old short _u_-vowel of words like _full_, _wolf_, _wool_. This change has taken place in a number of words with an originally long _u_ (Chaucerian long close _o_), such as _forsook_, _hook_, _book_, _look_, _rook_, _shook_, all of which formerly had the vowel of _boot_. The older vowel, however, is still preserved in most words of this class, such as _fool_, _moon_, _spool_, _stoop_. It is highly significant of the nature of the slow spread of a "phonetic law" that there is local vacillation at present in several words. One hears _roof_, _soot_, and _hoop_, for instance, both with the "long" vowel of _boot_ and the "short" of _foot_. It is impossible now, in other words, to state in a definitive manner what is the "phonetic law" that regulated the change of the older _foot_ (rhyming with _boot_) to the present _foot_. We know that there is a strong drift towards the short, open vowel of _foot_, but whether or not all the old "long _oo_" words will eventually be affected we cannot presume to say. If they all, or practically all, are taken by the drift, phonetic law 13 will be as "regular," as sweeping, as most of the twelve that have preceded it. If not, it may eventually be possible, if past experience is a safe guide, to show that the modified words form a natural phonetic group, that is, that the "law" will have operated under certain definable limiting conditions, e.g., that all words ending in a voiceless consonant (such as _p_, _t_, _k_, _f_) were affected (e.g., _hoof_, _foot_, _look_, _roof_), but that all words ending in the _oo_-vowel or in a voiced consonant remained unaffected (e.g., _do_, _food_, _move_, _fool_). Whatever the upshot, we may be reasonably certain that when the "phonetic law" has run its course, the distribution of "long" and "short" vowels in the old _oo_-words will not seem quite as erratic as at the present transitional moment.[154] We learn, incidentally, the fundamental fact that phonetic laws do not work with spontaneous automatism, that they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually worms its way through a gamut of phonetically analogous forms.

[Footnote 154: It is possible that other than purely phonetic factors are also at work in the history of these vowels.]

It will be instructive to set down a table of form sequences, a kind of gross history of the words _foot_, _feet_, _mouse_, _mice_ for the last 1500 years:[155]

[Footnote 155: The orthography is roughly phonetic. Pronounce all accented vowels long except where otherwise indicated, unaccented vowels short; give continental values to vowels, not present English ones.]

I. _fot_: _foti_; _mus_: _musi_ (West Germanic)
II. _fot_: _föti_; _mus_: _müsi_
III. _fot_: _föte_; _mus_: _müse_
IV. _fot_: _föt_; _mus_: _müs_
V. _fot_: _fet_; _mus_: _müs_ (Anglo-Saxon)
VI. _fot_: _fet_; _mus_: _mis_(Chaucer)
VII. _fot_: _fet_; _mous_: _meis_
VIII. _fut_ (rhymes with _boot_): _fit_; _mous_: _meis_ (Shakespeare)
IX. _fut_: _fit_; _maus_: _mais_
X. _fut_ (rhymes with _put_): _fit_; _maus_: _mais_ (English of 1900)

It will not be necessary to list the phonetic laws that gradually differentiated the modern German equivalents of the original West Germanic forms from their English cognates. The following table gives a rough idea of the form sequences in German:[156]

[Footnote 156: After I. the numbers are not meant to correspond chronologically to those of the English table. The orthography is again roughly phonetic.]

I. _fot_: _foti_; _mus_: _musi_ (West Germanic)
II. _foss_:[157] _fossi_; _mus_: _musi_
III. _fuoss_: _fuossi_; _mus_: _musi_ (Old High German)
IV. _fuoss_: _füessi_; _mus_: _müsi_
V. _fuoss_: _füesse_; _mus_: _müse_ (Middle High German)
VI. _fuoss_: _füesse_; _mus_: _müze_[158]
VII. _fuos_: _füese_; _mus_: _müze_
VIII. _fuos_: _füese_; _mous_: _möüze_
IX. _fus_: _füse_; _mous_: _möüze_ (Luther)
X. _fus_: _füse_; _maus_: _moize_ (German of 1900)

[Footnote 157: I use _ss_ to indicate a peculiar long, voiceless _s_-sound that was etymologically and phonetically distinct from the old Germanic _s_. It always goes back to an old _t_. In the old sources it is generally written as a variant of _z_, though it is not to be confused with the modern German _z_ (= _ts_). It was probably a dental (lisped) _s_.]

[Footnote 158: _Z_ is to be understood as French or English _z_, not in its German use. Strictly speaking, this "z" (intervocalic _-s-_) was not voiced but was a soft voiceless sound, a sibilant intermediate between our _s_ and _z_. In modern North German it has become voiced to _z_. It is important not to confound this _s_--_z_ with the voiceless intervocalic _s_ that soon arose from the older lisped _ss_. In Modern German (aside from certain dialects), old _s_ and _ss_ are not now differentiated when final (_Maus_ and _Fuss_ have identical sibilants), but can still be distinguished as voiced and voiceless _s_ between vowels (_Mäuse_ and _Füsse_).]

We cannot even begin to ferret out and discuss all the psychological problems that are concealed behind these bland tables. Their general parallelism is obvious. Indeed we might say that to-day the English and German forms resemble each other more than does either set the West Germanic prototypes from which each is independently derived. Each table illustrates the tendency to reduction of unaccented syllables, the vocalic modification of the radical element under the influence of the following vowel, the rise in tongue position of the long middle vowels (English _o_ to _u_, _e_ to _i_; German _o_ to _uo_ to _u_, _üe_ to _ü_), the diphthongizing of the old high vowels (English _i_ to _ei_ to _ai_; English and German _u_ to _ou_ to _au_; German _ü_ to _öü_ to _oi_). These dialectic parallels cannot be accidental. They are rooted in a common, pre-dialectic drift.

Phonetic changes are "regular." All but one (English table, X.), and that as yet uncompleted, of the particular phonetic laws represented in our tables affect all examples of the sound in question or, if the phonetic change is conditional, all examples of the same sound that are analogously circumstanced.[159] An example of the first type of change is the passage in English of all old long _i_-vowels to diphthongal _ai_ via _ei_. The passage could hardly have been sudden or automatic, but it was rapid enough to prevent an irregularity of development due to cross drifts. The second type of change is illustrated in the development of Anglo-Saxon long _o_ to long _e_, via _ö_, under the influence of a following _i_. In the first case we may say that _au_ mechanically replaced long _u_, in the second that the old long _o_ "split" into two sounds--long _o_, eventually _u_, and long _e_, eventually _i_. The former type of change did no violence to the old phonetic pattern, the formal distribution of sounds into groups; the latter type rearranged the pattern somewhat. If neither of the two sounds into which an old one "splits" is a new sound, it means that there has been a phonetic leveling, that two groups of words, each with a distinct sound or sound combination, have fallen together into one group. This kind of leveling is quite frequent in the history of language. In English, for instance, we have seen that all the old long _ü_-vowels, after they had become unrounded, were indistinguishable from the mass of long _i_-vowels. This meant that the long _i_-vowel became a more heavily weighted point of the phonetic pattern than before. It is curious to observe how often languages have striven to drive originally distinct sounds into certain favorite positions, regardless of resulting confusions.[160] In Modern Greek, for instance, the vowel _i_ is the historical resultant of no less than ten etymologically distinct vowels (long and short) and diphthongs of the classical speech of Athens. There is, then, good evidence to show that there are general phonetic drifts toward particular sounds.

[Footnote 159: In practice phonetic laws have their exceptions, but more intensive study almost invariably shows that these exceptions are more apparent than real. They are generally due to the disturbing influence of morphological groupings or to special psychological reasons which inhibit the normal progress of the phonetic drift. It is remarkable with how few exceptions one need operate in linguistic history, aside from "analogical leveling" (morphological replacement).]

[Footnote 160: These confusions are more theoretical than real, however. A language has countless methods of avoiding practical ambiguities.]

More often the phonetic drift is of a more general character. It is not so much a movement toward a particular set of sounds as toward particular types of articulation. The vowels tend to become higher or lower, the diphthongs tend to coalesce into monophthongs, the voiceless consonants tend to become voiced, stops tend to become spirants. As a matter of fact, practically all the phonetic laws enumerated in the two tables are but specific instances of such far-reaching phonetic drifts. The raising of English long _o_ to _u_ and of long _e_ to _i_, for instance, was part of a general tendency to raise the position of the long vowels, just as the change of _t_ to _ss_ in Old High German was part of a general tendency to make voiceless spirants of the old voiceless stopped consonants. A single sound change, even if there is no phonetic leveling, generally threatens to upset the old phonetic pattern because it brings about a disharmony in the grouping of sounds. To reëstablish the old pattern without going back on the drift the only possible method is to have the other sounds of the series shift in analogous fashion. If, for some reason or other, _p_ becomes shifted to its voiced correspondent _b_, the old series _p_, _t_, _k_ appears in the unsymmetrical form _b_, _t_, _k_. Such a series is, in phonetic effect, not the equivalent of the old series, however it may answer to it in etymology. The general phonetic pattern is impaired to that extent. But if _t_ and _k_ are also shifted to their voiced correspondents _d_ and _g_, the old series is reëstablished in a new form: _b_, _d_, _g_. The pattern as such is preserved, or restored. _Provided that_ the new series _b_, _d_, _g_ does not become confused with an old series _b_, _d_, _g_ of distinct historical antecedents. If there is no such older series, the creation of a _b_, _d_, _g_ series causes no difficulties. If there is, the old patterning of sounds can be kept intact only by shifting the old _b_, _d_, _g_ sounds in some way. They may become aspirated to _bh_, _dh_, _gh_ or spirantized or nasalized or they may develop any other peculiarity that keeps them intact as a series and serves to differentiate them from other series. And this sort of shifting about without loss of pattern, or with a minimum loss of it, is probably the most important tendency in the history of speech sounds. Phonetic leveling and "splitting" counteract it to some extent but, on the whole, it remains the central unconscious regulator of the course and speed of sound changes.

The desire to hold on to a pattern, the tendency to "correct" a disturbance by an elaborate chain of supplementary changes, often spread over centuries or even millennia--these psychic undercurrents of language are exceedingly difficult to understand in terms of individual psychology, though there can be no denial of their historical reality. What is the primary cause of the unsettling of a phonetic pattern and what is the cumulative force that selects these or those particular variations of the individual on which to float the pattern readjustments we hardly know. Many linguistic students have made the fatal error of thinking of sound change as a quasi-physiological instead of as a strictly psychological phenomenon, or they have tried to dispose of the problem by bandying such catchwords as "the tendency to increased ease of articulation" or "the cumulative result of faulty perception" (on the part of children, say, in learning to speak). These easy explanations will not do. "Ease of articulation" may enter in as a factor, but it is a rather subjective concept at best. Indians find hopelessly difficult sounds and sound combinations that are simple to us; one language encourages a phonetic drift that another does everything to fight. "Faulty perception" does not explain that impressive drift in speech sounds which I have insisted upon. It is much better to admit that we do not yet understand the primary cause or causes of the slow drift in phonetics, though we can frequently point to contributing factors. It is likely that we shall not advance seriously until we study the intuitional bases of speech. How can we understand the nature of the drift that frays and reforms phonetic patterns when we have never thought of studying sound patterning as such and the "weights" and psychic relations of the single elements (the individual sounds) in these patterns?

Every linguist knows that phonetic change is frequently followed by morphological rearrangements, but he is apt to assume that morphology exercises little or no influence on the course of phonetic history. I am inclined to believe that our present tendency to isolate phonetics and grammar as mutually irrelevant linguistic provinces is unfortunate. There are likely to be fundamental relations between them and their respective histories that we do not yet fully grasp. After all, if speech sounds exist merely because they are the symbolic carriers of significant concepts and groupings of concepts, why may not a strong drift or a permanent feature in the conceptual sphere exercise a furthering or retarding influence on the phonetic drift? I believe that such influences may be demonstrated and that they deserve far more careful study than they have received.

This brings us back to our unanswered question: How is it that both English and German developed the curious alternation of unmodified vowel in the singular (_foot_, _Fuss_) and modified vowel in the plural (_feet_, _Füsse_)? Was the pre-Anglo-Saxon alternation of _fot_ and _föti_ an absolutely mechanical matter, without other than incidental morphological interest? It is always so represented, and, indeed, all the external facts support such a view. The change from _o_ to _ö_, later _e_, is by no means peculiar to the plural. It is found also in the dative singular (_fet_), for it too goes back to an older _foti_. Moreover, _fet_ of the plural applies only to the nominative and accusative; the genitive has _fota_, the dative _fotum_. Only centuries later was the alternation of _o_ and _e_ reinterpreted as a means of distinguishing number; _o_ was generalized for the singular, _e_ for the plural. Only when this reassortment of forms took place[161] was the modern symbolic value of the _foot_: _feet_ alternation clearly established. Again, we must not forget that _o_ was modified to _ö (e)_ in all manner of other grammatical and derivative formations. Thus, a pre-Anglo-Saxon _hohan_ (later _hon_) "to hang" corresponded to a _höhith_, _hehith_ (later _hehth_) "hangs"; to _dom_ "doom," _blod_ "blood," and _fod_ "food" corresponded the verbal derivatives _dömian_ (later _deman_) "to deem," _blödian_ (later _bledan_) "to bleed," and _födian_ (later _fedan_) "to feed." All this seems to point to the purely mechanical nature of the modification of _o_ to _ö_ to _e_. So many unrelated functions were ultimately served by the vocalic change that we cannot believe that it was motivated by any one of them.

[Footnote 161: A type of adjustment generally referred to as "analogical leveling."]