On the Approaches to the English Language [pp. 434-456]

442 ON THE APPROACHES TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. EJuly,
shifting (permutation) of the mute consonants and a common
thickening or thinning of stem-vowels. High German, in particular, has carried the permutation process one step farther
than the other languages. Anglo-Saxon, Norse, German in its
many varieties, Gothic, are all descendants of one common stock,
a primitive language of which we have no remains, but which
philologists have attempted to reconstruct for us, at least in the
outlines of its phonology. This primitive language was extremely simple in its vowel and consonant systems, rather full
in nominal and pronominal inflections, but deficient in verbal
tenses. If we take up Anglo-Saxon, we shall find that a word is
often spelled in different ways, while different words are spelled
in the same way; that vowels are broken, dimmed, obscured;
that the so-called reduplicating verbs do not reduplicate, that
the ablauting verbs are a tangled maze, that the entire theory of
umlauts seems to be a thing without rhyme and without reason.
Were Anglo-Saxon isolated, there would be no remedy; the beginner wou'd have to take things as he finds them. But AngloSaxon has an elder brother, or cousin, or uncle-it is hard to
settle the relationship precisely-whose features are as clearcut as those of a Greek statue. Those who know Gothic only
by hearsay, or by a few detached paradigms in treatises on
other languages,can form no just conception of its structure. It
is remarkably regular; its verbs, whether reduplicating or ablauting or weak, conf(orm closely to the models of their respective classes; the nouns do the same; also the adjectives, only
borrowing, in the strong declension, terminations from the pronouns, which can be recognized at a glance. The ablaut system
is full and regular, while the umlauts have not yet crept in, so
that we are confronted with forms that explain to us how, in
Anglo-Saxon, stem-vowels are umlauted even although the cause
of umlaut, an i in the following syllable, has itself ceased to exist in Anglo-Saxon. Thus, we have in Anglo-Saxon:
N. bbc, (a book.) plural, b6c,
G. b6c b6ca,
D. bec, bocum,
A. boc. b6c.
, we are informed, is the umlant of 6, produced by an i in
the following syllable. But of the eight cases given, only two
have a second syl1able, and in these two the second syllable