s remoter
affiliations.

Analogy may not only refashion forms within the confines of a related
cluster of forms (a "paradigm") but may extend its influence far beyond.
Of a number of functionally equivalent elements, for instance, only one
may survive, the rest yielding to its constantly widening influence.
This is what happened with the English _-s_ plural. Originally confined
to a particular class of masculines, though an important class, the _-s_
plural was gradually generalized for all nouns but a mere handful that
still illustrate plural types now all but extinct (_foot_: feet,
_goose_: _geese_, _tooth_: _teeth_, _mouse_: _mice_, _louse_: _lice_;
_ox_: _oxen_; _child_: _children_; _sheep_: _sheep_, _deer_: _deer_).
Thus analogy not only regularizes irregularities that have come in the
wake of phonetic processes but introduces disturbances, generally in
favor of greater simplicity or regularity, in a long established system
of forms. These analogical adjustments are practically always symptoms
of the general morphological drift of the language.

A morphological feature that appears as the incidental consequence of a
phonetic process, like the English plural with modified vowel, may
spread by analogy no less readily than old features that owe their
origin to other than phonetic causes. Once the _e_-vowel of Middle
English _fet_ had become confined to the plural, there was no
theoretical reason why alternations of the type _fot_: _fet_ and
_mus_: _mis_ might not have become established as a productive type of
number distinction in the noun. As a matter of fact, it did not so
become established. The _fot_: _fet_ type of plural secured but a
momentary foothold. It was swept into being by one of the surface drifts
of the language, to be swept aside in the Middle English period by the
more powerful drift toward the use of simple distinctive forms. It was
too late in the day for our language to be seriously interested in such
pretty symbolisms as _foot_: _feet_. What examples of the type arose
legitimately, in other words _via_ purely phonetic processes, were
tolerated for a time, but the type as such never had a serious future.

It was different in German. The whole series of phonetic changes
comprised under the term "umlaut," of which _u_: _ue_ and _au_: _oi_
(written _aeu_) are but specific examples, struck the German language at
a time when the general drift to morphological simplification was not so
strong but that