ages as a whole have not developed
nasalized vowels. Certain Upper German (Suabian) dialects, however,
have now nasalized vowels in lieu of the older vowel + nasal consonant
(_n_). Is it only accidental that these dialects are spoken in proximity
to French, which makes abundant use of nasalized vowels? Again, there
are certain general phonetic features that mark off Dutch and Flemish in
contrast, say, to North German and Scandinavian dialects. One of these
is the presence of unaspirated voiceless stops (_p_, _t_, _k_), which
have a precise, metallic quality reminiscent of the corresponding French
sounds, but which contrast with the stronger, aspirated stops of
English, North German, and Danish. Even if we assume that the
unaspirated stops are more archaic, that they are the unmodified
descendants of the old Germanic consonants, is it not perhaps a
significant historical fact that the Dutch dialects, neighbors of
French, were inhibited from modifying these consonants in accordance
with what seems to have been a general Germanic phonetic drift? Even
more striking than these instances is the peculiar resemblance, in
certain special phonetic respects, of Russian and other Slavic languages
to the unrelated Ural-Altaic languages[168] of the Volga region. The
peculiar, dull vowel, for instance, known in Russian as "yeri"[169] has
Ural-Altaic analogues, but is entirely wanting in Germanic, Greek,
Armenian, and Indo-Iranian, the nearest Indo-European congeners of
Slavic. We may at least suspect that the Slavic vowel is not
historically unconnected with its Ural-Altaic parallels. One of the most
puzzling cases of phonetic parallelism is afforded by a large number of
American Indian languages spoken west of the Rockies. Even at the most
radical estimate there are at least four totally unrelated linguistic
stocks represented in the region from southern Alaska to central
California. Nevertheless all, or practically all, the languages of this
immense area have some important phonetic features in common. Chief of
these is the presence of a "glottalized" series of stopped consonants of
very distinctive formation and of quite unusual acoustic effect.[170] In
the northern part of the area all the languages, whether related or not,
also possess various voiceless _l_-sounds and a series of "velar"
(back-guttural) stopped consonants which are etymologically distinct
from the ordinary _k_-series. It is difficult to believe that three such
pec