the same history? Not in
the least. Perhaps B has a strong tendency toward audible breath release
at the end of a word, so that the final _l_, like a final vowel, was
originally followed by a marked aspiration. Individuals perhaps tended
to anticipate a little the voiceless release and to "unvoice" the latter
part of the final _l_-sound (very much as the _l_ of English words like
_felt_ tends to be partly voiceless in anticipation of the voicelessness
of the _t_). Yet this final _l_ with its latent tendency to unvoicing
might never have actually developed into a fully voiceless _l_ had not
the presence of voiceless _l_-sounds in A acted as an unconscious
stimulus or suggestive push toward a more radical change in the line of
B's own drift. Once the final voiceless _l_ emerged, its alternation in
related words with medial voiced _l_ is very likely to have led to its
analogical spread. The result would be that both A and B have an
important phonetic trait in common. Eventually their phonetic systems,
judged as mere assemblages of sounds, might even become completely
assimilated to each other, though this is an extreme case hardly ever
realized in practice. The highly significant thing about such phonetic
interinfluencings is the strong tendency of each language to keep its
phonetic pattern intact. So long as the respective alignments of the
similar sounds is different, so long as they have differing "values" and
"weights" in the unrelated languages, these languages cannot be said to
have diverged materially from the line of their inherent drift. In
phonetics, as in vocabulary, we must be careful not to exaggerate the
importance of interlinguistic influences.

[Footnote 171: This can actually be demonstrated for one of the
Athabaskan dialects of the Yukon.]

I have already pointed out in passing that English has taken over a
certain number of morphological elements from French. English also uses
a number of affixes that are derived from Latin and Greek. Some of these
foreign elements, like the _-ize_ of _materialize_ or the _-able_ of
_breakable_, are even productive to-day. Such examples as these are
hardly true evidences of a morphological influence exerted by one
language on another. Setting aside the fact that they belong to the
sphere of derivational concepts and do not touch the central
morphological problem of the expression of relational ideas, they have
added nothing to the structural peculiarities of our languag