h and German vowels and consonants.
Regularity of phonetic law. Shifting of sounds without destruction
of phonetic pattern. Difficulty of explaining the nature of phonetic
drifts. Vowel mutation in English and German. Morphological
influence on phonetic change. Analogical levelings to offset
irregularities produced by phonetic laws. New morphological features
due to phonetic change.

IX. HOW LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER

Linguistic influences due to cultural contact. Borrowing of words.
Resistances to borrowing. Phonetic modification of borrowed words.
Phonetic interinfluencings of neighboring languages. Morphological
borrowings. Morphological resemblances as vestiges of genetic
relationship.

X. LANGUAGE, RACE, AND CULTURE

Naive tendency to consider linguistic, racial, and cultural
groupings as congruent. Race and language need not correspond.
Cultural and linguistic boundaries not identical. Coincidences
between linguistic cleavages and those of language and culture due
to historical, not intrinsic psychological, causes. Language does
not in any deep sense "reflect" culture.

XL LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Language as the material or medium of literature. Literature may
move on the generalized linguistic plane or may be inseparable from
specific linguistic conditions. Language as a collective art.
Necessary esthetic advantages or limitations in any language. Style
as conditioned by inherent features of the language. Prosody as
conditioned by the phonetic dynamics of a language.

INDEX

I

INTRODUCTORY: LANGUAGE DEFINED

Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we rarely pause to
define it. It seems as natural to man as walking, and only less so than
breathing. Yet it needs but a moment's reflection to convince us that
this naturalness of speech is but an illusory feeling. The process of
acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing
from the process of learning to walk. In the case of the latter
function, culture, in other words, the traditional body of social usage,
is not seriously brought into play. The child is individually equipped,
by the complex set of factors that we term biological heredity, to make
all the needed muscular and nervous adjustments that result in walking.
Indeed, the very conformation of these muscles and of the appropriate
parts of the nervou