PREFACE No apology is needed for an attempt to write an introduction to the Phonetics and History of the German Language that is simple enough to be intelligible to students without linguistic erudition, and at the same time sufficiently comprehensive to meet to a reasonable degree the requirements of the teacher of German. Phonetics and historical grammar have at last come into their own as legitimate and indispensable elements of the training of foreign language teachers, but a text-book for these subjects adjusted to the complicated needs of our colleges has so far been a desideratum. It goes without saying that in compiling this little manual I have made free use of the principal works on the subjects with which it deals. In fact, the phonetic part can hardly claim to be much more than an adaptation of the books of such phoneticians as Sievers, Viëtor, Jespersen, Sweet, etc. In the historical part, while consulting at every step the standard works by Wilmanns, Behaghel, Streitberg, and others, I have found myself compelled to follow a more independent course in characterizing the German tongue as a direct and nearly unbroken development of the Indo-European parent language, evolved by the continuous action of a homogeneous set of phonetic and psychological tendencies. Leaving aside the scientific aspect of my theory, this system, thru its consistent linking of phonetics and historical grammar, cannot fail to make the study of both more useful to the student than an independent treatment of these two branches of linguistic science would be. May critics not deal too harshly with me for having presumed to embody in my booklet some new presentations of details (such as the Germanic preterit and optative, the High German sound shift, the derivation of the name Germani, the evolution of the German dialects and the German standard language); I have rigidly suppressed such heresies wherever they did not seem unavoidable postulates of the general pedagogical plan of my book; sometimes, I confess, it was with some regret that I put them into the background, as, for instance, when I professed to share the present standard view of the Indo-European 'mediae aspiratae,' which I described as 'middle stops,' while I am strongly convinced that they really were voiceless spirants; to introduce this theory seemed to me too bold at this time, altho I realized the extent to which it would have simplified the treatment of the Germanic sound shift and Verner's Law. The Transcriptions-Misère so frequently complained of by philologists could not fail to give me considerable trouble. I had to cut more than one Gordian knot in my endeavor to reconcile the customary transcription of phonetics with that of historical grammar, chiefly so in the use of the letters g and g; in connection with the traditional use of Roman type for phonetic transcription and Italics for philological examples, I have followed the arbitrary principle of using with either type the regular font sign for the common stop, thus reserving, in the historical part, the type g for the labio-velar; this decision and the use of Greek x and y for the velar spirants were dictated by practical rather than by scientific considerations. During the typesetting my difficulties in typographical matters were greatly alleviated by the unremitting care and sagacity of Mr. Adolph Linsenbarth, |