An important aspect of the analysis of written language is to explain its relationship to spoken language. The volume focuses on how morphology influences forms of spelling. It brings together 8 papers, including a review of the historical development of German and Dutch orthography, a paper about the possibilities for marking morphological structure that exist in German spelling, and about the effects of such marking on the process of reading.

this volume studies how speakers deal with loanwords from foreign languages. Are foreign words adapted in pronunciation, writing, flexion and syntax to the recipient language or do they keep characteristics of the language of their origin? Do loan units change the system of the recipient language or do they get changed by it? Methodical considerations to identify foreign words supplement these studies on German, Polish, Hebrew and Japanese.

Language change is operative at all levels of a language. Alongside the effects of general linguistic change phenomena, word formation displays a species of change all its own. A central concern of this study is to delimit and describe this specific species. A theoretical definition of the subject addressed by the study leads on to an evaluation of authentic language material. It transpires that word-formation change is centrally determined by changes in linguistic productivity, empirically substantiated here by the analysis of newspaper texts from the 17th to the 20th century.