AN INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTIC SCIENCE BY EDGAR H. STURTEVANT Professor of Linguistics Emeritus in Yale University NEW HAVEN YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS COPYRIGHT, 1947, BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS Printed in the United States of America First published April 1947 Second printing, May 1948 Third printing November, Fourth printing July t Fifth printing March 1956 All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form except by reviewers for the public press, without written permission from the publishers. PREFACE This volume is intended for readers with no previous knowledge of linguistics it is hoped that no one will have difficulty in reading and understanding all of it. This does not mean that scientific problems have been avoided or that the content of linguistic science has been watered down. The guiding motto of the author has been the quotation from homas Huxley on the first page of the intro ductory chapter Science is ... nothing but trained and organ ized common sense the language of our community, then, should be capable of conveying the science of our community to all its members. Technical terms have generally been avoided if the termi nology of ordinary speech would do instead, and such technical terms as seemed necessary have been explained. Obviously a book of this size is far from complete. It is hoped that most readers will go on to fuller discussions of the subject. By far the best book to follow this is Leonard Bloomfields Language. 1 Other books will be referred to in the following pages. All foreign words and forms are cited in transcription. Greek is written with Latin letters according to thesystem developed by the Romans, except that at is written ail t, ci ot, oil oil, iil f, oi. It should be no ed that Greek c is represented by c, and by ch. I have occasionally marked with a prefixed star a word that is not citable from any text, but I have not used this symbol before recon structed forms that are clearly labeled as such in the context. The symbol means becomes or becoming, and stands for comes from or coming from. Thanks are due to the many scholars who have contributed in one way or another to this book, especially to Leonard Bloomfield and Bernard Bloch of Yale and to Adelaide Hahn of Hunter College. j. New York, Henry Holt and Co, 1933. CONTENTS Phonetic Symbols ix I. Introductory i II. Phonetics and Phonemics 9 III. The Relation of Writing to Speech 19 IV. Records of Speech 30 V. The Origin of Language 40 VI. Descriptive Linguistics 51 VII. The Empirical Basis of Phonetic Laws 65 VIII. Why Are Phonetic Laws Regular 74 IX. Assimilation and Dissimilation 85 X. Analogic Creation 96 XI. Processes Sometimes Confused with Analogic Creation no XII. Change of Vocabulary 123 XIII. Change of Meaning 133 XIV. Borrowing 142 XV. The Comparative Method 154 Index 169 PHONETIC SYMBOLS USED IN THIS BOOK CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY i. The English language, as everyone knows, has a double vocabulary in addition to the words used in everyday life, we have another set of terms that tend to be ustd in books and public addresses, and also in conversation when the occasion is formal or when the subject-matter calls for precision. Since a large proportion of the words in this second vocabulary are loans from other languages, it has been called the foreign learned vocabulary. It includes not onlya great many learned-sounding synonyms for very plain words, such as prestidigitation for sleight-of hand or expectorate for spit, but also most of our technical terminology. 2. An example of a foreign-learned term is the phrase linguistic sci ence 1 in the title of this book. The word linguistic is merely the more formal and imposing synonym of the adjective language in everyday speech one might as well say language science. Even that phrase, how ever, would have a special a technical sense, and so both words need further clarification...