did we
should say that they had an Irish or German brogue. Chaucer we
cannot read without some grammatical explanation or a glossary;
correctly pronounced his language would sound to us more like Low
German than like our English. If we go back only about forty
generations from our time to that of Alfred the Great, we come to
English as strange to us as modern German, and quite unintelligible,
unless we study carefully both grammar and lexicon.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bloomfield: _loc. cit._, p. 195.]

There are, in general, three kinds of changes that take place
in a language. "Phonetic" changes, that is, changes in the
articulation of words, regardless of the meaning they bear.
This is illustrated simply by the word "name" which, in the
eighteenth century was pronounced ne'm. " Analogic"
changes, that is, changes in the articulation of words under
the influence of words somewhat similar in meaning. The
word "flash," for example, became what it is because of the
sound of words associated in meaning, "crash," "dash,"
"smash." The third process of change in language alters
not only the articulate forms of words, not only their sound,
but their sense. All these changes, as will be presently pointed
out, can easily be explained by the laws of habit early discussed
in this book, these laws being applicable to the habit of
language as well as to any other.

In the case of phonetic change, it is only to be expected that
the sounds of a language will not remain eternally changeless.
A language is spoken by a large number of individuals, no
two of whom are gifted with precisely the same vocal apparatus.
In consequence no two of them will utter words in
precisely the same way. Before writing and printing were
general, these slight variations in articulation were bound to
have an effect on the language. People more or less unconsciously
imitate the sounds they hear, especially if they are
not checked up by the written forms of words. Even to-day
changes are going on, and writing is at best a poor representation
of phonetics. The Georgian, the Londoner, the Welshman
and the Middle Westerner can understand the same
printed language, precisely because it does not at all represent
their peculiarities of dialect. Variant sounds uttered by one
individual may be caught up in the language, especially if the
variant articulation is simpler or shorter. Thus the shortening
of a word from several syllables to one, though it starts
accidental