Linguistic Change

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. This little book, which has grown out of lectures to students beginning their scientific study of language, is primarily intended as a textbook for similar introduc tory courses. It is hoped, however, that it will appeal to a wider public, and consequently technical terms and symbols that are not familiar to all educated people have been eliminated as far as possible. Some readers will be offended at the lack of any exact system of phonetic notation; but such a notation would have required a long explanation, which some readers would have skipped, and which would have caused others to lay the book aside. N 0 real ambiguity seems to result from our attempt to use ordinary symbols and terms in their familiar values.