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In the Athabaskan group many verbs change the quality or quantity of the vowel of the radical element as it changes its tense or mode. In another Indian language, Yokuts , vocalic modifications affect both noun and verb forms. Consonantal change as a functional process is probably far less common than vocalic modifications, but it is not exactly rare.
Some of these grammatical processes, like suffixing, are exceedingly wide-spread; others, like vocalic change, are less common but far from rare; still others, like accent and consonantal change, are somewhat exceptional as functional processes. Not all languages are as irregular as English in the assignment of functions to its stock of grammatical processes.
A peculiarly interesting type of infixation is found in the Siouan languages, in which certain verbs insert the pronominal elements into the very body of the radical element, e.g., Sioux cheti "to build a fire," chewati "I build a fire"; shuta "to miss," shuunta-pi "we miss." A subsidiary but by no means unimportant grammatical process is that of internal vocalic or consonantal change.
Teaching adults to read a strange tongue is hard work; I have little doubt but that the Bishop is right in saying they must be taught English; but it is so very difficult a language, not spelt a bit as pronounced; and their language is all vocalic and so easy to put into writing.
Strikingly similar to English and Greek alternations of the type sing sang and leip-o "I leave," leloip-a "I have left," are such Somali cases as al "I am," il "I was"; i-dah-a "I say," i-di "I said," deh "say!" Vocalic change is of great significance also in a number of American Indian languages.
Absolute ignorance of that language, except the brief mention in my father's communications, received by myself from that body whose publication before I die is the sole purpose of this manuscript make it quite certain that it is in the main a vowel language, consisting of short vocalic syllables.
The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutterals and vocalic syllables, like the endings ën, ës, ë, which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together. Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary weakness of his time.
If we are actually justified in assuming that the expression of all syntactic relations is ultimately traceable to these two unavoidable, dynamic features of speech sequence and stress an interesting thesis results: All of the actual content of speech, its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in origin limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and rhythm.
Only when this reassortment of forms took place was the modern symbolic value of the foot: feet alternation clearly established. All this seems to point to the purely mechanical nature of the modification of o to ö to e. So many unrelated functions were ultimately served by the vocalic change that we cannot believe that it was motivated by any one of them. The German facts are entirely analogous.
'You have a quick observation, Captain Waverley, which in this instance has not deceived you. The Gaelic language, being uncommonly vocalic, is well adapted for sudden and extemporaneous poetry; and a bard seldom fails to augment the effects of a premeditated song by throwing in any stanzas which may be suggested by the circumstances attending the recitation.
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