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Updated: June 15, 2025
These particular variations won through because they so beautifully allowed the general phonetic drift to take its course without unsettling the morphological contours of the language. All these factors were equally true of the German vocalic shift. Nor did it. And this is to my mind a highly significant fact.
"The people about me seemed all young, or scarcely more than, as we say, in middle life. They speak less than the earth folk, and when they speak they utter very simple sentences, and seem very sincere. I often stood by little groups gathered at the corners of cross streets, and listened to their musical intonations. The language is vocalic and monosyllabic.
All in all it is clear that pitch accent, like stress and vocalic or consonantal modifications, is far less infrequently employed as a grammatical process than our own habits of speech would prepare us to believe probable. We have seen that the single word expresses either a simple concept or a combination of concepts so interrelated as to form a psychological unity.
It does not matter that in such a case as the English goose geese, foul defile, sing sang sung we can prove that we are dealing with historically distinct processes, that the vocalic alternation of sing and sang, for instance, is centuries older as a specific type of grammatical process than the outwardly parallel one of goose and geese.
Only later in the history of the language was the vocalic alternation made significant for number. And yet consider the following facts. The change of foti to föti antedated that of föti to föte, föt.
The relations of grammar are thus expressed for the most part by changes of vocalic sound, just as in English the plural of "man" is denoted by a change in the vowel. The verb is but imperfectly developed; it is, in fact, rather a noun than a verb, expressing relation rather than time.
At any rate, the process is alive enough to lead our children into untrodden ways. We all know of the growing youngster who speaks of having brung something, on the analogy of such forms as sung and flung. In Hebrew, as we have seen, vocalic change is of even greater significance than in English. What is true of Hebrew is of course true of all other Semitic languages.
I talked to him just to hear my own voice and his in response, to realize if words were still words with the old meaning, if the intangible mutation I had undergone was a reality, if I was indeed alive, if my lungs and throat, the configuration of my mouth, the vocalic impact of the air, was a fact, a sound, a meaning, or whether it all was some phantasmagoria, beautiful and fair indeed, to be dispelled with a shock of annihilation.
It has all the vocalic syllables and endings it needs for softness, and incloses them mostly in consonants for condensation, vigor, and emphasis. Primarily the translator has to consider the resources and individualities of his own tongue.
The chief difficulty in isolating accent as a functional process is that it is so often combined with alternations in vocalic quantity or quality or complicated by the presence of affixed elements that its grammatical value appears as a secondary rather than as a primary feature.
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