ABSTRACT
Descriptive and Historical Linguistics. THERE are two ways of treating linguistic phenomena which may be called the descriptive and the historical. They correspond to what in physics are called statics and dynamics (or kinetics) and differ in that the one views phenomena as being in equilibrium, and the other views them as being in motion. It is the pride of the linguistic science of the last hundred years or so that it has superseded older methods by historical grammar, in which phenomena are not only described, but explained, and it cannot be denied that the new point of view, by showing the inter-connexion of grammatical phenomena previously isolated, has obtained many new and important results. "'here formerly we saw only arbitrary rules and inexplicable exceptions, we now in very many cases see the reasons. The plural feet from foot was formerly only mentioned as one of a few exceptions to the rule that plurals in English substantives were formed in -8: now we know that the long [i·] of the plw'11 is the regular development of Proto-English [ce·], and that this [ce·], wherever it was found, through [e·] (still represented in the E spelling) became [i·] in Present English (cp. feed, green, 8weet, etc.). Further, the [ce·] of fad has been shown to be a mutation of the original vowel [0·], which was preserved in the singular fo·t, where it has now through a regular raising become [u] in the spoken language, though the spelling still keeps 00. The mutation in question was caused by an i in the following syllable; now the ending in a number of plurals was -iz in Proto-Gothonic (urgermanisch). Finally this ending, which was dropped after leaving a trace in the mutated vowel, is seen to be the regular development of the plural ending found, for instance, in Latin -€B. Accordingly what from the one-sided (static) Modern English point of view is an isolated fact, is seen to be (dynamically) related to a great number of other facts in the older stages of the same language and in other languages of the same family. Irregularities in one stage are in many instances recognized as survivals of regularities
