Excerpt from Linguistic Change: An Introduction to the Historical Study of Language 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.