by one of the surface drifts of the language, to be swept aside in the Middle English period by the more powerful drift toward the use of simple distinctive forms.  It was too late in the day for our language to be seriously interested in such pretty symbolisms as foot:  feet.  What examples of the type arose legitimately, in other words via purely phonetic processes, were tolerated for a time, but the type as such never had a serious future.

It was different in German.  The whole series of phonetic changes comprised under the term “umlaut,” of which u:  ue and au:  oi (written aeu) are but specific examples, struck the German language at a time when the general drift to morphological simplification was not so strong but that the resulting formal types (e.g., Fuss:  Fuesse; fallen “to fall”:  faellen “to fell”; Horn “horn”:  Gehoerne “group of horns”; Haus “house”:  Haeuslein “little house”) could keep themselves intact and even extend to forms that did not legitimately come within their sphere of influence.  “Umlaut” is still a very live symbolic process in German, possibly more alive to-day than in medieval times.  Such analogical plurals as Baum “tree”:  Baeume (contrast Middle High German boum:  boume) and derivatives as lachen “to laugh”:  Gelaechter “laughter” (contrast Middle High German gelach) show that vocalic mutation has won through to the status of a productive morphologic process.  Some of the dialects have even gone further than standard German, at least in certain respects.  In Yiddish,[162] for instance, “umlaut” plurals have been formed where there are no Middle High German prototypes or modern literary parallels, e.g., tog “day”:  teg “days” (but German Tag:  Tage) on the analogy of gast “guest”:  gest “guests” (German Gast:  Gaeste), shuch[163] “shoe”:  shich “shoes” (but German Schuh:  Schuhe) on the analogy of fus “foot”:  fis “feet.”  It is possible that “umlaut” will run its course and cease to operate as a live functional process in German, but that time is still distant.  Meanwhile all consciousness of the merely phonetic nature of “umlaut” vanished centuries ago.  It is now a strictly morphological process, not in the least a mechanical phonetic adjustment.  We have in it a splendid example of how a simple phonetic law, meaningless in itself, may eventually color or transform large reaches of the morphology of a language.

[Footnote 162:  Isolated from other German dialects in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.  It is therefore a good test for gauging the strength of the tendency to “umlaut,” particularly as it has developed a strong drift towards analytic methods.]

[Footnote 163:  Ch as in German Buch.]