[ Footnote 143: ] They: them as an inanimate group may be looked upon as a kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more properly belongs.
[ Footnote 144: ] See [page 155].
[ Footnote 145: ] I have changed the Old and Middle High German orthography slightly in order to bring it into accord with modern usage. These purely orthographical changes are immaterial. The u of mus is a long vowel, very nearly like the oo of English moose.
[ Footnote 146: ] The vowels of these four words are long; o as in rode, e like a of fade, u like oo of brood, y like German ü.
[ Footnote 147: ] Or rather stage in a drift.
[ Footnote 148: ] Anglo-Saxon fet is “unrounded” from an older föt, which is phonetically related to fot precisely as is mys (i.e., müs) to mus. Middle High German ue (Modern German u) did not develop from an “umlauted” prototype of Old High German uo and Anglo-Saxon o, but was based directly on the dialectic uo. The unaffected prototype was long o. Had this been affected in the earliest Germanic or West-Germanic period, we should have had a pre-German alternation fot: föti; this older ö could not well have resulted in ue. Fortunately we do not need inferential evidence in this case, yet inferential comparative methods, if handled with care, may be exceedingly useful. They are indeed indispensable to the historian of language.
[ Footnote 149: ] See [page 133].
[ Footnote 150: ] Primitive Germanic fot(s), fotiz, mus, musiz; Indo-European pods, podes, mus, muses. The vowels of the first syllables are all long.
[ Footnote 151: ] Or in that unconscious sound patterning which is ever on the point of becoming conscious. See [page 57].
[ Footnote 152: ] As have most Dutch and German dialects.