[ Footnote 153: ] At least in America.
[ Footnote 154: ] It is possible that other than purely phonetic factors are also at work in the history of these vowels.
[ Footnote 155: ] The orthography is roughly phonetic. Pronounce all accented vowels long except where otherwise indicated, unaccented vowels short; give continental values to vowels, not present English ones.
[ Footnote 156: ] After I. the numbers are not meant to correspond chronologically to those of the English table. The orthography is again roughly phonetic.
[ Footnote 157: ] I use ss to indicate a peculiar long, voiceless s-sound that was etymologically and phonetically distinct from the old Germanic s. It always goes back to an old t. In the old sources it is generally written as a variant of z, though it is not to be confused with the modern German z (= ts). It was probably a dental (lisped) s.
[ Footnote 158: ] Z is to be understood as French or English z, not in its German use. Strictly speaking, this “z” (intervocalic -s-) was not voiced but was a soft voiceless sound, a sibilant intermediate between our s and z. In modern North German it has become voiced to z. It is important not to confound this s—z with the voiceless intervocalic s that soon arose from the older lisped ss. In Modern German (aside from certain dialects), old s and ss are not now differentiated when final (Maus and Fuss have identical sibilants), but can still be distinguished as voiced and voiceless s between vowels (Mäuse and Füsse).
[ Footnote 159: ] In practice phonetic laws have their exceptions, but more intensive study almost invariably shows that these exceptions are more apparent than real. They are generally due to the disturbing influence of morphological groupings or to special psychological reasons which inhibit the normal progress of the phonetic drift. It is remarkable with how few exceptions one need operate in linguistic history, aside from “analogical leveling” (morphological replacement).
[ Footnote 160: ] These confusions are more theoretical than real, however. A language has countless methods of avoiding practical ambiguities.
[ Footnote 161: ] A type of adjustment generally referred to as “analogical leveling.”
[ 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.