[14] In numerous papers in North Am. Review and elsewhere, and finally in the pamphlet Max Müller and the Science of Language, a Criticism (New York, 1892). Müller’s reply to the earlier attacks is found in Chips from a German Workshop, vol. iv.
[15] Who was the discoverer of the palatal law? This has been hotly discussed, and as the law was in so far anticipated by other discoveries of the ’seventies as to be “in the air,” it is perhaps futile to try to fix the paternity on any single man. However, it seems now perfectly clear that Vilhelm Thomsen was the first to mention it in his lectures (1875), but unfortunately the full and able paper in which he intended to lay it before the world was delayed for a couple of years and then kept in his drawers when he heard that Johannes Schmidt was preparing a paper on the same subject: it was printed in 1920 in the second volume of his Samlede Afhandlinger (from the original manuscript). Esaias Tegnér had found the law independently and had printed five sheets of a book De ariska språkens palataler, which he withdrew when he found that Collitz and de Saussure had expressed similar views. Karl Verner, too, had independently arrived at the same results; see his Afhandlinger og Breve, 109 ff., 305.
[16] “Es ist besser, bei solchen versuchen zu irren als gar nicht darüber nachzudenken,” Curtius, K 145.
[17] In this book the age of a child is indicated by stating the number of years and months completed: 1.6 thus means “in the seventh month of the second year,” etc.
[18] An American child said autonobile [ɔtənobi·l] with partial assimilation of m to the point-stop t.
[19] Cf. Beach-la-Mar, below, Ch. XII § 1.
[20] Cf. below on the disappearance of the word son because it sounds like sun (Ch. XV. § [7]).
[21] Cf. the fuller treatment of this question in GS ch. ix.
[22] H. G. Wells writes (Soul of a Bishop, 94): “He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely above the threshold of his conscious thought.” Here we see the wrong interpretation of the preposition over dragging with it the synonym above.