¹ This word has, of course, nothing to do here with “place of articulation.” One may feel, for instance, that sound A is to sound B as sound X is to sound Y without having the remotest idea how and where any of them is produced.

² If B ever develops an orthography, it is likely to fall into the habit of writing az for the pronounced as in cases of type az-a: as, but as in cases of type as-a: as. Philologists not convinced of the reality of phonetic patterns as here conceived will then be able to “prove” from internal evidence that the change of etymological v, z, δ, γ to -f, -s, -θ, -x did not take place until after the language was reduced to writing, because otherwise it would be “impossible” to explain why -s should be written -z when there was a sign for s ready to hand and why signs should not have come into use for f, θ, and x. As soon as one realizes, however, that “ideal sounds,” which are constructed from one's intuitive feeling of the significant relations between the objective sounds, are more “real” to a naive speaker than the objective sounds themselves, such internal evidence loses much of its force. The example of s in B was purposely chosen to illustrate an interesting phenomenon, the crossing in a single objective phoneme of a true element of the phonetic pattern with a secondary form of another such element. In B, e.g., objective s is a pool of cases of “true s” and “pseudo-s.” Many interesting and subtle examples could be given of psychological difference where there is objective identity, or similarity so close as to be interpreted by the recorder as identity. In Sarcee, an Athabaskan language with significant pitch differences, there is a true middle tone and a pseudo-middle tone which results from the lowering of a high tone to the middle position because of certain mechanical rules of tone sandhi. I doubt very much if the intuitive psychology of these two middle tones is the same. There are, of course, analogous traps for the unwary in Chinese. Had not the Chinese kindly formalized for us their intuitive feeling about the essential tone analysis of their language, it is exceedingly doubtful if our Occidental ears and kymographs would have succeeded in discovering the exact patterning of Chinese tone.

³ As in French jour.

⁴ Bilabial v, as in Spanish.

⁵ As in German ich.

⁶ Incidentally, if our theory is correct, such a form as singer betrays an unconscious analysis into a word of absolute significance sing and a semi-independent agentive element -er, which is appended not to a stem, an abstracted radical element, but to a true word. Hence sing: singer is not psychologically analogous to such Latin forms as can-: can-tor. It would almost seem that the English insistence on the absoluteness of its significant words tended at the same time to give many of its derivative suffixes a secondary, revitalized reality, -er, for instance, might almost be construed as a “word” which occurs only as the second element of a compound, cf. -man in words like longshoreman. As Prof. L. Bloomfield points out to me, the agentive -er contrasts with the comparative -er, which allows the adjective to keep its radical form in -ηg- (e.g., long with -η: longer with -ηg-).

⁷ B, D, G represent intermediate stops, “tonlose Medien.” In this series they are followed by aspiration.

⁸ The slight objective differences between English and Spanish θ and δ are of course not great enough to force a different patterning. Such a view would be putting the cart before the horse.

⁹ Obviously we need not expect -ts and -tš to develop analogously even if s and s do.

¹⁰ Needless to say, such records are in place in studies explicitly devoted to experimental phonetics.