206 The Loom of Language rion of suffixes. Its oldest Aryan manifestation., called Ablaut by Ger- man grammarians, is most characteristic of the verb We have met with examples in the strong class which includes wwm, come^find., ut Ablaut is common in Sanskrit (matum^ to measure—mita^ measured)^ and in Greek (trepo> I turn—tetropha, I have turned), but much less so in Latin To-day it is most strongly entrenched m the Teutonic group Several types of root vowel change are particulaily characteristic of Teutonic, especially German, verbs One is die existence of pairs of which one member is intransitive (cannot have an object), the other transitive in a caumtwe sense We still have a lew such pairs in English, e.g /#//-/< $it-sct Thus we fall down (wtrans*), but we/0// a tree (i e cause it to full) We he down, but we lay (caiuc to he) a book on the table We nt down, but we w/ (cause to sit) a flag on a pole. Umlaut is the technical word for a type of root inflexion peculiar to the Teutonic group It is specially characteristic of the noun, and is illustrated by die English plurals man~mcn> foot-feet Such pairs origin* ally had a plural suffix containing the i or j (p 84) sound, which modified the vowels a, o> u in the stem itself. Thus we get Old High Geiman gwt-getti (mod Geina Oast-Gastc). Ihe process began first m English, and was aheady complete m documents of the eighth cen- tury Alfred's English had/^-/t'/, wuwnvs (pronounce the jy like the u of French or the u oi German) In the language ol Shakespeare they appear as/w^/it, and WHWA-WCVS Old English had other pairs which have since disappeared. Thus the plural of boc? our book (German Buck) waO