¹ I hope, also, to help dispose of the notion that the usual processes of linguistic change are suspended on the American continent (Meillet and Cohen, Les langues du monde, Paris 1924, p. 9). If there exists anywhere a language in which these processes do not occur (sound-change independent of meaning, analogic change, etc.), then they will not explain the history of Indo-European or of any other language. A principle such as the regularity of phonetic change is not part of the specific tradition handed on to each new speaker of a given language, but is either a universal trait of human speech or nothing at all, an error.