After these various examples, no one would venture
to assert that the labials b and p are not a hardening
of the 1), which itself is issued from the vowel ou,
and that the gutturals and their aspirates are not



Indo-European Phonetics. 375

the result of the effort made to vary or to utter the
sound V ; this effort would have produced at first a
confused sound, gradually growing more precise as the
friction of agglutination obliterated the semi-vowel.
This is perhaps more than a hypothesis. In any case,
these considerations will not appear out of place in a
philosophical study of language and the formation of
sounds. They seem to grasp those physiological causes,
so long ignored, of the deviations which concealed from
the Latins, Persians, and Teutons the fundamental
identity of their vocabularies.
