Excerpt from A Short Comparative Grammar of English and German: As Traced Back to Their Common Origin and Contrasted With the Classical Languages The French edition of this work, published in November, 1893 (Paris, Hachette), was reviewed shortly afterwards in the, Academy (no. 1131), in so friendly and sympathetic a spirit that I feel bound to express my gratitude to the anonymous critic, both for the valuable suggestions he made, and for the praise he gave to my book. Of the former I have, as he will perceive, availed myself as far as possible, and have deferred to his opinion in almost every case. There is, however, one point on which he appears to have misjudged me ; he evidently missed the note on page 23 (p. 21 of this translation), and was therefore led to suppose that I had stated as a fact that an r-vowel actually existed in English. The confusion is only apparent; for the sake of brevity I thought it advisable not to separate the English final r from the other English and from the German final liquids and nasals, but at the same time I reminded my French readers that the r in this position had become an untrilled vowel, and I referred them for further details to a subsequent section. And I am still inclined to believe this course the best for my purpose, especially when we take into consideration the fact, of which there is hardly any doubt, that as recently as two centuries ago the r was no less trilled in mother than it is at the present day in raven. A few words are necessary in regard to the terminology adopted in this work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.