[Doubled consonant symbols in Hurrian syllabic writing indicate two different qualities: in certain cases voicelessness (as in Hittite), in other cases actual length. See the summary at the end of the article.]

The current definition of bebeodan is ‘to command’, of forbeodan ‘to forbid’.

There are two cases, however, where bebeodan translates Latin prohibere:

(1) In a manuscript of the eighth century, in the Old High German Glosses published by Steinmeyer and Sievers 1.26.9:

Arcentibus prohibentibus pipeotantem piuuariantem

(2) In the Old English version of the Benedictine Rule of the third decade of the eleventh century:

EETS 90.62.10:

from pam him pe beoϑbeboden he ne a quibus eum proibuerit non gedyrstlrece presumat

After serving for a few centuries in the several Romanic languages as an indeterminate pronoun, homo disappeared from general use in all except French. The present study, in supplementing the limited discussion of grammarians, briefly reviews the history and the use of this pronoun in Italian and deals mainly with the causes that led to its desuetude.

To account for the rise of the pronominal function of uomo, Meyer-Lübke suggests French influence. But the general occurrence in Romance of homo with the value of an indefinite pronoun points rather conclusively to an antecedent development in Latin. Examination of the proper Latin authors reveals that homo was actually employed with pronominal force, and there is consequently little necessity of attributing the rise of this use of uomo to foreign influence.

Uomo (<homo), like French on, was in origin a masculine substantive in the nominative case. We shall see to what extent these characteristic traits were preserved.

It is well known that the earliest and probably best descriptive grammar in existence is the Sanskrit grammar of Pāṇini (?350 b.c.). The subject of the following essay is Pāṇini's phonological analysis of the Sanskrit consonants. This illustrates some of the more important techniques used by Pāṇini and his colleagues. It also enables us to reconstruct some of the methods by means of which Pāṇini constructed his grammar.

Whatever our interpretation of the exact nature of the language of Latin documents and inscriptions of the centuries preceding the emergence of written Romance may be, there seems little doubt that the deviations from Classical or standard Latin which are found in these written materials are due to interference coming from the speech of their writers. Thus, ever since Diez and Schuchardt, Romanists have turned to the mistakes found in Vulgar Latin writings in order to find corroborating evidence for developments which took place in spoken Romance. Recent studies have shown that the mistakes made by the Late Latin writers and scribes follow consistent patterns which reveal the developments and even the underlying dialectal trends of their speech. The real problem of interpreting Late Latin documents and perhaps the real crux of the controversy connected with those documents is, strangely enough, not the interpretation of consistent deviations from Classical standards, but the evaluation of patterns of consistent conformity with that standard.