Students of language have in general placed primary emphasis upon the generating mechanisms of speech. For example, it is common to classify the sounds of speech in physiological terms; phonetic tables and charts usually show organic position or mechanism in one dimension and method of production in the other. There has also been considerable interest in the acoustical effects or results of speech production. Von Kempelen was among the first to promote a serious interest in this subject, with a volume published in 1791. The literature on the subject is far more distinguished and extensive than most linguists realize; but it cannot compare with the much more voluminous literature on physiological phonetics and voice production. Within the past ten years, great impetus has been given to the study of acoustic phonetics by developments in electro-acoustical instrumentation and by the new, important, and challenging problems which have come upon the field of communication engineering.

My purpose in speaking of the attributive participle as ‘identifying’ has been to avoid the term ‘defining’, which applies to most but not all of the examples. There are some attributive participles that perform a different function, which I have called ‘characterizing’. In the standard grammars, the two types are not, as a rule, distinguished.1

ORTHOGRAPHY. The orthography of Marshallese was devised by American Protestant missionaries in the middle of the last century. The Bible has been translated into Marshallese and written in what we refer to as the Bible spelling. If the Marshallese were good spellers, the Bible spelling would probably be as hallowed in practice as in theory. As it is, many valuable clues to phonemic facts in Marshallese have been derived from variant spellings. The linguist loveth a cheerful misspelled

[Reconstruction by the comparative method (as distinct from internal reconstruction based on alternations between phonemes in a paradigm) is essentially a problem in phonemics, in which the place of allophones is taken by sets of sound correspondences that are partially alike (share one component) and in complementary distribution. The principle is illustrated by the IE dental and labial stops as reconstructed from Sanskrit and Germanic, by IE *s in Greek and Latin, and by the IE aspirates in Italic]

In 1955, in a review of the Trager-Smith Outline of English structure, I made a first attempt at phonemicizing an old-fashioned dialect of Atlanta, Georgia, which did not seem to fit the overall pattern of nine vowels and three semivowels that Trager and Smith had proposed. Further discussion followed at the First Texas Conference in 1956, where the arguments for a tenth vowel were strengthened by Raven I. McDavid and Sumner Ives; but even the rebellious, at that time, were still working within the Smith and Trager framework, and when their arguments were published in the proceedings of the Conference, they suffered because the secretary who transcribed them had been unable to cope with so many different dialects and because proof-reading had been peccable. A tentative report on the Conference to the 1956 Linguistic Institute at Ann Arbor was received with benevolent amusement, and ensuing debates with myself and Hans Kurath appeared in later numbers of Language and in my Short introduction to English grammar.

In my article on aspect in Gothic (AG), Lg. 30.211-23 (1954), I restricted my investigation to the aspectual nondistinctiveness of the derivational form alone (AG §1.1). In this study I shall also seek to show that there was in the Old High German of Tatian (OHG-T) no direct correlation between derivational form and aspect. Going one step further, I shall demonstrate that this lack of correlation applied equally to the tense form. At the same time, I shall prove the close de pendence of aspect upon basic verbal meaning. Again as in AG, I shall employ a theory of aspect which differs somewhat from the prevailing view (§2.1), but which I shall here first contrast with the novel definition of aspect that Howard B. Garey proposes and brilliantly applies in a recent study (§2.2).3 I shall, further, in a brief discussion of the relation of tense to aspect, adopt and explicitly modify some of Garey's terminology (§2.3). As a last preliminary, I shall con sider the possible interrelations between aspect and form (§2.4).

The following alternative analyses of the Korean vowel system are compared: (1) By the view of traditional phonemics, we recognize nine vowels /i e ø ε ə a u o/, plus autonomous /w y/. (2) By distinctive feature analysis, regarding w and y as on-glide realization of features [+round] and [+palatal], we recognize nineteen vowels: i e ε i ə a u o, wi we (= φ) wε wa wə, ve vε və va vu vo. (3) By the view of generative phonology, we recognize four vowels—high , low a, mid rounded o, and mid unrounded ə—with w and y as on-glides, and with y as a fronting off-glide. (4) If we extend the analogy of off-glide y, and recognize a backing off-glide w, then we have three vowels, ə a, and two distributionally free glides, w and y. It is argued that alternative (3) gives us the truest and simplest picture, when considered in conjunction with morphophonemic phonomena, and especially in the light of the generality that several phonological rules gain by this analysis. It is hoped that this paper illustrates the possibility of choosing the ‘descriptively adequate’ solution from among several competing, non-unique, ‘observationally adequate’ solutions.