Glottochronology makes certain general statements about historical processes in linguistics and sets up mathematical models which are declared to correspond to the processes. These models are presented in the form of algebraic equations. Numerical data are then collected from particular historical situations and put into the equations, whence numerical results are derived which are then converted into specific historical statements. It is the thesis of the present paper that the mathematical models which these equations represent do not correspond sufficiently to the general statements, that they are therefore inadequate models, and that the results obtained by using them are unreliable in proportion as the models are defective.

The guttural initials generally accepted as proposed by Bernhard Karlgren for archaic Chinese are six: k kh g gh ng h, where h represents aspiration. In the evolution from the archaic of about 800 b.c. to the ancient Chinese of about 600 a.d., four of these are believed to remain unchanged. For the other two the accepted statement is the following:

Unaspirated g, which existed only before y, was yodicized through the influence of the latter: *gywang became jywang (j is yod, of Engl. yes). Aspirated gh, which was preserved unaltered before y, changed into fricative γ before other vowels.

In the year 301 A. D., the Emperor Diocletian issued an elaborate edict fixing maximum prices for all salable articles and for personal services. The Edict was nominally to apply to the whole empire; but the various fragments of copies which have been found have all been discovered in the eastern quarter of the empire, which was under the special administration of Diocletian, and the Edict seems therefore to have been intended only for that portion.

During the past five years it has become clear that phrase structure rules and transformations provide a grossly inadequate characterization of the notion ‘rule of grammar.’ The problem is this: phrase structure rules and transformations are local; they define well-formedness conditions on individual phrase-markers and on pairs of successive phrase-markers. However, certain rules of grammar are global in nature; they extend over entire derivations, or parts of derivations, and cannot be stated in full generality (if at all) by local operations. I have proposed that rules of grammar be considered as well-formedness conditions on derivations (or ‘derivational constraints’). In the most general case, rules of grammar will be global in nature. Phrase structure rules and transformations turn out to be special cases of derivational constraints. From the point of view of linguistic description, the theory of derivational constraints is as much an innovation over transformational grammar as transformational grammar was over phrase structure grammar. In this paper a few of the phenomena that require the postulation of global derivational constraints will be considered. Some of these are purely syntactic in nature; others involve the interaction of syntax and phonology. The cases that involve the interaction of syntax and semantic representations are not considered here, nor is the formal characterization of such constraints included.

This idiom was explained by Zimmer as a preterite passive (passé indéfini) which secondarily acquired active meaning. He confined his investigation to the spoken dialects and appears to have been misled by French grammatical categories. In fact the meaning is present and active, and the phrase is a blend of two uses of the verb ‘to be’ which date from the Old Irish period. It may be as early as the 13th century.

In comparative Germanic grammar it is conventionally assumed that IE e eu became respectively PGc. i iu when a high front vowel or glide (i ī j) occurred in the following syllable. Apart from differences of opinion regarding the manner in which this development took place, the grammars show very little disagreement on the subject. Nearly all assign the change to Proto-Germanic (or at least pre-Gothic) times, although Schulze in particular has noted an apparent lack of umlaut in early runic inscriptions and foreign spellings of Germanic names. It is also a conventional assumption that IE i u became respectively PGc. e o when a low or mid vowel () occurred originally in the next syllable, provided that neither i ī j nor a cluster of nasal plus consonant intervened. In this instance, however, some scholars have doubted that the change took place in Proto-Germanic times.

Though considerations of meaning in linguistics can be replaced, up to a point, by rigorous structural procedures, i.e. procedures involving solely the kinds and order of the elements of the language under investigation, they cannot be replaced by distributional procedures, despite the claim recently made by Harris. Distributional procedures may be sufficient to establish the rules by which all longer expressions (especially sentences) can be constructed out of the elements, but they are inadequate for the establishment of certain other rules that would mirror the so-called logical properties and relations of sentences and other expressions.