During my stay in Ethiopia in 1946–47 I had occasion to investigate various argots, including those of merchants, of minstrels, and of the people possessed by the spirit called zar. The present article will deal with the merchants' argot. There is no unified merchant argot all over Ethiopia, not even among speakers of the same language. The argot under consideration is spoken by the merchants of Moţa, to the north of Debre Markos, the capital of Godjam; it is called kəlaməñña (see §3). A superficial investigation of the argot of the merchants of Gondar, the capital of Begemder, north of Godjam, convinced me that the two argots are quite different. It would be of particular importance to investigate the argot of the merchants of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, which is the meeting-point for merchants of the various populations of the country.

In evaluating possible analyses of phonemic systems within a distinctive feature framework, the average number of bits per phoneme is often taken as a measure of economy. Alternative solutions can be compared with regard to their deviation from the optimal binary feature specification of n phonemes expressed by the formula log2 n. That such a scale of economy cannot serve to evaluate phonological systems which are integrated into the total grammar of a language has been recognized in principle (Halle 1959:29–30, 45), but is not always considered in practice.

[1. Ir. āsaim (NIr. fāsaim) ‘grow’ : Goth, wahsjan, etc. 2. W blin ‘tired’ < IE *mlēno- or *mlīno- from the root *mel- ‘rub, grind’. 3. Ir. breo ‘flame’ : OE brīwan, brīw, etc. 4. W brig‘top, crest’ : Grk. . 5. Ir. bun, W bon ‘bottom’ from the root *bhen- ‘strike’ in Goth, banja, etc. 6. W clwyf ‘ wound, disease’ : Skt. klībá-. 7. Ir. crēcht ‘wound’ : MLG schrā, ON skrā, etc. 8. Ir. fennaim ‘flay’ : Skt. pari-vās-, etc. 9. Ir. gāba ‘danger’ : Russ, zabóta, OE cēpan. 10. W gosod ‘put’ derived from the root *st(h)ā- ‘stand’. 11. W hawdd ‘easy’, gwahodd ‘invite’ : Skt. sādhú-. 12. W hogen ‘girl’ from the root *seu-q- ‘suck’. 13. Br. miz ‘expense’ from OFr. mise. 14. Br. piz ‘stingy’ semantic borrowing from Fr. chiche. 15. On Ir. serrach ‘foal’. 16. W tor ‘tear’ : Lith. tárpas, etc. 17. W trwch ‘ broken, maimed’ : Lith. trúkti.]

The American anthropologists who have been linguistic scholars as well—I would mention Boas, Sapir, and, last but not least, Alfred L. Kroeber, whom we delight to honor in this issue of Language—have been catholic in their approaches to linguistics. Descriptive linguistics on this continent owes a tremendous amount to these men. But none of them has ignored historical problems, and in their various ways and even with radically different points of view on subjects which were open to dispute, they have contributed much to both detailed genetic problems, especially of the North American continent, and to the discussion of certain general questions. One of the latter is a problem that arises again and again in any region of the world where the linguistic picture is complicated, and it is particularly fitting, as will appear, if I attempt to add something to it as an offering to Kroeber.

Students of infants and of language have long wondered over the fact that a structure of such enormous formal complexity as language is so readily learned by organisms whose available intellectual resources appear in other respects quite limited. While a certain amount of work has been done on phonological development, and there has been much speculation about the acquisition of ‘meanings’, development at the morphological and syntactic levels has been relatively little studied. Yet it is perhaps the development at these levels that is the most striking and puzzling.

Frisk, GEW s.v. hézomai, states: 'Der Aorist heîsa, hês(s)ai aus idg. *e-sed-s-ṃ (mit sekundärer Aspiration), *sed-sai stimmt zum aind. Konj. ní … ṣátsat “er möge sich niederlassen” (RV 10,53,1).' This view is also found, for example, in Brugmann, Grdr. 2.2.1172 (§812), and in Brugmann-Thumb, Griech. Gramm. 362. To be sure, Gk. heîsa is not generally considered a PIE inheritance. Meillet, Mélanges de Saussure 86, says of Brugmann's list of PIE sigmatic aorists: '… la plupart des exemples sont dépourvues de toute valeur probante pour établir l'existence indo-européenne de telle ou telle forme.' Specht, KZ 62.50–1 (1934–5), considers heîsa a Greek innovation, and Schwyzer 1.755–6 lists it among such aorists as éstēsa 'set', ébēsa ‘brought’, which are clearly secondary when compared to the intransitive root aorists éstēn, ébēn; cf. Meillet, loc.cit, 94, None of these authors, however, directly considers Skt. sátsat in his discussion of heîsa. Since, moreover, the comparison of these two forms as the basis for a PIE sigmatic aorist of *sed is accepted in what is now the standard etymological dictionary of Greek, it seems worthwhile to summarize briefly and more explicitly than has previously been done the evidence against this equation. I do this as a preliminary to demonstrating that sátsat is clearly an independent creation of Indic.