In a recent article in Language, Charles F. Hockett has presented an analysis of the stressed syllabics of the Vespasian Psalter and Hymns. Hockett opposes the traditional view which interprets ea, eo, io, and ie as short diphthongs, and offers a solution of his own which within the limitations of one MS is in part convincing. In general, he equates each vowel letter or digraph with a phoneme. In agreement with us, with Mossé, and with Daunt, but in contradiction of the established tradition, he regards the digraphs ea, eo, io, and ie as spellings for monophthongs; he believes, however, that these short digraphs represent separate short vowel phonemes; we believe that in early OE they represented allophones of the front vowels /i/, /e/, and /æ/; we believe that eo, io, and ie represented allophones only in the earlier period. These allophones later became phonemes, whereas the allophone represented by ea did not. Hockett's speculations about the motivations of the scribes who first selected these particular digraphs in these particular values are appealing. Especially ingenious is his theory about the origin of the letter y in OE, which he considers to have been originally a digraph (591–4).

The syntactically definable category of proper nouns is only a subclass of the orthographically definable class. Many capitalized nouns, e.g. Kodak and Purex, are not members of the syntactically definable class. Further, the syntactic proper nouns are a subclass of the countable nouns of English. Proper nouns permit the selection of essentially the same set of determiners as other countable nouns, differing materially only in that they require a zero allomorph of unstressed the when singular and when not preceded by a restrictive adjective or followed by a restrictive relative clause. Proper nouns, like other countable nouns, are freely pluralizable. Allowing free selection of determiners and numbers with proper nouns obviously simplifies the statement of selectional restrictions with regard to determiners, numbers, and nouns, and at the same time simplifies the statement of the selectional restrictions that hold between a noun phrase and its appositive noun phrase. These syntactic gains are not dissipated in semantic losses. Allowing free selection does not permit the generation of semantic anomalies. Determiner plus proper noun constructions are not semantically peculiar. Grimm means the same thing in Grimm wrote the book as in The famous Grimm wrote the book; thus it seems pointless to conclude that Grimm is being ‘used as’ a common noun in the latter.

In Vedic Sanskrit about 150 forms in -si, formed from 23 roots, are used as imperatives of the 2nd singular. Among the most frequent in the Rigveda are yakṣi ‘sacrifice’ (34 times), vakṣi ‘carry, bring’ (25 times), parṣi ‘bring across’ (16 times), neṣi ‘lead’ (10 times), darṣi ‘pierce’ (10 times), satṣi (10 times), rāsi ‘bestow’ (8 times). Until quite recently the position of these forms within the Vedic verbal system has usually been left undecided. In 1955 Burrow merely noted that their ‘termination is identical with that of the 2 sg. indic, pres., but these indicatives are quite clearly distinguished because the presents are differently formed’. Three years earlier, Renou expressed the view that the type in question was ‘une formation autonome, où une ancienne désinence -s a pu être prolongée par un i déictique’. The decisive advance, alluded to above, is due to the recent work of Johanna Narten, but especially to George Cardona's excellent paper published only a year ago. Whereas Narten still insisted that the formation was ‘bildungsmässig ausserhalb des Tempussystems stehend’ (39), although she admitted that in several cases the imperative in -si ‘im vedischen Sprachgefühl wohl zum s- Aorist gerechnet [wurde]‘ (45), Cardona cogently showed that the -si imperative was not only part of the s-aorist system but was most closely linked with the s-aorist subjunctive.

Antoine Thomas first suggested in 1896 that Fr. lingue ‘ling, Lota molva (a fish)’ is of Germanic origin. His discussion of the word, published first in Romania and repeated shortly thereafter in Thomas’ Essais de philologie française, was a sober, concise, but thorough treatment which included all pertinent evidence that has been published on the subject. Later discussions have added nothing. They have either repeated fragments of the evidence cited by Thomas, usually omitting portions of the remainder which tended to balance those they used, or have adduced material which is irrelevant. Virtually nothing will be added here but evidence which would be irrelevant were it not necessary to refute erroneous proposals made later. Thomas' cautious conclusions were hardly more specific than indicated above. He stated that the French word must have been borrowed from Germanic, but could have been taken from English, Flemish, Dutch, or one of the Scandinavian languages. This proposal is clearly preferable to the only explanation previously suggested, derivation from Lat. lingua ‘tongue’ because of the physical appearance of the fish; as far as it goes, it has apparently been accepted without question. The subsequent history of the etymology, however, has been one of confusion and inaccuracy, with the result that its present state constitutes a regression from that at the time of Thomas' article.