[IH ъA became IE ə. IH ъ? became Hitt. a; IH ъx became Hitt. aḫ(ḫ); IH ъγ became Hitt. aḫ before a vowel, a before s.]

The phonetic features of Arabic conventionally referred to by European and American scholars simply and collectively as emphasis, and identified by Arab grammarians as ?iṭbāq ‘spreading and raising of the tongue’, ?isti9lā? ‘elevation of the dorsum’, and tafxīm ‘thickness, heaviness’, have been attested in all known modern dialects of Arabic except Maltese. Early Arab grammarians recognized three pairs of contrasting emphatic and plain (i.e. nonemphatic) consonants— /.t d/, /./, and /.s s/, four other consonants as emphatic but unpaired— /.dqx γ/, and in certain environments emphatic variants of /1/ and /r/. That these were not the only consonants occurring with emphasis, at least in some environments, can be inferred from the proscriptions of such pronunciations in the Quranic orthoepy literature; but whether such consonants occurred in contrasting pairs, or only had emphatic positional or free variants, is less certain. In various modern dialects, restrictions on the distribution of emphasis and the number of contrasting emphatic and plain consonants differ considerably. All dialects have preserved the contrasting pairs listed above, or their reflexes. And as a result of sound change as well as borrowing and analogy, all dialects have acquired additional contrasting pairs; the following occur in all of the major dialects: /.t t/, /.d d/, /.s s/, /.z z/, /.l 1/, /.r r/, and, generally only in peninsular dialects, /./. Furthermore, most of these dialects exhibit additional contrasting pairs, especially in the labial series.

This study is intended to illuminate the highly recessive nature of the ‘New England Short o.‘ The varying stability of the feature from word to word and from region to region and the extent of divided and unsettled usage from community to community and speaker to speaker provide an unusual glimpse of a linguistic phenomenon long recognized but never adequately documented.

The Sui language is spoken in the southeastern part of Kweichow, China. While the language can be shown to have certain relations with the Tai group, it exhibits many peculiarities and divergences from the ordinary Tai languages. The material for this study is taken chiefly from an analysis of over 2600 lines of folk songs, gathered by the writer in 1942 from two small villages, Li and Ngam, in Lipo, Kweichow.

[1. Hittite u-, we-, wa- ‘hither’ and awan ‘down’ are cognate with Latin au- ‘away’, Sanskrit ava ‘down’, and related words. 2. Hitt. pe-har(k)-‘carry’ is cognate with Indo-European ∗bher-; pe- ‘secum’ is from Indo-Hittite ∗∗bh: Greek φή ‘as’, IE ∗bho- ‘both’, and the case-endings in bh. 3. Hitt. paimi ‘I go’ is from IH ∗∗bh-eimi, while we-, wo- ‘come’ is cognate with Gk. ἔβŋν, Skt. agām, etc.]