[Hittite evidence indicates that the relative kwi- kwo- is a development of the indefinite. In Hittite a subordinate relative clause can scarcely be distinguished from a coordinate indefinite clause. A typical sentence can mean either ‘some utensils are there, and these he picks up’ or ‘which utensils are there, these he picks up’. Six features that characterize the indefinite type are found to be present in an overwhelming majority of examples of the relative type, 390 of which have been examined.]

In my Studies in New Mexican Spanish1 I have already called attention to the existence of certain syllabic consonants in New Mexican Spanish. In the following pages I shall discuss this subject much more in detail.

‘Lenition’, in German ‘Lenierung’, a term proposed by Rudolf Thurneysen, has nowadays widely superseded the traditional but ambiguous 'aspiration' as the designation of a set of phenomena characteristic of all insular Celtic languages. The least ambiguous definition of 'lenition' is probably that to be found in Thurneysen's Grammar of Old Irish, a revised and enlarged translation of his Handbuch des Altirischen: 'Lenition ... is the term used to describe a mutation of consonants which normally originated in a reduction of the energy employed in their articulation. It affected not only medial, but also such initial consonants as were closely associated with the preceding word. ... It is earlier than the loss of vowels in final and interior syllables ..., for it presupposes the continued existence of these vowels.' In the ensuing paragraphs, Thurneysen indicates the phonetic contexts in which Irish lenition took place; but since we are here concerned with the phenomenon of lenition in general, rather than with the details in any specific form of insular Celtic, we need not list all the situations in the various Goidelic and Brythonic languages in which lenited consonants occur—the less so since we find in attested linguistic stages traces of an extension of the lenited pronunciation to cases where it certainly did not exist at the time when the actual leniting shift originated. Let it suffice here to say that lenition proper arose when a consonant was surrounded by open articulations, mostly vowels and w, but also, in the case of some consonants, when followed by l, r, n. For the sake of simplicity, in what follows we shall frequently use the phrase 'intervocalic position' in reference to all the contexts in which lenition took place.

It is to Yuen Ren Chao that we are indebted—among so many other things—for the first modern phonetic description and phonological analysis of a spoken Tibetan dialect; in this pioneering work of his with a Lhasa speaker he noted a number of alternations in vowel quality that seemed to run counter to the generally regular one-to-one correlation to be observed between the vowels of the Tibetan written language and the vocalization of the modern dialects. Chao's work on that occasion was by and large limited to a description of the reading pronunciation for a text in the written language, and hence it then appeared to him possible to treat these alternations as the result of differences in tempo or even as simply fortuitous; but subsequent work with speakers of the same language, involving living speech rather than the reading of literary texts, has shown that the phenomenon which Chao noticed and so meticulously recorded in his early publication is instead part of a widespread process of vowel assimilations which at least in Lhasa Tibetan operates in certain morphemes in a fashion regular enough to merit the designation ‘vowel harmony’.

This paper argues that Chomsky’s version of the history of linguistics is fundamentally false. With evidence drawn from recent reviews and some additional information, it argues that the term ‘Cartesian’ has no historical justification in regard to the linguistic theory embodied in the 1660 Port-Royal Grammar. The paper then examines the history of linguistics from 1660 to the Romantics, a period in which Chomsky finds much scattered evidence for the persistent dominance of the Cartesian tradition. Contrary to Chomsky’s opinion, however, Locke and not Descartes was the dominating force. Du Marsais was strongly anti-Cartesian and outspokenly pro-Lockean. The basic and most influential work in 18th century linguistic theory was Condillac’s Essai (1746), which is entirely Lockean; this work revived linguistic theory at the mid-century, including universal grammar. There is no conflict between universal grammar and the entirely Locke-derived theoretical work on the origin of language. Chomsky’s version of history is the product of serious deficiencies in knowledge and research, and is an obstacle to the creation of a true and significant history of linguistics.

The continuing relevance of Bernard Bloch's ‘Postulates for phonemic analysis’ lies in the facts that they point to the basis of the minimal-pair identification test, the most powerful tool in phonological analysis, and that they further point to the basic necessity of sound-discrimination in the development of human language.

Perhaps the most problematical feature of verbal usage in modern English is the alternation of simple and progressive forms. According to the traditional opinion, the progressive is intended to emphasize durative aspect; but while this emphasis, as well as the contrast it offers to that of the simple form, is well illustrated in such an example as While we were talking, the telephone rang, there are countless cases in which the peculiar force of the progressive is at first glance difficult to grasp. Such cases may be divided into two main groups.