The Algonkian family of languages, with its great geographical spread from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rocky Mountains and from Hudson's Bay to the Carolinas, together with the inevitable proliferation of dialects (daughter languages) which accompanies such a spread, provides a goldmine of still largely un-exploited source material to exemplify a wide variety of principles in comparative linguistics. Unfortunately, only a part of the family has been intensively studied from the comparative point of view; as a consequence, many points of interest are likely to be represented in a fragmentary or indecisive fashion in the literature. Bloomfield's Algonkian studies were limited to four of the Central languages—Fox, Cree, Menomini, and Ojibwa; and Hockett in his follow-up work stayed within the same boundary, except for the addition of Potawatomi. Excellent results have been achieved by this limitation, but proper caution requires that the limitation be kept fully in mind whenever there is a temptation to generalize, or to compare developments in this family with those in other families.

Morphophonemics, as the term is used here, subsumes every phase of the phonemic shape of morphemes: the typical shapes of alternants, the types of alternation, and the various environmental factors (phonological or grammatical) which elicit one alternant or another of those morphemes which appear in more than one shape. This usage is broader than some which have recently been described, for instance by Bloch and by Wells.

Lat. uespillo ‘undertaker for the poorest classes’ is cognate with Hitt, wašpaš ‘clothes’, both showing a stem form *wosp- with further IE cognates. Close analysis of a variety of texts in both languages demonstrates the important position in Roman funerary practice of the ritual of dressing the corpse (performed by the undertaker), and the specific use of the Hittite term in the Old Kingdom as ‘clothes for the dead’. This collocation provides the semantic point of contact between the two lexical items: the matching of semantic mark necessary for a satisfactory etymology.

We aim in this paper to replace by a unified, systematic theory the heterogeneous and incomplete methods hitherto offered for determining IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENTS (hereafter abbreviated IC, plural ICs). The unifying basis is furnished by the famous concept of patterning, applied repeatedly and in divers special forms.

The element -ti-, -sti-, -stri- in Latin words like rūsticus, domesticas, terrestris goes back to a -ti-/-tri-formation of adverbs or prepositions denoting space and time; thus, *domesti-: *entesti-, *nemestri-: *ent(e)ri-. The terms formed on these adverbs and prepositions refer not only to location, but also to family, household, and social organization in general. They express a sharp distinction between terms designating persons or objects within the household and those outside it. In a general way, this contrast is expressed by the element r on the one hand and the element i on the other; no special function can be ascertained in this connection for the element t. Adverbs of space appear partly with t, partly without it. The r or tr came to be used in comparative forms; originally its meaning was spatial. It seems that the function of designating a contrast, which preceded the function of designating a comparative, developed in expressions meaning such things as ‘above’ and ‘below’: an object that is above another is ‘more above’ than the object with which it is contrasted.

The historical interpretation of the inflectional forms of Tocharian nouns has lagged behind for an obvious reason. The endings of the verbs show their IE affinities at once, and such changes as have occurred present no more obstacles to their explanation than those in the other IE languages. On the other hand the case endings of the nouns, most of all those of the nominative plural, e.g., -am, -ñ, -ant, -u, do not recall directly any IE case formatives, and therefore at first seem to defy explanation. Nevertheless it is not possible that the Tocharian declensions have no IE antecedents at all, for such a contrast between the origin of nouns and verbs is inconceivable. Explanations of Tocharian case endings must take as their starting point IE conditions. This is the only line of attack which holds forth promise of attaining any results, and even in this way it cannot be hoped to settle once for all the history of every variety of declensional pattern. While the writer believes that he can make some suggestions which will win assent, he also recognizes that other details will necessarily be subject to change after maturer consideration.