0. Dialects of the Rumanian language are spoken today in three rather widely separated areas of Balkan Europe, the largest by far being that of Rumania itself. Within boundaries very nearly approximating those of the Rumanian nation at its territorial maximum after World War I, some 15 to 20 millions of persons speak the mutually intelligible and very closely related DACO-RUMANIAN dialects: those of Muntenia, Oltenia, Transylvania, the Banat, Moldavia, Bessarabia and Bukovina on the left bank of the Danube, and of Dobrugea on the right bank. To the south of the Daco-Rumanian area relatively small numbers of people in scattered sections of Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus, and southern Albania speak the MACEDO-RUMANIAN and MEGLENITIC dialects, the latter being restricted to the vicinity of Salonika; and in a few villages of the Istrian Peninsula of Yugoslavia a small and dwindling number of persons speak ISTRO-RUMANIAN.

In many branches of Ural-Altayic, investigations are far from being exhaustive. This is particularly true of the Tungus group, inasmuch as with the exception of one sub-division—Mandžu—little research has been done. So far even the classification of the Tungus languages and dialects remains a subject for controversy. In the standard work on Tungus ethnology, Social Organization of the Northern Tungus (Shanghai, 1929), by S. M. Širokogorov, the languages are divided, in accordance with the author's hypothesis concerning Tungus migrations, into a northern and a southern group. The southern group includes Mandžu, the historical language of the Ňu-Čžen (also: Jučen and Džürdžen), Goldi, and Olča (lower Amur). The remaining Tungus languages are placed in the northern group, which today is called Eveŋki (‘the people‘), a term used by the Tungus themselves. Širokogorov, as well as other scholars, disregards a third Tungus group, the Even or Lamut. These consist of hunters and reindeer-breeders who roam in scattered groups over the vast territory between the Khatanga river (100° E. long.) and the Anadyŕ (165° E. long), infringing on the territory of the Jakut in the lowlands of the Lena, Jana, and Indigirka rivers. They are thus separated from their southern kinsmen, the Eveŋki, by a distance of nearly 1300 miles. The geographic distribution of the Tungus cannot be here discussed in detail. Eastward of the ninetieth meridian almost two-thirds of the entire Siberian territory are inhabited by the Tungus.

It is generally taken for granted that the present-day pronunciation of Arm. p' t' k' represents the original status: Meillet (Esquisse 23) simply states this view without discussion: ‘Il y avait trois séries d'occlusives ... chacune d'elles existant sous forme de sourde non aspirée, de sourde aspirée (c'est-à-dire où l'explosion était suivie d'un souffle) et de sonore'. In spite of the general agreement upon this matter, it seems worth while to take it up again and test the common view of p' t' k', since this view appears to be based only on the present-day situation.

In §1, a reconsideration of the orthographic evidence for Gothic yields a synchronic distinctive-feature analysis of its phonology. In §2, a general procedure is proposed for determining a Stammbaum, by positing that tree which assumes the fewest rules of sound change from the proto-language to the dialects. In considering the diachronic rules of early Germanic, North and West Germanic are shown to share more rules than do North Germanic and Gothic. Hence the optimal tree must split first into a North-West Germanic branch and an East Germanic one. Available non-linguistic evidence (§3) supports this view.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the accent and quantity systems of the Serbo-Croatian literary language as they function on the synchronic phonological plane, without considerations of morphology or of linguistic history, these being other and separate problems.

The description is based on data presented in the standard works, and on my own observations during a month in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1938.

In his article Proto-Indo-European Reality and Reconstruction, Ernst Pulgram states that ‘when we reconstruct, through the methods of comparative historical linguistics, an array of asterisked Proto-Indo-European forms, the procedure itself implies that the result of our endeavours is a uniform construct’, and asserts that ‘anything in linguistics that is timeless, non-dialectal, and non-phonetic, by definition does not represent a real language’ (422). He then bases his further discussion of the impossibility of learning about ‘Real Proto-Indo-European’ on the presumed unreal nature of the reconstructed proto-language: ‘No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality’ (423). Hence, for Pulgram, the formulaic character of our reconstructions of individual items renders it impossible to make a serious attempt to reconstruct texts in a proto-language: ‘To write an Aesopian fable or the Lord's Prayer in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is innocent enough as a pastime, but the text has no doubt little if any resemblance to any speech ever heard on earth’ (423).

The relationship of Hittite and Indo-European has been recognized chiefly on the basis of certain correspondences in inflectional terminations, suffixes, and pronouns. Indo-European etymologies have, to be sure, been suggested for a considerable number of Hittite words, but a large proportion of these etymologies are clearly unsound and even those which are most plausible have never been worked into the sort of consistent system which could bring conviction to those who understand sound etymological method.