Culture, to employ Tylor's well known definition, is ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ It is clear that language is a part of culture: it is one of the many ‘capabilities acquired by man as a member of society.’

Our reconstruction of a proto-language is theoretical and partial; but the language itself was necessarily real and whole. As a real language, it shared with all real languages the characteristic of non-uniformity. Some of its speakers spoke differently from others; they spoke differently from their linguistic predecessors and successors. And at any time, in any dialect, the phonemes of a real language display variations in different phonetic environments. In short, the language which our reconstructions adumbrate had linguistic change; it had isoglosses; and it had allophones.

Nez Perce vowel harmony involves two groups of co-occurring vowels: /i e u/ and /i a o/. Most words contain only one of the two groups of vowels. Certain morphemes are variable and may have vowels of either group, while others have only the second group. The latter type of morpheme, whether stem or affix, dictates the vowel harmony. Three analyses, one in terms of prosody, and two in terms of distinctive features, are given, in an attempt to derive the modern Sahaptian vocalic systems from that of Proto-Sahaptian.

Questions can be expressed in the Ethiopian languages in either an affirmative or a negative way, as is the case in other languages. In answer to an affirmative question ('Will you come tomorrow?'), the particle is 'yes' for an affirmative statement, and ‘no’ for a negative statement. The verb of the question is most often repeated either in the affirmative ('Yes, I will come') or in the negative ('No, I will not come'). In answer to a negative question ('Will you not come tomorrow?'), the Ethiopian languages have various ways of expressing the affirmative or the negative. The object of the present study is to illustrate the various ways of expressing 'yes' or ‘no’ as an answer to a negative question. The investigation was made with the help of informants in Amharic, Tigrinya, Harari, and Chaha and Soddo of the Gurage group.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a highly developed but little known type of communication as practised by the Mazateco Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico. The texts presented show the importance of tone in the language, and indicate that conversation can be carried on with a very wide range of lexical possibilities without the segmental phonemes of normal speech.

The statement has been made by Stahl and others1 that in the ab urbe condita construction the participle may stand in the attributive, as well as the predicative, position. In support of this, the following passages have been cited: Thuc. 3.53.3; 66.3; Hdt. 7.169; 9.69; Xen. Hell. 6.3.11; Lysias 25.6. In addition I have noted the following, in which attributive participles have been treated as complementary by editors or translators: Thuc. 1.6.1; 3.40.6; 4.87.5; Eur. Hipp. 1336.

In 1858, a farmer plowing a field in Suszyczno, near Kovel in the old administrative unit Volhynia (now in the northwestern Ukraine), turned up an iron spearhead with an inscription and abundant ornamentation. After its publication some seventeen years later, the inscription became, and has remained, an object of keen interest to scholars, who at first had been inclined to doubt its authenticity because of forgeries that had recently occurred. R. Henning (who saw the spearhead itself before it was lost), L. F. A. Wimmer, and others were convinced that it bore inscribed runes and that the inscription was East Germanic. This is still the general opinion; because of the final -s of the inscribed word, it is considered to be Gothic. It is believed to date from about the 3rd century A.D.

The archaic Latin inscription known as the Inscription of Duenos, from a word occurring in it which may be a personal name, stands on a small triple jar found in Rome in 1880 and first published by its finder, H. Dressel, apparently in collaboration with F. Bücheier, who also wrote on it. Scholars have been busying themselves with it ever since, until we find the forty-first interpretation in a recent monograph of E. Goldmann of Vienna.