In phonemic representations of German utterances, it is common practice to follow the system proposed by Trager and Smith (1951) for designating the so-called suprasegmental phonemes in English. According to this system, there are four phonemic stresses and four distinctive pitch levels. It is considered essential to mark the pitch level at the beginning and end of every utterance (phonemic clause), while an additional pitch indicator is called for when there is a ‘significant’ pitch change within the utterance. Moulton, to whom we owe most for our knowledge of the phonemic structure of German, modifies this system somewhat (1962:113–4) by recognizing only three ‘word stresses’ and a ‘syntactical stress’, which is used to mark the commonly accepted ‘center of the utterance’, i.e. the syllable with the strongest phonetic stress. The inadequacies of the Trager-Smith system and its modification by Moulton are perhaps best illustrated by the difficulty of obtaining uniform analyses of a given utterance, even by auditors trained in the use of the system.

1. Introduction. The development of South Dravidian phonology has shown, through its entire recorded and reconstructable history, extensive vocalic assimilation of the type which is known as metaphony, umlaut, or vowel mutation. Specifically, the vowels of radical (word-initial) open syllables have become lower when the following syllable contains the low vowel a. The points to be made in this paper are four. (1) This process is reflected in all modern South Dravidian languages, though it is obscured in the literary dialects of Tamil and Malayalam by a change of an opposite, dissimilatory type. (2) The process, which in its earliest form affected only high short vowels, has spread in some languages to affect other vowels, including long ones. (3) This enlarged scope of the process has in some cases produced new phonemic distributions and expanded phonemic inventories. (4) The process has parallels in non-Dravidian languages of South Asia, raising the possibility that a linguistic area or Sprachbund, made up of languages displaying metaphony, may be recognized in the Indian subcontinent.

[Only on the basis of a large collection of actually occurring examples is it possible to set up a precise and adequate definition of mahogany (or any similar word), as it is used in present-day colloquial American English. The definition so arrived at is contrasted with a typical dictionary definition based on secondary sources.]

The split of IE *VRs and *VsR into VRR in Lesbian and Thessalian and VR in the other dialects cuts a striking isogloss through ancient Greece. This split may be related to other developments of Greek by applying Jakobson's feature system to four Greek sound changes, all of them in essence well known and widely accepted. It is then shown that this suffices to solve, with no modification of the rules, the problem of the reflexes of IE *ws and *sy in Greek, and accounts for such hitherto ill-explained developments as *awsōs > Doric āwṓs, Lesbian aúōs ‘dawn’; *awsēr > Ionic āḗr, Lesbian aúēr ‘lower atmosphere’; *dewsomai > Attic déomai, Lesbian and Thessalian deúomai ‘need’; *dhusyō > Ionic thūō, Aeolic thuíō ‘rage’; and gen. *-osyo > Attic and Ionic *-ōo > -ō, Aeolic -oio.

In this study an attempt is made to show that, upon close examination, certain phonemic alternations in Mandarin Chinese, which hitherto have been regarded as due to dialectal mixing, can be established as being internal evidence for some old phonological distinctions. The study examines various cases of dissimilation among pre-vocalic (or post-vocalic) segments which post-vocalic (or pre-vocalic) segments have conditioned within syllables during the history of the Chinese language. The discussion is focused specifically on the phonological factors conditioning the alternation of velar vs. palatal initial consonants, and of velar vs. dental final consonants. These alternations are interpreted as a special type of dissimilation—that of medials conditioned by final palatal nasal and stop, which can be reconstructed on the basis of quite independent external evidence. This leads to the reconstruction of a four-way distinction among Ancient Chinese ending consonants: labial, dental, palatal, and velar.

Comparative treatment of the Germanic resonants has, in the past, emphasized Gothic. An analysis of irregular Old English material here leads to a better understanding of the problem. The present paper provides evidence for an extension of Sievers' Law to polysyllables, and a refutation of Lehmann's claim that the IE resonant system was maintained into late Proto-Germanic.1