In the comparison of Tagalog, Malay, and Javanese, three well-exemplified correspondences involving final vowel (V) or laryngeal are found:

1. (1) Tg. -V : Ml. -V : Jv. -V (e.g. Tg. tubo, Ml. tăbu, Jv. tĕbu sugarcane').

2. (2) Tg. -V? : Ml. -Vh : Jv. -Vh (e.g. Tg. tu:bo? ‘grow’, Ml. tuboh ‘body’, Jv. tuwoh ‘growth‘).

It is evident, upon even a cursory examination, that the curiously faulty hexameters of Commodian illustrate one stage in the loss of quantitative distinctions which the Latin language suffered in postclassical times. This fact has suggested to many that we may find in them a clue to the change which has made modern European verse so different from the classical measures. I, too, am convinced that the clue is there, and the purpose of this paper is to find it.

This paper is the second in a series of articles dealing with various phases of colloquial Japanese grammar. The dialect to be described is the present-day standard language, based on the speech of educated persons native to Tokyo. Forms and constructions peculiar to other dialects, including the literary style, are not considered.

In his article on Huichol phonemes, McIntosh notes a stylistic relationship between r and l, which he regards as phonemically separate: ‘The voiced alveolar lateral 1 is a specialized symbolic phoneme, stylistically alter-[nat]ing with r in words of endearment or diminutives. ... The alveolar flap r is varied by children to the alveolar lateral 1 and is varied to the same phoneme by adults in songs and when they talk baby talk’ (fnn. 3, 4). A similar stylistic relationship is noted between z and s, which he considers allophones of one phoneme: ‘z is varied to a nonretroflex voiceless variant by children and by adults talking baby talk and also in songs’ (fn. 2). Further examination of the language indicates that a similar stylistic alternation occurs for all alveolar phonemes. The purpose of the present paper is to interpret this alternation in terms of the concept that language is systematic; specifically, to assign the stylistic features to a definite place in the structure of Huichol. The data upon which the interpretation is based will be given in detail, and several alternative treatments will be discussed, before describing the preferred interpretation.

This paper suggests a method of quantifying judgments of relative ‘closeness’ or ‘distance’ between related languages, and gives some results of its application.

There is no speech community in which all speakers’ speech behavior is identical. The linguist defines a homogeneous speech community as one in which the members’ linguistic patterns are alike except for haphazard variations—haphazard as to type and magnitude and also as to the individuals producing them. It is questionable whether even this sort of speech community actually exists, but it is a useful fiction.

The Semitic imperfect as represented by Arabic has three patterns with respect to the vowel of the 2nd radical: (ya)ktal, (ya)ktul, (ya)ktil; thus, yašrabu ‘he drinks’, yaktubu ‘he writes’, yanzilu ‘he descends’. In Hebrew, these patterns are (yi)ktal, (yi)ktol, (yi)ktel, with the vowels a, o, e respectively; thus, ‘he will study’, yišmor ‘he will watch’, ‘he will sit’. In the Ethiopian group, Geez (or Old Ethiopie) is known as the only language that had two patterns, namely corresponding to yaktal of Semitic, and going back to Semitic yaktul and yaktil, with the reduction of the short u and i of the 2nd radical to . These forms, however, are those of the jussive, not the imperfect indicative as in the other Semitic languages. The Geez jussive goes back to a perfect kätlä, the jussive to a perfect kätälä; thus, perfect läbsä ‘he put on a dress’, jussive perfect nägärä ‘he said’, jussive .

The phonemes of a language are categories defined for the native speaker by acoustic and functional attributes. Workers at the Haskins and Bell Telephone laboratories have tried to specify the acoustic invariants of particular phonemes of American English; they have usually worked with single vowel allophones, and with the first three formants in the spectrograms of these allophones. Jakobson and his co-workers, drawing on these acoustic studies and on familiar articulational analyses, have proposed that the phonemes of English can be specified in terms of a small number of acoustic-articulational attributes having binary values. Each phoneme of English is said to be a unique bundle of such distinctive features. In all this, nothing is said about the functional attributes of phonemes.

The state of our etymological knowledge of this word is excellently summarized by REW §9439:

*VOLUS ‘fliegend’.

Afrz. veule ‘eitel’, ‘leer’, nfrz. veule ‘schlaff’, ‘weichlich’.—Zussg.: afrz. vanvole ‘nichtige Sache’, volgrain ‘Spreu’, volgrener ‘fliegen machen’.—Thomas, Mél. 214. (Zweifelhaft; VOLA Diez 698 ist begrifflich, dän. hvegl, schwed. vägel ‘unstet’ Vising, NTF. n.v. 7, 33 formell schwierig.)