Scholars follow error as willingly as truth, and accept opinion as readily as fact. A sentence falsely ascribed to Columella by Holder in his Alceltischer Sprachschatz (2.1245, 51-3) is to be found in no manuscript or printed edition of Columella. Whence Holder got it, remains a mystery, but at least twenty scholars have repeated it (from Holder) and ascribed it to Columella without stopping to verify the text (cf. PID 2.204). An object discovered at Gièvres (in the Loir-et-Cher) in the middle of the last century was described as an amulet and the inscription which it bears misread when first published. Both the spurious description and the erroneous transcription were accepted by Hirschfeld (CIL 13.1324) and repeated by Holder (op.cit. 2.1011, 54-1012.2), who writes

pixtionovimxmorucin

n which x before t, if the reading were justified, would have to be transcribed χ, as in Pixtacus, Pixtaucus (with a : au, see my paper in the Havers Festschrift, Die Sprache 1, 1949), Pixticenus (i.e. -genus), Pixtil(l)us beside Pictaui, Picones, Pictil(l)us, and Picti. As for x before (and after) m, that is quite vapid.

This is part of the Offa passage, which may not be quite as old as the original Widsiđ (see Chambers 202), though certainly not a very late interpolation. No verb is expressed in this sentence, and the five words of line 40 permit of certain variations in syntax. From the predication that has preceded, however, something like ‘achieved’, ‘won’ or ‘had’ is understood, thus : ‘No man of the same age won greater valor in single combat than he.‘ I scan line 40a as type C. The word efeneald, whenever it is used as a adjective, may also govern the dative, but it does not govern the dative when used as a substantive, which function it undoubtedly has here. Only the genitive accompanies the substantive in OE : his efeneald, etc., and him would be superfluous if taken with efeneald.

An analysis of speech errors provides evidence for the psychological reality of theoretical linguistic concepts such as distinctive features, morpheme structure constraints, abstract underlying forms, phonological rules, and syntactic and semantic features. Furthermore, such errors reveal that linguistic performance is highly rule-governed, and that in many cases it is grammatical rules which constrain or monitor actual speech production. While a model of linguistic competence is independent of temporal constraints, a model of linguistic performance must provide information as to the sequencing of events in real time. To explain the occurrence of particular kinds of errors, a specific ordering of rules is posited, which ordering may or may not coincide with the organization of a grammar.

[Latin cŏr ‘heart’ and chorda ‘string, cord, chord’ have been proposed as the origin of Spanish acordar. Examples from early texts show that all the principal meanings of acordar are to be found in cŏr and related words. Chorda accounts for only the meanings ‘harmonize, agree’ and not for the meanings that refer to mental and emotional states. Although there may be an overlapping of cŏr and chorda in the meanings ‘harmonize, agree’, cŏr, since it could account for all meanings, should also appear in REW §71a. It should be stated that of the two Latin words chorda occupies the second place of importance.]

Possibly the most widely disseminated fact about the Chinese language is that each syllable has a definite musical accent or tone forming an inalienable part. This fact emerges from even the most casual inspection of a Chinese dictionary, in which the syllabic symbols are each labelled with one or more tones, and where it is obvious that the intelligibility of a particular syllable depends on its having the correct tone. Persons who try to talk standard Chinese have to be told that a large number of these tones disappear in connected speech, which only goes to show the universal sloppiness of people. A pedantic speaker, who is at the same time literate, can restore the tones by visualizing the graphs with which the speech would be written down. But it must be concluded that for illiterates the intelligibility of their communications cannot depend on a theoretical knowledge of the tones for syllables that have no tones. An examination of Tangsic brings to light in that Wu dialect a situation rather different from what is ordinarily imagined. (For a definition and general description of the Tangsic dialect see Lg. 28.457-8.)

[After a brief statement concerning junctures, prosodemes, and consonants, the paper is devoted to a phonemic analysis of the syllabic sounds of English (the vowels and diphthongs) on the basis of their phonetic character, their distribution, and their mutual relations. The results of the analysis are summarized in a table of syllabics and in a concise description of the total pattern.]

The concept of time in relation to action finds expression in the verbal forms of a great many, although not all, languages. ‘In English we have made up our minds that all action must be conceived of in reference to three standard times’,—the present, the past, and the future. Of these three, the devices for the expression of the future—their origin, development, and present use—receive from our grammarians the least satisfactory treatment.

The traditional interpretation of [y] and [w] in Spanish forms like bien ‘well’ and bueno ‘good’ has been to assign them to the phonemes /i/ and /u/. The semivowel allophone of each of these vowel phonemes is stated to occur in the following positions: SV, VSV, CSV, VSC, VS; examples (from Chavarría-Aguilar): huerta, Tehuantepec, puerta, jaula, hoy. All analysts, however, agree that there are still other allophones that cannot be assigned to /i/ and /u/, but must be assigned to a phoneme /y/ (variously transcribed as /j, y, ž/), though with the exception of King they do not describe any allophones that must be assigned to /w/ and therefore set up no such phoneme. The assignment of [y] and [w] to /i/ and /u/ therefore achieves at best only the economy that results from having no /w/ in the phoneme inventory. Other possible advantages, such as those of pattern congruity, will be examined hereafter by comparison with the analysis to be suggested here.