In a comparison of the linguistic results of Experiments I, II, and III, it will be important to have a measure of the relative difficulty of the learning under each of these three sets of conditions. In Experiments I and II, where the two visual factors of shape and color are exactly correlated with specific and uniformly recurring sound-sequences, it is also possible to compare the rates and degrees of learning of (1) the syllables corresponding to shape and color, and (2) the names corresponding to the 14 figures of the learning series and those corresponding to the 2 figures which occurred only in the recognition series. By correct response is meant a response to a figure substantially identical with the name which was taught to the subject in the learning series, or, in the case of the two figures which did not occur in the learning series, a response showing a correct analysis of the factors of shape and color in accordance with the categories of the linguistic system of the experiment. Many responses have been counted as correct, for the purposes of these comparisons, which deviate phonetically to some extent from the words taught, but which are nevertheless unmistakeable variants of these words.

In Language 10. 43ff. (1934), R. G. Kent, in his review of L. Bloomfield's Language (New York, 1933), mentions Bloomfield's transcription of the Russian word for city, gorod. Bloomfield writes ['gorot], while Kent would prefer ['gort]. The justification given to Kent by Bloomfield for his transcription is: 'Weakening of unstressed syllables in Russian is sufficiently indicated when the place of accent is given, i.e., ['gorot] but plural [goro'da] tells as much as ['gorǝt, gǝra'da]: in fact, to the persons who know the rule which you cite, it tells more, since each of these transcriptions indicates both the accented and the unstressed forms of each vowel-phoneme, whereas ['gort], for instance, fails to tell whether the second syllable has [o] or [a] or [i].'

Developments in linguistic theory have shed important light upon the theory and practice of translation, resulting in the recognition that translating is basically not a process of matching surface forms by rules of correspondence, but rather a more complex procedure involving analysis, transfer, and restructuring. Such linguistic procedures as transformation and componential analysis provide far more satisfactory bases for translation than have existed in the past. At the same time, the theory of translation is able to provide linguistic science with new insights into structure and with improved methods for testing hypotheses.

Most speakers of Norwegian in the Middle West belong to the farming class. Nearly all are bilingual, and many of them handle the English language better than the Norwegian. It is often easy to detect their Scandinavian background in listening to their English, even in the case of second- or third-generation Americans. They were usually educated in a grade school and a Norwegian-Lutheran parochial school. The parochial school, until relatively recent times, was conducted in Norwegian; the children were taught to read and write the language. As a result, only the youngest speakers of Norwegian are without any knowledge of its literary form. Literary Dano-Norwegian is still used in church services, and is the familiar form of the language to those of the city population who cultivate the idiom of their ancestors in the Sons of Norway lodges; but the country communities use dialects almost exclusively. As a rule, a community has only one main dialect. The pioneers preferred to settle with people from their own district in Norway; if people from two districts settled close together, the dialect that counted the larger number of speakers usually replaced the other. Dialect mixtures is seldom to be found except in individual speakers; only one case has been reported where a mixed dialect seems to be the language of a community. Only the largest settlements, for instance the Koshkonong settlement near Madison, have maintained several dialects with equal prestige.