The objections of Kuhn and Quirk to various reinterpretations of Old English digraph spellings, including our own, have made it clear that extensive discussion of single structure points in the overall frame of the Old English phonological system is a wasteful procedure. The system and the minimal oppositions which make up the system are coexistent and difficult to discuss intelligibly without going through the circular but internally consistent process of describing the one in terms of the other. Taking our departure from a pattern whose outlines were implicit but largely unstated, we attempted to deal with one point of the structure in detail. This kind of presentation seems to have been a mistake, and to have led to some of Kuhn and Quirk's misunderstanding of OP 4. The correction of our error of judgment about presentation must, however, await further research and publication, undertaken not to prove a thesis but to arrive at the most complete, consistent, and economical interpretation of the total evidence. The present article, therefore, only points out some matters of fact and clarifies the basic disagreements.

§49. There are three distinct elements from which interrogatives are derived. These interrogatives are both pronominal and qualificative.

Bad luck with biological models has left historical linguistics with such a heritage of confusion and specious explanations as to condition linguists to reject or ignore all putative parallels between languages and living organisms. Traditional textbooks for the history of the English language, though they show vestiges of biology-patterned language history, make regular protests that a language, after all, is not really an organism. Sapir charged ‘the evolutionary prejudice’ with being ‘probably the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking’, and offered a devastating, memorable comparison: 'A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoölogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow.' A few years ago Charles F. Hockett attacked the shoddy terminology of historical linguistics, demonstrating that, from both the pedagogical and the professional point of view, ' “evolution” and “progress” certainly ought to be avoided', that ‘law’, a longtime troublemaker, was distorted by deterministic biology as well as by physics, and that the use of kinship terms ‘must be modified in order to render them fit for use in discussing language’. Henry M. Hoenigswald's Language change and linguistic reconstruction treats language so unbiologically that the few traditional terms employed for language relationships—‘ancestor’, ‘daughter’, and 'sister'—are as startling as if they were bold, fresh metaphors. Quite recently Winfred P. Lehmann declared on behalf of historical linguists: 'We now view language as a set of social conventions so complex that a simple biological or geometrical model is totally inadequate. Rather than force one on language, we attempt to understand it in its complexity.'

There are currently two prominent competing approaches to the study of the social significance of variation in language. One approach is the observation of the frequency of variants in actual speech and their correlation with social factors. The other approach, scalogram analysis, instead of recording the frequency of variants, systematically shows what the use of one variant implies for the use of another. It is argued here that the observation of frequency leads to generalizations not revealed by the use of scalogram analysis alone. Finally, some suggestions are made concerning the application of both models to problems of the teaching of reading and of socially standard English.

When we consult an etymological dictionary, particularly a dictionary of a living tongue, we should prefer not to find such broad statements as ‘stammt angeblich aus dem Chinesischen’ or ‘Emprunt du chinois’ with no effort made to record the precise etyma. It so happens that there are ten modern French words, no longer considered foreign by the French speaker, which are supposedly of Chinese origin. These are ailante, cangue, cannequin (or caniquis), ginseng, jonque, kao-ling, moxa, poussa, typhon, and thé. Except in the case of typhon Ernst Gamillscheg contents himself with the German phrase which I have quoted. His important source, the Dictionnaire général of Hatzfeld, Darmesteter, and Thomas, is more specific than this at times, but even there we often find no etymon cited or an occasional inaccurate statement such as ‘ailante, emprunté du chinois ailanto’, whereas ailanto cannot possibly be claimed as a native Chinese word. In Chinese this tree is called ch'u (2627) or ch'ou ch'un (2521 and 2856). Karl Lokotsch in his dictionary of European words of Oriental origin has used almost exclusively as his source for Chinese words an article by Hirth in Herrigs Archiv. The very recent etymological dictionary of the French language prepared by Oscar Bloch, with the collaboration of von Wartburg, is far superior in its treatment, but it omits some of the words in question, and in several other instances we are inclined to differ with it. Where any of these ten French words are also current in English the NED is certainly the best reference of all. It is our intention here to check these references, for the words in question, and to specify, where possible, the exact Chinese etyma.

This paper develops further the theory of morphemic analysis presented by Zellig S. Harris in 1942. Morphemic analysis is the operation by which the analyst isolates minimum meaningful elements in the utterances of a language, and decides which occurrences of such elements shall be regarded as occurrences of ‘the same’ element.

In the fifth book of the Iliad is a tangle of textual and linguistic problems. The poet, after telling how Diomedes stabbed Aphrodite's arm near the hand, finishes (if we disregard for a moment lines 340–2, which will turn out to be an interpolation) his description of the encounter (339):

A previous paper focused on a process of affixation operating on the Mezquital Otomi verb-root-initial consonant. In brief, this process involves a series of glottal elements (?, h, and voicing) fused with root-initial stops, and a series of palatal elements (y, ñ, and t) fused with root-initial glottal consonants, ? and h. The present paper describes other simulfixes to complete the discussion. Two other processes, prefixation and suffixation, are also described in relation to the verb nucleus.

On June 26, 1935, the expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago found at Persepolis a number of inscribed stone tablets, made in the shape and fashion of clay tablets, and bearing an important document of King Xerxes. Two tablets bore the Old Persian text, one the Akkadian version, and one the Elamite. A translation with a certain amount of historical commentary was given out by the Oriental Institute as a newspaper release, appearing in The New York Times for Feb. 9, 1936, and also in The University of Chicago Magazine 28.4.23–5 (Feb. 1936). This formed the basis for my own remarks on the inscription, in JAOS 56.211–5 (June 1936). A photographic view of the tablets at the place of discovery, with some explanatory remarks by Eric F. Schmidt, of the Expedition, was given in the Illustrated London News for Feb. 22, 1936, page 328; an abstract of this was presented in Archiv für Orientforschung 11.91 (first semester 1936). The actual text in the original languages was not accessible until it was published by Ernst Herzfeld in Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 8.56–77 (Nov. 1936); he had previously published in the Revue de l'Histoire des Religions 113.21–41 (Jan.–Feb. 1936) an address on Die Religion der Achaemeniden, originally delivered as an address at the Sixth Congress of the History of Religions at Brussels, Sept. 18, 1935, in which he drew upon the new material contained in these tablets. The latest bibliographic item which has come to my attention is a study by Hans Hartmann in Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 40.145–60 (March 1937).