The following description of Old English weak-verb morphophonemics is predicated on a constituent-structure analysis which differs in some respects from that implied in traditional grammars of Old English—particularly in the treatment of the gemination of final stem-consonants of verbs of the first class and the -i- element of verbs of the second class. A system of morphonemes, represented as a matrix of distinctive features, is posited for Old English, and the rules are cast in terms of these features. The resulting description emphasizes the underlying structural regularities of the weak-verb system, and is suggestive of relationships between ordered synchronic rules and linguistic change.

In an article entitled Dempwolff's *R (Lg. 29.359–366), I referred (362 f.) to a difference between Dempwolff and myself in the interpretation of the Ngaju-Dayak material which he assigns to a posited ‘alte Sprachschicht’. What was there characterized as a difference in interpretation can now be shown to involve a fundamental procedure in the application of the comparative method. For this reason it appears worth while to specify the procedure.

The relative pronouns in Old English are þe and se, þe being used when the clause has the function of a limiting or distinguishing adjective and se when it has the function of a descriptive adjective, e.g.:

Se casere þe wæs Claudius haten ‘the Emperor called Claudius’.

Se casere, se wæs Claudius haten ‘the Emperor, who was called Claudius’.

In the first sentence the relative clause distinguishes one particular emperor from others, in the second it adds a descriptive detail to a noun already sufficiently defined. Both kinds of clause may qualify the same noun, e.g.: Hom. I. 100.4 Se eahtateoða dæg þæs monðes þe we hatað Martius þone ge hatað Hlyda ‘the 18th day of the month that we call March, which you call Hlyda’. The analogy of other subordinate clauses leads us to expect that conjunctive order will be the rule in the relative clause, and this we find to be the case; but common order is a frequent exception especially when the verb is unstressed, e.g., ‘sum mæsse-preost on þam lande þe is gehaten Hispania se wæs ðearle geswenct’. Occasionally the order of subject and verb is inverted as in ‘Abel þone ofsloh Cain his broðor’.

In his review of Bloomfield's book Language, Kent (LANGUAGE 10.40-8) has dealt with what will seem to many a very objectionable feature of this volume, namely the system of transcription therein proposed. The purpose of all legitimate publication is, presumably, to make one's self understood, and there are features of Bloomfield's system which operate to defeat, or at any rate to make needlessly painful the achievement of that purpose.

The Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills in South India are a community numbering some 40,000 and comprising seven sub-castes. They are known to be immigrants from Mysore state, having appeared on the Nilgiris some five or six centuries ago. Their language is certainly an offshoot of Kannaḍa, as is shown by its having in common with modern Kannaḍa among other features initial h instead of p of other Dravidian languages. A. N. Narasimhia, in The history of p in Kanarese, has demonstrated for Kannaḍa that h- appeared first in inscriptions in the language in the 10th century A.D. and by the 16th century had established itself in inscriptions in almost all words. In the 13th century h- < p- had already begun to disappear and has now entirely disappeared in the uneducated vernaculars; we have no information whether this is the case in all the local vernaculars. In the Badaga language this h- still remains, but in the absence of a dialect atlas for Kannaḍa this survival of h- is of no use in dating the advent of the Badagas in the Nilgiris. The Badaga language is said by speakers of it to have different dialects, but no work has been done except on that spoken in the neighborhood of Kateri. Enough work has been done by the writer on this one dialect of Badaga to permit a short treatment of phonology and especially of the vowels.

The purpose of this article is twofold: to examine the various patterns of declension found in Russian and establish the morphemes in them; and, by this presentation, to exemplify a possible method of morphemic analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to compare some aspects of the quantity systems of two related languages, Finnish and Estonian.

Finnish and Estonian belong to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family. They have almost identical segmental phoneme inventories. Superficially it also seems that they have very similar word structures. Often Finnish and Estonian words can be matched morpheme for morpheme or even phoneme for phoneme. Both languages have fixed primary stress on the first syllable of a word. In principle, both are quantity languages: oppositions between short and long phonemes permeate the phonological structure of both. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the quantity systems of the two languages show far-reaching differences.

§25. Structure of the Verb. Except in certain forms of the imperative mood, the verb is composed of at least three formative elements : prefix, stem, and vowel suffix.

The significance of our reconstructed forms, precisely what is intended by them, is an old question which some of us discussed briefly at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences of 1904 (cf. the publication, vol. III, pp. 35, 57), and which has been elaborated in the long article of E. Hermann, KZ 41. 1 ff. There is not only a difference in the views expressed by various scholars, but often in the case of the same one an apparent discrepancy between the interpretation of reconstruction that is explicitly professed and that which must be inferred from his practice. For example Meillet, Introd. 24 ff., insists on the unreality and the purely formulaic character of the reconstructions, saying that these are nothing but convenient formulae for given correspondences (similarly Oertel, Lectures 128, and others). Yet throughout the work he is constantly, like any other scholar in the field, asserting or discussing the sound, form, or type that must be assumed for the parent speech to account for given correspondences, and whether this and that type is inherited from the parent speech or an innovation. Again, not believing in the existence of three guttural series in the parent speech, he does not recognize the ‘plain velars’ of other scholars, whereas from his professed principle one would expect him to have the least compunction in admitting them as convenient formulae for a well-known set of correspondences. The fact is, of course, that to him, and to all, the reconstructions, while mainly useful as formulae, are still something more than mere formulae of correspondences, they imply a certain interpretation of these correspondences, a conviction or a provisional theory regarding their approximate common starting point.