§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.

It is a well known fact that the nominal system of Proto-Indo-European (as well as the pronominal and verbal systems) has to be reconstructed with three numeri—singular, plural, and dual. In many of the Indo-European languages the dual has disappeared as an independent formal category, so that the old threefold contrast is found to be replaced by a binary one.

Apparently without guiding principle, the perfect participles passive of certain verbs in Latin have a short radical vowel, while others have a long vowel: thus factus, spectus, scissus, to faciō, speciō, scindō; but āctus, rēctus, vīsus, to agō, regō, videō. An excellent summary of the discussion which has grown up around this point was given by Sommer in 1914; but for the proper understanding of the problem it will be necessary briefly to repeat the main points.

In a recent review Henry M. Hoenigswald brought into conjunction two facts of ancient Greek phonology which have in the past been considered separately. He did not, however, state categorically that they represent two facets of the same development, but merely suggested that they might. I hope to show in this paper that they are indeed connected, and that by treating them together we can clarify the phonology of the sequence /wo/ in Greek. The two facts are that the allomorph /a/ of the morpheme {negative prefix} occurs more frequently before /o/ and /o:/ than before any other vowel where one would expect the allomorph /an/; and that ‘prosodical digamma’ is absent in Homer before /o/ and /o:/, though it does occur before /oi/.

In the Swabian dialect there is the word [mie] which means ‘brake, brake shoe, or device, at the back of a cart, for arresting or stopping the motion of a cart’. The etymology of the word has always been a subject of some controversy. The present paper attempts to bring to light new evidence concerning the etymology and perhaps to remove the controversial aspects of it.