Bariba is spoken by an estimated 150,000 people in the Cercles of Parakou, Kandi, and Natitingou in Dahomey, and by an undetermined number of people in adjacent sections of Nigeria. The position of Bariba among the West Sudanic languages must for the time being remain undecided. It certainly belongs in the general classification of Voltaic, but is not closely related to Gurma in the Eastern group of Voltaic languages. Bariba is remarkably similar in structure to languages in the Senufo group in the Ivory Coast and Sudan, but my knowledge of other Voltaic languages is insufficient to justify a more specific statement.

The late George A. Kennedy, in his ‘Negatives in Classical Chinese’, notes that there are some sixteen forms of the negative 'all loosely denned as “no, not”', and sets out to discover if some criterion other than 'meaning' can provide a tighter classification and perhaps an explanation for this seemingly random and interchangeable repertory of negatives in Classical Chinese.

When approaching the linguistic problem of grammatical parallelism one is irresistibly impelled to quote again and again the pathbreaking study written exactly one hundred years ago by the juvenile Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism. The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism, ranging from the technical so-called Parallelisms of Hebrew poetry and the antiphons of Church music to the intricacy of Greek or Italian or English verse.

Several linguists have contended that categorical perception is a central or even a defining property of language. The statements of this ‘polarity principle’ for language usually imply descriptions of two kinds of behaviors: detecting that two speech sounds are different, and identifying each of them. This article spells out the implied descriptions, then presents evidence that they are valid. It also shows, however, how categorical perception can be obtained for various non-speech continua, including hue, loudness, and azimuth. Thus, it casts doubt upon a popular theory that attributes categorical perception of speech to articulation. Instead, the article concludes that the description of language provided by the polarity principle is, under certain conditions, equally valid as a description of any behavior, human or infra-human—in other words, that the polarity principle is merely the formulation in the domain of language of some very general laws concerning the behavior of organisms.

In LANG. 11.140-7 some notes were presented on the English dialect of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. On pp. 146-7 there was given a handful of words still in more or less general use which are survivals of the original German speech of the inhabitants of this town. Recently another interesting word which still preserves great vitality has returned to my memory.