For many years, now, and particularly within the last decade, there has been increasing use of the term ‘phoneme’, ‘wenn man sich auch nicht immer über seine definition einig ist’. Parallel to this increased use of the term, there has been the re-emergence of a concept of some unit of spoken language, a unit which is not the same as a ‘sound of speech’. It has long been known to phoneticians and linguists in general that the sounds of speech, even within the narrowest restrictions of time and place, even within the usage of a single individual, present an almost infinite variety. Scarcely any two speakers of a given dialect pronounce the same word exactly alike, either as to their articulatory movements or as to the sound-waves which those movements set up in the atmosphere. And yet, within the communicative and expressive medium, those (articulatorily and acoustically) slightly different processes are still the same word; and the ‘sounds’ which comprise this same word are in some way the same sounds, within the frame of that communicative and expressive medium which is the language of the community. It is the recognition of this sameness, this effective unity, which has found expression in the term ‘phoneme’ as a unit of spoken language.

Several words are used to express parenthood in the Republican period, but such terms as genitor, genetrix, creator, creatrix, omniparens, and sator are used very infrequently. Some of the major authors of the period use no words of parenthood other than pater, mater, and parens, and in the others the number of occurrences is so trifling that we can limit our study to the three words most commonly employed.

One of the fundamental changes from Proto-Indo-European to the Germanic dialects is that from a verbal system based on aspect to a system based on tense. By the time of our Germanic records the change was accomplished; aspect to be sure was still conveyed in the Germanic languages, but through morphological processes that were not consistently applied to all verbs, such as the ga- prefix. Tense, however, was a category marked in every verb. Moreover, unlike the PIE situation, where the imperfective (present) was sometimes marked to distinguish it from other aspects—a situation maintained in Gk. tithēmi ‘I place’ beside the unmodified stem form of the aorist éthēka T placed'—in Germanic only the preterit was marked, with rare exceptions like Go. standan beside stōþ, bidjan beside baþ. Accordingly the Gmc. verbal system differed from the IE system in the grammatical meaning which it characteristically expressed, and in its method of marking that meaning.

The question of the mutual relation of the various privative nominal prefixes characterised by n in the Indo-European languages, as well as of these prefixes to the n-negative particles, has repeatedly been discussed from more than one point of view. Without recapitulating the theories already advanced, which may readily be ascertained from the appended bibliography, the problem may be examined anew in the light of all linguistic evidence now available. The fullest data are found in Greek, then in Italic, Indian, and Iranian; doublets of the type ∗ : ∗ne are rare in Celtic, Teutonic, and Balto-Slavic; they are not found in Armenian, which has only an = ∗ ; and their existence is questionable in Albanian.

In the Greek vocabulary there are a number of words with a prefix ἀ- which have caused considerable difficulty to students of Greek morphology. The problem is usually dismissed by adopting the merely descriptive term ‘prothetic vowel’, even in comparative and historical statements; but this way of avoiding the issue is far from satisfactory.

The grammarian, having delimited the range of data he suspects to be related, seeks to express this relatedness (= regularity = generalization) in the simplest and clearest (= most revealing) way. For example, examining some English phrases, he may notice:

1. (1) the man I do business with

2. (2) the man that I do business with

3. (3) the man who(m) I do business with

4. (4) the man with whom I do business

5. (5) the man to do business with

6. (6) the man with whom to do business

and would, perhaps, like to state the manner in which certain clauses and clauselike sequences are attached to a noun to form a complex nominal; he would be especially pleased if he could reflect the unity of the mechanism in a single statement. Most of the time, the data do not lend themselves to such elegant summary, and the grammarian must settle for a major statement backed up by one or two qualifying ‘remarks’ (as the older handbooks say). But he does not ‘settle’ easily.

The indefinite pronoun, ὁ ἡ τὸ δϵῖνα ‘so-and-so’, like other Greek pronominal stems (cf. αὐτvός, ἐκϵῖνος) is difficult to analyze, and even more difficult to etymologize. It has been much discussed in the literature and a number of ingenious suggestions have been made; nonetheless, as discerning a judge as Gustav Meyer noted long ago that the word was ‘in Ursprung and Bildung dunkel’ and concluded his analysis with a non-committal ‘non liquet’.

[In Indo-Hittite long vowels and diphthongs with long prior element were shortened before h. In Pre-Indo-European h was lost in all positions, and an immediately preceding vowel was lengthened if h had been followed by another consonant. These phonetic laws furnish an explanation of certain vowel alternations in Greek and Sanskrit which have hitherto been ascribed with some difficulty to ablaut.]

[If we accept the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, the existence of middle r-paradigms in both Hittite and Indo-European puts the middle ending -r back into Indo-Hittite. Even if we assume that Hittite is simply one of the IE dialects, the evidence for medial r-forms in PIE is still overwhelmingly strong. The semantic aspect is important. There is virtually no positive evidence for a volitive impersonal in -r. But verbal r-forms with middle meaning occur in Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Hittite, Armenian, Phrygian, Venetic, Italic, and Celtic. This proves that not only r-forms, but r-forms with middle meaning, were inherited.]