The Gothic letter that is now usually transcribed as w occurs in the MSS as a cursive form of the Greek majuscule Y. So far as scribal spelling is concerned, this letter creates no complications; it is used consistently and without confusion in both native and foreign words. On the other hand, modern interpretations of Go. w may become fairly complex, involving nuances of pronunciation that the scribes either disregarded or failed to recognize. All told, Go. w has been assigned five different values—two vocalic, one semivocalic, one spirant, and one purely non-phonetic.

Alternative hypotheses regarding the vowel system of Proto-Sahaptian and the transition to the two daughter languages, Nez Perce and Sahaptin, are examined. The proto-language may possibly have had a five-vowel system ∗/i e a o u/, identical to that of Nez Perce, and already showing the same pattern of vowel harmony alternations. But a reconstruction of the vocalic system before the development of vowel harmony, whether or not this predated Proto-Sahaptian, presents several possibilities. A six-vowel system ∗/i ə e a o u/ would allow a straightforward development. A suggested three-vowel system is rejected. The possibilities of development from four- or five-vowel systems are examined, but these, while conceivable, are less plausible. Examination of the comparative evidence suggests that Proto-Sahaptian possessed the six-vowel system and may have lacked vowel harmony. Some areal similarities to such a system are noted.

0.1. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relations between the layering in structural trees and the scale of rank. My standpoint will be that of scale-and-category grammatical theory as I understand it.

In a recent article in LANGUAGE, Hans Kurath criticized some remarks of mine in the same journal. I have profited from his criticisms, some of them quite justified; a personal or bad-tempered reply would be inexcusable. On the other hand, the issues which Kurath has raised are basic; his arguments are not always either clear or conclusive; and if they go unquestioned, they may be accepted, not because they are sound but because they are his. Since inquiry among my linguistic friends suggests that some explanations might be of general interest, I wish to ask a number of questions.

Linguists, like many other people who feel called upon to talk about language, are in the habit of saying that speech activity is continuously variable in nature. Having said this, they proceed to describe particular samples of speech as sequences of events which they isolate on the basis of either articulatory definitions or acoustic definitions, or both. In carrying out this operation they are not seriously inconvenienced by the continuous aspect of speech: the fact that boundaries between any two of the elementary events composing an utterance cannot be fixed with exactness does not constitute a problem for them. They may occasionally use metaphoric expressions such as ‘overlapping phones’ and ‘slurring’, by way of acknowledging the continuously varying character of speech; but the function of such expressions is to justify the keeping of a discrete representation in the face of any demonstration that the physical segmentation of speech is hopeless. (That it is in fact not hopeless at all is beside the point here.) Speech may indeed be continuously varying when looked at in the laboratory, but the basic fact about speech is that human beings can hear it as a sequence of auditory fractions. Linguists may divide an utterance into a larger number of fractions than other listeners do, but even linguists have never been forced to concede the inadequacy of a discrete representation on the ground that it did not account explicitly for the physical continuous character of speech.

It is now more than a half century since the memorable controversy concerning the application of analogy to linguistics began to be fought out between the old school on the one hand and the neo-grammarians on the other. Today, analogy is regarded as at least of equal if not greater importance than the phonetic laws themselves.

The most generally assumed ‘cause’ of analogic change has been verbal association (Thumb and Marbe 1901; cf. Kainz 1954:49–53, Stern 1931:199–236). I have presented experimental reasons (Esper 1933) and theoretical reasons (Esper 1935) for regarding such associations rather as results of a more fundamental condition inherent in the nature of the relationships between environmental patterns and response patterns.