Alfred Louis Kroeber died in Paris in the early morning of Wednesday, 5 October 1960, in his eighty-fifth year. He was a member of the Linguistic Society of America from its beginning, a Signer of the Call that led to its founding, and its president in 1940.

Most linguists agree on the existence, or at least on the inescapable utility, of two kinds of basic elements in a language: morphemes and phonemes. The relation between them, however, is conceived of in various ways. In this paper we survey some of these ways, and then extend the discussion to some other aspects of language design and of linguistic method and theory.

The classical Prakrit vowel system has been chosen as a starting point to study the history of the vowel system of Gujarati. The evidence for the intervening stages is supplied by documents, and it is proposed to show how many phonemic systems have to be postulated for these intervening stages. The changes in the phonemic systems have, in turn, been followed by significant changes in the grammatical systems, thus providing us with more reliable data on the stages in the history of the Gujarati language. Statements about changes in the consonants have been excluded mainly because they are relatively few, and do not play a significant role in the changes in the grammatical system. Where the changes in consonant and vowel systems are interdependent, statements about consonant changes have been made.

It may seem obvious that when we set out to write a grammar of a language, the definition of that language is one of our first tasks. Further, that since we are dealing with language, the criteria used in our definition should be linguistic. These criteria should delimit the language geographically, that is, from other languages, and chronologically, that is, from earlier and later stages of the same language. Yet in spite of these minimum requirements for an adequate definition, our handbooks are not precise in their definitions or explicit in regard to criteria used for the definitions they give.

In a recent article in Language, Charles F. Hockett has presented an analysis of the stressed syllabics of the Vespasian Psalter and Hymns. Hockett opposes the traditional view which interprets ea, eo, io, and ie as short diphthongs, and offers a solution of his own which within the limitations of one MS is in part convincing. In general, he equates each vowel letter or digraph with a phoneme. In agreement with us, with Mossé, and with Daunt, but in contradiction of the established tradition, he regards the digraphs ea, eo, io, and ie as spellings for monophthongs; he believes, however, that these short digraphs represent separate short vowel phonemes; we believe that in early OE they represented allophones of the front vowels /i/, /e/, and /æ/; we believe that eo, io, and ie represented allophones only in the earlier period. These allophones later became phonemes, whereas the allophone represented by ea did not. Hockett's speculations about the motivations of the scribes who first selected these particular digraphs in these particular values are appealing. Especially ingenious is his theory about the origin of the letter y in OE, which he considers to have been originally a digraph (591–4).

'This whiskey,' said O'Reilly, sampling spirits that claimed to be from his homeland, 'was not exported from Ireland; it was deported.'

The past decade has seen a flurry of activity in the field of language contact, with the result that we now have many descriptive studies and several valuable theoretical reviews of the field which serve to stimulate and guide further inquiry. One of the suggestions repeatedly pressed on the reader of Weinreich's Languages in contact and Haugen's Bilingualism in the Americas is the necessity of interdisciplinary research in studying the so-called extralinguistic factors which abound in any consideration of this subject. To be sure, linguists have made great strides in their principal area of interest in language contact, viz. the study of linguistic borrowing. But these studies have been by and large descriptive of the linguistic results of language contact. They are not so much interested in the behavior which accounts for the observed changes (say, between two historical stages of a language) as they are in identifying and tabulating the changes. Excellent documentation of the range of variability of these linguistic results is unfortunately matched by little knowledge concerning the social factors which effect their inception.