[A discussion of conventional popular statements about language and of certain characteristic reactions called forth when these are brought into question.]

Gafat is an Ethiopic language which was spoken some 150 years ago in the province of Gafat, southwest of Gojjam, northwest of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. According to the testimony of the latest travellers, the language is no longer spoken in that province. The inhabitants of Gafat now speak Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. The only document which allows us to gain an insight into the structure of the language is the translation of the Song of Solomon from Amharic into Gafat made by a priest of Gafat at the end of the 18th century for the traveller James Bruce. The manuscript is now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Another available document of this language is a collection of words made by Beke, On the languages and dialects of Abyssinia and the countries to the South, published in the Proceedings of the Philological Society 2.99–107 (1845), but in fact all the words are already Amharic provided with the Gafat ending -iš (see §2.5). According to Beke the language was sinking into oblivion.

The etymon of OCS syn ‘πύργoς‘ is found in the contemporaneous Turkic languages.

To one who believes firmly that in the teaching of ancient as well as of modern languages an accurate pronunciation is the best possible start toward language mastery and the appreciation of literature, the pronunciation of Greek and Latin is a subject of unfailing interest. The evidence for the ancient pronunciation has been studied by a considerable number of scholars, and has recently been set forth excellently by Edgar H. Sturtevant in the second edition of his Pronunciation of Greek and Latin (Linguistic Society of America, 1940). The essential features of the phonology are, of course, settled beyond doubt, yet as to some lesser points of the pronunciation it is still possible to raise certain questions, even if one cannot always answer them. The theme of this discussion is the bearing of evidence from the modern languages on the pronunciation of gn in Latin and of γμ and γv in Greek.

Since Muratori, there have been several attempts to explain etymologically Ital. pozzánghera ‘mud-puddle’. The following ones stand out: 1. Caix identifies pozzánghera with Emilian pociacra and traces both back to Lat. *puteacula. 2. Meyer-Lübke considers it a derivative from puteus, but leaves it with the remark: ‘mit unerklärtem Ausgang’. 3. Gamillscheg sees the etymon in Langob. putz-angar ‘versumpfter Platz’, supporting his theory by geographical reasons. From the supposedly Langobardic origin of the compound pozzánghera Gamillscheg infers Langobardic origin also for the simple pozza ‘mud-puddle’. 4. Hubschmied derives both pozzánghera and pozzángola from puteus with the suffix -ang (which occasionally adds a pejorative nuance to the basic word), reinforced by a diminutive suffix. 5. Hall reconstructs on the basis of Emil. pociacra Ital. *pozzachera, according to him a derivative of pozza, enlarged by the pejorative -́era: pozzánghera, then, is a crossing of this *pozzachera with fango ‘mud’. The weakness of these hypotheses consists in the fact that they do not consider sufficiently either the older forms or the geographical distribution of the term under discussion.

In the oldest OE texts—the Epinal glossary, the Corpus glossary, and the oldest documents—b is written medially where other Germanic languages have /b/, and f is written where other Germanic languages have /f/; e.g. obær, halbæ, libr, hræbnes, ebor (Ep.), giaban (doc.), uulfes, cefr, hofr. The same distinction is found in final position; e.g. hualb, stæb, reab, uuf (Ep.), gib (doc.). In later OE texts, f is universally used both medially and finally; e.g. lifr, ofer, hræfn, efor, stæf, reaf. Some isolated spellings in Epinal indicated the coming change in spelling practice: unofercumenræ, sifunsterri, nabfogar. Corpus has even more cases, e.g. halfe, forscrifen, as well as reverse spellings like ceber, where b appears for f.

According to the NED, the English noun runt is of obscure etymology. The editors rightly reject the connection with Middle Dutch runt ‘ox’ upheld (among others) by Weekley, but they offer nothing in its stead. H. Falk, in his Altnordische Waffenkunde 52, connects runt with Icelandic hrotti, a word which he defines as langer Mensch (longurio)'. In S. Blöndal's Islandsk-Dansk Ordbog the word hrotti is defined in Icelandic: ‘stór, klunnalega vaxinn maÐur (big, heavy, clumsy man)'; and in Danish: 'höj Mand af plump Vækst (tall, fat man)'. The derogatory sense 'coarse, rude fellow’ is recorded in Cleasby-Vigfússon's Icelandic-English Dict.; similarly in Blöndal and in Fritzner. In his Eigennamen im Beowulf 75, E. Björkman adds Danish runte, a form in which the sound-change nt > tt did not take place. In the Dansk Ordbog published under the auspices of Videnskabernes Selskab, runte is defined as 'en lang Stage, tyk ved den nederste Ende, til at springe over en Grøft med (a long pole, thick at the lower end, for use in jumping over a ditch)'. An Icelandic form without assimilation also occurs, though neither Falk nor Björkman mentions it. This form is hrunki, which Fritzner glosses ‘stor Person (big person)', while in Cleasby-Vigfússon only the derogatory senses 'clown, brute’ are recorded. According to Falk, runt and hrotti may go back to a stem *hrungt- (base hrung plus t-suffix); the base is cognate with OE hrung ‘rung, staff, rod, beam, pole,’ the modern rung (of a ladder or chair). I analyze hrunki as made up of this same base hrung plus k-suffix. The two words hrotti and hrunki obviously agree in meaning, whether used with or without derogation. They also agree in that they may be used as proper names. Hrunki is on record as a nickname, and Hrotti is on record as a sword-name: it occurs in the Elder Edda and the Völsungasaga as the name of Fáfnir's sword. Since the Scandinavians had a way of making a man's nickname do duty also as the name of his sword, the existence of the sword-name Hrotti indicates that Fáfnir had a nickname Hrotti, even though this nickname is not recorded as such. A nickname Hrotti would be eminently suitable for Fáfnir, who was by far the biggest and grimmest of the sons of HreiÐmarr and, when he exercised his powers as a shape-shifter, took the form of a huge dragon. To the sword-name Hrotti answers the sword-name Hrunting recorded in the OE poem Beowulf. This name shows the -ing-suffix regular in English (as distinguished from Scandinavian) sword-names. The sword in question presumably got its name from an owner nicknamed Hrunta. In other words, hrunta is the OE cognate of Icelandic hrotti, and the modern English runt can be traced back to OE times. Yet another Scandinavian proper name belongs here: the mythological name Hrungnir is obviously made up of a base hrung plus n-suffix, and since this name is that of a giant it goes well with the meaning ‘big person, tall man’ recorded for hrunki and hrotti. No Scandinavian form without a suffix occurs. Forms in other Germanic dialects without suffix, besides the OE hrung mentioned above, are Gothic hrugga ‘rod, staff’ and German runge.