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.

It has become commonplace in historical linguistics to recognize instances in which final consonants have been lost from the ends of words. When inspecting sets of apparent cognates which differ only in that one language has final stops which are missing in the other, few linguists would hesitate to conclude that the stopped items represent the older form. More specifically, among the Tibeto-Burman languages, where some languages have a much fuller complement of final stops than others, it has been generally taken for granted that languages with many final stops are, in that feature, more conservative than languages with few or no final stops. Nevertheless, in the Maru language, which is spoken in northern Burma and which is quite closely related to Burmese, certain final stops seem to be intrusive, though they have developed in an entirely regular way from unstopped syllables. That is, certain Maru syllables which have final stops are cognate with unstopped Burmese syllables, and it will be the purpose of this paper to argue that the open syllable forms of Burmese are the more conservative.

In phonemic representations of German utterances, it is common practice to follow the system proposed by Trager and Smith (1951) for designating the so-called suprasegmental phonemes in English. According to this system, there are four phonemic stresses and four distinctive pitch levels. It is considered essential to mark the pitch level at the beginning and end of every utterance (phonemic clause), while an additional pitch indicator is called for when there is a ‘significant’ pitch change within the utterance. Moulton, to whom we owe most for our knowledge of the phonemic structure of German, modifies this system somewhat (1962:113–4) by recognizing only three ‘word stresses’ and a ‘syntactical stress’, which is used to mark the commonly accepted ‘center of the utterance’, i.e. the syllable with the strongest phonetic stress. The inadequacies of the Trager-Smith system and its modification by Moulton are perhaps best illustrated by the difficulty of obtaining uniform analyses of a given utterance, even by auditors trained in the use of the system.

In evaluating possible analyses of phonemic systems within a distinctive feature framework, the average number of bits per phoneme is often taken as a measure of economy. Alternative solutions can be compared with regard to their deviation from the optimal binary feature specification of n phonemes expressed by the formula log2 n. That such a scale of economy cannot serve to evaluate phonological systems which are integrated into the total grammar of a language has been recognized in principle (Halle 1959:29–30, 45), but is not always considered in practice.

Joshua Whatmough, who died on 25 April 1964, was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, on 30 June 1897, the son of Walter and Elizabeth (née Hollows) Whatmough. In conversation, and occasionally in print, Whatmough used to refer to his childhood familiarity with the local speech of his home region, although, as many members of this Society will recall, his adult style of speech was a variety of educated British English moderately close to the norms of RP, yet always flavored with reminiscences of Lancashire phonetics.