Discussion during the last twenty-five years has made the relation of Latin to Osco-Umbrian a problem, where none had previously existed. Until about that time, the assumption of a unity later than West Indo-European—Uritalisch or Proto-Italic—from which both Latin and Osco-Umbrian were derived, was universally accepted; it is still the doctrine to be found in the standard handbooks of Indo-European. During the last quarter-century, however, this hypothesis has been repeatedly called in question by Italian and German linguists, and there are now many who regard Latin and Osco-Umbrian as essentially two separate branches of the Indo-European family. Since this problem, so far as I know, has not been the subject of a full-length treatment in any American journal, a review and an evaluation of the recent arguments may be of interest.

In dealing with the origin of Hittite ḫ, Danish ‘laryngealists’ seem reluctant to give up the idea of deriving it from an IE k-sound. This theory originated with Bedřich Hrozny, who, in several IE etymologies for Hittite words, implied that their initial ḫ- reflected an IE guttural. The tentative conclusions of the Czech linguist were soon worked out by Carl J. S. Marstrander, on the assumption that Hitt. ḫ- continues IE *ĝh- (gh). The evidence adduced being most questionable, this view failed to carry conviction; yet other prominent linguists, later on, considered Hitt. ḫ a reflex of IE gutturals. Johannes Friedrich derived Hitt. ḫu-iš-nu-zi ‘cause to live’ from IE *gwī- ‘live’, whereas Holger Pedersen compared Hitt. ḫa-an-te-iz-zi-iš ‘first’ with OIr. cét-, cétne, W cyntaf ‘first’, Gaul. Cintugnatus.

The guttural initials generally accepted as proposed by Bernhard Karlgren for archaic Chinese are six: k kh g gh ng h, where h represents aspiration. In the evolution from the archaic of about 800 b.c. to the ancient Chinese of about 600 a.d., four of these are believed to remain unchanged. For the other two the accepted statement is the following:

Unaspirated g, which existed only before y, was yodicized through the influence of the latter: *gywang became jywang (j is yod, of Engl. yes). Aspirated gh, which was preserved unaltered before y, changed into fricative γ before other vowels.

In an earlier article I suggested that Malay tiga may be a borrowing of a Middle Indic tiga, the equivalent of Sanskrit trika. My attention has been called to the published statements of Dutch authorities who disagree with this view.

This paper offers an example of how connected discourse can be formally analyzed in such a way as to reveal something of its structure. The method used here was described in a previous paper, Discourse analysis, Lg. 28.1–30 (1952). It consists essentially of the following steps: given a particular text, we collect those linguistic elements (morphemes or sequences of morphemes) which have identical environments within a sentence, and we call these equivalent to each other; thus, if we find the sentences AF and BF in our text, we write A = B and say that A is equivalent to B or that both are in the same equivalence class. We further collect those linguistic elements which have equivalent (rather than identical) environments, and we call these also equivalent to each other; if we find the sentences AF and BE, and if A = B (because BF occurs too), then F is secondarily equivalent to E, and we write F = E. (Note that in the sentence AF, A is the environment of F, and F is the environment of A.) This operation enables us to collect many or all of the linguistic elements or sections of any particular text into a few equivalence classes. For example, if our text consists of the sentences AF: BE: CG: BF: ME: AG: NE: NG: MH, we set up two classes: one class to include A, B (because of AF and BF), C (because of AG and CG), M, and N (because of BE and ME and NE); the other class to include F, E (because of BF and BE), G (because of AF and AG), and H (because of ME and MH).