Linguists who conceive of their science as a discipline which collects utterances and classifies their parts often pride themselves on their freedom from mentalism. But freedom from mentalism is an inherent feature of the taxonomic conception of linguistics, for, according to this conception, a linguist starts his investigation with observable physical events and at no stage imports anything else.

One of the factors preventing the wider acceptance of the laryngeal theory of Proto-Indo-European phonology may be that it is rarely presented in a consistent manner. Those who accept the validity of the theory generally work from it as a basis rather than towards it as the thing to be explained. Hence an opponent of the theory is apt to be presented with arguments of several different sorts. One such argument is the pragmatic one that frequently runs : The problem of (say) Brugmann's Law, long unsolved, is amenable to solution by means of a laryngeal. One may object on the one hand that every problem is amenable to ‘solution’ provided enough new entities are introduced, and on the other that the problem in question is perhaps amenable to solution in another way. The laryngealist will retort that another, seemingly quite unrelated problem, generally in another language, is also solved by applying a laryngeal solution. Since solving two problems with one theory is better than solving them with two, this argument from application frequently serves to silence, if not to convince, the opposition.

Antoine Thomas first suggested in 1896 that Fr. lingue ‘ling, Lota molva (a fish)’ is of Germanic origin. His discussion of the word, published first in Romania and repeated shortly thereafter in Thomas’ Essais de philologie française, was a sober, concise, but thorough treatment which included all pertinent evidence that has been published on the subject. Later discussions have added nothing. They have either repeated fragments of the evidence cited by Thomas, usually omitting portions of the remainder which tended to balance those they used, or have adduced material which is irrelevant. Virtually nothing will be added here but evidence which would be irrelevant were it not necessary to refute erroneous proposals made later. Thomas' cautious conclusions were hardly more specific than indicated above. He stated that the French word must have been borrowed from Germanic, but could have been taken from English, Flemish, Dutch, or one of the Scandinavian languages. This proposal is clearly preferable to the only explanation previously suggested, derivation from Lat. lingua ‘tongue’ because of the physical appearance of the fish; as far as it goes, it has apparently been accepted without question. The subsequent history of the etymology, however, has been one of confusion and inaccuracy, with the result that its present state constitutes a regression from that at the time of Thomas' article.

The traditional classification of the Old English strong verbs is crucially influenced by historical considerations. This is obvious; it is less obvious that the description is thereby distorted. It will be the purpose of this paper to show that a strictly synchronic approach results in a different analysis.

In one of his most perceptive essays, Otto Jespersen in 1929 explored the notion of ‘veiled language’. He noted that ‘round-about expressions’ were to be found in the popular speech of many nations, and he felt that they are ‘of interest to students of linguistic psychology as characteristic of one type of the popular mind’. Students of language have long known that taboo presents many problems, not the least of which is that taboo ought to be self-defeating. If a word is never spoken, it should die out in a generation; no doubt many words have been so lost. But taboo is usually only partial—perhaps it exists to be broken. In most cultures there are individuals who play the role of rogue; and it may even be conventional to arrange occasions on which it is expected that the taboos will be broken.

The purpose of this paper is to present the initial results of a study of certain regularities in the structure of written English words. Our objective will be to show that it is possible to extend the phonemic concepts of consonant, vowel, and syllable to written forms and that there is considerable utility in doing so. In particular, we shall show that a major proportion of the one-syllable words, graphemically defined, have the same part-of-speech assignments when checked against standard dictionaries. In this sense we shall claim that the one-syllable words form a part-of-speech class. We further conjecture that graphemic syllabification is intimately related to part-of-speech assignment in the set of all written English words.