The Hittite documents show many instances of an interchange of the vowels e and a. Since the variation is not uniform, and neither vowel of the pair is restricted to any phonetic surroundings or morphological categories, we must apparently assume several causes, and sound method requires the separate treatment of groups of words which show parallel phenomena. In this paper I propose to discuss the variation in monosyllabic verbal roots which end in a consonant.

Initial h before I, n, r disappeared in ONorw. at a preliterary date but was regularly retained in Olcel. (cf. Noreen §289). In Olcel. this initial h- was often lost, or an initial h- was often added to I, n, r, through association between words having initial hl, hn, hr and words having initial l, n, r. This associative process was due to resemblance in meaning or in form aside from the initial consonants in question. After the loss or the accretion of initial h- had become established between certain words or word groups there developed a general feeling of uncertainty as to whether a word should begin with hl or l, hn or n, hr or r. Most cases of this type of general confusion are naturally found in the Late Olcel. period, yet several instances may be cited in the classical period; which shows that the process was even then well under way. For the classical period I may mention the following examples: Hniflungr (Elder Edda) for Niflungr, rār ‘damp’ (Elder Edda) for hrār, hrjā for rjā ‘wrestle’; for the Late Olcel. period hnezla (for nezla) ‘button loop’, hniᵭra (for niᵭra) ‘to lower’, reᵭr (for hreᵭr) ‘genitals’, hreifr (for reifr) ‘glad’, hrifsa (for rifsa) ‘to rob’, ringja (for hringja) ‘a round pail’.

The explanation of the Italic imperfects in *-fām Lat. -bam which is commonly accepted in the hand books is not without its difficulties, although it has many points in its favor. It is true that the derivation of e.g. legēbam from a participial or infinitival form of lego plus *bhu̯ā-m, the old injunctive of IE *bheu-, is unobjectionable from the phonetic point of view, and that both the second syllable of Osc. fu-fans and Lat. -bam -bās, etc., may without the slightest hesitation be derived from *bhu̯ā-m. It is also true that the derivation of the formation from one of the most common of IE roots and the analogy of periphrastic imperfects of the type of Engl, was reading are additional favoring considerations. Nevertheless there are two very serious difficulties which make it hard to agree with this hypothesis in its received form.

Lat. auster ‘south wind; south’, austrālis ‘southern’: aurōra, etc., is a well established etymology, but not sufficiently explained. Both groups of words may be referred to a base *awes- or perhaps rather *ēwes- (with a- from ǝ), with the primary meaning ‘wave, roll, rise’, descriptive of fire and water. Hence *austro- was used both of the east, orient, in reference to the rising of the sun, and of the south, or rather of the south wind, as the rain-bearer, storm-bringer, thawer. For Lat. auster is described as fulmine pollens (Lucr. 5. 744), turbidus (Hor. Od. 3. 3. 4), nullius (Prop. 2. 15, 56), humidus (Virg., G 1. 462), pluvius (Ovid, M 1. 66), and also as frigidus, hibernus, validus, vehemens. We may therefore compare Skt. oṣárn ‘geschwind; sogleich’, Swed. yster ‘sehr lebhaft, unbändig’, ORG ustar ‘gierig’, ustr ‘Fleiss’; Norw. ӯr ‘ausgelassen’, Swiss ūr, ūrig ‘stürmisch (von Wetter), wild, zornig’, Bav. eurisch ‘mürrisch’ (or these with IE r); Norw. ӯsja ‘swarm out, of small animals’, usta ‘stöbern’ (of dust or rain), usle ‘coaldust’, ON usti ‘glowing ashes’, ysja ‘fire’, Lat. ūro, Skt. uṣmā 'Hitze, Glut, Dampf, etc.; vāsa-h 'Wolgeruch', Swed. ōs 'Dunst, Geruch,' OE wōs 'moisture, juice', MLG wōs ‘Absud, Brühe, Most’, wasem ‘Wasserdampf, Dunst’, OHG wasulun ‘pluviis’, Norw. vaslast ‘nass werden, fliessen’.

With the main points made by Professor Whatmough in Language 3.105–9, as to the etymology and meaning of the Oscan word deketāsio-, a title of magistrates at Nola and at Abella, I am in hearty agreement. In two minor details only I should like to supplement or modify what he says.

In the following notes I shall study the more important linguistic phenomena that are to be found in my Cuentos populares españoles, the most abundant and most important collection of Spanish folk-tales that has ever been collected and published. The three volumes that contain the folk-tales offer us 280 dialectic versions of some 200 different tales representative of 24 of the 49 provinces of Spain and collected from 88 different towns, villages, and localities from the following regions of north, central, and southern Spain: La Montaña, Asturias, León, Castilla la Vieja, Castilla la Nueva, Andalucía, La Mancha, and Estremadura. About one third of the materials are from Old Castile. All the folk-tales, with the exception of those from Asturias, were collected and taken down (frequently in phonetic script) by myself. The Asturian folk-tales (eleven in number) are the only materials in the entire collection that may be called non-Castilian and for that reason they will not enter into our present linguistic studies. The linguistic materials that are to be the object of our study are, therefore, fundamentally and essentially Castilian materials from Old and New Castile and from the southern Spanish regions that have been castilianized since the XIIth century when these regions began to be recaptured from the Arabs, and they do not, in general, represent any of the special linguistic characteristics of Asturian, Galician, Leonese, Aragonese, Valencian, Portuguese or Catalonian. Andalusian Spanish shows, to be sure, certain linguistic traits that appear to separate it from the Castilian of the northern and central regions, but many of these traits are after all developments of phenomena that had their beginnings in Castile.