In calling attention to the shortcomings of the existing theory of internal reconstruction, Wallace L. Chafe finds it

In the beginning of the 5th century Marcellus Empiricus of Bordeaux composed a collection of popular medical instructions, De medicamentis liber, in which he offered prescriptions and instructed how to cure various sicknesses. The treatment and application of medicine were to be accompanied by healing charms. The work was written in Latin. Beside numerous Latin and a few Greek incantations there are some which are generally believed to be Gaulish. In the original Aquitania, south of the river Garonne, Iberian was spoken before Latin, but at Bordeaux there was a Celtic-speaking enclave.

Several years ago I published in this journal an article concerning the form of Indo-European personal names. Were they typically dithematic, like Greek Aristo-bulos, Sanskrit Agni-datta, Iranian Ana-phes, Keltic Cingeto-rix, Old High German Fridu-berht, and hundreds of others in the onomastica of the various, especially the older Indo-European languages? Or were dithematic names only a special shape, disproportionately emphasized in the frequency of occurrence by the tradition and the kind of text at our disposal, at the expense of the much less recorded monothematic names? No doubt some monothematic names are hypocoristic abbreviations of dithematic ones; they are generally recognizable by either their stem or their ending. But a large number of available monothematic names are certainly original. Are they just as typically Indo-European, or less so, or more so?

In his article Proto-Indo-European Reality and Reconstruction, Ernst Pulgram states that ‘when we reconstruct, through the methods of comparative historical linguistics, an array of asterisked Proto-Indo-European forms, the procedure itself implies that the result of our endeavours is a uniform construct’, and asserts that ‘anything in linguistics that is timeless, non-dialectal, and non-phonetic, by definition does not represent a real language’ (422). He then bases his further discussion of the impossibility of learning about ‘Real Proto-Indo-European’ on the presumed unreal nature of the reconstructed proto-language: ‘No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality’ (423). Hence, for Pulgram, the formulaic character of our reconstructions of individual items renders it impossible to make a serious attempt to reconstruct texts in a proto-language: ‘To write an Aesopian fable or the Lord's Prayer in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is innocent enough as a pastime, but the text has no doubt little if any resemblance to any speech ever heard on earth’ (423).

It has often been regretted that, while the methods of modern linguistics have achieved notable progress in the field of phonology, corresponding results for syntax have been considerably less impressive. At least one reason for the truth underlying this regret is undoubtedly the inability of the linguist to satisfy the very requirements which he himself has thought it necessary to impose on an adequate syntactic description. His persistent failure has resulted not so much, I think, from the lack of knowledge or insight into the nature of linguistic systems but rather in large measure from the unrealistic nature of these requirements.

[Vowel nasality is a distinctive feature in American English in cases such as camp, hint, and bunk, as compared, respectively, with cap, hit, and buck. This is demonstrated by the results of a number of experiments with synthetic speech and magnetic tape, by data obtained from spectrograms and kymograms, and by the descriptive analysis of pertinent utterances by American speakers. A general rule for the distribution of this phenomenon is given in the conclusion.]