In 1873, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli proposed to distinguish, in addition to the two recognized Gallo-Romance linguistic areas of North French and Provençal, a third, which he named Franco-Provençal. He defined this as

un tipo idiomatico, il quale insieme riunisce, con alcuni suoi caratteri specifici, più altri caratteri, che parte son comuni al francese, parte lo sono al provenzale, e non priviene già da una tarda confluenza di elementi diversi, ma attesta bensì la sua propria indipendenza istorica non guari dissimile da quella per cui fra loro si distinguono gli altri principali tipi neolatini.

The long-established hypothesis that Gothic ái áu still represented the diphthongs [ai au] in the time of Wulfila is expressed in the writings of such scholars as Jellinek, Streitberg, Braune, and Kieckers. In recent years, however, an increasing number of linguists, including Hirt, Marstrander, Wright, and Mossé, have reached the conclusion that Wulfila's ái áu were no longer diphthongs but had become monophthongized to long open [ε: ɔ:] respectively. Still others, e.g. Wrede and Prokosch, agree only that such a monophthongization took place. Wrede assigns it to the post-Wulfilian period, and Prokosch qualifies his acceptance of the theory: ‘I believe that Hirt is right, but the question is largely one of chronology. Shortly before Wulfila's time, Gmc. ai au were still diphthongs in Gothic ... . Shortly after Wulfila, they were monophthongs’.

During my stay in Ethiopia in 1946–47 I had occasion to investigate various argots, including those of merchants, of minstrels, and of the people possessed by the spirit called zar. The present article will deal with the merchants' argot. There is no unified merchant argot all over Ethiopia, not even among speakers of the same language. The argot under consideration is spoken by the merchants of Moţa, to the north of Debre Markos, the capital of Godjam; it is called kəlaməñña (see §3). A superficial investigation of the argot of the merchants of Gondar, the capital of Begemder, north of Godjam, convinced me that the two argots are quite different. It would be of particular importance to investigate the argot of the merchants of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, which is the meeting-point for merchants of the various populations of the country.

The speech of monolingual natives of some languages is comprised of more than one phonemic system; the simultaneously existing systems operate partly in harmony and partly in conflict. No rigidly descriptive statement of the facts about such a language accounts for all the pertinent structural data without leading to apparent contradictions. These are caused by the conflict of statements about one phonemic system with statements about another system or part of a system present in the speech of the same individual.