The complete publication of the Lydian inscriptions by Buckler has been followed up almost immediately by Sayce with a suggestive article on their decipherment—an article, however, which raises more questions than it settles. The following remarks were prompted by it, but I find it necessary frequently to disagree with Sayce's conclusions. In the transliteration of the Lydian characters I shall follow Sayce, except that I shall represent the sibilants as Buckler does.

Since the appearance of E. K.‘s dedicatory epistle in the first edition of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar, many theories have been advanced in explanation of the diction which Spenser used. Most of these have dealt with the influence of renaissance theories of diction on Spenser's language; many have added little to the material contained in E. K.‘s dedicatory epistle; and few have dealt with the details of the language itself. It is not my purpose in this paper to add another study to the list of those dealing with Spenser's relationship to contemporary theories of diction. It is my purpose rather to point out the extent to which Spenser used archaisms and to show that he consciously used a specialized diction for his pastoral poetry.

The older Indo-European languages have preserved a considerable number of adjectives in oxytone ú of the type Ved. prthús, Avest. , Gr. πλατus ‘broad’; or Ved. , Goth, þaúrsus; OHG. durri ‘dry.‘ For the most part they express very primary adjectival ideas, to a large extent qualities inherent in concrete objects, showing that they were formed at a very early time. They are generally made from the reduced grade of the root, due to their oxytone accent, but morfological and lexical (semantic) influences have tended occasionally, though not very often, to efface the inter-play between oxytonesis and reduced root-form (Vedic = Gr. , etc.). Adjective function and the position of the accent preserve their distinctive class character to an uncommon degree.

The state of confusion of our knowledge of the linguistics of Central America needs no better comment than the hodge-podge in that section of Les Langues du Monde, recently edited by Meillet. Oaxaca is a veritable tangle-knot of linguistic stocks. One is reminded of the Ca'ifornia of early days with its twenty-one unconnected families. Oaxaca is a comparatively small state, but there are fourteen tongues spoken within its borders. With the exception of Aztec not one of them has been seriously studied until now. As for the classifications, they vary all the way from Belmar, who reduces them all to three families, to Meillet, who has eight different stocks represented in the state, four of which would be made up of one single isolated language. I hope that the present paper will help to clear the situation.

F. Sommer, in the revised edition of his Handbuch der lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehre, offers no explanation of the development of final -āi in the dative singular of ā-stems (= first declension) to -ae rather than to ī; see pp. 146, 327–28. Yet the development of the long diphthong āi to ī in non-initial (= unaccented) syllables is certain in the dative-ablative plural of ā-stems, and an identical development of the long ōi is seen in the same forms of the o-stems, where length is assured by the Sanskrit form: inst. pl. devāis = Latin dīvīs. The long diphthong in the dative singular of ā-stems is proved by the Greek ending in ‘terrae,’ ‘deae.'