Through the kindness of Professor Sturtevant we have been supplied with information about Hittite to enable us to make a Hittite column for the distribution table used in our study of Indo-European linguistic relationships by the quantitative method. The distribution of plus and minus signs for the Hittite column is as follows :

Plus: 6, 7, 14, 22, 25, 26, 32, 36, 42, 45, 47, 52, 55, 64.

Blanks: 3, 4, 9, 15, 16, 27, 28, 29, 30, 48, 67, 68.

Minus: all the rest except 8.

The historical interpretation of the inflectional forms of Tocharian nouns has lagged behind for an obvious reason. The endings of the verbs show their IE affinities at once, and such changes as have occurred present no more obstacles to their explanation than those in the other IE languages. On the other hand the case endings of the nouns, most of all those of the nominative plural, e.g., -am, -ñ, -ant, -u, do not recall directly any IE case formatives, and therefore at first seem to defy explanation. Nevertheless it is not possible that the Tocharian declensions have no IE antecedents at all, for such a contrast between the origin of nouns and verbs is inconceivable. Explanations of Tocharian case endings must take as their starting point IE conditions. This is the only line of attack which holds forth promise of attaining any results, and even in this way it cannot be hoped to settle once for all the history of every variety of declensional pattern. While the writer believes that he can make some suggestions which will win assent, he also recognizes that other details will necessarily be subject to change after maturer consideration.

Previous experimental investigations of English vowel-length have been confined principally to the Received Standard dialect of British English. Though over thirty years old, Meyer's pioneering work on the lexical duration of vowels in the speech of a Londoner and an Oxfordshire man continues to be the only extensive collection of data on English vowel-duration. A start has been made, however, in the experimental measurement of American sound-length in two recent studies of quite different nature. In the first the durations of sounds in a Middle Westerner's reading of a short piece of narrative prose were obtained from oscillographic recordings, and gross averages were computed for vowel and consonant durations. The second measured lexical durations in 131 monosyllables with a final dental stop from the writer's own pronunciation, and set up several conclusions concerning American ‘quantity’ based on the relative values of the durations.

The Chiricahua Apache, in aboriginal times, occupied the territory centering about the junction of the Arizona-New Mexico state line with the international boundary. Since this region was explored and colonized by the Spaniards as early as the sixteenth century, the Chiricahua have probably been in contact with Spanish-speaking peoples for more than three hundred years.

However, the influence of Spanish on the language of the Chiricahua has been a slight one. In my dictionary, there are but nineteen words of indisputable Spanish origin. All other linguistic innovations which can be attributed to Spanish contact are either changes or extensions of meaning of older linguistic elements or recently formed descriptive compounds.

In Language 14.303, Professor Urban T. Holmes, Jr., noting that the Dean of Lismore represents Gaelic spirant g by z, queries whether this might represent the pronunciation of the Dean's day or dialect.

The Linguistic Society of America will hold its Sixteenth Annual Meeting at Philadelphia, on December 27 and 28, 1939, at the invitation of the University of Pennsylvania.