When the utterances of a language have been analyzed into their smallest meaningful units, the morphemes, a number of these morphemes in most languages have more than one morpheme alternant. Insofar as these alternants are sequences of phonemes (in which case we call them morphs), the phonemic differences among all the different morphs belonging to one phoneme can be described, classified, and compared with the differences among morphs of other morphemes, considered morpheme by morpheme. The total class of these differences so described, classified, and compared is called the morphophonemics of the language in question, and any two morphs of the same morpheme are said to stand in a relation of (morphophonemic) alternation with each other. The most common symbol for alternation is ~. Alternations may be reduced to their lowest phonemic terms; thus (Bloch 416, Type VIII) the alternation duw ~ di (do ~ di-d) may be reduced to uw ~ i. Sometimes, as in this example, the reduction can be effected in more than one way; we could reduce the alternation to two phonemic alternations: u ~ i and w ~ zero (cf. Bloch 414, par. 3). In this case, and perhaps always, the difference between alternative ways is trivial.

Analysis of the grammatically complete sentence in Ukrainian reveals, as elsewhere in Indo-European, the familiar ‘logical’ polarity of subject and predicate. The nucleus of the subject is preponderantly a nominal element, that of the predicate a verbal one; apart from their characteristic suffixes of derivation, the first is defined morphologically by a system of declension, the second by a system of conjugation, i.e. by two contrasting patterns of flexion. The fact of flexion itself serves as a criterion to discriminate between the inflected and the uninflected lexical constituents (lexemes) of the language. The nominal system is, if anything, rather more involved than the verbal and covers the expression of a series of notional categories, only some of which (e.g. person and number) it shares with the verb. Selected case-relations are represented by more or less characteristic morphemes, and the variety of these is multiplied by the demands of gender and number.

In Old Irish, there exists a group of verbs which are characterized by the fact that they normally infix a meaningless neuter pronoun of the third person singular. Such a verb, for example, is ar·crin ‘perishes’, which, however, with the infix usually occurs in the form ara·chrin ‘perishes (it)'. Similar to ara·chrin and to the other verbs of this group is apparently ar·clich ‘wards off, parries'. Although so far this fact has not been noted, it likewise seems to infix a meaningless neuter pronoun in the following two passages from the oldest recension of Táin Bó Cúailnge:

If it is true that few competent studies have been written on Hispanic prefixes and suffixes, one may claim without exaggeration that no inquiry, either descriptive or historical, has ever been made into the infixes. Yet in many cases etymological work can hardly be carried on adequately without some attention to the elements inserted between radical and suffix. Perhaps the reason that these have proved so elusive is that in Romance they have no clearly definable connotation of their own. The following notes illustrate the aid that can be derived from the study of one characteristic infix, -eg-, in the solution of various lexical problems.

It has been established by Henry Lee Smith Jr. and Edgar H. Sturtevant that the Germanic Verschärfung is due to the original presence of laryngeals. Both, however, seem to have been puzzled by the appearance of this phenomenon after u, in cases like Swed. rugg ‘shaggy hair’ and Norw. dial. rugga ‘carpet of shaggy hair’ beside ON rǫgg, rǫggr ‘long coarse wool’. According to Sturtevant, ‘we may assume that in Swed. rugg the Verschärfung has spread from the form with IH rъHW- > IE rəhw- to a related form with rhu- > IE ru-.' He holds that ‘a similar explanation is available for the vocalism of Goth, skuggwa “mirror”, bluggwans “struck”, OIcel. tryggr “true”, etc.’ but seems reluctant to admit that IH ihy and uhw should have yielded IE ihy and uhw (whence the Germanic Verschärfung), since nothing appears to warrant the hypothesis that ‘an IH voiceless laryngeal when preceded and followed by the same semivowel behaved in the same way as a voiceless laryngeal after ъ and before a semivowel.’ Sturtevant's explanation, however, offers no solution for the baffling alternate development of IH uhw- in Indo-European pointed out by Smith and attested by ON rȳja ‘to pluck wool', with a long vowel, like ON brū ‘bridge’, trū, trūa ‘faith’, būa ‘to dwell’, alongside of ON bryggja ‘pier, bridge’, tryggja, tryggva ‘to make firm’, byggja ‘to inhabit’. Though stating that this phenomenon, found throughout Indo-European, is particularly evident in Germanic and should explain ū in the 2d class of strong verbs (type of OE sūpan), Smith does not inquire any further into its origin. He merely enumerates a few possibilities, among which two deserve special notice: the alternate development might be due either to ‘an accent shift in certain classes of words which returned the accent to the root vowel after the reduction of the diphthong in time for the laryngeal to lengthen the u in pre-IE times’ or to a particular ‘syllabification of roots containing laryngeals’.

In the first volume of The Eccentricities of John Edwin, Comedian (1791), the author of the memoirs, or perhaps rather his literary executor, Anthony Pasquin, alias John Williams, has something to say about the linguistic idiosyncracies of certain contemporary London actors. Since these anecdotal comments, which appear to be unknown to Anglists, add something to our meager knowledge of Cockney in the latter half of the 18th century, I shall reprint them here with what phonological and grammatical notes may seem pertinent.