Our descriptions of the system of noun inflection in Proto-Indo-European have been modified little since the beginning of this century. At that time Schmidt, Jacobi, van Wijk, and others were discussing the case endings; Brugmann was examining the gender categories, primarily to propose that the feminine gender was secondary.

[Proto-IE -Hy- and -Hw- (where H was either a glottal spirant [h] or a glottal stop [q]) resulted in PGmc. -qy- and -qw-. This phoneme /q/, of limited distribution and duration, fell together with /g/ in East Germanic, with /k/ and /g/ in North Germanic, and with /k/ and /y, w/ in West Germanic]

There has been a great deal of interest lately in the application of structural techniques to problems of dialect comparison. Studies in this field are rendered difficult, however, by the fact that many of the existing surveys were planned at a time when the phonemic principle was still insufficiently understood and questionnaires lacked examples illustrating points which were later found to be of great importance. As a result, many of the field records available at present are inadequate for complete phonemic analysis. If a geographical study is to yield enough structurally relevant information, it must be based on advance knowledge of the major phonemic and phonetic features characteristic of the region. A structural linguistic survey in an area not previously studied might therefore consist of two stages: (a) a preliminary series of phonological studies at selected points in the area, using informant methods of the type employed in studies of a single dialect, with a classification of dialect differences found; and (b) a detailed geographical survey with the aid of questionnaires to determine the spread of the features discovered in the preliminary study.

This article presents an analysis of the morphemic structure of the French personal pronouns. The ‘definite article’ is taken as a pronominal form—see §2.4. The analysis is carried out by the methods discussed in my article French morphology: Verb inflection, Lg. 31.511–29 (1955); note particularly §0.2 for the general basis, §0.3 for symbols, and §§1.1–2 for phonology and morphophonemics.

The Old English dialects have traditionally been viewed as mere extensions of the dialects of the continental Germanic tribes before their migration to Britain. Following Bede's famous division of the fifth-century invaders into Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, writers have postulated three corresponding dialects: Kentish, Anglian, and Saxon. In this paper I shall develop the hypothesis that the origins of the English dialects lie not in pre-migration tribal affiliations but in certain social, economic, and cultural developments which occurred after the migration was completed. This does not imply that the continental Germanic dialects are irrelevant to the genesis of English dialects; indeed the influence of Frisian is central to my hypothesis. Only those influences, however, which were felt after the migrations were relevant to formation of the English dialects; for I believe that these dialects originated not on the continent but on the island of Britain.

This is the concluding paper in a series of three studies that deal with the relation of form to aspect in Germanic: in 4th-century Gothic, in 9th-century East Franconian, and now in the late 10th-century Wessex translation of the Lindisfarne Gospels. Once again I propose to demonstrate that verbal forms are indifferent to aspect in a Germanic language. But in the interest of brevity I shall here restrict the demonstration to verbs whose reference is nonperfective, since these are, by definition, capable of aspectual shift and so can serve by themselves to illustrate the possible interrelations between form and aspect. Departing from my procedure in AT, I shall arrange the illustrative material primarily in terms of verbal sets (VS), and only within these as Simplexes, ge-Compounds, and Prefix-Compounds, showing at a glance that Old English verbal forms were indifferent to aspect on all three derivational levels. The terminology and the method of analysis are otherwise the same here as in AT. The five verbal sets deđ, dyde, dó, dónde, dón correspond to the Old High German tuot, teta, tuo, tuonti, tuon; the form-aspect relationship of the Late Latin of the Lindisfarne Gospels is taken to be identical with that of the basic text of Tatian.

In a recent article in LANGUAGE, Hans Kurath criticized some remarks of mine in the same journal. I have profited from his criticisms, some of them quite justified; a personal or bad-tempered reply would be inexcusable. On the other hand, the issues which Kurath has raised are basic; his arguments are not always either clear or conclusive; and if they go unquestioned, they may be accepted, not because they are sound but because they are his. Since inquiry among my linguistic friends suggests that some explanations might be of general interest, I wish to ask a number of questions.

The Editor has invited me to comment briefly on James Sledd's criticisms of my two recent papers in Language. It seems that Sledd finds little in either of my papers that he can accept without reservation, although he passes over in silence some of the most important points I make. Without any explicit commitment on his part concerning such matters, some of his comments are hard to evaluate. But I shall try, taking them in sequence.

The present note has two purposes: to discuss the relation of intervocalic to initial and final consonant sequences in Spanish; and on the basis of the Spanish data to suggest a general model for describing the relative probability of occurrence of intervocalic clusters.

Sol Saporta has presented data which are claimed to confirm his hypothesis that ‘the average frequency of a consonant cluster is a function of the difference between the phonemes in the cluster: low frequencies are expected for clusters which are either extremely similar or extremely dissimilar; high frequencies are expected for clusters which are at neither extreme.‘ The difference between any two phonemes is measured as the number of distinctive features in which they are different. A second article, in which Saporta collaborated with Kathryn C. Keller, considers the possibility that the results might have been expected by chance. The concerns of the present note are (1) to point out that Keller and Saporta did not adequately resolve the question of the chance nature of the results, (2) to present the appropriate mathematical and statistical techniques for doing so, and (3) to make new assessments of some of the data analyzed by Keller and Saporta.