The most important vocalic sound-change of Old High German is the i-umlaut, usually referred to simply as umlaut. Its importance lies in its creation of a whole series of new sound units, which are still preserved in Modern Standard German, as well as in its structural similarity to certain sound-changes that occurred in practically all the other Germanic languages and are assumed for a period preceding the earliest OHG sources. It is the purpose of this article to deal particularly with some still controversial aspects of umlaut: the role of consonants in umlaut itself and in the so-called secondary umlaut (Sekundärumlaut); the geographic distribution of umlaut and its spread; and its often misunderstood chronology.

The title of this article is more pretentious than the subject that I propose to treat in these few pages. My concern here is with a question of method; accordingly I shall defer a more comprehensive treatment to some future publication, and refrain from burdening the present essay with details and examples. The purpose of this paper is to show how, through a study of pre-Romance archeology, anthropology, and ethnology, the Italian dialects can be made to appear in a new and perhaps brighter light.

It is a commonplace that the Spanish conjunctive pronoun has more than one possible position with respect to a series of interdependent verbs. Constructions of the type Lo quiero ver ~ Quiero verlo, Lo estoy viendo ~ Estoy viéndolo, Lo vamos a tratar de hacer ~ Vamos a tratarlo de hacer ~ Vamos a tratar de hacerlo are of everyday occurrence; they have been counted and to some extent classified by Keniston.

Most speakers of Norwegian in the Middle West belong to the farming class. Nearly all are bilingual, and many of them handle the English language better than the Norwegian. It is often easy to detect their Scandinavian background in listening to their English, even in the case of second- or third-generation Americans. They were usually educated in a grade school and a Norwegian-Lutheran parochial school. The parochial school, until relatively recent times, was conducted in Norwegian; the children were taught to read and write the language. As a result, only the youngest speakers of Norwegian are without any knowledge of its literary form. Literary Dano-Norwegian is still used in church services, and is the familiar form of the language to those of the city population who cultivate the idiom of their ancestors in the Sons of Norway lodges; but the country communities use dialects almost exclusively. As a rule, a community has only one main dialect. The pioneers preferred to settle with people from their own district in Norway; if people from two districts settled close together, the dialect that counted the larger number of speakers usually replaced the other. Dialect mixtures is seldom to be found except in individual speakers; only one case has been reported where a mixed dialect seems to be the language of a community. Only the largest settlements, for instance the Koshkonong settlement near Madison, have maintained several dialects with equal prestige.

Ever since phonemic pitch was reported for Maya, the existence of similar phonemic pitch in the related languages has been an interesting possibility. The purpose of this paper is to investigate that possibility as it concerns Huasteco. We attempt to demonstrate (1) that vowel length is phonemic; (2) that the pitch heard is not that' of a ‘tone language’ but constitutes, rather, part of an intricate intonation system; (3) that stress is non-phonemic. Special attention is given to intonation, since the intonational pitch of American Indian languages has been but little investigated, and we have not seen elsewhere in reports of these languages a similar structure comprising a limited number of pitch levels united into a system of significant pitch sequences. In order that the reader may see the suprasegmental phenomena of Huasteco against the background of the segmental material, we give also a brief statement of the number and nature of the consonant and vowel phonemes.

The term prosodeme has been used in recent writings on phonemcis as a stylistic variant of prosodic phoneme to describe such modifications of the basic speech sounds as tone, stress, and duration. Bloch and Trager, in 1942, also included juncture as a ‘related phenomenon’. In his recent postulates for phonemic analysis, Bloch appears to have been unable to find any common denominator for these features, since he abstracts duration at one point of his analysis, pitch and stress at quite another, and finds no basis at all for including juncture. In general, the distinction that has been made in recent American writings on the subject has been one between so-called segmental and suprasegmental phonemes. Some sounds are thought of as occurring one after another, like bricks in a wall, while others occur simultaneously with these and usually span a number of the individual bricks at a time. There are troublesome aspects of this definition, since there are some simultaneous linguistic phenomena, which, as Bloch says in his article on postulates (§48.2), ‘we do not usually wish to treat in the same way’. It will be the purpose of this paper to consider more closely the nature of the prosodemes, and see if it may not be possible to find a common factor which sets them off from the usual linear phonemes. We shall question the use of the term ‘suprasegmental’ as an adequate description of the prosodemes, and ask whether we are justified in classifying the prosodemes as a special kind of phoneme.