Scholars are accustomed to deriving the Indo-European neuter plural ending -ā/ə from the ending -ā of the feminine singular. Since I am convinced that the feminine gender was developed after the separation of Hittite (or rather Proto-Anatolian) from the parental stock, I have suggested that we should rather assume that the singular collectives were originally of neuter gender; although they seem to have become feminine in Proto-Indo-European.

Old Irish -icc ‘reach, attain’, which does not exist as a simple verb in any Celtic language, has usually been connected with Skt. aśnoti ‘reaches’; more particularly it should be comparable to the augmentless form of the aorist. The chief reason for upholding this theory is the close affinity between the perfect forms of this verb in Celtic and Sanskrit: OIr. -ánicc and Skr. ānaṃśa. The vowel in the present-tense form in Old Irish has caused some difficulty and has been variously explained (see VG 752, Anm. 3; Pokorny, Altir. Gramm. 48, and IF 35.339). The only possible explanation seems to be that we have here a case of shortening in unstressed position. The expected stressed forms would be: 3d sg. *-éicc, 3d pl. *-éccat, which became, as stress was lost in context, -ice and -eccat respectively. In the same way one finds OIr. lécimm ‘I leave, let’ appearing as leigim and ligim (seldom léigim) in the modern Irish (and Scottish Gaelic) dialects. The influence of numerous compounds (ni·aricc ‘does not find’ etc.) must also be taken into consideration in order to explain the final victory of the forms with a short vowel. The original Celtic form corresponding to OIr. -icc may therefore have been (3d sg. pres. ind.) *anket, which in Goidelic changes its a into e (and i) before the nasal consonant cluster.

[In the first part of the 17th century the normal French pattern was je le veux voir; but after Molière the pattern became je veux le voir. Syntax had little influence on the change: it was due partly to logical and phonetic causes, but was retarded in the popular language by analogy.]

The purpose of this paper is to describe a highly developed but little known type of communication as practised by the Mazateco Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico. The texts presented show the importance of tone in the language, and indicate that conversation can be carried on with a very wide range of lexical possibilities without the segmental phonemes of normal speech.

The expression ‘nuclear structures’ has become, in our day, a term to conjure with; but the concept is not new in linguistics. It is mentioned or implied in contemporary discussions under the terms ‘immediate constituents’, ‘rank’, and ‘endocentric phrases’; in the older literature it is referred to as ‘modification’, ‘attribution’, or ‘subordination’. An assumption of different ranks is implicit in such word-pairs as stem-affix, head–attribute, noun-adjective, substantive–modifier, verb–adverb, principal-subordinate.