In recent years, a number of scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with the traditional view of the Old English vowel system, particularly with the customary interpretation of the OE spellings ea, eo, io, and ie, and have presented more or less coherent alternative theories. The arguments of the malcontents have received an excellent critical review by Kuhn and Quirk, who, however, give no new analysis of their own, seeming rather to suggest that the traditional view is essentially correct.

This paper suggests a method of quantifying judgments of relative ‘closeness’ or ‘distance’ between related languages, and gives some results of its application.

There is no speech community in which all speakers’ speech behavior is identical. The linguist defines a homogeneous speech community as one in which the members’ linguistic patterns are alike except for haphazard variations—haphazard as to type and magnitude and also as to the individuals producing them. It is questionable whether even this sort of speech community actually exists, but it is a useful fiction.

Old French is traditionally provided with two types of adjectives. Those of Type I descend from the Latin adjectives in -us -a -um, and distinguish the masculine from the feminine by the presence or absence of -e (< -A), e.g. mort < mortu, morte < VL morta; bon < bonu, bone < bona. Those of Type II descend from third-declension adjectives, which do not distinguish the masculine from the feminine, e.g. grant < grande, vert < viride, fort < forte. (The Latin forms are, as is traditional, quoted in the accusative case but without the -M, which was lost before the Proto-Romance era.)

The present paper attempts to analyze a portion of Spanish verb morphology, namely the morphemes which indicate person. The model within which the analysis is framed is that of Item and Arrangement. Phonemic stretches are segmented into morphs; each morph boundary coincides with a phoneme boundary, but not conversely. We reject replacive and subtractive morphs. We accept zero morphs, but not zero morphemes, i.e. morphemes with zero as their only member. We also accept portmanteau morphs, i.e. morphs which belong simultaneously to two morphemes, but (again) not morphemes with portmanteau morphs as their only member. On the basis of the Spanish data, we suggest a further restriction on the use of zero and portmanteau morphs.

It has usually been assumed that the modern Arabic dialects are on the whole lineal descendants of Classical Arabic or of a variety very similar to this. Stated differently, this assumption holds that apart from borrowings and innovations the linguistic substance of the modern dialects is a direct continuation of an earlier stage of Arabic substantially identical with the Classical Arabic of the grammarians, with only a few isolated instances in which one or more of the modern dialects seem to preserve archaisms antedating the codification of the Classical language. Until clear contradictory evidence is produced, this assumption will have to stand as the most reasonable working hypothesis. The purpose of the present study is to offer one important refinement to this hypothesis, namely that most modern Arabic dialects descend from the earlier language through a form of Arabic, called here the koine, which was not identical with any of the earlier dialects and which differed in many significant respects from Classical Arabic but was used side by side with the Classical language during early centuries of the Muslim era.

Methods of modifying the normal patterns of speech for purposes of entertainment or concealment are perhaps universal. Where such practices abound in both type and incidence, one may assume that considerable cultural importance is associated with the contexts in which they occur, and that the statuses of the most frequent users are also of particular significance. The following is a brief analysis of the linguistic and sociocultural aspects of such a situation recently noted in the Philippines among the Hanunóo.

Since the publication of the last paper in this series, Hokan study has been enriched by a major new source of data, William Bright's The Karok language (UCPL 13; Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957). As one of the objectives of this series is to test the Shastan hypothesis (i.e. the notion that Achumawi and Atsugewi have a closer relationship to Shasta than they have to any other Hokan languages except each other and are therefore to be classified with Shasta in a Shastan subgroup of Hokan), comparisons outside the ‘Shastan subgroup’ are mandatory. For though comparison of Palaihnihan (Achumawi and Atsugewi) with Shasta can show, as PS I and PS II do fairly conclusively, that the Palaihnihan languages are more closely related to each other than either is to Shasta, they do not rule out the possibility of Palaihnihan being a subgroup within Shastan. To rule out this possibility and to test the Shastan hypothesis, it is necessary to have reference to non-‘Shastan’ Hokan languages. Unfortunately for the purposes of the present paper, Karok has only two dorsal phonemes—the stop /k/ and the spirant /x/, in contrast with Achumawi . The consequences of these differences in phonemic diversity are discussed below, after presentation of the Palaihnihan materials basic to this series.