It is well known that in a number of European languages the perfect form of the verb employs an auxiliary identical with the verb used for predicating possession—e.g. English I have loved, French j'ai aimé, Portuguese eu tenho amado, Modern Greek ėkhō . From discussions by Vendryes and by Benveniste it has also become clear that in transitive sentences the similarity between perfect and ‘possessive’ expressions is not confined to cases involving an auxiliary ‘to have’.

[The graphs 〈etuvanoinu〉 and 〈etokoinu〉 on the bronze tablet of Idalium do not contain optatives duwánoi and , but aorist indicatives éduwan and édōk'. Éduwan comes from *édoan for édon in the same way that éthijan comes from *éthean for éthen. The infinitive dowénai is scarcely dow-énai: evidence outside Italic for a root form dow- is not convincing. Either it is do-wénai, with a suffix otherwise unknown in Greek, or a development, partly analogic, from *do-énai. 〈oinu〉 is perhaps oîn nu, containing a particle cognate with Attic oûn; PGk. *óen could account for both, since a sound law PGk. *-en > Cypr. -in can be set up. The Cypriote thematic active infinitive ending is -ēn, not -en.]

A number of linguists have attempted to establish a traditional phonemic system for Modern Faroese, but they have uniformly come to grief over the vowel segments. Since there are only a very few minor problems involving the phonetic facts, it is clear that the difficulties lie not in our knowledge of Faroese but rather in the linguists themselves and most particularly in their insistence on honoring the invariance condition. The invariance condition is the demand that every occurrence of [x1] be considered an allophone of /x/ and that [x1 x2 x3…], allophones of /x/, share at least the defining features implied in /x/. This restriction does not allow the assignment of some [x1] to /x/, some to /y/, etc., nor may [x y z …] be derived from /x/ by the change of some feature implied in /x/.

In the comparison of Tagalog, Malay, and Javanese, three well-exemplified correspondences involving final vowel (V) or laryngeal are found:

1. (1) Tg. -V : Ml. -V : Jv. -V (e.g. Tg. tubo, Ml. tăbu, Jv. tĕbu sugarcane').

2. (2) Tg. -V? : Ml. -Vh : Jv. -Vh (e.g. Tg. tu:bo? ‘grow’, Ml. tuboh ‘body’, Jv. tuwoh ‘growth‘).