The major portion of this article is devoted to a criticism of Twaddell's monograph ‘On Defining the Phoneme.‘ The criticism is adverse throughout. Still, if the result of negating a negative is positive, it may be justifiable to presume that if this is a contribution at all, it is of a constructive character. Some negative assertions are made in said monograph concerning the results thus far achieved in the physical analysis of speech sounds. If we do not misconstrue those assertions, they are at variance with the literature on the subject. We wish to present the evidence.

The theory of phonemes has received a great deal of attention from linguists within the last few years, and the applications of the theory to descriptive linguistics have become reasonably clear, though there still remain problems in need of further study. However, there has been less interest in the theory on the part of students of the history of language, many of whom practically ignore the theory altogether; or assume, on the other hand, that the sound changes which we can prove to have taken place in the past were practically coextensive with phonemic shifts. It seems, therefore, worth while to attempt a tentative examination and classification of the relations between sound change and phonemic change in the hope that the applications of the theory of phonemes to the historic study of language may be to some extent clarified.

[In Venetic inscription no. 249, Ethnographic Museum of Vienna, the r in the second line goes with tola in the first and tolar is a verb, third singular present middle, and not a noun. It belongs with OIr. canar and has an indicative and personal meaning ‘he dedicates’. canar means in the Old Irish glosses ‘is sung’, not ‘there shall be singing’. The comparison of Old Irish, Latin, Oscan (fufans), Venetic, Greek (ἔτλᾱν), Lithuanian, Old Ch. Slav., and perhaps Tocharian, indicates that this ā-formation in PIE was essentially indicative. Its ‘injunctive’ value is simply a modal use of the indicative.]

After serving for a few centuries in the several Romanic languages as an indeterminate pronoun, homo disappeared from general use in all except French. The present study, in supplementing the limited discussion of grammarians, briefly reviews the history and the use of this pronoun in Italian and deals mainly with the causes that led to its desuetude.

To account for the rise of the pronominal function of uomo, Meyer-Lübke suggests French influence. But the general occurrence in Romance of homo with the value of an indefinite pronoun points rather conclusively to an antecedent development in Latin. Examination of the proper Latin authors reveals that homo was actually employed with pronominal force, and there is consequently little necessity of attributing the rise of this use of uomo to foreign influence.

Uomo (<homo), like French on, was in origin a masculine substantive in the nominative case. We shall see to what extent these characteristic traits were preserved.