Linguistic relationships in Northern Asia have been the subject of speculation and controversy for many years. This paper attempts to provide evidence to help prove the relationship of Korean to Japanese; peripheral attention is paid to the other languages spoken across the vast territory that stretches from the Bosporus to Kamchatka. The relationship of the Altaic group of languages—the three families called Turkic, Tungusic (or Tungus-Manchu), and Mongolian—is widely accepted today, although the evidence has not been marshalled as convincingly as some of us might wish. ‘Hyperborean’ or ‘Paleosiberian’ is a term of convenience to refer to some Siberian languages of undetermined lineage; these include the Chukotan group (Chukchi or Luoravetlan, Koryak or Nymylan, and near-extinct Kamchadal), Ainu, and Gilyak (or Nivkh). In addition to Korean (K), Middle Korean (MK), Japanese (J), and Old Japanese (OJ), forms are cited in this paper from Turkish (Tk.); Lamut (L), a Tungusic language also called Even; Dagur (D) Mongolian, as well as Khalkha (the standard language of Outer Mongolia); Ainu (A); and Gilyak (G). There are a very few citations from Kamchadal and Koryak, and an occasional item from Hungarian or Finnish as representatives of the Uralic family, which some scholars believe related to the Altaic languages in a Ural-Altaic family or ‘superstock’. The obvious close relationship of the languages of the Ryukyu Islands to standard Japanese has been well established for years, and by proto-Japanese I refer to the ancestor of both Ryukyu and ‘Main Islands’ Japanese, assuming that it was the speech of the people of what is called (after the name of an archeological site) the Yayoi culture, thought to be responsible for bringing rice farming to the islands about two thousand years ago.

It is to Yuen Ren Chao that we are indebted—among so many other things—for the first modern phonetic description and phonological analysis of a spoken Tibetan dialect; in this pioneering work of his with a Lhasa speaker he noted a number of alternations in vowel quality that seemed to run counter to the generally regular one-to-one correlation to be observed between the vowels of the Tibetan written language and the vocalization of the modern dialects. Chao's work on that occasion was by and large limited to a description of the reading pronunciation for a text in the written language, and hence it then appeared to him possible to treat these alternations as the result of differences in tempo or even as simply fortuitous; but subsequent work with speakers of the same language, involving living speech rather than the reading of literary texts, has shown that the phenomenon which Chao noticed and so meticulously recorded in his early publication is instead part of a widespread process of vowel assimilations which at least in Lhasa Tibetan operates in certain morphemes in a fashion regular enough to merit the designation ‘vowel harmony’.

The late George A. Kennedy, in his ‘Negatives in Classical Chinese’, notes that there are some sixteen forms of the negative 'all loosely denned as “no, not”', and sets out to discover if some criterion other than 'meaning' can provide a tighter classification and perhaps an explanation for this seemingly random and interchangeable repertory of negatives in Classical Chinese.

It is well known that a form conventionally avoided in ordinary speech is nonetheless likely to persist as part of the active vocabulary of the community, while forms homonymous with it are likely to disappear. An early statement to this effect is Bloomfield's: ‘It is a remarkable fact that the tabu-word itself has a much tougher life than the harmless homonym.' This phenomenon is observable in many languages, including English and Chinese. Chinese is a more fruitful field than English in this respect because in English sets of homonyms are not especially frequent, and when they occur they seldom have more than two members each. But in Chinese languages, such as the Peking dialect (Pk.), the situation is different: sets of homonyms are frequent, often containing over ten members commonly occurring in ordinary speech. This is because there are not many possible different syllables in the language, and because there is a preponderance of monosyllabic morphemes and words. The result is that if a word is tabued, it is likely to be monosyllabic and homonymous with other words and morphemes at the time the tabu takes effect. This paper describes one instance of tabu in Pk., suggests some mechanisms that might be involved, offers a reconstruction for an earlier form of the tabued word, and tentatively dates some stages in the history of the tabu.

The terms chèng (1) and ch'í (11) present a perplexing problem for the reader or translator of texts in traditional Chinese military thought. In nonmilitary contexts chèng is rendered by a range of expressions including 'upright, true, orthodox, correct, regular, authorized, exact, straight, formal, just, at the time of, during, to adjust, principal, original, obverse', ch'í is translated 'strange, wonderful, rare'; the same graph read chī is translated ‘odd, single, surplus’.

In 1948, Y. R. Chao suggested that the voiced velar fricative of Mandarin might be regarded as an initial; but since he found that there was little chance of minimal contrasts, we might, for practical purposes, leave this phoneme unmarked. In the present paper I intend to list additional examples of contrast involving this initial, and to comment on its patterning with other initials.

In my article ‘On the tone system of the Miao-Yao languages‘ I dealt chiefly with Miao data. With the additional data on Yao made available in recent publications I can now reconstruct the tonal system of Proto-Yao in greater detail and with more certainty.

The terms Miao and Yao refer both to peoples and to languages. The Yao people speak Mien, a Yao language; Punu, a Miao language; and Laka, a language whose relations are still uncertain. Yao, in contrast to Miao, has a complicated system of finals: vowels may occur in final position, or they may be followed by -y, -w, -p, -m, -t, -n, -k (in some dialects _?), or -η). Miao, on the other hand, has a complicated system of initials, with both simple consonants and consonant clusters, which Yao for the most part lacks. Some differences in vocabulary also characterize the two.

1. Introduction. The development of South Dravidian phonology has shown, through its entire recorded and reconstructable history, extensive vocalic assimilation of the type which is known as metaphony, umlaut, or vowel mutation. Specifically, the vowels of radical (word-initial) open syllables have become lower when the following syllable contains the low vowel a. The points to be made in this paper are four. (1) This process is reflected in all modern South Dravidian languages, though it is obscured in the literary dialects of Tamil and Malayalam by a change of an opposite, dissimilatory type. (2) The process, which in its earliest form affected only high short vowels, has spread in some languages to affect other vowels, including long ones. (3) This enlarged scope of the process has in some cases produced new phonemic distributions and expanded phonemic inventories. (4) The process has parallels in non-Dravidian languages of South Asia, raising the possibility that a linguistic area or Sprachbund, made up of languages displaying metaphony, may be recognized in the Indian subcontinent.

The songs of the Todas, a small Dravidian-speaking community of the Nilgiri plateau in South India, have by this time been reported on twice, and an attempt has been made (in the second report) at a sociological interpretation. Preparation of a corpus of 260 texts for publication has involved indexing, and it is now possible to undertake a stylistic analysis.

The Atayal sentence in its minimal form consists of a nuclear construct. It may further contain one or more postcentral complements, and one or more units in precentrai EXPOSURE.

The construct most often consists of a VERB (a conjugatable word) which may be accompanied by one or more PRONOUNS (declinable words). In rare cases the construct (or rather QUASI CONSTRUCT) consists of a noun and a pronoun, or two nouns.

In this paper I am not primarily concerned with the exact degree of notionality or of interjectionality to be found in the Malay/Indonesian words brought under study. Virtually all the words encountered which reveal the inclinations discussed here tend toward the interjectional or expressive rather than toward the notional pole, yet they are by no means onomatopoeic in the narrowly soundimitative or sound-suggestive sense. They are expressives in which sound symbolism plays an undeniable part. As we move away from echoism pure and simple, however, we find greater freedom in the arrangement of the sounds and particularly of the consonants. (It is this relative lack of importance attached to a rigid sequence that I am concerned with in a second part of this study, to be published later.) In this respect Malay/Indonesian goes much farther than English or other Indo-European languages and is at the opposite pole from Semitic, where, in general, the order of the three radicals is firmly fixed.

For some time I have been engaged in a study of the constructions used with verbal nouns and adjectives in several Indo-European languages, and have published material on the subject in various periodicals. Here I shall endeavor to synthesize my findings.

When approaching the linguistic problem of grammatical parallelism one is irresistibly impelled to quote again and again the pathbreaking study written exactly one hundred years ago by the juvenile Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism. The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism, ranging from the technical so-called Parallelisms of Hebrew poetry and the antiphons of Church music to the intricacy of Greek or Italian or English verse.

Whether or not he is familiar with the technical terms currently favored, or aware of the actual processes behind these terms, a speaker or student of Spanish, on some undefined level of consciousness, senses (or acts as if he sensed) the existence of such contrastable inflectional models as sent-ir ‘to feel’ : sient-e ‘(he, she, it) feels’ vs. ped-ir ‘to ask’ : pid-e ‘(he, she, it) asks’. The native speaker may even at some time or other have faced the dilemma of choosing, in the stressed syllable of such a verb form, between ie and i, and the foreign student is certain to have come to grips with such practical difficulties and to have been guilty, upon occasion, of gross errors. Preceptive grammarians and practitioners of language teaching, accordingly, have at all times paid attention to the hazards of the choice between the two conjugational categories.

J. W. Marchand, in an article which bears almost the same title as the present note and which was published in Language 33.346–54 (1957), reexamines the question posed in that title, and reaches the conclusion that the reflexes of PIE /i/ and /e/ did not contrast in identical environments, i.e. that these two PIE phonemes had merged in Proto-Germanie, and that, accordingly, the system of PGmc. short syllabics exhibited only a three-way contrast: one front vowel, one back vowel, one low vowel. He presents arguments which are intended to establish the validity of two assumed sound-changes for Pre-Germanic : PIE /i/ > /e/ before /a/ sounds, and PIE /e/ > /i/ before /u/, and he declares that if we deny the occurrence of these sound changes, we must accept the phones [i] and [e] as members of different phonemes. My contention here is simply that the occurrence of the alleged changes for Proto-Germanie (or Pre-Germanic) has not been proved, and that Proto-Germanie must therefore be assumed to have exhibited, as asserted by Twaddell and Kuryłowicz, an asymmetrical structure in its system of short syllabics.

In a much cited and little appreciated paper, Y. R. Chao more than thirty years ago anticipated the logic-inspired position of Noam Chomsky that mechanical discovery procedures are not a realistic goal for linguistic analysis. Here I look briefly at a familiar problem in the analysis of English in an attempt to underline some relations of unique and nonunique analyses.

The problem is that of the relation of traditional long and short vowels in modern American English, and for paradigm I shall consider only the vocalic nucleus of beat vs. that of bit (with a sidelong glance at the word dear). But first it is necessary to dispose of a straw man, without which the matter cannot even be discussed as a problem. In currently fashionable terms, this straw man might be named the ‘strong non-uniqueness position’, and taken to hold that no criteria can POSSIBLY be adduced to prefer one solution over another: it is all a matter of taste.

The Algonkian family of languages, with its great geographical spread from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rocky Mountains and from Hudson's Bay to the Carolinas, together with the inevitable proliferation of dialects (daughter languages) which accompanies such a spread, provides a goldmine of still largely un-exploited source material to exemplify a wide variety of principles in comparative linguistics. Unfortunately, only a part of the family has been intensively studied from the comparative point of view; as a consequence, many points of interest are likely to be represented in a fragmentary or indecisive fashion in the literature. Bloomfield's Algonkian studies were limited to four of the Central languages—Fox, Cree, Menomini, and Ojibwa; and Hockett in his follow-up work stayed within the same boundary, except for the addition of Potawatomi. Excellent results have been achieved by this limitation, but proper caution requires that the limitation be kept fully in mind whenever there is a temptation to generalize, or to compare developments in this family with those in other families.

In 1919 Dixon and Kroeber proposed that five language groups in California (Wintun, Maiduan, Yokutsan, Miwokan, and Costanoan) were a genetic unit, which they called Penutian. A study of the available data over the past several years has verified this postulation. Penutian, so defined, is a single family of languages.

The Hare Indians, according to Jenness, lived in northwestern Canada, ‘west and northwest of Great Bear lake, extending in the east to a little beyond the Anderson river, and in the west to the first line of mountains west of the Mackenzie river’. Their language, spoken by about four or five hundred people, belongs to the Athapaskan stock.

In spite of the influential Saussurean dichotomy of synchronic and dia-chronic studies, it has in fact not been possible to keep these two main aspects of linguistics in hermetically sealed compartments. The aim of this paper is to explore the theoretical relations between phenomena in the two fields in the context of the current interest in universals. The examples cited are not intended to be conclusive and are meant only as illustrations.