[It is shown that a linguistic dating system can be set up on the basis of several explicit assumptions about morpheme decay. Thirteen sets of data, presented in partial justification of these assumptions, serve as a basis for calculating a universal constant to express the average rate of retention k̄ of the basic-root-morphemes : k = 0.8048 ± 0.0176 per millennium, with a confidence limit of 90%. Finally an expression is derived for the sampling-error to be expected in the calculated time-depths of related dialects.]

[OCS *bedrъnъ ‘rich’ is attested only once, in the form bedъno. It has no relation to bъdrъ ‘vigilant’ and bъděti ‘be awake’. It is cognate with Sanskrit bhadraḥ ‘good fortune, auspicious’, and establishes an IE *bhed-r- rather than the bh̿d- posited by earlier investigators. From the same base are formed Slavic names for the herb burnet saxifrage and the ladybug, both of which are associated in Slavic belief with good luck and prosperity.]

This paper is a morphophonemic and morphemic study of a class of Romanian words defined by their inflectional behavior as nouns. The point of departure is an array of isolated examples in phonemic form; the result is a classification of nouns by morphological types and a morphemic formula. The corpus from which the examples are drawn consists of Romanian texts interpreted with the aid of native speakers, supplemented with utterances by the speakers themselves.

Three attempts have been made in recent years to apply the techniques of modern descriptive linguistics to the Old English spellings produced by breaking, palatal diphthongization, i-umlaut, and velar umlaut. Desirable as such attempts are, the authors of the present article find the results still far from satisfactory.

Lucumí is a term here used to refer to a language spoken in Cuba by practitioners of the religion known as Santería. In Cuba both the santeros and the language are often called Lucumí, a form of which the origin has been discussed by William Bascom. Bascom seems to have been the first to assert positively that Lucumí is derived from Yoruba, a language of southwestern Nigeria. This view is supported by the folklore of Lucumí-speakers, which often contains propositions like these: Lucumí is Yoruba; Lucumí and Yoruba are the same thing; Lucumí is a dialect of Yoruba; Lucumí is a mixture of Yoruba dialects. Other writers have rejected the classification of Lucumí as related to Yoruba in the usual sense, and have called Lucumí a pidgin language. The purpose of this paper is to test Bascom's hypothesis by the comparative method—specifically, by investigating phoneme correspondences in cognate items.