Since the Committee on the Language Program of the American Council of Learned Societies has recently begun to issue a series of structural sketches of various languages, it is evident with the appearance of the first monograph in this series (French, by Robert A. Hall Jr.) that the time is ripe to raise a general question which has hitherto been too carelessly passed over: are the methods of structural linguistics applicable in the same degree to the languages of culturally retrograde and of culturally advanced peoples? The question is not proposed in any captious spirit; but the reader should be forewarned that the remarks which follow take a direction diametrically opposed to that of much recent descriptive work in America, and particularly to the drift of many recent articles in Language. It is only fair to answer the question at once by stating roundly that in my opinion the same descriptive criteria cannot be applied to the speech of relatively backward and of relatively civilized peoples. The assumption of the contrary involves a linguist, I believe, in a number of highly questionable attitudes and erroneous working principles; in dealing with the language of a civilized people, he pursues an illusory goal of ‘scientific impartiality’ and proceeds to exclude from consideration precisely those elements which make the language a Kultursprache. The result is not only a limitation but in the strictest sense a falsification.

In discussions of Proto-Indo-European phonology few attempts have been made to state the distribution of phonemes in the proto-language. Handbooks give lists of the phonemes, with examples of their occurrences; this is the presentation that we find in both Brugmann's and Hirt's descriptions of PIE phonology. From such lists, especially from those given by Brugmann, students can draw conclusions about the distribution of PIE phonemes; the conclusions of course are valid only to the extent that the compiler was aware of the need for a comprehensive list. But accurate descriptions of the distribution of PIE phonemes are lacking.

[Slav. *piln) ‘diligent’ (Pol. pilny etc.) is *pri-lgn, a formational variant of OCS etc. priležn ‘diligent’. — Slav, nagl ‘sudden etc.’ is probably *na-lgl, a derivative of na-leg- (Bg.) ‘to fall upon’.]

Kahane and Beym's analysis of syntactical juncture in colloquial Mexican Spanish, Lg. 24.388–96 (1948), based on the pronunciation of a single speaker—a woman from Oaxaca—, throws considerable light on the problem under consideration, and is a forward step in the analysis of Spanish structure. Though these authors recognize the obvious disadvantages of their method of getting raw data, namely the use of only one informant and the reading—as against spontaneous speaking—of a play, they seek to generalize their findings as valid for the Spanish language as a whole. Nevertheless, they leave the door open for further investigation of detailed material in order to arrive at objective criteria valid for Spanish in general.

This is the first of two articles on the Cuzco dialect of Kechua, whose aim will be to sketch the grammatical structure of this language in as much detail as the recorded material permits. The study is based on the speech of Gabriel Escobar, a native speaker of Kechua born in Cuzco, Peru. Although the available data are insufficient for an exhaustive description and the present outline can be no more than tentative, it is believed that the system shown here will not be substantially changed by further investigation, but will only be amplified by the addition of new details.