In Ulfilas' translation of the New Testament, γονυπϵτ in Mark 10.17 is translated knussjands, and again in Mark 1.40 kniwam knussjands. Since the beginning of research in Germanic linguistics neither the meaning of knussjan nor its etymology has been satisfactorily determined. This article is an attempt to establish both, and also to classify several groups of words in the Germanic dialects which from time to time have been wrongly associated both with Goth. knussjan and with one another.

The familiar doctrine that Primitive Indo-European possessed a full-grade (accented) vowel o derives from Ferdinand de Saussure. His thesis was that in addition to in ablaut relation to e there was another vowel which appeared in Greek and Italic as o and which was due to the influence of a certain lost consonant of undefined character. He had three reasons for this assumption: (1) Greek and Italic present in certain words an that is not observed to alternate with . (2) Greek and Italic o in open syllables corresponds to Indo-Iranian ā, according to ‘Brugmann's law’; but sometimes Graeco-Italic o corresponds to Indo-Iranian a in open syllables, and de Saussure held that-such pairs came from the full-grade, non-ablauting o. (3) Armenian usually responds to Graeco-Italic o with o, but in certain words with a, and in these words again de Saussure found full-grade, non-ablauting o. A fourth reason was later supplied by Zubaty, who held that in Lithuanian full-grade ō appears as uo while original ō in ablaut relation with e or ē appears as o.

Problems connected with the borrowing of words from language to language have occupied the attention of many linguists. In most cases this attention has been focused on languages of the remote past, where opportunity for first-hand phonetic observation has been cut off entirely. In the meanwhile borrowing has been going on within the United States on a scale rarely equalled in history, between English on the one hand and all the immigrant languages on the other. Here it becomes possible to record by modern means and to study by modern methods the phonetic form of each word in each of its incarnations, foreign, American, or hybrid. In the following study of one such dialect the writer wishes to present a concrete instance of the possibilities inherent in this kind of research.

The particular materials examined as a basis for the notes presented in this paper consisted of some three thousand personal letters copied from those in the files of one of the government bureaus in Washington. These letters were made available several years ago through the efforts of the Modern Language Association with the support of the Linguistic Society, and their collecting and copying financed by the National Council of Teachers of English. In this limited body of material it has been possible to record every occurrence in each category examined and by studying the facts quantitatively as well as qualitatively gain some knowledge not only of the kind of variety that exists in actual usage but also something of the relative amounts of that variation. There is much impatience with statistical studies of grammatical constructions and often with just cause. On the other hand, many of the general statements concerning particular phenomena of a language actually express or imply quantitative judgments—judgments of absolute or relative frequency. Most of these depend upon general impressions rather than upon an attempt carefully to calculate the frequency of actual instances in any body of material. Concerning the genitive there are many such quantitative statements based only upon general impressions. The material offered in these notes will assist in checking the validity of three such statements that are frequently repeated.

The Nuzu tablets, excavated by an American expedition, have consumed a good deal of the labor of American Assyriologists in recent years and will continue doing so for some time to come. After the publication of the material has far advanced, the grammar of the new dialect is in progress of reconstruction. The efforts made in this direction have so far been of a merely descriptive kind. It seems time now to apply also the linguistic line of approach to Nuzu Akkadian. Though the registration of the philological facts is the necessary basis for such work, it will in turn help to clarify difficulties which the descriptive grammar is unable to remove.