The Linguistic Society of America has come of age. An account of its origin is to be found in the first number of this journal, dated March 1925 (Lang. 1.1-5). There also something is said about the state of affairs which prompted the founding of the Society—a state of affairs now remembered only by those who have reached middle age.

In the analysis of complexes into elements, there is always the twofold problem of the size of units on the one hand and the identity of units on the other. In analyzing speech sounds, for example, one can ask how large a phoneme is and whether sounds can profitably be analyzed longitudinally into simultaneous components, or, on the other hand, what different sounds (allophones) can be grouped together as members of one and the same phoneme. Similarly, on the question of what is a word, one can ask how large a segment of speech is to be recognized as a word, or, on the other hand, what different utterance fractions can be grouped together as instances of the same word.

[The immediate cause of the lengthening appears to have been the development of new vowels, which came about through vocalization of j w and through generation of transition vowels in conjunction with liquids and nasals. These changes were in turn produced by the operation of stress accent.]

[Germanic au > O E 𝓮̄a [æa]; 𝓮̄u > lo. In late Northumbrian texts the spellings ea and eo appear almost interchangeably for both diphthongs. In general these spellings are ambiguous and the most recent view has been that the confusion was merely graphic. Certain isolated textual forms, however, point to phonemic coalescence in an ǣ-diphthong, an interpretation supported by the evidence of modern North Country dialects.]

[By the end of the 18th century the diacritical system for indicating pronunciation had been developed almost to the stage now current in commercial dictionaries. This paper traces the growth of diacritical systems from their beginnings in early 18th-century dictionaries to their final form at the end of the century, and indicates the relative usefulness of the 18th-century dictionaries as source material for studies of pronunciation.]