This paper begins with a question. It gives empirical data in order to show that the question appears answerable in principle. It discusses some problems that require an elaboration of the preliminary solution. Finally, it summarizes a few of the implications of the study.

In the Festschrift für Paul Kretschmer 267–74 (1926), in an article entitled Gedanken über den lateinischen ā-Konjunktiv, N. S. Trubetzkoy proposed very convincingly the theory that the ā-subjunctive of Italic and Celtic was, in reality, originally an optative not a subjunctive. His thesis was that beside the athematic optative in jē/ī (Lat. siem, siēs, siet / sīmus, etc., Gk. eíēn/eîmen, Skt. syām, etc.), there were two distinct optatives for thematic indicatives, one in oi (Gk. phéroi, Skt. bharet, Goth, bairai, etc.), which is the one generally recognized, and another in ā found in Italic and Celtic to the exclusion of the oi optative.

This is a continuation of two articles published several years ago in Language (30.197–201 [1954]; 31.4–8 [1955]). In these articles I was concerned above all with a reinterpretation of the interrelationship of the various Armenian reflexes of PIE p t k kw. My conclusions were that it was best to assume that the first result of the Proto-Armenian sound shift of Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops was a set of voiceless spirants, and that some allophones of these spirants later merged with other phonemes, while the principal allophones were affected by a further shift, as a result of which they became voiceless aspirated stops. I interpreted Greek evidence as indicating a rather late date for this second shift (about the beginning of the seventh century a.d.). This interpretation has been challenged by Hans Jensen in an article in Aus der byzantinistischen Arbeit der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik I (1957), and I now deem it possible that the date of the second shift has to be set considerably earlier than I had assumed. On the other hand, I do not find it necessary to revise my basic theory concerning the results of the first or Proto-Armenian sound shift ; only the postulation of Proto-Armenian spirants provides us with a consistent explanation of the seemingly erratic distribution of reflexes of Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops.

Zellig S. Harris distinguishes three situations in the ordering of morphemes relative to each other: ‘restricted’, ‘contrasting’, and ‘descriptively equivalent order’. Candidates for all three types are found in Modern German. It is the purpose of this paper to examine some problems of order in German within the framework of a transformational grammar.

In present-day usage, Italian casamatta and its cognates in other European languages (Sp. casamata, Fr. and Eng. casemate, Ger. Kasematte) refer to a type of chamber, vault, or embrasure in the ramparts of a fortress, or to a similar embrasure on ships. In some castles, the casemate can assume the shape of a vaulted passage, running along from tower to tower above the inner edge of a moat, and pierced with arrow-loops to the field. It is generally acknowledged that Eng. casemate, Fr. casemate, Ger. Kasematte, and Sp. casamata are all Renaissance borrowings, directly or indirectly, from Ital. casamatta, which is first attested in Machiavelli (1520).

The purpose of this paper is to bring to the attention of interested persons the existence and availability of a high-speed computer program designed to aid in the determination of lexicostatistical indices, of the type developed by Swadesh, for assessing the degree to which any two given languages are cognate. The program was written by Carroll for the IBM Electronic Data Processing Machine Type 704 (with a 32,768-word magnetic-core storage) at the suggestion of Dyen, who wished to compute lexicostatistical indices among several hundred Malayopolynesian languages. The need for a high-speed computer program is suggested by the fact that the number of possible different pairwise comparisons among n languages increases geometrically with the number of languages; specifically, it is n(n - l)/2. If the comparisons are based on, let us say, the words in each language corresponding to the 200 ‘meanings’ of Swadesh's standard list, the analysis of the data for 100 languages involves a total of nearly a million separate acts of comparison. The program which is now available enables the performance of this job in approximately one hour and a quarter—provided, of course, that the data have all been properly assembled and coded for input to the machine. The individual acts of comparison (that is, the comparison of the forms for a given meaning in two languages) are performed at the rate of about 300 per second for typical kinds of data.

Sydney M. Lamb's informative description of The Digital Computer as an Aid in Linguistics, Lg. 37.382–412, is most welcome as a clear and systematic exposition of an important development in linguistic research. Lamb's article deals with a type of electronic computers (the IBM 704, 709, 7090) which represent, in general conception and design, a class of machines oriented primarily towards scientific computations and emphasising internal speed and large core storage capacity. This is the type of machine which is most widely represented in American universities, reflecting the needs of the science and engineering departments. Some institutions, however, have installed electronic computers which were designed with a somewhat different function in mind and which are, in some respects at least, often better equipped as aids in linguistic research. These are, broadly speaking, the machines intended not predominantly for scientific work but also for data processing, and thus especially suitable for the manipulation, organization, and classifying of large bodies of numeric and alphabetic data. It may be perhaps too optimistic to hope that the needs and desires of linguists will carry much weight when it comes to the acquisition or replacement of computers for general university use. But with the growing awareness of the importance of mechanolinguistics, linguistic applications of the computer may be more frequently considered in the future when such administrative decisions are made.