If we threw a cork out on the waves of a pond, it would rise and fall as they passed under it. From the time it rode one crest until it dipped down and came up on top of the next, would represent one double vibration, and the number of such dips it had to make in a second would show the speed at which the wave was travelling and could be represented in d.v./sec. So, if it made 100 such dips in a second, we would say the waves were travelling at the rate of 100 d.v./sec.

The general argument of Walleser (Sprache und Heimat des Pāli-Kanons) is as follows: The agreement of all old sources that the language in which the Tipiṭaka was brought to Ceylon was that of Māgadha is too strong to be lightly cast aside. The capital of Magadha was Pāṭaliputta (Sanskrit Pāṭaliputra). In Buddha's time it was known as Pāṭali-gāma Tāṭali Village.‘ Walleser accordingly goes back to Wilson's theory that Pāṭaliputra is a transformation of Pāṭalipura Tāṭali Fortified Town.‘ The language therefore would be known as Pāṭalī Bhāṣā, or simply Pāṭalī, in the same way that the language of Magadha was known as Māgadhī. Now it is well-known that in the Middle Indo-Aryan dialects stop consonants (when unaspirated) have a marked tendency to drop out, and frequently the vowels thus brought into hiatus contract. Examples of this are found even in Pāli, thus Kusināra (Sanskrit Kuśinagara). So Pāṭali could become Pāali and finally Pāli. As a parallel on the Asokan inscriptions Peteṇika (so!), from *Prātiṣṭhānika (a vṛddhi derivative of Pratiṣṭhāna) is adduced. Hence Pāli is the language of Pāṭaliputta (Sanskrit Pāṭaliputra). The charge that Pāli can not have had its home in Magadha because of its phonetic and grammatical peculiarities can be met because this does not take into consideration the wide territories of Magadha: within these a rather considerable range of dialectic peculiarities is possible; again, Pāli as a literary language existed over too long a stretch of time to expect uniformity in every detail; Pāli being contemporaneous with Buddha is naturally more archaic than the Asokan dialects, but in any case Pāli is near the dialects of the eastern Asokan inscriptions.—A wealth of literary references are given by Walleser to support his views, and a number of other linguistic points are treated incidentally.

The first two lines of Yasna 46.17 are as follows: yaθrā v  afšmānī snghānī

nõiṯ anafšmąm  djāmāspā hvõ.gvā

The infinitive form of this verb is standan. The stem of the verb must therefore have been *stađ-. Accordingly the preterite singular form stōþ must represent an earlier *stōđ; hence we should have expected a preterite plural form *stōdum(= *stōđum) instead of stōþum.

This form of cuanto más occurs only once, in a folk-tale from Zamora, 192: ‘Güeno, pues la chica fué creciendo y el diablo contimás iba creciendo la chica más se enamoraba de ella.‘

Sayce has published in Revue d'Assyriologie 24. 123–6 (1927), an article on the Hittite names of parts of the body. He gives a numbered list of words, beginning with (1) and ending with (49). At the close he draws a few conclusions, one of which is put as follows:

As it is the names of the bodily members which constitute the most primitive and uncontaminated portion of the vocabulary of a language the list which I have given is of primary importance in determining the philological position of Official Hittite. The overwhelming number of names is Asianic; there are three which are connected with Semitic and 6 and possibly 8 which are borrowed from Indo-European or have themselves been borrowed by Indo-European languages.