The phonemes of a language are categories defined for the native speaker by acoustic and functional attributes. Workers at the Haskins and Bell Telephone laboratories have tried to specify the acoustic invariants of particular phonemes of American English; they have usually worked with single vowel allophones, and with the first three formants in the spectrograms of these allophones. Jakobson and his co-workers, drawing on these acoustic studies and on familiar articulational analyses, have proposed that the phonemes of English can be specified in terms of a small number of acoustic-articulational attributes having binary values. Each phoneme of English is said to be a unique bundle of such distinctive features. In all this, nothing is said about the functional attributes of phonemes.

In my article on aspect in Gothic (AG), Lg. 30.211-23 (1954), I restricted my investigation to the aspectual nondistinctiveness of the derivational form alone (AG §1.1). In this study I shall also seek to show that there was in the Old High German of Tatian (OHG-T) no direct correlation between derivational form and aspect. Going one step further, I shall demonstrate that this lack of correlation applied equally to the tense form. At the same time, I shall prove the close de pendence of aspect upon basic verbal meaning. Again as in AG, I shall employ a theory of aspect which differs somewhat from the prevailing view (§2.1), but which I shall here first contrast with the novel definition of aspect that Howard B. Garey proposes and brilliantly applies in a recent study (§2.2).3 I shall, further, in a brief discussion of the relation of tense to aspect, adopt and explicitly modify some of Garey's terminology (§2.3). As a last preliminary, I shall con sider the possible interrelations between aspect and form (§2.4).

In OE, long consonants are fully established in one and only one position: between a fully stressed or a half-stressed short vowel (or diphthong) and a following unstressed vowel, as in clyppan, settan, reccan, ebba, middel, hycgan, frogga, fremman, spinnan, spillan, steorra, siþþan, missan, hliehhan (hlæhhan), and (after a half-stressed short vowel) in bliccettan ‘glitter’, oretta ‘challenger’, faranne (inf.), wēstenne ‘wilderness’.

The existence of an ‘emphatic’ or velarized in Classical Arabic and the modern dialects has often been noted and the sound has been carefully described. Descriptions which have been made from a structural point of view have generally regarded this emphatic as an allophone of the usual l, not an independent phoneme, both in the Classical language and in the dialects. The purpose of this note is to make clear why the emphatic must be regarded as an independent phoneme in Classical Arabic and in most if not all the modern dialects.

In Mezquital Otomi certain phonological components (rather than phonemes as such) appear to differentiate between the aspect markers of the verbs. For example, the difference between the incompletive form ‘is or was scraping’ and the completive ‘did or will scrape (at a point of time)‘ is the component of voicing. Such components appear to have morphemic status in relation to the distribution of a large proportion of verb roots. The phonemic syllable, consisting most commonly of a consonant, a vowel, and a tone, is the matrix in which the interchange of components takes place. The syllable margin, specifically the initial consonant, is the focus of operation.