It is well known that the earliest and probably best descriptive grammar in existence is the Sanskrit grammar of Pāṇini (?350 b.c.). The subject of the following essay is Pāṇini's phonological analysis of the Sanskrit consonants. This illustrates some of the more important techniques used by Pāṇini and his colleagues. It also enables us to reconstruct some of the methods by means of which Pāṇini constructed his grammar.

Glottochronology makes certain general statements about historical processes in linguistics and sets up mathematical models which are declared to correspond to the processes. These models are presented in the form of algebraic equations. Numerical data are then collected from particular historical situations and put into the equations, whence numerical results are derived which are then converted into specific historical statements. It is the thesis of the present paper that the mathematical models which these equations represent do not correspond sufficiently to the general statements, that they are therefore inadequate models, and that the results obtained by using them are unreliable in proportion as the models are defective.

It is the purpose of this paper to present some of the results of a statistical comparison of the basic vocabularies of a collection of Malayopolynesian languages. By reason of the very number of its members, the Malayopolynesian family has great importance among the language families of the world. A fair estimate would place the number of Malayopolynesian languages at about 500. If the number of the languages in the world is set at about 4000, then about ⅛ of all the world's languages are Malayopolynesian.

Maranao is a member of the Tagalog family of Philippine languages; these, together with the Visayan languages, are members in turn of the Malayopolynesian family. These languages are characterized by verbal inflection to indicate not only time, kind of action, and psychological point of view of the speaker, but also certain grammatical relations between the verb and the topic of the sentence. When a substantive phrase is not the topic, its grammatical relation to the verb is indicated either by particles or by certain pronoun forms. In some of these languages, position in the sentence signals such relations, but in Maranao position carries little functional load.