Students of infants and of language have long wondered over the fact that a structure of such enormous formal complexity as language is so readily learned by organisms whose available intellectual resources appear in other respects quite limited. While a certain amount of work has been done on phonological development, and there has been much speculation about the acquisition of ‘meanings’, development at the morphological and syntactic levels has been relatively little studied. Yet it is perhaps the development at these levels that is the most striking and puzzling.

Frisk, GEW s.v. hézomai, states: 'Der Aorist heîsa, hês(s)ai aus idg. *e-sed-s-ṃ (mit sekundärer Aspiration), *sed-sai stimmt zum aind. Konj. ní … ṣátsat “er möge sich niederlassen” (RV 10,53,1).' This view is also found, for example, in Brugmann, Grdr. 2.2.1172 (§812), and in Brugmann-Thumb, Griech. Gramm. 362. To be sure, Gk. heîsa is not generally considered a PIE inheritance. Meillet, Mélanges de Saussure 86, says of Brugmann's list of PIE sigmatic aorists: '… la plupart des exemples sont dépourvues de toute valeur probante pour établir l'existence indo-européenne de telle ou telle forme.' Specht, KZ 62.50–1 (1934–5), considers heîsa a Greek innovation, and Schwyzer 1.755–6 lists it among such aorists as éstēsa 'set', ébēsa ‘brought’, which are clearly secondary when compared to the intransitive root aorists éstēn, ébēn; cf. Meillet, loc.cit, 94, None of these authors, however, directly considers Skt. sátsat in his discussion of heîsa. Since, moreover, the comparison of these two forms as the basis for a PIE sigmatic aorist of *sed is accepted in what is now the standard etymological dictionary of Greek, it seems worthwhile to summarize briefly and more explicitly than has previously been done the evidence against this equation. I do this as a preliminary to demonstrating that sátsat is clearly an independent creation of Indic.

Most contemporary handbooks of English recognize a class of so-called ‘function-words’ with special inflection, called pronouns, together sometimes with a wider class of words which are said to replace pronouns in certain environments and are called perhaps ‘pronominale’; all are often classified as a subset of nouns. More or less attention may be given to the peculiarities of English pronominal inflection, but important regularities among obligatory choices of pronoun are usually avoided, no doubt because all previous discussions of this subject in older texts have had to resort heavily to semantic notions. In fact, the strong implication of most contemporary treatments is that the choice of pronominals is dictated, if at all, purely by the intended meaning of the sentence.

The phonetic features of Arabic conventionally referred to by European and American scholars simply and collectively as emphasis, and identified by Arab grammarians as ?iṭbāq ‘spreading and raising of the tongue’, ?isti9lā? ‘elevation of the dorsum’, and tafxīm ‘thickness, heaviness’, have been attested in all known modern dialects of Arabic except Maltese. Early Arab grammarians recognized three pairs of contrasting emphatic and plain (i.e. nonemphatic) consonants— /.t d/, /./, and /.s s/, four other consonants as emphatic but unpaired— /.dqx γ/, and in certain environments emphatic variants of /1/ and /r/. That these were not the only consonants occurring with emphasis, at least in some environments, can be inferred from the proscriptions of such pronunciations in the Quranic orthoepy literature; but whether such consonants occurred in contrasting pairs, or only had emphatic positional or free variants, is less certain. In various modern dialects, restrictions on the distribution of emphasis and the number of contrasting emphatic and plain consonants differ considerably. All dialects have preserved the contrasting pairs listed above, or their reflexes. And as a result of sound change as well as borrowing and analogy, all dialects have acquired additional contrasting pairs; the following occur in all of the major dialects: /.t t/, /.d d/, /.s s/, /.z z/, /.l 1/, /.r r/, and, generally only in peninsular dialects, /./. Furthermore, most of these dialects exhibit additional contrasting pairs, especially in the labial series.

The Shasta language of northern California and southern Oregon has a long history of relevance for Hokan studies. In 1905 R. B. Dixon presented evidence to show that J. W. Powell's Palaihnihan family (1891), comprising Achumawi (Achomawi) and Atsugewi, was related to a group of Shasta dialects, some of which had been newly discovered by him. A. S. Gatschet had come to the same conclusion much earlier, as reported by Powell (1891.98), but did not present his evidence.

In my article ‘The lexicostatistical classification of the Malayopolynesian languages’, a procedure for lexicostatistical classification on the basis of percentages of probable cognates in a standard list of basic vocabulary was set forth which had these elements for determining primary groups (i.e. groups with only languages as members) :