For more than a generation now the bulk of scientific linguistic publication in America has been devoted to descriptive linguistics and the vast majority of the last generation of students of linguistics have devoted themselves largely to that field. The larger measure of scientific advance has accompanied the larger measure of devotion. That is to be expected. There have, of course, been notable exceptions. But I believe the facts will bear me out in my observation that these notable exceptions have been due to the continued labors of an older generation of scholars.

Hans Ehelolf has published two parallel passages from a fragmentary Hittite text. The important fact to which Ehelolf called attention is that in col. 2, line 8 we have an Akkadian phrase: A-NA lú BE-EL É-TIM salBE-EL-DI Ê-TIM, which is repeated in Hittite words in line 18: pár-na-aš iš-ḫi-i pár-na- aš iš-ḫa-aš-ša-ri. Both lines mean ‘to the master of the house, to the mistress of the house’; it follows that iš-ḫa-aš-ša-ri, a dative whose nom. sg. is citable as iš-ḫa-aš-ša-ra-aš, is a derivative of iš-ḫa-a-aš e-eš-ḫa-a-aš ‘master’. I, at least, have no doubt that the latter word is cognate with Lat. erus, the IH source of the two being either ’esxos or ’esyos.

[An earlier paper tried to prove on the basis of 390 Hittite examples that the relative kwis developed from the indefinite kwis. The present paper aims to show on the basis of the same 390 examples how the relative thus formed from the indefinite, at first used only in a restrictive or generalizing sense, eventually acquired also a non-restrictive or definite sense.]

[Skt. ‘seer’ from the IE base *rese- ‘howl’; Skt. nāra- ‘water’ from the base ‘swim’; OPera., GAv. spāda-, YAv. ‘army’ from the base ‘swell, be strong’; Av. ‘herd’ from the base ‘strive, desire, gain’.]

This paper, which I have the pleasure of offering in honor of one who worked hardest for the establishment of the Linguistic Society, is a study of the syntactic constructions within which the form is included. The selection of such a topic was influenced by two considerations: less seems to me to be known about Homeric syntax than about Homeric phonology and Homeric morphology; the introduction and development of the proper technique for the handling of syntactic problems seem important achievements of the Linguistic Society.

Scholars follow error as willingly as truth, and accept opinion as readily as fact. A sentence falsely ascribed to Columella by Holder in his Alceltischer Sprachschatz (2.1245, 51-3) is to be found in no manuscript or printed edition of Columella. Whence Holder got it, remains a mystery, but at least twenty scholars have repeated it (from Holder) and ascribed it to Columella without stopping to verify the text (cf. PID 2.204). An object discovered at Gièvres (in the Loir-et-Cher) in the middle of the last century was described as an amulet and the inscription which it bears misread when first published. Both the spurious description and the erroneous transcription were accepted by Hirschfeld (CIL 13.1324) and repeated by Holder (op.cit. 2.1011, 54-1012.2), who writes

pixtionovimxmorucin

n which x before t, if the reading were justified, would have to be transcribed χ, as in Pixtacus, Pixtaucus (with a : au, see my paper in the Havers Festschrift, Die Sprache 1, 1949), Pixticenus (i.e. -genus), Pixtil(l)us beside Pictaui, Picones, Pictil(l)us, and Picti. As for x before (and after) m, that is quite vapid.

Late Republican Latin has five (or six) syllabic short vowel phonemes, a e i o u (and, in the upper-class pronunciation of certain Greek loanwords, y). As will become clear in the course of this discussion, the corresponding five (or six) long vowels are best analysed as simple vowels followed by an element of length, thus a: i: etc. (usually printed ā ī).

For approximately a century students of the Iguvine Tables have recognized that the Umbrian phoneme represented by ř in the native alphabet and by rs in the Latin alphabet must in a few cases, when in intervocalic position, be etymologically equated not with Latin d but with l. The theory did not at first win universal acceptance in the sense that ř may be derived from original l; some accepted d as the only possible source of ř and explained the Latin l as secondary or else denied the etymologies which assumed the change l > ř. Since the originality of the l in some cases is proved by cognates outside Italic, provided we accept the etymological equations (and some of them can scarcely be denied), practically all scholars now accept the change l > ř for at least a few words. Von Planta (loe.cit. fn. 1) carefully examined the forms alleged to exemplify the change, attempting to define the conditions under which it occurred, and concluded that it was restricted to situations where intervocalic l was followed by a close e or by ĭ. Since the number of relevant examples is small, Buck (69) declines to make any exact formulation of conditions, and editors generally have been satisfied with merely listing the probable instances. It is therefore with some feeling of temerity that I attempt in this article to reexamine the conditions of the sound-change. If my conclusions are acceptable, they may have some value for certain problems of Umbrian etymology and interpretation. If they are too uncertain, the list of new applications of the change l > ř since the appearance of von Planta’s work may be of some service.

The problem of verbal aspects received very little attention in Prokosch’s Comparative Germanic Grammar—only two and a half pages; and what is said there is phrased in vague generalities. Nothing definite is given referring specifically to Germanic languages. The Bibliographical Notes, which are quite abundant for other chapters, have not a single reference to this section of the book. This is in utter contrast with Behaghel’s treatment of the subject, who in his Deutsche Syntax devotes two and a half pages (printed in very small type) exclusively to bibliographical references, more than half of them dealing with perfective and imperfective aspects in Gothic, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old English, Middle High German, and Netherlandish. Additional bibliographical references can be found in C. R. Goedsche’s article on verbal aspect in German, and in the recent book by R. H. Ružić.

In a paper entitled Assimilation and Dissimilation, read at the Linguistic Institute in the summer of 1936, Roland G. Kent explained these two types of linguistic change as the products of psychological conditions. They are due to the fact that ‘the thinking of the speaker is ahead of his utterance’ and they are hence for the most part regressive. Regressive assimilation is caused by an attempt to catch up with the thought, resulting in the replacement of one phoneme by another more similar to or identical with a subsequent phoneme. Regressive dissimilation is caused by an endeavor to avoid identity with what is coming by preventing the recurrence of the same phoneme within the same form. Because of the psychological factors involved, assimilation and dissimilation prove to be semiregular processes, that is to say, they are linguistic changes very different from the gradual and unnoticeable alterations of ‘phonetic change’. They consist in a redistribution of phonemes which is unpredictable, even though under certain conditions they occur with considerable regularity.

The object of this note is to suggest that in certain specific uses of the characters for nan ‘difficult’ and hao ‘good’ (Nos. 8 and 7 in the table), used to write vernacular expressions, we ought possibly to recognize well-known interrogatives which are written in an already acknowledged variety of wa3’s. The nan which has long troubled me belongs to the expression nan tao, seeming to mean literally ‘hard to say’; the hao belongs to the phrase hao jung-i ‘very difficult’, generally explained as ironic (jung-i means ‘easy’). My thesis demands preliminary consideration of those forms of interrogation in Chinese which use initially in the phrase some word that might be called an adverb or a particle of interrogation.

Trukese is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 10,000 inhabitants of the islands of the Truk lagoon and by a few thousands more in the Hall Islands to the north and in the Mortlock Islands to the south. This paper is the first attempt (as far as I know) to apply the comparative method to Trukese. A large number of reconstructions based on the comparison of some eleven different Malayo-Polynesian languages are available. This paper attempts to deal with the results obtained by applying these reconstructions to Trukese. This procedure should give us some insight into the history of the Trukese vowels.