The student who turns to our many excellent handbooks for information on the stops and spirants of Proto-Germanic finds that they agree completely in some respects, but disagree just as completely in others. All of them assume for Proto-Germanic a set of voiceless spirants and a set of voiceless stops: the spirants /f þ h/ as in English fish, thin, horn, derived from PIE /p t k/ as in Latin piscis, tenuis, cornu; and the stops /p t k/ as in English lip, two, kin, derived from PIE /b d g/ as in Latin labium, duo, genus. All of them also assume that there were some further sounds derived from PIE /bh dh gh/ and, by Verner's Law, from /p t k/, and that these sounds were voiced; but there is no agreement whatever as to whether these sounds were stops, or spirants, or both.

In the Jaina Māhārāṣṭrī tales excerpted by the late Hermann Jacobi from the monk Devendra's commentary on the Jain canonical work Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, and published by him in his Ausgewählte Erzählungen in Mâhârâshṭrî (Leipzig, 1886), there is a puzzling stanza in the story of King Bambhadatta (Sanskrit Brahmadatta), for which I wish to offer an interpretation. This story is from the commentary on Chapter 13 of the Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, which is entitled Citta and Saṃbhüya (Sanskrit Citra and Sambhūta), the names of two Jain monks. One of these, Saṃbhūya, has been reborn as the universal emperor Bambhadatta, and the other is again a Jain monk; the chapter consists of a conversation between the two. The context, however, is the story of the two in a previous existence when they were the twin brothers Citta and Sambhūya.

[Recent experiments with synthetic speech have shown that the perception of voiceless stops depends in large measure on the context, not on the characteristics of the consonants alone. The same phenomenon was investigated in actual speech by recording voiceless stops on tape before certain vowels, cutting them away, and splicing them back before other vowels. The change in context caused certain instances of [k] to be perceived as [p] or [t]. The experiment shows that in actual speech the context of an initial voiceless stop is an important factor in its perception; the results agree strikingly with those obtained for synthetic speech. It is further suggested that aspiration ought properly to be regarded as part of the following vowel rather than of the preceding consonant.]

Many who have read the materials of present-day American linguists and have listened to their discussions have gained the impression that these linguists have cast out ‘meaning’ altogether. The two statements following are typical.