Nearly all scholars who have worked with the cuneiform Hittite texts have assumed that the language has consonantal u (transcribed w or ṷ) as well as syllabic u, and consonantal i (transcribed y, j, or ḽ) as well as syllabic i. Although there have been few explicit statements to that effect, it appears that the difference between w and u and between y and i has usually been considered phonemic. At any rate that is the opinion underlying Sturtevant's treatment. Nevertheless there has been a tendency to recognize only w and y before vowels and only u and i before consonants, and such a distribution raises the question whether w and u, y and i are not rather positional variants of the phonemes u and i. The purpose of this discussion is to examine and classify a large enough body of material to settle the question.

The verbal root sem-, which Holger Pedersen connects with Lith. semiù ‘I draw, empty out’, forms many compounds in Irish by prefixing one or more preverbs. With two such preverbs, for example, this root occurs in to-ess-sem- and to-uss-sem-, the deuterotonic and prototonic pres. ind. 3d sg. of which would be do-eisim, ·teisim ‘pours out’ and do·uisim, ·tuisim ‘brings forth’. Parallel to the latter, one consequently expects fo·uisim, ·fuisim to be composed of the same root sem- preceded by the preverbs fo and uss (oss). Apart from the difference in the initial element, these two verbs are, therefore, structurally identical in other respects.

[A study of the seventy-six Old English verbs with the suffix -ettan: their derivation, their meaning, and the causes of their subsequent disappearance. See the last paragraph.]

Benjamin Lee Whorf died on July 26, 1941, at his home in Wethersfield, Connecticut, after an illness of several months; he was 44 years old. Whorf was trained as an engineer, having graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918; at the time of his death he was an assistant secretary of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. His work in linguistics began about 1928, with an interest in the decipherment of Maya; this led to his studying modern Mayan and Aztec, and thence to a deep penetration of the field of American Indian and general linguistics. In 1930 Whorf held a Social Science Research Council grant, under which he recorded the Aztec dialect of Milpa Alta, Mexico. In 1936 and 1937 he was a research fellow at Yale, and the association with Edward Sapir during those years was, in his own opinion, the most important influence on his linguistic thinking.