In the present state of our techniques we may assume that we know how to isolate morphemes properly—that is, unequivocally and without unaccountable residue. It is not so certain that we know how to isolate words, and hence how to separate morphology from syntax. Given a viable definition of the word for some particular language, we come finally to the problem of assigning words properly to relevant syntactic units such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. To illustrate one possible technique of discovering the syntactic framework of a language, I shall analyze a short text of Ponapean, a Micronesian language of the Eastern Caroline Islands.

Ever since it was discovered that Hittite, the language in which the bulk of the cuneiform tablets from Boğazköy is composed, is an Indo-European language or a language related to Indo-European, historians and linguists alike have been interested in the question as to the time when these people entered Asia Minor. The tablets were mostly written between 1400 and 1200 b.c., but the history of the Hittite state can be traced back to about 1900 b.c.; at that time, at the latest, Hittites must have been present in Anatolia. The problem of their origin has been complicated by the fact that the Hittite language is not isolated in the peninsula, but forms part of an ‘Anatolian’ group of languages to which Luwian and Palaic—likewise attested in the Boğazköy material—and furthermore the language of the inscriptions written in Hittite hieroglyphs also belong. The latter can at present be traced back to the middle of the 2nd millennium but for the most part cover the early centuries of the 1st millennium.

This is a phonemic analysis of the Sanskritized literary Tamil spoken in Madras by those whose vernacular is Tamil and whose fluent knowledge of Sanskrit is due to their heritage and upbringing. This variety of the language is distinct, on the one hand, from the several geographically determined dialects and, on the other, from Taṉittamiḻ, ‘pure Tamil’, which, free (at least in intention) of all Indo-Aryan influences, has records possibly two thousand years old and is in use today by certain people in the Tamil area. Sanskritized Tamil is a cultivated, literary language subject to strict canons of grammar and style, but it is a living speech and not an artificial medium used only by scholars.

Very few of the languages of the Tai family still preserve consonant clusters of the type pl-, kl-, pr-, kr-, etc. The two languages generally known to preserve such clusters, at least in part, are Siamese and Ahom, the latter an extinct language of Assam. The dialects of Wu-ming and Lung-an, both in central Kwangsi province, are the other dialects I know which preserve them to a certain extent. The widely scattered distribution of these languages shows that the preservation of the clusters indicates no specially close linguistic relationship among them. Three other languages—Lao, a language closely related to Siamese; Shan, closely related to Ahom; and Dioi of Kweichow province, with which Wu-ming shares many common characteristics—have all simplified such clusters. It is safe to assume that the simplification is in most cases an individual dialect development, and that the clusters persisted in each of the various dialect groups before their simplification took place.