A recent article, The importance of language universals, raises a problem that is fundamental to all linguistic science, and is of particular relevance at the present time in the light of current developments in linguistic method. The authors refer to the importance of studying those features of culture that are found to be universal in human society, one of which is language itself. They then suggest (and this is a topic that requires some elaboration) that linguistics and the study of languages will be benefited by an investigation of ‘universals of language’, features of human language exhibited everywhere, in all speech communities. They proceed to suggest and enumerate such universals in the fields of phonology, grammar, and semantics.

In spite of the delay in the publication of a linguistic atlas of the Iberian Peninsula, the material which is gradually becoming available on individual dialects is so plentiful that lexical areas can be delimited with a fair degree of accuracy, and studies in the reconstruction of sequences of events may be undertaken with small risk. One such problem involves the spread (in the dimensions of space and time) of five entirely unrelated Latin word-families, which, at a late stage of their Hispanic development, seem to have exerted a measure of influence on one another through mutual encroachment or avoidance. This problem is here discussed as a tentative step in the indicated direction, and also as a contribution, based on fresh material, to the general problem of homonymy and near-homonymy as factors in language history.

In comparative Germanic grammar it is conventionally assumed that IE e eu became respectively PGc. i iu when a high front vowel or glide (i ī j) occurred in the following syllable. Apart from differences of opinion regarding the manner in which this development took place, the grammars show very little disagreement on the subject. Nearly all assign the change to Proto-Germanic (or at least pre-Gothic) times, although Schulze in particular has noted an apparent lack of umlaut in early runic inscriptions and foreign spellings of Germanic names. It is also a conventional assumption that IE i u became respectively PGc. e o when a low or mid vowel () occurred originally in the next syllable, provided that neither i ī j nor a cluster of nasal plus consonant intervened. In this instance, however, some scholars have doubted that the change took place in Proto-Germanic times.

Leveling of the radical vowel in the plural paradigm of the consonantal r-stems denoting family relations. In the plural paradigm of the substantive consonantal declension, i-umlaut of the radical vowel originally occurred only in the nom.-acc. form, since only here did the end syllable contain the vowel i. This vowel status is regularly preserved in the monosyllabic consonantal stems; cf. fϕtr (*fōt-iR) fóta fótum fϕtr (*fōt-iR), from fótr (masc.) ‘foot’; merkr (*mark-iR) marka mǫrkum merkr (*mark-iR), from mǫrk (fem.) ‘mark’ (a weight or money value). The consonantal r-stems denoting family relations belonged to the dissyllabic pattern in the singular (faÐer ‘father’, bróÐer ‘brother’, móÐer ‘mother’, dótter ‘daughter’, syster ‘sister‘), but became monosyllabic in the plural (feÐr, brϕÐr, etc.). Nevertheless, contrary to the pattern of the monosyllabic type (fótr, mǫrk), the original radical vowels a and ó in the genitive and dative forms were leveled out in favor of the umlauted vowels e and ϕ of the nom.-acc. forms; cf. , etc. So far as I know, no explanation has ever been given for this discrepancy between the two types of consonantal stems.

The transition area as a crucial but difficult problem in American linguistic geography has been ably presented in a recent article by Alva L. Davis and Raven I. McDavid Jr. The relative lack of pattern in the data from transition areas, compared to the easily mapped patterns found in relic and focal areas, is probably responsible in part for the slight attention that has been paid to transition areas before the appearance of this article. Davis and McDavid properly conclude that transition areas will assume increased importance as research in American linguistic geography moves away from the numerous focal and relic areas of the Atlantic coast toward the increasingly heterogeneous transition areas of the western United States. Certainly the collection and analysis of dialect vocabulary in California has revealed to the present writers a situation even more varied and complex than that of northwestern Ohio.

Davis and McDavid conclude that it will be necessary to collect much more complete information from transition areas if one is to correlate speech patterns with the historical and cultural complex. They suggest no new methods, however, by which the limited data now available from transition areas may be more adequately analyzed and understood. In the process of analyzing our own material from California, we have come to the conclusion that the speech patterns of traneition areas grow much clearer when viewed as quantitative rather than as qualitative phenomena.

The following paper is a descriptive analysis of the phonemes of the language represented by the Zographensis manuscript, based on the distribution of the symbols used by the scribe. Wherever two alternative analyses are possible from the descriptive data, historical evidence is used in making a choice. Such evidence is also used in making an initial phonetic assumption. Otherwise it is not used, either to determine the phonemes or to supplement the distributional analysis.

The term sememe was defined by Bloomfield as ‘the meaning of a morpheme’. Inasmuch as any language is a semiotic system in which continuous reality is arbitrarily classified into discrete categories that correspond to speech forms, it is useful to maintain this definition. By doing so we have the morpheme as the minimal unit of meaningful speech form (Saussure's signifiant) and the sememe as the minimal unit of discretely classified reality (Saussure's signifié) corresponding to it.