ATA time when nearly every nook and corner of the globe has been made accessible and when international relations are becoming from year to year more general and more intimate, it seems only natural that the idea of a universal language, as a means of common intercourse for all mankind, should have been revived, so as to be hailed in many quarters with delight and enthusiasm. “Revived,” I said, for we must not imagine that the present generation is the first to embrace a similar idea. Every one of us is familiar with the story of the tower of Babel, as told in Genesis, chapter 11, beginning with the statement “And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.” This condition was contrary to the will of the Lord, especially after the people had begun to build a city and a tower whose top was to reach unto heaven. “So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore was the name of it called Babel: because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.”

Although the Greek language shows a considerable number of forms with present reduplication in ι, yet in no sense do these constitute a living category. They are almost a closed circle of old and inherited verbs, subject to all kinds of analogical changes which give evidence of failure to understand their structure, while even new forms show by their very appearance that they were not consciously felt as reduplicating forms. Thus πταμαι (Moschus, etc.) for πτoμαι was clearly patterned after σταμαι, for if felt as a reduplicating form it would have appeared as ∗πταμαι. At the same time this analogical formation shows that itself was no longer analyzed as reduplicated. We may in fact say that the whole category of reduplicating presents, however clear is its existence from the historical point of view, was psychologically a nonentity. The individual reduplicated verbs were either structurally obscure to the speakers of the language, or else they were analyzed wrongly, i.e. not in accordance with their origin. Thus no doubt μí-μvω was usually conceived as μíμμ-vω because the latter conception is supported by a number of verbs like τμ-vω, and, moreover, by the probable division of syllables in pronunciation (μíμ-μ-vω rather than μí-μvω while there was nothing at all to assist in the apperception of the original weak form of the root μv-. Even those reduplicated presents which are clearest to the philologist, e.g. δí-δω-μι and τí-θŋ-μι must have been wrongly analyzed or seemed structurally obscure to many speakers. That e.g. was sometimes conceived as , with thematic vowel, is shown by the analogical of the New Testament. On the other hand, e.g. were certainly often taken as thematic formations and analyzed τíθ--τ and τíθ--ται in the as is made clear by of D at Luke 8:16, and still more by the following thematic forms in papyri: and cf. Robertson, Gram. Gr. N. T. 318.

The history of science records many illustrations of the human inclination to cling to a neat generalization regardless of the evidence behind it. Within our own field we may mention the classification of languages as inflected, agglutinating, or isolating; and the obviously false dogma that phonetic laws operate without exception.

It is now more than a half century since the memorable controversy concerning the application of analogy to linguistics began to be fought out between the old school on the one hand and the neo-grammarians on the other. Today, analogy is regarded as at least of equal if not greater importance than the phonetic laws themselves.

The languages considered are: Zapotek, Mixtek, Chinantek, Mazatek, Cuicatek, Chatino, Chocho.

The thesis of this paper is that all these languages are essentially monosyllabic, that they are undergoing an evolution toward the development of a system of pronominal suffixes, that these suffixes can be traced through a series of dialectical variations all the way from a mere repetition of the pronoun after the verb, through agglutination, to fused “inflection” of verbal endings.

THE significance of our reconstructed forms, precisely what is intended by them, is an old question which some of us discussed briefly at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences of 1904 (cf. the publication, vol. III, pp. 35, 57), and which has been elaborated in the long article of E. Hermann, KZ 41. 1ff. There is not only a difference in the views expressed by various scholars, but often in the case of the same one an apparent discrepancy between the interpretation of reconstruction that is explicitly professed and that which must be inferred from his practice. For example Meillet, Introd. 24ff., insists on the unreality and the purely formulaic character of the reconstructions, saying that these are nothing but convenient formulae for given correspondences (similarly Oertel, Lectures 128, and others). Yet throughout the work he is constantly, like any other scholar in the field, asserting or discussing the sound, form, or type that must be assumed for the parent speech to account for given correspondences, and whether this and that type is inherited from the parent speech or an innovation. Again, not believing in the existence of three guttural series in the parent speech, he does not recognize the ‘plain velars’ of other scholars, whereas from his professed principle one would expect him to have the least compunction in admitting them as convenient formulae for a well-known set of correspondences. The fact is, of course, that to him, and to all, the reconstructions, while mainly useful as formulae, are still something more than mere formulae of correspondences, they imply a certain interpretation of these correspondences, a conviction or a provisional theory regarding their approximate common starting point.