The Hittite words for ‘year’ and the seasons appear in the texts in two variant forms, one without, the other with an nt-suffix. Thus we find side by side:

According to the well-known rule of our grammars, going back to the Roman grammarians, in a Latin word of three or more syllables the accent always fell on the antepenult if the penult was short. And one kind of short syllable consisted of a short vowel with a stop and a liquid (in that order) intervening before the next vowel. Hence the antepenultimate accent of tenebrae ‘darkness’ or tonitrus ‘thunder’.

Lexical polarization is used in this paper as a convenient label for the influence exerted by one word on its semantic opposite. In Classical Latin, for instance, DEXTER serves for ‘right’ and SINISTER for ‘left’. The ancient Romance expressions for ‘right’ are traceable to DEXTRU (to the extent to which DĪRĒCTU ‘straight’ or another rival word has not usurped its place), yet Romance equivalents of ‘left’, barring innovations, consistently presuppose the scantily documented late variant SINEXTRU rather than common SINISTRU (which alone is found even in the glosses). Taking into account the pronunciation of Late Latin, we may reckon with the presence of the pair DESTRU ˜ SINESTRU (SENESTRU) on the colloquial level prior to the disintegration of the Empire. The anomaly in the development of sinistru is thus reduced to the excessive opening of its stressed vowel, which was in any event bound to open to a minor extent: the i advanced not only to [e], as in comparable words, but to [ε]. This departure from the norm, in the absence of other clues, is most plausibly accounted for by assuming a certain amount of pressure exerted by [destru] on [senestru], until the two words reached the maximum degree of similarity compatible with the maintenance of their basic difference. We are here concerned with an instance of formal attraction through association by contrast, a process in which a weaker (passive) partner is reshaped on the pattern of its stronger (active) opposite.

The phonemes of Korean are here analyzed in three ways: in terms of articulatory components, of auditory qualities, and of distinctive oppositions. A detailed phonetic description is provided in §2 and §2.1. The language analyzed is standard colloquial Korean, ideally represented by educated speakers native to Seoul. Like many standard languages, standard Korean consists of not one but many dialects. This analysis attempts to include all linguistic patterns other than those which seem to be partially assimilated borrowings from English.

In the process of comparing linguistic meaning-forms of languages which have proved to be related, one may find a small number of attractive comparisons exhibiting a correspondence which, if divided, would be subsumable under other already established correspondences. To account for this type of correspondence the comparatist may treat it (1) as resulting from a special condition within the proto-language, either the existence of a hitherto unidentified phoneme or cluster, or the existence of proto-doublets (i.e. synonymous and nearly homonymous meaning-forms), or (2) as appearing because of changes within the daughter languages other than phonetic change: analogy, or borrowing from another dialect or from a related language. The second alternative cannot be a solution for a hitherto unassigned correspondence found in a set of otherwise systematic comparisons (1) if the correspondence is found in a position not subject to the effects of analogy and (2) if two or more languages exhibit respectively the same (or identifiable) unanticipated correspondents in each case. Borrowing in great quantity from other dialects or from related languages might produce such an effect if only one language were concerned, but it is hardly likely to do so in two languages independently.

[The aural evaluation of vowel sounds is a basic problem in both experimental and applied phonetics. This paper deals with the judgment of phonetic equivalence in the elementary case of sustained vowels. The definition of the phonetic value of vowels in terms of physiological and acoustical dimensions is considered, and the conventional vowel diagram is discussed as a means of representing vowel sounds in a multidimensional phonetic space.]