In a recent article in Language, Charles F. Hockett has presented an analysis of the stressed syllabics of the Vespasian Psalter and Hymns. Hockett opposes the traditional view which interprets ea, eo, io, and ie as short diphthongs, and offers a solution of his own which within the limitations of one MS is in part convincing. In general, he equates each vowel letter or digraph with a phoneme. In agreement with us, with Mossé, and with Daunt, but in contradiction of the established tradition, he regards the digraphs ea, eo, io, and ie as spellings for monophthongs; he believes, however, that these short digraphs represent separate short vowel phonemes; we believe that in early OE they represented allophones of the front vowels /i/, /e/, and /æ/; we believe that eo, io, and ie represented allophones only in the earlier period. These allophones later became phonemes, whereas the allophone represented by ea did not. Hockett's speculations about the motivations of the scribes who first selected these particular digraphs in these particular values are appealing. Especially ingenious is his theory about the origin of the letter y in OE, which he considers to have been originally a digraph (591–4).

The recent rapid development of electronic computing facilities on college and university campuses has become particularly dramatic during the past several months. Dozens of colleges and universities now have ‘medium-sized’ computers such as the IBM 650, and several campuses have larger machines. The best known of the large-scale digital computers are the IBM 704, 709, and 7090 systems, which are very similar to each other. Among the universities which have machines of this type are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Universities of Michigan, Washington, and California (at both Berkeley and Los Angeles), and several additional ones have recently been installed or are on order at other institutions. Comparable machines made by Remington-Rand are available at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina.

In a recent article Hans Kurath has admirably stated the importance of a ‘careful consideration of the phonic character and range of the several phonemes’ in historical linguistics, even if the phonemic point of view is also essential there. Indeed, the primary material of a historical linguist consists of the written reflexes of languages as transmitted to us, and all synchronic and diachronic analyses have to be based on them. Phonetic interpretation is feasible but the obvious impossibility of direct observation or instrumental recording seems to preclude phonetic analysis in the study of a ‘dead language’. Is then historical phonetics without scientific value and significance? This judgment would be erroneous, since, after all, we cannot conceive of phonemes without their phonetic variants or allophones, and, what is even more important, we see the origin of phonemic change in the development of such allophones. Phonemic changes are the main events in the phonological history of a language; but they cannot be explained or fully described without postulating specific phonetic values. Thus there cannot be any historical phonemics without historical phonetics. Phonetic identification of phonemes and their variants is an important task in historical linguistics, and the methods used as well as the results achieved deserve a more detailed investigation.

The analysis of tone phonemes, or tonemes, like that of segmental phonemes, necessarily involves considerations of phonetic similarity—necessarily, because there is no other basis upon which tones occurring in noncontrastive distribution can be phonemically identified with one another. But how is ‘phonetic similarity’ to be understood in the case of tones? Not, certainly, in the sense in which it is understood in the case of segmental phones, where it denotes some objective similarity in the articulatory or acoustic characteristics of the phones themselves. To be sure, even in this case phonetic similarity is a rather elastic criterion; but at least it can be shown, for example, that two vocalic phones have a common tongue position, or two consonantal phones certain common distinctive features. No such objective similarity is demonstrable in the case of tones—at least, of level tones; for, since it is relative rather than absolute pitch that is involved in tonemic systems, a given toneme may occur at virtually any pitch of which the voice is capable. Variants of a man's high tonemes may be acoustically similar to those of a woman's low tonemes; and in the speech of a single speaker a given level of pitch in two utterances or even within one utterance may represent variants of several different tonemes. The possibilities of phonemic overlapping of level tonemes are virtually unlimited.

'This whiskey,' said O'Reilly, sampling spirits that claimed to be from his homeland, 'was not exported from Ireland; it was deported.'

In The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor, 1961), Hans Kurath and his collaborator, Raven I. McDavid Jr., have given us the first detailed study in structural dialectology that has ever been made of a large geographical area. In the present article, offered in Kurath's honor, I shall try to make a similar contribution in miniature: a structural analysis of the vowel of a single pair of words, involving part of the short-vowel system of part of German-speaking Switzerland. Following Kurath's example, I shall examine the vowel phonically, phonemically, and historically.

Reduplication is considered as affix and morpheme, in connection with the assumption that verbal distortions have structural correlates, in order to raise a question of descriptive method.

The past decade has seen a flurry of activity in the field of language contact, with the result that we now have many descriptive studies and several valuable theoretical reviews of the field which serve to stimulate and guide further inquiry. One of the suggestions repeatedly pressed on the reader of Weinreich's Languages in contact and Haugen's Bilingualism in the Americas is the necessity of interdisciplinary research in studying the so-called extralinguistic factors which abound in any consideration of this subject. To be sure, linguists have made great strides in their principal area of interest in language contact, viz. the study of linguistic borrowing. But these studies have been by and large descriptive of the linguistic results of language contact. They are not so much interested in the behavior which accounts for the observed changes (say, between two historical stages of a language) as they are in identifying and tabulating the changes. Excellent documentation of the range of variability of these linguistic results is unfortunately matched by little knowledge concerning the social factors which effect their inception.

Das Ergebnis des Zusammenstoβes der östlichen und westlichen deutschen Sprechweisen am Ende des Krieges war im groβen und ganzen nicht eine Mischung der einheimischen und der zugewanderten Sprachformen, sondern ein verstärkter Rückgang im Gebrauch der beiderseitigen Mundarten zugunsten der gemeinsamen hochdeutschen Umgangssprache, wie ich früher dargelegt habe.

In the Introduction to his Anleitung zu phonologischen Beschreibungen (1935)' Trubetzkoy speaks about the methodological differences between phonetics in its physical and physiological and also, perhaps, psychological aspects, and the other part of linguistics (Sprachlehre), and then makes the following statement (here translated) :

The phonemic system of Old English has become a matter of increasing interest to linguists in recent years. Twenty years ago, structural linguists seldom concerned themselves with the phonemes of a ‘dead’ language, while traditional linguists and philologists generally regarded phonemes as something exotic, something outside the purview of normal language activities and studies. Since 1939, however, we have seen a fair number of publications dealing with the Old English phonemic system or portions of it, written either from a structural viewpoint or in a manner which indicates an awareness of the structural problems of the language.

The above passage in Chaucer's well-known poem has been variously interpreted. In the glossary to the Aldine edition, revised by Richard Morris, the word embosed is defined as ‘sheltered in a wood’. In Robert Bell's edition, somewhat revised by Skeat in 1878, there is a note: ‘Embosed is a technical term applied to a deer when so hard pressed as to foam at the mouth, and hang out the tongue.‘ These were the two most widely used editions prior to the publication of the Oxford Chaucer, freshly edited by Skeat in 1894, and both were several times reprinted. They also represent the two alternative explanations of embosed.