In 1910, Matteo Giulio Bàrtoli published an article, Alle Fonti del Neolatino; and in 1925, two books: a joint publication with Giulio Bertoni, Breviario di Neolinguistica, and an independent book, Introduzione alla Neolinguistica (Princìpi—Scopi—Metodi). In these three works he formulated certain theories concerning linguistic change, deriving largely from the study of linguistic geography, and on the basis of these theories, combined with the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, he developed an approach to linguistics which he and Bertoni termed Neolinguistica or ‘Neo-Linguistics’. The work of the neolinguisti or ‘Neo-Linguists’ (as they styled themselves in opposition to the Neo-Grammarians) has remained generally unknown in this country until recently, when several articles have appeared, arguing the superiority of the ‘neo-linguistic’ method over other approaches. Since these articles give only a partial and not wholly accurate picture of Bàrtoli's theories and their value, and since Bàrtoli's books are in general not easily accessible to American linguists, an attempt at presentation, critical discussion, and evaluation of his ‘Neo-Linguistics’ is in order. We shall make such an attempt in this article, primarily on the basis of the Introduzione alla Neolinguistica. The basic questions we shall try to answer are : (1) What does Bàrtoli have to say to us? (2) What is it worth from the point of view of general linguistic method? (3) What is it worth to us, here and now?

1.0. This paper presents a formalized procedure for describing utterances directly in terms of sequences of morphemes rather than of single morphemes. It thus covers an important part of what is usually included under syntax. When applied in a particular language, the procedure yields a compact statement of what sequences of morphemes occur in the language, i.e. a formula for each utterance (sentence) structure in the language.

The Linguistic Society of America has come of age. An account of its origin is to be found in the first number of this journal, dated March 1925 (Lang. 1.1-5). There also something is said about the state of affairs which prompted the founding of the Society—a state of affairs now remembered only by those who have reached middle age.

1. Fanti is the principal language of the Gold Coast Colony, which forms the southern part of the Gold Coast, British West Africa. It is the native language of perhaps a million people, and is used as a second language by many more. To a large extent it appears to be mutually intelligible with Twi, which is spoken in the Ashanti province to the north. It is not, however, mutually intelligible with Gã, the language of Accra, the Gold Coast capital. Fanti is a member of the Akan group of languages, and falls into the general classification of Sudanic languages.

Many of the categories used in the discussion of the Indo-European verbal paradigm are functional rather than structural, a fact recognized and succinctly stated by Brugmann: ‘Bei der Gruppierung der Formen eines Verbalsystems ist die traditionelle Grammatik von der Bedeutung der Formen ausgegangen, nicht von formantischer Gleichartigkeit. Infolge davon hat sie zum Teil solches, was formal zusammengehört, voneinander getrennt und solches was formal verschieden ist, vereinigt.’ And later in the same paragraph: ‘Zunächst ist zu betonen, dass ein Bildungsunterschied zwischen den Formen des Präsenssystems und den Formen des Aorists ursprünglich nicht vorhanden war.’ Among his examples he points out the structural identity of the ‘imperfects’ Skt. ábhāt, Gk. with the ‘aorists’ Skt. ásthāt, Gk. , and the use of the stem *ĝene- to form an ‘imperfect’ in Skt. ájanat, but an ‘aorist’ in Gk. Of course, it is the coexistence or the absence, as the case may be, of a ‘present’ built from the same stem that determines whether such a form is to be accounted an ‘imperfect’ or an ‘aorist’. All this is in sharp contrast to the procedure of Semitists, who, in their treatment of finite verbs, employ categories that are structural throughout; e.g. in Arabic grammars and dictionaries the various ‘stems’ are merely listed in an arbitrary numerical order. Thus, once past the ‘First’ or Ground-stem, the structural relations of all the other stems (II-XV) are throughout predictable; it suffices for the lexicon merely to mention which of these derivative stems exist, without quoting the actual forms. One can imagine the mild chaos created in Arabic grammar if a strictly functional classification of verb-stems as ‘reflexive’, ‘causative’, etc. were to be introduced.

In the analysis of complexes into elements, there is always the twofold problem of the size of units on the one hand and the identity of units on the other. In analyzing speech sounds, for example, one can ask how large a phoneme is and whether sounds can profitably be analyzed longitudinally into simultaneous components, or, on the other hand, what different sounds (allophones) can be grouped together as members of one and the same phoneme. Similarly, on the question of what is a word, one can ask how large a segment of speech is to be recognized as a word, or, on the other hand, what different utterance fractions can be grouped together as instances of the same word.

[Old Spanish vellido, bellido and Old Galician-Portuguese velido ‘beautiful’ are retraced to Lat. mellītus ‘sweet like honey, beloved, darling’, with possible interference of bellus. Spanish and Portuguese melindre, Minhoto melingre ‘fritters made of honey’, later ‘daintiness, prudery’, are connected with mellīgō, -inis ‘honeysubstance’, used by Pliny. Two recorded Latin formations are thus added to the Romance lexicon.]

[Skt. bāṣpa- Hears; steam' is a Middle Indie form of an Old Indic *varṣman- ‘rain’.— Rigvedic busá- ‘mist’ and bundá- ‘arrow’. The ‘you‘-pronoun *ušm- and *šm- in Indic and Iranian.]

The Latin adjectives ending in -idus generally appear beside intransitive verbs of the second conjugation and abstract nouns ending in -or, -ōris: e.g. timeō, timor, timidus. They represent, as it were, the participle, of which the original form is probably preserved in an example like acētum ‘vinegar’ : aceō. These verbs show long ē outside the present: vereor : verēcundia, valeō : valētūdō, aceō : acētum : acēscō, tābeō : tābēs : tabēscō, Lith. tyléti ‘to be silent’, OCS iměti ‘to have’. The meaning of the ē-verbs is ‘to be in a state’ and also ‘to keep in a state’.

[The immediate cause of the lengthening appears to have been the development of new vowels, which came about through vocalization of j w and through generation of transition vowels in conjunction with liquids and nasals. These changes were in turn produced by the operation of stress accent.]

[The basic meaning of the simple present tense is the constitution of things, logical, physical, psychological, essential, etc.; of the present progressive, mere occurrence. The distinction between them is not a time-distinction.]

[Hittite evidence indicates that the relative kwi- kwo- is a development of the indefinite. In Hittite a subordinate relative clause can scarcely be distinguished from a coordinate indefinite clause. A typical sentence can mean either ‘some utensils are there, and these he picks up’ or ‘which utensils are there, these he picks up’. Six features that characterize the indefinite type are found to be present in an overwhelming majority of examples of the relative type, 390 of which have been examined.]

[Germanic au > O E 𝓮̄a [æa]; 𝓮̄u > lo. In late Northumbrian texts the spellings ea and eo appear almost interchangeably for both diphthongs. In general these spellings are ambiguous and the most recent view has been that the confusion was merely graphic. Certain isolated textual forms, however, point to phonemic coalescence in an ǣ-diphthong, an interpretation supported by the evidence of modern North Country dialects.]

[Sanskrit has five nasal phonemes: velar, retroflex, dental, and labial nasals, and anusvāra. The palatal nasal is an allophone of the dental.]