The most important vocalic sound-change of Old High German is the i-umlaut, usually referred to simply as umlaut. Its importance lies in its creation of a whole series of new sound units, which are still preserved in Modern Standard German, as well as in its structural similarity to certain sound-changes that occurred in practically all the other Germanic languages and are assumed for a period preceding the earliest OHG sources. It is the purpose of this article to deal particularly with some still controversial aspects of umlaut: the role of consonants in umlaut itself and in the so-called secondary umlaut (Sekundärumlaut); the geographic distribution of umlaut and its spread; and its often misunderstood chronology.

In 1873, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli proposed to distinguish, in addition to the two recognized Gallo-Romance linguistic areas of North French and Provençal, a third, which he named Franco-Provençal. He defined this as

un tipo idiomatico, il quale insieme riunisce, con alcuni suoi caratteri specifici, più altri caratteri, che parte son comuni al francese, parte lo sono al provenzale, e non priviene già da una tarda confluenza di elementi diversi, ma attesta bensì la sua propria indipendenza istorica non guari dissimile da quella per cui fra loro si distinguono gli altri principali tipi neolatini.

For more than a generation now the bulk of scientific linguistic publication in America has been devoted to descriptive linguistics and the vast majority of the last generation of students of linguistics have devoted themselves largely to that field. The larger measure of scientific advance has accompanied the larger measure of devotion. That is to be expected. There have, of course, been notable exceptions. But I believe the facts will bear me out in my observation that these notable exceptions have been due to the continued labors of an older generation of scholars.

The long-established hypothesis that Gothic ái áu still represented the diphthongs [ai au] in the time of Wulfila is expressed in the writings of such scholars as Jellinek, Streitberg, Braune, and Kieckers. In recent years, however, an increasing number of linguists, including Hirt, Marstrander, Wright, and Mossé, have reached the conclusion that Wulfila's ái áu were no longer diphthongs but had become monophthongized to long open [ε: ɔ:] respectively. Still others, e.g. Wrede and Prokosch, agree only that such a monophthongization took place. Wrede assigns it to the post-Wulfilian period, and Prokosch qualifies his acceptance of the theory: ‘I believe that Hirt is right, but the question is largely one of chronology. Shortly before Wulfila's time, Gmc. ai au were still diphthongs in Gothic ... . Shortly after Wulfila, they were monophthongs’.

The title of this article is more pretentious than the subject that I propose to treat in these few pages. My concern here is with a question of method; accordingly I shall defer a more comprehensive treatment to some future publication, and refrain from burdening the present essay with details and examples. The purpose of this paper is to show how, through a study of pre-Romance archeology, anthropology, and ethnology, the Italian dialects can be made to appear in a new and perhaps brighter light.

When the utterances of a language have been analyzed into their smallest meaningful units, the morphemes, a number of these morphemes in most languages have more than one morpheme alternant. Insofar as these alternants are sequences of phonemes (in which case we call them morphs), the phonemic differences among all the different morphs belonging to one phoneme can be described, classified, and compared with the differences among morphs of other morphemes, considered morpheme by morpheme. The total class of these differences so described, classified, and compared is called the morphophonemics of the language in question, and any two morphs of the same morpheme are said to stand in a relation of (morphophonemic) alternation with each other. The most common symbol for alternation is ~. Alternations may be reduced to their lowest phonemic terms; thus (Bloch 416, Type VIII) the alternation duw ~ di (do ~ di-d) may be reduced to uw ~ i. Sometimes, as in this example, the reduction can be effected in more than one way; we could reduce the alternation to two phonemic alternations: u ~ i and w ~ zero (cf. Bloch 414, par. 3). In this case, and perhaps always, the difference between alternative ways is trivial.

It is a commonplace that the Spanish conjunctive pronoun has more than one possible position with respect to a series of interdependent verbs. Constructions of the type Lo quiero ver ~ Quiero verlo, Lo estoy viendo ~ Estoy viéndolo, Lo vamos a tratar de hacer ~ Vamos a tratarlo de hacer ~ Vamos a tratar de hacerlo are of everyday occurrence; they have been counted and to some extent classified by Keniston.

During my stay in Ethiopia in 1946–47 I had occasion to investigate various argots, including those of merchants, of minstrels, and of the people possessed by the spirit called zar. The present article will deal with the merchants' argot. There is no unified merchant argot all over Ethiopia, not even among speakers of the same language. The argot under consideration is spoken by the merchants of Moţa, to the north of Debre Markos, the capital of Godjam; it is called kəlaməñña (see §3). A superficial investigation of the argot of the merchants of Gondar, the capital of Begemder, north of Godjam, convinced me that the two argots are quite different. It would be of particular importance to investigate the argot of the merchants of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, which is the meeting-point for merchants of the various populations of the country.

Hans Ehelolf has published two parallel passages from a fragmentary Hittite text. The important fact to which Ehelolf called attention is that in col. 2, line 8 we have an Akkadian phrase: A-NA lú BE-EL É-TIM salBE-EL-DI Ê-TIM, which is repeated in Hittite words in line 18: pár-na-aš iš-ḫi-i pár-na- aš iš-ḫa-aš-ša-ri. Both lines mean ‘to the master of the house, to the mistress of the house’; it follows that iš-ḫa-aš-ša-ri, a dative whose nom. sg. is citable as iš-ḫa-aš-ša-ra-aš, is a derivative of iš-ḫa-a-aš e-eš-ḫa-a-aš ‘master’. I, at least, have no doubt that the latter word is cognate with Lat. erus, the IH source of the two being either ’esxos or ’esyos.

Analysis of the grammatically complete sentence in Ukrainian reveals, as elsewhere in Indo-European, the familiar ‘logical’ polarity of subject and predicate. The nucleus of the subject is preponderantly a nominal element, that of the predicate a verbal one; apart from their characteristic suffixes of derivation, the first is defined morphologically by a system of declension, the second by a system of conjugation, i.e. by two contrasting patterns of flexion. The fact of flexion itself serves as a criterion to discriminate between the inflected and the uninflected lexical constituents (lexemes) of the language. The nominal system is, if anything, rather more involved than the verbal and covers the expression of a series of notional categories, only some of which (e.g. person and number) it shares with the verb. Selected case-relations are represented by more or less characteristic morphemes, and the variety of these is multiplied by the demands of gender and number.

[An earlier paper tried to prove on the basis of 390 Hittite examples that the relative kwis developed from the indefinite kwis. The present paper aims to show on the basis of the same 390 examples how the relative thus formed from the indefinite, at first used only in a restrictive or generalizing sense, eventually acquired also a non-restrictive or definite sense.]

The speech of monolingual natives of some languages is comprised of more than one phonemic system; the simultaneously existing systems operate partly in harmony and partly in conflict. No rigidly descriptive statement of the facts about such a language accounts for all the pertinent structural data without leading to apparent contradictions. These are caused by the conflict of statements about one phonemic system with statements about another system or part of a system present in the speech of the same individual.

In Old Irish, there exists a group of verbs which are characterized by the fact that they normally infix a meaningless neuter pronoun of the third person singular. Such a verb, for example, is ar·crin ‘perishes’, which, however, with the infix usually occurs in the form ara·chrin ‘perishes (it)'. Similar to ara·chrin and to the other verbs of this group is apparently ar·clich ‘wards off, parries'. Although so far this fact has not been noted, it likewise seems to infix a meaningless neuter pronoun in the following two passages from the oldest recension of Táin Bó Cúailnge:

Most speakers of Norwegian in the Middle West belong to the farming class. Nearly all are bilingual, and many of them handle the English language better than the Norwegian. It is often easy to detect their Scandinavian background in listening to their English, even in the case of second- or third-generation Americans. They were usually educated in a grade school and a Norwegian-Lutheran parochial school. The parochial school, until relatively recent times, was conducted in Norwegian; the children were taught to read and write the language. As a result, only the youngest speakers of Norwegian are without any knowledge of its literary form. Literary Dano-Norwegian is still used in church services, and is the familiar form of the language to those of the city population who cultivate the idiom of their ancestors in the Sons of Norway lodges; but the country communities use dialects almost exclusively. As a rule, a community has only one main dialect. The pioneers preferred to settle with people from their own district in Norway; if people from two districts settled close together, the dialect that counted the larger number of speakers usually replaced the other. Dialect mixtures is seldom to be found except in individual speakers; only one case has been reported where a mixed dialect seems to be the language of a community. Only the largest settlements, for instance the Koshkonong settlement near Madison, have maintained several dialects with equal prestige.