The problem of verbal aspects received very little attention in Prokosch’s Comparative Germanic Grammar—only two and a half pages; and what is said there is phrased in vague generalities. Nothing definite is given referring specifically to Germanic languages. The Bibliographical Notes, which are quite abundant for other chapters, have not a single reference to this section of the book. This is in utter contrast with Behaghel’s treatment of the subject, who in his Deutsche Syntax devotes two and a half pages (printed in very small type) exclusively to bibliographical references, more than half of them dealing with perfective and imperfective aspects in Gothic, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old English, Middle High German, and Netherlandish. Additional bibliographical references can be found in C. R. Goedsche’s article on verbal aspect in German, and in the recent book by R. H. Ružić.

In a paper entitled Assimilation and Dissimilation, read at the Linguistic Institute in the summer of 1936, Roland G. Kent explained these two types of linguistic change as the products of psychological conditions. They are due to the fact that ‘the thinking of the speaker is ahead of his utterance’ and they are hence for the most part regressive. Regressive assimilation is caused by an attempt to catch up with the thought, resulting in the replacement of one phoneme by another more similar to or identical with a subsequent phoneme. Regressive dissimilation is caused by an endeavor to avoid identity with what is coming by preventing the recurrence of the same phoneme within the same form. Because of the psychological factors involved, assimilation and dissimilation prove to be semiregular processes, that is to say, they are linguistic changes very different from the gradual and unnoticeable alterations of ‘phonetic change’. They consist in a redistribution of phonemes which is unpredictable, even though under certain conditions they occur with considerable regularity.

The object of this note is to suggest that in certain specific uses of the characters for nan ‘difficult’ and hao ‘good’ (Nos. 8 and 7 in the table), used to write vernacular expressions, we ought possibly to recognize well-known interrogatives which are written in an already acknowledged variety of wa3’s. The nan which has long troubled me belongs to the expression nan tao, seeming to mean literally ‘hard to say’; the hao belongs to the phrase hao jung-i ‘very difficult’, generally explained as ironic (jung-i means ‘easy’). My thesis demands preliminary consideration of those forms of interrogation in Chinese which use initially in the phrase some word that might be called an adverb or a particle of interrogation.

Trukese is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 10,000 inhabitants of the islands of the Truk lagoon and by a few thousands more in the Hall Islands to the north and in the Mortlock Islands to the south. This paper is the first attempt (as far as I know) to apply the comparative method to Trukese. A large number of reconstructions based on the comparison of some eleven different Malayo-Polynesian languages are available. This paper attempts to deal with the results obtained by applying these reconstructions to Trukese. This procedure should give us some insight into the history of the Trukese vowels.