In a recent article I attempted to show that on the basis of Hittite evidence and the laryngeal hypothesis alone assumption of the existence of ъ is unnecessary if we assume the laryngeals to have been sonants obeying Sievers-Edgerton's law. In so doing, I dealt with the comparison of Hitt. tum-me-ni, da-a-u-e-ni ‘we take’, 2d pl. da-at-te-ni, 3d sg. da-a-i : Lat. dās, Skt. dádāsi ‘you give’. Concerning the variation between m and w in the Hittite forms I said: ‘The questions of the stage of these processes in which the uw/um problem arose and of whether variant forms of the endings already existed are outside the province of this discussion.‘ The purpose of the present article is to take up these questions and to show how the problem of uw/um alternation in Hittite may be answered more simply and satisfactorily by a restatement of phonological law consistent with the assumption of laryngeal sonants.

0. Dialects of the Rumanian language are spoken today in three rather widely separated areas of Balkan Europe, the largest by far being that of Rumania itself. Within boundaries very nearly approximating those of the Rumanian nation at its territorial maximum after World War I, some 15 to 20 millions of persons speak the mutually intelligible and very closely related DACO-RUMANIAN dialects: those of Muntenia, Oltenia, Transylvania, the Banat, Moldavia, Bessarabia and Bukovina on the left bank of the Danube, and of Dobrugea on the right bank. To the south of the Daco-Rumanian area relatively small numbers of people in scattered sections of Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus, and southern Albania speak the MACEDO-RUMANIAN and MEGLENITIC dialects, the latter being restricted to the vicinity of Salonika; and in a few villages of the Istrian Peninsula of Yugoslavia a small and dwindling number of persons speak ISTRO-RUMANIAN.

No Indo-Europeanist can fail to be struck by the numerous cases in which the same root seems clearly to appear sometimes with initial s plus consonant, sometimes with the same consonant but without the s. This is called ‘s mobile’, or in English ‘s movable’. Often the two forms appear in the same language, as in Skt. paś : spaś- ‘see’. In other cases one form appears in one Indo-European language, or in several, the other in other languages. But there is no regularity; all Indo-European languages seem to be unpredictable in this respect. As Wackernagel observes (1.§231), the facts, it seems, Verbieten an ein durchgehendes Lautgesetz zu denken'. In the next sentence he writes: ‘... muss solcher Schwund [of initial s before consonant] schon in der Grundsprache stattgefunden haben, und zwar ... wenn bestimmte Konsonanten im Auslaut des vorausgehenden Wortes standen’.

Our descriptions of the system of noun inflection in Proto-Indo-European have been modified little since the beginning of this century. At that time Schmidt, Jacobi, van Wijk, and others were discussing the case endings; Brugmann was examining the gender categories, primarily to propose that the feminine gender was secondary.

The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of the oft-repeated proposition that we can not handle meaning linguistically, by attempting to evolve an empirical procedure for the processing of semantic field data, which can then be evaluated in terms of the criteria of consistency, exhaustiveness, and simplicity. This procedure will be applied to a minimum semantic contrast in grammar—the difference in grammatical meaning correlated with the presence or the absence of a single paradigmatic morpheme. I shall call this correlation a GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY, and the contrasting morphemic units the GRAMMATICAL FORMS of this category.

Jacob Grimm believed that Gothic ei designated a diphthong. He based his opinion on the presence of two characters in the orthographic symbol, the alternations between ei and ij, and parallelisms in the use of ei, ai, au, and iu. Many modern scholars have resorted to reasoning of this sort in their efforts to justify diphthongal references for ai, au, iu, though it is now generally agreed that ei designated a monophthong. The supporting evidence is almost entirely orthographic. It may be assumed that Gothic ei is a direct transliteration of Greek ei (a monophthong in the 4th century A.D.), since (1) ei is used to transcribe ei in foreign names, e.g. Peilatus (Peilâtos), Samareites (Samareítēs), and (2) the need for an orthographic distinction between ei and i would be suggested by the Greek use of ei and i. No present-day student of Gothic phonology would think of claiming that ei was a phonetic spelling or of citing the alternation ei : ij as proof that ei was a diphthong.

J. A. Rea's note in IJAL 24.145–50 (1958), Concerning the Validity of Lexicostatistics, is a telling example of partisanship on problems which are still open but on which attitudes tend too often to be taken either wholly favorable or wholly unfavorable.

Using the higher of two retention rates (85.4% against 80.5%), and therefore the one operating more slowly toward change, Rea tests eight Romance languages with 100 words, and finds the time depths of separation absurdly low and recent, as matched against knowledge of the actual history of the languages: less than one-half as great. He therefore denies that lexicostatistics has 'any usefulness or validity even for the languages upon which it is based'.

[All available morphological and orthographic data are re-examined in support of the theory that the Gothic digraph au designates relatively low back monophthongal values when it occurs in the inflectional syllables. This problem is compared with the closely related problem of ai, and the implications of parallelism in the use of the two digraphs are considered briefly.]

[Proto-IE -Hy- and -Hw- (where H was either a glottal spirant [h] or a glottal stop [q]) resulted in PGmc. -qy- and -qw-. This phoneme /q/, of limited distribution and duration, fell together with /g/ in East Germanic, with /k/ and /g/ in North Germanic, and with /k/ and /y, w/ in West Germanic]

There has been a great deal of interest lately in the application of structural techniques to problems of dialect comparison. Studies in this field are rendered difficult, however, by the fact that many of the existing surveys were planned at a time when the phonemic principle was still insufficiently understood and questionnaires lacked examples illustrating points which were later found to be of great importance. As a result, many of the field records available at present are inadequate for complete phonemic analysis. If a geographical study is to yield enough structurally relevant information, it must be based on advance knowledge of the major phonemic and phonetic features characteristic of the region. A structural linguistic survey in an area not previously studied might therefore consist of two stages: (a) a preliminary series of phonological studies at selected points in the area, using informant methods of the type employed in studies of a single dialect, with a classification of dialect differences found; and (b) a detailed geographical survey with the aid of questionnaires to determine the spread of the features discovered in the preliminary study.

With the help of the work so far done in comparative Dravidian studies, it is possible to reconstruct the following phonemes for Proto-Dravidian (PDr.).

Consonants:

Vowels:

The purpose of the present brief note is twofold: to correct in certain respects the analysis outlined in my recent note in MLN 71.265–9 (1956), while taking account of the relative spate, of late, of published views on this subject; and to carry the analysis a bit farther.

1. Sehrt, in Festgabe für Theodor Frings 1-11 (1956), has recently argued the old interpretation, which may be summarized as follows (3): 'Dass also die Zeichen ai, au zwei Lautwerte haben, wird wohl kaum zu bestreiten sein.' I see nothing especially fresh in his arguments for a dual interpretation. His reasoning is based entirely on etymological or morphophonemic considerations or on explicit inattention to dialect provenience. Penzl long ago disposed of such arguments, in JEGP 49.228-30 (1950). The main problem outstanding for Sehrt seems to be the decision between a diphthongal or monophthongal, long or short interpretation of supposed older long diphthongs. Again, Sehrt's arguments are all etymological and morphophonemic. Moreover, his solution is a variation on an old theme; for a handy reference to earlier notions on a 'Hiatusgesetz', see Penzl 227 fn. 41.

[Application of the diachronic method to a structural study. A discussion of the segmental phonemes of a Dutch dialect introduces a reconstruction of the development of the vowel system, on historical evidence supplemented by an interpretation of distributional peculiarities in the modern dialect. Structural influences of the standard language on the dialect are discussed, and certain future developments are outlined.]

The past three decades have seen a number of monographs and articles on the phonetics of Icelandic, but little has yet been done with its phonemics. A first attempt was made by Kemp Malone in a paper read to the Linguistic Society in 1950, but this was drastically amended in a note he published three years later in LANGUAGE. There is a vigorous dogmatism in Malone's approach to phonemics, unhampered by those ifs and buts which strew the discourse of more cautious scholars. Although he claims to have taken account of phonemic work done since 1923, when he published his Phonology of Modern Icelandic, there are no references to indicate the scope of his reading, and few traces in his work of the ideas advanced by other scholars. His only statement of principle is this: 'I have tried first of all to classify each isolable speech-sound as an allophone of some phoneme.' He provides minimal pairs for each phoneme and a brief statement of its distribution. But we do not learn just how he isolated these speech sounds and overlooked others, or what criteria permitted him to classify the sounds with one phoneme and not another. Neither is there any description of the larger units into which the phonemes enter, or any consideration of alternative analyses such as we have been taught to expect in recent phonemic work. That alternatives are possible becomes apparent in his reconsideration of the prosodic system, which permitted him to reduce the number of phonemes at one blow from 61 to 39. This change suggests that there is room for further consideration of Icelandic phonemics. It will be the purpose of this paper to explore various possible analyses of Modern Icelandic as a contribution to what has been called the 'indeterminacy' of phonemic systems and the ‘convertibility’ of different descriptions. We shall also take up some of the problems involved in finding the structure or structures of a language.

It is well known that at least two conflicting forces contribute to the development of languages and dialects: regular sound change, which is studied by the techniques of comparative linguistics, and diffusion of linguistic innovations beyond their original source, which is studied by the techniques of linguistic geography. The present paper offers a detailed study of these two forces and their interaction in the dialects of Mazatec.

A procedure for the subgrouping of related languages or dialects on the basis of exclusively shared innovations was proposed by Brugmann and recently elaborated by Dyen (in a review of Otto Dahl's comparative study of Malagasy and Maanyan.) In the present study of the Mazatec dialects, the procedure is applied to an Amerindian language.