Much has been written on the subject of madness in the ancient world. Historians of science have discussed the prevalence of mental diseases, their classification, diagnosis, and treatment, as well as the explanations of them put forward by the adherents of different philosophical and physiological doctrines. The representations of madness in literature and the popular attitude toward it have been analyzed, while the controversies in regard to some details of the Roman law on the matter are apparently not yet settled. To the question however of the Greek or Latin vocabulary describing madness, little attention has been paid. It is from this point of view that the present study has been undertaken.

In Latin a noun and participle are sometimes combined in such a way that the weight of the meaning seems to lie in the participle rather than in the noun. This peculiar relationship between participle and noun may be seen in the well-known phrase of dating, ab urbe condita, which for want of an exact definition is often used to identify the construction. Analysis of the words shows that what is really an abstract idea has been expressed in concrete terms. Logical expression would call for an abstract noun in place of the participle, with a second noun in the genitive case, and a translator is forced to have recourse to some such device in order to render the meaning, e.g. ‘from the founding of the city’. Participles of this type can be found in Latin in all the cases except the vocative and in combination with a large number of prepositions.

In the Mitanni letter the following two pairs of passages are found which evidently vary identical ideas:

1. (a) a-ti-i-ni-i-in Ma-ni-e-na-an še-e-ni-iw-wa-ŭ-[e] (14) pa-aš-ši-i-it-ḫi ŭ-ŭ-na (II 13f.) and

2. (b) [ ...... ] (114) [Gi-]li-i-an [pa-aš-ši-i-it-ḫi-iw-wa [Ma-ni-]en-na-a-an pa-aš-ši-i-it-ḫi-ip (115) [na-]ak-ku-ša-a-ŭ ŭ-ŭ-na-a-al-la-a-an še-e-ni-iw-wη-ta (I 114f.).

3. (c) ip-šu-ši-i-in ti-i-ḫa-níš-ḫi-i-in ú-ú-na-a-an (IV 49) and

4. (d) ŭ-na-a-la-an (20) še-e-ni-iw-wη-ú-a ti-i-ḫa-niníš-ḫa-la-an ip-šu-ši-i-la-an (III 19f.).

A study of the neuter plural in Vergil made by Dr. John F. Gummere showed that there is an excess of nominative, accusative, and vocative plurals over the corresponding case-forms in the singular, as compared with the situation in masculine and feminine nouns; and that the frequency of nominative, accusative, vocative plural of neuters reaches its height in nouns of those classes whose nominative, accusative, vocative plural form is of greatest metrical convenience. In a further examination of dactylic verse Dr. Margaret W. Herr states that a study of plurals in the Metamorphoses has given the same results for Ovid that Dr. Gummere's study gave for Vergil.

I intended a short, inoffensive article on ME ū, devoted chiefly to the Early American au-spellings. The present monograph has grown out of unavailing struggles to retain my original intention and the accepted phonological theory in face of the recalcitrant rhymes and spellings of Professor Miles L. Hanley's Wisconsin Collection. Various extended analyses of minor factors that figure largely in the following pages were needed, in the first place, to settle my own misgivings; they are retained in the hope that they may perform a like service for the reader. I am fully conscious of the many points on which either my imagination or my methodology may have failed me, and it is with certain inward doubts that I present my tentative conclusions for criticism, correction, and amplification.

The purpose of this study is to record and comment on the standard words and some of the dialect words for horse in French- and Provençal-speaking territory. Since the horse is a part of the every-day life of a people, it was felt to be of some linguistic interest to see what terms were used or had been used in the past in referring to or designating this domestic animal. Most of the words were gathered from glossaries and dictionaries listed in Professor W. von Wartburg's Bibliographie des dictionnaires patois.

One may expect to find instances of phonologic (morpho-phonemic) alternation in almost any language. In English there are changes in consonants, vowels, and stress, insertions, and elisions; and many of these are conditioned only by the phonetic surroundings of the morphemes. An example is the possessive suffix, which is -əz (or - 𝚤z) after a sibilant, -z after a voiced non-sibilant, -s after a voiceless non-sibilant.

Through the kindness of Professor Sturtevant we have been supplied with information about Hittite to enable us to make a Hittite column for the distribution table used in our study of Indo-European linguistic relationships by the quantitative method. The distribution of plus and minus signs for the Hittite column is as follows :

Plus: 6, 7, 14, 22, 25, 26, 32, 36, 42, 45, 47, 52, 55, 64.

Blanks: 3, 4, 9, 15, 16, 27, 28, 29, 30, 48, 67, 68.

Minus: all the rest except 8.

There is nothing novel in equating Skt. ā and Lat. ā; the suggestion was made in 1883 independently by Froehde and Johannes Schmidt. Nine years later Von Planta noted that Oscan ā- in aamanaffed ‘mandavit’ strongly supports this view; for, while Lat. ā might result from abs before a voiced consonant and Umbrian aha-, ā- might come from ap- before t-, Oscan s remains before voiced consonants (fíísnu, posmom) and in Oscan inherited p before t appears as f (scriftas).

When the Greeks borrowed the alphabet they took over the Semitic qoph as well as kaph, and they employed the former before back vowels (e.g. Corinthian híoμ∈s, καóν), but in the course of time was crowded out by κ. Scholars have inferred that the extra letter served no useful purpose, because there was no phonemic difference between κ before back vowels and in other positions. Similarly the Etruscans borrowed both and κ from the Greeks, and on some early Etruscan inscriptions the use of q is limited in the same way as Gk. , while k is used only before the vowel a.

When you first learn Greek, you are naturally surprised when you come to the principal parts of γíγνομαι and find γ∈νήσομαι, νόμην and then apparently a perfect active: , and finally . This paper has to do with the true interpretation of this phenomenon and similar anomalies which occur in Indo-Iranian and also, in one or two isolated instances, in Latin.

As early as 1921 Emil Forrer advanced the hypothesis that Hittite separated from the Pre-Indo-European parent stock before the time of the Primitive Indo-European language that has been partially reconstructed by the comparative method. Forrer did not undertake to prove his point, but I have tried to do so in a series of articles.

The historical interpretation of the inflectional forms of Tocharian nouns has lagged behind for an obvious reason. The endings of the verbs show their IE affinities at once, and such changes as have occurred present no more obstacles to their explanation than those in the other IE languages. On the other hand the case endings of the nouns, most of all those of the nominative plural, e.g., -am, -ñ, -ant, -u, do not recall directly any IE case formatives, and therefore at first seem to defy explanation. Nevertheless it is not possible that the Tocharian declensions have no IE antecedents at all, for such a contrast between the origin of nouns and verbs is inconceivable. Explanations of Tocharian case endings must take as their starting point IE conditions. This is the only line of attack which holds forth promise of attaining any results, and even in this way it cannot be hoped to settle once for all the history of every variety of declensional pattern. While the writer believes that he can make some suggestions which will win assent, he also recognizes that other details will necessarily be subject to change after maturer consideration.