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.

The theory that there was a spontaneous development of an obscure vowel in final position on certain occasions in Old Italian has gained general currency and has been carried on in the works of the main authorities. D'Ovidio and Meyer-Lübke speak of a ‘Murmelvokal’ and consider it to have been an obscure vowel of []-quality; Grandgent refers to it as a ‘glide-vowel’ without further definition of its phonetic timbre.

Previous experimental investigations of English vowel-length have been confined principally to the Received Standard dialect of British English. Though over thirty years old, Meyer's pioneering work on the lexical duration of vowels in the speech of a Londoner and an Oxfordshire man continues to be the only extensive collection of data on English vowel-duration. A start has been made, however, in the experimental measurement of American sound-length in two recent studies of quite different nature. In the first the durations of sounds in a Middle Westerner's reading of a short piece of narrative prose were obtained from oscillographic recordings, and gross averages were computed for vowel and consonant durations. The second measured lexical durations in 131 monosyllables with a final dental stop from the writer's own pronunciation, and set up several conclusions concerning American ‘quantity’ based on the relative values of the durations.

It is probably no more than a coincidence that in both OArmenian and O Irish a distinction of voice rather generally observed in other parts of the verbal paradigm is wanting in the imperfect indicative, so that in Armenian the active and the passive of normal thematic verbs have here a common inflection, as do the active and the deponent verbs in Irish.

In five of the passages considered in Chapter I, the participle held the attributive position. Because of this difference in form, I have reserved these passages for separate treatment in another chapter.

Darius the Great of Persia died in 486 B.C. and was buried in a tomb cut in the south face of a steep rocky ridge about nine or ten miles northwest of Persepolis. His tomb is the third in a row of four, if we start counting from the west. The rocky ridge is called Husain Kūh or the ‘Mountain of Husain’, but Occidentals more commonly call it Nakš-i Rustam ‘Portrait of Rustam’, a name properly belonging to the tomb of Darius and its sculptured reliefs.

The Chiricahua Apache, in aboriginal times, occupied the territory centering about the junction of the Arizona-New Mexico state line with the international boundary. Since this region was explored and colonized by the Spaniards as early as the sixteenth century, the Chiricahua have probably been in contact with Spanish-speaking peoples for more than three hundred years.

However, the influence of Spanish on the language of the Chiricahua has been a slight one. In my dictionary, there are but nineteen words of indisputable Spanish origin. All other linguistic innovations which can be attributed to Spanish contact are either changes or extensions of meaning of older linguistic elements or recently formed descriptive compounds.

[Etymologies are offered for: aduggere ‘to irritate, anger’; Sien, asciunare ‘to gather’ and dialectal cognates; attraccare ‘to draw a boat to shore’; bifolco ‘cow-herd’; coccolarsi ‘to squat; to enjoy oneself’; dunque ‘therefore’; elce ‘holm-oak’; incignare ‘to begin’; infolcarsi ‘to interfere, meddle’; ischio ‘oak’; lazzo ‘(stage) trick, gag’; mucca ‘milch-cow’; pozzanghera ‘mud-puddle’; uggio ‘disgust’; also for Span, mozo, muchacho, Port, moço ‘boy’.

These etymologies are divided into two groups: those involving contamination or the like, and simple etymologies.]

In his very valuable book, Emplois des aspects du verbe russe (Paris, 1914), Prof. André Mazon analyses the various usages of the perfective and imperfective aspects and in connection with the present forms of both, he has a section on the Historical Present of the Imperfective (123–5) and on the Historical Present-Future or Present Perfective (149–59). Both of these sections deal with a very striking phenomenon of some portions of the Russian language. On the whole, he has handled the matter very carefully, but perhaps it may be possible to look at some of these cases a little more closely.

In my last chapter I showed that the relation between participle and noun that grammarians have used as the defining characteristic of the ab urbe condita construction is to be found in other uses of the participle as well. This relation I called ‘complementary’. Finding no criterion, either of meaning or of function, that would distinguish the ab urbe condita examples as a group from other complementary participles, I decided that the best procedure would be to list them according to the grammatical function that each performs in its sentence. Arranging them in this way would, I felt, best bring out the mutual similarities and differences that they show and might perhaps throw new light on the complementary participles as a class.

The Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills in South India are a community numbering some 40,000 and comprising seven sub-castes. They are known to be immigrants from Mysore state, having appeared on the Nilgiris some five or six centuries ago. Their language is certainly an offshoot of Kannaḍa, as is shown by its having in common with modern Kannaḍa among other features initial h instead of p of other Dravidian languages. A. N. Narasimhia, in The history of p in Kanarese, has demonstrated for Kannaḍa that h- appeared first in inscriptions in the language in the 10th century A.D. and by the 16th century had established itself in inscriptions in almost all words. In the 13th century h- < p- had already begun to disappear and has now entirely disappeared in the uneducated vernaculars; we have no information whether this is the case in all the local vernaculars. In the Badaga language this h- still remains, but in the absence of a dialect atlas for Kannaḍa this survival of h- is of no use in dating the advent of the Badagas in the Nilgiris. The Badaga language is said by speakers of it to have different dialects, but no work has been done except on that spoken in the neighborhood of Kateri. Enough work has been done by the writer on this one dialect of Badaga to permit a short treatment of phonology and especially of the vowels.

The statement has been made by Stahl and others1 that in the ab urbe condita construction the participle may stand in the attributive, as well as the predicative, position. In support of this, the following passages have been cited: Thuc. 3.53.3; 66.3; Hdt. 7.169; 9.69; Xen. Hell. 6.3.11; Lysias 25.6. In addition I have noted the following, in which attributive participles have been treated as complementary by editors or translators: Thuc. 1.6.1; 3.40.6; 4.87.5; Eur. Hipp. 1336.

Students of American Indian languages have given little attention to syntax. This neglect may be partly explained, though not justified, by the fear of imposing arbitrarily on exotic languages a set of concepts derived from intensive study of the more familiar Indo-European tongues. The possibility of error due to preconceptions is certainly real, especially for those who venture first into new territory. Perhaps the present paper will serve to stimulate more activity in this extremely interesting and important phase of linguistic science.