[It is shown that a linguistic dating system can be set up on the basis of several explicit assumptions about morpheme decay. Thirteen sets of data, presented in partial justification of these assumptions, serve as a basis for calculating a universal constant to express the average rate of retention k̄ of the basic-root-morphemes : k = 0.8048 ± 0.0176 per millennium, with a confidence limit of 90%. Finally an expression is derived for the sampling-error to be expected in the calculated time-depths of related dialects.]

The following discussion grew out of my attempt to fulfill a request from the Editor of Language to review the late R. H. Stetson's Motor phonetics: A study of speech movements in action, 2d edition (pp. xi, 212, with 122 figures in the text; Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company [for Oberlin College], 1951), hereafter referred to as Mot. Phon. The routine reviewing procedures did not work out. Much of Stetson's material seemed unlikely to interest readers of Language; many matters which might interest them, and which Stetson's topic might seem to bear on, are either not discussed at all or are only obliquely hinted at in Mot. Phon. Further, Stetson's expository style, with its idiosyncratic terminology, its peculiar structure of repetitions and unsignaled transitions, its unlabeled analogies, its mixture of polemic and report, requires a paraphrase before discussion.

La valeur emphatique de l'indo-européen *kwid est attestée par cid dans le Rgveda, par čit̠ de l'Avesta, par čiy du vieux perse, par oὔκι d'Homère et d'Hérodote, par cid en vieil irlandais. La nuance indéfinie de ce petit mot à l'origine, restée visible en présence d'un interrogatif ou dans le cas du redoublement, s'est ailleurs modifiée, passant de ‘en quelque chose’ à ‘un peu’, d'où par litote ‘plutôt, bien sûr, même, en particulier’ (Bartholomae, Ai. Wb. 593 'und zwar'). Dans RV IV.3.4 Macdonell lui attribue un sens atténué, Geldner au contraire met le mot en valeur: tváṃ cin naḥ śámyā (pada śámyai) bodhi... svādhḥ 'merke du wenigstens auf diesen Opferdienst von mir'. Et pour I.10.9 ν̄ cid dadhiṣva me gíraḥ, Macdonell traduit: ‘Even now take to thyself my songs’, là où rien ne légitime le sens de ‘maintenant encore’; mais Geldner écrit: ‘Nimm doch ja meine Lobreden an’.

The functional history of the IE negative prefix, the variants of which we conveniently designate by their central form *-, is an integral part of the history of IE composition. A classification of IE compounds, based on historical rather than logical considerations, would include (1) old types, generally declining during the historical period of IE—bahuvrīhis and synthetic compounds (verbale Rektionskomposita), and (2) distinctly younger types—pronominal hypostatics, determinatives, and copulatives.

This is an attempt to suggest briefly a systematic approach to a number of desiderative or future formations in various IE languages. Taking laryngeals into consideration, I hope to show their possible inclusion under a single formula. No exhaustive study of all variants or subtypes is intended, and no attempt is made to trace the working of analogy which was certainly involved in formations of this kind. The main object is, however, to disqualify some of the more awkward appeals to analogy which have seemed necessary so far.

[OCS *bedrъnъ ‘rich’ is attested only once, in the form bedъno. It has no relation to bъdrъ ‘vigilant’ and bъděti ‘be awake’. It is cognate with Sanskrit bhadraḥ ‘good fortune, auspicious’, and establishes an IE *bhed-r- rather than the bh̿d- posited by earlier investigators. From the same base are formed Slavic names for the herb burnet saxifrage and the ladybug, both of which are associated in Slavic belief with good luck and prosperity.]

Par rapport à l'usage du sanskrit classique (très variable d'ailleurs suivant les genres et les époques), le Rgveda (RV) ne présente qu'un nombre relativement limité de composés. Laissant à part les formations nombreuses, mais peu caractéristiques, où le membre antérieur est un invariant—préverbe, préposition, préfixe, adverbe ou nom adverbialisé—et qui n'entrent pas dans la définition stricte de ‘composé nominal’, on ne trouve en moyenne que cinq composés pour 150 mots (ou: pour 80 mots pleins), à peine davantage dans les portions récentes de la Samhitā. La proportion varie suivant le style: les passages descriptifs (ainsi 2.21) ou emphatiques en présentent davantage, les hymnes simples (comme l'hymne à Pūsan 6.54 ou le dialogue 'affectif Yama-Yamī 10.10) en ont fort peu.

The primary type of these two consonant clusters represents the PGmc. status when the two consonants were not due to the contraction of an intermediate vowel, whereas the secondary was the result of this contraction. In the primary type both Gothic and Old Norse show that l exerted an occlusive force on the following ð; cf. PGmc. *stĕ-staðĕ > *stĕ-stal-ð > Goth, stai-stal-d [not *stai-stal-þ] ‘acquired’; PGmc. *halðĕ > PN *hal-ð > *hal-d [not *hal-þ] > ON halt ‘hold’. Only Gothic shows that r exerted an occlusive force upon ð; cf. Goth, waur-d [not *waur-þ] ‘word’, but ON or-ð. For Old Norse we may then postulate the primary status as ld : rð.

This paper is a morphophonemic and morphemic study of a class of Romanian words defined by their inflectional behavior as nouns. The point of departure is an array of isolated examples in phonemic form; the result is a classification of nouns by morphological types and a morphemic formula. The corpus from which the examples are drawn consists of Romanian texts interpreted with the aid of native speakers, supplemented with utterances by the speakers themselves.

Certain Old Norse secondary formations were discussed in Lg. 29.26-33 (1953). Here I shall continue the discussion by adding examples which at the time of my previous article I had not yet investigated.

The problem. Sanskrit noun stems ending in u, when subjected to secondary derivation, typically replace u by av, whereas, typically, stems ending in i simply drop the i before a suffix beginning with a vowel or with y (rather than replacing the i by ay or e respectively). I have not found any attempt to explain this disparate treatment, which, to judge from the implication or the express statement of our standard reference works, prevails equally in the Rig-Veda and in all later stages of Sanskrit. To point out, as the grammars do, that in this regard i-stems behave like stems in a, ā, and ī is not to explain the disparity but to heighten it.

The republication of Benjamin L. Whorf's articles on what Trager calls metalinguistics has aroused a new interest in this country in the problem of the relationship that a particular language may have to its speakers' cognitive processes. Does the structure of a given language affect the thoughts (or thought potential), the memory, the perception, the learning ability of those who speak that language? These questions have often been asked and many attempts have been made to answer them. The present paper is an attempt to lay bare the logical structure of this type of investigation.

Distinctive features occur in lumps or bundles, each one of which we call a phoneme. The speaker has been trained to make sound-producing movements in such a way that the phoneme-features will be present in the sound-waves, and he has been trained to respond only to these features and to ignore the rest of the gross acoustic mass that reaches his ears. Leonard Bloomfield (1933)

The number of different phonemes in a language is a small submultiple of the number of forms. Leonard Bloomfield (1926)

The logical demand that a science speak in quantitative terms is met by linguistics because it speaks in terms of phonemes. Leonard Bloomfield (1927)

Three attempts have been made in recent years to apply the techniques of modern descriptive linguistics to the Old English spellings produced by breaking, palatal diphthongization, i-umlaut, and velar umlaut. Desirable as such attempts are, the authors of the present article find the results still far from satisfactory.

There is a group of asseverative particles, usually postpositive, serving normally to stress the preceding word, which seem to be allied: Hittite -ma, Sanskrit sma smā, and Greek μά.