‘Lenition’, in German ‘Lenierung’, a term proposed by Rudolf Thurneysen, has nowadays widely superseded the traditional but ambiguous 'aspiration' as the designation of a set of phenomena characteristic of all insular Celtic languages. The least ambiguous definition of 'lenition' is probably that to be found in Thurneysen's Grammar of Old Irish, a revised and enlarged translation of his Handbuch des Altirischen: 'Lenition ... is the term used to describe a mutation of consonants which normally originated in a reduction of the energy employed in their articulation. It affected not only medial, but also such initial consonants as were closely associated with the preceding word. ... It is earlier than the loss of vowels in final and interior syllables ..., for it presupposes the continued existence of these vowels.' In the ensuing paragraphs, Thurneysen indicates the phonetic contexts in which Irish lenition took place; but since we are here concerned with the phenomenon of lenition in general, rather than with the details in any specific form of insular Celtic, we need not list all the situations in the various Goidelic and Brythonic languages in which lenited consonants occur—the less so since we find in attested linguistic stages traces of an extension of the lenited pronunciation to cases where it certainly did not exist at the time when the actual leniting shift originated. Let it suffice here to say that lenition proper arose when a consonant was surrounded by open articulations, mostly vowels and w, but also, in the case of some consonants, when followed by l, r, n. For the sake of simplicity, in what follows we shall frequently use the phrase 'intervocalic position' in reference to all the contexts in which lenition took place.

The Semitic languages of Ethiopia occupy a geographical domain in which Cushitic was and still is employed. When the Semites of South Arabia conquered Ethiopia, they imposed their Semitic language on this Cushitic domain. A stage of bilingualism followed, which still endures. The Cushitic group lost ground, most probably because of the political prestige of the conquering Semites, but not without exerting a great influence on the structure of the Semitic languages. In fact, the Semitic languages of Ethiopia are in some respects quite far removed from the typical Semitic pattern. Some of these differences are no doubt due to the internal development of Semitic in Ethiopia; others may be inherited from the Semitic group that came from South Arabia, concerning which we are not sufficiently informed; but many of them are certainly a result of Cushitic influence.

Leveling of the radical vowel in the plural paradigm of the consonantal r-stems denoting family relations. In the plural paradigm of the substantive consonantal declension, i-umlaut of the radical vowel originally occurred only in the nom.-acc. form, since only here did the end syllable contain the vowel i. This vowel status is regularly preserved in the monosyllabic consonantal stems; cf. fϕtr (*fōt-iR) fóta fótum fϕtr (*fōt-iR), from fótr (masc.) ‘foot’; merkr (*mark-iR) marka mǫrkum merkr (*mark-iR), from mǫrk (fem.) ‘mark’ (a weight or money value). The consonantal r-stems denoting family relations belonged to the dissyllabic pattern in the singular (faÐer ‘father’, bróÐer ‘brother’, móÐer ‘mother’, dótter ‘daughter’, syster ‘sister‘), but became monosyllabic in the plural (feÐr, brϕÐr, etc.). Nevertheless, contrary to the pattern of the monosyllabic type (fótr, mǫrk), the original radical vowels a and ó in the genitive and dative forms were leveled out in favor of the umlauted vowels e and ϕ of the nom.-acc. forms; cf. , etc. So far as I know, no explanation has ever been given for this discrepancy between the two types of consonantal stems.

The guttural initials generally accepted as proposed by Bernhard Karlgren for archaic Chinese are six: k kh g gh ng h, where h represents aspiration. In the evolution from the archaic of about 800 b.c. to the ancient Chinese of about 600 a.d., four of these are believed to remain unchanged. For the other two the accepted statement is the following:

Unaspirated g, which existed only before y, was yodicized through the influence of the latter: *gywang became jywang (j is yod, of Engl. yes). Aspirated gh, which was preserved unaltered before y, changed into fricative γ before other vowels.

In contrast to the other Germanic languages, Gothic has two endings in the genitive plural: all masculines and neuters have -ē (e.g. dagē, waúrdē, gastē, suniwē, attanē, haírtanē, brōprē); of the feminines, some have -ē, some -ō (e.g. qēnē, mahtē, handiwē, baúrgē, but þiudō, tuggōnō, manageinō). The other Germanic languages have only one ending each: OHG OS -o (e.g. tago, dago), OIcel. OE -a (daga). This ending agrees with Gothic -ō, from Proto-Germanic -õ(n). The Gothic ending -ē is unique not only in Germanic but in Indo-European.

The transition area as a crucial but difficult problem in American linguistic geography has been ably presented in a recent article by Alva L. Davis and Raven I. McDavid Jr. The relative lack of pattern in the data from transition areas, compared to the easily mapped patterns found in relic and focal areas, is probably responsible in part for the slight attention that has been paid to transition areas before the appearance of this article. Davis and McDavid properly conclude that transition areas will assume increased importance as research in American linguistic geography moves away from the numerous focal and relic areas of the Atlantic coast toward the increasingly heterogeneous transition areas of the western United States. Certainly the collection and analysis of dialect vocabulary in California has revealed to the present writers a situation even more varied and complex than that of northwestern Ohio.

Davis and McDavid conclude that it will be necessary to collect much more complete information from transition areas if one is to correlate speech patterns with the historical and cultural complex. They suggest no new methods, however, by which the limited data now available from transition areas may be more adequately analyzed and understood. In the process of analyzing our own material from California, we have come to the conclusion that the speech patterns of traneition areas grow much clearer when viewed as quantitative rather than as qualitative phenomena.

In an earlier article I suggested that Malay tiga may be a borrowing of a Middle Indic tiga, the equivalent of Sanskrit trika. My attention has been called to the published statements of Dutch authorities who disagree with this view.

Bariba is spoken by an estimated 150,000 people in the Cercles of Parakou, Kandi, and Natitingou in Dahomey, and by an undetermined number of people in adjacent sections of Nigeria. The position of Bariba among the West Sudanic languages must for the time being remain undecided. It certainly belongs in the general classification of Voltaic, but is not closely related to Gurma in the Eastern group of Voltaic languages. Bariba is remarkably similar in structure to languages in the Senufo group in the Ivory Coast and Sudan, but my knowledge of other Voltaic languages is insufficient to justify a more specific statement.

Modern West European languages (and their offshoots such as American English) generally have just one voiceless fortis sibilant phoneme /s/, whatever else there may be, such as /z, š, θ, c/. But in every considerable area at least two quite different [s] phones are in use, dorsal [s] and apical [ṣ]. The commoner variety is the dorsal [s]. In its articulation the tongue tip is idle (in persons with a ‘normal bite,‘ as the dentists say, the tip touches the lower incisors or gums or both), and the sibilant squeeze is made against the upper alveolar ridge by the upper surface of the tongue. The apical [ṣ] is nowhere truly rare, but it is the less common variety in the principal areas, except that it is standard in Castilian Spanish. The apical articulation has the tongue tip raised, and the tip itself makes the sibilant squeeze.

The following paper is a descriptive analysis of the phonemes of the language represented by the Zographensis manuscript, based on the distribution of the symbols used by the scribe. Wherever two alternative analyses are possible from the descriptive data, historical evidence is used in making a choice. Such evidence is also used in making an initial phonetic assumption. Otherwise it is not used, either to determine the phonemes or to supplement the distributional analysis.

This paper offers an example of how connected discourse can be formally analyzed in such a way as to reveal something of its structure. The method used here was described in a previous paper, Discourse analysis, Lg. 28.1–30 (1952). It consists essentially of the following steps: given a particular text, we collect those linguistic elements (morphemes or sequences of morphemes) which have identical environments within a sentence, and we call these equivalent to each other; thus, if we find the sentences AF and BF in our text, we write A = B and say that A is equivalent to B or that both are in the same equivalence class. We further collect those linguistic elements which have equivalent (rather than identical) environments, and we call these also equivalent to each other; if we find the sentences AF and BE, and if A = B (because BF occurs too), then F is secondarily equivalent to E, and we write F = E. (Note that in the sentence AF, A is the environment of F, and F is the environment of A.) This operation enables us to collect many or all of the linguistic elements or sections of any particular text into a few equivalence classes. For example, if our text consists of the sentences AF: BE: CG: BF: ME: AG: NE: NG: MH, we set up two classes: one class to include A, B (because of AF and BF), C (because of AG and CG), M, and N (because of BE and ME and NE); the other class to include F, E (because of BF and BE), G (because of AF and AG), and H (because of ME and MH).

Salishan is a widely ramified stock of considerable time depth and of extensive geographic spread in western North America, where it comes into contact with a number of other distinct stocks. Because of its internal ramification and its diversified external contacts, Salishan offers an extremely fruitful field for studying the effect of language on language in geographic and historic contexts.

The term sememe was defined by Bloomfield as ‘the meaning of a morpheme’. Inasmuch as any language is a semiotic system in which continuous reality is arbitrarily classified into discrete categories that correspond to speech forms, it is useful to maintain this definition. By doing so we have the morpheme as the minimal unit of meaningful speech form (Saussure's signifiant) and the sememe as the minimal unit of discretely classified reality (Saussure's signifié) corresponding to it.