Scholars are accustomed to deriving the Indo-European neuter plural ending -ā/ə from the ending -ā of the feminine singular. Since I am convinced that the feminine gender was developed after the separation of Hittite (or rather Proto-Anatolian) from the parental stock, I have suggested that we should rather assume that the singular collectives were originally of neuter gender; although they seem to have become feminine in Proto-Indo-European.

Our reconstruction of a proto-language is theoretical and partial; but the language itself was necessarily real and whole. As a real language, it shared with all real languages the characteristic of non-uniformity. Some of its speakers spoke differently from others; they spoke differently from their linguistic predecessors and successors. And at any time, in any dialect, the phonemes of a real language display variations in different phonetic environments. In short, the language which our reconstructions adumbrate had linguistic change; it had isoglosses; and it had allophones.

This book is not, as its title may seem to promise, an authoritative survey of an established science. Acoustic phonetics is now in its infancy. The time when general agreement will be reached on its principles is still far in the future. That is, we are at that point of its development where the appropriate sort of publication, according to settled custom, would consist of numerous short articles by various workers, reporting on single discoveries or presenting arguments on single points of theory. Only later, when data and discussion had accumulated to such an extent that the well-known phenomena of convergence had begun to show up, would a summary publication normally be in order, a book which could be trusted as a whole and in all but a small fraction of its details. Such a book was Eduard Sievers' Grundzüge der Phonetik, the culmination of decades of study and theorizing, which will never be truly superseded. The present book is certain to be superseded as a whole, and to be proved wrong or to require restatement at so many points that if the circumstances were at all ordinary there would be no justification for covering the ground that it covers in book form either now or for some years to come. But the present situation in acoustic phonetics is so very extraordinary that immediate book publication of a broad survey appears inescapable. There are two main reasons for this. One is the relative unpreparedness of linguists to deal with acoustic data, the other is the sudden, recent, and unpublicized development of the instruments for laboratory acoustic phonetics.

In a study of the neuter plural in Vergil by Dr. John F. Gummere it was proved that the ratio of the nominative, accusative, and vocative neuter singular nouns to the corresponding cases of the plural is considerably lower than the ratio for prose, and that this excess of nominative, accusative, and vocative neuter plural nouns in Vergil results from their metrical convenience for the production of short syllables, which, because of the syncope in Italic, are much less numerous in Latin than in Greek, from which the dactylic hexameter was borrowed. In a similar study of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, Dr. Margaret W. Herr attained the same result as Dr. Gummere. However, a study of the iambic and trochaic verse of Plautus and Terence by Dr. Jessie M. Glenn has shown that the ratio of these case-forms in these meters is similar to that found in prose, and that the difference from Vergil and Ovid is to be accounted for by the difference between the requirements of iambic and trochaic verse and those of the dactylic hexameter.

This sketch is intended to supply a concise description of the structure of modern colloquial standard French; primarily on the basis of slow colloquial speech (§0.112).

Culture, to employ Tylor's well known definition, is ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ It is clear that language is a part of culture: it is one of the many ‘capabilities acquired by man as a member of society.’

0.1. Leonard Bloomfield was the first to state explicitly some of the assumptions that underlie the methods of linguistic science; his formulation of these axioms in the second volume of LANGUAGE has remained for more than twenty years the only attempt of its kind. We may find it necessary now, in the light of recent theoretical discussions, to make certain changes of detail in his list of assumptions; but the importance of his article as a contribution to linguistic theory is undiminished. Whoever undertakes, in future, to apply the postulational approach to linguistics, will find his task made easier by the model that Bloomfield has provided.

[A large part of the Slavic ne-presents, probably all imperfectives, have replaced older je-presents, a number of which are still preserved in Old Church Slavic and Later Church Slavic, especially Old Russian.]

The element -ti-, -sti-, -stri- in Latin words like rūsticus, domesticas, terrestris goes back to a -ti-/-tri-formation of adverbs or prepositions denoting space and time; thus, *domesti-: *entesti-, *nemestri-: *ent(e)ri-. The terms formed on these adverbs and prepositions refer not only to location, but also to family, household, and social organization in general. They express a sharp distinction between terms designating persons or objects within the household and those outside it. In a general way, this contrast is expressed by the element r on the one hand and the element i on the other; no special function can be ascertained in this connection for the element t. Adverbs of space appear partly with t, partly without it. The r or tr came to be used in comparative forms; originally its meaning was spatial. It seems that the function of designating a contrast, which preceded the function of designating a comparative, developed in expressions meaning such things as ‘above’ and ‘below’: an object that is above another is ‘more above’ than the object with which it is contrasted.

Old Irish -icc ‘reach, attain’, which does not exist as a simple verb in any Celtic language, has usually been connected with Skt. aśnoti ‘reaches’; more particularly it should be comparable to the augmentless form of the aorist. The chief reason for upholding this theory is the close affinity between the perfect forms of this verb in Celtic and Sanskrit: OIr. -ánicc and Skr. ānaṃśa. The vowel in the present-tense form in Old Irish has caused some difficulty and has been variously explained (see VG 752, Anm. 3; Pokorny, Altir. Gramm. 48, and IF 35.339). The only possible explanation seems to be that we have here a case of shortening in unstressed position. The expected stressed forms would be: 3d sg. *-éicc, 3d pl. *-éccat, which became, as stress was lost in context, -ice and -eccat respectively. In the same way one finds OIr. lécimm ‘I leave, let’ appearing as leigim and ligim (seldom léigim) in the modern Irish (and Scottish Gaelic) dialects. The influence of numerous compounds (ni·aricc ‘does not find’ etc.) must also be taken into consideration in order to explain the final victory of the forms with a short vowel. The original Celtic form corresponding to OIr. -icc may therefore have been (3d sg. pres. ind.) *anket, which in Goidelic changes its a into e (and i) before the nasal consonant cluster.

The Sui language is spoken in the southeastern part of Kweichow, China. While the language can be shown to have certain relations with the Tai group, it exhibits many peculiarities and divergences from the ordinary Tai languages. The material for this study is taken chiefly from an analysis of over 2600 lines of folk songs, gathered by the writer in 1942 from two small villages, Li and Ngam, in Lipo, Kweichow.