The verb προσκυνϵῖν, which is commonly used to describe the worship of the gods and the obeisance before rulers, has been the subject of several recent discussions in connection with its use in the New Testament and in the literature of the imperial cult. In a paper on Alexander, Schnabel, relying chiefly on the etymological meaning of the word, explained the proskynesis at Bactra as a kiss sent to the daimon of Alexander. This view was adopted by some scholars. But another interpretation of προσκυνϵῖν has recently found favor. Bolkestein, in his study of the Deisidaimonia in Theophrastos, has attempted to show that the gesture implied in προσκυνϵῖν was to kneel and not to send a kiss. Proskynesis, he says, is generally supposed to have had two distinct meanings, the first one implying a hand.-kissing gesture, the second indicating the Oriental obeisance. But, Bolkestein (30) continues, a careful examination of the texts shows that, although προσκυνϵῖν originally meant ‘zu Fuss fallen und küssen’, in Greek literature it is used only for a kneeling gesture; if the hand-kissing gesture was known in the religion of ancient and classical Greece it was never called proskynesis. The result of Bolkestein's study may be seen in Nock's statement that 'kneeling is the only meaning of the word, as Bolkestein has shown.' In his admirable article on the ceremonial of the Imperial court, Alföldi accepts Bolkestein's interpretation. He calls Berve's explanation of προσκυνϵῖν ώς θϵὸν τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον as a hand-kissing gesture 'ein Irrtum, verursacht durch die seither durch Bolkestein widerlegte übliche Erklärung der griechischen Proskynese.' In Horst's recent study of the verb προσκυνϵῖν, the gesture implied, especially in the classical period, is not discussed in detail, though Horst does not entirely accept Bolkestein's results.

After serving for a few centuries in the several Romanic languages as an indeterminate pronoun, homo disappeared from general use in all except French. The present study, in supplementing the limited discussion of grammarians, briefly reviews the history and the use of this pronoun in Italian and deals mainly with the causes that led to its desuetude.

To account for the rise of the pronominal function of uomo, Meyer-Lübke suggests French influence. But the general occurrence in Romance of homo with the value of an indefinite pronoun points rather conclusively to an antecedent development in Latin. Examination of the proper Latin authors reveals that homo was actually employed with pronominal force, and there is consequently little necessity of attributing the rise of this use of uomo to foreign influence.

Uomo (<homo), like French on, was in origin a masculine substantive in the nominative case. We shall see to what extent these characteristic traits were preserved.

Verbs in the Hopi language are noteworthy for their very rich and expressive development of verbal aspects and voices. I shall say nothing in this paper of the nine voices (intransitive, transitive, reflexive, passive, semi-passive, resultative, extended passive, possessive, and cessative); and of the nine aspects (punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial, projective, and continuative) I shall deal with only two. It may be noted that there are no perfective and imperfective aspects; in fact Hopi does not in any way formalize as such the contrast between completion and in-completion of action. Its aspects formalize different varieties of the contrast between point-locus and extent-locus of phenomena, indifferently in time or space, or in both. Hopi also has three tenses: factual or present-past, future, and generalized or usitative. Hopi verbs belong to seven classes or conjugations having slightly different inflectional systems. Class 1, the largest and most creative class, contains a few categories not found in the other classes, among them the segmentative aspect.

The relative pronouns in Old English are þe and se, þe being used when the clause has the function of a limiting or distinguishing adjective and se when it has the function of a descriptive adjective, e.g.:

Se casere þe wæs Claudius haten ‘the Emperor called Claudius’.

Se casere, se wæs Claudius haten ‘the Emperor, who was called Claudius’.

In the first sentence the relative clause distinguishes one particular emperor from others, in the second it adds a descriptive detail to a noun already sufficiently defined. Both kinds of clause may qualify the same noun, e.g.: Hom. I. 100.4 Se eahtateoða dæg þæs monðes þe we hatað Martius þone ge hatað Hlyda ‘the 18th day of the month that we call March, which you call Hlyda’. The analogy of other subordinate clauses leads us to expect that conjunctive order will be the rule in the relative clause, and this we find to be the case; but common order is a frequent exception especially when the verb is unstressed, e.g., ‘sum mæsse-preost on þam lande þe is gehaten Hispania se wæs ðearle geswenct’. Occasionally the order of subject and verb is inverted as in ‘Abel þone ofsloh Cain his broðor’.