The particular materials examined as a basis for the notes presented in this paper consisted of some three thousand personal letters copied from those in the files of one of the government bureaus in Washington. These letters were made available several years ago through the efforts of the Modern Language Association with the support of the Linguistic Society, and their collecting and copying financed by the National Council of Teachers of English. In this limited body of material it has been possible to record every occurrence in each category examined and by studying the facts quantitatively as well as qualitatively gain some knowledge not only of the kind of variety that exists in actual usage but also something of the relative amounts of that variation. There is much impatience with statistical studies of grammatical constructions and often with just cause. On the other hand, many of the general statements concerning particular phenomena of a language actually express or imply quantitative judgments—judgments of absolute or relative frequency. Most of these depend upon general impressions rather than upon an attempt carefully to calculate the frequency of actual instances in any body of material. Concerning the genitive there are many such quantitative statements based only upon general impressions. The material offered in these notes will assist in checking the validity of three such statements that are frequently repeated.

This article was suggested by that of Edgerton in Lang. 10.235 ff., in which he shows the insufficiency of the arguments adduced from Sanskrit for the existence of a schwa secundum in Indo-European times. Since the facts alleged in support of the theory from this language may as well be explained otherwise, the question of the existence of the ъ is thrown back upon other languages, notably upon Latin and Greek, the proof from which is supposed to be most conclusive. The writer of this article consequently wishes to point out that the evidence from these also has no compelling power, and that it can be interpreted otherwise more persuasively. He also wishes to show the complete lack of conclusiveness of the a-prioristic generalities used to support the schwa-secundum theory. While he therefore does not take it upon himself to say that he is positive that there was no such thing, he is certain that no decisive evidence for it has as yet been found.

The Nuzu tablets, excavated by an American expedition, have consumed a good deal of the labor of American Assyriologists in recent years and will continue doing so for some time to come. After the publication of the material has far advanced, the grammar of the new dialect is in progress of reconstruction. The efforts made in this direction have so far been of a merely descriptive kind. It seems time now to apply also the linguistic line of approach to Nuzu Akkadian. Though the registration of the philological facts is the necessary basis for such work, it will in turn help to clarify difficulties which the descriptive grammar is unable to remove.