One of the fundamental linguistic sources of inference about prehistoric migrations is the geographical distribution of related languages. This paper attempts to set forth the structures of such distributions and of the hypotheses which explain them. The presentation is perhaps too formulaic and too simplistic. Further collection of instances in recorded history should provide the proper testing of the formulae and their correction or, if they prove useful, their further elaboration.

The phonemes of a language are categories defined for the native speaker by acoustic and functional attributes. Workers at the Haskins and Bell Telephone laboratories have tried to specify the acoustic invariants of particular phonemes of American English; they have usually worked with single vowel allophones, and with the first three formants in the spectrograms of these allophones. Jakobson and his co-workers, drawing on these acoustic studies and on familiar articulational analyses, have proposed that the phonemes of English can be specified in terms of a small number of acoustic-articulational attributes having binary values. Each phoneme of English is said to be a unique bundle of such distinctive features. In all this, nothing is said about the functional attributes of phonemes.

[The paper evolves a set of premises for the internal reconstruction of phonemic split, outlines a practical procedure for application to concrete problems, and supplies examples to illustrate the procedure.]

[In order to let Chaucer's use of Romance vocabulary provide additional evidence of his authorship of The equatorie of the planetis, it is necessary to distinguish between the overall percentage of such words in his writings, and that in works of different length. It is shown that the percentage of Romance words changes significantly with the length of the text, according to the relation

percentage of Romance words = 10 log10 (total words in text)

Using this formula, we calculate the expected percentage of Romance words in the Equatorie, estimated to contain about 6048 words, as 10 logio 6048 = 37.8%. By counting, it is found that Romance words constitute 37% of the vocabulary. The good agreement between theory and observation provides evidence for Chaucer's authorship of the Equatorie.]

The American anthropologists who have been linguistic scholars as well—I would mention Boas, Sapir, and, last but not least, Alfred L. Kroeber, whom we delight to honor in this issue of Language—have been catholic in their approaches to linguistics. Descriptive linguistics on this continent owes a tremendous amount to these men. But none of them has ignored historical problems, and in their various ways and even with radically different points of view on subjects which were open to dispute, they have contributed much to both detailed genetic problems, especially of the North American continent, and to the discussion of certain general questions. One of the latter is a problem that arises again and again in any region of the world where the linguistic picture is complicated, and it is particularly fitting, as will appear, if I attempt to add something to it as an offering to Kroeber.

Albanian possesses a palatal semivowel represented orthographically by j. Although this sound appears in initial position, it does not seem likely that it is the normal Albanian development of initial IE */y/. Albanian j- is seen most frequently in loanwords : jarm ‘plow’ < Bulg jarьn ‘yoke’ ; jir ‘edge’ < NGk. gûros ‘extent, embrace’; ‘a type of guitar’ < Turk, jongar ‘guitar’.

[A quantitative study of English word formation based on the data of the Thorndike-Lorge frequency list. Results cover (a) dimensions of the word-forming mechanisms of modern English, (b) measures of the relations between the major suffixes and word classes, and (c) the main equivalences symbolized by the major suffixes.]

Among Alfred L. Kroeber's many great contributions to the sciences of society, some of the most important are in the field of linguistics. They include both descriptive and comparative research, and embrace theory as well as documentation. He has paid considerable attention to the question of linguistic diffusion, tracing and analyzing specific examples of morphologic and lexical borrowing among California Indian languages and developing the theoretical implications of the process. It was in the course of a major study along these lines that he and his co-worker, Roland B. Dixon, discovered several previously unsuspected groupings of languages, including ‘Ritwan’, ‘Hokan’, and Tenutian', and thereby helped to open to comparative linguistics the new horizon of long-range comparison, which we are still struggling to master.

In my article on aspect in Gothic (AG), Lg. 30.211-23 (1954), I restricted my investigation to the aspectual nondistinctiveness of the derivational form alone (AG §1.1). In this study I shall also seek to show that there was in the Old High German of Tatian (OHG-T) no direct correlation between derivational form and aspect. Going one step further, I shall demonstrate that this lack of correlation applied equally to the tense form. At the same time, I shall prove the close de pendence of aspect upon basic verbal meaning. Again as in AG, I shall employ a theory of aspect which differs somewhat from the prevailing view (§2.1), but which I shall here first contrast with the novel definition of aspect that Howard B. Garey proposes and brilliantly applies in a recent study (§2.2).3 I shall, further, in a brief discussion of the relation of tense to aspect, adopt and explicitly modify some of Garey's terminology (§2.3). As a last preliminary, I shall con sider the possible interrelations between aspect and form (§2.4).

In Lehmann's recent article on the Proto-Indo-European resonants in Germanic (Lg. 31.355–66), he adduces some evidence pointing to the retention, in Germanic, of the allophonic distribution posited for liquids and nasals in Proto-Indo-European (§4.1, §4.3). In this connection he discusses certain metrical features which require that the nasals, in some cases, be considered syllabic. In addition, some forms containing nasals are discussed in terms of strictly structural criteria. Involved are the graphs um, un (ul, ur), these being the Germanic reflexes of the Indo-European syllabic resonants. It is commonly considered that the u, in these cases, developed as a prop-vowel when the nasal or liquid (in zero grade) no longer functioned as a syllabic. It is further usually considered that by the time of the earliest Germanic texts this u, originally automatic in the neighborhood of nasals and liquids (in zero grade), had become phonemic, merging with the reflex of IE u.

In OE, long consonants are fully established in one and only one position: between a fully stressed or a half-stressed short vowel (or diphthong) and a following unstressed vowel, as in clyppan, settan, reccan, ebba, middel, hycgan, frogga, fremman, spinnan, spillan, steorra, siþþan, missan, hliehhan (hlæhhan), and (after a half-stressed short vowel) in bliccettan ‘glitter’, oretta ‘challenger’, faranne (inf.), wēstenne ‘wilderness’.

A recently published paper by Gordon H. Fairbanks discusses a question pertinent to the glottochronologic counts of Morris Swadesh and others: On what phonological basis are words to be correlated for lexicostatistical purposes? The most desirable basis is undoubtedly that of determining cognates on the basis of phonemic correspondences. But if this is the only basis, glottochronological methods must be largely inapplicable at present to such groupings as Hokan and Penutian, where few phonemic correspondences have been established. It is apparent that Swadesh does not always limit himself to such a basis. To take an example from his more recent work, his relating of words for ‘man’ in languages of both Americas, ranging from Kwakiutlan *wism to Yamana win, can hardly be based on knowledge of a regular correspondence between Kwakiutlan *w and Yamana w. The basis must then be general phonetic similarity, rather than correspondence. We may apply the term correlate to pairs connected either as cognate or as phonetically similar. The question then remains, what degree of phonetic similarity is necessary to establish a pair or set of correlates? To judge from Swadesh's list of cognate words for ‘man’, which includes such diverse items as Lokono uadili, Caxinaua ina, and Quechua runa, the degree need not be great. The exact degree appears to be determined more by intuitition than by any objective factor.