Some years ago, in an article called The status of linguistics as a science (Lg. 5.207–14 [1929]), Edward Sapir made an interesting statement describing language in part as ‘a guide to “social reality”’. The statement goes on to say (209):

Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

Linguistic science is today in every sense of the word an international science. Few disciplines can lay better claim to this term than ours, in view of its universally and specifically human subject matter, as well as its bearing on the interrelationship and communication of nations. Even within our generation a vast expansion of linguistic study has taken place when compared with the preceding one. It is characteristic that around 1930 contributions to phoneme theory were being made by men as widely scattered as Trubetzkoy in Austria and Yuen Ren Chao in China. This was already a forward step over the much narrower field of Rask and Grimm, but we have seen a still more intense effort in the last two decades. From the occasional contributions of isolated professors we have in our own country proceeded to a concerted and eager program of linguistic research sponsored by a whole group of scholars working together in a vigorous and well-knit Linguistic Society.

Since the Committee on the Language Program of the American Council of Learned Societies has recently begun to issue a series of structural sketches of various languages, it is evident with the appearance of the first monograph in this series (French, by Robert A. Hall Jr.) that the time is ripe to raise a general question which has hitherto been too carelessly passed over: are the methods of structural linguistics applicable in the same degree to the languages of culturally retrograde and of culturally advanced peoples? The question is not proposed in any captious spirit; but the reader should be forewarned that the remarks which follow take a direction diametrically opposed to that of much recent descriptive work in America, and particularly to the drift of many recent articles in Language. It is only fair to answer the question at once by stating roundly that in my opinion the same descriptive criteria cannot be applied to the speech of relatively backward and of relatively civilized peoples. The assumption of the contrary involves a linguist, I believe, in a number of highly questionable attitudes and erroneous working principles; in dealing with the language of a civilized people, he pursues an illusory goal of ‘scientific impartiality’ and proceeds to exclude from consideration precisely those elements which make the language a Kultursprache. The result is not only a limitation but in the strictest sense a falsification.

The Hittite words for ‘year’ and the seasons appear in the texts in two variant forms, one without, the other with an nt-suffix. Thus we find side by side:

Behind the words ăvτα, ăντην, àντί (all ‘over against’ and the like) lies a noun *ant- ‘front, face’, and by its side another noun *ant-ā of similar meaning. The dative of *ant- is continued in ăντί, its accusative in ăvra; while ăντην continues the accusative of the other noun. Similar groups (cf. Risch 4) may be seen in : ίωκή, : φυγή, άλκί: . The loss of the other cases resulted in the isolation of the surviving forms, and so in a shifting of these into the class of adverbs. The present paper examines separately the use of , , and in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The weak preterit presents one of the most difficult problems in Germanic linguistics. Many investigators have applied themselves to the solution of the problem, and the number of publications occupied with this question is so great that a perspective can hardly be gained. The varied attempts at a solution, many quite recent, are proof that the much-discussed question has lost none of its appeal. The problem offers a recurring challenge to research, since it cannot yet be considered finally solved.

In discussions of Proto-Indo-European phonology few attempts have been made to state the distribution of phonemes in the proto-language. Handbooks give lists of the phonemes, with examples of their occurrences; this is the presentation that we find in both Brugmann's and Hirt's descriptions of PIE phonology. From such lists, especially from those given by Brugmann, students can draw conclusions about the distribution of PIE phonemes; the conclusions of course are valid only to the extent that the compiler was aware of the need for a comprehensive list. But accurate descriptions of the distribution of PIE phonemes are lacking.

According to the well-known rule of our grammars, going back to the Roman grammarians, in a Latin word of three or more syllables the accent always fell on the antepenult if the penult was short. And one kind of short syllable consisted of a short vowel with a stop and a liquid (in that order) intervening before the next vowel. Hence the antepenultimate accent of tenebrae ‘darkness’ or tonitrus ‘thunder’.

[Slav. *piln) ‘diligent’ (Pol. pilny etc.) is *pri-lgn, a formational variant of OCS etc. priležn ‘diligent’. — Slav, nagl ‘sudden etc.’ is probably *na-lgl, a derivative of na-leg- (Bg.) ‘to fall upon’.]

Lexical polarization is used in this paper as a convenient label for the influence exerted by one word on its semantic opposite. In Classical Latin, for instance, DEXTER serves for ‘right’ and SINISTER for ‘left’. The ancient Romance expressions for ‘right’ are traceable to DEXTRU (to the extent to which DĪRĒCTU ‘straight’ or another rival word has not usurped its place), yet Romance equivalents of ‘left’, barring innovations, consistently presuppose the scantily documented late variant SINEXTRU rather than common SINISTRU (which alone is found even in the glosses). Taking into account the pronunciation of Late Latin, we may reckon with the presence of the pair DESTRU ˜ SINESTRU (SENESTRU) on the colloquial level prior to the disintegration of the Empire. The anomaly in the development of sinistru is thus reduced to the excessive opening of its stressed vowel, which was in any event bound to open to a minor extent: the i advanced not only to [e], as in comparable words, but to [ε]. This departure from the norm, in the absence of other clues, is most plausibly accounted for by assuming a certain amount of pressure exerted by [destru] on [senestru], until the two words reached the maximum degree of similarity compatible with the maintenance of their basic difference. We are here concerned with an instance of formal attraction through association by contrast, a process in which a weaker (passive) partner is reshaped on the pattern of its stronger (active) opposite.

[Almost every Romance language has a number of verbs in -ir(e), in which some endings are taken from the Latin inchoatives. This conjugation had its origin in a blending of the old inchoative verbs in -ēscō with certain denominative verbs of the 4th conjugation (not with verbs of state in -ēre). The ēscō-forms came to be regarded as personal endings of denominative verbs. Hence -īscō, a collateral form of -ēscō, was preferred by a large section of the Latin-speaking territory, giving rise to a type -īscō -īre in some of the Romance languages.]

[To the writer's knowledge, the initial mutations of the Keltic languages have never been systematically stated as functions of morphophonemes. The first part of this paper gives sample morphophonologies of three of these languages—Old Irish, Welsh, and Breton—by way of illustrating the simplification thus arrived at in situations that otherwise present great complexities in synchronic morphological statement. Such use of morphophonemes further lends precision to diachronic statements and by extension may also prove useful on the phonetic level by simplifying the statement of the stock and distribution of phonemes extracted at an earlier point in linguistic analysis.]

The present description of the phonemes of Costa Rican Spanish is offered primarily for comparison with Castilian Spanish. Attention is directed especially to Tomás Navarro Tomás, Manual de pronunciación española (Madrid, 1932), and George L. Trager, The phonemes of Castilian Spanish, TCLP 8.217–22 (1939); Trager's article is essentially a phonemic restatement of Navarro Tomás' larger work. It is hoped that the present study will lead also to further comparisons, on the phonemic level, with other modern Spanish dialects, American and European.

The phonemes of Korean are here analyzed in three ways: in terms of articulatory components, of auditory qualities, and of distinctive oppositions. A detailed phonetic description is provided in §2 and §2.1. The language analyzed is standard colloquial Korean, ideally represented by educated speakers native to Seoul. Like many standard languages, standard Korean consists of not one but many dialects. This analysis attempts to include all linguistic patterns other than those which seem to be partially assimilated borrowings from English.

Kahane and Beym's analysis of syntactical juncture in colloquial Mexican Spanish, Lg. 24.388–96 (1948), based on the pronunciation of a single speaker—a woman from Oaxaca—, throws considerable light on the problem under consideration, and is a forward step in the analysis of Spanish structure. Though these authors recognize the obvious disadvantages of their method of getting raw data, namely the use of only one informant and the reading—as against spontaneous speaking—of a play, they seek to generalize their findings as valid for the Spanish language as a whole. Nevertheless, they leave the door open for further investigation of detailed material in order to arrive at objective criteria valid for Spanish in general.

In his valuable article on the Indo-European vowels in Albanian (Lg. 26.379–88), Stuart A. Mann recommends a principle of etymological method that is characterized by admirable, not to say Utopian, rigor. He considers ‘complete correspondence of whole words’ (379) to be the only sure evidence on which to base etymology, and regards this as an improvement upon ‘continental neo-grammarian practice’ (379 fn. 2). As an antidote to the reckless overworking of the theory of Wurzelerweiterung, Mann's principle is certainly to be hailed. It would, of course, result in wholesale pruning of our etymological dictionaries, which may or may not be desirable. Would, for instance, Welsh ebol ‘colt’ < have to be rejected as a cognate of OLat. equos ‘horse’, since complete correspondence is lacking and a simplex *eb < * cannot be attested? Or would Mann apply his principle in its strictest form only to such procedures as the reconstruction of the original vocalic system of a language, such as he attempts in his article? In the latter event, his conservatism doubtless guarantees a certain dependability of results. But once the principle of whole-word correspondence is imposed, it goes without saying that the words used in establishing correspondences must themselves be verified philologically and not merely lexicographically. The bane of Celtic linguistics has been a flair, at certain periods, for creative lexicography. The Welsh Dictionary (1803) of the notorious William Owen Pughe, for instance, contains—not the extant Welsh vocabulary of his day, although some of that was inevitably incorporated in the work— but, in large measure, fictitious words which are the author's contribution to his mother tongue. Continental scholarship and even native authorities, relying on the work of Pughe and his followers, proceeded to draw etymological and phonological conclusions that had no basis in linguistic fact, being derived from Pughe's ghost words. Recent Welsh lexicographical practice has fortunately succeeded in getting rid of most of these phantoms. As a matter of fact, predeeessors of Pughe were often far less fantastic than he; as early as 1632 John Davies provided an extremely reliable work (except for its etymologies), based on a careful analysis of the vocabulary of Welsh literature.