The significance of our reconstructed forms, precisely what is intended by them, is an old question which some of us discussed briefly at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences of 1904 (cf. the publication, vol. III, pp. 35, 57), and which has been elaborated in the long article of E. Hermann, KZ 41. 1 ff. There is not only a difference in the views expressed by various scholars, but often in the case of the same one an apparent discrepancy between the interpretation of reconstruction that is explicitly professed and that which must be inferred from his practice. For example Meillet, Introd. 24 ff., insists on the unreality and the purely formulaic character of the reconstructions, saying that these are nothing but convenient formulae for given correspondences (similarly Oertel, Lectures 128, and others). Yet throughout the work he is constantly, like any other scholar in the field, asserting or discussing the sound, form, or type that must be assumed for the parent speech to account for given correspondences, and whether this and that type is inherited from the parent speech or an innovation. Again, not believing in the existence of three guttural series in the parent speech, he does not recognize the ‘plain velars’ of other scholars, whereas from his professed principle one would expect him to have the least compunction in admitting them as convenient formulae for a well-known set of correspondences. The fact is, of course, that to him, and to all, the reconstructions, while mainly useful as formulae, are still something more than mere formulae of correspondences, they imply a certain interpretation of these correspondences, a conviction or a provisional theory regarding their approximate common starting point.

The method of postulates (that is, assumptions or axioms) and definitions is fully adequate to mathematics; as for other sciences, the more complex their subject-matter, the less amenable are they to this method, since, under it, every descriptive or historical fact becomes the subject of a new postulate.

ATA time when nearly every nook and corner of the globe has been made accessible and when international relations are becoming from year to year more general and more intimate, it seems only natural that the idea of a universal language, as a means of common intercourse for all mankind, should have been revived, so as to be hailed in many quarters with delight and enthusiasm. “Revived,” I said, for we must not imagine that the present generation is the first to embrace a similar idea. Every one of us is familiar with the story of the tower of Babel, as told in Genesis, chapter 11, beginning with the statement “And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.” This condition was contrary to the will of the Lord, especially after the people had begun to build a city and a tower whose top was to reach unto heaven. “So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore was the name of it called Babel: because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.”

The archaic Latin inscription known as the Inscription of Duenos, from a word occurring in it which may be a personal name, stands on a small triple jar found in Rome in 1880 and first published by its finder, H. Dressel, apparently in collaboration with F. Bücheier, who also wrote on it. Scholars have been busying themselves with it ever since, until we find the forty-first interpretation in a recent monograph of E. Goldmann of Vienna.

Scholars are now well equipped with treatises upon the corruptions which are found in manuscripts, and upon the manner in which editors must proceed as they make up a corrected text.

One of the considerations that led to the foundation of the Linguistic Society of America, was the impression that the opportunities for training in linguistic science were inadequate and very unevenly distributed. It was hoped that we could assist in remedying the situation; and in fact, since our organization, whether through our influence or not, several universities have notably strengthened their linguistic staff.

Although the Greek language shows a considerable number of forms with present reduplication in ι, yet in no sense do these constitute a living category. They are almost a closed circle of old and inherited verbs, subject to all kinds of analogical changes which give evidence of failure to understand their structure, while even new forms show by their very appearance that they were not consciously felt as reduplicating forms. Thus πταμαι (Moschus, etc.) for πτoμαι was clearly patterned after σταμαι, for if felt as a reduplicating form it would have appeared as ∗πταμαι. At the same time this analogical formation shows that itself was no longer analyzed as reduplicated. We may in fact say that the whole category of reduplicating presents, however clear is its existence from the historical point of view, was psychologically a nonentity. The individual reduplicated verbs were either structurally obscure to the speakers of the language, or else they were analyzed wrongly, i.e. not in accordance with their origin. Thus no doubt μí-μvω was usually conceived as μíμμ-vω because the latter conception is supported by a number of verbs like τμ-vω, and, moreover, by the probable division of syllables in pronunciation (μíμ-μ-vω rather than μí-μvω while there was nothing at all to assist in the apperception of the original weak form of the root μv-. Even those reduplicated presents which are clearest to the philologist, e.g. δí-δω-μι and τí-θŋ-μι must have been wrongly analyzed or seemed structurally obscure to many speakers. That e.g. was sometimes conceived as , with thematic vowel, is shown by the analogical of the New Testament. On the other hand, e.g. were certainly often taken as thematic formations and analyzed τíθ--τ and τíθ--ται in the as is made clear by of D at Luke 8:16, and still more by the following thematic forms in papyri: and cf. Robertson, Gram. Gr. N. T. 318.

The Inscription of Darius the Great, cut high up on the face of the cliff at Behistan in Western Persia, records the accession of Darius to the throne of Persia and his successful suppression of a number of revolts against his power. It is engraved in a cuneiform syllabary, the conventions of which are well determined and familiar to scholars (cf., for example, E. L. Johnson, Historical Grammar of the Ancient Persian Language, 29-35; also R. G. Kent, JAOS 35.325-9, 332, on special points). The text is presented in the cuneiform syllabary, with transliteration, translation, and critical annotations, by L. W. King and R. C. Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistûn in Persia, 1-91 (1907), a publication of the British Museum embodying the results of their reexamination of the rock and its inscription; this is the definitive text. A transliteration and translation, with critical notes and vocabulary, is contained in H. C. Tolman, Ancient Persian Lexicon and Texts (1908); and the same scholar's Cuneiform Supplement (1910) contains an autographed copy of the text in the cuneiform, and as an appendix E. L. Johnson's Index Verborum to the Old Persian Inscriptions, which is a complete word concordance : these two volumes are Nos. VI and VII in the Vanderbilt Oriental Series. These will be referred to hereafter by easily recognizable abbreviations.

A student of the American Indian languages is naturally led to investigate the wide-spread use of the quinary-vigesimal system of counting which he meets in the whole territory from Alaska along the Pacific Coast to the Orinoco and the Amazon. One is tempted to begin with an inquiry into the concept of number in general, and a study of the binary, ternary, and quaternary systems of counting, but for these subjects I refer to the works of Conant, McGee, Villiers, Eells, and Gibbs. It is interesting to follow the evolution of the concept of number from the stage where there is practically no idea of it, to the counting in pairs, frequent among the Australian and South American tribes, and then to higher units. For the purpose of this paper, however, I shall assume that the stage of counting by fives, and the discovery that the five fingers of the hand are the most practical means of so counting, has been reached. This discovery naturally leads, almost immediately, to the extension of the quinary base to the decimal, i.e., the two hands, and then to the vigesimal, including also the toes of the feet.

The very circumstances attending the production and proliferation of a great literature fix its language as a matter of record, and the literary record itself becomes classic along with the literature it perpetuates—an apparently unchanging standard of language perfection. Thenceforth all those ordered shiftings through which the speech of a people keeps adjusting itself to its developing group consciousness, seem to be but illiterate and careless deviations from the classic norm.

It is evident, upon even a cursory examination, that the curiously faulty hexameters of Commodian illustrate one stage in the loss of quantitative distinctions which the Latin language suffered in postclassical times. This fact has suggested to many that we may find in them a clue to the change which has made modern European verse so different from the classical measures. I, too, am convinced that the clue is there, and the purpose of this paper is to find it.

As examples of Greek inscriptions, two bronze tablets have been selected, of which one bears a treaty between Naupactus and the Hypocnemidian Locrians, and the other a treaty between the Oeantheans and the Chaleians.

The history of science records many illustrations of the human inclination to cling to a neat generalization regardless of the evidence behind it. Within our own field we may mention the classification of languages as inflected, agglutinating, or isolating; and the obviously false dogma that phonetic laws operate without exception.

There are here several points to notice:

a) The tones of the first and second persons singular agree perfectly with the corresponding independent pronouns; and in a certain degree this is also true for the third singular, since in the majority of cases the tone-pattern of nu kwa or yu kwa is low, middle or low, high. And these three persons of the singular are precisely the ones which are used alone, that is without any suffix.

A somewhat detailed study of this particular dialect is interesting for two reasons: firstly, because this is the dialect furthest removed from the primarily monosyllabic type characteristic of Zapotek and other related languages; secondly, because in its use of pitch tone it presents a very typical problem in the evolution of tone from a functional, variable, morphological factor to a fixed, independent, semasiological entity.

Grimm's Law having been given to the world one hundred years ago, the present occasion would seem to lend itself to a critical review of some of its salient features.

Grimm was by no means the first scholar to observe that in the Germanic languages consonants are often at variance with those of the cognate languages. Such discrepancies were especially noted and commented upon by students of Gothic from Franciscus Junius to the Swedish Professor Johannes ab Ihre and James Jamieson, the author of a well-known Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish language. Yet for a long time observations to this effect remained isolated, and amounted to little more than a mixture of truth and errors.