The meanings of pater and mater present no problems in either the singular or the plural. Parens may now be more fully considered. Whatever change of gender this word underwent must have been completed in the pre-literary period of Latin, or, at any rate, before our extant literature was written. It happens that parens is masculine in the earliest example of its use, Carmen Saliare 1 (Baehrens):

divóm paréntem cánte,

divóm deo súpplicáte.

The chief meanings of this word as registered by Godefroy, are ‘ round dance’ and ‘circle’. The difficulty lies in whether it is to be traced to a Celtic etymon or to the Latin choraules ‘a flute player’. Skeat in the second edition of his English Etymological Dictionary suggested the Celtic origin. He was severely criticized by C. Nigra, in the following terms

Le prof. Skeat appuie son étymologie celtique sur l'autorité du Cornish Lexicon de Williams et cite, entre autres, les termes bret. karoll, corn. carol, gael. carull, etc. [‘song’] dont cependant la provenance française semble bien évident.

The first two lines of Yasna 46.17 are as follows: yaθrā v  afšmānī snghānī

nõiṯ anafšmąm  djāmāspā hvõ.gvā

Apparently without guiding principle, the perfect participles passive of certain verbs in Latin have a short radical vowel, while others have a long vowel: thus factus, spectus, scissus, to faciō, speciō, scindō; but āctus, rēctus, vīsus, to agō, regō, videō. An excellent summary of the discussion which has grown up around this point was given by Sommer in 1914; but for the proper understanding of the problem it will be necessary briefly to repeat the main points.

The infinitive form of this verb is standan. The stem of the verb must therefore have been *stađ-. Accordingly the preterite singular form stōþ must represent an earlier *stōđ; hence we should have expected a preterite plural form *stōdum(= *stōđum) instead of stōþum.

The Greek κ-Perfect presents the most favorable conditions possible for testing the validity of a widely prevalent theory as well as for detecting the steps by means of which a formation grows from its first beginnings to an extensive category. Since it is formed from only twenty or twenty one verbs in vowel stems in the language of Homer, it is reasonable to believe that these represent, in approximate fashion, the earliest strata of κ-Perfects in the Greek language. We are thus able, as it were, to observe the category in the very process of formation, and a close scrutiny of the Homeric forms ought to give an answer to several questions. Are the verbs such as to give support to the common derivation of the κ-Perfect from the ‘root determinative’ κ found in the singular aorists ἔδωκα, ἔθηκα, and ἕηκα, κα as opposed to the plurals ἔδoμεν, ἔθεμεv, and -εἷμεν?

The object of this article is not to add one more hypothesis to the many others that have at various times been advanced to explain the origin of the Latin vī-Perfect, but rather to call attention to an old and neglected explanation which seems to the writer so simple and obviously superior to all the vague guesses which are apparently enjoying much greater favor, that it is a source of amazement, e.g. that Stolz-Leumann, Lat. Gram. 335, do not even mention the same in their extensive enumeration of theories and authorities.

The plural of parens is a convenient word for the meaning pater et mater or patres et matres. Neither patres nor matres will properly express this meaning. Although the plural of parens proves to have a variety of meanings, we may well expect the meanings ‘father and mother’ and ‘fathers and mothers’ to predominate. Moreover, because of its convenience we may expect the plural of parens to occur more often relatively than the singular.

In Aucassin et Nicolette, VIII, 7, occurs this passage : Et li cris lieve et la noise, et li cevalier et li serjant s'arment et qeurent as portes et as murs por le Castel desfendre, et li borgois montent as aleoirs des murs, si jetent quariax et peus aguisiés. Roques simply defines 'chemin de ronde'; Suchier, too, has it as 'Gang auf der Festungsmauer' implying, however, that a technical connotation might be involved. It is the purpose of this note to explain what the last named editor fails to explain, namely just what this connotation is.

Metrical convenience and metrical preference seem to enter into a poet's choice among parens, pater, and mater. Forms of parens provide suitable and desirable endings for lines of several metres, notably the dactylic hexameter. It must be remembered that sometimes a poet may choose one word rather than another because it conveniently fits into a certain place in his line, while on other occasions he writes his line in such a way as to enable him to use the word which he desires. Perhaps the two influences counteract each other.

In Language 4. 28–30, Prof. U. T. Holmes tries to show that some native Celtic word must have had some part in the etymology of caroler ‘to dance a round dance’. He refers to a Welsh coroli ‘to move in a circle’ and to a Welsh corol (or corawl) ‘circular’. But I doubt whether sufficient authority can be found for either of these words.

The origin and signification of the prefixes of Tibetan have in the past been the centres of a variety of theories, and among them m-has naturally excited speculation. The light thrown upon the matter by the native grammarians does not seem to greatly clarify the issue, although in the case of m- their main statement has, perhaps, a significance so far unnoticed. The object of this note, accordingly, is to bring out this fact, and to illumine the origin of at least some of the substantives in m-. To this end let us first examine the main contention of the Tibetan grammarians with regard to this prefix.

This form of cuanto más occurs only once, in a folk-tale from Zamora, 192: ‘Güeno, pues la chica fué creciendo y el diablo contimás iba creciendo la chica más se enamoraba de ella.‘

Sayce has published in Revue d'Assyriologie 24. 123–6 (1927), an article on the Hittite names of parts of the body. He gives a numbered list of words, beginning with (1) and ending with (49). At the close he draws a few conclusions, one of which is put as follows:

As it is the names of the bodily members which constitute the most primitive and uncontaminated portion of the vocabulary of a language the list which I have given is of primary importance in determining the philological position of Official Hittite. The overwhelming number of names is Asianic; there are three which are connected with Semitic and 6 and possibly 8 which are borrowed from Indo-European or have themselves been borrowed by Indo-European languages.

Caesar. Many of the authors of the Republican period, such as Caesar, have used words of parenthood so infrequently that figures indicating the number of instances of each word in such authors have small significance. Table V shows the number of times Caesar employs each of the three words in each case. The nominative singular to the ablative plural are to be read from left to right with the total last.