1. Setting of the problem. When in 1937 Douglas Chrétien and I published Quantitative Classification of Indo-European Languages (Lg. 13.83–105) it aroused a little flurry of attention but no follow-up, except an extension of the method by ourselves to include Hittite (Lg. 15.69–71 [1939]). For some years I had looked on our essay as a dead limb of effort, especially since my coauthor came subsequently to doubt the fruitfulness of the method on the ground that most of the values found by us lacked statistical significance.

Isthmus Zapotec belongs to the Zapotec language family spoken in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. There are at least seven different “dialects” of the Zapotec “language,” but they are often considered to be separate languages, inasmuch as they are mutually unintelligible. The Isthmus dialect is spoken in an area bordering the Pacific coast in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

In calling attention to the shortcomings of the existing theory of internal reconstruction, Wallace L. Chafe finds it

It is a truism of diachronic linguistic theory that most historically transparent forms are explainable as compromises between sound shifts (the norm) and a wide range of analogical adjustments (the deviation from the norm). In practice, however, scholars have so far made only modest advances in their attempts at analyzing associative interferences with predictable linguistic change. Specifically, if numerous examples have been collected, often at random, of the extension or complete generalization of an inflectional or derivational morph (say, the marker of a number, a gender, or an agent), little has been ascertained, at least in the Romance domain, on the opposite phenomenon, the preservation of a close-knit paradigmatic pattern at the heavy cost of a break in the consistency of a sound correspondence. Though Sapir, and possibly others before him, eloquently outlined the problem of morphological resistance to a sound shift (Language 196–204, ed. 1921), the precise exemplification and even the technique of analysis remain to be provided on the Romance side—a side credited with controlling a particularly suitable portion of experimental data. The present article is meant to mark just one step, long overdue, in this direction.

[Go. iddja and OE ēode ‘went’ continue a pre-Germanic perfect to the root ∗ey ‘go’, whose earliest shape was sg. ∗eóye (§6), pl. ∗eiyt (§16), and which became PGmc. ∗eō (§14), ∗ijjun (§17). In the singular ∗eó- did not contract (§7–13); this rule partly accounts for OHG ier ‘plowed’ (§11), and permits us to explain Gmc. ēt ‘ate’ as a replacement of ∗eat from ∗eóde (§§12–3, §21). The development of ∗-óye to ∗-ō agrees with that of ∗-āye to ∗-õ in presents of the second weak class (§14). The -jj- of ∗ijjun is regular from ∗-iy- (§17). Go. iddja, iddjedun has been remodeled from ∗i-a, ∗iddj-un (§19), and OE ēode, ēodon contains the suffix of the weak preterit added to the singular, PGmc. ∗eō, WGmc. ∗eu (§20).]

This study presents a summary of the phonological structure of the Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB) of the educated people of Calcutta. It offers neither a mass of detailed data nor startling innovations of theory, but is intended to provide basic explanation for someone who wants to know the facts about the phonology of the language. There are astonishingly few straightforward descriptions of the phonologies of the various modern languages of South Asia, and this attempts to fill that need for one of them. Bengali is one of the major Indic (or Indo-Aryan) languages of South Asia; in number of speakers and general importance it is second only to Hindi-Urdu, and in quality and quantity of literary production it is second to none. It is spoken by over seventy million people, somewhat more than half of them in East Pakistan and the remainder in West Bengal, India. There is a standard literary form of the language, the sādhu bhāṣā, quite diverse regional dialects, and a Standard Colloquial, the calit bhāṣā, which is described here. Bengali is customarily written in a special alphabet of the Devanagari type, the Bengali alphabet.

In his Notes on Vedic noun-inflexion 31 (1942), F. B. J. Kuiper has recognized in Vedic yu, Av. āyū ‘life, age’ a Proto-Indo-European ∗Aóyu parallel in structure to the ∗dóru, ∗ĝónu, and ∗sónu of Skt. dru, Gk. dóru ‘wood’, Skt. jnu, Gk. gónu ‘knee’, and Skt. snu ‘back’. The initial laryngeal has disappeared without trace in Indo-Iranian, even in the oblique cases (e.g. Avestan gen. yaoš from ∗Ayéws), but is indicated by cognates in European languages: Gk. ain ‘life, age', aiweí, aién, aiés, etc. ‘always’, and Lat. aevus, aevum ‘age, eternity’, all pointing to ∗Aeyw-, with a vocalism comparable to that of Welsh derw ‘oaks’ and Ru. dérevo ‘tree’. Indecisive in this respect are Germanic cognates such as Gothic aiws∗ ‘age, eternity’ and ajukduþs∗ ‘eternity’. Celtic forms such as W oes ‘age, lifetime’, oed ‘age’ and OIr. aís ‘age; people’ seem to lack ∗w and are not certainly cognate with the family of Skt. yu and Lat. aevum (cf. Pedersen, VKG 1.176, Walde-Pokorny 1.7, Pokorny IEW 11, and Vendryes, Lexique étymologique de l'irlandais ancien, A 21).

In the beginning of the 5th century Marcellus Empiricus of Bordeaux composed a collection of popular medical instructions, De medicamentis liber, in which he offered prescriptions and instructed how to cure various sicknesses. The treatment and application of medicine were to be accompanied by healing charms. The work was written in Latin. Beside numerous Latin and a few Greek incantations there are some which are generally believed to be Gaulish. In the original Aquitania, south of the river Garonne, Iberian was spoken before Latin, but at Bordeaux there was a Celtic-speaking enclave.

[This paper deals with the origin of the Greek thematic nasal presents kámnō ‘toil, weary’ and támnō ‘cut’ (Att. témnō). These are explained as -ne/o-presents formed to the thematic aorists ékamon, étamon (Att. étemon). The standard explanation of kámnö and támnō is that these presents are thematicizations of -nā-presents. This view is shown to lack substantiation.]

In his valuable pioneering study The Phonemes of Gothic, Lg. 24.76–86 (1948), William Moulton suggests that Gothic /w/ has two allophones: [] and [w]. The first of these is spelled with u, e.g. auk, þiuþ; the second with w, e.g. wigs, gaidw, or with ƕ (interpreted as /hw/), e.g. ƕas, or with q (interpreted as /kw/), e.g. qam. He regards the letter u in other occurrences as (1) designating a short syllabic /u/, (2) designating a long syllabic /u:/, and (3) supplying the second half of the compound symbol au—a means of writing additional short and long syllabic phonemes. He assumes that the letter w also has an alternative reference, a short syllabic found only in foreign words, e.g. Lwstrws.

Several years ago I published in this journal an article concerning the form of Indo-European personal names. Were they typically dithematic, like Greek Aristo-bulos, Sanskrit Agni-datta, Iranian Ana-phes, Keltic Cingeto-rix, Old High German Fridu-berht, and hundreds of others in the onomastica of the various, especially the older Indo-European languages? Or were dithematic names only a special shape, disproportionately emphasized in the frequency of occurrence by the tradition and the kind of text at our disposal, at the expense of the much less recorded monothematic names? No doubt some monothematic names are hypocoristic abbreviations of dithematic ones; they are generally recognizable by either their stem or their ending. But a large number of available monothematic names are certainly original. Are they just as typically Indo-European, or less so, or more so?

In a recent article Stockwell, Bowen, and Silva-Fuenzalida were able to prove that word boundary in Spanish is phonologically significant, that is to say phonemic, determining the occurrence of particular allophones within otherwise identical environments. This may also be expressed by saying that a phoneme of juncture occurs between some words in Spanish. The authors compare items like the following: [eŋoxo] en ojo ‘in (the) eye’ vs. [eneros] eneros ‘Januaries’ (a contrast found in the Caribbean and Central American areas and elsewhere); [ezdeaki] vs. [ezðeaki] es de aqui ‘he's from here’ (both forms found in all dialects). To avoid setting up [ŋ], [n], [ð], and [d] as four separate phonemes, they assume a juncture to exist in the phrases, en + oxo/ and /es + de + aki/. Hence they analyze [ŋ] and [d] as the allophones of /n/ and /d/ proper before and after plus juncture respectively.

The Proto-Semitic vowels, as usually reconstructed, are identical with those of Classical Arabic: short */i a u/, long /*ī ā ū/. In addition, a number of the long vowels are recognized, on the basis of morphophonemic alternation, as resulting from earlier sequences of short vowels and */y/ or */w/. For example, on the basis of the cognate set Heb. /dān/, Acc. /dānu/, Syr. /dān/, Arab. /dāna/ ‘he judged’, Gray reconstructs Proto-Semitic */dāna/. Since this long-vowel correspondence contrasts, however, with that of the set Heb. /šālōš/, Acc. /šalāšu/, Syr. /tәlāθ/, Arab. /θalāθun/, Eth. /šalās/ ‘three’, where he also reconstructs an */-ā-/, he posits a presumably pre-Proto-Semitic */aya/ for the first set on the basis of the imperfects Heb. /yāÐīn/, Acc. /ˀidīn/, Syr. /nәÐīn/, and Arab. /yadīnu/. The methodological error here is immediately apparent: if the long vowel of */dāna/ contrasts in its reflexes in the descendent languages with the long vowel of */θalāθu/, then the contrast existed in Proto-Semitic, and the morphophonemic alternation is irrelevant in determining it. A similar situation exists with respect to the verb Heb. /qām/, Syr. /qām/, Arab. /qāma/, Eth. /qōma/ ‘he stood’ (for the Acc. reflex cf. Acc. /kānu/ ‘he existed’, Arab. /kāna/ 'he was'), where Gray reconstructs */qāma/. To explain the Heb. reflexes one has to resort to an analogical formation from the forms with suffixes (/dantā/ 'you judged', /qamtā/ ‘you stood‘) where the vowel remained short, with subsequent stress lengthening of the reestablished short vowel in the simple forms. For Eth. one must recognize an */aw/ nucleus in the suffixed forms which went to /ō/ and was reestablished in the simple form. It is much easier, however, to recognize that */aya/ and */awa/ existed in Proto-Semitic.

In the Swabian dialect there is the word [mie] which means ‘brake, brake shoe, or device, at the back of a cart, for arresting or stopping the motion of a cart’. The etymology of the word has always been a subject of some controversy. The present paper attempts to bring to light new evidence concerning the etymology and perhaps to remove the controversial aspects of it.