Very few of the languages of the Tai family still preserve consonant clusters of the type pl-, kl-, pr-, kr-, etc. The two languages generally known to preserve such clusters, at least in part, are Siamese and Ahom, the latter an extinct language of Assam. The dialects of Wu-ming and Lung-an, both in central Kwangsi province, are the other dialects I know which preserve them to a certain extent. The widely scattered distribution of these languages shows that the preservation of the clusters indicates no specially close linguistic relationship among them. Three other languages—Lao, a language closely related to Siamese; Shan, closely related to Ahom; and Dioi of Kweichow province, with which Wu-ming shares many common characteristics—have all simplified such clusters. It is safe to assume that the simplification is in most cases an individual dialect development, and that the clusters persisted in each of the various dialect groups before their simplification took place.

Many who have read the materials of present-day American linguists and have listened to their discussions have gained the impression that these linguists have cast out ‘meaning’ altogether. The two statements following are typical.

Though considerations of meaning in linguistics can be replaced, up to a point, by rigorous structural procedures, i.e. procedures involving solely the kinds and order of the elements of the language under investigation, they cannot be replaced by distributional procedures, despite the claim recently made by Harris. Distributional procedures may be sufficient to establish the rules by which all longer expressions (especially sentences) can be constructed out of the elements, but they are inadequate for the establishment of certain other rules that would mirror the so-called logical properties and relations of sentences and other expressions.