The most generally assumed ‘cause’ of analogic change has been verbal association (Thumb and Marbe 1901; cf. Kainz 1954:49–53, Stern 1931:199–236). I have presented experimental reasons (Esper 1933) and theoretical reasons (Esper 1935) for regarding such associations rather as results of a more fundamental condition inherent in the nature of the relationships between environmental patterns and response patterns.

According to Bartholomae (1885:206–7), when an Indo-European aspirated stop was followed directly by one or more unaspirated obstruents, the aspiration was transferred from the beginning of the cluster to the end, as in the conventionally cited example IE PGk. *pat-skhō > Gk. páskhō ‘I suffer’ beside Gk. páthos ‘suffering, disease’. Bartholomae's formulation stipulates further that the entire cluster became voiced when its first component was voiced, e.g. IE *lubh-tós > * lub-dhós > Skt. lub-dhás ‘covetous’ beside lubh-yāmi ‘I yearn’. As textbook descriptions of the process regularly indicate, the Indo-European languages as a group honor Bartholomae's Law considerably more in the breach than in the observance. Thus, on purely phonologic grounds, IE *légh- + -trom might be expected to become *lég-dhrom, but the corresponding historic Greek form léktron shows the reflex of IE /kt/, not /gdh/. In such instances, which are so numerous as to constitute the rule rather than the exception, the absence of change is generally ascribed to analogy. Thus, IE *légh-trom, under the influence of related forms like *légh-os, would not become *lég-dhrom, but would merely undergo devoicing and de-aspiration of /gh-t/ to /kt/, hence Gk. léktron ‘couch’ beside lékhos ‘bed’.

Linguistic relationships in Northern Asia have been the subject of speculation and controversy for many years. This paper attempts to provide evidence to help prove the relationship of Korean to Japanese; peripheral attention is paid to the other languages spoken across the vast territory that stretches from the Bosporus to Kamchatka. The relationship of the Altaic group of languages—the three families called Turkic, Tungusic (or Tungus-Manchu), and Mongolian—is widely accepted today, although the evidence has not been marshalled as convincingly as some of us might wish. ‘Hyperborean’ or ‘Paleosiberian’ is a term of convenience to refer to some Siberian languages of undetermined lineage; these include the Chukotan group (Chukchi or Luoravetlan, Koryak or Nymylan, and near-extinct Kamchadal), Ainu, and Gilyak (or Nivkh). In addition to Korean (K), Middle Korean (MK), Japanese (J), and Old Japanese (OJ), forms are cited in this paper from Turkish (Tk.); Lamut (L), a Tungusic language also called Even; Dagur (D) Mongolian, as well as Khalkha (the standard language of Outer Mongolia); Ainu (A); and Gilyak (G). There are a very few citations from Kamchadal and Koryak, and an occasional item from Hungarian or Finnish as representatives of the Uralic family, which some scholars believe related to the Altaic languages in a Ural-Altaic family or ‘superstock’. The obvious close relationship of the languages of the Ryukyu Islands to standard Japanese has been well established for years, and by proto-Japanese I refer to the ancestor of both Ryukyu and ‘Main Islands’ Japanese, assuming that it was the speech of the people of what is called (after the name of an archeological site) the Yayoi culture, thought to be responsible for bringing rice farming to the islands about two thousand years ago.

In Vedic Sanskrit about 150 forms in -si, formed from 23 roots, are used as imperatives of the 2nd singular. Among the most frequent in the Rigveda are yakṣi ‘sacrifice’ (34 times), vakṣi ‘carry, bring’ (25 times), parṣi ‘bring across’ (16 times), neṣi ‘lead’ (10 times), darṣi ‘pierce’ (10 times), satṣi (10 times), rāsi ‘bestow’ (8 times). Until quite recently the position of these forms within the Vedic verbal system has usually been left undecided. In 1955 Burrow merely noted that their ‘termination is identical with that of the 2 sg. indic, pres., but these indicatives are quite clearly distinguished because the presents are differently formed’. Three years earlier, Renou expressed the view that the type in question was ‘une formation autonome, où une ancienne désinence -s a pu être prolongée par un i déictique’. The decisive advance, alluded to above, is due to the recent work of Johanna Narten, but especially to George Cardona's excellent paper published only a year ago. Whereas Narten still insisted that the formation was ‘bildungsmässig ausserhalb des Tempussystems stehend’ (39), although she admitted that in several cases the imperative in -si ‘im vedischen Sprachgefühl wohl zum s- Aorist gerechnet [wurde]‘ (45), Cardona cogently showed that the -si imperative was not only part of the s-aorist system but was most closely linked with the s-aorist subjunctive.

It is well-known that Grassmann's law is restricted in its application in Greek vis-à-vis Sanskrit. In Greek, the rule applies generally to deaspirate an initial underlying aspirated stop in a reduplicating syllable: tithēmi ‘I place’ < *thithēmi, pépheuga ‘I have fled’ < *phé-pheuga, kékhutai ‘it has poured forth’ < *khé-khutai, etc; but within a root it applies only to an initial dental and to /h/ from an underlying /s/: tréphō ‘I nourish’ < *thréphō (cf. thrépsō ‘I shall nourish’), trikhós ‘hair, gen. sg.’ < *thrikhós (cf. thríks ‘hair, nom. sg.’), ékhō ‘I hold’ < *hékhō < *sékhō (cf. héksō ‘I shall hold’, éskhon ‘I held‘), etc. There are no cases in Greek in which a root-initial labial or velar voiceless unaspirated stop alternates with the corresponding aspirated stop.

It has become commonplace in historical linguistics to recognize instances in which final consonants have been lost from the ends of words. When inspecting sets of apparent cognates which differ only in that one language has final stops which are missing in the other, few linguists would hesitate to conclude that the stopped items represent the older form. More specifically, among the Tibeto-Burman languages, where some languages have a much fuller complement of final stops than others, it has been generally taken for granted that languages with many final stops are, in that feature, more conservative than languages with few or no final stops. Nevertheless, in the Maru language, which is spoken in northern Burma and which is quite closely related to Burmese, certain final stops seem to be intrusive, though they have developed in an entirely regular way from unstopped syllables. That is, certain Maru syllables which have final stops are cognate with unstopped Burmese syllables, and it will be the purpose of this paper to argue that the open syllable forms of Burmese are the more conservative.

In order to clarify the phonemic status of Gmc. i and e, it is necessary to reach some conclusion regarding the disputed historical development of IE i in Germanic. The assumption of a regular change of IE i to Gmc. e before a, ō, or is refuted especially by the evidence of the i in the past participles of first-class strong verbs and in adverbs such as OHG hina, nidana, but a considerable number of e-forms in the various Germanic dialects must be explained. It can be shown that the partial overlapping in Germanic of the two phonemes /i/ (represented in all environments by [i]) and /e/ (with the allophones [i] and [e]) led to the occasional development of an e-allophone of /i/ by a type of systemic analogy.

It is to Yuen Ren Chao that we are indebted—among so many other things—for the first modern phonetic description and phonological analysis of a spoken Tibetan dialect; in this pioneering work of his with a Lhasa speaker he noted a number of alternations in vowel quality that seemed to run counter to the generally regular one-to-one correlation to be observed between the vowels of the Tibetan written language and the vocalization of the modern dialects. Chao's work on that occasion was by and large limited to a description of the reading pronunciation for a text in the written language, and hence it then appeared to him possible to treat these alternations as the result of differences in tempo or even as simply fortuitous; but subsequent work with speakers of the same language, involving living speech rather than the reading of literary texts, has shown that the phenomenon which Chao noticed and so meticulously recorded in his early publication is instead part of a widespread process of vowel assimilations which at least in Lhasa Tibetan operates in certain morphemes in a fashion regular enough to merit the designation ‘vowel harmony’.

This limited treatment of French verb morphology is intended to exemplify the principles of generative phonology. The finite verb is represented as a sequence of morphemes: stem (+ conjugation vowel) + tense marker + person ending. For each morpheme there is a unique underlying phonological representation, exhibiting structural regularities which are not overtly marked at the phonetic level. A sequence of morphemes thus represented is then subjected to the ordered set of morphophonemic rules, the end result being the phonetic representation of the sequence in question. The rules, in addition, furnish an explanation for certain morphological and phonological phenomena observable within the verb conjugation.

The late George A. Kennedy, in his ‘Negatives in Classical Chinese’, notes that there are some sixteen forms of the negative 'all loosely denned as “no, not”', and sets out to discover if some criterion other than 'meaning' can provide a tighter classification and perhaps an explanation for this seemingly random and interchangeable repertory of negatives in Classical Chinese.

Elizabethan English in general and Shakespearean English in particular frequently uses pronouns in imperative constructions. The use of these pronouns has no correlation with the age, sex, or social status of the speaker, although Shakespeare does employ certain types of such constructions to indicate dialectal or foreign speech. The pronouns always follow the verb. In the case of constructions with periphrastic do, the pronoun follows do and precedes the main verb, although adverbial elements may come between the pronoun and the main verb.

In phonemic representations of German utterances, it is common practice to follow the system proposed by Trager and Smith (1951) for designating the so-called suprasegmental phonemes in English. According to this system, there are four phonemic stresses and four distinctive pitch levels. It is considered essential to mark the pitch level at the beginning and end of every utterance (phonemic clause), while an additional pitch indicator is called for when there is a ‘significant’ pitch change within the utterance. Moulton, to whom we owe most for our knowledge of the phonemic structure of German, modifies this system somewhat (1962:113–4) by recognizing only three ‘word stresses’ and a ‘syntactical stress’, which is used to mark the commonly accepted ‘center of the utterance’, i.e. the syllable with the strongest phonetic stress. The inadequacies of the Trager-Smith system and its modification by Moulton are perhaps best illustrated by the difficulty of obtaining uniform analyses of a given utterance, even by auditors trained in the use of the system.

In 1955, in a review of the Trager-Smith Outline of English structure, I made a first attempt at phonemicizing an old-fashioned dialect of Atlanta, Georgia, which did not seem to fit the overall pattern of nine vowels and three semivowels that Trager and Smith had proposed. Further discussion followed at the First Texas Conference in 1956, where the arguments for a tenth vowel were strengthened by Raven I. McDavid and Sumner Ives; but even the rebellious, at that time, were still working within the Smith and Trager framework, and when their arguments were published in the proceedings of the Conference, they suffered because the secretary who transcribed them had been unable to cope with so many different dialects and because proof-reading had been peccable. A tentative report on the Conference to the 1956 Linguistic Institute at Ann Arbor was received with benevolent amusement, and ensuing debates with myself and Hans Kurath appeared in later numbers of Language and in my Short introduction to English grammar.

It is well known that a form conventionally avoided in ordinary speech is nonetheless likely to persist as part of the active vocabulary of the community, while forms homonymous with it are likely to disappear. An early statement to this effect is Bloomfield's: ‘It is a remarkable fact that the tabu-word itself has a much tougher life than the harmless homonym.' This phenomenon is observable in many languages, including English and Chinese. Chinese is a more fruitful field than English in this respect because in English sets of homonyms are not especially frequent, and when they occur they seldom have more than two members each. But in Chinese languages, such as the Peking dialect (Pk.), the situation is different: sets of homonyms are frequent, often containing over ten members commonly occurring in ordinary speech. This is because there are not many possible different syllables in the language, and because there is a preponderance of monosyllabic morphemes and words. The result is that if a word is tabued, it is likely to be monosyllabic and homonymous with other words and morphemes at the time the tabu takes effect. This paper describes one instance of tabu in Pk., suggests some mechanisms that might be involved, offers a reconstruction for an earlier form of the tabued word, and tentatively dates some stages in the history of the tabu.

In evaluating possible analyses of phonemic systems within a distinctive feature framework, the average number of bits per phoneme is often taken as a measure of economy. Alternative solutions can be compared with regard to their deviation from the optimal binary feature specification of n phonemes expressed by the formula log2 n. That such a scale of economy cannot serve to evaluate phonological systems which are integrated into the total grammar of a language has been recognized in principle (Halle 1959:29–30, 45), but is not always considered in practice.

Nez Perce vowel harmony involves two groups of co-occurring vowels: /i e u/ and /i a o/. Most words contain only one of the two groups of vowels. Certain morphemes are variable and may have vowels of either group, while others have only the second group. The latter type of morpheme, whether stem or affix, dictates the vowel harmony. Three analyses, one in terms of prosody, and two in terms of distinctive features, are given, in an attempt to derive the modern Sahaptian vocalic systems from that of Proto-Sahaptian.

1. The ease or difficulty of learning phonological categories, experienced by a speaker of language X attempting to learn language Y, has been attributed by linguists to (1) the competing phonemic categories of native language (N) and target language (T) systems, (2) the allophonic membership of these phonemic categories, and (3) the distributions of these categories within their respective systems. It has been noted that the higher the degree of similarity between the N and T phonological categories, the easier it is for the speaker to learn the T phonological categories, and the converse has been held to be true.

The discussion to follow will be concerned with a number of occurrences of noch in written and spoken German. Typical examples are these:

1. (a) 'Der Hund ist fort, rief die junge Frau. ‘Nein, sieh doch her, er liegt immer noch da.’ (Elisabeth Langgässer, Jetzt geht die Welt unter)

2. (b) Der Kellner kam und brachte den Kaffee. ‘Bringen Sie mir noch einen grossen Kirsch dazu,' sagte ich. (Erich Maria Remarque, Drei Kameraden)

3. (c) Sollte Klotho heissen, nicht Claire, der traut man es noch zu, dass sie Lebensfäden spinnt. (Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der alten Dame)

The terms chèng (1) and ch'í (11) present a perplexing problem for the reader or translator of texts in traditional Chinese military thought. In nonmilitary contexts chèng is rendered by a range of expressions including 'upright, true, orthodox, correct, regular, authorized, exact, straight, formal, just, at the time of, during, to adjust, principal, original, obverse', ch'í is translated 'strange, wonderful, rare'; the same graph read chī is translated ‘odd, single, surplus’.