The two papers on Mandarin phonology by C. F. Hockett which appeared in 1947 and 1950 are exemplary cases of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics at its best. They demonstrate clearly the insight to be gained by intelligent analysis which is independent of traditional work while not ignorant of it.

The contribution of Hockett's analysis and its high degree of independence from particular sectarian bias about how languages must be analyzed is shown by the fact that one can use his phonemes in writing generative phonological rules which take relative ordering as a substantive property of language, in spite of the striking difference between such a framework and that used by Hockett in the articles cited.

In 1948, Y. R. Chao suggested that the voiced velar fricative of Mandarin might be regarded as an initial; but since he found that there was little chance of minimal contrasts, we might, for practical purposes, leave this phoneme unmarked. In the present paper I intend to list additional examples of contrast involving this initial, and to comment on its patterning with other initials.

0.1. The Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages form a group of closely related dialects consisting of Georgian (with an old literary tradition going back to the 5th century A.D.), Megrelian, Chan (or Laz), and Svan.

0.2. The Kartvelian languages may be viewed as descendants of a common language that existed in the past, of which different transformations yielded historically attested cognate linguistic systems. The ancestral common language (Common Kartvelian) is not recorded in documents. We arrive at it by special methods of reconstruction.

In my article ‘On the tone system of the Miao-Yao languages‘ I dealt chiefly with Miao data. With the additional data on Yao made available in recent publications I can now reconstruct the tonal system of Proto-Yao in greater detail and with more certainty.

The terms Miao and Yao refer both to peoples and to languages. The Yao people speak Mien, a Yao language; Punu, a Miao language; and Laka, a language whose relations are still uncertain. Yao, in contrast to Miao, has a complicated system of finals: vowels may occur in final position, or they may be followed by -y, -w, -p, -m, -t, -n, -k (in some dialects _?), or -η). Miao, on the other hand, has a complicated system of initials, with both simple consonants and consonant clusters, which Yao for the most part lacks. Some differences in vocabulary also characterize the two.

Joshua Whatmough, who died on 25 April 1964, was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, on 30 June 1897, the son of Walter and Elizabeth (née Hollows) Whatmough. In conversation, and occasionally in print, Whatmough used to refer to his childhood familiarity with the local speech of his home region, although, as many members of this Society will recall, his adult style of speech was a variety of educated British English moderately close to the norms of RP, yet always flavored with reminiscences of Lancashire phonetics.

1. Introduction. The development of South Dravidian phonology has shown, through its entire recorded and reconstructable history, extensive vocalic assimilation of the type which is known as metaphony, umlaut, or vowel mutation. Specifically, the vowels of radical (word-initial) open syllables have become lower when the following syllable contains the low vowel a. The points to be made in this paper are four. (1) This process is reflected in all modern South Dravidian languages, though it is obscured in the literary dialects of Tamil and Malayalam by a change of an opposite, dissimilatory type. (2) The process, which in its earliest form affected only high short vowels, has spread in some languages to affect other vowels, including long ones. (3) This enlarged scope of the process has in some cases produced new phonemic distributions and expanded phonemic inventories. (4) The process has parallels in non-Dravidian languages of South Asia, raising the possibility that a linguistic area or Sprachbund, made up of languages displaying metaphony, may be recognized in the Indian subcontinent.

The songs of the Todas, a small Dravidian-speaking community of the Nilgiri plateau in South India, have by this time been reported on twice, and an attempt has been made (in the second report) at a sociological interpretation. Preparation of a corpus of 260 texts for publication has involved indexing, and it is now possible to undertake a stylistic analysis.

The Atayal sentence in its minimal form consists of a nuclear construct. It may further contain one or more postcentral complements, and one or more units in precentrai EXPOSURE.

The construct most often consists of a VERB (a conjugatable word) which may be accompanied by one or more PRONOUNS (declinable words). In rare cases the construct (or rather QUASI CONSTRUCT) consists of a noun and a pronoun, or two nouns.