In this paper I am not primarily concerned with the exact degree of notionality or of interjectionality to be found in the Malay/Indonesian words brought under study. Virtually all the words encountered which reveal the inclinations discussed here tend toward the interjectional or expressive rather than toward the notional pole, yet they are by no means onomatopoeic in the narrowly soundimitative or sound-suggestive sense. They are expressives in which sound symbolism plays an undeniable part. As we move away from echoism pure and simple, however, we find greater freedom in the arrangement of the sounds and particularly of the consonants. (It is this relative lack of importance attached to a rigid sequence that I am concerned with in a second part of this study, to be published later.) In this respect Malay/Indonesian goes much farther than English or other Indo-European languages and is at the opposite pole from Semitic, where, in general, the order of the three radicals is firmly fixed.

For some time I have been engaged in a study of the constructions used with verbal nouns and adjectives in several Indo-European languages, and have published material on the subject in various periodicals. Here I shall endeavor to synthesize my findings.

When approaching the linguistic problem of grammatical parallelism one is irresistibly impelled to quote again and again the pathbreaking study written exactly one hundred years ago by the juvenile Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism. The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism, ranging from the technical so-called Parallelisms of Hebrew poetry and the antiphons of Church music to the intricacy of Greek or Italian or English verse.

Whether or not he is familiar with the technical terms currently favored, or aware of the actual processes behind these terms, a speaker or student of Spanish, on some undefined level of consciousness, senses (or acts as if he sensed) the existence of such contrastable inflectional models as sent-ir ‘to feel’ : sient-e ‘(he, she, it) feels’ vs. ped-ir ‘to ask’ : pid-e ‘(he, she, it) asks’. The native speaker may even at some time or other have faced the dilemma of choosing, in the stressed syllable of such a verb form, between ie and i, and the foreign student is certain to have come to grips with such practical difficulties and to have been guilty, upon occasion, of gross errors. Preceptive grammarians and practitioners of language teaching, accordingly, have at all times paid attention to the hazards of the choice between the two conjugational categories.

J. W. Marchand, in an article which bears almost the same title as the present note and which was published in Language 33.346–54 (1957), reexamines the question posed in that title, and reaches the conclusion that the reflexes of PIE /i/ and /e/ did not contrast in identical environments, i.e. that these two PIE phonemes had merged in Proto-Germanie, and that, accordingly, the system of PGmc. short syllabics exhibited only a three-way contrast: one front vowel, one back vowel, one low vowel. He presents arguments which are intended to establish the validity of two assumed sound-changes for Pre-Germanic : PIE /i/ > /e/ before /a/ sounds, and PIE /e/ > /i/ before /u/, and he declares that if we deny the occurrence of these sound changes, we must accept the phones [i] and [e] as members of different phonemes. My contention here is simply that the occurrence of the alleged changes for Proto-Germanie (or Pre-Germanic) has not been proved, and that Proto-Germanie must therefore be assumed to have exhibited, as asserted by Twaddell and Kuryłowicz, an asymmetrical structure in its system of short syllabics.