Questions can be expressed in the Ethiopian languages in either an affirmative or a negative way, as is the case in other languages. In answer to an affirmative question ('Will you come tomorrow?'), the particle is 'yes' for an affirmative statement, and ‘no’ for a negative statement. The verb of the question is most often repeated either in the affirmative ('Yes, I will come') or in the negative ('No, I will not come'). In answer to a negative question ('Will you not come tomorrow?'), the Ethiopian languages have various ways of expressing the affirmative or the negative. The object of the present study is to illustrate the various ways of expressing 'yes' or ‘no’ as an answer to a negative question. The investigation was made with the help of informants in Amharic, Tigrinya, Harari, and Chaha and Soddo of the Gurage group.

The present study is an attempt to account for the variety in which Ancient Chinese (AC) syllables ending in -p, -t, and -k develop tones in the Peking dialect (P) that are identical to the tones carried by P reflexes of other AC syllables. AC syllables ending in -p, -t, and -k belong to a category traditionally known as ju4 sheng1 ‘Entering Tone’; other syllables belong to any of the three other tone categories, called p'ing2 sheng1 ‘Level Tone’, shang3 sheng1 ‘Rising Tone’, or ch'ü4 sheng1 'Departing Tone'. Entering Tone syllables neutralize the tonal distinctions which apply to syllables in other tone categories.

In present-day usage, Italian casamatta and its cognates in other European languages (Sp. casamata, Fr. and Eng. casemate, Ger. Kasematte) refer to a type of chamber, vault, or embrasure in the ramparts of a fortress, or to a similar embrasure on ships. In some castles, the casemate can assume the shape of a vaulted passage, running along from tower to tower above the inner edge of a moat, and pierced with arrow-loops to the field. It is generally acknowledged that Eng. casemate, Fr. casemate, Ger. Kasematte, and Sp. casamata are all Renaissance borrowings, directly or indirectly, from Ital. casamatta, which is first attested in Machiavelli (1520).

This paper is not designed as a survey of the field of language data processing. My views on this are set forth in some detail elsewhere. Rather, the purpose of this paper is to consider the varying extent to which a computer program can be integrated into the process of linguistic research itself. I am here limiting myself to descriptive linguistics.

The purpose of this paper is to bring to the attention of interested persons the existence and availability of a high-speed computer program designed to aid in the determination of lexicostatistical indices, of the type developed by Swadesh, for assessing the degree to which any two given languages are cognate. The program was written by Carroll for the IBM Electronic Data Processing Machine Type 704 (with a 32,768-word magnetic-core storage) at the suggestion of Dyen, who wished to compute lexicostatistical indices among several hundred Malayopolynesian languages. The need for a high-speed computer program is suggested by the fact that the number of possible different pairwise comparisons among n languages increases geometrically with the number of languages; specifically, it is n(n - l)/2. If the comparisons are based on, let us say, the words in each language corresponding to the 200 ‘meanings’ of Swadesh's standard list, the analysis of the data for 100 languages involves a total of nearly a million separate acts of comparison. The program which is now available enables the performance of this job in approximately one hour and a quarter—provided, of course, that the data have all been properly assembled and coded for input to the machine. The individual acts of comparison (that is, the comparison of the forms for a given meaning in two languages) are performed at the rate of about 300 per second for typical kinds of data.

Sydney M. Lamb's informative description of The Digital Computer as an Aid in Linguistics, Lg. 37.382–412, is most welcome as a clear and systematic exposition of an important development in linguistic research. Lamb's article deals with a type of electronic computers (the IBM 704, 709, 7090) which represent, in general conception and design, a class of machines oriented primarily towards scientific computations and emphasising internal speed and large core storage capacity. This is the type of machine which is most widely represented in American universities, reflecting the needs of the science and engineering departments. Some institutions, however, have installed electronic computers which were designed with a somewhat different function in mind and which are, in some respects at least, often better equipped as aids in linguistic research. These are, broadly speaking, the machines intended not predominantly for scientific work but also for data processing, and thus especially suitable for the manipulation, organization, and classifying of large bodies of numeric and alphabetic data. It may be perhaps too optimistic to hope that the needs and desires of linguists will carry much weight when it comes to the acquisition or replacement of computers for general university use. But with the growing awareness of the importance of mechanolinguistics, linguistic applications of the computer may be more frequently considered in the future when such administrative decisions are made.