Abstract: In the earlier stages of work on the Hopi language I had the pleasant feeling of being in familiar linguistic territory. Here, wondrous to relate, was an exotic language cut very much on the pattern of IndoEuropean; a language with clearly distinct nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with voices, aspects, tense-moods, and no outr6 categories, no gender-like classes based on shape of objects, no pronouns referring to tribal status, presence, absence, visibility, or invisibility. But in course of time I found it was not all such plain sailing. The sentences I made up and submitted to my Hopi informant were usually wrong. At first the language seemed merely to be irregular. Later I found it was quite regular, in terms of its own patterns. After long study and continual scrapping of my pre-conceived ideas the true patterning emerged at last. I found the experience highly illuminating, not only in regard to Hopi but as bearing on the whole subject of grammatical categories and concepts. It happens that Hopi categories are just enough like Indo-European ones to give at first a deceptive impression of identity marred with distressing irregularities, and just enough different to afford, after they have been correctly determined, a new viewpoint toward the, on the whole, similar distinctions made in many modern and ancient Indo-European tongues. It was to me almost as enlightening to see English from the entirely new angle necessitated in order to translate it into Hopi as it was to discover the meanings of the Hopi forms themselves. This was notably true for the four types of verbal category herein discussed. It will be well to outline first the following general distinctions: (1) OVERT CATEGORY; one marked by a morpheme which appears in every sentence containing the category, vs. COVERT CATEGORY; not marked in sentences in general, but requiring a distinctive treatment in certain types of sentence, e.g. English genders. (2) WORD CATEGORY; a category (overt or covert or mixed) which delimits one of a primary hierarchy of word classes each of limited membership (not coterminous with entire vocabulary), e.g. the familiar 'parts of speech' of Indo-European and many other languages, vs. 275

Abstract: The Nuzu tablets, excavated by an American expedition, have consumed a good deal of the labor of American Assyriologists in recent years and will continue doing so for some time to come. After the publication of the material has far advanced, the grammar of the new dialect is in progress of reconstruction. The efforts made in this direction have so far been of a merely descriptive kind. It seems time now to apply also the linguistic line of approach to Nuzu Akkadian. Though the registration of the philological facts is the necessary basis for such work, it will in turn help to clarify difficulties which the descriptive grammar is unable to remove. The observations presented here have arisen from the study of Pfeiffer and Speiser's One Hundred New Selected Nuzi Texts; they will' therefore be documented by reference chiefly to that volume. They will deal with certain features of orthography, phonology, morphology and syntax in the order indicated.1

Abstract: Of more than seventy works by Varro (116 27 BCE) we have only his treatise On Agriculture and part of his On the Latin Language, a work typical of its author s interest not only in antiquarian matters but also in the collection of scientific facts, and containing much of very great value to the study of the Latin language.

Abstract: [If we accept the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, the existence of middle rparadigms in both Hittite and Indo-European puts the middle ending -r back into Indo-Hittite. Even if we assume that Hittite is simply one of the IE dialects, the evidence for medial r-forms in PIE is still overwhelmingly strong. The semantic aspect is important. There is virtually no positive evidence for a volitive impersonal in -r. But verbal r-forms with middle meaning occur in Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Hittite, Armenian, Phrygian, Venetic, Italic, and Celtic. This proves that not only r-forms, but r-forms with middle meaning, were inherited.]

Abstract: Problems connected with the borrowing of words from language to language have occupied the attention of many linguists. In most cases this attention has been focused on languages of the remote past, where opportunity for first-hand phonetic observation has been cut off entirely. In the meanwhile borrowing has been going on within the United States on a scale rarely equalled in history, between English on the one hand and all the immigrant languages on the other. Here it becomes possible to record by modern means and to study by modern methods the phonetic form of each word in each of its incarnations, foreign, American, or hybrid. In the following study of one such dialect the writer wishes to present a concrete instance of the possibilities inherent in this kind of research. My informant concerning the particular dialect of American Norwegian here discussed is Mr. Odin Anderson, a student at the University of Wisconsin without previous training in linguistics, whose interest had been aroused to the extent that he spent many weary hours preparing a tentatively complete list of the words employed in his Norwegian dialect. That this list is not actually complete is shown by the fact that it contains only some 5500 words (of which about 1300 are English loanwords), which is probably too little for any actual language. In spite of this, it must be regarded as an impressive contribution toward complete knowledge of this very interesting dialect. The gathering of words has reached a point at which new words do not suggest themselves easily, but come to mind only rarely and fortuitously. This vocabulary represents the speech of a specific family living near the town of Blair in western Wisconsin, in the midst of a solidly Norwegian country community. No living member of this family has ever seen Norway,' and my informant is a third generation immigrant. His grandfather and greatgrandfather emigrated from Norway and

Abstract: The term 'polarity' was adopted for linguistic purposes by Carl Meinhof, who introduced it in his comparative account of the Hamitic languages,' published in 1912. Slow at first in gaining currency, this designation has steadily been increasing in popularity; today it stands for a widely recognized principle said to be operative alike in the Hamitic and Semitic languages. This is what Meinhof himself has to say on the subject: 'If under certain conditions A becomes B, B will become A under the same conditions. I call this process polarity for the following reason. The magnet has a positive pole (A) and a negative pole (B). If the positive pole becomes negative under the influence of a stronger magnet, i.e., if A becomes B, the negative pole will turn positive, B becoming A'.2 The author goes on to suggest an explanation for the process. The speakers of the languages involved divide things into two principal categories, such as male and female. A change in classification entails transfer from one category to the other. In Meinhof's own words: 'To put it pointedly,3 what is not a man is necessarily a woman, and what is not a woman must be a man; tertium non datur'. This formulation is based on phenomena observed in three out of the seven groups of Hamitic languages with which the book deals. But even in those three Meinhof notes important exceptions to the

Abstract: ?1. The forty odd years which have elapsed since the first publication of a Tocharian text' leave much for the comparativist to do. As clear as is the affinity of both dialects A and B2 to Indo-European, even so inexplicable are still many of the countless special developments that have led to their remarkable appearance alongside the other languages of the family. It is, in fact, the problem of the relationship of Tocharian to the other Indo-European dialects which has most interested scholars from the very beginning, while very little time has been devoted to the comparative study of the two dialects themselves. Indeed, their interrelationship is as yet quite imperfectly understood. As remarked already by M. Sylvain L6vi,3 in speaking of the vocabulary, the more one observes their fundamental identity, the more one is struck by their divergences. The remark may apply no less appropriately to the phonology. The phonology of Tocharian has proved disconcerting for the comparativist from the very start. The one order of (voiceless) stops from the three (or four) of PIE renders the etymology extremely ambiguous from the point of view of the consonantism alone, especially when coupled with the fact that the three guttural series likewise fall together. But this is not the worst. The vocalism so far has defied almost every attempt that has been made to bring it to order. In 1924

Abstract: [The High German shift of West Germanic initial [k-], currently defined as a shift to an affricate, can be defined in the phoneme system of the dialects only as a shift to a combination of stop plus related spirant [kx-, kh-, gh-]. This definition enables us to apply an exact criterion to some of the dialects. The shift of [k-1 covers a larger territory than appears under the current formulation: it covers all the Upper German (Apfel) dialects and in the west extends beyond them.]

Abstract: Hittite verbs fall into two conjugations, one of which shows in the first person singular active an ending -mi and the other an ending -6i; it is customary to speak of the mi-conjugation and the 6i-conjugation. Now Greek verbs are commonly classified as pF-verbs and wverbs. Consequently it naturally occurred to Hrozn?, Sprache der Hethiter 101, that, as the Hittite ending -mi is identical with Gk. -$L, so Hitt. -hi ought to be identical with Gk. -w. The first attempt to carry through this suggestion in detail has just been published by Couvreur, Annuaire de l'Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves 4.551-73 (1936). Since the author is one of those who accept the laryngeal hypothesis,j he must identify the consonant of the ending -hi with an IE laryngeal. He has some doubt as to whether he should see in it the voiceless spirant, which he writes h and I shall write x, or the voiced spirant, which he writes ' and I shall write y. Since x is held to induce a-color of a neighboring vowel, the former hypothesis requires the assumption that IE bher5 comes from *bhero-ax or *bhero-xa; but the Stosston of Lith. velN, etc., is against such a development (cf. Hirt, Handbuch der griechischen Lautund Formenlehre2 468). Consequently he prefers to start with *bhero-y. This, however, causes difficulty; for Couvreur, Hett. h2 140-94, holds that original y yields Hittite 6, as against hh from x, while the first person singular of the hi-conjugation ends in -hhi when a vowel precedes the ending (e.g. da-ah-4i). He tries to get around the difficulty by citing such orthographies as da-a-ah-i in three or four passages (all still unpublished) beside hundreds of occurrences of da-a6-ki,