ALBERT MOREY STURTEVANT: Initial h before l, n, r in Old Icelandic. 169 WALTER PETERSEN: The Italic Imperfect. 175 FRANCIS A. WOOD: Some Words for 'South'. 184 Notes and Personalia. ROLAND G. KENT: Oscan Deketasio-. . AURELIO M. ESPINOSA: The Language of the Cuentos populares españoles. !. Book Reviews.. Books Received..... 187 .. 188 199 208 211 WAVERLY PRESS, INC. Founded 1924 OFFICERS FOR 1927 President, PROFessor Carl DarLING BUCK, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. Vice-President, Professor Edgar Howard SturteVANT, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Secretary and Treasurer, PROfessor Roland G. KENT, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. Executive Committee, the preceding, and PROFESSOR EDWARD SAPIR, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. PROFESSOR LEONARD BLOOMFIELD, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. PROFESSOR EDWARD PROKOSCH, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pa. Committee on Publications: Chairman and Editor: PROFESSOR GEORGE MELVILLE BOLLING, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Term expiring 1927: PROFESSOR DANIEL BUSSIER SHUMWAY, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. Term expiring 1928: PROFESSOR AURELIO M. ESPINOSA, Stanford University, California. Term expiring 1929: PROFESSOR SAMUEL MOORE, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. The Linguistic Society of America was founded in December, 1924, for the advancement of the scientific study of language. The Society plans to promote this aim by bringing students of language together in its meetings, and by publishing the fruits of research. It has established both a quarterly journal and a series of monographs; the latter will appear at irregular intervals, according to the material offered to the Committee on Publications and the funds available for the purpose. Members will receive both in return for the annual dues of Five Dollars. Membership in the Society is not restricted to professed scholars in linguistics. All persons, whether men or women, who are in sympathy with the objects of the Society, are invited to give it their assistance in furthering its work. Application for membership should be made to the Secretary, Professor Roland G. Kent, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. Entered as Second Class Matter at the Postoffice at Baltimore, Maryland. This Journal is published quarterly by the Linguistic Society of America. Members of the Society receive it without extra charge, three dollars of the annual dues being appropriated for this purpose; to others, its price is five dollars per annum. Subscriptions and other business communications should be addressed to Language, or to Roland G. Kent, Treasurer, L. S. A., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. Manuscripts for publication should be sent to George Melville Bolling, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. THE e-PERFECT IN HITTITE E. H. STURTEVANT YALE UNIVERSITY The Hittite documents show many instances of an interchange of the vowels e and a. Since the variation is not uniform, and neither vowel of the pair is restricted to any phonetic surroundings or morphological categories, we must apparently assume several causes, and sound method requires the separate treatment of groups of words which show parallel phenomena. In this paper I propose to discuss the variation in monosyllabic verbal roots which end in a consonant. That the matter needs elucidation appears from these typical examples: ešzi 'he is' ari 'he has arrived' aranzi 'they have arrived' erir 'they had arrived' Hrozný1 discussed the variation in the radical syllable of verbs, but without coming to any satisfactory conclusion. Forrer2 groups together paradigms of a number of verbs which exhibit the phenomenon, under the captions: 'Umlaut von Verben der mi-Konjugation' and 'Umlaut von Verben der hi-Konjugation'. Tenner supplements the forms given by Forrer, and remarks quite justly: 'Mit dem nur vor i eintretenden germanischen Umlaut hat dieser hethitische Vokalwechsel jedenfalls nichts zu tun'. Tenner confines his attention to three verbs of the hi-conjugation, and precisely these verbs, I think, suggest the true source of the variation in most of the words discussed by Hrozný and Forrer. The verbs are citable as follows: 1 Die Sprache der Hethiter 169, 170f. (1917). 2 Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft NF 1.213f. (1922). Ein Hethitischer Annalentext des Königs Mursilis II 18f. (Leipzig, 1926). With the exception of the forms printed in italics, these verbs show the vowel a in the singular, the third person plural present and imperative, and in the participle, while the vowel e appears throughout the plural, except the third person present and imperative. The few forms which vary from this scheme are of course to be explained by analogy. = I have pointed out that some of the personal endings of the Hittite hi-conjugation are remarkably similar to those of the Indo-European perfect tense (2nd sing. ti tha, 3rd sing. i = e, 3rd pl. pret. ir beside Skt. ur, Lat. ĕre, s frequently inserted before second personal endings as in Lat. vidisti, vidistis, etc.). If, then, the hi-conjugation is in part identified with the Indo-European perfect, the stem-vowel e in the plural of our three verbs is to be equated with Germanic plurals like Gothic bērum 'we bore' beside bar 'he bore'. The fact that there is usually no indication of length in the e-forms cited above does not constitute an objection. If the original vowel quantities survived in Hittite, at any rate they cannot be inferred from the orthography of our documents; e-eš-zi = tori 'he is' and e-šá-ri = ἧσται “he sits are typical examples. The correctness of our equation becomes obvious upon a closer scrutiny of the three verbs. Other Hittite words clearly related with LANGUAGE 2. 33f. (1926). |