Digressões Lexicológicas. Pp. 256. By JOSÉ JOAQUIM NUNES. Lisbon: Livraria Clássica Editora de A. M. Teixeira e Ca. (Filhos), 1928.

All but two of the twenty-four chapters of this volume first appeared as separate articles in a newspaper of Rio de Janeiro. They are thus a work of linguistic popularization and Dr. Nunes has presented his many and varied subjects in the form of pleasant familiar essays.

The book is divided into two parts: Language and Grammar. The first part contains chapters on the following subjects: Gallicisms in Portuguese, the history of the Portuguese pronouns of address, semantics, the rôle of metaphor in everyday speech, doublets, popular etymology, and various other etymological problems. The second part deals chiefly with the morphological history of the various parts of speech. A chapter on the formation of the plural of nouns ending in l and of nouns ending in a nasal contains an interesting and original study of intervocalic n. There follow chapters on the rôle of analogy in the development of adjectives and verbs, and a chapter on the development of the definite and indefinite articles.

Probably the most important chapter in the book is the one on the personal infinitive. Dr. Nunes rejects his own theory and that of Prof. Leite de Vasconcellos, that the personal endings were added to the infinitive through analogy with the finite tenses of the verb, particularly the future subjunctive, and accepts the theory of Dr. José Maria Rodrigues, that this peculiar tense is derived from the Latin imperfect subjunctive, which disappeared in general from the Romance languages, but which was, so far as form is concerned, an inflected infinitive. This theory is interesting, but it would seem that the theory of Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, 'Der portugiesische Infinitiv', Romanische Forschungen 7.79, which is, in fact, a variation of Dr. Nunes own rejected theory (Gramática Histórica Portuguesa 309), must also be given due consideration. In Old Spanish there is found a pronoun mos which probably results from a confusion of the verb ending -mos with nos. A form mosotros is also found. Now Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos believes that what was first a pronoun assumed the combined rôle of suffix and pronoun with the infinitive and later the rôle of suffix alone, and that from this beginning the infinitive took on the other personal endings.

Students of Portuguese will do well to read these delightful essays on the Portuguese language.

EDWIN B. WILLIAMS

NOTES AND PERSONALIA

AT THE CLOSE OF THE SKETCH OF MAURICE BLOOMFIELD's life mention was made (LANGUAGE 4. 217) of a work that he had left unpublished. On account of the importance of the enterprise and the wide range of its linguistic interest it seems desirable to give a fuller account of it. Professor Franklin Edgerton, whom Bloomfield had chosen to cooperate with him, sends at the request of the editor the following description:

VEDIC VARIANTS

By the late MAURICE BLOOMFIELD

AND

FRANKLIN EDGERTON

I. BASIS OF THE WORK

This work is based on Bloomfield's Vedic Concordance (Cambridge, Mass., 1906; Harvard Oriental Series, Vol. 10).

The Concordance is 'an alphabetic index to every line of every stanza of the published Vedic literature and to the liturgical formulas thereof, that is an index to the Vedic mantras, together with an account of their variations in the different Vedic books' (title-page). It contains some 90,000 entries, each consisting of a 'pada' or half-line (the smallest metrical unit, commonly 8-12 syllables) of a metrical text, or of a prose formula used in a prose liturgical text. Some fifty important Vedic texts, and a considerable number of minor ones, are here completely indexed in so far as they contain verses or liturgical formulas used in any part of the extensive Vedic ritual.

Of the ca. 90,000 entries, not far from one-third occur more than once, sometimes in the same text, more often in different ones. Some are repeated many times. Counting these repetitions, there are probably over 180,000 individual quotations in the Concordance.

Of the repeated text-units recorded, perhaps 30,000 in all, it is estimated that about one-third show variants. It is with the variant readings of these repeated mantras, numbering roughly 10,000, that the present work is concerned.

II. ITS INTEREST AND IMPORTANCE

As to extent, the variations range all the way from change of a single letter in a single word, to radical rearrangements of the whole text. They may or may not be accompanied by shift of meaning, great or slight. They may be assumed to have been made sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. As to character, they are of the most varied sort. They concern phonetics, the interrelation of different sounds and sound-changes; various departments of morphology, such as formation of stems of nouns, pronouns, and verbs, their inflection, and suffixation; syntax; order of words in the sentence; synonyms; meter; etc. There is hardly an important paragraph in Vedic grammar, or a department of the textual criticism and exegesis of the Veda, on which they fail to throw light. The future study of the Veda will rest heavily on them.

But that is by no means all. For general linguistics the Variants will have extraordinary interest and value. The literature of the world happens to contain no analogous body of material which can compare with them in size and scope. The tradition of the Veda was mainly, and at first exclusively, oral; and 'what was originally one and the same stanza or formula was handed down in the texts of the various schools in more or less varying forms. The variants are often of the same general character as those which appear in the various forms of ballads, or of church hymns: there are simple differences in the order of words; differences due to the substitution of a more familiar, handy, or modern word or grammatical form for an archaic, inconvenient, or obsolescent one of equivalent meaning or function [or the converse of this, due to a conscious archaizing tendency]. To this must be added the very important point that there are also many cases in which a given mantra passage, composed under certain definite circumstances, was later on adapted and changed to serve a new purpose. Furthermore, Vedic literary production is often in a high degree imitative and mechanical [a trait which it shares with most religious literature]. The poets or priests, more or less consciously, fell into habits of expression such that entire lines of different stanzas or hymns, and considerable sequences of words of different prose passages, show much similarity.' So, but for the bracketed phrases, Bloomfield wrote in the Preface to the Concordance, before he had systematically studied the Variants. Later he would probably have laid greater stress on the presumably unconscious element in the variations, which was perhaps at least as weighty as the conscious, and is certainly at least as interesting linguistically. The

writer, at any rate, suspects that we learn even more about the speechhabits of the Vedic priests from the changes which they introduced without realizing it, than from their deliberate alterations. But whether conscious or unconscious-and at this distance it is obviously impossible to separate the two classes with confidence-any linguistic scholar will see at a glance how many interesting observations can be drawn from these thousands of variations, touching on every field of grammar and of linguistic psychology.

III. PRESENT STATUS

From the pages of the Concordance, Bloomfield collected and classified the Variants, arranging them topically under ten or a dozen main heads, with numerous subdivisions in each; of course very many passages had to be included several times over under different headings. This preliminary spade-work was completed when he proposed to his pupil, the present writer, a collaborative enterprise, which offer was gladly accepted. This was about 1913. In the next half-dozen years I worked up a preliminary draft of four of the major sections of the work (Nos. 2–5 below), and Bloomfield completed the most of No. 1. There the matter rested, for lack of prospect of publication; altho many Vedic scholars the world over have been impatiently waiting for it.

On Bloomfield's death in 1928, I took charge of the entire body of materials; and in the past months I have been revising and completing the section on the Verb, which he had nearly finished. It seems best to publish it first, since most of it can be issued substantially as it came from the pen of one of the greatest Vedists and linguistic scholars of the world. It will be ready for the printer by June, 1929. Each of the following four sections could be prepared for the press in a few months. The remaining sections exist only in the form of rough lists taken from the Concordance by Bloomfield.

IV. CONSPECTUS OF SECTIONS OF THE WORK

1. The Verb. Estimated 350 printed pages. Ready in June 1929. Principal divisions: Voice, Mood, Tense, Person, Number, Secondary Conjugations, Interchange between finite verbs and verbal nouns or adjectives, Augment and Reduplication, Stemgradation. All except chapters on Person and Number were left in virtually final form by Bloomfield; these two chapters have been written by Edgerton. The results are illustrated by the fascinating article by Bloomfield 'On instability in the use

of moods in earliest Sanskrit,' American Journal of Philology 33.1 ff., which was a preliminary sketch for the chapter on Mood, presenting however only a small selection from its materials. 2. Phonetics, including Euphonic Combination ('sandhi'). Est. ca. 600 printed pages. The longest and possibly the most interesting section. Interchanges between different individual sounds, and their diverse treatment in combination with other sounds; simplification of consonant groups; rhythmic and metrical influences on sounds; haplology and dittology; assimilation, metathesis, and other 'irregular' changes; vowel-gradation or 'ablaut'; etc. etc. One specially interesting feature, cropping out at many points, concerns the influence of popular dialects on the literary and learned language of the Veda, as evidenced by 'Prakritic' phonology, that is phonetic features which appear centuries later in the literary and inscriptional remains of Middle-Indic or Prakrit dialects derived from Sanskrit. Stray instances of this sort of thing have been noticed before, but no one has suspected the enormous scope of it as revealed by the Variants, which will furnish the basis for a new stage in Indian dialectology. The ms. of this section was prepared primarily by Edgerton but received considerable attention from Bloomfield. Except the Verb section it is nearest to completion and could be prepared for press in a short time.

3. Noun Formation. Est. 300 printed pages. Stem and suffix formation of nouns and adjectives. The major part deals with nominal suffixes, and presents a mass of material quite unprecedented hitherto for the study of this very interesting department of linguistics.

4. Noun Inflection. Est. 450-500 printed pages. Case, number, and gender of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. Important for morphology (formally equivalent case-endings, etc.), but even more for syntax (interchange between cases, etc.). For instance, the surprising fact comes out that every single one of the eight cases of the Sanskrit noun interchanges with every other one, usually very many times; except that by a whimsical chance we have not noticed any interchange between vocative and locative. What does this mean? The answer is too long and complicated to give here, but no linguist could fail to be interested in it.