[Criticism of Kurylowiez' development of the theory that IE ǝ was a consonant. His studies have led to a number of acceptable etymologies; but these can be explained on the earlier assumptions, while a number of others are inconsistent with the theory, which as a whole cannot be maintained. Hittite h is the continuant of an Indo-Hittite consonant that was lost in Indo-European.]

My younger editorial colleagues, to whom the entire credit for this book is due, have asked me to add some personal account of Professor Curme, with whom I have had the closest association for thirty-six full years. Perhaps no man in the world is less concerned about publicity than my friend: he discovered his grande passion, Linguistic Research, very early in life, and his unwavering devotion has left no room for smaller ambitions.

The remarkable poetical quality exhibited in the Brut of Layamon is perhaps hardly recognized at its true value even by students of our earlier literature. The rather excessive length of this work has probably deterred many from a careful and thorough perusal, and it is likely that the number of those who have read it right through is not large. The Present writer believes that lovers of English poetry will be well repaid by such a study and he has attempted to display some of the chief beauties of the Brut in an article which appeared in the January 1930 number of the Review of English Studies.

[Greek κάραβοs is not the source of the Slavic word, as is frequently assumed, but is borrowed from it. The Slavic term can be explained as a derivative of IE *qer ‘cut’. It passed also into Latin as carabus. See also the summary at end of the article.]

[Hittite shows no trace of assibilation or palatalization of the gutturals, and so the development of the Indo-European palatals seems to have been subsequent to the Indo-Hittite period. Hittite shows an independent phoneme (u or ) corresponding to the labial element of the IE labiovelare, and this state of affairs must be assumed for IH also. The loss of this labial sound had begun under certain circumstances in IH, and it continued in primitive IE and in the historic IE languages.]

The bibliography contains general works and the more important books and articles in which the accentuation of compounds in the various IE languages is discussed. The abbreviations which are employed in the text are inserted here in parentheses.

In Neue Jahrb. 43. 385 ff. (1919) L. Deubner revives the idea that the word paean is originally an apotropaic cry for help, without particular verbal signification and derived from Cretan magic. It develops, he maintains, from the wild leap of the Cretan medicineman into the song of Apollo; and, comparing the word with ejaculations such as λ∈λ and λαλαi he includes also the refrain of the marriage hymn In the course of a long discussion of the paean he dismisses among other ‘Irrlichter’ the derivation of the word proposed by me in 1911 at a meeting of the American Philological Association, and afterward published in the Classical Review. Most of my arguments are summed up by Deubner in an ‘etc’. I have discussed the matter further in Troy and Paeonia (New York, 1925) and as I had not read Deubner's article at the time of my last writing on the subject, I should like now to consider some of his statements which appear to me wrong or misleading, and to strengthen by a new emphasis my suggested derivation for paean.

In 1927 I published in this Journal (3. 71–86) a study on 'The Inflection of the Present Indicative Active in Indo-European.' Since that time, further investigation, particularly along the lines of vocalic alternation (apophony, 'Ablaut'), with its underlying factor of accent, has led me to conclusions which seem to me so much deeper in foundations and, in a measure, so much broader in results that I regard that older discussion as practically supplanted by the one which I now present.

[The Indo-European affinities of the Hittite language being now generally accepted as proved by the inflectional forms and most of the usual criteria, the primary desideratum of linguistic scholars is the further association of Indo-European etymologies with the known Hittite vocabulary, which has so far proceeded more slowly. The subjoined etymologies are offered in the hope of adding something to our identification of the elements in the Hittite word-list.]

The development of the original diphthongs in Hittite has seemed to be a peculiarly difficult problem; but evidence has gradually accumulated until something like a system has emerged. We may now say that all the original short diphthongs appear in Hittite as monophthongs, whereas the original long diphthongs retain their diphthongal character. It is not always possible to distinguish with certainty between the several diphthongs; but it will promote clearness if I treat them separately, as far as possible.