Paper presented at the Seventh International Conference on Salish Languages, Bellingham, Washington, August 1972; research supported by the National Science Foundation. (DD)

This paper discusses the relationship between linguistic reconstructions and their historical validity using the case of Old Japanese (8th century A.D.) vowels as an example. Reconstructions throughout the paper include only those cases in which the modern reflexes and phonological correspondences between two or more genetically related languages…

A lexical comparison of four native speakers' spontaneous discourse in the Acadian French spoken in a southern Nova Scotia village with standard spoken French is described. This study is part of a larger study of four regional variations on Nova Scotia Acadian French and has as its objectives both linguistic analysis and improvement of standard…

The author aims: (1) to show that generative phonology uses essentially the method of internal reconstruction which has previously been employed only in diachronic studies in setting up synchronic underlying phonological representations; (2) to show why synchronic analysis should add the comparative method to its arsenal, together with whatever…

The rhyming practices of Sima Xiangru and Wang Bao, early and mid-western Han poets of the Shu area, reveal details about the finals of their languages. Comparisons are made of similarities and differences of their dialects to that of a later compatriot, Yang Xiong. (Author/CB)

As the several specific applications in this paper demonstrate, multidimensional scaling provides a long-needed means for investigating and describing spatial relationships among speech varieties. It is especially applicable to the relationships among varieties of a single language (or more properly, linguistic "cline"), which, as is…