The New Zealand accent belongs to the British group of English accents. There are three main divisions: General New Zealand, which is spoken in most parts of the country, and the accents of Otago, in the south of the South Island, and on the West Coast of the South Island. The three divisions follow the original pattern of settlement. In the North Island, settlement was directed by the New Zealand Company, which founded Auckland and Wellington in 1840; other settlements followed in the late 1840s. In the South, the Anglican Church founded Christchurch and Nelson in the early 1850s. These settlements had the common aim of reproducing English society as it existed in the south of England and drew most of their settlers from persons dispossessed by the Industrial Revolution. The difficulties of life in early New Zealand effectively levelled out social differences, with important effects on the language. Otago was founded in 1848 by the Scottish Free Church. The West Coast was not settled until the Gold Rush of the 1860s attracted miners from the goldfields of Victoria and California. Since that time there has been considerable immigration from the British Isles, at first a mere trickle from Europe and then a flood of Central European refugees after the Second World War. In general the willingness of the average New Zealander to travel for reasons of work or promotion has prevented the growth of regional accents; but the West Coast and Otago tend to keep to themselves, isolated by rough country and their own sense of community.

When Ferdinand de Saussure, the eminent linguist, died in 1913, no publications had resulted from his teachings in general linguistics. After his death, however, several of his disciples published his university lectures from notes taken down by students in class and from Saussure’s personal notes. Today, half-acentury later, the full implications of Saussure’s teachings have still to be elaborated. For a long time, American scholars seemed particularly reluctant to turn to the Cours; reviews or critiques were few and far between. In the words of Einar Haugen: “Rarely does one see a reference in American writings on linguistic theory to the works of de Saussure, Trubetzkoy, or other European writers, although they were the thinkers who gave us the instruments with which we work. I yield to no one in my admiration for Bloomfield and Sapir; but I regard it as a kind of provincialism to suppose that all sound linguistics began with them.” This state of affairs changed rather quickly with the 1959 English translation of the Cours after which the work enjoyed rather unprecedented success. To give only one instance, Noam Chomsky, who had made no important references to Saussure before 1959, referred to him frequently after that date.

A bundle of isoglosses running from the northwest Leningrad area southeast through Moscow divides the Great Russian area into North Great Russian (NGR) and South Great Russian (SGR). The three principal differences between these two areas are said to be: (1) the voiced velar stop [g] in NGR corresponds to the voiced velar fricative [γ] in SGR; (2) NGR has a distinction between /o/ and /a/ in unstressed position whereas SGR does not; and (3) the third person verb ending has a plain (nonpalatalized) /t/ in NGR but not in SGR. This paper deals with the analysis and interpretation of the first of these isoglosses.

In the process of defining the phonological syllable as a unit which may or may not correspond to the phonetic and phonemic definitions of the syllable, a few of what seem to be basic assumptions regarding the nature of syllables have been overridden, the result in Russian and Czech being the accumulation of some residual segments, which are neither syllables nor members of any syllables. These residual segments are called “isolated consonantal microsegments.”

In this paper, we would like to examine one particular definition of the phonological syllable with regard to four criteria for the syllable outlined by Greenberg with particular attention to the fate of the isolated consonantal microsegments (ICM’s).

The purpose of this paper is to show that the term “palatal” has been used with various meanings and to redefine or establish a consistency of terminology concerning this term with respect to palatalized and central consonants. Confusion arising from the various divisions of the tongue into articulators and from the misuse of the above articulatory terms has led to incorrect phonological solutions.

The status of Russian palatalized and palatal consonants has been under discussion recently. Dunatov claims in a recent article that Russian palatal consonants cannot be palatalized and suggests three different orders of palatals to distinguish “the three articulatory sets of palatals encountered in the Slavic languages”: pre-palatal, medio-palatal, and post-palatal. However, he fails to state the distribution of them in Russian or the other Slavic languages.

Traditionally the Latin second singular imperative consists of the bare stem—note Ferdinand Sommer, Handbuch der Lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehre 516 (Heidelberg, 2nd ed., 1948): “Die 2. sg. act. war endungslos und stellte den nackten Verbalstamm dar…”; Ernst Kieckers, Historische lateinische Grammatik 227 (Muenchen, 1962): “Im Imperativ ist die 2. sing. endungslos”; W. M. Lindsay, The Latin Language 516 (Oxford, 1894): “In the 2 Sg. Act. of the Present Imperative the bare stem of the Verb is used….” These conclusions are based on imperative forms such as amā “love,” monē “warn,” tege “cover,” audī “hear,” cape “take,” alongside infinitives amāre, monēre, tegere, audīre, capere.

In a historical phonology three kinds of statements must be made: first, there must be a statement of the changes which convert an earlier or proto A into a later or daughter B; second, there must be a statement of the chronology of these changes relative to one another in the time period AB; and third, a statement of whether or not changes in the language area A produce one (B) or more (C, D,…) later systems, and in the latter case, a statement of the relationships between these distinct systems. The first two kinds of statements have been well formulized. This paper will be concerned with the third, a formulation of language split.