Our attention has been drawn by Mrs. Chadwick1 to the need for systematic work on the collection and study of the unwritten literature—the thought of men in artistic form, to use her own phrase—of the peoples of Africa. This article raises very briefly certain points in connection with this study and attempts to illustrate them from Igbo unwritten literature. The causes for the comparative neglect of any thorough research work on African unwritten literature cannot be discussed here. But in passing one may note the tendency to rely predominantly on visual observation which has spread from the natural sciences to other fields and among them to that of social anthropology. It can, however, hardly be doubted that a systematic collection and study of this literature is desirable from the linguistic, the sociological, and the literary point of view.

One of the more obvious facts about the occurrence of grammatical concord in a language is the possibility of classifying the words -that operate the concord. The simplest kind of classification is one in which a class consists of all those words which require or display a particular set of agreements. In this way a definite number of classes is established, but there is no indication of any relationship between the classes, indeed the nature of such relationships, if any, is a subject for further investigation. As is widely known, in Bantu languages grammatical concord is operated by means of prefix agreement, a fact which is moreover one of the criteria used to determine whether or not a given language is to be accepted as Bantu. For this reason it is possible to examine on a general basis certain features of the class system of these languages that is involved in the use of concord.

THE purpose of these notes is to suggest a new approach in the study of articulation with the aid of palatography.

The language material studied consists of words in English, Marathi, Burmese, Chinese, and Fijian uttered for the purpose by native speakers of the languages, trained to work with artificial palates.

It must constantly be borne in mind that utterances are events, not facts. The finding and the stating of the facts are the business of the phonetician. He attempts this by means of a set of correlated techniques each one of which makes its own specialized abstractions from the utterances. The findings are stated in the technical syntax and idiom of the discipline, employing categories and notations required by the conceptual framework.