In studies on English phonology it has often been pointed out that sp, st, sk present difficulties of interpretation. In by far the majority of these studies a bisegmental interpretation has been adopted, and the discussion has then turned on the identity of the second elements of these consonant clusters. Should the stop constituents be analysed as /p, t, k/, /b, d, g/, or /P, T, K/ (i.e. archiphonemes)? In the American structuralist school a /p, t, k/ analysis has usually been preferred on the basis of ‘ phonetic realism’ (e.g. Swadesh 1934, Pike 1947, Trager and Smith 1951), but it has subsequently been demonstrated that the stops after s are phonetically more similar to /b, d, g/ than to /p, t, k/ (Lotz et al. 1960, Reeds and Wang 1961, Davidsen-Nielsen 1969). In Praguean phonology, e.g. Trubetzkoy 1939, an archiphonemic solution has been advocated.

One peculiarity of St. Lawrence Island (SLI henceforth) Eskimo is the vowel lengthening which is triggered by the [ə] (or [ɨ]).Such vowel lengthening only takes place in the first syllable and under certain phonological conditions. The vowel thus lengthened assumes the full length of a long vowel, distinct from a short vowel and a ‘fake’ long vowel.

It has been observed (Halliday 1967: 33–34, 54–55 ; cf. Crystal 1969: 273, ix, and Lee 1960: 58–59, with different tonality treatment) that the fall-rise nuclear tone in such sentences as

I ˈdidn't ˈcome because of the ˅food.

The following specimen is a version of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ in the Breton dialect of Groix, an island situated off the south coast of Brittany. Groix Breton belongs to the Vannetais dialect group. It has been described in the author's Grammaire structurale du Breton de l'Île de Groix (Ternes 1970).

Linking /r/ concerns words having as final phoneme in isolate pronunciation either /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ or one of the five phonemes involving a (final) central vowel /ə, ɜ, ɪə, eə, ʊə/. When any of these is followed closely by a word beginning with one of the English vowel sounds an /r/ may be heard. The Gimson 1970 treatment of this topic contains detailed comments on the limitation of the operation of this pattern in situations where many or most speakers are inhibited from applying the rule to link owing to the influence of popular conceptions of incorrectitude in regard to the uttering of /r/ where no r is represented in the traditional orthography. However, it contains no explicit reference to the dependence of the r-link on either the segmental or the prosodic environments which the words involved in the r-link provide. On the other hand, Ward 1939 and various works of Jones (1918, 1956a, 1956b, 1956c) described at some length ‘special circumstances in which a final r has no consonantal value even when the following word begins with a vowel’ (Jones 1956b : § 757). Gimson 1970 makes no reference to such cases nor to Jones's mention of them. The enquirer must therefore wonder whether there is no reference to such exceptional cases because they are no longer current or merely from pressures of space or possibly from uncertainty. Gimson's revision of the Jones 1956a text of Jones's Explanations in Jones-Gimson 1967, which makes several minor amendments, leaves the fairly lengthy treatment of linking /r/ unaltered.