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Virginia High School students are finding it hard to escape their German studies because their newest study sheet is now available not on VHS, BETA or Channel One; rather, it is now exclusively showing on "PILLOWCASE"! Yes, the bedroom, once the inner sanctum of the teenage existence, is now fair game for foreign language instruction. The format of "PILLOWCASE" involves purchasing bargain white pillowcases and ironing the German student's first name on the front side. (The philosophy here being that personalization will endear the pillowcase to its owner.) These iron-on letters are flat and will not cause disfiguring indentations on the student body. This is not the case with the other side of the pillowcase, where the instructor chose neon-colored tube paints to write the principal parts of 53 strong and weak German verbs. All colors of paint were used to make studying stimulating, and verbs were selected because of the prominent role they play in German speech and the German final exam. In all seriousness, interval study is promoted by the pillowcase theory as well. Besides studying verbs in the classroom, the student will have precious moments before sleep to study verbs without the hassle of digging out a text or study guide. Numerous studies have shown that the last waking moments can be used for very productive learning.

Certainly one of the marks of an educated speaker of English is the ability to distinguish between "lie" and "lay," but an astonishingly small percentage of Americans comes to college with that ability. Surely, then, driving home the distinction with the help of the parallel German opposition liegen/legen is worth a ten-minute digression. Since students are geared to learning principal parts of German verbs, a good way to begin is to ask for volunteers to give the principal parts of "lie" and "lay." Having thus confirmed that there is indeed a problem, one can clarify the difference by asking what hens do and what one should let sleeping dogs do. For reinforcement, the teacher can have the students complete the following sentence: "I am not going to take that down." By this time everyone should realize that these are actually two distinct verbs. The time is then ripe to present the mnemonic crutch: "To lie" means to recline, "to lay" means to place. The former never takes a direct object, the latter always does. The students should be made to understand that if they say "lay" in the present tense without an object, they have used the wrong verb. The contrastive pairs sitzen/setzen and stehen/stellen are also useful in explaining the difference between intransitive and transitive verbs.

AS ANY schoolteacher knows full well, the verb drink is an irregular English verb which has the three principal parts, drink, drank, drunk. These forms, infinitive, preterite, and past participle, and only these, the schoolteacher will tell you, are correct. Moreover, the handbooks, presumably written by experts, will agree with the teacher (or vice versa) and so will the dictionaries and the grammars, even those written by authors who consider themselves enlightened liberals.

IN THEIR TREATMENT of noun inflection our textbooks for the study of German are burdened with over-systematization. In these books the inflectional structure of the noun is divided into the 'strong declension' (which is in turn subdivided into three classes-really declensions), the 'weak declension,' and the 'mixed declension.' For each of these five declensions, paradigms are cited that represent the two or three genders concerned and which, where conditions permit, illustrate the presence or absence of vowel mutation, and also certain other variations of type, with four cases for the singular and four for the plural. Usually there is also given some information as to what kinds of nouns belong in each category-information which, except as it concerns the 'first class strong,' is mostly unsatisfying, and which in any event is more readily assimilable if presented gradually or if acquired through the process of analogy. Often five, or the greater part of five, lessons are devoted to the presentation of the declensions.' The encounter with these convinces the learner, at the very outset, that German has indeed a complicated system of inflection. When the student has learned all the paradigms, together with the accompanying details, he feels that he knows the noun, and unfortunately for him the teacher is too often of the same opinion. And yet, when this system has been mastered, the learning of the noun, even for the most elementary purposes, has been only begun. For the acquired knowledge has but trivial value if the student does not know to which declension this, that, and the other noun belongs. The correct placement of the great majority of nouns-numerous as they are-must be learned for one word at a time. From this there is no escape. The student needs to know the principal parts of all the nouns encountered, or at least those of the more important ones, which are to form his active vocabulary. But this is not at all a hopeless task. For, after all, only a relatively small number of nouns has to be learned during the first

1. In the better known South Dravidian languages, the verb system is such that two principal parts, or two stems, suffice as a basis on which the whole system may be built. The second stem is in general derivable from the first by the addition of a suffix *-ior a suffix containing a dental stop (sometimes disguised by morphophonemic alternations), and is the basis for the past tense alone, or, in some of the languages, for present-future and past tenses, or for other combinations of forms. On the first stem are built all the remaining positive forms and the negative forms. Vocalic alternation within the stems, either of quality or of quantity, is very rare, but in the extremely few verbs where it occurs tends to be persistent throughout the history of all the languages; e.g. the verb 'see' has stems *kan-, *kantin Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Coorg, and Toda, while Kota shows variation between ka-nand kanin the first stem, with leveling begun but not yet completed, or perhaps completed but with the disturbing long vowel reappearing by loan from other languages of the group. Likewise, any deviation from the suffixes given above as forming the second stem is rare. When there is deviation from this norm of two stems with vowels identical and the second stem formed from the first as stated, the verb is irregular. Of the handful of such verbs, two are the subject of this paper, namely the verb meaning 'come' and the verb paired with it in form in South Dravidian languages and variously recorded as meaning 'give' or 'bring.' A comparative study is made with the objects of setting up Proto-Dravidian forms and finding an origin for the irregularities. The study will introduce from my field-notes, most of which are still unpublished, material for Toda, Kota, Coorg, and Kolami,1 and