even in dialects with /z/ in greasy, the verb to grease always has /s/). Note 2: the phoneme does not alternate with (and never did). In native words, is from *sk, and either the change of this sequence to postdated the rearranging of voicing in pre-Old English fricatives, or else it was phonetically long between vowels, originally, much like the of present-day Italian (pesce "fish" is phonetically ) and long fricatives, just like sequences of fricatives, were always voiceless in Old English, as in cyssan "to kiss". The Early Modern English development of < */sj/, as in nation, mission, assure, vastly postdated the period when fricatives became voiced between vowels. Note 3: a common misstatement of cases like OE /f/ > Modern English /f, v/ is that a "new phoneme" has been created. Not so. A new contrast has been created. Both NE /f/ and /v/ are new phonemes, differing in phonetic specifications and distribution from OE /f/. Without doubt, one component in this misunderstanding is the orthography. If, instead of speaking of the development of Old English /f/ we said that OE split into /f/ and /v/, there would presumably be less confused talk of "a" new phoneme arising in the process. Loss In Hoenigswald's original scheme, loss, the disappearance of a segment, or even of a whole phoneme, was treated as a form of merger, depending on whether the loss was conditioned or unconditioned. The "element" that a vanished segment or phoneme merged with was "zero". The situation in which a highly inflected language has formations without any affix at all (Latin alter "(the) other", for example) is quite common, but it is the only one (nominative singular masculine: altera nominative singular feminine, alterum accusative singular masculine, etc.) of the 30 forms that make up the paradigm that is not explicitly marked with endings for gender, number, and case. From a historical perspective, there is no problem since alter is from *alteros (overtly nominative singular and masculine), with the regular loss of the short vowel after *-r- and the truncation of the resulting word-final cluster *-rs. Descriptively, however, it is problematic to say that the "nominative singular masculine" is signaled by the absence of any affix. It is simpler to view alter as more than what it looks like, /alterØ/, "marked" for case, number, and gender by an affix, like the other 29 forms in the paradigm. It