It is obvious enough that linguists in general have been less successful in coping with tone systems than with consonants or vowels.
No single explanation is adequate to account for this.
Improvement, however, is urgent, and at least three things will be needed.

The first is a wide-ranging sample of successful tonal analyses.
Even beginning students in linguistics are made familiar with an appreciable variety of consonant systems, both in their general outlines and in many specific details.
An advanced student has read a considerable number of descriptions of consonantal systems, including some of the more unusual types.
By contrast, even experienced linguists commonly know no more of the range of possibilities in tone systems than the over-simple distinction between register and contour languages.
This limited familiarity with the possible phenomena has severely hampered work with tone.
Tone analysis will continue to be difficult and unsatisfactory until a more representative selection of systems is familar to every practicing field linguist.
Papers like these four, if widely read, will contribute importantly to improvement of our analytic work.

The second need is better field techniques.
The great majority of present-day linguists fall into one or more of a number of overlapping types: those who are convinced that tone cannot be analysed, those who are personally scared of tone and tone languages generally, those who are convinced that tone is merely an unnecessary marginal feature in those languages where it occurs, those who have no idea how to proceed with tone analysis, those who take a simplistic view of the whole matter.
The result has been neglect, fumbling efforts, or superficial treatment.
As these maladies overlap, so must the cure.
Analyses such as these four will simultaneously combat the assumptions that tone is impossible and that it is simple.
They will give suggestions that can be worked up into field procedures.
Good field techniques will not only equip linguists for better work, but also help them overcome negative attitudes.
Actually, none of these papers says much directly about field techniques.
But it is worth pondering that very little has been published on any phase of field techniques in linguistics.
These things have been disseminated by other means, but always in the wake of extensive publication of analytic results.

The third need is for better theory.
We should expect that general phonologic theory should be as adequate for tone as for consonants and vowels, but it has not been.
This can only be for one of two reasons: either the two are quite different and will require totally different theory (and hence techniques), or our existing theories are insufficiently general.
If, as I suspect, the problem is largely of the second sort, then development of a theory better able to handle tone will result automatically in better theory for all phonologic subsystems.

One issue that must be faced is the relative difficulty of analysis of different phonologic subsystems.
Since tone systems typically comprise fewer units than either consonant or vowel systems, we might expect that they would be the easiest part of a phonologic analysis.
Actual practice does not often work out this way.
Tone systems are certainly more complex than the number of units would suggest, and often analytically more difficult than much larger consonantal systems.

Welmers has suggested one explanation.
Tone languages use for linguistic contrasts speech parameters which also function heavily in nonlinguistic use.
This may both divert the attention of the uninitiate and cause confusion for the more knowledgeable.
The problem is to disentangle the linguistic features of pitch from the co-occurring nonlinguistic features.
Of course, something of the same sort occurs with other sectors of the phonology: consonantal articulations have both a linguistic and an individual component.
But in general the individual variation is a small thing added onto basic linguistic features of greater magnitude.
With tone, individual differences may be greater than the linguistic contrasts which are superimposed on them.
Pitch differences from one speaker to another, or from one emotional state to another, may far exceed the small differences between tones.
However, any such suggestion accounts for only some of the difficulties in hearing tone, or in developing a realistic attitude about tone, but not for the analytic difficulties that occur even when tone is meticulously recorded.

A second explanation is suggested by the material described in Rowlands' paper.
Tone and intonation often become seriously intermeshed.
Neither can be adequately systematized until we are able to separate the two and assign the observed phenomena individually to one or the other.
Other pairs of phonologic subsystems also interact or overlap in this way;
for example, duration sometimes figures in both the vowel system and the intonation.
Some phonetic features, for example glottal catch or murmur, are sometimes to be assigned to segmental phonemics and sometimes to accentual systems.
But no other two phonologic systems are as difficult to disentangle as are tone and intonation in some languages.
This explanation of tone difficulties, however, does not apply in all languages.
In some (the Ewe type mentioned above) interaction of tone and intonation is restricted to the ends of intonation spans.
In many of the syllables, intonation can be safely ignored, and much of the tonal analysis can be done without any study of intonation.
Still, even in such languages tone analysis has not been as simple as one might expect.

A third explanation is suggested by Richardson's analysis of Sukuma tone.
There we see a basically simple phonemic system enmeshed in a very complex and puzzling morphophonemic system.
While the phonemes can be very easily stated, no one is likely to be satisfied with the statement until phonemic occurrences can be related in some way to morphemic units, i.e. until the morphophonemics is worked out, or at least far enough that it seems reasonable to expect success.

In the "typical tone language", tonal morphophonemics is of the same order of complexity as consonantal morphophonemics.
The phonemic systems which must support these morphophonemic systems, however, are very different.
The inventory of tones is much smaller, and commonly the contrasts range along one single dimension, pitch level.
Consonantal systems are not merely larger, they are multidimensional.
Morphophonemic rules may be thought of as joining certain points in the system.
The possibilities in the consonantal system are very numerous, and only a small portion of them are actually used.
Phonemes connected by a morphophonemic rule commonly show a good bit of phonetic similarity, possible because of the several dimensions of contrast in the system.
Tonal morphophonemics, in a common case, can do nothing but either raise or lower the tone.
The possibilities are few, and the total number of rules may be considerably greater.
Often, therefore, there are a number of rules having the same effect, and commonly other sets of rules as well, having the opposite effect.
Tonal morphophonemics is much more confusing to the beginning analyst than consonantal morphophonemics, even when the total number of rules is no greater.

The difficulty of analysis of any subsystem in the phonology is an inverse function of the size -- smaller systems are more troublesome -- for any given degree of morphophonemic complexity.
This hypothesis will account for a large part of the difficulties of tonal analysis, as well as the fact that vowel systems are often more puzzling than consonantal systems.
The statement of the system is a different matter.
Smaller systems can of course be stated much more succinctly.
A phonemic system can be stated without reference to morphophonemics, but it cannot always be found without morphophonemics.
And the more complex the morphophonemic system is in relation to the phonemic base, the less easily a phonemic system will be analysed without close attention to the morphophonemics -- at least, the less satisfying will a phonemic statement be if it cannot be related through morphophonemic rules to grammatically meaningful structures.

The design of orthographies has received much less attention from linguists than the problem deserves.
There has been a tendency on the part of many American linguists to assume that a phonemic transcription will automatically be the best possible orthography and that the only real problem will then be the social one of securing acceptance.
This seems naive.
Most others have been content to give only the most general attention to the broadest and most obvious features of the phonology when designing orthographies.
Apparently the feeling is that anything more would be involvement in technical abstrusenesses of possible pedantic interest but of no visible significance in practical affairs.
The result of this attitude has been the domination of many orthography conferences by such considerations as typographic 'esthetics', which usually turns out to be nothing more than certain prejudices carried over from European languages.
Many of the suggested systems seem to have only the most tenuous relationship to the language structures that they purport to represent.
Linguists have not always been more enlightened than "practical people" and sometimes have insisted on incredibly trivial points while neglecting things of much greater significance.
As a result, many people have been confirmed in their conviction that orthography design is not an activity to which experts can contribute anything but confusion.

A. E. Sharp, in Vowel-Length And Syllabicity In Kikuyu, examines one set of related orthographic questions and its phonologic background in detail.
His objective is merely to determine "what distinctions of length and syllabicity it may be desirable to make explicit in a Kikuyu orthography" (59).
To do so, he finds it necessary to examine the relevant parts of the phonology thoroughly and in detail.
In the process, he develops some very significant observations about problems of a sort that are often difficult.
A few of his examples are of very great interest, and the whole discussion of some importance for theory.
His orthographic recommendations are no simplistic acceptance of phonemics on the one hand or of superficiality on the other.
Rather he weighs each phonologic fact in the light of its orthographic usefulness.
He concludes that some changes can be made in the current orthography which will appreciably improve its usefulness, but hesitates to suggest precise graphic devices to effect these changes.
I hope his suggestions are given the consideration they deserve in Kikuyu circles.
This, however, will not exhaust their practical usefulness, as they rather clearly indicate what thorough phonologic investigation can contribute to orthography design.
We need many more studies of this sort if the design of written languages is to be put on a sound basis.

One other paper deals with a phonologic problem: Vowel Harmony In Igbo, by J. Carnochan.
This restates the already widely known facts in terms of prosodies.
As a restatement it makes only a small contribution to knowledge of Igbo.
But it would seem more intended as a tract advocating the prosodic theory than a paper directed to the specific problems of Igbo phonology.
The paper has a certain value as a comparatively easy introduction to this approach, particularly since it treats a fairly simple and straightforward phenomenon where it is possible to compare it with a more traditional (though not structural) statement.
It does show one feature of the system that has not been previously described.
But it does not, as it claims, demonstrate that this could not be treated by traditional methods.
It seems to me that it rather easily can.

Five of the papers deal with grammatical problems.
On the whole they maintain much the same high standard, but they are much more difficult to discuss in detail because of their wider variety of subject matter.
My comments must be briefer than the papers deserve.

W. H. Whiteley writes on The Verbal Radical In Iraqw.
This must be considered primarily an amendment and supplement to his early A Short Description Of Item-Categories In Iraqw.
It exhibits much the same descriptive technique and is open to much the same criticisms.
The treatment seems unnecessarily loose-jointed and complex, largely because the method is lax and the analysis seems never to be pushed to a satisfactory or even a consistent stopping-point.