The vocabulary of Khotan Saka of ancient Khotan, Gostana-deśa of Buddhist Sanskrit, has a large fund of basic words; for the philosophy of Buddhism too they made full use of the Buddhist Sanskrit vocabulary, beside a number of north-western Prakrit forms. Many words, however, stand isolated. Their meanings are indeed often assured by bilingual texts or parallel passages in Buddhist literature, but other words are translated speculatively from contexts.

It is well known that during the course of their histories a number of Indo-European languages, all of them members of the Indo-Iranian branch of the family, developed an ergative construction. Thus, in certain tenses of the verb, their grammars came to treat in forlly identical manner the subject of an intransitive verb and the logical object of a transitive verb, the agent (or logical subject) of this latter being given a different morphological marker. Now although ergativity has been studied in a wide variety of languages as a synchronic phenomenon, the opportunities for examining it from a diachronic point of view are in the great majority of cases severely limited by lack of historical documentation. The Indo-Iranian languages, however, form a notable exception. These, thanks to the availability of texts from closely related languages covering a time-span of some three millennia, provide us with a chance to observe both the development of the construction and its subsequent decline. The present paper will do no more than attempt to trace a part of this process, namely the way in which the ergative construction has disappeared from a certain area of western Iranian. It bases its arguments upon the assumption that the geographical continuum of the Kurdish dialects, whose grammars exhibit the whole range of possibilities from fully ergative systems in the north to fully accusative systems in the south, reflects the successive stages of a diachronic process. This being granted, it should be possible by ordering the synchronic patterns of representative dialects from the northern, the central and the southern regions, to arrive at a picture of the historical sequence of events which has led to the loss of ergativity in the southern dialects and to isolate the mechanisms involved in their resultant restructuring. The wider problems of precisely how the construction arose historically and of why within the Indo-European family it appears to be confined to Indo-Iranian will not be dealt with here.

It has been observed (Emeneau (1957), 63–4) that Toda and Kota show loss of many vowels in the non-initial syllables of reconstructed proto-Dravidian (PDr.) or proto-South Dravidian (PSDr.) forms. An attempt was made to state a rule as follows: ‘every non-initial syllable of PSDr. (or perhaps PDr.) that has a short vowel loses its vocalic peak in Toda; vowels of all qualities are lost except that *i > y'. Exceptions were noted, and an attempt was made, with some misgivings, to save the rule by several manoeuvres. One of these was to insist that the rule applied only to pre-Toda short vowels and to note that some at least of the short vowels that appear in non-initial syllables in Toda words ‘originally’ were long vowels, i.e. some Toda short vowels in non-initial syllables were derived from pre-Toda by a rule that stated that PSDr. (or PDr.) long vowels in non-initial syllables became short vowels in Toda and remained as such. This latter rule can be demonstrated to hold for a greater number of examples than the few that were mentioned in the 1957 paper. It should be noted at once that the rule applies only to Toda, and that when cognates are to be found, Kota retains the length of these vowels.

The India Office Library MS Ch ii 003 contains 73 folios of a medical text written alternatingly in Sanskrit and Khotanese. The folios are numbered from 44 to 116. Although the text ends in the middle of a Sanskrit recipe, the beginning of the text has survived. As no title and no colophon are extant and as the text has not been traced elsewhere H. W. Bailey assigned the text the convenient label Jwaka-pustaka ‘The Book of Jivaka’. The text begins as an exposition made by the Bhagavant to the famous physician Jīvaka, called elsewhere in Khotanese ‘the king of physicians’.

It has been recognized from the earliest times, i.e. from Kātyāyana (K) on, that, although Pāṇini's description of Sanskrit is miraculously concise and almost equally comprehensive in those topics it covers, it requires some supplementation. Even so, P's inadequate treatment of adverbs is noteworthy, and the more so as the tradition was remarkably slow to supplement this deficiency. This paper deals with two connected topics: (i) conceptualization and naming of the adverb; (ii) grammatical descriptions of adverbial usage.

Scholars seem to be almost unanimous in admitting that there must have existed striking differences between the ritual institutions which are more or less clearly alluded to in the hymns of the Ṛgveda-saṃhitā, and the systematized rituals described and discussed in the brāhmaṇas and ritual sūtras. It has even been surmised that in ṛgvedic times there did not yet exist one elaborated and practically homogeneous ritual system. The probabilities would rather be in favour of the supposition that the chief Vedic families—in the first place those to which we owe some important collections of hymns—performed divine service according to substantially parallel but partly divergent traditions of their own, which, however, did not fail to influence each other. Evidence of these differences is expected from a careful comparison of the relevant facts found in the so-called family books of the Ṛgveda.

It is a common experience in Avestan studies that a seemingly novel explanation on closer inspection turns out to have already been published long ago but to have been disregarded by all later authors. A case in point is the Gāthic hapax DušƏrƏθrīš Y 49.I

which Hanns-Peter Schmidt (1968), 172 translates as follows: ‘Wahrlich, mit (Lebens-)Dauer erfiillt ist der Verpester, der sehr Grosse! Der ich auf die schlechtbehiiteten (Kühe) hinhören will mit der Wahrheit, o Weisheit…’. While the first line poses many problems, which, however, are not relevant in the context of this brief note, the general meaning of the second is not disputed.

The sculptured frieze that forms the subject of this paper is carved on the main shrine of the Śiva temple at Tārācuram, 5 km. south of Kumpakonam, a provincial town in Thanjavur District, Tamilnadu. Narrative friezes of the great Indian epics are a quite usual feature of Hindu architectural ornament both in India and beyond. It is also the case that individual Tamil Śaiva saints, to whom the collective name in Tamil, Nāyaṉmār, sing. nāyaṉār, is applied, appear commonly in iconography in temples of the Tamil-speaking area. But the frieze at Tārācuram is exceptional in being a portrayal of the complete set of the 63 Nāyaṉmār as they figure in that closely-related group of Tamil medieval texts of which the most important is Cekkiḻār's Pěriya purāṇam. Indeed, as will be shown, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Tārācuram frieze is virtually a set of illustrations to that work, and that the one would tend to confirm the date assumed for the other. Moreover, the various anomalies in Pěriya purānam, such as the total omission of Māṇikkavācakar and the reversing of the logical order of events in the case of Nāyaṉār 51 (N51), Kaḻaṟciṅka nāyaṉār and N54, Pukaḻttuṇai nāyaṉār, are precisely mirrored in the Tārācuram frieze.

Die besondere Keilschrift, die in achämenidischer Zeit zur Wiedergabe altpersischer Texte verwendet wurde, ist seit mehr als einem Jahrhundert immer wieder der Gegenstand von Untersuchungen gewesen. Es ist unmöglich, in dem eingeschränkten Rahmen dieses Festschriftbeitrages die einzelnen Auffassungen vorzuführen und kritisch gegeneinander abzuwägen; als Lecoq 1974 das Gesamtproblem darzustellen unternahm, entstand ein Aufsatz von der Stärke eines Buches. Ich sehe keinen anderen Weg, als aus der Fülle der Literatur über dieses Thema in scheinbar apodiktischer Weise jene Argumente für eine Schrift-Konstruktion in achämenidischer Zeit vorzuführen, die mich überzeugt haben und auf denen ich weiterbauen möchte (u. 2.1–2.3), sowie das einzige mir wesentliche Argument gegen eine Erfindung dieser Keilschrift (u. 3) zu erläutern, um dessen Entkräftung ich mich in diesem Aufsatz bemühen werde.

Among manuscripts and documents collected for the Vrindaban Research Institute (VBI) from the Rādhādāmodara Temple in Vrindaban (Uttar Pradesh) are two (referred to below as documents A and B) which contain the text of testamentary depositions in the name of Jiva Gosvāmī. He is known to have founded the Rādhādāmodara Temple and to have been alive at the dates given in the text. It was Jīva who, consolidating the work of his uncles Sanātana and Rūpa, definitively established Vrindaban as the headquarters of the Caitanyapanthī Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sect. The testament, which envisages both posthumous implementation and possible revocation, contains Jlva's provisions for succession to the custody of the temple, idols, and library. The principal parties involved are known from other documents in the collection, and most names recur in Bhaktamāl and other related literary sources. Its over-riding importance lies, however, in the fact that no written Will has hitherto come to light in India, except those that are clearly influenced by European practice.

It seems appropriate, as a contribution to a volume in honour of a scholar who in a long series of brilliant etymological studies has solved many problems in Indo-Aryan philology, to offer a paper suggesting new etymologies for two Pali compound words which seem to be incorrectly denned in the Pali Text Society's Pali-English dictionary.

From the time of Vararuci on, most scholars, with the exception of some Gujarat Jain writers, have tended to view the Prakrit dialects in terms of Sanskrit and the divergencies from regular Sanskrit derivation have dominated discussions. T. Burrow's studies on the language of the Kharoshti documents from Chinese Turkestan (1931) brought a new perspective to Middle Indo-Aryan, and showed how much Prakrit was of intrinsic interest in its grammatical structure. One of the most striking characteristics of Prakrit is an internal and not a Sanskrit-dominated feature, namely the bewildering profusion of declensional endings and the apparently haphazard manner in which they can be used. Thus in the case of the nominative-accusative plural of the common neuter nouns in -a the grammars state that-ā, -āïm, -āï and -āni are all used in Prakrit (Pischel 1900: 255). It is well known that some of these endings are dialectal variants as will be discussed below, but this does not account for the entire situation. Such a profusion of alternants, and free variation of the kind postulated by Prakrit grammars would be unthinkable in any natural language. It would seem obvious that syntactic and stylistic variation must be involved. An attempt has been made in a recent paper (Schwarzschild (1977)) to show this in connexion with the locative endings and a similar situation is discussed here in relation to the neuter plural endings.

As is generally known, the correspondence Tibetan stes-dbaṅ-gis—Sanskrit daivāt or daivena was proposed by Johannes Nobel and translated by him as ‘durch Schicksalsfügung’ (by dispensation of fate). He did so in his edition of the Tibetan version Udrāyana, offering the correspondence as a conjecture for naivam. The equation has been taken over by Professor Lokesh Chandra into his Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary, though failing to refer to it there as a conjecture. While I do not wish to contest in any way Nobel's conjecture, I thought it useful to adduce certain other correspondences, most of which were found when trying—unsuccessfully so far—to corroborate the conjectuŕe by quotations from actual texts.

As a result of the gradual attrition of final syllables, which caused the Old Iranian nominal plural endings to become insufficiently distinct from those of the singular, the plural was extensively remodelled in almost all Middle and New Iranian languages. Such renovation could come about in two ways. Either the more distinctive pl. inflexions, such as the gen. *-ānām or the instr. and dat. forms containing *b, could be extended or adapted to supply other cases, as happened in Parthian, Šuγnī, etc., or the old pl. could be replaced by a surrogate pl. derived from a sg. collective noun. The latter process is well illustrated by Sogdian, where the usual pi. suffix is -t (oblique -ty) after heavy stems, -t– (obl. -ty') after light stems. As is indicated by the inflexion, which is that of an old ā-stem, and by the fact that f. sg. forms of the articles and demonstratives are used with pl. nouns, this suffix derives from that of the OIr. f. abstract-collective nouns in *-tā-.

In the preface to my restoration of the text of the Vīsaḷadevarāsa I remarked, ‘To the best of my knowledge, it has never before been found necessary to emend an entire text on metrical principles’; and I rather assumed that it was unlikely ever to be found necessary again. I certainly did not imagine that a great part of my work over the next years would be devoted to further large-scale metrical emendation; yet so it has turned out, and what is offered here is an interim progress-report, together with a few tentative generalizing conclusions.

The root dī- is found in the Rgveda some 13 times as dīyati and once as dàyaté (dàyamāna-), including once each with the preverbs nis and pári, and once in Satapatha-brāhmana in the intensive dédīyitavai. Pali has dayati (beside dēti) = uppatati.

The Irulas 2 are a tribal complex of four tribes inhabiting the lower slopes of the northern, eastern and southern parts of the Nilgiri mountains of South India. They speak a tribal language of their own—the ërla na:ya—in four dialects; it belongs, historically, to the Tamil-Malayalam group of South Dravidian.3 Two of the tribes intermarry, so that the Irula complex forms a tribal group of three endogamous units. Linguistically and from the point of social organization, the Irula situation may be thus symbolized as

The creativity of Irula-speaking tribes finds expression mostly in music,4 dance, and above all, in verbal art.5 They have a wealth of oral traditions characteristic for most pre-literary cultures; though modernization—thus far mostly in the socio-economic sphere—has had its impact on the Irula-speaking tribes, the absolute majority of the Irulas are still illiterate. Hence storytelling, oral rendering of myths, legends and genealogies, and other forms of verbal art are still very much alive.