Between the River Tigris at Mosul and the first Kurdish villages some 20 miles to the east there is a strip of territory, extending approximately 40 miles from north to south, inhabited by a variety of peoples professing many religions. The least known of these are three extreme Muslim sects. The first to study them was Father Anastase Marie, in an article concerning the Šabak, the Ṣārlī, and the . These , ‘ Kurds … calling themselves Allāhī’, he places in the villages of ‘Umarkān, Topraq-ziyāra, Tell Ya℈qūb, and Bašpīta. He names ‘Alī-raš, , Xazna, and Tallā;ra as Šabak villages but is clearly wrong in ascribing them to the district. They are, in fact, due east of Mosul, in the same nāḥiya of Ḥamdāanīya (= Bartallā) as Topraq-ziyāra and the other villages.

Prominent among the authors of the ‘Silver Age’ or Renaissance of Georgian literature was Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani (1658–1726). A scion of one of the leading K‘art‘lian princely families, Sulkhan Orbeliani was related on his father's side to the Mukhranian reigning dynasty of Eastern Georgia; his mother, T‘amar, was the daughter of the feudal magnate Zaal, Erist‘avi or Duke of the Aragvi. On becoming a monk in later life Sulkhan replaced his Christian name by that of Saba, and is therefore usually known as Sulkhan-Saba.

Whatever was the original meaning of IE *sneigwh-, it is clear that it already meant ‘snow’ in the time of Indo-European community. Words of that group are to be found in all branches of Indo-European except Hittite, Albanian, Armenian, and Tocharian (of which in any case the recorded vocabulary is small).

The purpose of this essay is to trace in outline the history of the languages used in Calcutta and its environs during a period extending roughly from 1760 to 1840. The languages were Arabic, Bengali, English, Hindustani, Persian, Portuguese, and Sanskrit. Account has been taken of the status of the languages at different times, the people who used them, the extent to which they were used, and the purposes they served. To do this it has been necessary to take a wide view of the history of the period, and make references which properly fall within the field of political, social, religious, and economic history: such as the policies of the East India Company, both in London and Calcutta, the plans and actions of the Christian missionaries, the attitudes and preferences of the main religious communities, the development of education, and the changing opportunities in the economic life of the people.

Fundamental concepts are often the more difficult to define because of their ubiquitous employment, and though the majority of people are content to do without a definition the lack of one stands as a perpetual challenge to human intelligence. Property is just such a concept, standing upon the frontiers of linguistics, law, and logic without deriving final shape from any of them. Since no legal transaction or dealing could take place without it, and since innumerable events familiar to daily life depend upon it for their effectiveness, it seems strange that it is so little understood.

The horizontal division of Indian societies into hierarchically ranked castes and sub-castes has been the subject of a considerable literature, and recent anthropological studies of individual villages have largely concentrated on analysing the function and interrelation of such caste groups. The internal organization or vertical divisions of endogamous castes have, on the other hand, received little attention, though the work of Louis Dumont in Tamilnad, of Kathleen Gough in Malabar, and of Adrian C. Mayer in Madhya Bharat, which is for the most part still unpublished, promises to throw considerable light on the internal structure of castes in these areas.

THERE would seem little to commend the establishment of an etymological equation between Tibetan so ‘tooth’ and Chinese ya of the same meaning, even after substituting for the northern pronunciation ya of the latter word the Cantonese pronunciation nga, which is identical with Karlgren's reconstruction of the ‘ancient’ Chinese sound, and almost identical with his reconstruction of the ‘archaic’ sound value as nga.1

Mr. Tukumi-Syunsuke, the author of the article of which a translation is here offered, is a member of the Sisoo-no-Kagaku Kenkyuukai, or Institute for the Science of Thought, founded in Tookyoo in 1946. The article appeared in the first number of its journal. ‘Study group’ would be a more exact rendering of kenkyuukai than ‘Institute’, but the English title is that used by the members of the group themselves. A survey of the Institute's work has been published by a colleague of mine.

There are, broadly speaking, two uses of language, assertive and expressive. ‘The Marunouti building is in Tookyoo’, ‘1 and 1 are 2’, are assertive statements; their truth can be ascertained by experiment or by logic. ‘Go over there‘, ‘~ is good’, are expressive statements; they are designed to influence the recipient through expressing a state of the utterer. The wartime statement ‘America and Britain are inhuman monsters’ is a pseudo-assertive one.

The phonological structure of the Vietnamese word as used in the system of Vietnamese word classes established in this paper may be stated in terms of syllables. The syllable is denned as the element of Vietnamese having the prosody of one, but not more than one, of the system of six tones set up for the analysis of the Vietnamese language at the phonological level. The syllabic unit is used to refer to an element of text at the grammatical level of analysis corresponding to the syllable at the phonological level. A study of Vietnamese texts enables the following statements to be made:

Since Bleek first introduced the method of classifying nominals in Bantu languages by means of their concord prefixes, and of assigning a number to each class so constituted, this has been the accepted practice in Bantu linguistic studies.

The numbering of the classes is, however, more precisely a means of labelling the different sets of concord prefixes that operate the grammatical agreement in any given language. Nevertheless, as it is in one type of word only, the independent nominal, that the class is an integral characteristic of the word, it is in respect to these nominals that the assorting into classes is important.

A RECONSIDERATION of the material used for my article ‘The monosyllable in Szechuanese’1 in the light of the technique of prosodic analysis being developed in the Department of Phonetics of the School of Oriental and African Studies 2 has led me to believe that it is susceptible of a more rigorous and satisfying treatment, in which some of the apparently eccentric features take a normal place.

An essential part of the prosodic approach is the abstraction of those features that may be regarded as syntagmatic. One feature of this kind is ‘vowel harmony’; prosodic analysis is well equipped to deal with this in terms of x2018;frontness’ and ‘backness’, or ‘openness’ and ‘closeness’, these being treated as characteristic of the entire word or of a considerable part of it.

In the phonological analysis of Tigre a prosodic feature of this kind may be abstracted, the relevant phonetic observation being that there are sequences of open front vowels, and that within those sequences there are no half open central vowels. It is this feature that is referred to in the title as ‘openness’.

The relations within the suffixed forms of the Turkish word havt hitherto been treated as a series of unconnected statements as a result of the phonological and grammatical levels of analysis being made in phonemic terms. ‘Vowel Harmony’, which implies a separating out of the vowels from the rest of the word structure, ‘Consonant Alternance’, and ‘variant’ forms with the implication of consonants ‘changing’ from one form to another, all these are statements not related to the structure of the word, and bring in their train some irregularities in the grammatical statement where none need arise.

Certain parallels between musical structure and linguistic structure have been insisted on by Professor J. R. Firth in several publications. This is an attempt to illustrate a parallel musical and linguistic analysis within a strictly limited field, and in a ‘restricted language’, and thereby to exhibit in this field a congruence of musical and linguistic structuring. It is hoped that the material employed will be of interest as being the first published, examples of songs from the Yurok community.