In this Bulletin, Vol. II, pp. 731–54, I have dealt in a preliminary way with the Brit. Mus. Ms. Sloane 1820, the Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais of Father J. Fenicio, Ṣ.J., which forms the common source of certain parts of the Asia Portugueza of M. de Faria y Sousa and of Baldæus' Afgoderye der Oost-Indische Heydenen, and is also the original of the work called Collectio omnium dogmatum & arcanorum ex Purámis sen libris Canonicis Paganorum Indianorum, etc., written before 1789 by the Carmelite Father Ildephonsus a Præsentatione, and now apparently lost. I have also tried to show there in what connexion this uncommonly valuable manuscript stands to another one by Father M. Barradas, S.J., that seems still to be preserved in a private library in Portugal.

Note.— The script used to represent Egyptian Arabic speech in these notes is that of the International Phonetics Association, with the necessary modifications for Egyptian Arabic sounds, as found in Gairdner's Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.

Many grammars of the Japanese spoken language have been written, and some of them are well compiled on more or less scientific principies, but one of the most important characteristics of the spoken language, namely the tones and their laws, have been rather neglected.

1. The following article has grown out of notes made in response to a request from Sir George Grierson for the paradigm of a Shina () transitive verb with a root ending in a consonant, and in reply to a suggestion made by him that the construction with the trs. vb. is agential, i.e. that the ostensibly active trs. vb. is in fact passive, or was originally so.

There is scarcely anything in language so meagrely dealt with by scholars as musical accent. That is particularly the case with such languages as have no so-called etymological tones; but musical accent in “tone languages” has also been most inadequately examined. The reason for this is of course that the student considers himself incapable of clearing up this side of the language he is examining. That it is, however, possible to penetrate very deep into the tone systems of a language without having a sharp ear for music (in the usual sense of the words) is shown in K. E. Laman's The Musical Accent or Intonation in the Kongo Language. This work is undoubtedly a most important attempt to disentangle the musical accents of a tone language, and deserves to be studied by all those who have an interest in such things, not only by Africanists. I do not propose here to give a regular review of it, but as I suppose most readers of this Bulletin do not know Laman's book, I will give a short summary of its contents.

The distinction made between the ākhyāyikā and the kathā by the writers on Sanskrit Poetics is well known. We propose in this paper to consider how far the prescriptions of the rhetoricians apply to the few existing specimens of the ākhyāyikā and the kathā by Subandhu and Bāṇa-bhaṭṭa, and what light, if any, they throw on the development of these species of prose composition in Classical Sanskrit.

Ecce iterum Crispinus! The readers of this Bulletin are doubtless as weary of the dis crambe repetita of the Bhāsa-controversy as I am, and I must crave their indulgence for returning to it in reply to Professor Keith's remarks in Vol. III, p. 295 ff.

The early literature of the Hindi group of languages, that is the literature written in Avadhī, Bihārī, Rājputānī, and Hindi proper, was largely poetical, and prose was rare. In the beginning of the nineteenth century Lallū Jī Lāi and Sadal Miśr entered Dr. Gilchrist's service and at his suggestion translated some early works into modern vernaculars. The works selected were chiefly Sanskrit, and they were translated into Braj or Khaṛī Bolī. Lallū Jī is the better known of the two, but he was not a pioneer, nor was his example followed. For nearly fifty years after he wrote, nothing of real merit was produced in Khaṛī. The practical founder of modern Hindi prose, the man who gave it its impetus and started it on its career of prosperity, was Hariś Chandar. A somewhat exaggerated emphasis has been placed on Lallū's and Sadal Miśr's translations, and this has resulted in a lack of perspective. Lallū has been acclaimed as the “Father of Hindi prose”. The title is inaccurate, and has been made the subject of protest. One Hindi writer, in complaining of his being called the “Creator of Khaṛī Bolī”, maintains that such an idea is entirely erroneous, and remarks that before his books were brought out Sadā Sukh Lāi and Inẖā Allāh were writing in straightforward Hindi. He adds, in an amusing aside, that they wrote on their own initiative and not at the behest of another. He also criticizes Lallu's style as being too much tainted with Braj idioms and poetical turns of expression. Sadal Miśr he regards as Lallu's superior.

A letter received some time ago from my Lamu correspondent, Muhammad bin Abubakar (commonly known as Muhamadi Kijuma), contains a passage which may be translated as follows:—

“Behold these verses: I obtained them from the Watikuu (that is to say), from an aged woman of Rasini; it contains a testimony (to the ancient glories) of Emezi, which was a great country [city?] with mansions of stone, very large, and before the Arabs settled in Africa, it was already in ruins. It lies to the south of Waraka.”

The language of Zanzibar par excellence is Swahili, and Zanzibar may be said to be the home of this language, not in the sense that its oldest form is spoken there, but because the Zanzibar dialect has come to be known best, owing to the writings of such men as Steere, Madan, Sacleux, and, to some extent, Krapf, though his dictionary is mainly devoted to the Mombasa dialect. Also in the days of the opening up of Africa, explorers and traders generally fixed up their caravans in Zanzibar, and these porters and soldiers journeyed into the far interior, some of them remaining there and thus making Swahili a lingua franca understood, as Steere says, along the coasts of Madagascar and Arabia, and in Central or inter-Tropical Africa, as well as by the Seedees (Sidis) in India.

In a paper contributed to the Bhandarkar Commemoration Volume in 1917, Professor S. K. Belvalkar announced the discovery of a new commentary on the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Māṭhara, and identified it with the lost Sanskrit original of the commentary on that work preserved in the Chinese translation of Paramārtha (c. a.d. 550). Commenting on this suggestion in 1918, I observed that derivation of the newly discovered commentary and of Paramārtha from the same source was an alternative possibility. Professor Belvalkar has now, in a paper which was written to form part of the collection presented to Professor Hillebrandt on his 70th birthday, and is pxiblished in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Institue, adduced reasons in support of his original suggestion.

On pages 559–64 of Vol: II of Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris (London. 1874) we find under the date of a.d. 1213 the following curious anecdote regarding King John. The heading runs: Qualiter rex desperans miserit ad admiralium Murmelim. The story, which never seems to have attracted the attention it deserves, is of considerable interest to students of Islamic history, whether it be based on fact or no.