Section 1. General

Until the publication in the Gaekwar's Oriental Series XXXVII of the Apabhramśakvyatrayi (AKT) (edited with Sanskrit Introduction, Notes, and Appendices by the Jain pandit Lalchandra B. Gandhi) in 1927, the existence of prose Apabhramśa was unknown. This work, however, able though it is, is not much utilized or even consulted, and the extracts from the Kuvalayamālā Kahā, which he uses as illustrations, have never been discussed from a linguistic point of view. The whole of the Kuvalayamālā (as it is also called) has never been published, and it is an original work of linguistic importance.

Though not invariably susceptible of demonstration, the influence of Classical Arabic upon the popular literature of Arabic-speaking Muslims in North Africa may safely be assumed. ‘Popular’, indeed, the early Islamic verse forms (ši'r mawzūn) and the later stanzaic compositions (klam or ālat al-andalus) have remained, and in these, even when modified by local tradition, the source of inspiration is easily recognized. Less clear is the transfer pattern of classical elements in the strictly vernacular poetry (klam melḥūn) of the same people. It is this category of composition with which the following observations are concerned, and wḥich suggested selection of the term ‘vernacular’ rather than ‘popular’. A further factor contributory to isolation of this topic is the existence of a vernacular literature amongst non-Muslim Arabic speakers in North Africa: the Jewish communities. There, owing both to Judaeo-Arabic orthography and to confessional motives in the selection of theme, the tyranny of Classical Arabic is considerably weakened, to some extent a consequence of social (educational) lines of demarcation. Important, however, are the affinities between the vernacular compositions of both groups, especially in matters relating to rhetorical convention and prosodic structure.

Despite the admonitions of responsible scholars, writers of books on Buddhism still tend to assume that a reasonably historical account of the life and personal teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha may be extracted from the earliest available canonical accounts. This quest of the historical Buddha began as a Western nineteenth-century interest, imitating both in its pre-suppositions and its methods of inquiry the parallel quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The general principle of operation is set forth succinctly by Hermann Oldenberg in his impressive work, Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, Berlin, 1881, 92:

‘Abstrahiren wir nun von den Traditionen der bezeichneten Kategorien, welche sämmtlich unhistorisch oder doch des unhistorischen Characters verdachtig sind, so behalten wir als festen Kern der Erzählungen von Buddha eine Reihe positiver Thatsaohen iibrig, die wir als einen zwar sehr bescheidenen, aber vollkommen gesicherten Besitz für die Geschichte in Anspruch nehmen dürfen’.

Just as there are said to be ‘painters' painters’ and ‘poets' poets’, so too there may be said to be ‘linguists' languages’, and amongst these must without any question be included the languages of the Caucasus. These languages, with their elaborate and unusual phonetic, phonological, and morphological structures, possess a special fascination for professional linguists, from both the practical and the theoretical point of view.

Burrow and Emeneau (1961, p. xiii, n. 3) have observed that ‘Ta. and Ma. seem to have evidence for two phonemes [/n/, the dental and /ṉ/, the alveolar]a in PDr., but the matter is not yet clear’. This is mainly due to the non-availability of data about the distribution of these phonemes in those two languages and the allophonic distribution, if any, in other languages. With the help of increased material available now, an attempt is made in this paper to find out the history of the development of the two nasal phonemes in Ta. and Ma. and to establish their allophonic nature in PDr. Since definite information about the phonetic nature of the phoneme /n/ is not available for languages such as Kui, Parji, Nk. [Ch.] etc., this study is incomplete to some extent.

Among the numerous Kharosthi documents recovered from Chinese Turkestan and transcribed and edited by A. M. Boyer, E. J. Rapson, and E. Senart, is one which is in many ways unique. This is the oblong wooden tablet which is numbered 661 in the second volume of these scholars' Kharosthī Inscriptions, where there is given on plate 12 a photographic reproduction of the document in question. It is one of the few documents discovered at Endere, which seems in ancient times to have been a sort of military fort situated about halfway between Charchan (Calmadāna of the inscriptions) and Nina or Niya (Cad'ota). Not only does it show some marked peculiarities of alphabet, dialect, and general style of composition, but as can be seen from the reproduction the form of writing also is quite unusual.

It is written in a very stiff and archaic form of script, but the ink is fresh and the writing is very well preserved and clear and Konow is probably right when he says in his paper on “ The Names of the Kings in the Niya documents ”, published in Acta Orientalia, that “ it does not seem possible to ascribe a late date to E. vi, ii, i, which is probably not an original but a copy from an old tablet ”. Various indications supporting this view of a very early date for the original of this document will be noticed in the course of the following commentary. For the sake of convenience of reference, I repeat the text of the inscription here.

It is difficult to write correctly about the grammar of a language; it is almost impossible to be accurate about its pronunciation. It follows that the weakest and most unsatisfactory part of books on a language is nearly always that which deals with sounds. The reasons are various. I give some of them here with special reference to Urdu and Hindi.

A ‘Mirror for magistrates’ entitled ‘The manners of kings and advice to them’ (adab al-mulūk'iḥhum) precedes in MS Or. 9446 of the British Museum the suḥbat al-mulūk (commonly called kitāb al-tāj) which is ascribed to Jāḥiຓ. As the former names Saladin, the ascription to Jāḥiຓ, if meant to apply to it, is wrong. Each section begins with a line or two, ‘The prudent king will do this, will not do that’, followed by one or more examples from history.

The question primarily at issue is whether da and desu in modern, chiefly conversational, Japanese, together with other forms commonly held to belong to paradigms of da+ and desu+ viewed as inflected items, should be called copulative forms; whether, that is to say, they perform the grammatical function of linking a subject with a predicate. The question also concerns combinations consisting of de followed by one of the forms of aru+, arimasu+, or gozaimasu+. In general, these combinations have when positive the same uses and senses as forms of da+ and desu+ and are when negative the only available negative counterparts of those forms. Some attention will be given to what has been said about the verb nari+ (< ni ari+) and the combination nite ari+ of the now obsolete Classical Literary style, though no attempt will be made to reach conclusions about them.

JALĀL AL-DĪN RŪMĪ in Maihnawi, ii, 3478 sqq., recounts a story of a saint J falsely accused of theft, and of the miraculous manner in which he cleared himself. R. A. Nicholson in his annotation to the passage (vol. vii, p. 359) comments: “ Saints accused of theft, who produce miraculous proof of their innocence, appear in many legends related by Moslem hagiographers.”