It is a matter of considerable regret that no copy of the Aśokan inscriptions has been found at Pātaliputra. Such a version, inscribed at the capital of Aśoka's empire, might have been expected to be in the language of the capital itself, and therefore by implication in the official language of the court and secretariat. There can be no doubt that many of the difficulties which face us in the task of interpreting the Aśokan inscriptions arise because of errors in the translation from the Pkt. of the original into the Pkts. of the various regions. Possession of the Pātaliputra version would enable us to read the inscriptions free from such translation errors.

The gerund here studied is a grammatical form of great interest on account of its phonological variations and the wide range of its syntactical relationships. It occurs in the single form, gide, in a strengthened form, giderek, and in a pair form, gide gide. We find it as an independent gerund and in verbal combinations which vary from mere association to complete fusion, such as gidememek and gideyor (gidiyor). It also has a tendency to become specialized in use as a post-gerund, and numerous particles have originated in this way. It has had a long history, being one of the basic grammatical forms of Turkish, a common feature of the Turkish family of languages from the time of the early inscriptions of northern Asia. In Ottoman Turkish its importance (except in the -erek and pair forms) has gradually declined during the last 500 years, and it is now used only to a very limited extent; but in Old Ottoman it was fairly widely employed, and the texts which have survived provide ample material for study. It is, however, a complicated study. In the work which has been done it would seem that investigators have usually relied on insufficient data, or have applied methods unsuitable for this case. For example, the method of general comparison between Ottoman on the one hand and various speech forms such as Uighur, Chaghatai, and modern Anatolian dialects on the other, cannot give satisfactory results. There are too many unknown factors, too many imponderables. Such a procedure inevitably leads to the comparison of mere isolated examples which do not really prove anything. I have therefore confined myself to Old Ottoman, and my method has been to take whole texts and collect and classify all the examples of this gerund which they contain. This is laborious, but it produces results which cannot be obtained in any other way.

The Dedanite-Minaean text R 3695 (= M 356) has received no treatment in extenso since the rendering initially proposed by Jaussen and Savignac, which in the light of present knowledge must be considered wholly unsatisfactory.

Some years ago I received from the India Office Library a xerox copy of a short document found at Kew among the papers of Sir Joseph Hooker, with an inquiry as to whether it was a permit for him to travel in Sikkim for the botanical research described in his Himalayan Journals (1854/1905). I knew enough Lepcha to be able to report to the India Office Library that the 42 lines of Lepcha script (romanized and translated at (II) below) were some sort of statement of accounts in East India Company rupees (kúm-pá-nyi kóm tsu; line 1); but I was not able to arrive at the sense of the text in detail until my present stay in Kalimpong again put me in touch with Lepchas, especially Mr. A. Foning, of the Kalimpong Lepcha Association, whose help it is a pleasure to acknowledge.

Among the numerous extant manuscripts of the Lao-tzu, Tao te ching perhaps the best known, apart from the famous Ma wang tui manuscripts discovered in Hunan province in 1973 and the Hsiang erh chu manuscript from Tun Huang (important primarily for its commentary), is the long fragment known as the So Tan manuscript, currently in the private collection of Mr. John B. Elliott and through his generosity on extended loan to the University Art Museum at Princeton. The manuscript is said to have been a part of the Tun Huang finds of the turn of the century. It appears to be one of the few of those manuscripts that remained in China after its discovery rather than immediately finding its way to France, England, or some other Western country. It moved from private collector to private collector, from Peking to Hong Kong to Japan and back again, only becoming a part of the John B. Elliott collection relatively recently.

Between October 1963 and August 1964 the writer was engaged in linguistic field-work in the Cairns Rain Forest of North Queensland, while employed as Research Officer by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Intensive studies were made of the Dyirbal, Giramay, and Mamu languages, and linguistic descriptions of these languages are at present being prepared for publication. In 1942 Tindale had mentioned a language that he called ‘Barbaram’, spoken on top of the Dividing Range about 70 miles inland from Cairns. Entirely on the basis of the 11 words Tindale quoted, it seems, Mbabaram acquired a reputation of mystery, and has been singled out as one of the two Australian languages which seem least able to be fitted into the linguistic pattern of the continent. Recent work by Hale on 30 Cape York languages seemed to emphasize the possible uniqueness of Mbabaram.

In a recent article, I argued that the study of early Arabic grammar of the second and third centuries A.H. should be based on the sources of that era, and not on the work of the later grammarians, as these often do not report the real stand of a particular grammarian on a particular issue, and more often misunderstand certain early grammatical concepts, or use their own terminology rather than the older one to elucidate them. The problem becomes more acute when we find that many modern scholars can still only see early Arabic grammar through the eyes of the later grammarians, beginning with the fourth-century figures and probably ending with Suyṭ. Learning about early grammar from later sources is inescapable, given the scarcity of existing second- and third-century sources, but this is nevertheless permissible only if we do not impose the method, and especially the terminology, of the later authors on early grammar.

The Cherng shianqtext is included as section 25 of the present editions of the Shyun Tzyywhich are all based on the edition established by the Tarng commentator Yang Lianq. In his preface, which is dated A.D. 819, Yang Lianq notes that the editions at his disposal included the Cherng shianq as section eight.