In September 1964 we were able, after considerable difficulty, to reach the village al-Jinainah (al-Junainah) of Wādī Jirdān (which we had already visited earlier in the year along the spectacular new road from Wādī ‘Amaqīn). In the afternoon of that day and early next morning before leaving to return to ‘Ataq we made a brief survey of the tower known as al-Muqaiyad—the subject of this article. The visit being so hurried and part of the work being carried out after dark, we were not able to record everything in quite the detail we should have wished. We are much indebted to Lt.-Col. Adrian Donaldson, D.S.O., M.B.E., the CO., and Major S. F. B. Francis, T.D., then of the 5th Battalion, Federal Regular Army, the latter escorting us to the mouth of Wādī Jirdān at ‘Ayādh, and for the generous hospitality they gave us at ‘Ataq. We acknowledge with pleasure the courtesy of Shaikh Ruwais b. Miḥsin b. Ḥasan Namārī Hilālī, Federal Councillor, who permitted us to survey the ḥuṣn and supplied us with much information on it, as also to his brother Ḥasan b. Miḥsin.

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.

The Sabaic rock inscription published by A. Jamme under the siglum Ja 1028, from a Location at Bi'r Ḥimā, 85 km. north-east of Najrān, is among the most important documents that we have for the history of Yemen in the period beford Islam. Attention has hitherto been mainly centred on exploiting its historical data; less notice has been accorded to the detailed linguistic (and specially syntactic) features, which are my topic here.

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.

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.

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.

The Ming government's grave concern with the Mongols appears on every written page of the history of that era. Moreover, this obsession with the danger threatening from the north is reflected in a great number of place names. Towers, fortresses, garrison towns of every kind and description built and repeatedly repaired along the border, carried names referring directly or indirectly to the Mongols. Whenever a new construction was begun, it had to be given a name, and every often a name indicating a role in the defence of the country: in fact, these names call to mind such Russian place names as Vladivostok Domination of the East, and Vladikavkaz Domination of the Caucasus.

Publications by Weinreich, Chafe, Makkai, and Mitchell have put the problem of idiom formation in the focus of attention. Kuwaiti Arabic (KA) idioms, however, seem to have received very little attention or no serious attention from professional linguists. The majority of KA idioms are semantically specialized phrases that belong to a more informal or colloquial level of speech.

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 discovery of the Anatolian family of languages early in the present century' confronted Indo-Europeanists with a verbal system of considerably less complexity than that which had been assumed, largely on the basis of Greek and Indo-Iranian evidence, to have existed in the latest common period of the parent language. This raised questions which are still keenly debated today. Did the simplicity of the Anatolian system represent something more primitive than the classic image of Indo-European, out of which the latter could be explained as a subsequent development, or was it the simplified outcome of an originally more complex system, close to that which had been reconstructed before the Anatolian family was known? Where Anatolian had isolated features (such as the ending -i(š) of the 3 s. preterite of the –ḫi conjugation) corresponding to features which characterized the whole of a paradigm in Indo-European (such as –s– in the sigmatic aorist), had it preserved a relic of a once fully-formed s– aorist which had been largely lost as a result of merger with other categories, or was this a 3 s. ending which had subsequently become incorporated into the stem to form a new kind of paradigm?.