§1 1. Kale ilyo pali BaMwamba na BaNkulu baletuma fita,

2. fileya ku mishi ya bantu aba Mambwe.

3. Babasanga, baikatana, balapikana no kulasana na mafumo.

4. Awishyo mubiye panshi, amumo mutwe, amumo mutwe,

5. asenda, atwala ku mfumu. Balaimba amalaila, baleti,

6. “Sompa, sompa, sompa, sompa, sompa,” ne mitwe ya abantu

7. Mfumu aiti: “Mwasalipeni.” Yalabanaila ubwali.

The story of Tepegöz is the eighth of the twelve surviving tales of the medieval Turkish cycle of Dede Korkut. In language and style it is uniform with the remainder of the cycle, but in character it differs considerably, being composed largely of incidents common to the folktales of many peoples. Its most striking feature, and the one which has attracted most attention, is the variant of the story of Polyphemus which it contains. But besides this the story has a peculiar interest of its own. It is not a mere chance retelling of an old tale. Its narrative has been based upon a traditional wording which goes back to a time before the various incidents, of independent origin, were welded together in the present complex story.

It is recorded in a number of standard works on the western Sudan and northern Nigeria that about the year A.D. 1300 Sākūra, the usurping King of Mali, performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and was murdered by the Danakil on the return journey. Delafosse writes: ‘C'est en revenant des lieux-saints par le Yémen et l'Erythrée, vers l'an 1300, que Sakoura trouva la mort: il fut dévalisé et assassiné par des Danakil sur la côte de Tadjourah, comme il venait de débarquer sur la terre d'Afrique.’ Meek, de Pedrals, and Bovill give the same story, and the last-named comments: ‘He was not returning by the customary route through Cairo, but through Eritrea and the Eastern Sudan, following what has now become the great pilgrim road of West-Central Africa.’ Now if Sākūra was killed in what is to-day French Somaliland, or for that matter anywhere in Somali or Dankali country, he was far to the south of ‘the great pilgrim road’, which does not cross Eritrea at all. Nor is it conceivable that it should ever have done so. It goes through Bornu, Wadai, and Darfur to the Nile and now reaches the Red Sea at Port Sudan. There is no reason why pilgrims should have gone so far to the south of the latitude of Jidda and so have given themselves the task of climbing over the Abyssinian plateau which was, moreover, in Christian hands. A glance at the map will show what a very strange route Sākūra is alleged to have chosen. Having landed at Tajura he would have had three alternatives. The first was to follow approximately the line of the modern railway to Addis Ababa, climbing the steep escarpment in Shoa, and then making his way across Ethiopia and down the other side of the plateau to the Nile valley in Sennar, whence he could have reached Darfur. This would have been very difficult for topographical reasons and would have necessitated a long journey through Christian territory. The second possibility was to travel northwards along the coast until he reached a place such as Suakin where he could have turned westwards and headed for the Nile. This would have been even more difficult, given the character of the Danakil and their country. Last and most difficult of all, he could have attempted the little-used and circuitous route that led through the Sidama States, on the southern borders of Ethiopia, to the White Nile. It is almost inconceivable that he should have been trying to do any of these things.

One of the most important sources for our knowledge of the length of vowels in the Tiberian tradition of Biblical Hebrew is a corpus of manuscripts containing transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic letters. In most of the manuscripts the Arabic transcription employs the orthography of Classical Arabic to represent the sounds of Hebrew. Since Classical Arabic orthography used matres lectionis systematically to mark long vowels we are able to reconstruct the distribution of long and short vowels in Tiberian Hebrew. The transcriptions show us that the main factors determining vowel length were stress and syllable structure.

Khwarezmian linguistic studies have progressed but slowly since their inception in 1927, when A. Z. V. Togan published his discovery of some Khwarezmian (hereafter Xw.) sentences in an Arabic fiqh book. W. B. Henning's first article appeared after nine years and a quarter of a century later H. W. Bailey could still refer to ‘the slowly emerging Chorasmian’. The latest bibliography cannot boast more than two dozen titles. It is our tragic loss that Henning, having studied all the available Xw. material in the course of four decades, should have left ready for publication only the first 260 entries (from '– to ' kiv) of the Khwarezmian dictionary on which he was working at his most untimely death. Of course, Togan's publication in 1951 of the facsimile of a manuscript of Zamakhshari's Arabic dictionary Muqaddimatu 'l-adab, almost completely glossed in Xw., made the greater part of the extant Xw. material generally available, but, not least because of the labour involved, few have cared to duplicate or anticipate Henning's work. Now suddenly, however, in the words of a colleague, ‘everyone has become a Khwarezmologist’, through the publication of a transliteration and translation of this same linguistic material by Johannes Benzing.

Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73) wrote Meghanādbadhkāvya‘ The death of Meghanād’, a nine-canto epic, in 1861. Being a Rāma story, the poem naturally owes much of its substance to the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, which is represented in Sanskrit by Vālmīki's mahākāvya and in Bengali by Krittibās's work; but it differs from that tradition, widely and in a most original way, in the characterization of the persons, the selection and presentation of the episodes, and above all in sentiment and sympathy. This divergence was the result of deliberate choice. ‘I despise Ram and his rabble (i.e. the monkeys); but the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination’ Datta wrote to R. N. Basu. In other letters he gave further indications of his thinking about the approach to his subject. ‘I mean to give free scope to my Inventing powers and to borrow as little as I can from Vahniki’; and,' If the father of our poetry (i.e. Vāhmīki) had given Ram human companions I could have made a regular Iliad of the death of Meghanad.

The Old Khotanese fragment H 147 NS 115 in the collection of the India Office Library, London, was first published in transcription by Bailey in KT, v, 56. This paper contains a re-edition of the fragment, now with a translation and a commentary, and a discussion of two of the words occurring in the fragment: ha[ṃ]där-väto ‘*in the interior’ and patīśu ‘in autumn’, also including an excursus on OKh. vya and ya, 3S optative of ‘to be’.

§ 1. L'importance de la formulation négative, qui définit puissamment le Sanskrit à toutes les étapes de son évolution, apparat avec clarté dès les mantra védiques. Un nombre considérable de formules ne nous sont données que sous l'aspect négatif, soit dans l'ordre de la constatation, soit dans celui de la prohibition. Certains verbes ne figurent guère qu'en proposition négative, ainsi nas- riṣ- rudh- vyath- sridh-. Il se produit très fréquemment qu'une formulation faite d'abord en termes positifs soit reprise' par voie négative (ou l'inverse, mais bien plus rarement), sous une teneur identique ou analogue: ainsi ṇo párā dāḥ, viii, 71, 7 (les références numériques sans nom d'ouvrage concernent le Rgveda), ou avec contre-partie plus stricte dviṣántam máhyaṃ randháyan mó aháṃ dviṣaté radham, i, 50, 13, párā suva/ yád bhadráṃ tán na suva, v, 82, 5. Des séries de strophes sont bâties sur le schème de la “contre-partie” on trouvera des exemples groupés à des fins particulières, pour le RV., par Oldenberg, ZDMG., lx (notamment, p. 727 sqq.); pour la TS., par Weber, Ind. Stud., xiii, p. 77 sqq. (passim); pour l'AV., par M. Gonda, Stilistische Studie over AV. i–vii, p. 33.

°čcingha~ “ griffe ” (pəšsō. čingha- “ aux griffes écartées ”), auquel répond pers. čäng “ griffe, serre, poing; crochet ”, suppose un radical de type I *qen-g- qui se retrouve au degré o à la base de pers. käng “ aile, bras, branche”

Le type II .qn-eg- (enregistré par Walde-Pokorny, p. 391), apparaît mdans une série de mots germaniques désignant eux aussi soit une partie du corps de forme recourbée, soit un instrument ou objet de même forme; il présente, encore comme le type I, les degrés e et o: par exemple ags. hnecca “ nuque, arrière de la tête ”, en face de v. isl. hnakki “ nuque ”, hnakkr “ ancre ”, etc.

So far as our manuscripts are concerned, the first half of the ninth s century yields an almost complete blank. To judge by the absence of any dated text during forty-five years, the Tibetan rulers were not favourable either to orthodox Buddhism or to any form of literary activity. At any rate, a remarkable revival took place immediately after the revolution of Chang I-ch’ao, and the number of dated documents for the second half of the century is actually larger than for any previous period of the same length. It is true that the proportion of sutras and other Buddhist texts has now shrunk considerably. In their place we find miscellaneous documents of many kinds—letters and reports, circulars and account notes, calendars and didactic treatises, mostly in a fragmentary state. The most important feature, however, is the first appearance of printing, of which there are three specimens, dating from 868, 877, and 882 respectively. The first of these is the world-famous copy of the Diamond Sutra with its well-designed frontispiece, printed from blocks in so masterly a fashion as to make it evident that the art of printing must already have been practised in China for a considerable time.