Malay is one of the best-studied of all Austronesian languages, both synchronically and diachronically. We would not therefore expect a study of Malay historical phonology to uncover much that is new. In this paper, however, I will suggest that a basic change has been overlooked in past work on the language.

IN my book Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (1937) there emerged from the treatment of these three topics a picture of some features of the Zande mind, revealing itself often as a suspicious, distrustful, hostile mind. Another facet of this mentality is revealed in the Zande concept of sanza (pi. asanza).

The long-awaited Greek-letter inscription discovered, on 6 May 1957, by the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan in the course of their excavations at ‘Surkh-Kotal’, the ancient Bagolango, has now been made public by M. André Maricq under the title of ‘La grande inscription de Kaniṣka et l'étéo-tokharien, l'ancienne langue de la Bactriane’, JA, CCXLVI, 4, 1958, 345–440. It is wonderfully well-preserved and, once one gets accustomed to the somewhat barbaric forms of certain letters, offers not the slightest difficulty to the reading. The difficulties lie elsewhere: this is the first substantial, and at the same time readable, document of the Iranian language once spoken in Bactria and, appropriately to a text in an unknown language, is slow in yielding its meaning to the scholar, who inevitably has to be guided partly by often contradictory internal evidence, partly by uncertain comparisons with related languages. All those devoted to Central Asian history and languages will be grateful to M. Maricq for his painstaking work and for his unselfishness in publishing this superb monument before being able to submit more than a partial interpretation.

The Portuguese presence in Sri Lanka dates back to the early sixteenth century and lasted some hundred and fifty years. It gave rise to a Creole language based on Portuguese, Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole (SLPC), which Dalgado (1936) considered to be the most vigorous of the Portuguese Creoles.

THIS paper is the outcome of a short study of the pronunciation of an Ossete born in Dzaeusegi-hseu (Wladikavkaz). The Digoron dialect of Ossetic is my informant's mother tongue, but as he left his homeland more than twenty years ago and has in the interval probably had more occasion to speak Kussian and Polish than his own language, the possibility that his pronunciation has been thereby affected cannot be discounted. At the suggestion of Professor H. W. Bailey a short investigation of his pronunciation of Ossetic was undertaken. Some of the material used was taken from notes put at my disposal by Professor Bailey, to whom I am greatly indebted for his generous help and for much invaluable information and criticism. Other material was found in a collection of folk-stories, the Pamyatniki narodnogo tvorchestva Osetin, or was supplied by my informant himself. The tentative nature of any linguistic analysis based on a short study of the pronunciation of one speaker is obvious, and it will be understood that the findings are only valid within these limitations.

The typographical conventions adopted in this paper are as follows:—

Italic type is used to show the roman spelling of Digoron as used in the Pamyatniki or by my informant.

Heavy type is used for the phonetic transcription of my informant's pronunciation.

Heavy type in single quotes is used to indicate the units of what may be called “unuttered speech”.

The use of all three conventions is demonstrated by the following statement:— “nivәrun niværun is the realization of the junction of ‘ni’ and әvәrun’”.

The most exciting experience I had during my visit to Morocco in the winter of 1951–52a visit made possible by the generosity of the Eockefeller Trust was the discovery, in the famous Qarawūyūn Library in Fez, of a manuscript containing one half, the second half, of an Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.The shortness of my stay in that ancient and fascinating Moorish city, and the disabling indisposition that befell me there, made it impossible for me to do more at the time than take note of the existence of this precious codex; but later the authorities of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines in Rabat, to whom I am infinitely obliged, procured for me a microfilm of the manuscript. It is now my high privilege to publish this preliminary note, in anticipation, I hope, of a full edition later on.

Of the Primitive Indian stops it is true to say, as Dr. J. Bloch says of their descendants in Marāthī, that in most of the modern Indo-Aryan languages they have in principle remained unchanged. This is certainly true of initial stops; and although single intervocalic stops have with the exception of the cerebrals disappeared, new intervocalic stops, double or single, have been introduced as the result of assimilation among consonant groups.

The study of fortification in the Indian subcontinent is a discipline not only of intrinsic merit but also of considerable extrinsic value, for the material it may be expected to yield is of relevance to the archæologist, antiquarian, and historian, taking these terms in the broadest sense; indeed, it is these, in somewhat narrower terms perhaps, who have helped to amass the not inconsiderable body of material which is at present available on the fortified sites in the subcontinent, most of which have long been known to archæologists and art-historians. The old series of Archæological Survey of India Reports (1862–84), largely reports of tours by Cunningham and his associates, contain much material on the major fortified sites of the subcontinent, although some of this is merely incidental to the main purposes of the reports; the New Imperial Series of the Archæological Survey, including the regional surveys, presents more precise and detailed description of individual sites, and this is supplemented by the Archæological Survey of India Annual Reports, from 1902 onwards, and the reports of various states with autonomous departments of archæology, most notably the Nizām's Dominions whose sometime Director, Dr. Ghulam Yazdani, has in addition to considerable work on the Deccan sites published in those reports produced two valuable monographs. These works have supplemented the evidence of the sites themselves with the available historical material, documentary and epigraphic, and further epigraphic material is available in the volumes of Epigraphia indica and Epigraphia indo-moslemica, as well as in some of the Memoirs of the A.S.I. Less reliable technically, but always useful and often suggestive, is the information available in the gazetteers of the various provincial governments and states. The journals of learned societies with an Indian interest add more to this material, as do the catalogues and journals of Indian museums.

Puppetry in China has a long history. The modern remnants of a rich tradition testify to the wealth that was, and the art is being revived in various ways, and given new forms. Although there is more early literature and specific comment in ancient books on ancient Chinese puppets than there is for any other kind of puppetry in its early days, it is not absolutely clear when they originated. The words nearly always used to refer to puppets are mu-ou-hsi ‘wooden doll plays’ and k'uei-lei-tzu, k'u-lei-tzu, k'uei-lei, or k'uei-lei-hsi. The original meaning of the latter terms is tantalizingly elusive, but the k'u might possibly suggest a hole or aperture within which they were performed. These are historically the most common words used. The earliest mention of any of the terms is found in Feng-su t'ung by Ying Shao (fl. c.a.d. 178), but the origins of puppetry may either lie much before or after that book.

Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) is India's leading comic book series, featuring hundreds of mythological titles about the Hindu gods. Founder Anant Pai initially eliminated all miracles, believing them to be unscientific interpolations. But while producing Tales of Durga (no. 176, 1978), he declared that the comic must be an “authentic” recreation of the Devī Māhātmya scripture, and that all miracles in the classical Sanskrit text must be faithfully rendered in the comic. This article examines the discourse of authenticity that surrounds the production of Tales of Durga in particular and this comic book series more generally. Through a careful reading of the Devī Māhātmya, content analysis of Tales of Durga, a consideration of the unique characteristics of the comic book medium, and interviews with comic book producers, this study provides insight into modern interpretations of the Devī Māhātmya and evolving Hindu attitudes towards the martial goddess Durga.

The present paper discusses the synchronic status and the origin of the semi-vowels /j/ and /w/ in Old Tibetan on the basis of modern Tibetan languages and other Sino-Tibetan languages, in particular Rgyalrong and Lolo-Burmese.

Just before the intellectual impact of Britain on Indian Islam a religious reform movement had swept over Muslim India. Although this movement itself does not come into the scope of the present essay, we note it at the outset because: (a) Intellectually it sought to regenerate Islam by going back to the pure and simple Islam of the early period and tried to weaken the hold of medieval authorities on the Muslim mind. Consequently, although reactionary in itself, its ‘purification’ impetus prepared, in some measure, the way for subsequent intellectual developments.

In this essay, I look into the growth in the Ottoman ilmiye hierarchy, and its emergence as a distinct career path, through an analysis of the backgrounds and careers of forty-nine officials who reached the highest four ilmiye positions. The analysis reveals that towards the middle of the sixteenth century new teaching and kadılık offices absorbed the growing number of ilmiye officials. After 1570, limitation of tenure periods and rules for promotion and removal were introduced to facilitate the employment of more officials. Meanwhile, greater emphasis was placed on receiving one's education and obtaining teaching positions in the central cities, especially Istanbul. Those scholars educated and taught in areas distant from the centre lost the opportunity to reach the highest ilmiye posts. In addition, after 1550, the sons of government officials were increasingly favoured in the ilmiye hierarchy.

A passion for card games, like a delight in drinking tea, is something which nowadays unites China with the rest of the world; and, as with tea drinking, many have surmised that the pastime of playing cards arose in China and spread westwards. I begin this study with a consideration of the rules of card games, and suggest that the rules themselves may offer, in some cases, evidence of transmission from East to West. To those interested in past cultural contacts, this suggestion in itself illustrates the value of trying to reconstruct the regulations of early games long forgotten, quite apart from the value of such research to sinologists. But it is not just the rules of play which need to be considered in such a context. The format of the playing card as a physical object that is small, portable and suited to mass production has prompted the thought that cards may have been one of the easiest samples of Chinese printing technique to pass between East and West. For this reason, the main focus of my study in reconstruction is on a pastime, the yezi xi (game of leaves), which dates to about the same time as our earliest sources on the origins of printing, but which eventually died out, to be superseded by other amusements. Are the surviving materials sufficient to confirm or deny existing speculations about its form? And if this was not a card game, when precisely did such games develop? But before considering such sinological questions, let us start closer to home.

R. C. Abraham's The principles of Tiv, though a teaching grammar which designedly avoids technical terms, contains the most careful and systematic treatment of the Tiv verbal system that has been published, and this and his other books are the only works on Tiv giving tonal details. But his classification of verbs, though based appropriately on their structure and tonal behaviour, is not entirely consistent, nor the most convenient basis for a clear and concise description of the whole verbal system. The present study is based on an analysis of the material provided in Abraham's books—particularly his excellent dictionary—checked and supplemented by several years' practical experience of the language in the field, and more recent detailed research with various informants in London.

Among manuscripts and documents collected for the Vrindaban Research Institute (VBI) from the Rādhādāmodara Temple in Vrindaban (Uttar Pradesh) are two (referred to below as documents A and B) which contain the text of testamentary depositions in the name of Jiva Gosvāmī. He is known to have founded the Rādhādāmodara Temple and to have been alive at the dates given in the text. It was Jīva who, consolidating the work of his uncles Sanātana and Rūpa, definitively established Vrindaban as the headquarters of the Caitanyapanthī Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sect. The testament, which envisages both posthumous implementation and possible revocation, contains Jlva's provisions for succession to the custody of the temple, idols, and library. The principal parties involved are known from other documents in the collection, and most names recur in Bhaktamāl and other related literary sources. Its over-riding importance lies, however, in the fact that no written Will has hitherto come to light in India, except those that are clearly influenced by European practice.

IN an article published several years ago we have collected evidence corroborating al-Maqrīzī's statement (mistrusted by Quatremère in Histoire des Mongols) that siyāsa, the legal code of the Mamlūks, was founded upon the Great Yāsa of Chingiz-Khān. The Great Yāsa was not merely a code of criminal and civil law but a system of rules governing the entire political, social, military, and economic life of the community which adopted it. The expansion of this system outside the Mongol nation was due to the belief that it was responsible for the extraordinary military success of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, and that it might be regarded as a talisman ensuring victories on the battle-field. The Yāsa rules concerning communal organization were even more important from this point of view than the laws treating of the behaviour of individuals. It is natural, therefore, to suppose that not only the Mamlūk criminal, civil, and commercial law but also the general organization of the Mamlūk state was based upon the Yāsa. The present article, inspired by the attempts made in modern times to collect and systematize the fragmentary evidence concerning the contents of the Yāsa, is intended to show that this organization is indeed comprehensible only in the light of such evidence. Some preliminary remarks are necessary.

In the summer of 1951, the presence in London of an Ellice Islander, Penitala Teo, gave me an opportunity of making a sound recording in a little-known Polynesian language. The briefness of his stay, as well as other factors, did not leave time for more than a cursory analysis of his speech, but there was enough evidence to establish a prima facie case for recognizing aspirated as well as non-aspirated consonants.

0.0. Our knowledge of traditional African literature has been greatly increased of recent years thanks, in part, to the Oxford Library of African Literature. Among the volumes of that series there have been some which have studied, either in breadth or depth, the genre of praise-poetry. The following notes on praise-poetry among the Shona aim at being a contribution to a study which Wilfred Whiteley, as joint editor of the Oxford Library, did much to promote.