The jungle tribes (or, as the Malays style them, Orang Utan) of the Malay Peninsula are not altogether an unknown quantity from the point of view of anthropology and linguistics. A number of scholars and travellers have devoted themselves to the study of them, the most important being Hrolf Vaughan Stevens, R. Martin, W. W. Skeat, the leader of the Cambridge expedition, Annandale, and Robinson.

This monograph was originally intended as a continuation of “Swahili Phonetics”, which appeared in African Studies, vol. 1, nos. 2 and 3, 1942, but war-time typographical difficulties rendered publication impossible then. I am very grateful to the editor of the S.O.A.S. Bulletin for publishing it now. Although it may be read as a separate monograph, some knowledge of Swahili phonetics is necessarily taken for granted, and I have numbered the paragraphs as from the end of “Swahili Phonetics”, so as to allow for cross-reference to that article.

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering into Arabic of the third chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra cum commentrary. (On this point see our translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering of the first two chapters of Patanñjali's Yogasktra). This translation is based on Ritter's edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritter's Text: KöprÜlÜ, 1589, fols. 412a–419a (writen on the margins). We have also compared the text with paralled passages and expressions in al-Bīrūnī's India.

Despite their period from the tenth to the twelfth century, at the height of the Middle Ages; despite their position in Egypt, at the centre of the civilization of the Near and Middle East; and despite their prominence as the third Caliphate of Islam, the Fāṭimids lack a satisfactory modern history of their dynasty. This is partly because of the length of their life, which covers the histories of so many hundreds of years; partly because of the span of their empire from North Africa to Egypt and Syria, stretching across the histories of so many regions; and finally because, at the level of Islam itself, their empire was divided between their dawla or state and their daՙwa or doctrine. The doctrine, which focused on the Fāṭimid Imām as the quṭb or pole of faith, gave the dynasty its peculiar strength and endurance. The failure of that doctrine to supersede the Islam of the schools, however, left the Fāṭimids increasingly isolated and ultimately vulnerable. Standing outside the mainstream of Islamic tradition, the dynasty's own version of its history was disregarded. Instead, its components passed out of their original context to be incorporated into the regional or universal histories of subsequent authors. Maqrīzī was alone in compiling his Ittiՙāẓ al-ḥunafā' as a history of the dynasty in Egypt, introduced by a miscellany of information on its origins and previous career.

Among the Arabic documents preserved in the archives of Sicily is one relating to the affairs of the Jewish community in Siracusa at the end of thetwelfth century. Belonging by origin to the episcopal church of Cefalù, it isnow in the Archivio di Stato at Palermo (Tabulario della Chiesa Vescovile di Cefalù, Perg. no. 25), and was included in the collection published by S. Cusain 1868–82.

The language of Zanzibar par excellence is Swahili, and Zanzibar may be said to be the home of this language, not in the sense that its oldest form is spoken there, but because the Zanzibar dialect has come to be known best, owing to the writings of such men as Steere, Madan, Sacleux, and, to some extent, Krapf, though his dictionary is mainly devoted to the Mombasa dialect. Also in the days of the opening up of Africa, explorers and traders generally fixed up their caravans in Zanzibar, and these porters and soldiers journeyed into the far interior, some of them remaining there and thus making Swahili a lingua franca understood, as Steere says, along the coasts of Madagascar and Arabia, and in Central or inter-Tropical Africa, as well as by the Seedees (Sidis) in India.

This study owes its inception to Sir Percival David, who possesses among the treasures in his private collection one of the few surviving copies of a large engraved map of the world, known to students of cartography as the Map of Hajji Ahmed. Invited by its owner to translate for him the legends in the map and especially the lengthy text accompanying it, which are written in Turkish, I became aware that a close analysis of this text yielded more information than has so far been obtained about the origin of the map.

The early imperial period was a time of rapid change in medical ideas and practices in China. Manuscripts and artifacts excavated from tombs of the second century B.C. along the Yangtze river valley bring fresh insights into some of the processes involved in medical innovation in the early centuries of the empire. Through examining exorcistic practices and petty surgery to the refinement of a body sustained and nourished by physiological essences, this paper describes recurring patterns found in the changing medical techniques associated with stone, be that lancets, hot pressing stones or mineral prescription. After the transition to a culture of applying fine metal acupuncture needles vestiges of these treatments found in early Chinese stone culture remain enshrined in both the theory and practice of canonical medicine.

The sociolinguistic phenomenon of codeswitching, both diglossic and bilingual (Arabic–Hebrew), is extremely pervasive in all varieties of Palestinian Arabic, including Negev Arabic. Surprisingly, neither of these types of codeswitching in Palestinian Arabic has received due scholarly attention; moreover, their interplay has not been studied for any type of Arabic. This article analyses quantitative and functional aspects of diglossic and bilingual codeswitching in the personal interview style of 11 Negev Bedouin female students, focusing on their functional interaction. In the five distinct registers analysed, ratios of both diglossic and bilingual codeswitching were found to rise from childhood narratives to recounts of the period of academic studies and expository sections, with the use of Hebraisms dropping in the more formal registers. Although mixed bilingual discourse with intensive codeswitching is the default style for in-group discourse of the young generation, I show that many switches are not random, but fulfil discourse-pragmatic, communicative, social and textual functions typical of each of the registers. For example, in the narrative registers, switching may mark evaluation (commenting, explaining, self-repair, sidetracking, repetition). In both narrative and non-narrative discourse it may mark quotations, rephrasing or paraphrasing, with or without a metalinguistic introducing particle such as ‘as they say’. The result is redundancy at the referential level, with pragmatic functions of emphasizing or elaborating at the discourse level. This is in keeping with functions identified for bilingual codeswitching in general and also for diglossic codeswitching in Arabic; but it is the first effort, as far as I know, to combine analysis of the two codeswitching dimensions in any given code; and, moreover, to study the interplay of this bi-dimensional switching with relation to the stylistic factors of genre and register.

We witness two kinds of Chinese texts in Tibetan transcription, thosewhich have the Tibetan transcription by the side of the Chinese characters—much as the Japanese syllabic script occurs by the side of theChinese characters—and those which are in Tibetan script only.

Verb roots remain constant in most Sino-Tibetan languages. But in; Burmese the consonantal initial of some verb roots alternates from an unaspirated surd in the intransitive to the corresponding aspirated surd in the transitive. And in some Tibeto-Burmic languages, particularly in the Himalayas, we find verbs with a sonant initial in the intransitive and a corresponding surd in the transitive. Diversity of form reaches the extreme in Old Bodish (classical Tibetan), where no positional phoneme of the verb is necessarily constant—whether consonantal prefix, consonantal initial, medial vowel, “final” consonant, or “suffixed” consonant.

The tenth chapter in the Lalita-vistara, entitled Lipiśālāsaṃdarśanaparivarta, is well known for the list of 64 different forms of writing which were mastered by the Bodhisattva in his schooling. The text continues by describing how his 10,000 fellow-pupils, by reason of his supernatural power (adhiṣṭhānena), when they pronounced the individual syllables (mātṛkā), produced for each sound a symbolic or esoteric phrase beginning with the syllable in question. Thus, yadā akāraṃ parikīrtayanti sma, todā anityaḥ saroasaṃskāraśabdo niścarati sma ‘When they recited the syllable a, then there arose the sound (phrase) “Non-eternal are all the saṃskāras”’. (I refrain from attempting to improve the dubious grammar of the edition; but the sense is not in doubt.) The remainder of the Sanskrit syllabary is dealt with in a comparable manner, in the normal order, a, ā, i, ī, … ka, kha, ga, gha, ṅa … ha.

Dirayta (ɗiraytá) is an Eastern Cushitic language spoken by a people calling themselves Diraaŝ (ɗiráaŝ), who live in the immediate vicinity of Gidole. Within Ethiopia generally the language is known as Gidoliñña. Dirayta and Musiya (Bussa or Busiñña) constitute the northernmost dialects of the Konsoid dialect chain, a linguistic entity first clearly established by Paul Black (forthcoming).

The higher-order subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman has been recently up for debate. The modern era of TB/Sino-Tibetan subgrouping began with Benedict 1972 (henceforth /STC), where that great comparativist refrained from offering a Stammbaum of the conventional type, leaving several individual languages and language groups unclassified, and placing Jingpho at the centre of diversity of the whole vast TB family (see Fig. 1.) Despite several peculiarities, notably the special position accorded Karenic and the lack of information on Baic (then called ‘Minjia’) or Qiangic, this scheme showed a healthily agnostic approach.

There is very little published material of the Galab (Geleba, Dasenech, Dathanaik, or Marille) language which is spoken around the northern shore of Lake Rudolf in the Gamu Gofa Province of south-western Ethiopia and in the adjacent areas of northern Kenya. Several attempts to determine the linguistic position of this language have been made, nevertheless no generally accepted classification exists as yet. This is, of course, due to lack of adequate descriptive data. I would therefore like to present in this paper a preliminary analysis of my own field data on Galab in the hope that it will at least provide a somewhat sounder basis for future work on the classification of the language.

When Buddist works in Sanskrit were first introduced into Europe, it was at once obvious that the language of some of them as it appears in the manuscripts was, in comparison with Classical Sanskrit, frequently ungrammatical, and on occasion barbarously so. The immediate and natural reaction of scholars accustomed to the regularity of Sanskrit was to stigmatize these shortcomings, and to attempt to remove as many irregularities as possible by forcibly emending the text. It was, however, very soon recognized that many of the seeming anomalies could not be abolished, and that they must be accepted as genuine in their own context. This was especially clear in the case of the verses of some of the older texts, where the metre often guaranteed non- Pāηinean forms; and the language of these verses, variously called the Gāthādialect, mixed Sanskrit, or hybrid Sanskrit, was recognized as something in its own right. The same courtesy was readily extended to the prose of the Mahāvastu, which in places could only have been made to resemble Sanskrit by completely rewriting the text. The prose of the other texts, being in many waysvirtually Sanskrit, took considerably longer to win the same recognition; but for many years now it has been generally admitted that here also is a language which must be judged according to its own standards, and not exclusively by the canons of classical Sanskrit grammar.

Up to this point I have attempted to show how Shen Nung was portrayed in late Warring States and early Han texts. I have also reviewed what we know about Nung (or Chu) and Lieh Shan shih, Keng-fu (Plough Father), and T'ien-tsu (Field Ancestor), since it may be one or all four of these figures that comes to be known as Shen Nung.

We can argue nothing for certain on this, and certainly T'ien-tsu in the Shih, was, we assume, a god of the Chou. But that point aside, there seems to be good reason to think that Shen Nung was originally a farming god of the Shang people. He is the hero who invented the plough, and the god to whom they turned when they needed rain. Ultimately, this may have been Hsieh, the first-born of the Shang people, known to us in our texts as Shu-chün or Yi-chün. That Shen Nung would become prominent only in texts that date from the late Chou should be no surprise; we should expect him to be overshadowed in early Chou times by their hero Hou Chi.

It is important to keep in mind as we proceed that in the materials we have examined so far, we have seen repeated references to ‘fire’ and ‘rain’ and ‘drought’. Ritual ways of producing rainfall and combating the drought could involve fire (yen-huo, in Shih, 211); they might also involve ‘invocations’, charging the drought demon to ‘Go to the north!’ (Shan-hai ching).

In a recent article on Ya'qūb Pasha, the Jewish physician of Sultan Meḥmed II, Professor F. Babinger cites two passages from the brief account of the career of Ya'qūb given by A. Galanté in his Médecins Juifs au service de la Turquie. The first tells of the arrival of Ya'ūb in Edirne during the reign of Murād II, of his service with Murād and Meḥmed II, and gives the text of an alleged ferman exempting Ya'qūb and his descendants from all taxation in perpetuity, granted by Meḥmed II at Boghaz-kesen in Rabī' II 856/Apr.-May 1452. The second alleges that in 1571 the descendants of Ya'qūb applied to the Rabbinate in Constantinople for exemption from Jewish communal taxes on the basis of this ferman. As Babinger points out, Galanté refers the first statement simply to ‘un auteur hébraïque’, without further specification, while for the second statement he cites no authority at all.

The Kushan god μοζδοοανο is attested on a group of rare coins of Kanishka I, where he is depicted as a bearded male bearing a trident in his right hand and riding a two-headed horse. It has been universally assumed that the name μοζδοοανο is connected in some way with that of Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity of the Zoroastrian religion, the second element of the Bactrian form being generally interpreted as an epithet meaning ‘victorious’.