Immediately after finishing his Kurzgefaβtes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen (KEWA), M. Mayrhofer had the very commendable courage to start work on an Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen (EWA), of which the first 11 fascicles now (Autumn 1992) lie before us. It is not, as the author rightly insists,‘a new (and improved) edition’ of KEWA, but a renewed attempt in its own rights. It is an attempt to produce ‘an etymological dictionary of’ a big corpus language (i.e. of Sanskrit)’ in ‘a practicable and finishable form’, that is: an etymological dictionary such as could be brought to completion ‘by a single scholar within his life time’,—provided this scholar would have the industry and tenacious dedication of a Mayrhofer, we should like to add. Even in the close atmosphere of such a somewhat constraining qualification, Mayrhofer aims high: he thinks of –an etymological dictionary approaching the fulfilment of demands of an ideal order–. The differences between the former work and the one recently begun, already clearly recognizable, are many and conspicuous. The changes introduced are mostly—not always, as is only to be expected—distinct improvements. One of the most important changes is highly welcome: the conscientious- reference to the first occurrence of each word in Sanskrit literature. The attribute ‘kurzgefaβt’ does not appear in the title. Even the KEWA was not actually ‘conciseမ: it was so in comparison only with the planned Vergleichendes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen by W. Wüst

This paper is intended as a sequel to our ‘Five Yurok songs’, published in the issue of the Bulletin dedicated to Professor J. R. Firth, and the statements there made about Yurok music in general apply also to the song presented and analysed here. This song was excluded from our previous article, not merely for reasons of space, but from a consideration of its composition. In the five songs already published, text and music, though realized together in the singing of the song, could be distinguished and separately analysed. In this song (a Brush Dance song) the human voice serves simply as a musical instrument, and the melody and rhythms making up the music are carried on a series of syllable sequences, to which no grammatical or lexical analysis can be applied and to which no translation can be given.

T he Mandaean, or Nasoraean religion is a system with no definite theology. It is, and apparently was from the first, an elaborate system of symbolical rites, meticulously preserved and performed by an hereditary priesthood. These priests, to judge by scrolls reserved for priests only, appear to have concealed gnosticconceptions in symbolical myths, personifying abstract conceptions and so veiling, even in priestly texts, high and metaphysical truths which only the especially endued could perceive if fitted to understand.

Thangmi is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in central-eastern Nepal and north-eastern India. The majority of Thangmi speakers live in Nepal and still inhabit their traditional homeland of Dolakhá district. There are ethnic Thangmi in many of the other districts of the kingdom, especially in the neighbouring districts of Sindhupálcok, Sindhulī and Rámecháp. The Thangmi population in India is largely concentrated in Darjeeling and is the product of an emigration earlier this century.

The “North-Western Prakrit” as Konow has called it is represented by the following documents.

(1) The two versions of Aśoka's edicts preserved at Mansehra’ and Shahbazgarhi. At this stage many of the characteristic features of the language have not yet developed, e.g. śr > ṣ, śv > śp.

(2) The later Kharoṣṭhi inscriptions, mostly short, collected by Konow in the second volume of the Corp. Inscr. Ind.

(3) The Kharoṣṭhi manuscript of the Dhammapada discovered near Khotan (Manuscript Dutreuil du Rhins).

(4) The Kharoṣṭhi documents from Niya, representing the administrative language of the Shan-Shan kingdom in the third century A.D. In the Journ. As., 1912, pp. 337 ff., J. Bloch examined the dialectical peculiarities of the Manuscript Dutreuil du Rhins and showed that they appeared in modern times in the languages of the North-West.

In ancient Iran there was evidently a strong sense of existence after death, which was reinforced by Zoroaster's reform and his teachings about heaven and hell, so the life on earth came to be lived with the hereafter continually in mind. An orthodox Zoroastrian combines an appreciation of the good creation of Ōhrmazd, and an acceptance of his allotted tasks within it, with a conviction that this world is nevertheless only a halting-place, and that true life comes after death. The moral requirements of his faith make him self-reliant, bearing the responsibility for his own conduct and ultimate fate; yet there is also a striking sense of community, of a bond between all those of the ‘good religion’, united by their common purpose and way of life. This senṣe of community extends to a remarkable degree to the righteous dead, to those souls ‘who have overcome for righteousness’ (yōi ašāi vaonarə). Religious works from the remote past (notably the Farvardīn Yašt) show that the Irani and Parsi Zoroastrians are at one with their ancestors in being aware of the spirits of the departed, in wishing to please them, and in rejoicing at a sense of their continuing care and protection.

It is generally accepted that the system of social relations obtaining in Outer Mongolia during the period of Manchu domination (1691–1911) is best described as feudalistic, and that no substantial change was made in this system during the period of autonomy which followed (1911–19). Indeed, in some ways, particularly in the granting of secular titles of nobility to high lamas, and the allotment to them of the appropriate retainers, the system was reinforced during those years. Society was divided basically into two classes, the nobility, and the commoners, or albat, those liable to corvée.

‘Les livres historiques sont rares en pays annamite: le climat et les guerres ont concouru a les de truire.’ When he wrote those words in 1904 Pelliot no doubt hoped that they would be true only of the past; but the troubled history of Việt-Nam in the middle decades of the twentieth century has made them also prophetic. Before modern methods for combating the climate could be brought to bear on the problem of archive preservation further wars occurred to destroy even more of the country's historical remains, as well as to disperse many of those which survived.

1.l. From May 1974 to May 1976 I carried out field research in the Nilgiri Hills, South India, with the purpose of collecting materials on the languages, oral traditions, religious beliefs and practices, and customs of three tribal communities, the Ālu Kuṟumbas, the Pālu Kuṟumbas, and the Muḍugas.

In this paper I shall present some first specimens of the language and folklore of the hitherto nearly unknown Pālu Kuṟumba tribe.

Through work on the large collection of Mandaic lead rolls in the British Museum and collations of incantation bowls in various museums and libraries, it appears that Mandaic gnostic incantation formulas were often translated into Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac, but not the reverse. In Late Antiquity, Mandaic Vorlagen seem to have dominated the field of magic in Mesopotamia. Although, only a scanty amount of pre-Islamic Mandaic incantation material has been published so far, classical Mandaic literature already gives many hints of this fact. It turns out that many solutions to puzzling words or spellings in Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls can be explained in the light of a Mandaic Vorlage.

One of the chief fascinations exercised by words—especially by loan-words—derives from their dual function as markers of both linguistic and cultural change. For those interested in words from this historical view-point perhaps nothing is more tantalizing than the difficulty of reproducing, in the study of words as cultural markers, those types of clear and comprehensive classification which have been so successfully developed for the analysis of words in their formal aspects.

European contemporaries regarded Ras Alula, Emperor Yohannes's general, as one of the most prominent leaders of Ethiopia in the crucial period of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was a period in which the country was struggling to remain independent during the ‘scramble for Africa’. The Ras was referred to as ‘the best native general and strategist that Africa has perhaps produced in modern times’, and ‘undoubtedly’ the ‘greatest leader that Abyssinia has produced since the death of the Emperor Theodore in 1868’. His Italian adversaries thought in 1885 that ‘Ras Alula is the most serious, the most influential, and the strongest personality in today's Abyssinia. The word of Alula is heard with enthusiasm and confidence by the King’. A Sudanese Mahdist historian wrote that ‘Ras Allulā was one of the famous and brave men in war, very experienced in the tactics of battles. He was a bone in the throat of the British, Italian, and Turkish [Egyptian] empires’. A British soldier and diplomat was of the opinion that ‘the Abyssinian generalissimo’ was ‘apparently the moving spirit of that country’.

The distinguished orientalist Reinhart Dozy, writing in 1849, and referring to the possible influence of Arabic poetry on Spanish romances and on the early troubadour lyrics, pronounced the whole question as ‘tout à fait oiseuse’. He went on to say about this highly controversial question: ‘nous voudrions ne plus la voir débattue, quoique nous soyons convaincu qu'elle le sera pendant longtemps encore. A chacun son cheval de bataille’.

Qur'ān 2:114 describes those who prevent God's name being uttered in His mosques (man mana'a masājida ‘llāhi an yukhdara fīā’smuhu) as ‘most unjust’ (aẓlamu). If further states that ‘they shall not be allowed to enter them except in fear; they shall endure the curse of chastisement in this world and great torture in the aftermath ’.

In Muslim law one of the topics of dispute which is traced back to some of the earliest authorities, and which persists as a difference between the various madhhabs and sects, concerns the obligations owed by her former husband towards a wife who has been divorced. Schacht attempted a summary of the positions taken in the dispute together with an explanation for them:

The Medinese hold that the definitely divorced wife who is not pregnant, can claim from her former husband only lodging during her period of waiting {‘idda); the Iraqians give her also the right to board. The two doctrines are based on two variants of Koran lxv.6, the Medinese on the textus receptus, the Iraqian on the reading of Ibn Mas‘ūd. When the text of Ibn Mas'ūd was superseded in Iraq by the textus receptus during the reign of the Umaiyad caliph ‘Abdalmalik (A.H. 65–86), this basis of the Iraqian doctrine was forgotten, and Abū Ḥanīfa was reduced to justifying it by an arbitrary interpretation of the textus receptus and by a tradition from ‘Umar.

The study of Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years owing to a wave of new publications which have considerably enriched the corpus of texts now at the reader's disposal. In parallel, significant progress has been made in the identification, publication and study of accurate manuscripts of Babylonian Rabbinic literature. Based upon a close reading of recently published magic bowls from the Moussaieff Collection, this article seeks to indicate how the two corpora are mutually enlightening and dependent. An accurate reading and interpretation of the bowls depends upon an intimate knowledge of Babylonian Aramaic grammar, for which much is to be learnt from the best rabbinic manuscripts. At the same time, the magic bowls confirm the antiquity of many linguistic traits found in these rabbinic sources, and accordingly confirm their status as reliable witnesses to the Talmudic language.

Ancient and medieval sources from Greece to Korea speak of the morally reprehensible habits of the Persians, who engage in close-kin marriage. Indian Buddhist texts also preserve similar ideas. One interesting passage in a narrative text makes use of this motif in a particularly interesting way, thereby indicating the character who appeals to the trope as ethically beyond the pale. The present paper explores the background of this common depiction of Persian marriage customs for its own intrinsic interest, and as a means to explicate the passage in question.

This paper describes the inverse marking systems of two closely related Khroskyabs varieties, Siyuewu and Wobzi, and hypothesizes the historical development of the Khroskyabs inverse marking system. I propose that a hypothetical prefix, *Cə-, which is probably related to the second person markers attested in many Trans-Himalayan languages, existed in Proto-Khroskyabs, and that it has different reflexes in the two modern Khroskyabs varieties.