Most of the available specimens of Paiśācī are recorded in Lacote′s Essai sur Gunādhya et la Brhaikathā, pp. 201 f., and in my article “ The Mysterious Paiśācī”, JRAS., 1943, 217 f. They comprise about a hundred words. I am now able, by the courtesy of Muni Punyavijayajī of the Svetambara Jaina Dharmasala, Baroda, who has sent me photostats of an early MS., to publish the longest extract extant in Paisaci from an unpublished portion of the Kuvalayamālā.

For many years after its publication in 1912 Berthold Laufer's book Jade: a study in Chinese archaeologh and religion remained a standard reference work for Western scholars. In his third chapter Laufer discusses certain three-lobed jade discs (pl. I); he is in general agreement with the theories of the late-nineteenth-century Chinese scholar Wu Ta-ch'eng , who named the discs hsüan chi and suggested that they were originally intended to be used for astronomical purposes. After Laufer the discussion was taken up by other writers on jade, and was carried a stage further in a series of papers by Henri Michel, beginning in 1947, in which he presented a considerable amount of literary and scientific evidence in support of his interpretation of the astronomical purpose of the discs. Michel's theories were lent additional weight and given a wide circulation by their inclusion in Joseph Needham's survey of Chinese astronomy. Since Michel, those writers who have doubted the astronomical connexions of the discs have nevertheless tended to retain the name huüan chi, which now seems to have become established as the standard term for this particular jade form on museum labels and in archaeological reports in China as well as in the West.

A Description of “World Orthography”, which is now the official manner of writing a number of languages of Africa, is to be found in the booklet Practical Orthography of African Languages published by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. The system is a phonetic one and is in most respects the same as the International Phonetic Alphabet, the chief exceptions being that j and y are used with their English values, vowel length is indicated by doubling the letter, and capital letters are provided for the use of those who consider them necessary. J. R. Firth has shown how World Orthography may be applied to Burmese and to several Indian languages, and it is the object of this article to show how it might be applied to Sinhalese.

It is indeed interesting to find sometimes a national practice of a people in. usage among another nation of quite different race, language, religion, culture, and habitation. This is, however, not a very rare thing if the custom in question was not forgotten, abandoned, or changed among its originators. We have numerous examples of this kind of adoption, in many countries. Amongst others I may mention some superstitious beliefs in the Muhammadan and Near Eastern countries, the origins of which can be traced to Central Asia and China.

Stimulated by Z. Harris's ‘Discourse analysis’ which raised the problem of continuing linguistic analysis in a particular connected discourse beyond the limits of a single sentence and by K. L. Pike's hints at the existence of a formal and semantic supra-sentence unit, such as the paragraph, American linguists produced some systematic and coherent descriptions of larger stretches of discourse, pointing towards certain grammatical, lexical, and stylistic relations reaching across sentence boundaries. Although most of these works deal with Amerindian languages, the method of analysis and the terminology they use can readily be applied to other languages, as was done, for instance in English, by V. Waterhouse in ‘Independent and dependent sentences’. This author draws a parallel between independent and dependent morphemes, phrases, and clauses on the one hand, and independent and dependent sentences, on the other, pointing out that ‘not all sentences are independent’ and that ‘there are in fact grammatical constructions which indicate that some sentences are dependent and therefore to be included in some larger linguistic form such as paragraph or discourse’.

In BSOAS, XXXIV, 3,1971, 546 I suggested the possibility that the development of Indo-European o to ā in Sanskrit, which, according to Brugmann's well-known and much contested theory, had been held to take place only in open syllables, may in fact have taken place in other environments also,. namely before consonant groups. The proposal was made in view of certain word equations quoted in connexion with the development of spontaneous cerebrals in Sanskrit, notably between Skt. κāṇḍα- ‘section between two joints, phalanx’ and bhāṇḍα-’ furniture, utensils, movable property’ on the one hand, and Gk.

The Bamum language is spoken in theFrench mandated territory of the Cameroons around the town of Famboun by about 55,000 speakers.

The observations set out here are based upon a short but intensive period of investigation at the Paris Exhibition in 1937, when, through the kind offices of Professor Henri Labouret, I was able to work with a native craftsman (an embroiderer) from Famboun, Andre Njoya.

The term ‘nominal piece’ is applied here to any utterance stretch denned initially by the presence of any or all of Nominal Classes 1,2, and 3 set up below, and finally either by sentence-closing intonation or a marker indicating the onset of another piece. The terms ‘negative piece’ and ‘conjunctival piece’ are applied to utterance stretches which lie outside the confines of both the nominal piece (as defined above) and the verbal piece (as defined in BSOAS, XXVI, 1, 1962, 152, para. 1). Any Rarotongan utterance is divisible without residue into one or more of these four pieces.

The pots which form the subject of this note are among the Indian collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. They were presented to the museum in 1921 by Lt.-Col. F. C. S. Lamborne-Palmer, C.B.E., and a note in the accessions register recalls that they were discovered during the digging of the foundations of a house in the early years of the century, at Owin (Ayun) in the Chitrāl valley, now in West Pakistan. What was striking from the outset about at least one of the three vessels was its resemblance to a form of jug occurring in early contexts in Iran. But when my attention was first directed to the collection, in the early 1950's, enough was not known of the prehistory of the North-West Frontier to allow any further evaluation. During the past decade several new and interesting discoveries have been made, and one may now draw more confident inferences regarding the collection. There are three pots only.

The Melanesian and non-MN languages alike belong to the group known as agglutinating, i.e. they are able to form compound words out of a number of elements, many of which are incapable of independent existence. In this they are not entirely different from the MN languages to the east of them, and yet there is a difference, and that not merely of degree but of kind. Prefixes and suffixes play their parts in these languages, as they do in SEP, but the power of adding indefinitely suffix to suffix is much more limited in insular MN than in SEP. Such a compound word as Suau ‘ita-komakomani-uyo-i-miu, take care of yourselves again, is hardly to be thought of, say, in Mota, Fiji, or Samoa.

In a passage found in all manuscripts of ‘Āshiqpashazāde's History of the Ottomans, and hence in the two editions ‘C’ and ‘G, the author relates that in 816/1413, when Meḥemmed I marched against his brother Mūsā, he himself—then a lad of about thirteen and evidently accompanying the army—fell ill and was left behind at Geyve (the township where the main road from Ankara to Constantinople crosses the Sakaria).

The land sale contracts of the late eleventh century published here are important for several reasons. First, they are the oldest known legal documents written in Turkish. Very many Uighur-Turkish civil documents were found in the more eastern parts of the Tarim basin, but none of those appear to be older than the thirteenth century. On the other hand, there are Central Asian legal documents in several non-Turkish languages from as early as the first centuries of our era. After the Turks had penetrated the area in alternately warlike and peaceful manner and become owners of land, they may have gone on using the local vernaculars for such purposes, as they adopted many other facets of local life. The present texts have a fairly rigid structure, but this should not be taken as an indication that they were preceded by a Turkish legal tradition: the Persian text of A.D. 1107 published by Minorsky (1942) shows a rather similar form, which may simply have been borrowed by the Turks. Formally, our documents differ from the non-Muslim deeds of land sale in Turkish, which appear to follow Chinese models; this also speaks against a common Turkish tradition. There is nothing surprising about this: the Turks were probably relatively new both to the area and the occupation.

There is evidence that a particular musical instrument was used by various Sino-Tibetan groups to convey speech, both for courting and for religious purposes. The Proto-Sino-Tibetan etymon for this gourd reed-organ is reconstructible as *s-jan. Its use as a speech surrogate is widely reported, from the earliest sources to the present. It is still used thus by many Tibeto-Burman groups.

I. Tuḷuva, a Dravidian speech spoken by about 400,000 people within a comparatively small area in the district of south Kanara, on the west coast of Madras Presidency, has preserved its individuality from a very early time, despite its being an uncultivated dialect with no literature of its own. The Mangalore missionaries were the first to reduce this unwritten language to writing, and they published in the closing decades of the last century a grammar and a dictionary of this speech, besides a few scriptural texts. An attempt is now being made by educated Tuḵuvas to cultivate their mother tongue as a literary speech through the composition of essays, stories, and poems.

A thorough and scientific treatment of the historiography of the African Muslim peoples and institutions south of the Zambesi is a long-felt and eminent want. As yet, this particular field of research has hardly been explored, and its results, if collected and evaluated, would add tangibly to our contemporary knowledge of Oriental penetration in lands where Europeans have founded new homes and fostered a vitalist conception of Occidental civilization.

It has long been recognized that the establishment of the Office of Music (Yüeh fu) as one of the agencies of state in Han imperial government played an important role in the development of Chinese poetry and nurtured the growth of particular genres of literature; and the precedent that was set at this time was followed at later stages of China's literary development with highly important results. Less attention, however, has been paid to the work of the office in arranging musical performances; or to the circumstances in which the office was established and in which its activities were several times curtailed, prior to its eventual abolition. In addition historians have not always appreciated the connexion that may be traced between the rise and fall of this office and other changes which occurred in the intellectual history of Han China.

This paper, by means of original Bedouin documents relating to matters of personal status, attempts to disclose interaction between custom and sharī'a and to illuminate some of the mechanisms tending to complete the islamization of a tribal society in process of sedentarization. The Bedouin dealt with here are a group of tribes in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem region: al-Sawāhira (c. 6,000 persons now) east of Jerusalem, al-'Ubaydiyya (c. 5,500) east of Bayt Saḥūr, the 13 al-Ta'āmira tribes (c. 20,000) extending over a sector east of Bayt Saḥūr in the north to Bayt Fajjār in the south, and al-Rashā'ida (c. 500) south-east of Taqū'a. Most of these tribes originate from Ḥijaz and Najd. They appeared in the region in small groups from the sixteenth century and in time developed into tribes, while absorbing local fallāḥs. Their main numerical increase took place in the twentieth century.

In the first part of this study we followed the development of the Ṣūfī ṭarīqa organization in Somaliland after the introduction of Islam and examined the functions exercised by Ṣūfī communities in the social structure. We interpreted the closer social and genealogical assimilation of jamā‘as among the nomadic tribes in terms of lack of arable land available for the foundation of independent settlements. It was argued that the genealogical idiom in which social relations are normally described, especially amongst the nomads, is extended to the jamā‘as by virtue of their identification with the Arabian genealogies of their sheiks. The incorporation of such Ṣūfi genealogies was held to explain how the Somali lineage system is in its furthest extension extrapolated to the Qurayshitic lineage of the Prophet.