The question concerning the location of the original home of the Indo-Europeans—by which name is designated, not a certain race or people of which no traces have so far been found, but the peoples or tribes who did at one time speak the no longer existing Indo-European language—has at times aroused great interest and vivid discussion amongst scholars. While at one time the consensus omnium seemed to vote for an Asiatic origin of the Indo-Europeans, and even, owing to a misunderstanding of the linguistic affinities of Sanskrit, looked for their old home within the borders of India, general opinion seems, since the time of Latham, to have decided for Europe as the cradle of Indo-European-speaking peoples. But as to where in Europe the starting-point of the migrations of these tribes should be looked for no uniform opinion is so far on record. The idea, certainly impossible, that the “Urheimat” should be looked for in Germany and then probably on the southern shores of the Baltic, has long been in favour with German scholars who saw in the ideal old Teutons described by Tacitus a real counterpart of the “Indo-Germanic” ancestors; and Scandinavian archaeologists and philologists have been strongly inclined to adopt this rather fanciful theory and to look for the “Urheimat” not only in Germany but also on the Danish islands and in the southernmost province of Sweden. Other scholars looked for a centre of spread in Hungary, and this theory has quite lately been advocated in an able way by Dr. Giles. The late lamented Professor Schrader, in his sound and thoroughly critical way, tried to establish that South Russia, the rich corn-land to the north of the Black Sea, was the original home of the Indo-Europeans; but he was not quite averse to the idea that they might at one time have extended over areas to the east of that part of Europe. There are other theories as well, but they do not need to be taken into consideration here.

Burushaski, the language of Hunza and Nagir, has not up to the present received any undue measure of attention.

The list of authorities in the Linguistic Survey of India is a short one containing only nine items. Of these only three are of serious importance:—

Dr. G. W. Leitner, The Languages and Races of Dardistan, Lahore, 1877.

Col. J. Biddulph, JRAS., vol. xvi, pt. i (1884), “The Boorishki Language,” being a corrected reprint of the Grammar and Vocabulary of the language, published in his Tribes of the Hindu Rush, Calcutta, 1880.

Dr. G. W. Leitner. The Hunza and Nagyr Handbook, pt. i, Calcutta, 1889.

When revolution broke out in China in 1911 and rapidly led to the overthrow of the dynasty and the founding of a republic, opinion throughout the world was startled and deeply impressed. The European press expressed amazement that a quaint Oriental people such as the Chinese should take it into their heads to carry out an anti-monarchical revolution, and that hard-headed political realist Vladimir Ilich Lenin waxed positively lyrical about the Chinese revolution and its leader. ‘The East’, he wrote, ‘has committed itself to the Western path,…further hundreds and hundreds of millions of people will from now on join in the struggle for the ideals for which the West has striven’. In Sun Yat-sen, he saw ‘a revolutionary democrat, imbued with that nobility and heroism peculiar to a rising rather than a declining class’. Even when Sun had been supplanted as President by Yüan Shih-k'ai, Lenin still saw a ‘mighty democratic movement’ in progress throughout Asia, whereby hundreds of millions of people were ‘awakening into life, light, and freedom’. Succeeding generations of scholars and political observers, instructed by the spectacle of corruption, division, and military domination which unfolded itself in various guises throughout the era from 1911 to 1949, have gone almost completely to the opposite extreme. What happened in 1911 was not a revolution at all, or only in the most superficial sense; the monarchical system was indeed overthrown, but there was no real change in the locus of power in society.

Prostration (sujūd) is a fundamental part of the ritual prayer (ṣalāt). It is the highest form of religious devotion and is often mentioned in the Quran as well as in many traditions from all genres of Muslim literature. Prostration is also mentioned in some traditions in relation to what Muslim sources define as sujūd al-shukr, i.e., literally, ‘the thanksgiving prostration’. This is a voluntary act of devotion consisting of a prostration performed by the believer when he wants to thank God for some blessing. There is an abundance of evidence concerning this kind of prostration and it will be discussed here.

In 1898 Queen Victoria sent a recording of her voice to the Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia and his Queen, Itege Taitu, together with some phonograph apparatus. The following year Menelik and Taitu returned the compliment by making recordings of their voices and sending them to Queen Victoria. The latter recordings have been preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, but Queen Victoria's recording was later destroyed on her instructions. The text of her message has, however, been preserved and is reproduced here. The message was dated Osborne, 8 August 1898:

‘I, Victoria, Queen of England, hope your Majesty is in good health. I thank you for the kind reception which you have given to my Envoys, Mr. Rodd and Mr. Harrington. I wish your Majesty and the Empress Taitou all prosperity and success, and I hope that the friendship between our two Empires will constantly increase’.

The early literature of the Hindi group of languages, that is the literature written in Avadhī, Bihārī, Rājputānī, and Hindi proper, was largely poetical, and prose was rare. In the beginning of the nineteenth century Lallū Jī Lāi and Sadal Miśr entered Dr. Gilchrist's service and at his suggestion translated some early works into modern vernaculars. The works selected were chiefly Sanskrit, and they were translated into Braj or Khaṛī Bolī. Lallū Jī is the better known of the two, but he was not a pioneer, nor was his example followed. For nearly fifty years after he wrote, nothing of real merit was produced in Khaṛī. The practical founder of modern Hindi prose, the man who gave it its impetus and started it on its career of prosperity, was Hariś Chandar. A somewhat exaggerated emphasis has been placed on Lallū's and Sadal Miśr's translations, and this has resulted in a lack of perspective. Lallū has been acclaimed as the “Father of Hindi prose”. The title is inaccurate, and has been made the subject of protest. One Hindi writer, in complaining of his being called the “Creator of Khaṛī Bolī”, maintains that such an idea is entirely erroneous, and remarks that before his books were brought out Sadā Sukh Lāi and Inẖā Allāh were writing in straightforward Hindi. He adds, in an amusing aside, that they wrote on their own initiative and not at the behest of another. He also criticizes Lallu's style as being too much tainted with Braj idioms and poetical turns of expression. Sadal Miśr he regards as Lallu's superior.

The aims of this paper are: (i) to report new dialect data for a vowel contrast in Acehnese which was not recorded in earlier descriptive work, (ii) to show that this contrast is cognate with a contrast reconstructed for Proto–Chamic, and (iii) to reconstruct this part of the vowel system of Proto–Aceh–Chamic.

A close genetic relationship between Acehnese and Chamic was first suggested by Nieman (1891). Although a contrary view was expressed by Blagden (1929), the issue has been conclusively put to rest by the work of Cowan (1933, 1948, 1974, 1981, 1983, 1988), Shorto (1975, 1977) and Collins (1975) who all agree on the existence of a distinct Aceh–Chamic sub–group within Austronesian.

Unfortunately, comparative work on Aceh-Chamic (Cowan: Chamo- Achehic, Shorto: Achino-Cham) has been hampered by problems of access to the data. In Lee's (1966) and Burnham's (1976) reconstructions of Proto-Chamic no mention is made of Acehnese. On the other hand, Cowan and Shorto, the two scholars who have furthered Aceh-Chamic studies the most, have not had access to Lee (1966), nor, in more recent works, to Burnham (1976). Another problem has been that Acehnese source materials have been restricted to just one dialect, as reflected by Djajadiningrat's (1934) and Kreemer's (1931) Acehnese-Dutch dictionaries.

This paper represents one step towards addressing some of these problems, by comparing new Acehnese dialect data with the comparative Chamic wordlist compiled by Lee and augmented by Burnham. I focus here upon a specific

Sixty-five years ago, in brief remarks devoted to the Shina of Dras, Bailey noted an unusual construction associated with the verb lezhonu ‘to get’:

A peculiar and interesting use of the instrumental case of the word sattā, which seems to have escaped the attention of the Sanskrit dictionaries, occurs frequently in the legal and commentatorial literature in connection with the Brahmanical gotra-system. Briefly, the situation is as follows: a Brahman may not marry within his own gotra. But as the word gotra came in the course of linguistic development to be loosely applied to subdivisions of the original groups, and even to individual families, while the exogamous unit remained the larger group, the prohibition of marriage within the gotra became ambiguous, and required to be supplemented, or rather defined, by a consideration of the pravara, the list of ṛṣi-names recited on specific sacrificial occasions. In other words, the pravara is used as a test to decide to which of the large exogamous groups a man belongs. In the pravara-appendix to the Baudhāyana Śrauta Sūtra the rule reads: eka eva ṛṣir yāvat pravareṣv anuvartate, tāvat samānagotratvam anyatra bhṛgvaṅgirasāṃ gaṇāt. “If even one ṛṣi recurs in the pravaras, that constitutes sameness of gotra (for exogamous purposes), except in the case of a gaṇa of the Bhṛgus and Aṅgirases (where a majority of the ṛṣi-names must be identical in order to prevent intermarriage).” Thus, for example, a member of the Nidhruva “gotra”, with the pravara “Kāśyapa, Āvatsāra, Naidhruva”, and a member of the Śaṇḍila “gotra”, with the pravara “Kāśyapa, Āvatsāra, Śāṇḍila”, both clearly belong to the Kaśyapa gotra, and as such are forbidden to marry.

The long struggle of the Thai against the Khmers, culminating in the attacks on and conquest of Angkor early in the fifteenth century A.D., brought the two peoples into intimate association. Thai literature was clearly a beneficiary of this close culture contact, and Cambodian influence upon it, dating back to this early period, is undoubted. Nevertheless, little detailed study of such influence has so far been attempted, partly because of a lack of suitable manuscript material, especially on the Cambodian side, and partly because serious comparative work of an historical nature on the two languages has hardly begun.