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.

DANS un livre, écrit en langue néerlandaise et qui a paru pendant la guerre,1 M. H. Wagenvoort, étudiant les traces du concept “primitif” de mana chez les Romains, a fait des observations intéressantes sur l′usage du mot latin gravitas. L′expression gravis auctor, qui se trouve fréquemment, n′a pas seulement la signification de “auteur ou informateur important ou compétent”, mais aussi celle de “homme d′influence et qui prend l′initiative”. La qualité la plus saillante de Vauctor, mot qui à l′origine a du signifier “celui qui augmente”, est celle que nous désignons par le terme “prestige”. Et comme auctor est un mot “mana”, c.à.d. un mot exprimant un concept relatif à l′ensemble des idées primitives et sémi-primitives qui se groupent autour du “mana”, M. Wagenvoort cherche à démontrer qu′il y a aussi des traces de “mana” dans l′usage du mot gravis. En preparant son expose sur gravis etc. il m′a demande quelques renseignements sur le mot Sanskrit guru- “lourd, etc.”, et sa question a attiré mon attention sur la signification primitive de guru- “maitre” et sur la croyance, répandue dans l′antiquité classique, que les dieux et les etres surhumains en général ont, en vertu de leur mana, un poids extraordinaire.

Under the patronage of the enlightened Fatimid caliphs (A.D. 969–1171) there flourished in Egypt a vigorous and refined art. The sumptuous palaces with which they had adorned their capital Cairo have vanished without trace, but the remains of their religious architecture, the magnificent gateways of Cairo's Fatimid wall (which have escaped destruction), together with the enthusiastic descriptions of contemporary travellers enable us to imagine the splendour of their court.

Among the Dunhuang Tibetan texts held by the India Office Collection of the British Library is a very large scroll, catalogued as Ch. 9.II.17, and long recognized as a compendium of Tibeto-Chinese transcriptional texts. Following the practice of Walter Simon (1958), this document is now conventionally called the ‘Long Scroll’. In earlier years several small portions of it were identified by Simon and others, but more recently Professor Tokio Takata has published a transcription of the entire text and reconstructed or identified almost all of it (Takata, 1993). Nevertheless, there remain portions of the manuscript which have not yet been restored, and these present a continuing challenge to those interested both in the Long Scroll and in Tibeto-Chinese transcriptions in general. The purpose of the present paper is to fill two such lacunae.

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’:

Wāman Pandit was born in the second half of the seventeenth century (the definite date is not obtainable) at the village of Kumthe in the Satārā, district of the Bombay Presidency. According to the latest research work of the Bharata Itīhāsa Samśodhak Mandali of Poona, Wāman was a native of Bijāpore. In his early days he received some training in Sanskrit from his father, who was the village-astrologer by profession, and who had considerable knowledge of Sanskrit. When about 18 he went to Benāres, the centre of Hindu learning and also the most sacred place of the Hindus. He was accompanied by his wife, an incident which shows that his parents were dead at that time. He applied himself rigorously to the study of Sanskrit for not less than twelve years, and having completed his education, in all departments of knowledge, he returned to his native place.

The purpose of the present article, as of its predecessor, is to make known a group of fragments surviving only in the form of transcriptions in the Nachlass of Olaf Hansen. Neither the original manuscript nor photographs seem to be extant. Olaf Hansen's handwritten transcripts, which I had the opportunity to study in Kiel in 1985, are published here by kind permission of his son Lars Hansen.

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.

One of the results of the sometime colonization of Africa was the concentration by linguists of various European countries on the languages of those African territories held under their suzerainty, and the neglect of languages spoken in areas ‘belonging to’ other European countries. Fang, spoken in parts of what are now Gabon and Cameroon, has not enjoyed a great deal of attention from English-speaking linguists and/or Africanists, though it holds considerable interest for both in the idiosyncrasies of the phonetic display relating to its phonological categories and configurations.