THE two ceremonial speeches which are given below were recorded for me in 1956 by an old Samoan talking-chief (tūlāfale) in the village of Amanave on the island of Tutuila. The text is an edited transcription made from those tapes.

Both speeches form part of a house-building ceremony known in Tutuila as le usuga i le fale (the visitation of the house), which commemorates the building by a matai (head of a family group) of a round-house (fale tele). The fale tele is used mainly as a meeting place for the village council and for the entertainment of travelling parties (malaga) from other villages. It is an expensive undertaking to build such a house as it involves the employment of a master-carpenter (matai tufuga, or, ceremonially, agai-o-tupu) and members of his guild (?āiga), who must be entertained lavishly during the work and paid with cash and fine-mats at a later ceremony (le umusāga). A Samoan who builds his village a fale tele is making a major contribution to their prestige, and the usuga ceremony is held as a mark of gratitude and respect.

“… desde tempo remoto passa por verdade demonstrada ogrande absurdo de que a lingua desta terra (Goa), a lingua de meio milhão de homens, nem tem gramática nem é susceptível de ser escrita; julgamos que ao menos faremos algum serviço se dissiparmos tão perniciosa ilusão, mostrando que a lingua concani não só tem a sua gramática, como qualquer outra, mas que a mesma gramatica foiem tempo formulada em regras e até impressa.” J. H. da Cunha Rivara, Ensaio Histórico da Lingua Concani, 1857, pg. 1.

In this article, some previously unrecognized facts about the way the morphology of the verb manifests relationships within clauses in Swahili are presented, in the context of current general linguistic interest in functional semantics.

Warren Hastings resigned the Governor-Generalship of Bengal in February 1785 and arrived in England in the following June. He faced his retirement with a fortune of approximately £75, 000, a total amounting to little more than a third of all the money which he had sent out of India during the 13 years of his administration. Those who knew Hastings well and who were aware that he had found it almost impossible to save anything out of his official salary of more than £30, 000 were pessimistic about his chances of living within the income of £3, 500, which he could anticipate from his capital of £75, 000. Such pessimism was fully justified.

The frequent Vedic construction exemplified by ṚV 5, 31, 4 indram … arkaír évardhayann éhaye héntav u ‘they strengthened Indra with hymns to slay the serpent’ has since Delbriick's days been the subject of some discussion and difference of opinion. Whitney expressed the view that the frequent use of the dative beside a so-called infinitive dative to denote the subject or the object of the action constitutes a case of attraction: in the above sentence one would, in accordance with the implication of this term, expect the accusative ahint, whereas in ṚV 1, 24, 8 cakira sryāya pánthām ánvetav u ‘he made a track for the sun to follow’, the dative of the noun denoting the being on whose behalf the path is made is understandable at first sight. Hence no doubt the comment made by Whitney before quoting the latter line: the construction is in part a perfectly simple one, but is stretched beyond its natural boundaries by a kind of attraction.

In the seventies and early eighties of the eighteenth century the Secret Committee had shown, as we have seen, an increasing tendency to become subservient to the Ministry, and in consequence the Directors had begun to keep a careful watch on the Committee's activities. Although, in April, 1783, to please Fox they nominated the “Chairs”, Sir Henry Fletcher and Nathaniel Smith, to be the Secret Committee, with authority to conduct the Company's naval and military affairs and to consult with the Ministry, they at the same time cautiously enjoined that such powers should be valid for only one month. These powers were grudgingly renewed monthly until November, when Fox, with the approval of Fletcher, who was one of his best friends and firmest political supporters, produced his India Bills, which sought to destroy the Company's existing home government. That Fletcher had seen and yet silently acquiesced in these revolutíonary Bills was deemed by the majority of the Directors to be a betrayal of his trust as chairman, and they promptly sacked him. So great was the blow to their confidence in the “Chairs” that subsequent to the overthrow of the Coalition in late December they forbade the new Chairmen privately to interview the Ministers unless accompanied by Laurence Sulivan, the senior Director and trusted representative of the Indian interest, the strongest party in the Court.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the general upsurge of nationalism in Europe exerted an influence on the Jewish population as well. This influence was particularly strong in Eastern Europe, where there occurred a formidable Jewish nationalistic renaissance, some features of which were: the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language; the widespread use of Jewish folk-lore in the works of Jewish writers, painters, and musicians; and the rebuilding and resettling of Palestine by small groups of Jewish pioneers. The new settlers in Palestine soon adapted Hebrew (which had indeed remained very much alive through the centuries as a literary tongue) to the requirements of daily existence, and it became the language of instruction in most of their schools. At present, practically the entire Israeli population (about two million) speaks Hebrew.

Parmi la trentaine de manuscrits ou de fragments turcs en écriture ouïgoure provenant de la célèbre grotte de Touen-houang dont je prépare l'édition, il y en a deux, sans doute du Xe siècle, écrits à coup sûr par des habitants de Khotan. Il s'agit dans un cas d'une lettre à propos d'événements survenus ‘ici à Khotan’, et, dans l'autre, d'une série de notations écrites à Cha-tcheou (Touen-houang) au dos d'un rouleau de sûtra chinois par un envoyé de ‘l'État d'Or’ (altun el), expression désignant Khotan, bien attestée dans les manuscrits khotanais de Touen-houang.

The dynasty which ruled the khānate of Bukhara during the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed descent from Chingiz Khān's son Jochi, as did the Shaybānids of the preceding dynasty. It is known as Ashtarkhānid, to recall the place of origin of the family, viz. Astrakhan. More often it is referred to as Jānid, after Jānāī Muḥammad Khān, who is considered by some as the first ruler of the dynasty. But it will be seen that there is no clear basis for such an assumption, and that in fact his father and his eldest son were between them the founders of the dynasty