Original Dravidian k-is palatalized to c- in Tamil Malayalam and Telugu when follwed by the front vowelsi, ī, e, ē. This change takes place in the following words:-

Ta. citar to scatter, also citaṟ, Ma. citaruka, Te, cedaru; Ka. kedaru, kedaṟu, Tu. kedaruni; Ka. also cadaṟu, cedaṟu, Tu. also cadaruni.

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 word tuṭhdyātanāni occurring in the Seventh Pillar Edict of Aśoka at Delhi-Topra, line 27, has caused much difference of opinion. A. C. Woolner, in his Asoka—Text and Glossary, ii, has cited the following interpretations given by various scholars : “sources of contentment” (Bühler), “opportunities for charity” (Vincent Smith), “sundry places where satisfaction may be given” (V. Smith, Asoka, 3rd edition), “persons who deserve suitable presents” (Liiders), “worthy recipients of charity” (Hultzsch).

It would be a happier occasion to be able to announce the completion of the publication of all the Sogdian manuscripts that Sir Aurel Stein and M. Paul Pelliot secured from the “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” at Tun-huang, were not this consummation overshadowed by the death of P. Pelliot, who has now followed Sir Aurel Stein after so brief an interval. The Sogdian MSS., which he entrusted to the care of the Bibliothèque Nationale, were believed lost for a number of years, but rediscovered by M. Filliozat in 1936. We cannot but admire the speed with which M. Benveniste has made them available to the public. As early as the spring of 1940 photographic reproductions of superb quality were published by Ejnar Munksgaard in Copenhagen; a few copies of this facsimile edition reached this country before communications were interrupted. A few weeks later M. Benveniste's monumental edition, comprising the transliteration, an excellent translation, a commentary of greatest learning which abounds in veritable pearls of linguistic notes, and a very full glossary which will make the publication of a Sogdian dictionary nearly superfluous, appeared in Paris, too late, however, for us to obtain the book; we had to curb our impatience until at long last, in September, 1945, we received this immensely valuable volume, through the kindness of the author and the good offices of the British Council.

The Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India for 1936–7 contains, among other interesting matter, a report by the late Mr. N. G. Majumdar on the excavation of a large and evidently important building at Lauriya Nandangarh, which seems to date from at least the second century B.C. Among the many things found here is a square leadin coin or token with the mould in which it was cast (pp. 49 f., pl. xxiv, 2–4). This bears on one side the device of the tree in rail and on the other taurine symbol surmounted by a legend in Brāhmī script of about the first century B.C., a ya ri ta sa, which Mr. Majumdar interpreted as Aya Ritasa, Pkt. corresponding to Skt. Ārya Rtasya, and meaning “Of the Honourable Rta”. He remarks that this “does not sound like a king's name …. It is thus possible that the lead piece represents a token and not a coin. Otherwise it would be hard to explain the discovery of a coin mould in the remains of religious establishment”. He thus seems inclined to regard it as a token issued by or for some religious teacher named in Skt. Rta and in Pkt. Rita.

Rāma Rāo's Grammar, which was summarized in the first part of this article, gives conjugational forms of the auxiliaries hū- and rhā- only. It will be convenient to give here the conjugation of an ordinary consonantal stem.

The romance of Vīs and Rāmīn has many claims to our attention. Fakhr A al-dīn As'ad Gurgānī wrote his version of it some time between A.D. 1040 and 1054, almost nine centuries ago, and only half a century after Firdausī completed the Shāh-nāma. The poem is based on an old “pahlavī” tale vaguely reminiscent of Tristan and Isolde, King Mark and Brangane. Many of its episodes echo feelings and attitudes dissonant with the post-Islamic ideas of marriage, women, and love. The poetic gifts of Fakhr al-dīn Gurgānī are also beyond doubt. Whatever the inconsistencies in the presentation of characters, whatever the length of the dialogues and soliloquies of the two lovers, these defects are redeemed both by the purity of diction of the poet and by bis truly humane understanding of men's passions, soarings, and failures.

Sinhalese is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages and “is derived from a form of speech of which our earliest document is the Rgveda” [TND., Introduction, p. xii]. Concerning its original home in Aryan India opinion is divided. The ancient tradition regarding the Aryan immigration into Ceylon is narrated in the old Pali Chronicles, Dīpavaṁsa, ix, 1 sq., and Mahāvaṁsa, vi, 1 sq. It is not necessary to discuss all its details here. Different interpretations of this legend have been advanced by various scholars. The main point of controversy is the identification and location of Lāḷa, the homeland of Vijaya. H. W. Codrington [“A Short History of Ceylon ”, pp. 6 sq.], W. Geiger [SghD., vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. xvii–xviii; also SghG., pp. vii–xi, pp. 1–3], and S. K. Chatterji [ODBLang., p. 15, pp. 72, 73 fn.], who identify Lāḷa with Lāṭa (Gujarat), maintain that the first Aryan colonists under the leadership of Vijaya came from Western India. On the contrary, E. Müller [Aic, pp. 23, 24; also IA., xi, p. 198], Rev. R. Siddhartha [“ The Indian Languages and their Relation with the Sinhalese Language“ in JRAS. (Ceylon Branch), xxxiii, No. 88, 1935, pp. 123 sq.], and M. Shahidullah [“The First Aryan Colonization of Ceylon” in IHQ., ix, 1933, pp. 742 sq.[, identifying Lāḷa with Rāḍha (West Bengal), contend that they came from Eastern India. Various arguments and explanations are propounded by them in support of their individual theories, and they all admit some measure of historical truth underlying the tradition.

An initial y- is found in Tamil only before long ā in such Words as yā1E49;ai elephant, yāṭu goat, yāṟu river, yāmai tortoise, etc. Side by side with these forms We also have forms without the initial y-, āṉai, āṭu, etc., and an examination of literary usage shows that the forms with initial y- has been dropped. In the early anthologies the forms with initial yā- greatly preponderate; in Middle Tamil, literature yā- and ā- forms are indifferently used; while in Modern Tamil, Particularly in the spoken language, ā- forms alone are current. The following is a list of such words together with their cognates in the other Dravidian languages:—

Ta. yā, ā to bind, tie; to dam up, stop, confine, yākkai binding, bond; body, ākkai body; strips of fibre used for thatching, yāppu binding, bond; metre, prosody, āppu bandage, tie; body; wedge, Ma. āppu wedge, plug, what stops a crevice, Ka. āpu a restraint, a stoppage, what stops, Malt. eye to tie, bind, 3rd p.t. ēcha, ēpu the fibres of a wild plant of which cord is made, Kur. ēp string, cord, rope, (with prothetic h-) hē' enā to tie, bind, 3rd p.t. hēcas.

Bishop caldwell, the founder of the comparative study of the Dravidian languages, was interested not only in the relationship of those languages among themselves, but also in the question of their connection with other families of languages outside India. His investigations in this direction led him to believe that the Dravidian languages are connected with what he called the “Scythian” family of languages. By the term “Scẏthian” Caldwell referred mainly to the Ural-Altaic languages, though occasionally using the word in a rather wider sense than that. Within the “Scythian” family he held that it was possible to define the position of Dravidian even more closely, by attaching it to the Finno-ugrian group in particular. The evidence which Caldwell offered in support of this theory consisted partly of grammatical features which he held to be common to the languages concerned, and partly of comparisons of vocabulary. The former are to be found scattered through the body of his work, and the latter are collected together in an appendix entitled “Glossarial Affinities”. In presenting this theory Caldwell was quite modest in his claims; he admitted the possibility of being misled by accidental assonances, and claimed rather to have pointed the way to the possibilities of future research than to have demonstrated the relationship with any finality.

The word Gāndhārī has been chosen to head this study as a term sufficiently wide in its scope to embrace the forms of the one Middle Indian dialect of the north-west of India, centred in the old Gāndhāra region, around modern Peshawar, and which we meet in most varied sources. Under this name I propose to include those inscriptions of Aśoka which are recorded at Shahbazgaṛhi and Mansehra in the Kharoṣṭhī script, the vehicle for the remains of much of this dialect: To be included also are the following sources: the Buddhist literary text, the Dharmapada found in Khotan, written likewise in Kharoṣṭhī, of which a new reading of the text available in facsimile is given in BSOAS 11. 488–512; the Kharoṣṭhī documents on wood, leather, and silk from Caḍ'ota (the Niya site) on the border of the ancient kingdom of Khotan, which represented the official language of the capital Krorayina, K 572, 512 lou-lan <ləu-lan (lou in a series with alternation of k and l) of the Shan-shan kingdom, and of one document, no. 661, dated in the reign of the Khotana maharaya rayatiraya hinajha dheva ṿijida-siṃha. With this more copious material must be grouped the scattered traces of the same Middle Indian dialect in Khotanese, Tibetan, Agnean, Kuchean, the earlier Chinese Buddhist transliterations, as, in particular, in the Dīrghāgama of the Dharmaguptaka ṡect and the remains in Sogdian, Uigur Turkish, and in Mongol (in living use), and also in Manchu texts. The modern Dardic languages Ṣiṇā, Khowar, Phalūᵛa and others represent the same type of Middle Indian. Much material in Chinese texts, for most of us hidden and inaccessible, remains to be gathered and sifted. The preliminary studies of P. Pelliot in Les noms propres dans les traductions chinoises du Milindapañha (JA 1914. 2. 379–419), of Fr. Weller in his paper Über den Aufbau des Pāṭikasuttanta (Asia Major 5. 1928), and of E. Waldschmidt in his Bruchstücke buddhistischer Sūtras aus dem zentralasiatischen Sanskritkanon I, 1932, have hardly realized the importance of this North-Western Prakrit.

IL est de règie de diviser les chroniques siamoises en deux classes: 1˚ les chroniques courtes, sommaires, (, skt sanhhepa), et 2˚ les chroniques longues, développées, (, skt vistdra).

Cette classification, purement formelle en son principe, coïncide pourtant avec la classification génétique de ces textes, du moins en gros. Les chroniques longues semblent dérivées d'une recension de la fin du XVIII e siècle; au contraire, les rapports des chroniques courtes entre elles et avec la recension longue sont fort loin d'être clairs.

The advancement of learning is learning is chiefly made in these three ways—by pure research, by applied research, and by interesting the general public in the results achieved. The last item is not the least important, although scientists, especially those engaged in pure research, are apt to discount and even to ignore it. In any event it is essential to publish the fruits of research among fellow-scientists for criticism, appraisement, and development. The spark of learning, which passes from master to pupil, is so feeble that unless fanned to a vigorous flame by some external agency it is apt to flicker out. It was only by a stroke of good fortune that the works of Mendel were brought to light after a long lapse of years.

From early times China was surrounded by states of lower culture, and on the whole, of lesser military power, which the Chinese regarded as protectorates or tributaries. As early as the Chou dynasty, interpreters were appointed to deal with envoys bringing tribute or declarations of loyalty. The Chou interpreters were called chi , hsiang , ti t'i , or i , and took charge of peoples from the east, south, west, and north respectively. The Ch'in dynasty bureaux of tributary affairs were the tien k'o and tien shu kuo , which the Han later replaced by the Ta Hung Lu under which there were interpreters (i kuan ). In the Sui, T'ang, and Sung dynasties tributary affairs were handled by the Ssŭ Fang Kuan (). In the Ming dynasty the Ssŭ I Kuan was founded to translate foreign diplomatic documents, and was continued in the Ch'ing with a change of name ( to ) and accompanied by the Hui T'ung Kuan, which handled oral interpreting.

The dated documents belonging to this last half-century of the Stein Collection are more numerous than ever, but also for the most part scrappy and fragmentary. There are very few Buddhist canonical texts, but a considerable variety of miscellaneous prayers, eulogies, certificates, letters, contracts, calendars, inventories, and so forth. The general impression one obtains is of a period of gradually increasing poverty and political unrest, in which the civilization introduced by the Chinese is seriously threatened, and Buddhism, though still maintaining its position as the dominant religion, has greatly degenerated since the palmy days of the early T'ang dynasty.

Professor E. H. Johnston's sudden death in October, 1942, was a grievous blow to Oriental research. Sir Richard Burn, called in by the authorities of Balliol College to go through his papers, found amongst them a rough manuscript article and other material on the Sanskrit inscriptions of Arakan, together with correspondence on the subject with Mr. G. H. Luce and other scholars who had supplied him with rubbings and photographs. As will be seen from the following letter to Mr. Luce, dated the 15th August, 1942, Professor Johnston was contemplating the preparation of this work for publication:

“I have not yet heard what is your opinion about publishing some of the Arakanese results now. Life is short and uncertain these days, and it will hardly be possible to get anything out in Epigraphia Birmanica for years to come. What I should like to do is to publish Ānandacandra's inscription, omittiṇg all I have said in the draft about the palæography and just mentioning the others, with a brief account of the coins and of the historical conclusions. For one thing it might attract the attention of linguists and lead to some ideas about the vernacular names; e.g. what language is Seviṅreṅ, assuming my reading to be correct? The fuller consideration of details could then be reserved till Epigraphia Birmanica is ready to come about.

Khami is one of the most important Sino-Tibetan languages because of the extensive data it presents regarding prefixes, preserved in so few groups of that linguistic family. The Khimi described here is a subdialect of the Southern dialect of the Khami language, Kukish group, Burmic division of Sino-Tibetan. Phonetically it differs from the more commonly recorded Southern dialect chiefly in the pronunciation of an original -a as -aw (as in English awe).

The Pokau or Nara (also spelt Pokao or Nala) language is spoken in a hilly district near the coast to the east of Hall Sound in the Central Division of British New Guinea. The villages speaking the language are Vanuamai, Oroi, Alaala, Diumana, Dubu (or Tubu), Kaiau (or Bokama), Lalime, Abo and Epa.

In 1946 the School of Oriental and African Studies is celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Sir William Jones: in 1948 University College, London, will celebrate that of Jeremy Bentham. In this there is something more than an accidental approximation of dates. All subsequent scientific English thinking about law is traceable to these two men. The English School of Analytical Jurisprudence; the great tide of law reform which swept through nineteenth-century England; the codification (the word is his own coinage) of law not only in England and India but in many different parts of the world: these things admittedly sprang from the genius of Jeremy Bentham. Sir William Jones's influence was smaller in volume, though almost as widely diffused. He had neither the apostolic fervour of reform nor the overflowing vitality which carried Bentham on with undiminished vigour to eighty-four years: he died before reaching his forty-seventh birthday. But his influence was, none the less, considerable. The first of our Orientalists who was also a lawyer, Colebrooke, Sutherland, Wynch, and other Sanskritists, the Macnaghtens and the Baillies followed in his footsteps. In particular Colebrooke, greatest of them all, and Ian Baillie came directly under his influence. But it is equally true, though less generally recognized, that he is the forerunner of the other great English school of legal philosophy, the historical and comparative school, and that the work of Sir Henry Maine and his successors might have lacked some of its most distinctive elements if Jones's translation had not rendered the Institutes of Manu available to Maine when he was writing Ancient Law. Indeed, Maine's whole career might have been different; for just as his known interest in Oriental legal systems led to Jones's appointment as a judge of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, so it was the interest in Indian ideas evinced in Ancient Law which led to Maine's appointment as law member of the Governor-General's Council, and so to all his later work on similar topics.