Panipawa wanu waniwhena kunyitu kulumbata, waniwhena kukodya ihato ilele. Pawakomwele wala wanu palele ihato, aniwakamula kuwamila. Wawele kukaya wanilolela nanga pawaheleke ndulu. Uliamba waniuka kuwila wanu wanji mpaka ukula, kukodya kuwila ihato ilele, ikawakamula wanu wala kuwamila wohewohe, pakaya pao wanihila na kuwamila ihato. Bahi, ihiyalile mkongwe umo, mkongwe yula awele na chitumbo. Bahi mkongwe yula aniweleka mwana mnume. Mwana yula na mkuhuma m'chiturabo aniudya kuchi “Mjomba awele kwachi?” Kuuka anyokwe kuchi “Akapali, aniliwa”. Aniudya kuwila kuchi “aliwidye kwachi?” Kuchi “Kunyitu”. Bahi mwana yula aniwahaulila anyokwe kuchi “Nembele munu awhene kunyitu akawalala changa aide nacho”. Anyokwe waniwhena kunembela munu, wakamwona waninyaulila kuchi “Whena ukalembela changa wide nacho”. Munu yula aniwhena panyitu anilembela changa anichoona aniwalala mpaka kukaya kuwhena nacho. Kunamupa mwana yula. Mwana atedono “Wino wawula mapatila wake nguwike kumutwe”. Waniwawula wakamika kumutwe. Pawamikile kumutwe mwana atongwedono “Wino ndembela chipula chikulungwa mning'e”. Wanilembela kumupa. Atwete mpatila wa changa kuwala kumutwe na chipula makono, aniwahaulila anyokwe kuchi “Ngupapata, tuwhene ngulangule indila iwapite wanu”. Waniuka anyokwe na wanji wanu kunangula indila. Waniwhena munyitu maduwa matatu, liduwa lya mcheche wawhena kadiki uwino wawene muyo mele nyongo mkulungwa, ihato ilele. Wanu kuchi watile, aniwalimbidya kuchi “Mnatukute” Wann wala wanikala pahi. Apite mwene mwana yula kulongolela. Aniwhena kuimila ihato nainang'o kula iniimila. Mwana yula kutwala chipula chake kuyakula makono. Wino apilikene ihato kuchi “Wepo mwana, we lapa kachi, mwawene kwachi chinu panyitu kudiuka mwa liyanga ngungungungu?” Kuka mwana nawing'e kuchi “Wepo ihato, lapa, kachi rawawene kwachi mwana namkuwelekwa dihuli mutwe mbee?”. Kuka ihato kuchi “Wepo mwana'we lapa! kachi mwawene kwachi chinu panyitu kudiuka mwa liyanga ngungungungu?”. Kuka mwana kuchi “Wepo ihato lapa! kachi mwawene kwachi mwana namkuwelekwa dihuli mutwe mbee?” Bahi wanitahukana akauka mwana kumkamula ihato yula kutwala chipula chake akanjinja ihato. Ihato upala inihwa. Akatumbula munda, bahi, wohe wanu wachimila wala wakahuma wohewohe pia wakahuma. Kuleka wauya mpaka kukaya wanu wohe wakalinowela pakuholoka alongawao. Wakatwala bola munu mtumwa kumupa mwana yula kuleka wakadenga luwungo.

In this Bulletin, Vol. II, pp. 731–54, I have dealt in a preliminary way with the Brit. Mus. Ms. Sloane 1820, the Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais of Father J. Fenicio, Ṣ.J., which forms the common source of certain parts of the Asia Portugueza of M. de Faria y Sousa and of Baldæus' Afgoderye der Oost-Indische Heydenen, and is also the original of the work called Collectio omnium dogmatum & arcanorum ex Purámis sen libris Canonicis Paganorum Indianorum, etc., written before 1789 by the Carmelite Father Ildephonsus a Præsentatione, and now apparently lost. I have also tried to show there in what connexion this uncommonly valuable manuscript stands to another one by Father M. Barradas, S.J., that seems still to be preserved in a private library in Portugal.

One point only in Dr. Barnett's vivacious article in the last number of this Bulletin (pp. 519–22) seems to merit further examination, because it deals with an issue which is capable of definitely objective treatment, namely the reference in the Pratimānāṭaka to the Nyāyaçāstra of Medhātithi. Dr. Barnett, despite the brief refutation of his view given by me above (Vol. III, Pt. II, p. 295), still insists that the Nyāyaçāstra can only mean the Manubhāṣya, a work of the tenth century a.d.

Abū ‘Alī Muḥammad b. ‘Ali b. al-Ḥasan b. Muqlah, better known as Ibn Muqlah, was born in Baghdad in A.H. 272 (I. Kh.). It has been said that “the details of the childhood of great men are apt to be petty and cloying”; the historians have not provided an opportunity of judging of the truth of this generalization in his case, for their notices only begin when he had already set about earning a livelihood. He worked in one of the dīwāns or administrative departments on a salary of six dīnārs per mensem (Fakh., 318). Fortune favoured him, and while yet very young he came to enjoy intimacy with and a share in the counsels of Ibnu'l-Furāt during the first term of his wazirate, which extended from 296, the year following the accession of the Khalīfah al-Muqtadir, to 299. He had a turn for composition both in prose and verse, and well illustrated the Arab adage: “the pen is one of the two tongues” (al-‘Iqdu'l-Farīd, ii, 153, Cairo, 1316). Specimens of his verses will be given later; Ibn Miskawayh quotes his prose-account of the circumstances in which news of the murder in 296 of Md. b. Dāaūd b. al-Jarrāḥ, after he had been enticed from the place where he had concealed himself when his intrigue on behalf of Ibnu'l-Mu‘tazz miscarried, was secretly communicated to Ibnu'l-Furāt; he there states that on this occasion he was a companion of the wazir's privacy (TU., 66).

In the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, London, at pp. 107 to 117 of III, 1, are to be found some criticisms by Messrs. Krishna Pishāroḍi and Rama Pishāroḍi on my views of Bhāsa and his authorship of Svapna-Vāsavadatta and the connected dramas published in the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series. Their arguments are summarized hereunder with replies thereto:—

I. “Every open-minded critic must perforce admit that Pratimā-nāṭaka must come after Kālidāsa, Chārudatta after Śūdraka, and Avimāraka after Daṇḍin.”

[In view of the curiosity which has been aroused by the examination of the works of Father Thomas Stephens, S.J., preserved in the Marsden Collection—which has now been transferred from King's College to the School of Oriental Studies—the following biography of this first Englishman to visit India cannot fail to be of interest to our readers. The letter addressed by Thomas Stephens to his father, in which he recounts the incidents of his voyage to India, does not appear in print for the first time, but on account of its innate charm of style, and of the vivid picture it presents of a voyage round the Cape in the second half of the sixteenth century, it certainly deserves to be better known, and no excuse is required for its reproduction. —Editor.]

This little Sanskrit play belongs to the ancient repertory of Travancore. Having recently obtained from Pandit V. Venkaṭarāma Śarmā of Chenganur a Nāgarī transcript of one MS., which may be called A, and a collation of another MS., which I designate as B, I now publish the text in transliteration, with such corrections and emendations as seem to be necessary, but without attempting to enforce uniformity of spelling. I have added numbers to the verses.

Note.— The script used to represent Egyptian Arabic speech in these notes is that of the International Phonetics Association, with the necessary modifications for Egyptian Arabic sounds, as found in Gairdner's Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.

The material upon which this paper is based is in the first instance taken from the Relationship systems and customs of a Sudan Arab tribe (the Kababish) and of the Beni Amer, a Hamitic tribe whom I have been able to study myself in the Sudan by means of the genealogical method. Miss Moss kindly collected a list of relationship terms in Malta for me, which I have used. The rest of the material has been taken from dictionaries, and although I am fully aware of the inadequacy of material culled from dictionaries, yet in this case the method is inevitable. Full investigation into the relationship system and social organizations of the Amharic-speaking Abyssinians would be of the greatest value, and a complete examination of the Maltese terms would also be of interest. I have had much help from friends, though they are in no case responsible for my conclusions. Chief among these is Professor S. Langdon, who has given me much information. I am also indebted to Dr. Hall, Professor Zammit, Dr. Czermak, and Mr. S. H. Ray for references.

In support of his view that the drama published by him under the title Svapna-vāsavadatta in the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series (to which I shall henceforth refer as “the TSS. play”) is the work of Bhāsa, Mahāmahōpâdhyāya Gaṇapati Śāstri cites in JRAS., Oct. 1924, p. 668, a passage from the unpublished Bhāva-prakāśa of Śāradātanaya. I have examined three MSS. of the latter work. It nowhere ascribes the play to Bhāsa; but the context of the quotation and the observations on nāndī throw some light on the Bhāsa-problem.

Many grammars of the Japanese spoken language have been written, and some of them are well compiled on more or less scientific principies, but one of the most important characteristics of the spoken language, namely the tones and their laws, have been rather neglected.

The Basin of the Rivers Oxus and Jaxartes (which may be regarded as a single unit from the geographical as well as the historical point of view) has several times over played a particular part in the world's history. In conjunction with its complement, the Basin of the Tarim, it has served as a corridor or line of communication between the home-lands of several independent civilizations. By this route; the Middle Eastern World (and the Mediterranean World behind it) has communicated with India, and both India and the Middle East (sometimes alternately and, less often, simultaneously) with the Far Eastern World of China, Korea, and Japan.

The following is a brief digest of a pamphlet published by the Committee of Orientalists in Petrograd early in 1924. The publication was by order of the Academy of Sciences and is compiled and edited by M. V. Kotvich.

As cousin marriage has been dealt with so exhaustively by Sir James Frazer and also by Professor Westermarck, I feel I owe some apology for bringing forward the subject again. In the first place I must say that I put together the notes for this paper before the publication of either Folk-lore in the Old Testament or the new edition of The History of Human Marriage, and that I am concerned not with the problem as to how this form of marriage has arisen, but why it has spread as it has, and indeed is still spreading.

The story of Suto and Tato is in no way fiction, it is a lively reality, and anyone even slightly acquainted with these far-distant, but beautiful and picturesque countries and their inhabitants, will confirm my statement. The principal actors, Shaikh Muhammad Sadiq, the Shaikh of Barzan, Tato, Osman—Suto's elder son, are no longer alive. I am not certain about Suto himself. This old man, a perfect type of a Kurdish chief ruling over the most impregnable region of Central Kurdistan, may yet be alive. At any rate, in 1918 he was. Mulla Said, the narrator, was murdered in Urumia in July, 1918, by his countrymen. Peace be on him!

1. The following article has grown out of notes made in response to a request from Sir George Grierson for the paradigm of a Shina () transitive verb with a root ending in a consonant, and in reply to a suggestion made by him that the construction with the trs. vb. is agential, i.e. that the ostensibly active trs. vb. is in fact passive, or was originally so.

The problem of “accent” in the Japanese language has attracted the attention of a few Japanese scholars for some hundred years. In recent years more writers, both native and foreign, on the Japanese language have touched upon this problem. For instance, B. H. Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, 3rd ed., 1898, pp. 19–20; R. Lange, Lehrbuch der japanischen Umgangssprache, 1906, ss. xxvii–viii; E. R. Edwards, Étude phonétique de la langue japonaise, 1903, § 142 f., § 159. Native writers: S. Izawa, Kokutei Tokuhon Seidokuho (The Orthoepy of the State Text Books); B. Yamada, Nihon Daijiten (Japanese Grand Dictionary); T. Takahashi, Hatsuon Jiten (Pronouncing Dictionary). Yet the results attained by these writers have not been quite satisfactory, as, for instance, Lange considers the Japanese “accent” to be that of stress, while Izawa thinks it is the delicate difference of length of speech-sounds. Yamada, Takahashi, etc., while they were right in thinking it to be difference of pitch, could not make out the pitch relations of the syllabic units of each word, and their method of indicating the “accent” was quite misleading.

In the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series are included thirteen dramas which the learned editor, Mahāmahōpādhyāya T. Gaṇapati Śāstri, has assigned to Bhāsa, the predecessor of Kālidāsa. The various arguments advanced by him in support of his theory may be summed up thus:—

The thirteen dramas, which we shall hereafter term the T.B. dramas, display a similarity of structure as regards the prologue and poetic merit, and have some common passages. It is, therefore, assumed that they are the works of one and the same author. Rājaśēkhara says that Bhāsa has written many dramas, one of which is Svapna-vāsavadatta; and Bāṇa says that Bhāsa's dramas open with a speech by the Sūtradhāra. Since one of the T.B. plays is named Svapna-vāsavadatta, and since they all open with a speech by the Sūtradhāra, it is inferred that Bhāsa is the author of all of them. The question whether their language is antique enough to justify their ascription to a predecessor of Kālidāsa is also discussed. The presence of archaisms, the simplicity of the Sanskrit, and the ‘freshness” of the Prakrit are urged as arguments for an answer in the affirmative. It is also claimed they have such poetic merits as to offer even Kālidāsa a model. This position is apparently substantiated by pointing out various ideas common to both these dramas and the works of Kālidāsa.

Errata in “Studies in Semitic Kinship”, I, Bulletin, Vol. III, Part I, pp. 51–68

p. 56, col. 3, 1. 9, for dsōdoh read dōdah.

p. 56, col. 5, 1. 9, for 'amont read 'ant.

pp. 59 and 60, for Buchanan Grey read Buchanan Gray.

There is scarcely anything in language so meagrely dealt with by scholars as musical accent. That is particularly the case with such languages as have no so-called etymological tones; but musical accent in “tone languages” has also been most inadequately examined. The reason for this is of course that the student considers himself incapable of clearing up this side of the language he is examining. That it is, however, possible to penetrate very deep into the tone systems of a language without having a sharp ear for music (in the usual sense of the words) is shown in K. E. Laman's The Musical Accent or Intonation in the Kongo Language. This work is undoubtedly a most important attempt to disentangle the musical accents of a tone language, and deserves to be studied by all those who have an interest in such things, not only by Africanists. I do not propose here to give a regular review of it, but as I suppose most readers of this Bulletin do not know Laman's book, I will give a short summary of its contents.