In BSOAS, xxxii, 2, 1969, my friend and colleague, Dr. Abraham Demoz of the Haile Sellassie I University, Addis Ababa, published the Amharic text of a phonograph message which the Emperor Menelik II (1889–1913) and the Empress Taitu sent to Queen Victoria.

Al-Qādī al-nu'mān (d. 363/974) holds a unique position in the history of Ismā'īlī/Fāṭimid literature. He was a voluminous author and headed a family of distinguished judges; his sons and grandsons held the office of chief judge in the Fāṭimid empire in Cairo for approximately half a century, except for brief intermissions.

Since Chinese is the crucial example of a purely isolating language, linguists have long been interested in any phenomena which suggest that some classes of Chinese words may once have been infected. A point which has attracted especial attention is the existence of a pair of 1st person pronouns, wu/*ngo- and wo/*ngấ , of which the latter has free distribution but the former is generally subject or possessive down to the second century B.C. Half a century ago Karlgren pointed out the same terminations in a pair of 2nd person pronouns, ju/*ńo' and erh/* , and suggested that proto-Chinese had pronoun declension, with -o marking the nominative and genitive and -a the accusative (but his evidence of restricted distribution was inconclusive except in the case of wu). Later Kennedy preferred to explain the distribution of wu by classing it with various other pronouns and particles in which the level tone is associated with uncompleted utterance (so that either, like wu, they are never phrase-final, or they are phrase-final but interrogative, as with hu/*g'o- and the other interrogative particles). A further important contribution is Chou Fa-kao's discovery of a possessive termination -ǝg, which he ascribes to fusion with the possessive particle chih/*ǝg- . In 1969 I myself proposed a classification of the pronouns into two systems, the pre-Classical and the Classical.

At Vd., iii, 8, occurs the phrase (in Geldner's edition) yaṭ Bā paiti fraēštəm sairi nikante spānača irista naraēča irista. To explain the word sairi Bartholomae (Air. Wb., 1564–5) assumed a noun sar- f. of which sairi would be tjhe expected dual form.

A few years ago the author's attention was drawn to a signed and dated quadrant which is in a private collection in California. Since the writer cannot claim to know much (let alone to understand the working) of astronomical instruments, it seemed logical to look around and offer its publication to an expert. Unfortunately, no one has so far expressed any enthusiasm or interest. But the quadrant bears the signature of a well-known astrolabist and is dated; its publication, therefore, seems desirable.

The Yün-men chuanis an obscure work which does not deserve obscurity. It is actually a Ming chantefable, a fact which already gives it great value, since only a handful of works survive from the flourishing oral literature of that dynasty. But it has, in addition, a striking incidental importance: it proves to be the immediate source of a well-known Ming vernacular short story. It thus neatly demonstrates a point on which there has been a good deal of speculation—that Ming writers on occasion created their stories by taking their scissors to existing chantefables—and provides a unique opportunity to study the process.

A group of scholars at the Institute for Oriental Languages, State University of Utrecht, Netherlands, are planning to prepare a critical edition of the Kubjikāmatatantra, which is likely to be one of the oldest Hindu Tantras, but is still accessible only through manuscripts.

The word blags-pa occurs in line 48 of the Li-yul chos-kyi lo-rgyus. A manu-script of this work, brought back from Tun-huang by Paul Pelliot, has been described by F. W. Thomas in his Tibetan literary texts and documents concerning Chinese Turkestan, London, 1935, p. 303, n. 1, and by Marcelle Lalou in Inventaire des manuscrits tibetains de Touen-houang, n, Paris, 1950, p. 25, No. 960. The text has been translated by F. W. Thomas, op. cit., 305–23. R. E. Emmerick has edited the text in his Tibetan texts concerning Khotan, London, 1967, 78–91. Emmerick's glossary (op. cit., 108–60) has to be consulted for his interpretation of the text. The passage which contains the word blags-pa is the following: thos-pa'i bsod-nams kyaṅ bskal-pa gcig-gi sdig 'byah // blags-pa'i bsod-nams ni / bskal-pa grans myed-pa'i sdig 'byan //. Thomas reads slags-pa'i instead of blags-pa'i and explains in a note that slags = Klags (p. 313, n. 2). His translation is as follows: ‘The merit of even hearing it cleanses the sin of one æon; the merit of reading it cleans the sin of countless æeons’. Emmerick states in his glossary: ‘blags (pf. <blag-pa “to hear”) 48. F. W. Thomas has “reading”, with the note slags = klags (TLT i.313 n. 2). But the reading is blags on my photograph, blag-pa is “to hear“ by itself or with rna-ba. So Das, Russ. D. against Jä’.

Relations between the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Royal Asiatic Society have always, as is naturally right and proper, been both close and cordial. A note on what for the present generation of members is an occasion of great moment in the life of the Society may therefore not be without interest to readers of the Bulletin.

Trois Sūtra du Samyuktāgama (Taishō Issaikyō (T), 99) traitant à des titres divers de la vacuité ont spécialement retenu l'attention de l'auteur du Mahāpraj˜āpāramitopadeśa (en abrégé Upadeśa, T, 1509), interpréte autorisé du Madhyamaka ou de la Philosophic du Milieu. II s'agit du Paramārthaśūnyatāsūtra ‘Sūtra de la vacuité au sens vrai du mot’, du Mahāśūnyatāsūtra ‘Sūtra de la grande vacuité’ et du Samrddhisūtra ‘ Sūtra de Samrddhi’ ainsi appelé du nom d'un disciple du Buddha. En voici des citations, accompagnées des explications que l'Upadeśa leur a consacrées.

The ‘Analects of Confucius’ 1/13 records a saying of Yu Tzu which begins as follows:

The meaning of yen k'efu yeh has never, to my knowledge, been satisfactorily explained. Any acceptable explanation, it seems to me, must furnish satis-factory answers to three questions. (1) What does the wordfu mean in this context ? (2) What is the construction of the sentence ? (3) What is the point of the saying ?

In 1954 I published an article on consonant clusters in Tai, in which a number of clusters such as etc., were reconstructed for Proto-Tai. Some of them are preserved in some modern dialects, and some others have since been found to exist in the Saek language. However, not all clusters can be attested in the modern languages, and this is particularly true for the dental clusters. In the case of labial or velar clusters, namely a labial or velar consonant followed by a liquid, a small number of the languages preserve at least some of the clusters, such as Siamese, Ahom, Wuming, etc., but in the case of dental clusters hardly any modern language preserves such clusters. Saek is the only language which shows dental clusters, tl- and tr- according to Haudricourt (1963, 158) but tl-, tr-, thl-, and thr- according to Gedney (1970, 74). However, most of these clusters do not seem to go back to Proto-Tai dental clusters, but rather to velar clusters. Siamese has tr-, but it occurs mainly in Sanskrit and Cambodian loans. Thus the reconstruction of dental clusters is far more difficult than that of other clusters.