In, and since, the nineteenth century a more than passing interest inPashto verse, both literary and popular, has been shown in Europe, as thefollowing titles (not to mention a number of chrestomathies) testify:

One of the most important problems faced by the administration in the early days of British rule in India was how to ascertain and distinguish the different types of land-tenure prevalent there. It was obvious that a great variety of rights existed by custom in respect of land, and when the government proposed to collect revenue it was essential to know from which party or parties it could be expected and in what manner and proportions it should be levied. The task was completed by elaborate local inquiries, but very little help was anticipated or received from legal textbooks in Sanskrit, which might have been expected to provide information upon so obviously fundamental a subject. But here and there details which throw light upon medieval practices are to be found in the books, and these seem to connect tolerably well with the results of the inquiries made during the nineteenth century. An instance of this seems worthy of quoting, not merely for its comparative rarity and for the juristic skill exhibited by the author, but chiefly because of the intrinsic interest of one of the tenures in question, which has a high curiosity-value and is probably of a species confined to India.

These remarks on the verb complex are based on the speech system of one informant. The informant was born in Tientsin but was brought up in Peking, and lived in both Peking and Tientsin until 1948. She does not wish her name to be divulged, but I should nevertheless like to place on record here my very great indebtedness to her for her great patience and conscientiousness.

We witness two kinds of Chinese texts in Tibetan transcription, thosewhich have the Tibetan transcription by the side of the Chinese characters—much as the Japanese syllabic script occurs by the side of theChinese characters—and those which are in Tibetan script only.

Three details of the background ought to be explained before we come to discuss the subject itself: (1) the bimetallism of the Ch'ing currency; (2) the rigidity of the Ch'ing fiscal system; and (3) the financial stringency at the end of the Tao-kuang period.

Just before the intellectual impact of Britain on Indian Islam a religious reform movement had swept over Muslim India. Although this movement itself does not come into the scope of the present essay, we note it at the outset because: (a) Intellectually it sought to regenerate Islam by going back to the pure and simple Islam of the early period and tried to weaken the hold of medieval authorities on the Muslim mind. Consequently, although reactionary in itself, its ‘purification’ impetus prepared, in some measure, the way for subsequent intellectual developments.

It is obvious to anyone who reads Lao Tzǔ that opposites play a prominentpart in it. There is hardly a page on which one cannot find some contrasted terms like ‘ long ’ and short', ‘ weak’ and ‘ strong ’. What may not be soobvious is the complexity of the different theories concerning these opposites.It is thepurpose of this paper to study, in some detail, these theories.

‘Kusemai’ was the name given to a particular type of musical entertain- ment which flourished in Japan, mainly around Kyōto and Nara, in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.1 The name implies dances (mai) which were peculiar and unconventional (huse), but the peculiarity of the performances lay not so much in the dance as in the music. The musical style of Kusemai put overwhelming emphasis on the beat at the expense of melody, and the novel effect to which this gave rise was sufficient, it seems, to warrant the rather disparaging name. The dance itself was of very minor importance and probably consisted of little more than the performer turning and stamping in time to the music. In Kusemai the song was more important than the dance, and the music of the song more important than the words.

In this essay an attempt will be made, with the assistance of Chinese sources, to define the political status of Tāmbraliṅga in South East Asian history from the end of the tenth century until the early thirteenth century. This subject has been bedevilled by a textual error in the Sung shih in connexion with an embassy from Tāmbraliṅga to China in 1001, with the name for Tāmbraliṅga rendered as ‘Tan-mei-liu ’; the transliteration should have been ‘Tan-liu-mei ’ The error was a minor one, but unfortunately it has had consequences out of proportion to its size. In particular, it seems to have been indirectly responsible for an exaggerated estimate of the extent of Śrīvijayan influence in the Malay Peninsula during a considerable part of that empire's history.

The two inscriptions which are the subject of this article are preserved in the vestibule of the Kyaikmaraw image shrine in the village of that name, which lies on the Ataran 11 miles south-east of Moulmein. That to the left of the entrance (Kyaikmaraw I) records a dedication of land to the shrine by the ruling queen of Pegu, Bañā Thau (Shin Sawbu), in A.D. 1455, and is thus the earliest dated Middle Mon inscription as well as the only one assignable to Bañā Thau's reign which antedates the co-regency of Dhammacetī. The stone to the right of the entrance (Kyaikmaraw II), which is mutilated and much weathered, is for the most part occupied by a fragmentary replica of lines 8–20 of the first, but with a different preamble, and apparently records a second dedication.

In the summer of 1951, the presence in London of an Ellice Islander, Penitala Teo, gave me an opportunity of making a sound recording in a little-known Polynesian language. The briefness of his stay, as well as other factors, did not leave time for more than a cursory analysis of his speech, but there was enough evidence to establish a prima facie case for recognizing aspirated as well as non-aspirated consonants.

R. C. Abraham's The principles of Tiv, though a teaching grammar which designedly avoids technical terms, contains the most careful and systematic treatment of the Tiv verbal system that has been published, and this and his other books are the only works on Tiv giving tonal details. But his classification of verbs, though based appropriately on their structure and tonal behaviour, is not entirely consistent, nor the most convenient basis for a clear and concise description of the whole verbal system. The present study is based on an analysis of the material provided in Abraham's books—particularly his excellent dictionary—checked and supplemented by several years' practical experience of the language in the field, and more recent detailed research with various informants in London.

For a definition of the term huong-hỏa, we can do no better than give two quotations, one from a Frenchman, the other from a Vietnamese. ‘Le huong-hỏa’, says Professor M. R. Deloustal ‘est une institution trop connue pour qu'il soit nécessaire de s'appesantir longuement sur sa description. En principe, c'est une portion de patrimoine, quelquefois une certaine somme d'argent, dont les revenus servent à entretenir l'encens ( huong) et le luminaire (hỏa) sur l'autel des ancêtres, c'est-à-dire à subvenir aux frais de leur culte et à l'entretien de leurs tombeaux.’1 Mr. Le Van Dinh tells us ‘La masse de biens créée pour le service du culte ancestral, c'est le huong-hoa, biens de “l'encens et du feu”, biens susceptibles d'assurer au culte qu'ils desservent tout l'éclat, toute la splendeur désirables, ainsi qu'une pérennité temporelle et spatiale’.2

This study of the nominal forms of Bilin follows the theoretical approach and expositional framework of a previous paper that dealt with the verbal forms of the language, but the linguistic statement is both phonologically and morphologically of a very different type.

The forms associated with the scatter of the noun are far less numerous than those of the verb; the maximum number theoretically obtainable from the analysis presented here is 84. Some of the forms could be regarded as composed of three elements (and in some cases four), but for a general statement it is more appropriate to treat Bilin as inflected rather than as agglutinative. For there are again phonetic features that preclude a purely segmental analysis; these include pitch pattern, but not vowel harmony, and two new features, one of reduplication, and the other involving alternating types of consonantal articulation.

At the moment, both in the British Protectorate and in Somalia, the adoption of a standard orthography for the Somali language is fiercely debated. In discussion of the merits of the various scripts proposed, technical problems of orthography have to some extent been lost sight of. Nationalistic arguments have favoured ‘Somali writing’ (‘Ismaaniya) while religious or Pan-Islamic arguments have supported an Arabic script. This article discusses an orthography invented some 20 years ago by a well-known Gadabuursi sheikh, Sheikh ‘Abduramaan Sh. Nuur, the present Government Qā1E0D;ī of Borama District in the west of the British Protectorate. The script has not, as far as I am aware, been previously described in the literature on Somaliland. I publish it here with no intention of attempting to contribute to the already abundant confusion in the choice of a standard orthography for Somali.

In a previous article I quoted two or three sayings of the ỌkọŊkọ society of the Igbo people of south-eastern Nigeria and very briefly outlined some of the main features of the cultural setting of Igbo unwritten literature. I also suggested that we needed not so much odd specimens of this literature as considerable collections of the various genres in their social environment.

Israel Friedlaender pointed out long ago that the work of Ibn Hazm,al-fisalfi 'l-nihal, was not a book but a collection of pamphlets ; not all these collections were identical. Asin Palacios published a Spanish translation of the printed text with many careful notes and Di Matteo discussed the criticisms of Jews and Christians by Ibn Hazm but neither knew the British Museum manuscript Or. 842 which differs from the print by omissions and additions. Some paragraphs on Muslim sects, absent from the print, were published in BSOAS, xn, 1, 1947, 1 ff. (This passage is in Or. 843 which is by the same hand as Or. 842.) Another addition (f. 2a) states that the Samaritan Pentateuch gives the years from the fall of Adam to the flood as 1307, the Hebrew which is accepted by both the Rabbanites and Karaites as 1650 (presumably the final 6 was lost by a scribal error), and the Greek as 2242. It adds that another sect of the Jews made the period 667 years and 8 months less 8 days. (A thousand has probably dropped out.)