In this paper I seek to show that proto-Mon-Khmer *p as the second element in an initial cluster normally developed in Mon to -w-, and that *b underwent the same development accompanied by voicing of the initial consonant where this was a plosive. The point, as a contribution to Mon-Khmer phonology, is a minor one; but it has consequences of some importance for morphological reconstruction.

Hanoi Vietnamese, although not apparently genetically related to Chinese, is a language phonologically of the Chinese type; in the terminology of Hockett (1955, 60–1, 129), Hanoi Vietnamese phonology constitutes a system without interludes, with syllable juncture, and with tones as ICs of syllables. Hanoi phonology is in fact rather close to the phonology of Middle Chinese (Karlgren's ‘Ancient Chinese’, cf. Pulleyblank, 1962, 64), the source, via the dialect of Chinese called ‘Sino-Vietnamese’ (Haudricourt, 1954, 79), of the majority of Vietnamese lexical items.

Among the Ethiopic manuscripts in the British Museum, which originate from the Emperor Theodore's Magdala collection, were two copies of the Kebra Nagast ‘Glory of the Kings’, the Ethiopian national saga, catalogued as Orient. 818 and 819 (=Wright, Catalogue of the Ethiopic MSS in the BM, NO. CCXCI). But Orient. 819, written during the reign of the Emperor Iyasu I (1682–1706), was returned to Ethiopia in circumstances which throw a dramatic light on the paramount importance of this work. In August 1872, the Emperor Yohannes of Ethiopia wrote to Queen Victoria and to Earl Granville, the British Foreign Secretary, and requested the return of the Kebra Nagast which had been taken to England by the Napier expedition in 1868.