The recent publication of the complete translation of the Yogasūtrabhāṣyavivaraṇa (also known as Pātañjalayogaśastrabhāṣyavivaraṇa and Bhagavatpadīya; henceforth abbreviated as Vivaraṇa) into English by Trevor Leggett is the latest contribution to the study of this intriguing and significant Sanskrit philosophical text. Prior to this publication (whose first two chapters were separately published already in 1981 and 1983 respectively) only a few excerpts thereof have been translated by Hajime Nakamura, into Japanese. It is a measure of the growing interest in the original text that it has attracted several astute preliminary studies, notably by P. Hacker, T. Vetter, W. Halbfass and A. Wezler in the West, and H. Nakamura in Japan.

As it stands, the title of the printed English translation reads: ‘The complete commentary by Ṥaṅkara on the Yoga Sūtra-s-a full translation of the newly discovered text.’ This is regrettably likely to be misleading in more than one way.

Poem No. CXL in the Diwan of Hassan b. Thabit is usually connected with the incident when the poet was attacked and wounded by Safwan b. al-Mu'attal. However, the poem itself, the incident, and the precise relation between poem and incident all seem to have been the subject of controversy. As for the poem, different versions exist in various sources. The opening line is:—

Judged in the context of the 18 Purāṇas, or even the 180 Upa-, or Subsidiary Purāṇas, the title, Pāṇḍava-Purāṇa, must seem unusual, since the Pāṇḍavas are neither gods nor avatāras, nor sages; for it is the exploits of these divine or semi-divine figures that form the subject matter of the traditional Purāṇas. The Jainas' choice of this title would therefore appear to be a deliberate effort to present a Jaina version of the Mahābhārata story, a version which would show how the virtuous Pāṇḍavas and the rather harmless Balarāma are reborn in heaven, whereas Kṛṣṇa, the ‘nārāyana’, and Jarāsandha, the ‘pratinārāyaṇa’, are consigned to hell.

For typographical reasons the Jahai words and phrases in the following grammatical sketch have been transcribed from the Anthropos alphabet into the script of the International Phonetic Association. The two alphabets do not strictly correspond, and it seems desirable to add a few explanations of some of the symbols used.

Section 1. General

Until the publication in the Gaekwar's Oriental Series XXXVII of the Apabhramśakvyatrayi (AKT) (edited with Sanskrit Introduction, Notes, and Appendices by the Jain pandit Lalchandra B. Gandhi) in 1927, the existence of prose Apabhramśa was unknown. This work, however, able though it is, is not much utilized or even consulted, and the extracts from the Kuvalayamālā Kahā, which he uses as illustrations, have never been discussed from a linguistic point of view. The whole of the Kuvalayamālā (as it is also called) has never been published, and it is an original work of linguistic importance.

The valley of Dantig in Amdo plays a central role in Tibetan Buddhist historical literature as the place where the monastic code was maintained during the tenth century after the dissolution of the monasteries in central Tibet. This article shows that a manuscript (now kept at the British Library) carried by a Chinese pilgrim monk through this region in the 960s, which mentions Dantig, is the only direct documentary evidence of Tibetan monastic culture in this region at this time. The authors also show how the name Dantig, which has been previously unexplained, derives from the Sudāna Sūtra, a Buddhist narrative of exile and return that is directly relevant to the aspirations of the refugee monks from central Tibet who settled in the region.

This paper examines the state-of-the-art for the historical study of the Rma (Qiang) language (< Trans-Himalayan/Sino-Tibetan) and points out some methodological issues in earlier work. The paper discusses how vowel correspondences have been obfuscated by loanwords, onomatopoeic forms, and analogical levelling. It also discusses the analysis of compound forms and points out how certain compound forms have been incorrectly etymologized. It deals with broader, more fundamental issues in prior work such as top-down rather than bottom-up reconstructions, and problematic conceptualizations of what constitutes reconstructions. The article offers potential solutions to the issues discussed and points out where future work would be most profitable.

In examining wares discovered from the cultures of Sanxingdui and Jinsha and from the former site of the ancient kingdom of Dian in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, this article highlights a number of shared features and trends that suggest a continued artistic, technological and cultural transmission through time and space. The article aims to supplement established theories on the rich material culture of this region. It will look in particular at the development of its striking bronze metallurgy, largely deriving from the established traditions of the Yellow River valley in China’s Bronze Age. It highlights the function of a dense network of trading routes, referred to in modern scholarship as the “Southwest Silk Road”, as an important facilitator of cultural and artistic exchange and reciprocation from ancient times.

Among the numerous Kharosthi documents recovered from Chinese Turkestan and transcribed and edited by A. M. Boyer, E. J. Rapson, and E. Senart, is one which is in many ways unique. This is the oblong wooden tablet which is numbered 661 in the second volume of these scholars' Kharosthī Inscriptions, where there is given on plate 12 a photographic reproduction of the document in question. It is one of the few documents discovered at Endere, which seems in ancient times to have been a sort of military fort situated about halfway between Charchan (Calmadāna of the inscriptions) and Nina or Niya (Cad'ota). Not only does it show some marked peculiarities of alphabet, dialect, and general style of composition, but as can be seen from the reproduction the form of writing also is quite unusual.

It is written in a very stiff and archaic form of script, but the ink is fresh and the writing is very well preserved and clear and Konow is probably right when he says in his paper on “ The Names of the Kings in the Niya documents ”, published in Acta Orientalia, that “ it does not seem possible to ascribe a late date to E. vi, ii, i, which is probably not an original but a copy from an old tablet ”. Various indications supporting this view of a very early date for the original of this document will be noticed in the course of the following commentary. For the sake of convenience of reference, I repeat the text of the inscription here.

Tone made its appearance in descriptions of Tibetan pronunciation as early as 1881, when Jäschke introduced the term into an account of the prosodic features of the spoken Tibetan dialects: ‘A system of tones has been introduced. … I am told by European students of reputation, who have made the Tonic languages of eastern Asia their special department, that only the first principles of what are known as the high and low Tones, have made their way into Tibetan. … Here, as in the languages of Farther India, generally, which possess an alphabetic system of writing, the Tone is determined by the initial consonant of the word.

In 1894, Jacob Barth proposed that the preformative conjugation in some of the Semitic languages goes back to a – generally bygone – inverse correlation between the thematic vowel of the stem and that of the conjugational prefix. Evidence for such a distribution is well attested in all branches of Central Semitic, yet it remains disputed whether it should be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic as well. This paper makes use of new data from a living Semitic variety, namely the Arabic dialect of Ḥugariyyah in the south of Yemen, where the pattern observed by Barth is still operative. We examine the interaction of the conjugational prefixes with the dialectal future tense marker š(a)-, and point to cases where the inverse correlation is violated. We outline a sequential development, starting with a phonetically-driven re-distribution of the preformative vowels, and followed by their reanalysis as integral to the prefix. We then propose that comparable developments may have taken place in other Semitic varieties, predominantly Akkadian, and thus view the Akkadian preformative conjugation as a derivative of a former inverse correlation, as reconstructed by Barth.

Burrow and Emeneau (1961, p. xiii, n. 3) have observed that ‘Ta. and Ma. seem to have evidence for two phonemes [/n/, the dental and /ṉ/, the alveolar]a in PDr., but the matter is not yet clear’. This is mainly due to the non-availability of data about the distribution of these phonemes in those two languages and the allophonic distribution, if any, in other languages. With the help of increased material available now, an attempt is made in this paper to find out the history of the development of the two nasal phonemes in Ta. and Ma. and to establish their allophonic nature in PDr. Since definite information about the phonetic nature of the phoneme /n/ is not available for languages such as Kui, Parji, Nk. [Ch.] etc., this study is incomplete to some extent.

Before the discovery of the ancient inscriptions of southern Arabia by Arnaud, Halévy, Glaser, and several other explorers, knowledge of the pre-Islamic peoples of Yemen and Ḥaḍramawt was incomplete and imprecise, and was derived from the Old Testament, the annals of Assyrian kings, and from the classical and Arab historians and geographers.