§1 1. Kale ilyo pali BaMwamba na BaNkulu baletuma fita,

2. fileya ku mishi ya bantu aba Mambwe.

3. Babasanga, baikatana, balapikana no kulasana na mafumo.

4. Awishyo mubiye panshi, amumo mutwe, amumo mutwe,

5. asenda, atwala ku mfumu. Balaimba amalaila, baleti,

6. “Sompa, sompa, sompa, sompa, sompa,” ne mitwe ya abantu

7. Mfumu aiti: “Mwasalipeni.” Yalabanaila ubwali.

Some years ago I received from the India Office Library a xerox copy of a short document found at Kew among the papers of Sir Joseph Hooker, with an inquiry as to whether it was a permit for him to travel in Sikkim for the botanical research described in his Himalayan Journals (1854/1905). I knew enough Lepcha to be able to report to the India Office Library that the 42 lines of Lepcha script (romanized and translated at (II) below) were some sort of statement of accounts in East India Company rupees (kúm-pá-nyi kóm tsu; line 1); but I was not able to arrive at the sense of the text in detail until my present stay in Kalimpong again put me in touch with Lepchas, especially Mr. A. Foning, of the Kalimpong Lepcha Association, whose help it is a pleasure to acknowledge.

It is a matter of considerable regret that no copy of the Aśokan inscriptions has been found at Pātaliputra. Such a version, inscribed at the capital of Aśoka's empire, might have been expected to be in the language of the capital itself, and therefore by implication in the official language of the court and secretariat. There can be no doubt that many of the difficulties which face us in the task of interpreting the Aśokan inscriptions arise because of errors in the translation from the Pkt. of the original into the Pkts. of the various regions. Possession of the Pātaliputra version would enable us to read the inscriptions free from such translation errors.

Khwarezmian linguistic studies have progressed but slowly since their inception in 1927, when A. Z. V. Togan published his discovery of some Khwarezmian (hereafter Xw.) sentences in an Arabic fiqh book. W. B. Henning's first article appeared after nine years and a quarter of a century later H. W. Bailey could still refer to ‘the slowly emerging Chorasmian’. The latest bibliography cannot boast more than two dozen titles. It is our tragic loss that Henning, having studied all the available Xw. material in the course of four decades, should have left ready for publication only the first 260 entries (from '– to ' kiv) of the Khwarezmian dictionary on which he was working at his most untimely death. Of course, Togan's publication in 1951 of the facsimile of a manuscript of Zamakhshari's Arabic dictionary Muqaddimatu 'l-adab, almost completely glossed in Xw., made the greater part of the extant Xw. material generally available, but, not least because of the labour involved, few have cared to duplicate or anticipate Henning's work. Now suddenly, however, in the words of a colleague, ‘everyone has become a Khwarezmologist’, through the publication of a transliteration and translation of this same linguistic material by Johannes Benzing.

The three publishing houses of Wen-wu in Peking, Shanghai shu-tien, and Ku-chi in Tientsin joined forces to produce a new edition of the Taoist Canon. The Tao-tsang they published in 1988 is meant to be an improvement on the so-called Cheng-t'ung Tao-tsang printed in 1921–23 by the Han-fen lou branch of Shanghai Commercial Press. The latter takes as its foundation the copy of the Ming Canon from the archives of the Pai-yün Kuan (White Cloud Abbey) in Peking. The woodcut edition of the Ming Canon contains two components. The core collection appeared under the title Ta Ming Tao-tsang ching in the years 1444–45 of the Cheng-t'ung reign period. A small supplement entitled Hsü Tao-tsang ching was issued in 1607.

When, in the beginning of last May, I visited Professor Sir E. Denison Ross, of Oriental Studies, he showed me a book entitled Ch'ao hsien Kuan i yu. It was of great interest to me, as I had not seen it before, and T asked permission to examine it. He willingly complied with my request, but at the same time asked me to write some explanatory notes on the book. Being only on a visit to the country, I am unable to refer to Corean books of reference, and for the explanations, etc., which follow, can only trust to my memory.

Photographs of unpublished Parthian and Sogdian manuscripts were taken recently in Berlin by Captain J. A. Dabbs, of the University of Austin, Texas, and sent by him to Professor Henning, who kindly allowed me to look through the Parthian material at once. One fragment, M 741, proved to be of considerable interest. It contains portions of two hymns, which are alphabetic and may therefore be presumed to be original work in Parthian. The device of beginning every verse with a letter of the alphabet limits each hymn to some twenty-four verses; but in this case the two hymns are connected in their subject-matter and possibly formed part of a sequence. Several hymn-cycles have been identified in Parthian and Middle Persian, but the alphabetic device is not used in any of them. The hymns in M 741 have as their subject two myths of the creation, following chronologically one upon the other. The narrative would be difficult to follow, however, without some previous knowledge of the mythology, for the handling is poetic and allusive. Words and phrases occur which can be found in other similar texts, having been taken presumably from the prose scriptures which were the authority for all later renderings of the Manichsean myths. The author could assume a general familiarity with these scriptures, and so allow himself some freedom in his retelling of the stories.

The first hymn, which contains a new Parthian name for a divinity, has for its subject the seduction of the Archontes and the descent of active evil to the earth.

The discovery of the Anatolian family of languages early in the present century' confronted Indo-Europeanists with a verbal system of considerably less complexity than that which had been assumed, largely on the basis of Greek and Indo-Iranian evidence, to have existed in the latest common period of the parent language. This raised questions which are still keenly debated today. Did the simplicity of the Anatolian system represent something more primitive than the classic image of Indo-European, out of which the latter could be explained as a subsequent development, or was it the simplified outcome of an originally more complex system, close to that which had been reconstructed before the Anatolian family was known? Where Anatolian had isolated features (such as the ending -i(š) of the 3 s. preterite of the –ḫi conjugation) corresponding to features which characterized the whole of a paradigm in Indo-European (such as –s– in the sigmatic aorist), had it preserved a relic of a once fully-formed s– aorist which had been largely lost as a result of merger with other categories, or was this a 3 s. ending which had subsequently become incorporated into the stem to form a new kind of paradigm?.

The Yao dialects constitute a clearly differentiated branch of the Miao-Yao language family, both in vocabulary and phonology. Phonologically, they are characterized by a wide range of vowels and the presence of final consonants, whereas the Miao dialects have generally a very simple system of rhymes but great complexity in the initials. Their close connexion is very apparent, although the rules for sound-correspondences have not yet been worked out. No affiliation of the Miao-Yao languages with any of the neighbouring groups— Tibeto-Burman, Chinese, Thai-Sui, or Mon-Khmer—has yet been convincingly demonstrated.