In certain types of Old Bodish transitive verbs (Types 2, 7, 8), the initial of the imperative is regularly aspirated and would correspond to what Li believed to be the primitive form of the verb except for morphophonic change.

But aspiration of these stems does not occur in the imperative in West Bodish, as it does in Old and Central Bodish. Citable examples from Sbalti and Burig are almost wanting. For Burig, Francke gives the imperative tog, corresponding to O.B. t'ogs “fasten!”, and Bailey has tsăt-“awake”, im. tsot. The last might have been aspirated if aspiration were characteristic of the West Bodish imperative; however, the only related form in Old Bodish is sod-pa, sad-pa. But it is significant that neither Read, pp. 46–7, nor Bailey, p. 17, in their discussion of the changes occurring in the West Bodish imperative, mention any alteration of the initial. Nor does Jäschke in his Tibetan Grammar. On the contrary, Jaschke does provide some positive proof that aspiration does not occur hi the West Bodish imperative in the few West Bodish (Ladwags or Lahul dialect) imperative forms in his grammar (99–101), and still more in his dictionary:—

It has been frequently noted by linguists and other observers that in many parts of the Arabic-speaking world, the speech patterns of any one region divide quite sharply into two groups—that of the towns on the one hand, and that of the surrounding countryside on the other. The following is an attempt to show the relationship of two dialects of Arabic spoken in the province of Khūzistān in Iran which can be considered to be representative of urban and rural groups within their area.

In January of 1936 Dr. Ernest Mackay, director of the excavation of the American School of Indic and Iranian Studies at Chanhudaro, courteously arranged that I should have the use of a Brāhūī speaker and an interpreter for a number of sessions. The Brāhuāī, Dad Muhammad by name, belongs to the Nīchārī tribe of the Jhalawān division of the Brāhūīs. Some confirmatory note s were made as well with the aid of another of the Brāhūī speakers working at the excavation, of the same tribe and village as Dad Muhammad. The note s made were chiefly phonetic.

The field-work for the present article was begun in Kuwait in December 1958 and continued for a longer period in the spring of the following year. Besides making measurements on a fairly large būm, the Muhallab, lying in Kuwait harbour, we had many interviews with sailors and shipbuilders, all of the older generation of Kuwaitis.

It has already been noted by Professor F. W. Thomas 1 that there are several striking coincidences in religious topography between Buddhist Khotan and Nepal. In addition to place–names, however, there is also a considerable body of legendary tradition common to the two countries.

Verb roots remain constant in most Sino-Tibetan languages. But in; Burmese the consonantal initial of some verb roots alternates from an unaspirated surd in the intransitive to the corresponding aspirated surd in the transitive. And in some Tibeto-Burmic languages, particularly in the Himalayas, we find verbs with a sonant initial in the intransitive and a corresponding surd in the transitive. Diversity of form reaches the extreme in Old Bodish (classical Tibetan), where no positional phoneme of the verb is necessarily constant—whether consonantal prefix, consonantal initial, medial vowel, “final” consonant, or “suffixed” consonant.

In a recent article on Ya'qūb Pasha, the Jewish physician of Sultan Meḥmed II, Professor F. Babinger cites two passages from the brief account of the career of Ya'qūb given by A. Galanté in his Médecins Juifs au service de la Turquie. The first tells of the arrival of Ya'ūb in Edirne during the reign of Murād II, of his service with Murād and Meḥmed II, and gives the text of an alleged ferman exempting Ya'qūb and his descendants from all taxation in perpetuity, granted by Meḥmed II at Boghaz-kesen in Rabī' II 856/Apr.-May 1452. The second alleges that in 1571 the descendants of Ya'qūb applied to the Rabbinate in Constantinople for exemption from Jewish communal taxes on the basis of this ferman. As Babinger points out, Galanté refers the first statement simply to ‘un auteur hébraïque’, without further specification, while for the second statement he cites no authority at all.

The higher-order subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman has been recently up for debate. The modern era of TB/Sino-Tibetan subgrouping began with Benedict 1972 (henceforth /STC), where that great comparativist refrained from offering a Stammbaum of the conventional type, leaving several individual languages and language groups unclassified, and placing Jingpho at the centre of diversity of the whole vast TB family (see Fig. 1.) Despite several peculiarities, notably the special position accorded Karenic and the lack of information on Baic (then called ‘Minjia’) or Qiangic, this scheme showed a healthily agnostic approach.

It is a fundamental point of comparative and historical linguistics that genealogical affiliation can only be established on the basis of concrete linguistic features, the more central the feature the more important for classificatory purposes. While there is no absolute consensus about how a central linguistic feature be identified, it can be taken as axiomatic that long-term reconstruction and classification rests most fundamentally on phonological and morphological criteria. Of these two, Hetzron (1976b) has argued that it is the morphological which is the most important because morphology represents the level of grammar that is both more complex and more arbitrary in the sense that the sound-meaning dyad has no natural basis. Precisely this arbitrariness ensures that morphological correspondences are relatively unlikely to be due to chance.

The tenth chapter in the Lalita-vistara, entitled Lipiśālāsaṃdarśanaparivarta, is well known for the list of 64 different forms of writing which were mastered by the Bodhisattva in his schooling. The text continues by describing how his 10,000 fellow-pupils, by reason of his supernatural power (adhiṣṭhānena), when they pronounced the individual syllables (mātṛkā), produced for each sound a symbolic or esoteric phrase beginning with the syllable in question. Thus, yadā akāraṃ parikīrtayanti sma, todā anityaḥ saroasaṃskāraśabdo niścarati sma ‘When they recited the syllable a, then there arose the sound (phrase) “Non-eternal are all the saṃskāras”’. (I refrain from attempting to improve the dubious grammar of the edition; but the sense is not in doubt.) The remainder of the Sanskrit syllabary is dealt with in a comparable manner, in the normal order, a, ā, i, ī, … ka, kha, ga, gha, ṅa … ha.

During a recent stay in Cairo, I found in the Taimūr¯ya library a manuscript copy of an interesting Ismaili work entitled Kitābu'1-Iḋāḥ wa'1-Bayān, by the Yemenite dā'i Ḥusain ibn 'Ali.

The manuscript is of 165 pages, 16 by 23 cms., in two hands—the first till p. 70, at 22 lines per page, the second pp. 71–165 at 19 lines per page. The first and last lines of each page are in red ink throughout. The copy was started by the Sharif 'Abdullah Abū Yūsuf, and completed on his death by 'Ali b. Shaikh Ibrāhīm Al-Haidarābādī. It is dated 22nd Dhu'l Hijja 1286 (= 26/3/1870), and was made by order of the chief Dā'i Al-Ḥasan b. Ismā'īl.

When Buddist works in Sanskrit were first introduced into Europe, it was at once obvious that the language of some of them as it appears in the manuscripts was, in comparison with Classical Sanskrit, frequently ungrammatical, and on occasion barbarously so. The immediate and natural reaction of scholars accustomed to the regularity of Sanskrit was to stigmatize these shortcomings, and to attempt to remove as many irregularities as possible by forcibly emending the text. It was, however, very soon recognized that many of the seeming anomalies could not be abolished, and that they must be accepted as genuine in their own context. This was especially clear in the case of the verses of some of the older texts, where the metre often guaranteed non- Pāηinean forms; and the language of these verses, variously called the Gāthādialect, mixed Sanskrit, or hybrid Sanskrit, was recognized as something in its own right. The same courtesy was readily extended to the prose of the Mahāvastu, which in places could only have been made to resemble Sanskrit by completely rewriting the text. The prose of the other texts, being in many waysvirtually Sanskrit, took considerably longer to win the same recognition; but for many years now it has been generally admitted that here also is a language which must be judged according to its own standards, and not exclusively by the canons of classical Sanskrit grammar.

The following is an attempt to relate the distribution of linguistic variants in the spoken Arabic of southern Iraq and Khūzistān to certain geographical areas on the one hand and to certain demographically isolatable groups on the other. These factors correlate in certain cases with political regions of earlier times. The geographical areas are relatable to communication patterns of preautomobile times and to some extent group around the main waterways of the area, the Tigris, Euphrates, Shaṭṭ al-'Arab, and Kārūn. The demographic groupings involved in particular what may be referred to as degree of sedentari-zation and also degree of contact with the nomad populations in the desert to the west of the Euphrates. It is true that in some cases the social and regional groupings were coextensive; however, the distinction between the two is maintained in the treatment because the linguistic features correlating with demographic groups could be shown to have similar demographic relevance in other areas of Mesopotamia, while the features regarded as primarily of regional relevance were relevant only to the area under investigation.

IN the Introduction to his edition of the Āvaśyaka tales the late Professor Leumann wrote on p. 1 : “ Since-as may be easily understood—Jacobi, when he endeavoured to utilize the language and contents of the Jaina tales for Indology, started with the Uttarādhyayana Ṭikā, of Devendra which was in his possession, and since this author, belonging as he does to the period of decadence and therefore more familiar with Sanskrit, writes a rather doubtful Prakrit—therefore the editor was chiefly concerned with the establishing of a thoroughly reliable Prakrit text … that was to be suitable for clearing the way for a more correct judgment and utilization of medieval Jaina Prakrit.” The appearance of the first portion of Leumann's text was welcomed by Pischel in his Pkt grammar (§ 21) in the following terms: ” The most important text in JM is : Die Āvaśyaka-Erzählungen. Herausgegeben von Ernst Leumann. 1. Heft. Leipzig 1897. The absence of any commentary unfortunately renders the understanding rather difficult; some passages remain wholly obscure. But even these few forms show that from texts in JM we may yet expect much new and important material.”

This paper is concerned with the textual study of the Sikh scripture, the Adi Granth. Beginning with a survey of previous approaches to the text of the Adi Granth, it argues that the traditional framework that has previously governed such studies is unable to deal with the complexity of the extant manuscript traditions of the bānī (the corpus of compositions in the Granth). In the earliest period, a number of concurrent oral repertoires of the bānī were in existence; over time, the written Adi Granth evolved into a number of relatively standardized recensions. Future textual studies on the Adi Granth must also begin to take into account the ways in which the text was received and read in the pre-modern period. Finally, the field must take cognizance of the contexts within which texts were produced and read, particularly those arising from merchant literacy.

There is very little published material of the Galab (Geleba, Dasenech, Dathanaik, or Marille) language which is spoken around the northern shore of Lake Rudolf in the Gamu Gofa Province of south-western Ethiopia and in the adjacent areas of northern Kenya. Several attempts to determine the linguistic position of this language have been made, nevertheless no generally accepted classification exists as yet. This is, of course, due to lack of adequate descriptive data. I would therefore like to present in this paper a preliminary analysis of my own field data on Galab in the hope that it will at least provide a somewhat sounder basis for future work on the classification of the language.

For too long study of ancient Near Eastern representational art and study of possibly related texts have been entirely separate disciplines, the one a branch of archaeology, the other of philology. This accounts for the very scanty results obtained and their frequently questionable character. In the case of Classical Greece and Rome art historians ordinarily command Greek and Latin so as to use written sources at first hand, but Near Eastern archaeologists have commonly been illiterate in their fields of study, while philologists often have limited knowledge of art and use that very amateurishly. Thus it is an occasion for rejoicing that a serious attempt has just been made on some very difficult material from Syria and Anatolia, and that one major break-through has resulted which opens up prospects of fuller understanding of certain aspects of ancient art. The author, E. Williams-Forte, is primarily an art historian with a speciality in ancient Near Eastern seals, and she has taken an interest in Ugaritic to be able to exploit that material. Her Columbia Ph.D. thesis: Mythic cycles: the iconography of the gods of water and weather in Syria and Anatolia during the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1600 B.C.) has not been published, but a lengthy article derived from parts of it has recently appeared. This starts from the tree and snake in the garden of Eden and investigates their possible Canaanite background. The original observation of major importance is that the storm god of Syria and Anatolia of the first half of the second millennium B.C., Anatolian Tarhunna, Syrian Hadad or Baal, Mesopotamian Adad, occasionally holds up a plant, branch or tree as a symbol.

A new volume of literary texts from Nimrud has been in gestation for a very long time. Tablets were first found in Max Mallowan's excavations at Nimrud in 1949, with many more tablets found in subsequent seasons. In 1963 the decision was made to publish all the literary tablets from the Nabû Temple in hand copy, and this effort has finally culminated in the form of Literary texts from the Nabû temple, edited by J. A. Black and D. J. Wiseman (Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud 4, 1998). As is so often the case with the publication of new literary texts, these copies often solve many problems and create just as many new ones for editors of texts; many of the copies could benefit from collation. Furthermore, the catalogue describing the tablets is extremely sparse, and much more could have been done by the editors to identify the tablets and note published duplicates. Nevertheless, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the field of Assyriology by publishing a large number of literary texts in cuneiform copy.

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.