The following text is taken from a MS owned by the monastery of May Anbäsa Kidanä Mәhrät, about 15 km. west of Makalle, on the new road to Hagärä, Sälam. The MS is described by its owners as Mäshafä Wägris, and contains the following items.

Professor E. H. Johnston's sudden death in October, 1942, was a grievous blow to Oriental research. Sir Richard Burn, called in by the authorities of Balliol College to go through his papers, found amongst them a rough manuscript article and other material on the Sanskrit inscriptions of Arakan, together with correspondence on the subject with Mr. G. H. Luce and other scholars who had supplied him with rubbings and photographs. As will be seen from the following letter to Mr. Luce, dated the 15th August, 1942, Professor Johnston was contemplating the preparation of this work for publication:

“I have not yet heard what is your opinion about publishing some of the Arakanese results now. Life is short and uncertain these days, and it will hardly be possible to get anything out in Epigraphia Birmanica for years to come. What I should like to do is to publish Ānandacandra's inscription, omittiṇg all I have said in the draft about the palæography and just mentioning the others, with a brief account of the coins and of the historical conclusions. For one thing it might attract the attention of linguists and lead to some ideas about the vernacular names; e.g. what language is Seviṅreṅ, assuming my reading to be correct? The fuller consideration of details could then be reserved till Epigraphia Birmanica is ready to come about.

In what follows I would like to discuss the structure of Amharic relative clauses. In the course of the discussion, I would like to make the following three claims which I will attempt to substantiate in turn. First, I believe that relativization is a kind of pronominalization and, consequently, the particle yä- that is attached to the main verb (or its auxiliary) of the relative clause is not a relative pronoun. Second, I maintain that the ‘yä- clause’ in subject position in Amharic cleft sentences is also a relative clause with an unspecified element as its head. My third claim is that Amharic genitive phrases originate from relative clauses and that the noun (phrase) in the genitive phrase to which the particle yä- is attached in surface structure is governed by a preposition in underlying structure, and the head of a genitive phrase is the head of the under-lying relative clause. In this connexion, I also argue that there is a rule in Amharic which moves the particle yä- (to the right) over, at least, one constituent.

Most Iranists are probably acquainted with some of my writings on Iranian chronology and systems of time-reckoning. One of the essential points in my outline of the history of the Iranian calendars is the theory I put forward about the date of the creation of a fixed religious year, co-existing and running parallel with the civil year, which was a vague one. This fixed year, called in Pahlavi literature Vihēǰakīk, was, however, theoretical and without any application in daily life. It was used only by the Zoroastrian clergy for the purpose of ascertaining the original position of the religious festivals and keeping them in or about their astronomical positions. By the ‘original position’ is meant the places these most important religious days occupied in the tropical year at the time of instituting the Vihēǰakīk year, which time may or may not have been the epoch of the initial adoption of the Mazdayasnian or ‘Young Avestan’ civil year in Iran. The date I proposed was 441 B.c., or at any rate some time in the first decade of the second half of the 5th century B.c.

In 1955, the appearance in the Patrologia Orientalis of the Old Georgian version of St. Luke's Gospel brought to a successful conclusion the project initiated some thirty years ago by the late Professor Robert P. Blake of Harvard University, namely the critical editing of the famous Adysh (or Adishi) Gospel manuscript, copied at Shatberd in Tao-Klarjet'i in A.D. 897, and later removed thence to be preserved in a remote village in highland Svanet'i.1 After Blake's death in May 1950, his work was brought to completion by Canon M. Brière, who had already collaborated on the edition of St. John.2 Now that their pioneer work has made this important Biblical text fully accessible to Western scholars, the time seems ripe to attempt a brief survey in the most general terms of recent work published or in progress in Georgian New Testament studies.

The primary purpose of this paper—apart from a personal concern to offer a token of affection and respect to a friend and colleague of many years’ standing—is to consider two analytical models (one drawn from early Christian history, the other from the history of science), and to suggest ways in which these may help us to interpret the data of religious, and in particular Muslim, change in sub-Saharan Africa.

Some years ago, I published in this Bulletin an article, one of the main purposes of which was to propose a hypothesis concerning the dating of the Kharoṣṭhī documents discovered by Sir Aurel Stein at the ancient sites in Chinese Turkistan, the so-called ‘Niya’ site (Cabta), and Lou-Ian (Kroraina). At almost the same time, Professor Enoki Kazuo independently published an article which, while covering a much wider historical period, nevertheless dealt also with a certain number of topics included in my own article; and it was gratifying to find that on most of these points we had reached similar conclusions. More recently, Dr. Michael Loewe published an article which was largely a critique of certain points in my own, for which purpose he drew upon the evidence of the Chinese histories. I bow to Dr. Loewe's superior knowledge of these sources and of the Chinese language; and it would be presumptuous of me to attempt to assess or criticize his article as a whole. Nevertheless, I venture to continue to disagree with him on a number of points, on which I maintain my original views, or have modified them but slightly.

The purpose of this paper is to show that one of the characteristics of the Chadic languages is the existence of two types of phonological rules affecting vowels. One type of rule operates on the vowels of the stem when a suffix is added and another type of rule operates on the vowel of the suffix itself. The latter type is triggered by the syllabic structure and/or the height of the vowels of the stem.

Since its début in 1881, when Charles Rieu's brief but masterly grammatical sketch appeared, the Gorānī koinĒ has become one of the Cinderellas of Iranian studies, literary and linguistic. Apart from a notice by E. B. Soane, of which more below, its only real outing has been in Professor Minorsky's compendious article on ‘The Gūrān’, containing an illustrated survey of all the epic, lyric, and religious verse then known in Gorānī. The surviving manuscripts acquired by Professor Minorsky he has since donated to the Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute (Institut Narodov Azii AN), where they remain unpublished.

In the study of Chinese science it is important to take into account the fact that there are many Chinese terms which do not convey exactly the same meanings to traditional and modern scholars. It is essential to try to put ourselves in theshoes of the former in order to have a better understanding of classical Chinese texts. Take for example the simple term shuxue, which we all take to mean ‘mathematics’. Indeed we are quite correct to call it ‘ mathematics’ when it appears in a modern text, or after the time of Li Shanlan (1811–1982) who first used itwhen he translated Western mathematical works into Chinese. However, when the term shuxue appears in any text written before the time of Li Shanlan it can often be dangerous to use the modern meaning of the term without circumspection. I quote a passage on the Biography of Zhang Zhong from the Ming waish. contained in the Imperial Compendium Gujin tushu jicheng which reads:

(Zhang) Zhong was studying at his youth and presented himself at the jinshi level of civil examinations. However, he failed, and whereupon he gave rein to roaming among the mountains and streams. On one occasion he came across an extraordinarily gifted person and learned shuxue from him. (Henceforth) he talked about future destiny, and was often uncanny in accuracy.

The Great Mosque at Harāat ranks among the largest religious buildings still standing in Iranian lands. In the past it has been referred to as an example of Ghūrid architecture heavily restored at various periods. In fact, anyone standing inside the four-ayvān courtyard and looking at the typical arches (plates I-II) or at the marble columns so similar to the stone work at the Gāzargāh, and the mausoleum of Gawharshād, would be inclined to regard it as a typically Tīmūrid mosque. But as soon as one walks into the ayvān this vault takes on unusual proportions: on each side are passages with remarkably strong pillars; and the points of the arches differ from the usual Tīmūrid modulum. The same is true of the complex passages leading from the eastern façade, almost entirely rebuilt in recent years: here also strong square pillars support arches the spans of which come closer to twelfth- or thirteenth-century models rather than those of the late fifteenth century. It would be unwise, of course, to reappraise the period of such an important structure on the basis of a passing impression; a thorough study on the spot, including the drawing of the over-all plan and elevations, and accurate measurements, is necessary.

As early as 1821 Rasmus Rask identified Sinhalese as a speech belonging to the same class as Sanskrit, and added that Tamil belonged to quite a different class. Since then the subject has been studied and discussed by various scholars, and it is established beyond doubt that Sinhalese is an Indo-Aryan language. Dravidian languages have, however, had their influence on Sinhalese, chiefly through contact, and Tamil, being the language spoken by a large population in the neighbouring part of India, asserted a wide influence on the vocabulary, grammar, and literature of Sinhalese. Before examining the Dravidian loan-words in Sinhalese and the influence of Dravidian languages on its structure, the amount of the indebtedness of Sinhalese writers to Tamil authors for their subject matter will be examined here.

In a previous paper, we discussed a series of solar eclipse observations recorded in medieval Arabic chronicles both for their astronomical and chronological value. In the present paper we investigate lunar eclipses reported in these same sources as well as in many further chronicles. It should be stressed that our interest here is limited to eclipse records from chronicles; we have not included any material from technical treatises composed by astronomers. The observations are largely from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), Egypt, Iraq, and Syria; they mainly cover the date range from A.D. 867 to 1520, with additions from 1674 to 1791.

Plural markers in some languages are quite unlike their Indo-European counterparts in that their use does not depend only on number but also on other considerations (pragmatic, perspective-related and so on). This article gives an insight into how such plurals work, based on a careful analysis of the suffix -men in Mandarin Chinese.

The notion of personal collective is what universally underlies the so-called plural of personal pronouns. Benveniste (1966) has shown that in this case pluralization does not amount to an addition or multiplication of elements, but to what he calls ‘amplification of persons’, that is, a collective. In Chinese it is this pronominal plural that has been extended, under certain conditions, to nouns.

It is claimed that the occurrence of -men is governed by the conjunction of number (n>1) and person (reference to a subject-origin). Grammatical person is taken to refer to the space (and positions within it) organized around a subject-origin, normally the speaker. -Men requires that entities be related to a human locator who performs the role of the deictic centre and acts as the origin of point of view. The required conditions are by definition met with personal pronouns, which is why -men is obligatory, but are seldom satisfied with nouns, which is why the latter take the suffix only rarely. Most remarkably, when nouns are not reducible to pronouns, the occurrence of -men is associated with a shift in perspective. The group is considered from the point of view of a locator distinct from the speaker, not from that of the speaker. The speaker being essentially free to shift his viewpoint or not, this explains why -men is optional (though not arbitrary) with nouns in such contexts. Note that, all else being equal (n>1), the contrast between N and N-men is not one of number but of point of view (external versus internal point of view). In summary, the suffix operates in all cases with reference to a subject-origin, either the speaker or a protagonist whose point of view is provisionally adopted by the narrator.

The case of Chinese, far from being exotic, is a meaningful illustration of the interaction between the grammatical categories of number and person. This study opens up new typological perspectives in terms of grammaticalization of the pronominal versus nominal plural across languages.

The present paper describes a palatographic investigation of Javanese coronal stops. Javanese exhibits stop consonants at both dental and alveolar places of articulation. In the current roman orthography, the dentals are represented by the single letters t, d, while the alveolars are represented by the digraphs th, dh. Thus, for example, titik [titI?] ‘full stop’ contrasts with thithik [titI?] ‘a little’.

The inscriptions published here for the first time were discovered in the course of a visit to Edessa, the modern Urfa, during the summer of 1956. My journey was made possible by generous subventions from the Central Research Funds of the University of London and the Pilgrim Trust Fund administered by the British Academy. It is a pleasure to express here my gratitude not only to those bodies, but also to the officials of the Turkish Department of Antiquities and to the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, whose ready co-operation greatly facilitated our work in the field; and my sincere thanks are due no less to the energy and perseverance of Dr. D. S. Rice and his assistants Dr. Donald Strong and Mr. Michael Ballance, my companions in the rigours of an Anatolian heat-wave.

The Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum has in its collections an inscribed plaque (BM 136772) which is intriguing for bearing not one but one and a half inscriptions, for being almost perfectly legible, and yet for having no obvious purpose. There is no information about its provenance (the plaque was in a European private collection for some considerable time) other than that it is said to have come, indirectly, from Iran. Of this there can be little doubt, as we shall see. The plaque is of sheet silver, roughly rectangular, and measures approximately 13 · 5 cm. in width and 14 · 5 cm. in length. At some time it has been folded in half both ways, leaving a horizontal crack across the middle. Another crack runs across the bottom right-hand corner. It is possible to give these orientations because of the 21 lines of writing which, from their division, were incised in the plate after it acquired its present shape. The writing is ‘inscriptional’ Parthian. The first 14 lines bear a close copy of the corresponding version of the rock inscription of Shapur I at Ḥāǰīābād (by Persepolis), and 11. 15–21, probably by another hand, contain a repetition of the beginning of this. But this is by no means to say all.

The mausolea that safeguarded the remains of the Commanders of the Faithful are not preserved among the meagre remnants of 'Abbāsid Baghdād. The history of these prominent buildings can be reconstructed from historical sources, however, and their significance sketched. The evidence presented here is not new, but it may profitably be reviewed with regard to funerary practices, terminology, and the development of Islamic architectural forms.

Priyā Dās was the first commentator on Nābhā Dās's celebrated work, the Bhaktamāla. His commentary entitled Bhaktirasabodhinī is a most valuable exposition of the Bhaktamāla, and later commentaries are mainly based on Priyā Dās's work. It is both surprising and disappointing how little is known about Priyā Dās. Although all the writers on the history of Hindi literature have frequently referred to and quoted from the commentary, only a few sentences, in some cases not more than two or three, are devoted to the author. This paper attempts to throw light on some aspects of his life and his other works, and to remove certain misconceptions.