Literary languages of Western Europe are national languages as well; there is no divorce between them and the people; there may be a distance, but no gap between them and the ordinary vernaculars, and their growth and vicissitudes reflect those of the vernaculars. So the historians of the language are able to discover when, where, how they came into existence, and call them to give evidence as to its later destinies. For instance, we know the place where French was born, how it asserted itself against Latin, how it turned out provincial speeches; we can make a fairly good evaluation of the distance between written and spoken French, in the past and now. In India conditions are vastly different; our knowledge of its languages, at least in their most ancient stages, is based only, or nearly so, on literary languages, of which we know neither the local basis, nor the degree of connection with the vernaculars. They do not give expression to the thoughts and feelings of the people; at the most, they give an ideal picture of the culture of a small community.

Colonel Low mentioned the schemes of Francis Light and James Scott for a British occupation of Thalang or Salang (Junk Ceylon) in Logan's Journal in 1849, and, sincethen, some attention has been paid to the official sources in English on this subject. Gerini comments on ‘the silence of the local annals about such land-grabbing schemes on the part of the British’.

Before proceeding to examine the poetry of the Baḵẖtiāri people, it is desirable to say something about their manner of life and the physical environment which to a large extent has determined it, and which presents those aspects and objects of nature which are familiar to all of them.

The system of mountains which extends from N.W. to S.E. across the south-. western part of Persia is occupied by a series of tribes, all of whom pursue a more or less nomadic form of life. On the west, south of Karmanshah, are the Feili Lurs of what may be called the Kingdom of Pusht i Kūh, with its practically independent ruler, the Wāli. Next, to the east come the large autonomous

Qur'ān 2:114 describes those who prevent God's name being uttered in His mosques (man mana'a masājida ‘llāhi an yukhdara fīā’smuhu) as ‘most unjust’ (aẓlamu). If further states that ‘they shall not be allowed to enter them except in fear; they shall endure the curse of chastisement in this world and great torture in the aftermath ’.

It is generally accepted that the system of social relations obtaining in Outer Mongolia during the period of Manchu domination (1691–1911) is best described as feudalistic, and that no substantial change was made in this system during the period of autonomy which followed (1911–19). Indeed, in some ways, particularly in the granting of secular titles of nobility to high lamas, and the allotment to them of the appropriate retainers, the system was reinforced during those years. Society was divided basically into two classes, the nobility, and the commoners, or albat, those liable to corvée.

The word blags-pa occurs in line 48 of the Li-yul chos-kyi lo-rgyus. A manu-script of this work, brought back from Tun-huang by Paul Pelliot, has been described by F. W. Thomas in his Tibetan literary texts and documents concerning Chinese Turkestan, London, 1935, p. 303, n. 1, and by Marcelle Lalou in Inventaire des manuscrits tibetains de Touen-houang, n, Paris, 1950, p. 25, No. 960. The text has been translated by F. W. Thomas, op. cit., 305–23. R. E. Emmerick has edited the text in his Tibetan texts concerning Khotan, London, 1967, 78–91. Emmerick's glossary (op. cit., 108–60) has to be consulted for his interpretation of the text. The passage which contains the word blags-pa is the following: thos-pa'i bsod-nams kyaṅ bskal-pa gcig-gi sdig 'byah // blags-pa'i bsod-nams ni / bskal-pa grans myed-pa'i sdig 'byan //. Thomas reads slags-pa'i instead of blags-pa'i and explains in a note that slags = Klags (p. 313, n. 2). His translation is as follows: ‘The merit of even hearing it cleanses the sin of one æon; the merit of reading it cleans the sin of countless æeons’. Emmerick states in his glossary: ‘blags (pf. <blag-pa “to hear”) 48. F. W. Thomas has “reading”, with the note slags = klags (TLT i.313 n. 2). But the reading is blags on my photograph, blag-pa is “to hear“ by itself or with rna-ba. So Das, Russ. D. against Jä’.

Hadramawt, properly speaking, is the name of the Wadi, a province separated from its coast by an empty stony plateau. Each of these provinces is a distinct entity

This paper is intended as a sequel to our ‘Five Yurok songs’, published in the issue of the Bulletin dedicated to Professor J. R. Firth, and the statements there made about Yurok music in general apply also to the song presented and analysed here. This song was excluded from our previous article, not merely for reasons of space, but from a consideration of its composition. In the five songs already published, text and music, though realized together in the singing of the song, could be distinguished and separately analysed. In this song (a Brush Dance song) the human voice serves simply as a musical instrument, and the melody and rhythms making up the music are carried on a series of syllable sequences, to which no grammatical or lexical analysis can be applied and to which no translation can be given.

The distinguished orientalist Reinhart Dozy, writing in 1849, and referring to the possible influence of Arabic poetry on Spanish romances and on the early troubadour lyrics, pronounced the whole question as ‘tout à fait oiseuse’. He went on to say about this highly controversial question: ‘nous voudrions ne plus la voir débattue, quoique nous soyons convaincu qu'elle le sera pendant longtemps encore. A chacun son cheval de bataille’.

‘Les livres historiques sont rares en pays annamite: le climat et les guerres ont concouru a les de truire.’ When he wrote those words in 1904 Pelliot no doubt hoped that they would be true only of the past; but the troubled history of Việt-Nam in the middle decades of the twentieth century has made them also prophetic. Before modern methods for combating the climate could be brought to bear on the problem of archive preservation further wars occurred to destroy even more of the country's historical remains, as well as to disperse many of those which survived.

To do honour to my old friend Walter Simon I have put together here five documents from Central Asia. These are: (1) the photograph of the Turkish text in Khotan Saka script; (2) a Tibetan letter in Khotan Saka script; (3) pieces of document from Kuci (Kucha) inscribed with Kharoṣṭhī and Brahml script; (4) a fragment of Khotan Saka containing the word bisīvrai; and (5) three Tibetan documents with Khotan Saka words.

In Muslim law one of the topics of dispute which is traced back to some of the earliest authorities, and which persists as a difference between the various madhhabs and sects, concerns the obligations owed by her former husband towards a wife who has been divorced. Schacht attempted a summary of the positions taken in the dispute together with an explanation for them:

The Medinese hold that the definitely divorced wife who is not pregnant, can claim from her former husband only lodging during her period of waiting {‘idda); the Iraqians give her also the right to board. The two doctrines are based on two variants of Koran lxv.6, the Medinese on the textus receptus, the Iraqian on the reading of Ibn Mas‘ūd. When the text of Ibn Mas'ūd was superseded in Iraq by the textus receptus during the reign of the Umaiyad caliph ‘Abdalmalik (A.H. 65–86), this basis of the Iraqian doctrine was forgotten, and Abū Ḥanīfa was reduced to justifying it by an arbitrary interpretation of the textus receptus and by a tradition from ‘Umar.

Immediately after finishing his Kurzgefaβtes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen (KEWA), M. Mayrhofer had the very commendable courage to start work on an Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen (EWA), of which the first 11 fascicles now (Autumn 1992) lie before us. It is not, as the author rightly insists,‘a new (and improved) edition’ of KEWA, but a renewed attempt in its own rights. It is an attempt to produce ‘an etymological dictionary of’ a big corpus language (i.e. of Sanskrit)’ in ‘a practicable and finishable form’, that is: an etymological dictionary such as could be brought to completion ‘by a single scholar within his life time’,—provided this scholar would have the industry and tenacious dedication of a Mayrhofer, we should like to add. Even in the close atmosphere of such a somewhat constraining qualification, Mayrhofer aims high: he thinks of –an etymological dictionary approaching the fulfilment of demands of an ideal order–. The differences between the former work and the one recently begun, already clearly recognizable, are many and conspicuous. The changes introduced are mostly—not always, as is only to be expected—distinct improvements. One of the most important changes is highly welcome: the conscientious- reference to the first occurrence of each word in Sanskrit literature. The attribute ‘kurzgefaβt’ does not appear in the title. Even the KEWA was not actually ‘conciseမ: it was so in comparison only with the planned Vergleichendes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen by W. Wüst

1.l. From May 1974 to May 1976 I carried out field research in the Nilgiri Hills, South India, with the purpose of collecting materials on the languages, oral traditions, religious beliefs and practices, and customs of three tribal communities, the Ālu Kuṟumbas, the Pālu Kuṟumbas, and the Muḍugas.

In this paper I shall present some first specimens of the language and folklore of the hitherto nearly unknown Pālu Kuṟumba tribe.

This paper describes the inverse marking systems of two closely related Khroskyabs varieties, Siyuewu and Wobzi, and hypothesizes the historical development of the Khroskyabs inverse marking system. I propose that a hypothetical prefix, *Cə-, which is probably related to the second person markers attested in many Trans-Himalayan languages, existed in Proto-Khroskyabs, and that it has different reflexes in the two modern Khroskyabs varieties.

European contemporaries regarded Ras Alula, Emperor Yohannes's general, as one of the most prominent leaders of Ethiopia in the crucial period of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was a period in which the country was struggling to remain independent during the ‘scramble for Africa’. The Ras was referred to as ‘the best native general and strategist that Africa has perhaps produced in modern times’, and ‘undoubtedly’ the ‘greatest leader that Abyssinia has produced since the death of the Emperor Theodore in 1868’. His Italian adversaries thought in 1885 that ‘Ras Alula is the most serious, the most influential, and the strongest personality in today's Abyssinia. The word of Alula is heard with enthusiasm and confidence by the King’. A Sudanese Mahdist historian wrote that ‘Ras Allulā was one of the famous and brave men in war, very experienced in the tactics of battles. He was a bone in the throat of the British, Italian, and Turkish [Egyptian] empires’. A British soldier and diplomat was of the opinion that ‘the Abyssinian generalissimo’ was ‘apparently the moving spirit of that country’.

Current scholarship often describes early Ottoman historiography as a phenomenon initiated and conducted by the Ottoman state. In particular, the unprecedented growth in the number of Ottoman history books composed during the reign of Bayezid II (1481–1512) is viewed as such. Modern historians commonly argue that in the aftermath of the Kilia and Akkerman victories (1484), Bayezid II decided to propagate a new Ottoman ideology and commissioned Ottoman history books to be written for this purpose. This article argues that there is not enough evidence to suggest that Bayezid II orchestrated or directed this upsurge in history production. The premises of Halil İnalcık's earlier studies in particular, upon which much of our understanding of the subject was built, do not hold.

Over a period of some forty years, 380/990–421/1030, the Fatimids in Egypt exchanged embassies with their Zirid viceroys in Ifrīqiya after these had been recognized as a hereditary dynasty, and to a lesser extent with their Kalbid deputies in Sicily. Sijillāt or official letters of the Fatimid chancery, accompanied by sumptuous presents, invested the Zirids with their authority and favoured them with important announcements, while the Zirids replied in kind. The embassies were ostentatiously welcomed by the Zirids as proof of their legitimacy, while serving to maintain the connection with Cairo on which the Fatimids were similarly dependent for the sake of their imperial standing in the world. The importance of that connection to both dynasties was shown in the 440s/1050s, when it was broken by the Zirids and restored by a Fatimid intervention, celebrated in a fresh series of sijillāt. With their emphasis on the style as much as the substance of the messages, the exchanges are excellent illustrations of mediaeval diplomatic correspondence as described by John Wansbrough in Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean.