An initial y- is found in Tamil only before long ā in such Words as yā1E49;ai elephant, yāṭu goat, yāṟu river, yāmai tortoise, etc. Side by side with these forms We also have forms without the initial y-, āṉai, āṭu, etc., and an examination of literary usage shows that the forms with initial y- has been dropped. In the early anthologies the forms with initial yā- greatly preponderate; in Middle Tamil, literature yā- and ā- forms are indifferently used; while in Modern Tamil, Particularly in the spoken language, ā- forms alone are current. The following is a list of such words together with their cognates in the other Dravidian languages:—

Ta. yā, ā to bind, tie; to dam up, stop, confine, yākkai binding, bond; body, ākkai body; strips of fibre used for thatching, yāppu binding, bond; metre, prosody, āppu bandage, tie; body; wedge, Ma. āppu wedge, plug, what stops a crevice, Ka. āpu a restraint, a stoppage, what stops, Malt. eye to tie, bind, 3rd p.t. ēcha, ēpu the fibres of a wild plant of which cord is made, Kur. ēp string, cord, rope, (with prothetic h-) hē' enā to tie, bind, 3rd p.t. hēcas.

Brian h. hodgson's vocabulary of the ‘Kirānti’ contains a jumble of dialects, those in adjoining columns seldom being closely related to each other. But his vocabulary has the advantage that all the dialects listed by him belong to one Tibeto-Burmic group, which we may call East Himalayish.

The year in which 'Alī Bey al-Kabīr, Mamlūk ruler of Egypt (1760–72), first came to power as shaykh al-balad, the most important office in Egypt from the middle of the eighteenth century to Bonaparte's expedition, has been a matter of some disagreement. The Western contemporary accounts of Lusignan, Savary, and Volney give 1763, or the Muslim equivalent 1177. Later historians, Marcel, Cattaui, Combe, Heyworth-Dunne, Rossi, Mahmūd al-Sharqāwī, Wiet, and Shaw accept this date—though in another article Shaw changed his earlier date of 1177/1763 to 1171/1758 for the rise of 'Alī Bey al-Kabīr to the office of shaykh al-balad. Ahmad Haydar al-Shihābī and Masson also chose 1758. Other dates for this event have been given: 1757 by Dehérain, 1766 by 'Alī Pasha Mubārak and François Charles-Roux, and finally 1760 by the contemporary chronicler 'Abd al-Rahmān al-Jabartī. Muhammad Ramadān and P. M. Holt accept al-Jabartī's date. The object of this article is to show that al-Jabartī's dating and account of 'Alī Bey al-Kabīr's rise to power are accurate, and in so doing, to explain the sources of confusion in so many of the studies that have treated 'Alī Bey al-Kabīr's early history.

Muhammad b. Muhammad b. ‘Alī Abū Bakr al–Khawāfī al–Harāwī was born in Khurāsān in 757/1356 and he died at Herat in 838=1435. Praised by Jāmī as one who personified wisdom, both exoteric and esoteric, he was, without doubt, an important master of the Suhrawardiyya Sūfī order, though he established his own silsila, the Zainiyya. None the less, he was schooled in a number of other Sūfī orders. Dr. Leonard Lewisohn has revealed in his studies of the mystic poet, Mawlānā Muhammad Shīrīn, otherwise known as al–Maghribī, that al–Khawāfī is listed at the end of the Ṭaifūrī silsila by Ḥājj Zain al-‘Ābidīn al-Shirwānī. According to Ibn Karbalā'ī, he was a part-time student of Ishāq Khuttalānī and he was also affiliated to ‘Ala’ al-Dawla Simnānī, though it is ultimately to Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī that his silsila is usually traced.

The long struggle of the Thai against the Khmers, culminating in the attacks on and conquest of Angkor early in the fifteenth century A.D., brought the two peoples into intimate association. Thai literature was clearly a beneficiary of this close culture contact, and Cambodian influence upon it, dating back to this early period, is undoubted. Nevertheless, little detailed study of such influence has so far been attempted, partly because of a lack of suitable manuscript material, especially on the Cambodian side, and partly because serious comparative work of an historical nature on the two languages has hardly begun.

The purpose of the present article, as of its predecessor, is to make known a group of fragments surviving only in the form of transcriptions in the Nachlass of Olaf Hansen. Neither the original manuscript nor photographs seem to be extant. Olaf Hansen's handwritten transcripts, which I had the opportunity to study in Kiel in 1985, are published here by kind permission of his son Lars Hansen.

In terms of numbers of speakers, Wolaytta (hereafter to be referred to by the abbreviation ‘W’) is by far and away the most important variety of the Ometo linguistic cluster. According to Ethnologue: languages of the world (Grimes (ed.), 1996), there are two million mother-tongue speakers of the variety, and this number would have to be augmented by large numbers of speakers of other Ometo tongues who have some degree of second language command of W. It is surprising, therefore, how little scholarly attention has been focused on it. The present work goes some way towards rectifying the situation. The earlier literature (Cerulli, 1929; Chiomio, 1938; Padri Missionari, 1969; Ohman et al., 1976) represents a decidedly scanty resource for solid information on W grammar, and in their introductory review (13–14) Lamberti and Sottile (hereafter abbreviated to ‘L&S’) dispose of it in summary fashion, though it does appear that they draw rather more heavily on these sources for their account of cultural matters (15–19). One other work that L&S refer to in their introduction is the doctoral dissertation by Adams (1983), but one must assume that they had no access to it since, subsequently, it is never cited, and this is very unfortunate as in the present reviewer's opinion Adams's description of W is still the best available—but of this more will be discussed later.