This paper offers an analysis and a new translation of an Atharvanic hymn addressed to the goddess of Night, Rātrī, attested in both recensions of the Atharvaveda (AV), in the Śaunakīya, and in the Paippalāda. The translation is accompanied by a philological and text-critical commentary as well as an analysis of some linguistic features of the Vedic language of this period, such as the use of emphatic reflexive pronouns and the periphrastic progressive tense (usually disregarded in standard Vedic grammars).

This paper constitutes the first linguistic analysis of nominal possessive constructions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hasidic Hebrew hagiographic tales. Such analysis is necessary because it sheds much-needed light on the grammatical structure of this prominent but largely unstudied early modern Eastern European form of Hebrew. Hasidic Hebrew possessive constructions exhibit a variety of noteworthy features, namely non-standard uses of the construct chain including definiteness of the construct noun, double definiteness, and split construct chains; construct chains with adjectives in the absolute position; the productiveness and widespread use of the construct chain; the tendency to favour the post-Biblical Hebrew possessive particle של shel only in certain syntactic contexts; and the employment of the Aramaic particle ד- de- specifically to express geographical and temporal relationships. These phenomena reflect a mix of various strata of Hebrew as well as Aramaic, Yiddish, and independent elements that combine to form a unique system distinct from other varieties of Hebrew.

Bishop caldwell, the founder of the comparative study of the Dravidian languages, was interested not only in the relationship of those languages among themselves, but also in the question of their connection with other families of languages outside India. His investigations in this direction led him to believe that the Dravidian languages are connected with what he called the “Scythian” family of languages. By the term “Scẏthian” Caldwell referred mainly to the Ural-Altaic languages, though occasionally using the word in a rather wider sense than that. Within the “Scythian” family he held that it was possible to define the position of Dravidian even more closely, by attaching it to the Finno-ugrian group in particular. The evidence which Caldwell offered in support of this theory consisted partly of grammatical features which he held to be common to the languages concerned, and partly of comparisons of vocabulary. The former are to be found scattered through the body of his work, and the latter are collected together in an appendix entitled “Glossarial Affinities”. In presenting this theory Caldwell was quite modest in his claims; he admitted the possibility of being misled by accidental assonances, and claimed rather to have pointed the way to the possibilities of future research than to have demonstrated the relationship with any finality.

This paper arises out of dissatisfaction with wholly instrumentalist explanations of Muslim separatism in India, views which have their critics but which generally prevail nowadays, reinforced by no less an influence than that of Michel Foucault. The problem is the fundamental one of what constitutes a group, and in particular of whether or not there can be objective harmonization, ‘orchestration sans chef d'orchestre qui confère regularité’, within any set of people. At an empirical level, in regard to Indian Muslims, the debate has three main elements: what was the nature of communalism, how far Muslim separatism was a process, and whether its development was a sufficient explanation for the partition of 1947. To the extent that Muslims became separatist, they obviously might have been diverted into other attitudes, and to that extent is it important to identify events which encouraged or errors which prevented that diversion.

On this occasion the discussion will begin as a review of A nationalist conscience, Mushirul Hasan's study of M. A. Ansari, and then move on to some of the issues suggested by Ansari's life and Hasan's treatment of it. The book provides an important corrective, in its emphasis and viewpoint, to the tendency to attribute the partition in India to a consistent and inevitable conflict between increasingly irreconcilable forces. The study extends and rounds out earlier work; it brings to life the alternative symbolized by Ansari, and thus casts into relief the occasions when Hindu–Muslim agreement and a common front against the British seemed possible, as in 1919–22 and 1935. The book exhibits the familiarity and maturity of understanding resulting from such an intense and long-term project of research. It is a timely contribution too, as intercommunal tensions once again mount in South Asia, and voices are heard suggesting that the secular constitution of India is inappropriate to the essential character of its people. The book's implicit thesis is that separatism did indeed evolve, with clear stages from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century; that its opponents were unable to arrest its advance; and that Ansari is significant for exemplifying these two points. Hasan thus illustrates an alternative to communalism offered during the struggles against British rule; it was an alternative which failed. The question is whether or not it could have succeeded.

It is one of the most tantalizing features of the ancient history of southern Asia that there is no generally accepted solution to the dating problems of the Kushan dynasty. The wide divergences of opinion still current with regard to this question were well evidenced by the lively discussions which took place at the Conference on the Date of Kanishka, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies from 20 to 22 April I960. It was rightly appreciated that numerous questions of Oriental history and archaeology depend on the correct solution of this problem.

The India Office Library MS Ch ii 003 contains 73 folios of a medical text written alternatingly in Sanskrit and Khotanese. The folios are numbered from 44 to 116. Although the text ends in the middle of a Sanskrit recipe, the beginning of the text has survived. As no title and no colophon are extant and as the text has not been traced elsewhere H. W. Bailey assigned the text the convenient label Jwaka-pustaka ‘The Book of Jivaka’. The text begins as an exposition made by the Bhagavant to the famous physician Jīvaka, called elsewhere in Khotanese ‘the king of physicians’.

There was a prevailing opinion in English linguistic literature that the modern prose Hindī, High Hindī, or Kharī bolī, was invented by the English.

This point of view was maintained some time ago by such a highly authoritative scholar as Sir G. A. Grierson. Thus, in the preface to his work on the history of Hindī literature he says : “ The first half of the nineteenth century … was the period of the birth of the Hindī language, invented by the English, and first used as a vehicle of literary prose composition in 1803 under Gilchrist‘s tuition, by Lallū Jī Lāl, the author of the Prem Sāgar.”

Multiple varieties of Arabic attest a definite noun + adjective syntagm in which only the adjective is marked morphologically with the article, e.g., Lebanese bēt iz-zġīr “the small house”. The feminine ending *-ah is everywhere realized -(v)t, e.g., Baghdadi sint il-māḍye “last year”. Most have assumed that it was originally appositional, and re-analysed as a construct, prompted perhaps by the loss of case (Hopkins 1984; Pat-El 2017). A few scholars (Reckendorf 1921; Retsö 2009) have argued that this syntagm was originally construct. In this article I draw on relevant Arabic data, including parallels with dialectal tanwīn, as well as comparative Semitic evidence, to argue that this syntagm is, diachronically and synchronically, one of apposition and not annexation. I propose that the feminine -at here represents a retention of proto-Arabic *-at, which was protected by the close relationship between a noun and following attribute. I conclude with a discussion of historical and comparative implications.

Tocharian B eñcuwo “iron” and Tocharian A añcu* have been connected to the Iranian words for “iron”, notably Khwarezmian hnčw. On the basis of insights into the patterns of borrowings from Khotanese into Tocharian, it is argued that the Tocharian words must have been borrowed from a preform of Khotanese hīśśana- “iron”. Further, a new etymology is proposed for “iron” that accounts for the variation of this word in Iranian. The fact that Tocharian borrowed the word for “iron” from Khotanese, not from the archaic steppe dialect of Iranian that is the source of many other loanwords in Tocharian, suggests that the contacts between this latter dialect and Tocharian took place before iron became widespread in the region.

This paper provides a new explanation for the insertion of *a in plural forms of *CVCC- nouns also formed with an external plural suffix, e.g. *ʕabd- : *ʕabad-ū- ‘servant(s)’, in various Semitic languages. This *CVCaC-ū- pattern is usually considered to be a remnant of the Proto-Semitic broken plural system in Northwest Semitic, but we show that it goes back to Proto-Semitic in this form. Internal evidence from Semitic as well as comparative evidence from Afroasiatic points towards a pre-Proto-Semitic plural suffix *-w- underlying the external plural suffixes. This suffix created a consonant cluster in the plural of *CVCC- nouns, triggering epenthesis of *a. As the prime example of broken plural formation in Northwest Semitic thus seems to be purely suffixal in origin, we conclude by briefly considering the implications for the history of nominal pluralization in Semitic.