Tonal analysis has revealed many functions, grammatical as well as semantic, which tone performs in West African languages. Here we confine ourselves to one aspect, the incidence of tone in verbs, and in particular we examine the tonal patterns of verbal forms.

The oldest texts—Rgveda and Avesta—of the Indie (Indo-aryan) and Iranian languages, which together form the Aryan family, agree in much of their vocabulary, as well as in much of their grammar and syntax.

The recently discovered Līlātilaka, containing as it does the oldest known observations upon the grammar of the Malayalam language, has naturally won for itself a position of importance; and although there has perhaps been a tendency to exaggerate its merits, the evidence which it offers will certainly be of interest and value to students of the history of the Dravidian languages. Nevertheless, although it has quickly achieved fame in its own country, it has remained all but unknown in the west. So far as I can ascertain, only a solitary copy of the edition of the Sanskrit sutras with Malayalam translation of the original Sanskrit commentary, by A. Krsna Pisarati (Trivandrum, 1092 = A.D. 1916) has reached this country; and even this did not reach the British Museum until 1938. The chief aim of the present paper, therefore, is to render accessible the text of the sutras.

Although the discovering of a complete Palestinian Targum in the Codex Vatican Neofiti 1 (N) erroneously marked in the spine as ‘ Targum Onkelos ’ was not of archaeological but merely archival nature, it was an event of major importance in Aramaic studies. Its announcement by the discoverer, Alejandro Diez Macho, a former student of P. E. Kahle, in Estudios Biblicos, 16, 1956, 446 ff., and Sefarad, 17, 1957, 119 ff., and especially the impressive voluminous publication by the same scholar, Neophyti 1 Targum Palestinense MS de la Biblioteca Vaticana (Madrid-Barcelona, I, Genesis, 1968; II, Exodo, 1970; III, Levitico 1971; IV, Numeros, 1974; v, Deuteronomio, 1978), provided with detailed scholarly introductions to each volume as well as translations of the edited text into Spanish (by the editor), French (by R. Le Déaut) and English (by M. McNamara and M. Maher), aroused great and justified enthusiasm among scholars. Meanwhile, a facsimile edition in 140 copies was published by Makor in Jerusalem (1970), which helped to clear up certain problems in Macho's edition (esp. the omission of the Hebrew lemmata at the beginning of each verse and errors obliterated by the copyists) deplored by David M. Golomb in his recently published thesis, A grammar of Targum Neofiti (p. 1 f.).

The body of rules translated below was first discovered by a Park Ranger employed to restore the erstwhile gold-mining town of Barkerville, British Columbia, as an historical monument. Searching for authentic artefacts in an abandoned ‘Chinese Frėemason’ hall in the neighbouring town of Quesnel Forks, he came upon some tattered ceremonial robes, a Chinese book of codes and signs, and a board approximately 10 feet in length inscribed with Chinese characters. These (with some other items) were stored by the ranger at Barkerville, in a box marked ‘unidentified materials’, which was found by the authors in the summer of 1961, while carrying out field research on Chinese social organization in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. Mr. Ho identified the calligraphy on the board as a set of rules of the Chih-kung T'ang.

In my paper ‘On the Altaic numerals’ I made the point that Turkic, like Mongolian, segregated 6–9 by suffixes, and that Turkic further divided these into two morphological groups, 6–7 and 8–9. My good friend Robert Underhill has pointed out to me that I neglected an additional piece of evidence for these groupings, in the formation of the decades; that is, I overlooked the sets represented in Osmanli Turkish by altmiş, yetmiş ‘60, 70’ and seksen, doksan ‘80, 90’. The latter pair is clearly from *sekiz+on and *dokuz+on, and this shows up clearly in Old Turkish and Chuvash. I am grateful to Underhill for having pointed out this additional argument, and it leads me in turn to some further considerations which I take this opportunity to present.

The following poem was copied for me in 1912 by Muhammad bin Abubakar bin ‘Umar (Muhamadi Kijuma) of Lamu. The author was one ‘Umar bin Amin, a blind Sharif of Siu, said (in 1913) to have died “ about fifty or sixty years ago ”. This information was furnished by Ahmad bin Abubakar bin ‘Umar es-Siwi, of Mambrui, who added that ‘Umar recovered his sight on completing the poem ! His name, by a not uncommon practice, is spelt out in the final stanza. So far as the poem shows any linguistic peculiarities, these belong to the Lamu dialect, which differs considerably from the poet's native speech of Siu. This may be due to its passing through the hands of Lamu copyists, or, more probably to the deliberate adoption of what was considered to be a more literary form of language.

Whether or not the text has been corrupted here and there, I find some obscurities which I have been unable to translate. These I have left with a query, in the hope that some reader in East Africa may be able to elucidate them. Some allowance, moreover, has to be made for poetical licence, in view of the difficulties of this very artificial kind of composition.

The structure of the gâthâs is at first sight far from obvious. It has even been contended that the sequences of stanzas preserved in the Avesta under the titles Yasna 28, 29, etc., were in nearly all cases mere haphazard collections.

The problem of “accent” in the Japanese language has attracted the attention of a few Japanese scholars for some hundred years. In recent years more writers, both native and foreign, on the Japanese language have touched upon this problem. For instance, B. H. Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, 3rd ed., 1898, pp. 19–20; R. Lange, Lehrbuch der japanischen Umgangssprache, 1906, ss. xxvii–viii; E. R. Edwards, Étude phonétique de la langue japonaise, 1903, § 142 f., § 159. Native writers: S. Izawa, Kokutei Tokuhon Seidokuho (The Orthoepy of the State Text Books); B. Yamada, Nihon Daijiten (Japanese Grand Dictionary); T. Takahashi, Hatsuon Jiten (Pronouncing Dictionary). Yet the results attained by these writers have not been quite satisfactory, as, for instance, Lange considers the Japanese “accent” to be that of stress, while Izawa thinks it is the delicate difference of length of speech-sounds. Yamada, Takahashi, etc., while they were right in thinking it to be difference of pitch, could not make out the pitch relations of the syllabic units of each word, and their method of indicating the “accent” was quite misleading.

The Zulu language proper, Isizulu, is now spoken by the natives of Zululand and of the greater part of Natal, though naturally there are dialectal differences within that area, and these differences become more pronounced as the Xosa border is approached. The language of the amaMpondo, for instance, seems to savour both of Zulu and of Xosa. One of the outstanding phonetic differences between Zulu and Xosa is that the latter uses the alveolar nasal combination nd where the former uses the velar ηg, e.g. Xosa ndi, and Zulu “cardinal” vowels and the use of the vowel chart, cf. the various phonetic readers published by the London University Press, and particularly the Italian Phonetic Reader. They are indicated on the chart by the numbers (1) to (8).