Most Sanskrit texts dealing with Indian music refer to 7 svaras (notes) and 22 śrutis (intervals ? microtones ?) which are said to be the basis of Indian music. Many modern writers in Western as well as the vernacular languages consider that śrutis refer to the microtonal variations in particular notes from one rāga to another. In order to convey the general opinion on the subject of intonation, we quote from Alain Daniélou, a prominent writer on North Indian music:

‘It is impossible to sing the complete scale of the shrutis accurately in succession (as some singers pretend to do), but they can all be sung with perfect accuracy when they are embodied in expressive scales’.

He hunted the valley till it was midday. Moreover, there were with him two-and-thirty crowned kings, his vassals at that time. Not for the joy of hunting did the emperor hunt with them so long, but because he had been made a man of such high dignity that he was lord over all those kings.

‘The dream of Macsen Wledig’

That the three provinces which constituted Rāmaññadesa, the Mon kingdom in Lower Burma, were divided into 32 townships is one of those acknowledged crumbs of fact which, passed down from historian to historian, never seem to excite more specific inquiry. The institution has suggestive parallels and analogues elsewhere in South East Asia, to the study of which Sir Richard Winstedt, in the ‘History of Perak’ which he wrote with R. J. Wilkinson, himself contributed almost thirty years ago.

The comparative Altaic phonology recently published by Professor Poppe is the third post-war attempt to give body to the theory of the genetic relationship of Altaic languages. In the recent spectacular renascence of Altaic studies two similar works have been published: one by Kotwicz, the other by Ramstedt. It is interesting to note that these surveys were published at a time when the genetic relationship of the Altaic language had already been tacitly admitted for about a century.

The term ‘nominal piece’ is applied here to any utterance stretch denned initially by the presence of any or all of Nominal Classes 1,2, and 3 set up below, and finally either by sentence-closing intonation or a marker indicating the onset of another piece. The terms ‘negative piece’ and ‘conjunctival piece’ are applied to utterance stretches which lie outside the confines of both the nominal piece (as defined above) and the verbal piece (as defined in BSOAS, XXVI, 1, 1962, 152, para. 1). Any Rarotongan utterance is divisible without residue into one or more of these four pieces.

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’.

The admirable dissertation on the biography of the Persian mystic and wonder-worker Aḥmad-i Jām by Dr. Heshmat Moayyed has now been followed by an edition of the chief text furnishing the basis for the biography. The learned editor knew of only one complete manuscript of this work, contained in MS Nafid Pasha 339, together with a fragment in Berlin Oct. 3784. The purpose of this paper is to bring to notice the existence of a second complete copy, the collation of which is essential for the establishment of a definitive text.

The tone patterns of the Recent Style (chin-t‘i ) have always given trouble to Western readers of Chinese poetry. Chinese authorities offer us a confusing variety of patterns, each with a different tone sequence for every line of the quatrain, no apparent principle of organization, and seemingly unaccountable licences for certain syllables. Yet if we choose to ignore these patterns, we are left only with such clumsy rules of thumb as that syllables of the same tone tend to fall into pairs and that corresponding syllables within the couplet generally contrast in tone.

In a number of recent publications it has been suggested that the existence of more than one liquid consonant in parallel distribution in certain of the Polynesian outliers may not only provide an important clue for the next attempt to ascertain the status of Polynesian languages, but incidentally suggest a solution of the problem of the routes of Polynesian migrations.

No. 6174 of Giles's Catalogue of the Chinese manuscripts from Tun-huang states that on the back of this manuscript there is a ‘short text relating to the legend of the Weaving Maiden and the Cowherd’. On inspection this turns out to be a series of verses, two for each of the five watches of the night, headed Hsi ch‘iu t‘ien ‘Eejoicing in the autumn sky’

Rarotongan sentences may be classed broadly as statements, unmarked questions, and marked questions. Statements have an intonation contour characterized by a final fall; unmarked questions are segmentally identical with statements, but have an intonation contour characterized by a final rise-fall and generally require a yes-or-no answer; marked questions contain one of four interrogatives, a?a ‘what ?’, ?ai ‘who ?’, ?ea ‘where ?, when ?’, ?ia ‘how many ?’, are characterized by a final rise in the intonation contour, and cannot be answered by a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

The term ‘verbal piece’ is applied here to any utterance stretch defined initially by one of the particles listed in paragraph 6 and finally either by sentence-closing intonation or by a marker indicating the onset of another piece. Investigation of the order in which forms appear within these limits leads to the recognition of a number of sequential positions within the verbal piece. Forms are classified according to their distribution over these positions and commutability within them.

The Iranian field seems sometimes to have more than its fair share of fakes. In material form they range from silver bowls with novel ‘Old Persian’ inscriptions to highly original ‘early modern Persian’ manuscripts. On the literary side we have a series of dictionaries which should rate high among works of fiction, containing as they do, beisde the glossators' mistakes of centuries, the vocabularies of at least two fictitious languages.

A few weeks ago while looking through our library's set of Ibrahim Hakki Konyah's popular periodical Tarih Hazinesi, with its lavish photographs of important material, I chanced on the reproduction of a nishān of 815/1412, one of the illustrations accompanying an article on the Turkish State Archives (vol. i, no. 5, issue of 15 January 1951, p. 238).

The commemoration volume published by the Turkish Historical Society for the tercentenary of the death of the Ottoman polymath Kātib Čelebi (1609–57) contains an exhaustive survey of his works by 0. Ş. Gökyay, with much new information on the extant manuscripts. Here appears a description of his Rawnaq al-salṭana ‘Splendour of the sultanate’, previously known only from the author's cursory mention of it, in his Mīzān al-ḥaqq, as ‘a history of Constantinople’.