As a result of the gradual attrition of final syllables, which caused the Old Iranian nominal plural endings to become insufficiently distinct from those of the singular, the plural was extensively remodelled in almost all Middle and New Iranian languages. Such renovation could come about in two ways. Either the more distinctive pl. inflexions, such as the gen. *-ānām or the instr. and dat. forms containing *b, could be extended or adapted to supply other cases, as happened in Parthian, Šuγnī, etc., or the old pl. could be replaced by a surrogate pl. derived from a sg. collective noun. The latter process is well illustrated by Sogdian, where the usual pi. suffix is -t (oblique -ty) after heavy stems, -t– (obl. -ty') after light stems. As is indicated by the inflexion, which is that of an old ā-stem, and by the fact that f. sg. forms of the articles and demonstratives are used with pl. nouns, this suffix derives from that of the OIr. f. abstract-collective nouns in *-tā-.

In the preface to my restoration of the text of the Vīsaḷadevarāsa I remarked, ‘To the best of my knowledge, it has never before been found necessary to emend an entire text on metrical principles’; and I rather assumed that it was unlikely ever to be found necessary again. I certainly did not imagine that a great part of my work over the next years would be devoted to further large-scale metrical emendation; yet so it has turned out, and what is offered here is an interim progress-report, together with a few tentative generalizing conclusions.

The root dī- is found in the Rgveda some 13 times as dīyati and once as dàyaté (dàyamāna-), including once each with the preverbs nis and pári, and once in Satapatha-brāhmana in the intensive dédīyitavai. Pali has dayati (beside dēti) = uppatati.

The Irulas 2 are a tribal complex of four tribes inhabiting the lower slopes of the northern, eastern and southern parts of the Nilgiri mountains of South India. They speak a tribal language of their own—the ërla na:ya—in four dialects; it belongs, historically, to the Tamil-Malayalam group of South Dravidian.3 Two of the tribes intermarry, so that the Irula complex forms a tribal group of three endogamous units. Linguistically and from the point of social organization, the Irula situation may be thus symbolized as

The creativity of Irula-speaking tribes finds expression mostly in music,4 dance, and above all, in verbal art.5 They have a wealth of oral traditions characteristic for most pre-literary cultures; though modernization—thus far mostly in the socio-economic sphere—has had its impact on the Irula-speaking tribes, the absolute majority of the Irulas are still illiterate. Hence storytelling, oral rendering of myths, legends and genealogies, and other forms of verbal art are still very much alive.