Although the Hebrew Bible is a literary document of relatively limited size, containing only a certain segment of what must have been a considerable body of literature, there is little doubt that even those remnants which have come down to us include some areas of the vocabulary of lewdness which have not always been recognized, either intentionally or unintentionally. While I do not hold the view that the Old Testament is either exclusively or even primarily a ‘religious’ text, it is unquestionably true that the criteria of admission into the canon were governed by considerations not entirely divorced from the element of likely divine approval. Yet even within those books of the Hebrew Bible whose orthodox propriety was never in any doubt there are embedded thoughts as well as expressions that fall within the field and broad range of the present paper. And this is, a fortiori, the case with regard to those compositions which had to struggle hard to gain admission into the canon of the Old Testament.

The decline of the Gondarine monarchy and the concomitant increase in wealth and power of Tegre province, and of its capital Adwa, led, in the mid-eighteenth century, to a shift in the Ethiopian balance of power. This development, which threatened the then impoverished ruling house of Gondar, and the very continuity of the but weakly centralized State, resulted, as on other such occasions, in a major dynastic alliance between the contending parties. The compact involved two of the most important Ethiopian political figures of the century: Emperor Bakaffa's astute widow Empress Mentewwab, and the first of the great warlords of Tegre, Sehul Mika'el, a rich and powerful chieftain who was soon to emerge as the maker and breaker of kings. Mika'el was by then already well known in the Ethiopian metropolis where, according to the later Scottish traveller James Bruce, he was so ‘lavish in his money’ that ‘all Gondar were his friends’, as a result of which it was ‘plain’ to ‘everybody, that nothing could stop’ his ‘growing fortune’.

The dialects spoken in the Najd of Saudi Arabia have striking features which not only are unknown or unreported in other dialects but also retain some characteristics of the 'Arabiyya and of ancient dialects of the peninsula reported by the Arab grammarians. On both these counts, they are of paramount importance for synchronic, comparative and historical dialectology. Yet little is known of them and published materials remain scanty. It is the purpose of this article to describe in some detail the morphology of the verb, i.e., the stem, the subject markers and the object pronouns, and in the process, present phonological features and processes, in a dialect spoken in the North of the Najd, specifically that of Hāyil. This is an important town on the edge of the Jabal Shammar mountains just south of the Nafud, and some 350 miles to the north-west of Riyādh. Although the dialect manifests features which are typically Najdi, in the sense that investigation shows them to exist in other dialects of the Najd, it also possesses peculiarities all its own.

It is remarkable that, of the many more or less fragmentary Manichaean writings in Iranian languages discovered in Central Asia at the beginning of this century,1 one of the few texts directly attributable to Mani himself has still, three-quarters of a century after its first partial publication, not appeared in a full and satisfactory edition, with translation. ‘Mani;apos;s Šābuhragān, in which he summarized his teachings in Persian for the enlightenment of Sabuhr I,;apos; is known from nine more or less fully preserved sheets (i.e. of at least two pages each) of one MS. and some eight or nine smaller pieces. The larger fragments were first published in transcription in 1904, in F. W. K. Müller's pioneering ‘Handschriften-Reste in Estrangelo-Schrift aus Turfan, Chinesisch-Turkistan’, II, with an incomplete interlinear translation and partly out of order. The text alone was then republished in transliteration (in Hebrew letters) in C. Salemann's ‘Manichaeische Studien’, I. There the matter largely rested until 1930, when A. V. W. Jackson used the text extensively in his article ‘A sketch of the Manichaean doctrine concerning the future life’. In an article published posthumously in 1946, A. Ghilain established, without seeing either photographs or the originals, that the two fragments of M 473 glassed together as a and b, and published by Müller as they so appeared, are to be fitted together in the reverse order, the lower piece b above the upper a. Most recently Mary Boyce has included the text of the fragments M 473, 475, 477, 482, 472 and 470, so ordered correctly but with the omission of a number of incomplete passages, as text z in her Reader in Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian.

There is evidence that a particular musical instrument was used by various Sino-Tibetan groups to convey speech, both for courting and for religious purposes. The Proto-Sino-Tibetan etymon for this gourd reed-organ is reconstructible as *s-jan. Its use as a speech surrogate is widely reported, from the earliest sources to the present. It is still used thus by many Tibeto-Burman groups.

These examples from Targum Neofiti 1 should be appended to the note of Jonas C. Greenfield, ‘The prepositions ‘AD/‘AL in Aramaic and Hebrew’.

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 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.