Phonetic adjustment in conversational exchange between Arabs of different nationalities is a fundamental, subtle aspect of Educated Spoken Arabic in Egypt and the Levant (ESA). More often than not educated Arabs adjust to a ‘classical norm’ of a voiceless uvular plosive (q), usually corresponding to a voiced velar plosive (g) or a glottal plosive (ʢ) in most vernaculars of our region, in a conscious or unconscious attempt both to elevate and to ‘koineize’ their speech. What follows attempts, inter alia, to show something of the relationships between the variants of this diaphonemic entity and such extra-linguistic factors as the biographies of collocutors and speech function, and to illustrate the fact that items with [q] serve the purposes of modernization in the area.

The colophons of the Mongol Ganjur contain a large number of terms and expressions having to do with ‘writing’, ‘translation’, ‘revising’, ‘correcting’, ‘copying’, etc.; but, with these expressions appearing in almost numberless varieties of combinations with each other and with other words, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assign a precise meaning to each particular one as distinct from the others. Some of these terms are synonyms and are used either together, or as substitutes one for the other, duplicating and repeating each other. The taste of the writers may very well have dictated the choice of one term in one place, and a different one, with roughly the same meaning, in another passage. The various ways in which these terms are combined and strung together, themselves strongly suggest that the Mongol translators, or the authors of the colophons, maintained no sharp distinction between the various terms: where is the precise line between ‘correcting’ and ‘revising’, ‘editing’, and ‘compiling’? Nevertheless, it should be possible to classify those expressions or terms into a few categories, even if there exists no clear line of demarcation between the various notions shading off into each other. I do not intend to trace such neat lines of separation, but I do believe that it is possible to define, if only in broad terms, the general meaning of the expressions concerned. And if carefully analysed and compared, these very words may tell us something about the manner in which the translation of the Buddhist sūtras was achieved.

In JRAS, 1960, 95 f., while reviewing J. Gonda's Four studies in the language of the Veda (The Hague, 1959), I put forward the view that the Sanskrit root mā- ‘to make, produce, create’ should not be regarded as a special meaning development of the root mā- (<IB mē-) ‘to measure’, but that it should be taken as an independent root derived from IE mā- ‘to make’, etc., which is also to be seen in Lat. māteria, māteriēs ‘substance, material’ and in the IE word for ‘mother’ (Lat. māter, etc.). The matter was dealt with very briefly in that review, and a much fuller treatment is needed to establish the conclusions proposed there. It is the purpose of the present article to provide this.

The Mahānubhāvas are a Maharashtrian bhakti sect founded in the second half of the thirteenth century. Like other Indian bhakti sects, the Mahānubhāvas practise exclusive devotion to one god, but do not thereby deny the existence of other gods. Rather, Mahānubhāvas hold that ‘the gods’ form a category of real beings distinct from jīvas, the world, and God. Mahānubhāva thought pays a good deal of attention to the gods; yet this attention does not compromise Mahānubhāva monotheism.

In 1679 the Fifth Dalai Lama issued a decree appointing Sangs-rgyas rgya mtsho to conduct the administration of secular affairs on his behalf in the post usually known as that of regent. The decree, sealed with the imprint of the Dalai Lama's hands, is inscribed in the Potala on a wall opposite the steep triple stair leading down to the great eastern courtyard called Bde-yangs-shar. It is referred to in the third volume of the autobiography of the Dalai Lama (Du-ku-la III, fol. 128a) and in the Vaidurya ser-po composed by Sangs-rgyas rgya-mtsho in 1698 (VSP, p. 360); but the complete text does not appear to have been published in any Tibetan or western work. The copy transcribed below is derived mainly from a photograph kindly given me by Ernst Krause who accompanied Dr. Ernst Schaefer to Lhasa in 1939. As can be seen in the reproduction in plate I the last two lines are obscured by a wooden frame protecting the Dalai Lama's hand-prints and for that passage I am indebted to the Tibetan scholar and author, Tsipon W. D. Shakabpa.

It is a commonplace in the study of pre-Han texts to acknowledge that the received version of a given text cannot be assumed to reflect with any significant degree of fidelity its original form. A text is, as the literal sense of the English word implies, something woven, something stitched together (cf. Skt. sūtra, Ch. ching), and once woven, it may ravel. It would then be subject to re-weaving, either in its entirety alone, or together with other, originally distinct texts. In the former case individual phrases or lines might be introduced throughout the piece for reasons for euphony, stylistic balance, or perhaps because of a misunderstanding of the original sense on the part of a later scribe. In the latter case wholly independent accounts might become interwoven, begetting a new, hybrid document. Such re-weaving with its gratuitous additions of new material might occur several times, further distorting the primary content on each occurrence. The end result of such a process of textual alterations would be a composite and thoroughly heterogeneous work of diverse provenances, and of uncertain internal uniformity.

In Sino-Tibetan (1972) P. K. Benedict has offered two different accounts of the significance, for Tibeto-Burman (TB) and Sino-Tibetan (ST) reconstruction, of the three types of ‘vocalic alternation’ in the Written Tibetan (WT) verb, a/a/o, e/a/o and o/a/o. His original account (c. 1942–3) reads: ‘Tibetan, however, shows a puzzling type of vocalic alternation in its verbs, in which stems in a regularly take o in the imperative and often either o or e in the present… The e of the present stem is possibly to be interpreted as an effect of the prefixed element’- <*a- [ə-]. Similarly, the o of the imperative stem has perhaps been conditioned by an archaic imperative suffixc -o…' (pp. 126–7). His revised version (1972) reads: ‘The Chinese vowels cannot be explained without setting up a 7-vowel system for ST … and Tibetan verb forms reflect this early system as follows:

ST/TB *a = T aa (no alternation, except in the imperative)

ST/TB *â = T ao

ST/TB *ə = T ae

We can now, by way of illustration, reconstruct TB *g-sât (T gsod-pa, Pf.bsad) …; also TB*səm “breath, voice, spirit”: T sem(s)-pa. Pf. semsbsams “think” …' (p. 126, n. 344).

fa In both the Prefix and Suffix conjugations of ‘Afar the distinction between perfect and non-perfect aspects is generally maintained in main verb forms. Mood forms, such as the imperative and jussive, are, however, exceptions to this. The morphological means whereby this aspect distinction is realized is essentially different in the two conjugations although historically one of these means derives from the other. One accidental result of this historical derivation is that two affixes of identical form have come to occupy comparable locations in the structure of the verb. One of them occurs in certain Prefix verb forms, the other in certain Suffix verb forms. In most constructions the functions of these affixes are quite distinct. There are, however, certain constructions in the two conjugations, which clearly correspond functionally to each other, but in which the distribution of the two affixes is anomalous. In this paper the questions are looked at in the light of an internal reconstruction of some areas of the verbal system, with the result that a hypothesis of partial (contextually determined) restructuring is presented as the most plausible means of explaining the anomalies.

Most collections of Japanese wood-block printed books contain some items that were once in the possession of the circulating libraries known as kashihonya and the library of the School is no exception. Kashihonya were certainly in existence by the Genroku period (1688–1704), for the collection Haikai sugatanazo, which was published in 1703, includes the verse, Karihon no kakidashi ga kuru toshizakai ‘The year's end—when the bills come in for books borrowed’. Thenceforward they thrived on the growing literate population and in the Tokugawa period they reached their peak during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is from this time that almost all the former kashihonya books in the School date. The books contain the usual range of seals and admonitory labels attesting to their use by kashihonya, but I list only those with sufficient information to be of interest.

The 'Afar translation team of the Ethiopian Bible Society began in September 1976 and in the following two years completed about two-thirds of the New Testament. The team consisted of Alo Aydaahis, main translator; Guto Wuddo, assistant translator and tester, and Loren Bliese co-ordinator and exegete. Since English was difficult for the two 'Afar members of the team, the language used to translate from was the popular Amharic version being prepared by the Bible Society of Ethiopia. The use of Amharic as the source language resulted in interference in the 'Afar draft, as subsequent testing revealed.

Studies of political and administrative institutions in pre-colonial Burma have almost invariably adopted a synchronic perspective. In those inquiries limited to two or three generations, the effort to present a composite picture entails perhaps few dangers. But in so far as these investigations embrace very long periods, or in so far as studies of a particular era have attempted to project their findings on to the pre-modern period as a whole, they present an artificially static image of indigenous civilization.

I.o. The phenomenon of reciprocity has, within the framework of generative grammar, been dealt with either as an aspect of sentence coordination as in the following:

1(a) the boy saw the girl

(b) the girl saw the boy

(c) the boy and the girl saw each other

A recent visit to Iraq (made possible by a fellowship grant from the British School on the Gertrude Bell fund and by the kind assistance of the Directorate General of Antiquities in Iraq) enabled the writer to look closely at a number of manuscript collections. What follows is an indication of these resources and a review of a new catalogue.