It appears from those who have written the history of Russia that neither native nor European authorities know anything about it before the latter half of the ninth century, and that the tenth century is nearing its end before anything like firm ground is reached. Their name is by this time quite familiar to the Arabic chroniclers, and Ibn al-Athir even takes the trouble to record the commencement of the conversion of the Russians to Christianity; according to him in the year 375, i.e. 985–6 a.d., the Byzantine emperors being besieged found it necessary to invoke the aid of the king of the Russians, and offered him their sister in marriage. She declined to marry one who was not of her religion, whence this Russian king adopted Christianity, and that was how the religion began to be propagated in his country. The date of the first conversion of a Russian king given by Morfill on the authority of a Russian chronicle is within two years of that assigned by Ibn al-Athir; the former 988, the latter apparently 986; and Ibn al-Athir is here following a contemporary record. The name Rūs, i.e. Russians, was already familiar to Ibn al-Athir's readers and indeed those of the authority whom he excerpts owing to their being mentioned by the popular poet Mutanabbi in his most celebrated poem, describing the victory won by the Hamdanide Saif al-daulah in 954 over a force mustered by the Byzantine general called the Domesticus, wherein according to the poet so many tribes and tongues were represented that a staff of interpreters was required.

The languages of India Proper belong to two great families— in the North, the Indo-Aryan; and in the South, the Dravidian. The map here displayed shows the localities in which the former are spoken. These Indo-Aryan tongues again lull into two main groups, viz., those of the Midland—indicated on the map by red — and a number of Outer Languages, indicated by blue. These two groups differ from each other in an important characteristic, which has affected their respective literatures to no inconsiderable extent. In the Midland the languages are all analytical. Their grammars are very simple, they are cumbered by few grammatical forms, and they indicate the various relations of time and space by the aid of auxiliary words, just as we do in English. The Outer Languages, on the contrary, are synthetic. Their idioms depend chiefly on grammatical form, and, as in Latin or German, each has a more or less complicated system of declension and conjugation.

There is a great deal to be said for the contention that national character expresses itself in popular sayings and proverbs. That the latter are sometimes paradoxical and tend to extremes cannot be denied. Truth is, however, often seen at her best on the tight rope.

The following selection of well-known Kurdish sayings is made with a view to illustrating the character of the Kurds. As an excuse for its imperfections reference can be made to the lack of Kurdish literature and the existence of many dialects, which make it somewhat difficult for a foreigner to acquire a working knowledge of the language as a whole.

The Kurds are a mountain race, with all the characteristics of mountaineers—love of freedom, violent passions, and a clannish feeling of pride. These primary traits dispose the Kurd to fly to arms at small provocation, and engage with zest in bitter blood feuds.

In Bengali, as in most Indian languages, every consonant, unless some other vowel is written with it, i pronounced with an unwritten “inherent” vowel, = a.

§ 1. The Sanskrit MS. Oxford 1442, inaccurately described in the catalogue, contains the larger part of the Bhiksunīkarmavācanā. This text is interesting (1) as one of the most important parts of the Sanskrit Vinaya hitherto discovered, and (2) because the rules concerning the Nuns have not been much studied even from Pali sources. As far as we know no Bhikkhunlkammavakya has been published. The MS. is incomplete;

In 170 Chinese Poems I have given an account of Po Chü-i's life and translations of over sixty of his poems.

Here are twenty-two further poems, of which all but one are now translated for the first time. The exception is No. 19, of which Pfizmaier gives a very inaccurate version in Denkschr. d. K. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Wien, xxxvi (1888), p. 239.

The following inscription is now edited—for the first time, as far as I am aware—from an ink-impression which my friend Pandit Shyama Shankar Har Chaudhuri, M.A., of Jhalrapatan, has kindly sent to me, together with a transcription by Pandit Gopal Lal Vyas, Curator of the Archæological Department of H.H. the Maharaja of Jhalawar's Government. The place where it was found is not stated.

[MR. L. F. TAYLOR, of the Indian Educational Service, was the official entrusted by the Government of Burma with the preparation of the gramophone records of the languages of that Province, which have lately been presented to the School of Oriental Studies. It was he, also, who prepared the valuable report on the Preparatory Stage or Linguistic Census, for the proposed linguistic survey of Burma. In the course of correspondence on these subjects, I appealed to him for help in the vexed question of the tones peculiar to these forms of speech, and he very kindly undertook a minute inquiry into the subject and forwarded to me the notes which form the body of this paper. As they were too valuable to be consigned to the obscurity of office records, with his permission I have arranged them into the form of an article. So far as I know these notes of Mr. Taylor's are the only attempts at illustrating graphically the tones of several important languages of Further India that have been published. In this connexion, I would also refer the student to Dr. C. N. Bradley's valuable articles on pp. 282 ff. of vol. xxxi (1911) of the Journal of the American Oriental Society and on pp. 39 ff. of vol. xlvi (1915) of the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. The first deals with Siamese and the second with two Chinese dialects. In each the wave-lengths of the tones used in these languages as mechanically recorded in the Rousselot apparatus were carefully measured and plotted, forming curves or patterns of pitch which could be shown upon a chart. It is interesting to find that the results thus obtained by Dr. Bradley for Siamese closely agree with those recorded by Mr. Daniel Jones and Mr. Taylor.

Swahili stands alone among the Bantu languages in possessing a literature, which originated before the people came in contact with Europeans and has probably been in existence for several centuries. The Arabs, who settled on the east coast of Africa from the seventh century onwards, brought with them their alphabet and their prosody; and their descendants who, intermarrying with the daughters of the land, evolved the Swahili language, have preserved both to this day, though not without modifications. The use of the Arabic alphabet to express Swahili sounds involves considerable difficulties, and though some of these have been surmounted by expedients similar to those adopted in writing Turkish, Persian, Malay, etc., the reading even of an ordinary letter is by no means always a simple matter.

The primary business of a teacher is to teach. But everyone who has had practical experience of teaching has found that he has learned from his pupils almost as much as he has taught, since contact with younger minds supplies a new point of view, which imparts a fresh novelty to familiar facts. For example, when a man is acquiring a living language, he learns the pronunciation (not only syllabic pronunciation but the significant tones and inflexions of the language) by sheer imitation, by trusting to his aural memory and his power of grasping sounds unfamiliar to him in his own tongue. But when he tries to impart his accomplishment to others, he must needs analyse, if he is to explain, what he has learnt. Hence teaching, if it is not mere mechanical transmission of information, such as can be got from a book, becomes, in effect, a species of research.

The following hymns are written, one on the back, the other on the front of a picture in the Stein Collection dated A.D. 910, representing Kuan-yin and two donors (register mark 1919. 1. 1. 014).

Under the name of Sudanic or Negro languages are comprehended, according to the generally received terminology, the African tongues which stretch in a broad band across the continent from Cape Verd to the Great Lakes; further north they reach nearly to the Red Sea in isolated instances, and in the south to the confines of the Indian Ocean in the shape of linguistic islets whose affinities are only with difficulty recognizable. To the south of the area stretches the Bantu territory, interspersed with pigmy and Bushmen elements, of whom the latter alone have well-marked forms of speech, while the former appear to speak the tongues of Bantu neighbours, or of Sudanic tribes, who must have been their neighbours at an earlier period but have now been swallowed up in the Bantu flood. South-west of the Bantu we have the Nama languages, often classified as Hamitic.

The Gr. documents in questions are, apart from their historical interest, very valuable from the point of Iran, philology. They contain many Iran, names, whose forms truly represent the changes which their Av. or AP. forerunners went through in the early Parthian Pahl. language. Fortunately many of the names occurring in these documents are met with in the ancient Arm. literature. During the Parthian period of the history of Persia, about 250 B.C. to A.D. 226, Armenia was the apple of discord between the Parthians and the Romans, and it formed according to the fortunes of war a part of the Roman or Persian territory, or a kingdom under the suzerainty of Rome or Parthia. In consequence the Armenians came much in touch with the Parthians, from whom they borrowed a considerable number of Persian words for their language and a large number of Persian pr. names as well. Thus it is that in Arm. the intermediate forms of Iran. words, those between the A P. and the MidPers. of the Sasanian period, are to be found fossilized. Again, with an equal amount of certainty the MidPers. words of the Sasanian period are met with in Arm., viz., those which were borrowed during the Sasanian period of the history of Persia, about A.D. 226 to 631. We are thus able to trace all the changes, which the original Iran, vowels and consonants went through, from the very early A v. times down to the dawn of NP. period. Nearly all these pr. names treated in the notes are found in the works of one or more of the following Arm.]

is used here as in Taoist phraseology, to indicate spiritual purity of nature, and cannot very well be translated “true” or “genuine” (), as Diaz takes it, followed by Legge and Saeki. A better definition is that formulated by Diaz himself when he comes to explain the word , namely: . We may observe in passing that the whole of this exordium strongly recalls the language of the Tao Tê Ching, especially in chapters 4 and 25. Nearly all that is said here of the Trinity might apply equally well to Tao. Diaz goes on to remark that is the fundamental attribute () of God, and his fundamental condition (). But perhaps this is over-refinement. Other renderings are appended; the second and third seem to me faulty because they interpret as an adverb modifying .

[The chief object of this preliminary canter in the field of Basque Philology is not to attempt any exhaustive treatment of the Basque Declension, which easily lends itself to a great wealth of detail and complexity, but to prove from a purely grammatical standpoint, and as briefly as a reasonable condensation of the subject will admit, the fundamental identity in the structure of the Kolarian and Basque declensions which is the result of their common origin.]

A Fair attempt at coolness invaded the autumn evening after the day, which had been hot enough for a Continental mid-summer. In France the climate can do these things and one gets used to it; and so in the evening of a late autumn day I was comfortable in tropical clothing, after a day worthy a country of a more easterly situation on the map.

The Malay language is one of the leading vernaculars of the world, and has been growing in importance of late years owing to the development of trade and particularly of the rubberplanting industry. It is an easy language to acquire a smattering of, as it involves few difficulties of phonetics, accidence, or syntax in the form of it which is current as a lingua franca. But this jargon bears the same relation to the real Malay language as the Pidgin English of the China ports does to our own English. The real Malay is the speech of the Malays themselves. It is a leading member of a vast family of languages, commonly styled the Austronesian, or Malayo-Polynesian, or Oceanic, family, which is of Asiatic origin, but has an almost entirely insular domain. It includes Madagascar, Indonesia, with a part of Formosa, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia, as well as the greater part of the Malay Peninsula, a portion of the coast of New Guinea, the Mergui Archipelago off the coast of Tenasserim, and a small tract in Eastern Indo-China, which was probably the original centre of dispersion of the whole family. Its extreme, points in Polynesia are (inclusively) the Sandwich Islands, Easter Island, and New Zealand. With the exception of the languages of Northern Halmahera and a few Papuan ones in or near New Guinea, all the numerous native languages of this extensive area are related together and to Malay.