In this article, some previously unrecognized facts about the way the morphology of the verb manifests relationships within clauses in Swahili are presented, in the context of current general linguistic interest in functional semantics.

While working in the Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague, in 1973, this writer had his attention drawn by Dr. G. V. Smith to an envelope in Koloniaal Archief 982 (Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren 1620) which apparently contained several early Javanese letters. Upon investigation these proved to be original correspondence between the dignitaries of Bantěn and the Dutch under Jan Pietersz. Coen after the Dutch conquest of Batavia in 1619. They are written not in Javanese but in Malay, five of the letters employing Javanese script and one Arabic script. The letters are of interest as evidence of the Bantěn opinion of the Dutch (although the reader would be wrong to accept the innocent tone of the letters at face value) and as early examples of pasar Malay, the lingua franca of maritime South-East Asia.

In coming to talk about George Steiner's extraordinary tour de force, a work that was clearly designed to be a masterpiece and so narrowly and peculiarly falls short of that aim, I feel rather like an inverted Balaam, for unlike Balaam I came to bless and not to curse, to appreciate and not to disparage. And now I stand here, not without awe before so monumental an achievement, yet full of doubts, questions, uncertainty, even some distrust.

The following note, though drafted by A. F. L. Beeston, is essentially the result of co-operative discussion between him, A. K. Irvine, W. W. Müller, M. Rodinson, and J. Ryckmans; all of whom are now in agreement on the issue. The discussion originated from the question whether four words beginning with t- in CIH 540 (tbs2nf line 15, ts3n/ts1n lines 16 and 19, tbn line 18) are to be explained as containing a feminine relative pronoun t as a variant of the normal Sabaic form ḏt, as Praetorius suggested; or are t-prefix verb forms. In favour of the relative interpretation are the facts, firstly that in classical Arabic poetry we find a masculine ḏā contrasting with feminine tī, and the same type of alternation is widely attested in vernacular dialects, including Yemeni ones; secondly, that in all four cases there is a defined feminine antecedent (‘glmtn, k'btn, k'bt/ġyln, k'bt/mfllm—assuming, as is most probable, that the last word is a proper name). Against it was the fact that such a pronoun appeared to be attested nowhere in all Sabaic except in this text. G. M. Bauer (Yazyk yuzhnoarabiyskoy pis'mennosti, Moscow, 1966, 92) accepted the relatival interpretation, but describes it as a ‘late’ use; while M. Rodinson (‘Sur un pseudo-relatif sudarabique’, Actes du premier Congrès international de Linguistique Sémitique et Chamito-semitique, Paris, 1969, ed. by Caquot and Cohen, Paris, 1974, 290–1) and W. W. Müller (in an article for AION, 1975, sent to press before our discussions took place) were inclined to deny the existence of this relative and adopt the verbal interpretation.

The Sāsanavaṃsa ‘History of the religion’, a Pali work written in Burma in 1861, has long been recognized as an important source for the study of Theravāda Buddhism. It is essentially a chronicle of famous monks which seeks to trace the lineal succession of orthodox theras from the Buddha's immediate disciple Upāli to the heads of the saṅgha at Mandalay in the author's own lifetime. As early as 1882 Louis de Zoysa in his Catalogue of Pali, Sinhalese, and Sanskrit manuscripts in the temple libraries of Ceylon referred to the Sāsanavaṃsa as a work containing ‘very interesting information on the religious history of … Burma and Ceylon’. In 1892 the Russian Orientalist Ivan Pavlovitch Minaev drew upon the Sāsanavaṃsa for his Recherches sur le bouddhisme, in which he quoted fairly extensively from the Pali text. H. Kern in 1896 classed it along with the better-known Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa as ‘highly important for the ecclesiastical history of Ceylon’, and the treatise also gained mention in the researches of such leading Buddhist scholars as E. Hardy, Wilhelm Geiger, and G. P. Malalasekera.

The following incantation bowl from the Martin Bodmer Library, Geneva, contains an inscription in Syriac script consisting of 13 lines on the interior and one line on the exterior surface of the bowl. The inscription begins in the centre of the bowl, which contains an image of a snake with its tail in its mouth. The bowl measures 13·8 inches in diameter and 5·8 inches in height.

In spite of over 14 years of activity—most of which was of a military nature—hardly any Taiping military despatches have survived or, if they have, they remain to be discovered. The only copy of this rare example, published here for the first time, is in the Public Record Office (series 682, No. 275/A3). It was amongst the documents found in the office of the Governor-General of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, on the occasion of the British capture and occupation of Canton in 1858. There is no means of knowing how accurately it was copied; on the other hand, there is no reason to question its authenticity or accuracy.

Very little reference to clan-praises is to be found in general works on African oral literature or in the documentation dealing specifically with literature from southern Africa. By contrast, considerable attention has been paid to panegyric forms of praise-poetry applying to individual human beings (or to an individual animal or object) among the Southern Bantu peoples. Lestrade, writing in 1933, reported that clan-praises were widely employed in southern Africa, and he briefly outlined their nature and function. Yet virtually no detailed work on clan-praises has so far been published except in the case of the Shona, with a recent series of illuminating articles by Fortune and Hodza. Among the Shona, clan-praises appear to be of greater importance than individual praises. For other Southern Bantu peoples, on the other hand, one might easily gain the impression that clan-praises were non-existent, owing to the overwhelming concentration upon individual praise-poetry in the existing documentation. Returning to Lestrade's article of 1933, however, one finds the noteworthy observation that clan-praises are in fact heard more frequently than individual praises: ‘Clan praise-names are used … on all occasions calling for a certain amount of formality and special politeness of address: at a meeting of a council of tribesmen, in some solemn family conclave, when strangers address each other ceremoniously, clan praise-names are heard. Individual praise-names, together with praise-verses and praise-poems, however, are heard somewhat more rarely: it is only on the occasion of some festival or other ceremonial event, calling for some display of oratory, that these latter are heard’. Nevertheless, despite this observation, it appears that Lestrade himself, and a great number of other scholars too, have paid no further attention to clan-praises. Clearly, the reason for this lies in the great wealth of individual praise-poetry, relating to kings, chiefs, great warriors, and statesmen, that exists among peoples such as the Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Sotho, and Tswana, and the fact that this genre is regarded as being their most highly developed form of oral literature. Yet, since clan-praises are more commonly encountered, according to Lestrade, why have they been totally neglected ? The reason would appear to be that Lestrade, Bryant and many other scholars seem to have dismissed them as amounting to no more than short, single ‘praisenames’, which do not attain the stature of ‘praise-verses’ or ‘praise-poems’. Since the short clan-praises constitute a distinctive genre of oral poetic imagery, the matter deserves reappraisal.