In his recently published Sīgiri graffiti (London, etc., Oxford University Press, 1956), Dr. S. Paranavitana, the Archaeological Commissioner of Ceylon, includes a long introductory section (Vol. I, pp. xxxii-clxxi) entitled ‘Grammar’, wherein he makes a large number of alterations to the previously held theories on the Sinhalese language which are principally to be found in the late Professor W. Geiger's Grammar of the Sinhalese language (Colombo, 1938).

The Museo Civico of Turin possesses an Islamic metal vessel which, so far as I am aware, has not been published but which deserves attention on more than one count. This is a small silver-inlaid bowl (Inv. No. 159) (pis. I-VI, fig. 1). Its circular base measures only 11.1 cm. in diameter, its height 8.3 cm., and its upper aperture 16.5 cm. The walls of the vessel, projecting sharply at about half its height, give it a squat and somewhat unstable appearance.

This paper is intended as a sequel to our ‘Five Yurok songs’, published in the issue of the Bulletin dedicated to Professor J. R. Firth, and the statements there made about Yurok music in general apply also to the song presented and analysed here. This song was excluded from our previous article, not merely for reasons of space, but from a consideration of its composition. In the five songs already published, text and music, though realized together in the singing of the song, could be distinguished and separately analysed. In this song (a Brush Dance song) the human voice serves simply as a musical instrument, and the melody and rhythms making up the music are carried on a series of syllable sequences, to which no grammatical or lexical analysis can be applied and to which no translation can be given.

For the Hindi term ūbaṛ khābaṛ ‘uneven or unshapely place or ground’, no satisfactory derivation has so far been suggested. The expression evidently originates from two words, of which the latter, khdbar, may be connected with Skt. kharva-, Pkt. khabba-, with the -ṛa suffixed as in so many other words of NIA. Skt. kharva- means ‘low, dwarfish’ according to Monier-Williams's Sanskrit-English dictionary, where it is cited from the lexicons, and this meaning may well fit in here.

In my Dictionary of Sea Dayak, I gave a scheme for the systematic spelling of the language in a table that is reproduced below. The following notes on the phonetic interpretation of this spelling are based on the pronunciation of speakers from the Second Division of Sarawak. The descriptions refer to words spoken in isolation, which have slightly increased stress on the final syllable.

It is remarkable that no Syriac inscriptions have been discovered hitherto at Harran or in its immediate vicinity. Cuneiform tablets have been unearthed, and these reflect the prominence of the city in ancient times.But written records in Syriac have been strangely absent. And yet we know that for more than a millennium—certainly until the eleventh century—the indigenous inhabitants of Harran spoke Syriac. Lying only about 30 kilometres south of Edessa, the home of classical Syriac, Harran was nevertheless able to maintain jealously its distinctive character and traditions.

The entry gseb in Jäschke's Tibetan dictionary, which has been taken over almost without a change into that compiled by Sarat Chandra Das, poses a problem in so far as it differs in an important point from the entries to be found in the dictionaries of A. Csoma de Kőrös, I. J. Schmidt, and that of the Catholic Missionaries of Tibet, generally referred to as Desgodins' dictionary. While all these dictionaries are in agreement on the meaning of ‘stallion’, which has been listed by J(äschke) under I, the difference occurs in the treatment of gseb (alternating with seb), listed by J under II.

Angulimāla (Finger-garland, nickname from the chain of fingers which he wore), the fierce bandit, occurs at many places in the Pali Canon. One of the best-known episodes in which he figures and which has caused a good deal of comment is that of his conversion, told in the Angulimāla-sutta of the Majjhima Nikāya (no. 86; PTS, II, 97 sq.). For his legendary biography see Malalasekera's Dictionary of Pāli proper names, s.v.

Here we see him following the Buddha in murderous intention trying to catch up to him as he walks on in his usual, natural step (Pakatiyā). But he soon realizes that his is unable to do so: the nearer he gets the more distant the Buddha is. He wonders: Although he is of great strength and can race elephants, horses, and deer: here must be a superman who can move at will.

AJudge from Qanṭūriya in Spain, Khālid b. ‘Īsā al-Balawī, spent the years 1336–40 on pilgrimage, passing through Africa and Jerusalem. He was interested in inscriptions and copied several in Jerusalem; those which can be checked, Ma'mūn's in the Dome of the Rock and Saladin's in al-Aqṣā, are accurate, so we may assume that others are also. The record is contained in B.M. Or. 9252 and Paris (B.N.) 2286. It is a pleasant duty to thank the Bibliothèque Nationale for answering a question about the Paris MS and so supplying a word missing from the Museum copy.

Philological studies in Africa are inevitably bound up with the vexed question of the classification of its languages. Many authorities have attempted this classification. Some, like Oust, Drexel, Delafosse, van Bulck, rely on evidence which is as much ethnological as linguistic, while others, like Müller, Meinhof, Westermann, Werner, Sir Harry Johnston, Guthrie, Homburger, Greenberg, and the various authors of the ‘Handbook of African Languages’, have tried to confine themselves to linguistic criteria. It is the purpose of this article to discuss the sort of linguistic data these investigators have consulted, and their methods of using it.

One of the most dramatic features in the history of Indo-Aryan languages has been the utter collapse of the ancient prefixal system which had been used for expressing the various shades of human concepts. The dramatic nature of this break-down will be particularly appreciated when we take into account the fact that even for an ordinary concept such as ‘to come’, Sanskrit had to depend upon a prefix, viz. ā ‘hither’, so that ‘to come’ was indicated by ā-gam- or ā-yā, literally ‘hither—move’. This implies that the roots gam- or yā- by themselves denoted movement in general and during the formative period of Sanskrit a stage is conceivable when going and coming were linguistically undifferentiated. This supposition may perhaps be somewhat confirmed by a parallel occurring in two languages at the present day, viz.

It is somewhat disconcerting that in our Sanskrit lexicons we sometimes meet with words which have been wrongly translated and this is particularly distressing when such words are frequently used in literature and indicate objects which must have been familiar to the Indo-Aryans. A notable example is Skt. haṃsa, commonly interpreted by the dictionaries as meaning not only a goose but also a swan or a flamingo. Unfortunately Western indologists have shown a distinct preference for the latter two aquatic birds, because the goose is considered a far too prosaic creature to enter the exalted realm of poetry. A study of the subject has convinced me that hamsa means the goose and nothing else.1 My conclusion is based in the first place on ornithological evidence.

In the Berlin collection of Sanskrit literary remains from Chinese Turkestan there is a manuscript, catalogue-number S 474, which has been identified by me in a preliminary report1 as containing the text of the first 25 Sūtras of the Nidānasamyukta, one of the most important parts of the Sanskrit Saṃyuktāgama which corresponds to the Saṃyuttanikāya, the ‘Collection of Grouped Discourses’, in Pāli. The greater part of the first 19 leaves of the manuscript has been preserved. The script is of the older Central Asian Brahml type, and the folios, as far as they are complete, are unusually large (13 × 52 cm.).

As Mongol dynasty plays were written partly for Mongol patrons one would expect a certain amount of Mongol vocabulary to creep into them. But in the ‘Hundred Plays’, which despite recent discoveries still remains the most extensive collection that we possess, not more than two or three Mongol words occur. This may be partly due to the fact that they were edited in late Ming times, when such words were no longer intelligible and may well have been replaced by the editor with Chinese words. Two words which remain are hala- (ala-) ‘to smite’, ‘kill’, and darasun ‘wine’. It appears that both of these were so well embedded in Chinese vocabulary that they were not recognized as foreign words.

Fannbay, to quote the definition of the ‘Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist terms’ are ‘Buddhist hymns [which are] sung to repress externals and calm the mind within2 for religious service; also in praise of Buddha’. The first element, Fann, a transliteration of Brahma, refers to the Indian origin of the term, the second element, bay, is the Chinese transliteration of pāṭha ‘chanting’. Under the name Fannbay this type of Buddhist chant as developed in China (actually a kind of long-drawn-out tune) was transplanted in Japan in Tarng times and is known in Sino-Japanese reading as Bonbai.3

The presence of Sanskrit loanwords in Malay was noted at least as far back as the time of Sir William Jones (Asiatick Researches, III, 11, 12), and lists of them have been compiled, showing how they include not only abstract terms like those that need the conception of time or price or profit, but terms of relationship, names for parts of the body, names for utensils and articles of commerce, and many court terms of honorific import.

Monemvasia, an island town of the Morea, the Malvasia of the Italians, the Malvoisie of the French, is now an almost forgotten place, though its name still lives on as that of the strong sweet wine originally grown there—the ‘Malvasia’, ‘Malvasier’, ‘Malvoisie’, ‘Malmsey’ of the various languages and literatures of Europe. Yet once Monemvasia was a major port and emporium on a most important sea-route, and at the same time an impregnable fortress which played in history a rôle of no small consequence. As guardian of the western entrance to the Aegean Sea it was indeed the ‘Gibraltar of Greece’, as a modern writer1 has called it, though nowadays the comparison is confined to its natural situation.