Si l'on ignorait que le brahui est une langue dravidienne, ce n'est pas la conjugaison du present verbal qui le révélerait. En voici les désinences (Bray, §§ 202–3):—

Qu'il suffise de mettre en regard le paradigme des langues qui lui sont le plus proches, le gondi (prétérit, d'après Ch. Trench, Gr. of Gondi, p. 15):

et le kurukh (d'après A. Grignard, Gr. of the Oraon language, pp. 68–9):

pour se rendre compte que, sauf aux 2e et 3e personnes du pluriel, le système est différent.

These verses have been a stumbling block to successive generations of editors. One of the latest of these, for example, Dr. W. 0. E. Oesterley, has courageously faced the difficulties but, for reasons which will be stated in the course of this note, got himself tied up rather badly. He saw clearly enough that must refer to God's attitude to the Psalmist's enemy. But the difficulties began for him when he took to refer to the wicked man. In the first place Oesterley did not sufficiently reahze that the possibility of the wicked man repenting of his evil ways rarely occupied the mind of the Psalmist. It is in the Prophets that we get constant appeals to the wicked to repent, not in the Psalms. By the time of the Psalmists society had largely become stratified. The cleavage between the and the was complete. To the or the was irretrievably lost. God's clemency was only sought on behalf of the straying from the path of righteousness. I would therefore suggest that referred to God, at the same time altering to . The rendering would then be: “God is wroth every day; yea, he will not turn back.”

Since the publication of my article (JRAS., 1945, pp. 165 ff.) Dr. A. A. Hekmat has kindly sent me a copy of his book Jāmī, published at Teheran in 1941 (A.H. 1320). In view of Ṣāfīs evidence, he there (pp. 185 f.) dates the first daftar of the Silsilat al-dhahab between A.H. 873 (accession of Sulṭān Huṣayn) and A.H. 877 (Jāmi's pilgrimage). He also calls attention to a relevant passage in the poem itself, strangely overlooked by Ethé and by all other scholars. The important line, which will be found on p. 214 of the lithograph of the Nafaḥāt al-unsand Silsilat al-dhahab published at Cawnpore in 1874, runs as follows:—