These transcriptions are tentative in character, and are presented with great diffidence. The idea was taken from similar transcriptions of versions of the fable of the North Wind and the Sun in various languages published by the International Phonetic Association in an excellent little pamphlet, The Principles of the International Phonetic Association. They have been done from dictation by persons who habitually speak the respective languages, and the transcriber has checked and in other ways sought to verify them at every step. Nearly all of them were done in Calcutta early in 1919, but they have since been revised. He has not given a table of sounds, as so many languages and dialects (there are some twenty-two in the present paper, including practically all the important languages of India) cannot be well represented all together. The sounds of Sanskrit may be regarded as the norm for all Indian languages, and the ordinary values of these are too well known to be described here.

A Mongst the Kurds there is found a considerable variety of religions, which has caused unfavourable observers to regard them as idolatrous. Not only are the Christians of several dominations represented among them, but also the Muslims, who form the predominant millah or creed among the peoples of Kurdiâstan in addition to these there are several less important sects, of which by far the most important are the Qizilbâsh and the Yazîdî Kurds.

The historical materials which we have for the prosecution of the above inquiries are scanty, but the conclusions which may be deduced from them may serve in a measure to support an argument based mainly, as it must be, on the general principles of the progress of language and literature and upon analogical reasoning.

In 1907 M. Louis Desplaques described in Le Plateau Central Nigérien a series of large tumuli—pyramids of earth—the burial places of chiefs of a past era. He notes their existence at El Walaji and as far east as Aménaka, near Zinder, on the banks of the Niger near the Bassa rapids, west to Sikassa, and on the banks of the Senegal. On archaeological grounds, supported by a well-known passage from the Arab writer El Behri, he concludes that they were built by “red” or Berber races of the same stratum of population as the ancient inhabitants of the Ghana Empire. “They remain”, he writes, “as the sole witnesses of the activity, the industry, and civilization of these ‘red’ peoples, whose names and real origin we do not know”.

(1) To the Beloved we drank a wine,

With which we were intoxicated,

Ere the vineyard was created.

The Beloved is the Prophet, or the Creator Himself, source of love. The wine is the knowledge and love of the Divinity and the intoxication is ecstasy.

The dawn of the nineteenth century marks a new era in the history of Arabic literature. After five centuries of mental lethargy, beginning with the irruption of the Mongols into the Muslim world in the thirteenth century, a renewed zeal for learning has dispelled the gloom which so long overshadowed the Arabic-speaking countries. Many factors were at work to bring about a beneficial change. The West began to take varied interest in the dormant East by collecting and studying its long-forgotten literatures.

The Lotuko language as here set forth is spoken by about 40,000 people, all of whom, with the exception of a few hundreds in the Opari district of Mongalla Province and the Chua District of Uganda, live in the district of that name.