The identity of the Chevalier de Lalée, known to Indians as Rustum Jung, has given rise to much speculation. Owing to its fancied similarity with that of Count Lally, he had been called “the younger Lally” till the late Sir Evan Cotton pointed out that he had no connection with that ill-fated general, though a nephew of the General, Michel de Lally, Brigadier des armées du Roi, came to India in the “Regiment de Lally”, but he never made any figure in the history of the French in India.

Arabic authors are fond of recording the help that al-Walīd received from the Byzantine Emperor when he was building the Mosque of Madīna and the Great Mosque of Damascus.

Let us take Madīna first. Balādhurī (c. 868) merely states that “al-Walīd wrote to 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz, his Governor at Madīna, ordering him to demolish the mosque and reconstruct it. He had money, mosaics and marble sent to him and eighty Rūmī and Coptic craftsmen, inhabitants of Syria and Egypt… ”

The South-Arabian inscriptions Hamilton 3–13, as well as a few small sculptures, were found by Major the Hon. R. A. B. Hamilton in Šabwat (Ḥaḍramawt) in 1938 and given to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, in 1952. Both sculptures and texts were published recently in this journal (April, 1954, pp. 43–63) by W. L. Brown and A. F. L. Beeston in a very interesting article on “Sculptures and Inscriptions from Shabwat”.

It has long been known that the ancient Arab philologists not infrequently misinterpreted difficult words and that, consequently, Arabic lexicons contain a number of unwarranted explanations. The principal reason for such errors was that rare words were often interpreted by mere guess, when the fault lay with the professional philologists. In other instances, certain words were misunderstood and wrongly applied before Arabic philology came into existence and the philologists had no choice but to assign them the meanings attributed by tradition or actually found in oral or literary usage, although when checked by literary evidence, the explanations were often wrong. Words of foreign origin in particular underwent that process on being accepted into the Arabic language but doubtless, indigenous words, too, became so affected.

We are at present witnessing a timely revival of interest in Arabic lexicography. The completion of Lane's Dictionary is planned by the International Congress of Orientalists. A small part of Noldecke's projected dictionary has been printed. J. Kraemer has drawn attention to Fischer's voluminous notes for a new dictionary of classical Arabic. All this fills a real need, but it contributes only incidentally to the study of Arabic lexicography. Indeed, the tendency is now to obtain material for dictionaries from Arabic literature direct, rather than from the old philological works. On the other hand, there are signs that the study of Arabic lexicography as an end in itself, rather than as a source of vocabulary, is gaining ground. There is the new Beirouth edition of the Lisān al 'Arab. Moreover, two theses on Arabic lexicography have recently been presented for higher degrees—that of L. Kopf to Jerusalem, and that of A. Darwish (dealing especially with al Khalīl ibn Aḥmad and the Kitāb al ‘Ain) to London. Still, there is a pressing need for more work in this field, which presents fascinating problems. For example, whence did the Arabs derive their lexicographical technique? What influence had Greek and Sanskrit models? What does European lexicography—a comparatively late growth—owe to the Arabs. These questions are not yet answered and they are not likely to be answered so long as Semiticists and Indo-European philologists work in isolation. Moreover, lexicography is hardly taken seriously as a science even now and little has been written on European lexicography.

“The tendencies of Apabhraṃśa in phonetics and grammar help to bridge the gap between typical Prakrit and the modern languages.” A. Woolner expressed this view in 1928 when comparatively few Apabhraṃśa texts had been published and the remarkable continuity of the Indo-Aryan languages was accepted as a fact. Since then their general pattern of development, which appeared with simple clarity to Woolner, has often been obscured by the wealth of linguistic material of the Middle Indo-Aryan period that has come to light.

Homonymy in verbal roots in Sanskrit is a recognized phenomenon. Well-known examples of this are found in such cases as the following: ūh- ‘to remove’, ūh2 ‘to consider’; kṛt-1 ‘to cut’, Kṛt-2 ‘to spin’; gā-1 ‘to go’, gā-2 ‘to sing’; ci-1 ‘to gather’, ci-2 ‘to observe’; dhā-1 ‘to place’, dhā-2 ‘to suck’; bhuj-1 ‘to bend’, bhuj-2 ‘to enjoy’; vṛ-1 ‘to cover’, vṛ-2 ‘to choose’. In the case of vas- we find three homonymous roots (vas-1 ‘to shine’, vas-2 ‘to clothe’, vas-3 ‘to dwell’), and in the case of dā- no less than four (dā-1 ‘to give’, dā-2 ‘to divide’, dā-3 ‘to bind’, dā-4 ‘to clear’). In such cases the various meanings are so distinct from each other that the separation into two or more roots is done without any difficulty, and there is no doubt that we have here different roots, although they are identical in form. In practice, of course, the homonymy is considerably restricted by variation in inflection and derivation (vásati, váste, uccháti, etc.).

Edgerton's identification of a reference to Rome in the Mahābhārata deserves fresh attention in view of Sir Mortimer Wheeler's discovery in 1945 of traces of an Indo-Roman trading station at Arakamedu, near Pondicherry, with its train of consequential archæological implications. The passage in the Mahābhārata occurs as part of the “Digvijaya” of Sahadeva in the Sabhāparva (Mah. ii, 28/47–9, B.O.R.I. ed):—

“By means of envoys he brought under control and made to pay tribute the one-footed people, the Kēvalas who live in the forest, the city of Sañjayanti—the Pānḍyas Draviḍas together with the Chodras and Keralas, the Andhras and Talavanas and Kalingas. By means of envoys he made to pay tribute and brought under control Antioch and Rome and the city of the Yavanas,”