The medieval registers of the papal Chancery and of the royal Chanceries of Western Europe, which have preserved archival copies of outgoing documents, are an invaluable source for students of medieval European history and diplomatics. Analogous sources from medieval Islamic Chanceries are practically non-existent. We know from literary works, especially the handbooks for government secretaries, that the medieval Islamic Chanceries kept records of the documents they issued by meticulously copying them and filing them in an archive. Some of the surviving documents which emanated from the Egyptian chanceries also attest to this practice. These often contain annotations made by copyists certifying that the document had been copied in the Chancery and/or in other government offices. We also have a report by a clerk of the Ayyūbid Chancery concerning the search in the archives for the copy of a decree which had been issued several years previously. To this report is attached a reproduction of the archival copy. The original contents of the archives of the medieval Egyptian Chanceries, however, have perished almost without a trace.

The Shāhsevan tribes of Azarbayjan were involved in various important events during the Constitutional period. In spring 1908, border incidents in Shāhsevan territory, between tribesmen and Russian frontier guards, provided the Russians with a pretext for military intervention in Azarbayjan on a scale which hastened the fall of the Constitutionalist government in Tehran. During the winter of 1908–9, there were some Shāhsevan among the reactionary forces which besieged Tabrīz. In late 1909 most of the Shāhsevan chiefs joined a Union of tribes of eastern Azarbayjan, which proclaimed opposition to the Constitution and the intention of marching on Tehran and restoring the deposed Muḥammad 'Alī Shāh. They plunde ed Ardabīl, receiving wide coverage in the European press, but were soon subdued by Nationalist forces during that winter and spring 1910. Subsequently the Shāhsevan were regarded as dangerous potential support for muḥammad 'Ali, while the main activity of their warriors was resistance to the occupying Russian forces.

The first manifestation of the regional cultures of India as we know them today was, in most cases, the literature produced by the medieval bhakti (devotional) movements. Composed in the regional languages, the bhakti literature provides evidence of early forms of these languages. Further, by its very existence, it marks the genesis of pride in the languages, of acceptance of them as appropriate vehicles for literary expression. Often addressed to local or regional deities (who are sometimes identified as local manifestations of gods worshipped throughout India), this literature clearly served to articulate and focus regional devotion to such deities. In addition, it is also possible that the bhakti literature provides evidence of the process by which people began to think of the regions as regions (i.e., their genesis as cognitive regions), began to identify themselves as belonging to the regions, and began to take pride, not just in the languages or deities of the regions, but in the regions themselves. This is the process which led ultimately, in very recent times, to the formation of the states of modern India.

Taking them one by one, it is generally agreed that [] are the allophones of /w r j/ occurring only before nasal vowels. Ward (1952) noticed the nasalization of these approximants before nasal vowels but was rather confused by their orthographic forms. We have observed that all instances of [ɲ] occur when [j] is followed by a nasal vowel. This non-syllabic palatal nasal is therefore an allophone of /j/ and it is different from the syllabic one which is homorganic with the following consonant. Examples of this non-syllabic [ɲ] can be seen in the following words:

In the reserve collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum at Battersea is a grey granite slab bearing three and a half lines of inscription in Persian, with thirteen lines of Tamil characters cut rather irregularly on two vacant spaces at the bottom (pl. I). Excluding those parts of the stone which are obviously intended to be concealed within a wall surface, its dimensions are 38 cm. in height by 58 cm. in lenght; it is in excellent condition except for a small piece of spalling at the top right of the stone, which does not affect the inscription.

Surely no one involved with comparative Dravidian, or Altaic, or Elamite, or even simply with historical linguistics in general, would question the exhortations to linguistic virtue laid down by K. V. Zvelebil (BSOAS, XLVIII, 1, 1985, 116–20): every scholar in the world who is interested in these questions at all will agree that, touching upon the genetic affiliation of Tamil and Japanese, ‘hypotheses have emerged that deserve more careful and sympathetic attention’ (p. 116), and also that ‘it would be premature, sweepingly to dismiss … a hypothesis [of non-accidental connexion between Japanese and Tamil (Dravidian)] as impossible and fantastic’ (p. 117). But over and above these unexceptionable generalities, Zvelebil's note reflects his tacit assumption that the Japanese linguistic forms and English glosses in Ōno Susumu's Sound correspondences between Tamil and Japanese (Tokyo, 1980) are valid, and reliable as evidence for the comparativist. Unfortunately, this is not true.