In JRAS, 1967, 22–5, I was able to prove that Khotanese bihīysde means ‘it increases’ and not ‘it decreases’ as had been thought earlier. In BSOAS, XXIX, 3, 1966, 616–17, I showed how bihīysde could be connected with bihīyu ‘very’ and bihīta- ‘intense’. The forms discussed there were analysed under the lemmata *bihis-, bihījs-, *bihīys-, and bihīs- in SGS 100.

The Old Khotanese fragment H 147 NS 115 in the collection of the India Office Library, London, was first published in transcription by Bailey in KT, v, 56. This paper contains a re-edition of the fragment, now with a translation and a commentary, and a discussion of two of the words occurring in the fragment: ha[ṃ]där-väto ‘*in the interior’ and patīśu ‘in autumn’, also including an excursus on OKh. vya and ya, 3S optative of ‘to be’.

Māwardī said of zakāt that it was paid ṭahratan li-ahlihā ma'ūnatan li-ahl al-sahman, as a purification for the donor and a support for the recipient. It has thus a dual aspect. As a social tax it provides for the transfer of wealth from certain productive classes of society to certain poor or non-productīve classes. As a religious duty it is of essentially the same type as ṣalāt, ḥajj, etc., afarīḓa 'ala l-'ayn. Like these it is a ritual whose correct performance involves an attention to precise details of quantity (naṣāb), timing (al-ḥawl), and intention (niyya) which may be irrelevant or even inimical to the optimum fulfilment of the social aim.

Detailed information about the rhythmic organization of Indian art-music in the pre-Muslim period is provided by three Sanskrit treatises: the Nātyaśāstra attributed to Bharata (compiled before the fifth century A.D.: hereafter cited as BhNS); the Dattilam of Dattila (DD; of similar date); and the Saṅgītaratnākara of Śārṅgadeva (SSR; written between 1210 and 1247). The system of rhythm described in these texts differs in many respects from the tālasystems of modern North and South Indian music. It is therefore of the greatest interest to find, albeit in a comparatively late source (c. 1100), examples of melodies from the pre-Muslim period preserved in notation, which appear to exemplify the early Indian rhythmic system, and from which it is possible to draw conclusions about the relationship between tala and melody.

The introduction to the Sung shih monograph on music stresses the value of music to the ruler in the following way: ‘The second of the four mainsprings of kingly government is music, which brings the minds of the people into harmony and transforms the world.’ Music naturally played a major role in court ritual, especially in the sacrifices at the Temples of Heaven and Earth and the imperial tombs. The full complement of musicians at court in the early eleventh century was over seven hundred, and the control of music came under the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, T'ai-ch'ang-ssu, whose President had overall responsibility for all musical affairs including those to do with pitch, texts, dances and military music. One of his subordinates, the Hsüeh-lü-lang

took charge of the lü-lüwhereby Yin and Yang are brought into harmony. He arranged the positions for the musicians and dancers of the palace orchestra and the special orchestra. It was he who held the flag to indicate the beginning and end of musical sections at the great sacrifices. When he raised it the trough (chu) was thumped and the music started, and when he lowered it [the back of] the tiger (yü) was scraped and the music stopped. He was in charge of all matters of musical precedence.

It is a remarkable fact that of the Achehnese language, one of the most important languages of Sumatra, no grammatical description has ever appeared in print that meets minimum requirements. The only grammar extant is K. H. van Langen's Handleiding voor de beoefening der Atjehsche taal (The Hague, 1889). But notwithstanding Van Langen's laudable effort under difficult conditions, his work does not do justice to the language. There are two main objections. First, it is based on the written language. This is (or was in Van Langen's time) exclusively written in Arabic script, which clearly represents an earlier stage of the Achehnese language when certain phonemes had a different value and certain finals existed which have now been dropped. But Van Langen based even his transliteration in Latin characters on these archaic and obsolete Arabic spellings. The second objection is that the author never realized that Achehnese is an inflecting language, and treated certain personal prefixes as indicating a passive voice and a gerund instead of flexional elements of the verb. One aspect of his work is, however, still useful: the chrestomathy which forms a part of it, written in Arabic script, with a transliteration and a translation of some of the texts.

The existence of a totally indigenous Oromo writing system is not something that is very widely known about among Éithiopisants, and our present description of this remarkable achievement is written in the belief that the subject has never before received attention. Remarkable achievements are generally the achievements of remarkable men, and before embarking on a consideration of the writing system itself, it has seemed only appropriate to devote the first section of this paper to a short biographical sketch of the man who devised the system. At this point we are bound to acknowledge our great indebtedness to Shaykh Mahammad Rashād, a student of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō, who not only gave us copious information about the life of his teacher, but generously provided us with copies of a number of manuscripts, among which is one (shown in Figs. 2–5) which sets out in a clear way the principles of Shaykh Bakri's orthography. Without the Amharic and Arabic explanations of this key we should have been involved in a work of decipherment, and the present study might well have proved impossible. We are likewise indebted to Dīmā Yōnīs, who took great pains on our behalf in interviewing former students and friends of Shaykh Bakri, and subsequently translated into English and typed out the information he collected.