The Spanish priest Fra Sebastian Manrique, who visited Agra thirty-five years after Akbar′s death, recorded that Akbar′s Library, consisting of books written mostly by “very ancient and serious authors”numbered twenty-four thousand. Many of these must have been illuminated and illustrated ;nearly all, like most of the frescoes with which the Emperor caused his artists to adorn his palaces at Lahore and at Fathpur Sikri, have now perished. Ivan Stchoukine in his careful study of Indian miniature painting, surveying the principal illustrated manuscripts of the reign, enumerates only fourteen, though his list might have been rather larger. It would, had Stchoukine known of it, certainly have included the manuscript with which this note is concerned, for Mr. Chester Beatty′s Jog-Bāshisht is unquestionably one of the leading documents of the book art of the formative period of Mughal painting, and deserves to rank with two other celebrated manuscripts, both in this country, of the latter part of Akbar′s reign, the Bahāristān belonging to the Bodleian Library, and Mr. Dyson Perrins′s Khamsa of Nizāmī.

Much of the economic and colonial history of England can be written in terms of the changing membership of the House of Commons;and much of the early history of the British in Asia in particular can be fully understood only in relation to the rise and fall of competing parties at the India House in Leadenhall Street. The following brief glimpse into Indian politics in London in the period of Olive′s sojourn in England between his first and second governorships of Bengal illustrates the force and truth of these generalizations.

While Burmese nature poems are numerous enough in all periods of W literature to fill a sizable anthology, interest in the life of countrypeople–w their work and diversions–does not seem to have been manifested till the first half of the eighteenth century, when Padethayaza wrote his idylls, one of which we give here as No. I.

These notes are based on the pronunciation of Mr. Lai Mama, of the Baptist Mission at Lungleh, whose recent presence in London afforded an opportunity, rare in this country, of studying Lushai at first hand. The investigation was short and incomplete, but sufficient phonetic data were collected to enable certain principles governing the structure of the monosyllable in isolation to be stated.

It is many years since at an Oriental Congress in Paris Dr. C. O. Blagden started the comparative study of the genealogy of the Malay rulers of medieval Malacca, comparing the account in the then best known version of the Sejarah Melayuor “ Malay Annals ” with the list of rulers recorded in Chinese sources (Essays Relating to Indochina, 2nd series, vol. 1, Notes on Malay Archipelago and Malacca, W. P. Groeneveldt) and in d′Albuquerque′s Commentaries (Hakluyt Soc, 1927). Since Dr. Blagden wrote his paper, there have been pubKshed under my name two other Malay sources for the genealogy of the Malacca dynasty: a chapter from a MS. of the Bustan al-Salatin by Shaikh Nur al-din (JRAS., Straits Branch, 1920, No. 81, pp. 39–47) and an earlier version of the “ Malay Annals ” (JRAS., Malayan Branch, 1938, No. 16). There is also new material in the Suma Orientalis of Tomé Pires (Hakluyt Soc., 1944, vol. ii, pp. 229–259). And there is a valuable paper on the Founder of Malacca by P. V. van Stein Callenfels (JRASMB., 1937, pt. ii, pp. 160–6).

“He was not of course a critical historian: in his materials fact was mixed with myth and folklore in varying proportions and he was not competent to sift them…. His forte is vivid and picturesque description, the lively presentation of scenes and actions, characters and states of society.” These words were written of Herodotus. That they might well have been written of, the author of the Sějarah Mělayu or Malay Annals, whoever he may have been, is the theme of this article.

The speech here investigated is that of Mr. Josua Bogidrau of Suva, Fiji. Mr. Bogidrau was born in Lakemba, Lau, where the language has marked local characteristics, but at the age of thirteen he was sent to the Queen Victoria School at Suva, capital of Fiji, and has modified his speech in accordance with Bauan, the dialect with the greatest prestige. I have been able to check a number of points with a native Bauan speaker, who tells me that B.′s pronunciation is acceptable Bauan.

The two fragments here transliterated and interpreted were discovered among the mass of manuscripts brought back by the late Sir Aurel Stein from the cave–shrines of the “Thousand Buddhas” near Tun–huang, in Western Kan–su. These texts are written on the back of two short fragments of the “Diamond” and “Lotus” siitras in Chinese, dating probably from the early ninth century A.D. They are particularized in the note below.

“All polite literature”, said the scholar Yen Chih-t′ui, “is derived from the five classical writings ”,. This statement, true in a general sense, illustrates the traditional attitude of Chinese scholars who, whenever possible, referred to the classical age as the source of anything new which they desired to introduce.

The gloss bih you wey yee (with the reading of in the falling tone indicated by the faanchie “bih. bih ell faan ”) is to be found in Ju Shi ′s “Collected Commentaries to the Four Books” (Syhshu Jyijuh) in explanation of a famous passage in Mencius (Jiuann [hereafter abbreviated as J.], 1, p. 5B). The King Huey of Wey admits to Mencius the ignominious position into which his country has fallen from the heights of past glory through defeats suffered on all sides, and tells him of his intention to make a supreme effort to wipe off the shame: Goaren chyy jy.

In his very important article on “The Beginnings of Alchemy” (Isis, Nov., 1947, see p. 82) Professor Dubs quotes Tso Chuan, Duke Chao, 29th year, and says: “This item seems to be the earliest mention of iron in China”. The same view has been expressed by most writers on Chinese cultural history, and it is true that in the text of the Tso Chuan as we possess it to-day the word “iron” (t'ieh) occurs. But it is worth noting that elsewhere in the Tso Chuan, and in the Kü , US (t'ieh) occurs only as a place-name. The Tso Chuan passage which mentions iron is as follows: , “They laid upon the country a contribution of one ku of iron, in order to cast a penal tripod ”, that is to say, a tripod with a code of law inscribed upon it.

The ‘makeshift’ or ‘pidgin’ language here discussed has been usuallycalled in English ‘the Yokohama dialect’ or ‘Yokohama Japanese’. In Japanese the corresponding ‘Yokohama-hotoba’ is sometimes heard, but it is hardly a recognized name, and examples of the language are apt to be dismissed as foreigners′ mistakes.

In the past African place-names were recorded by Europeans who often had little or no knowledge of the African languages concerned, or of phonetics, and who therefore used the nearest “ home ” spelling. This “ home ” spelling depended largely on the nationality of the map-maker concerned, and the result was blocks of English, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese spellings, of varying degrees of accuracy, in the various “ spheres of interest”. In addition, where explorers‘ lines cut across each other, identical places would be furnished with names with conflicting spellings. Further, many mapmakers were led astray by their informants,’ who, as like as not, supplied them with the name of the place in the trade language rather than in the local vernacular.

Tonal analysis has revealed many functions, grammatical as well as semantic, which tone performs in West African languages. Here we confine ourselves to one aspect, the incidence of tone in verbs, and in particular we examine the tonal patterns of verbal forms.

Our attention has been drawn by Mrs. Chadwick1 to the need for systematic work on the collection and study of the unwritten literature—the thought of men in artistic form, to use her own phrase—of the peoples of Africa. This article raises very briefly certain points in connection with this study and attempts to illustrate them from Igbo unwritten literature. The causes for the comparative neglect of any thorough research work on African unwritten literature cannot be discussed here. But in passing one may note the tendency to rely predominantly on visual observation which has spread from the natural sciences to other fields and among them to that of social anthropology. It can, however, hardly be doubted that a systematic collection and study of this literature is desirable from the linguistic, the sociological, and the literary point of view.

One of the more obvious facts about the occurrence of grammatical concord in a language is the possibility of classifying the words -that operate the concord. The simplest kind of classification is one in which a class consists of all those words which require or display a particular set of agreements. In this way a definite number of classes is established, but there is no indication of any relationship between the classes, indeed the nature of such relationships, if any, is a subject for further investigation. As is widely known, in Bantu languages grammatical concord is operated by means of prefix agreement, a fact which is moreover one of the criteria used to determine whether or not a given language is to be accepted as Bantu. For this reason it is possible to examine on a general basis certain features of the class system of these languages that is involved in the use of concord.

THE purpose of these notes is to suggest a new approach in the study of articulation with the aid of palatography.

The language material studied consists of words in English, Marathi, Burmese, Chinese, and Fijian uttered for the purpose by native speakers of the languages, trained to work with artificial palates.

It must constantly be borne in mind that utterances are events, not facts. The finding and the stating of the facts are the business of the phonetician. He attempts this by means of a set of correlated techniques each one of which makes its own specialized abstractions from the utterances. The findings are stated in the technical syntax and idiom of the discipline, employing categories and notations required by the conceptual framework.