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.