The only kind of speech behaviour with which the present study is directly connected is the oral naming of Chinese characters. Chinese characters have been prominent cultural objects for thousands of years. Even the sketchiest description of what they have been called by countless millions over a vast area of Asia would be a colossal task. All that is here attempted is a systematic analysis of what a certain number of selected characters were called by Mr. K. H. Hu, of Changsha.

Florida is a convenient name for the largest island in the Nggela group, British Solomon Islands. This group consists of three inhabited islands. The smaller western island bears the native name of Olevuga, and is separated from the other two islands in the group by a fairly wide strait known as the “Sandfly Passage”. The centre and eastern islands are separated from one another by a narrow strait called the “Ututha” by the natives, but known to white people to-day as the “Boli Pass”, though its older name was the “Scudamore Passage”. These two islands bear the one native name of Nggela.

A Sanskritist who reads for the first time a Buddhistic Sanskrit text such as the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka is struck at once by peculiarities of vocabulary and style which differentiate it from normal Sanskrit. If he limits himself to the prose parts, ignoring the verses, he will rarely encounter forms or expressions which are definitely ungrammatical, or at least more ungrammatical than, say, the Sanskrit of the epics, which also violates the strict rules of Pāṇini. Yet every paragraph will contain words and turns of expression which, while formally unobjectionable (if, perhaps, non-Pāṇinean), would never be used by any non-Buddhist writer.

The purpose of this article is to bring to notice an aspect of a Bantu language, which is not often touched upon in the conventional grammars, and the hope is expressed that its perusal may stimulate thought. Even if it but blazes a trail from which others may depart, the writing of it will not have been in vain. This article is both introductory and complementary to an article entitled “The ‘Idea’ Approach to Swahili”, which appeared in the Bulletin, Vol. VII, Part 4, 1935.

For 300 years after Vasco da Gama touched Calicut generations of traders, merchants, missionaries, soldiers, and other emissaries from at least five different nations of Europe took their turn in India, pursuing their interests at a respectful distance, making no obtrusive efforts to scrape acquaintance with Sanskrit culture. Such advances were socially difficult, and would not have been welcomed. Moreover, our early associations were with Dravidian India, and very few cultured Brahmins sought membership of Christian Churches.

It would seem that originally there were two particles in Bantu to indicate pronominal relationship of reference, but that in process of time some languages (among them Swahili) dropped the e and allowed o to usurp some of its functions. The e has been retained in LuGanda and plays its own particular part, o, too, occurs in LuGanda, partly coinciding with its use in Swahili. It also occurs in LuGanda in places which in Swahili would require a different construction.

Das Wort kommt im Frahang ī Pahl., iv, 2, in der auf die Getreidearten Weizen, Gerste, Hirse folgenden Reihe der Hülsenfrüclite vor: . Seine Lesung, Herkunft und Bedeutung sind aber bisher nicht festgestellt. Das Pahl.-Pazand Gloss, von Jamaspji Asa-Haug bietet vînûk mit der unrichtigen Bedeutungsangabe “a seed, grain for agricultural purposes”. Sie beruht auf der irrigen Annahme Anquetils (vgl. auch Justi, Bund., p. 267 3), dass im Frahang das Wort (alles falsche Schreibungen für ═ aram. “Samenkorn”) noch als Erklärung zu dem vorhergehenden gehört. Die traditionelle Aussprache von ist vīnag, vīnūg, vīnū, vīnī (Junker, Frahang 115 sub ). Um dasselbe Wort handelt es sich natürlich in der Stelle Gr. Bund. 117, 2 f., wo in der Klasse der Getreidepflanzen nach (Weizen), (Gerste) und (nicht Reis, sondern statt Hirse : Frah. i¯ PH., iv, 1; Bund., ed. Justi 64,17 , vgl.WZKM, 26, 1912, 300) noch aufgezählt werden:

Dass das Singhalesische unter die “Modern Indo-Aryan Vernaculars” einzureihen ist, wird heute wohl von niemand mehr ernstlich bestritten. Irn Linguistic Survey of India, i, 1, p. 145, ist diese Tatsache auch von dem Grossmeister der indischen Sprachenkunde, Sir George A. Grierson, anerkannt worden, obwohl in dem Werke selbst das Singhalesische keine Berücksichtigung finden konnte. Möge es mir gestattet sein, einige ganz bescheidene Nachträge zu meiner vor nunmehr 38 Jahren erschienenen Etymologie des Singhalesischen, die den Ausgangspunkt und die Grundlage für meine Studien über diese Sprache bildete, dem allverehrten Jubilar zur Feier seines 85. Geburtstages in aufrichtiger Dankbarkeit zuzueignen.

The pronunciation of a coming after certain initial consonants as e, is the most important of the vowel changes met with in the Indo-Aryan loanwords of Malayāḷam, and also perhaps the most interesting from a phonological point of view.

The first to note and record the change was Gundert. He observed that a occurring after the voiced sounds g, j, d, d, y, and r is heard as e in the pronunciation of the Malayāḷis (A Grammar of the Malayalam Language, 2nd ed., p. 8). Gundert's observation is obviously imperfect inasmuch as the change is regularly manifested after b and l also, over and above the sounds specified by him.

Investigation of Middle Indian morphology from the strictly linguistic point of view can fairly be said to have been made thus far only by Jules Bloch, notably in his L'Indo-aryen du Véda aux temps modernes (Paris, 1934). However valuable as descriptive grammars and as collections of material the Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen of Richard Pischel (Strasbourg, 1900) and the Pāli Literatur und Sprache of Wilhelm Geiger (Strasbourg, 1916) undoubtedly are, both works are far from linguistic in purpose. In Bloch's masterly survey of the history of Indian linguistic development from Vedic through Sanskrit and Middle Indian to Modern Indian, on the other hand, embracing phonology, morphology, and sentence-structure, it was scarcely possible, in view of the mass of material, for him todiscuss every detail. It is my purpose, then, as a comparative linguist, to consider in the following pages certain phenomena in Middle Indian which seem to merit further study, omitting on principle all that appears already to have been satisfactorily explained, such as the pronouns (cf. Bloch, pp. 145–7). Speaking in very general terms, Middle Indian would seem to present a mixture of forms common to Vedic and Sanskrit, number of survivals to be paralleled only in Vedic or Iranian, and a considerable amount of contamination of formations whose functions were, at least approximately, identical.