There are several problems intimately connected with pronominal affixes in Chadic. These problems may be connected with each other and an explanation of one may possibly shed some light on other problems. The following problems will be discussed in the present paper:

(a) In several languages there exist pre-pronominal markers whose function is poorly understood. I will illustrate this problem in the example of Hausa, because it is the most familiar Chadic language and also because it is fairly typical for the situation under consideration.

The fifth and last entry in British Museum MS Add. Or. 9061 (ff. 145b–154a) is described in the catalogue of Arabic MSS in the British Museum as Averroes's ‘synopsis contentorum’ of the eight books of Aristotle's Physics. This text appears as an unlikely addition to the rest of the MS, which contains the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in Arabic translation. The text, written in Maghrebi hand, is neat and pointed, and is marred only by a few small blotches. It was edited and translated into English by M. Saghir Hasan al-Masumi in 1956 in the Dacca University Studies under the title, ‘Ibn Rushd's Synopsis of Aristotle's Physics’.

Geiger in his Etymological glossary of the Sinhalese language, 27, under uyana gives as its origin Sk. udyāna-, Pa. uyyāna-, but does not explain the -yy- < -dy- as opposed to Pa. -jj- in ajjā < adyá or upajjati < utpadyatē. Geiger was not alone in his failure to explain the difference in development. V. Henry in Précis de grammaire pâlie, 33, and Geiger himself in Pāli, Literatur und Sprache, 66, both note that it was ud + y- which > -yy- and quote Pa. uyyutta- and uyyōga- < udyukta- and udyāga-, while Mayrhofer in his excellent Handbuch des Pāli does not refer to the problem.

Writing in 1941, in the foreword to his Khotanese texts I (Cambridge, 1945), H. W. Bailey related concerning the Jvaka-pustaka: The late Dr A. F. Rudolf Hoernle had begun a study of part of this text. Some six years ago I saw the MS on one afternoon, but when about two years later I wished to examine it, it was not to be found. I have not seen it again and do not know what Dr Hoernle had done.

In his pioneer work on the Burushaski language, Lorimer (1935a:64) noted the existence of what has been later described as an ergative construction: the subject of a transitive verb is in the ergative case (a special case, usually marked by the suffix-e) while the subject of inttransitive verbs, as well as the object of transitive verbs, are in the absolutive case (morphologically unmarked) as appears in the examples 1(a)-(c) below:

The appearance of substantial dictionaries of Kuy and Bruu, both compiled by native speakers under the auspices of the Indigenous Languages of Thailand Research Project (Sriwises, 1978; Thongkum and Puengpa, 1980), allows us to observe a significant measure of agreement between the lexicons of these two Mon-Khmer languages. There is a good deal of similarity also between their phonological systems, notably in respect of the vowels.

Among the many texts and manuscripts that Sir Aurel Stein brought to London from the Grottoes of the Thousand Buddhas at Tun-huang early in this century was a text of the first half of the Lao tzu (chapters 1–37 of the standard, received version of the text) with a commentary known as the Hsiang erh chu (Stein MS 6825 in the British Museum). This document has attracted considerable scholarly interest because of its ostensible connexion with the origins and early history of Celestial Master (t'ien shih ) Taoism in the Later Han dynasty. Lu Te-ming (c. 550–c. 630) listed the Hsiang erh chu as a commentary to the Lao tzu in his Ching tien shih wen, and said that accordingto one tradition it was written by Chang Lu (d. 216). This is the earliest known suggestion that the Hsiang erh chu is a text of the Celestial Master school.

Among the principle inhabitants of the northern Togolese town of Sansanne Mango, the Anufom, only the members of one of the forty named lineages possess a ‘genealogy’ which purports to extend to ancestors born significantly prior to 1764, the year in which the forbears of the Anufom overthrew the Gurma inhabitants of the village of Kondjoko and established their military camp on its site. This aberrant genealogy of the lineage Kambaya is also of interest in that it consists, in its greater part, of two written documents, the only example of the use of Arabic script for this purpose that has been discovered in northern Togo.