This present study is the result of observations I made on the speech of Mr. S. M. Ahamba, while he was at the School in 1946. Mr. Ahamba is an Igbo, and was born and brought up in Lorji, a small rural village situated near the western bank of the Imo River, some twenty miles east-south-east of Owerri town. He has spent some time at Obosi and Awka, both in Onitsha Province, and also at Egbu, three miles from Owerri. It must be emphasized, however, that the type of Igbo he speaks is not that of Owerri town itself. It could be most nearly described as the Lorji dialect spoken by a school teacher who has spent some years away from home.

The importance and function of the Secret Committee as an essential part of the East India Company's home government have in general been misrepresented or ignored. From the beginning the Company's executive body in London consisted of the rather large number of twenty-four and, since the Company was wholly dependent upon trade, the formation of a smaller, trustworthy committee, which in emergency could safeguard the Company's voyages, especially against the threat of war or piracy, by giving secret instructions to the ships' captains, was sooner or later inevitable. Likewise, as the Company became increasingly entangled in Indian politics, it realized the necessity of issuing secret political orders from London, and since the Company's unwieldy executive body was obviously ill-fitted for this task a Secret Political Committee soon evolved. That the duty of ensuring the safety of the Company's ships and of issuing secret political orders should have been entrusted to one and the same Committee was convenient and natural. Historians have not only underestimated the significance of this Committee's activities down to its statutory establishment in 1784, but have also tended to disregard the part it thenceforth played, describing it at best as a mere ministerial instrument or as a channel, conveying to India the Ministry's instructions “which it could neither discuss nor disclose”. The truth is much less one-sided than this, and in fact long before 1784 the Secret Committee had emerged as the cabinet council of the Company, the most powerful Committee at the India House, a status which it maintained until the Company's extinction in 1858.

Most scholars in Japanese studies (history, linguistics, literature) tend to accept in one form or another the ancient legend that the phonetic writing system of ancient Japan, known as man'yōgana, came from Paekche. This legend about the ancient Korean kingdom—Paekche—appears in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, Japan's two oldest chronicles. To date there have been few attempts to use concrete data from the peninsula either to prove or reject this legend. This article supplies information from all epigraphic data on the Korean peninsula to show that Paekche spread the use of Chinese (sinographs) to be used phonogrammatically and that Koguryo educated the rest of the peninsula in the use of this script.

The last recorded case of sati in India, the murder (for such it undoubtedly was) of Roop Kanwar, which took place in the large Rajasthani village of Deorala in 1987, has had many reverberations. In particular, it has served as a focus for international and Indian women activists' opposition to continuing gender violence and to male domination in general. Not surprisingly, the responses have been wide-ranging, from individual and collective acts of feminist solidarity to various attempts at local level, mainly by men and political agencies, to discredit this particular women's movement.

This study is concerned with the interpretation of number and gender concord as abstracted from sentences of different types whose common feature is the inclusion of a participial form. This term is used here, rather than the more usual ‘participle’, as the forms being considered here do not exactly correspond with what are described in the traditional grammars as ‘present (or imperfect) participle’ and ‘past (or imperfect) participle’; the term is applied here to those members of a verbal paradigm which can be colligated with huaa, huii, or hue.

Scholars have rightly questioned the periodization of early modern Hindi literature (fourteenth to mid-nineteenth century) into two major thematic and temporal categories, often described as binaries: an early bhaktikāl (era of devotion), and the later rītikāl (era of mannerism). It is now common to understand bhakti and rīti as complementary modes of poetic expression rather than oppositional styles that poets had to identify with entirely. This paper uses the perspective of poet-saints (sants) to argue that, although the sants share many features with the rīti poets in terms of genres and register, they diverge fundamentally from them on the topic of the proper motives of composing verse. The criticism that the sants register with selected rīti themes – conflicts which would later figure in the writings of Hindi literary historians in the nationalist era – can be seen as anticipating the modern bhakti versus rīti distinction.

1.l. From May 1974 to May 1976 I carried out field research in the Nilgiri Hills, South India, with the purpose of collecting materials on the languages, oral traditions, religious beliefs and practices, and customs of three tribal communities, the Ālu Kuṟumbas, the Pālu Kuṟumbas, and the Muḍugas.

In this paper I shall present some first specimens of the language and folklore of the hitherto nearly unknown Pālu Kuṟumba tribe.

Hadramawt, properly speaking, is the name of the Wadi, a province separated from its coast by an empty stony plateau. Each of these provinces is a distinct entity

Voici une dizaine d'années encore, bien peu de travaux avaient été consacrés à la poésie en Mauritanie ou du moins au ġne, la poésie en dialecte hassāniyya. Nous n'avons toujours pas I'équivalent pour le ġne du fameux al-Wasīt que le mauritanien Sid Ahmed Ould Alamīn publia en Egypte au début du siècle et qui comporte une anthologie du ši'r, la poésie mauritanienne en arabe classique. Cependant, ces dernières années, beaucoup de poésies dialectales ont été recueillies et transcrites, quelques-unes sont publiées, d'autres devraient I'être ou ont fait I'objet de mémoires À I'École Normale Supérieure de Nouakchott (cf. bibliographic).

Qur'ān 2:114 describes those who prevent God's name being uttered in His mosques (man mana'a masājida ‘llāhi an yukhdara fīā’smuhu) as ‘most unjust’ (aẓlamu). If further states that ‘they shall not be allowed to enter them except in fear; they shall endure the curse of chastisement in this world and great torture in the aftermath ’.

The distinguished orientalist Reinhart Dozy, writing in 1849, and referring to the possible influence of Arabic poetry on Spanish romances and on the early troubadour lyrics, pronounced the whole question as ‘tout à fait oiseuse’. He went on to say about this highly controversial question: ‘nous voudrions ne plus la voir débattue, quoique nous soyons convaincu qu'elle le sera pendant longtemps encore. A chacun son cheval de bataille’.

This paper is intended as a sequel to our ‘Five Yurok songs’, published in the issue of the Bulletin dedicated to Professor J. R. Firth, and the statements there made about Yurok music in general apply also to the song presented and analysed here. This song was excluded from our previous article, not merely for reasons of space, but from a consideration of its composition. In the five songs already published, text and music, though realized together in the singing of the song, could be distinguished and separately analysed. In this song (a Brush Dance song) the human voice serves simply as a musical instrument, and the melody and rhythms making up the music are carried on a series of syllable sequences, to which no grammatical or lexical analysis can be applied and to which no translation can be given.

Colonel Low mentioned the schemes of Francis Light and James Scott for a British occupation of Thalang or Salang (Junk Ceylon) in Logan's Journal in 1849, and, sincethen, some attention has been paid to the official sources in English on this subject. Gerini comments on ‘the silence of the local annals about such land-grabbing schemes on the part of the British’.

Before proceeding to examine the poetry of the Baḵẖtiāri people, it is desirable to say something about their manner of life and the physical environment which to a large extent has determined it, and which presents those aspects and objects of nature which are familiar to all of them.

The system of mountains which extends from N.W. to S.E. across the south-. western part of Persia is occupied by a series of tribes, all of whom pursue a more or less nomadic form of life. On the west, south of Karmanshah, are the Feili Lurs of what may be called the Kingdom of Pusht i Kūh, with its practically independent ruler, the Wāli. Next, to the east come the large autonomous