The accumulation of knowledge concerning the Semitic languages of Ethiopia has reached a stage when one may wish to venture upon a systematic comparative investigation of this linguistic group. Such an attempt is E. Hetzron's Ethiopian Semitic: studies in classification, which represents, in terms of genetic classification, the most detailed and penetrating comparative study hitherto undertaken in this field. The book is somewhat more ambitious than its subtitle would suggest; in fact it offers a fairly comprehensive exposition, well reasoned and carefully elaborated, of a new classification of the Ethiopian Semitic languages. And, as already argued a century ago, ‘in the field of cognate languages, classification is but a “modification” of the history of a language’, since ‘eo ipso the history of language turns into a genetic classification’, or, as postulated in a more recent study, ‘the establishment of valid hypotheses concerning genetic relationships among languages is a necessary preliminary to the systematic reconstruction of their historical development’. The Ethiopian language area is sometimes mentioned as especially convenient for the comparativist. Indeed, ‘the field is inexhaustible and exceptionally fascinating’, as it comprises a rich variety of languages, dialects and ‘sub-dialects’’, Semitic and non-Semitic, spoken side by side in adjacent regions and at various substrata. However, such a linguistic situation is not necessarily favourable for applying the genealogical-comparative method, especially as regards interrelations between close, and rather fragmented, dialects.

Parmi la trentaine de manuscrits ou de fragments turcs en écriture ouïgoure provenant de la célèbre grotte de Touen-houang dont je prépare l'édition, il y en a deux, sans doute du Xe siècle, écrits à coup sûr par des habitants de Khotan. Il s'agit dans un cas d'une lettre à propos d'événements survenus ‘ici à Khotan’, et, dans l'autre, d'une série de notations écrites à Cha-tcheou (Touen-houang) au dos d'un rouleau de sûtra chinois par un envoyé de ‘l'État d'Or’ (altun el), expression désignant Khotan, bien attestée dans les manuscrits khotanais de Touen-houang.

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering into Arabic of the second chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra cum commentary. (On this point see our translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering of the first chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra.) This translation is based on Ritter's edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritter's text: Köprülü, 1589, folios 412a–419a (written on the margins). We have also compared the text with parallel passages and expressions in al-Bīrūnī's India. In some cases the passages in India are identical, while in others they show differences. Sometimes these differences are merely stylistic. In other cases there is a doctrinal divergence.

The question as to how many individuals in one of the religious communities of ancient and modern India at a given historical moment understood all the meanings and implications of their traditional ritual symbolism may to a considerable extent be irrelevant, but the relation between religious practice and the philosophical or theological doctrines underlying it is of outstanding interest. Whereas we are, as far as this relation between thought and practice in Vedic religion is concerned, placed in favourable circumstances because the Brāhmaṇas explaining the thought solve many problems arising from a study of the sūtras describing the ritual acts, ritual texts compiled in the Hindu period, and even those which originated in the centuries of transition, often force us to apply modified methods of investigating these connexions. A special importance attaches to those documents, which, from one point of view that is often shared by the indigenous tradition, may be regarded as late representatives of Vedism, and from another as early products of Hinduism characterized by the prominence of other gods and the appearance of other cults. Among these texts those issuing from the religious community of the Vaikhānasas, which, as a small but important group, continues to exist in the South of India, are of special interest because they embody the tradition of a society of Indian devotees which at first constituted a Vedic school belonging to the Taittirīya branch of the Black Yajurveda, and in the transitional period and the centuries after came to transform itself into a community of devout worshippers of Viṣṇu.

The late Dr. Mont Follick was a Labour Member of Parliament in the first post-war House of Commons and a dedicated advocate of spelling reform. I vividly remember a vigorous parliamentary debate, initiated by Mont Follick and supported, outside the House, by Bernard Shaw, which ranged widely over the field of spelling reform. When Mont Follick died, he left a generous bequest to the University of Manchester for the endowment of a chair whose occupant would concern himself with matters of spelling improvement and rationalization. The committee appointed by the Manchester University Senate to study this offer and its academic implications had many interesting and enjoyable discussions, and we eventually emerged with a proposal, accepted by the Mont Follick trustees, for the establishment of a chair of Comparative Philology with special responsibility for studies of graphic and phonemic representation (or some such formula). After exhaustive inquiries we appointed William Haas to this chair in 1963, and his subsequent activities and publications have shown that this was a singularly felicitous choice and a wellnigh ideal appointment.

In 1961, the late Reverend Antoine Mostaert (1881–1971) published a fairly long document, namely the announcement to the Mongols of the Banner Otoγ of the death of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager in the winter of 1908, and a number of regulations for the required period of official mourning (‘Annonce de la mort de l'Empereur Te-tsoung et de l'Impératrice douairière Ts'eu-hi aux Mongols de la bannière d'Otoγ (Ordos)’, in Herbert Franke (ed.), Studia Sino-Altaica: Festschrift für Erich Haenisch zum 80. Geburtstag, Wiesbaden, 1961, 140–55).

The notebooks of the late Antoine Mostaert (BSOAS, XL, 2, 1977, 338) contain two documents from Otoγ banner in Ordos, from 1907 and 1921 respectively, on the necessity of having border guards in order to prevent banditry. The letter of 1907 mentions an act of banditry committed by a group of Chinese Muslims. How frequent such crimes were around 1907, I do not know; but with regard to the ‘commission’ of 1921, the reader should know that the early 1920's were extremely turbulent years in Otoγ: as the result of a number of murders committed there, Mongols fought among themselves and at the same time had to face repeated irruptions of Chinese bandits and soldiers often more likely to behave like bandits than like upholders of the law. In a forthcoming paper, I hope to publish a number of documents relative to those murder cases and the impact they had on the daily lives of the people. In the meantime these two documents on the formation of border guards may be of some interest.

Among the many attractive rugs illustrated and described in H. A. Lorentz's book on Chinese rugs are two pillar rugs, one of which bears a dedicatory inscription in Chinese, the other a dedicatory inscription in Mongol. The rugs apparently form a pair. They are of the same size, the design of each, an encircling dragon, is a mirror image of that of the other, the borders are identical, and the positions of the inscriptions correspond. The shades of colour, too, are the same, indicating contemporaneous manufacture. Yet, on the face of it, the two inscriptions refer to two distinct donations, and they have been so interpreted by the author. The date in the Chinese inscription is the first month of summer in the year i-yu in the reign of Ch'ien Lung, that is 1765, while the date in the Mongol inscription is the first month of summer in the female-blue hen year in the reign of Badarayultu Törö (Kuang Hsü), that is 1885. Mr. Lorentz quotes expert opinion to the eifect that, the dates apart, the two rugs look as if they must have been woven at the same time as each other and be of late date. The inference is, he says, that both were made in 1885. Yet, he says, after describing the Chinese inscription: ‘The puzzle is that the Mongol inscription in the other rug declares that this rug was presented by a different person one hundred and twenty years later!’. He offers an ingenious explanation for this dilemma, suggesting that the second donor, for he is of the opinion that two donations did indeed take place, at an interval of 120 years, caused an earlier rug to be copied, in order that he could present a pair, rather than a single item. The donor's idea would have been, to quote Mr. Lorentz: ‘I herewith submit the copy of a famous rug dedicated in 1765, to which I add another such rug with my own dedication, presenting thus a pair’.