So much attention has been concentrated on the doctrines on which Christians and Muslims differ that often it is not realized how closely their philosophical presuppositions agree on many matters. In the following pages, which form a brief comparison of Ash'arite theology as represented by al-Shahrastānī (d. 1153) in his Nihāyatu-l-Iqdām fī ‘ilmi’ l-kalām with Catholic theology as represented by St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) in his Summa contra Gentiles, an attempt is made to bring points of agreement into prominence.

The Summa contra Gentiles possesses such enormous value in itself that the primary object of its composition has been lost sight of. Yet the connexion between it and Islam is indissoluble. It was written at the request of the Master-General of the Dominicans, Raymund of Pinnaforte, with the express purpose of convincing the Muslims of Spain of the rational basis of Christianity and the errors of their own religion. In the second chapter of the Summa (quae sit auctoris intentio) St. Thomas particularly singles out Muhammadans. Jews, he says, can be refuted from the Old Testament; heretics from the New Testament; but Machomestitae et Pagani can only be convinced by natural reason. And it is to natural reason that he proceeds to appeal.

Though none was better equipped than St. Thomas to undertake an exposition of the Catholic Faith, it is, I think, clear that he felt himself at a disadvantage in writing against people whose books he could not read and of whom he knew only from the translations of others.

The basis of the list of biographical works in this part is the material in two articles from al-Rābitat al-‘Alawīya, a rare but learned journal published by the ‘Alawl saiyids for about four years at Batavia. This journal is unlikely to be found in Europe, unless indeed a set exists in Holland, but it is a source of major importance for the student of Hadramī history, as he will find material there not available elsewhere. I have not seen a complete set even in Hadramawt, though individual issues are to be found in various libraries.

II

In a former article (BSOAS xiii, pp. 7–22) a collation was offered of the Chester Beatty 4/10th century manuscript of al-Jumahl's Tabaqāt al-shu‘arā’ as compared with J. Hell's edition. In the following pages we have indicated or transcribed the passages contained in the Chester Beatty manuscript which are omitted in Hell's text and the derivative Cairo edition.

In the year 1292/1875 there was born to a mixed Kurdish-Arab family a child who was destined to play a prominent part in modern Arabic literature. He was named Ma'rūf and was the second of two children in the family.

No one can say with certainty who was Ma‘rūf’s father because he himself rarely spoke about his family. So far as I am aware, there is not a single reference to his father in his Dīwān. Ma‘rūf’s unwise reticence concerning his family helped his opponents to allege that he was an illegitimate child. The late Tāha ar-Rāwī, the Iraqi philologist, who associated with Ma'rūf for over a quarter of a century, asserted that he avoided answering questions concerning his parentage and, if pressed hard, he would answer briefly and change the subject. The investigations of genealogists led them to the conclusion that his father belonged to the Kurdish tribe of al-Jabbārah, which was acknowledged by all the Kurds as being of ‘Alid origin. If so, then it must have been originally an Arab tribe which migrated to non-Arab districts. His mother is said to have belonged to the tribe of al-Qarāgfūl, a branch of ammar which dwells in the plain regions of Iraq.

Rusāfī was brought up in his grandfather's house in the quarter of al-Qarāgūl in Baghdad. A small dark room was allotted to him, which made him inclined to solitude and meditation. In his childhood he was not seen to mix with other children. But his fondness for mechanical instruments led to an accident in which he lost one of his fingers.

Only one Islamic metal vessel can be said with certainty to have been made at Mosul. This is the so-called Blacas Ewer in the British Museum which bears an Arabic inscription stating that it was engraved by ujā’ b. Man'a al-Mawṣilī at Mosul in the month of Rajab 629 (= May 1232).

The structure of the gâthâs is at first sight far from obvious. It has even been contended that the sequences of stanzas preserved in the Avesta under the titles Yasna 28, 29, etc., were in nearly all cases mere haphazard collections.

The study of the Pahlavi poetry, so spiritedly initiated by M. Benveniste twenty years ago, seems to have come to a dead end. That certain Pahlavi texts, as the Ayādgār-ī Zarērān or the Draxt-ī Asūrīg (the Dispute of the date-palm with the goat), are poems, is conceded on all sides; but the formal problems, the problems of rhythm, metre, and rhyme, remain in the dark. It seems doubtful whether the material at hand is capable of leading us to definite conclusions. There are two main obstacles. Firstly, the notorious sloppiness of the copyists leaves too much room for conjecture; the mere addition or omission, at the editors’ discretion, of the word for “and” and the harf-i idāfet is sufficient to disturb the rhythmical balance. Secondly, as a rule we do not know the dates of composition, and therefore cannot tell how the words were pronounced by the authors; it makes a considerable difference to the metre (whatever it was) whether we put down paδak or paig, mazdayasn or mazdēsn, rōšn or rōšan, aδaκ or aig, šικanj or šκanj, giyān or gyān, yazat or yazd, awiš or ōš, druyist or drīst or drust or durust, hačaδar or azēr.

One thing is clear: a biased approach will not lead to convincing results. On the strength of the preconceived notion, carried forward from the study of the Avesta (where matters are equally dubious), that the metre is a purely syllabic one, the Pahlavi poems were made to suffer a great deal of emendation; where the usual procedure of omitting inconvenient words produced lines too short to fit into the scheme, either words were added or their pronunciation distorted.

In the Journal Asiatique for 1941–2 my friend the late Professor Sten Konow published an article entitled Une nouvelle forme aberrante de khotanais. This new type of Iranian is contained in the document P 410 brought back by the late Paul Pelliot from Tumšq, a ruined site near the modern Maralbashi.

For the study of the history of this region all the materials, unfortunately often fragmentary, which the various expeditions have recovered for us have proved and are still proving of great importance. The present Tumšuq fragment is a notable addition to this material.

Sten Konow gave with his study a facsimile of the MS. fragment, a transliteration (in which he had enjoyed the assistance of J. Filliozat) and a tentative translation, together with a glossary of the words according to his readings. Six years later he turned again to the document and in the Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 14 (1947), pp. 156 ff., he published a second study of the document. It is a pleasure to recognize the merit of these pioneer studies, but neither could be considered as providing a clear interpretation. In one point, the reading of ai, the incorrect at is kept in the second study, although in the glossary to the first study J. Filliozat had pointed out that the sign was properly au.

The document is vitally important for Iranian dialectical studies. Hence a new treatment is well justified. The recognition that the document contains a type of Buddhist ordination service changed the whole problem of its interpretation.

While I preparing an edition of Matrceta's Hymn of 150 Verses (Satapañcāśatka) I learnt of the existence in the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin of a quantity of unpublished manuscript fragments of poetry identified as Mātrceta's, included among the material brought back by four successive German expeditions to Central Asia. Through the good offices of Professors H. W. Bailey and F. W. Thomas, photographed copies of these pieces eventually reached me. They proved to consist of about 120 leaves or portions of leaves, practically without exception in “Slanting Gupta” script, from at least seventeen separate MSS., ranging from almost complete folios to fragments containing only two or three legible syllables.

The collection was placed unconditionally at my disposal by the authorities of the Academy, to whom are due my most grateful acknowledgments of their generosity, the more so because a complete transcription by Dr. W. Siegling accompanied the texts. It is hardly necessary to add that this transcription is a work of the highest care and competence which could only have been carried out by an expert in the deciphering of Central Asian documents. In doubtful cases I have compared his readings with the originals and have checked several lengthy passages systematically, but additions or corrections thus introduced could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The text which follows can, therefore, be presented with a confidence which I could not have felt in a decipherment of my own; for apart from the normal difficulties of this script, blurred and mutilated characters abound.

Verb roots remain constant in most Sino-Tibetan languages. But in; Burmese the consonantal initial of some verb roots alternates from an unaspirated surd in the intransitive to the corresponding aspirated surd in the transitive. And in some Tibeto-Burmic languages, particularly in the Himalayas, we find verbs with a sonant initial in the intransitive and a corresponding surd in the transitive. Diversity of form reaches the extreme in Old Bodish (classical Tibetan), where no positional phoneme of the verb is necessarily constant—whether consonantal prefix, consonantal initial, medial vowel, “final” consonant, or “suffixed” consonant.

Any work of Mr. Chao, “the father of Chinese phonetics,” must command respect. It is not, therefore, without a sense of the boldness of my under-taking that I venture in the following pages to suggest ways in which it is possible to improve upon the system of transcription he has laid down for Cantonese.

The introduction is worth careful study by the student of any foreign language. In it Mr. Chao says, with great justice: “The problem which an Occidental student of Chinese has to face first is to learn what the language and writing are and not what they might better be… the most practical point of view is the scientific, empirical one of learning about what is.” There-fore a book about Cantonese intended for the student of Cantonese should describe Cantonese as it is: there should be no attempt to normalize the irregular, to simplify the difficult, to rationalize the irrational; it is as dangerous to strain the links between Cantonese and National Chinese by over-emphasizing analogies as it is to deny the existence of the links and analogies altogether. Many foreign works on Cantonese reflect the antipathy towards the NgoaykoangIhoo which the authors have absorbed from long residence in Kwangtung: so that any turn of phrase which betrays Kwoakyux influence, any modification of pronunciation which tends to obscure any of the divergencies between the tongue of Canton and that of Peiping, are regarded as deviations and not simply condemned but, what is worse, ignored.

At the beginning of September 1854, almost six months after Commodore Perry had concluded his convention with Japan, Sir James Stirling, Commander-in-Chief of the British East Indies fleet, took his squadron into Nagasaki harbour to negotiate with the Japanese officials there. Unlike Perry, his primary object was not to obtain a treaty of commerce and friendship. War between Britain and Russia had broken out in March, and it was his duty to hunt down, if possible to destroy, Admiral Poutiatin's squadron then in Pacific waters. This task, he realized, would be made much easier if he could use Japanese ports for obtaining stores and refitting on the terms usually allowed a belligerent by a neutral state, and if this meant that Russia could use those ports on similar terms, he was confident that he could deny her access to them by his own greater strength at sea. In fact, whatever secret hopes he may have had as to the ultimate effect of his discussions on Anglo-Japanese relations, Stirling went to Nagasaki principally to settle a point of practical importance to his conduct of naval operations. He wished to know in what light the Japanese government would view the use'of its ports by the belligerents, and was ready to suggest, perhaps insist on, a policy favourable to Great Britain.

Despite this limited objective, there followed an exchange of letters, some weeks of waiting, and a number of discussions with the Nagasaki Bugyoo (the Governor of Nagasaki), as a result of which Stirling obtained a convention similar in many respects to that of Perry, though somewhat more restricted in its provisions.

Among the ancient towns of the Swahili coast Siu is reputed to be one of the oldest. Stigand wrote: “The people of Siu claim that their town is older than that of Pate.” The poem that follows was written by Sayyid ‘Umar bin Amin bin ‘Umar bin Amin bin Nadhir al-Ahdal, who lived at Siu as Kadhi during the time of Mohammad bin Mataka and when Sayyid Majid, the Sultan of Zanzibar, attacked Siu in A.h. 1273 (A.d. 1856). The composer left a number of other poems, including some written in praise of the Prophet which are still recited in East African mosques on the Birth Day of the Prophet.

The present work is of the type formerly known as Waji-waji, an archaic Swahili word for a didactic poem. It is written in the well-known Arabic method of five lines to a verse. Generally this method was employed in composite work, one man composing two or three lines of each verse and another adding the rest but following the style and the meaning. In Sayyid Amin's poem the first three lines in a verse are complete in themselves, while the last two lines are added only to expand the meaning or to give a taste to the verse. Even so, a special feature of this poem indicates that it is the work of one man. Each fourth line begins with a letter of the Swahili-Arabic alphabet. He excludes the letters pei and vei, which are not used with much frequency by most Swahili scribes, the letters bei and fei being preferred.

Since the early ‘thirties we have found it necessary constantly and independently to review the sort of abstractions usually made in descriptive linguistics, and in making new ones to refer them to a schematic framework of levels, at each one of which some component of meaning could be handled by a system of constructs and stated.

Professor Panconcelli-Calzia seems only recently to have awakened to the idea that four-fifths of linguistics, including even experimental phonetics, is invention rather than discovery. The work of the English school of phonetics since the time of the Bells has been rich in invention, and earned the inadequate description of being “practical”. In the best sense of the word, descriptive linguistics must be practical, since its abstractions, fictions, inventions, call them what you will, are designed to handle instances of speech, spoken or written, and make statements of the meaning of what may be called typical speech events. All these fictions, whether made by machines or by direct verbal statement may perhaps be figuratively described as “asymptotic”.

If we are constantly mindful of the different levels of abstraction and the nature of the fictions set up, the inventions of kymography and palatography and the inventions of phonology or other branches of linguistics may be brought into relation and used to justify one another mutually.

The purpose of the present article is to give an illustration of the pressure of “invention” at the levels of phonology and even of general linguistic theory, which has led to ancillary “inventions” in the laboratory.