The Rgyalrong languages are a group of unwritten non-Tibetic languages spoken in north-western Sichuan Province, China. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the Brag-bar (a dialect of Situ Rgyalrong) kinship terminology at the synchronic level, and then by using both internal reconstruction and comparative method, we attempt to explain the directionality of both formal and semantic changes in the Brag-bar terminology. Thus we demonstrate that the present kinship system of Brag-bar (Situ) originates from a system with Omaha skewing.

In a previous article I quoted two or three sayings of the ỌkọŊkọ society of the Igbo people of south-eastern Nigeria and very briefly outlined some of the main features of the cultural setting of Igbo unwritten literature. I also suggested that we needed not so much odd specimens of this literature as considerable collections of the various genres in their social environment.

Professor Guillaume's new translation of the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq (in the recension of Ibn Hishām) will stand as an enduring monument to his tenure of the Chair of Arabic at the University of London. The Arabic has been rendered into elegant classical English, very readable in style, with none of that awkwardness of English idiom which often besets translations attempting to present an Arabian setting and outlook so utterly different from those of the Occident as that portrayed in the Sīrah.

In an earlier study, ‘Assimilation, and the definite nominal particle in Balti Tibetan’ (Sprigg, 1972), I dealt with vowel harmony in words in which the noun is colligated with the definite nominal particle, a particle that has the constant phonetic form po when in junction with the final syllable of a noun ending in a consonant (-Cpo), e.g. smenpo ‘the medicine’ sman, but variable phonetic features where the final syllable of the noun ends in a vowel: a share in the features of the resulting word-final long vowel, either -o: or -u: according to vowel harmony.

When revolution broke out in China in 1911 and rapidly led to the overthrow of the dynasty and the founding of a republic, opinion throughout the world was startled and deeply impressed. The European press expressed amazement that a quaint Oriental people such as the Chinese should take it into their heads to carry out an anti-monarchical revolution, and that hard-headed political realist Vladimir Ilich Lenin waxed positively lyrical about the Chinese revolution and its leader. ‘The East’, he wrote, ‘has committed itself to the Western path,…further hundreds and hundreds of millions of people will from now on join in the struggle for the ideals for which the West has striven’. In Sun Yat-sen, he saw ‘a revolutionary democrat, imbued with that nobility and heroism peculiar to a rising rather than a declining class’. Even when Sun had been supplanted as President by Yüan Shih-k'ai, Lenin still saw a ‘mighty democratic movement’ in progress throughout Asia, whereby hundreds of millions of people were ‘awakening into life, light, and freedom’. Succeeding generations of scholars and political observers, instructed by the spectacle of corruption, division, and military domination which unfolded itself in various guises throughout the era from 1911 to 1949, have gone almost completely to the opposite extreme. What happened in 1911 was not a revolution at all, or only in the most superficial sense; the monarchical system was indeed overthrown, but there was no real change in the locus of power in society.

Although the presence of Nestorian Christianity in China under the Tang dynasty is a familiar enough matter to students of religion, many scholars in Chinese studies were until very recently reluctant to undertake substantial research into this topic, for the very good reason that they had been expecting the appearance of posthumous work on one of our main sources for this episode by Paul Pelliot (1878–1945), who was probably the greatest Asianist of the twentieth century. In 1984 Pelliot's translation of the source in question, the ‘Nestorian stele of Xian’, originally erected in 781 but first rediscovered in the seventeenth century, was actually published as part of a posthumous publication by another scholar, J. Dauvillier, who had been concerned primarily with the Syriac portions of the stele inscription. Since, however, Dauvillier's volume did not include any of Pelliot's copious notes to his translation, sinological scholarship was not substantially advanced by the appearance of this monograph.

In an article concerning the prehistory of Kelantan G. Benjamin provided an etymology for the toponym ‘Lebir’ as deriving from the Old Mon [OM] word for ‘sea, river’, OM Iḅir, Iḅīr, modern Mon LM ḅś, SM /бi/. He went on to say that there is evidence to assume early Malay–Mon contacts; in fact, it was only by the twelfth century A.D. that a language-shift at the expense of Mon occurred in an area of what is today southern Thailand and northern Malaysia. By implication this might also mean that there were contacts between groups speaking Aslian languages and Mon.

In support of his hypothesis Benjamin referred to epigraphic evidence, in particular to Mon inscriptions from southern Thailand as the earliest written in any vernacular. In fact, there are only two inscriptions, previously claimed to be written in Mon, Nś. 2, discovered in 1971, from Nakhorn Sri Thammarat [Ligor] and Nś. 3 from the same area. The Thai Government's Fine Arts Department [FAD] dates Nś. 2 to the later half of the thirteenth century A.D., at a time when Benjamin assumes the language-shift Mon > Malay/Thai in the peninsula to have already taken place. But the difficulty is not only how to reconcile the comparatively late date—based on palaeographical grounds—with Benjamin's chronological framework; the inscription is largely illegible and classed by the FAD in its most recent publication as written in ‘Old Mon and Old Burmese’. The other inscription which the FAD has interpreted as Old Mon is Nś. 3/RIS XXVII, dated by Cœdès to the sixth century. But Cœdès himself was unable to determine the language of this one line inscription, and it cannot be ascribed to Old Mon.

Within a few years of their landing at Sanjan in Gujarat, in A.C. 916, the Parsis established a great sacred fire there, an Ātaš Bahrām. This was a costly and laborious undertaking, which must have taxed the resources of the small new colony to the utmost. One of the most exacting tasks was to fetch by land from Iran ash from an old Ātaš Bahrām, to be used in the preparatory rituals. Through this the Ātaš Bahrām of the Parsis acquired a physical descent, a silsila, from the sacred fires of Iran; and once they had enthroned it, with rites which took months to complete, the Parsis were content to let this be their only temple fire for hundreds of years. A second Ātaš Bahrām was not installed until 1765. Since then another six have been consecrated, making a total of eight of these great fires.

The present paper discusses the hypothesis according to which a devoicing sound shift *sb- > sp-, *sd- > st-, *sg- > sk- took place in pre-Tibetan. I show that all examples supporting this putative sound shift have better explanations, and that this hypothesis creates more problems than it solves. In addition, I discuss data from modern Tibetic varieties, showing that no typological parallel for such a sound shift is attested.