In this article, some previously unrecognized facts about the way the morphology of the verb manifests relationships within clauses in Swahili are presented, in the context of current general linguistic interest in functional semantics.

In a recent lecture to the Philological Society (now in the press, and to appear in the Transactions, 1947) I had occasion to quote a Central Asian ethnic name Ttaudägara–. The one passage where this name has been found is in the Khotanese manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale numbered P 2741. I had prepared this text for publication in 1942, but it remains still unprinted. I therefore print it here since a controversy may be expected over this name as a possible equivalent of Ooyápa, and it is desirable the basic evidence should be in the hands of scholars as soon as possible. A complete translation is hardly possible yet and only the relevant passage is rendered here.

In the seventies and early eighties of the eighteenth century the Secret Committee had shown, as we have seen, an increasing tendency to become subservient to the Ministry, and in consequence the Directors had begun to keep a careful watch on the Committee's activities. Although, in April, 1783, to please Fox they nominated the “Chairs”, Sir Henry Fletcher and Nathaniel Smith, to be the Secret Committee, with authority to conduct the Company's naval and military affairs and to consult with the Ministry, they at the same time cautiously enjoined that such powers should be valid for only one month. These powers were grudgingly renewed monthly until November, when Fox, with the approval of Fletcher, who was one of his best friends and firmest political supporters, produced his India Bills, which sought to destroy the Company's existing home government. That Fletcher had seen and yet silently acquiesced in these revolutíonary Bills was deemed by the majority of the Directors to be a betrayal of his trust as chairman, and they promptly sacked him. So great was the blow to their confidence in the “Chairs” that subsequent to the overthrow of the Coalition in late December they forbade the new Chairmen privately to interview the Ministers unless accompanied by Laurence Sulivan, the senior Director and trusted representative of the Indian interest, the strongest party in the Court.

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).

In the death of Professor Ida Ward in the Guildford Hospital on 10th October 1949, just after her sixty-ninth birthday, African studies lost one of their greatest exponents, and Africa one of its best friends.

Ida Caroline Ward was born in Bradford on the 4th October 1880, the eighth child of a Yorkshire wool merchant. Prom a school in Bradford she went to the Darlington Training College and later to Durham University, where she graduated B.Litt. with distinction. The North Country background of her early years remained with her always and gave a delightful “ common-sense ” colour to her character.

After sixteen years of teaching in secondary schools, she joined the Phonetics Department under Professor Daniel Jones in University College, London, in 1919, and soon established herself as an authority in the phonetics of the main European languages and in the study of speech defects. Noteworthy works of this period are A Handbook of English Intonation (written in collaboration with the late Lilian E. Armstrong), The Phonetics of English, and Speech Defects, Their Nature and Cure. Her interest in her mother tongue persisted, and she was actually working on another edition of the book on English Intonation when she died.

It was while lecturing at University College to missionaries that her interests turned towards West African languages—Kanuri, Igbo and Efik were her first fields of African research—and her first major work, The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Efik (for which the University of London awarded her the D.Lit. in 1933), threw a new light on the study of these languages, and showed that intonation, that element hitherto so elusive, was one that could and should be studied if justice was to be done to African languages.

In preparing a bibliography of the modern South Arabic languages I came across the only document of the dialect of Curia Muria. It is J. G. Hulton's article, “ Notice on the Curia Muria Island,” in the Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, 3 (1840), 183–197.2 This article, in which the author gives a detailed description of the island and its inhabitants, contains a list of 103 words in English, Arabic, and in the dialect of Curia Muria.3

The name salūqī was that given by the Arabs, from, at the latest, the beginning of Islam, to the medium-sized gazehound with long pendulous ears which had hunted in the area of the Near and Middle East for perhaps thousands of years. As far as we are aware, the earliest occurrence of the word in Arabic literature is in a poem of Yazīd b. Dirār al-Muzarrid, who was born before Islam and who talks of banāt salūqiyyayn, ‘the offspring of two salūqīs’. Although the actual term salūqī does not, to my knowledge, occur in the classical hunting songs (ṭardiyyāt) of the Abbasid era, it is a word in general use in animal literature and that of the chase right through the medieval and late medieval periods. The word has survived to this day in the areas of the Arab World where the hound is still to be found, notably in the Hijaz and Najd areas of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

Burmese music is a virgin field for research. Nobody can bewail this virginity more than myself. To help me there does not seem to exist a single western work on Burmese music though there are such classics as Fox Strangways' on Indian and J. H. Levis' on Chinese music. Many writers on Burma have passed remarks, kind or humorous, on Burmese music. But few have attempted a technical study of it. Nothing Burmese escaped the notice of Sir James George Scott, of course. But I know of only two who left some technical remarks on Burmese music: Paul Edmonds, the author of Peacocks and Pagodas; and P. A. Mariano, in an appendix on Burmese music to that most lovingly produced book Burma by Max and Bertha Ferrars.