Although the discovering of a complete Palestinian Targum in the Codex Vatican Neofiti 1 (N) erroneously marked in the spine as ‘ Targum Onkelos ’ was not of archaeological but merely archival nature, it was an event of major importance in Aramaic studies. Its announcement by the discoverer, Alejandro Diez Macho, a former student of P. E. Kahle, in Estudios Biblicos, 16, 1956, 446 ff., and Sefarad, 17, 1957, 119 ff., and especially the impressive voluminous publication by the same scholar, Neophyti 1 Targum Palestinense MS de la Biblioteca Vaticana (Madrid-Barcelona, I, Genesis, 1968; II, Exodo, 1970; III, Levitico 1971; IV, Numeros, 1974; v, Deuteronomio, 1978), provided with detailed scholarly introductions to each volume as well as translations of the edited text into Spanish (by the editor), French (by R. Le Déaut) and English (by M. McNamara and M. Maher), aroused great and justified enthusiasm among scholars. Meanwhile, a facsimile edition in 140 copies was published by Makor in Jerusalem (1970), which helped to clear up certain problems in Macho's edition (esp. the omission of the Hebrew lemmata at the beginning of each verse and errors obliterated by the copyists) deplored by David M. Golomb in his recently published thesis, A grammar of Targum Neofiti (p. 1 f.).

Kalpeni is one of the islands of the enchantingly beautiful small archipelago known as Lakshadweep, a group of diminutive coral islands lying off the southwest coast of India, scattered on the Arabian sea 200 to 400 kilometres off the Kerala Coast. The islands, though small, are densely populated-inhabited by an interesting tribal people, who are engaged mainly in cultivation of the coconut tree, and as a side-line, in fishing. The archipelago is part of the Republic of India, and is ruled directly by the Central Government since 1958. The events narrated in this article, however, took place when the islands were attached for administrative purposes to the districts of Malabar and South Kanara of the Madras Presidency (as most of British South India was called in the colonial days). Kalpeni Island was situated in that part of this territory of which the District Collector of Malabar was the supreme authority.

A new text edition usually stimulates further publications and evaluations of similar texts. This situation particularly applies to J. Naveh and S. Shaked, Magic spells and formulae (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), since much new material has come to light in recent years. The present article consists of additional texts which have special relevance to the above mentioned volume (see my review of Naveh-Shaked in this issue). Two magic bowls which appeared at Sotheby's (London) in 1985 were copied by me and sent to Naveh and Shaked for study and publication. One bowl in Jewish Aramaic script (Text A) was also copied by the present writer, but the bowl was not easily legible, and Naveh and Shaked chose not to include it within the corpus of bowls, because neither the photographs nor the hand copy were sufficiently reliable. Since the present owner and location of the bowl is unknown, I have included my hand copy of the bowl here, with an attempt to read as much as is reasonably legible, in the hope that eventually the bowl will reappear and corrections to these readings can be made, through collation of the original. A second bowl, in Syriac script, was edited by Naveh and Shaked (Bowl 17), but since they chose not to publish the hand copy of the bowl, it is given below (as Text B).

It has often been said that the Persian language written and spoken in India does not possess that flavour which is generally found in the writings of the Iranian authors. There is an element of truth in the foregoing charge so far as the literature produced in India during the later period of Muslim rule is concerned. But the Persian literature produced in India from the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century may be favourably compared with the writings of many an indigenous Iranian scholar. The works of Amīr Khusrau and Hasan of Dihli and Badr-i-Chāch, who flourished during this period, are highly esteemed by Iranian scholars and are placed next to Sa'dī and Jalāl ul-Dīn Rūmī. The early immigrants who made India their permanent home retained the purity of their tongue in a much larger measure than their successors. But with the growing influence of the Hindu scholars who began to study Persian to qualify themselves for the service of the State, the difference in the style of India and Persia proper became more marked.

Professor E. ULLENDORFF is entitled to the grateful appreciation of all students of Ethiopic letters for having published anew the Falasha story of the ‘Death of Moses’. The first edition published by the late Dr. Jacques Faitlovitch in 1906 has, indeed, become very rare. Moreover, his editio princeps was based on a single manuscript, while Ullendorff's recension is the result of a painstaking comparison of Faitlovitch's text with a manuscript extant inthe National Library of Addis Ababa. Some variants of this manuscript were already knownfrom the notes appended to Professor Wolf Leslau's translation of the ‘Death of Moses’ in his Falasha anthology, New Haven, 1951. Now we have them all before us in the apparatus criticus of Ullendorff's edition. The collation of the Addis Ababa manuscript has yielded an improved text. Itso happens, however, that this is not yet the last stage in the research on this interesting opuscle.

The word(pi. ) appears in most of the lexicons which I have consulted, but it does not seem to be known in the sense of a supernatural creature, although this meaning is familiar to Yemenite folklore and dialect.

Maewo is the northernmost island eastwards of the double chain of islands in Melanesia known as the New Hebrides. Dr. R. H. Codrington gives a grammar of Maewo in ML., pp. 408–420. The dialect used by him for the grammar was that of Tanoriki, a place some twelve miles from the north end of the island on the west side. This grammar was founded principally on information supplied by native scholars from that part of Maewo in the Melanesian Mission school at Norfolk Island. Codrington also made use of a small edition, 33 pp., of the Book of Common Prayer in the language. The translation of Psalm 100 in ML., p. 419, is taken from that book.

The problem of “accent” in the Japanese language has attracted the attention of a few Japanese scholars for some hundred years. In recent years more writers, both native and foreign, on the Japanese language have touched upon this problem. For instance, B. H. Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, 3rd ed., 1898, pp. 19–20; R. Lange, Lehrbuch der japanischen Umgangssprache, 1906, ss. xxvii–viii; E. R. Edwards, Étude phonétique de la langue japonaise, 1903, § 142 f., § 159. Native writers: S. Izawa, Kokutei Tokuhon Seidokuho (The Orthoepy of the State Text Books); B. Yamada, Nihon Daijiten (Japanese Grand Dictionary); T. Takahashi, Hatsuon Jiten (Pronouncing Dictionary). Yet the results attained by these writers have not been quite satisfactory, as, for instance, Lange considers the Japanese “accent” to be that of stress, while Izawa thinks it is the delicate difference of length of speech-sounds. Yamada, Takahashi, etc., while they were right in thinking it to be difference of pitch, could not make out the pitch relations of the syllabic units of each word, and their method of indicating the “accent” was quite misleading.

Under the name of Sudanic or Negro languages are comprehended, according to the generally received terminology, the African tongues which stretch in a broad band across the continent from Cape Verd to the Great Lakes; further north they reach nearly to the Red Sea in isolated instances, and in the south to the confines of the Indian Ocean in the shape of linguistic islets whose affinities are only with difficulty recognizable. To the south of the area stretches the Bantu territory, interspersed with pigmy and Bushmen elements, of whom the latter alone have well-marked forms of speech, while the former appear to speak the tongues of Bantu neighbours, or of Sudanic tribes, who must have been their neighbours at an earlier period but have now been swallowed up in the Bantu flood. South-west of the Bantu we have the Nama languages, often classified as Hamitic.

The following poem was copied for me in 1912 by Muhammad bin Abubakar bin ‘Umar (Muhamadi Kijuma) of Lamu. The author was one ‘Umar bin Amin, a blind Sharif of Siu, said (in 1913) to have died “ about fifty or sixty years ago ”. This information was furnished by Ahmad bin Abubakar bin ‘Umar es-Siwi, of Mambrui, who added that ‘Umar recovered his sight on completing the poem ! His name, by a not uncommon practice, is spelt out in the final stanza. So far as the poem shows any linguistic peculiarities, these belong to the Lamu dialect, which differs considerably from the poet's native speech of Siu. This may be due to its passing through the hands of Lamu copyists, or, more probably to the deliberate adoption of what was considered to be a more literary form of language.

Whether or not the text has been corrupted here and there, I find some obscurities which I have been unable to translate. These I have left with a query, in the hope that some reader in East Africa may be able to elucidate them. Some allowance, moreover, has to be made for poetical licence, in view of the difficulties of this very artificial kind of composition.