The occurrence of -k- in the conjugation of the verb in the perfect, instead of the expected -t- which marks the 2s., 2 pl., and 1s. in other Arabic dialects, was noted and discussed in two studies by Ettore Rossi. His aim was to offer a general classification of the Yemeni dialects, and he treated the occurrence of the personal suffixes in -k- in terms of their geographical extent. He found these suffixes in the area of the western slope of the Yemen plateau, and the parts stretching southward to Aden. As an illustration he gave for the dialect of Raymah:

This type of suffixation, as Rossi noted, falls into line with that of Ethiopic, and the Modern South Arabian languages, such as Mahri and Socotri.

0.0. Our knowledge of traditional African literature has been greatly increased of recent years thanks, in part, to the Oxford Library of African Literature. Among the volumes of that series there have been some which have studied, either in breadth or depth, the genre of praise-poetry. The following notes on praise-poetry among the Shona aim at being a contribution to a study which Wilfred Whiteley, as joint editor of the Oxford Library, did much to promote.

Several works dealing with the cultural history of Islam in India assert that the province of Sind became a centre of Islamic learning shortly after its conquest by Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim al-Thaqafī at the beginning of the eighth century a.d.

One of the purposes of the Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching in Kenya, which Professor Whiteley directed, was to gather information that might help to clarify the nature of the problems faced by language teachers. One of my concerns in the Survey was to investigate problems that were encountered in the teaching of Swahili at secondary level; and in this paper I would like to outline and discuss some of the information obtained, regarding such problems and the factors to which they can be attributed.

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.

Before he became a professional linguist, Wilfred Whiteley was employed in anthropological research by the then Government of Tanganyika in the Southern Province of that Territory (1948–51). In 1949 he was requested to investigate the customary law on chiefly succession in the Njelu Ngoni chiefdom of Songea District, where dispute had arisen over the appointment of a new chief. In 1952–3 I was asked to continue and to widen those inquiries, both as part of a general anthropological survey and because a succession dispute had developed in the other Ngoni chiefdom in the same District. Whiteley had left a brief memorandum and a few notes which I was able to use as a starting-point. Some of the resulting data have been published elsewhere (Gulliver, 1954, 1955, and 1971). It is fitting, however, to return to those materials in memory of my old friend and colleague, and as a reminder of his sustained interest in social anthropology.

Grassmann, in his Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda (1872), has two separate entries kīrí subst. (m) and kīrín both adj. and subst. (m). To the former he assigns the meaning ‘singer’ and to the latter ‘praising’ and ‘singer’. He lists three occurrences of the forms of kīrín, two as instr. sg. kīríṇā 5.4.10 (= TS 1.4.46.1) and 5.40.8, and one as nom. pl. kīríṇas 5.52.12. But the form kīríṇā can as well be derived from kīrí and for this form a separate stem kīrín would not be necessary. But this is not true of kīríṇas. For its derivation, a stem kīrín would be necessary. The verse where the form in question occurs runs: chandaḥstúbhaḥ kubhanyáva útsam ā kīríḥo nṛtuḥ. The line refers to the dancing of the Maruts near the útsa The author of the Padapāṭha gives the Saṃhitā word as kīríṇas, and following him scholars have interpreted the form as nom. pl. of kīrín and translated it as ‘bards’ or ‘singers’. But it is also possible to analyse the Saṃhitā text kīríṇo nṛtuḥ as kīríṇā u nṛtuḥ where kīríṇā could be instr. sg. and can come from the stem kīrí. The line would then mean that the Maruts danced, and the singer of the hymn, to whom they had manifested themselves (té me … āsan dṛśí … ‘they (i.e. the Maruts) appeared to me’ 5.52.12) danced with them too. In this interpretation we are going against only the Padapāṭha.

The Altaic nasals and liquids form a natural class which has been insufficiently treated as a coherent group. Moreover, doubt has been repeatedly cast on the notion of Altaic as a genetic unity. Arguments for genetic unity are frequently based on correspondences in phonetic shape of matching lexemes or formants. I have recently argued for correspondences in suffixation rules applying to a restricted syntactic-semantic class (the numerals). Apart from showing correspondences in the various components of the respective grammars, we may also strengthen the argument for genetic relation by showing a continuity in the nature of specific features. The present paper points to certain such continuities in the distinctive phonological features that, as I propose to show, must be assumed for the proto-language.

This paper is an attempt to interpret the child's learning of his mother tongue as a sociosemiotic process. What is intended here by ‘sociosemiotic’ will be largely left to emerge from the discussion; but in the most general terms it is meant to imply a synthesis of three modes of interpretation, that of language in the context of the social system, that of language as an aspect of a more general semiotic, and that of the social system itself as a semiotic system—modes of interpretation that are associated with Malinowski and Firth, with Jakobson, and with Lévi-Strauss, among others. The social system, in other words, is a system of meaning relations; and these are realized in many ways of which one, perhaps the principal one as far as the maintenance and transmission of the system is concerned, is through their encoding in language. The meaning potential of a language, its semantic system, is therefore seen as realizing a higher level system of relations, that of the social semiotic, in just the same way as it is itself realized in the lexicogrammatical and phonological systems.

One of the results of the sometime colonization of Africa was the concentration by linguists of various European countries on the languages of those African territories held under their suzerainty, and the neglect of languages spoken in areas ‘belonging to’ other European countries. Fang, spoken in parts of what are now Gabon and Cameroon, has not enjoyed a great deal of attention from English-speaking linguists and/or Africanists, though it holds considerable interest for both in the idiosyncrasies of the phonetic display relating to its phonological categories and configurations.

In my paper ‘On the Altaic numerals’ I made the point that Turkic, like Mongolian, segregated 6–9 by suffixes, and that Turkic further divided these into two morphological groups, 6–7 and 8–9. My good friend Robert Underhill has pointed out to me that I neglected an additional piece of evidence for these groupings, in the formation of the decades; that is, I overlooked the sets represented in Osmanli Turkish by altmiş, yetmiş ‘60, 70’ and seksen, doksan ‘80, 90’. The latter pair is clearly from *sekiz+on and *dokuz+on, and this shows up clearly in Old Turkish and Chuvash. I am grateful to Underhill for having pointed out this additional argument, and it leads me in turn to some further considerations which I take this opportunity to present.

The following songs are some of those collected by me in Mombasa during the autumn of 1969. I am deeply grateful to the School of Oriental and African Studies for giving me this unique opportunity to study this rich field of Swahili traditional poetry.