The present article seeks to describe a major group of Jewish North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects located across the Great Zab river in the eastern and south-eastern parts of the dialectological map of NENA, hence the term “Trans-Zab Jewish Neo-Aramaic” (“Trans-Zab”, for short) chosen for this dialect group. A large set of phonological, morphophonological, morphological and lexical innovations, shared by all members of this group, is presented. Each of the Trans-Zab features is compared with contrastive parallel features in other, selected NENA varieties. Finally, an internal classification of Trans-Zab into three subdivisions is proposed, based on a comparison of three respective paradigms of the positive present copula.

Ancient and medieval sources from Greece to Korea speak of the morally reprehensible habits of the Persians, who engage in close-kin marriage. Indian Buddhist texts also preserve similar ideas. One interesting passage in a narrative text makes use of this motif in a particularly interesting way, thereby indicating the character who appeals to the trope as ethically beyond the pale. The present paper explores the background of this common depiction of Persian marriage customs for its own intrinsic interest, and as a means to explicate the passage in question.

The Theragāthā anthology of “Elders' Verses” is one of the canonical Pali verse texts for which K. R. Norman provided much-needed fundamentally revised English translations, with full-scale philological annotation that in most respects supersedes all that had gone before. He has now again revised these in the light of the progress that has been made over nearly forty years since their original publication. What emerges in Theragāthā is in large measure a delightful collection of character sketches of ascetic types, labelled with captions that contrast exemplary monks such as “Mr. Well-being” with others, such as “Beggarly Bhāradvāja”, the bumptious ex-brahmin convert, and “Rags”, who is inclined to sleep during the sermon. This specimen survey seeks, however, to emphasize how much effort is still required in order to achieve and communicate an adequate appreciation of the verses, by striving to free the poetry from commentatorial obfuscation and editorial corruption.

Most of the adjectival verbs in the Kathmandu and Dolakha dialects of Newar exhibit idiosyncratic phonotactic shapes, including rare disyllabic stems and heavy and nasalized rhymes. The same set of adjectival verbs exhibits irregular inflectional patterns in the derivation of lexical adjectives in Kathmandu Newar. Comparison of the modern forms of both varieties and Classical Newar suggests that we reconstruct a class of monosyllabic adjectives for Proto-Newar. In Classical and Kathmandu Newar, these adjectives received an /u/ augment; verbs were created with the infinitive -ye and the attendant Class III verb paradigm. By contrast, in Dolakha Newar the forms underwent a derivational process, probably originally compounding, with the verb yer- “come”. This process resulted in disyllabic stems which now follow regular inflectional patterns, except under negation. The incorporation of the old adjectives into the modern verbal systems thus represents a separate wave in the development of modern verbs in Newar.

“Dhāraṇī”, with its many cognates in Chinese and other languages, is one of the most complex terms in Buddhism. Particular shadings of the tradition's notions of memory, meaning, and meditation, as well as specific kinds of incantations and mnemonic devices, all fall within what can seem a rather bewildering semantic range. However, the logic of the term is consistent over a wide range of sources, though Western treatments have often been misleading. It is usually claimed that the basic practical significance of “dhāraṇī” is either memory or incantation. Yet Chinese sources make clear that each of these understandings overly privileges a narrow band of the term's usage. Understanding that the basic practical sense of “dhāraṇī” was “grasp”, not memory or spells, illuminates connections within a range of sources, from doctrinal treatments to injunctions to “hold” dhāraṇī-incantations in mind and, indeed, on the body encountered in texts of various kinds.

Passages in received texts and in recently found legal documents show the different ways in which four terms refer to offices of Han imperial government; zhongdu guan indicates offices of the central government in the capital city; duguan signifies offices controlled by the central government but posted to work in the commanderies and counties; xianguan refers to just those offices but it is often used of “the government” in general, and in exceptional cases it specifies the emperor in person; xiandao guan were the offices of provincial government established in the counties (xian) and marches (dao).

Tracing the migration of Muslims from India to South Africa's Natal colony in the late nineteenth century, the article focuses on the missionary activities of Ghulām Muhammad “Sūfī Sāhib” (d. 1329/1911). Placing Ghulām Muhammad in a new religious marketplace of competing religions, and versions thereof, the article examines the strategies through which he successfully established his form of Islam among Natal's indentured and merchant Muslim classes and used the fabric of religion to bind together a distinctly “Muslim” community from the heterogeneous individuals and groups brought from India by commerce and the plantation economy. As a founder of shrines no less than madrasas, Ghulām Muhammad demonstrated the ways in which a customary Islam of holy men, festivities and hagiographies flourished and responded to the demands and opportunities of modernity. Building on the popular appeal of customary piety, Ghulām Muhammad consolidated his success by providing a range of social services (education, healthcare, burial) for the Indian poor of Natal, to create an effective public platform for the norms of Sharia in South Africa.