The Year 9 A.H. is known as 'ām al-wufūd, ‘the year of the delegations', on account of the many tribal delegations which came at that time to the Prophet at Medina. One of the most impressive was that of Tamīm. The accounts of its meeting with the Prophet are rich in detail, and involve both Qur'ānic verses and poems. As is often the case with our sources, there is a considerable amount of confusion between the various accounts. In this instance, however, the confusion is the result not merely of falsifications of failures of recall but also of the conception which guided the Muslim scholars in their redaction of the material. The compilers, rather than their primary sources, are responsible for the confusion which is the main subject of thispaper.

It is widely held belief among bedouins that common linguistic characteristics point to a common genealogical origin. Bearing in mind the importance attached to racial origin amongst bedouins, it is not surprising that they should be keen observers of the dialect of their own and neighbouring tribes. My investigations of the bedouin dialects of the North and East of Arabia do indicate that a common geographical origin is often reflected in a uniform dialect. In this area many bedouin tribes seem to have left an original homeland in the west some 200 years ago, so that in the somewhat isolated conditions of bedouin life their dialect retains the characteristics of the speech of their homeland. A particularly striking case of this is the Rashāyida, a tribe which ‘Arab tradition allies to the Hutaim of north-western Arabia. At some time this tribe broke up and many of them moved east to become clients of the Muṭair. Many others however crossed by sea to the Sudan when they acquired new camels and resumed the nomadic way of life. At present, with the increasing prosperity of Saudi Arabia, many of these have returned as immigrant workers or have been repatriated. Their dialect, however, after a period of perhaps 150 years' separation, is still recognizably of the Najdī type. It would not be possible for dialectology to verify bedouin genealogies; nevertheless, it can be seen that it might support traditions about the earlier location of tribes, since historical sources are not very informative for the medieval period in the Arabian peninsula.

The Vedic verb pávate occurs with great frequency in the ninth book of the Ṛgveda with reference to the preparation of the Soma drink. It is normally rendered in Sāyaṇa's commentary as Kṣarati ‘flows'. There is nothing in the contexts to suggest that this meaning is inappropriate, since the flowing of Soma is continually referred to, and by a variety of synonyms. Such are arṣati ‘flows', dhāvati ‘runs', yāti ‘goes', īyate ‘goes', and so forth. There is no contextual reason why we should not accept the authority of the commentator and regard this verb as yet another synonym describing the progress of the liquid during the course of its preparation.

The greatness of Tsong Khapa as a Mādhyamika philosopher lay in his daring originality (which, to the chagrin of his opponents, he traced to a revelation from Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom) and his stress on human reason as an integral factor in the path to enlightenment, a stress which made him value above all a form of Madhyamaka which was systematically coherent. Tsong Khapa's interpretation of Madhyamaka ranges across the entire Madhyamaka corpus, organizes, clarifies obscurities and, above all, makes sense (which is not the same thing as saying that it is true). Madhyamaka thought can be difficult, and in the hands of a scholastic thinker whose temperament and outlook was akin, I suspect, to Aquinas, so Madhyamaka thought becomes extremely difficult. Tsong Khapa moulded Tibetan into a language of considerable philosophical subtlety and sophistication. His writings are renowned for their difficulty among Tibetans, and they are despairingly difficult to translate.

Written Tibetan (WT) is unusual among Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages in possessing a relatively complex verb morphology which contains—apart from distinctive ‘prefixes' for intransitive/transitive verb pairs, a phenomenon found elsewhere in ST—prefixes and suffixes for certain tenses as well as a morphologically significant ablaut system, none of which can be found, or at least, none of which are common in other ST languages. The simplest ways of dealing with the problem of the origin and development of this system in the light of comparative ST researches are, firstly, ignoring it, and secondly, coming up with ad hoc theories about its independent development, thereby not affecting the apparently stable edifice of ST in any way.

Poetry has traditionally been the major vehicle of literary expression in Việt-Nam. It has also been the principal means for the presentation of educational, social, political and other information, hence one may say that among its purposes it was, and is, used for the exhortation of patriotic, nationalist spirit, the warning to outsiders of the seriousness of consequence if they intruded and, during periods of unwanted foreign presence or, even worse, of foreign dominance, it was used for the expression of all varieties of political opinion.

In Johnson's Standard Swahili-English dictionary (1939) the meaning of the verb-Shika is described as follows:

hold fast, take hold of, keep hold on, seize, grasp, keep. A common word with a wide range of application, e.g. (1) get hold on, press hard on, be on the mind, put in difficulties; (2) keep a hold on, persevere in; (3) hold to, keep to, observe, remember, attend to, obey; (4) determine, resolve, make up the mind to; (5) also as Intrans. have a hold, prevail, be urgent.

Il serait faux de considérer Le regard du roi de Camara Laye comme un manifeste anti-existentialiste. Il n'en est pas moins vrai qu'il se dégage de ceroman symbolique et mystique une attitude envers la vie et la mort qui est aux antipodes de celle adoptée par un existentialiste athée tel que Jean-Paul Sartre, par exemple. Or, Camara Laye passa neuf ans à Paris, entre 1947 et 1956, époque oé l'existentialisme fut é apogêe. Le regard du roi parut en 1954. Parmi les thêmes nombreux qui s' entrelacent inextricablement dans ce roman complex, ceux du libre-choix et du mysticisme se détachent comme les deux aspects opposês de la condition humaine. Ces deux thêmes correspondent, en gros, à la distinction que Camara Laye fait, ê tort ou ê raison, entre l'attitude ‘rationnaliste' occidentale et l'attitude surnaturelle africaine respectivement. Notre but, dans cette étude, est d'analyser Les rÔles à la fois parallêles et antagonistes, que jouent dans la vie du personnage principal, Clarence, le librechoix et le mysticisme.

A passage in one of the poems of al-Kumayt describes how the poet encountered a ḏi'b (in this context undoubtedly a wolf) dying of thirst, and out of pity for the beast gave it the remnants of his own water; the first hemistich of the concluding line runs: fa Ǧubba lahŪ sawlun mina'l-mā'i ǵābirun ‘so there was poured out for him a scanty boon of water'. The second hemistich bihī kaffa 'anhu 'l-ḥībata 'l-mutaḥawwibu was interpreted by M. Ullmann in his Das Gespräch mit dem Wolf as meaning,‘ (just so much as that) wherewith a man by his ablution washes away his sin'. In my review of that work (BSOAS XLVI, l, 1983, 144) I expressed doubts about this, and proposed that the poet's meaning was the much simpler and more straightforward ‘wherewith the tormented beast relieved his anguish'.

In Frajzyngier (1981) I attempted to reconstruct vowel-raising and vowellowering rules in Chadic. Vowel-raising rules were found in three branches of Chadic, and they operated under similar conditions, viz., vowels of the stem were raised when there was a high vowel added in the suffix. Vowel-lowering rules were found in two branches of Chadic, but I could not reconstruct them as being part of Proto-Chadic because they were essentially different rules: in the East branch the vowels of the stem were lowered when a low vowel suffix was added. In the West branch the last vowel of the word was lowered when a heavy syllable preceded it. In that paper I stated that unless vowel-lowering rules were found in some other branches of Chadic, these rules could not be reconstructed as existing in Proto-Chadic. It now appears that such rules do exist in other branches. In Mulwi, or Munjuk, a Biu-Mandara language, there exists a vowel-lowering rule that operates under similar conditions as vowel-lowering rules in the East Branch l anguages, Mubi and Migama.