The 1990s bore witness to significant advances in the study of Chinese migration history. This paper explores ways in which these new insights into population and migration patterns in the lower Yangtze watershed throw light on the history of dialects currently assigned to the Jiāng-Huái family by the Language atlas of China. It is found that the lexical corpora of many of these dialects were laid down as the result of two migration waves, one during the late Táng period and the other after the fall of the Northern Sòng. Material from the first of these waves is now found in bái or colloquial pronunciations of certain syllables. Material from the second wave constitutes the primary lexical component of these dialects and also contributes those wén or literary readings which pair directly with the colloquial pronunciations in each dialect. Interaction with several contiguous dialect groups is also noted. In particular, interlocking or commensurate wén/bái correspondences with dialects of the Northern Wú group are discussed and exemplified.

“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.

It is not yet generally accepted in European works that a distinction of grammatical gender exists in Kurdish. In the Northern group of Kurdish J dialects the Izafe appears in a number of forms, e.g. a, ā, ē, ī, and the nominal 5 oblique case ending as -ē and -ī. An analysis of these forms into a clear system, with two declensions according to grammatical gender, has been made by members of the princely family of Bedir Xan. A comparison of all the available texts in the light of their analysis serves to confirm the general validity of the paradigms and therefore of a distinction of grammatical gender, disguised to a varying extent by the generalization of certain forms. The history of a number of words of known gender suggests that the distinction is inherited.

A hitherto unexplained phenomenon is the appearance in the Central Kurdish Mukrī dialect of two forms of the nominal oblique case ending, -ē and -ī. The similarity of these forms to the corresponding Northern dialect forms is obvious. A comparison of related words in the two groups of dialects shows that in the Mukrī dialect also the difference of the forms marks a distinction of grammatical gender.

It is well known from relatively recent Ethiopic tradition that Ethiopia was once ruled by a queen called Gudit, Yodit, Isat or Gaՙwa, with both positive and negative characteristics. On the one hand she was a beautiful woman of the Ethiopian royal family, much like the Queen of Sheba, and on the other she was a despicable prostitute who, at a time of political weakness, killed the Ethiopian king, captured the throne, and as a cruel ruler destroyed Aksum, the capital, persecuted the priests, and closed the churches.

The name of Aḥmad Bābā first became known to European scholarship through the articles of the French scholar M. A. Cherbonneau in the years 1854 and 1855. In 1857, when Heinrich Barth published his Travels and discoveries, Aḥmad Bābā achieved a spurious fame which lasted for over 40 years as the supposed author of the Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān. It was not until 1897 that the learned German's attribution was scornfully refuted by the French journalist Felix Dubois, in his Tombouctou la mystérieuse, and the work was correctly assigned to al-Sa'dī the Timbuctoo scholar who died in 1656. During the twentieth century the name of Aḥmad Bābā has frequently been mentioned by writers about the medieval Western Sudan, usually as the symbol of all that was finest in sub-Saharan Islamic learning in the Middle Ages.

The last active period in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics, although associated with scholars who for the first time explicitly identified themselves as new, has generally been castigated in modern histories as repetitious and devoid of thoughtfulness. This paper presents a case study dealing with competing analyses of a single short poem by two of the major theorists of this period, Appayya Dīkṣita (sixteenth century) and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja (seventeenth century). Their arguments on this one famous poem touch in new ways on the central questions of what the role of poetics had become within the Sanskrit world and the way in which it should operate in relation to other systems of knowledge and literary cultures.

THERE can be few phrases more familiar to readers of Buddhist texts than the traditional opening of the sūtras:

Pali: evaṃ me sutaṃ ekaṃ samayaṃ bhagavā Sāvatthiyaṃ viharati.

Sanskrit: evam mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavān Śrdvastyaṃ viharati sma.

It is over 100 years since Brian Houghton Hodgson was persuaded by what he described as ‘great peculiarities in the use of the pronouns’ in certain of the languages of the southern Himalayan region to ‘divide the Himalayan races primarily into two groups, distinguished by the respective use of simple or non-pronomenalised [sic], and of complex or pronomenalised languages’. This method of classification was taken over by Sten Konow in the third volume of the Linguistic Survey of India and has been widely accepted by linguists since that time. ‘Pronominalization’ has been taken to mean pronominal usage of a certain kind, particularly within the verbal complex, and has on the whole been regarded as a non-typical feature of Tibeto-Burman languages, probably to be accounted for by alien influences, and restricted, within the Tibeto-Burman family, to the languages grouped together by Konow under the name ‘Himalayan’.

(a) Material for the present article was obtained before and during a recent period of study-leave in Cyrenaica. My particular informant, who also accompanied me during the tour, was Mr. Idris ‘Abdallah, from Gyrene, a member of the Ḥāsa tribe. The dialect illustrated may be termed the Bedouin dialect of the Jebel.

Examples are given throughout in Arabic script and follow the method used by my informant for writing his dialect. Thus presented, they are immediately intelligible to a literate Cyrenaican, who is accustomed to written colloquialisms, for example in letters, petitions, agreements, and vernacular (usually Bedouin) poems appearing in the local Press. The phonetic transcription is intended to suggest a pronunciation for the examples.

The expression pramāṇabhūta is attested in a number of Indian grammaticaland philosophical texts, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, its existence in texts no longer accessible inSanskrit being inferable from their translations in Tibetan where we find its standard equivalent tshad mar gyur pa. But the grammatical correctness and the interpretation of the term have given rise to a good deal of discussion and exegesis. Some commentators have taken up the grammatical question as to why we have the form pramāṇabhūta rather than the at first sight perhaps more normal form pramāṇībhūta. And in the Buddhist Pramāṇa-school a problem arises as to the precise meaning of the expression pramāṇabhūta employed as an epithet of a person. For by Dignāga and Dharmakirti pramāṇa has been exhaustively divided into pratyakṣa ‘(direct) perceptual knowledge’ and anumāna ‘inferential knowledge’, so that in the usage of their school at least a person (puruṣa, pudgala)—as opposed to knowledge or a cognition (jñāna = šes pa, or dhi/buddhi = blo)— would not strictly speaking be considered in the first instance as a pramāṇa.

It is many years since at an Oriental Congress in Paris Dr. C. O. Blagden started the comparative study of the genealogy of the Malay rulers of medieval Malacca, comparing the account in the then best known version of the Sejarah Melayuor “ Malay Annals ” with the list of rulers recorded in Chinese sources (Essays Relating to Indochina, 2nd series, vol. 1, Notes on Malay Archipelago and Malacca, W. P. Groeneveldt) and in d′Albuquerque′s Commentaries (Hakluyt Soc, 1927). Since Dr. Blagden wrote his paper, there have been pubKshed under my name two other Malay sources for the genealogy of the Malacca dynasty: a chapter from a MS. of the Bustan al-Salatin by Shaikh Nur al-din (JRAS., Straits Branch, 1920, No. 81, pp. 39–47) and an earlier version of the “ Malay Annals ” (JRAS., Malayan Branch, 1938, No. 16). There is also new material in the Suma Orientalis of Tomé Pires (Hakluyt Soc., 1944, vol. ii, pp. 229–259). And there is a valuable paper on the Founder of Malacca by P. V. van Stein Callenfels (JRASMB., 1937, pt. ii, pp. 160–6).

Puns stand as a bridge between rhyme and metaphor. Sound—that characteristic of rhyme—combines with the explosion of semantic implications associated with metaphor into the form of word play or punning. The quality of blending of sound together with meaning remains the best definition of what constitutes a pun. Certainly it is possible to create a classification system for puns which will lead to a workable description of the phenomenon. Interesting attempts along this line have been made working with Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, and English material, for example. Such efforts tend to rely on the formal aspects of the words used in the puns in order to produce their classificatory systems. That is, they speak of puns using the ‘literal’ meaning of two words, puns relying on ‘metaphoric’ meanings, and so forth; or they speak of the formal relationship between the words in question in terms of the combinations and permutations of letters and sounds. The aim of this paper, however, is not to circumscribe the use of puns in the Qur՚ān, although certainly a number of formal ranges of punning employment will emerge in the course of the treatment. Rather, the goal is to see what puns convey to the reader of the Qur՚ān, to see how the sound of music combines with sound argument within the text of scripture. Leaving the definition of word play or pun open (indeed, even using those two words interchangeably) allows the broadest view of the phenomenon to be embraced.

It might appear that the Qur'ān does not establish the wuḍū', or ‘lesser ablution’. It mentions only ġasl and tayammum the distinction between which is most clearly expressed in Q. 4: 43:

Do not approach the [place of] prayer when you are befuddled, until you know what you are saying, nor in a state of ritual impurity (junub)—except for those merely passing through [the place of prayer]—until you have cleansed yourselves (taūtasilū); and if you should be ill or on a journey, or come from the lavatory or have touched women, and cannot find water, then make for (tayammamū) some pure soil and wipe your faces and your hands

During a journey in the Near East I spent some days in Urfa, the ancient Edessa, in the south-east of Turkey, and from there I visited Sumatar Harabesi in the Tektek mountains on 27 and 29 January 1971. The object was to study all known Syriac inscriptions in Urfa and its surroundings, which date from the first three centuries of our era, in situ for their republication in a small corpus. In Sumatar Harabesi my attention was primarily directed upon the inscriptions published by Segal, all situated upon the so-called Central Mount, clearly an ancient cult site. I also visited the cave with bas-reliefs and inscriptions discovered by Pognon. It is now inhabited by a Bedouin family, but in spite of the inconveniences caused by this circumstance, it was possible to read the inscriptions, blackened as they were, by the light of a pocket torch and an oil-lamp, and it was impressive to observe once more how able an epigrapher this French consul was.

§ 1. The Pahlavi text treated in this article was first published by M. E. BLOCHET from a codex of the Bibliothėque Nationale of Paris—the manuscrit Supplément persan, no. 1216, p. 1—4— in the Revue de L'Histoire des Religions, Paris 1895, vol. 32, pp. 18—23 of the appendix, and translated by him with notes in the same volume of the Revue pp. 233—241. It was published for the second time in the PahlT. II, pp. 109—114 and edited by JAMASP-ASANA (Bombay 1913) with collations from the mss. JE. JJ. MK. and DP.

In an appendix to the article ‘Chinese and Indo-Europeans’ it was shown that, contrary to the view put forward but never demonstrated by the eighteenth-century scholar Ts'ui Shih, and adopted by the eminent sinologists Paul Pelliot and G. Haloun, chapter 123 of the Shih-chi on ‘Ta-yüan’ could not have been reconstituted from parallel passages in the Han shu but must have been the source for the latter—as one would naturally assume if doubts had never been raised. In summing up the evidence I noted that the most important discrepancies between Shih-chi, 123, and the Han shu concerned the Wu-sun and Sakas and I argued that one must assume that the Han shu had grafted separate, additional, material on to the account in the Shih-chi. I did not, however, go into the matter in detail. This is the burden of the present article.

The most northerly section of the African Rift Valley is inhabited by a pastoral people who call themselves 'Afar. Their present territory extends eastward from the scarp of the Ethiopian plateau and as far north and east as the Red Sea. The railway line between Addis Ababa and Jibuti appears to coincide with the southernmost fringes of 'Afar population. The area is mainly desert or semi-desert, and contains numerous tokens of its geological past in the form of volcanoes, lava fields, and hot springs. Survival is not easy in this harsh environment, so that to some extent most 'Afars are obliged to live a seasonally nomadic existence. Certain areas do have permanent habitations, but 'Afars have never taken seriously to agriculture and those who live in villages along the coast and engage in fishing probably exemplify the most radical departure from pastoralism. Most of the terrain described lies within Ethiopia, but there are a great many 'Afars in the contiguous Territoire Français des Afars et des Issas. As far as the 'Afar are concerned this political boundary does not underscore any tribal divisions of note and there is a good deal of contact between folk occupying areas on different sides of the border.

Several verbal forms reconstructed for proto-Semitic strongly resemble reconstructed forms in proto-Berber: compare Semitic yV-PaRRaS to Berber y-əFăRRăS, Semitic yV-PRaS to Berber y-əFRăS, and Semitic yV-PRuS and yV-PRiS to Berber y-ăFRəS. We suggest that these forms are historically related and sketch a line of development from the reconstructed meanings to their attested uses. yVPaRRaS, originally imperfective, retains that value in both Berber and Semitic. yVPRas, originally stative, gained a perfective meaning in Berber and Semitic; the stative meaning is retained in Berber, but was largely lost in Semitic. yVPRus/yVPRiS, originally perfective, retained that meaning in Semitic, merging with the newly perfective yVPRas forms; in Berber, yVPRaS completely replaced perfective yVPRuS/yVPRiS, relegating the latter to non-aspectual uses. We conclude by considering the quality of the first vowel; the alternation seen in Berber y-əFRăS and y-ăFRəS supports reconstructions as yiPRaS and yaPRuS/yaPRiS, conforming to the Barth–Ginsberg Law of Semitic.

Shaykh Khaḍir al-Mihrānī, the Ṣ؛fī guide and soothsayer of the Maml؛k sultan al-Ẓāhir Baybars (regn. 658–76/1260–77), was the subject of an article by Louis Pouzet, ‘Haḍir ibn Abî Bakr al-Mihrānî’ (Bulletin d'Études Orientales, XXX, 1978, 173–83), which is based almost entirely on the account of Shaykh Khaḍir in al-Nahj al-sadīd by the Coptic chronicler al-Mufaḍḍal b. Abi'l-Faḍā'il. Pouzet was apparently unaware that an almost identical account of Shaykh Khaḍir appears in the eighth volume of Ibn al-Dawādārī's Kanz al-durar wa-jāmi' al-ghurara. The editor of this volume, Ulrich Haarmann, discusses at length in his introduciton (pp.24–9) the relationship between the works of Ibn al-Dawādārī and Ibn Abi'l-Faḍā'il, and demonstrates that they drew independently on a source derived at one or two removes form the still largely unpublished Ḥawādith al-zamān of the Syrian chronicler al-Jazarī (658–739/1260–1338). Since Ibn al-Dawādārī completed this volume, according to the colophon, in 734/1334, while the unique (and probably autography) MS of al-Nahj al-sadīd is dated 759/1358, the version in Kanz al-durar may reasonably be assumed to be the older. A collation of the two versions, however reveals that they agree almost entirely, both verbally and in content. Two points of detail regarding Blochet's edition and translation of Ibn Abi'l-Faḍā'il, as used by Pouzet, may be noted in passing. Blochet, p. 459, line 2, reads kanīsat al-fuh؛d (tr. ‘l'église des Panthères’), a textual error for kanīsat al-Yah؛d, Șthe synagogue of the Jews’. Pouzet here tacitly corrects his source (p. 178). On the other hand, he accepts Blochet's curious rendering of bābā as ‘intendant’ (Pouzet, pp. 174–5 and n. 9), whereas it is surely obvious from the context that it has here, as often, a dervish connotation.

This article is one of a series that reassesses the dhāraṇī texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The article seeks to examine dhāraṇī texts by using the linguistic tools of pragmatics, especially historical pragmatics, to assist the understanding of their statements. Rather than the meaning of the term dhāraṇī as a subject term, the domain of truth-conditional semantics, this paper examines statements in texts labelled dhāraṇī. Pragmatics examines meaning in context, and the categories of speech acts developed by Searle has been especially helpful in mapping out differences within such texts and the formalization of statements across texts. The grammaticalization of specific speech elements, especially interjections, in the context of mantra-dhāraṇīs is also discussed.