The absence in Socotri of a t- Prefix in some imperfect verbal forms has been noted briefly in a number of learned atricles, but this important feature of the language has not been adequately documented or analysed. It is possible, however, to show that the non-occurrence of a t- prefix is observable only in the imperfect forms of certain types of verb, principally the causative verbs, simple quadriliteral verbs, simple hollow verbs, certain intensive-conative verbs, and, it seems likely, the passives of simple verbs.

Since the early ‘thirties we have found it necessary constantly and independently to review the sort of abstractions usually made in descriptive linguistics, and in making new ones to refer them to a schematic framework of levels, at each one of which some component of meaning could be handled by a system of constructs and stated.

Professor Panconcelli-Calzia seems only recently to have awakened to the idea that four-fifths of linguistics, including even experimental phonetics, is invention rather than discovery. The work of the English school of phonetics since the time of the Bells has been rich in invention, and earned the inadequate description of being “practical”. In the best sense of the word, descriptive linguistics must be practical, since its abstractions, fictions, inventions, call them what you will, are designed to handle instances of speech, spoken or written, and make statements of the meaning of what may be called typical speech events. All these fictions, whether made by machines or by direct verbal statement may perhaps be figuratively described as “asymptotic”.

If we are constantly mindful of the different levels of abstraction and the nature of the fictions set up, the inventions of kymography and palatography and the inventions of phonology or other branches of linguistics may be brought into relation and used to justify one another mutually.

The purpose of the present article is to give an illustration of the pressure of “invention” at the levels of phonology and even of general linguistic theory, which has led to ancillary “inventions” in the laboratory.

IN October 1948, the Governor of Hong Kong appointed a committee to consider the position of Chinese law and custom in that colony. The report of this committee, which was published in February 1953,1 will have drawn attention to the fact that the old family law of China, quite apart from the limited recognition given to it by the courts, continues to exercise considerable influence on the lives of millions of Chinese, not only in Hong Kong, but in the other British territories of South-East Asia. In China itself, as regards matters of the family, the Civil Code of the former National Government had never, over most of the country and for the mass of the people, any very eifectual force, and the customary law continued to exist in almost undiminished vigour until the establishment of the People's Government in 1949.2 Since then the situation has changed completely. New laws regarding marriage and property are effectively enforced, and have everywhere replaced the old customs and, what is still more important, an extremely efficient system of mass-education in the principles of Communism will before long have expelled from people's minds those beliefs on which the old Chinese law was based. From now on, apart from Formosa, it is only in Hong Kong and among the communities of overseas Chinese throughout South-East Asia that Chinese customary family law will continue to exist, but even with such limitations it is still of sufficient importance to make its study of practical significance.

This article is based on letters from the Geniza. The writers were merchants who dealt in imports and exports between Egypt and other countries of the Mediterranean basin. These merchants were part of the Jewish elite and maintained close ties with the Muslim authorities. They enjoyed considerable status with these authorities, who co-operated with the merchants, especially in the transport of goods; some of the high officials were, in fact, ship-owners. The administration of the time took a great interest in imports and exports, and would at times confiscate goods required by the army. The article reviews a series of citations from letters thus examining the relationship between the merchants and the authorities. The second part deals with the evidence of the droughts found in the merchants' letters; it is interesting to compare the details on droughts with the information in the Arabic sources. The third part discusses the information contained in the Geniza documents on the conquest of Jerusalem (638). This is followed by a discussion of two figures who are also known from Arabic sources: Manasseh b. Abraham Ibn al-Qazza¯z, and Barjawa¯n. The letters also reflect the restrictive measures against Jews and Christians in the days of Caliph al-Ha¯kim.

This article examines the competing theories dealing with the origin of the so-called plural suffix -men in Chinese. Their internal consistency is assessed both diachronically and—in a novel approach—on the conceptual level, that is, with reference to the fundamental value of -men today. As a result, the theses favouring an autochthonous development come out on top, to the detriment of those postulating an exogenous source. -Men is in all likelihood an outcome of the grammaticalization of the notion of ‘clan’, operating on a substratum of ancient Chinese collectives.

The distinction made between the ākhyāyikā and the kathā by the writers on Sanskrit Poetics is well known. We propose in this paper to consider how far the prescriptions of the rhetoricians apply to the few existing specimens of the ākhyāyikā and the kathā by Subandhu and Bāṇa-bhaṭṭa, and what light, if any, they throw on the development of these species of prose composition in Classical Sanskrit.

Yenitsa, in Ottoman Turkish Yenije-i Vardar or Vardar Yenijesi, is a small town some 50 km. west of Thessaloniki. Situated at the foot of Mount Païkon, near the lake of the same name (which was drained several years ago), it was in the Ottoman period an important Turkish military and cultural centre, particularly as being the base of the ghāzīs, the ‘warriors for the Faith’, who had followed the great march-lord (uj-begi) Evrenos on his campaigns in Thrace and Macedonia. Very early, perhaps as early as 1372, Evrenos had come to Central Macedonia with his followers and settled in this place, where already there was probably a Byzantine castle. There soon grew up a township, from which Evrenos and his sons and grandsons set out on repeated raids in all directions, devastating the countryside and preparing the way for the definitive occupation of Macedonia, and later of Albania, by the ‘central’ apparatus under the command of the sultan. It is probable that the several occupations of various towns in this area, such as Veria (Turkish: Karaferye) and Thessaloniki, were the achievement of these raiders. Yenije soon had a con-siderable Turkish population, so that in 1430, after the final occupation of Thessaloniki, Murad II was able to order the deportation from there to the newly-conquered city of a thousand Turkish families without reducing Yenije's prosperity.

John Dryden's ‘Religio laid’, a defence in rhyming couplets of English Protestantism, is not an obvious point of departure for this study of a Muslim poem about juristic authority. There is value however in the comparison for the contrasts that emerge. Dryden's poem first defends Christianity against an Enlightenment Deism, and then situates English Protestantism between the two extremes of Papism and ‘the private spirit’ (‘Occasioned by great zeal and little thought’). Ibn ‘Ābidīn's ‘Chaplets on the mufti's task’, written in the nineteenth century, is a highly condensed version of a conventional academic work of the type sometimes called ‘manuals for muftis’ or adab al-muftī. It aims to inform the professional mufti and the educated jurist of a methodology for the discovery of a rule of law. It speaks of secure authority; very different from the challenged, if triumphant, authority of English Protestantism in the seventeenth century.

The study of Muslim lexicology concerned with the Qur'ān has a short but illustrious bibliography, the highlights of which may be summed up for the purposes of the following discussion by mentioning four people: Arthur Jeffery, whose Foreign vocabulary of the Qur'ān contains a lengthy introduction concerning various classical Muslim attempts to come to grips with the Qur'ānic lexicon; Chaim Rabin, who in his Ancient West-Arabian attempts to use a text which deals with dialect words in the Qur'ān as one of Ms sources for the reconstruction of ‘pre-literary Arabic dialects’; Lothar Kopf, who, through his articles and posthumously published dissertation extracts, exposes many of the trends and pitfalls in Arabic dictionaries, most notably those features which result from the influence of the Qur'ān; and John Wansbrough, who via his Quranic studies has treated us to his analysis of some of the early texts and has provided some very cogent and persuasive arguments concerning the motivations behind the compilation of such treatises.

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.

The book which passes under the name of Ho-kuan-tzu, ‘Master of the pheasant cap’, an otherwise unknown teacher supposedly of the third century B.C., expounds a variety of syncretism which roots the fa decreed by the ruler in a Yin-Yang cosmological scheme. It is remarkable for presenting no less than three contradictory programmes for ideal government, two of them described at length and ascribed to sage emperors missing in orthodox historiography; one is roughly classifiable as Legalist, one as Yin-Yang, the third as Taoist anarchist. It attracted little attention until recently because of lack of evidence as to its date. But with the discovery in 1973 of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts of Laotzu it was noticed that the ‘Yellow Emperor’ documents attached to manuscript B are closely related to it; and Wu Kuang has since pointed out that the first two chapters observe the taboo on the personal name of the Ch'in First Emperor.

It is a remarkable fact that of the Achehnese language, one of the most important languages of Sumatra, no grammatical description has ever appeared in print that meets minimum requirements. The only grammar extant is K. H. van Langen's Handleiding voor de beoefening der Atjehsche taal (The Hague, 1889). But notwithstanding Van Langen's laudable effort under difficult conditions, his work does not do justice to the language. There are two main objections. First, it is based on the written language. This is (or was in Van Langen's time) exclusively written in Arabic script, which clearly represents an earlier stage of the Achehnese language when certain phonemes had a different value and certain finals existed which have now been dropped. But Van Langen based even his transliteration in Latin characters on these archaic and obsolete Arabic spellings. The second objection is that the author never realized that Achehnese is an inflecting language, and treated certain personal prefixes as indicating a passive voice and a gerund instead of flexional elements of the verb. One aspect of his work is, however, still useful: the chrestomathy which forms a part of it, written in Arabic script, with a transliteration and a translation of some of the texts.

Although in Chinese culture surgery has not usually been seen as a major part of medical practice, during the Sui (A.D. 581–618) and the Tang dynasties (A.D. 618–907) it showed a marked flowering in the field of ophthalmology. There are indications that it was closely related to Indian medical and surgical ideas which were transmitted to China. The evidence is found in historical records, popular literature and also in medical works and compilations. Interestingly, the origins of this transmission are seen in Chinese Buddhist canonical literature which emerged during the introduction of Buddhism into China in the late Han period (A.D. 25–220) and the mutual contacts which followed immediately thereafter.

Considering the unique position of the Modern South Arabian languages within Semitic it is surprising how little has been published concerning them. A case in point is the Jibbāli language of Dhofar, whose extreme phonetic and phonological complexity should arouse the interest of the general linguist as well as of the Semitic specialist. This becomes clear in even a brief perusal of the most notable pioneer study of the language, T. M. Johnstone's Jibbali lexicon.

A discussion of the mathematical manuscripts of Mauretania requires an overall introduction to this almost completely unexplored literature.

Its foundations must first be established. Between the years 1978 and 1985 a project financed initially by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BRD), then by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, was entrusted to Dr. Rainer Oßwald and myself by the Mauretanian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Its objective was the collection and protection of the selected Arabic manuscript literature of Mauretania.

The Pahlavi inscription discovered in 1936 by the expedition of the Oriental Institute of Chicago is perhaps the most important document of the Sasanian empire. It was found at the eastern wall of the so-called “ Kaaba of Zoroaster ” which was probably a Firetemple, in front of the Achsemenian tombs at Naqšl-i-Rustam.

We owe our thanks to Professor Sprengling, of Chicago, who unhesitatingly undertook the task of publishing this very difficult inscription although previously Pahlavi was not among the numerous fields of his researches. As early as January, 1937, a preliminary transcript of the text together with a short commentary was published 1; this edition was closely followed by a further contribution of Professor Sprengling 2 which was accompanied by a photograph of the inscription, thus facilitating the participation of other scholars in the interpretation of the new monument 3; for much remains to be done.

The German Turfan collection includes fragments of two Early New Persian manuscripts in Syriac script, a bilingual (Syriac and New Persian) Psalter and a pharmacological handbook containing prescriptions similar to those in the Syriac Book of Medicines published by E. A. W. Budge. Both texts make use of certain non-Syriac characters, some of which were also used for writing Sogdian while others may have been created especially for writing Persian in Syriac script. The Syriac text of the Psalter fragments is that of the Peshitta; the translation is particularly valuable for the vocalization of the Persian words. In addition to many unusual and interesting words, the pharmacological fragments attest the rare Syriac numeral symbols derived from those of ancient Aramaic. The present article contains a transliteration and translation of all these texts together with a glossary and full philological discussion.

Bi-polarity is the use of the same term to denote both speaker and addressee. It is possible to distinguish broadly three types of bi-polar term in Kuwaiti Arabic (KA). The first type is characterized in form by the use of the monolexic kin-terms: /yuba/ ‘father’, /yumma/ ‘mother’, /yaddi/ ‘grandfather’, /yadda/ ‘grandmother’. The second type consists of the vocative particle /ya/ + the KA kin-term for brother /?ax/ + 2nd person pronominal suffix. The third type of KA bi-polar term consists of the joining word /wa/ ‘and’ + the personal pronoun /ana/ ‘I’ + one of the monolexic kin-terms + 2nd person pronominal suffix. In this paper a comparison is made between these three types of bi-polarity exploring the relationship between their respective forms and functions.

One of the arduous problems of ancient geography is the location of the furthest points in Atropatene (Azarbayjāan) which were reached by Antonius in 36B.C., by the Byzantine allies of Khusrau II in A.D.591 and by the Emperor Heraclius in A.D. 624–7.