Okina , a ritual play without plot, a collection of old songs and dialogues interspersed with dances, can be seen in many parts of Japan, performed in various versions. In village festivals, it may be put on by local people using libretti derived from oral traditions, and in larger shrines professional players might be employed to perform it at the New Year. Puppets enact Okina dances at the start of Bunraku performances and Kabuki actors use them to open their season. Such Okina performances derive from Nō traditions, and as might be expected, the Nō schools have their own Okina, based on texts deriving from the Edo period, which they perform at the start of celebratory programmes. These ‘official’ versions feature, among other roles, two old men: Okina and Sanbasō (). Before the fifteenth century, when Nō traditions were being established, it was common for a third old man known as Chichi no jō () to appear as well (I shall refer to this ‘complete’ form as Shikisanban, three ritual pieces, a term used by Muromachi performers). These old men are marked out from all other Nō roles by their use of a unique type of mask, having a separated lower jaw connected by a cord (the so-called kiriago).Erika de Poorter, in her introduction to Okina, suggests that actors dropped the third section because its Buddhist content conflicted with a trend away from Buddhism towards Shinto (a trend she refers to as ‘the spirit of the times’). She supports her theory by adducing a similar ideological shift in contemporaneous interpretations of Okina and legends about the origins of Nō. De Poorter tells us little about these interpretations, as is perhaps appropriate for an introductory essay. This study, however, aims to give a full account of them, starting with a Buddhist reading, recorded near the beginning of the Muromachi period, proceeding to interpretations current among performers in the fifteenth century, and concluding with the purely Shinto explanation taught by the Yoshida lineage in the mid-sixteenth century.

This study analyses the original waqf documents belonging to Qijmās al-Isḥāqī, an amir who lived in late Mamluk Egypt and Syria, from three perspectives: first, the types of assets possessed or endowed by Qijmās and the creation of these assets; second, the contexts and purposes of establishing waqfs by comparing the data obtained from the documents and the life history of Qijmās, which was reconstructed from literary sources; and third, how his personal relationships reflected the character of his waqfs. Further, this study reveals how he selectively and strategically used the waqf system for personal and/or public benefit at different stages of his life and according to the prevalent social circumstances. This case study proves that the waqf system had multi-dimensional and complex functions: in addition to realizing its universal purpose of enabling the performance of charitable deeds, the waqf system fulfilled the founder's particularistic secular intentions and expectations.

This paper takes a novel approach to the question of when and how the text of the Quran was codified into its present form, usually referred to as the Uthmanic text type. In the Quran the phrase niʿmat allāh/rabbi-ka “the grace of god/your lord” can spell niʿmat “grace” either with tāʾ or tāʾ marbūṭah. By examining 14 early Quranic manuscripts, it is shown that this phrase is consistently spelled using only one of the two spellings in the same position in all of these different manuscripts. It is argued that such consistency can only be explained by assuming that all these manuscripts come from a single written archetype, meaning there must have been a codification project sometime in the first century. The results also imply that these manuscripts, and by extension, Quran manuscripts in general, were copied from written exemplars since the earliest days.

Achinese and the Austronesian languages spoken on the South-East Asian mainland (‘Chamic’) are known to have borrowed numerous words from Mon-Khmer and to show other effects of Mon-Khmer contact. Systematic comparison especially of their historico-phonological peculiarities makes it appear that they are closely related, irrespective of this, within Austronesian. Such a postulated relationship is at variance with the findings of lexicostatistics. It is suggested that the discrepancy results from the very high incidence of Malay loans in Achinese.

A RECONSIDERATION of the material used for my article ‘The monosyllable in Szechuanese’1 in the light of the technique of prosodic analysis being developed in the Department of Phonetics of the School of Oriental and African Studies 2 has led me to believe that it is susceptible of a more rigorous and satisfying treatment, in which some of the apparently eccentric features take a normal place.

Baule is one of the most widely spoken languages in the French Ivory Coast; the Handbook of African Languages, Part II, gives the number of speakers as 373,000. It is, according to the Handbook classification, a member of the Anyi-Baule dialect cluster of the Akan language group. Because of its importance, and the fact that no description of it has so far appeared, it is considered worth while to bring forward the present phonological analysis even though it is only provisional; a more definitive statement must await further study in the field.

It may be possible to study special cases of the general philosophical problem, how language and thought are correlated, by considering definite thought structures and definite languages. The difficulty, that thought seems to be accessible only or at least primarily through language, can be partly avoided by concentrating upon formal expressions of thought structures which are considerably different from ordinary language. In the following an attempt will be made to show, with the help of symbolic logic, how certain general structures are expressed in classical Sanskrit and, subsequently, how certain logical structures are expressed in the technical Sanskrit of Indian logic. The results do not prove that some logical principles depend on linguistic structures; for, evidently, the linguistic structures themselves may reflect a deeper-lying structure of thinking or ‘being’. On the other hand, if it were possible to show that some expressions could occur only in languages with a special structure—e.g. some Indo-European languages—this kind of research might throw some light on the problem of the universality of logical principles.

Au cours de l'été 1972, nous avons trouvé aux archives de Topkapl Sarayl, sous la cote E 8938, un firman addressé au qāḍī de Kilia et délivré à Constantinople le 14 Safer 914/14 juin 1508.

Since the publication in 1954 of M. Cœdes' sixth and last volume of edited and translated Cambodian inscriptions, almost every legible text of Old Khmer which has so far come to light has been readily available in transcribed form to the student of the Khmer language. It is a humble and restricted literature which has come down to us, as the praises of gods and kings and most of the important edicts were written in Sanskrit while the native tongue was found useful chiefly for recording (and ensuring that everyone understood) such matters as the duties of temple slaves, the revenues due to the foundations, and the pious deeds of the local gentry. The language lacks uniformity because the field covered by the inscriptions is both geographically and temporally extensive, spreading over the whole area of Cambodia and spanning the seventh to the fourteenth centuries.

In his new work Presuppositions of India's philosophies, addressed as a textbook to the Western reader, Professor Karl H. Potter submits an interpretation of the key Indian concept of mokṣa, in which he draws an analogy with Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of Will to Power. The latter is invoked as typifying ‘a strand of thought which glorifies spontaneity and growth, which looks ahead to man's eventual success in overcoming the bonds which make him temporarily less divine, and which sees no exercise of power of which man is not in principle capable’(p. 2).

Noun plurals showing partial reduplication appear sporadically in a wide variety of Afroasiatic languages, particularly in the Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic groups. In past treatments it has generally been assumed that these examples are remnants of a widespread proto-Afroasiatic process of plural formation by reduplication. The following paper argues on empirical and theoretical grounds that it is more likely that reduplication as such was not a means of plural formation in proto-Afroasiatic and that a reduplicated plural only occurred as a morpho-phonologically conditioned variant of the prosodically extended stem (or ‘nternal-a’) plural. This paper seeks to demonstrate that in those languages where reduplication does occur as a major means of plural formation it is more easily interpreted as an innovation rather than as a conservative retention.

This study examines the treatment of meat in Assyrian state cult of the first millennium bce. To this aim, the administrative and cultic textual evidence about offerings of whole animals, meat cuts, and meat-based culinary preparations are considered here. After an overview of the meat offerings in the ritual action of a series of Assyrian cult ceremonies, the enquiry focuses on the culinary treatment, presentation, and manipulation of the sacrificial meat; the evidence discussed reveals that the culinary treatment of the meat offered differed according to the deity and the cultic occasion.

The modern Japanese tourist visiting the Topkapi Sarai may well be struck by a display of sixteenth-century samurai armour and helmet held there. It was presented, along with a sword, to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1892 by Yamada Torajirō (1866–1957), an important pioneer in the history of Turkish-Japanese relations and the subject of this paper. Yamada, who was to remain in the imperial capital for almost twenty years, was witness to the history of the Hamidian era of conservative modernism under the despotic regime of the so-called ‘Red Sultan’, and the subsequent dramatic transition to constitutionalism that came with the Young Turk revolution of 1908. He was one of only two Japanese resident in the city (possibly in the whole empire) in this period. The other was Nakamura Ejirō, owner of the first Japanese shop in Istanbul, and Yamada's friend and partner.

In this paper a number of gestures used by Kenya coastal Swahili speakers is described. We describe gestures that are associated with speech in various ways ranging from some requiring speech as they are performed to others referred to via verbs or phrases which are performed non-verbally. We attempt to place the verbal-dependent gestures on a continuum of verbal—non-verbal communication. We also describe verbally-independent gestures and gesturally independent speech forms that function similarly in discourse.

The scholastic investigation of stress in Arabic starts with Lambert's pioneering article in 1897. Lambert demonstrated that the accepted stress of Classical Arabic is not based on genuine tradition, but was formulated at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Erpenius, who was influenced by the (Syrian–) Lebanese pronunciation of Classical Arabic. Recognizing the secondary origin of the traditional stress in Classical Arabic, Lambert established the relationship of stress in Classical Arabic to that of the various Arabic dialects on an entirely new basis. He himself emphasized the originality of stress as it is preserved in the Maghribī dialects (ibid., 409).3 In 1907 the first fascicle of Brockelmann's monumental Grundriss appeared, in which (pp. 82 ff.) Brockel-mann advocated the originality of the traditional accentuation in Classical Arabic, as generally preserved in the Syrian-Lebanese dialects. In 1908, Kampffmeyer reached the conclusion that the system of stress in the Maghribī dialects is more original than that of the Syrian-Lebanese group. However, since he published only the first part of his Untersuchungen, he dealt only with the stress in Spanish Arabic and the Moroccan (pp. 7–58), in addition to his results (pp. 1–7) contained in his brief introduction. A short synopsis of his views, with additional material, is included in Kampffmeyer, EI. An important review of the stress in Arabic (pp. 35–41) is contained in Sarauw. Despite the late appearance of his work (1939), he had almost completed it at the time of his sudden death in 1925. Moreover, the main body of his treatise had been composed as early as 1908 (cf. p. 3), the same year in which Kampffmeyer claimed the originality of the Western (Maghribī) stress.

The subject of this paper is a small work entitled Qahr al-wujūh al-‘ābisa bi-dhikr nasab umarā’ al-Jarākisa wa-ttisālihi bi-Quraysh,2 which might be rendered, ‘A cogent demonstration of the lineage of the amīrs of the Circassians and its connexion with Quraysh’. Manuscripts exist in the John Rylands Library in Manchester and in the British Museum. The Rylands copy, com-pleted on 21 Rajab 1092/6 August 1681, states that the original work was finished on 1 Rajab 1041/23 January 1632. The British Museum copy is dated in the colophon 21 Hijja 1258/23 January 1843.3 The work is anonymous but the style and language suggest that its author was an 'ālim who enjoyed the patronage of a Mamluk amīr, Ridwān Bey.

This study examines how Devletoğlu Yūsuf Balıḳesrī’s versified Hanafi law manual, written in Anatolian Turkish and dedicated to the Ottoman sultan Murad II (d. 855/1451), engages in a complex relationship between the nascent vernacular, Anatolian Turkish, and the Classical Arabic religious textual tradition. Devletoğlu Yūsuf's work, Manẓūm fıḳıh, is a Turkish paraphrase of the Wiqāya, a popular abridgement of the major Hanafi law handbook, the Hidāya, in the form of a mathnawī (verse work of rhymed couplets). Several passages from the “Book on the Affairs of the Qadi” in Devletoğlu Yūsuf's work are analysed in order to gain insight into how the work functions as a normative text in the Classical Hanafi tradition set within a localized context. Furthermore, this study explores how the work expounds upon the benefits of transmitting religious knowledge in the vernacular and justifies the use of Turkish for religious texts by drawing on Hanafi-approved Persian language practices of religious devotion. Of particular interest is how Devletoğlu Yūsuf grounds his argumentation on the rhetorical theories of the Classical Arabic grammarian, ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī.

Āyatullāh Ruhullāh Khumainī's first major political work, Kashf al-asrār (The revealing of secrets), was published in about 1943, its purpose being according to the author, to repudiate attacks upon the ‘ulamā’ by writers in the press and printed leaflets during the Riḍā Shāh period, and to rectify the misconceptions that had arisen among the public as a result of the dissemination of these views. It would seem that the book, however, was primarily a refutation of one work, Asrār-i hizār sāla by ‘Alț Akbār Ḥakamțzāda, also published in 1943. Ḥakamțzāda accused the ‘ulamā’ of encouraging superstitious practice amongst their following in order to perpetuate their own power, and cited as examples belief in the intercession of the Prophet and his descendants, designated as shirk, and non-recognition of the legitimacy of the temporal power.

It is now some years since Professor Halil İnalcik expressed the hope that a ‘systematic investigation in the library collections of Turkey’ might bring to light, in their original independent form, the fifteenth-century Ottoman ‘calendars’ (taḳvīm) or ‘chronological lists’ whose existence is to be postulated from the analysis of the style and content of the chronicle-texts into which they have evidently been incorporated. The subject of these lists was then much in my mind, so that while I was in Turkey in 1958–91 was on the look-out for such a text. My search, if not ‘systematic’, was fairly thorough; all the same, it was fruitless: I came upon several late examples, to indicate that the chronological list remained a favourite form of compilation beyond the fifteenth century, but no early self-contained text, relating the events of two or three decades, of the type whose existence the chronicles indicated. The kindness of a colleague, however, has now led me in London to what I believe to be the copy of such a text.

The study of Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years owing to a wave of new publications which have considerably enriched the corpus of texts now at the reader's disposal. In parallel, significant progress has been made in the identification, publication and study of accurate manuscripts of Babylonian Rabbinic literature. Based upon a close reading of recently published magic bowls from the Moussaieff Collection, this article seeks to indicate how the two corpora are mutually enlightening and dependent. An accurate reading and interpretation of the bowls depends upon an intimate knowledge of Babylonian Aramaic grammar, for which much is to be learnt from the best rabbinic manuscripts. At the same time, the magic bowls confirm the antiquity of many linguistic traits found in these rabbinic sources, and accordingly confirm their status as reliable witnesses to the Talmudic language.