This paper aims to explore the origin and to reconstruct the path of the development of a preverbal element, glossed as ACQ here, in the Nanning Yue dialect (NY) spoken in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in south-western China. Apart from being a full verb meaning “acquire”, this morpheme can also appear in preverbal and post-verbal positions, expressing different modalities. It is argued that the preverbal ACQ in Early Cantonese (i.e. the ancestral language of modern Cantonese spoken in the Pearl River Delta as well as NY) is relatively non-productive, and this leads us to consider that the emergence of this peculiar grammatical element in modern NY might involve external factors. One possible such factor is language contact. Specifically, we argue that the new readings derived from the preverbal ACQ in NY were transferred from Zhuang, the most common non-Sinitic language of the Tai-Kadai family in Guangxi, by contact-induced interference.

All Semitic languages use a relative marker as at least one strategy of relativization, and all branches show reflexes or relics of reflexes of an interdental relative marker. The wide consensus that the relative pronoun was originally identical to the proximal demonstrative is based on the formal identity between the bases of the two in West Semitic, and on the wide attestation of the process Demonstrative > Relative in world languages. In this paper, we will show that there are a number of significant problems with the reconstruction of the relative pronoun, which, when taken together, make tracing its origin to the demonstrative highly unlikely. Instead we will argue that the opposite is true: the demonstrative in West Semitic is a secondary formation on the basis of the relative marker.

In a number of recent publications it has been suggested that the existence of more than one liquid consonant in parallel distribution in certain of the Polynesian outliers may not only provide an important clue for the next attempt to ascertain the status of Polynesian languages, but incidentally suggest a solution of the problem of the routes of Polynesian migrations.

How translatable are concepts across cultures? How do translated concepts interact with the receiving culture's repertoire of concepts and influence its prevailing mode of thinking? How do translated concepts, specifically concepts of category of knowledge such as ‘science’, ‘philosophy’, ‘religion’, etc., have an impact on the receiving culture's existing body of knowledge? This paper explores the above questions with reference to an anthology currently being compiled by the author, in English translation, of texts on Chinese thinking about translation. The initial title was ‘An anthology of Chinese translation theories: from ancient times to the revolution of 1911’; this was changed to ‘An anthology of Chinese thought on translation’ before the present title, ‘An anthology of Chinese discourse on translation’, was adopted. By analysing, in a self-reflective manner, the decisions involved in the movement from ‘theory’ to ‘thought’ to ‘discourse’, I hope to throw some light on the epistemological impact produced by translated concepts in the receiving culture. The impact is analysed in terms of the disciplining of knowledge that could be effected by translated concepts—disciplining in the sense of organizing, ordering, hierarchizing, including/excluding, centring/decentring, aligning and re-aligning of material deemed to constitute knowledge in the receiving culture, for the purpose of mono-cultural cross-cultural, or intercultural study. As the use of translated concepts (e.g. ‘science’, ‘philosophy’, ‘religion’) to name bodies of knowledge in ancient China is a common, though not uncontroversial practice, the issue of the disciplining of knowledge dealt with in this paper should be relevant not only to translation scholars but also to sinologists and Chinese scholars the world over.

Most modern systems of law find it convenient to impose a limit to collateral succession. The average man of to-day knows little and cares less about his distant cousins; and, if he will not even take the trouble to execute a will in their favour, the State which has protected him and his fortune and taken an ever increasing interest in his welfare, has, it is thought”, a stronger claim to his goods at death than those who were strangers to him in life and whose title is only what Lord Thurlow called “the accident of an accident ”.

The MS of this poem came to me among the same collection of miscellaneous Hausa and Arabic MSS kindly loaned to me by Alhaji Nasiru, which contained B of the Song of Bagauda. As in the case of this latter, all that could be told me was that the manuscript had come from a malam in Kano City. The poem was attributed to 'Abdullh b. Muḥammad by several local savants learned in astrology whom I consulted. The initial invocation al-'abd al-faqr il raḥmat rabbihi is of course characteristic of 'Abdullh, and Bivar has pointed to the significance of these invocations.

In the history of Hindi literature, the oldest extant text of medieval Hindi prose is the collection of hagiography known as the as the vārtā literature which, since the seventeenth century, has been central to the religious life of the Hindu devotional community known as the Puṣṭi Mārga. This article argues that a close examination of these texts in their proper social and historical context reveals that the vārtā literature was written and revised during a time when the Puṣṭi Mārga was slowly expanding its sphere of religious influence in Western and Central India. The result was a body of literature whose principal purpose was to shape the religious self-identity of the Puṣṭi Mārga by stressing the community as a close-knit and exclusive fellowship of believers who owed their final allegiance to Kṛṣṇna and the community's religious leaders who were known as mahārājas.

This paper discusses Abdullah Cevdet, one of the founding members of the Young Turk ‘Committee of Union and Progress’, who in 1922 caused considerable public commotion by publishing an article favourable to the Baha'i religion in his journal İctihâd. He was prosecuted for attacking Islam and the prophet Mohammad by expressing his thoughts in favour of the Baha'i religion, recommending it as a world religion to replace Islam, which he deemed to be backward. It is argued here, in the context of Cevdet's Weltanschauung, that he did not use ‘Baha'ism’ merely as a tool to educate the Muslims in line with his Positivist ideas but that he identified himself with this new religious creed.

‘Tone’, at least in the literature dealing with Far Eastern languages, is commonly used in several ways: for instance, in ‘the tones of the language’, or ‘Cantonese has seven tones’, reference is made to the tones as membersof a system, while in ‘such-and-such a word has tone X’ the reference is tothe assignment of an item to one of the members of the system. The differencein reference is made quite clear by the context, and no ambiguity ensues; theconcept of ‘tone’ remains precise, and difficulties arise only when no distinctionis made between ‘tone’ as used above and the realization of tones in particularenvironments. Far different is the use of expressions denoting ‘changes intone’, for which there is no agreed terminology. In diachronic work, ‘change’ usually refers to changes through time in the overall system of basic tones, and secondarily to changes in the assignment of items to members of this system, as, for instance, when it is said that in Standard Chinese, items with voicedplosive initials changed from the shăng tone to the qù tone by the Sung dynasty.

The development of the cerebral or retroflex series (ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ ḷ ṣ)in Old Indo-Aryan is a complicated phenomenon to which many factors have contributed, and a full and satisfactory account of it is yet to be produced. One of the factors involved is that of spontaneous cerebralization, by which original dentals become cerebrals without the presence of any predisposing influence. This phenomenon has always been recognized to some extent but its full extent and significance have only recently come to be recognized.

This paper is an attempt to interpret the child's learning of his mother tongue as a sociosemiotic process. What is intended here by ‘sociosemiotic’ will be largely left to emerge from the discussion; but in the most general terms it is meant to imply a synthesis of three modes of interpretation, that of language in the context of the social system, that of language as an aspect of a more general semiotic, and that of the social system itself as a semiotic system—modes of interpretation that are associated with Malinowski and Firth, with Jakobson, and with Lévi-Strauss, among others. The social system, in other words, is a system of meaning relations; and these are realized in many ways of which one, perhaps the principal one as far as the maintenance and transmission of the system is concerned, is through their encoding in language. The meaning potential of a language, its semantic system, is therefore seen as realizing a higher level system of relations, that of the social semiotic, in just the same way as it is itself realized in the lexicogrammatical and phonological systems.

The object of the present article is to re-state two obscure problems and to show that their likely solution can be found only in tṛeating them jointly. The two points are: the name of the ancient capital of the Ās (Alāns, now Ossets), as attested in the tenth century, and the identification of the town *MKS conquered by the Mongols in the course of the campaign of 636/1239.

As the sources on the latter event are more numerous I shall deal with it first. On the Muslim side we have two accounts of Batu's campaign, that of Juvaynī who completed his work in 658/1260, and that of Rashīd al-dīn, who wrote about 710/1310.

Studies of political and administrative institutions in pre-colonial Burma have almost invariably adopted a synchronic perspective. In those inquiries limited to two or three generations, the effort to present a composite picture entails perhaps few dangers. But in so far as these investigations embrace very long periods, or in so far as studies of a particular era have attempted to project their findings on to the pre-modern period as a whole, they present an artificially static image of indigenous civilization.

The various documents concerning Emperor Dāwit's embassy to the Republic of Venice in 1402 have been brought together in Carlo Conti Rossini's article of 1927 on European influence upon Ethiopian art before the coming of Jesuit missionaries in the mid sixteenth century. The purpose of this brief paper is to expand the story of Dāwit's embassy with a short document, which sheds some light upon the motives for this and subsequent Ethiopian embassies to European nations during the period before the Adalite invasions that began in 1529.

The Jewish-Persian manuscript Or. 8659 was brought to my attention by Dr. J. Rosenwasser of the British Museum, to whom I am most grateful for giving me the occasion to examine it closely and discover its great interest. Dr. Rosenwasser had rightly queried the description of the manuscript as ‘a commentary on Joshua’. There are quotations from Joshua on fol. lr and v, it is true, but that is by no means the whole story. He also remarked that the first and last folios deal with the same subject, and fol. 1 should in fact follow immediately on fol. 10. It was with this introduction, and much initial help with the Hebrew passages, that he urged the investigation of the text on me.

This poem by a Macassar Malay describes the successful war of the Dutch against Macassar from 1666 to 1669. It was edited by Dr. C. Skinner for a London Ph.D. and published in 1963. The manuscript of the original poem is no longer available, but it is deduced that it must have been written between July 1669 and June 1670. The name of the author is recorded, an Enci' Amin; we learn from a comment in the poem itself that it was recorded on Chinese paper. It is unusual to know even this much about the original manuscripts of works in traditional Malay literature. Of the two extant manuscripts the earlier, preserved in Leiden, contains only part of the. poem. Although the name of the copyist is not given Dr. Skinner, continuing a fascinating piece of investigation by the Dutch scholar H. T. Damstè, is able to demonstrate with reasonable certainty that it was a Dutch lady, Cornelia Valentijn, wife of the famous Franςis; furthermore, that it would have been copied c. 1710 in Ambon.

The medieval registers of the papal Chancery and of the royal Chanceries of Western Europe, which have preserved archival copies of outgoing documents, are an invaluable source for students of medieval European history and diplomatics. Analogous sources from medieval Islamic Chanceries are practically non-existent. We know from literary works, especially the handbooks for government secretaries, that the medieval Islamic Chanceries kept records of the documents they issued by meticulously copying them and filing them in an archive. Some of the surviving documents which emanated from the Egyptian chanceries also attest to this practice. These often contain annotations made by copyists certifying that the document had been copied in the Chancery and/or in other government offices. We also have a report by a clerk of the Ayyūbid Chancery concerning the search in the archives for the copy of a decree which had been issued several years previously. To this report is attached a reproduction of the archival copy. The original contents of the archives of the medieval Egyptian Chanceries, however, have perished almost without a trace.

The remarkable rise of the ‘Aẓms from an inconspicuous family of landed campaigners at Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man to a dynasty of governors that ruled in Syria for most of the eighteenth century owes its origin to the process of disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and its institutions.

It would seem that the genealogy given in the fragment of the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy might be more authentic than the one given in the Ghallāwiyya. While the importance given to ancestresses in the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy and its attempt to explain an individual's origins in terms of diversity rather than by a single patriline descending from one important ancestor certainly set it apart from later western Saharan genealogies and from Arab and Muslim genealogies in general, it is obviously a more realistic picture of origins, as a person's ancestors double with each earlier generation rather than becoming fewer. Also, the text of Sīdī Ahmad al-Bakkāy, which is older than the Ghallāwiyya, does not take the genealogies back as far as the later work which, however, is not convincing because of many apparent errors and illogicalities.