Sixty-five years ago, in brief remarks devoted to the Shina of Dras, Bailey noted an unusual construction associated with the verb lezhonu ‘to get’:

There are two schemes of creation in Zoroastrianism. According to one, Ohrmazd fashions the world in the manner of a skilful craftsman. According to the second, Ohrmazd gestates and gives birth to the world. This article is about the latter. The relevant Pahlavi texts are presented and discussed. The article argues that Pahlavi authors used macrocosm-microcosm correspondence theory to elaborate the doctrine from Avestan rudiments.

This paper suggests a different approach in the study of Qing dynasty yongwu poetry, which is to analyse the cultural significance of the object in this literary subgenre instead of its lyrical essence. Taking eyeglasses as an example, this paper surveys the general development of imported and domestic eyeglasses in China from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and presents various literary interpretations assigned to this object through time. It further discusses Western and Chinese materiality, the economy and scholars' lives, political and social justification, as well as literary complexity and object identity, which are vital to the development of poetry on eyeglasses in the late imperial period.

The field of the various regional theatres, ti-fang-hsi which represent a substantial part of the traditional Chinese theatre, still remains largely unexplored. It has always been outside the scope of the interest of Chinese and European scholars, who have paid most attention to Yüan-ch'ü the drama of the Mongol era, to the K'un-ch'ü theatre, and lately also to Ching-hsi or Peking opera. The Peking opera is in fact one of the regional theatres by origin, but it occupies an exceptional position because it is distributed throughout China and is not localized in a specific part of the country like other ti-fang-hsi.

The manuscript Qarawīyūn 727 in Fez contains on folios 37b–38a a tradition reported by Yūnus b. Bukayr on the authority of Ibn Isḥāq. The tradition tells of a meeting between the Prophet and Zayd b. ‘Amr b. Nufayl, one of the ḥunafā' in Mecca. During the meeting Zayd b. ‘Amr was offered meat which he, however, refused to eat, arguing that he never ate meat sacrificed before idols.

A peculiar and interesting use of the instrumental case of the word sattā, which seems to have escaped the attention of the Sanskrit dictionaries, occurs frequently in the legal and commentatorial literature in connection with the Brahmanical gotra-system. Briefly, the situation is as follows: a Brahman may not marry within his own gotra. But as the word gotra came in the course of linguistic development to be loosely applied to subdivisions of the original groups, and even to individual families, while the exogamous unit remained the larger group, the prohibition of marriage within the gotra became ambiguous, and required to be supplemented, or rather defined, by a consideration of the pravara, the list of ṛṣi-names recited on specific sacrificial occasions. In other words, the pravara is used as a test to decide to which of the large exogamous groups a man belongs. In the pravara-appendix to the Baudhāyana Śrauta Sūtra the rule reads: eka eva ṛṣir yāvat pravareṣv anuvartate, tāvat samānagotratvam anyatra bhṛgvaṅgirasāṃ gaṇāt. “If even one ṛṣi recurs in the pravaras, that constitutes sameness of gotra (for exogamous purposes), except in the case of a gaṇa of the Bhṛgus and Aṅgirases (where a majority of the ṛṣi-names must be identical in order to prevent intermarriage).” Thus, for example, a member of the Nidhruva “gotra”, with the pravara “Kāśyapa, Āvatsāra, Naidhruva”, and a member of the Śaṇḍila “gotra”, with the pravara “Kāśyapa, Āvatsāra, Śāṇḍila”, both clearly belong to the Kaśyapa gotra, and as such are forbidden to marry.

It is argued that this work is a native Hausa tradition, and therefore a Hausa comment on history and the confrontation between Islam and paganism. This is important because our researches have hitherto been based almost entirely upon documents of the Fulani tradition, and Hausa comment has been scant. The fact that the song is written in Hausa is not of itself evidence of native Hausa origin, for certain of the Fulani are known to have composed in Hausa as well as Arabic and Fula. It is to the content and the imagery that we must look for this evidence.

Among the Dunhuang Tibetan texts held by the India Office Collection of the British Library is a very large scroll, catalogued as Ch. 9.II.17, and long recognized as a compendium of Tibeto-Chinese transcriptional texts. Following the practice of Walter Simon (1958), this document is now conventionally called the ‘Long Scroll’. In earlier years several small portions of it were identified by Simon and others, but more recently Professor Tokio Takata has published a transcription of the entire text and reconstructed or identified almost all of it (Takata, 1993). Nevertheless, there remain portions of the manuscript which have not yet been restored, and these present a continuing challenge to those interested both in the Long Scroll and in Tibeto-Chinese transcriptions in general. The purpose of the present paper is to fill two such lacunae.

In a previous article I quoted two or three sayings of the ỌkọŊkọ society of the Igbo people of south-eastern Nigeria and very briefly outlined some of the main features of the cultural setting of Igbo unwritten literature. I also suggested that we needed not so much odd specimens of this literature as considerable collections of the various genres in their social environment.

Professor Guillaume's new translation of the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq (in the recension of Ibn Hishām) will stand as an enduring monument to his tenure of the Chair of Arabic at the University of London. The Arabic has been rendered into elegant classical English, very readable in style, with none of that awkwardness of English idiom which often besets translations attempting to present an Arabian setting and outlook so utterly different from those of the Occident as that portrayed in the Sīrah.

It is hardly possible to praise the work which is the subject of this article too highly. It follows quite rapidly in the wake of a quartet of volumes devoted to the study of the languages of the Horn (Lamberti 1986, 1988a, 1988b; Haberland and Lamberti, 1988), and together with the more recently published Materialien zum Yemsa, (Lamberti, 1993b) constitutes a deeply impressive contribution to this area of scholarship. It is the present writer's long-held opinion that within this field the most pressing need continues to be good synchronic descriptions and dictionaries of the lesser-known languages and dialects. The work in hand meets just that need. As it happens, Shinassha has not been altogether neglected by previous research (cf. Grottanelli, 1941; Plazikowsky Brauner, 1950; Rottland, 1990), but every reader of this book will agree with me when I say that we now have a treatment of the language far beyond anything we have had previously. Indeed, as far as ‘Westkuschitik’ (alias ‘North Omotic’) languages are concerned, this bids well to be the most thoroughgoing description yet. Of course, it goes without saying that, short of reduplicating the researcher's fieldwork, it is impossible for any reader of such a book to vouch for the forms presented; but such is the scrupulous attention to detail in transcription, the accuracy in cross-referencing, and the general internal consistency in this particular work that little doubt could be entertained as to its being anything but authoritative.

Hardly had the article ‘A Farewell to the Khagan of the Aq-Aqatärān’ been printed, when my eye fell on a passage in Pliny which settles the problem posed by Mšyk. Shapur, it will be recalled, defeated the Roman army, under Gordianus (who fell in the battle), at Mšyk = MHCIXICH and MICIXH, and renamed the town (and district) Pērōz-Šabūr. The ancient name, in a form which precisely corresponds with the Parthian spelling Mšyk, is mentioned by Pliny, v, 21, 4 (§ 90): scinditur Euphrates a Zeugmate dlxxxxiv mp. circa vicum Massicen, et parte laeva in Mesopotamiam vadit per ipsam Seleuciam, circa eam praefluenti infusus Tigri; dexteriore autem alveo Babylonem … petit; a later passage, vi, 30, 3 (§ 120), indicates that the left branch referred to is the Narmalchas, the ‘Royal River’. The identity of Massice with Pēroz-Šabūr could have been recognized, even without the help of the inscription, by comparing Pliny with Ammianus Marcellinus, who made a statement in similar terms, xxiv, 2, 7, hinc pars fluminis scinditur … ducens ad tractus Babylonos interiores …, alia Naarmalcha nomine … Ctesiphonta praetermeat; the latter branch was crossed by the Roman army, which immediately came upon Pirisabora.

The aims of this paper are: (i) to report new dialect data for a vowel contrast in Acehnese which was not recorded in earlier descriptive work, (ii) to show that this contrast is cognate with a contrast reconstructed for Proto–Chamic, and (iii) to reconstruct this part of the vowel system of Proto–Aceh–Chamic.

A close genetic relationship between Acehnese and Chamic was first suggested by Nieman (1891). Although a contrary view was expressed by Blagden (1929), the issue has been conclusively put to rest by the work of Cowan (1933, 1948, 1974, 1981, 1983, 1988), Shorto (1975, 1977) and Collins (1975) who all agree on the existence of a distinct Aceh–Chamic sub–group within Austronesian.

Unfortunately, comparative work on Aceh-Chamic (Cowan: Chamo- Achehic, Shorto: Achino-Cham) has been hampered by problems of access to the data. In Lee's (1966) and Burnham's (1976) reconstructions of Proto-Chamic no mention is made of Acehnese. On the other hand, Cowan and Shorto, the two scholars who have furthered Aceh-Chamic studies the most, have not had access to Lee (1966), nor, in more recent works, to Burnham (1976). Another problem has been that Acehnese source materials have been restricted to just one dialect, as reflected by Djajadiningrat's (1934) and Kreemer's (1931) Acehnese-Dutch dictionaries.

This paper represents one step towards addressing some of these problems, by comparing new Acehnese dialect data with the comparative Chamic wordlist compiled by Lee and augmented by Burnham. I focus here upon a specific