bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Poison-detecting Birds.
Authors: Charpentier Jarl
Published: January 2010

The Arthaśāstra of Kautilya1 in the chapter of the first book dealing with the measures for safety within the royal harem has the following passage (ed. Jolly and Schmidt, vol. i, p. 25, 13 seq.):–

śukaḥ śārikā bhrngarājo vā sarpaviṣaśankāyāṃ krośati krauñco viṣābhyāśe mādyati glāyati jivajivakaḥ mriyate mattakokilaḥ cakorasyākṣiṇī virajyete ‖

“ The parrot, the maina, and the Malabar bird shriek when suspicious of snake poison; the curlew becomes quite tipsy2 in the neighbourhood of poison; the pheasant swoons; the amorous cuckoo dies; the eyes of the cakora partridge change their natural colour (i.e. become red).” 3

Kāmandaki has, of course, copied this as most other passages of the Kauṭilīya, cf. Nītisāra, vii, ll–13a–b:—
A Grammar of the Lau Language, North East Coast of Big Mala, Solomon Islands
Authors: Ivens W. G.
Published: January 2010

The Lau language is spoken by the inhabitants of the “ artificial islands ” in the lagoon off the north-east coast of Big Mala, Solomon Islands, and by the people who live on the natural island Ngwalulu (Manoba, of the Admiralty charts) which closes the northern entrance to the lagoon. The southern end of the lagoon is known as Ataa Cove, and the language of the islanders in that part of the lagoon has a closer affinity to the languages of the hill peoples of the mainland than has Lau proper. In Port Adam, Little Mala, there are two villages whose people also talk Lau. they being immigrants from Ataa Cove. The hill languages of the north end of Big Mala use certain sounds which do not appear in Lau. These sounds are ngg, i.e. ng in English “ finger ”, nd instead of pure d, mb instead of pure b. Also the Lau h appears as s or th.
A Study of the Language of Marau Sound, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands
Authors: Ivens W. G.
Published: January 2010

The Material for the study here presented was collected during a short stay at Marau Sound in 1927, in pursuance of my research work. Bishop Patteson, of the Melanesian Mission, published grammatical notes of the language of Marau Sound at Auckland, New Zealand, about 1860, together with a short catechism, a translation of the Apostles´ Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and a list of words. This material was edited by von der Gabelentz, and was published in his Melanesischen Sprachen, Leipzig, 1873. I have worked through the material and corrected it where necessary. The two pieces of translation, Creed and Lord's Prayer, which appear in von der Gabelentz. are too faulty to be inserted here as specimens of the language, and I had not the opporetunity of correcting them.

Bishop Patteson had several men from Marau Sound with him at Auckland, among whom, according to the information given to me, were Tootoo, Waaro mae, Waihunu, Nini pua, Porike, Porasi (who died at Auckland), and also Vouvete of Kaoka, a village on the mainland near by. The large percentage of San Cristoval wordsand grammatical constructions which appear in Bishop Patteson's material, as quoted by von der Gabelentz, is probably due to the influence of Taroaniara, a San Cristoval man, who acted as guide on the visits to Marau Sound, and whose wife was a Marau Sound woman. Taroaniara was with the party at Auckland, and evidently acted as interpreter. He may even have been commissioned by the Bishop to render certain stock pieces, e.g. the Creed, into the language of Marau Sound. This supposition would account for the presence in the translations of words like tahi, to live, tataro (San Cristoval dadaro) for “ cross ”, and for such grammatical constructions as ia, personal article in San Cristoval, instead of a, the Marau Sound usage. Also it would account for the use of ni, demonstrative article, and ia, personal pronoun 3rd singular. However, there is good internal evidence that the work in the main was done by the Bishop.
Mabale Stories
Authors: Tanghe J.
Published: January 2010

The following stories are the first two of a Mabale series. Mabale is a Bantu dialect spoken by the Ba–mabale (sing. Wa–mabale; both abbreviations of moto wa Mabale, a Mabale-man and batu ba Mabale, the Mabale people).

The Bamabale live on the right bank of the Congo River, up but especially down Nouvelle–Anvers.1 They also occupy the immediate hinterland and are even found in a few places on the left bank, opposite the same central town.

The Bamabale belong to the group of tribes we usually call Bangala. Amongst them are the Iboko, who also live at Nouvelle–Anvers, and whose ancestor Mata-Boiki (i.e. grandson of Boikr) has become famous, since his encounter with Stanley; further, the Mbenga, Motembo, Losengo and Boloki (between N.A. and the mouth of the Mongala); the Ndobo and Mbundzi (down N.A.), all on the right bank. The BaFәtә (near Lisala) and the εlεku (at Lolanga and near Coquilhatville); the Libinza, Ewaku, and Likoka (in the hinterland, on the Ngiri).
Tulu Prose Texts in Two Dialects.
Authors: Ayyar L. V. Ramaswami
Published: January 2010

I. Tuḷuva, a Dravidian speech spoken by about 400,000 people within a comparatively small area in the district of south Kanara, on the west coast of Madras Presidency, has preserved its individuality from a very early time, despite its being an uncultivated dialect with no literature of its own. The Mangalore missionaries were the first to reduce this unwritten language to writing, and they published in the closing decades of the last century a grammar and a dictionary of this speech, besides a few scriptural texts. An attempt is now being made by educated Tuḵuvas to cultivate their mother tongue as a literary speech through the composition of essays, stories, and poems.
Some Mongolian Maxims
Authors: Yoshitake S.
Published: January 2010

Of all the literary languages of Asia, the one to which in this country least attention has been paid is perhaps the language of the Mongols. No grammar or dictionary of any importance has ever been compiled in English; the study of the Mongolian language has in fact been almost monopolized by Russian and Scandinavian scholars, although some valuable contributions to the same cause have been made also by French, German, and Japanese scholars, published, however, in their own languages.
The Agastya Selection of Tamil Saivite Hymns
Authors: Thompson M. S. H.
Published: January 2010

Tevaram , a condensed and figurative expression, means “a garland of verse addressed to God”, with the added idea that devotion is the “thread” on which the several “flowers” or verses are strung. It thus forms a very fitting title for the devotional songs of the three saints, Appar, Sundarar, and Sambandar, the greatest of the sixty-three exponents of the Śaivite religion in the Tamil country.
Grammatical Sketch of the Jahai Dialect, Spoken by A Negrito Tribe of Ulu Perak and Ulu Kelantan, Malay Peninsula
Authors: Schebesta Pater P.
Published: January 2010

For typographical reasons the Jahai words and phrases in the following grammatical sketch have been transcribed from the Anthropos alphabet into the script of the International Phonetic Association. The two alphabets do not strictly correspond, and it seems desirable to add a few explanations of some of the symbols used.
Chansons De Pagayeurs
Authors: Tanghe Par J.
Published: January 2010

Les différents motifs musicaux que nous avons réunis ici sous le titre de “Chansons de Pagayeurs” ont été recueillis et annotés au cours d'excursions en pirogue sur le Fleuve, du côté de Nouvelle-Anvers et pendant des randonnées à travers les nombreuses voies d'eau sinueuses, qui sillonnent la forêt marécaguese de la contrée des Bangala.
Homicide in Islamic Law
Authors: Anderson J. N. D.
Published: January 2010

Perhaps the first point which attracts the attention of the European lawyer who begins to study the treatment of qatl (homicide) in the text-books of Islamic law is that it is there treated, in modern parlance, more as a tort than a crime. To understand the offence properly, however, no such simple classification will suffice: instead, it is essential to view it in its historical setting and detailed development.

Under the heading of ‘uqūbāt, or punishments, Muslim lawyers treat primarily the very limited number of offences for which definite penalties (hudūd, singular hadd) are expressly prescribed in the arīa, although reference is also frequently made to the discretionary power of the Ruler or Judge suitably to punish other wrongdoing. Offences in general, moreover, are normally sub-divided into those which are regarded as exclusively involving the “right of God”, those in which both the “right of God” and the right of some individual is recognized but the former is held to preponderate, and those in which the latter is regarded as predominant. In the first category all jurists include sariqa in its two degrees (theft and brigandage), zinā (illicit sex relations), urb (wine drinking) and, when placed in this context, irtidād (apostacy from Islam); in the second, some jurists place qaf (the unproved assertion of a chaste person's incontinence), although others put this in the third category; while in the latter all include homicide and wounding. In effect an offence in which the right of God (as the Head of the community) is held to be exclusive or preponderant more or less corresponds to the modern crime, and one in which a private individual's right is regarded as predominant to the modern tort, for the chief practical difference is that in the former neither the party primarily injured nor, indeed, the Court may drop the case or allow a settlement once it has been started, while in the latter the injured party may do either at his or her discretion.
Inscriptions Pehlvi des Plats Sassanides du Musée de l'Ermitage
Authors: Ghirshman R.
Published: January 2010

Dans les Mémoires du Comité des Orientalistes, F. A. Rosenberg a publié une coupe sassanide inédite, entrée il n'y a pas longtemps au Musée de l'Ermitage, et qui avait appartenu avant au Musée de l'Oural. Son décor comprend le sujet bien connu de la chasse du roi Bahrain Gor, et est semblable à, celui du plat qui appartint à 1'ancienne collection Likhatcheff et qui est conservé au Musée de Kazan.

Le plat de l'Oural porte une inscription gravée sur la partie extérieure du fond. F. A. Rosenberg publie cette inscription ainsi que deux autres qui sont gravees en pointillé, au même endroit, sur deux autres coupes sassanides. Pour simplifier la comparaison, nous les reproduisons dans l'ordre donné par Rosenberg.
The Sahaskritī poetic idiom in the Ādi Granth
Authors: Shackle C.
Published: January 2010

In two previous studies we have sought to advance the process of understanding the complex linguistic character of the Āḍi Granth (AG) by isolating and describing two special stylistic varieties of language, which significantly differ from the normal idiom of the book as a whole. These were shown to be based respectively on the extensive use of elements drawn from the dialects of the South-Western Panjab, and of loan-items from Persian: but it was further emphasized that they were stylistic varieties of the usual AG poetic language, and were in no sense to be regarded as straightforward examples of contemporary Multani or Indo-Persian.
A post-verbal aspectual particle in Classical Chinese: the supposed preposition hu
Authors: Graham A. C.
Published: January 2010

Throughout most of pre-Han literature we find a particle hu which appears to occupy the same syntactic position as the directive preposition yü. Indeed, one particle often substitutes for the other in parallel passages.

‘The old and the weak are rolled into the gutters’ (of the dead in time of famine; the parallel in Me. 2B/4 has yü for hu).
Defining Chinese Warlords and Their Factions
Authors: Ch'en Jerome
Published: January 2010

“ The warlords of twentieth–century china have received little scholarly attention.”. This omission is due, apart from the reasons viven in Mr. Sheridan's ‘Preface’, to the historical significance of the men and their period not being fully appreciated. What sort of men were they ? How did they rise to such great power? What effect did their abuse of power have on Chinese society ? Why did the May Fourth Movement, the Washington Conference, the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the reorganization of the Kuomintang, and the May 30th Movement use the misrule of the warlords as their back–drop? How far did the warlords undo the work of the restoration in the 1860“s and 19870”s ? These are but a few pertinent questions. In a period of merely 16 years (1912–28), over 1, 300 warlords had fought more than 140 provincial and interprovincial wars. Such a period is bund to be complicated but should not daunt the curiosity of the historian.
Literary and astronomical evidence for a total eclipse of the sun observed in ancient Ugarit on 3 May 1375 b.c.
Authors: Sawyer J. F. A. , Stephenson F. R.
Published: January 2010

A total eclipse of the sun is rare enough in any one place and spectacular enough to leave a profound impression on those who observe it. From very early times it was regarded as a portent of disaster and carefully recorded. Advances in the field of geophysics, together with the advent of the high-speed computer, have made it possible to compute early solar eclipses with a new degree of precision, and we may now expect to find a significant correlation between literary and astronomical evidence for solar eclipses in areas where a sufficiently representative bloc of literature has survived. The region around Has Shamra (ancient Ugarit) is one such area, and it was decided to compute the principal solar eclipses visible there during the period covered by the Ugaritic texts (c. 1450–1200 b.c.), and scan the texts for possible references.
On The Calendar Of Zoroastrian feasts
Authors: Boyce Mary
Published: January 2010

The curious fact has long been known that the greatest single festival of the Zoroastrian year, Nō Rōz, is celebrated twice over, with almost identical observances, on two separate days, namely Rōz Ohrmazd of Māh Fravardīn, and Rōz Hordād of the same month, i.e. on the first and sixth days of the first month of the year. As al-Bīrῡnī recorded, writing c. A.D. 1000: ‘On the sixth of Fravardīn, the day Hordād, is the Great Nō Rōz, for the Persians a feast of great importance’. The first of this month was celebrated as the Lesser Nō Rōz. Sasanian melodies were named for bothNō Rōz ī wuzorgandNō Rōz ī xwurdag; and later the two days were also known respectively as the ‘special’ Nō Rōz(Nō Rōz-i xāṣṣa)and the 'general’ Nō Rōz (Nō Rōz-i ‘āmma). Among the Parsis the Great Nō Rōz ‘is kept with as much pomp and rejoicing as…New Year's Day’; and in Persia orthodox priests still do not recite Rapithwin Gāh, the daily prayer which marks Nō Rōz and the return of summer, until noon on Rōz Hordād of Māh Fravardīn, on which day the faithful there gather together for communal services to celebrate the beginning of the new religious year.
A text in Old Amharic
Authors: Cowley Roger
Published: January 2010

The following text is taken from a MS owned by the monastery of May Anbäsa Kidanä Mәhrät, about 15 km. west of Makalle, on the new road to Hagärä, Sälam. The MS is described by its owners as Mäshafä Wägris, and contains the following items.
The beginnings of Islamic learning in Sind—a reconsideration
Authors: Friedmann Yohanan
Published: January 2010

Several works dealing with the cultural history of Islam in India assert that the province of Sind became a centre of Islamic learning shortly after its conquest by Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim al-Thaqafī at the beginning of the eighth century a.d.
Man, nafs, rūḥ, 'aql
Authors: Tritton A. S.
Published: January 2010

This essay takes for granted articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam and papers by D. B. Macdonald and W. E. Calverley but a brief summary may be allowed. Nafs and rūh were used loosely to mean almost anything connected with life, but acquired new meanings as the years went by. Men differed about the nature and activity of all three constituents of man. ‘Soul’ is almost the equivalent of nafs in its precise sense though it may be hard at times to decide if ‘self’ is not more appropriate. It is easier to admit the existence of soul than to define it for it has neither genus nor proprium; any definition is imperfect and any description inadequate. It is part of the world soul as intellect is part of the world intellect, it is part of the spirit of God, torn off by the instrumentality of intellect, it is simple, incorruptible, and unchangeable. Many were the suggestions; it is a compound of constituents (rukn), union of elements('unsur), a self-moving accident, hot spirit, a nature in perpetual motion. It is a living substance(jawhar) but is not in the body in the same way as rūh is. Another idea is close to a Jewish view that all souls are one and are made different by the influences of the spheres and stars through or by which they pass on their journey to earth. The threefold division of soul into vegetal, animal, and rational was known and may have something to do with the religious division into the soul at rest in faith, the censorious soul, and the lusting soul. Instead of censorious the meaning ‘changeable’ is also given.8 A variant is that a believer has three souls while a hypocrite and an unbeliever have each one.
Land tenure in the Middle Assyrian period: a reconstruction
Authors: Postgate J. N.
Published: January 2010

This article is an attempt to assemble and reassess the evidence relating to the problems of land tenure in the Middle Assyrian period, and to show that all ‘private’ land was normally held as a concession from the crown in return for the performance of ilku obligations. The subjects are treated in five main sections:

1: ilku and military service (pp. 496–502)

2: the Middle Assyrian laws, tablet A, § 45 (pp. 502–8)

3: allocation of tenures by the crown (pp. 508–12).

4: evidence from the land sale documents (pp. 512–17)

5: conclusions (pp. 517–19)
Spontaneous cerebrals in Sansktit
Authors: Burrow T.
Published: January 2010

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.
A seventeenth-century chronicle by Ibn al-mukhtār: a critical study of Ta'rīkh al-fattāsh
Authors: Levtzion N.
Published: January 2010

In 1853, Heinrich Barth visited Timbuktu, and ‘was so successful as to have an opportunity of pursuing a complete history of the Kingdom of Songhay. … These annals, according to the universal statement of the learned people of Negroland, were written by a distinguished person of the name of Ahmed Baba’. With this chronicle at his disposal, Barth was able, for the first time, to present a meaningful outline of the history of the Songhay empire. Circumstances prevented Barth bringing back a complete copy of the manuscript. In the 1890's, however, following the French occupation, three manuscripts of that chronicle reached Paris, to be edited by 0. Houdas and E. Benoist, translated by Houdas, and published in 1898–1900. Houdas proved that this chronicle, Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān, had been written not by Ahmad Bābā; but by another scholar of Timbuktu, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sa'dī, born in 1596. The chronicle ends in 1655, which may be taken as the date of its completion.
Is Biblical Hebrew a language?
Authors: Ullendorff Edward
Published: January 2010

There is no need to explain what I mean by “Biblical Hebrew” (BH): I refer, of course, to the language of the major part of the Old Testament (OT) which is written in a Canaanite tongue clearly distinguished from the few chapters in Daniel and Ezra which are composed, or at any rate extant, in Aramaic. While we have no knowledge of the precise nature of the language spoken by the Hebrew immigrants into Canaan, it is likely that from a linguistic point of view the OT owes more to the vanquished Canaanites than to the conquering Hebrews. The latter are called'iḇrīmalready in the Patriarchal narratives (Gen. xiv, 13, xl, 15, etc.), but their language ('iḇrīṯ) is never as such mentioned in the OT. This may, of course, be owing to one of those purely fortuitous circumstances in the transmission of the ancient Hebrew vocabulary with which this paper is in part concerned. Whetheryәhūḏīṯ‘Jewish’ (2 Kings xviii, 26, Isa. xxxvi, 11, etc.),śәṗaṯ kәna'an‘the language of Canaaan’ (Isa. xix, 18), and'iḇrīṯ‘Hebrew’ (first attested in the prologue to Ben Sira) are wholly identical is—as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere—not fully established.
Some characteristics of Meccan speech
Authors: Ingham Bruce
Published: January 2010

The following is an account of the spoken Arabic of Mecca. The present work does not attempt a comprehensive description but is confined to the phonology of the syllable and the morphology of the verb and affixes; such a study is perhaps the most economical way of showing the character of the dialect and its relation to other dialects. My thanks are due to Mr. M. H. Bakalla, a post-graduate student of this school and a native of Mecca, for his constant help in the preparation of this article.
The Kirgiz original of Kukotay found
Authors: Hatto A. T.
Published: January 2010

The Kirgiz original of the Smert' Kukotay-khana i ego pominki (= K), long thought to have survived only in Ch. Valikhanov's celebrated translation, was discovered in Leningrad in 1964 by Valikhanov's distinguished editor-in-chief, Professor Alkey Margulan of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences. He announced his discovery in the August (No. 8) issue of his Academy's ‘Herald’ (Khabarši/Vestnik) of 1965 and printed in adapted Cyrillic transliteration excerpts from the text totalling 885 (out of over 3,000) lines, together with a 13-page introduction in Kazakh dealing chiefly with the biographical background of Valikhanov's recording of the text.
Ṣanhājah scholars of Timbuctoo
Authors: Norris H. T.
Published: January 2010

The scholars who are descendants of Muhammad Aqīt b. ‘Umar b. ‘Alī b. Yahyā al-Ṣanhājī, and who include Aḥmad Baba al-Tinbuktī, are rightly regarded as being among the greatest in the medieval Sudan. Yet, in part due to the fact that the mosque and quarter of Sankuray were the focal point of their scholastic endeavours and in part due to the vague use of the geographical expression Takrūr, which included, as an appendage, areas northwards to the Mauritanian Adrar as well as the Sudanese Sāhil, the essentially ḥanh¯jī and Saharan origin and background of these scholars is sometimes underrated.
Some Reflections on Zurvanism
Authors: Boyce Mary
Published: January 2010

From the studies of Zurvanism made in this century, a large measure of agreement has been reached. It is accepted that Zurvan ‘est en general le dieu du firmament lumineux et étoilé … avant tout le dieu du sort … en général regardé comme un dieu quadriforme’; and that his cult was ‘enraciné surtout dans l'lran occidental’. But a fundamental disagreement has developed over the origin of Zurvanism. H. S. Nyberg, although pointing out scrupulously that ‘le mythe zervanite n'st directement attesté que dans le mazdéisme’, and that ‘nous ne trouvons jamais un système zervanite où Ormuzd ne soit représenté’, has nevertheless maintained that Zurvan is an ancient Iranian god, whose cult, older than Zoroaster, has been partly adopted into, and partly obliterated by, orthodox Mazdeism. In this he has been followed by a number of scholars.
Material Relating to the State of Learning Among the Fulani Before their Jihād
Authors: Hiskett M.
Published: January 2010

The existence of an Arabic MS known as Kitāb al-barakafi 'l-sukūn walharaka wa-hiya 'l-marsuma bi-'ida‘ al-nusūkh man akhadhtu ‘anhu min shuyūkh was known to Delafosse who believed it to be the work of a paternal uncle of Sultan Bello. A. Brass has deduced from internal evidence in the Tazyīn al-waraqāt of ‘Abdullāh ibn Fodio that the work belongs to ‘Abdullāh, and has accepted the title in the form given by Delafosse. Georges Vajda has shown that this title arises from the confusion of two different works, and that the title of ‘Abdullāh's work is 'Idā‘ al-nusūkh man akhadhtu ‘anhu min al-shuyūkh.
Taklamakan miscellany
Authors: Bailey H. W.
Published: January 2010

To do honour to my old friend Walter Simon I have put together here five documents from Central Asia. These are: (1) the photograph of the Turkish text in Khotan Saka script; (2) a Tibetan letter in Khotan Saka script; (3) pieces of document from Kuci (Kucha) inscribed with Kharoṣṭhī and Brahml script; (4) a fragment of Khotan Saka containing the word bisīvrai; and (5) three Tibetan documents with Khotan Saka words.
The terminations of the Archaic Chinese pronouns
Authors: Graham A. C.
Published: January 2010

Since Chinese is the crucial example of a purely isolating language, linguists have long been interested in any phenomena which suggest that some classes of Chinese words may once have been infected. A point which has attracted especial attention is the existence of a pair of 1st person pronouns, wu/*ngo- and wo/*ngấ , of which the latter has free distribution but the former is generally subject or possessive down to the second century B.C. Half a century ago Karlgren pointed out the same terminations in a pair of 2nd person pronouns, ju/*ńo' and erh/* , and suggested that proto-Chinese had pronoun declension, with -o marking the nominative and genitive and -a the accusative (but his evidence of restricted distribution was inconclusive except in the case of wu). Later Kennedy preferred to explain the distribution of wu by classing it with various other pronouns and particles in which the level tone is associated with uncompleted utterance (so that either, like wu, they are never phrase-final, or they are phrase-final but interrogative, as with hu/*g'o- and the other interrogative particles). A further important contribution is Chou Fa-kao's discovery of a possessive termination -ǝg, which he ascribes to fusion with the possessive particle chih/*ǝg- . In 1969 I myself proposed a classification of the pronouns into two systems, the pre-Classical and the Classical.
Some dental clusters in Tai
Authors: Li Fang Kuei
Published: January 2010

In 1954 I published an article on consonant clusters in Tai, in which a number of clusters such as etc., were reconstructed for Proto-Tai. Some of them are preserved in some modern dialects, and some others have since been found to exist in the Saek language. However, not all clusters can be attested in the modern languages, and this is particularly true for the dental clusters. In the case of labial or velar clusters, namely a labial or velar consonant followed by a liquid, a small number of the languages preserve at least some of the clusters, such as Siamese, Ahom, Wuming, etc., but in the case of dental clusters hardly any modern language preserves such clusters. Saek is the only language which shows dental clusters, tl- and tr- according to Haudricourt (1963, 158) but tl-, tr-, thl-, and thr- according to Gedney (1970, 74). However, most of these clusters do not seem to go back to Proto-Tai dental clusters, but rather to velar clusters. Siamese has tr-, but it occurs mainly in Sanskrit and Cambodian loans. Thus the reconstruction of dental clusters is far more difficult than that of other clusters.
A michiyuki passage from the Taiheiki
Authors: O'Neill P. G.
Published: January 2010

Early forms of michiyuki‘travel sequences’ in works of Japanese literature are to be found in a few of the songs and poems in the eighth-century Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and Man'yōshū. They continued to be used in general literature and, through sung entertainments such as imayō, enkyoku, and kusemai, appeared also in various forms of drama. The best examples are to be found in the medieval military tales and in the puppet plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), where the treatment of the travel sequence reaches its peak by a combination of text, music, and movement. One of the most famous michiyuki texts, however, is this passage from the Taiheiki, a fourteenth-century war tale, which describes the journey from Kyōto , the imperial capital, to Kamakura , the seat of the military government in the eastern part of the country, made by a court noble in 1331 after he was arrested for being implicated in the emperor Go-Daigo's second plot to overthrow the Hōjō military rulers.
Śākyamuni's final nirvāṇa
Authors: Snellgrove David L.
Published: January 2010

Despite the admonitions of responsible scholars, writers of books on Buddhism still tend to assume that a reasonably historical account of the life and personal teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha may be extracted from the earliest available canonical accounts. This quest of the historical Buddha began as a Western nineteenth-century interest, imitating both in its pre-suppositions and its methods of inquiry the parallel quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The general principle of operation is set forth succinctly by Hermann Oldenberg in his impressive work, Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, Berlin, 1881, 92:

‘Abstrahiren wir nun von den Traditionen der bezeichneten Kategorien, welche sämmtlich unhistorisch oder doch des unhistorischen Characters verdachtig sind, so behalten wir als festen Kern der Erzählungen von Buddha eine Reihe positiver Thatsaohen iibrig, die wir als einen zwar sehr bescheidenen, aber vollkommen gesicherten Besitz für die Geschichte in Anspruch nehmen dürfen’.
Un ensemble sémantique tibétain: créer et procréer, être et devenir, vivre, nourrir et guérir
Authors: Stein R. A.
Published: January 2010

L'ensemble annoncé dans le titre comporte les mots suivants qui peuvent remplir, selon le contexte, les fonctions de nom, verbe ou adjectif:sridousrid-paetsri;sprulousprul-paet 'phrul;so, sos, gso-ba, 'cho-ba, bços. Bien entendu, les divers elements de cet ensemble relevent aussi d'autres ensembles séinantiques qui coupent le premier. Leur groupement peut paraître arbitraire; il est le fait de l'auteur de cette note qui a cru y déceler une certaine homogéneité de conception. Chacun de ces mots appartient à une famille ou à, un arbre généalogique dont les ramifications peuvent former avec d'autres un réseau compliqué. Le regroupement proposé vise à mettre á jour des connotations inconnues ou insuffisamment définies par les dictionnaires. L'auteur a eu pour principe de se laisser guider par les associations trouvées dans les textes mêmes, les contextes, plutôt que d'élaborer des définitions basées sur l'usage exclusif des dictionnaires. II est pleinement conscient du fait que les auteurs de ces textes appartiennent à une époque relativement tardive de l'histoire de la langue. Mais il pense aussi que, si ces auteurs ne pouvaient sûrement pas avoir une connaissance consciente de l'étymologie des mots qu'ils employaient, ils on dû être guidés inconsciemment, à. leur insu, par le sens de leur propre langue que le savant européen ne peut avoir qu' à, un faible degré. Certes les rapprochements faits par les auteurs indigénes, les connotations ou associations d'idées qu'ils ont retenues ne reflètent pas nécessairement l'étymologie réelle (remontant historiquement à la formation du tibètain en tant que membre de la grande famille des langues tibéto-birmanes).
Pali Phāsu- and Dātta-
Authors: Turner R. L.
Published: January 2010

Madame C. Caillat in a magistral article in Journal Asiatique, CCXLVIII, 1, 1960, 41–64, followed by a note in JA, CCXLIX, 4, 1961, 497–502, has in establishing the meaning of Pa.1 phāsu- confirmed its connexion with sprś. I question Mme. Caillat's exposition on one point only, namely the exact form of the original derivative of sprś lying behind Pa. phāsu-. Like the previous scholars whom she quotes—Kern, Hoernle, Pischel, and Schwarzwald—she assumes the original form to have been *sparśu-, the resultant *phassu- becoming phāsu-, although recognizing that examples of such a change in Pali are rare; and for most of these an alternative explanation will be offered below. Nevertheless in Prakrit and, according to Pischel (Gr. Pk., § 62), with special frequency in Ardhamāgadhi the first geminate to be shortened with lengthening of a previous vowel was -ss- (Turner, BSOAS, XXXIII, 1,1970,171). The Jaina texts in Ardhamāgadhī have both phāsaī ∽ Pa. phassati < *sparśati and phāsuya- ∽ Pa. phāsu(ka)-; and it is tempting to see the saffle origin for ā in both Ardhamāgadhī words phāsai and phāsuya-. But the existence of Pa. phāsu(ka)- invites the assumption of another origin than spass- both for it and Pk.amg. phāsuya-, for according to Mme. Caillat (JA, 1960,47) the antiquity of Pa. phāsu- is assured by the occurrence of aphāsu- in the Pātimokkha as well as by phāsu- in the Aśokan Calcutta-Bairāt Minor Rock Edict.
A Confucian's view of the taxation of commerce: Ts'ui Jung's memorial of 703
Authors: Twitchett Denis
Published: January 2010

One of the most striking developments during the T'ang period is the gradual improvement of the position of merchants and artisans, traditionally held in low esteem, and the parallel change in the attitude of government and the ruling élite towards them. These changes, which I have described in some detail elsewhere, led in the last century of the T'ang and the following period to the gradual acceptance of the desirability, and indeed the necessity, of levying taxation from the merchants and from the urban population. Th
is in turn implied the tacit abandonment of the long-established ‘physiocratic’ doctrine that the state revenue system should be based exclusively upon taxes and labour services levied upon the peasantry. The document which forms the subject of this paper is perhaps the fullest and most closely argued statement by a T'ang statesman of the traditional position on this matter.
Zurvanica. III.
Authors: Zaehner R. C.
Published: January 2010

With this article the series “Zurvanica” comes to an end. There still remain passages in the Dēnkart deserving of attention, notably in the fourth book. The author has, however, found the relevant passages in that book so obscure and so difficult that he cannot undertake to publish a translation of them for a long time yet. In the present article all passages of importance have been collected from the third book. To these have been added the celebrated Daharĩ passage in the Šikand GumāniīVazār and the conclusion of that book. The translation of certain Pahlavī terms has sometimes been a source of embarrassment.
A Soyūrghāl of Qāsim b. Jahāngir Aq-qoyunlu (903/1498).
Authors: Minorsky V.
Published: January 2010

The story of the Persian document which forms the subject of the present article is not devoid of romance. It was discovered in 1896 by the well-known Bosnian scholar Ṣafvet-beg R. Bašagić in the possession of a local noble, Nuri-beg Čengić of Ustikolina. This family is said to be immigrants in Bosnia; their forefathers must have come as officials of the Ottoman Empire, then received fiefs and settled in the country. The farmān in question being kept in the family archives, and evidently connected with the ancestors of the Čengić, points to the origin of the family from far-away Kurdistan.

A facsimile of the interesting document was published by Bašagić1first accompanied by an article in Serbian, and then by a German translation of the latter. On the whole the work of the late Bosnian scholar quite satisfactorily served its immediate purpose, if we take into consideration the difficulties the author must have had, working as he was in a provincial town, wheTe-a knowledge of Persian was certainly no common attainment.
Rifā‘ah Badawī Rāfi‘ aṭ-Ṭahtāwī: The Egyptian Revivalist
Authors: Heyworth-Dunne J.
Published: January 2010

Rifā‘ahbey, for by this name is he generally known, was born at Ṭahṭā, in the province of Girgā, in 1801. His genealogy goes back to Muḥammad al-Bāḳir b. ‘Alī Zain al-‘Ābidīn b. al-Ḥasan b. Fāṭimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muḥammad. His ancestors had been well-to-do but when Rifā‘ah was born, his parents were in great pecuniary difficulties. They were apparently affected by the confiscations by Muḥammad ‘Alī of the iltzamāt during the early part of his reign. Rifā‘ah’s father was compelled to go from one place to another in order to seek hospitality. At one time the family stayed with relations at Mansẖa’at an-Nīdah, near the town of Girgā these peregrinations, the young Riā‘ah began to memorize the Ḳor’ān under the care of his father.,
A Guide to the Metres of Urdū Verse.
Authors: Grahame Bailey T.
Published: January 2010

From the point of view of Europeans there is no book that deals satisfactorily with Urdū, metres, and as the metres are numerous, it is difficult for a student to recognize any except the three or four commonest. They have all been taken over unaltered from Persian, and Persian took them almost unaltered from Arabic. To Europeans the rules of Urdū prosody seem arbitrary, because metres must conform to certain rules for which there seems to be no adequate reason.

For example the commonest Urdū, metre is scanned as follows: maf‘ūlu fā‘ilātu mafā‘īlu fā‘ilun. It might just as well be scanned mustaf‘ilun mafā‘ilu mustaf‘ilun fa‘al or in other ways, but we should be arbitrarily told that there are no such metres and that in fact they would be impossible.
An eighteenth century Ethiopian dynastic marriage contract between Empress Mentewwab of Gondar and Ras Mika'el Sehul of Tegre
Authors: Pankhurst Richard
Published: January 2010

The decline of the Gondarine monarchy and the concomitant increase in wealth and power of Tegre province, and of its capital Adwa, led, in the mid-eighteenth century, to a shift in the Ethiopian balance of power. This development, which threatened the then impoverished ruling house of Gondar, and the very continuity of the but weakly centralized State, resulted, as on other such occasions, in a major dynastic alliance between the contending parties. The compact involved two of the most important Ethiopian political figures of the century: Emperor Bakaffa's astute widow Empress Mentewwab, and the first of the great warlords of Tegre, Sehul Mika'el, a rich and powerful chieftain who was soon to emerge as the maker and breaker of kings. Mika'el was by then already well known in the Ethiopian metropolis where, according to the later Scottish traveller James Bruce, he was so ‘lavish in his money’ that ‘all Gondar were his friends’, as a result of which it was ‘plain’ to ‘everybody, that nothing could stop’ his ‘growing fortune’.
The verb in northern Najdi Arabic
Authors: Abboud Peter F.
Published: January 2010

The dialects spoken in the Najd of Saudi Arabia have striking features which not only are unknown or unreported in other dialects but also retain some characteristics of the 'Arabiyya and of ancient dialects of the peninsula reported by the Arab grammarians. On both these counts, they are of paramount importance for synchronic, comparative and historical dialectology. Yet little is known of them and published materials remain scanty. It is the purpose of this article to describe in some detail the morphology of the verb, i.e., the stem, the subject markers and the object pronouns, and in the process, present phonological features and processes, in a dialect spoken in the North of the Najd, specifically that of Hāyil. This is an important town on the edge of the Jabal Shammar mountains just south of the Nafud, and some 350 miles to the north-west of Riyādh. Although the dialect manifests features which are typically Najdi, in the sense that investigation shows them to exist in other dialects of the Najd, it also possesses peculiarities all its own.
Speech through music: the Sino-Tibetan gourd reed-organ
Authors: Bradley D.
Published: January 2010

There is evidence that a particular musical instrument was used by various Sino-Tibetan groups to convey speech, both for courting and for religious purposes. The Proto-Sino-Tibetan etymon for this gourd reed-organ is reconstructible as *s-jan. Its use as a speech surrogate is widely reported, from the earliest sources to the present. It is still used thus by many Tibeto-Burman groups.
The interchange of 'AD/'AL in Targum Neofiti 1
Authors: Lund Jerome A.
Published: January 2010

These examples from Targum Neofiti 1 should be appended to the note of Jonas C. Greenfield, ‘The prepositions ‘AD/‘AL in Aramaic and Hebrew’.
Preservation of original Aryan vocabulary in the modern languages
Authors: Turner R. L.
Published: January 2010

The oldest texts—Rgveda and Avesta—of the Indie (Indo-aryan) and Iranian languages, which together form the Aryan family, agree in much of their vocabulary, as well as in much of their grammar and syntax.
Space-Forms in the Work of the Baghdād Maqāmāt Illustrators, 1225–58
Authors: James David
Published: January 2010

While acknowledging the complexity of fourteenth-century Persian painting, it would be fair to state that one of the things that makes the painting of 1400 so visibly and obviously different from that of 1300 is the introduction in the course of that century of a number of technical developments which increased, quite dramatically, the area of picture-space available to the artist. Undoubtedly the most important of these was ‘the development of the “high horizon” technique, whereby the ground is seen, as it were, from above so that the figures can be spaced out in various planes without interfering with one another, thus allowing the composition to be conceived on a larger scale with the corresponding diminution in scale of the human figures in proportion to the whole’. To this one might add the expansion of the composition beyond the confines of the frame in a manner more ambitious than hitherto, and, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the appearance of the double-page miniature which is perhaps the logical conclusion of these developments.
Notes on the Structure of Galab
Authors: Sasse Hans-Jürgen
Published: January 2010

There is very little published material of the Galab (Geleba, Dasenech, Dathanaik, or Marille) language which is spoken around the northern shore of Lake Rudolf in the Gamu Gofa Province of south-western Ethiopia and in the adjacent areas of northern Kenya. Several attempts to determine the linguistic position of this language have been made, nevertheless no generally accepted classification exists as yet. This is, of course, due to lack of adequate descriptive data. I would therefore like to present in this paper a preliminary analysis of my own field data on Galab in the hope that it will at least provide a somewhat sounder basis for future work on the classification of the language.
Some Amharic and other documents from the Eugen MittwochNachlass
Authors: Ullendorff Edward
Published: January 2010

There are two specific reasons for publishing these documents—quite apart from their intrinsic value—in an article in honour of H. J. Polotsky. My teacher H.J.P. and myself were, at different times,in statu pupillari, at any rate informally, in relation to Eugen Mittwoch (1876–1942). Polotsky took part in a Syriac class and in 1933–4 collaborated in the work of editing the Arŝam documents (private letter from H.J.P. to E.U. dated 25 December 1977), while I attended some informal lectures on Arabic given by Mittwoch in the mid-1930s. And, secondly, Polotsky has declared that any specimen of Aläqa Tayyä's handwriting is ‘always extremely pleasing’ (see below andBSOAS, XXXV, 2, 1972, 255 ff.).
Manuel II Palaeologos on the strife between Bāyezīd I and Ḳāḓị Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad
Authors: Zachariadou Elizabeth A.
Published: January 2010

The letters of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologos, studied and exploited by Byzantinists since they were published for the first time by E. Legrand in 1893, are now available in a new edition by G. Dennis, in which they are translated, accompanied by the appropriate comments and, in most cases, accurately dated. These letters constitute a most valuable contemporary source for the years 1382–1417 because they help to fill one part of the much deplored ‘gap’ in Byzantine historiography. Moreover, they include evidence which sheds light on some details of early Ottoman history, as will appear from the following analysis of Manuel's material dealing with the conflict between the sultan Bāyezīd I and the ruler of Sivas, ḲāḲi Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad in 1391.
Provincial reforms in Taung-ngu Burma
Authors: Lieberman Victor B.
Published: January 2010

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.
Some notes on ‘A text in Old Amharic’ of Roger Cowley
Authors: Haile Getatchew
Published: January 2010

A few uears ago, Roger Cowley edited an interesting text of the Tamhartä haymanot in older Amharic with an English translation under the title given above. The text is of special value to te study of the history of Amharic: it is relatively lengthy (14 fols., 2 cols., 12 lines to a column and 6–8 characters to a line), in prose, and shows most of the features of archaic Amharic known so far. In spite of the fact that, to use the author's own words.
Kha and other Words denoting “Zero” in Connection with the Metaphysics of Space
Authors: Coomaeaswamy Ananda K.
Published: January 2010

Kha, cf. Greek, is generally “cavity”; and in the Ṛg Veda, particularly, “the hole in the nave of a wheel through which the axle runs” (Monier-Williams). InJourn. U.P. Hist. Soc., vii, 44–5 and 62, Mr. A. N. Singh shows conclusively that in Indian mathematiqal usage, current during the earlier centuries of the Christian era,khameans “zero”; Sūryadeva, commenting on Aryabhaṭa, says “thekhasrefer to voids (khāni śūnyā upa lakṣitdāi) … thuskhadwnakemeans the eighteen places denoted by zeros”.
The Verb “to say” as an Auxiliary in Africa and China
Authors: Waley A. , Armbruster C. H.
Published: January 2010

It is well known that the verb yen to “say” has some very peculiar usages in early Chinese. In about forty instances in the Book of Odes it obviously has not its normal meaning “to say” (or “what is said”, i.e. words). For example (Legge's edition, p. 62), does not mean “The duke says he bestows a goblet”, but simply “The duke bestows a goblet”.
Sons of suns: myth and totemism in early China
Authors: Allan Sarah
Published: January 2010

The ‘problem of myth’ for Western philosophers is a problem of interpreting the meaning of myths and explaining the phenomenon of myth making. The ‘problem of myth’ for the sinologist is one of finding any myths to interpret and explaining why there are so few—for myth-making is generally assumed to be a universal faculty of mankind. One explanation for the paucity of myth in the traditional sense of stories of the supernatural in ancient Chinese texts is the nature of Chinese religion. In China, gods, as well as ancestors and ghosts, were believed to be dead men, spirits who had lived in this world at a certain place and time and continued to need sustenance from the living and to exert influence over them. They related primarily to those who gave them ritual offerings and little thought was given to any possible interaction between them
The Brasses of Badr al-Dīn Lu'lu’
Authors: Rice D. S.
Published: January 2010

Only one Islamic metal vessel can be said with certainty to have been made at Mosul. This is the so-called Blacas Ewer in the British Museum which bears an Arabic inscription stating that it was engraved byujā’ b. Man'a al-Mawṣilīat Mosulin the month of Rajab 629 (= May 1232).