In a recent study entitled ‘The muwashshaḣāt: are they a mystery?’, I described the muwashshaḣāt as the product of the simple and natural attempt by the Arab literati to extend the proliferation or permutations of rhyme in Arabic prose to Arabic poetry. I pointed out also that in order to accommodate this proliferation of rhyme or to make it possible in poetry, Arabic verse forms had to undergo two notable and quite pervasive developments:

The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan has, in recent years, attracted an ever-growing volume of research. In part, this may be attributed to the easier access to archival sources, both in England and—to a lesser extent—in the Nile Valley. In addition, there has evolved an increasing interest in bilateral relations between Egypt and the Sudan, prompted in part by the political outlook of Presidents Sadat and Numayri, and even more important, by the apparent decline in the Nile waters, especially in the 1980s. The Integration Charter {takamut), first announced by Presidents. Sadat and Numayri in 1974 and signed by Egypt and the Sudan in 1981, sought to establish co-operation, in a wide variety of spheres, which would—so it was hoped—ultimately lead to unity. These anticipations failed to materialize following the chatige of regime in the Sudan in 1985, and seem even less realistic under the present Sudanese fundamentalist dictatorship.

The Yazata of the benediction known as the Dahma Āfriti is a figure whose importance in the Zoroastrian pantheon has been obscured, it seems for two main reasons. One is that, although she was apparently originally accorded a place among the thirty ‘calendar’ divinities, she subsequently lost this, probably in an Achaemenian calendar reform. The other is that later still her identity became confused through her name acquiring several Middle Persian forms: Dahm Yazad, Dahmān Āfrīn, Dahmān, the last, since it is a formal plural, causing some misunderstandings in her veneration locally.

The Avestan adjective dahma is understood to have meant originally ‘instructed’, that is, in the Zoroastrian faith; but, to judge from its use in context, it developed the sense of ‘pious, devout’, occurring frequently with ašavan as a term for a good Zoroastrian. The name of the benediction is accordingly generally rendered as the ‘Pious Blessing’. Much power was attributed by Zoroastrians to solemnly pronounced words, and the compilers of the extended yasna liturgy set the ‘Pious Good Blessing’, Dahṃa VaohviĀfriti, after the Ahuna Vairya, Ašəm Vohū and Yenhē hātąm as the fourth of the mighty utterances which crush and destroy Anra Mainyu and his hordes (Y.61:l–2). (The other three form a group because together they precede the Gāthās, and together are the subject of the commentary which forms (Y. 19–21.)

Partial and complete Bible translations into classical Chinese existed well before Protestant missionaries actually began to work actively among the Chinese. Translation work accelerated once missionaries gained a foothold in the newly opened treaty ports after 1842, and the entire Bible or portions of it were translated into Fuzhou, Amoy, Canton, Hakka, Suzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai dialects. S. I. J. Schereschewsky's (1831–1906) translation of the Old Testament (OT) into the northern vernacular in 1875 opened a new chapter. His translation was accessible to larger numbers of people and, in contrast to the OT in classical Chinese, was readily understood when read to the illiterate. Moreover, unlike previous translations, it was prepared entirely from the Hebrew original.

The purpose of this essay is to examine some of Schereschewsky's views on translating and several of the techniques which he employed in rendering into Chinese the Book of Genesis. My basic assumption is that translation is an interpretative activity. When a text is transposed from one language into another, changes are introduced that are consonant with the receiving languages and culture. Translation is affected by interpretations from within the receptor tradition which, in turn, makes possible the acceptance of the translation and the ideas which it contains. Thus the Old (as well as the New) Testament translations represented one of the initial steps in the signification of Protestant Christianity.

The aim of this article is to present a new edition, translation and commentary of the treaty concluded in 1387 between the Ottoman ruler Murād I (1362–1389) and the Comune of Genoa. As the only known extant fourteenth-century treaty between the Ottomans and a western city state, the treaty is of considerable importance for early Ottoman history, a period for which contemporary Turkish sources are scant.

The definitions of the term ‘ālam (world) given by Muslim scholars from the tenth century onwards are as varied as the discussions on the world's shape, the aim of its existence and its reality (or irreality). Most theologians would agree that ‘ālam is ‘all that is not God’, or ‘all that exists, other than God’, thereby implying that the world is simply ‘all that is created’.

In the 1950s when Professor Stein was engaged in his research on the Gesar epic, he wrote: ‘If there ever existed a complete recension of all Chapters, they remain unknown to us. Neither written texts nor oral versions contain the totality of the epic story. And the ones that we know of at present, present themselves in the form of a literature that is still alive and mobile.’

Since then, the situation has totally changed with the publication of many previously unknown chapters, not only those that have come down to us from the past but also the new products of a literature that is still expanding, as Professor Stein so accurately observed. What I am concerned with here, however, is the theoretical basis which underlies the ordering of the episodes relating to the hero and his life, and the notion of a correct ‘chronological order’ which the tradition presents, however fictitious the events may be. It is the materials which existed before our time which are most pertinent here and which permit us to identify the theoretical basis of which I speak. That basis provides a perspective on the question as a whole, and a guide through the tangled structure of the Tibetan epic. We are now, as I said, in a better position than in the 1950s to make an assessment of the whole body of Tibetan epic literature.

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.

Tone made its appearance in descriptions of Tibetan pronunciation as early as 1881, when Jäschke introduced the term into an account of the prosodic features of the spoken Tibetan dialects: ‘A system of tones has been introduced. … I am told by European students of reputation, who have made the Tonic languages of eastern Asia their special department, that only the first principles of what are known as the high and low Tones, have made their way into Tibetan. … Here, as in the languages of Farther India, generally, which possess an alphabetic system of writing, the Tone is determined by the initial consonant of the word.

The problem concerning the phonetic value of the Middle Korean (MK) Grapheme Δ is one of the most troublesome in the study of Korean historical phonology. There are several hypotheses about the phonetic value of this grapheme, its phonemic status, and origin.

The most widespread and more or less generally accepted theory proposes that MK Δ was a voiced fricative [z] which appeared as the result of the lenition of phoneme /s/ in the intervocalic and post-sonorant positions, since Δ is found in these positions in the overwhelming majority of cases (Yi Kimun 1987, 30) and (Ramsey, 1978: 33). Thus, this point of view denies the phonemic status of Δ, representing it as an allophone of /s/.

Attaining just a glimmer of an understanding of Chinese or Japanese in the seventeenth century required prodigious feats of imagination and the abandonment of widely-held convictions about the nature of language. Progress towards a rational and sophisticated understanding was held up by persuasive but fantastical theories to which lifetimes were devoted in vain. In their very different ways both languages were subversive of contemporary notions of language, and the conceptual frameworks for adequate descriptions had to be generated from scratch. The difficulties can scarcely be overestimated: the Chinese language was vigorously attacked in 1678 as the language of the devil on the ground that its pictographic nature would occasion a breach of the Second Commandment if the name of God were written, and the following year Leibniz drew up a list of questions concerning Chinese which ask, among other things, ‘whether the Chinese language was artificially constructed, or whether it has grown and changed by usage like other languages’. Japanese attracted less interest, but the difficulty of the two languages was legendary: in 1708 the Dutch scholar Adrian Reland (1676–1718), who published numerous works on Persian, Jewish and Islamic studies, wrote of the immense numbers of characters to be learnt by anybody who wished to know Chinese or Japanese, with awe at the thought that ‘a man's life would scarcely suffice to attain perfect knowledge of one language’.

In The Ramtek Inscriptions [I] (hereafter RI) mention was made of a Vākāṭaka inscription in the Kevala-Narasiṁha temple on Ramtek Hill, the discovery of which was reported in IAR, 1982–83, 137. The credit for first discussing, as well as editing the text goes to the Director of the Archaeological Survey and Museums of Maharashtra, Dr. A. P. Jamkhedkar. In an article which appeared in 1986 in R. Parimoo (ed.), Vaiṣṇavism in Indian arts and culture (pp. 335–41), Jamkhedkar attributed the inscription to Prabhāvatī Guptā (op. cit., 340), an attribution for which he adduced arguments in a subsequent article that was published in M. S. Nagaraja Rao (ed.), Kusumāñjali, vol. i in 1987 (pp. 217–23).

In colloquial Tamil the form-class of expressives includes some items which have in each member of a reduplicated pair an initial voiced stop, alongside many with initial voiceless stops. This is unlike the form-classes of nouns and verbs which have in initial position only voiceless stops, except for some borrowings from Sanskrit or other sources. The writing system has no provisions for such initial voiced stops, except for a very few items with the ‘northern letter’ j-. The etymological dictionary shows that in general, when in colloquial Tamil these voiced stops appear in expressives, etyma that appear in the other Dravidian languages also have voiced stops; they are then to be reconstructed for South Dravidian or in some cases even for Proto-Dravidian, and it is to be assumed that they were found in all periods of Tamil even though they were not written as such.

The system of Japanese interpersonally marked linguistic elements (keigo) encodes interpersonal relations between the addresser, the referent of the grammatical subject and the indirect object, as well as the addressee. Basically, the distinction is between a reference axis and an address axis. The reference axis expresses assessment of the status of the subject vis-à-vis the addresser of the communication, and when relevant, also of the indirect object vis-à-vis the subject (and addresser). Expressions of the former relation are termed subject honorifics or exalted forms, those of the latter relation object honorifics or humble forms.

By and large, the verb is the core constitutent of interpersonally marked expressions. To use an example from Classical Japanese (CJ) which is slightly more complicated than Modern Japanese, but more relevant to the following discussion, uramu ‘to bear a grudge’ is a plain, i.e. interpersonally unmarked, form. As such it can be used in reference to the action of the addresser, the addressee, or a third person, whenever the status of the persons involved is equal and the speech situation informal. By contrast, urami tamafu is an exalted form expressing the addresser's consideration of the exalted status of the subject, be it the addressee or a third person. Morphologically, urami tamafu is a combination of a head verb with the auxiliary verb tamafu ‘to deign’.

The word sadāṁ is attested in Sukhothai inscriptions only once, namely, in inscription n [#2 or Sd.2] (fourteenth century A.D.) from Wat Sri Chum (face B, line 61). It is glossed by Prasert na Nagara as a verb ‘to do’ The context in inscription #2, face B, reads as follows.

Since the appearance of Stuart N. Wolfenden's monumental Outlines of Tibeto-Burman linguistic morphology in 1929, attention has increasingly focused not only on derivational processes in Tibeto-Burman, but also on the flexional morphology of conjugations and declensions. The first systematic comparison of Tibeto-Burman conjugational and pronominal morphology was James John Bauman's elaborate Pronouns and pronominal morphology in Tibeto-Burman in 1975. Bauman put to rest any lingering doubts that the conjugations of Tibeto-Burman languages could be attributed to an Austro- Asiatic substrate, and he adduced a vast body of data demonstrating the nativeness and antiquity of conjugational morphology in Tibeto-Burman. Verbal agreement in Tibeto-Burman has traditionally been known by Hodgson's term ‘pronominalization’, based on the assumption that conjugational affixes ultimately derive from ancient independent pronouns. Bauman demonstrated that the conjugational systems of Tibeto-Burman languages, and therefore any ancient pronominal system they may reflect, are more conservative than the independent pronominal systems attested in individual languages. Based on a comparison of these conjugations, Bauman (1975: 195, 237, 247) proposed the prototypical Tibeto-Burman agreement system shown in tables 1 and 2.

My This paper is a critical evaluation of B. Nothofer's definition of ‘Malayic’ (§1). It also discusses his classification of Iban (or ‘Sea Dayak’) as a separate primary branch in the Malayic language group, and his analysis of some aspects of Iban phonological history (§ 2).

The Malayic language group consists of (literary, standard) Malay and all dialects and languages that are sufficiently close to Malay in order to form an exclusive subgroup with it within the Austronesian language family. In 1985 I finished a PhD thesis which is a phonological, lexical and morphological reconstruction of Proto-Malayic, the hypothetical stock-language of the Malayic subgroup. The reconstruction is made on the basis of six members of the Malayic subgroup, viz. Malay, Minangkabau, Banjarese, Middle Malay (Seraway variant) Iban and Jakartanese. In August 1986 the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in Kuala Lumpur organized the International Workshop on the History of Malay, the contributions to which were published in 1988 (Mohd. Thani Ahmad and Zaini Mohamed Zain, 1988). Nothofer's paper treated the various views on the definition of the Malayic subgroup (Nothofer, 1988). Concerning my 1985 study, Nothofer made the following criticisms: definition of ‘Malayic’ is different from that of previous scholars and I do not explain in which way it differs. More particularly, my definition differs from that of Blust (1981), who also includes the Chamic languages of Vietnam and Rejang.

The three publishing houses of Wen-wu in Peking, Shanghai shu-tien, and Ku-chi in Tientsin joined forces to produce a new edition of the Taoist Canon. The Tao-tsang they published in 1988 is meant to be an improvement on the so-called Cheng-t'ung Tao-tsang printed in 1921–23 by the Han-fen lou branch of Shanghai Commercial Press. The latter takes as its foundation the copy of the Ming Canon from the archives of the Pai-yün Kuan (White Cloud Abbey) in Peking. The woodcut edition of the Ming Canon contains two components. The core collection appeared under the title Ta Ming Tao-tsang ching in the years 1444–45 of the Cheng-t'ung reign period. A small supplement entitled Hsü Tao-tsang ching was issued in 1607.

Because of the growing interest in Buddhist hermeneutics in recent years, the subject of p'an-chiao (classification of teachings) has lately attracted increasing attention in the West. P'an-chiao is essentially an attempt to distinguish and to integrate various trends of Buddhist thought, various systems of Buddhist praxis and various kinds of Buddhist texts, with a view to highlighting their individual characteristics and to reconciling their apparent disparities. Different Chinese Buddhist schools, each with its own particular idea of the essence of the Buddha Dharma, naturally consider the significance of the heterogeneous elements of their spiritual heritage differently. Hence, examining and comparing their p'an-chiao theories is a convenient and reliable way to assess their doctrinal positions and to determine the respective places of their teachings in the bewildering labyrinth of Buddhist dogmatics. This article is an attempt to bring out the basic orientation and special concerns of Chi-tsang's (549–623) thought as reflected in his opinions about a number of central Buddhist sūtras and their interrelation. Chi-tsang, as is well-known, was the pivotal figure in the revival of Chinese Madhyamaka in the late sixth century, and it was the common consensus that his teaching represented the apex of the development of Madhyamaka thought in China.

In this note I shall re-present an old solution to a small problem that was noted by Arthur Waley a little over fifty years ago.2 In the course of doing so, I shall also challenge the view that the Analects does lend support to the view that Confucius maintained that it was important for the gentleman (jun zi) to secure a reputation. Finally, I shall comment briefly on the significance that my overall analysis has for the view that the Analects, despite its composite nature,3 can nevertheless be read as a text which has been consciously edited such that it presents internally consistent themes.