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

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 ”.

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 following schedule of an inheritance was discovered by me in 1962 when, by courtesy of the Kano Native Authority, I was carrying out a survey of manuscripts contained in the Library of the Shahuci Judicial School, Kano. In the course of my searches I unearthed from the back of a cupboard a bundle of miscellaneous papers. On examination these proved to consist largely of single folios of Arabic, Fula, and Hausa MSS displaced from their contexts. Scattered among them, however, were a number of sheets which appeared to be taxation returns; lists of booty; household accounts of the palace; fragments of prayers, wirds, Qur'anic charms and the like. Among them was this incomplete schedule of an estate.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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’, 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.

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

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

The 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.

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

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

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.

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