The role of language and linguistic-philological studies in the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century received much attention. The aim of this article is to focus on the language factor in Zionism and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in the Yishuv between 1904 and 1914. Founded in 1904, the Hebrew Language Council was expected to enhance the process of revival and, from the very beginning, an unmistakably nationalist attitude to its subject matter marked the Council's agenda. However, the authority of the Council to make binding decisions on linguistic matters was contested by a number of other Zionist institutions, a development which ruined the prestige and effectiveness of the Council. The controversy resulted less from a turf war or quarrels over scarce resources than a deeper question of which institution represented the “true” Hebraic spirit. The World Zionist Organization's decision to de-align from cultural matters, including the revival of Hebrew, worsened the conditions under which the Council operated. From a comparative perspective, thus, the Hebrew case provides an unusual case of linguistic nationalism, which should be of interest to students of both nationalism and sociolinguistics.

A frequent phenomenon in Tamil and Malayalam loan–words from early XX Indo–Aryan is the dropping of an initial sibilant.1 More rarely examples occur in Telugu and Kanarese. Cases can be quoted for all the three Sanskrit sibilants, though the immediate source of the borrowings are forms with Prakrit s-.

The village of Qïzïl Qujašis situated in the district of Okťabŕ, about three miles from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I collected material on the dialect of this village from the Uzbeks Xamidov εnver (51 years old) and Eaxmatov Qulmet (49 years old), during their stay in Vienna in August, 1944. Neither of them had ever left their native village, where they had worked as agricultural labourers. Their parents also lived in the same village. These two Uzbeks had never gone to school and were illiterate.

This article is a sequel to some previously published work, during the preparation of which I was fortunate enough to have the benefit of many discussions with Wilfred Whiteley. While one cannot assume that the results as presented here would meet with his approval, it is certain that the subject stirred his interest; I hope therefore it will not be considered too unlikely a candidate for the honour of inclusion in his memorial volume

In BSOAS, XXXVIII, 1, 1975, at p. 92 I noted the anomaly in the Achinese and Mainland reflexes of the PAN base reconstructed by Dyen as *[tT]ahan: Ach. thön, töhön ‘to endure’, Cham tha:n ‘to draw back, restrain’, Röglai that ‘to set [trap]’, which imply rather *-q-. Dyen's *-h- rested on the comparison of Malay tahan ‘to restrain, to endure strain, to set [traps]’ with Tagalog tahán ‘cessation’, Samar-Leyte Bisayan táhan ‘to detain’, Bikol táhan ‘to endure more than another’. It required the assumption that Javanese tahan ‘to restrain, endure’, which also prima facie implies *-q-, was a loan ‘perhaps from Malay’.

Many Kharoṣṭhī documents have been unearthed from the buried cities in the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert in the last thirty years. I went to the south of the Desert and conducted an archaeological survey along the Silk Road in the summer of 1986. A Kharoṣṭhī wooden tablet happened to be on display in the Khotan Museum when I visited there, but no serial number had been given to the new document. It was allegedly collected by Mr. Li Xuehua, an officer of the Min Feng county, when he explored the way to the Niya site for the shooting of a television programme on the Silk Road in 1981. However, he did not leave any further information on the exact place where the tablet was found in the vast area of Niya.

In this paper, I argue that the Semitic kinship terms *ʔab-‘father’, *ʔaḫ- ‘brother’, and *ḥam- ‘father-in-law’ originally ended in a w, which left traces in several of their forms. In the singular, the w contracted with the case vowels leaving a distinctive pattern of short and long vowels in the unbound, bound, and suffixal forms. In the plural, the w was retained in several languages due to the insertion of an a-vowel between the final two root consonants, a common Afro-Asiatic pluralization strategy: *ʔabw- > *ʔabaw. I further suggest that the West Semitic plural morpheme -aw was derived by analogy with the plurals *ʔabaw and *ʔaḫaw, and is not, as commonly suggested, an inherited Semitic or Afro-Asiatic plural marker.

This paper describes attribution in Old Babylonian. The principles drawn upon are the traditional view of Akkadian syntax, modern Semitic syntax, and the principles of European structuralism. Bringing all these together, while exemplifying and proving previous unexplained statements by using Old Babylonian material, renders the whole issue tangible for every linguistically-oriented reader. ša syntagms are described, each component separately, as a pronominal construct nucleus with an attribute; this attribute is either a nominal or a clause. ša syntagms, being appositive to a referent substantive (when occurring), are in the same paradigm with adjectives, which are shown to have the same components as ša syntagms: a pronominal nucleus, an attribute and the attributive link between them.

In recent years a number of scholars have proposed more or less detailed schemas of the formation of the Zoroastrian ritual. These schemas offer accounts of the arrangement of the texts in the liturgy, the process of its formation, and even its function from an endogenous perspective. One way or another, they argue that the official Zoroastrian liturgy is an integrated ritual with a coherent text, and that the function of the ritual and the intention behind the arrangement of the texts can be determined by means of philological, literary and comparative analyses. The questions of formation and meaning of the Zoroastrian liturgy these scholars have placed on the agenda are important not only for the study of Zoroastrianism but also for the history of religions and ritual theory. I consider their accounts with respect to the texts they invoke and the methods they use, and show that their arguments suffer from fatal flaws.

The literary form and rhetorical structure of ancient Chinese poems have not been sufficiently studied. The “Jiu zhang” 九章 (Nine Avowals) attributed to Qu Yuan 屈原 contain distinctive formal features which are highly suggestive for interpretations of Qu Yuan's life and works. At the level of rhetoric, the protagonist frequently describes his own mental state using metaphors of knots and entanglement. At the level of form, the internal structure of the poems, and “Chou si” 抽思 (Unravelled Yearnings) in particular, involves series of overlapping, cross-referencing units that recall the “strange loop” discussed by Douglas Hofstadter as a model of human consciousness. Reading these poems is not just a matter of reconstructing their historical contexts but also of understanding their intended effects on the reader, who is effectively transported into a simulation of Qu Yuan's mind.

This article deals with the grammaticalization of the lexical meaning of GUO “to cross, pass” in Mandarin Chinese. GUO displays two aspectual/temporal values, known as the experiential suffix -guo and the phase complement guo respectively. The first indicates that in the past there is at least one instance of the event represented by the sentence and the second that an expected event has occurred and is now over. The experiential suffix refers to indefinite occurrences, whereas the phase complement refers to definite occurrences. These two values can be unified at a theoretical level. Aspectual GUO is concerned in all cases with the location of events in time: it situates an event in the (relative) past and it indicates either that among past events there is at least one occurrence of this type of event (suffix -guo), or that a particular (previously identified) event has passed, that is, entered the class of the past events (phase complement guo).

In 1782, the year of King Badon's coronation, someone close to the Burmese palace wrote a legal manuscript. This paper gives a translation of and commentary on that section of the manuscript dealing with kingship. By tracing the sources of the material used, it contributes to the debate about the sources of Burmese political philosophy. Was precolonial Burmese political thought primarily Hindu, primarily Buddhist, primarily Indian or none of the above?

Susan Roosevelt Weld has observed that the Houma and Wenxian covenant texts, excavated texts dating to the fifth century bc, can be considered “examples of collective responsibility”. New materials from the Wenxian covenant texts provide further evidence relevant to this issue. In this article I present my analysis of a previously unseen imprecation, “Cause [you] to have no descendants” 俾毋有胄後. I suggest the excavated covenants provide the earliest references found in a legal context to collective punishment, a practice that, while archaic in origin, is generally better known from Qin and later penal codes. I also discuss the scope of the term shì 氏, as it is used in the imprecation, in the context of Mark Lewis's work defining basic social units in the Zhou period.

This is a syntactic-semantic study of negative and non-assertive environments in Contemporary (Israeli) Hebrew (henceforth CH), with particular reference to the determiners and pro-forms specific to them. These are illustrated by the non-italicized forms in 1–3 below:

By ‘non-assertive environments’, I mean incomplete negation (as with Enghlish ‘hardly, few’), implied negation (as with ‘reluctant, hard’), questions and conditionals. In English, these environments all allow a similar use of ‘any, anyone’ and suchlike, e.g. ‘I hardly saw anyone, it's hard to persude anyone, did any stock go? The concept ‘non-assertive’ has been described for English by Quirk et al (1972:53), Klima (1964)—he uses ‘affective’—and others.

The Ma-wang-tui texts of Lao-tzu have seemingly confirmed two points long held to be true by many scholars: (1) that the text from an early date, if not right from the outset, was divided into two parts; and (2) that—while it is not claimed that the Ma-wang-tui texts represent the original text—it was not originally divided into chapters. This latter conclusion is open to debate since, although there are neither chapter numbers nor names in the Ma-wang-tui texts, there are punctuation dots (·) in part II of text A, often placed at the beginning of one of our present chapters. However, absence of punctuation elsewhere, and the failure of what there is to completely coincide with present chapter divisions, would seem to indicate at least that the present eighty-one chapter divisions—thirty-seven in part I and forty-four in part II—were not yet (c. 180 B.C.) uniformly observed.

In studies of Islamic architecture dealing with the earliest periods, a natural emphasis has fallen on the mosques of the Holy Cities of Arabia, the Ḥaramayn, whenever the architecture of the Arabian Peninsula has been discussed. In later periods, extensions and restorations in the Ḥaram in Mecca and the Mosque of the Prophet in al-Madīna have likewise been discussed, but until recent times, little has been said of any other Arabian mosques. As far as mosques beyond the Ḥaramayn are concerned, this neglect has been caused largely by their inaccessibility; but as a result of the imbalance, students of Islamic architecture have been left to judge Arabia by the Prophet's Mosque, which was only truly Arabian at its foundation, and the Ḥaram and the Ka'ba, which were always unique in Islam in terms both of religion and of architecture. As for later extensions and restorations of either mosque, these tell more of the development of Islamic architectural style and taste beyond the Peninsula than of any Arabian religious architectural tradition.

Although the Hebrew Bible is a literary document of relatively limited size, containing only a certain segment of what must have been a considerable body of literature, there is little doubt that even those remnants which have come down to us include some areas of the vocabulary of lewdness which have not always been recognized, either intentionally or unintentionally. While I do not hold the view that the Old Testament is either exclusively or even primarily a ‘religious’ text, it is unquestionably true that the criteria of admission into the canon were governed by considerations not entirely divorced from the element of likely divine approval. Yet even within those books of the Hebrew Bible whose orthodox propriety was never in any doubt there are embedded thoughts as well as expressions that fall within the field and broad range of the present paper. And this is, a fortiori, the case with regard to those compositions which had to struggle hard to gain admission into the canon of the Old Testament.

In the sixth Article of Impeachment brought against him by the House of Commons, Warren Hastings was accused of disobeying the Regulating Act of 1773 and the orders of the Court of Directors of the East India Company by accepting presents from various Indians. These presents included a sum of three lakhs of sicca rupees, or £37,500, described as a loan from Maharaja Nabakrishna, or ‘Nobkissen’ as he was usually known to his European contemporaries. Both the prosecution and the defence agreed that Hastings had originally borrowed the three lakhs, subsequently keeping them and using them to repay money which he claimed was owed to him by the East India Company. The prosecution maintained that Hastings had ‘fraudulently’ extracted the loan and that he had ‘corruptly and illegally’ retained it as a present, inventing the pretext that the Company owed him money. Hastings replied that Nobkissen had converted the loan into a present of his own free will, and that he had accepted it on the Company's behalf and had used it to repay money genuinely spent on its service in the past. His version convinced a majority of those members of the House of Lords who took part in the verdict at the end of the trial, and he was acquitted by 20 votes to 5 on that particular section of the Presents Article. The episode did not, however, end with the Impeachment. Nobkissen filed a Bill against Hastings in the Court of Chancery for the return of his money, and, although he was unsuccessful, much new evidence was disclosed which would have had an important bearing on the Impeachment. The purpose of this article is to review Hastings's relations with Nobkissen in the light of this new material. It may still be possible to accept the peers' verdict that Hastings had acted neither ‘fraudulently’ nor ‘illegally and corruptly’, but before this verdict can be accepted, very much more will have to be taken into account than was discussed at the Impeachment.