Words which designate both themselves and their opposites can be found in many languages around the world. For the Arabic grammarians of the eighth and ninth centuries the existence of such a class of words was a concern as it was a potential hindrance to intelligibility and clarity of semantic interpretation. This paper seeks to engage one thread of that tradition, to reposition it in the context of more modern linguistic scholarship, and to expand on it implications for an understanding of language, all the while hopefully dispelling some of the more wanton psychological misconceptions it has engendered.

Perhaps no question of historical-geographical interest relating to the ancient Middle East has been so frequently a subject of inquiry or brought a greater difference of opinion than has that of the location of the countries of Magan and Meluḫḫa. The problems of identification are particularly confused because widely separate areas appear to be indicated at different periods. Old Babylonian and Sumerian references seem to place these regions at the lower end of the Persian Gulf and along the coast of the Indian Ocean beyond, while texts of the late Assyrian period indicate Egypt and Nubia/Ethiopia

Tanzanian novelist and philosopher Euphrase Kezilahabi strives to “dismantle the resemblance of language to the world” (1985: 216) through challenging the fundamental philosophical dichotomy of subject and object. The result of this dismantling will be a new “language whose foundation is Being” (Kezilahabi 1991: 69; lugha ambayo msingi wake ni kuwako). This is an expression of a new relationship between humanity and Being built on a holistic epistemology of experience and embodiment. Through “kuwako”, Kezilahabi expresses in Swahili the Heideggerian concept of Sein (Being). His adherence to Heidegger, however, puts him at risk of compromising the very foundation of his own philosophy: his continued critique of essentialism. This article argues that Kezilahabi salvages his concept of “kuwako” from these essentialist pitfalls precisely through his declared “destructive rather than deconstructive stand vis-à-vis the Western philosophy of value and representation” (Kezilahabi 1985: 4). The destruction is implemented on the thematic level: a phase of “vurumai” (chaos) which destroys previous traditions of philosophy is staged in Nagona. However, translation is an even more powerful device to carry out this destruction: “kuwako” is not an innocent reiteration but a radical reformulation of Heidegger's central philosophical concept, decisively informed by Kezilahabi's lifelong propensity for existentialism.

The treatment of Proto-Iranian *θw (PIE *t) is one of the isoglosses distinguishing Middle Persian from Parthian and thus important for Western Iranian dialectology. The re-discussion of the Parthian development of this consonant cluster by Nicholas Sims-Williams presents a welcome opportunity for some notes on the matter. I will argue that there is some additional evidence in favour of his suggestion that the Parthian result is not -f- as previously assumed, but a consonant cluster. I will also suggest a modification of the steps that the development takes. The Middle Persian development of *θw as well as some related issues of historical phonology and Pth. orthography and Western Ir. are likewise discussed.

The only notable works on poetics and prosody that survive in Pali are the Subodhālankāra (comprising, in effect, Kārikā and Vrtti) and Vuttodaya. They have been ascribed to the twelfth-century Sinhalese monk Sangharakkhita and described, almost from the outset, as ‘dependent upon Sanskrit models’ and ‘based entirely upon Sanskrit prosody’ respectively. Indeed the Vrtti names a ‘Dandi’ as its basic source. The Pali Text Society's 2000 edition of the Subodhālankāra, complete with two versions of the Vrtti, compiled by P. S. Jaini, has registered many, but by no means all of the parallel passages in Dandin's Kāvyādarśa, the seminal manual of Sanskrit poetic theory. The present article seeks to show that the Pali texts depend rather on earlier Middle Indian traditions of rhetoric and poetics, coupled with theories adumbrated in Nātyaśāstra. It is reasonably certain that the basic Pali material, especially as presented in the version with ‘Abhinavatīkā’, has been drawn upon by the author of the Sanskrit Kāvyādarśa; and there is evidence that the ‘Porānatīkā’ has been superficially influenced by the Sanskrit text. The material goes far to explain classical Sanskrit notions of Alamkāra, Rasa and Dhvani. The Pali prosody Vuttodaya seems to have been equally baselessly maligned, and should take its place along with surviving vestiges of Prakrit prosody as the fundamental link between Vedic and classical theory.

Armenian karmir “red” has often been considered as deriving from East Iranian, thus speaking in favour of relations between Armenian and Sogdian, a Middle Iranian language spoken at considerable distance from Armenia. For the origin of Hebrew karmīl, on the other hand, a Middle Persian “karmīr” has been suggested. In either case, the etymology would be Proto-Indo-European *ku̯ṛ́mi- “worm” (be it directly or as a borrowing from Sanskrit kṛ́mi-) from which the colour term would be derived in a way parallel to French vermeil “scarlet” from ver “worm”, thus a term referring to a red dye obtained from scale insects (cochineals). I argue that karmīr is not a Middle Persian word for “red”, that Sogdian is unlikely to be the source of the Armenian and Hebrew words, and that an Indian origin is not probable either because of the specific features of the Indian scale insect dye. Conversely, Armenian scarlet was widely known and appreciated already in antiquity, so that, for historical as well as linguistic reasons, the origin of the word is likely to be an Iranian language within the region where Armenian was spoken.

Only comparatively recently was it recognized that the few MSS of portions of Kemālpaazāde's ‘History of the Ottoman Dynasty’ which exist in the libraries of Western Europe represent less than a half of the complete work and that there survives in Istanbul the great bulk of the ten books of which it originally consisted.

The beginnings of the novel as a literary art in Egypt are so recent that the student of contemporary Arabic literature might well be excused for seeking to trace some genetic connection between its development and the earlier productions of the Syrian school of writers. But except for the possibility that the success of the Syrian novelists (whose works have been admirably described by Professor Kratchkowsky in the study frequently quoted in the previous articles of this series, and now available in a German translation) may have encouraged the Egyptian writers to produce a class of works which would appeal to the same public, the literary movement which forms the subject of the present article has remained in general entirely independent of the Syrian historical novel. Western influences, which are very marked in the later stages, have been exercised directly, but Egyptian recreational literature continued for a long time to lean rather on classical and conventional models. It is only very slowly and hesitatingly that it has emancipated itself, and its progress in this direction has been sporadic and individual rather than the result of a steady evolution.

I.o. The phenomenon of reciprocity has, within the framework of generative grammar, been dealt with either as an aspect of sentence coordination as in the following:

1(a) the boy saw the girl

(b) the girl saw the boy

(c) the boy and the girl saw each other

Apart of the island of the central Solomon Islands which was called Santa Ysabel by the Spanish discoverers is known as “Sambana” to the natives of Narovo (Eddystone) and Mandegusu islands, who used to raid it. The north end of the island is called Kia, and the southern end is known as Bugotu. There is no one native name for the whole of the island.

The manuscript numbered S. 788 in the Stein Collection at the British Museum is a fragment, only about a foot square, containing on one side of the paper part of two ballads descriptive of fighting in the frontier regions, the second of which is entitled “the Ballad of Yen,”. Both the writing and the paper point to a date in the late ninth or beginning of the tenth century.

In a recent brief survey in Biblische Notizen Pardee has defended the concept of an ‘epistolary perfect’ in Hebrew letters. In that survey he examined each of the usages of a ‘perfect’ verbal form (i.e. ‘suffix conjugation’ or qātat) in the extant corpus of Hebrew letters most of them extra-Biblical. Those forms which described completed acts prior to the writing of the letter were separated off from those which described aspects of the epistolary acts themselves such as ‘writing’ ‘sending’ and ‘commanding’ and the latter were termed ‘epistolary perfects’. In the present study we wish to examine the epistolary conventions observed in Ugaritic and in Akkadian. As in Pardee's previous study Ugaritic ‘perfect’ (qtt) forms and Akkadian preterite (iprus) and perfect (iptaras) forms will be examined in order to determine the conventions governing their usage in letters.

The elders of North-East Africa have long been renowned for their powers of memory on which their compatriots relied for genealogical lineages, rights of ownership, Procedures of law, marrige customs and the like. Literate of otherwise, they all for the most part imparted their accumulated knowledge by word of mouth. Unlike the griots of West Africa, however, quite a few made use of written documents, at least in the form of notes. These documents are different from and independent of the royal and ecclesiastical records which are well known to scholars. These are private papers intended for personal use and as such contain valuable, Uncensored, historical information. I realized how ubiquitous the practice was during my research travels in the various regions of the Ethiopian Empire during the years 1965–75. Whenever such an informant failed to recall a particular name, date of fact during an interview, of doubted the accuracy of the sequence of his narrative, he would quickly pull out his mnemonic aid from a box under his bed or would call for a family member to hand him the desired item. The mnemonic aid often consisted of scribbled scraps of paper, letters, Photographs, invitation cards to weddings of com memorative feasts. Some possessed thin school notebooks comprising sketches in Amareña, Tegreña of Arabic, sufficient to prompt the memory to produce a fluent narrative. The contents of such a notebook, and indeed a typical one of its kind, consitute the boby of the present article.

Mvet is used, in the A 70 languages, both for a type of musical instrument and for the special genres of oral literature played or delivered to its accompaniment.

As the name for a musical instrument mvet has been variously translated as ‘musical bow’, ‘cithar-harp’, ‘native guitar’, and so forth. It is, technically speaking, a chordophone with resonators. The commonest type consists basically of a dry ‘bamboo’ (Wes Kos name; in fact the stem of a palm frond, nnen zam, Raphia sp.) about four feet in length, an inch and a half in diameter, and slightly curved. The bark is slit, on the convex side, into four thin strips left attached at both ends, then raised on an indented wooden peg, set slightly off centre. These strings (minsam) are adjusted for tuning by bark or leather rings sliding along the stem. Calabashes are tied underneath as resonators, the biggest, central one being considered male, the others female.

Inscription on a limestone slab, 27 ½ in. 7 ½in.; obtained from a man who has done extensive digging in Haid Ibn ‘Aqil, the necropolis of Timna’, and now in Major, M. D. Van Lessen's possession. Plate I.