In the recently published volume of his collected papers Professor S. E. Loewenstamm includes two studies (here amplified) dealing with a feature of Semitic prosody described by him as ‘expanded colon’.His thesis is disarmingly straightforward: non-contiguous and, in some cases, contiguous repetition exhibits under certain conditions the deliberate expansion of a primary poetic structure, called ‘basic formula’ (p. 287), ‘simple basic formula’ (p. 289), ‘basic formulation’ (p. 291), ‘basic colon’ (p. 293). Production of an ‘expanded colon’, in contrast to mere ‘repetitive parallelism’ (p. 283 n. 8), requires (1) a ‘repetitive formula’, (2) an ‘intervening formula’, and (3) a ‘complementary formula’ (pp. 284–5, 293–4). Component (1) must at first utterance be grammatically incomplete; component (2) may consist of a vocative and/or grammatical subject; component (3) must render the ‘repetitive formula’ at second utterance grammatically complete. Thus, CTA 2:IV:8–9

in which the first tow segements (‘ Now your enemy, O Baal/Now your enemy you shall smite’) constitute the ‘expanded colon’, the third (‘Now you shall subdue your oppressor’) being merely parallel.

The interest of medieval Jewish historians in the works rather than the lives of the great figures of history explains the relative paucity of biographical data to be found in their writings. Indeed the most factual contemporary accounts of the foremost Jewish thinker of the medieval period, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), are to be found in Muslim historiographies, whereas entries of comparable substance by Jewish authors are both later in date and more fictitious in nature. Although Maimonides's legal and philosophical writings betray at times both warmth and humanity, the autobiographical letters that have come down to us, on the other hand, portray him as an extremely occupied person, whose professional engagements left him little time for the mundane affairs of his fellow men.

In a recent article, I argued that the study of early Arabic grammar of the second and third centuries A.H. should be based on the sources of that era, and not on the work of the later grammarians, as these often do not report the real stand of a particular grammarian on a particular issue, and more often misunderstand certain early grammatical concepts, or use their own terminology rather than the older one to elucidate them. The problem becomes more acute when we find that many modern scholars can still only see early Arabic grammar through the eyes of the later grammarians, beginning with the fourth-century figures and probably ending with Suyṭ. Learning about early grammar from later sources is inescapable, given the scarcity of existing second- and third-century sources, but this is nevertheless permissible only if we do not impose the method, and especially the terminology, of the later authors on early grammar.

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.

Though beset with dispute, wavering conviction and a fair amount of inconsistency, most theories of Biblical prosody exhibit a dominant concern with phonology. Since one at least of the phenomena under scrutiny is metre, this shared propensity is hardly surprising, conditioned as a matter of course by Classical literature and the European tradition, but also by considerable evidence from the proximate sphere of other Semitic literatures. Comment upon the poetry in Hebrew scripture is as ancient as Philo and as varied as could be expected from two millennia of scholarship characterized by evolving method and changing fashion. For the metrical component, acknowledgement of more than one period of poetic production has enabled a chronological hypothesis to accommodate several systems that would otherwise, restricted to the data of the Massoretic text, be in mild competition if not, indeed, severe conflict. At stake is the unit of stress: its identity, distribution and frequency, a phonological quest rarely modified by reference to morphology. A notable exception is the attention recently directed to line internal juncture (sandhi) of which the primary effect is to eliminate or at least blur word boundaries. While the value of this operation for describing an evolution from accentual to quantitative prosody cannot be denied, its practical consequence may be merely characterization of the poetic line as a more or less constant number of syllables. In such an arbitrary continuum the location of stress is no easier than in the admittedly simplistic but nonetheless pragmatic identification of word with ictus. To this end Massoretic accentuation, whatever its shortcomings, has proved remarkably adaptable.

It was remarked by the Czech linguist Pavle Ivi that it would be possible for particular linguistic landscapes to fit easily into particular theories about linguistic diffusion. He was referring especially to the difference between the Stammbaum or family tree theory and the Wellentheorie or wave theory as expounded by the Neo-grammarians. The family tree theory sees dialect features as genetically transmitted and traceable to the homeland of the group concerned. The wave theory on the other and concentrates more on the present geographical location of the speakers and traces the geographical diffusion of dialect features across the landscape independently of the movement of groups of people. If a distinction between family tree landscapes and wave theory landscapes is possible, as Ivi suggests, then the dialectology of the bedouin tribes of north-eastern Arabia falls quite definitely into the first group. In a previous article the writer described the dialect of the Muṭair tribe of Eastern Arabia which a dialect of the Central Najd type akin to the dialects of Central Najd and the 'Aniza tribes of the Syrian Desert. The Ḍhafr, although direct neighbours of the Muṭair to the north and west, speak a dialect of a quite different kind, basically North Najd, akin to the speech of the Jabel Shammar and the Shammar tribes, but with some admixture of Central Najd features. It seems that in this area dialect is a marker of tribal identity and since there is no gradation between membership of the Ḍhafr tribe and membership of the Muṭair, the dialects are similarly clearly demarcated geographically. The boundary between the Ḍhafr and the Muṭair also Muṭair also constitutes a more far-reaching boundary between Ahl al-Shiml and Ahl al-Jinb, northern and southern bedouin. This division is marked by dialect features and also certain other cultural externals such as dress and tent structure.

Scholars dealing with sources which cite the names of weights and measures of capcity used in the countries of the Near East in the Middle Ages will have recourse to the classic treatise of H. Sauvaire and the monograph of W. Hinz. Sauvaire collected his materials mainly from Oriental sources, while Hinz also included data from various European sources such as travelogues and a few Merchant Guides. A significant number of these medieval Merchant Guides, often called ‘Pratica della mercatura’ or ‘Tarifa’ by the Italians, has been preserved in European libraries and MSS collections, and others, additional to the few cited by Hinz, have been printed. There is also an abundance of revelant data concerning Levantine weights in the registers of the Venetian and Genoese customs offices of the later Middle Ages and in judicial acts referring to their activities. In theses records both the weights used in Venice and Genoa those of the Levantine emporia are accurately noted and these data are very reliable. Finally, there is much information to be gleaned from the protocols of the pleadings before the Venetian tribunal of the Guidici di petiziòn, a law court dealing with commercial litigations. These acts too contain authentic data, although those comprised in the claims of the litigants should be accepted cumgrano salis. The purpose of this paper is to present materials from these European sources which complement and, it would seem, correct those collected from the theoretical treatises of Oriental authors of the Middle Ages. Although the various Oriental weights are often confused in these souces, they do make it possible to clarify certain questions in teh field of historical metrology.

Modern tendencies in the linguistic development of Arabic, in both its literary and colloquial aspects, has for some time now been the subject of serious scholary study (see, e.g. Blau, 1978, Cantarino, 1974-5, Stekevych, 1970, amont others). Contact between different social groups and thus between different dialects and speech levels, has brought about changes in the actual speech of Arabic-speaking peoples which have been variously called koineization, levelling and classicization (or literarization) (cf. Blanc, 1960). These processes will be the subject of this paper.

Yska, in his Nirukta, divides words into four classes: nman (noun), khyta (verb), upasarga (preposition) and nipta (particle). He is the only one of all the ancient writers on grammar who deals at some length with the last mentioned category of particles. The introduction to this class runs as follows:

atha nipt uccvaceṣv artheṣu nipatanti. apy upamrthe. api karmopasaṃgrahrthe. api padapraṇḥ

The object of this brief account is primarily to make available the Mahānubhāva evidence on Dattātreya—most of which, where it is published at all, is published in Marathi. The little written on the subject in the West is either out-dated or extremely sketch, and fails to distinguish between what is said of Dattātreya in the early Mahānubhāva texts and the tales of the later material. At the same time it is necessary to provide some kind of context by referring to the Puranic evidence and also to the more recent developments of the Dattātreya cult which is confined almost entirely to western India—Gujarat, Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. These sections are far from exhaustive for there are more trails than can be pursued in the course of one article.

The Ming government's grave concern with the Mongols appears on every written page of the history of that era. Moreover, this obsession with the danger threatening from the north is reflected in a great number of place names. Towers, fortresses, garrison towns of every kind and description built and repeatedly repaired along the border, carried names referring directly or indirectly to the Mongols. Whenever a new construction was begun, it had to be given a name, and every often a name indicating a role in the defence of the country: in fact, these names call to mind such Russian place names as Vladivostok Domination of the East, and Vladikavkaz Domination of the Caucasus.

Khums was, like zakāt, a ritual duty incumbent on individuals, a farīḍa 'alā l-'ayn. Distinguished from the other 'ibādāt by being as to immediate aim human rights and not divine ones (ḥaqq li'l-ādamiyyīn not ḥaqq li'llāh) the final aim of both khums and zakāt was none the less divine reward and more certain salvation. The qur'ānic basis for khums was found in the verse (8: 41):

Know that whatever you acquire as material gain a fifth belongs to God and to the Prophet and to those related and the orphans and the poor and the wayfarers.

L'objet de la prèsente ètude est ľèdition de trois documents relatifs aux rapports èconomiques entre la Moldavie et les Ottomans au temps du sultan SelĪm Ier (1512–1520). Nous les dèsignerons de la manièsignerons de la manière suivante:

Documents no1: Acte adressè par Selīm à Bogdan III de Moldavie le 25 janvier 1512, soit trois trois mois avant son avànemenyt au trône ottoman (24 avril).

Documents no2: Acte adressè par SelĪm au commandant de la fortersse ottomane de Kilia 2 entre le 9 et le 18 fèvrier 1512 (donc antèrieur de plus de deux mois à son avènement).

Documents no3: Deux paragraphes d'un repport adressé le 15 avril 1520 à la porte ottomane par Küčü Pīrī, caid ď; Aqčaqazanliq, et concernant les droits d'explonitation de quinze lacs situès en Moldavie mèridionale.

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.

Malay is one of the best-studied of all Austronesian languages, both synchronically and diachronically. We would not therefore expect a study of Malay historical phonology to uncover much that is new. In this paper, however, I will suggest that a basic change has been overlooked in past work on the language.

The study of quantifiers is an important area of language description. This is in part because their description has proved relevant to an issue of great theoretical interest, the relation between syntax and semantics. One question of interest is how far the unity of their semantic function is reflected in their syntactic behaviour. This raises questions like, is there a syntactic category ‘quantifier’ or ‘quantifier phrase (QP)’?

Since the publication of the catalogue of manuscripts in Indonesian languages in British public collections (Ricklefs and Voorhoeve, 1977), further MSS have of course come to light, as have some of those errors which inevitably attend such a work. It seems appropriate to publish here a list of additions and substantive corrections known to the authors by the beginning of 1981. The authors of the catalogue are grateful to those librarians and scholars who have brought such things to their notice, and particularly to Dr. A. C. Milner for offering his descriptions of Malay MSS found in the Wellcome Institute for publication here.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in Turkish art and architecture, an interest that embraces not only the monuments in Turkey proper but also those which were erected in south-eastern Europe during the Ottoman occupation. Thus a few years ago, when in conjunction with the World of Islam Festival a symposium was held in Edinburgh dedicated to Islam in the Balkans, the participants dealt with Islamic monuments in Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece and Yugoslavia. The Ottoman monuments of Hungary are admittedly not as numerous as those of these south-east European countries; nevertheless,they represent the achievements of a period which is justifiably called the ‘classical’ period in Ottoman art.

Much of modern Hausa verse is either didactic in tone or is written in praise of God, a person, or a political party. Didacticism and praise are often seen as separate descriptive labels for poetry, song or other forms of verbal art. Yet treatment of topic may in fact be very similar in didactic and in praise poetry; certainly in Hausa this is the case. The aspect of treatment that shows this similarity is the association of the message/theme/topic with words conveying the ideas ‘good’, ‘worth’, ‘quality’ or words indicating their opposites ‘bad’, ‘worthlessness’, ‘lack of quality’. This association is made rather in the way that a product is sold by being linked by the advertiser to things ‘attractive’, ‘of value’, ‘of use’, etc., except that the valueloaded words in Hausa are drawn from a moral and religious code very different from those ‘codes’used to sell soap.

Guṇḍam Rāuḷ lived in the thirteenth century in Ṫddhipur, a small town in the easternmost part (Vidarbha) of the Marāṭhī-speaking region of India. He appears to have been somewhat mad. Members of the Mahānubhāva sect, a devotional (bhakti) sect native to the region, revere him as the guru of their founder, Cakradhar, and as one of five major incarnations of their one God, ParameŚvara. Reverence for Guṇḍam Rāuḷ does not lead his Mahānubhāva biographers to deny his madness: the present paper will demonstrate this fact, and attempt to explain it.