1. Bray's excellent work (1909, 1934) on Brahui, the Dravidian language spoken, so improbably, in Baluchistan, could not help but be used to the full by Burrow and myself in our 35 years of work on Dravidian etymologies. My very short contact, no more than eight hours, with Brahui speakers at the Chanhu-daro excavation early in 1936 (Emeneau, 1937) had stimulated me and provided a background for intensive etymological study based on Bray's material. This resulted in my publications, especially in 1962, reprinted in part and with some slight change in 1980a (pp. 315–49). In this latter publication (p. 318) I ventured a statement: ‘More descriptive field-work would certainly provide [more material on the language]. Whether much more would emerge to add to Bray's account is uncertain. Certainly it seems that vocabulary additions would probably include no new items from the Dravidian heritage’.

The question primarily at issue is whether da and desu in modern, chiefly conversational, Japanese, together with other forms commonly held to belong to paradigms of da+ and desu+ viewed as inflected items, should be called copulative forms; whether, that is to say, they perform the grammatical function of linking a subject with a predicate. The question also concerns combinations consisting of de followed by one of the forms of aru+, arimasu+, or gozaimasu+. In general, these combinations have when positive the same uses and senses as forms of da+ and desu+ and are when negative the only available negative counterparts of those forms. Some attention will be given to what has been said about the verb nari+ (< ni ari+) and the combination nite ari+ of the now obsolete Classical Literary style, though no attempt will be made to reach conclusions about them.

Just as there are said to be ‘painters' painters’ and ‘poets' poets’, so too there may be said to be ‘linguists' languages’, and amongst these must without any question be included the languages of the Caucasus. These languages, with their elaborate and unusual phonetic, phonological, and morphological structures, possess a special fascination for professional linguists, from both the practical and the theoretical point of view.

According to Islamic tradition the companions of Jesus in the Quran, the ḥawāriyyūn, were faithful disciples. Critical scholars largely agree that the Quran means to present the ḥawāriyyūn as such, and generally translate ḥawāriyyūn as “apostles” or “disciples”. Some add that ḥawāriyyūn is related to ḥawāryā, the Geʿez term used for the apostles in the Ethiopic Bible. In the present article I argue that while the Quran indeed means to signal the apostles of Christian tradition with the term ḥawāriyyūn, it does not consider the ḥawāriyyūn to have been faithful. The Quran praises the ḥawāriyyūn for their belief in Jesus (a belief that distinguishes them from other Israelites, i.e. the Jews) but reprimands them for abandoning his message. Hence emerges the exceptional position of Christians in the Quran: they are not condemned but rather exhorted to return to their prophet's teaching.

In Somaliland God is universally known by the names Allaah and Rabbi, both of Arabic origin, but the full list of His 99 Arabic names is known only to sheikhs and wadaads.1 In addition to the Arabic names, however, there are a considerable number of purely Somali titles for Allaah. The majority of those recorded here will be seen to be praise-names referring to God's attributes and in many cases direct equivalents in Somali of the corresponding titles in Arabic.

The Mahasin al-majalis of Ibn al-'Arif (†536/1141) is a Sufi treatise of minor dimensions and inconsiderable importance, one of a multitude of such summaries that bridge the gap between the classical works of Kalabadhi, Qushairi, and Makki, and the phenomenal productivity of Ibn al-'Arabi. For all that, the essay (for it is little more) is not without interest; it is allusive and elliptical in style, thus affording material for commentators; and the author begins his discourse proper by quoting, though not by name, the Mawdqif of Niffari; as Ibn al-'Arabi afterwards used Ibn al-'Arif quite freely and approvingly, it is always possible that he got to know and take an interest in Niffari through this intermediary.

In examining wares discovered from the cultures of Sanxingdui and Jinsha and from the former site of the ancient kingdom of Dian in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, this article highlights a number of shared features and trends that suggest a continued artistic, technological and cultural transmission through time and space. The article aims to supplement established theories on the rich material culture of this region. It will look in particular at the development of its striking bronze metallurgy, largely deriving from the established traditions of the Yellow River valley in China’s Bronze Age. It highlights the function of a dense network of trading routes, referred to in modern scholarship as the “Southwest Silk Road”, as an important facilitator of cultural and artistic exchange and reciprocation from ancient times.

In 1894, Jacob Barth proposed that the preformative conjugation in some of the Semitic languages goes back to a – generally bygone – inverse correlation between the thematic vowel of the stem and that of the conjugational prefix. Evidence for such a distribution is well attested in all branches of Central Semitic, yet it remains disputed whether it should be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic as well. This paper makes use of new data from a living Semitic variety, namely the Arabic dialect of Ḥugariyyah in the south of Yemen, where the pattern observed by Barth is still operative. We examine the interaction of the conjugational prefixes with the dialectal future tense marker š(a)-, and point to cases where the inverse correlation is violated. We outline a sequential development, starting with a phonetically-driven re-distribution of the preformative vowels, and followed by their reanalysis as integral to the prefix. We then propose that comparable developments may have taken place in other Semitic varieties, predominantly Akkadian, and thus view the Akkadian preformative conjugation as a derivative of a former inverse correlation, as reconstructed by Barth.

The famous manuscript in Kharoṣṭhī script which contains an anthology of Buddhist verses similar to the Sanskrit Udānavarga and the Pali Dhammapada became known first in 1892, when portions came into the hands of MM. Dutreuil de Rhins and Grenard in Khotan. They were told that the MS. had been found in the ruins of the Vihāra at the Gośṛnga hill (on this site see M. A. Stein, Ancient Khotan, pp. 185 ff.). Other portions were acquired by the Russian Consul-General in Kashghar, M. N. Th. Petrovskii, and were sent by him to M. S. F. Oldenburg in St. Petersburg in February, 1897. In the same year, 1897, M. Oldenburg prepared a photograph and transcription of one folio of the St. Petersburg collection, which was published and presented by the Oriental Faculty of the University of St. Petersburg to the Eleventh International Congress of Orientalists held in Paris in 1897 (Predvaritel'naja zametka o buddijskoj rukopisi, napisannoj pismenami Kharoṣṭhī, St. Petersburg). Meantime, also in 1897, the portions of the MS. which had been brought to Paris were placed in the hands of M. Émile Senart, who published his reading and interpretation of the MS., with five facsimiles, in the Journal Asiatique (1898, ii, pp. 193–308). He used in addition to the text published in facsimile a large number of small fragments, and was also able to add the readings of that part of the St. Petersburg manuscript which contained half-lines fitting into his fragment B. M. Senart remarked that the portion of the MS. in St. Petersburg was more extensive and better preserved than the portion in Paris.

In the Arabian Peninsula, lexically diminutive personal names, family names and place names are ubiquitous. In a dataset of 9,060 Arabian names, 1,717 (19 per cent) are diminutive. This article finds that the diminutive pattern CiCēC (cf. Classical CuCayC) has meanings and functions in Arabic names that are distinct from its meanings and functions in common nouns. In addition to expected meanings related to size, the diminutive carries partitive and attributive meanings. It may simply mark a name (as an onymic) or derive a name (as a transonymic). The diminutive may disambiguate two similar names found in close proximity (e.g. Diba ≠ Dubai). The form and function of the diminutive differ categorically according to what kind of name is diminutivized, supporting the semantic-pragmatic theory of names. A quantitative analysis of toponyms indicates that diminutive names are associated with Bedouin dialects and practices, as suggested by previous research.