If Clifford Geertz's definition of religion as a culturally determined system of symbols is valid, then it can be argued that the religious ideology of pre-Confucian—Early (or Western) Zhou—China is centred around the symbols of power and communication. Heaven, sacrifice, and gift-decree are some of the categories of this religious system, the majority of them reducible to the themes of a sacred hierarchy and communicative relationship between its subjects. The crucial position in this context is occupied by the concept of .

Edward Harold Stuart Simmonds, who died on November 9, 1994 aged 75, will be remembered as one of the few distinguished scholars who combined a knowledge of both the languages and the literatures of Thailand and Laos, and who, between 1951 and 1967 succeeded almost single-handedly in establishing the study of Tai languages, literature and culture in Britain at university level.

In 1983 Monika Höhlig published a pamphlet (reprinted in 1990) setting out her ideas for producing a romanized script for (North-West Caucasian) Circassian. Since the bulk of the Circassian community lives not in the Caucasus but in Turkey (or elsewhere in the Near East), her basic tenet was that, where necessary, the roman characters should have the same values that obtain for the purpose of representing Turkish—so that, for example, the letter c would represent the voiced palato-alveolar affricate []. Two further principles which guided the creation of this script were: (a) that any attempt to provide one totally independent character for each phoneme of the language would lead to an unwieldy number of new letter-shapes, and (b) that no diacritic should be employed that is not available on a Turkish typewriter.

Thanks to its variety of meanings, the word mundus had already aroused the interest of classical authors. It is in fact widely attested throughout the history of the language both as an adjective and as a noun.

The adjective mundus, -a, -um means primarily ‘propre, d’ où soigné, coquet, élégant’ (DELL, 420), but is it also found used in the rural language when the act of cleaning is involved as is proved by the occurrence in this context of the derived verbs commundō, emundō, and by the expression mundus ager. The definition given to the adjective as mundus quoque appellatur lautus et purus (in Festus, cf. DELL, 420) accounts for this particular meaning because we find expressions describing earth ready for farming as humus subacta et pura ‘earth (which has been) worked and cleaned’. The relevance and wide distribution of this meaning of the adjective in the spoken language is made apparent by the occurrence in the Romance languages of numerous derivatives, such as Italian mondo ‘cleaned, purified’ and mondare ‘to husk, thresh, weed’, or French monder ‘to clean by separating something impure’ and émonder ‘to remove dead branches, to lop a tree’.