Every student of Rabbinic literature is aware of the formal argument known as qal va-ḥomer ‘the argument from the minor to the major’. There are numerous instances of the argument in Rabbinic literature, dating from pre-Tannaitic times down to the close of the Talmud. The argument runs: if A is so then B must surely be so; if the ‘minor’ has this or that property then the ‘major’ must undoubtedly have it. It is of interest to Old Testament scholars that the Rabbis purported to detect many examples of the use of this argument in Scripture. The Rabbis use the argument as one of their hermeneutical principles by means of which they expand and elaborate on the Biblical teachings. However, they rightly contend that they did not invent the argument but that it is found in the Bible itself. The purpose of this paper is to examine this contention more fully and to note possible implications for Old Testament studies.

D. H. Müller says of the Śheri poems which he published in 1907 that they are ‘in einem älteren Mehri-Dialekt abgefasst, der dem Überlieferer nicht ganz verstandlich war’. He goes on to say that despite his best efforts he has not been able to make complete sense of all of the poems he wrote down.

Are rules constructs of linguists or descriptions of actual associations latent in the speakers' mind? An interesting method of verifying the psychological reality of rules has been proposed by P. Kiparsky (1968). It can be summed up as follows. Given two chronological stages of a language (or two languages) where one can be said to be descended from the other, one first has to describe a phenomenon in the ancestor-language, then seek out and describe the phenomenon that can be considered a development thereof in the daughter-language. The two phenomena may be found somewhat different in certain respects, though still similar enough to be recognized as historically related. If the surface difference between the two phenomena, conceived as a change from the first to the second, can be explained, by comparing the formulation of the two descriptions, as a plausible modification of the first (set of) rule(s) naturally leading to the second, the chances are that the rules actually describe what appears in the speakers' mind, as part of collective knowledge. For Kiparsky, such a plausible change is primarily simplification.

The great majority of the Amharic letters which form the subject of this article are part of the papers left by the late Professor Eugen Mittwoch. Not all the letters published here were addressed to Mittwoch. A few were sent by their Ethiopian writers to members of the Rosen mission to Ethiopia in 1905 or to the German Chargé d'Affaires at Addis Ababa. They were later handed by their addressees to the man who represented Amharic studies in Germany at that time. Among those addressed to Mittwoch himself the letters by Həruy Waldä Səllase, the former Foreign Minister, and by Aläqa Tayyä, Mittwoch's informant and a minore figura in Amharic literature, are perhaps of the greatest interest. Nearly all the writers here represented have played some part in recent Ethiopian history, and their letters may therefore lay claim to some interest on those grounds alone.

The scholastic investigation of stress in Arabic starts with Lambert's pioneering article in 1897. Lambert demonstrated that the accepted stress of Classical Arabic is not based on genuine tradition, but was formulated at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Erpenius, who was influenced by the (Syrian–) Lebanese pronunciation of Classical Arabic. Recognizing the secondary origin of the traditional stress in Classical Arabic, Lambert established the relationship of stress in Classical Arabic to that of the various Arabic dialects on an entirely new basis. He himself emphasized the originality of stress as it is preserved in the Maghribī dialects (ibid., 409).3 In 1907 the first fascicle of Brockelmann's monumental Grundriss appeared, in which (pp. 82 ff.) Brockel-mann advocated the originality of the traditional accentuation in Classical Arabic, as generally preserved in the Syrian-Lebanese dialects. In 1908, Kampffmeyer reached the conclusion that the system of stress in the Maghribī dialects is more original than that of the Syrian-Lebanese group. However, since he published only the first part of his Untersuchungen, he dealt only with the stress in Spanish Arabic and the Moroccan (pp. 7–58), in addition to his results (pp. 1–7) contained in his brief introduction. A short synopsis of his views, with additional material, is included in Kampffmeyer, EI. An important review of the stress in Arabic (pp. 35–41) is contained in Sarauw. Despite the late appearance of his work (1939), he had almost completed it at the time of his sudden death in 1925. Moreover, the main body of his treatise had been composed as early as 1908 (cf. p. 3), the same year in which Kampffmeyer claimed the originality of the Western (Maghribī) stress.

The Amharic verb expresses various aspects of action by a system of derived stems. The basic stem is modified either internally (by various infixes) or externally (by the addition of one of a number of prefixes). To these derived forms there are usually applied terms taken directly from, or modelled on. traditional European grammatical terminology. These terms, such as passive, reflexive, causative, factitive, etc., do not fully describe the function of the particular forms to which they are applied. They can also lead to an incorrect understanding of the exact function of a particular form. However, they have been and continue to be used if only through long custom and familiarity. In the Amharic verbal system there are two excellent examples of this, namely those two forms called by some scholars causative and factitive and by others first and second causative, respectively; they are, of course, those derived forms with prefix /a-/ and /as-/ respectively. Whilst in many examples these preformatives can be found to express what causative and factitive (or any other such name) may be defined as meaning, there are in these two instances just as many examples to the contrary. For example, ‘he fed’, does express a causative turn of the base form ‘he ate’, but ‘he acquired’ and the derived ‘he studied’ do not appear to have such a clear relationship.

Of the several commentaries on the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñā-pāramitā-sūtra, the Abhisamayālaṅkāra-ālokā of Haribhadra (ninth century) and the Sāratamā of Ratnākaraśānti (eleventh century) are the only two works that have survived in the original Sanskrit. The Ālokā is well known through the editions of Tucci and Wogihara, and critical works in this field by Obermiller and Conze. The Sanskrit text of the Sāratamā is now awaiting publication in the Tibetan Sanskrit Works Series, Patna. It is based on two incomplete MSS photographed by the late Rāhula Sāṃkṛtyāyana in the year 1937 and preserved in the library of the Bihar Research Society, Patna.

The Library of the Wellcome Institute is devoted to the history of medicine and related sciences. Apart from some 250,000 printed books, it contains about 10,000 manuscripts, half of which are in Oriental languages.

In 1970 I was entrusted with describing the Ethiopian manuscripts belonging to this library. There were 34 of them: 17 mostly of religious content and completely unrelated to the interests of the Institute, 16 magical scrolls, and one manuscript mainly of divinatory content. Without constituting medical manuscripts in the strict sense of the term, the scrolls are designed to combat demons and diseases and to keep people in good health. They can be called magico-medical scrolls and belong to the field of ethnomedicine. The scrolls are written in Gə'az with strong Amharic influence. At the suggestion of Dr. F. N. L. Poynter, Director of the Wellcome Institute, the Wellcome Trust decided to donate the first group of manuscripts to the British Museum, to whom 14 were presented in June 1970 and 3 others in June 1971. All these manuscripts have been described by the present writer in the Catalogue of the Ethiopian manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since 1877 (in preparation). The present catalogue notes contain only the description of the 16 scrolls and the divinatory manuscript.

Sībawaihi has occasionally been criticized for his obscurity and inconsistency. The former may be conceded, since it pertains only to his style and presentation, which undoubtedly make heavy demands on the reader, but the second criticism is an attack on Sībawaihi's linguistic reasoning and needs to be refuted. In the following pages we shall examine the background and use of the phrase ‘ishrūna dirhaman ‘20 dirhams’ as a locus probans in more than a score of grammatical arguments in the Kitᾱb, to which must be added a dozen or so other cases involving the use of similar expressions and grammatical principles. Two results should emerge: first we should gain the impression that the Kitᾱb is a work of the utmost coherence and consistency (with due allowance for the date of its composition), and second we shall uncover certain features of Slbawaihi's grammatical theory which appear to have been ignored by later grammarians.

In what follows I would like to discuss the structure of Amharic relative clauses. In the course of the discussion, I would like to make the following three claims which I will attempt to substantiate in turn. First, I believe that relativization is a kind of pronominalization and, consequently, the particle yä- that is attached to the main verb (or its auxiliary) of the relative clause is not a relative pronoun. Second, I maintain that the ‘yä- clause’ in subject position in Amharic cleft sentences is also a relative clause with an unspecified element as its head. My third claim is that Amharic genitive phrases originate from relative clauses and that the noun (phrase) in the genitive phrase to which the particle yä- is attached in surface structure is governed by a preposition in underlying structure, and the head of a genitive phrase is the head of the under-lying relative clause. In this connexion, I also argue that there is a rule in Amharic which moves the particle yä- (to the right) over, at least, one constituent.

The four preceding articles in this series have been devoted to the chapter ‘Verbs’ of Das chwaresmische Sprachmaterial einer Handschrift der ‘Muqaddimat al-adab’ von Zamaxšari, I, attention being focused chiefly on the doubtful or erroneous transliterations of the Xw. glosses provided by the editor, Johannes Benzing. In this final article we return to the incomplete chapter on ‘Nouns’ which begins the book. Many of the glosses in Muq., 1–72 (Benzing, 1–60) remain sadly obscure, being insufficiently pointed hapax legomena of the type CCByk, BC'Dyk. Even some of these entries show the inadequacy of Benzing's transliteration scheme, e.g. TBBc 22.1 to indicate ‘BBBc with the points of t, probably for the first letter’,RNB 25.4 for ‘RBB with one point, probably for -n-’, B'BBwk 40.3 which could well be B'mwk. kCYNyk 26.5 but BCBByk 44.4 for the identical sequence of undotted letters, šY'MY'Nyk 49.1 for what could as well be šΛS'Byk, NTY 58.4 ‘owl’ for what is undoubtedly, if surprisingly, nty. In every such case reference to the facsimile is absolutely essential, and occasionally profitable, as will be seen below.

The identification and assessment of his source materials are among the historian's most basic tasks. The purpose of the present discussion is to describe three versions of the Javanese chronicle called Babad tanah Djawi and to provide excerpts describing the familiar story of the fall of Madjapahit in order to show how the same story differs in these three versions. The texts will be compared with regard to date and origin, and their historical value will be considered. This is not an attempt to pronounce on the course of events surrounding the fall of Madjapahit, although scholars interested in that subject may find these texts to be of value. This is rather an attempt to identify and to compare these basic sources. In this consideration, the episode of Madjapahit's fall will be used as an example.

The Musabba'āt played an important part in the history of the Kordofan/Dār Fūr region in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article attempts to define who they were and to examine the careers of three generations of Musabba'āt sultans, in particular that of the grandson, their most famous sultan, Hashim b. ‘Isāwī al-Musabba'āwī.

Burrow and Emeneau (1961, p. xiii, n. 3) have observed that ‘Ta. and Ma. seem to have evidence for two phonemes [/n/, the dental and /ṉ/, the alveolar]a in PDr., but the matter is not yet clear’. This is mainly due to the non-availability of data about the distribution of these phonemes in those two languages and the allophonic distribution, if any, in other languages. With the help of increased material available now, an attempt is made in this paper to find out the history of the development of the two nasal phonemes in Ta. and Ma. and to establish their allophonic nature in PDr. Since definite information about the phonetic nature of the phoneme /n/ is not available for languages such as Kui, Parji, Nk. [Ch.] etc., this study is incomplete to some extent.

The main purpose of this article is to show that the conjugations (binyanim) in Colloquial Israeli Hebrew, looked at from the point of view of their syntactic and semantic functions, form together a coherent, tightly organized system, in which each conjugation is characterized by a fixed configuration of semantic and syntactic properties. These properties are represented in terms of three concepts, defined and explained in §4: semantic value, semantic tie-up, and syntactic tie-up. There are many deviations from the regular pattern of the system, but relatively few of these are true exceptions. In the majority of cases either there is a rule which explains the apparent deviation, or the deviation should be considered unimportant in some definite sense.

It is now more than 90 years since Fortunatov first enunciated that rule of phonetic development in Sanskrit which has since borne his name. The article in which this theory was proposed appeared in A. Bezzenberger's Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen, VI, 1881, 215–20, and the rule formulated by him was that in the group l + dental in Sanskrit the l disappears and the dental is changed to lingual (cerebral, retroflex). This process of phonetic change is illustrated by the comparison of the Sanskrit word paṭa- ‘cloth’ with OSlav. platǐno, Russ. polotnó ‘linen cloth’, etc., where Sanskrit paṭa- has replaced a pre-Sanskrit *palta-. Fortunatov cited a large number of examples in support of this rule, and although many of these are unacceptable, there still remain enough good etymologies in his list to provide significant support for his theory. It is a noteworthy feature of this change that the cerebral replacing the combination of l with dental is a single consonant, in marked contrast to the later assimilation of r followed by dental in Middle Indo-Aryan where the result is always a double consonant (e.g. -ṭṭ- in vaṭṭai 〈 vartate, etc.). Another significant difference is that whereas in MIA the combination of r with dental results in dental as well as cerebral (vattai beside vaṭṭai, etc.), the product of l + dental in Sanskrit is invariably cerebral.

It is exactly 40 years ago that the Otani University, Kyoto, published its Comparative analytical catalogue of the Kanjur division of the Tibetan Tripitaka, edited in Peking during the K'ang-hsi era, this Kanjur division, together with the Tanjur division, being now available in reduced size as the Tibetan Tripitaka, Peking edition, edited by Daisetz T. Suzuki. Ever since that time it would have been possible to state that the Tibetan version of the Amoghapᾱśakalparᾱja (No. 365) has been listed as numbering 24 chapters (bam-po) as opposed to the 25 chapters of the Derge print, set out by the compiler on the same pages, together with references to the Chinese version (in vol. xx of the Taishō Tripitaka). It is easy to ascertain that the Narthang print (as well as the manuscript copy of the British Museum) also have 25 chapters. On the other hand the Cone print, though numbers of chapters are not indicated in Mibu's Comparative list, and the Mongolian Kanjur, as is evident from Professor Ligeti's catalogue, have only 24 chapters

The graph in Classical Chinese represents three different words, a noun (fu1/✴pῗwo╴ ‘man, husband’), a final particle (fu2/✴bῗwo╴ ‘n'est-ce pas?’), and a word (also read (fu2/✴bῗwo╴) which of all the common pronouns and particles is perhaps the one which has most persistently defied all attempts at a usable grammatical description.

The story of Balai Pustaka begins in 1908, a memorable year in the history of modern Indonesia, for that was the year in which Boedi Oetomo, the first nationalist organization in Indonesia, was founded. In the same year the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies set up a Commissie voor de Volkslectuur, a Committee for Popular Literature. And even though there was no visible connexion between the founding of Boedi Oetomo and the setting up of this Committee, there certainly was an indirect link. Both the foundation of Boedi Oetomo and the need for an institution for popular literature had something to do with the expansion of modern education in the colony.