After discussing the historical processes that led to Arabian names being recorded in Babylonian texts, especially during the reign of Nabonidus in the mid-sixth century BCE, the chapter offers an extensive overview of the Arabian toponyms, ethnonyms, and anthroponyms that are attested in these records.

Byzantine Greek historiography forms an indispensable group of written sources for Eurasian history, including the history of the Mongol Empire. The sources must be interpreted within the framework of Byzantine civilization (Greek antiquity, Christianity, and the Roman imperial tradition). One of the major difficulties in interpreting Byzantine sources derives from the archaizing character of ethnonyms: one appellation may refer to several ethnic groups, and sometimes the same ethnos is designated by different terms. Another limitation is that the Byzantines’ horizon extended primarily to the western lands of the Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde, and Ilkhanid Iran. In this chapter the four major histories of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries (Georgios Akropolites, Georgios Pachymeres, Nikephoros Gregoras, Ioannes Kantakouzenos) are treated. Then Byzantine sources relating to the Mongol period are enumerated and briefly characterized, according to their literary genres: histories, world chronicles, local histories, poems, epistles, geographical works, state and ecclesiastical documents, encomia, and oracles.

Hausa’s rich morphology employs prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, the latter with fixed tone melodies. Reduplication is very common. ‘Feminatives’ were created by adding a feminine suffix to words that were already feminine. Plural formation reflects consonant changes such as Klingenheben’s Law and the loss of final nasals. An ongoing drift has been the change of plural nouns into singulars. Similarly one has ‘frozen pluractionals’, i.e., erstwhile pluractionals without simple counterparts. The elaborate ‘grade system’ developed from basic verbs ending in /a/ or /i/ plus synchronically semantically empty CV suffixes and/or an adverb-like extensions such as totality and ventive. Different grades serve as transitivizers and intransitivizers. The ‘efferential’ grade manifests two originally distinct extensions, *-asi and *-da. Singular ethnonyms come from language names, the initial ba- being a reflex of the word ‘mouth’. The plural counterpart with -awa derives from a formative indicating ‘community’. Derivatives indicating agentive, locational, and instrumental are described including ‘pseudo-agentives’, i.e., words with agentive form but without agentive meaning.