In a recent study entitled ‘The muwashshaḣāt: are they a mystery?’, I described the muwashshaḣāt as the product of the simple and natural attempt by the Arab literati to extend the proliferation or permutations of rhyme in Arabic prose to Arabic poetry. I pointed out also that in order to accommodate this proliferation of rhyme or to make it possible in poetry, Arabic verse forms had to undergo two notable and quite pervasive developments:

The definitions of the term ‘ālam (world) given by Muslim scholars from the tenth century onwards are as varied as the discussions on the world's shape, the aim of its existence and its reality (or irreality). Most theologians would agree that ‘ālam is ‘all that is not God’, or ‘all that exists, other than God’, thereby implying that the world is simply ‘all that is created’.

Tone made its appearance in descriptions of Tibetan pronunciation as early as 1881, when Jäschke introduced the term into an account of the prosodic features of the spoken Tibetan dialects: ‘A system of tones has been introduced. … I am told by European students of reputation, who have made the Tonic languages of eastern Asia their special department, that only the first principles of what are known as the high and low Tones, have made their way into Tibetan. … Here, as in the languages of Farther India, generally, which possess an alphabetic system of writing, the Tone is determined by the initial consonant of the word.

Attaining just a glimmer of an understanding of Chinese or Japanese in the seventeenth century required prodigious feats of imagination and the abandonment of widely-held convictions about the nature of language. Progress towards a rational and sophisticated understanding was held up by persuasive but fantastical theories to which lifetimes were devoted in vain. In their very different ways both languages were subversive of contemporary notions of language, and the conceptual frameworks for adequate descriptions had to be generated from scratch. The difficulties can scarcely be overestimated: the Chinese language was vigorously attacked in 1678 as the language of the devil on the ground that its pictographic nature would occasion a breach of the Second Commandment if the name of God were written, and the following year Leibniz drew up a list of questions concerning Chinese which ask, among other things, ‘whether the Chinese language was artificially constructed, or whether it has grown and changed by usage like other languages’. Japanese attracted less interest, but the difficulty of the two languages was legendary: in 1708 the Dutch scholar Adrian Reland (1676–1718), who published numerous works on Persian, Jewish and Islamic studies, wrote of the immense numbers of characters to be learnt by anybody who wished to know Chinese or Japanese, with awe at the thought that ‘a man's life would scarcely suffice to attain perfect knowledge of one language’.

The word sadāṁ is attested in Sukhothai inscriptions only once, namely, in inscription n [#2 or Sd.2] (fourteenth century A.D.) from Wat Sri Chum (face B, line 61). It is glossed by Prasert na Nagara as a verb ‘to do’ The context in inscription #2, face B, reads as follows.

My This paper is a critical evaluation of B. Nothofer's definition of ‘Malayic’ (§1). It also discusses his classification of Iban (or ‘Sea Dayak’) as a separate primary branch in the Malayic language group, and his analysis of some aspects of Iban phonological history (§ 2).

The Malayic language group consists of (literary, standard) Malay and all dialects and languages that are sufficiently close to Malay in order to form an exclusive subgroup with it within the Austronesian language family. In 1985 I finished a PhD thesis which is a phonological, lexical and morphological reconstruction of Proto-Malayic, the hypothetical stock-language of the Malayic subgroup. The reconstruction is made on the basis of six members of the Malayic subgroup, viz. Malay, Minangkabau, Banjarese, Middle Malay (Seraway variant) Iban and Jakartanese. In August 1986 the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in Kuala Lumpur organized the International Workshop on the History of Malay, the contributions to which were published in 1988 (Mohd. Thani Ahmad and Zaini Mohamed Zain, 1988). Nothofer's paper treated the various views on the definition of the Malayic subgroup (Nothofer, 1988). Concerning my 1985 study, Nothofer made the following criticisms: definition of ‘Malayic’ is different from that of previous scholars and I do not explain in which way it differs. More particularly, my definition differs from that of Blust (1981), who also includes the Chamic languages of Vietnam and Rejang.

In this note I shall re-present an old solution to a small problem that was noted by Arthur Waley a little over fifty years ago.2 In the course of doing so, I shall also challenge the view that the Analects does lend support to the view that Confucius maintained that it was important for the gentleman (jun zi) to secure a reputation. Finally, I shall comment briefly on the significance that my overall analysis has for the view that the Analects, despite its composite nature,3 can nevertheless be read as a text which has been consciously edited such that it presents internally consistent themes.