The Yazata of the benediction known as the Dahma Āfriti is a figure whose importance in the Zoroastrian pantheon has been obscured, it seems for two main reasons. One is that, although she was apparently originally accorded a place among the thirty ‘calendar’ divinities, she subsequently lost this, probably in an Achaemenian calendar reform. The other is that later still her identity became confused through her name acquiring several Middle Persian forms: Dahm Yazad, Dahmān Āfrīn, Dahmān, the last, since it is a formal plural, causing some misunderstandings in her veneration locally.

The Avestan adjective dahma is understood to have meant originally ‘instructed’, that is, in the Zoroastrian faith; but, to judge from its use in context, it developed the sense of ‘pious, devout’, occurring frequently with ašavan as a term for a good Zoroastrian. The name of the benediction is accordingly generally rendered as the ‘Pious Blessing’. Much power was attributed by Zoroastrians to solemnly pronounced words, and the compilers of the extended yasna liturgy set the ‘Pious Good Blessing’, Dahṃa VaohviĀfriti, after the Ahuna Vairya, Ašəm Vohū and Yenhē hātąm as the fourth of the mighty utterances which crush and destroy Anra Mainyu and his hordes (Y.61:l–2). (The other three form a group because together they precede the Gāthās, and together are the subject of the commentary which forms (Y. 19–21.)

Partial and complete Bible translations into classical Chinese existed well before Protestant missionaries actually began to work actively among the Chinese. Translation work accelerated once missionaries gained a foothold in the newly opened treaty ports after 1842, and the entire Bible or portions of it were translated into Fuzhou, Amoy, Canton, Hakka, Suzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai dialects. S. I. J. Schereschewsky's (1831–1906) translation of the Old Testament (OT) into the northern vernacular in 1875 opened a new chapter. His translation was accessible to larger numbers of people and, in contrast to the OT in classical Chinese, was readily understood when read to the illiterate. Moreover, unlike previous translations, it was prepared entirely from the Hebrew original.

The purpose of this essay is to examine some of Schereschewsky's views on translating and several of the techniques which he employed in rendering into Chinese the Book of Genesis. My basic assumption is that translation is an interpretative activity. When a text is transposed from one language into another, changes are introduced that are consonant with the receiving languages and culture. Translation is affected by interpretations from within the receptor tradition which, in turn, makes possible the acceptance of the translation and the ideas which it contains. Thus the Old (as well as the New) Testament translations represented one of the initial steps in the signification of Protestant Christianity.

In the 1950s when Professor Stein was engaged in his research on the Gesar epic, he wrote: ‘If there ever existed a complete recension of all Chapters, they remain unknown to us. Neither written texts nor oral versions contain the totality of the epic story. And the ones that we know of at present, present themselves in the form of a literature that is still alive and mobile.’

Since then, the situation has totally changed with the publication of many previously unknown chapters, not only those that have come down to us from the past but also the new products of a literature that is still expanding, as Professor Stein so accurately observed. What I am concerned with here, however, is the theoretical basis which underlies the ordering of the episodes relating to the hero and his life, and the notion of a correct ‘chronological order’ which the tradition presents, however fictitious the events may be. It is the materials which existed before our time which are most pertinent here and which permit us to identify the theoretical basis of which I speak. That basis provides a perspective on the question as a whole, and a guide through the tangled structure of the Tibetan epic. We are now, as I said, in a better position than in the 1950s to make an assessment of the whole body of Tibetan epic literature.

The problem concerning the phonetic value of the Middle Korean (MK) Grapheme Δ is one of the most troublesome in the study of Korean historical phonology. There are several hypotheses about the phonetic value of this grapheme, its phonemic status, and origin.

The most widespread and more or less generally accepted theory proposes that MK Δ was a voiced fricative [z] which appeared as the result of the lenition of phoneme /s/ in the intervocalic and post-sonorant positions, since Δ is found in these positions in the overwhelming majority of cases (Yi Kimun 1987, 30) and (Ramsey, 1978: 33). Thus, this point of view denies the phonemic status of Δ, representing it as an allophone of /s/.

The system of Japanese interpersonally marked linguistic elements (keigo) encodes interpersonal relations between the addresser, the referent of the grammatical subject and the indirect object, as well as the addressee. Basically, the distinction is between a reference axis and an address axis. The reference axis expresses assessment of the status of the subject vis-à-vis the addresser of the communication, and when relevant, also of the indirect object vis-à-vis the subject (and addresser). Expressions of the former relation are termed subject honorifics or exalted forms, those of the latter relation object honorifics or humble forms.

By and large, the verb is the core constitutent of interpersonally marked expressions. To use an example from Classical Japanese (CJ) which is slightly more complicated than Modern Japanese, but more relevant to the following discussion, uramu ‘to bear a grudge’ is a plain, i.e. interpersonally unmarked, form. As such it can be used in reference to the action of the addresser, the addressee, or a third person, whenever the status of the persons involved is equal and the speech situation informal. By contrast, urami tamafu is an exalted form expressing the addresser's consideration of the exalted status of the subject, be it the addressee or a third person. Morphologically, urami tamafu is a combination of a head verb with the auxiliary verb tamafu ‘to deign’.

Since the appearance of Stuart N. Wolfenden's monumental Outlines of Tibeto-Burman linguistic morphology in 1929, attention has increasingly focused not only on derivational processes in Tibeto-Burman, but also on the flexional morphology of conjugations and declensions. The first systematic comparison of Tibeto-Burman conjugational and pronominal morphology was James John Bauman's elaborate Pronouns and pronominal morphology in Tibeto-Burman in 1975. Bauman put to rest any lingering doubts that the conjugations of Tibeto-Burman languages could be attributed to an Austro- Asiatic substrate, and he adduced a vast body of data demonstrating the nativeness and antiquity of conjugational morphology in Tibeto-Burman. Verbal agreement in Tibeto-Burman has traditionally been known by Hodgson's term ‘pronominalization’, based on the assumption that conjugational affixes ultimately derive from ancient independent pronouns. Bauman demonstrated that the conjugational systems of Tibeto-Burman languages, and therefore any ancient pronominal system they may reflect, are more conservative than the independent pronominal systems attested in individual languages. Based on a comparison of these conjugations, Bauman (1975: 195, 237, 247) proposed the prototypical Tibeto-Burman agreement system shown in tables 1 and 2.

When King Mindon (reigned 1853–78) transferred his court to Mandalay and began to build his palace there in 1857, many parts of the teak buildings were brought from the old capital of Amarapura. In the hundred years before that, the palace had already been disassembled and moved from Ava to Amarapura and back again before King Shwebo Min finally reassembled the royal buildings at Amarapura in 1837. Each time, complex wood structures covered with gilt carvings were taken apart and transported to the new royal centre. When it was re-erected, embellishments were added, and the whole refurbished with new paint and gilding.