The pronunciation here described is that of Mr. Keng Vannsak, a young Cambodian born at Kompong Chhnang.

The words quoted in illustration of the text are shown both in Cambodian script and in a simplified phonetic transcription based on that of the International Phonetic Association. Where it has been considered useful, a more detailed transcription in general phonetic terms has been given in square brackets. All examples have been checked with a second Cambodian, Mr. Keo Mongkry, and where his usage differs from that of Mr. Keng, this has been noted.

The territory of the present-day Soviet republic of Azarbayjan roughly corresponds to the ancient Caucasian Albania (in Armenian Aḷovan-k', or Aḷvan-k', in Arabic Arrān > al-Rān). Twenty-six languages were spoken in Albania and it had its own kings (Strabo, xi, 4). However, during the seven centuries between Pompey's expedition in 66–5 B.C., to which we owe most of our information on the ancient life of the country, and the Arab invasion in the 7th century A.D., great changes had taken place in the area, under the influence of the Persian expansion up to the Caucasian passes, the Khazar and Alān inroads from the north, and the Armenian cultural activities which resulted in the conversion of the surviving Albanians to the Armenian form of Christianity. The Arab geographers refer to the Arrānian language as still spoken in the neighbourhood of Barda'a (Persian: Pērōz-ābādh, Armenian Partav), but now only the two villages inhabited by the Udi are considered as the direct continuators of the Albanian linguistic tradition.

In 1836 the Arabian traveller J. R. Wellsted described the Hindu community of Masqaṭ, 'Umān, as constituting ‘a body of the principal merchants’ of that port. By the 1870s the Indian merchants dominated the commercial life of Masqaṭ and had replaced the Āl Bū Sa'īd rulers of the town as the paramount economic power in 'Umān. While this community has much wider significance than their pivotal role in the commerce of Masqaṭ and 'Umān (the Indian merchants in Masqaṭ were a component of the great Indian Ocean trading network, and as Hindus and Shī'īs in a Sunnī, more properly Khārijī, country they offer potential insights into the status of minority groups in Muslim states) the focus of this study is the more specific problem of their origins, development and social and economic activities in Masqaṭ to the end of the nineteenth century.

The history of Baghdad in the second half of the eleventh century is dominated by the name of the great Saljūqid minister, Niẓām al-Mulk, a name linked to an extensive network of institutions founded by him throughout the lands of the eastern caliphate: the Niẓāmīya colleges. Most widely known among them was the college in Baghdad, founded in 457/1065 and inaugurated in 459/1067. The renown of the Niẓāmīya of Baghdad, both in medieval oriental sources as well as in studies undertaken by modern Oriental and Western scholars, is such that it is the first institution likely to come to the mind of a person familiar with the period's history. Whenever historians have put their efforts into the field of Muslim education in the Middle Ages, whether in a general or specialized way, they have seldom failed to mention the fame of the college. Efforts have been made to establish the list of its professors and the most famous among its students; approximations have been made as to the date of its disappearance; investigations have been pursued to determine its exact location on Baghdad's east side; causes of its decline have been proposed; a whole treatise and other learned articles have been devoted to the history of this college alone.

The attitude of the early Islamic state towards figurative representations is often cited as a source contributing to the establishment of officially-supported iconoclasm within the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 726. Islam has generally adopted a position opposed to the representational in secular art, and the exclusion of all figurative motifs from Islamic religious art is clear from the first, yet this attitude is not necessarily to be regarded as intrinsically iconoclastic in the true sense of the word; indeed, outside Arabia itself, the only evidence of iconoclasm until the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate in 132/750 is confined to the well-known attack on images and statues carried out on the orders of Yazīd II. b. ‘Abd al-Malik (101–105/720–724). This much discussed outbreak of iconoclasm is well documented by Islamic and Christian sources, but the very fact that it is so specifically associated with Yazīd's Caliphate suggests that it was considered unusual at the time. Although Christian sources carefully record the difficulties of their communities under the Umayyads, the absence of references to image-breaking under Caliphs before Yazīd implies that his action was a rarity worthy of comment: under normal circumstances, it would seem the Muslims left the Christians to use icons and representations or not, as they wished.

In current studies of the problem of landlorḍism in twentieth-century China there is a fundamental conflict and contradiction between the interpretations of the socio-economic historians, whose major thesis is often the inevitable process of progressive weakening and eventual decline of the control of ‘feudal’ landlords over land and peasants, and the actual conditions and facts of contemporary Chinese history, in which the decay of landlord power seems to have been far from inevitable, and where such persons as P'eng Pai and Mao Tse-tung have had to exert great revolutionary efforts to forcibly destroy the landlords' dominance.

Recent work on the impact of print on Muslim societies has been much concerned with debating how conceptions and structures of religious authority may have been altered, and a new era of religious change inaugurated, through this technology. It was only in the nineteenth century—the latter half of that century in case of the Indian subcontinent—that print came to be wholeheartedly embraced by the Muslim religious élite as a vehicle for the effective dissemination of their ideas. Some scholars have emphasized the role of print in enabling the ՙulam¯' to reach wider audiences than could ever be conceivable in a manuscript age. Though print threatened to undermine the age-old styles of person to person transmission of knowledge, and conceptions of authoritative transmission associated with those styles, what the ՙulamā' gained was not only a new, effective, and—compared to the costs of the manuscript age—relatively inexpensive medium to reach and influence new audiences, but also access to religious classics which were hitherto available only to a select few, but which would now undergird new movements of revival and reform in their societies. While acknowledging these aspects of the impact of print, other scholars have seen the adverse effect of print on ‘traditional’ religious authority to be the more noteworthy. Precisely because religious classics were now accessible, often through translations into the vernacular, the special claims of the ՙulamā' as the guardians and authoritative interpreters of religious texts came to be disputed. As Francis Robinson has put it, ‘Increasingly from now on any Ahmad, Mahmud or Muhammad could claim to speak for Islam.’

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.

Persia is as a whole less liable than Europe, but more than most Asiatic countries, to catastrophic earthquakes, but the references thereto in printed literature are few and peculiarly difficult to discover as few, if any, indexes to books on Persia so much as mention the word.

Watson (p. 190) remarks that earthquakes are “ very frequent in most parts of Persia ”. Allemagne (i. 3) classes them, with plagues and famines, as Acts of God to which the country is specially liable.

Khurasan.—Hamdallah Mustawfi refers to a cypress at the village of Kishmar near Turshiz (100 miles south of Nishapur): “ such was its power that earthquakes which frequently devastated all the surrounding districts never did any harm in Kishmar.’ This was in A.H. 247 (A.D. 861).

Nassiri Khusrau (A.D. 1340) states that Nishapur was completely destroyed by an earthquake in the reign of Abaqa Khan (A.D. 1267). Wajid ud Din Zangi Fariwandi rebuilt it in A.H. 669 (A.D. 1270). A similar catastrophe overwhelmed the town in A.H. 808 (A.D. 1405), when most of the inhabitants were buried in the ruins.

Taking its cue from two specific examples (particular terms used by Aristotle and by Yan Fu) the first part of this article rehearses the hermeneutic question of cross-cultural understanding but gears the discussion to the specific issues of the complicity of translation in cross-cultural understanding, whether in an historical or an anthropological sense, and of the need to inspect critically the vocabulary used in the exercise. The second part considers practical ways in which the cross-cultural study of translation might proceed. It harks back to I. A. Richards, draws on the anthropology of Clifford Geertz and on philosophical pragmatism to redefine the aim of cross-cultural translation studies, and finally settles on the notion of ‘thick translation’ as a self-reflexive way to engage with other concepts of translation.

In the mid eighth century, towards the end of the Umayyad regime, a major earthquake occurred in Palestine and the East, of which we know from Christian, Jewish and Muslim sources. Archaeologists relate to destruction by this earthquake layers in several sites, such as Jerusalem, Gerasa in Arabia, and sites mostly along the Jordan valley, among them Kh. Mefjer near Jericho, Pella, Capernaum, Sussita-Hippos, and recently, Bet Shean-Scythopolis (see below).

The exact date of this earthquake is controversial; some scholars date it to 746, others to 747 or 748, In 1960, M. Margaliot suggested that the earthquake took place in 749. In this article we present new archaeological and numismatic evidence in support of this later date (see below p. 234, and pl.II).

Following the political upheavals of 1978, the history and development of Shiite religious thought in modern-day Persia has been the subject of detailed scholarly studies, but the modern development of Sufism—the mystical tradition that lies at the heart of traditional Persian culture, literature and philosophy, which is, from the cultural and literary point of view at least, the most fascinating aspect of the Perso-Islamic religious tradition—remains almost completely uncharted. In contrast to the classical and medieval periods of Persian Sufism which have undergone much scholarly investigation in recent years, the study of the modern period of Iranian tasawwuf, though far better known and documented, has been seriously neglected by scholars.

Contemporary sources furnish fairly ample information on the structure of the Mamluk army and the units from which it was composed; but, though some of their definitions and descriptions come near to the truth, the present writer has found none of them to be completely accurate. He is of the opinion that the treatment of this question by modern Orientalists is also in need of some emendation, and he here submits the composition of the Mamluk army which, in his opinion, is the correct one, and the grounds for his suggestion will be presented in the course of the discussion.

Like many other rhythmic terms, ‘free rhythm’ is widely enough used to be recognized as part of the vocabulary of musicology, without ever having been convincingly studied or even denned. In general, this term and its various synonyms refer to music without metrical organization. ‘Free rhythm’ is an important musical phenomenon which has been largely neglected by the field of ethnomusicology. This paper discusses the deeper theoretical and methodological problems underlying this neglect.

Bengali is spoken by over 48 millions of people, and naturally it has many dialects. These dialects range themselves into four main groups—Western, North Central, Northern, and Eastern (with a South-Eastern sub-group). The morphological differences between the four groups of dialects are slight, except in the case of the South-Eastern sub-group; but considerable divergences exist in sounds and phonology. These divergences, however, are not so great as to create mutual unintelligibility among speakers of Bengali in different parts of the country, except, perhaps, in the extreme east and south-east. The language which is commonly used in literature is a ‘high’ dialect, which is composite in its inflections, although it is based mainly on West Bengali of several centuries ago. The grammar of this ‘high’ Bengali—the sādhu bhāṣā, as it is called—is archaic, and explains most of the forms of the modern dialects as presenting the prototypes of these latter; but its pronunciation and intonation vary with the different dialectal areas.

The article discusses two key terms in the Quran in connection with the corresponding (cognate or semantically related) terms in the writings of other religious communities in the Near East (Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Mandaeism, Manichaeism). The investigation leads to a discussion of the religious environment of early Islam and in particular its relationship with Jewish Christianity.

‘ Les lois de compétence ne sont done plus les mêmes pour tous ceux qui se trouvent en Algerie. Aujourd'hui une distinction doit être faite, et, ce qui doit paraître invraisemblable en France, au xxe siècle, le critérium de cette distinction est religion.’

In 1853, Heinrich Barth visited Timbuktu, and ‘was so successful as to have an opportunity of pursuing a complete history of the Kingdom of Songhay. … These annals, according to the universal statement of the learned people of Negroland, were written by a distinguished person of the name of Ahmed Baba’. With this chronicle at his disposal, Barth was able, for the first time, to present a meaningful outline of the history of the Songhay empire. Circumstances prevented Barth bringing back a complete copy of the manuscript. In the 1890's, however, following the French occupation, three manuscripts of that chronicle reached Paris, to be edited by 0. Houdas and E. Benoist, translated by Houdas, and published in 1898–1900. Houdas proved that this chronicle, Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān, had been written not by Ahmad Bābā; but by another scholar of Timbuktu, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sa'dī, born in 1596. The chronicle ends in 1655, which may be taken as the date of its completion.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how changes in the social structure of the countries of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are being reflected in new patterns of dialect use. The last 30 years have seen an enormously increased interest in Arabic as a living mode of everyday communication, reflected in many dialectological, typological and sociolinguistic studies. As a result, we now have a much clearer overall picture of the dialect geography of the eastern Arab world, and the beginnings of an understanding of the dynamics of language change. Inevitably, the focus of many studies has been geographically specific, so that the area-wide nexus between social change and linguistic change has not always been seen in a sufficiently broad context. By examining three case studies documented in the literature, I aim to point up similarities in the dynamics of change which are often obscured by distracting local particularities.

The conversion of Ghazan Khan to Islam in A.H. 694/A.D. 1295 was an event of great importance for both the Mongol ruling class and the Muslim subjects of his kingdom. The story of this conversion, based primarily on semi-official Persian works emanating from the Īlkhānid state itself, has been retold and analysed in varying detail by several modern scholars. Recently, Dr. Charles Melville, using contemporary Arabic sources from the Mamluk Sultanate, has enriched our knowledge of this event; in addition, he has suggested that the Islamization of the Mongols may have been well advanced even before Ghazan's conversion. Melville deals mainly with Ghazan's conversion per se, as well as the events that led up to it. As for the nature of Ghazan's Islam, he writes: ‘It is beyond the scope of this paper to speculate on the sincerity of Ghazan's conversion, which we can never know, or on what he actually understood of Islam …’. He does show, however, that Ghazan's conversion to Islam was more than just a personal decision based on religious conviction: one motive behind this move was a desire to attract those Mongols who had already become Muslims, and thus to win their support in his struggle against Baidu.