In the recently published volume of his collected papers Professor S. E. Loewenstamm includes two studies (here amplified) dealing with a feature of Semitic prosody described by him as ‘expanded colon’.His thesis is disarmingly straightforward: non-contiguous and, in some cases, contiguous repetition exhibits under certain conditions the deliberate expansion of a primary poetic structure, called ‘basic formula’ (p. 287), ‘simple basic formula’ (p. 289), ‘basic formulation’ (p. 291), ‘basic colon’ (p. 293). Production of an ‘expanded colon’, in contrast to mere ‘repetitive parallelism’ (p. 283 n. 8), requires (1) a ‘repetitive formula’, (2) an ‘intervening formula’, and (3) a ‘complementary formula’ (pp. 284–5, 293–4). Component (1) must at first utterance be grammatically incomplete; component (2) may consist of a vocative and/or grammatical subject; component (3) must render the ‘repetitive formula’ at second utterance grammatically complete. Thus, CTA 2:IV:8–9

in which the first tow segements (‘ Now your enemy, O Baal/Now your enemy you shall smite’) constitute the ‘expanded colon’, the third (‘Now you shall subdue your oppressor’) being merely parallel.

This is a syntactic-semantic study of negative and non-assertive environments in Contemporary (Israeli) Hebrew (henceforth CH), with particular reference to the determiners and pro-forms specific to them. These are illustrated by the non-italicized forms in 1–3 below:

By ‘non-assertive environments’, I mean incomplete negation (as with Enghlish ‘hardly, few’), implied negation (as with ‘reluctant, hard’), questions and conditionals. In English, these environments all allow a similar use of ‘any, anyone’ and suchlike, e.g. ‘I hardly saw anyone, it's hard to persude anyone, did any stock go? The concept ‘non-assertive’ has been described for English by Quirk et al (1972:53), Klima (1964)—he uses ‘affective’—and others.

Scholars dealing with sources which cite the names of weights and measures of capcity used in the countries of the Near East in the Middle Ages will have recourse to the classic treatise of H. Sauvaire and the monograph of W. Hinz. Sauvaire collected his materials mainly from Oriental sources, while Hinz also included data from various European sources such as travelogues and a few Merchant Guides. A significant number of these medieval Merchant Guides, often called ‘Pratica della mercatura’ or ‘Tarifa’ by the Italians, has been preserved in European libraries and MSS collections, and others, additional to the few cited by Hinz, have been printed. There is also an abundance of revelant data concerning Levantine weights in the registers of the Venetian and Genoese customs offices of the later Middle Ages and in judicial acts referring to their activities. In theses records both the weights used in Venice and Genoa those of the Levantine emporia are accurately noted and these data are very reliable. Finally, there is much information to be gleaned from the protocols of the pleadings before the Venetian tribunal of the Guidici di petiziòn, a law court dealing with commercial litigations. These acts too contain authentic data, although those comprised in the claims of the litigants should be accepted cumgrano salis. The purpose of this paper is to present materials from these European sources which complement and, it would seem, correct those collected from the theoretical treatises of Oriental authors of the Middle Ages. Although the various Oriental weights are often confused in these souces, they do make it possible to clarify certain questions in teh field of historical metrology.

The object of this brief account is primarily to make available the Mahānubhāva evidence on Dattātreya—most of which, where it is published at all, is published in Marathi. The little written on the subject in the West is either out-dated or extremely sketch, and fails to distinguish between what is said of Dattātreya in the early Mahānubhāva texts and the tales of the later material. At the same time it is necessary to provide some kind of context by referring to the Puranic evidence and also to the more recent developments of the Dattātreya cult which is confined almost entirely to western India—Gujarat, Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. These sections are far from exhaustive for there are more trails than can be pursued in the course of one article.

The Ma-wang-tui texts of Lao-tzu have seemingly confirmed two points long held to be true by many scholars: (1) that the text from an early date, if not right from the outset, was divided into two parts; and (2) that—while it is not claimed that the Ma-wang-tui texts represent the original text—it was not originally divided into chapters. This latter conclusion is open to debate since, although there are neither chapter numbers nor names in the Ma-wang-tui texts, there are punctuation dots (·) in part II of text A, often placed at the beginning of one of our present chapters. However, absence of punctuation elsewhere, and the failure of what there is to completely coincide with present chapter divisions, would seem to indicate at least that the present eighty-one chapter divisions—thirty-seven in part I and forty-four in part II—were not yet (c. 180 B.C.) uniformly observed.

The study of quantifiers is an important area of language description. This is in part because their description has proved relevant to an issue of great theoretical interest, the relation between syntax and semantics. One question of interest is how far the unity of their semantic function is reflected in their syntactic behaviour. This raises questions like, is there a syntactic category ‘quantifier’ or ‘quantifier phrase (QP)’?

Much of modern Hausa verse is either didactic in tone or is written in praise of God, a person, or a political party. Didacticism and praise are often seen as separate descriptive labels for poetry, song or other forms of verbal art. Yet treatment of topic may in fact be very similar in didactic and in praise poetry; certainly in Hausa this is the case. The aspect of treatment that shows this similarity is the association of the message/theme/topic with words conveying the ideas ‘good’, ‘worth’, ‘quality’ or words indicating their opposites ‘bad’, ‘worthlessness’, ‘lack of quality’. This association is made rather in the way that a product is sold by being linked by the advertiser to things ‘attractive’, ‘of value’, ‘of use’, etc., except that the valueloaded words in Hausa are drawn from a moral and religious code very different from those ‘codes’used to sell soap.

The fifth and last entry in British Museum MS Add. Or. 9061 (ff. 145b–154a) is described in the catalogue of Arabic MSS in the British Museum as Averroes's ‘synopsis contentorum’ of the eight books of Aristotle's Physics. This text appears as an unlikely addition to the rest of the MS, which contains the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in Arabic translation. The text, written in Maghrebi hand, is neat and pointed, and is marred only by a few small blotches. It was edited and translated into English by M. Saghir Hasan al-Masumi in 1956 in the Dacca University Studies under the title, ‘Ibn Rushd's Synopsis of Aristotle's Physics’.

The appearance of substantial dictionaries of Kuy and Bruu, both compiled by native speakers under the auspices of the Indigenous Languages of Thailand Research Project (Sriwises, 1978; Thongkum and Puengpa, 1980), allows us to observe a significant measure of agreement between the lexicons of these two Mon-Khmer languages. There is a good deal of similarity also between their phonological systems, notably in respect of the vowels.