The mausolea that safeguarded the remains of the Commanders of the Faithful are not preserved among the meagre remnants of 'Abbāsid Baghdād. The history of these prominent buildings can be reconstructed from historical sources, however, and their significance sketched. The evidence presented here is not new, but it may profitably be reviewed with regard to funerary practices, terminology, and the development of Islamic architectural forms.

This paper attempts to identify some unexplored types of articulation in the production of some speech sounds. The main interest here lies in the way some English and Arabic sounds are produced: the vowel /a/ in English, and Arabic consonants /ε/ and /ħ/.

Numerous Arab geographers and Persian literary texts refer with a variety of detail to an important desert caravanserai known as Dayr-i gachīn (Ar. Dayr al-jiss), situated to the south of Ray. The word dayr, meaning in Arabic ‘monastery’, or perhaps ‘hospice’, seems a natural term for a caravanserai. That the term could also mean a domed building and a fire temple is suggested by both the Burhān-i qāti' and the Farhang-i Ānandrāj. The Burhān-i qāti', under ‘Khwarnaq’, states:

Khwarnaq is the arabized word for Khuwarna, and this was a most excellent building which was built for Bahrām-i Gūr by Nu'mān b. Mundhir … and the other palace, which had three domes, one inside the other, and was built as a temple and a place of worship, they called Si-dayr since in Pahlavi they call a dome ‘dayr’.

The great South-East Asian linguist and epigrapher, Gordon H. Luce, devoted many decades of his long life to the decipherment and analysis of the inscriptions of Old Burma. He had long intended to draw on the unparalleled wealth of materials in his files to produce a comparative lexicon of ‘prestandard Old Burmese’ (OB). As Professor Henderson explains in her moving introduction, Luce's advancing years and failing eyesight caused A comparative word-list of Old Burmese, Chinese and Tibetan (CWL) to be less ambitious in scope or polished in format than Luce would have wished. Even so, the CWL is a mine of fascinating comparative material, not only for OB, where Luce's first-hand expertise was second to none, but also for Archaic Chinese (AC) and Written Tibetan (WT), where he had to rely for his data on Karlgren's reconstructions and Jäschke's dictionary.

La langue. Le bafia est une langue bantou parlée dans le centre sud de la République Unie du Cameroun, plus précisément par les autochtones de la ville de Bafia (chef-lieu du département du Mbam) et de ses environs. Cette ville se trouve à quelque 150 km au nord-ouest de Yaoundé, la capitale du Cameroun.

Although in classical Arabic all short vowels, as a rule, are preserved, a is more persistent than i/u: in prose, pausal -in/-un are elided, yet -an shifts to -ā. In many modern Arabic dialects too (dubbed by J. Cantineau diffeérentiel) a tends to be sustained in phonetic environments in which i/u are elided. This is, it seems, the reason that in the Bedouin dialects of northern Arabia and the Syrian-Iraqi desert it is the historical tanwīn -an, rather than -in/-un, that is preserved, especially when preceding an indefinite attribute; even phonetic -in has, it seems, to be derived from original -an. The same applies to medieval Judeo-Arabic 'n (spelt as a separate word) in this position.

Although any lingering doubts about the lexical value of the Semitic particle bal ought by now to have been dispelled by the observations of Labuschagne and Aartun, a few further remarks on the problems involved in contextual analysis might not be altogether superfluous. While this particular instance of etymological overkill is not included there, the several pitfalls encountered in the practice respectively of comparative philology and textual emendation are meticulously documented in Barr's monograph on methodology. And the dangers of ‘pan-Ugaritism’ have been signalled more than once. The purport of these caveats is clear: textual problems will not always (or even often) be solved by reference to cognates. Occasional solutions may be lexical, seldom morphological, and even more rarely syntactic, since ‘meaning’ is, in the final analysis, a product of context.

Sogdian has two words for ‘thief, robber’, both of good Old Iranian pedigree. From Av. gaδ- there is B. γδ- /γaδ-/, attested in the pl. γδ'yšt, P 6, 14, SCE 312, and in γδ'wny ‘theft’, SCE 331, 426. More common, from SKr., Av. tāyu-, is B. t'y(h), VJ 239, P 2, 1113; 7, 138;24, 2, Chr. ty, C 2 51R.31, pl. S. t'yt (Man.) T i α 2 (Tales, 478), also L 61, 3; 103 R 2, and B. t'y'wny, P 9, 15, L 98a 1, Man. ṯ'ywnyy, BBB e 6‘theft’, B. t'y'yck', VJ 339 ‘stealthily’. But there are more Buddhist thieves, not recognized by the editor of the Paris text P 2, E. Benveniste. Where t'y there occurs, in 1043, 1091 (t'yt)-95, 1100, he adopted R. Gauthiot's earlier interpretation ‘āyatana’, ignoring the difficulty that these—whether ‘abodes’ or ‘senses’ —can hardly 'škr- ‘pursue’, and justifying it by a paper etymology: ‘Le sens est proprement “entrée” (cf. t'ys- “entrer” t'y < t-'y- comme tγ'm “guè” VJ 64e <t-γ'm); ce doit être un calque de chinois jou “entrée”. La preuve [sic] en est que dans Vim. 15, tys “entrée” signifie āyatana d'après le chinois (Weller, As.Maj. X, p. 323).— Différent est naturellement t'y “voleur” 1113’. An *ᾱy- ‘to come’, linked with gam forms, is not found in Sogdian, however, nor for that matter in any other East Iranian language. ‘Āyatana’ is only (once) tys in Sogdian, and *t'y ‘entry’ is a ghost word.