Articles

Using etymological methods, the present study identified three Sinitic and Slavic shared (Sino-Germanic) etyma: U+9E7F, U+9732 and U+8EF8. These three etyma form a rhyme correspondence. This regular sound change validates the etymological connection in question. The etymon U+9E7F for “deer and similar animals of the superfamily Cervoidea” has been identified in Sinitic, Slavic, Germanic, Baltic, Celtic, Romance, Hellenic, Armenian, Indo-Iranian and Tocharian. The etymon U+9732 for “dew” has been identified in Sinitic, Slavic, Baltic, Romance and Indo-Iranian. The etymon U+8EF8 for “dark” has been identified in Sinitic, Slavic, Germanic, Baltic, Celtic, Romance, Albanian, Hellenic and Indo-Iranian. In Indo-European linguistics, the Proto-Indo-European roots *h1ol-ḱ-i- “deer, elk”, *Hros-eh2 “dew” and *h2eḱs-(i-) “axle, axis” are newly identified in Sinitic.

Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit contains, among others, interpretative rules called paribhāṣās which guide the correct reading of grammatical rules expressed in a concise form by means of special terms, denotations and other shortening techniques. A careful study of Pāṇini’s grammar shows that paribhāṣās formulated by him are not enough to clarify all the nuances of various grammatical rules. Therefore commentators formulated additional paribhāṣās that allowed them to interpret correctly the rules of Pāṇini’s grammar and to resolve conflicts between the grammatical operations prescribed by it. Not only is a description of these additional interpretative rules unavailable in Russian literature, but even mentions of this phenomenon of Sanskrit grammatical literature are rare. The article highlights the history and principles of compilation of commented lists of post-Pāṇinian paribhāṣās by medieval Sanskrit grammarians of different schools. A comparative analysis of these lists is carried out and the traditional classification of paribhāṣās is discussed. It can be concluded that for at least one and a half thousand years (4th–18th centuries) a brief but exhaustive set of commented rules of interpretation of Pāṇini’s grammar was being compiled. The works of commentators differed both in the composition and order of presentation of the rules and in the understanding of each of them. This process was crowned by the 18th-century work of Nāgojībhaṭṭa, “The Lunar Diadem of Paribhāṣās” (Paribhāṣenduśekhara), which remains canonical today.

An in memoriam article on Professor Alexey Petrovich Rogachev, a distinguished Russian Oriental scholar and translator.

The article presents an annotated translation of the anonymous Chinese collection “Landun Shiyong” (Ten Verses on London), the first known poetic description of London in Chinese.

An in memoriam article dedicated to Alexander Mikhailovich Dubyansky.

A report on the international seminar of the Nusantara Society dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the Institute of Asian and African Studies.

The article examines attempts to institutionalize political processes at the township and village level in China and changes to grassroots governance in the era of Xi Jinping.

A report on the nineteenth School of Young Africanists.

The article describes the Department of Middle Eastern History at Moscow State University and its place in the development of Russian Oriental studies.

The article analyzes the position of the Muslim Brotherhood in Mauritanian domestic politics and the development of the Tawassul party between 2007 and 2019.

The first part of a study of the medieval Arabic philologist Ibn Jinni’s theory of larger etymology.

The second part of the study examines Ibn Jinni’s theory of larger etymology and semantic relations among Arabic root variations.

The article examines religious endowments to Buddhist institutions of the kingdom of Awa from a monk and rulers of Chiang Mai, using two Burmese inscriptions from the fourteenth century.

The article analyzes the use of the Chinese contrastive discourse marker 但是 dànshì “but” in the spoken Chinese of advanced Russian learners.