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Two Old Babylonian contracts from a Swedish private collection are published. The known modern history of the contracts is described. The texts are given a historical and geographical context in the Ancient Near East of the Old Babylonian period (ca 2000-1595 BCE). The type of text, the people appearing in them, some administrative procedures and the times in which the contracts were written are discussed.

This study deals with the sequential organization of language choice and codeswitching between Persian as a first language and Swedish as a second language in the process of initiating and resolving a problem of understanding and producing the correct version of a lexical item. The data consist of detailed transcripts of audio tapings of two bilingual students' collaborative writing sessions within the frame of a one-year master's program in computer science in a multilingual setting at a Swedish university. The students, both Persian- speaking, are advanced speakers of Swedish as a second language. For this article, four lexical language-related episodes, where codeswitching between Persian and Swedish occurs, are analyzed. The analyzed excerpts in this article are drawn from a corpus of data consisting of language-related episodes identified and transcribed in the audio tapings. We employ a conversation analysis (CA) approach for the analysis of bilingual interaction. This means that the meaning of the codeswitching in the interaction is described in terms of both global (the conversational activity at large) and local interactional factors. In the analysis, a close step-by-step analysis of the turn-taking procedures demonstrates how the communicative meaning of the students' bilingual behavior in a lexical episode is determined in its local production in the emerging conversational context and how it can be explicated as part of the following social actions: drawing attention to a problem, seeking alliance when a problem is made explicit and confirming intersubjective understanding when the problem is resolved.

This paper presents the results of a sociolinguistic research project among the Jadgal with special focus on language use, language attitudes, bilingual proficiency and multilingualism.

It is usually difficult to translate poems from one language into another keeping both the original form and meaning. However, between languages which are very close to each other structurally and genetically, especially when one of these languages is under the influence of the other one, there is often a higher degree of translatability than between unrelated languages. Also, when the speakers of the two languages share a common cultural framework of reference because of shared literary traditions including common poetic techniques, the form and meaning of the poems can be preserved to a considerable degree when they are translated. Geographically, spreading from Asia Minor in the north-west to Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent in the north-east and south-east, respectively, Persian literature has had a strong influence on the local and national literatures of these areas. The great Iranian classical poets developed philosophical, mystical, moral and love themes which also influenced poets for generations. In addition, allusions and poetic imagery which they used spread along with their relatively concrete vocabulary to poetry in the the above mentioned areas in general, and to Balochi poetry in particular. In this brief survey, the translatability of Persian and Balochi ghazals from one language to the other has been examined according to form, poetic imagery and lexicon.

This study deals with the surprising commissioning of a new translation into Hebrew of the New Testament only months after the prestigious translation by the celebrated German Hebraist Prof. Franz Delitzsch had been published, in 1877. An alternative to the professor’s version was to be molded by Isaac Salkinson, a renowned Hebrew translator of world classics, like Shakespeare’s Othello.

Salkinson, who despite his controversial status as a convert to Christianity, and even as a Presbyterian missionary, was still ‘high in demand’ by high-profile Haskalah proponents, due to his exceptional knowledge of Hebrew idioms. As an all-Jewish enterprise, Salkinson’s Hebrew NT, edited by the acclaimed Jewish scholar, Christian D. Ginsburg, aroused a storm of criticism among Protestant Hebraists after its publication in 1885. Foremost among the critics was the Oxford professor Samuel R. Driver, co- author of the BDB lexicon, the standard reference for Biblical Hebrew. Driver publicly declared Salkinson’s knowledge of Hebrew to be inadequate. At the same time, Salkinson’s language was pronounced a source of delight by a Jewish audience ready to reclaim Hebrew as their national tongue. Even today Salkinson’s rich Hebrew is admired by Israeli authors.

The present linguistic study of Salkinson’s NT translation has been undertaken to provide insights into these very divergent evaluations of his opus.

Persian writings on theory of music has passed through phases of change during its evolution. One of these phases began at the beginning of the 16^th century with the abandonment of scientific Greek-Arabic influenced writing on music theory and the emergence of a new approach to the subject. This phase, which can be labelled the post-scholastic period, was one of the most productive phases of the genre and many tracts and treatises were written during that period. One of the works from this era which come down to us is a concise tract by Neẓām-al-din Aḥmad Gilāni. In this article, the author and the opus are first introduced, then a critical edition of the text and an English translation of the text are provided.

The book presents two important Persian-language works on music theory from the post-scholastic era (16th–18th centuries). They are Resalah-e Karramiyyah by Davrah Karami (Sofrachi) and Resalah-e Musiqi in Mohit al-tavarix by Mohammad Amin (b. Mirza Zaman Boxari; Sufiyyani).

The author introduces and discusses the works, the writers, the various manuscripts, and the editorial method and technique applied in editing. He has critically edited and translated the texts into English. Both the Persian text and the English translation are accompanied by copious footnotes explaining specific terms and variations. A concise analysis of the theoretical discussions and musical terms used in each work is also presented.

In editing the manuscripts, both the traditional and the stemmatic method and the procedure of eliminatio lectionum singularium have been applied. Two Treatises—Two Streams will hopefully contribute to the better understanding of the evolution of music, music theory, and literature in Iran and Central Asia from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century

2nd rev. and expanded edition