This study discusses the manner in which Atayal (Atayalic subgroup, Austronesian language family) underwent a semantic shift in time expressions such as “a little while ago,” “now, today,” and “morning, tomorrow.” In relation to this, the forms for “yesterday,” “a little while ago,” and “later” are also discussed. In Proto-Austronesian, the meanings of “morning” and “tomorrow” are inseparable, and this form is reconstructed as *dama. In earlier Atayal, sasan meant both “morning” and “tomorrow.” The Atayal form, sasan, “morning, tomorrow,” does not reflect *dama. This study examines the origin of sasan in Seediq (Atayalic subgroup), a language closely related to Atayal. In Seediq, the form for “now, today” is saða, and it later became saya. The ð dates back to the Proto-Atayalic *j; thus, a tentative form in Proto-Atayalic can be reconstructed as *saja, meaning “now, today.” The Proto-Atayalic *j is reflected as g, r, or s in Atayal, so *saja can be reflected as saga, sara, or sasa. The last form, sasa, may be related to sasan “morning, tomorrow.” It is likely that -an was attached, a suffix indicating time or space, resulting in sasa-an. Then, one of the a’s was deleted from the consecutive vowels, becoming sasan. Somehow, its meaning shifted from “now, today” to “morning, tomorrow.” This study proposes that this semantic shift was driven by another semantic shift relating to a Proto-Atayalic form, *sawni, which means “a little while ago.” This word extended its meaning to include “today in the morning” and then further extended to refer to “today”; it probably also referred to “now.” As sawni became “now, today,” sasan, the original word for “now, today,” shifted its meaning to “morning, tomorrow.”

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Historians of nomadic societies in East Africa have emphasized their high mobility as the core of the pastoral mode of subsistence. It has long been supposed that borders were procedures for containing this mode of subsistence and making such societies amenable to administration. However, recent scholars have approached the issue from a different angle. They insist that borders are arbitrary institutions that have been imposed regardless of the disposition of cultural areas. For them, the drawing of boundaries can be approached as a process in which a variety of actors negotiate with each other, produce meanings, and create profitable opportunities. On the basis of this methodological perspective, this study explores the political impact of boundaries drawn by the colonial state in northeastern Kenya on the Somali pastoralists. This study is distinctive in that it investigates administrative boundaries instead of international borders. To date, scholarly attention has been mainly devoted to the latter. However, this does not mean that administrative boundaries have less significance; internal borders offer a better opportunity to reflect on the specific meaning of statehood, especially in the case of peripheral borderlands. By examining how the government territorialized a specific sub-clan of Somalis and how the latter engaged with such territorialization, this study provides a nuanced understanding of colonial rule in the frontier region of northeastern Kenya. It argues that the porous boundaries were consequences not of the restrictive nature of state rule but of a specific kind of governmentality in a frontier region where administrative and judicial powers were concentrated in the hands of local officials. Furthermore, the Somali sub-clan, whose collective identity was anchored by the setting of these boundaries, struggled to utilize them for a politics of authority and territoriality.

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This study is a philological study of the Uigur version of a Sino-Uigur bilingual inscription on a stele at the Mañjuśrī Temple in Suzhou. The stele was found in the Wenshu Mountain Grottoes, 15 km southwest of Jiuquan, Gansu Province. It commemorates the restoration of the Mañjuśrī Temple at the Wenshu Mountain Grottoes in 1326 by Nom Taš , the ruler of Eastern Čaγataids in Gansu, and his family. Paul Pelliot was the first to introduce the existence of the inscription to the academic world. Subsequently, as historical studies utilizing this inscription, the works of Masa’aki Sugiyama should be mentioned. In 1986, Geng Shimin and Zhang Baoxi’s research was the first published study that deciphered the Uigur text. Unfortunately, there are several misinterpretations in their reading, so it is inadequate in terms of textual reliability. Nearly 40 years have passed since the publication of their work, and many parts of their reading now need to be revised in light of the current level of research. In view of the importance of this inscription, I have long felt the need to revise the Uigur text so that it can be used not only by researchers in Turkology but also by those who specialize in the history of the Mongol Empire. In 2010, The Best Selection of Gansu Ancient Stele Inscriptions Rubbings from Lanzhou Stele Forest was published in China, and color photographs of the rubbings of the inscription were made available to the public. Even though I do not have access to the original Uigur text, I re-examined the Uigur text from the photos published in this work. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France also has rubbings by Pelliot, and the images can be viewed in the digital library Gallica. In this study, we re-examine the Uigur text using these two kinds of rubbings and submit a new text, translation, and commentary reflecting the latest research standards.

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In this study, we provide the tone class (AB/C) of 924 nouns of the Kohama dialect of Southern Ryukyuan Yaeyaman. As pointed out in Celik et al. (2022), there are very few reports on the tone class of each word in the different dialects of Yaeyaman. Furthermore, among the dialects (Kohama, Kuroshima, Yonaguni) known to retain the distinction between the tone classes B and C reconstructed in proto-Yaeyaman, the tone class of each word has only been extensively documented for Yonaguni. This means that, with the presently available data, the classified vocabulary of tone classes B and C reconstructed for proto-Yaeyaman is identical to the classified vocabulary of the present-day Yonaguni dialect. However, in order to achieve an accurate reconstruction of the classified vocabulary of tone classes B and C in proto-Yaeyaman, we need to compare the tone data from all the dialects of Yaeyaman that retain the distinction between these two tone classes. Accordingly, in this study, we focus on the Kohama dialect, which retains the distinction between tone classes B and C, and, on the basis of the authors’ fieldwork, provide information on the tone class of 924 nouns. With such data, we could also confirm that there is a regular correspondence between Kohama’s tone classes and the tone classes reconstructed in proto-Ryukyuan. That is, Kohama’s AB tone class corresponds to proto-Ryukyuan tone classes A and B while tone class C corresponds to the proto-Ryuykuan tone class C. However, some words belonging to tone class C seem to correspond to proto-Ryukyuan tone class B. Using the data, we hope to achieve a more accurate reconstruction of the classified vocabulary of classes B and C in proto-Yaeyaman.

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