LINGUIST List 5.857

Sun 31 Jul 1994

Qs: Persian verbs, African in song, Who is your name?, Maltese

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1. Reza Hashema Gask, query on Persian verbal system
2. R.Y.L. TANG, African lg in pop song
3. , Query: Who is your name?
4. , Q: History of Maltese Writing

I hope someone on the list can help me with my query. The persian
verbal system is sometimes cansidered binary (present/past).
Windfuhr(1979: Persian Grammar: History and State of Its Study,
pp.90-91) has adopted this view. The future tense is then
considered a perfective prersent, a view which is not justified
at least to me. Can anyone maintaining the same view elaborate
on the rationale behind it? On the other hand, some believe in
a tripartite tense system (present, past, future (periphrastic)).
Does any one know of any arguments for or against this latter view?

I would like to thank all in anticipation for their time and effort
in replying to the query. Please relpy to the following e-mail:

gaskccl.umist.ac.uk

Best regards
Reza

Dear netters,

Just a matter of curiousity. I saw the following fragment, alleged to be
from an African language, in the lyrics of a Cantonese pop song in Hong
Kong:

'Amani, nakupenda, nakupenda we we'
'Tunataka we we'

(These are the romanizations used by the music industry here)

Can somebody on the net name the language and explain the word meanings
for me? Thanks.

Cheers,

Raymond Y.L. TANG
Dept. of English
University of Hong Kong

Email: h9290030hkusub.hku.hk
 h9290030hkuxa.hku.hk

I am trying to collect examples of languages which use
'who' rather than 'what' (or 'how') in asking about
a person's name. Please direct replies to me.

Since I wasn't able to find references in the local library, I want to ask
some questions about the history of maltese writing.

In an dictionary printed in the 30s I found the letters turned U (Ajn) and
turned U with dot above (Ghajn) which are now replaced by digraphs.
Unfortunately, all maltese entries are in caps only, so the lowercase and
italic shapes are missing. What did they look like? What is the
``etymology'' of this glyph?

The other interesting letter is the double barred H which is still in use.

When was the latin writing introduced for maltese?

Yours, J"org Knappen.