Three Arabic Letters from North Sumatra of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

This article examines three Arabic documents, one from the Sultanate of Samudera-Pasai dated 1516, and two from the Sultanate of Aceh, dated 1602 and 1603, written in the name of Sultan Alauddin Riayat Syah (r.1589–1604). The Samudera-Pasai document represents the earliest surviving manuscript in the Arabic script from Southeast Asia, while the second and third letters are some of the earliest documents that have come down to us from the Aceh sultanate. Despite their historical importance, these documents have not previously been adequately published. This article presents an analysis from a diplomatic, stylistic and philological point of view, comparing them with Malay and Middle Eastern epistolary traditions and examining the significance of the use of Arabic. It also considers the light they shed on diplomatic practice in early modern North Sumatra. An edition and modern English translation of the documents are presented in an appendix, along with a contemporary Portuguese translation of the Pasai letter and the translation by the English Arabist William Bedwell (1561–1632) of the Aceh letter of 1602.PostprintPeer reviewe

Apparent Communicative Efficiency in the Lexicon is Emergent

Is language designed for communicative and functional efficiency? G. K. Zipf famously argued that shorter words are more frequent because they are easier to use, thereby resulting in the statistical law that bears his name. Yet, G. A. Miller showed that even a monkey randomly typing at a keyboard, and intermittently striking the space bar, would generate “words” with similar statistical properties. Recent quantitative analyses of human language lexicons (Piantadosi et al., 2012) have revived Zipf\u27s functionalist hypothesis. Ambiguous words tend to be short, frequent, and easy to articulate in language production. Such statistical findings are commonly interpreted as evidence for pressure for efficiency, as the context of language use often provides cues to overcome lexical ambiguity. In this study, we update Miller\u27s monkey thought experiment to incorporate empirically motivated phonological and semantic constraints on the creation of words. We claim that the appearance of communicative efficiency is a spandrel (Gould & Lewontin, 1979), as lexicons formed without the context of language use or reference to communication or efficiency exhibit comparable statistical properties. Furthermore, the updated monkey model provides a good fit for the growth trajectory of English as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Focusing on the history of English words since 1900, we show that lexicons resulting from the monkey model provide a better embodiment of communicative efficiency than the actual lexicon of English. We conclude by arguing for the need to go beyond correlational statistics and to seek direct evidence for the mechanisms that underlie principles of language design

Hyperglycemia and Hyperlipidemia Act Synergistically to Induce Renal Disease in LDL Receptor-Deficient BALB Mice

Diabetic nephropathy is the leading cause of end-stage renal disease in Western countries, but only a portion of diabetic patients develop diabetic nephropathy. Dyslipidemia represents an important aspect of the metabolic imbalance in diabetic patients. In this study, we addressed the impact of combined hyperlipidemia and hyperglycemia on renal pathology. Kidneys from wildtype (WT) or LDL receptor-deficient BALB/cBy mice (BALB. LDLR -/-) were examined at 22 weeks of age. Diabetes was induced by administration of streptozotocin and mice were randomly assigned to either standard chow or Western diet. Chow fed BALB. LDLR -/- mice did not demonstrate renal abnormalities, whereas BALB. LDLR -/- mice fed a Western diet showed occasional glomerular and tubulointerstitial foam cells. Diabetic WT mice had modestly increased glomerular cellularity and extracellular matrix. Hyperlipidemic and diabetic BALB. LDLR -/- mice exhibited an increase in glomerular cellularity and extracellular matrix, accumulation of glomerular and tubulointerstitial foam cells and mesangial lipid deposits. The tubular epithelium demonstrated pronounced lipid induced tubular degeneration with increased tubular epithelial cell turnover. Hyperlipidemia and hyperglycemia seem to act synergistically in inducing renal injury in the BALB. LDLR-/- mouse. This model of diabetic nephropathy is unique in its development of tubular lesions and may represent a good model for hyperlipidemia-exacerbated diabetic nephropathy. Copyright (C) 2004 S. Karger AG, Basel

Advances in Emerging and Neglected Infectious Diseases

Univ Texas El Paso, Dept Biol Sci, El Paso, TX 79968 USAUniv Fed Sao Paulo, Dept Biociencias, Campus Baixada Santista, Santos, SP, BrazilDepartamento de Biociências, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Campus Baixada Santista, Santos, SP, BrazilWeb of Scienc