Culture, society and development are the three most pertinent factors associated with every human civilization; however, they are distinctive and relative. Thus, development exists distinctively in every society. Today, globalization has promoted and consolidated democracy – ‘liberal democracy’ – almost across the globe as the single ideology and the best form of government that must be practised for the protection of individuals’ fundamental human rights. However, the adoption of liberal democracy varies and continues to create a dichotomous marginality between the ‘capitalist West’ and the so-called developing nations with respect to its results. The pertinent questions are: what is the relevance of liberal democracy to Third World development? How important are the desirability, feasibility, conditions and possibilities of liberal democracy for a country where democracy is alien to its political culture? And how is the cultural and historical backdrop of the developing world different from that of the West? We will explore the importance of political clientelism in African political development and look beyond liberal democracy for an African-like democracy. This essay aims to contribute to our collaborative intellectual efforts by looking at the existence of development in human cultural patterns, the historical perspective of liberal democracy, its meaning, its validity, its relationship to African development, neo-colonialism and the global clientelistic structure for continuous dependency, as well as political clientelism importance to African development; by reconstructing the ontological notion of development to the Third World nations as envelopment- overt control of the progress of Third World nations by Global West and by suggesting a possible alternative for a sustainable development.

The Egyptian presence in the Southern Levant during the Late Bronze Age is to be considered as rooted and capillary on the territory. Nevertheless, by excluding some written sources as the Letters of el-Amarna, it is practically impossible to evaluate local perceptions and representations of who populated the region during this period. In fact, Southern Levant presents an extreme lack of human depictions and iconographies, thus Egyptian direct witnesses become very useful to provide a vivid picture of society and its prominent historical protagonists. “Asiatics” depictions on reliefs, paintings and Egyptian artifacts, give us a quite punctual idea of who the Levantines were and what they wore during this period. The paper means to focus on the analysis of the personal ornaments by which “Asians” are identified and represented, as well as on the function of ethnic, cultural and identity markers these items represent in the depictions. An iconographic and stylistic analysis will try to show the association between images and objects through material culture findings in and extra context, though bearing in mind the asymmetric vision the Egyptians had in perceiving themselves and representing other people, sometimes far more distant than it appeared.

In this paper, I describe the linguistic encoding of the conceptual category “emotion” in Swahili, focusing on analysis of the lexicon. After giving a brief overview of recent studies on lexical semantics, I will discuss and problematise the conceptual category of “emotion”. I will first describe the Swahili verbs which describe the semantic domain of perception, e.g. – sikia (hear); - ona (see); - hisi (touch), and show that, in some contexts, their meaning is often metonymically extended to “feel”. I will then present analysis of definitions and contexts of use of the Swahili terms for “emotion” which were relevant during data collection. Data were collected both through Swahili monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and through interviews with and questionnaires administered to native Swahili speakers in Dar es Salaam. The study shows that Swahili uses different terms in order to describe the different facets of the complex category of “emotion”. Swahili uses a general term hisia, a loanword from Arabic, to indicate both physical and abstract feelings. However, there are other Swahili terms which indicate different semantic facets of the concept “emotion”: mzuka (spirit), which is culturally linked to spirit possession and healing practices; mhemko (excitement), which can have different meanings according to the context of use, e.g. anxiety, strong desire, anger or love; and msisimko (thrill), which suggests specific reference to a bodily reaction, e.g. to fear, cold or excitement.

The world of Swahili contemporary poetry, as remarked by M. M. Mulokozi and T. S. Y. Sengo (1995: 22), is amazingly broad, given the progressive diffusion of the Swahili language in the course of the last two centuries, from the East African coast to the continental regions of Eastern and Central Africa. Accordingly, authors of Swahili poetic texts can also be found in the “periphery” of the Swahilophone area, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where this language has become the medium of modern songs and written poetry in many areas, although the latter is hardly visible in a context where creative writing is predominantly expressed in French. In the present contribution, after an introduction on Swahili poetry in the DRC and on the linguistic complexity of the Swahilophone environment of Katanga, and particularly of its main city, Lubumbashi, we will present some (so far unpublished) poems by Patrick Mudekereza, art curator and director of the cultural centre WAZA, together with a first analysis of his verses, whose poetics emerges from plurilingualism and corporality.

This article provides an overview of the social and literary revival and linguistic regeneration of the nineteenth century in Arab countries, especially in the Syro-Lebanese region. After outlining the work of the most important Lebanese lexicographers, this research focuses on the author Saʻīd al-Ḫūrī as-Sartūnī and his multiple interests. The aim of this paper is to understand the role of this author in a reform carried out by two groups of intellectuals, one conservative and one reformist, in the period called Nahda .

One of Lampung (Sumatra, Indonesia) sub-ethnic groups, the Pubian Lampung people, has unique and varied terms of address equipped with a set of rules to use them. However, despite the great importance of the terms of address of the Pubian dialect of the Lampung language as assets of local and national cultures that need attention, protection and development, few researchers have studied this issue. Hence, this study was aimed at investigating the terms of address used in the Pubian Lampung language. This study, which provides a descriptive analysis of the entire system of terms of address, was conducted through a qualitative approach in which the data were collected through observations and interviews. The results of this study show that the terms of address of the Pubian Lampung language include: 1. kinship terms of address based on blood relation and marriage; 2. non-kinship terms of address used to address conversation partners from the same ethnicity, newly-known/unknown conversation partners from the same ethnicity, known conversation partners from the same ethnicity, conversation partners of different ethnicities, newly-known or unknown conversation partners of different ethnicities, known conversation partners of different ethnicities; 3. terms of address based on family background which include religious, ordinary (non-noble), noble families; 4. terms of endearment; 5. terms of reference; 6. terms of address based on birth order; 7. customary title terms of address based on customary status/rank and marriage; 8. pronouns of address; 9. terms of address of proper names; and 10. religious terms of address. Finally, the implications and limitations of this study with some suggestions for future research are discussed.

Any translator has the mission to translate a text or interpret a speech while retaining the meaning and while remaining as faithful as possible to the source text or speech. The goal of the translator is to transfer the text from the source language to the target language so that the meaning and style of writing remain the same. However, because of the differences between languages, it is often difficult to preserve an exact translation of the source text. The translator is therefore confronted with issues in his translation work, especially when it comes to figurative meanings. This article discusses some of these issues in journalistic texts. We propose in this study to examine the translation of the antithesis in some French newspapers and its translation into Arabic, thus shedding light on the way in which the translators manage their work and the different types of translation that they may be confronted with.