Berber languages outside Mauritania have a number of different morphological classes of vowel-final and semivowel-final verbs (“final weak verbs”). The situation in Zenaga of Mauritania looks very different. In this article, the Zenaga reflexes of the non- Mauritanian weak verbs are compared by studying all relevant cognates. As a result, it proves possible to establish to what extent the main weak verb classes of non- Mauritanian Berber are reflected in Zenaga, and to what extent certain irregularities can be understood from Zenaga-internal developments.

The article examines Olga Tokarczuk's view of weakness and the weak – with regard to her characters, identities, ontologies, and various notions of spirituality – and tries to make out the ways in which her approach to this problem is shaped by the philosophical idea of 'traces'. Tokarczuk's thought, as we find it embodied in her work, shows a remarkable similarity to the idea of 'weak thought' ( pensiero debole) and the teachings of Zen Buddhism. Instead of striving for generalizations and unification, it pursues individual uniqueness; it prefers to concentrate on the exception rather than the rule. It focuses on the ontological underdog – a weak, flawed, vulnerable human being. It is precisely because of these deficiencies, and not despite them, that the individual is more interesting than everlasting matter or the God's eternity. Moreover, transcendence, when it does manifest itself in her work, usually takes the form of a trace, faint and feeble (as, for example, in Lurianic Kabbalah). The aim of this article is to draw attention to an important dimension of Tokarczuk's fiction and to identify a handful of clues for further study.

The late Trappist monk and prolific author, Thomas Merton, was intensely concerned with the self – or to be more precise, with the desire to break free from the tyranny of the self he took to be his identity. His early years in France and England were marked by a sense of loss and dislocation. After leaving Cambridge for Columbia, his subsequent life in America and decision to be baptised a Catholic at the age of 23 eventually led to his taking vows as a Cistercian monk. On taking the name Frater Louis, the ‘world’ with all its temptations and unresolved issues had been left safely behind along with his old identity. Or so he thought. In fact, Merton’s years as a Trappist led to a best-selling autobiography written under obedience to his abbot and many more books to follow. Compared at the time of its publication to St Augustine’s Confessions, the autobiography led to his international renown as Thomas Merton. He voiced his disquiet over what he called ‘this shadow, this double, this writer who […] followed me into the cloister … I cannot lose him.’ In time, Merton came to the realisation – through the lived experience and voracious reading of the Bible, St Augustine, the mystics, the individuation process propounded by Jung, Zen Buddhism and others – that the ‘self’ he was trying to escape was, in fact, largely a ‘false’ self driven by the ego. This paper traces Merton’s journey from that self to the authentic self which is found in God, and in transcendence. Obsession with ‘the self’ as understood in the 21st century makes the study of Merton’s path to selfhood much more vital. The advent of the ‘Selfie’, the self-promotion that social media afford and the examples of narcissistic individuals in positions of power give the lie to the lives in which self-consciousness is confused with self-realisation. Nothing, as Merton discovered, could be further from the truth.