Sibilants And Emphatics In South Arabic

This book, by a group of leading international scholars, outlines the history of the spoken dialects of Arabic from the Arab Conquests of the seventh century up to the present day. It specifically investigates the evolution of Arabic as a spoken language, in contrast to the many existing studies that focus on written Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. The volume begins with a discursive introduction that deals with important issues in the general scholarly context, including the indigenous myth and probable reality of the history of Arabic; Arabic dialect geography and typology; types of internally and externally motivated linguistic change; social indexicalisation; and pidginization and creolization in Arabic-speaking communities. Most chapters then focus on developments in a specific region - Mauritania, the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Northern Fertile Crescent, the Gulf, and South Arabia - with one exploring Judaeo-Arabic, a group of varieties historically spread over a wider area. The remaining two chapters in the volume examine individual linguistic features of particular historical interest and controversy, specifically the origin and evolution of the b- verbal prefix, and the adnominal linker -an/-in. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of the linguistic and social history of Arabic as well as to comparative linguists interested in topics such as linguistic typology and language change.

Preliminary Material -- ' -- B -- G -- D -- Ḏ -- H -- W -- Z -- Ḥ -- X -- Ṭ -- Ẓ -- Y -- K -- L -- M -- N -- S -- C -- Ǵ -- F -- Ṣ -- Ḍ -- Q -- R -- Ś -- Š -- T -- Ṯ -- Selective Bibilography.

The book presents an introduction to Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Amharic, Tigrē, Mehri, and Arabic with analysis and parallel texts.

Erstmals wird hier die Fulle der englischsprachigen Athiopienliteratur geordnet dargeboten. In 100 Sections fuhrt der Autor alle fur die wissenschaftliche Beschaftigung mit Athiopien wichtigen Buch- und Zeitschriftenbeitrage zum Beispiel zur "Historyof Research", "Archaeology", "Religion", aber auch Fragen der "Sociology", "Agriculture", "Zoology" und "Medical Sciences" auf. Wie im Falle der deutschsprachigen Literatur ("Bibliographia Aethiopica: Die athiopienkundliche Literatur des deutschsprachigenRaumes" = Aethiopistische Forschungen 9 [1982]) berucksichtigt der Autor auch alle ihm zuganglichen Besprechungen, womit bei einer Aufnahme von mehr als 24.000 Titeln eine Art "Bibliographic Enzyclopedia" entstanden ist.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship, based on the author's research in the region. Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic interest, the importance of the language for phonological and morphological theory lies, as the author shows, in its rich root-and-pattern morphology and its large set of guttural consonants. Dr Watson focuses on two eastern dialects, Cairene and San'ani. Cairene is typical of an advanced urban Mediterranean dialect and has a cultural importance throughout the Arab world; it is also the variety learned by most foreign speakers of Arabic. San'ani, spoken in Yemen, is representative of a conservative peninsula dialect. In addition the book makes extensive reference to other dialects as well as to classical and Modern Standard Arabic. The volume opens with an overview of the history and varieties of Arabic, and of the study of phonology within the Arab linguistic tradition. Successive chapters then cover dialectal differences and similarities, and the position of Arabic within Semitic; the phoneme system and the representation of phonological features; the syllable and syllabification; word stress; derivational morphology; inflectional morphology; lexical phonology; and post-lexical phonology. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic will be of great interest to Arabists and comparative Semiticists, as well as to phonologists, morphologists, and linguists more generally.