Manding Ajami samples: Mandinka and Bamana.

Languages of Southern Arabia. Papers from the Special Session of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 2014

A Typology of West African Ajami Manuscripts: Languages, Layout and Research Perspectives, 2021

In the process of creating their manuscripts, the scribes in West Africa had two linguistic sets-Arabic and non-Arabic (Ajami)-and they had to visually express these repertoires following the logic of interplay between these different sets. The suggested classification of Ajami manuscripts tries to follow this logic. Besides establishing formal types, the classification provides a glimpse into specific cultural domains that generated different types of manuscripts and suggests research perspectives and methods of study relevant to each type.

2009

Reviewed by Gonzalo Rubio (Pennsylvania State University) This is the first volume of a four-volume reference work on Arabic language and linguistics. 1 The second (Eg-Lan) volume was published in late 2006, and the third one (Lat-Pu) in early 2008. This is an unusually fast pace for a project of this nature, and the editors and the publisher must be congratulated for their diligence. As its title indicates, this encyclopedia includes articles on a wide variety of linguistic topics, from language acquisition to computational linguistics and descriptive grammar. Nevertheless, the present review will focus exclusively on entries that pertain, in one way or another, to historical linguistics. The entry on "Afro-Asiatic languages" by Andrzej Zaborski (35-40) is necessarily brief, but it provides the reader with a general idea of the kinship that relates the various branches of this large family: Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and (for those who distinguish it from Cushitic) Omotic. A particularly interesting feature of Zaborski's presentation lies in his questioning the accuracy of the family tree model (the Stammbaummodell) as a rendition of the historical connections between the branches of Afroasiatic (see also Rubio 2003, 2006). However, the bibliography for this entry is a bit puzzling. There is no mention of Lipiński (2001). It is true that many have pointed out the idiosyncrasies that plague Lipiński's manual, especially the fact that no references are provided in the text of such a massive volume, so the reader never knows if something is a commonly accepted theory or a minority opinion, and whether a specific point is someone else's idea or the author's. Still, as Voigt (2003) has noted, in spite of all its shortcomings, Lipiński's overview shows much more awareness of recent developments in the study of Semitic and Afroasiatic languages than Kienast's (2001) does, but only the latter is listed in this entry's bibliography. If idiosyncrasies were a reason

Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 107 (2017), 2017

This article deals with a treatise of lahn al-ʿāmma discovered in Tunis and dating back to the fifteenth century, al-Jumāna fī izālat ar-ratāna (‘The pearl that removes the corrupted speech’), a work which includes linguistic mistakes that belong to both Andalusi and Tunisian Arabic. The article presents a dialectological analysis of this treatise that represents a useful source for our knowledge of the linguistic situation of medieval Tunisia.

Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2018

The Maǧmūʿa min šiʿr al-Mutanabbī wa-ġawāmiḍihi, the 'Collection of some verses of al-Mutanabbī and its unclear points', composed by the renowned Sicilian grammarian ʿAlī b. Ǧaʿfar Ibn al-Qaṭṭāʿ (d. 515/1121 A. D.) was edited for the first time by Umberto Rizzitano in 1955 and then by Muḥsin Ġayyāḍ in 1977, but it has never been studied from a morphological and lexical point of view. This paper sets out to assess the contribution of Ibn al-Qaṭṭāʿ to grammatical and philological studies in the Siculo-Andalusi context. In particular, this study focuses on some morphological issues presented by the Sicilian Grammarian, such as ilḥāq (BAALBAKI 2002, 2008), taḫfīf (BAALBAKI 2008), the structures of the demonstrative pronouns and the ismu l-fāʿil. Moreover, some verses of which Ibn al-Qaṭṭāʿ gives a lexical/semantic commentary will be analyzed. To highlight Ibn al-Qaṭṭāʿ's contribution to grammatical theory, the excerpts proposed will be compared to Ibn Ǧinnī and al-Iflīlī's commentaries on al-Mutanabbī's poems.

Proceedings of the 4th Conference of the International Arabic Dialectology Association (AIDA), Marrakesh, Apr. 1 – 4. 2000. In Honour of Professor David Cohen, edited by Abderrahim Youssi, 201-210, 2000

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 2020

Scholars of Mandaic have long been aware of the puzzling usage of the feminine construct form bnat “daughters” in place of the masculine form bnia “sons;” however in the absence of further evidence this phenomenon has not received adequate attention in the reference grammars and lexicons of Classical and Post-Classical Mandaic. In the current paper I present a new interpretation for the development of the constructions bnat anaša and bnat anania in a masculine meaning (“human beings” and “children of clouds”) based on new data from Early Mandaic epigraphic sources and on one forgotten form in a secondary manuscript of the Ginza Rabba.

Semitic Dialects and Dialectology. Fieldwork—Community—Change, 2022

The present text and the additional comments that follow it provide examples of the characteristics which set the dialect of Kuria Muria apart from mainland dialects. The introduction consists of a brief literature review on Kuria Muria studies. Then follows a morpheme-to-morpheme glossed text recorded in 2017 from a prominent tribal leader of the Al Shaḥrī tribe branch native to al-Ḥallānīya. Each relevant item is then commented upon. It is argued that not only does Kuria Muria Jibbali / Shehret possess the much-debated shift of lateral sibilants to interdental fricatives but it also exhibits a few other features which cannot be found in mainland varieties.