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This handbook provides a comprehensive account of the languages spoken in Ethiopia, exploring both their structures and features and their function and use in society. The first part of the volume provides background and general information relating to Ethiopian languages, including their demographic distribution and classification, language policy, scripts and writing, and language endangerment. Subsequent parts are dedicated to the four major language families in Ethiopia - Cushitic, Ethiosemitic, Nilo-Saharan, and Omotic - and contain studies of individual languages, with an initial introductory overview chapter in each part. Both major and less-documented languages are included, ranging from Amharic and Oromo to Zay, Gawwada, and Yemsa. The final part explores languages that are outside of those four families, namely Ethiopian Sign Language, Ethiopian English, and Arabic. With its international team of senior researchers and junior scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian Languages will appeal to anyone interested in the languages of the region and in African linguistics more broadly.
The first global history of African linguistics as an emerging autonomous academic discipline, covering Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.
Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Suc...
Four years after the publication of the Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature, volume I (Brill, 2014), this volume present the second installment of the Corpus. Inspired by D.H. Müller’s pioneering studies of the 1900s, the authors publish a large body of folklore and ethnographic texts in Soqotri. The language is spoken by more than 100,000 people inhabiting the island Soqotra (Gulf of Aden, Yemen). Soqotri is among the most archaic Semitic languages spoken today, whereas the oral literature of the islanders is a mine of original motifs and plots. Texts appear in transcription, English and Arabic translations, and the Arabic-based native script. Philological annotations deal with grammatical, lexical and literary features, as well as realia. The Glossary accumulates all words attested in the volume. The Plates provide a glimpse into the fascinating landscapes of the island and the traditional lifestyle of its inhabitants.
The consecutive tenses are fundamental in all descriptions of Classical Hebrew grammar. They are even basic to the textbooks on Biblical Hebrew. Being fundamental in the verbal system, and part of any beginner’s grammar, they pose a serious problem to a linguistic understanding of the verbal system, since grammars describe an alternation of ‘forms’ or ‘tenses’ in double pairs: wayyiqṭol alternates with its ‘equivalent’ qaṭal, and wə-qaṭal alternates with its ‘equivalent’ yiqṭol. This ‘enigma’ in the verbal system is handled in the book by recognising that the alternation of the consecutive tenses with other tenses, in the reality of the text, represents a linki...
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2020 Winner of the 2021 African Studies Review Prize for the Best Africa-focused Anthology or Edited Collection A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea introduces readers to current research on major topics in the history and cultures of the Ethiopian-Eritrean region from the seventh century to the mid-sixteenth, with insights into foundational late-antique developments where appropriate. Multiconfessional in scope, it includes in its purview both the Christian kingdom and the Islamic and local-religious societies that have attracted increasing attention in recent decades, tracing their internal features, interrelations, and imbrication in broader netwo...
Traditional livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain them are dying out around the world. This book is a collection of research on the relationships between people, their environment, their expertise and their languages along the ecologically fragile coasts of the Arabian Peninsula. These studies are the outcome of many years of collaborative fieldwork with local communities in three main regions of southern and eastern Arabia: the Musandam Peninsula, Dhofar and al-Mahrah, and the island of Soqotra. Bringing together oral literature, traditional scientific knowledge, and marine subsistence at the peripheries of the Arabian seaboard, the volume makes a major contribution to the documentati...
This edited volume brings together a diverse and rich set of contributions on the Arabian Peninsula. Ranging from history, field linguistics, and cultural studies these essays address the diversity of languages, ways of life, and natural environments that have marked the region throughout its history. The book stems from the intellectual exchange and collaboration fostered by a virtual workshop that met regularly in 2020-21 and which drew participants from within and beyond the academy. The contributions gathered in this volume highlight the need for a better understanding of a region that hosts a vast amount of culturally and linguistically diverse material, often in a precarious state of c...
Semitic Languages in Contact contains twenty case studies analysing various contact situations involving Semitic languages. The languages treated span from ancient Semitic languages, such as Akkadian, Aramaic, Classical Ethiopic, Hebrew, Phoenician, and Ugaritic, to modern ones, including languages/dialects belonging to the Modern Arabic, Modern South Arabian, Neo-Aramaic, and Neo-Ethiopian branches of the Semitic family. The topics discussed include writing systems, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. The approaches range from traditional philology to more theoretically-driven linguistics. These diverse studies are united by the theme of language contact. Thus, the volume aims to provide the status quaestionis of the study of language contact among the Semitic languages. With contributions from A. Al-Jallad, A. Al-Manaser, D. Appleyard, S. Boyd, Y. Breuer, M. Bulakh, D. Calabro, E. Cohen, R. Contini, C. J. Crisostomo, L. Edzard, H. Hardy, U. Horesh, O. Jastrow, L. Kahn, J. Lam, M. Neishtadt, M. Oren, P. Pagano, A. D. Rubin, L. Sayahi, J.Tubach, J. P. Vita, and T. Zewi.
The Development of the Biblical Hebrew Vowels investigates the sound changes affecting the Proto-Northwest-Semitic vocalic phonemes and their reflexes in Tiberian Biblical Hebrew. Contrary to many previous approaches, Benjamin Suchard shows that these developments can all be described as phonetically regular sound laws. This confirms that despite its unique transmission history, Hebrew behaves like other languages in this regard. Many Hebrew sound changes have traditionally been explained as reflecting non-phonetic conditioning. These include the Canaanite Shift of *ā to *ō, tonic and pre-tonic lengthening, diphthong contraction, Philippi’s Law, the Law of Attenuation, and the apocope of short, unstressed vowels. By reconsidering reconstructions and re-evaluating phonetic conditions, this work shows how the Biblical Hebrew forms regularly derive from their Proto-Northwest-Semitic precursors.