This is the third and final volume of the lexical part of the work. Section Bb contains comparative material to the root system from cognate languages, including sixteen Semitic and three Cushitic fairly well represented languages as well as Tuareg, Hausa, old Egyptian and Coptic quoted systematically; Omotic; Berber other than Tuareg, and Chadic other than Hausa likewise as groups; other Semitic and Cushitic less regularly; etymological and semantic comments follow dictionary entries; phonological discussion, including an attempt at the determination of pre-Semitic phonemes on the basis of...

This volume is dedicated to professor Jacob Hoftijzer on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday as well as of his retirement from the chair of "Hebrew Language and Literature, the Israelite Antiquities and Ugaritic" at the University of Leiden. After a preface by A. van der Heide and a bibliographical list of Hoftijzer's publications, the volume contains 16 essays on syntactical questions in the field of Hebrew and Aramaic. Most of these essays deal with subjects occurring in Hoftijzer's publications. Such are the nominal sentence, the particle 'et', questions related to clause types...

As a culture area the Arab world has had different ecological structures nomadic (bedouin) and sedentary (rural and urban) with parallel linguistic systems. Throughout the long history of the Arabic language, the development of transitional stages has generated linguistic correlates in Arabic dialects. The notion "ecolinguistics," combined and reinforced with the concepts of "compatibility" and "lexical diffusion," is introduced in this study to identify such a sociolinguistic change. The domain of change for this ecolinguistic variation is the extended family in which the middle generation...

The Kitāb of Sībawayhi, compiled in the 8th century, is the oldest existant Arabic grammar. It has gone through many editions, but all are based on a copy from the 18th century. The author of this important book has discovered 11 manuscripts in addition to the 66 mentioned by F. Sezgin (GAS, IX). More than 40 were used in this book to contribute to a new understanding of the history of the text. She has now definitively shown that all of the recensions, oriental and occidental, follow closely the--now lost--copy of al-Mubarrad (d. 9th century), which functioned as a...

The aim of the present work is to make a contribution to the understanding of the inner workings of the Syriac language through a study of one important corpus written in that language. The book contains four chapters on aspects of Syriac syntax. In addition, a chapter on inner-Syriac developments -- traceable owing to the fact that the Gospel of Matthew was translated several times and at different dates -- and a chapter on the process of translation from Greek into Syriac are included as well. The analysis of the language of the Syriac versions of Matthew facilitates the use of these...

Severed from its parent language and from the other vernaculars, as well as from the Islamic culture and religion, the peripheral Arabic dialect of Malta has for the last nine centuries been exposed to large-scale contact with Medieval Sicilian, Italian and, later, English. Modern Maltese thus incorporates a great mass of borrowed words. This volume is a description of the processes by which Romance and English loan verbs have been integrated to varying degrees into the Arabic structure of Maltese morphology. It also proposes a typological classification of borrowed verbs in a continuum...