Containing Charles Ferguson's papers on Arabic linguistics, this volume addresses issues of continuing concern in phonology, syntax, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics.
The introduction provides a biographical sketch, including excerpts from interviews with Ferguson in which he discusses his career and dealings with Arabic. A critical overview precedes each of the four sections (Diachronica, Phonology, Register and Genre, and General).
This work fills an important gap in the history of linguistics in documenting much of the career and contributions of a formative figure in...

This study deals with the development of Arabic linguistics as a distinct Islamic science. The period covered ranges from the founding father of Arabic grammar, Sībawayh, up through the classical era focusing on the grammarian al-Mubarrad (d. 285 AH/898 AD). The reader is introduced to the environment in which Arabic grammar evolved. Subsequently, al-Mubarrad's position vis-a-vis Sībawayh and other contemporary grammarians is analyzed in depth and, finally, his decisive role in the development of Arabic linguistics is discussed. Those interested in the intellectual history of early...

This volume deals with the numerous grammatical passages included in the voluminous Kitāb al-'Ayn, the earliest Arabic dictionary (8th century). This material is isolated and classified according to its various grammatical categories and then analyzed, taking due account of the current knowledge of the state of Arabic grammar in its early stage of development. The much disputed attribution of Kitāb al-'Ayn to h̬alīl b. Aḥmad is reconsidered from the vantage point of this grammatical material. This reconsideration involves a critical study of the vast...

This volume deals with Judaeo-Jerusalem Arabic affected by Jewish socio-religious life, its interrelatedness with non-Jewish Jerusalem Arabic, and its erosion by youths through replacement by Hebrew.
The socio-religious life of the Jewish community is first introduced, followed by descriptions of socio-linguistic processes of both dialect varieties, of integrating and discharging foreign borrowings, of lexico-semantic concord and contrast between both dialect varieties, of varieties relating to relative status of interlocutors, and of deteriorating Judaeo-Jerusalem Arabic replaced by...

In 1997 Naphtali Kinberg died, one of the best specialists in Classical Arabic and the Arabic grammatical tradition. His main work, the index on Farrā''s Ma'ānī l-Qur'ān, which appeared in the Brill series Handbook of Oriental Studies (1996) will remain one of the most important reference tools for future research in this field. In this volume the editors have collected a number of articles in which Kinberg demonstrates his ability to combine modern linguistic insights with the theories of the Arab grammarians. The result is a series of detailed studies on such...

This book contains an investigation of the co-occurrence between the consonants in the triliteral and quadriliteral verbal roots of Arabic and Hebrew. The consonants are grouped on the basis of Manner or of Place. Both co-occurrence restrictions and co-occurrence preferences of consonants and of consonant groups are described in detail. The statistical test for pronomial proportions is used in order to determine the statistical significance of the results. These results are compared to those of earlier work by other authors on this subject. The findings are explained within the framework of...

Freedom as a value is older than Greece, as evidence from the Ancient Near East shows us through this book. Snell first looks at words for freedom in the Ancient Near East. Then he examines archival texts to see how runaways expressed their interest in freedom in Mesopotamian history. He next examines what elites said about flight and freedom in edicts, legal collections, and treaties. He devotes a chapter to flight in literature and story. He studies freedom in Israel by looking at Biblical terminology and then practice in narratives and legal collections. In a final chapter Snell traces the...

Containing a detailed grammatical description of the spoken Aramaic dialect of the Christian community in the town of Qaraqosh, which lies on the Mosul plain in Northern Iraq, this volume also includes a transcription of oral texts recorded in the dialect.
The grammar is based on extensive fieldwork carried out among native speakers. It consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax. There is also a study of semantic fields in the lexicon of the dialect and full glossaries of lexical items.
This Aramaic dialect has never been described before. It is one of the most archaic...

The book, consisting of two volumes, presents a critical edition and an annotated English translation of the work on Hebrew grammar al-Kitāb al-Kāfī fī al-Luġa al-'Ibārniyya by the medieval Karaite grammarian 'Abū al-Faraj Hārūn Ibn Faraj. This was one of the most important works on Hebrew grammar that was written in the Middle Ages, which, however, was lost to knowledge for several centuries and is here recovered from medieval manuscripts for the first time in a modern edition. In addition to the text edition and translation, the book contains an...

This volume deals with medieval comparative Semitic philology (Hebrew/Aramaic/Arabic) as practised by Hebrew philologists in the Arabic speaking lands, from Iraq to Spain, discussing its development through the generations, its technics and its theoretical basis. This research is based upon an analysis of over ten thousand occurrences of comparisons in linguistic works, biblical commentaries and the like, made by fourteen Hebrew scholars from the 10th-12th centuries CE, among them Saʿadiah Gaon, Judah b. Quraysh, David b. Abraham Alfasi, Jonah b. Janah and Isaac b. Barūn. Several...