Michael C.A. Macdonald is one of the great names of Arabian Studies. He pioneered the field of Ancient North Arabian and made invaluable contributions to the history of Arabia and the nomads of the Near East, their languages, and their scripts. This volume gathers thirty-two innovative contributions from leading scholars in the field to honor the career of Michael C.A. Macdonald, covering the languages and scripts of ancient Arabia, their history and archaeology, the Hellenistic Near East, and the modern dialects and languages of Arabia. The book is an essential part of the library of any who...

This book contains a comprehensive grammatical description of Mehri, an unwritten Semitic language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, along with a corpus of more than one hundred texts. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered. The texts, presented with extensive commentary, were collected by the late T.M. Johnstone. Some are published here for the first time, while the rest have been newly edited and translated, based on the original manuscripts. Semitists, linguists, and anyone interested in the folklore of southern Arabia will find...

This volume contains sixteen contributions from the fourth conference on the Foundations of Arabic linguistics (Genova, 2016), all having to do with the development of linguistic theory in the Arabic grammatical tradition, starting from Sībawayhi's Kitāb (end of the 8th century C.E.) and its continuing evolution in later grammarians up till the 14th century C.E. The scope of this volume includes the links between grammar and other disciplines, such as lexicography and logic, and the reception of Arabic grammar in the Persian and Malay linguistic tradition.

This is the first comprehensive dictionary of the Safaitic inscriptions, comprising more than 1400 lemmata and 1500 lexical items. The dictionary includes a lengthy introduction to the inscriptions as well an outline of various aspects of the Safaitic writing tradition.

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...

In The Semantics of Silence in Biblical Hebrew, Sonja Noll explores the many words in biblical Hebrew that refer to being silent, investigating how they are used in biblical texts, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Ben Sira. She also examines the tradition of interpretation for these words in the early versions (Septuagint, Vulgate, Targum, Peshitta), modern translations, and standard dictionaries, revealing that meanings are not always straightforward and that additional work is needed in biblical semantics and lexicography. The traditional approach to comparative Semitics, with its over-simplistic...

From Sībawayhi to ʾAḥmad Ḥasan al-Zayyāt: New Angles on the Arabic Linguistic Tradition, a volume edited by Beata Sheyhatovitch and Almog Kasher, brings together nine articles written by leading scholars of the Arabic linguistic tradition. These articles trace the development of the tradition, from Sībawayhi to modern Arabic language academies. The authors shed light on lesser-known aspects of this tradition, such as little-investigated grammatical structures, and problematic spots of the ʿamal theory and the grammatical terminology. They explore the discipline’s relations with...

The alignment splits in the Neo-Aramaic languages display a considerable degree of diversity, especially in terms of agreement. While earlier studies have generally oversimplified the actual state of affairs, Paul M. Noorlander offers a meticulous and clear account of nearly all microvariation documented so far, addressing all relevant morphosyntactic phenomena. By means of fully glossed and translated examples, the author shows that this vast variation in morphological alignment, including ergativity, is unexpected from a functional typological perspective. He argues the alignment splits are...

This book is the very first comprehensive description of the Arabic variety spoken in the South-Western Iranian province of Khuzestan. It contains a detailed description of its phonology and morphology with numerous examples and a collection of authentic texts presented in transcription with an English translation. The author uses a corpus-based method for the grammatical analysis relying on original data collected during fieldwork in Khuzestan as well as among other Khuzestani Arab communities in Kuwait and Austria. The introduction and text collection offer the reader insights into...