Maria Bulakh

Arabic influences on Tigre: A preliminary evaluation

Tigre, an Ethio-Semitic language spoken in Eritrea by a predominantly Muslim population, is known to have remained in intensive contact with Arabic since at least the nineteenth century. In the present article we attempt to survey the lexical and grammatical features of Tigre which are potentially attributable to Arabic influence. The genealogical proximity of Arabic and Ethio-Semitic complicates the task, as borrowed features and common retentions are not always easily distinguishable. In the lexical domain, the Arabic impact is undoubtedly conspicuous: thus, even in the core vocabulary Arabic loanwords are more prominent than in any other Ethio-Semitic language. Nevertheless, for many individual lexemes the borrowing hypothesis remains to be substantiated. Recent Arabic influence is probably responsible for a few relatively superficial features of Tigre phonetics and morphology. Several more deeply-rooted features may in principle be due to a more ancient and more intensive contact with Arabic: the specific influence of the ejectives on the vowels; the grammatical categories of singulative and diminutive; the diversity of verbal noun patterns in the basic stem; and several types of broken plural formation.

On some poorly known or unrecognized verbal categories in Soqotri: 1905–2015

The article deals with two hitherto unexplored—to some extent, even unknown—verbal categories of the Modern South Arabian language Soqotri (Island of Soqotra, Gulf of Aden, Yemen), namely the “old imperative” and the n-conditional. Research material is taken from both the early publications of the Austrian expedition and the authors’ own field materials recently collected on the island. It is demonstrated that both categories have survived up to now and can be found—albeit not very frequently—in the living speech of the islanders. In the concluding segments of the article, a few hypotheses about the functional load of the categories under scrutiny are advanced and discussed.

The Arabic-Ethiopic Glossary by al-Malik al-Afḍal

The Arabic-Ethiopic Glossary by al-Malik al-Afḍal by Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan is an edition of a unique monument of Arabic lexicography, comprising 475 Arabic lexemes translated into several Ethiopian idioms in a late-fourteenth century manuscript from a private Yemeni collection.

List of Plates

This chapter presents a list of plates that occur in the book Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature. The book talks about rather detailed description of a vocalic system of Soqotri that can be found in Naumkin-Kogan 2014. The core of the Soqotri vocalic system consists of just five phonetically simple elements: e, e, i, o, u. This very narrow system, sharply contrasting with the bewildering array of vocalic symbols used in the majority of earlier text publications and grammatical descriptions, is capable of rendering the vast majority of derivational and inflectional categories both in the verbal and nominal domains.Keywords: Soqotri Oral Literature; vocalic symbols

The Texts - soundfiles embedded

This chapter presents a list of 30 Soqotri texts of Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature (CSOL). Certain texts listed in the chapter include: the faithful wife, the story of the Makon, Rehabhen of the Tribe di-Kishen, the spring of Qiso, a wise mans son, a Jinnis kiss and a wondrous palm. The texts are provided with Arabic and their English translation. The inventory of the consonantal phonemes of Soqotri is easy to establish, and their phonemic representation in transcription rarely presents serious difficulties.Keywords: Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature (CSOL); phonemic representation; Soqotri texts

Three Glossed Texts

By the mid-1970s, more than seventy years had elapsed since the pioneering achievements of D.H. Muller, the first to uncover for Western scholarship the inexhaustible treasures of the Soqotri language and its oral literature. This chapter presents a list of three glossed texts namely: the moon bears witness against the murderers, a crazy tourist, and a woman separating two brothers. Lexical headings display the same quadripartite structure as the corpus itself: from left to right, the Soqotri lexeme in Semitological transcription, the English translation, the Soqotri lexeme in the Arabic-based script and, finally, the Arabic translation.Keywords: Arabic translation; D.H. Muller; glossed texts; oral literature; Soqotri lexeme