This book contains a detailed grammatical description of Jibbali (or Shahri), an unwritten Semitic language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, along with seventy texts. This is the first ever comprehensive grammar of Jibbali, and the first collection of texts published in over a hundred years. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered. The texts include those collected by the late T. M. Johnstone (newly edited and translated), as well as new texts collected by the author, while the grammar is based both on the texts and on original fieldwork. Semitists, linguists, and anyone interested in the folklore of Arabia will find much valuable data and analysis in this volume.

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 much valuable data and analysis in this volume, which is the most detailed grammatical study of a Modern South Arabian language yet published.

The Semitic Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language clusters within this language family, from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms. This second edition has been fully revised, with new chapters and a wealth of additional material. New features include the following: • new introductory chapters on Proto-Semitic grammar and Semitic linguistic typology • an additional chapter on the place of Semitic as a subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, and several chapters on modern forms of Arabic, Aramaic and Ethiopian Semitic • text samples of each individual language, transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, with standard linguistic word-by-word glossing as well as translation • new maps and tables present information visually for easy reference. This unique resource is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and language. It will be of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, linguistic anthropology and language development.

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.

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.

This book explores the rich paremiological heritage of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t, an endangered pre-literate language belonging to the Modern South Arabian sub-branch of Semitic, spoken by an ever-decreasing number of people in the Dhofar governorate of the Sultanate of Oman. Reflecting the historical value of proverbs and idiomatic expression within the documentation of a language, Giuliano Castagna analyses a sizeable share of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t proverbs, sayings and idioms from Arabic-language publications, as well as hitherto unpublished expressions that reveal undocumented features in the domains of lexicon, phonetics, phonology and morphology. Castagna’s grammatical analysis (phonetic, phonological and morphological) of these pieces of folk knowledge underpins the documentation of an obsolete lexicon. It is accompanied by a brief introduction to the study of proverbs (paremiology) and a succinct grammatical sketch of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t, making the book useful both to experts and to students of these topics.

This volume makes important contributions to the growing body of descriptive and theoretical studies in Arabic linguistics. It focuses on the rich linguistic work being done on Arabic dialects. The papers on individual dialects draw attention to the micro-variation that exists, emphasize that they do not comprise a uniform group, and reveal the implications of dialectal variation for linguistic theory. The chapters are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology, syntax, and sociolinguistics. They address first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, phonetics, aspects of negation, light verb constructions, raising verbs, and sociolinguistic variation. The book is indispensable reading for those working in dialect description, the analysis of Arabic and the Semitic languages, and linguistic theory more generally.