Folia Orientalia

The present paper offers a more macroscopic and system-oriented analysis of the tense-taxis-aspect-mood (TTAM) semantics of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system developed within the framework of grammaticalization-based maps and cognitive linguistics. By combining the maps (i.e. qualitative compositions of senses) and waves (i.e. qualitative-quantitative complexes of senses) into higher-level dynamic modules, i.e. currents, and by explaining the global system in terms of such currents, the study designs a possible way of expansion of the semantic maps’ model from a gram-oriented analysis to a more systemic perspective. Accordingly, higher level properties of the sub-modules of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system are postulated, the environments of grams are expanded from their immediate setting (the adjacent waves on the stream) to other, more distant, regions of the verbal organization, and a tentative dynamic model of the entire Biblical Hebrew verbal system is formulated.

Im Koran wird eine Religionsgemeinschaft der Sabier genannt. Damit können aus lautlichen Gründen nicht die südarabischen Sabäer gemeint sein, wie man früher geglaubt hat. Heute werden nach Meinung vieler Gelehrter die Mandäer mit den Sabiern in Verbindung gebracht. Die Berichte über die Sabier stimmen aber weitgehend nicht mit den religiösen Vorstellungen und rituellen Handlungen der Mandäer überein. In der Literatur der Mandäer kommt die Selbstbezeichnung „Sabier“ nicht vor. Deshalb verbergen sich hinter diesem Namen mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit die Elchasaiten oder eine samaritanische Sekte. Die Verwendung des Namens machte aber die Mandäer unangreifbar und sie konnten als Sabier des Korans und Besitzer eines Buches, das von Johannes geoffenbart wurde, bis auf den heutigen Tag im Herzen der islamischen Welt als einzige gnostische Religionsgemeinschaft überleben.

Dans la tradition sémitologique le problème du «bilitèrisme ou «trilitérisme» de la racine consonantique est traité d’habitude avec la réconstruction linguistique des unités parentes. Ici on propose de traiter le processus de la «triconsonantisation» de la racine consonantique comme un résultat de l’action des facteurs morphologiques: le paradigme verbal et le paradigme de la flexion «interne».

This study analyzes the conditional structures in the Spoken Arabic of Siirt, focusing on a series of aspects such as the topic of the sentences in such syntactical structures, the conditional markers, the verbal patterns and preverbal particles employed for introducing the conditionals and a compositional analysis of the conditional clause, with focus on the distinction between the real, open, generic, habitual and hypothetical conditionals, among other known types of the structure under study.

In the article the affiliation of Kujarke in genealogical classification is discussed. The Kujarke language is an isolate from Chad-Sudan neighborhood, described by the anthropologist Doornbos in 1981 (partially published in 1983). The present study operates with all c. 200 lexemes collected by Doornbos and evaluates their affinities in neighboring languages classified as Chadic and Nilo-Saharan. It is possible to conclude that Kujarke probably represents an independent group of East Chadic branch. From the neighboring Nilo-Saharan languages the strongest influence was identified from the Fur family.

Manuscript number 888 of the Collection of Arabic manuscripts of the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial (Spain) contains a small treatise composed by physician and pharmacologist ʿĪsā b. Māssah al-Baṣrī (9th century). This work offers a detailed description of different causal agents that originate the sexual impulse and its culmination, the coitus. The treatise enumerates and interprets the physical factors that conform man’s sexual response, which is viewed as a purely physiological process, as well as the cultural and psychological factors that shape and modulate the sexual preferences of each individual.

The lack of a comprehensive etymological dictionary of the best documented and, in many accounts, main Semitic language, i.e., Arabic, is a serious drawback for progress in our knowledge of the background and evolution of lexical studies of the whole Afrasian phylum. Any serious attempt at achieving that goal would require a team of a number of scholars working hard during several years; however, in the meantime, a modest shortcut could be to consecrate some personal efforts in that direction on a single important Arabic dialect, and this is what we are presently trying to bring about, within the project of a linguistic encyclopaedia of Andalusi Arabic. So far, our endeavours have cast some new lights of lexical borrowing not only from well-known cases of Aramean and Persian origins, but also, e.g., from Akkadian and Old Egyptian, as well as a rather detailed account of phonetic changes and lexical composition scarcely detected or never heretofore suspected and having often prevented the recognition of the true etyma of Semitic and non-Semitic stock, of which the present article is, of course, only a résumé and introduction.

The Epistle of Barnabas, usually included in the works of the Apostolic Fathers, is an anonymous text written in koiné Greek. It was probably composed between the end of the First and the beginning of the Second Century in an Egyptian or Syro-Palestinian setting. The text is made up of two parts: the first one has an anti-Judaic apologetic nature; the second one is instructive and paraenetical. The Latin version of the Epistle (L), which is useful in the constitutio textus of the original too, concerns the first of the two parts. An analysis of the language and of the technique of translation allows asserting that L was probably compiled in Rome between the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third Century. Moreover, its main features may be identified in the literality and in the linguistic and stylistic popularity. The literality is both quantitative and distributional: the changes are usually narrow (except expressions which introduce Biblical quotations) and concern parts which may be considered accessory by a semantic point of view. The popular style is due to the attention the translator pays to the needs of the sociocultural situation of the readers and is confirmed by the presence of rhetorical figures as alliteration. These two characteristics, which are typical of Latin translations of Greek Patristic texts compiled between the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third Century, are due to stylistic choices which are homogeneously and congruently applied. Moreover, in L these characteristics are strictly bound, because the sermo humilis characterizes the Greek text too.

This paper attempts to define the term, ḥikāyat ḥāl māḍiya, as it is explained by the Qur’ān commentators, who can be considered as the primary source for understanding this term. The term, ḥikāyat ḥāl māḍiya, is not a unique phenomenon of the Arabic language in general or of the Qur’ān in particular. ḥikāyat ḥāl māḍiya, a term typically translated in the research literature as the historical present, is a universal phenomenon used especially in narratives. Before examining the use of the term, ḥikāyat ḥāl māḍiya, in Qur’ānic exegesis, we first provide the Western definition of the term, historical perfect or, as it is also called, historic imperfect, historical present tense or narrative present.1 As will be shown in the first part of the paper, the Western definition is almost identical to the definition of the term, ḥikāyat ḥāl māḍiya, provided by the commentators on the Qur’ān. In both Western and Arabic sources these terms refer to verbs in the present tense used in order to provide a vivid effect and to evoke a past event recounted in a narrative. However, this traditional usage is criticized by Western scholars who propose, based on discourse-analysis, alternative explanations for the tense-switching between the simple past and the historical present. Alternative explanations for verbs in the imperfect which are considered to be cases of ḥikāyat ḥāl māḍiya are also mentioned by the commentators on the Qur’ān and are presented in the second part of this paper.

This article is a presentation of the EtymArab© project, a start-up (“zero”) version of an etymological dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic. Taking the etymology of some generosity-related lexical items as examples, the study introduces the reader to the guiding ideas behind the project and the online dictionary’s basic features.

Figuig Berber (eastern Morocco) has a large number of deictic constructions. Among these, a construction with a preposed pronominal element followed by a genitival phrase is by far the most common. All deictic constructions use a basic contrast between two elements: -u and -ənn. In exophoric deixis, the former has proximal interpretation, while the latter has distal interpretation. In endophoric deixis, the situation is more complicated. For some speakers, only constructions with -ənn are permitted in this use, while other speakers use both constructions with -u and -ənn, without clear contrast. In the article, emphasis is laid on when endophoric deictic marking is used, and when it is absent. In principle, such marking shows that the referent has already been mentioned in the previous context, and can be regarded anaphoric. However, in such situations, it is still possible not to mark the noun. This is mainly the case when there is only one potential referent in a given situation, as, for example, in the case of kings, or as is often the case with nouns modified by a genitival phrase.

Under the name of ‘pivot derivation’, this article reconsiders a phenomenon known by Arab grammarians and lexicographers as well as by Arabists and Semitists: the derivation of a secondary lexical family from a primary one, via a morphologically ambiguous form. Through the examples of ma‘īn, masīḥ and ma/isāḥa, and a rereading of Mez (1906), it proposes several extensions of this type of derivation, made possible not only by homophony but also by homography or phonetic accidents, and compatible with the borrowing from other languages.

In recounting or representing speech, both oral storyteller and literary narrator as well as the modern translator have at their disposal similar interpretive choices in how to represent it, ranging from mimesis to paraphrase to a simple notice that speech occurred. Most commonly, these metapragmatic comments take the shape of quotative frames, which introduce the represented speech and specify various pragmatic features of it, such as the original speaker, the original addressee, the nature of the speech event, or the reason for the speech event. The metapragmatic variety of quotative frames encountered within the Hebrew Bible has usually been described as the work of authors/redactors and attributed to written literary style. In this paper we first describe the metapragmatic shapes of quotative frames in Biblical Hebrew narrative and their discourse pragmatic functions. We then review recent evidence which suggests that at least some of the metapragmatic variety in biblical narrative reflects the oral strategies of representation employed by the storytellers/performers of originally oral texts. Finally, we explore the ways in which modern translators of the biblical text also engage in interpretation (or, a metapragmatic analysis) of the speech events portrayed in the text, using the story of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) as an example.

La contribution du regretté professeur Andrzej Zaborski à l’étude de la poétique du somali est sans doute un des aspects les moins connus de son activité scientifique dans le domaine afro-asiatique. C’est pourtant une réanalyse féconde qu’a initiée cet éminent savant en dépassant les présentations habituelles faites de monographies et d’anthologies pour s’attacher au principe formatif du texte poétique, ouvrant ainsi la voie à une réflexion sur les rapports entre oralité et écriture.

This study examines different aspects of English lexical borrowings in New Persian, their phonetic adaptation, semantic changes, and social attitudes towards them (i.e. tensions between the prescriptive stand of language purists and the community, especially the young people of Tehran). It is based on the corpus of c. 340 words collected from dictionaries of Modern and colloquial Persian, media, spoken language sources, and data assembled from the Persian Internet sites.

The paper presents the results of diachronic analysis of independent grammatical morphemes which function in the grammatical systems of Chadic languages. The following markers are being considered: genitive-linking morpheme, subject and object markers, copula, focus marker. Etymologically, the markers are traced back to Chadic (and Afroasiatic) system of determiners identified by the three phonological elements, namely *n, *t, and *k which have their vestiges in contemporary systems. It is claimed that what is a retention on phonological ground, contributes to innovation processes on the grammatical level.

The subject of this article are the Egyptian inspirations in the graphic works of Ewa Siedlecka-Kotula, an artist living and working in Kraków in the second half of the 19th century. During the period from May 1948 until June 1949 she resided in Cairo, a productive period which came to fruition in the form of a special cycle of linocuts, executed in 1969 and based on earlier sketches. The series comprises of the following works: “Kobiety/Women”, “Woda/Water”, “Ryż/Rice”, “Tkacze/Weavers”, “Pasterka/ Female shepherd”, and “Barany/Rams”, depicting contemporary Egyptians and their typical, everyday tasks. During her stay in Egypt the artist also designed the exhibition graphics for the 16th Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition in Cairo. Her works were put on display at an individual exhibition (December 1948). She also participated in the exhibitions entitled “Le salon des femmes-artistes” in Cairo Women’s Club (March 1949) and “France-Égypte” in the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo (May 1949). Ewa Siedlecka-Kotula’s works met with much interest at that time. Unfortunately, references to antiquity are very scarce in her art, and include only a watercolour showing an Egyptian peasant by a shaduf (fig. 1), and a drawing of a female offering-bringer figurine from the tomb of Nakhti, overseer of the seal, in Asyut (early 12th dynasty, around 1900 BC). The latter drawing was perhaps made in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and most likely represents a statuette whose current fate remains unknown, which would make this drawing an exceptional record.

My series “Some Berber Etymologies” is to gradually reveal the still unknown immense Afro-Asiatic heritage in the Berber lexical stock. The first part with some miscellaneous Berber etymologies was published back in 1996. Recently, I continued the series according to initial root consonants1 in course of my research for the volumes of the “Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian” (abbreviated as EDE, Leiden, since 1999, Brill)2 with a much more extensive lexicographical apparatus on the cognate Afro-Asiatic daughter languages. As for the present part, it greatly exploits the results of my ongoing work for the the fourth volume of EDE (analyzining the Eg. lexical stock with initial n-). The present part contains etymologies of Berber roots with initial *n- followed by dental stops. The numeration of the entries continues that of the preceding parts of this series. In order to spare room, I quote those well-attested and widespread lexical roots that appear common Berber, only through a few illustrative examples. The underlying regular consonant correspondences between Berber vs. Afro-Asiatic agree with those established by the Russian team of I.M. Diakonoff and summarized by A.Ju. Militarev (1991, 242–3).

After an introduction on previous work on this topic (§1), a survey is provided of all the Ugaritic terms in the alphabetic texts relating to parts of the body, of both humans (§2) and animals (§3). Cognates in various Semitic languages are given as well as equivalents in Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European, with several new proposals. A separate section is on composite expressions, which form an unusual set within Semitic (§4). A table of the results is included (§5), followed by comments on distribution (§6) and some conclusions (§7).