Folia Orientalia

The Karatepe inscriptions contain an intriguing image of a woman walking fearlessly with spindles. This image builds on the symbolism of the spindle in the ancient Near East as an emblem of femininity and highlights the gendered language of the passage in which it occurs. In the context, the figure of the woman with spindles is contraposed with the image of the fearful man. The contrast between them portrays the magnitude of the positive changes accomplished by Azitawada, the ruler who commissioned the inscriptions.

Egyptian writer ʼIhsān ‛Abd al-Quddūs is one of the most prolific contemporary Arab writers and gained great popularity, especially in his country, but also all over the Arab world. The author deals with issues considered by society, including literature, taboos as the relationship between man and woman outside the context of marriage, the description of physical contacts, carnal and passionate love, prostitution, drugs, and the emancipation of women. In his stories he was interested in the feelings of the human being and in his relationship with the society. Al-Quddūs can be regarded as one of the most multifaceted intellectuals in the whole Arab world: in addition to being a writer and journalist of great popularity, he also occupied a prominent place in Egyptian cinema. ʼIhsān ‛Abd al-Quddūs was a provocative artist of great popularity in his time, but little known in the West, because of the scarceness of translated texts. Through the translation and analysis of his works it is possible to open up a wider glimpse into the knowledge of contemporary Arab literature.

More than 30 years ago Andrzej Zaborski (1983; 1987 {1983}) collected and analyzed all Cushitic and Omotic numerals, which were described in his time, and tried to analyze their internal structure. His two pioneering studies stimulated the present attempt to collect all available relevant data about Cushitic numerals and to analyze them in both genetic (Afroasiatic) and areal (Omotic, Ethio-Semitic and Nilo-Saharan) perspectives, all at the contemporary level of our knowledge. With respect to the long mutual interference between various groups of Cushitic and Omotic languages, it is necessary to study the numerals in both the language families together. The presented material is organized in agreement with the genetic classification of these languages. On the basis of concrete forms in individual languages the protoforms in partial groups are reconstructed, if it is possible, and these partial protoforms of numerals in the daughter protolanguages are finally compared to determine the inherited forms. The common cognates are finally compared with parallels in other Afroasiatic branches, if they exist, or with counterparts in Ethio-Semitic or Nilo-Saharan languages, if they could be borrowed from or adapted into the Cushitic or Omotic languages.

This article approaches the nature of Classical Arabic from the ideological discourse about it. More specifically, it investigates the controversy about “pure” and “Arabized” Arabs which was raised during the Umayyad period. The paper claims that underlying this controversy was an attempt by northern and southern Arabians to appropriate the symbolic capital of the sacred language. The tribal genealogies developed during the same period are also claimed to reflect political alliances. A third claim made in this connection is that Basran and Kufan grammarians were probably also involved indirectly by selecting data on which they based their linguistic analyses.

The Corpus Ignatianum, usually included in the works of the Apostolic Fathers, is made up of seven letters in koiné Greek, probably written by Saint Ignatius of Antioch. These texts, which have a complicated literary history, are very interesting and original from a linguistic and stylistic point of view. A lexical analysis of the Corpus Ignatianum, in particular, allows identifying first of all a noteworthy lexical creativity. There are indeed some hapax, unusual words and neologisms, which are often compound words. Moreover, in these texts some words already used in classical Greek are first attested in Christian literature. There are also some latinisms. Another noteworthy lexical characteristic of the Corpus Ignatianum is the presence of words and metaphors which are typical of Hellenistic philosophy, especially of Stoicism, and which are present also in Christian literature.

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.

The question of what is the difference between borrowing and code-switching has attracted the attention of scholars far and wide and gave at the same time rise to a plethora of publications in order to draw a boundary between these two terms. In the most recent of these publications (Grosjean 1982, Poplack & Meechan 1995 & 1998; to name but a few), it has been often argued that borrowings are donor-language items that are integrated in the grammar of the recipient language at a community level, while code-switches take place at individual level and they retain the grammar of the language from which they derive. However, the current political and economic uncertainties in various regions of the world have been found to cause mass refugee movements to conflict-free places, where contact between newcomers and locals usually lead to some kind of linguistic interinfluencing. The current study discusses the contactinduced German-origin lone lexical items used by Iraqi-Arabic-speaking refugees in Germany. It is the aim of this study to show whether or not these lexical items can be considered as code-switches or established borrowings. The data I am analyzing come from spontaneous and elicited conversations of the first and second wave of Iraqi- Arabic-speaking refugees and asylum seekers to Germany as well as from online- and paper-pencil-questionnaires.

Berber languages outside Mauritania have a number of different morphological classes of vowel-final and semivowel-final verbs (“final weak verbs”). The situation in Zenaga of Mauritania looks very different. In this article, the Zenaga reflexes of the non- Mauritanian weak verbs are compared by studying all relevant cognates. As a result, it proves possible to establish to what extent the main weak verb classes of non- Mauritanian Berber are reflected in Zenaga, and to what extent certain irregularities can be understood from Zenaga-internal developments.

Here is an analysis of the tale of the marriage of al-Hadhād (of the Himiar royal dynasty) with a woman of jinn found in Arabic sources dated from the 9th to 12th centuries. In the light of archaeological data and other folklore sources collected by scholars in the last 60 years (Serjeant, Daum, Rodionof), this tale could be interpreted as a foundation myth, with its strong anthropological and political implications, for the community of Maʾrib, the capital city and the main site of Sabaic religiousness in pre-Islamic times. It could also provide some keys of interpretation of a more general religious sensitivity in Arabia encompassing polytheistic or monotheistic creeds.

This article proposes that the ’imāla phenomenon was an innovation in the Najd region. The non-’imāla form was the traditional form because it is the vowel production in the available Ancient North Arabian data. The article will separate the use of ’imāla as an assimilatory vowel from the Najdi non-assimilatory production by analyzing the testimonial data in the traditional books of grammar. Finally, the article will use the available genealogical literature to establish an approximate chronology for the innovation and to justify the spread of the innovation among the pre-Islamic tribes.

A genetic subgrouping of 16 East Chadic languages is proposed in this paper. Contrary to the popular lexicostatistical approach, and in order to take into account potentially different rates of lexical evolution in the individual languages, it is attempted here to rely on the identification of common innovations. A practical method is presented how to apply the notion of common innovation when working with lexical isoglosses. This new method can also serve as a model for the subgrouping of language families other than East Chadic.

In general the iconographic details recorded in the hagiographic literature are pretty meagre. Authors focus on the miraculous properties of icons. The Coptic lives of the saints may be selected as representative for the Early Christian and Byzantine hagiography. The Martyrdom and Miracles of Saint Mercurius the General and other lives contain stories about the Saint’s icons. We have some information about church decoration in the East, but, it does not look as impressive as John of Gaza’s extensive ecphraseis of St. Sergius’ and St. Stephen’s complex decorative programmes. However, we actually find a number of interesting minor descriptions in the church histories, in the theological polemic on icons, and in the hagiographies. A Syriac manuscript from the British Museum preserves a chronicle of the monastery of Qartamin, Mor Gabriel. I focus on a chapter which describes the church’s construction and its interior decoration. The essential part of the art terminology, which we know from the Coptic texts, consists of the Greek borrowings. The Syriac texts show an entirely different pattern. The Syriac description compiled by an anonymous monk from Qartamin resembles the hymn on the Edessa Cathedral. The Syriac art description in general evolved along entirely different lines from the Greek ecphrasis. Greek borrowings in the discussed Syriac texts are rare, and if they do appear, they are limited to only certain words.

The papers of this series examine various domains of the Egyptian core lexicon in order to evidence to what degree the basic vocabulary is of clearly Semitic vs. African cognacy. The fourth part focuses on the Ancient Egyptian anatomical terminology of the back parts from the head to the upper torso.

After an introduction (§1), all the Ugaritic terms for occupations, professions and social classes are set out in a classified list together with their cognates in other Semitic languages and their equivalents in Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European and other language groups (§2). There are also sections on composite expressions (§3) proper nouns (§§4–5) and both syllabic Ugaritic and Ugaritian Akkadian terms in these categories (§6). A table sets out the results (§7), with statistics for distribution (§8) and language (§9) and finally there are some conclusions (§10).

Ármin(ius) Vámbéry and the problem of antisemitism. In his article the author deals with the problem of antisemitism Á. Vámbéry was confronted with. The author has narrow his survey to some topoi and their reflections in contemporary German-speaking newspapers as well as statements of German-speaking academics concerning his “Jewishness”.

In this brief article five bronze fibulae will be presented which are being exposed in the museum of Kahramanmaraş and belonging to the Roman period. These five examples are rare and significant for the Roman archaeology of Asia Minor.

Buildings with religious functions were among the extant buildings of Ancient times. Among the buildings having existed since ancient history in Iran and which were regarded by Iranians as places for worship and rituals, one could refer to fire temples, idol-temples and monasteries, (synagogue and convents). Unlike the aforementioned buildings, Catacombs in ancient times were places for burying the dead. Thus, like the aforementioned buildings, they had religious functions. Many writers of works belonging to Islamic era paid attention to many of these buildings. All of the authors admitted the existence of such buildings and their religious functions although the Islamic authors did not have profound knowledge about these archeological buildings and their descriptions and reports about such buildings were intermingled with legend. The present paper is an attempt to examine the religious functions of these buildings and search in descriptions and reports of Islamic authors with a descriptive-analytic approach. The assumption of this research is based on the fact that and the collection of reports from the historical texts of the Islamic period is very brief, and because of the time gap between the era of building prosperity and the time of recording and recording them in these monuments, it is scattered and somewhat legendary. The result of this research suggests that in the descriptions of most Islamic historians, the principle of the existence of these fire temples and their religious function is confirmed by the relative domination of Islam. But in part, the prosperity and the existence of the conquerors and the conversion of the peoples of the prominent countries into Islam have prevented the display of a clear image of these works.