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Introduction Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 9 (2017) 1–7 brill.com/aall Introduction Sabrina Bendjaballah umr 6310 cnrs & Université de Nantes [email protected] Philippe Ségéral umr 7110 cnrs & Université Paris 7 [email protected] The 12 contributions to this special issue of baall examine different aspects of the Modern South Arabian Languages (msal) from various perspectives: analysis of individual msal, comparative analysis of various msal, and formal grammar. msal comprise an independent branch of the Semitic family. They are spoken in Yemen, and in the Dhofar Governorate of Oman: Mehri and Hobyot are both spoken in both countries, Ḥarsusi, Jibbali, Baṭḥari are spoken in Oman, Soqoṭri is spoken on the island of Soqotra (Yemen). The existence of msal has been detected only recently: Soqoṭri, Jibbali and Mehri were discovered during the first half of the 19th century (1834, 1836 and 1840 respectively), while Ḥarsusi, Baṭḥari and Hobyot were discovered during the 20th century (1937 for the first two, and 1981 for the last one). The Austrian Südarabische Expedition at the very end of the 19th century constitutes a first, fundamental step towards the analysis and knowledge of msal (see the publications by Maximilian Bittner, Alfred Jahn, David Hein- rich Müller etc. in the frame of the Viennese Kaiserliche Akademie der Wis- senschaften). After this step, important results have been achieved, e.g. by Wolf Leslau (Lexique Socotri, 1938) and Ewald Wagner (Syntax der Mehri-Sprache, 1953). The major breakthrough in the study of msal is due to Thomas Muir Johnstone (1924–1983) in the 1960s–1980s: T.M. Johnstone gathered numerous recordings, wrote about 15 major articles, and published 3 dictionaries (the Harsusi Lexicon in 1977, the Jibbali Lexicon in 1981 and the Mehri Lexicon posthumously in 1987). Johnstone’s crucial work was followed by important contributions due in particular to the following scholars: Miranda Morris, Antoine Lonnet, Marie- Claude Simeone-Senelle, Walter von Müller, Harry Stroomer and Alexander © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18776930-00901014 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:16:41AM via free access 2 bendjaballah and ségéral Sima. More recently, different groups of scholars made it possible to achieve new results in the field: see the work of Sam Liebhaber on Mehri poetry, the work of Janet Watson on Mehri (The Structure of Mehri, 2012), the two refer- ence grammars by Aaron Rubin on Mehri and Jibbali (The Mehri Language of Oman, 2010 and The Jibbali (Shaḥri) Language of Oman, 2014), the posthumous publication of the Hōbyot Vocabulary by Ak’io Nakano in 2013 and finally the work by Vitaly Naumkin, Leonid Kogan, Maria Bulakh & al. on Soqoṭri (Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature, vol. 1, 2015). It is in this context that the OmanSaM project was designed and initiated. This project was accepted by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche in 2013 (anr-13-bsh2-0001, www.agence-nationale-recherche.fr/?Projet=ANR -13-BSH2-0001 and http://omansam.huma-num.fr). Between October 2013 and September 2017, this project gathered a group of linguists working on msal from various perspectives and coming from diverse epistemological traditions: philologists as well as formal and descriptive linguists (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax). The idea underlying the project was to make these differ- ent perspectives converge in a fruitful synergy to create a network of colleagues working on msal and make progress in the description and analysis of msal. The OmanSaM project allowed for the collection of data via fieldwork in Oman and in France with invited native speakers. These data include gram- matical paradigms (both nominal and verbal) as well as spontaneous speech, in three msal: Mehri, Jibbali and Hobyot. The corpora were constructed so as to elucidate various issues in phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax. A dedicated database is under construction (in collaboration with Clément Plancq, Lattice, cnrs and Sylvain Pierré) and will hopefully be made available in the near future via the Huma-Num infrastructure (http://www.huma-num .fr/). To date, the project has led to more than 60 communications and publica- tions, and to the creation of a series of annual workshops held in the autumn in France: Paris (2013, 2014), Strasbourg (2015), and Nantes (2016). The project contributed in a significant way, we believe, to the field and to the development of msal studies in the last few years. On the occasion of these workshops, we had the pleasure to welcome highly respected experts in the field: Aaron Rubin in 2013, 2014 and 2015, Janet Wat- son and Miranda J. Morris in 2014, Leonid Kogan and Lutz Edzard in 2015, and Samuel Liebhaber in 2016. All of them readily accepted our invitation to con- tribute to this special issue of baall. The first half of the volume presents the articles offered by our guests at the OmanSaM workshops, the second half con- tains contributions by the OmanSaM members. Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 9 (2017) 1–7 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:16:41AM via free access introduction 3 It starts and ends with the contributions of two historic figures in the field of msal, Miranda Morris and Antoine Lonnet. Miranda Morris has conducted fieldwork on msal since the 1970’s. Her intimate knowledge of these languages and of the people who speak them is probably unique among today’s scholars. (Miranda’s contribution to the field also extends to the environment where msal are spoken, see e.g. her work on the botany of Soqotra and Dhofar). In her article, entitled “Some thoughts on studying the endangered Modern South Arabian Languages”, she considers the fact that today msal are all endangered. She focuses on the case of Baṭḥari, “the most critically endangered language of the group”, and a language for which nearly all data available are those that she has collected herself. She insists on the fact that it is necessary to study msal on the basis of continuous speech rather than elicited data. She describes lexical impoverishment in Baṭḥari, Hobyot and Soqoṭri, in particular regarding the “living quarters”. She then takes stock of the situation of mono- and plurilingualism and their consequences. Finally, she underlines the complexity of specialized lexicons concentrating on the activities of the people, and concludes with an examination of judgments produced by the native speakers. Antoine Lonnet’s work includes a number of reference publications and lin- guistic surveys of msal, which have considerably improved our knowledge of these languages. His work is based on a large set of fieldwork data he elicited in Yemen (Mahra and Soqotra) between 1983 and 1995. His article, entitled “Mod- ern South Arabian ikōtəb is not necessarily iparras or yənaggər”, considers the longstanding issue of the analysis of the msa basic stem imperfect form (e.g. Mehri 3ms ikōtəb “he writes”). His aim is to show that this form is not neces- sarily to be viewed as sharing the same proto-pattern as the Akkadian basic stem imperfect (3ms iparras “he decides”) or the Ethiopic basic stem imperfect (Gəˁəz 3ms yənaggər “he speaks”). He concludes that the msa imperfect pat- terns with other Semitic languages like Arabic or Hebrew in having an under- lying -C1C2vC3-stem. The surface form with a vowel between the first two root consonants results from a phonetic evolution. In a direct continuation of his PhD BedouinWithoutArabic:Language,Poetry and the Mahra of SoutheastYemen (2007), Sam Liebhaber has published various books and articles on Mehri oral poetry, and created the Mahri Poetry Archive (http://sites.middlebury.edu/mahripoetry), an extensive online resource dedi- cated to the poetic traditions of the Mahra. His contribution, “Acoustic Spec- trum Analysis of Mahri Poetry: An Empirical Approach to Bedouin Vernacular Prosody”, provides some preliminary results based on spectrograms, compar- ing the same lines of Mehri poetry performed in two different modes: chanting and recitation. The author observes that the two modes differ, and concludes Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 9 (2017) 1–7 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:16:41AM via free access 4 bendjaballah and ségéral that the organizational rhythm of this poetry is contingent on performance and is not intrinsic to the poetic text itself. Aaron Rubin is the author of many articles on msal as well as of two refer- ence grammars on Mehri and Jibbali (see the references above; a new, largely revised version of his Mehri grammar is expected to appear very shortly). A new, meticulous listening of Johnstone’s recordings, as well as a thorough examination of Johnstone’s transcription play a fundamental role in his work. His article, “The Reliability of Published Mehri Texts”, corrects various errors that were left in Johnstone’s transcriptions, on the basis of a careful examina- tion of the corresponding audio recordings. The author shows that in many places where there was an apparent exception to a rule, this is in fact due to a mistake in the published texts. He provides some examples of such errors, and illustrates how a re-examination of Johnstone’s Mehri texts significantly affects our understanding of the grammar. The corrections highlighted by the author concern both the lexical and the grammatical domain, e.g. the morphological form of the definite article, verbal morphology, and the use of prepositions and other particles. Janet Watson, next to her expertise in the Arabic dialects of the Arabian Peninsula, dedicates herself to studying msal. She contributed to the posthu- mous publication of Alexander Sima’s work, and is the author of several articles on the phonetics and syntax of msal, and of a reference grammatical study of Mehri (see the reference mentioned above).
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