Review of Burtea, Zwei äthiopische Zauberrollen (original) (raw)
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Berber_PhoenicianFO51_2014.pdf
In the article the question of traces of Phoenician/Punic influence in lexicon of Berber languages is solved in perspective of chronology of disintegration of the Berber dialect continuum. It is possible to conclude that the oldest layer of Canaanite loans is also attested in the West Berber branch. It means the beginning of this influence preceded the disintegration of the attested Berber languages.
Gnomon (München), 2021
The benefits of the CIIP project for the scholarly community are obvious and enormous and the team merits the admiration and thanks of all those with any interest in ancient Judaea/Palestine, both for the quality and the speed of their common work. By this point the series has already established itself as a reference and no further comment is required by way of introduction. Volume IV covers a geographical region of very special interest, over a period of extraordinary change: from Alexander to Muhammad. While the wise decision was made to devote a separate (2-part) volume to Jerusalem itself, Judaea and Idumaea represent the real heart of the territory explored in the CIIP. The distinctive and decisive social and religious history broadly binding the 172 locations handled in this volume-from tiny sites, quite off the map, to important centers like Hebron, Bethlehem, and Beit Guvrin-lends particular promise for further study of the multitude of micro-histories catalogued here. In various ways, the successive, intricate processes of Hellenization, Romanization, and Christianization are all detectable in the corpus, right up the moment of the Muslim Conquest. A vast deposit of information is naturally included in the 1580 concentrated pages and more than 1300 inscriptions (#2649-3978) comprising Parts 1 and 2. The format is like that followed in the other volumes, and no general historical and archeological introduction is offered at the beginning of the volume. This lack of a synthetic orientation, of course, reflects the challenging nature of the contents, which, besides the chronological and geographical diversity typical also of other similar collections (e.g. CIL, IG), is also unusually linguistically diverse, so that an adequate conspectus is simply very difficult to gain. The bigger sites are, nevertheless, given separate introductions proportioned to their importance; and obviously the true core of the publication is the assemblage and decipherment of the specific artifacts. Here the familiar presentation is attractive, compact, and complete. Each individual entry includes a brief description, including the findspot (when known), a transcription, translation, short (or sometimes rather developed) commentary, and a focused bibliography. Nearly always, photographs or drawings are also provided. A 60-page Index of Personal Names (cumulative with the earlier volumes) along with three maps and a key to the named locations is included at the back of Part 2. An additional index of foreign words and phrases would have been a large undertaking (not made easier by the multiple languages involved), but an
Ramzi Rouigh, Berberization and its Modern Artifacts, in Storica. 67-68 • anno XXIII, 2017
References to ancient and prehistoric Berbers have been standard in the last two centuries, even if historians have long known that the name «Berbers» was of medieval Arabic origin. At the heart of this anachronism is the notion that the Berbers are the region’s indigenous inhabitants, an idea that has been critical to the development of the field of Berber studies. Drawing attention to the modern construction of Berbers, this article identifies some of the most salient features of this Berberization in view of eliciting research based on new historicizing grounds.
M. Lafkioui (ed.) , "African Arabic: Approaches to Dialectology" (2013) pp. 271-291, 2013
The analysis of the Kitāb al-barbariyya, provides for the first time evidence for certain phenomena related to language contact between the Berber and Arabic in the Middle Ages. The date of composition of the text is not known. Several clues (including the spelling of [g], transcribed with <ǧ> and not with ) point to a period prior to the Hilali invasion or very close to it. The most remarkable phenomena can by gathered in the domain of borrowings. Even at an early stage, the text displays a number of Arabic loanwords in Berber, which are concentrated mainly in the field of religion, even if the language of this document preserves much of the native lexicon. In some cases, we can see a difference in the use of native vs. borrowed lexicon in different parts of the work, probably due to a difference in time of composition of the books which constitute the text. Such is the case of Berber asersur corresponding to Arabic ḥuǧǧa “(divine) proof, argument ” (f. 96a, l. 12), substituted by the loanword lḥuǧǧeṯ (f. 1a l. 1 and passim) in the opening book (which was almost surely composed after the rest of the work). Moreover, in some cases, the phonetic shape of the loanwords records some phonetic and morphological processes in Maghribi spoken Arabic which began early to differentiate it from “classical Arabic”. The best evidence comes from the numerals of the second decade: ṯnāš <ʾṯnʾš> “twelve” (f. 124a, l. 8), tmenṭac “eighteen” (f. 62b, l. 15), where we can see the loss of the last part of the numerals and the emphatisation of internal t as a trace of a dropped ‘ayin. The presence of these forms as loanwords in this ancient Berber text shows that these phenomena, considered by Ferguson as belonging to an old “arabic koine”, had already taken place in early times (see Ferguson 1959: 626, Brugnatelli 1982: 43). Borrowed numerals also provide the evidence of the early appearance of yet another feature typical of Maghribi Arabic, namely constructions with a particle n: xamsṭac n yum “fifteen days” (f. 42b, l. 3) jours », ṯnāš en wuqiyya “twelve ounces”, ṯnāš en dirham “twelve dirhams” (f. 57b, l. 16). Last but not least, sometimes a borrowing may help to find the original meaning of some Arabic words that seem forgotten or disputed already in ancient times.
Old Latin berber. Indo-European Heroic Poetry and Slavic Epics, Copenhagen DK. (Presentation.) Talk published; see Ligorio 2013c. (Supersedes the presentation.)