Review: R. Hasselbach "Case in Semitic" (Language 2014) (original) (raw)
Reflections on Arabic and Semitic: Can proto-Semitic case be justified
Reflections on Arabic and Semitic: Can proto-Semitic case be justified?, 2016
From a comparative linguistic perspective the question whether or not proto-Semitic had a functioning case system similar to that in Classical Arabic does not readily yield an unequivocal answer. It is generally agreed that there are Semitic languages or sub-language families for which a proto-case system is plausible, but equally, there are others where such a system did not exist. The issue is, arguably, more interesting for Arabic than for any other Semitic language, since Arabic is a language whose contemporary varieties totally lack morphological case, but whose classical variety had a case system. In this paper I reiterate arguments I have made before for the indeterminacy of knowing whether proto-Arabic had a case system, embedding it in an expanded comparative look at two Semitic languages, Amorite and Epigraphic (Old) South Arabian. As a spinoff of this comparative discussion one can contemplate ways in which the case system such as described by Sibawaih was instrumentalized out of a system which was not necessarily the system he himself described. Giving greater due to comparative linguistic arguments than is customary practice in Semitic studies opens the door to a consideration of a number of important aspects of Arabic linguistic history which have hitherto been neglected.
Romano-Arabica, 2017
In several works (1998a;b, 2006/9, 2015), Professor J. Owens has developed a revisionist history of the Arabic system of nominal case inflection. Rather than reconstructing the case system of Classical Arabic, cognate with Akkadian and Ugaritic, for Proto-Arabic, he proposed several scenarios in favor of a caseless variety of Proto-Semitic from which the modern Arabic dialects descend. This article engages with the Owens' methodology, data, and claims in a defense of the traditional reconstruction – Proto-Arabic had a nominal case system similar to Classical Arabic that was lost in the modern dialects. We reconstruct a historical scenario to explain the eventual breakdown and disappearance of case in modern Arabic.
The term " clause combining " refers to the way clauses are placed in sequence within the textual unit. In Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic languages, this issue receives much attention, for it relates to the time line, to parataxis and syntactic subordination, and in particular to the way descriptive clauses are interwoven within the clause sequence as " circumstantial clause. " This weighty, and heavy, subject has been taken up by the wide-ranging research project " Circumstantial Qualifiers in Semitic: The Case of Arabic and Hebrew, " under the direction of Bo Isaksson, which already has produced a number of highly significant essay collections. 1 The present volume centers on the definition and description of the circumstantial clause, on the way hypotactic clauses are marked (in addition to the conjunction), and on the impact of these issues on the economy of the text. The languages discussed are both colloquial (Egyptian and Damascene Arabic; Neo-Aramaic from Zakho in northern Iraq), and literary (classical Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, Sabaean, and Old Babylonian Akkadian), treated by a wide range of scholars from Uppsala, Lund, Gothenburg and Jerusalem.