FOLIA ORIENTALIA VOL. LV — 2018 On 'imāla in pre-Islamic Arabic (original) (raw)

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Reviewed by Gonzalo Rubio (Pennsylvania State University) This is the first volume of a four-volume reference work on Arabic language and linguistics. 1 The second (Eg-Lan) volume was published in late 2006, and the third one (Lat-Pu) in early 2008. This is an unusually fast pace for a project of this nature, and the editors and the publisher must be congratulated for their diligence. As its title indicates, this encyclopedia includes articles on a wide variety of linguistic topics, from language acquisition to computational linguistics and descriptive grammar. Nevertheless, the present review will focus exclusively on entries that pertain, in one way or another, to historical linguistics. The entry on "Afro-Asiatic languages" by Andrzej Zaborski (35-40) is necessarily brief, but it provides the reader with a general idea of the kinship that relates the various branches of this large family: Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and (for those who distinguish it from Cushitic) Omotic. A particularly interesting feature of Zaborski's presentation lies in his questioning the accuracy of the family tree model (the Stammbaummodell) as a rendition of the historical connections between the branches of Afroasiatic (see also Rubio 2003, 2006). However, the bibliography for this entry is a bit puzzling. There is no mention of Lipiński (2001). It is true that many have pointed out the idiosyncrasies that plague Lipiński's manual, especially the fact that no references are provided in the text of such a massive volume, so the reader never knows if something is a commonly accepted theory or a minority opinion, and whether a specific point is someone else's idea or the author's. Still, as Voigt (2003) has noted, in spite of all its shortcomings, Lipiński's overview shows much more awareness of recent developments in the study of Semitic and Afroasiatic languages than Kienast's (2001) does, but only the latter is listed in this entry's bibliography. If idiosyncrasies were a reason