Search

Lamma 2 Front Matter

After Walter Bruno Henning’s untimely death in Berkeley (CA, USA) in 1967, his work materials, correspondence, and personal library seem to have remained in his home for some years. Contemporaries of Henning’s were convinced that his estate contained unpublished work of great value, and complained, sometimes bitterly, that they were prevented from making use of them. Yet some materials were in fact sent to colleagues, for at least several years after his death. But after this time, it does not appear that Henning’s unpublished work or other materials continued to be used by other scholars. His Nachlass re-surfaces in 1992 in the Guide to the Archival Materials of the German-speaking Emigration to the United States after 1933, where it is listed as still in Berkeley in the possession of his son-in-law Theodor B. Kahle. By 2008, the Nachlass (including unpublished working materials, correspondence, and personal library) was accessioned by the Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933-1945, part of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (Frankfurt, Germany). This inventory has been made on the basis of my personal inspection of the entire Nachlass at the Deutsches Exilarchiv during visits in 2022 and 2023.

During a short stay in Ghat in 1850, the British explorer James Richardson arranged for Muhammad Sharif to translate a list of words and phrases into the Tuareg variety spoken by the Uraghen tribe of the area, variably termed Tamahaq or Tamajeq by its speakers at the time. This article provides a transcription, retranscription, retranslation, and analysis of this previously unpublished material. The results provide data relevant to sociolinguistic variation in Ghat, proving the importance of variation even within a single idiolect, including for reflexes of the key Tuareg shibboleth *z > h vs. > z, ž. These phrases also reveal some morphological archaisms not otherwise attested in Tuareg, most notably traces of a person marking system matching the Ghadamsi “future”.

Some of the earliest voice recordings of Arabic made for linguistic purposes date from World War I and were made by German authorities who recorded prisoners of war in the Halbmondlager camp outside of Berlin. This study analyzes two voice records in particular, which are labelled 'Tripolitanisch-Arabisch (Tunesien)' and stem from what is now southern Tunisia. This study seeks to historicise the scientific context of these voice records as well as interpret the linguistic data preserved by them in the light of Arabic dialectology. It also raises questions about the reliability of both voice recordings and printed linguistic data from the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sogdian Epigraphy of Central Asia and Semirech'e. By VLADIMIR A. LiVSHITS, translated by TOM STABLEFORD and edited by NICHOLAS SIMS-WILLIAMS. Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, pt. II: Inscriptions of the Seleucid and [...]

This paper discusses agreement patterns in Kalīla wa-Dimna, a collection of animal fables translated from Middle Persian to Arabic in the 8th century CE by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and considered one of the masterpieces of early Arabic prose. It advances the hypothesis that the text bears traces of interference from the L1 of its translator, Middle Persian. Kalīla wa-Dimna features agreement patterns unattested in any other described variety of Arabic. The paper provides an introduction to the complex textual history of Kalīla wa-Dimna, followed by a detailed analysis of the agreement patterns emerging from the text. A survey of agreement in both Arabic (in its written and spoken varieties) and Middle Persian then highlights the main differences between the two systems, followed by a discussion of the possible interference that resulted in Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's reinterpretation of the Arabic system as based on animacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the copula systems of Sogdian, an extinct Middle Iranian language, and Yaghnobi, a modern eastern Iranian language. It argues that Sogdian has one copula for the relations of existence, location, and possession, and develops three new, distinct copulas for identification and attribution. It also argues that the Yaghnobi system is similar, with a copula for existence and possession and two copulas for identification, attribution, and location. This paper suggests that the innovated Sogdian forms resulted from the combination of pronouns with the existential verb, with a possible distinction in their syntax based on the deixis of the copularizing pronouns. Finally, it shows that the large number of copula forms in Sogdian result from the re‐analysis of the copulas as verbal stems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, Chris Nickell and Adam Benkato think together about the mobilization of Blackness in Arabic hip hop from two different contexts: a rap battle in Beirut, Lebanon and music videos from Benghazi, Libya. In both, hip hop artists confront Blackness with the nation through the Afro-diasporic medium of hip hop. Although the examples we consider here participate, in several ways, in hip hop's larger generic functions as a globalized Black medium of resistance, they also bolster pre-existing discourses of race and racism, anti-Blackness in particular. We argue that this seeming contradiction--instances of anti-Blackness appearing in an iteration of a Black expressive form--is in fact a feature, not a bug, of the flexible way the genre works. We have paired these two examples, which we describe and analyze individually given their differing social contexts as well as our differing research focuses, in order to glimpse the discursive level at which racecraft functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]