Die agyptisch-arabischen Dialekte, vol. 4: Glossar, Arabisch-Deutsch.

• Author: Stewart, Devin J.
• Position: Review

By PETER BEHNSTEDT and MANFRED WOIDICH. Beihefte zum Tubinger Atlas des vorderen Orients, series B, no. 50.4. Wiesbaden: DR. LUDWIG REICHERT VERLAG, 1994. Pp. xiii + 513. DM 98.

If your sun bread is triangular, you must be in Kom Lolah! For those who have not yet had the chance to visit Egypt's more obscure backwaters, this work provides a vicarious linguistic tour through Kafr il-Ballas, il-Kitkateh, Izbit il-Basili and a host of towns and villages throughout Egypt. And whether you need to adjust a plow, build an oven, or fix a water wheel on the way, you won't be at a loss for words. This Arabic-German glossary is volume four, part one of Die agyptisch-arabischen Dialekte. The first is an introduction, the second dialectal maps (1983), and the third texts, in two parts, from the Delta (1987) and from the Nile valley and the oases (1988); the last part of the work, volume four, part two, is a German-Arabic glossary, scheduled to appear soon. The volume under review provides a great deal of information-on the vocabulary of regional Egyptian dialects, covering the entire country, from the bedouins of the Libyan desert to the fishermen of Alexandria and the Red Sea, to the peasants of the deep Sa id. It draws not only on extensive field work the authors conducted between 1975 and 1983, but also on a number of published linguistic studies and specialized works on Egyptian folklore, baby-talk, agriculture, flora, and fauna.

The authors are careful to point out that this is a glossary, not a systematic dictionary. It does not claim to be comprehensive, and only includes the particular forms recorded by the authors or published in the studies they consulted. Thus, many nouns appear only in the singular and verbs in only the perfect or the imperfect. No single regional dialect is covered in full. Nevertheless, the work contains a great deal of information, over 6,000 root entries and approximately 23,000 individual items. Each citation is ascribed to a specific location and/or region, and cross-references to related entries are frequently provided. Particularly evident in the collection is dialectal material from the oases, the B eri Arabs (between Thebes and Isna), the Awlad Ali bedouin of the western desert, and the Ababda bedouin of southern Egypt. Much of the material has to do with agriculture, including names for the various parts of plows, water-wheels and other water-raising devices, the methods of preparing fields and planting various crops, methods of tending to date-palms, types of fish, parts of boats, and so on. The technical terms, such as those describing the five successive clover harvests (p. 502) or the various products produced from milk (p. 428), will be useful for specialists in agriculture and material culture. In addition, the glossary contains fascinating linguistic material of general interest.

The chief achievement of the glossary - as of Die agyptisch-arabischen Dialekte as a whole - is to provide a record of the linguistic variety found in Egypt. Despite Cairene Arabic's undisputed status as the nation's prestige dialect, and despite the economic and political centralization that, together with radio, television, and cassette tapes, have enabled it to make vast inroads on local dialects in the course of this century, the glossary makes it perfectly clear that Cairene is not the...