Das Verbalsystem des Altathiopischen: Eine Untersuchung seiner Verwendung und Funktion unter Berucksichtigung des Interferenzproblems.

• Author: Burtea, Bogdan
• Position: Book Review

Das Verbalsystem des Altathiopischen: Eine Untersuchung seiner Verwendung und Funktion unter Berucksichtigung des Interferenzproblems. By STEFAN WENINGER. Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz. Veroffentlichungen der Orientalischen Kommission, vol. 47. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2001. Pp. 387.

This book, based on the Habilitationsschrift (Munich 1997) of the author, deals with the most important, and at the same time, most complicated part of the syntax of Classical Ethiopic ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), i.e., the verbal system. The theoretical and methodological framework of this book is based on the works of the German Slavist Erwin Koschmieder on tense and aspect (Zeitbezug und Sprache: Ein Beitrag zur Aspekt-und Tempusfrage [Leipzig: Teubner, 1929] and Beitrage zur allgemeinen Syntax [Heidelberg: Winter, 1965], 70-89). Koschmieder developed the method of the noetical (from Greek noema "thought, idea, understanding, mind") analysis of facts (Sachverhaltsanalyse). This method postulates the existence of thought categories independent of any individual language. These thought categories, grammaticalized in a different way in each individual language, should lie at the root of the tense system of the respective language. This noetical method, thought of as a universal approach to language, has been used and developed for Semitics by Adolf Denz and his pupils (see Denz's Die Verbalsyntax des neuarabischen Dialektes von Kwayris [Irak]: Mit einer einleitenden allgemeinen Tempusund Aspektlehre [Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1971] and the book under review, p. 24).

Weninger's study of the verbal system of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] also belongs to this tradition, which already claims a normative position in German Semitic studies. The introduction to the volume (pp. 3-36) presents the noetical method mentioned above and contains a short description of the linguistic material to be analyzed--[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] literature in its Aksumite and post-Aksumite stages. Weninger points out the syntactical features of each period and stresses the difficulties generated by the fact that on the one hand, the Aksumite literature (4th-8th century A.D., which contains the Bible, the apocrypha, patristics) is represented, with the exception of the Ethiopian inscriptions, by translations from Greek, and on the other hand, the post-Aksumite literature (13th-19th century) contains a large number of translations from (Christian)...