Selected Papers in Ethiosemitic and Neo-Aramaic Linguistics.

• Author: Haberl, Charles G.
• Position: Book review

Selected Papers in Ethiosemitic and Neo-Aramaic Linguistics. By OLGA KAPELIUK. Jerusalem: THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY. MAGNES PRESS, 2009. Pp. xii + 579.

In this volume Olga Kapeliuk has brought together most of her articles on Ethiosemitic and Neo-Aramaic languages and dialects published over a period of nearly four decades of scholarship on these two groups, from 1969 ("Auxiliaires descriptifs en amharique") to 2008 ("Between Nouns and Verbs in Neo-Aramaic"). The articles (forty-three in total), which are written in Hebrew (one), French (four-teen). and English (twenty-eight), have been drawn from diverse and disparate peer-reviewed journals, conference volumes, and Festschriften associated with the disciplines of Ethiopian and Near Eastern Studies, as well as linguistics. This work is thus an extremely handy resource for scholars interested in these two language groups, and particularly for those interested in the broader phenomena of language change, language contact, Sprachbunde, and diachrony in what the author has deemed "Peripheral Neo-Semitic."

Kapeliuk does not employ the term "peripheral" to deprecate the subjects of her scholarship; rather, the term is purely geographical, as these two groups stand on the peripheries of the territory where Semitic languages have historically been spoken. Indeed, despite its peripheral status, Amharic (which is the primary subject of the articles on Ethiosemitic languages) is the second most widely spoken Semitic language after Arabic, even if it has received comparatively less scholarly and public attention than other widely spoken modern Semitic languages such as Arabic itself and Israeli Hebrew. The thirty-two articles dedicated exclusively to Ethiosemitic languages such as Amharic and Ge'ez, which compose the bulk of the present work, introduce the reader to a broad array of linguistic issues, particularly within the realm of syntax and morphosyntax.

The other sub-family of languages treated in this volume, Neo-Aramaic, is much less widely spoken and indeed endangered by most standards; speakers of Christian Urmi, which is Kapeliuk's primary focus among them, likely number no more than 200,000, even though figures available through the internet suggest far greater multitudes of speakers. While most of the examples are given either in their original scripts or according to the usual accepted transcription systems, the largest portion of the examples of Neo-Aramaic are adduced from texts published in...