A fresh look at Sabaic.

• Author: Avanzini, A.
• Position: Untersuchungen zur Phonologie und Morphologie des Sabaischen - Book review

In recent years, Norbert Nebes and Peter Stein have been doing an excellent job in fostering a better understanding of Sabaic grammar. Particularly worthy of mention here is the succinct but very well prepared summary of grammar in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (Nebes and Stein 2003). This excellent volume by Stein is a study of phonology and morphology and thus not simply a grammatical description but an authentic linguistic study on Sabaic.

The very useful indices, which for every inscription give not only bibliographical but also internal references--that is, page and note citing a specific line of a particular text--make the vast Sabaic corpus accessible for the first time to scholars of south Arabia as well as to scholars of Semitics in general. Great care has gone into the editing. One is struck by the painstaking effort to prevent the trivial mistakes that are so easy to make in a work of this size and of this editorial difficulty.

I confess that, upon opening the book I was somewhat frightened by the great quantity of notes, but the first impressions that this was the work of a young scholar merely wishing to appear knowledgeable by including as much bibliography as possible soon disappeared. The notes are almost always rich in useful information, and they often cite other texts to support the translations and grammatical rules discussed in the text.

Following the example of an excellent layout used earlier by Nebes, the grammar presents around 580 examples that clarify the phonological and morphological phenomena discussed. This approach is very effective, even though the contexts adduced are sometimes rather difficult to interpret philologically, which makes the discussion rather contorted and hard to read.

A number of morphological features of Sabaic, for example, the declension of the substantive or the use of the n-suffix in the infinitive of the verb have already been presented by the author in previous works (Stein 2002a; 2002b), and he has returned to the general topic of the diachronic and geographical subdivision of Sabaic in two articles published subsequent to his grammatical work (Stein 2004; 2005).

The breadth of documentation on Sabaic and its complex temporal, geographical, and typological evolution emerge clearly from Stein's work. Sabaic is certainly the best known language of south Arabia, with its very long history of almost 1500 years and an enormous corpus of attestations in a variety of textual genres: construction texts, dedications, and legal texts; no fewer than 5,300 of them constitute the documentary basis on which Stein constructs his work. A number are short and linguistically simple, but the majority are syntactically complex and discursive; to the monumental texts are to be added the earliest examples written in cursive characters carved on wooden sticks.

Stein's criterion for defining a Sabaic text is purely linguistic: a Sabaic text is one that has Sabaic linguistic features (p. 4). This is not always self-evident. Texts such as CSAI I, 7 = Doe 6 and CSAI I, 8 = Doe 7, written in the capital of Qataban, are only included by Stein in the Sabaic corpus because they contain certain "Sabaic" morphological features within a text which was obviously drawn up in Qataban. This is a question internal to Qatabanic language and culture, and the texts are assuredly Qatabanic and not Sabaic. The definition of an epigraphic corpus should be based on a combination of linguistic and cultural features.

From the viewpoint of general reconstruction, it is significant that Stein always refers to the Sabaic "language" (pp. 4-5) and the other south Arabian "languages," scrapping the misleading definition still found in Beeston's first work of grammar (1962), of a south Arabian "language" and its "dialects," Sabaic, Minaic and so on. Stein rightly urges the publication of works of grammar for other south Arabian languages, and I fully agree with his impression that there are significant grammatical differences among the languages of south Arabia. By contrast, I am much less in agreement with his statement that "South Arabian" is a purely geographical term (indicating, in addition, a characteristic common writing method) and not a linguistic one. Resemblances among south Arabian languages can certainly not be demonstrated merely on the basis of a common script, but rather on that of a series of phonological, morphological, syntactical, and lexical features which make up a linguistic group within Semitic.

In my view, the idea of an "innovative" Sabaic being part of "central Semitic" (according to Hetzron's well-known definition) put forward by Voigt (1987) and Nebes (2001) and here taken up by Stein, while the other three south Arabian languages are considered more archaic and more similar to Modern South Arabian and Ethiopic, must also be reconsidered. My own work on the Qatabanic corpus (Avanzini 2004; 2005) has brought to light typical features of what in many ways, including writing and morphology, is a well-stratified language linguistically more "innovative" than Sabaic. Sabaic is assuredly the language of south Arabia for which we now possess the most tools: Beeston's grammars, a number of grammatical sketches, and the Sabaic dictionary.

At the outset of this work, Stein lists the reasons why he thought it necessary to present a new work on Sabaic grammar despite the existence of several others: Beeston's works (one from 1962 about all the south Arabian languages, the other from 1984) are too concise to address all the linguistic and epigraphic problems raised by the documentation. There has been a notable increase in recent years of the number of inscriptions published. The first non-monumental Sabaic texts written on sticks or on palm-leaf stalks published recently document for the first time a language typologically different from that of the monumental texts. Many recent studies have clarified or modified aspects of Sabaic grammar. Stein could perhaps have added another reason, which appears to have no direct bearing on his work: the beginning of Sabaic documentation dates back almost five hundred years earlier than stated in Beeston's works.

The short chronology, which dates the beginning of southern Arabian states to the middle of the...