Introduzione alle lingue semitiche.

• Author: Rosenhal, Franz

This little volume makes the brave attempt to compress modern Semitology into a few pages - and within the framework of general linguistics. Garbini, a highly accomplished veteran in the field with many publications to his credit, and his former student Durand, who has shown daring and promise in his comparison of, mainly, Hebrew and Berber phonology in Precedents chamito-semitiques en hebreu (Rome: Universita degli Studi >, 1991), have largely succeeded. All the recent discoveries in the Near East, which cover the entire range of Semitic languages, have had an unsurprising by-product: they have shown how tremendous the gaps in our knowledge are and that everything we learn is just the prelude to new problems. Thus, speculation widely predominates. The present work is intended to be accessible to students, but it requires a seasoned knowledge of at least two Semitic languages to understand and evaluate the authors' ideas and reasoning.

The subjects dealt with are: a survey of the Semitic languages (pp. 27-73); a description of their linguistic characteristics (pp. 75-129); their classification and history (pp. 131-52); and a factual survey of Hamito-Semitic languages that focuses on much debated definitions and terminology (pp. 153-76). Brief bibliographies for each chapter as well as a general bibliography (pp. 177-91) are sufficient for their purposes, although on some occasions, publications such as those of W. Diem or R. C. Steiner might have been included. The introductory remarks (pp. 13-25) begin with a reference to the famous table of nations in Genesis, dated here quite late. This properly sets the scene; however, it no longer provides usable linguistic information, and thus stands out as rather traditional in a work that throughout stresses its avowed purpose of replacing "traditional" scholarly views.

Prime sources of information are the older Semitic languages. The stress is on the northern sector as against the southern languages of south Arabia and Ethiopia, which are seen as comparatively late marginal developments. Living Semitic languages are very briefly described in the first chapter but referred to only occasionally, no doubt for reasons of space. The creation of a balance between the fragmentary data of old and the detailed oral information now available is a difficult task. The problem of diachronic incongruity becomes even more formidable with respect to the related non-Semitic African languages. With the exception of...