Mehri Texts from Oman (Based on Field Materials of T. M. Johnstone).

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Review

Mehri Texts from Oman (Based on Field Materials of T. M. Johnstone). By HARRY STROOMER. Semitica Viva, vol. 22. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 1999. Pp. xxvii + 303. DM 168 (paper).

The late Thomas Muir Johnstone (1924-1983), Professor of Arabic at the University of London (SOAS) from 1970-1982, was one of the truly outstanding Semitists of our era. A prolific fleldworker, he produced ljarsiisi Lexicon and English-Harsusi Word-List (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), Jibbali Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), and the posthumous Mehri Lexicon and English-Mehri Word-List, with Index of the English Definitions in the jibbali Lexicon (compiled by G. Rex Smith) (London: SOAS, 1987). Indeed, much of our current knowledge about Modern South Arabian languages comes from his pioneering research.

Harry Stroomer of the University of Leiden has rendered the field of Semitic linguistics a great service by editing Johnstone's unpublished field materials on the Mehri spoken in Oman. These texts, which formed the basis of the latter's dictionary, were deposited in the Durham University Library after his untimely death, Antoine Lonnet, Anda Hofstede, and Stroomer published articles on them (pp. xxii-xxiii). At long last, we have Johnstone's texts with translations and annotations, fittingly placed in Otto Jastrow's Semitica Viva series.

These texts are unique in that they represent Omani Mehri, whereas all the other material available on this language deals with the Yemeni dialect. Mehri is also spoken in Saudi Arabia, according to the map in Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle, "The Modern South Arabian Languages," in Robert Hetzron, ed., The Semitic Languages (London: Routledge, 1997), 381. As far as I know, nothing has been published on Saudi Arabian Mehri. She (p. 378) does correct an alleged geographical fact presented in Johnstone's "The Modern South Arabian Languages," Afro-Asiatic Linguistics 1.5 (1975): 93-121, viz., that Mehri is spoken in AI-Mukalla, Yemen (p. 94). However, this has already been corrected by Johnstone himself in Mehri Lexicon (p. xi), in which he States that all Mehris there have given up their native language and speak only Arabic.

Stroomer emphasizes that Omani Mehri is more archaic than the Yemeni dialect (p. xiv), reiterating the position taken by Johnstone in the introduction to Mehri Lexicon (p. xi). Needless to say, Mehri comparative-historical dialectology awaits painstaking scrutiny by future scholars, such as that...