Studies in Near Eastern Culture and History in Memory of Ernest T. Abdel-Massih.

• Author: Wakin, Jeanette

The eighteen studies in this volume dedicated to Ernest Abdel-Massih, the late Professor of Arabic at the University of Michigan, are about evenly divided between Arabic and other fields. The contributions are tied together only in that their authors are colleagues from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, or former students.

In "Selections from Sibawayhi," James A. Bellamy offers translations from the grammarian's Kitab that illustrate analogical principles and other features particular to Sibawayhi's school. Mary M. Levy organizes "Rules for Forming Noun Plurals in Modern Standard Arabic," making a valiant but doubtful effort to establish a system to teach especially the broken plural patterns. Another article with a pedagogical theme is Edna Amir Coffin's "Teaching Hebrew of the Communications Media: Crosscultural Considerations." Ernest N. McCarus studies a phenomenon in colloquial Arabic in "A Case of Semantic Reconstruction: The Egyptian Arabic Verbal Prefix Bi-." Loraine K. Obler considers the spoken forms of one word and posits a theory about change in "Reflexes of Classical Arabic say un 'thing' in the Modern Dialects: Synthetic Forms in Language Change." In "The Relation between al-Jurjani and Modern Western Linguists," Raji M. Rammuny claims that al-Jurjani's theory of nazm anticipates much of modern linguistic thought. An interesting memoir by Nasir al-Din Nashashibi going back to the 1940s and earlier is the subject of a translation by Trevor le Gassick in "A Palestinian Journalist Looks Back." Finally--for the Arabic contributions--in "Baqillani's Critique of Imru Al-Qays," Mustansir Mir shows that al-Baqillani's analysis of the poet's qasida not only does not stand up to scrutiny, but even worse, if his criticisms were valid, they would be applicable to the Qur'an as well--a notion that would certainly...