Semitic Studies in Honor of Wolf Leslau on the Occasion of His Eighty-fifth Birthday, November 14th, 1991, 2 vols.

• Author: McCarus, Ernest N.

Edited by ALAN KAYE. Wiesbaden: OTTO HARRASSOW1TZ, 1995. Pp. xix + 1,719. DM 368.

The name Wolf Leslau is synonymous with the study of Modem South Arabic and the Ethiopic languages. His numerous works, dating from 1933 until today, attest to an indefatigable and consummate skill in research and publication over some sixty years. A remarkable number of scholars - 129 - have contributed articles to these two volumes to pay him tribute. The articles include studies on the Afroasiatic family and its various branches - Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic - as well as on individual languages within these groupings; there is even an article on Indo-European. They concern many aspects of linguistic study - historical, synchronic, etymological, phonological, syntactic and semantic, orthographic, etc. There is a lengthy encomium by the editor, Alan Kaye, detailing the education and professional development of Wolf Leslau, and Monica S. Devens' annotated bibliography of Leslau's works totals 300 items - five of them yet in press! The articles dealing with Arabic, the primary interest of this reviewer, would alone constitute an impressive Festschrift. The review will perforce be limited to particular articles in this group.

Dominique Caubet, "The Active Participle as a Means to Renew the Aspectual System: A Comparative Study in Several Dialects of Arabic" (pp. 209-24): The active participle of Arabic is a fascinating part of the morphology; it covers a variety of meanings and a variety of functions, but not all participles share them all. Caubet has performed an important service with this study of the role of the active participle in North African Arabic dialects, providing both data and interesting analyses. Her intent is to incorporate the participle within the verbal system, showing it to be an integral part of the aspectual system of Arabic, all the while maintaining the distinction between nomadic and sedentary dialects. The participles may denote progressive ("is doing"), future ("is going to do") or perfective ("having done") sub-aspects. Caubet points out that participles of many verbs denoting motion, physical or psychological states, or qualities may have all three of these meanings. This is remarkably parallel to my findings in an analysis of the active participles of Modern Standard Arabic in the course of setting up a semantic classification of the MSA verb, and it would be useful to do a thorough comparison of the standard language...