A Syntax of San ani Arabic.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.

This welcome addition to synchronic Arabic dialectology (in Otto Jastrow's Semitica Viva series) is a comprehensive syntactic description of San ani Arabic done along more-or-less traditional lines. I say traditional because there are references to the functional linguist, Michael A. K. Halliday, as well as to the author of one of the finest (conventional) grammars available for an Arabic dialect, Mark W. Cowell (Damascene). This tome is based on the author's fieldwork (between 1985-92) as well as on some published material on this dialect (by such well known previous investigators as Peter Behnstedt, Hamdi A. Qafisheh, Werner Diem, and Otto Jastrow). It probably also incorporates some of the findings reported in her Ph.D. thesis, "Aspects of the Phonology and Morphology of Three Yemeni Dialects" (S.O.A.S., University of London, 1989), which I have so far been unable to obtain.

The introduction (pp. 5-10) presents an overview of San ani phonology, with illustrations of syncope, epenthesis, assimilation, and diphthong reduction, among other topics. One very interesting phenomenon requiring, in my view, further comparative-historical analysis in order to comprehend the broader dialectological picture is the gemination of /n/, in forms such as annak 'from you (m. sg.)' (p. 8), or absarannahum 'they (f.) saw them (m.)' (ibid.), while geminate devoicing (dhuppi 'fly' for dhubbi, p. 10) is a process which is very rare in contemporary Arabic dialects as a whole. Indeed, one wants to know precisely how both the aforementioned developments came about. Watson has conflicting information about the opposite process of voicing, however, in her phonological rule that /t/ regularly voices in intervocalic position. Thus la dinsas 'don't forget (m. sg.)' (p. 9) is illustrative, yet this very sentence is also recorded with a /t/ (p. 10). My guess at an explanation of this alleged free variation is that the /t/ form is either an Egyptianism or a more acrolectic pronunciation, i.e., higher up on the continuum (multiglossic) scale (in this connection, see my "Formal vs. Informal in Arabic: Diglossia, Triglossia, Tetraglossia, etc., Polyglossia-Multiglossia Viewed as a Continuum," Zeitschrift fur arabische Linguistik 27 [1994: 47-66]), since it occurs in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. Another discrepancy about voicing is the statement that "voiceless stops regularly assimilate to an adjacent voiced consonant, as in madbax for matbax 'kitchen'" (p. 9), yet...