A Basic Vocabulary of the Bedouin Arabic Dialect of the Jbali Tribe.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.

This book is the result of the author's pioneering fieldwork (1990-92, but interrupted by the Gulf War) near al-Tur and Wadi el-Feyran, southern Sinai (Egypt), under the sponsorship of the Japanese Ministry of Education. Nishio presents some information on the Jbali tribe, also jabali, jebeli, or j(i)baliyye (pp. ix-xi), whose history, we are told, is related to that of the famous St. Catherine's Monastery, built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian (527-566 A.D.). He describes the origins of the tribe, some of whom came from Bosnia, Wallachia (Rumania), as well as Alexandria. Their switch from Greek or Coptic to Arabic, according to the author, was such that their "first" Arabic was a "pidgin-like" (p. xi) Arabic, which via creolization and decreolization, developed into today's fullfledged Jbali Arabic - reminiscences of Versteegh (1984). Although it is certainly possible, I find no evidence to support Nishio's hypothesis and consider it implausible.

The bulk of the book is a dictionary of the Jbali dialect, arranged according to the lexical (really semantic) principles of Japan's internationally acclaimed linguist, Shiro Hattori. The author gives the English gloss followed by its equivalent in Japanese, Modern Standard Arabic, and Jbali.

Nishio's work is an important contribution to Arabic dialectology, accurate for the most part, and of inestimable value, particularly for the recorded details showing free variation. For example, Jbali seems to be changing under the superstrate influence of Cairene, as we note that 'two eyes' is enen or enen (p. 1). The vowel shortening of e in this unstressed environment is a well-known phonological process in Cairo Arabic, and the author informs us that all Jbali speakers can understand Cairene ("it may be the result of T.V. sets," p. xii).

Specialists will be interested in the phenomenon of degemination recorded as part of the free variation mentioned above. For example, 'my face' is both wsi ~ wussi (p. 3), or 'look!' is fakkaru ~ fakkru ~ fakru (p. xvi). Degemination has been noted for other Arabic dialects (e.g., Feghali 1989: 14, 79 for Moroccan, and Rosenhouse 1982:38 for Galilee Bedouin), German dialects (Griffen 1990), Latin (Pillinger 1983), etc. It is a subject in comparative Semitics crying out for a detailed comparative-historical investigation.

Let me now turn to a few interesting Jbali lexemes. The verb ra?a 'see' survives as raa, impf. yeri (p. 9; also known in Saudi Arabia, according to...