Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land.

• Author: KAYE, ALAN S.
• Position: Review

Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land. By TIM MACKINTOSH-SMITH.

London: JOHN MURRAY, 1998. Pp. xi + 280, maps. $35.

Yemen is virtually unparalleled in the Arab world as a museum of Arabic dialects. The author, a Veteran of some thirteen years' residency in the land of Bilqis, has written a captivating account of his travels in Yemen and his intimate contact with many of its inhabitants. Indicative of the scenario is chapter eight, "True Ancient Naturals" (pp. 206-47), a description of Suqutra--an island notoriously difficult to get to, as I can attest from my own experience doing fieldwork in 1998--and its 40,000 residents. Typical of the information supplied in this exciting chapter, Mackintosh-Smith reports that the Arab writers glossed Suqutra as suq qatr 'the Emporium of Resin'; however, its etymon is probably Sanskrit dripa sakhadara (sic) [1] "the Island of Bliss," which in all likelihood served as the input for the Epigraphic South Arabian dh skrd (cf. the Greek name for the island, Dioskurida [p. 206]). This volume is particularly valuable for its fascinating linguistic details, especially those dealing with the A rabic lexicon, which the author began to study at the University of Oxford; however, we note mention of other languages too, such as Soqotri's famous "lateral sibillant" (sic) (p. 209): for details, see Antoine Lonnet and Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle, "La phonologie des langues sud-arabiques modernes," in Phonologies of Asia and Africa (Including the Caucasus), ed. Alan S. Kaye (Winona Lake, hid.: Eisenbrauns, 1997): 348.

M-S's book records some very unusual Arabic vocabulary, e.g., di-asar (his transcription) "a fly which causes a potentially fatal infection by having its eggs in the nose and throat at certain seasons" (p. 237). The author's lexemes have been gathered in the spirit of the rich array of material compiled by the Reverend J. G. Hava for Al-fara id al-durriyyah: Arabic-English Dictionary (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1915), about which the author states: "As I turned its foxed pages, I broke through the wall of words into a wilderness of idea. It was another world, a surreal lexical landscape whose inhabitants lived in a state of relentless metamorphosis" (p. 2). The seeming infinity and the amazing diversity of the Arabic lexicon is what the author refers to as his "Dictionary Land," and the Arabian Peninsula has always offered a rich array of Arabic morsels. Consider, e.g., that zabab means 'messenger' and 'a huge...