Maria Bulakh – författare

For the first time after D. H. Müller’s pioneering studies of the 1900s, a large body of folklore texts in Soqotri becomes available to the Semitological scholarship. The language is spoken by ca. 100.000 people inhabiting the island Soqotra (Gulf of Aden, Yemen). Soqotri is among the most archaic Semitic languages spoken today, whereas the oral literature of the islanders is a mine of deeply original motifs and plots. Texts appear in transcription, English and Arabic translations, and an Arabic-based native script. Philological annotations deal with grammatical, lexical and literary features, as well as realia. The Glossary accumulates all words attested in the volume. The Plates provide a glimpse into the fascinating landscapes of the island and the traditional lifestyle of its inhabitants.

The Arabic-Ethiopic Glossary by al-Malik al-Afdal by Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan is a detailed annotated edition of a unique monument of Late Medieval Arabic lexicography, comprising 475 Arabic lexemes (some of them post-classical Yemeni dialectisms) translated into several Ethiopian idioms and put down in Arabic letters in a late-fourteenth century manuscript from a codex in a private Yemeni collection. For the many languages involved, the Glossary provides the earliest written records, by several centuries pre-dating the most ancient attestations known so far. The edition, preceded by a comprehensive linguistic introduction, gives a full account of the comparative material from all known Ethiopian Semitic languages. A detailed index ensures the reader's orientation in the lexical treasures revealed from the Glossary.

This book presents the results of a field research on the verbal system of Soqotri, a little-studied language spoken on the island of Soqotra (Arabian Sea) and belonging to the Modern South Arabian branch of Semitic. The investigation focuses on the so-called T-stems (marked by the infix -t-), mostly employed as derivational means of detransitivisation. In this book you will find comprehensive descriptions of the synchronic morphology and semantics of the T-stems, as well as an inquiry into their diachronic background. Simultaneously, the study is a contribution to the general typology of detransitivising derivation in the languages of the world.