Abstract
Abstract Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t is a language belonging to the Modern South Arabian (msa) branch of Semitic. It is currently endangered and spoken by an estimate of 50,000 ~ 70,000 people living in the Omani governorate of Dhofar. Similarly to the other msa languages, it is unwritten, and the survival of its speakers’ traditional knowledge rests on their ability to memorise and retain a large amount of information in the form of poetry, songs, folk-tales and proverbs. In 2000, ʕAli al-Shahri, a Dhofari historian and native speaker of Jibbali/Shahret, published a bilingual English/Arabic monograph named The Language of Aad/لغة عاد which is intended as an introduction to a wide array of aspects of the local culture, ranging from the toponymy of Dhofar, its traditional dances, songs, poetry and proverbs, to more unusual topics such as star-names, children games, traditional land allotment and more. This paper focuses on one of the most prominent topics of the monograph in question, namely a collection of 210 proverbs. Each proverb in this collection is provided with a translation in English and Arabic, and is presented in al-Shahri’s work by means of an idiosyncratic transcription system based on the Arabic script, in which linguistic sounds specific to msa are represented by coloured Arabic characters, to the detriment of comprehension. This paper aims at providing a linguistically viable description of these proverbs, by presenting them in a standard Semitic transcription. The transcription presented proceeds from the analysis of al-Shahri’s original recording (which features al-Shahri himself uttering these 210 proverbs one by one) stored at the Semitische Tonarchiv (SemArch) at the University of Heidelberg. Additionally, the original English and Arabic translations provided by al-Shahri are reported. These are followed by a brief commentary containing a description of each relevant term, as well as a general account of the meaning of each proverb. The conclusions pinpoint some phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical characteristics of the material examined, and identify a number of divergences and commonalities with other present-day and ancient Semitic subgroups which bear witness to the long and unwritten history of the Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t language.
Highlights
Which is intended as an introduction to a wide array of aspects of the local culture, ranging from the toponymy of Dhofar, its traditional dances, songs, poetry and proverbs, to more unusual topics such as star-names, children games, traditional land allotment and more
Each proverb in this collection is provided with a translation in English and Arabic, and is presented in al-Shahri’s work by means of an idiosyncratic transcription system based on the Arabic script, in which linguistic sounds specific to msa are represented by coloured Arabic characters, to the detriment of comprehension
Whilst it is not possible to trace the origin of each proverb, the different language registers found throughout the collection speaks to different origins in terms of time and dialect
Summary
Which is intended as an introduction to a wide array of aspects of the local culture, ranging from the toponymy of Dhofar, its traditional dances, songs, poetry and proverbs, to more unusual topics such as star-names, children games, traditional land allotment and more. This paper focuses on one of the most prominent topics of the monograph in question, namely a collection of 210 proverbs Each proverb in this collection is provided with a translation in English and Arabic, and is presented in al-Shahri’s work by means of an idiosyncratic transcription system based on the Arabic script, in which linguistic sounds specific to msa are represented by coloured Arabic characters, to the detriment of comprehension. The original English and Arabic translations provided by al-Shahri are reported These are followed by a brief commentary containing a description of each relevant term, as well as a general account of the meaning of each proverb. The Jibbali/Śḥərɛt̄ language belongs to the Modern South Arabian (msa) branch of Semitic, together with Mehri, Ḥarsusi, Hobyot, Baṭḥari and Soḳoṭri. The position of Hobyot within the western subgroup is not entirely clear, so that some scholars such as Rubin (2015: 313), assign it to a further subdivision within western msa
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