Overview

This volume contains a detailed grammatical description of the dialects of Old Arabic attested in the Safaitic script, an Ancient North Arabian alphabet used mainly in the deserts of southern Syria and north-eastern Jordan in the pre-Islamic period. It is the first complete grammar of any Ancient North Arabian corpus, making it an important contribution to the fields of Arabic and Semitic studies. The volume covers topics in script and orthography, phonology, morphology, and syntax, and contains an appendix of over 500 inscriptions and an annotated dictionary. The grammar is based on a corpus of 33,000 Safaitic inscriptions.

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9789004289291

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Reviews

Let it be said from the start that this is a first-class study which places firmly on the map a language which is of huge importance in the context of the history of the Arabic language and, more generally, of Arabian epigraphy and Semitic linguistics. - G. Rex Smith, University of Leeds. Grace a Ahmad al-Jallad, les specialistes de grammaire semitique comparee ont desormais un acces simplifie a ce formidable corpus, qui ressuscite tout un pan de l'histoire de la langue arabe et, par la meme, de l'histoire des peuples arabes preislamiques. - Jonas Sibony. This well-researched and structured book will be of interest to Semitists, who will find invaluable parallels and ideas, while comparatists will now have a reliable reference work with dozens of glossed examples when they construct linguistic models based on a large sample of world languages. - Naim Vanthieghem - Princeton University.

Let it be said from the start that this is a first-class study which places firmly on the map a language which is of huge importance in the context of the history of the Arabic language and, more generally, of Arabian epigraphy and Semitic linguistics. - G. Rex Smith, University of Leeds. Grace a Ahmad al-Jallad, les specialistes de grammaire semitique comparee ont desormais un acces simplifie a ce formidable corpus, qui ressuscite tout un pan de l'histoire de la langue arabe et, par la meme, de l'histoire des peuples arabes preislamiques. - Jonas Sibony. This well-researched and structured book will be of interest to Semitists, who will find invaluable parallels and ideas, while comparatists will now have a reliable reference work with dozens of glossed examples when they construct linguistic models based on a large sample of world languages. - Naim Vanthieghem - Princeton University.

Author Information

Ahmad Al-Jallad, Ph.D. (2012) Harvard University, is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University. He has published on the comparative grammar of the Semitic languages, the history of Arabic, and on the epigraphy of Ancient North Arabia.

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