Overview

Deploying a bottom up instead of the conventional top down approach, and drawing extensively on both literary and dialectal Arabic lexical sources, the present glossary proposes and validates the contention of a prehistoric symbiosis transpiring between Ancient Egyptian and Arabic two and a half millennia before the advent of Islam. Its empirical rationale and methodological basis rest firmly on these venerable idioms’ rich textual documentation, yielding the language historian an ample etymological database enriched—in the case of Arabic—with a virtually unlimited corpus drawing on the living speech of some 300 million speakers across the Near East and Africa. The muster provided here comprises over 800 lexemes and reveals, for the first time in longue durée research on Afroasiatic, striking unsuspected commonalities linking Old Egyptian to Yemeni Arabic.

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Alexander Borg is Professor Emeritus at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. After studying linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) he obtained a Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in Arabic dialectology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the course of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship he was granted the Habilitation at the University of Erlangen and held further Humboldt research fellowships at the Freie Universität Berlin, and the universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Leipzig. In 1983 he co-founded the Mediterranean Language Review with Prof. Paul Wexler, and the Arabic Language and Literature Series with Prof. Sasson Somekh, both published by Harrassowitz (Wiesbaden). His research focus on diachronic and cognitive aspects of the diaspora Arabic lexicon, e.g. in Cyprus (Comparative Glossary of Cypriot Maronite Arabic, 2004), Malta, Al-Andalus, and the Negev, culminated in the discovery of prehistoric traces of spoken Arabic in Ancient Egyptian (WZKM 2019).

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