An Annotated Corpus of Three Hundred Proverbs, Sayings, and Idioms in Eastern Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t

• Main Author: Castagna, Giuliano
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Open Book Publishers 2024
• Series: Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Subjects: Afro-Asiatic languages; Arabic; Encyclopaedias and reference works; Endangered language; Grammatical analysis; History; History and Archaeology; Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t; Language and Linguistics; Language qualifiers; Linguistics; Middle Eastern history; Proverbs and idioms; Quotations, proverbs and sayings; Reference works; Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects; Semitic language; Semitic languages; Sociolinguistics; Sultanate of Oman
• ISBN: 1805113844; 9781805113850; 9781805113843; 1805113852
• DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0422

This book explores the rich paremiological heritage of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t, an endangered pre-literate language belonging to the Modern South Arabian sub-branch of Semitic, spoken by an ever-decreasing number of people in the Dhofar governorate of the Sultanate of Oman. Reflecting the historical value of proverbs and idiomatic expression within the documentation of a language, Giuliano Castagna analyses a sizeable share of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t proverbs, sayings and idioms from Arabic-language publications, as well as hitherto unpublished expressions that reveal undocumented features in the domains of lexicon, phonetics, phonology and morphology. Castagna’s grammatical analysis (phonetic, phonological and morphological) of these pieces of folk knowledge underpins the documentation of an obsolete lexicon. It is accompanied by a brief introduction to the study of proverbs (paremiology) and a succinct grammatical sketch of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t, making the book useful both to experts and to students of these topics.