Deploying a bottom-up instead of the conventional top-down approach, and drawing on both literary and dialectal Arabic lexical sources, Borg presents a glossary that proposes and validates a prehistoric symbiosis between Ancient Egyptian and Arabic two and a half millennia before the advent of Islam. The rich textual documentation of the venerable idioms he cites anchors his empirical rationale and methodology, allowing language historians 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. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
This study is the first attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of Arabic by examining lexical evidence of its symbiotic relationship with Ancient Egyptian already apparent from the Pyramid Texts (c. 26132181 BC). It documents the contention that Ancient Egypt was a strategic site in its early prehistory.
| Acknowledgments |
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vii | |
| Abbreviations and Symbols |
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viii | |
| Introduction |
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1 | (1) |
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1 Aim and Scope of the Glossary |
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1 | (10) |
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11 | (7) |
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3 Diachronic Approaches to Arabic |
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18 | (3) |
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4 Ancient Egyptian and Arabic |
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21 | (1) |
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22 | (3) |
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6 From Etymology to History |
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25 | (6) |
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7 Ancient Egypt and Western Arabia |
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31 | (3) |
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8 A Paradigm Shift in Arabic Dialectology |
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34 | (3) |
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9 From Ancient Egyptian to Old Arabic |
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37 | (4) |
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10 Cognitive Approaches to the Lexicon |
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41 | (3) |
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44 | (31) |
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49 | (26) |
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Glossary (Ancient Egyptian -- Arabic) |
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75 | (290) |
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77 | (7) |
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84 | (15) |
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99 | (4) |
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103 | (1) |
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104 | (13) |
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117 | (19) |
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136 | (18) |
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154 | (8) |
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162 | (2) |
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164 | (11) |
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175 | (6) |
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181 | (19) |
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200 | (17) |
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217 | (5) |
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222 | (2) |
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224 | (4) |
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228 | (2) |
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230 | (13) |
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243 | (7) |
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250 | (11) |
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261 | (15) |
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276 | (14) |
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290 | (14) |
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304 | (14) |
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318 | (19) |
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337 | (6) |
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343 | (20) |
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363 | (2) |
| Index |
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365 | |
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).
