26.4599, Review: Anthropological Ling; Ling & Lit; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling; Translation: Kogan, Naumkin (2014)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4599. Fri Oct 16 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4599, Review: Anthropological Ling; Ling & Lit; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling; Translation: Kogan, Naumkin (2014)

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Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 14:10:37
From: David Gay [dafyddgay at gmail.com]
Subject: Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-4626.html

EDITOR: Vitaly  Naumkin
EDITOR: Leonid  Kogan
TITLE: Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: David Elton Gay, (personal interest - not currently working at a university)

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature is the first of two volumes that offer an edition and translation of a large number of texts of Soqotri folk narrative and poetry. Soqotri is a Modern South Arabian language spoken by about 100,000 people on the island of Socotra, which is south of Yemen (of which it is part) and just off the Horn of Africa. Naumkin and his collaborators edit and translate 30 Soqotri texts in this volume.

The volume opens with an introduction that offers a summary of each text, an explanation of the alphabets and transcriptions used to record the texts, an outline of Soqotri phonology, and a few words about Soqotri morphology. Soqotri was not a written language--such texts as were written by previous collectors were written either in Arabic or Latin script--but during the course of their work Naumkin and his collaborators devised a script for Soqotri that is based on Arabic script.

The thirty texts then follow. Each is presented in four parallel versions: from left to right these versions are the Soqotri in Latin transcription; an English translation; an Arabic translation; and then the Soqotri in Soqotri script. Each text is followed by philological notes that mostly examine the problems of translating Soqotri, a problem of special significance because the language of the texts is often an older form of Soqotri that the informants themselves didn’t understand fully. As the authors explain, “[o]ur annotations are not intended to replace either a systemic grammatical description of the language or a reader for beginners…. Instead, we have concentrated [on explaining] what can legitimately be considered unusual, complicated or enigmatic.” (p. 21) The notes also often have much of interest on the Soqotri lexicon and morphology.

Four appendices close the book. The first offers fully parsed texts of three of the texts. The second is a full glossary of the lexicon of the texts, arranged mostly by consonantal root, as is typical of Semitic language lexical works, though as the editors  note, “[l]exemes not easily fitting this arrangement are listed alphabetically.” (p. 31) The third is a collection of plates that illustrate various sorts of items mentioned in the tales. The list of the plates, and the captions to the photos, both gloss the Soqotri for what is illustrated, unfortunately, without cross referencing to the glossary or texts. The final appendix is a bibliography of previous work on Soqotri.

EVALUATION

As both a linguist and folklorist I found Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature an often frustrating book to use. For example, even though this is a collection of oral literature, there are no folklore annotations to the texts; neither tale types nor motifs are catalogued, though both have been covered excellently for Arabic-Islamic cultures by Hasan el-Shamy (1995 and 2004). The stories encountered in Soqotri are, in fact, often versions of stories encountered elsewhere in the Middle East and even in world folk literature. 

Another problem with the presentation of the texts is that elements in the stories that would not be known to non-Muslims or non-Soqotris are not explained, as, for instance, with the angel Diheko, who appears in text 8, but without any explanation as to his significance. A reader thus cannot know, for example, if this angel is widely known in the Islamic world or if it is a local tradition.

The linguistic information about Soqotri is also very disorganized. While most of the description of Soqotri phonology is found in the introduction, information about Soqotri morphology is scattered among the introduction, notes, and glossary--and there is no index to help the user find it. There is thus no way of knowing, for example, that verbs related to the time of day are covered in a note on pp. 283-284. 

It is also clear from the many comments about the difficulty that the native-speaking Soqotri informants and scholar had with the texts that the stories and poetry use a form of Soqotri that is no longer used, yet there is no discussion of this special dialect or register in the book. 

In spite of these problems, “Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature” is a major contribution to scholarship on Semitic languages and folklore. It makes an extensive body of texts in one of the lesser-known modern Semitic languages easily accessible to linguists and folklorists, and, because of the full glossary, it could be used for teaching and learning Soqotri. 

REFERENCES

El-Shamy, Hasan. Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to Motif Classification. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

 El-Shamy, Hasan. Types of Folktale in the Arab World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Elton Gay is an independent scholar with research interests in historical linguistics (Indo-European, Semitic, and Finno-Ugrian), dialectology, and folk narrative.




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