29.597, Review: Arabic, Andalusian; Historical Linguistics; Lexicography: Corriente, Pereira, Vicente (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-597. Mon Feb 05 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.597, Review: Arabic, Andalusian; Historical Linguistics; Lexicography: Corriente, Pereira, Vicente (2017)

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Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2018 12:33:06
From: David Wilmsen [david.wilmsen at gmail.com]
Subject: Encyclopédie linguistique d’Al-Andalus Vol. 2

 
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EDITOR: Federico  Corriente
EDITOR: Christophe  Pereira
EDITOR: Ángeles  Vicente
TITLE: Encyclopédie linguistique d’Al-Andalus Vol. 2
SUBTITLE: Dictionnaire du faisceau dialectal arabe andalou
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: David Wilmsen, American University of Sharjah

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Reviewing a dictionary is different from reviewing other scholarly
productions, because there is no underlying theme or argument to assess. There
is, however, a huge amount of material to absorb and digest, such that a
review could never do justice to all the information that a dictionary can
provide. 

In assigning dictionary reviews to my translation students, I alert them to
the hallmarks of a good bilingual dictionary: front matter explaining the
symbols used in the entries; a thoroughgoing introduction, guiding readers in
the use of the dictionary; cross-referencing; and explications of usage in the
entries themselves. Other information in the form of charts, maps, gazetteers,
indexes of place or biographical names are always welcome, but a good
dictionary must display at least the four features that I ask my students to
address. Where Arabic dictionaries are concerned, cross-referencing means both
references within the entries, but also a reverse glossary (at least). It is a
peculiarity of bilingual Arabic dictionaries that they tend to be
unidirectional, either Arabic to a target language or the opposite. 

The dictionary under review, ‘Encyclopédie linguistique d’Al-Andalus Vol. 2,’
falls short in all four criteria. The last two specifications are not
absolutely essential. It being a dictionary of an extinct variety of Arabic,
its users will likely not need to acquire active command of the subtleties of
usage in the lexemes within it, but will only need their meanings explicated
as an aid to reading the texts from which they were culled. Nor are its users
likely to trouble themselves over how exactly to translate a particular word
or concept from their own languages into Andalusi Arabic. Nevertheless, the
entries themselves do include reasonable but curtailed examples of usage and
some cross–referencing, and a reverse glossary of sorts does close the book as
an Index des termes par langue (pp. 1389–1495). That itself is a curious
assortment, which we shall address presently.

The Dictionnaire is a compendious work, encompassing 1495 pages. Another
twelve pages of front matter bring the tome to more than 1500 pages. Five of
the pages in the front matter are taken up by titles, bibliographic details,
and the TOC. Another blank page between that and the list of bibliographic
acronyms leaves a scant 6 pages for the type of explanatory material that
characterizes good reference works.

>From there, the bulk of the Dictionnaire comprises a series of headings,
listing words by their beginning consonant, according to the arrangement of
the Arabic alphabet. A section begins with the Arabic letter in parentheses at
the top of the page, followed by its name transliterated in Latin letters. So
for example, the opening section is “(أ) Alif”. The second (p. 92) begins with
“(پ و ب) Bāʔ et Pāʔ”, etc. The inclusion of the letter (پ) pāʔ, by the way,
early on marks this as not an ordinary Arabic dictionary, inasmuch as Arabic
does not possess the sound [p] except in borrowings, most of those not
included in dictionaries unless they have been assimilated into the language,
whereupon the consonant would be pronounced [b], for example, būr saʕīd ‘Port
Said.’ A dictionary of Andalusi Arabic must include that letter, because of
the many borrowings from Romance in the texts from which the entries are
drawn.  

The entries also follow the listing of the words in alphabetical order by
tri-consonantal root in the manner typical of Arabic dictionaries, such that,
for example, those wishing to look up the name Muħammad would search for it
under the first letter in the root of the word {ħ} from the root {√ħ m d}, not
{m}. The entries are arranged with the transliterated consonants of the root
between curly brackets preceded by an asterisk and followed by the word in
Arabic typeface between parentheses, as such (p. 442): *{ḪWF}(ﺧﻮف). This is
followed by an abbreviation in upper case, referring to the primary or
secondary source (generally an edited volume of a primary source) where an
example of usage appears. Following that is a transliteration of various
derived forms of the root. For example, IQ > ḫifta niḫāf ḫawf = tatḫawwaf <,
GL > aḫāfu ḫawfun ḫāyifun /. The abbreviation with which this entry begins,
IQ, refers to the 12th century Andalusian poet Ibn Quzmān, the list following
> gives usages of that poet. For its part, GL refers to a work by Corriente
referred to on the acronym pages as Corriente 1991a, which the bibliography
section (pp. 1376–1387) reveals is another lexicographic work El léxico árabe
estándar y andalusí del ‘Glosario de Leiden’. The transliterations indicate an
example of the verb conjugated (in the 1st person indicative), the verbal
noun, and the active participle. So, the entry for *{ḪWF} looks like this: 

*{ḪWF} (ﺧﻮف)  
IQ > ḫifta niḫāf ḫawf = tatḫawwaf <, GL > aḫāfu ḫawfun ḫāyifun / maḫūfun< + ID
ʔym 2 > 

After four lines of the usages of this root found in various works in or about
Andalusi Arabic, the definition is given: craindre. With the help of the front
matter, we can read most of it: 

“ḪWF Ibn Quzmān deviant [the meaning of >] you feared [ḫif-ta fear.pfv-2ms] ‘I
fear’ [ni-ḫāf 1s-fear.ipfv] ‘fear’ [ḫawf n] résulte de [the meaning of <]
Corriente 1991a deviant ‘I fear’ [ni-ḫāf 1s-fear.ipfv]  ‘fear’ [ḫawf-un n-nom]
‘fearing’ [fear.ptc]  variation phonologique ou morphologique [the meaning of
/] ‘fearful’ [maḫūf-un fear.ptc-nom] jointure ouverte ; ajout de préfixe ou
suffixe ; mot rime [the meaning of +] ID [Jimenez’s edition of Ibn Danān] 

When we come to ʔym 2, however, the meaning becomes indecipherable. It happens
that  {√ʔ Y M} is an Arabic root expressing a different semantic domain
(“parmi les deux choices” p. 70). How that is related to Ibn Danān’s Sefer or
it can be jointure ouverte; ajout de préfixe ou suffixe; ou mot rime to *{ḪWF}
is not clear. Here is where a more detailed explanation of notation and
cross-referencing would have been helpful. 
   
The entire entry takes 12 lines, and is followed by and eight-line entry under
*{ḪWL} (ﺧﻮل), referring to the oncle maternel and tante maternelle, their
offspring, and a few other assorted meanings. 

This proceeds for 1376 pages until finally ending in the Bibliographie, itself
followed by the Index des termes par langue.    

EVALUATION

This is Volume 2 of the Encyclopédie linguistique d’Al-Andalus, Volume 1
having appeared in 2015. Entitled Aperçu grammatical du faisceau dialectal
arabe andalou: Perspectives synchroniques, diachroniques et panchroniques,
that volume covered the lexis, phonemics, morphology and syntax of the
language, also providing some sample texts. It was, in that respect, a
reiteration and revision in French of the 2013 Brill edition A Descriptive and
Comparative Grammar of Andalusi Arabic, the authorship of which is accredited
to the editorship of Institute of Islamic Studies of the University of
Zaragoza, but a reading of the introduction of which will identify the author
as Corriente. That volume is itself a return to Corriente’s pioneering 1977
work A Grammatical Sketch of the Spanish-Arabic dialect bundle. For its part,
Volume 2, the present work, looks to be a revision of Corriente’s 1997 A
Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic. As far as I know, it was Corriente who first
coined the term Andalusi Arabic, just as he was the first to use the term
“dialect bundle” in Arabic dialectology. Hence the term faisceau in the titles
of the first two volumes in the Encyclopédie. According to the publisher’s web
page, a third volume is planned, without that term in the title. That volume,
Dictionnaire des emprunts ibéro-romans: Emprunts à l’arabe et aux langues du
Monde Islamique, looks to be a revisiting of Corriente’s 2008 Brill release
Dictionary of Arabic and allied loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan,
Galician and kindred dialects. 

Two questions then arise: Why these revisitations, and what is new in all of
these, especially in the volume under review? The compilers give an immediate
answer to the first question in an otherwise spare two-page Avant-propos:  

Il faut avouer qu’aucun dictionnaire dont les matériaux ne cessent de
s’accroître ou d’être mieux compris ne peut se passer, après quelques années,
d’une révision de son contenu, ainsi que de ses objectifs et de sa
méthodologie. C’est pour ces raisons que nous avons décidé d’élaborer une
nouvelle édition d’un dictionnaire d’arabe andalou (p. iii)
It should be the duty of the authors to answer the second question, as well.
Because they do not, it falls to the reviewer to do so. What is new? Very
little except the language of the text itself. The authors do explain why they
chose to write in French, the native language of Pereira, rather than, say,
Spanish, the native tongue of Corriente and his student Vicente, or English,
the language of all the previous volumes upon which the Encyclopédie is meant
as une révision de leur contenu, ainsi que de leurs objectifs et de leur
méthodologie:

Nous avons choisi le français pour cet ouvrage, d’une parte en témoignage de
reconnaissance du mérite immense des arabisants francophones au cours des
derniers siècles, dont nous avons tous se bien profité, et d’autre part comme
un appel, sur toute adressé à nous disciples à nos jeunes collègues de
plusieurs pas, de la nécessité de ne pas s’astreindre à la connaissance et a
l’utilisation d’une seule langue de culture. 

This, too, is curious. It is by no means an idle appeal, but Corriente’s
disciples, of which there are many – he having almost singlehandedly created
the field of Andalusi Arabic studies out of only slightly (if skilfully)
worked cloth – all are capable of presenting their contributions in French at
international gatherings of Arabists. At least those who remain active in the
field are. What is more, the arabisants francophones of the current generation
are all capable of reading English and many of them write at least some of
their contributions to the field in that language. Perhaps the appeal is to
the Americans amongst their readership? Even then, the famously monolingual
Americans, if they know any other foreign language at all well enough to
engage in serious scholarship with it, it is Spanish. Much of Corriente’s
prodigious output, especially his detailed examinations of the texts from
which the entries from this dictionary are drawn is in Spanish. For example,
of the sixty-four of his works cited in the bibliography, forty-five are in
Spanish, as are his seminal studies of the colloquial Arabic poetic genres of
kharja and muwashshah and his arduous work with the twelfth-century zajal poet
Ibn Quzmān. Regardless, serious scholars of Arabic, Americans and otherwise,
are tutored in reading French and German. 

Rather, an appeal should be made to Arabists to pay closer attention to the
output of their hispanohablantes colleagues, that they may gain the deep
insights into the history of the language of their study that resides in the
extensive scholarship about Andalusi Arabic that they produce. For, as
Corriente is oft heard to lament, outside of Spain (he would say inside, too),
the Andalusi Arabic dialect bundle is a neglected variety of the language,
even while it is the best documented of the older dialects of Arabic. That
documentation comes in the colloquial writings of al-Andalus that survive to
this day, and it is largely Corriente and his disciples who have brought them
to scholarly light. This dictionary and his early lexicographic works are
invaluable aids in parsing the sometimes obscure meanings of those works,
composed, after all, for readers of a bygone era who were more familiar with
the idiosyncrasies of the language of the texts than are later generations,
removed in distance and time from the civilization that produced them. Even
native speakers of Arabic find a reading of the texts challenging in places.  

As to what else is new in the present work, it seems that the best way to
assess that is to choose a small section, featuring words beginning with a
letter with which few words in Arabic begin. As very few words in Arabic begin
with the first letter ظ, that appears to be a good place to conduct a test run
of the dictionary. In the Dictionnaire, that entry consumes all of four pages
(836–839), comprising but thirteen entries (not including the name of the
letter, with which the sections characteristically begin). By contrast, the
section covering the first letter of the Arabic alphabet (أ) requires
ninety-four pages to cover its 712 entries. The analogous section in A
Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic encompasses 34 pages and 841 entries. Its
section on (ظ) also has more entriBeyond Language Boundaries: Multimodal Use
in Multimodal Contexts, Marta Fernández-Villanueva and Konstanze Jungbluth.
Berlin: de Gruyter. 2016, 254 pp.
es, but not by such a large margin, incorporating fifteen entries in all of
about 1 and 3/4 pages (1997: 340-341). The compilers give no clue as to why
the entries have been reduced in the latest work. Despite their fewer entries,
the sections themselves take up more pages because of the larger typeface in
the Dictionnaire than that of the Dictionary, which, with its greater number
of entries, encompasses but 623 pages. 

Aside from that, it lists the roots in both IPA transliteration and their
Arabic characters, which its earlier counterpart has not done. Although the
Dictionnaire often provides fewer definitions and examples drawn from the
original texts than does the Dictionary, it makes up for that with an index
listing borrowings from other languages, including borrowings or cognates from
Semitic languages, from Akkadian to Ugaritic, that correspond to the root in
question. This by itself makes it a monumental work, surely the outcome of a
lifetime of study. 

Nevertheless, this index listing roots is confusing. It truly does provide
hundreds of cognates with Semitic languages, but we are not told whether those
are borrowings or shared common Semitic lexis. The Arabic dialects of the Gulf
do appear to contain some considerable borrowings from Akkadian, especially
agricultural terms (Holes 2016: 8 & 10–19), owing no doubt to the extensive
Assyrian and Aramaic presence in the Gulf until Islamic times. The Andalusi
Arabic dialect bundle, as an amalgam of northern and southern dialects of
Arabic, may indeed have retained borrowings from Akkadian, but are these what
we find in the seven pages of roughly 1,000 Akkadian roots? Not likely.
Likewise the twenty pages of Aramaic, are all of these also borrowings? Again,
it is unlikely. The same might be asked of the Hebrew entries. And what about
the Ugaritic? Were Arabic speakers ever in contact with Ugaritic? They may
have been, but we have no evidence of it, unless the Andalusi Arabic is an
attestation of that. If it were, the news should be broadcast far and wide.
But the writers of the Dictionnaire do not explain why Ugaritic words are to
be found in Andalusi Arabic. On the other hand, only about 150 words of Berber
origin are listed. Surely speakers of Andalusi Arabic were in contact with
Berber languages from the beginning of the Arab/Berber conquest of the Iberian
Peninsula? There was often friction between Andalusi Muslims of Arab or native
Iberian origin and those of Berber origins. Perhaps Andalusi writers of Arabic
eschewed the usage of recognizably Berber words? Our compilers do not
enlighten us on the matter.  
    
Meanwhile, the revision of the earlier works, the need for which the compilers
admit to, is apparent from the first page: “*{ʔBBWR} (أﺒﺒﻮر) dans Corriente
1997a: 1 semble être une erreur, car la graphie du manuscrit pourrait être
correcte et il faudrait donc respecter > ʔnbwrh < (q.v.)”

Not every misinterpretation has been revised, however. In the same section,
pp. 46–47, the entry *{ʔŠ) (اش) is defined by its basic meaning quoi, which is
what its reflexes mean in all living dialects in which its reflexes appear,
variously aš, ayš, ēš, aššu, šū, etc., all meaning ‘what?’ Yet in part 2 of
the entry, we find this:   “IQ, IA [Marugán’s 1994 edition of Ibn ʕĀṣim’s
proverbs], et ZǦ [Bencherifa’s 1971 edition of al-Zajjālī’s proverbs] … « ne »
IQ > iš nirīd naḥlaf < « je ne veuz pas jurer », > iš danb al+ḥadīd < « c’est
ne pas la faute de l’acier » (p. 47). 

This is a reversal, not a revision. In Corriente’s 1977 Sketch, we find the
origin of the interpretation of aš as a negator: “/iš/ (segregated from the
pronunciation with strong imāla [vowel fronting and raising] of the
interrogative /aš/) begins its semantic transfer … being a clear negative”
(1977: 145). Yet, the 2013 A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Andalusi
Arabic, of which Corriente is the author, states, “in some cases, the
interrogative rendering would be possible … ‘what is the fault of the iron?”
(2013: 127). This is no doubt in response to Wilmsen (2014: 72–86), in which
it is shown that in the reading of orthographic {aš} (however it was
pronounced) in the two examples cited in the Dictionnaire and others adduced
in the 1997 Dictionary (1997: 17) – where it is defined “iš not”, remains an
interrogative. (Wilmsen and Corriente had corresponded about the matter in
2012.)

How to explain the reversal? It seems that the current Dictionnaire is,
indeed, largely a reworking in French of the 1997 Dictionary, and the
compilers simply undertook the arduous task of adapting that compendious work
without considering others.

With that, it remains only to inquire after those who might benefit from
consulting this work. The answer is first and foremost that they would be
students of Andalusi Arabic and its texts who prefer that their first recourse
be to reference works in French. Those scholars will be unable to avoid
referring to Corriente’s works in English and Spanish, and, of course, to the
works in Andalusi Arabic in all of its manifestations to which those
invaluable references are a guide. It should be useful to Arabic historical
dialectologists, too, if they were to take the time to consider the
implications that Andalusi Arabic holds for the history of the Arabic
dialects. Some, of course, have. Others should, and this dictionary will be an
aid to them once they begin.    

A small complaint in that regard: The Sketch more-or-less consistently refers
readers to sections of the texts from which its examples are drawn; the
Dictionary less so; and the Dictionnaire sporadically at best. This will
oblige scholars to consult all the works in question. But they must, anyway.  
       

REFERENCES

Corriente, Federico. 1977. A Grammatical Sketch of the Spanish Arabic Dialect
Bundle. Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura.

Corriente, Federico. 1991. El léxico árabe estándar y Andalusi del “Glosario
de Leiden.” Madrid: Departamento de Estudios Árabes e Islámicos.

Corriente, Federico. 1997. A Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic. Leiden: Brill.

Corriente, Federico. 2008. Dictionary of Arabic and allied loanwords: Spanish,
Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and kindred dialects. Leiden: Brill.

Corriente, Federico, Christophe Pereira, Ángeles Vicente (eds.). 2015. Aperçu
grammatical du faisceau dialectal arabe andalou: Perspectives synchroniques,
diachroniques et panchroniques. Berlin/Boston : de Gruyter 

Corriente, Federico, Christophe Pereira, Ángeles Vicente (eds.). Forthcoming.
Dictionnaire des emprunts ibéro-romans: Emprunts à l’arabe et aux langues du
Monde Islamique. Berlin/Boston : de Gruyter

Institute of Islamic Studies of the University of Zaragoza. 2013. A
Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Andalusi Arabic. Leiden: Brill.

Jimenez Sánchez, M. 1996. Sefer ha-šarašim, par Sĕʕādyah ibn Danān. Granada:
Universidad de Granada

Marugán, Marina. 1994. El refranero andalusí de Ibn ʕĀṣim al-Garnāṭī. Madrid:
Hiperión.

Wilmsen, David. 2014. Arabic Indefinites, Interrogatives, and Negators: A
linguistic history of western dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

al-Zajjālī, Abū Yaḥyā ʕUbaid al-Dīn Aḥmad. 1971. amtāl al-ʕawām fī al-andalus
(Proverbs of the Common People in al-Andalus), Muhammad Bencherifa (ed.).
Rabat: Ministry of Culture.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Wilmsen is head of the Arabic and Translation Studies Department at the
American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. He has spent
twenty-five years in the Arabophone world, previously at the American
University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo. He is interested in
the history and prehistory of the Arabic dialects and the development of their
various syntactic features, especially object markers, interrogatives,
negators, and existential particles. He is currently involved in documenting
the Levantine Arabic features in the peripheral Arabic variety Maltese and in
researching manifestations of the Croft’s negative existential cycle in
Arabic.





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