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Towards a Comprehensive Edition of the Arabic–Ethiopic Glossary of al-Malik al-Afḍal, Part II: New Readings from the Second Sheet

Paper · 2014 · Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan

Summary

This article continues the authors' effort to produce a full edition of the Arabic–Ethiopic Glossary of al-Malik al-Afḍal, as reproduced in Varisco – Smith 1998 (sheets 217–219). In this glossary, Arabic headwords are glossed with Ethio-Semitic (ES) words written in Arabic script. Part II covers the second sheet (218) and discusses only entries for which Muth 2009–2010 offers no reading, or one the authors find unconvincing. For each Arabic lemma they establish its meaning from Arabic lexicons such as Lane, Dozy and Piamenta. They then reconstruct the probable ES pronunciation behind the Arabic-script spelling and test it against cognates in Geʿez, Tigre, Tigrinya, Amharic, Argobba, Harari and many Gurage varieties, mostly using the dictionaries of Leslau, Kane, Dillmann and Guidi. The entries cover garments, metals, musical instruments, foods and weapons. The result is a set of new identifications, several of which replace earlier readings. This sharpens the glossary's value as an early record of ES vocabulary and of words borrowed between Arabic, ES and Cushitic.

Key points

  • 218 A 23: the Arabic word for 'thousand' is glossed as *bäqˀl ʿamat 'hundred years'. This replaces Muth's bäʿal ʿamät 'Jahresfesttag', a phrase the authors note is unattested in ES. A similar number mismatch occurs in 218 A 22, where Arabic 'hundred' corresponds to Ethiopic 'twenty'.
  • Many textile terms are identified, including *bɨz(z)ät 'fluffed wool/cotton', *märwe 'striped cloth', *qämbissa 'shirt' and *mäḥaq 'dark woolen cloak'. *qämbissa ultimately derives from Arabic qamīṣ.
  • For 'trumpet' (218 C 8), the authors assume the copyist misplaced diacritic dots and read nafīr. They reject Muth's naqīr 'trough' because it does not fit the musical-instrument terms around it.
  • The food and weapon glosses include *ʿašäb 'salt', where a Somali cognate supports the initial ʿ; *qulalɨḥ 'egg'; *säḫär 'beer'; *ḥayb 'curds'; and *wärmät 'spear'. Leslau considers *wärmät a Cushitism.
  • The research was funded by RFH grant No. 12-04-00092a. Part I appeared in Aethiopica 2013.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When a reading is uncertain, the authors check whether it fits the topic of the surrounding entries, and drop candidates that break that coherence. Local thematic context is a cheap and strong constraint on ambiguous items.
  • I2. They model specific, plausible scribal errors, such as dots placed under the wrong letter, rather than treating the text as either exact or unusable.
  • I3. A reading is trusted only when several independent lines of evidence agree, such as cognates across many languages. One distant witness can settle a detail, as the Somali form does for an initial consonant.
  • I4. When the spelling and the comparative evidence point in different directions (kasra suggests *lɨmd, cognates suggest *lämd), the authors report both signals instead of forcing one answer.
  • I5. A meaning mismatch between source and gloss is accepted when the same pattern recurs elsewhere in the document, instead of being emended away.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): when choosing a lemma or word sense, use the dominant semantic field of nearby sentences as a tie-breaker, and log that choice as the explicit reason.
  • I2 (tokens): build a small, explicit table of likely confusions (typos, OCR swaps) into normalization, so each repair can be traced to a named confusion pair.
  • I3 (learn): when building silver data, give extra weight to agreement between witness parsers that are architecturally independent, and let a single reliable outlier witness decide narrow disputed features.
  • I4 (learn): keep conflicting signals as an explicit unresolved annotation, so evaluation can separate true uncertainty from errors.
  • I5 (back): during translation or regeneration through the meaning graph, allow documented systematic non-literal correspondences rather than flagging every mismatch as a failure.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksSocial Sciences · 1,772 worksSociology and Political Science · 577 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 2,908 works

Cite

Cite as Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan. 2014. Towards a Comprehensive Edition of the Arabic–Ethiopic Glossary of al-Malik al-Afḍal, Part II: New Readings from the Second Sheet. Aethiopica 17.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15460/aethiopica.17.1.862

@inproceedings{bulakh2014comprehensive,
  title = {{Towards a Comprehensive Edition of the Arabic–Ethiopic Glossary of al-Malik al-Afḍal, Part II: New Readings from the Second Sheet}},
  author = {Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan},
  booktitle = {Aethiopica 17},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.15460/aethiopica.17.1.862},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.17.1.862}
}

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