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Towards a Comprehensive Edition of the Arabic–Ethiopic Glossary of al-Malik al-Afḍal. Part III: New Readings from the Third Sheet

Paper · 2016 · Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan

Summary

This article completes a three-part series of preliminary editions of selected entries from the Arabic–Ethiopic Glossary attributed to al-Malik al-Afḍal (Varisco and Smith 1998, sheets 217–219). In this glossary, each Arabic headword is paired with one or more Ethiopic equivalents written in Arabic script. Here the authors take up the third sheet (219). They revise and correct the earlier treatment in Muth 2009–2010, and they decipher glosses that Muth had left unexplained.

For each entry they work through four steps:

  • reread the Arabic-script spelling against the manuscript's letter shapes;
  • reconstruct the probable Ethiopic word;
  • support it with cognates from Ethio-Semitic languages such as Gəʿəz, Tigrinya, Tigre, Amharic, Argobba, Harari, Gafat and the Gurage varieties, citing standard dictionaries;
  • note any semantic or formal mismatch.

The result is a set of new or improved identifications covering weapons, kinship, the body, illness, household activities and religion. Several of these point toward Harari or Gurage sources. The work matters because it brings the glossary closer to a reliable full edition and makes it more useful as early evidence for the history of Ethio-Semitic vocabulary.

Key points

  • The article is Part III and the last of the series; Parts I and II (Bulakh and Kogan 2013, 2014) dealt with sheets 217 and 218.
  • Glosses that Muth 2009–2010 had not deciphered are now explained:
    • for "mother" (219 A 9), *ʔənnate is read as Amh. ənnat plus the 1 sg. suffix ("my mother"), and *ʔəndot is linked to Gurage forms;
    • for "pregnant" (219 A 27), *läqäba is linked to Gafat and Soddo cognates.
  • Many readings depend on scribal paleography:
    • nūn shaped like lām, or lām like bāʔ;
    • wāw and rāʔ looking alike, which allows a haplographic omission (219 B 2);
    • an accidental nūn in the word for "drum" (219 F 16);
    • a probable miswriting of mänfäs (219 F 26).
  • Arabic qāf is taken as a rendering of Ethiopic ejective consonants. On that basis "clean" (219 F 28) is reconstructed with an ejective *ṣ.
  • Some identifications draw on borrowing and fieldwork:
    • a Cushitic source is cited for "shield";
    • Kafa or Sidaama sources are cited for "leper";
    • M. Bulakh's 2012 Harari fieldnotes confirm wäzäna as the basic word for "heart".
  • The research was funded by RFH grant no. 12-04-00092a.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When a related form is identified as a loan from another witness language (for example, Gəʿəz ʔagre treated as an Amharism), it is set aside and not counted as independent evidence.
  • I2. Leftover material in a form is explained by a known grammatical piece rather than ignored, as when the final -e in "mother" is read as the 1 sg. possessive suffix.
  • I3. Spelling anomalies are attributed to an explicit model of scribal error (look-alike letters, haplography, stray strokes) instead of being forced into the lexicon.
  • I4. Imperfect meaning matches are accepted but always flagged, as with quiver vs. arrow, a woman in childbed vs. the act of birth, and female slave vs. slave.
  • I5. Each reconstruction lists the cognates that support it and states openly where none of them matches fully.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): when silver data is agreed by several witness parsers, track which witnesses share a source or training data so that correlated votes do not count as independent agreement.
  • I2 (tokens): when a lemma almost fits, the analyzer could try peeling off known affixes or clitics before declaring the word unknown, and log which affix closed the gap.
  • I3 (tokens): a small, named catalogue of typo and OCR confusion patterns could propose normalizations, each carrying a cited reason that keeps the step explainable.
  • I4 (world): when mapping words to WordNet/FrameNet concepts, record "near-miss" links with the type of relation (part/whole, agent vs. process, hypernym) instead of silently equating them.
  • I5 (answer): answers could report both supporting evidence and the specific unresolved mismatch, which makes confidence auditable.

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

 Institutions

🎓Russian State University for the HumanitiesMoscow · Russia7 works · 1 citation

 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. 2016. Towards a Comprehensive Edition of the Arabic–Ethiopic Glossary of al-Malik al-Afḍal. Part III: New Readings from the Third Sheet. Aethiopica 18.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15460/aethiopica.18.1.762

@inproceedings{bulakh2016comprehensive,
  title = {{Towards a Comprehensive Edition of the Arabic–Ethiopic Glossary of al-Malik al-Afḍal. Part III: New Readings from the Third Sheet}},
  author = {Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan},
  booktitle = {Aethiopica 18},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.15460/aethiopica.18.1.762},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.18.1.762}
}

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