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In the Arab world, people belong to kinship groups (lineages and tribes). Many lineages are named after animals, birds, and plants. Why? This survey evaluates five old explanations – “totemism,” “emulation of predatory animals,” “ancestor eponymy,” “nicknaming,” and “Bedouin proximity to nature.” It suggests a new hypothesis: Bedouin tribes use animal names to obscure their internal cleavages. Such tribes wax and wane as they attract and lose allies and clients; they include “attached” elements as well as actual kin. To prevent outsiders from spotting “attached” groups, Bedouin tribes scatter non-human names across their segments, making it difficult to link any segment with a human ancestor. Young’s argument contributes to theories of tribal organization, Arab identity, onomastics, and Near Eastern kinship.
Explaining the Non-human Names of Arab Kinship Groups, Volume 1
Author:
In the Arab world, people belong to kinship groups (lineages and tribes). Many lineages are named after animals, birds, and plants. Why? This survey evaluates five old explanations – “totemism,” “emulation of predatory animals,” “ancestor eponymy,” “nicknaming,” and “Bedouin proximity to nature.” It suggests a new hypothesis: Bedouin tribes use animal names to obscure their internal cleavages. Such tribes wax and wane as they attract and lose allies and clients; they include “attached” elements as well as actual kin. To prevent outsiders from spotting “attached” groups, Bedouin tribes scatter non-human names across their segments, making it difficult to link any segment with a human ancestor. Young’s argument contributes to theories of tribal organization, Arab identity, onomastics, and Near Eastern kinship.
Explaining the Non-human Names of Arab Kinship Groups, Volume 1
Author:
In the Arab world, people belong to kinship groups (lineages and tribes). Many lineages are named after animals, birds, and plants. Why? This survey evaluates five old explanations – “totemism,” “emulation of predatory animals,” “ancestor eponymy,” “nicknaming,” and “Bedouin proximity to nature.” It suggests a new hypothesis: Bedouin tribes use animal names to obscure their internal cleavages. Such tribes wax and wane as they attract and lose allies and clients; they include “attached” elements as well as actual kin. To prevent outsiders from spotting “attached” groups, Bedouin tribes scatter non-human names across their segments, making it difficult to link any segment with a human ancestor. Young’s argument contributes to theories of tribal organization, Arab identity, onomastics, and Near Eastern kinship.
Explaining the Non-human Names of Arab Kinship Groups, Volume 2 Appendices
Author:
In the Arab world, people belong to kinship groups (lineages and tribes). Many lineages are named after animals, birds, and plants. Why? This survey evaluates five old explanations – “totemism,” “emulation of predatory animals,” “ancestor eponymy,” “nicknaming,” and “Bedouin proximity to nature.” It suggests a new hypothesis: Bedouin tribes use animal names to obscure their internal cleavages. Such tribes wax and wane as they attract and lose allies and clients; they include “attached” elements as well as actual kin. To prevent outsiders from spotting “attached” groups, Bedouin tribes scatter non-human names across their segments, making it difficult to link any segment with a human ancestor. Young’s argument contributes to theories of tribal organization, Arab identity, onomastics, and Near Eastern kinship.
Explaining the Non-human Names of Arab Kinship Groups, Volume 2 Appendices
Author:
In the Arab world, people belong to kinship groups (lineages and tribes). Many lineages are named after animals, birds, and plants. Why? This survey evaluates five old explanations – “totemism,” “emulation of predatory animals,” “ancestor eponymy,” “nicknaming,” and “Bedouin proximity to nature.” It suggests a new hypothesis: Bedouin tribes use animal names to obscure their internal cleavages. Such tribes wax and wane as they attract and lose allies and clients; they include “attached” elements as well as actual kin. To prevent outsiders from spotting “attached” groups, Bedouin tribes scatter non-human names across their segments, making it difficult to link any segment with a human ancestor. Young’s argument contributes to theories of tribal organization, Arab identity, onomastics, and Near Eastern kinship.
Author:
Abstract
This article examines the use of Mock Jewish English (MJE) among members of the modern far right as a means of perpetuating ideologies centered around antisemitic canards originating from the 19th and 20th centuries. In order to investigate MJE as an act of language crossing, I examine the 900+ million token Unicorn Riot subcorpus of the Corpus of Digital Extremism and Conspiracies (CoDEC). Following this analysis, I describe the linguistic features of MJE when it is used as ventriloquation, specifically the lexical and phonological features employed by the white supremacist parody advice show, Dear Rabbi. In my analysis, I find that these two strategies of MJE are used by members of the far right to spread antisemitic ideologies, further the semantic pejoration of Jewish lexical borrowings, and covertly affiliate themselves with one another in public spaces (via language crossing) or distance themselves from Jewishness (via ventriloquation).
Abstract
A History of the Hausa Language is the first book-length historical study of any language of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic. It synthesizes and updates the scholarly output on the topic by Paul Newman, for many decades Hausa’s most productive and influential scholar. In this review article we discuss Newman’s most striking findings on the history of Hausa’s phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon, adding questions and critiques where called for. We find the book to be a contribution without parallel to Hausa and to African linguistics.
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Abstract
Sluicing—a clausal ellipsis in which the only pronounced part of a question is the wh-phrase—has been controversial since its emergence (Ross, 1969). I address herein the existence and nature of the ellipsis site’s content with an experimental argument from the field of first language acquisition. Using intervention effects as a diagnostic of movement, this study examines whether Najdi Arabic (NA)-speaking children show a subject advantage in sluicing and whether a mismatch in animacy features aids their interpretation of object sluices. A yes/no question task was conducted with 48 NA-speaking children. The results revealed that NA-speaking children exhibit a statistically significant subject advantage, although economy considerations constrain when this subject advantage emerges. Yet, no effect of mismatching animacy was found. Regardless, the results argue in favour of the structural-movement analysis of sluicing. This study contributes to the persistent debate on ellipsis site content by providing an experimental argument that relies on data from the acquisition of sluicing in NA.
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Abstract
In its entirety as much as with regard to its four branches, the Chadic language family poses challenges to the application of the Neogrammarian-school comparative method, not the least because of the immense time-depth involved and aggravated by certain typological peculiarities of Chadic phonology and morphology as inherited from its Afroasiatic ancestry. This is particularly true for Central Chadic, which—with 80 languages—is the most numerous and most diverse branch of Chadic, which in total counts almost 200 languages and thereby more than half of all known Afroasiatic languages. Both more or less ‘regular’ and ‘sporadic’ sound changes criss-cross the territories currently occupied by speakers of Central Chadic languages in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad, which allow confident identification of cognates. Some cognates have survived many millennia of language history practically unchanged with regard to their phonetic realisations, while others differ remarkably from the reconstructed proto-language forms beyond ad hoc recognisability. Recent historical comparative research by Richard Gravina (2014, 2015) and the present author (2022, 2023) involving 66 spoken languages and some 230 cognate lexical items have unearthed much of the linguistic histories behind the massive synchronic diversity of the modern Central Chadic languages. The recent research by the author has added to our understanding of historical Central Chadic phonology by unravelling the phonological processes by which the languages have developed sets of new phonemes, in addition to tracing more or less ‘regular’ and ‘sporadic’ sound changes that the PCC segmental inventories of vowels and consonants underwent. Modern Central Chadic languages show sets of innovative vowels and consonant whose emergence can largely be attributed, besides occasional instances of segmental fusion, to the ‘colouring’ effects of so-called prosodies. This makes the analysis of prosodic features such as palatalisation, labialisation, prenasalisation and glottalisation essential in order to understand the evolution of modern Central Chadic languages.