A Comparative Cultural Glossary across the Modern South Arabian Language Family

This volume is the result of collaborative work conducted with a number of native speakers of the languages over several years. The volume presents a comparative cultural glossary of 345 head terms, which are given in the six Modern South Arabian languages: Group I: Mehri, Harsusi and Bathari; Group II: Sheret, Sokotri and Hobyot. The groupings are linguistically rather than geographically based. The list adapts and expands Claire Bowern's basic word list of 224 terms (Bowern 2008). Our word list was developed by the Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian (DEAMSA) team in collaboration with native speakers over a period of five years. Significant dialectal variants are noted for Mehri, Sheret, Hobyot and Sokotri, but these are by no means exhaustive. In many cases, the head words are 'umbrella terms' for clusters of forms, each of which has its own more precise semantic colouring. To demonstrate this clustering of forms, for each language the volume provides a selection of the many different forms offered by speakers for some head words.