Linguistic variation in Egyptian Judaeo-Arabic folk tales and letters from the Ottoman period
This thesis comprises a comparative typological study of Egyptian Judaeo-Arabic folk tales’ and letters’ grammatical features from the Ottoman period, with the aim of establishing the degree to which variation exists between two genres of written Judaeo-Arabic, and how it manifests itself. Within Judaeo-Arabic textual studies, the dominant trend is to examine a single genre of this written form of Arabic from one or more chronological period in isolation. As such, we know much about the linguistic features of business letters (Khan 1992, 2006, 2013; Wagner 2010, 2014), Biblical translations (Hary 1992, 2009) and folk tales (Palva 2007-2008; Hasson-Kenat 2016; Ørum 2017). Yet, our understanding of the extent and nature of linguistic variation between genres of written Judaeo-Arabic is somewhat limited. This research project addresses this disciplinary desideratum, working predominantly with previously unedited and untranslated manuscripts and adopting an inter-genre and diachronic comparative approach, throughout. The scope of this thesis is limited to two genres of written Judaeo-Arabic, focsuing on a small number of corpora (which each contain three to five manuscripts) from the fifteenth–nineteenth centuries. The thesis is divided into two main sections. The first of these examines the orthographical and (limited) phonological data available in these corpora. Among the more notable contributions in this section are: (i) a (re)-examination of the diacritical dot, both in relation to the much discussed Arabic letter ğīm, and other graphemes, which have been all but neglected in existing scholarship; (ii) an exploration of the potential motivations behind the separation of the definite article, a key feature of late written Judaeo-Arabic; and (iii) an investigation into the plene spelling of short vowels and the information contained therein. The second section is devoted to a detailed study of diachronic developments and inter-genre variaton in subordination, divided into three sub-sections. In the first of these sub-sections, I focus on syndetic and asyndetic forms of complementation, complement types, the modalities of complementtaking predicates, and complementisers. The second sub-section builds on previous studies of relative clauses in written Judaeo-Arabic (cf. e.g., Wagner 2010). The final sub-section centres on analysis of adverbial subordination and adverbial clause markers. The results of these explorations demonstrate that with regard to written Judaeo-Arabic, we may speak of consistent differences in styles unique to each genre. I conclude by expressing the intention of expanding this research to include an intergenre, diachronic study of written Judeao-Arabic morphological features, at a future date.
Judaeo-Arabic, Philology, Middle Arabic, Cairo Genizah
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