He bitaney lagge • Studies on Language and African Linguistics in honour of Marcello Lamberti

Description

The Title’s opening words in Wolaytta, He bitaney lagge, ‘That man is a friend’, are taken from the corpus recorded in Ethiopia by Marcello Lamberti himself and published in the Appendix 4 of the The Wolaytta Language (Studia Linguarum Africae Orientalis • 6; see page XVII below). The original transcription has been adapted to the new Wolaytta orthographic conventions. This volume is a tribute to Marcello Lamberti, a great scholar and a true friend to all of us. Colleagues, friends, and former students have joined here in the occasion of Marcello’s sixtieth birthday. Many of the contributions in this volume are directly or indirectly inspired to Marcello’s scholarship and work. Marcello Lamberti is known for his twofold love for both Indo-European and Cushitic studies. This love, tuned into a mission, prompted him to apply the historical-comparative method, as developed and refined in Indo-European linguistics, to Afro-Asiatic languages, and more specifically to Cushitic and the languages of the Horn of Africa. Everything flows from here: Marcello’s historical and etymological reconstructions, his classificatory proposals, his descriptive work. He bitaney lagge • Studies on Language and African Linguisticsin honour of Marcello Lamberti Contents: Foreword XIII Preface XV Publications by Marcello Lamberti XVII Sergio Baldi – Rudolf Leger Arabic Loans in Bole-Tangale. A closer look to Bole, Karekare, Ngamo, Kupto and Kwami 3 Václav Blažek Surmic Numerals in the East Cushitic Perspective 15 Vermondo Brugnatelli Some grammatical features of Ancient Eastern Berber (the language of the Mudawwana) 29 Luca Busetto Note sull’adattamento e codifica della scrittura latina in Africa 41 Guido Cifoletti Sulla poesia dei Begia 51 Grover Hudson Amharic rs Pronouns 55 Herrmann Jungraithmayr Binäre Oppositionen im Tschadischen 67 Olga Kapeliuk Creating Adverbs in Amharic 81 Ilaria Micheli Two Points in Kulango Grammar: I. Analytic Equivalents for Fossilized Verb Extensions; II. the Diminutive Alteration 91 Abdirachid Mohamed Ismail Somali Focus and topic system: a global analysis 103 Moreno Morani Alcune riflessioni sui prestiti siriaci in armeno 123 Umberto Rapallo Dalle teorie del “campo” alla ricostruzione etimologica e alle convergenze linguistiche 143 Graziano Savà Bayso (Cushitic), a typologically interesting endangered language of Ethiopia 163 Roberto Sottile Personal Pronouns and Object Marking in Basketo 175 Gábor Takács Omotic lexicon in its Afro-Asiatic setting I: Omotic *b- with dentals, sibilants, and velars 183 Livia Tonelli Das Oromo von Somalia: Ansätze einer linguistischen Beschreibung 201 Mauro Tosco On language, government, and the reduction of linguistic diversity 211 Martine Vanhove Towards a semantic map of the Optative in Beja (North-Cushitic) 231 Rainer Voigt Oromo studies and literature in the first half of the 19th century 247 Andrzej Zaborski New Examples of (yu-)qātilu as One of the Basic Imperfect Stems in Arabic 261