1. Introduction
Jibbali (also called Šaḥri or Śḥεri) is a Semitic language, spoken by roughly 30,000–50,000 people in Oman, mainly in the coastal towns (e.g. Ṣalalah, Mirbaṭ, Ṭaqah, Sad(a)ḥ, Ḥasik) of the south-west (Dhofar Governorate) and in the adjacent mountainous areas. It is also spoken on the island of Al-Ḥallaniya, the only inhabited island of the Khuriya Muriya (or Ḥallaniyāt) group, which lies roughly 70 km east of the town of Ḥasik, and 50 km south of the town of Sharbithāt. Jibbali includes three main dialects, usually designated Western, Central and Eastern.Footnote 1 The dialect of the island of Al-Ḥallaniya is, according to T.M. Johnstone (Reference Johnstone1981: xii), known to mainland speakers as “baby” Jibbali.
Within the Semitic family, Jibbali is part of the Modern South Arabian (MSA) group of languages, which comprise a separate branch of West Semitic; Jibbali is not a kind of Arabic. The other MSA languages are Mehri, Soqoṭri, Hobyot, Ḥarsusi and Baṭḥari, though the last two may be considered dialects of Mehri.
The existence of Jibbali was first brought to the attention of Europeans by Fulgence Fresnel (1795–1855), the French consul in Jeddah, through a series of articles in 1838.Footnote 2 Though Soqoṭri had been “discovered” by Europeans a few years earlier,Footnote 3 it was Fresnel who first recognized the existence of a new branch of the Semitic language family.Footnote 4
Since the time of Fresnel, our knowledge of Jibbali has improved quite a bit.Footnote 5 In 1898, several scholarly expeditions to Southern Arabia were launched by the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna (now called the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften). The result of this team's efforts was a great wealth of textual material in Mehri, Jibbali and Soqoṭri, published between 1902 and 1909, which greatly advanced the field of MSA studies. The team even brought informants from South Arabia to Vienna, including a Jibbali speaker who was in Vienna from May to September 1904. For Jibbali, the most relevant publication to emerge from their efforts is that of Müller (Reference Müller1907). Unfortunately, the Jibbali material published by Müller is the least reliable of the data collected by the Viennese team, due mainly, it seems, to the abilities of Müller's informant.Footnote 6 Bittner (Reference Bittner1917) includes a Jibbali–German lexicon based on Müller's texts.
In 1937, Bertram Thomas (1892–1950) published a sketch of four MSA languages, one of which was Jibbali.Footnote 7 Unfortunately, Thomas was not a trained linguist, as he readily admitted. Like most of his nineteenth-century predecessors, he was simply an adventurous traveller with a keen interest in language. Still, his work contains some very valuable data, including grammatical information and a long comparative word-list.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, T.M. Johnstone of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, carried out fieldwork in Oman and elsewhere in the Gulf (mainly Dubai). The results of his efforts were dictionaries of three MSA languages (Ḥarsusi, Jibbali and Mehri), a number of important articles, and two posthumously published text collections, on Mehri and Ḥarsusi. Johnstone also collected about sixty-five to seventy Jibbali texts, unpublished until this year.Footnote 8 Johnstone's Jibbāli Lexicon (1981) remains a primary resource on the language.
At around the same time as Johnstone was active in the field, a Japanese researcher named Aki'o Nakano was also pursuing field research. The results of visits to Yemen in 1971 and 1974 and a stay in Oman in 1974, were a comparative lexicon of Yemeni Mehri, Jibbali and Soqoṭri, published in 1986.
In Reference Hofstede1998, a Dutch scholar named Anda (Antje) Hofstede completed a PhD thesis at the University of Manchester, entitled “A syntax of Jibbāli”. Based on Johnstone's Jibbali texts, as well as on fieldwork conducted in Oman and with Omani informants in Great Britain, her work was in many ways the most thorough study of Jibbali, until Rubin Reference Rubin2014. Unfortunately, her work has never been published.Footnote 9
All of the above-mentioned researchers, and others who I have not mentioned here, have studied the Jibbali spoken on the mainland. None have ventured to the Khuriya Muriya islands where there are but few inhabitants. There is one exception, however, and it happens to be the first European to gather material on Jibbali.
From 1834 to 1836, J.G. Hulton, an assistant surgeon in the (British) Indian Navy, sailed on the ship Palinurus as part of a surveying mission in South Arabia. A primary aim of the mission, led by S.B. Haines,Footnote 10 was to look for suitable coal stations for ships on the India passage. In February and March 1836, the mission surveyed the Khuriya Muriya Islands, during which time Hulton collected some Jibbali material on the island of Al-Ḥallaniya.
Sadly, Hulton died just a few months after his time on the islands, in August or September of that year, after spending much of July and August in Sanaa.Footnote 11 A short report of his visit to the Khuriya Muriya islands was read to the Bombay Geographical Society – while Hulton was still living, but at sea – by a certain Mr Orlebar (published as Hulton Reference Hulton1836). Two longer publications appeared posthumously in 1840 and 1841. They contain mostly the same information but, significantly, the 1840 publication includes a list of 103 words in the local Jibbali dialect. Although it was published after Fresnel's articles on Jibbali, the material was collected in 1836, before Fresnel, making his data the earliest recorded Jibbali by a European.Footnote 12 Moreover, it remains the only published data on the dialect of the Khuriya Muriya islands.
Leslau, who in the early part of his long and distinguished career did some important work on MSA languages, published in BSOAS a study of Fulton's Jibbali word-list (Reference Leslau1947b).Footnote 13 Leslau's knowledge of the language was based on the material published by Müller and Thomas, which, as noted, was not always reliable. Nevertheless, Leslau was able to decipher Hulton's material quite well, and he made some excellent observations. But given the strides made in our knowledge of Jibbali since 1947, thanks mainly to Johnstone, a fresh review of Hulton's material seems constructive.
Before turning to Hulton's linguistic material, some additional information on the islands themselves is in order, including some excerpts from Hulton's articles.
2. The Khuriya Muriya islands
The Khuriya Muriya islands themselves are referred to already by some classical (Greek) authors, such as the author of the Periplus Maris Erythraei from the first century ce (Casson Reference Casson1989: 174). The fact that the inhabitants of this island spoke a language other than Arabic was documented in the twelfth century, by the famous Arab traveller and geographer Al-Idrīsī, who wrote that the inhabitants of “Khartan” and “Murtan” (apparently scribal corruptions for Khuriyan and Muriyan) spoke a language (the ancient language of ʿAd) unknown to the Arabs (Reference Amédée Jaubert1836–40: 1.48–9; Reference Cerulli1970: 52). When the British surveying team reached the islands in 1836, only Al-Ḥallaniya was inhabited, and barely so. It seems the population had, less than two decades before, suffered a severe loss under Wahhabi invaders from the Gulf (see below). The islands eventually came under British rule in 1854; this lasted until 1967 when rule was transferred to Oman. Today the island is home to about 350 fishermen and their families, though most move onto the mainland during the summer monsoon (mid-June to mid-September).
The observations made by Hulton (Reference Hulton1836; Reference Hulton1840; Reference Hulton1841) and Haines (Reference Haines1845) offer a fascinating historical snapshot of life on the island of Al-Ḥallaniya.Footnote 14 In his 1836 paper, Hulton wrote:Footnote 15
The [Khuriya Muriya] group consists of five islands … all resembling each other in their barren and rugged appearance. They sustain only a few salt water plants or stunted shrubs, and the water to be found on them is generally brackish …
The islands are composed principally of granite; limestone also occurs. The granite in the largest island (Helarnea [= Ḥallaniya]) assumes the form of pointed spires, the highest of which is estimated at 1500 feet …
On Sardi [= Sawdāʾ, the western neighbour of Ḥallaniya], the remains of former habitations were observed, but the only inhabitants at present on these islands are confined to Helarnea. Their number, however, does not exceed twenty-three individuals.Footnote 16 The language they use is a dialect of the Arabic, called Sheree [Śḥεri or Šaḥri], from the tribe by which it is spoken, who live near Cape Morebat [Mirbaṭ]. Some of the words and sounds appeared to Mr. Hulton to resemble the dialect in use among the aboriginal Socotrians, and he has furnished a vocabulary comparing the languages of the two races. A copious vocabulary of the Socotrian, collected by Captain Haines,Footnote 17 during his survey of that island, will furnish the means of making this comparison.
The soil of Helarnea being incapable of cultivation, the inhabitants are entirely dependent on the sea for their sustenance, and being unprovided with boats of any description, they are obliged to confine their occupation of fishing to the immediate vicinity of the rocks. They are, therefore, literally Ichthyophagi,Footnote 18 and live in a state of extreme poverty and wretchedness.
More detailed information on the islands (including geographical and meteorological topics) are included in the 1840 and 1841 articles. Following are some additional details from the 1840 version:
The soil of the island [Ḥallaniya] is quite incapable of being cultivated in any part, whatever industry or care might be bestowed in the attempt; there is indeed barely sufficient vegetation for support of a few straggling wild goats, which the sterility of the plains and growing neglect of their former possessors, have driven to the hills and vallies: necessity has compelled the inhabitants to look to the sea alone for means of subsistence …
Their habitations are formed of a few loose stones, heaped up in the form of a semicircular wall, with half a dozen dried sticks or fish-bones extended across, over which a little seaweed is lightly spread …
Wood is very scarce in every part of the island, and barely sufficient to meet the needs of the inhabitants, and perhaps of two or three boats that may touch here during the season ….
In both the 1840 and 1841 articles, Hulton describes one of the reasons for the small population of the island. The following is from the version published in 1841:
The natives ascribe the present low state of the population to the cruelty of the Wahhabis, who, before they received a death-blow from the British at Ras el-Kheimah (an event of which the natives of this island are well aware), invaded their country.Footnote 19 Their houses were destroyed, their scanty clothing torn from their backs, their goats killed, and some of their children forcibly carried away and condemned to perpetual slavery … This calamity befell them about seventeen years ago, and they now point to a young man whose birth is made the epoch of that sad event.
In the 1840 article, we read the following about the language spoken on Al-Ḥallaniya:
The people themselves assert that their ancestors came from the neighborhood of Hasec [Ḥasik] and Morbaat [Mirbaṭ], from whence they were driven by the internal discords of the Bedouin tribes … the language which they now use is almost identical with the Shehree, or that spoken by the tribe surrounding Morbaat, and this again differs, I understand, but in a trifling degree from the Mahara dialect [= Mehri]. I was forcibly struck by the resemblance it bore to the language of Socotra, especially in the pronunciation of one or two letters which foreigners can rarely imitate. Our pilot, who belongs to their neighbors, attempted in vain to do so, and excited the merriment of the bystanders by the contortion of his features. I have subjoined a vocabulary of their language which may be regarded as a fair specimen of the Shehree also. To point out its further peculiarity, I have contrasted it with the Arabic in common use along the coast. By reference to the vocabulary of the Socotran language, which Capt. Haines procured during his laborious and detailed survey of that island, and which is now in the possession of Government, it may be ascertained what affinity exists between them. In both, consideration must be made for the difficulty of finding letters to correspond with the sounds of the respective syllables. There are some which no characters will represent.
3. Hulton's linguistic data
In Hulton's Reference Hulton1840 article (pp. 195–7), we find a list of 103 vocabulary items. Following the English head words, Hulton provides a local Arabic word and a Jibbali word (though he simply uses “Curia Muria” for the heading, rather than “Shehree” or any other name for the language). As noted in the quotation cited above, he included the Arabic to show how distinctive the local language really was.
In Table 1 below, I have reproduced all three columns of Hulton's list, including his English, Arabic and Jibbali words, using his exact spelling. I have also included in the table my own reading of the Jibbali form, following mainland Jibbali where there is a good match. Hulton's attempted elicitation of words was not always successful (a situation not unknown to any modern linguistic fieldworker), and so I have also included an actual gloss for the elicited item. Sometimes the Jibbali word he received was very close to what he wanted. For example, when he wanted “a gun”, he got instead ĩndíḳ “the gun”, rather than məndíḳ ‘a gun’. On other occasions he was well wide of the mark, as for example when instead of ‘buy and sell’, he got yəḥár (or yəḥɔ́r) yəśtέm ‘he wants to buy’. Following the table is a commentary on each individual word.
Table 1. Hulton's Jibbali word-list, with modern Jibbali readings and glosses
Notes to the table:Footnote 20
1. ġeyg: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘man’.
2. teṯ: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘woman’. I have assumed that Hulton's initial y- is a typographical error. It is, of course, possible the printed form is correct, in which case it would represent a dialectal form.
3. əmbérεʾ: It is possible that Hulton's transcription with only an initial b- represents a dialectal form bérεʾ. The initial mb- is, however, attested across the MSA languages.
4. εrέš: Hulton's transcription could also represent εrέšš ‘his head’, since the informant included the 3 ms possessive suffix -š also in the word for ‘hand’ (#5).
5. yídəš: This is (y)íd ‘hand’, plus the 3 ms possessive suffix -š. Although JL (s.v. yd) lists only the form éd ‘hand’, Johnstone's texts include the variant pronunciations yídəš (text 35:3) and īdš (55:4) for ‘his hand’.
6. εrkɔ́t: As I have indicated in the table, this is most likely the 3 ms perfect of the root rkt ‘he stepped, put his foot down’. Worth noting, however, is that, according to ML (s.v. rkt; apparently from Johnstone's own fieldwork), Soqoṭri has the noun rɔkt ‘camel's hoof’. The Jibbali word for ‘foot’ is faʿm (also ‘leg’; see #7) or gέdəl.
7. faʿm: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘leg, foot’.
8. śɔf: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘hair (pl.)’. Its singular is śfet.
9. śɔ̄ṭ: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘fire’.
10. emí: This is the definite form. The indefinite is simply mí. This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘water’.
11. núśəb: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘milk’, though not a word found in other MSA languages.
12. ḳaṭmím xózər: The noun ḳaṭmím means ‘fresh butter’. The transcribed form ghutumun may suggest a dialectal variant ḳaṭmín (or similar), though this seems unlikely. The second word has two possible interpretations. It can be read xózər, a D/L-stem verb in the 3 ms perfect that means ‘he made butter’. The two words would thus be a phrase. The second alternative is to read xɔ́zər, which is another word for ‘fresh butter’ (limited to Eastern Jibbali, according to JL, s.v. xzr). The two words elicited would, in that case, be synonymous terms.
13. əlhúti: This is the plural of léʾ ‘cow’, the standard Jibbali word for that animal. Hulton's transcription could also represent the definite form εlhúti ‘the cows’.
14. έrún: This is the plural (and collective). Its singular is ɔz (obviously from a different root).
15. ṣod: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘fish’. This verbal root is well known from elsewhere in Semitic with the meaning ‘hunt’ or, less often, ‘fish’ (including derived nouns like ‘fishing’ and ‘fisherman’), but is not normally used for the animal itself outside of MSA and neighbouring (Yemeni/Dhofari) Arabic dialects.Footnote 21
16. ʿafar: This is the local Arabic name of the shrub Atriplex farinosa. (Recall Hulton's observation on the scarcity of wood on the island.) The name is not listed in Miller and Morris (Reference Miller and Morris1988), but ʿafar is found in Ghazanfar (Reference Ghazanfar1992: 38; Reference Ghazanfar2003: 39), who specifically lists the island of Al-Ḥallaniya as a place where this plant grows. The name is probably related to the Classical Arabic word ʿafār ‘kind of tree’, as Leslau (Reference Leslau1947b: 9) suggested.
17. εyúm: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘the sun’. Hulton's yeom could also represent the indefinite form yum. The Jibbali word yum means both ‘sun’ and ‘day’ (< Semitic *yum- ‘day’).
18. εrét: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘(the) moon’.
19. kəbkɔ́b: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘stars’.
20. jiház/jihɔ́z: The phoneme g can be pronounced palatalized in some Jibbali dialects, as j [dʒ] in Western Jibbali, and sometimes as g y in Central Jibbali. However, the Jibbali phoneme is elsewhere spelled g in this word-list (cf. #24, #53, #79), so this may just be an Arabic or Arabized form. This word for ‘boat’ is not listed in JL, though the word gihóz ‘Schiff’ appears in the texts collected by Müller (cf. Müller Reference Müller1907: 79, line 35; 128, line 1), and so is recorded in Bittner's lexicon (Reference Bittner1917: 29). The word must be related to Arabic jihāz ‘set, apparatus, equipment’, but the meaning ‘boat’ seems to be local.
21. aʿín: This is the definite form of ʿin, the standard Jibbali word for ‘eye’.
22. iðέn (izέn?): This is the standard word for ‘(the) ear’. Hulton's transcription suggests that the phoneme ð was realized as [z]. However, in the other word on this list with the phoneme ð (#50, ðɔr), Hulton used the transcription dth. Moreover, the locals clearly could pronounce the voiceless counterpart t.
23. naxrér: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘nose’.
24. gũl: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘camel’.
25. ḥaṣún: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘horse’.
26. xɔbz: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘bread’. Hulton's transcription of a final vowel -a, may represent a slightly variant form.
27. tũr: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘dates’ (collective or plural).
28. ĩźḥɔ́t: This derives from *ε-miźḥɔ́t, the definite form of the word miźḥɔ́t ‘salt’. The sound ź (transcribed by Hulton as lzt) is an allophone of l, pronounced as a voiced lateral fricative [ɮ].
29. ĩndíḳ: This derives from *ε-məndíḳ, the definite form of məndíḳ ‘rifle’.
30. rúmaḥ: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘spear’.
31. is̃ɔ́ʾ: Hulton's transcription shoh is a bit difficult to interpret. The word for ‘sword’ is attested already in the work of Fresnel (Reference Fresnel1838c: 547), who transcribed chtsò (his Arabic-letter transcription includes a final glottal stop). Fresnel considered the initial sound to be a single consonant, which he compared to the Russian щ šč. Hulton's sh may be an attempt at that sound. Müller recorded što (Bittner Reference Bittner1917: 63), while Thomas (Reference Thomas1937: 96) recorded both ishtōḥ and yiso; JL (s.v. ys̃ty) has is̃tɔ́ʾ and Nakano (Reference Nakano1986: 45) has ʾes̃tóʾ. The cluster s̃t heard by Müller, Thomas, Johnstone and Nakano seems to be a more modern development from that which Hulton and Fresnel heard, as noted already by Lonnet (Reference Lonnet1991: 70, n. 38). A form is̃ɔ́ʾ, without t, is apparently still used in some Eastern Jibbali dialects, however (Al-Shahri Reference Al-Shahri2007: 78), and so this form is not just more archaic, but also dialectal. The Jibbali word is probably cognate with Mehri əškay, with palatalization, and later dissimilation, of the second consonant (i.e. əškay > əšs̃ay > əštay in modern Central and Western Jibbali).
32. ṭib: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘gold’, though it is not common MSA.
33. fiẓ́át: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘silver’, sometimes also fiẓ́ẓ́át.
34. ṣífər: According to JL and ML (s.v. ṣfr), ṣífər is ‘brass’, like its Arabic counterpart. No word for ‘copper’ is listed in JL, but ML (s.v. ʿdn) includes mādēn ‘copper; any white metal’. JL defines maʿdέn as ‘white metal, aluminium’. It seems possible that the word ṣífər meant both ‘copper’ and ‘brass’ to Hulton's informants, since they probably saw little of either. Nakano (Reference Nakano1986: 111) found naḥás used for ‘copper’ in Jibbali.
35. fúdún: This is a standard word for ‘rock, stone’ in Jibbali.
36. ḥãr(t): One standard Jibbali word for ‘mountain’ is ḥãr. Either Hulton's final -t was a mistake, or this represents ḥãrt, a variant form. (Cf. also #55.)
37. nəḥór: JL and ML (s.v. nḥr) both list náḥar as an Eastern Jibbali form, and naḥrɔ́t as a Central Jibbali form, with the meaning ‘side-passage off a wadi’. In Johnstone's Jibbali texts (e.g. text 22:3), we find several times the word nəḥõr ‘wadi’. Though not in JL, I did find this word among one of the many handwritten word-lists included among Johnstone's papers at the University of Durham Library (Box 15C). In an article (Reference Johnstone1973: 101), Johnstone lists náḥár as the diminutive form of nəḥór. The form recorded by Hulton is likely the same form nəḥór (or nəḥõr) that Johnstone found, but failed to put in his lexicon. The general word for ‘valley’ in Jibbali is śaʿb.
38. ktab: This may represent the Arabic word kitāb. Hulton's transcription could also represent the Jibbali word ktɔb, which itself is borrowed from Arabic kitāb.
39. niẓ́áf: This word is not in JL, but cf. Mehri niẓ́āf ‘mattress; covers’ and Soqoṭri níẓ́af ‘bed-cover’. Since JL (s.v. nẓ́f) does list mənẓ́éf ‘mattress’, this may represent a dialectal form, though one identical to the attested forms of Mehri and Soqoṭri.
40. səkín: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘knife’.
41. ḥáši: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘sand’ or ‘dirt’.
42. xaṭéḳ: This is a standard Jibbali word for ‘cloth’, though for some Central Jibbali speakers (cf. JL and ML, s.v. xṭḳ) the meaning has narrowed to ‘indigo-dyed dress’.
43. dəgúgət: No word for ‘chicken’ or ‘fowl’ appears in JL, but ML (s.v. dgg) includes Central Jibbali dəgɔ́gət and Eastern Jibbali dgugt.
44. ənḳerɔ́t: This may be a dialectal word or, more likely, the name of a particular species of bird that has not been recorded by other researchers. It is surely related to the verb nḳɔr ‘peck’, which appears in JL, and which has excellent cognates throughout the Semitic family. As Leslau (Reference Leslau1947b: 11) notes, other Semitic languages have a word ‘beak’ from this root, and Arabic has a word naqqār as the name of a bird (meaning, literally, ‘pecker’; cf. English ‘woodpecker’).
45. ḳahlét: JL has ḳɔ́ḥlət ‘egg’ (pl. ḳɔ́ḥəl), while Bittner (Reference Bittner1917: 45) has ḳahalít. The island dialect seems to match very well with Bittner's form, so, while there seems to be dialectal variation within Jibbali, the form on the island is not unique. Müller (Bittner's source) usually distinguished h and ḥ, so he probably really heard ḳahalít. Still, since Johnstone heard ḥ, as did Thomas,Footnote 22 Hulton's transcription h may represent ḥ.
46. xɔr: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘lagoon; inlet’. There are no rivers on Al-Ḥallaniya, of course. The final -r of the word is often devoiced, resulting in something closer to xɔhr (as Johnstone transcribed; cf. JL, s.v. xwr).
47. ãʿṣōt: This is from *a-maʿṣōt, the definite form of maʿṣōt ‘turban’ (< *maʿṣabɔ́t). The noun itself is not in JL, but is attested in Müller's texts (e.g. Reference Müller1907: 42, line 37). The noun derives from the verb ʿaṣɔ́b ‘tie (around the head)’, which is listed in JL. This is probably an old-fashioned or outdated word, which would explain why, in Johnstone's newly made Jibbali version of Müller's above-mentioned text (Johnstone's text 97), Johnstone's informant used the word məsέr ‘turban’.
48. ḳedút: This form is unknown, but possibly only because neither Johnstone nor Müller recorded the Jibbali word for ‘lead’. Thomas (Reference Thomas1937: 80) has gillail for ‘lead’, which corresponds to the word for ‘bullets’ that Johnstone recorded as gilél (sg. gilílt). In Mehri, the words for ‘bullet’ and ‘lead’ come (logically) from the same root (rṣṣ), so they may do so in Jibbali as well. Thomas (Reference Thomas1937: 81) recorded the Ḥarsusi word for ‘lead’ as qudait, which looks very close to the form in Hulton's list, but with opposite vowels.
49. ḥadíd: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘iron’.
50. ðɔr: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘blood’. The final -r of the word is often devoiced, resulting in something closer to ðɔhr (as Johnstone transcribed; cf. JL, s.v. ðrw).
51. s̃əhérέn: This is a difficult form to interpret. The most likely fit for Hulton's transcription is s̃əhérέn, a 1cp perfect of the verb s̃əhérεʾ ‘breathe’ (root hrʾ).
52. téʾ: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘meat’.
53. gɔdš: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘skin’, gɔd (< *gɔld), plus the 3 ms possessive suffix -š.
54. ūt: This derives from *ε-bút, the definite form of but ‘house’.
55. xε̃rt: The word for ‘wine’ was recorded by Johnstone (JL, s.v. xmr) and Bittner (Reference Bittner1917: 41) as xε̃r (Bittner has some variation in the vowel). It is not clear if Hulton's final -t is an error, or reflects a variant form (cf. #36, above). However, since Arabic has both xamr- and xamrat- for ‘wine’, it seems likely that Hulton did hear xε̃rt.
56. səndúḳ: Bittner (Reference Bittner1917: 61) and JL (s.v. sndḳ) have səndíḳ ‘box’. Hulton's form more closely reflects Arabic ṣundúḳ, from which the Jibbali form was borrowed (cf. also Mehri səndáwḳ < səndúḳ). Hulton's form could be a dialectal variant, or Bittner's and Johnstone's səndíḳ could reflect a later development of the form.
57. ṣimx: There are a number of words for ‘wound’ in JL, but none are at all close to Hulton's seemh. Perhaps there is a connection with the obscure Arabic verb ṣamaxa ‘hit, smite’. Leslau (Reference Leslau1947b: 13), who was equally at a loss to explain this word, cited Arabic ṣamaḥa ‘hit with a whip’, which I did not find in any dictionary.
58. ʿónut: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘year’.
59. ɔ́rəx: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘month’, pronounced ɔrx or ɔ́rəx.
60. šḥér: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘today’. Some speakers of Central Jibbali also use the form šḥór.
61. rəḥím: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘good’, also used to mean ‘nice’ and ‘handsome’. I assume that the initial k- of Hulton's form must be a typographical error, as did Leslau (Reference Leslau1947b: 13).
62. défər: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘bad’.
63. mέkən: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘a lot’ or ‘much’, used independently or modifying a noun.
64. xέrín: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘a little (bit)’.
65. b-aġáwf: Hulton's form is very hard to interpret. Leslau (Reference Leslau1947b: 13) suggested that baathuf was a misprint for baaghuf and was related to the Mehri adverb b-aġáwf ‘above’ (also attested for Ḥarsusi and Baṭḥari). If correct, then this would probably represent a dialectal usage, or has simply been lost in later periods, since it is not otherwise known from Jibbali.
66. b-aġál: JL (s.v. ʾġl) contains the forms aġál ‘down, downwards’ and b-aġál ‘down there’. The final l can be devoiced in some dialects (or by some speakers), resulting in a pronunciation closer to aġáh or even aġá (as in Johnstone's text 40:4, and as recorded in JL for Eastern Jibbali; cf. also Bittner Reference Bittner1916: 56). Hulton's transcription with a final -alah may be reflecting something like -alh, that is a devoiced final -l. Alternatively, it may reflect a compound preposition b-aġá(l) lə-, as Leslau suggested. The normal word for ‘under(neath)’ in Jibbali is lxín or nxín (on this word, see Rubin Reference Rubin, Hasselbach and Pat-El2012a).
67. kεlṯún: This word clearly derives from the verb kɔlɔ́ṯ, as Leslau (Reference Leslau1947b: 13) noted. In JL, this word is defined as ‘story-teller’. Perhaps this was used also for someone who delivers the news upon returning to the island? It seems unlikely that this was used as an abstract noun ‘news’, since the -ún suffix in Jibbali (< Semitic *-ān) is used most often for agentives or for adjectives (see #74).
68. ḳərrét: Thomas (Reference Thomas1937: 98) recorded two words for ‘tomorrow’, girride and qereri (or qarairi). The latter obviously corresponds to the word ḳərérε recorded by Johnstone (and which is well attested in his texts), while girride corresponds to the form heard by Hulton. Thomas sometimes transcribed ḳ with g (instead of q), so I am assuming that the two words are both from the root ḳrr.
69. éb: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘big’, used only with masculine nouns. The feminine is ũm. The two words clearly derive from the words for ‘father’ and ‘mother’, respectively, as noted already by Müller (Reference Müller1909). This development of these two words is common to Jibbali and Soqoṭri.
70. níṣán: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘small’, though it is not common MSA.
71. də-gí(l): This must represent the perfect of the root gly, preceded by the particle d-. In JL (s.v. glv), Johnstone has the perfect as gíźi, with ź as an allophone of l, but Bittner (Reference Bittner1917: 29) has gíli. The form degil that Hulton transcribed must be something like də-gíl, with loss of the final vowel. His second form, presumably də-gí, is more surprising, and may be erroneous, since we would not expect the l to be lost.
72. õsέ: This derives from *ε-mosέ, the definite form of mosέ ‘rain’.
73. ṯíri: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘wet’.
74. ḳɔśʿún: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘dry’.
75. ḥɔ̄r: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘black’.
76. lūn: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘white’.
77. ʿɔ́fər: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘red’.
78. ənkáʿ l-yɔ́: This is the imperative ənkáʿ ‘come!’ combined with the adverb əl-yɔ́ ‘to here’.
79. ġad: This is presumably the imperative ġad ‘go!’. Hulton's transcription could also possibly represent the perfect aġád ‘he went’.
80. də-yəġélḳ: The form is a 3 ms imperfect of the root ġlḳ, plus the progressive marker d-. The meaning here reflects an earlier stage of the language. The verb in modern Jibbali (3 ms perfect ġɔlɔ́ḳ or ġalɔ́ḳ) means only ‘look, look for’, but in Hulton's time it could also have the more general meaning ‘see’, at least in the present tense. This is proven by data collected by other researchers. Krapf (Reference Krapf1846: 313), who compiled a Jibbali word-list just a few years after Hulton, also used this verb to translate ‘see’. And in Müller's texts, while śíni is the more common verb for ‘see’ (as in modern Jibbali), ġɔlɔ́ḳ has this meaning in a few passages, in addition to the meaning ‘look for’ elsewhere. The clearest example is in Müller (Reference Müller1907: 92, line 26), where we find tġelk śaʿb ðek … śink toš ‘do you see that valley? I saw it’.
81. d-hoʿak: This is a difficult form to interpret. It seems likely that this is a mistake for d-shoʿak, i.e. də-šãʿak ‘I have heard’, a 1cs perfect with the verb prefix d- (indicating a present perfect). The verb ‘hear’ in Jibbali (3 ms perfect šãʿ or šĩʿ) comes from the common Semitic root *smʿ, with the regular Jibbali shift of Proto-Semitic *s to š. In Mehri, Ḥarsusi, Baṭḥari, and Hobyot, Semitic *s regularly shifted to h, hence Mehri hīma ‘he heard’. If Hulton really heard d-hoʿak, with h, then this would represent a form with the same shift of *s to h, otherwise unknown in Jibbali.
82. xarɔ́g: This is one of two standard verbs for ‘die’ in Jibbali, and the one normally used for people. The other is fε̄t, most often used for animals.
83. əltáġ (yəltáġ): Hulton's transcription could represent the 3 ms imperfect yəltáġ ‘he kills’ or a ms imperative əltáġ ‘kill!’. The Arabic form given is uktul (i.e. uqtul), an imperative. This could suggest that the Jibbali form is imperative, except that there are other examples in this list where the Arabic column has an imperative and the Jibbali does not (e.g., #80 and #81). In modern Jibbali, the imperative of ‘kill’ has become irregular, taġ.
84. ezũš: The form is ambiguous. It could mean ‘I will give him’ or ‘they gave him’. Either way, the form derives from ezúm (1cs imperfect or 3mp/3fp perfect) plus the 3 ms object suffix. The form ezum alone can also be a 3 ms perfect ‘he gave’, but when combined with an object suffix, the result would be ezĩš. In modern Jibbali the initial e- can be dropped from the perfect forms.
85. ẓ́bɔṭ ʿáni: Hulton's form must represent the phrase ẓ́bɔt ʿáni. The form ẓ́bɔṭ is a ms imperative ‘take!’, while ʿáni is the preposition ʿar ‘from’ plus a 1cs suffix. Leslau (Reference Leslau1947b: 15) suggested that -ani was a 1cs object suffix on the verb. In fact, in the Jibbali of Johnstone's texts, 1cs suffixes are never used with verbs, and this seems also to be the case in Müller's material.
86. dḥa-l-ġád: Hulton's transcription must be a mangled attempt at the 1cs future dḥa-l-ġád ‘I will go’.
87. dḥa-l-ít: Hulton's transcription must be a mangled attempt at the 1cs future dḥa-l-ít ‘I will eat’.
88. əštíḳ: This can only be the 1cs subjunctive ‘I may drink’, which is also the form that is used to make the future dḥa-l-əštíḳ ‘I will drink’.
89. yəḥɔ́r yəśtέm: Hulton's transcription must represent two elements, yəḥɔ́r (or possibly yəḥár) ‘he wants/asks’ and yəśtέm ‘(that) he buy’. The second element is clearly the 3 ms subjunctive (dependent) form of the verb ‘buy’. The first element is more interesting. JL lists the verb ḥaré ‘beg’ (3 ms imperfect yḥír). Bittner (Reference Bittner1917: 38) defines the verb ḥaré ‘seek, ask for, wish for’ (3 ms imperfect yḥór).Footnote 23 Hulton's phrase then should perhaps be translated ‘he asks to buy’. However, there is good evidence that this verb also had the meaning ‘want’, as Hulton suggested (see #90), including a similar translation by Krapf (Reference Krapf1846: 312) and the fact that this verb is almost certainly the source of the future tense particle dḥar, which has developed into the variants dḥa, ḥa, and a- in modern Jibbali. See Rubin (Reference Rubin and Eades2012b) for a study of the development of this verb and the future tense particle. The standard verb for ‘want’ in Jibbali is ʿágəb, which originally had (and still can have) the meaning ‘like, love’.
90. yəḥár: Hulton's transcription can only come from a misanalysis of the preceding item. See the discussion above (#89) on this form.
91. śkol/śxol: This is another difficult form to interpret. The standard Jibbali word for ‘sit’ is skɔf. Mehri has śxəwəlūl, as do Ḥarsusi, Baṭḥari and Hobyot (with slight variations). The form Hulton heard must be from the same root. Thomas recorded a form with k for Mehri, rather than x, and forms with either k or x for Ḥarsusi. So Hulton's k is probably correct. Regardless, this seems to be a real dialectal Jibbali form. Like the Arabic gloss, it is probably an imperative ‘sit down!’; Julien Dufour (in a personal communication) has recorded Western Soqoṭri tśxɔl ‘sit down!’, a relic of the root found in Mehri, Ḥarsusi, Baṭḥari and Hobyot.
92. ṭaṭ (ṭad): This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘1’ (masculine form). One hears both ṭad (the etymological form) and ṭaṭ, and Hulton's transcription could represent either.
93. ṯroh: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘2’ (masculine form).
94. śɔṯét: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘3’ (masculine form).
95. εrbəʿɔ́t: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘4’ (masculine form).
96. xõš: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘5’ (masculine form).
97. štət: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘6’ (masculine form).
98. šəbʿét: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘7’ (masculine form).
99. ṯĩnét: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘8’ (masculine form).
100. saʿét: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘9’ (masculine form).
101. ʿəśírét: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘10’ (masculine form).
102. ʿáśər(i): The standard Jibbali word for ‘20’ is ʿáśəri, with the old dual suffix -i, as recorded by all previous and subsequent fieldworkers. The dual -i (preserved in Mehri) is normally lost in Jibbali words, though it is preserved in a very small number of words, including ‘20’. If Hulton was correct in recording only ʿáśər, then this would be a unique dialectal form.
103. mut: This is the standard Jibbali word for ‘100’.
4. Conclusion
Johnstone reported that mainland speakers of Jibbali refer to the dialect of the Khuriya Muriya islands as “baby” Jibbali because they pronounce the lateral fricatives ś [ɬ] and ź [ɮ] as ṯ [θ] and ð, respectively. Hulton's data do not totally support this assertion. He transcribed ś as thl (#8, 94), sh (#9), s (#11), or th (#74, 89, 91, 101, 102), and ź as lzt(h) (#28). So of the nine attempts to transcribe ś, four are clearly not th, and two suggest a lateral pronunciation. The one attempt to transcribe ź suggests a lateral pronunciation. Moreover, Hulton's mention of “the pronunciation of one or two letters which foreigners can rarely imitate”, cited above in section 2, is almost certainly a reference to the lateral fricatives, the MSA sounds on which foreigners routinely comment. His transcription of words #74, 89, 91, 101, and 102 could indeed represent a sound ṯ, in which case we might suggest that ṯ was a free variant of ś at this time. It is just as likely, however, that th was another attempt to write the sound ś. So, if Johnstone's statement is true for the dialect as spoken in the 1970s, it was not true – at least not completely – in 1836.
Looking at the word-list as a whole, the great majority of the words align with mainland Jibbali dialects. Of the 103 items, nearly all seem to align very well with mainland Jibbali. Two (#44, 48) are new words (with known cognates) that may simply have gone unrecorded for mainland Jibbali. The best candidates for real dialectal words are #65 and #91, and possibly #57. Numbers 2 and 81 are further possibilities, though I think these words were most likely just printed incorrectly. Numbers 36, 39, and 55 are words known from other dialects, but that seem to have a slightly different dialectal form (based on a different noun pattern). Finally, #102 may represent a dialectal loss of the suffix -i.
We can conclude that the dialect recorded by Hulton on the island of Al-Ḥallaniya is lexically very close to the Jibbali spoken on the mainland at the time. A couple of words reflect earlier forms (e.g. #31, and possibly #83), while others are words that have fallen out of use (#47, and possibly #65) or have undergone a later semantic shift (#80, #90). Of course, Hulton's list includes almost no verbal morphology, particles, or syntax, so we really cannot analyse the dialect in any significant way. There could also very well have been slight differences in pronunciation (vowels, in particular) that the transcription does not reveal. Fieldwork on the current state of this island dialect would certainly be very welcome.
Hulton's data provide the only available data on the Jibbali dialect of the island of Al-Ḥallaniya. So, imperfect as they might be, they are important for their unique contents. Moreover, they are a very valuable record of Jibbali as spoken in the early nineteenth century; in fact, with one insignificant exception (see note 12), they are the oldest record of Jibbali that we have.
