Modern South Arabian material from the diaries of Eduard Glaser

Abstract

This paper is a brief introduction to a hitherto largely unpublished corpus of nineteenth-century Modern South Arabian records from the diaries of the traveller and scholar Eduard Glaser (1855–1908). Together with the various other materials collected during his four journeys to South Arabia, Glaser also made eighty-nine diary pages of notes on the Modern South Arabian languages, consisting mainly of paradigms, word lists, sample sentences and a few short texts, most of which remain unpublished, with the exception of two short texts. After an introductory discussion of the materials involved, this paper presents one new Jibbali text from Glaser’s diaries, which contains a number of widely encountered features among Glaser’s records and can therefore be considered representative of the corpus as a whole.