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The corpus of Soqotri folklore
Until early 1980th the only publications of Soqotri folklore texts were those by the famous Austrian Arabist and Semitologist D. H. Müller, who penned three extensive monographs in this domain. During the period from 1905 to 1981 not a single Soqotrian folklore text was published – in fact, not a single text in Soqotri at all. This situation is strange, in view of the fact that most of this period the island of Soqotra was under British protectorate, and was even an object of several scientific expeditions. However, neither the unique language of the island nor its rich folklore tradition drew attention of British scholars.
After an independent state of South Yemen was formed, the interest of western scholars towards the language and culture of Soqotra increased. Thus, the eminent British scholar M. Morris carried out a number of highly interesting research projects in the domain o traditional medicine and ethnobotanics, which culminated in the fundamental, richly illustrated compendium « Ethnoflora of the Soqotra Archipelago» (co-authored with A. Miller). Furthermore, for many years M. Morris collected samples of Soqotri oral lore (finally published in 2021 in the three-volume monograph «The Oral Art of Soqoṭra. A Collection of Island Voices»). Important results in the domain of grammar and lexicon of Soqotri were achieved by the French scholars M.-C. Simeone-Senelle and A. Lonnet, who published a series of papers dealing with various grammatical phenomena of Soqotri language. M.-C. Simeone-Senelle is also the author of several systematic, although very short, descriptions of Soqotri included into survey articles on Modern South Arabian languages. However, the French scholars were not engaged in the systematic documentation of Soqotri folklore.
In view of such a situation, one cannot overestimate the significance of a short monograph by V. Naumkin and V. Porkhomovsky which was published in 1981. In this booklet, for the first time since Müller’s pioneering publications, the reader was offered some two dozens of previously unrecorded samples of Soqotri folklore. An important addition was a paper by the same authors published in 1995. Despite the fact that the first publications of Naumkin and Porkhomovsky were in Russian and ill-accessible to the foreign reader, for several decades they remained influential as practically the only report on Soqotri language and folklore in the modern times.
In 2010, V. Naumkin formed a group of specialists in Arabic and other languages and cultures of Middle East, who started realization of a highly ambitious task of creating and preparing for publiсation a series called «Corpus of the Soqotri Oral Literature».
In 2012–2014 the texts of the first volume of the «Corpus» appeared as journal articles, which allowed to approbate the methodology of publication of texts in a living Semitic language in accordance with the requirements of modern linguistics and philology. In 2014, the Netherland publishing house «Brill» printed the first volume of the Corpus of the Soqotri Oral literature, nearly 800 pages long. In 2018 the second volume appeared; the third volume of CSOL is currently under preparation.
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Other folklore texts
In the course of preparation of the first volume of CSOL with language consultants, the participants of the project became aware of the fact that not all of the texts collected by V. Naumkin, can be approved to be published in the framework of CSOL. In the first place, this includes erotic stories which were tolerated in the 1970ies but are strongly disapproved by modern Soqotrans who are brought up according to the norms of Arabian Islam. While acknowledging the linguistic and folklore importance of such samples, the language consultants are not unwilling to discuss and comment them, but do not wish to publish them under their names. As a compromise, these stories have been published as a separate paper by other participants of the project.
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«Revitalization» of the Soqotri texts of D.H. Müller
In 2012, L. Kogan was given access to the unique phonograph poetry recordings made by D. H. Müller in the beginning of the 20th century and preserved in the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Despite poor quality of the recordings, they could be listened to and deciphered by the modern Soqotrans, and this made possible a remarkable linguistic and cultural experiment, namely, the «revitalization» of Müller’s texts, highly valuable, but difficult to understand, by the descendants of Müller’s informants. The first result of this promising enterprise is the brochure Soqotri Texts in the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, published in 2015 in Oxford University Press.
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Theoretical approach to Soqotri folklore
As early as 1902, in the course of the documentation of several samlpes of Soqotri and Mehri folklore, D.H. Müller was able to produce a number of pioneering essays of comparative typological character, in which the author, making use of such text materials as were accessible to him (in various languages and in translations) analyzes parallels from Western and Eastern oral literature to the motives and plots of the South Arabian folklore texts. Regrettably, in the course of the next more than hundred years no new research in this area appeared, despite the fact that both the corpus of Müller and the texts published in more recent years reveal great potential for comparative folklore research.
Since 2016, V. Naumkin and L. Kogan carry out comprehensive comparative historical analysis of the Soqotran narrative folklore in collaboration with Yu. Beryozkin, an eminent scholar specializing in the folklore typology, geographical distribution and migration of folklore motives and plots. Up to now more than 30 samples of Soqotri folklore texts have been subjected to a thorough analysis. Most parallels are found in the Near East and Mediterranean areas. Yet, a number of specific motives of Soqotri folklore are shared by Indian oral traditions, on the one hand, and by the cultures of the Horn of Africa (or Northern Africa in general), on the other hand. This picutre is quite predictable and reflect natural, in the context of cultural history, tendencies.
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Research in the domain of verbal morphology
As early as in the 1970ies, V. Naumkin was able to collect a unique database on the verbal morphology of Soqotri, consisting of full paradigms of basic forms for some twenty verbal lexemes. Since 2010, M. Bulakh and L. Kogan are engaged in a long-term research aiming at a comprehensive description and analysis of the verbal morphology of Soqotri (regular and “weak” verbs in the basic and derived stems, as well as various verbal categories). The lexical database which serves as an empirical base for these studies includes more than two thousand verbal lexemes, many of which were previously unknown. Besides, L. Kogan and M. Bulakh have published a special paper dealing with two previously undescribed (and virtually unknown) verbal categories of Soqotri: «old imperative» and n-conditionalis.
The results of research on verbal morphology are published as a series of papers in such periodicals as Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics, Journal of Semitic Studies. In 2024, a special monography by M. Bulakh appeared («Т-Stems in Soqotri»), which deals with those stems of Soqotri which employ the detransitivizing marker -t-, and which provides their synchonic morphological and semantic analysis, as well as their comparison with the corresponding stems of the continental Modern South Arabian languages as well as of the Semitic languages in general.
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Soqotri lexical archive
In the course of the work on Soqotri folklore texts, Russian researches came to an obvious conclusion that the vocabulary contained in W. Leslau’s Lexique Soqotri presents only a small part of lexical riches of Soqotri, which had been preserved in the highly archaic language of the Soqotrans. A detailed description of hundreds of «new» Soqotri lexemes could be hardly possible in the framework of CSOL. This is why the participants of the Soqotri project decided to publish these lexicographic entries as a special series of papers under the title of «Soqotri lexical archive». At present, the German orientalistic periodical Zeitschrift den Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft has published four issues of the «Archive». One more issue is in preparation. Each paper contains 60 lexemes, commented in synchronic and diachronic perspective. Thus, no less than 300 earlier unknown verbal and nominal lexemes of Soqotri are introduced into the domain of comparative Semitic lexicography.
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Phonological description of Soqotri vocalism
The Soqotri vocalic system has presented a real tabula rasa for Semiticists for many decades. This gap has been filled by a special investigation by V.V. Naumkin and L.E. Kogan. A comprehensive analysis of verbal and nominal wordforms has revealed that the core of the Soqotri vocalic system is constituted by five phonemes (i, e, a, o, u). Other vocalic tembres mentioned in the literature either are phonologically irrelevant or have only restricted employment in the vocalic oppositions. The minimalist approach advocated by the authors proved to be extremely fruitful both for the synchronic analysis of the Soqotri language and for the comparative analysis of Soqotri and the continental Modern South Arabian languages.
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Soqotri Lexicon-Online
Until recently, the only comprehensive tool on Soqotri lexicography was the dictionary of Soqotri, prepared by the outstanding linguist W. Leslau, which was published in 1938 and which contains the vocabulary of Müller’s publications. Needless to say, in the course of the field research of the recent years, hundreds of new lexemes have been collected, and many of the lexicographic entries in Leslau’s dictionary have been provided with precise phonological transcription and with a more accurate semantic description. The glossaries of the first two volumes of the «Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature», as well as the publications of «Soqotri lexical archive», contributed considerably to the development of Soqotri lexicography. At the same time, it became evident that a comprehensive lexicographic database is a desideratum – a databse provided with a search engine and enabling researches to find the relevant lexeme together with all the information on its morphology, syntactic properties, semantics, etymology, as well as references to the relevant publications. This idea is now realized by the project of Soqotri Lexicon-Online, started in 2022. At present, the Lexicon contains ca. 4600 lexical entries, and new entries are constantly added. A print edition of the collected lexical entries of the Lexicon is also envisaged.
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