Essays on Gurage Language and Culture [SIGNED BY WOLF LESLAU] Dedicated to Wolf Leslau on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday, November 14th, 1996

Weisbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996. First edition. Softcover. vg. Large octavo. 239pp. Original printed wraps. Minor rubbing at extremities. Frontispiece b/w portrait of Leslau signed by him.

Collection of essays by various scholars on Gurage language and culture. Dedicated to Wolf Leslau on the occasion of his 90th birthday. There are at least 3 distinct Gurage languages, possibly as many as 12, according to Leslau. It is spoken in the South Ethiopic group of Semitic. Very minor rubbing to parts of edges on wraps, otherwise a tight copy in fine condition.

Scarce signed copy from the last library of Professor Leslau. From the collection of Wolf Leslau. Wolf Leslau was undoubtedly the greatest Semiticist linguist of the past century, many would even say of all time. He was born in Czestochowa, Poland, on November 14, 1906, and died in Fullerton, California, on November 18, 2006. The centenarian was working almost up to his final day on a descriptive grammar of the Ethio-Semitic language Gogot. As with so much of his work, his grammars were based on material he had collected doing fieldwork, in this particular case many decades before. He published more than fifty volumes and more than two hundred articles in a variety of international journals over a long and distinguished career of seventy-plus years, and he is known as a most prodigious contributor to Ethiopian linguistics (including three enormous projects of particular importance, Leslau 1979, 1987, 1995) as well as an important contributor to Semitic comparative and historical lexicography, and folklore and oral literature. His publications (written chiefly in English, but also in French, Yiddish, and Hebrew) ranged across descriptive grammar, comparative grammar, lexicography, grammatical/phonological and lexical reconstruction, etymology, language classification, borrowing, anthropological and cultural linguistic topics (e.g. folk tales, argots, riddles, songs, proverbs, taboos), translation, bibliography, reviews, and even recordings of Ethiopian traditional music.