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Copyright

Janet C.E. Watson; Andrea Boom; Amer al-Kathiri; Miranda Morris;

Published On

2024-10-17

Page Range

pp. 107–136

Language

  • English

Print Length

30 pages

Three Shehret Texts

Building With Flora

This chapter presents three audio texts in the Modern South Arabian language (MSAL) Śḥerɛ̄t (henceforth Shehret, a.k.a. Jibbāli) that deal with the use of indigenous flora for the building of houses for people and pens for livestock. The chapter begins with a brief background to the human–nature relationship in Dhofar, a brief description of the texts and the speakers and an outline of the phonemic inventory of Shehret. Section 2 describes the traditional use of plants as building materials. Section 3 presents the texts in Shehret, translated into English with annotations.
This chapter contributes to the documentation and revitalisation of language and culture in Dhofar. We hope that the botanical and cultural information presented here will be of interest to ethnobotany in general, and contribute to sustaining traditional knowledge in the region.

Contributors

Janet C.E. Watson

(author)
Leadership Chair for Language at University of Leeds
Honorary Professor at University of St Andrews
Visiting Professor at Sultan Qaboos University

Janet Watson studied at the University of Exeter and at SOAS, London. She has worked at the Universities of Edinburgh, Durham, and Salford and has held visiting posts at the Universities of Heidelberg (2003–2004) and Oslo (2004–2005). She took up the Leadership Chair for Language at Leeds at the University of Leeds in 2013, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2013. Since 2019, she has directed the Centre for Endangered Languages, Cultures and Ecosystems (CELCE). She is currently an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews and a Visiting Professor at Sultan Qaboos University. Her current research areas are on Modern South Arabian and the language–nature relationship.

Andrea Boom

(author)
PhD Candidate at University of Leeds

Andrea Boom is a Commonwealth Scholar and PhD candidate at the University of Leeds studying the link between endangered languages, cultures, and ecosystems in southern Arabia. She works mostly with the Mahra tribe of Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, exploring language and traditions to build resilience in the languages, cultures, and ecosystems. This research is particularly important today as people become disconnected from their immediate dependence on the natural world and knowledge of the symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment is disappearing.

Amir Azad Adli Al-Kathiri

(author)
Assistant Professor at University of Technology and Applied Sciences - Salalah

Amir Azad Adli Al-Kathiri holds an MA in the phonetics of Shehret and a PhD in Omani Arabic dialects from Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat. His research interests lie in the Shehret and Mehri languages of southern Arabia and in Omani Arabic dialects. He is currently Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Technology and Applied Sciences in Salalah, having worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Arabic Language, Dhofar University. He has published a book on the phonetics of Shehret, contributed to A Comparative Glossary of Modern South Arabian, and published academic articles on the verb in Shehret, the snake-bite treatment tradition of raʿbūt in Dhofar, and on the Kathiri dialect of Arabic.

Miranda Morris

(author)

Miranda J. Morris is an independent researcher who has published widely on the languages and cultures of the MSAL-speaking communities of southern Arabia. Her most recent publications include The Oral Art of Soqotra: A Collection of Island Voices (2021), three volumes in Soqoṭri, Arabic, and English, with Ṭānuf Sālim Di-Kišin, and Ethnographic Texts in the Baṭḥari Language of Oman (2024); with Fabio Gasparini, she is author of the first descriptive grammar of Bəṭaḥrēt, currently in preparation.