A Dictionary of Moca (Southwestern Ethiopia)
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. First edition. Paperback. Quarto. [6], 83, [1]pp. Rebound in boards with red buckram, gilt, spine strip. Original front wrapper mounted on front board.
Scarce dictionary of Moca, a dialect of the Kafa cluster in the southwest of Ethiopia. It is spoken in the province of Ilubador, to the west of Kafa, extending north across the river Baro. The language is called Sakka by the Moca themselves; the term Moca is used by the Galla and by the Europeans. good. Item #49915
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.
Price: $65.00