This article aims to introduce the Russian reader, first of all, specialists in languages and cultures of the Middle East, but also scientists working in geographically and thematically related disciplines, to the main achievements of Russian researchers in the field of language learning and oral folk art of the inhabitants of Socotra Island (Gulf of Aden, Yemen) 1.

Key words: Socotra, grammar, vocabulary.

RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE LANGUAGE AND FOLKLORE OF SOCOTRA: 2010-2016

Vitaly V. NAUMKIN, Leonid E. KOGAN

The article surveys the studies on the language and oral literature of the island of Soqotra (Gulf of Aden, Yemen) carried out during the past five years by a team of Russian scholars headed by Vitaly Naumkin. More than 20 studies under scrutiny cover a vast panorama of grammatical, lexical and folkloristic topics and represent by far the largest body of knowledge on the Soqotri language and culture published so far. A complete bibliography of books and articles by Naumkin's team is published in an addendum.

Keywords: Soqotra, grammar, lexicon, oral literature.

The starting point of the article is the complete bibliographic list of the works of our research group published from 2012 to 2016 (published below as an appendix). In the analytical part of the article, these works are grouped by topic, and in each section there are links to content-related studies published earlier as members of our journal.

The article was written in the framework of the project 14-01-18048, supported by the Russian Foundation for Scientific Research.

NAUMKIN Vitaly Vyacheslavovich-Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Scientific Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Leonid Yefimovich KOGAN-Candidate of Sciences, Head of the Department of History and Philology of the IVKA RSUH, Leading Researcher of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences; lkog@rggu.ru.

Vitaly NAUMKIN - Professor, Dr. of Science, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, President of the Institute of Oriental Studies.

Leonid KOGAN - Head of the Ancient Near Eastern Department, Russian State University for the Humanities.

1 A recently published monograph by one of the authors of this article [Naumkin, 2012] contains a detailed description of Socotra and Socotrians in various aspects, so it hardly makes sense to return to such general topics in the framework of this essay, which is specifically devoted to linguistic and folklore issues.

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the research team (mainly by V. V. Naumkin in collaboration with V. Ya.Porkhomovsky) and foreign scientists (starting with the pioneering research of D. H. Muller and M. Bitner and ending with the latest publications of M. Morris). Some attention is also paid to unpublished papers, databases, and other preparatory materials collected and analyzed as part of our research project.

1. LANGUAGE RESEARCH

1.1. Research in the field of verbal morphology

Already in the 1970s, V. V. Naumkin managed to create a unique database on the verbal morphology of the Socotrian language, which consisted of complete paradigms of basic forms for several dozen key elements of the verb vocabulary. Since 2010, project participants (primarily M. S. Bulakh and D. V. Cherkashin) A large-scale study is being carried out in this area, which aims at a complete and comprehensive analysis of the verbal morphology of the Socotrian language (strong and weak verbs in the main and derived breeds, as well as various categories of morphologically unique verbal lexemes). In 2014, the project participants published, in two parts, a large-scale article on the morphology of the Socotrian strong verb in the main breed (see appendix: 9, 10). This study, based on a lexical database of more than 380 units, is the first in a series of publications on this topic carried out by the German journal "Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik". In 2016, the next work in this series was published, devoted to the morphology of weak verb types in the main breed (see appendix: 18). This publication, based on a list of about 170 weak verbs of the Socotran language, examines all the main types of weak verbs in a synchronous and historical way.

In 2015-2016, L. E. Kogan and M. S. Bulakh conducted research in the field of two previously undescribed (in the strict sense of the word, practically unknown) verbal categories of the Socotrian language: the "old imperative" and the n-conditional.

Like some other modern Semitic languages, Socotri has largely lost the "old imperative" form of the Arabic uqtul. to express a command, the usual imperfect form is most often used. Nevertheless, early researchers of modern South Arabian languages (first of all E. Wagner [Wagner, 1953, p. 11-12]) drew attention to the fact that in the Socotrian texts of the "Vienna Corpus" (about which see below), forms are sporadically marked in the imperative meaning, which cannot be interpreted otherwise than as reflexes of the "old", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", "new", a Semitic imperative. Similar conclusions can be found in unpublished notes on Socotran morphology made in 1970-1980 by one of the authors of this article. Nevertheless, in the last decades of the 20th century, the idea that the Socotrian language continues to use the "old imperative" sporadically has been discredited due to a misunderstanding of another interesting phenomenon of Socotrian verb morphology - the fall of the t-prefix in the imperfect of some derived breeds (for this remarkable phenomenon, see fig.: [Bittner, 1917-1918, S.:347-351; Johnstone, 1968; Johnstone, 1980; Testen, 1992; Kogan, 2015, p. 471]). Forms of this type, which superficially resemble the "old imperative", in reality have nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, this observation is generally fair in the works of a number of modern researchers (T. M. Johnston, A. Lonne, M.-K. Simeon-Senel) was mechanically transferred to the forms of the "old imperative".

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breeds that are not related to imperfect in any way 2. In the work of L. E. Kogan and M. S. Bulakh (see appendix: 24), more than 50 examples of the use of the "old imperative" in various text corpora are collected and analyzed; this work also attempts to establish the functional and genre-stylistic distribution inherent in this relatively rare, but by no means extinct segment of Socotrian verb morphology.

According to the dominant point of view in modern semitology, the category of n-conditionalis is characteristic of the modern South Arabian languages of the Dofar region (Jibbali, eastern Mehri) and is absent in other areas of distribution of languages of this group (western Mehri, Socotri)3. Nevertheless, already in 1953 E. Wagner identified a sufficient number of examples of n-conditionals in the poetic texts of the "Vienna Corpus", pointing out their main syntactic function - marking the apodosis of unreal condition sentences [Wagner, 1953, p.152]. The examples of n-conditionals identified by L. E. Kogan in the speech of modern Socotri speakers irrefutably indicate that this category is not a survival one and is not limited to archaic poetic monuments. Moreover, the position of apodosis of the unreal condition clause is important, but by no means the only one where n-forms are used. The article already mentioned above (appendix: 24) contains a complete commented list of the relevant material with simultaneous and historical analysis.

1.2. Diminutive and verb name

During the 2014 field season, the project participants collected unique material on two extremely interesting areas of Socotrian morphology that were previously almost undescribed: the formation of diminutives (diminutives) and action names (infinitives or masdars).

The fact that Socotri has a very broad and unique inventory of diminutive models was fully understood by early researchers of the Socotri language (Bittner, 1918) and later by T. M. Johnstone (Johnstone, 1973). Nevertheless, the information about the Socotrian diminutive contained in early publications is extremely lapidary, while a correct linguistic analysis of the known examples was hindered by the lack of a convincing model for describing the vocal system of the Socotrian language. In the course of field research, Russian scientists have successfully filled in both of these gaps. The database containing information about the Socotrian diminutive currently contains at least 200 lexical units, and all the material has been carefully analyzed using the latest ideas about Socotrian vocalism (see section 1.4 below). It is expected that after further updating of the database, a complete and systematic description of the Socotrian diminutive will be made on its basis, within which some attention will also be paid to the diachronic perspective of the corresponding morphological formations (structural parallels in the continental SYUJA, as well as in the Arabic language and the Ethiopian-Semitic language Tigre).4
2 "In Soqotri there is no imperative, the imperfect performing this function" [Johnstone, 1968, p. 516]; "In Soqotri, command is expressed by the indicative imperfect" [Simeone-Senelle, 1997, p. 404]; "Le Soqotri n'a pas d'imperatif, I'ordre se donnant a l'inaccompli indicatif. Or certains auteursont ete trompes par un indicatif sans prefixe dans lequel ils ont cru voir une forme d'imperatif" [Lonnet, 1993, p. 74].

3 "It is possible... that comparable forms do not occur south of Dhofar" [Johnstone, 1975, p. 110]; "The conditional does not occur in the Mehri of Mahra or in Soqotri" [Simeone-Senelle, 1997, p. 404].

4 A preliminary description of the Socotri diminutive based on the forms contained in the first volume of the Corpus of Socotri Folklore (see [appendix: 7, pp. 33-35]). For diachronic observations on diminutive forms in modern South Arabian languages and other idioms of the South Semitic area, see [Kogan, 2015, p. 477-478; Bulakh and Kogan, 2011].

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In the available descriptions of the Socotrian language, the regularly formed category of the verb name (masdara) is not mentioned in any way, although a fairly significant set of such forms is already reflected in the Vienna Corpus5. As modern field studies show, almost every verb in Socotri has an associated noun, and the morphological correlation here is very similar to that observed in classical Arabic: a large variety of patterns and a lack of predictability in the main breed of vs. uniform and morphologically regular formation in each of the derived rocks. From a functional point of view, the Socotra Masdar is also very similar to its Arab counterpart.

1.3. Socotri Lexical Archive

In the course of translating and commenting on Socotran folklore texts, the project participants came to an obvious conclusion: the vocabulary contained in the Vienna Corpus 6 and reflected in V. Leslau's Lexique Soqotri [Leslau, 1938] is far from exhaustive of the lexical richness of the Socotran language, preserved intact in the speech of our informants. A detailed description of many hundreds of" new " words of the Socotrian language would hardly be possible in the limited framework of philological commentaries on individual texts, so it was decided to publish these lexicographic studies as part of a special series of articles called the Socotrian Lexical Archive.

To date, the German Oriental journal Zeitschrift den Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft has published three issues of the Archive (see appendix: 5, 14, 19), and two more issues are being prepared for publication. Each article contains 60 lexical units, commented in detail from a synchronous and etymological point of view. Thus, at least 300 previously unknown verbal and nominal lexemes of the Socotran language will be introduced into the use of comparative Semitic lexicography in the very near future. The significance of these data for the development of Semitic etymology cannot be overestimated.

1.4. Phonological description of Socotran vocalism

While the Socotran consonant system is generally quite transparent from both a synchronous and historical point of view, Socotran vocalism has been a genuine tabula rasa for many decades for linguists-semitologists (the same, unfortunately, can be said about the vocal systems of other modern South Arabian languages)7. This yawning gap, which made it almost impossible to correctly understand the entire Socotran language system as a whole, was filled in by a special study of the authors of this article (see appendix: 11). In this work, using extensive verbal and nominal material, it is shown that the core of the vocal system of the Socotrian language consists of five phonologically based vowel units (i, e, a, o, u)8, while all the other vowels of the Socotrian language have a phonological basis.

5 An important role here was played by the Socotra translation of the famous passage from Ecclesiastes ("The time to be born and the time to die...") made by D. H. Muller and his informant, which is literally saturated with verb names of different breeds and morphological types.

6 For more information about this meeting, see section 2.1 below.

7 For example, a strictly phonological, methodologically sound study of the vocalism of some dialects of Mehri was undertaken only recently, in the works of the British researcher J. R. R. Tolkien. Watson (2012). The vocalism of the Jibbali language remains virtually undescribed; the recent grammar of A. Rubin [Rubin, 2014] mechanically accepted the intuitive phonetic transcription of T. M. Johnstone [Johnstone, 1981] without any attempt to translate it into the language of modern phonological science.

8 At the same time, the vowel u is relatively rare: most of the examples fall on several specific positions of verbal and nominal morphology (imperfect of the passive voice, diminutive). Thus, in the full sense of the word, not even five, but four vowel phonemes are widely used.

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vocal timbres described in the literature and used in previously published publications and grammatical descriptions (in particular, δ, ə, ö) either have no phonological meaning at all, or have it to a limited extent. The authors ' minimalist approach to describing Socotrian vocalism is important not only for synchronous Socotrian linguistics, but also from the point of view of describing closely related modern South Arabian languages (not to mention the practical needs associated with recording and philological interpretation of Socotrian folklore monuments).

2. FOLKLORE RESEARCH

2.1. "Socotran Folklore Corps"

Until the early 1980s, the very genre of publishing Socotran folklore texts remained the fruit of the titanic work of a single researcher - the famous Austrian Arabist and semitologist D. H. Muller, who wrote three extensive works in this field [Muller, 1902; Muller, 1905; Muller, 1907].

Of greatest interest to the modern reader is the lengthy text collection of 1905, written down from the lips of an informant, an illiterate Socotran Ali Amer al-Nubhani, whom Muller managed to send to Vienna for a few months in 1902. This publication, which still has no analogues either in terms of the volume of recorded texts, or in their genre and thematic diversity, was and remains a desktop guide for any researcher interested in the Socotran language and folklore.

The 1902 book, for which Muller collected materials directly on the island during the work of the famous Austrian South Arabian expedition, is somewhat less important, both because of its limited volume and because Muller's knowledge of the Socotran language at that time was still very superficial. In addition, quite a few of the texts contained in it are translations from Arabic or Mehri. It is difficult to overestimate, however, the significance of the deeply archaic poetic fragments contained in it, collected by Muller from the mouths of the Bedouin inhabitants of the interior of Socotra. Finally, this book contains the only published text in the Socotri dialect of the island of Abd el-Khoury.

Muller's 1907 book is also relatively small in volume and is mainly devoted not to Socotri as such, but to the closely related continental language of Jibbali. The Socotri texts contained in it are translations from Jibbali, Mehri or Arabic and have no independent significance from the point of view of folklore studies. However, this does not negate their importance from a linguistic point of view, since the level of writing and interpretation of texts in this edition is not inferior to the 1905 book noted above.

In the period from 1905 to 1981, not only were no works of Socotran folklore published, but also no textual materials in the Socotran language were published at all. This state of affairs seems strange and unexpected - Socotra was under a British protectorate for most of this period and was even the object of several scientific expeditions, but neither the language nor folklore material attracted the attention of British researchers.9
9 Just before the British evacuation, the island was visited by a remarkable Arabic dialectologist, a prominent expert on continental SYU, T. M. Johnston. Johnston's few field notes (mostly scattered throughout his publications on continental languages) are of great value to Socotran linguistics, but they contain virtually no coherent sentences (let alone texts) in Socotran.

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After the formation of an independent South Yemeni state, the attention of Western researchers to the Socotra language and culture increased somewhat. Thus, the remarkable British researcher M. Morris published a number of interesting studies in the field of traditional Socotrian medicine and ethnobotany [Morris, 2002; Morris, 2003], culminating in the fundamental, richly illustrated compendium " Ethnoflora of the Socotrian Archipelago "(co-authored with E. Miller) [Miller, Morris, 2004] .10
French researchers M.-K. Simeon-Senel and A. Lonnet managed to achieve important results in the field of studying the grammar and vocabulary of the Socotrian language, but these scientists were not able to publish almost any coherent text in Socotrian (neither folklore nor any other content).11.

In this context, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of a small monograph published in 1981 by V. V. Naumkin and V. Ya. Porkhomovsky, in which, for the first time since Muller's publications, about two dozen of the most valuable samples of Socotrian folklore were offered to the reader's attention. An important addition to the 1981 work was an article by the same authors published in 1995. Although the original publications of V. V. Naumkin and V. Ya. Porkhomovsky were published in Russian and were rather difficult for foreign readers to access, 12 for several decades they have enjoyed considerable influence and authority as practically the only evidence available. on the existence of the Socotran language and folklore in the modern era.

In 2010, V. V. Naumkin managed to form a team of specialists in Arabic, other languages and cultures of the Middle East, who enthusiastically began to implement the ambitious task of creating and publishing a serial publication "Corpus of the Soqotri Oral Literature". Members of the group were mostly young employees of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquity of the Russian State Pedagogical University (L. E. Kogan, M. S. Bulakh, D. V. Cherkashin, E. Yu.Vizirova); subsequently, L. E. Kogan and M. S. Bulakh were also accepted as part-time employees in the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquity of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 2012-2014, the texts of the first volume of the Corpus were published in the form of preliminary publications, within the framework of which the methodology of publishing the text in a living Semitic language was developed, which would fully meet the most important requirements of modern philological and linguistic science. Thus, in 2012, detailed annotated editions of three notable examples of Socotran narrative folklore were published: "Rahabhan and the European Woman", "The Moon helps punish murderers" (see appendix: 1) and "The Ogress di-Izhamitin" (see appendix: 2) 13. In addition, in 2012, a synthesis article was published containing an annotated catalog of texts included in the first volume of the Corpus of the Soqotri Oral Literature (CSOL) (the Russian version of the catalog was published in 2013, see appendix: 6). As an appendix to this article, two small but notable articles were published:

10 It is known that for several decades M. Morris has been collecting and analyzing Socotran folklore, but not a single sample from her huge collection has been published so far (the only exception is the "quasi - folklore" dialogue of one of the contemporary poets [Morris, 2005]).

11 The only exception is a brief historical legend published by M.-K. Simeone-Senelle (2002). The publication contains an introduction, a transcription of the text, a translation into French, and a brief linguistic commentary.

12 Later, many of these works (as well as some other samples) were published by V. V. Naumkin and V. Ya. Porkhomovsky also in English, mainly in the famous British journal "Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies".

13 The first and third texts were previously published in Russian (Naumkin and Porkhomovsky, 1995; Naumkin and Porkhomovsky, 1981). The second text, which has remarkable parallels in the folklore traditions of different peoples of the world (the motif of "Ivik's Cranes") previously unknown.

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Two Socotran texts: a poetic exhortation of a grandfather to his grandchildren about a goat lost in a field, as well as a sample of Socotra's "modern folklore" (clearly inspired by real events, a comic story about the adventures of a hapless European tourist on Socotra). Finally, in 2014, an article was published containing a comparative analysis of two poetic works known in the recording of D. H. Muller and in several versions recorded by V. V. Naumkin (see appendix: 8).

At the end of 2014, the first volume of the Corpus of the Soqotri Oral Literature, almost 800 pages long, was published by Bril Publishing House in the Netherlands. The considerable volume of this book and a number of methodological and factual innovations adopted in it make it desirable to briefly present some of its elements in the context of this article:

* Linguistic and philological introduction, consisting of a short annotated catalog of texts contained in the book, basic facts from the field of phonology and morphology of the Socotrian language, principles of rendering Socotrian words in Latin and Arabic characters.

* Main part - 30 Socotran texts with detailed philological and linguistic commentary. The texts contained in the first volume belong to different genres, but classical folklore types, primarily narrative fairy-tale prose, noticeably predominate. Each text is published in four views : the Socotra text in semitological transcription; the English translation; the Socotra text written in the newly developed Socotra script based on Arabic 14; and the translation into literary Arabic.

* A detailed Socotra-English-Arabic thesaurus glossary that covers all the texts contained in the volume with a high degree of completeness and detail.

* A scientific illustrative device that allows readers who are not experienced in Socotran realities to get an idea of the "content plan" for many key Socotran terms that denote landscape elements and traditional economic activities.

The second and third volumes of CSOL are currently being prepared for publication. Both of them are built on the same fundamental principles as the first volume of this serial edition. The main difference lies in the type of texts published : along with narrative and poetic folklore, these volumes also contain texts of an ethnographic nature devoted to such traditional areas of economic activity as preserving surplus meat and dairy products, palm farming and date pulp production, and construction.

The text body of the second volume is currently fully assembled, elaborated and commented, most of the glossary is compiled, and the illustrative apparatus is made. Only the difficult socio-political situation in Yemen, which does not allow the research team to get in direct contact with informants, prevents the publication of this book.

Work on the third CSOL volume is in its infancy. To date, 17 texts of various contents have been collected and translated, with brief philological and linguistic commentaries compiled on some of them.

14 The objectives and scope of this article do not allow us to elaborate on the principles and content of the new Socotra script developed by us in collaboration with native informants. Suffice it to say that this innovation, potentially of great importance for the cultural development of the island, was enthusiastically received by both Socotrians themselves and the international scientific community. In 2014, it was recognized as one of the 10 most important scientific achievements of the year by BBC-Russian.

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In parallel with the preparation for the publication of the second volume of CSOL, the project participants published in an article format the most interesting monuments that are expected to be published as part of this book.

Thus, in the article by V. V. Naumkin, L. E. Kogan and D. V. Cherkashin (appendix: 13), a detailed annotated catalog of texts of the second volume was published, as well as several notable examples of poetic creativity of Socotrians.

In 2015, an annotated edition of three Socotran texts of an etiological nature was published (an extremely rare genre of narrative for Socotra, which is practically not reflected either in the texts of Muller or in the collections of our expedition). The texts contained in this publication (appendix: 15) deal with Socotri ideas about the origin of (1) rainwater ("Water of God") on the island of Socotra; (2) different number of teats in a cow (four) and sheep (two); (3) muteness of animals, plants and objects of inanimate nature. As the authors of the article were able to establish, all three texts have precedents in the Muller corpus. In addition, for some of the motifs contained in them, it is possible to establish remarkable parallels in the written literature of the Ancient East - Mesopotamian incantations, the Ugaritic epic, and monuments of the Old Testament.

The article by V. V. Naumkin and L. E. Kogan in 2016 (appendix: 21), in the publication dedicated to the anniversary of S. M. Prozorov, examines the ancient Socotri story about the "ghost cow" - a pet with special qualities that came to people from"air spirits". This story, already well-known to Muller (in place of the cow, a goat appears here), ends with the fact that people are unable to cope with a magical animal that brings various troubles and adversities, both to their flocks and to themselves. Of great interest is the fact that the "special status" goats that still on Socotra are descended from these legendary animals.

At the end of 2016, the Czech magazine "Archiv mahzezo" announced the publication of one of the most remarkable examples of oral folk art of Socotrians collected by our group: a poetic dialogue between God and man about the benefits( or, conversely, uselessness) of different types of sacrifices: while the sacrifices made during prayer about the rain, considered useful and beneficial, slaughtering animals for a memorial feast is subjected to scathing criticism.

2.2. Other folklore texts

While working with informants on the first volume of the Socotri Folklore Corpus, it became obvious to the project participants that not all the texts collected by V. V. Naumkin during the early field seasons can be approved for publication as part of a joint Russian-Yemeni publication. First of all, we are talking about erotic texts, which were quite tolerant in the NDRI, but meet with sharp disapproval among the majority of modern Socotrians, who were brought up in the strict moral and behavioral norms of Arabian Islam. Without denying the obvious linguistic and folklore value of such samples, informants agree to discuss and comment on them, but resolutely refuse to publish them under their own names. Within the framework of the compromise approach adopted by the project participants, these works were subjected to a comprehensive linguistic analysis (mainly through the efforts of M. S. Bulakh and L. E. Kogan) and published as a separate article without the formal participation of Socotri informants (appendix: 4).

2.3. "Revitalization" of D. H. Muller's Socotri texts

In 2012, L. E. Kogan got access to unique phonographic recordings of Socotrian poetry made at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by D. H. Muller and stored in the "Sound Archive" of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Despite the low quality

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However, they are generally quite well understood by modern Socotrians, which made it possible to carry out a remarkable linguistic and cultural experiment - the "revitalization" of the most valuable, but hardly understandable texts of Muller, with the active participation of distant descendants of those who once had these texts written down. The first result of this promising line of work was a hundred-page booklet published in Oxford University Press (see appendix: 15). There is every reason to believe that further work on the Socotrian texts of the Vienna Corpus will bring extremely important results both from a linguistic and folklore point of view.

2.4. Theoretical understanding of Socotran folklore

Already in 1902, in the course of a very preliminary acquaintance with a small number of samples of Socotrian and Mehrian folklore, D. H. Muller managed to create a number of deeply original, pioneering comparative-typological essays, in which the author analyzes parallels to the motives and plots of South Arabian folklore with the help of text materials available to him (in various languages and in translations). texts in the oral folk traditions of the East and West [Muller, 1902, p. 1 88-225; see also; Muller, 1907, p. 159-165].

It cannot be said that Muller's work as a folklorist completely missed the attention of specialists in this field of philology: for example, the results of his analysis are partly incorporated in the remarkable work of the Egyptian-American researcher A. El-Shami, which attempts a complete typological analysis of all published folklore of Arabic-speaking countries [El-Shamy, 2004].

Nevertheless, no new independent research in this area has emerged over the past 115 years, although even the Muller corpus (not to mention the newly published texts) provides great opportunities for comparative folklore research. A lengthy study published in 2016 in the Spanish journal Aula Orientalis is intended to fill this gap, at least in part. This work was created by the project participants in collaboration with Yu. E. Berezkin, a well-known St. Petersburg expert on the typology of folklore, geographical distribution and migration of folklore motifs and plots (see appendix: 20).

This paper, after a brief methodological introduction, provides a detailed comparative analysis of 30 samples of Socotrian folklore texts (both from the Vienna Corpus and from our own published and unpublished recordings).15. The analysis of each work is based on a ternary scheme. The first section contains the conventional name of the motif, its summary and number according to generally recognized folklore indexes. The second section contains a summary of the Socotra text, with special attention paid to the elements that are significant from the point of view of the typological characteristics of the motif. The third section provides a summary of comparative data, sometimes including a rather detailed retelling of parallel texts or fragments from other folklore traditions. For each motif, a special geographical map was created-a diagram on which the existence of similar motifs and plots among different peoples of the Old World was marked with dots.

The main conclusion of the article is that Socotran folklore has the greatest number of parallels with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean traditions, but a number of specific motifs unite it, on the one hand, with India, and, on the other, with the peoples of the Horn of Africa (and, more broadly, North Africa as a whole). Such a picture is quite expected and reflects natural trends from a cultural and historical point of view.

15 In cases where one or another text is known in both Muller and Naumkin, the article usually provides a summary of both versions and highlights the main differences between them.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AuOr - Aula Orientalis

BSOAS - Bulletin of the School for Oriental and African Studies

JNES - Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JSS - Journal of Semitic Studies

PSAS - Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies

QSA - Quademi di StudiArabi

WZKM - Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes

ZAL - Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik

ZDMG - Zeitschrift den Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft

list of literature

Naumkin V. V. Islands of the Socotra Archipelago (expeditions 1974-2010). Moscow, 2012.

Naumkin V. V., Porkhomovsky V. Ya. Ocherki po etnolinguistike Sokotry [Essays on the ethnolinguistics of Socotra], Moscow, 1981.

Naumkin V. V., Porkhomovsky V. Ya. Sokotriyskiye fol'klornye teksty [Socotri folklore texts]. Archaeological, ethnographic and Historical and Cultural Studies, Moscow, 1995, pp. 442-468.

Bittner M. Einige Besonderheiten aus der Sprache der Insel Soqotra // WZKM, 1917-1918, 30. S. 347-358.

Bittner M. Charakteristik der Sprache der Insel Soqotra // Anzeiger der philosophisch-historischen Klasse der kais. Akademie der Wissenschaften in Men. 1918, 55. S. 48-83.

Bulakh M., Kogan L. Arabic Influences on Tigre: a Preliminary Evaluation // BSOAS. 2011, 74. Ss. 1-39.

El-Shamy H. Types of the Folktale in the Arab World. A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index. Bloomington, 2004.

Johnstone T. M. The Non-Occurrence of a t-Prefix in Certain Soqotri Verbal Forms // BSOAS. 1968, 31. Pp. 515-525.

Johnstone T. M. Diminutive Patterns in the Modern South Arabian Languages // JSS. 1973, 18. Pp. 98-107.

Johnstone T. M. The Modern South Arabican Languages // Afroasiatic Linguitics. 1975, 1/5. Pp. 93-121.

Johnstone T. M. The Non-Occurrence of a /-Prefix in Certain Jibbali Verbal Forms // BSOAS. 1980, 43. Pp. 466-470.

Johnstone T. M. Jibbali Lexicon. Oxford, 1981.

Kogan L. Genealogical Classification of Semitic. The Lexical Isoglosses. Berlin, 2015.

Leslau W. Lexique Soqotri (Sudarabique moderne) avec comparaisons et explications etymologiques. Paris, 1938.

Lonnet A. Quelques resultats en linguistique sudarabique moderne // QSA. 1993, 11. Pp. 37-82.

Miller A., Morris M. Ethnoflora of the Soqotra Archipelago. Edinburgh, 2004.

Morris M. Plant Names in Dhofar and the Soqotra Archipelago // PSAS. 2002, 32. Pp. 47-61.

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application

BIBLIOGRAPHIC LIST OF WORKS BY RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS ON SOCOTRAN LANGUAGE AND FOLKLORE (2012-2016)

2012

1. D. Cherkashin, L. Kogan, V. Naumkin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi. Towards an Annotated Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature: the 2010 Fieldwork Season // PSAS. 2012, 42. Pp. 261-276.

2. D. Cherkashin, L. Kogan, V. Naumkin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi. A Brave Boy, His Bull, an Ogre and an Angel: a Remarkable Specimen of Soqotri Oral Literature WZKM. 2012, 102. Pp. 161-191.

3. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan. Towards a Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature: 1902-2012 // New Research in Archaeology and Epigraphy of South Arabia and Its Neighbors. Moscow, 2012. Cc. 295-311.

2013

4. V. Naumkin, M. Bulakh, L. Kogan. Two Erotic Stories from Soqotra Revisited // Babel und Bibel. 2013, 7. Pp. 527-563.

5. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A. I. al-Da'rhi. The Soqotri Lexical Archive: the 2010 Fieldwork Season // ZDMG. 2013, 163. Pp. 61-95.

6. V. V. Naumkin, L. E. Kogan. Korpus sokotriskogo fol'klora: annotirovannyi katalog tekstov pervogo toma [Corpus of Socotrian Folklore: Annotated catalog of texts of the first volume]. Moscow, 2013. pp. 179-197.

2014

7. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi, M. Bulakh, E. Vizirova. Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature. Volume One. Leiden, 2014.

8. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi. Two Archaic Poetic Compositions in Soqotri: 1905-1981-2012 // JSS. 2014, 59. Pp. 131-160.

9. V. Naumkin, M. Bulakh, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi. Studies in the Verbal Morphology of Soqotri. 1/1. Strong Triconsonantal Roots in the Basic Stem (the Analysis) // ZAL. 2014, 59. Pp. 25-56.

10. V. Naumkin, M. Bulakh, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi. Studies in the Verbal Morphology of Soqotri. 1/2. Strong Triconsonantal Roots in the Basic Stem (the Lexical Data) // ZAL. 2014, 60. Pp. 34-73.

11. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan. The Vowels of Soqotri As a Phonemic System // Languages of Southern Arabia. London, 2014. Pp. 57-79.

12. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan. More on Pre-Islamic Reminiscences in the Oral Literature of Soqotra // Semitia et Classica. 2014, 7. Pp. 273-278.

13. V. V. Naumkin, L. E. Kogan, and D. V. Cherkashin. Second volume of the Socotran Folklore Corpus: an annotated catalog of texts and three histories of etiological content // Research on Arabia and Islam. Collection of articles in honor of the 70th anniversary of M. B. Piotrovsky. Moscow, 2014, pp. 418-442.

2015

14. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi. Soqotri Lexical Archive: the 2011 Fieldwork Season // ZDMG. 2015, 165. Pp. 41-61.

15. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi. Soqotri Texts in the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. An Annotated Edition. Oxford, 2015.

16. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin. Three Etiological Stories from Soqotra in Their Near Eastern Setting // JNES. 2015, 74. Pp. 289-299.

17. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan. Dual Principles and Binary Oppositions in Socotri Social and Oral Traditions // PSAS. 2015, 45. Pp. 199-204.

2016

18. V. Naumkin, M. Bulakh, D. Cherkashin, L. Kogan, A. Issa, I. Gumaan, M. Mohammed. Studies in the Verbal Morphology of Soqotri. II. Weak and Geminated Roots in the Basic Stem // ZAL. 2016, 63. Pp. 19-60.

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19. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin, I.G. al-Da'rhi, A.I. al-Da'rhi. The Soqotri Lexical Archive: the 2010 Fieldwork Season // ZDMG. 2016, 166. Pp. 57-80.

20. Yu. Berezkin, D. Cherkashin, L. Kogan, V. Naumkin. Motifs of Soqotri Narratives: Towards a Comparative-Typological Analysis // AuOr. 2016, 34. Pp. 201-243.

21. V. V. Naumkin, L. E. Kogan. The ghost cow a hundred years later (about one remarkable story of Socotri folklore) / / Ars Islamica. In honor of Stanislav Mikhailovich Prozorov. Moscow, 2016. pp. 389-402.

In print

23. V. Naumkin, L. Kogan, D. Cherkashin. A Dialogue Between Man and God concerning Sacrifice: An Archaic Poetic Composition from the Island of Soqotra (with an Excursus on the Soqotri Reflex of Proto-Semitic *'il- 'god') // Archiv Orientalni. 2016, 84.

24. Leonid Kogan, Maria Bulakh. On Some Poorly Known or Unrecognized Verbal Categories in Soqotri: 1905-2015 // Brill Journal of Afroasiatic Linguistics. 2017.

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