--- title: "Some Comments on a New Manual of the — Corriente 2026" description: "This is a review article rather than an NLP study. It contains no data, models, UD resources or metrics. Corriente evaluates The Semitic Languages. An…" authors: ["Federico Corriente"] year: 2026 venue: "Folia Orientalia 50" source: "https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/6373" licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/corriente-2026-some-comments-new-manual-semitic/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/corriente-2026-some-comments-new-manual-semitic/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/9/) / Some Comments on a New Manual of the Semitic Languages # Some Comments on a New Manual of the Semitic Languages **Authors:** [Federico Corriente](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/federico-corriente/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Folia Orientalia 50 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/6373) · [PDF](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/download/6373/5295) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3025054467) **Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) ## Summary This is a review article rather than an NLP study. It contains no data, models, UD resources or metrics. Corriente evaluates *The Semitic Languages. An International Handbook*, edited by S. Weninger together with co-editors Janet Watson, M.P. Streck and G. Khan, and published by De Gruyter Mouton in 2011. The extracted PDF header says Folia Orientalia vol. 50, 2013, not 2026. His central concern is that collective handbooks easily lose balance. Contributors overrate their own specialty language. Arabic, despite supplying most of the comparative evidence, is often reduced to whatever two or three Western grammars of Classical Arabic report. He then goes through specific claims, mostly about Arabic, broken plurals and the "Central Semitic" grouping, and offers counter-evidence from dialects, Ethiopic, Berber and wider Afrasian. He also criticises inconsistent transcription, undefined abbreviations and many misprints. He concludes that the handbook is useful and in places masterly, but that it needs correction in a future edition. Part of the middle of the text was missing from the extract. ## Key points - Corriente names Brockelmann's *Grundriß* (1908) as the last successful single-author comparative grammar. He calls the collegiate *Introduction* by Moscati, Spitaler, Ullendorff and von Soden (1964) a rare successful team effort. - He argues that broken (internal) plurals are an inherited feature, not something spread by areal diffusion: - They are present across Afrasian, including Berber's {-a-} infix. - Tigre retains them as well. - In his view, this undermines the "Central Semitic" hypothesis. - He corrects several Arabic-specific claims: - šarq-awsaṭī is not good Modern Standard Arabic. - Neo-Arabic uses prefix a- only before pharyngeal or laryngeal consonants. - Feminine nouns do take broken plurals. - aʽyun and ʽuyūn differ as plurals of paucity versus abundance, not by meaning. - He criticises the presentation: - Some Aramaic chapters give examples in Hebrew script with no romanization. - The abbreviations TAM and TMA are used inconsistently and never expanded. - C. Meinhof's noun-class insights are ignored. - He lists misprints, for example: - Berber tam means "8", not "3". - The pharynx "widening" in emphatics should read "narrowing". ## Interesting ideas - Corriente insists on gathering facts and their connections first and forming the hypothesis afterwards, never searching for support for a ready-made theory. — For Mova (learn): self-induced repair rules should be proposed only from clusters of observed parser disagreements, and then tested on held-out data, rather than written first and confirmed selectively. - He warns that representing a language by one prestige variety distorts the whole picture, comparing it to describing Greek through Attic alone. — For Mova (tree): treebank and silver-data coverage should be audited by register and variety (dialogue, older literary English, informal text), so the parser does not learn a single "Attic" English. - He shows that two forms which seem to split a word's meaning may instead mark a grammatical nuance, and that such claims should be checked against dictionaries. — For Mova (tokens): before the lemmatizer or sense layer treats variant forms as separate senses, the split should be checked against WordNet or other lexical evidence. - He requires every abbreviation to be expanded and every example to carry one shared transcription, so that non-specialists can follow the text. — For Mova (back): generated explanations of each pipeline step should use one fixed glossary of labels and expand any abbreviation on first use, keeping outputs readable for non-experts. - His misprint list includes antonym slips such as widening for narrowing, which reverse a claim while looking harmless. — For Mova (world): consistency checks on compiled knowledge could flag facts whose predicate is the antonym of a well-attested fact about the same entity, catching single-word inversions. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{corriente2026some, title = {{Some Comments on a New Manual of the Semitic Languages}}, author = {Corriente, Federico}, booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 50}, year = {2026}, url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/6373} } ``` - [← previous Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tellingen-2026-smarter-edits-post-editing-error/) - [next → Some Dialects Are More Equal Than Others: Non-Prestigious Arabic Dialectal Bias in LLMs](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/eida-2026-some-dialects-more-equal-than/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/9/)