I studied Semitic Studies at Heidelberg University. Semitic Studies is the study of the Semitic languages, similar to how Romance Studies is the study of the Romance languages, or Slavic Studies is the study of the Slavic languages, a purely linguistic discipline. The best-known Semitic languages are Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Akkadian, Ethiopic, and South Arabian. Some of these languages have been documented in writing for several thousand years, and most are still spoken today in numerous dialectal variations. Semitic Studies at Heidelberg University had a modern philological focus, meaning it concentrated on the living, still-spoken varieties of Aramaic, Arabic, and South Arabian.
During my studies, I shifted my focus to the modern Arabic dialects and wrote my master's thesis on the Arabic dialect of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. To this end, I visited Hebron several times, made audio recordings of speakers from the city, created phonetic transcriptions and translations of these recordings, and finally wrote a short outline of the grammar of this dialect based on this material.
I once attended a seminar on Uzbek Arabic held by Otto Jastrow. There, I learned that a census in the Soviet Union in the 1930s revealed the astonishing fact that there are some villages in Uzbekistan where Arabic has been spoken since ancient times. Their inhabitants arrived in this Central Asian country with the first waves of Arab conquest and were subsequently geographically isolated from their Arab neighbors, losing contact with the rest of the Arab world. As a result, their dialect retained very archaic features while simultaneously undergoing a completely different development than other Arabic dialects. Fascinated by this fringe dialect, I delved into the history of the Arab conquests and concluded that remnants of these old Arab colonists must also still exist in eastern Iran. So, after completing my undergraduate studies, I traveled to the eastern Iranian province of Khorasan in search of Arabs. And I found them! Unfortunately, time was very limited; I spent only three days in a purely Arabic-speaking village, far removed in the border region with Afghanistan, at that time still without electricity or running water. My audio recordings from this trip and their grammatical analysis later are the first scholarly records of Khorasan Arabic.
Afterward, I turned my attention back to Palestinian Arabic. My wife and I lived for a year in a village near Ramallah and traveled from there to over a hundred villages to make audio recordings of elderly speakers. The result is a thick volume of Palestinian fairy tales and stories in phonetic transcription and German translation. Finally, based on this material, I wrote my dissertation, a comprehensive grammar and dialect geography of the Arabic dialect spoken in the villages around Ramallah.
Subsequently, I published a textbook on the dialect spoken by urban Palestinians for use at universities.
For almost ten years, I worked on a dictionary of Palestinian Arabic. During this time, I spent another year living in Ramallah with a Christian family. While I was there, collecting vocabulary with the help of assistants, I later analyzed dialectological literature and incorporated the missing words into my dictionary, citing them precisely. The dictionary comprises more than 9,000 roots with approximately 31,000 entries and references. It also includes over 11,000 examples and compounds, as well as more than 56,000 citations. Like all my previous works, it was published as a book by Harrassowitz in December 2022. It is one of the most comprehensive Arabic dialect dictionaries into a European language.
As a byproduct of my dictionary work, I then self-published five volumes on "Loanwords in Palestinian Arabic," "Animal and Plant Names in Palestinian Arabic," "Palestinian Proverbs," "Verb Types in Palestinian Arabic," and "Parerga to the Palestinian Lexicon."
Finally, an edited selection of Palestinian Fairy Tales in German, drawn from texts originating in the villages around Ramallah, was published.
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