The Parts of the Body in the Modern South Arabic Languages

The parts of the body in Semitic were dealt with in two important studies: F. Dietrich, Ueber die Gliedernamen im Semitischen, in his Abhandlungen für semitische Sprachforschung 101–258 (Leipzig, 1844); and H. Holma, Die Namen der Körperteile im Assyrisch-Babylonischen (Leipzig, 1911). Dietrich has a large collection of the names of the parts of the body in the Semitic languages known at the time; but his etymological explanations can be disregarded in view of the tendency, characteristic for that epoch, to explain the meaning of the words by two radicals of the root. Holma's book is a valuable collection, with sound etymological explanation. It would be desirable for Akkadian scholars to complete this collection systematically from the Akkadian texts discovered since 1911.