Ebook: He bitaney lagge • Studies on Language and African Linguistics in honour of Marcello Lamberti

The Title’s opening words in Wolaytta, He bitaney lagge, ‘That man is a friend’, are taken from the corpus recorded in Ethiopia by Marcello Lamberti himself and published in the Appendix 4 of the The Wolaytta Language (Studia Linguarum Africae Orientalis • 6; see page XVII below). The original transcription has been adapted to the new Wolaytta orthographic conventions.
This volume is a tribute to Marcello Lamberti, a great scholar and a true friend to all of us.
Colleagues, friends, and former students have joined here in the occasion of Marcello’s sixtieth birthday. Many of the contributions in this volume are directly or indirectly inspired to Marcello’s scholarship and work.
Marcello Lamberti is known for his twofold love for both Indo-European and Cushitic studies. This love, tuned into a mission, prompted him to apply the historical-comparative method, as developed and refined in Indo-European linguistics, to Afro-Asiatic languages, and more specifically to Cushitic and the languages of the Horn of Africa. Everything flows from here: Marcello’s historical and etymological reconstructions, his classificatory proposals, his descriptive work.