[LINK] Two Al Jazeera links on the island of Socotra, Yemen

[rfmcdonald]

First, Nicholas Alexrod has a photo essay (A precarious living on the Yemeni island of Socotra") showing how the semi-desert island of Socotra, far off the Yemeni coast, is beset by problems as its parent state decays into anarchy.

As interestingly, Mansur Mirovalev's "Russian roots and Yemen's Socotra language notes how the Socotran language--a Semitic language, part of the South Arabian group--has only recently gained status as a written language.

The Semitic language spoken by more than 50,000 inhabitants of Yemen's Socotra island is a linguistic time machine.

Socotri is the most archaic and isolated of several archaic and isolated tongues spoken in Yemen and Oman known as "modern South Arabian languages". Its vocabulary is immensely rich - for example, there are distinct verbs for "to go" according to the time of the day, or for "to give birth" depending on the animal involved.

Socotri's roots are close to the oldest written Semitic tongues that died out thousands of years ago - and it has grammatical features that no longer exist in Arabic, Hebrew or Aramaic. The study of Socotri helps understand the deep, prehistoric past - and the subsequent evolution - of all Semitic tongues.

"This is a very archaic linguistic and literary system that in many ways, I think, has preserved what we, the scholars, are used to perceive as the Biblical world or the ancient Arabic world," Leonid Kogan, professor of Semitic languages at Moscow's Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, told Al Jazeera.

Ten how is it that Socotri's first alphabet was invented five millennia after the cuneiform tablets in Akkadian - the first written Semitic tongue - and it happened some 5,000km north of Socotra, in Russia's Moscow?