ibn aššarīfah vs. ibn aljāriyah “Son of the Noble Wife vs. Son of the Concubine”: The Hebrew Component as a Polemic Device

This article is an attempt to understand the manners in which linguistic components function in an oral text. It analyses a story recorded from a Yemenite Jew, who describes a scene from his childhood in Yemen as he remembers it - or as he wants his listeners to conceive it. The language is Yemenite Arabic, yet Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic components are interwoven throughout the text, and build a linguistic plot which runs parallel to the main plot and modifies the theme.