Marwan Kilani
List of John Benjamins publications in which Marwan Kilani is involved.
Articles
2025 On the traces of “apples”, “plums”, and “pears”: Investigating a wanderword in ancient and modern Near Eastern languages Journal of Historical Linguistics 15:1, pp. 78–131 | Article
Wanderwords are a very common phenomenon among the languages of the world, but they are rarely discussed in detail. Their paths of spreading are often considered hardly reconstructible and their origins beyond reach, and being non-inherited, they are often ignored by the linguists working on the… read more
2021 Phonological change and interdialectal differences between Egyptian and Coptic: ḏ, ṯ → c = ϫ versus ḏ, ṯ → t = ⲧ Diachronica 38:4, pp. 601–627 | Article
The development of the Egyptian palatals ḏ and ṯ has long been a thorny issue in Egyptian linguistics. No convincing phonological rule for it has been identified so far. In the present paper I argue that the distribution of these phonemes is the result of inter-dialectal borrowings between a… read more
2015 Calculating false cognates: An extension of the Baxter & Manaster-Ramer solution and its application to the case of Pre-Greek Diachronica 32:3, pp. 331–364 | Article
This paper presents an extension of Baxter & Manaster-Ramer’s (2000) approach to the problem of false cognates in the determination of relationships between languages. Their approach uses a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate how many lexical similarities we can expect to be due to chance between… read more