Children of San’a

Salford Werner Arnold invited me to be his Stellvertreterin during his absence from Heidel-berg in the winter semester 2003 – 2004. I stayed, together with my family, for the whole year and had the wonderful experience of working with Alexander. Three years and three months after his death I still miss him and sometimes, when my mind is somewhere else, expect to be able to consult him on some linguistic matter or other. He had fun in his life and in his research, and I think he would have liked these enthusiastic children and their stories of games and their everyday life. Children are wonderful informants. They are full of energy and always keen to correct and repeat, where adults would have long since turned away in despair. Recording children is also very much a team activity – even when the researcher begins recording a single child, very soon others join in, or older children insist on correcting the information given by the younger child. In recent years I have recorded children in the Old City of San'a describing their everyday activities – particularly, but not exclusively, as this collection shows – games. Many of the old games described by Hussain al-Amri in Serjeant & Lewocks's great book on San'a (al-Amri 1983) continue to be played in some form or other. Some games have been introduced recently from other countries, as evidenced by the non-dialect forms for essential words in the game (see 5.1 with the use of hýna and 'ismik ēh) – how these games arrived, though, I can only guess. In some cases, words from other languages form an essential part of the game, as in the English 'yes!' towards the end of the game wagal 'hopscotch', a game not described here but included in Wa ‡f †anȥae': Texts in †anȥaenñ Arabic (Watson & Al-Amri 2000). My previous published texts on chil-dren's games have been recorded by adults, and in contrast to the adults' descriptions , the children describe in a very pro-active manner. The game is not only described , it is also played – and often carried on until I had fully understood the rules. In some cases, until I had won! During recordings older children often begin by acting as if they are performing in front of the teacher, often avoiding more dialectal forms, younger children less so. The younger children have a tendency to …