Introduction

Giuliano Castagna is an Associate Research Fellow at the Research Centre for History and Cultures (RCHC) of Beijing Normal University (BNU) at Zhuhai, mainland China. After obtaining a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Leeds, he held as an Assistant Research position at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Castagna’s research focuses on the documentation of some aspects of the Modern South Arabian branch of the Semitic languages. In particular, he is interested in the obsolescent morphological categories of the Jibbali/ Śḥərɛ́t language such as quadri- and quinqueliteral nominals and verbs, native (i.e. non-Arabic) onomastics and paremiology, and the seemingly non-Semitic lexical items in Modern South Arabian, as well as the role and degree of involvement of pre-documentary Modern South Arabian-speaking people in the old Indian Ocean trade network.