Ancient North Arabian (original) (raw)

Origin and Classification of the Ancient South Arabian Languages

Journal of Semitic Studies, 2009

ASA (= Ancient South Arabian) documentation is testimony to a lengthy linguistic history in southern Arabia which predates the earliest written attestations. The hypothesis attributing the origin of ASA culture to immigration from the north is hard to endorse. The QAT (= Qatabanic) verb system and ASA more in general have strong parallels with the verb system of the north west of the second millennium. Just as the hypothesis of a recent wave of immigration to south Arabia is open to debate, so must the general idea of an ASA belonging to central Semitic as opposed to archaic southern Semitic be reexamined.

2016. The relationship among the Ancient South Arabian languages re-examined

Ancient South Arabian (ASA) designates a group of four Semitic languages, namely Sabaic, Qatabanic, Minaic and Ḥaḍramitic, attested from the end of the 2nd millennium BC until the advent of Islam in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula (nowadays Yemen). In view of the many isoglosses shared, these languages have been traditionally considered as closely genetically related idioms being part of one linguistic family. On the other hand, they do show many specific traits and the level of diversity among each other is increasing, thanks to new available data and recent analytic studies. Subsequently, some scholars have now argued that the relationship among these languages should be revised, and even questioned the existence of ASA as a language family. This paper intends to re-examine the relationship among the ASA languages through the comparative presentation of the main grammatical phenomena and the assessment of the most relevant shared features of these idioms.

The Arabic Dialects of eastern Arabia: typology and outline history

Firstly, alone among the modern vernaculars, they have preserved a bundle of linguistic features that have been lost altogether outside the peninsula, and which seem to provide a link back to what is termed 'Classical Arabic', that is, the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur'an. Arabian explorers from Burckhardt 2 to Philby 3 have commented on this romantic-seeming  or 'purity', as have, in a more scientific way, modern Arabic dialectologists like Tom Johnstone 4 and Bruce Ingham 5 .

2012-Ugaritic and Old(-South)-Arabic: Two WS Dialects?

The relationship between the Ugaritic and the Arabic languages has been pointed out for many years and at different levels: phonological (and more recently graphemic, morphological, and lexical. But before developing the parallels quoted, we must define the precise range of the extremes to be compared. Ugarit and its language is a well-established magnitude in time and space, but the Arabic language and the Arabic people of the end of the second century BC are more diffuse. We do not have a significant corpus of Arabic texts for this period, so we are obliged to rely on much later testimonies, applying all the necessary reserve that the historical décalage imposes. Similar caution must be exercised in relation to the Arabic people of the moment. Who were these Arabs, and where did they live? We have very few data at our disposal to answer these questions. There is no political unit that can be defined as "Arabic"; we have to piece together the dispersed sources that the documentation of the Late Bronze archaeology has uncovered.