What can Nabataean Aramaic tell us about Pre-Islamic Arabic? (original) (raw)

Arabo-Aramaic and Arabiyya: From Ancient Arabic to Early Standard Arabic, 200 CE - 600 CE (2010)

The Aramaic written by speakers of Ancient Arabic from the 1st c. BCE through the 4th c. CE commonly known as "Nabataean" incorporated more and more Arabic words in the course of the 3rd c. CE and served for writing Early Standard Arabic from the 4th c. onwards. The article addresses two questions: Why did the Nabataeans use Aramaic as their language of administration, being Arabs who ruled mostly Arabs; and why does the Arabic dialect of the Nabataeans, as evident from their personal names, is so close to later Early Standard Arabic?

Nabataean in Contact with Arabic: Grammatical Borrowing

This study aims to establish and clarify the influence of Arabic on Nabataean Aramaic in its linguistic context. Less attention will be paid to the historical, political, and socioeconomic settings of the various contact situations due to their variety. Too often this has been discussed purely in terms of lexica. Well-established in linguistics, lexica can never be decisive in such discussions because of the way that words can be easily borrowed from different languages. Morphology and syntax are far more important, and arguably syntax may tell us most about the linguistic substratum of the writers of the inscriptional material.

The 'Aramaic Substrate' hypothesis in the Levant revisited

Journal of Semitic Studies, 2022

Aramaic was the lingua franca in the Levant in the millennium prior to the Muslim conquests. The exact nature of the spread of Arabic and the specifics of language shift in the Middle East are not yet well understood. Many scholars assume that Arabic primarily spread in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim conquest. The common opinion is that in the new empire, Arabic was learnt imperfectly by speakers of other languages, and the resulting dialects bear the marks of those underlying languages (Versteegh 2012). Specifically, in the Levant and parts of Mesopotamia that language was Aramaic. Several features of the colloquial dialects of the Levant and Mesopotamia were argued to be a result of an Aramaic substrate. In this paper we concentrate on the alleged Aramaic substrate in the modern Arabic dialects of the Levant, where information about the Arabic dialects is more complete, and draw attention to a number of methodological flaws in the scholarly work supporting this hypothesis. We show that some core 'Aramaic' features in Levantine Arabic are unlikely to originate from Aramaic. We further argue that the evidence is not consistent with a rapid and imperfect language shift, which resulted in substrate influence, but rather with a prolonged period of contact between bilingual populations, which resulted in the expected transference of specialized lexical items, but almost no grammatical features.

Inscriptional Evidence of Pre-Islamic Classical Arabic: Selected Readings in the Nabataean, Musnad, and Akkadian Inscriptions

2013

This book discusses a highly-debated research topic regarding the history of the Arabic language. It investigates exhaustively the ancient roots of Classical Arabic through detailed tracings and readings of selected ancient inscriptions from the Northern and Southern Arabian Peninsula. Specifically, this book provides detailed readings of important Nabataean, Musnad, and Akkadian inscriptions, including the Namarah inscription and the Epic of Gilgamesh. In his book, the author, a known Arabic type designer and independent scholar, provides clear indisputable transcriptional material evidence indicating Classical Arabic was utilized in major population centers of the greater Arabian Peninsula, many centuries before Islam. He presents for the first time a new clear reading of Classical Arabic poetry verses written in the Nabataean script and dated to the first century CE. Furthermore, he offers for the first time a clear detailed Classical Arabic reading of a sample text from two ancient editions of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, separated by more than1000 years. Throughout his readings, the author provides verifiable evidence from major historical Arabic etymological dictionaries, dated many centuries ago. The abundant of in-depth analysis, images, and detailed original tables in this book makes it a very suitable reference for both scholars and students in academic and research institutions, and for independent learners. http://books.google.com/books?id=r3SsGB336osC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Indeterminacy and the comparative method: Arabic as a model for understanding the history of Aramaic

Arabic Dialectology, ed. by Enam Al-Wer and Rudolph de Jong. Leiden: Brill, pp. 3-16, 2008

Indeterminacy and the comparative method: Arabic as a model for understanding the history of Aramaic Historical linguistics seeks not only to render plausible reconstructions of earlier stages of a language, but also to localize postulated developments within specific times and places. Semitic languages offer a rich challenge to historical linguistics in the latter respect precisely because a number of its members are attested either over long periods of time or over broad geographical areas, or both. Applying the comparative method, the basic analytic tool of historical linguistics, to them potentially allows a detailed testing of its applicative generality. One issue is how temporally precise, or determinate, solutions suggested by the comparative method are. This question is addressed here, using Aramaic as the language of study, and Arabic as a language of analogical support. 1

Digging up archaic features: "Neo-Arabic" and comparative Semitics in the quest for proto Arabic

Classical Arabic has been considered a highly conservative Semitic language. It has been assumed that some of its features are the closest we will get to Proto Semitic (e.g., the phonemic system, the case system etc.). In this talk, I argue on the basis of comparative Semitics that other forms of Arabic, namely Neo-Arabic and Middle Arabic, which are not normalized and do not attempt to imitate a non native variety, preserve archaic features much better than Classical Arabic. I will demonstrate this point using syntactic and morphological features. Some of these features are attested in Akkadian and Ugaritic as well as other languages, but not in Classical Arabic. I suggest, therefore, that the dialects are essential to the study of proto-Arabic.