Dialect Atlas of North Yemen and Adjacent Areas

Studies on Arabic Dialectology and Sociolinguistics

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I would therefore suggest that the definite article entered these languages through contact with Northwest Semitic languages in the southern Levant. Evidence for such a contact situation is in fact attested in an Ancient North Arabian inscription published by Hayajneh, Ababneh, and Khraysheh in The text is in a difficult-to-classify North Arabian script but contains a prayer formula typical of Thamudic B and Safaitic. In addition to this, the inscription may be a bilingual, as the same stone bears a Canaanite text, which remains undeciphered.

The published photographs of this component, like those of the Arabian inscription, are too poor to be of use for re-editing the text. Never- theless, this cultural nexus would have produced a bilingual environment in which the definite article, as a morphological feature and perhaps the mor- pheme itself, could have spread to Arabian languages lacking it. The spellings of Kms1 and Qws1 with the same sibilant, s1, indicate that this language has merged s1and s3.

The second line is read from right to left, but I sus- pect that the text is boustrophedon. The published photographs are not of a high enough quality to undertake a re-editing of the text, however, and so I will withhold judgement of the reading and interpretation of the second line until new photographs are published.

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Fortunately, H. Hayajneh informs me that he is preparing the text for a new round of 3D photography and will publish a new edition soon. The assimilation of the n in this context is not problematic, as even Classical Arabic experiences n assimilation with particles, e. Finally, contact between the languages of Arabia — not simply Northwest Semitic — and sociolinguistic factors arising from that, must have played an important role in the distribution of definite article forms in the pre-Islam- ic period.

An informative parallel is seen in Southwestern Arabian dialects of Arabic today. I will focus here on those that do not overlap with Huehnergard Personal names cannot be used to geneti- cally classify languages. The k-endings are an areal feature of southern Arabia, found not only in Ancient South Arabian, but all languages of this region regardless of their classification, e.

On the distribution of the modern k-dialects, see Behnstedt , verbs and on the ancient dialects, see Rabin , chapter 5. I have already argued in several places , a, , a that the dialects attested in the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions should be con- sidered Arabic, in genealogical terms, and constitute a continuum of dialects including the Arabic of the Nabataeans.

The following discussion will synthe- size my opinions on the matter and make the case for this as clear as possible. Putting aside the superficial shape of the definite article, Safaitic, and to a lesser degree Hismaic on account of the laconic nature of inscriptions in that script , exhibit most of the innovations of Arabic. The system of negation Classical Arabic shows a unique system of negative adverbs tied to modality. Nevertheless, it is only in Arabic, and in Classical Arabic to be precise, that such verbs function as a marked sub- junctive.

Thus, when the final radical is written, we can be sure that it is followed by a vowel, and in these cases, the verb is in a syntactic environment where Classical Arabic would require the subjunctive. In Ugaritic and Hebrew, they function as cohortatives and there is no consensus on the function of this morpheme in Amarna Canaanite. Yet, forms with otiose n persist and these can be interpreted as vestiges of ancient nunation. A handful of examples are discussed in Al-Jallad a: 69 , but no system as such can be identified.

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Nevertheless, Huehnergard explains that this is a very obvious analogy and therefore the feature should probably not be assigned too much weight. In addition to these, a unique Arabic development is attested in one His- maic inscription that deserves remark. T-demonstratives Huehnergard has suggested the t-demonstrative as Proto-Arabic inno- vation and I have followed him in previous works e. If he is correct, then this is another example of a Proto-Arabic innovation attested in Safaitic, e.

The Dadanitic corpus is far smaller than the Safaitic one but it is the only corpus of Ancient North Arabian to have a true monumental tradition. The main language of the Dadanitic inscriptions appears to be distinct from Arabic and exhibits features that cannot be otherwise reconstructed for Proto-Arabic. This feature cannot be un- derstood as the result of influence from the Minaean colony at Dadan Rossi , as Minaic has an s-causative. While some remnants of the h-causative can be identified in Arabic, most of which are loans, no productive h-morpheme is reconstructible for Proto-Arabic.

The main reason for the shift of my opinion is that the t-onset cannot be plausibly derived from any other part of the grammar, all other feminine markers being suffixes.

For an overview of Dadanitic nomenclature and grammatical features , see Macdonald ; and the forthcoming dissertation of F. Only the latter form is reconstructible for Arabic. The feminine ending Dadanitic does not seem to have levelled the -at allomorph of the feminine ending Huehnergard 20 , e. Arabic qaryatun, which would appear in Dadanitic orthography as qryt. Most of the Arabic dialects have lost this feature, and so it is unclear what forms they would have had in the verb or pronouns.

Safaitic does not employ matres lectionis, and so it is unclear if the pronouns inflect for the dual. These forms are found in Dadanitic, e. Macdonald , distinguish- ing it from Ancient South Arabian, which has -y.

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These features, I think, suggest that Dadanitic did not descend from Proto-Ara- bic but is rather a sister language. Whether Proto-Arabic and Dadanitic consti- tute a separate sub-grouping or whether their common ancestor is Proto-Cen- tral Semitic will have to await the discovery of more texts. If so, then the asymmetric paradigm of Dadanitic should also be reconstructed for Proto-Arabic.

However, consider- ing the Safaitic situation and, indeed, that of Thamudic F below , it is possible that variation in the shape of the definite article was something inherent to Dadanitic as well. The corpus and the classification of its language was the subject of a comprehensive study by Kootstra , in which special attention was given to its linguistic classification. A final development is the shift of w to y in word-initial position, attested clearly twice, e.

Confirmation of this hypothesis must await the discovery of longer and clearer texts. Thamudic Before discussing the classification of the Thamudic inscriptions, we should make it absolutely clear that Thamudic does not refer to a single language or script, nor does it refer to a group of languages and scripts that have more in common with each other than the other groupings.

Following Macdonald, it is simply a category for inscriptions that do not fall into one of the better understood classifications. The interrelationships between the different scripts remain poorly understood, as do their chronologies, and languages.

These group- ings are certainly too broad and will be revised in upcoming years as the texts are subjected to closer and more systematic studies. The following discussion will offer some preliminary impressions of the linguistic affiliation of these texts and will certainly be subjected to modification as our knowledge improves. The corpus con- tains primarily personal names and signatures associated with rock art; more- over, the scripts classified under this rubric are quite diverse and certainly form better defined sub-groupings.

The definite article, which is mostly used with a demonstrative force, is always h-. Win- nett has suggested the existence of the dative preposition k- but confirmation must await the discovery of clearer examples Winnett, no date. Despite the fact that Thamudic B is the most widespread category, the limited linguistic 64 For a good overview of Thamudic, see Macdonald The exact meaning of this word is not agreed upon by scholars Tsafrir These texts can be subdivided into several categories, with two main branches C1 and C2, based on geography and the phonemic values of the glyphs Al-Jallad Considering the brief nature of these texts, there is only a few things to say about their linguistic character.

The verb and pronouns The first person possessive suffix pronoun is consonantal, y, at least when at- tached to a noun in the accusative case and the personal suffix of the first person suffix conjugation is a t, e.

The corpus is spread from Northwest to Central Arabia and no chronological information has come to light, so any dating of this grouping is entirely conjectural. On this inscription, see Winnett and Reed —32, no. This issue will be taken up in a comprehensive article on the Tha- mudic C inscriptions, which is in preparation.

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My interpretation of the inscription differs entirely from the editio princeps and so I will provide a short commentary here. The conjunction f is attested perhaps with a comitative meaning,71 and w to connect two clauses. If this is a feature of the language of these inscriptions rather than of their source, then this would disqualify Thamudic C as a form of Arabic. Although short, the Thamudic C inscriptions exhibit an array of features that are completely alien to Arabic and likely reflect a distinct language.

This fact is brought into relief when we consider texts such as the following, which has so far defied interpretation, suggesting that if longer texts were available, we would be dealing with a variety as distinct from Arabic as the non-Sabaic Ancient South Arabian languages. As such it is the latest securely dated Ancient North Arabian inscription. But when it comes to linguistic classification, we can say nothing in any detail about the affiliation of these inscriptions. As far as I know, not even the definite article has been attested in this corpus.

A few longer texts exist in Thamudic D and these have so far defied interpretation. While this says nothing about classification, it does provide yet another example of the ex- treme diversity of article forms attested across Arabia. Some of the personal names are also marked with mimation. The verb form tqr was identified as a Gt stem ibid , equated with CAr ittaqa- ra, suggesting the infixation of the t. While this interpretation strains credulity, the syntax and etymological analysis are not convincing. I have settled on the term Thamudic F rather than Himaitic because there remains a great deal of graphic variation in the script to sort out.

Thamudic F, in the end, may encompass several scripts and so the label Thamudic seems appropriate for now. In addition to this list, we may add the person-number-gender suffixes on the 1st and 2nd person of the suffix conjugation in t cf. Macdonald 55 discusses these features in his usual thorough and balanced way.

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All are characteristic of any non-South Arabian Semitic language. By assuming an Arabic source, one risks essentializing the languages of Arabia to two groups — Arabic and Ancient South Arabian. We should not necessarily assume a strong linguistic border separating Sabaic from the Arabian languag- es spoken to the north of it. Instead, it is likely that Arabia constituted a con- tinuum of Central Semitic languages, for which we are afforded only glimpses by the epigraphic record. East Arabia The linguistic situation of East Arabia is far less clear than that of the west.

Like West Arabia, Aramaic was used widely as a literary language Stein Watson has produced a series of studies Watson b; Watson ; Watson et al. While these dialects exhibit a comparable mix of features, they do not represent a natural continuum from Arabic to the ancient languag- es of South Arabia.

Instead, they likely resulted from a convergence between the later movement of Arabic into this region and early Semitic languages. Features like bar and brat, for example, are not typical of Sabaic, but can be found in Modern South Arabian, which is today spoken hundreds of miles away. It is a close derivative of the Ancient South Arabi- an alphabet, but its language was considered a part of the North Arabian group because some of the personal names attested in the inscriptions contain the hn article, e. The relatively small corpus of formulaic grave inscriptions, however, offered little else to go on.

A single feature, discussed by A. The excavations at Mleiha in the Arabian Gulf, however, have brought to light several new texts in Hasaitic. If this is a native feature, and not a borrowing from Sabaic, then it would 78 Note that in Syriac literature from the 4th to 9th centuries, Qatar refers to the entire North- east Arabia, including present-day Qatar, Bahrain, and parts of the UAE. This of course is a non-linguistic criterion and is in any case absent so far in Thamudic C and D, and is extremely rare in Dadanitic and Thamudic B.

The spellings hqnt instead of hqnyt further suggest that triphthongs had collapsed in certain environments. The inscription furnishes a single isogloss that has been the subject of some debate. In addition to the word bn in the Hasaitic text, the author uses br. While the edition takes this as an Aramaicism, it is possible in light of the use of a similar form in the Modern South Arabian languages to consider this the result of substrate influence from a language similar to Modern South Arabian. However, given that zy occurs in a second inscription with a dual antecedent and never with inscriptions with a singular antecedent, this explanation seems most unlikely, as they concede Overlaet, Macdonald, and Stein , n.

The combination of these features makes Hasaitic quite unlikely to be de- scendent of Proto-Arabic and certainly rules out any genetic relationship with the dialects of Arabic spoken in the region today.

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