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Mohammad, Mohammad. 1999. “Anaphoric agree-ment in non-finite clauses in Arabic”. Ms., Univer-sity of Florida at Gainesville. Available from the Semitic Linguistics Research Archive: www.usc.edu/schools/college/semitic/.

——. 2000. Word order, agreement, and pronomi-nalization in Standard and Palestinian Arabic. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.

Ouhalla, Jamal. 1991. Functional categories and parametric variation. London: Routledge.

——. 1994. “Verb movement and word order in Arabic”. Verb movement, ed. David Lightfoot and Norbert Hornstein, 41–72. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Plunkett, Bernadette. 1993. “The positions of sub-jects in Modern Standard Arabic”. Perspectives on Arabic linguistics, V, ed. Mushira Eid and Clive Holes, 231–260. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.

Ross, J.R. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Rothstein, Susan. 1983. The syntactic forms of pred-ication. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Schmidt, Hans and Paul Kahle. 1918. Palästinen-sische Volkserzählungen aus Palästina, I. Göttin-gen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.

Stowell, Timothy. 1983. “Subjects across catego-ries”. Linguistic Review 2.285–312.

Williams, Edwin. 1980. “Predication”. Linguistic Inquiry 11.203–238.

——. 1983. “Against small clauses”. Linguistic Inquiry 14.287–308.

——. 1984. “Grammatical relations”. Linguistic Inquiry 15.639–673.

——. 1994. Thematic structure in syntax. Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Frederick M. Hoyt(University of Texas at Austin)

Pre-Islamic Arabic

1. T h e s o u r c e s f o r p r e - I s l a m i c A r a b i c

Pre-Islamic Arabic is the cover term for all vari-eties of Arabic spoken in the Arabian Peninsula until immediately after the Arab conquests in the 7th century C.E. Scholars disagree about the status of these varieties (Rabin 1955). Three different points of view stand out. Some schol-ars (Nöldeke 1904, 1910; Fück 1950; Blau 1965; Chejne 1969; Versteegh 1984) assume that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur±àn was similar, if not identical, to the vari-eties spoken in the Arabian Peninsula before the emergence of Islam. If differences existed, they

concerned mainly stylistic and minor points of linguistic structure.

A second group of mainly Western scholars of Arabic (Vollers 1906; Fleisch 1947; Kahle 1948; Rabin 1951; Blachère 1950; Wehr 1952; Spitaler 1953; Rosenthal 1953; Fleisch 1964; Zwettler 1978; Holes 1995; Owens 1998; Sharkawi 2005) do not regard the variety in which the Qur±àn was revealed as a spoken variety of Arabic in the peninsula. Some of them (Zwettler 1978; Sharkawi 2005) go so far as to state that the function of the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur±àn was limited to artistic expression and oral rendition ( poetic koine). Others are not as clear about the functional load of this variety in pre-Islamic times.

A third group of scholars (Geyer 1909; Nöldeke 1904, 1910; Kahle 1948) assume that the variety of Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur±àn was the variety spoken by Bedouin Arab tribes and nonsedentary Arabs, at least in the western parts of the peninsula where trade routes existed.

Some modern scholars of Arabic believe that the Classical Arabic grammarians held their view, that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur±àn was identical with at least the spoken varieties of some Arab tribes in the peninsula (Rabin 1955:21–22; Sharkawi 2005:5–6). A first reading of the grammatical texts seems to confirm that grammarians were quite aware of the existence of different lan-guage varieties in the Arabic-speaking sphere. They distinguished terminologically between

luÿa ‘dialect’ and lisàn ‘language’ (±Anìs 1952:16–17; Naßßàr 1988:58). Among several meanings of the word luÿa is the technical meaning of a linguistic variety (Rabin 1951:9). As early as the 2nd century A.H., grammarians were aware of differences among the dialects. Among the earliest writers on tribal dialects were Yùnus ibn £abìb (d. 182/798) and ±Abù ≠Amr aš-Šaybànì (d. 213/828), the author of the Kitàb al-jìm, in which odd and archaic lexical items used in certain tribes are recorded. In the 3rd century A.H., several authors are said to have written books on tribal dialects, among them al-Farrà± (d. 207/822), ±Abù ≠Ubayda (d. 210/825), and ±Abù Zayd al-±Anßàrì (d. 215/ 830). In addition to treatises on the dialects, there were those on the dialect words in the

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Qur±àn. Among the earliest authors in this field was Ibn ≠Abbàs (d. 68/687), to whom a treatise under the title Kitàb al-luÿàt fì l-Qur±àn was ascribed (Rippin 1981). In this treatise, both dialect and foreign words were listed accord-ing to their order of appearance in the Qur±àn. Several other treatises were dedicated to the same subject in the 3rd century A.H. (Naßßàr 1988:61–62). Ibn Fàris (d. 395/1005; Íà™ibì 19) identified differences among dialects, such as differences in vowels, assimilation, the addi-tion of vowels, realizing the hamza, gender marking, and plurals.

However, grammarians were not interested in the study of luÿàt as such. Had they really decided to study the dialects, they would have paid attention to variation and recorded phe-nomena with an abundance of details and examples. Rather, they chose to concentrate on the variety pertinent to their field of inquiry: their study of Arabic began as an ancillary to the study of the Qur±àn. Furthermore, if dialects had consumed the scholars’ interest, they would have used Bedouin as informants in order to find out whether certain features existed in some dialects but not in others, or how certain dialects behaved in certain con-texts. Instead, they chose to use Bedouin Arabs to emphasize how their dialects realized certain features of the Qur±ànic language, as arbiters in theoretical disputes, and as a means to verify the data.

A good example of the role of Bedouin is the famous story of the scholarly debate between Sìbawayhi and the Kufan grammarian al-Kisà±ì (Zubaydì, ¢abaqàt 68–71, in Bernards 1997:6). According to this story, at the court of the caliph ar-Rašìd, al-Kisà±ì and Sìbawayhi could not settle a theoretical point, and they had to submit the case to Bedouin Arabs for arbitra-tion. One Bedouin, who was waiting at the door, was admitted, and he favored al-Kisà±ì’s judgment over that of his adversary.

The Qur±àn stresses that it was revealed in a ‘clear’ Arabic tongue (e.g. Q. 16/103, 26/195). Therefore, the luÿàt in the text were marginal in comparison to pre-Islamic poetry, although this belonged to the same linguistic level as the Qur±àn. This may be the reason why the number of šawàhid ‘evidentiary verses’ from poetry outgrew the number of šawàhid taken from Bedouin speech in the grammarians’ works. The majority of šawàhid in Sìbawayhi’s

Kitàb were verses from the Qur±àn and lines of poetry; the grammarian al-Jarmì (d. 225/839) mentions a number of 1,050 lines of poetry in the Kitàb (Xizàna I, 8, quoted in Hàrùn’s intro-duction to the edition of the Kitàb). The purity of the Qur±ànic language served for grammar-ians as the touchstone for linguistic correctness, and the relative distance of dialects from this purity determined their functional value. The practical preference for certain Bedouin dialects over others in grammatical arbitration was due to the grammarians’ focus on the similarities of these dialects to the Qur±àn.

There are four main sources for pre-Islamic Arabic. Books of a general nature from the Abbasid period, books of Classical Arabic grammarians, and the Qur±àn provide us with texts varying in length and usefulness; in addi-tion, dictionaries contain a huge, albeit unorga-nized and unclassified, reservoir of lexical data on dialectal variation. Apart from the Qur±àn, these sources provide us with four types of data: speeches by pre-Islamic notables and famous orators; anecdotes from the utterances of seers and fortune tellers; proverbs (such as those in Jà™iΩ, Bayàn I, 184); and stories (such as in Ibn ±Is™àq, Sìra I, 321). From these sources some phonological, morphological, and syn-tactic variables stand out as indicators to the existence of dialects in the pre-Islamic Arabic sphere.

For grammarians in the first three centuries of the Islamic era (see Rabin 1951:6), the task of recording dialect features was marginal compared to the main target of codifying the features of Arabic. Thus, variable features and dialectal references to tribes occur rather at ran-dom in the books of grammar. However, Rabin (1951), ±Anìs (1952), and al-Gindì (1983) col-lected references to tribal features in dialect sketches. In the next section these features are organized according to dialect.

2. T h e d i a l e c t s o f p r e - I s l a m i c A r a b i c

2.1 The dialect of the £ijàz

£ijàzì Arabic features appear in the grammar-ians’ books more frequently than features of any other dialect. It is, therefore, a much better represented dialect in comparison to others, despite the fact that the region’s geographical

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definition is not as clear. In pre-Islamic times, the £ijàz was the western part of the penin-sula, between the Tihàma in the southwest and the Najd in the east. It included the Banù Sulaym and the Banù Hilàl. In the north was the territory of Bàlì, and in the south that of Hu≈ayl. After the advent of Islam, the Tihàma was included in the £ijàz, thus the Bedouin tribes in the interior were sometimes included in the £ijàz. It seems that for the grammarians, £ijàz referred to regions defined according to the post-Islamic demarcation. In this way, the urban centers of Mecca, Medina, and Âaqìf were included in that region. The term luÿa ±ahl al-£ijàz covers all differences that may have existed within this region.

Phonological features of this region include:

i. The pronunciation of /≠/ as hamza.ii. The use of the full forms of vowels, without

elision or vowel changes, e.g. ≠unuq ‘neck’ as against ≠unq in Eastern Arabian dialects, where short unstressed vowels were elided.

iii. The absence of vowel harmony, which was realized in Eastern dialects, e.g. £ijàzì ba≠ìr ‘camel’, corresponding to Eastern bi≠ìr. By the same token, uvular and pharyngeal consonants assimilated following vowels in the Eastern dialects, while in the £ijàz they rested immune, e.g. £ijàzì ≠uqr ‘the main part of the house’, corresponding to Eastern ≠aqr. In the neighborhood of uvulars and pharyngeals, the £ijàz had /u/, while the Eastern dialects had /a/.

iv. The tendency to shorten the long final vow-els in pause positions

v. The elision of the hamza.

Morphological features of this dialect include:

i. The 3rd person suffix pronouns -hu, -humà, -hum, and -hunna did not change to the -hi form after i or ì.

ii. For the singular relative pronoun, the £ijàz used alla≈ì rather than the Western and Yemenite ≈ì and ≈ù. For the feminine plu-ral, the £ijàz used allà±ì. The same form may have been used for the masculine plu-ral as well.

iii. The dual suffix in the £ijàz may have had a single form, -àni, for the nominative, accu-sative, and genitive cases alike. Ibn Hišàm (Muÿnì I, 37), in his explanation of the

nominative case of the demonstrative pro-noun hà≈àni ‘these two’ in the verse ±inna hàÚàni la-sà™iràni (Q. 20/63), claimed that in the dialect of the £ijàz, these demonstra-tive pronouns were indeclinable.

iv. The absence of taltala.v. The imperative of geminated verbs was

conjugated as the strong verbs, e.g. urdud ‘respond!’.

Syntactic features of this dialect include:

i. Some nouns were feminine in the £ijàz and masculine in the Najd and Tamìm. Some examples are tamr ‘dates’, ša≠ìr ‘barley’, ßirà† ‘path’. The word ßirà† appears in the first sùra of the Qur±àn (Q.1/6) followed by a masculine adjective (ßirà† mustaqìm).

ii. In the £ijàz, the predicate of verbal sen-tences agreed in number with the head verb (known as the luÿa ±akalùnì l-baràÿìμ), unlike Standard Arabic, where the head verb is always in the singular.

iii. In the £ijàz, after the shortened forms ±in and ±an, the subject took an accusative case, while in Classical Arabic and in the east, shortened particles lost their effect on the following nominal clause.

iv. After the complementizer ±inna, ±anna, etc. ( ±inna wa-±axawàtuhà), the £ijàzì dia-lect put the subject and predicate of the sentence in the accusative case. Ibn Hišàm (Muÿnì I, 36) explains the agreement in case between the subject and predicate in a nominal sentence after ±inna ‘in one version of a ™adìμ (±inna qa≠ra jahannama sab≠ìna xarìfan) by saying that the £ijàz did not distinguish between the subject and predi-cate in case endings after ±inna.

v. The predicate of kàna and other copu-las ( kàna wa-±axawàtuhà) was given a nominative case, while an accusative case is assigned to it in Classical Arabic.

vi. In the £ijàz, mà, là, and ±in had the same effect as the Classical Arabic laysa in assigning to the subject the nominative case and to the predicate the accusative case.

vii. Verbs in the indicative were used after ±an. An example comes from Mujàhid (d. 104/722), who read the verse li-man ±aràda ±an yutimma r-ra∂à≠ata ‘for those who want the suckling (period) to be completed’ with an indicative ending, yutimmu (Q. 2/233).

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2.2 The dialect of ±Azd

The ±Azd dialect is rarely mentioned in the lit-erature. Whereas anecdotes and šawàhid from other Yemeni dialects are given, the dialect of ±Azd receives little attention. More confusing still is the fact that there were two tribes by the name of ±Azd, one in Oman and the other in the western part of Yemen. The two features that are mentioned, however, show the difference between this dialect and the rest of Yemen.

i. The retention of the nominal case endings a, i, and u in the pausal position.

ii. The retention of the vowel a in the prefixes of the imperfect, e.g. yaktub ‘he writes’ as against the taltala in other dialects.

2.3 The dialect of Hu≈ayl

The tribe of Hu≈ayl was situated in the south-eastern part of the £ijàz, to the north of Yemen and to the northeast of ±Azd. Its location in the southeast of the £ijàz connected this tribe geo-graphically to the Eastern dialect group, which earned the tribe its fame for speaking well-formed Arabic. Despite this connection with the east, the dialect of Hu≈ayl belonged mainly to the Western group and functioned as an intermediate zone between the £ijàz and north-ern Yemen (Rabin 1951:79). The evidence for this claim comes from the grammatical and lex-ical features it shared with the Western group. They shared, for instance, ±awwàb ‘obedient’ and jadaμ ‘tomb’ with Kinàna. Other features mentioned by the grammarians include:

i. The insertion of short unstressed vowels in the middle of words, e.g. ibin ‘son’ instead of Classical Arabic ibn, and jawazàt ‘nuts’, sg. jawza. In Classical Arabic, words with a singular pattern fa≠la receive an anaptyctic vowel a in the feminine plural, to become fa≠alàt. This vowel is not added when the second radical in the root is w or y, but Hu≈ayl added an anaptyctic vowel to roots containing w and y as well.

ii. The absence of vowel harmony.iii. The absence of the hamza.iv. It is probable that in Hu≈ayl the final long

vowels were shortened, as was the case in the £ijàz.

v. The change of the glides wu and wi into the long vowels ù and ì, respectively.

vi. Hu≈ayl used the relative pronoun alla≈ì. The plural of this pronoun was alla≈ùna, in all numbers and genders, in opposition to Classical Arabic, which uses alla≈ìna.

vii. Concerning the taltala feature, Hu≈ayl was claimed to have used both forms: -a- imperfect like the £ijàz dialects, and -i- imperfect like the eastern tribes. This varia-tion is also common in ¢ayyi±. Both tribes had contact with eastern tribes, which may explain the variation.

2.4 The dialect of ¢ayyi±

The ¢ayyi± tribe was situated in the north of the Najd. It occupied the southern frontiers of the Nufùd desert and was also situated toward the northeast of the £ijàz region. It shared with the tribes of the eastern part some linguistic features, such as the taltala. Rabin (1951:193) claims that such common features are suggestive of the connecting role this tribe played between the dialects of the eastern and western parts of the peninsula. The territory of ¢ayyi± during the early Islamic period was not the original habitat of the tribe. The tribe was traditionally known to have migrated from northern Yemen together with the tribes with which it shared some linguistic features. Features of this dialect include:

i. The weakening of the final syllable and eli-sion of final nasals, laterals, t, and/or y.

ii. The absence of vowel harmony and vowel elision.

iii. The change of /≠/ into /±/, e.g. da±-nì ‘let me’; no other data about depharyngealization are available.

iv. The fate of hamza in this dialect is not known due to the absence of direct evidence.

v. The suffix pronoun of the 3rd person feminine in pause was -ah and -hà in context, which is in accordance with the Classical and Eastern Arabic weakening of final syllables.

vi. The form of the article was am-.vii. The singular feminine demonstrative was

tà, not hà≈ihi.viii. The relative pronoun was ≈ù, which was

used for the two genders and all numbers.ix. The -t of the feminine plural was dropped

in pause; again, this is in harmony with the weakening of final syllables.

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x. az-Zajjàjì (Šar™ 152) claims that as in the £ijàz, the predicate of verbal sentences agreed in number with the head verb.

2.5 The Arabic of Yemen

The dialect of Yemen was very well represented in the writings of the grammarians because of the special interest it held for the scholars of the 3rd and 4th centuries A.H., especially for lexicographers like Ibn Durayd (d. 321/933) and Našwàn (d. 573/1178). Although home to a host of South Arabian dialects, Yemen does not reflect much South Arabian influence, except for some lexical items that may be mere loanwords from that language. A good example is the word ba≠l ‘lord’, which is still common in Mehri (Rabin 1951:25–27).

During the time of al-Hamadànì (d. after 360/971), the main source on Yemen, a dialect similar to the Central Arabian Bedouin dialects was spoken in the region east of Saràt and in the extreme south. Al-Hamadànì describes these dialects as ‘correct’ Arabic. In the central and western regions of the Saràt, different dia-lects were spoken. These dialects are character-ized by al-Hamadànì as mutawassi† ‘middle’. Rabin (1951:45) claims that this attribute must mean that they were mixtures of Arabic and £imyaritic. In the southern part of Saràt and the mountains around Ían≠à±, the language showed strong traces of £imyaritic. In the area to the west, a mixture of Arabic and £imyaritic was spoken. In the villages, however, £imyaritic was predominant. Outside the villages, in the nomadic areas, West Arabian dialects were spoken (Rabin 1951:45). Thus, there were two linguistic communities in Yemen, apart from the Bedouin in the east. The first was that of the settled farmer groups, which spoke a mixture of £imyaritic and Arabic, while the other group consisted of the nomadic people who spoke West Arabian dialects. Although the Yemeni dialects spoken in this region were very similar to other Arabic dialects, Arabs considered them incomprehensible. There are several anecdotes in the literature showing that Arabs did not consider the dialects of £imyar Arabic to be similar to their own. The attribute †um†umàniyya was given in the literature to the £imyaritic dialect as a form of mockery.

The northern Yemen region hosted tribes speaking dialects so similar to each other that

they could be considered a defined group. This group was different from the rest of Yemen in the south and Hu≈ayl and the £ijàz in the north. Despite being distinct from both groups, the dialects of northern Yemen exhibited sim-ilarities with both. Rabin (1951:64) claims that because grammarians often ascribed £ijàzì dialect features to Kinàna, this region can be considered as an extension to the West Arabian dialect group. Among the tribes that lived in this region were Kinàna, Xaμ≠am, Hamadàn, ≠Anbar, Zubayd, and Muràd. The first four of these tribes are frequently mentioned in litera-ture, but whenever a feature is mentioned as belonging to a certain tribe, it may have applied to the rest of the tribes as well. Rabin (1951:64) also assumes that whenever the grammarians mention the tribes of Yemen, they mean these tribes living in the northern part. Among the features mentioned for these dialects are the following:

i. The absence of ±imàla. Al-Hamadànì, however, states that the Bedouin tribe of Banù £arb in the south realized ±imàla.

ii. The realization of hamza. However, in some cases the original hamza of the word was changed into the glide w. An example is ±àtaytu/wàtaytu ‘I obeyed’. This feature is still heard in some modern dialects.

iii. In some Yemenite dialects, the feminine end-ing -at was generalized to pause positions.

Yemenite dialect words may have received tanwìn even in the pause position.

iv. The definite article of the Yemenite dialect was am-. Unlike the Arabic definite article al-, it was not assimilated to dental and sibilant consonants. Words that received this article could also be given tanwìn. An example is found in al-Fìrùzàbàdì’s Mu™ì† (I, 37): mani m-qà±imun ‘who is standing?’

v. The dual suffix in northern Yemen, -àni, was suffixed to the noun. Although other tribes in the peninsula used a single dual ending as well, they coupled it with a dif-ferent treatment of the final short vowel. They either used -àna as a fixed form or inflected the ending. This feature was ascribed to Dabba in the northwest of the Empty Quarter, which shows that this fea-ture cut across dialect boundaries.

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vi. There was a sentence-initial particle ±am that was used with the verb in the imper-fect (Rabin 1951:37).

vii. In southern Yemen, especially in ðufàr, the demonstrative pronoun for both gen-ders was ≈ì, which followed the noun it modified, e.g. iš-šuÿl ≈ì ‘this work’ (Rabin 1951:75).

viii. The relative pronoun was ≈ì, without dis-tinction for gender or number. It was used in western £a∂ramawt and elsewhere. In other places of Yemen and as far north as Hu≈ayl, the Classical Arabic pronoun alla≈ì was used, but without distinction for number or gender.

ix. The negative particle was dù. Another form, still used in Ta≠izz, in the southern-most part of Yemen, is da±. This particle may stem from £imyaritic, since a par-ticle da± was found in some of the South Arabian inscriptions around the middle of the 6h century C.E.

x. The suffix of the 1st and 2nd persons of the verb in the perfect is -k, not -t. A good example is the saying of a woman: ra±ayku bi-™ulm kawaladku ibnan min †ìb ‘I saw in a dream that I gave birth to a son of gold’. The verbs ra±ayku ‘I saw’ and waladku ‘I gave birth’ end in this suffix. The same use is still current in the Yemeni countryside ( Yemen).

3. D i a l e c t a l d i f f e r e n c e s a n d l i n g u i s t i c c h a n g e i n p r e - I s l a m i c A r a b i c

The features of the pre-Islamic Arabic dialects that have been listed above show that the dia-lectal elements are random and inconclusive. However, the evidence suggests that some of the pre-Islamic dialects exhibited a tendency toward variation and that there was a certain dialect grouping. The dialects of the £ijàz and Yemen exhibit elements of agreement that group them together against the Eastern dia-lects of the Arabian Peninsula and Classical Arabic. On the phonological level, most of these dialects elided the hamza, except for parts of Yemen. Also, in the dialects of the £ijàz and Yemen, there was no ±imàla or vowel harmony, and they share a tendency to change diphthongs into long vowels: northern Yemen changed /ay/ into /à/, and Hu≈ayl changed /wu/ and /wi/ into /ù/ and /ì/.

In morphology, the dialects of the £ijàz and Yemen shared some similar tendencies with different realizations. With the exception of ¢ayyi±, all West Arabian dialects retained final morphemes unchanged in the pause position. In Yemen, the final -t of the feminine end-ing was not deleted in pause, and the nouns also retained tanwìn in pause. In ±Azd, nouns retained case endings in pause. In the £ijàz, the final vowel at the end of the 2nd person singular pronoun was not elided in final pause position.

There are also features distinguishing dialects from one another. On the phonological level, the southern part of Yemen realized the hamza, as opposed to the rest of this group of dialects that elided it. The phoneme /≠/ was treated dif-ferently by each dialect. In Yemen, it may have been pronounced with a degree of nasalization. It was depharyngealized and pronounced as hamza in the £ijàz and ¢ayyi±.

In morphology, there was variation in the use of the demonstrative pronoun. In Yemen, the particle for both genders was ≈ì, which was postpositioned to the definite noun. But in the £ijàz, each gender had its own demon-strative pronoun. The relative pronoun was another area of variation among the dialects. In southern Yemen and western Hadramawt, the relative pronoun was ≈ì, without distinction of gender and number, whereas in northern Yemen, alla≈ì was used without distinction in number and gender. Hu≈ayl, like northern Yemen, used alla≈ì as a relative pronoun for the singular and alla≈ùna for the plural. As was the case with Hu≈ayl, the £ijàz used alla≈ì for the singular but had allà±ì for the feminine and, probably, the masculine plural as well.

The data show that there were certain ten-dencies toward language change. Especially remarkable were the sound changes, in both east and west Arabia. In Yemen, Hu≈ayl, the £ijàz, and ¢ayyi±, there was a tendency to change the pharyngeal sounds. In Yemen, /≠/ was changed into a hamza. The same change took place in both the £ijàz and Hu≈ayl. It is not clear from the data, however, whether there was the same conditioning for this change in the £ijàz and Hu≈ayl. However, /≠/ was changed into /™/ in the same context by Sa≠d ibn Bakr and in the area around Medina.

The phoneme /™/ underwent lenition in the £ijàz, northern Yemen, and Hu≈ayl; it was almost completely devoid of pharyngeal fric-

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tion and went in the direction of /h/. All the examples we have for this change in the £ijàz seem to involve the condition that for the change to take place, /™/ must precede the open low short vowel /a/.

There is only one example of fortition in the data. In Yemen, the voiced palatal fricative con-sonant of Classical Arabic /j/ was realized as a voiced palatal stop consonant /g/.

There are also indications for anaptyxis, whereby a vowel is inserted in a consonant clus-ter. Such short vowels were current in Hu≈ayl and the £ijàz. A good example is the word ibin ‘son’, with a vowel i between the consonants b and n. This phenomenon goes together with the general tendency in the western part of the peninsula to preserve short unstressed vowels in the middle of words and to prevent word-final consonant clusters. Dialects of the east, on the other hand, tended to delete unstressed high front and back vowels i and u.

The semivowels, in both parts of the penin-sula, underwent changes when in the vicinity of vowels. The data indicates that the semivowel /w/ in Hu≈ayl was deleted when it preceded high vowels. This change may have caused the compensatory lengthening of the following vowel.

Change also extended to morphological and syntactic elements. On the syntactic level, there is a difference between the rules of Classical Arabic and the dialect of the £ijàz, in particu-lar, and other dialects in the western part of the peninsula in general. Since the dialects of the east show a greater similarity to the standard-ized variety of Classical Arabic, we may assume they were more conservative than the Western dialects, because both seem to be more elabo-rate, especially in the field of morphosyntax. Certain syntactic developments in the line of uniformity and category reduction happened in £ijàz and the Western dialects. Among them were those directed toward altering the ‘effect’ ( ≠amal) of certain ‘operators’ (≠awàmil) on the nominal sentences they modify. According to the rules of Classical Arabic and the Eastern dialects, after the copular verb kàna ‘to be’, the subject of the following nominal sentence is in the nominative case, while the predicate is in the accusative ( kàna wa-±axawàtuhà). In the £ijàz, however, both constituents of the sentence were in the nominative. The same generalization of case happened with the com-

plementizer ±inna ( ±inna wa-±axawàtuhà). In the standardized variety of Arabic, the subject of the nominal sentence governed by ±inna is in the accusative while the predicate is in the nominative. In £ijàz, both constituents were put in the accusative. The same develop-ment toward overgeneralization of case endings affected verbs and verbal sentences. After ±an, the £ijàzì dialect put the verb in the indicative, while the rules of the standardized variety pre-scribe a subjunctive here. In verbal sentences, verbs in the £ijàz agreed in number with their agents, as opposed to Classical Arabic, which limits the agreement between the verb and its agent to gender.

Within the general division of West Arabian dialects, some tribes shared features with the tribes of the eastern part of the peninsula. The clearest example was Hu≈ayl, which, like Eastern dialects, realized the hamza. Likewise, in Tihàma, elision affected short, unstressed vowels as in the dialects of the east, producing contracted combinations of preposition and article like mil and ≠al instead of min al- and ≠alà al-.

Some indications point to the progress of innovations in the peninsula. The data show that the £ijàz was at the center of innovations. On the phonemic level, the Western dialects were moving toward a more balanced system. Single voiceless sounds like the hamza were elided, and the pharyngeal /≠/ was moved from its place of articulation. It appears that the hamza was elided in the £ijàz in all environ-ments but was retained in Yemen, except when it occurred before the long open vowel /à/. If the hamza was fated to disappear from the old dialects of Arabic, this movement began in the £ijàz before Yemen, and before it was aban-doned in all environments. Another instance of the innovative character of the Arabic spoken in the £ijàz is the articulation of the /≠/ pho-neme. In the £ijàz, it was depharyngealized and shifted toward the hamza. In Yemen, the articu-lation of /≠/ was merely affected by nasalization. These examples suggest that innovations were born in the £ijàz in the north and traveled southward in the 7th century C.E.

There was a tendency toward generalizing a single relative pronoun in the Northwest Arabian dialects. The pronoun alla≈ì was used for masculine and feminine singular in the £ijàz and Hu≈ayl. In ¢ayyi±, a single relative

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pronoun ≈ù was used for the two genders and all numbers. But in the south, Yemen used two relative pronouns ≈ì and ≈ù. In the south, then, there was more than one relative pronoun, while in all other dialects of the West Arabian group, there was only one single pronoun.

On the syntactic level, however, the dialects of the £ijàz and Yemen were on equal footing with respect to some innovations. There was a tendency to generalize one case ending for different sentence constituents under different effects. Both the dialects of £ijàz and Yemen generalized the use of one dual suffix for all cases, Yemen using -àna while the £ijàz used -àni. Another case of generalization is the use of tanwìn in Yemen, where words in pausal position retained the tanwìn.

The reduction of the declensional system may be used as an example of change and, probably, of a tendency toward an analytical type. This development was in opposition to the stability of this feature in the Qur±ànic variety. The case system was reduced before the period of the Arab conquests, if not abandoned altogether in some areas.

Corriente (1971:20–50) studied the func-tional load in the poetic language. He agrees with Fleisch (1947) and Blau (1965) that the case endings might have been a feature of Bedouin and urban vernaculars as well as the poetic language. Although case endings were fully operative in the poetic language and the Qur±àn, these texts show that there was a form of Arabic that did not realize the full case sys-tem, existing at the same time and in the same place as the full ±i ≠ràb form. This fact caused, Corriente assumes, the coexistence of two dif-ferent evolutionary states in the development of Arabic (Corriente 1971:20–24). But, because the Arabic variety that realized case endings was a synthetic language which depended on the system for expressing syntactic relation-ships, Corriente conducted a survey of prose and verse texts from different periods. He dis-covered that the case endings, which character-ized the poetic language and some vernaculars, had a very low functional load, since the mean-ing of the passages studied could be identified without the use of the case endings. Therefore, these cases became redundant in the dialects (Corriente 1971:25).

Blau (1988:261–262) opposes this reason-ing, claiming that it is not possible to regard a

redundant aspect of the language as a secondary set. Therefore, low functional yield and redun-dancy do not prove that case endings had been dropped in spoken vernacular. Blau (1988:262) states that nothing can be inferred concern-ing language use from the redundancy of case endings in the classical language, because this system in the Semitic languages is generally redundant. Corriente (1973:154–163) remarks that the case system is merely an indication of a changing variety.

Diem (1973:227–237), reviewing the body of Arabic proper names in the Aramaic Nabataean inscriptions, shows that the low functional load of case endings may have been the result of long processes of development. The significant aspect of the written forms of these proper nouns is that at the end of each, there were letters indicating vowels u, a, and i. These vowels resemble the case endings as preserved in Classical Arabic. He notes that 95 percent of the simple nouns ended in w/u, while the rest ended in a or y/i or had no ending. The w/u final endings seem to be the rule. Diem (1973:335) asserts that w/u was actually the nominative case ending in Arabic, added to the end of the noun to represent the sound that had long disappeared from pronunciation but lingered on in the conservative orthography. In the category of theophoric compound names, some inscriptions have them without ending, while in the majority they end with y/i, which is an echo of the once-pronounced i ending of the noun construct. As for nontheophoric names, like ≠abd ≠amr, which did not form a noun construct, the second noun was written with a final w/u. At other times, no vocalic ending was written. Since nontheophoric names developed later than the theophoric names, the simple noun part with its traditional w/u was simply annexed to the first part. Diem speculates that the forms with final y/i in compound nouns and those with final w/u in simple names belonged to a time when Nabataean Arabic had case end-ings. Thus, final w and y must have represented the nominative and the genitive respectively. But by the time of the writing of these inscrip-tions, Nabataean Arabic must have lost its inflections, and the proof is the difference in spelling between compound and simple nouns. The use of final w/u in nontheophoric names, while the y/i was used in the theophoric names, means that the old case system was no longer

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in use, except as a fossilized orthographic habit (Diem 1973:235).

Diem speculates that the occasional forms without vowel letters in final position may reflect the actual everyday use of the language during the time of the inscriptions, where case endings no longer existed. Regarding the spread of this change, Diem believes that if Nabataean Arabic lost its case system in the 1st century B.C.E., it is difficult to assume that the areas of central Arabia bordering the Nabataeans remained immune to this linguistic change until the 7th century C.E. It was the language of poetry that did not lose the case system. In addi-tion, the relative importance of the Nabataeans until the 6th century C.E. may have enabled the change to spread into the Arabian heartland. However, the change did not creep into the poetic language because, apart from functional reasons, it was not a vernacular that was con-tinuously checked by and subjected to fashion.

Diem’s analysis identifies the locus of the beginning of change. The development toward a caseless language started in the peripheral area, where Arabic was only a vernacular. There are strong arguments that, due to the extensive contact between Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula and the Nabataean area in the period from the 1st to the 7th centuries C.E., the inno-vation probably moved to the northwestern and southwestern parts of Arabia, along the commerce lines and sedentary life in the penin-sula. Because contacts between the Nabataean areas and the eastern and southeastern parts of the peninsula were minimal, these regions maintained usage of case endings for a longer time than Western dialects, hence the gram-marians’ admiration of the Eastern dialects. As evidence, there were more discrepancies between the dialects of the £ijàz and Yemen and Classical Arabic in the use of the case system than between the Eastern dialects and Classical Arabic. While Eastern nomadic dia-lects resembled Classical Arabic in their use of case endings, some other dialects retained only residues of the case endings.

The data from Hu≈ayl and ±Azd show that they did not share in some of the innovations. ±Azd preserved full case endings, and in ¢ayyi±, the hamza was replaced by h. This does not mean that where the case system was retained, it was not in a state of development. In ±Azd, the cases were realized on the word in pause

position, whereas, according to the rules of Classical Arabic, they must be deleted in final position.

Strong linguistic relationships between the £ijàz and Yemen were natural, due to the heavy influence of social and trade interests, which flourished after the signing of the treaty between Persia and the Byzantine Empire in 561 C.E. This treaty blocked trade routes in the north of the peninsula and forced caravans to use the West Arabian route between Mecca and Yemen (Shahid 1988:181–192). Trade moved between the urban centers in Yemen and their equivalents in the £ijàz. Along this route, lin-guistic innovations may have spread from the £ijàz to the southern parts of Yemen. But if this is true, what prevented the Bedouin tribes of ¢ayyi±, ±Azd, and the Tihàma from sharing in linguistic innovations common between Yemen and the £ijàz, despite the tribes’ positions along the route?

According to ±Anìs (1952), it was natural for the dialects of the Tihàma and those of Hu≈ayl and ¢ayyi± to exhibit differences from those of the £ijàz and Yemen because the former were Bedouin tribes who shared some linguistic fea-tures with other, eastern Bedouin tribes. From the data in the Arab grammarians’ books, ±Anìs deduces that linguistic features were sometimes assigned to one sedentary tribe in the western part of the peninsula and at the same time to a Bedouin tribe in the eastern part. In other cases, opposite features were assigned to one and the same tribe. ±Anìs explains these apparent con-tradictions by assuming that tribes could have both sedentary and Bedouin clans. Features typical of Bedouin speech are in the realm of phonology, for instance vowel harmony and ±imàla. Therefore, when parts of Hu≈ayl were described by grammarians as having one of these features, they must have meant the Bedouin clans of that tribe, and one may fur-ther assume that they were the clans adjacent to the Najd. The same also applies to other Bedouin clans in the £ijàz and Yemen.

Yet, we do not know which parts of a tribe were Bedouin and which were not. More recently, al-Gindì (1983:36–38) accepts ±Anìs’s assumption but rejects the generalization that the majority of the inhabitants of the £ijàz were sedentary and the majority of the inhabit-ants of the eastern part of the peninsula, such as Tamìm, were Bedouin. He argues that the

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boundaries of the £ijàz and Tamìm, east and west, were not rigidly defined, and Bedouin clans were free to move from one geographical area to another without changing their iden-tity and linguistic behavior. Moreover, Tamìm, ±Asad, and Rabì≠a in the eastern part were large tribal alliances that included several tribes and may therefore have hosted different linguistic features.

It was natural for the Arab sedentary com-munities to gain and share in innovations more than Bedouin tribes did, since the former must have received the innovations through a con-stant line of communication with the source of innovation. If innovations that distinguished West Arabian dialects from Classical Arabic moved from the £ijàz to Yemen, they must have originated somewhere in the northwestern peripheral area. A case in point is the reduc-tion of the declension. This may have started in the Nabataean Kingdom in the 1st century C.E. and spread later to the rest of west and southwest Arabia along the trade routes. Trade caravans between the Levant and Mecca and between Mecca and Yemen were responsible for transporting innovation. Such a trade line is unlikely to transport innovation to off-line tribes and clans that were not stations along the route.

All this leads one to assume that the sed-entarized tribes along the western trade route were in the process of developing a special variety of Arabic, as opposed to the rest of the largely Bedouin dialects of Arabic. Although the data in the sources are random and few, it can be deduced that on the phonological level, these sedentary dialects were characterized by a change in the articulation of the pharyngeal / ≠/, the elision of hamza in all or most environ-ments, lack of vowel harmony, and absence of ±imàla. On the morphological level, sedentary dialects were characterized by the reduction of linguistic categories. Finally, on the syntactic level, they were defined by the overgeneralized use of case endings.

B i b l i o g r a p h i c a l r e f e r e n c e s

Primary sourcesFìrùzàbàdì, Mu™ì† = Majd ad-Dìn Mu™ammad ibn

Ya≠qùb al-Fìrùzàbàdì, al-Qàmùs al-mu™ì†. 4 vols. Cairo, 1357 A.H.

Ibn Fàris, Íà™ibì = ±Abù l-£usayn ±A™mad Ibn Fàris, aß-Íà™ibì fì fiqh al-luÿa wa-sunan al-≠Arab fì

kalàmihà. Ed. Moustafa el-Chouémi. Cairo: Qußùr aμ-Âaqàfa, 1964.

Ibn Hišàm, Muÿnì = Jamàl ad-Dìn ≠Abù Mu™ammad ≠Abdallàh ibn Yùsuf Ibn Hišàm, Muÿnì l-labìb ≠an kutub al-±a≠àrìb. Ed. Màzin al-Mubàrak and Mu™ammad ≠Alì £amdallàh. Damascus: Dàr al-Fikr, 1969.

Ibn ±Is™àq, Sìra = ±Abù Bakr Mu™ammad Ibn ±Is™àq, as-Sìra an-nabawiyya (in the recension of ±Abù Mu™ammad ≠Abd al-Malik Ibn Hišàm). Ed. Muß†afà as-Saqà, ±Ibràhìm al-±Ibyàrì, and ≠Abd al-£àfiΩ Šalabì. 4 vols. Cairo: Muß†afà al-Bàbì al-£alabì, 1936.

Jà™iΩ, Bayàn = ±Abù ≠Uμmàn ≠Amr ibn Ba™r Jà™iΩ, al-Bayàn wa-t-tabyìn. Ed. £asan as-Sandùbì. 3 vols. Beirut: Dàr al-Fikr, n.d.

Sìbawayhi, Kitàb = ±Abù Bišr ≠Amr ibn ≠Uμmàn Sìbawayhi, al-Kitàb. Ed. ≠Abd as-Salàm Mu™ammad Hàrùn. 5 vols. Repr., Cairo: Maktabat al-Xànjì, 1982.

Zajjàjì, Łar™ = ±Abù l-Qàsim ≠Abd ar-Ra™màn ibn ±Is™àq, Łar™ Durrat an-nawàßì.

Zubaydì, ¢abaqàt = ±Abù Bakr Mu™ammad ibn al-£asan az-Zubaydì, ¢abaqàt an-na™wiyyìna wa-l-luÿawiyyìn. Ed. Mu™ammad ±Abù l-Fa∂l ±Ibràhìm. Cairo: Dàr al-Ma≠àrif, 1973.

Secondary sources±Anìs, ±Ibràhìm. 1952. Fì l-lahajàt al-≠arabiyya. Cairo:

al-Maktaba al-±Anglù al-Mißriyya.Bernards, Monique. 1997. Changing traditions: al-

Mubarrad’s refutation of Sìbawayh and the subse-quent reception of the Kitàb. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Blachère, Régis. 1950. “Les savants iraquiens et leurs informateurs bédouins aux IIe–IVe siècles de l’Hégire”. Mélanges offerts à William Marçais, 17–48. Paris: G.-F. Maisonneuve.

Blau, Joshua. 1965. The emergence and linguistic background of Judaeo-Arabic: A study of the ori-gins of Middle Arabic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——. 1988. “On the problem of the synthetic char-acter of Classical Arabic as against Judaeo-Arabic (Middle Arabic)”. Joshua Blau, Studies in Middle Arabic and its Judaeo-Arabic variety, 260–269. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988.

Chejne, Anwar G. 1969. The Arabic language: Its role in history. Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press.

Corriente, Federico. 1971. “On the functional yield of some synthetic devices in Arabic and Semitic morphology”. Jewish Quarterly Review 62.20–50.

——. 1973. “Again on the functional yield of some synthetic devices in Arabic and Semitic morphol-ogy”. Jewish Quarterly Review 64.154–163.

Diem, Werner. 1973. “Die nabatäischen Inschriften und die Frage der Kasusflexion im Altarabischen”. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesell-schaft 123.227–237.

Fleisch, Henri. 1947. Introduction à l’étude des langues sémitiques: Eléments de bibliographie. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve.

——. 1964. “Arabe classique et arabe dialectal”. Travaux et Jours 12.23–62.

Fück, Johann. 1950. ≠Arabiya: Untersuchungen zur arabischen Sprach- und Stilgeschichte. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

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Geyer, R. 1909. Review of Vollers (1906). Götting-ische Gelehrte Anzeigen 171.

Gindì, A. al-. 1983. al-Lahajàt al-≠arabiyya fì t-turàμ. Beirut: ad-Dàr al-≠Arabiyya li-l-Kitàb.

Holes, Clive. 1995. Modern Arabic: Structures, func-tions and varieties. London: Longman.

Kahle, Paul. 1948. “The Qur±àn and the ≠arabiyyah”. Ignaze Goldziher Memorial, ed. S. Löwinger and J. Somogyi, I, 163–182. Budapest.

Naßßàr, H. 1988. al-Mu≠jam al-≠arabì: Naš±atuhu wa-ta†awwuruhu. Cairo: Maktaba Mißr.

Nöldeke, Theodor. 1904. Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft. Strasbourg: K. Trübner.

——. 1910. Neue Beiträge zur semitischen Sprach-wissenschaft. Strasbourg: K. Trübner.

Owens, Jonathan. 1998. “Case and Proto-Arabic”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61:1.51–73.

Rabin, Chaim. 1951. Ancient West Arabian. Lon-don: Taylor’s Foreign Press.

——. 1955. ”The beginnings of Classical Arabic”. Studia Islamica 4.19–37.

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Muhammad al-Sharkawi(American University in Cairo)

Prepositions

Prepositions may be defined as function words indicating the relation of a noun or pronoun to other words in the clause. Thus, the study of prepositions includes aspects of morphol-ogy and syntax as well as the lexicon itself. This entry classifies the prepositions of Arabic, briefly describes their most important forms, and outlines their usage in Classical, Modern Standard, and modern dialectal Arabic.

All prepositions in Arabic, regardless of whether they are classified as ‘primary preposi-tions’ or ‘secondary prepositions’ (see discus-

sion below), share several syntactic features. First, they always precede the noun they gov-ern – in other words, in Arabic there are no postpositions. Second, all Arabic prepositions require the genitive case; hence, in Arabic they are called ™urùf al-jarr ‘particles of the genitive’ (other terms used by the native grammarians for prepositions are ™urùf al-xaf∂, ™urùf al-±i∂àfa, and al-jawàrr). This salient feature of Arabic prepositions applies to the Classical and Modern Standard forms of the language, but not to the dialects, because the latter have given up case marking. Third, if the dependent item is a pronoun rather than a noun, it is usually suffixed to the preposition. This rule requires the repetition of the preposition in coordina-tive phrases, since only one single suffix can be attached to it, e.g. minnì wa-minka ‘from me and you’. There are very few prepositions that do not normally take suffixes, except in poetic language. Among them are ™attà ‘until’, mu≈ ~ mun≈u ‘since’, ka- ‘like’, and the compound preposition bi-là ‘without’. The preposition ka-, however, is sometimes prefixed to an indepen-dent pronoun, e.g. ka-huwa ‘like him’.

There is still no commonly accepted defini-tion of which Arabic words are prepositions. This is mainly the result of the fact that many of the words which Western concepts of gram-mar consider prepositions are not regarded as such by the Classical Arabic grammarians. For the latter, only a very few words (the number ranges between eight and fifteen, depending upon the grammarian) are real prepositions (i.e. ™urùf al-jarr) and thus belong to the word class of particles ( ™arf ). In grammars of Arabic, these words are often called ‘primary preposi-tions’ or ‘true prepositions’. Those words that are considered to be primary prepositions by Arab and Western grammarians alike are the following (a hyphen indicates that the word in question is attached to a following noun in Arabic script): ≠alà ‘on’; ≠an ‘away from’; bi- ‘with, in’; fì ‘in’; ™attà ‘until’; ±ilà ‘to, toward’; li- ‘for’; ka- ‘like’; min ‘from, of’; and mu≈ ~ mun≈u ‘since’ (< *min ≈ù; Arab grammarians give a sophisticated rule concerning mu≈ ~ mun≈u governing the nominative instead of the genitive; see Wright 1974:II, 173–174). In most Western grammars of Arabic, ma≠a ‘together with’ and ladà ~ ladun (with many variants) ‘at’ are also regarded as primary prepositions, whereas Arab grammarians include the different

prepositions


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