Abstract
MS T-S Ar.5.58 is a translation glossary from the Cairo Geniza that contains a list of Judaeo-Arabic glosses for Hebrew words from the biblical book of Samuel. These Arabic words are fully vocalised with the Tiberian Hebrew pointing system, providing more precise phonetic information about the scribe’s native Arabic dialect than could be expressed with standard Arabic vowel signs. This pointing reveals linguistic features known from modern varieties of vernacular Arabic, including a conditional tendency to raise /a/ to /e/ and a reflex of ǧīm as /g/. The manuscript can be dated between the tenth and twelfth centuries, making it an important source for the history of spoken medieval Arabic and Middle Arabic writing.
Highlights
A perennial problem of Arabic historical dialectology is the relative paucity of manuscripts that clearly record non-Classical forms
The Arabic words in this glossary are fully vocalised with Tiberian Hebrew vowel signs, and this pointing system allowed the scribe to record vocalic allophones – most notably /e/ – from their native Arabic dialect
They used the Tiberian šewa to indicate stress patterns in Arabic words, and their distribution of the dageš dot suggests that they realised Arabic ǧīm as a voiced velar stop /g/
Summary
A perennial problem of Arabic historical dialectology is the relative paucity of manuscripts that clearly record non-Classical forms. The šewa sign (ֹ )אrepresented silence at a syllable break, or /a/, equivalent to pataḥ.[15] This latter šewa is known as ‘vocalic’ šewa, and it occurs where the Masoretes pronounced an epenthetic vowel in place of a historic lexical vowel, predominantly in unstressed, open syllables.[16] Qameṣ (/ɔ/) and segol (/ɛ/) do not appear in the Arabic of T-S Ar.5.58, but the other seven signs do They all seem to retain their original Tiberian functions, which allowed the scribe to record allophonic features like imāla and to use šewa as a marker of Arabic stress patterns
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