Abstract
This article suggests that the dual suffix in pre-Islamic Arabic did not differentiate for case. Tamīm, one of the most trustworthy pre-Islamic dialects, treated the dual suffix invariably although it had a full case system. There are also tokens of the same invariable treatment in the Qurʾān. The article proposes that the suffix long vowel variation due to the phenomenon of ʾimāla makes the formal origin of the invariable dual suffix difficult to ascribe to the East and Northwest Semitic oblique dual allomorph.Keywords: Dual, pre-Islamic Arabic, ʾimāla, Classical Arabic, vowel harmony.
Highlights
This article discusses data on the dual suffix in pre-Islamic dialects from medieval Arab grammarians and manuals of qirāāt to suggest that the status of the dual suffix in the preIslamic Arabic linguistic situation was unique among the Semitic languages.1 The article does not, seek to take a comparative Semitic framework
Despite the limited and sporadic data about the morphological and syntactic aspects of pre-Islamic Arabic,2 the dual suffix3 is one of the features of pre-Islamic Arabic dialects that can shed light on both the position of grammatical case4 in the Arabic dialects in the peninsula, and how it came to be standardized after the emergence of Islam
One question is why did he do this despite the fact that his tribe Tamīm treated the dual suffix invariably? Another question is why did he read the predicate with an ambiguousalif despite his Tamīmi origin that is supposed to have usedimāla?If Tamīm did not decline the dual suffix for case as thegrammarians claim, both the subject and the predicate must have been given the same dual suffix
Summary
This article discusses data on the dual suffix in pre-Islamic dialects from medieval Arab grammarians and manuals of qirāāt to suggest that the status of the dual suffix in the preIslamic Arabic linguistic situation was unique among the Semitic languages. The article does not, seek to take a comparative Semitic framework. According to the theoretical grammatical concept of samā / naql ‘data transmission’, data from pre-Islamic dialects, poetry, speech of the Prophet and the Qurān are all trustworthy and eloquent These data sources reflect a formal picture of the dual suffix that is at once contradictory with the dual suffix in Classical Arabic and indicative of an arbitrary standardization of the that suffix as I will suggest in this article. Despite the formal similarity with Hebrew, we know from testimonials of medieval Arab grammarians that Najdi dialects in general and those of Tamīm in particular have given the dual the same oblique ending This contradicts the fact that Tamīm is one of the best three dialects in Arabic in realizing the case system in its full Semitic triptotic shape. I will come back to this statement once more in the discussion section
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