Arabian Dialects Research Articles

Chariots, mail coaches and wagons in the Arabic dialect of Qaṭrāyīth (“in Qatari”) in early Islamic eastern Arabia

AbstractThis paper will present the evidence for two newly discovered words, gawzag and shagar, meaning “two-horse chariot/mail coach” and “wagon” respectively in the eastern Arabian dialect of Qaṭrāyīth (Syriac for “in Qatari”) of the seventh and eighth centuries ce. They reveal the continued local knowledge of wheeled transport in Arabia and possible use long after its supposed disappearance in the Near East between the fourth and sixth centuries according to Richard Bulliet's well-known thesis in his seminal work The Camel and the Wheel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). The fact that this vernacular maintained two specific words for two different modes of wheeled transport likely suggests a practical need for them in everyday communication among the inhabitants of the Beth Qaṭraye region (Syriac for “region of the Qataris” in north-eastern Arabia). Moreover, their use in an Arabic dialect reveals that native words were developed for wheeled vehicles in the local language spoken by the inhabitants of the area well before the adoption of markabah as a neologism to mean chariot in nineteenth-century Arabic, according to Michael Macdonald's stimulating article “Wheels in a land of camels” (Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 20/2, 2009). Thus, the various rock drawings of two-wheeled carts and chariots in northern Arabia may in fact not only have been known but also used nearby in eastern Arabia, rather than being inaccurate representations reflecting a distant awareness of the existence of chariots elsewhere such as in Mesopotamia and Egypt as had been previously thought. This is a literary, philological. and historical study that aims at presenting newly discovered vocabulary in context for further analysis by linguists and others.

Abha Arabic

Abha Arabic is a dialect of Arabic (ISO 693-3: ara), belonging to the Semitic language family group, and spoken primarily in Abha city. Abha Arabic can be broadly classified as a variety of Arabic from the Arabian Peninsula group (Versteegh, 2014), and further sub-classified as a south (-west) Arabian dialect (Ingham, 1982). Abha city is the administrative capital of the province of Asir, in south-west Saudi Arabia (Figure 1). The population of Abha is approximately 290,185 and that of the Asir province is 1,601,725, according to the most recent data on the population (General Authority for Statistics, 2010). The province is named after the Asir tribe, who first inhabited Abha and the surrounding regions. The present day Abha Arabic dialect thus represents a blending of Bedouin and urban dialects. The first settlers to Abha were the Bani-Mghed tribe (an Asir tribe) followed by three additional Asir tribes (Alkam, Rabiah w Rufeda, Bani-Malik) and other nearby tribes such as the Gahtaːn, Bal-lahmir, Bal-lasmir, Shahran, Rejal Alma’, all of which had distinct dialects (Al-Azraqi, 1998). These dialects merged to varying degrees and were further influenced by urban education and mass media, which were and continue to be dominated by Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) (Al-Azraqi, 1998).1

Ruʾūs al-Jibāl Arabic in Context: A Proposal for an Expanded Typology of Southeastern Arabian Dialects

Abstract This paper seeks to clearly outline the features that distinguish Ruʾūs al-Jibāl Arabic (also called Šiḥḥī Arabic, Musandam Arabic) spoken on the Omani peninsula from surrounding dialects. Comparison with nearby Arabic varieties yields a few areal features (in segmental phonology) that establish a dialect continuum from the coasts of northern Oman to Musandam. A large number of phonological similarities between Ruʾūs al-Jibāl Arabic and Dhofari Arabic are then documented here for the first time. This robust but discontinuous link re-frames many of the peculiarities of Ruʾūs al-Jibāl Arabic as vestiges of a coastal southern Arabian dialect group. This finding fits a wellknown ancient pattern of northward population movements out of south Arabia, and allows for a more effective delineation of innovations unique to Ruʾūs al-Jibāl . It also offers a direction forward for an expanded framework for the classification of the Arabic dialects of southeastern Arabia, incorporating Oman's peripheries at Dhofar and Musandam.

THE QURAN AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION ABOUT THE FEATURES OF MORPHOLOGY IN ANCIENT ARABIAN DIALECTS

The goal of this study is to demonstrate the significance of the Qur'an as a source of linguistic information about the morphology of the Arabian dialects in the pre-Islamic period. The paper analyze the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches to identifying the dialect layer of the Quranic vocabulary. Among the traditional approaches, we could mention an appeal to the lexicographic works of medieval Arab authors, containing information on the dialect vocabulary in the Qur'an, and the usage of epigraphic sources as comparative material. The study also demonstrates the importance of the chronology of the Quranic text compilation as a potential criterion for identifying vocabulary related to the Meccan and Medinan dialects. This, along with turning to new approaches to studying the morphology of the Arabic language, allows expanding knowledge about the sociolinguistic situation in Arabia in the time of the emergence of Islam.

PELESAPAN DAN PENGGANTIAN BUNYI BAHASA ARAB

The objects of this research are the forms of ellipsis and sound substitution, which occur in Arabic. Those are fuṣÊa Arabic which belong to Egyptian and Saudi Arabian dialects. This research will benefit those who learn and teach Arabic as well as the researcher of Arabic language. As a library research, the data was taken from books, journals, and websites. Subtitution and ellipsis may happen for the purpose of making the sound expression easier to be pronounced, e.g qaf becomes hamzah, jim becomes gain in Egyptian dialect or qaf becomes gain, żal becomes dal in Saudi Arabian dialect. The subtitution and ellipsis also occure with the purpose of simplification as what happens in he removal of ta ta’nis and ta’marbuṭoh.

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XIII-XIV (review)

Reviewed by: Perspectives on Arabic linguistics XIII-XIV ed. by Dilworth B. Parkinson, Elabbas Benmamoun Andrew Nevins Perspectives on Arabic linguistics XIII-XIV. Ed. by Dilworth B. Parkinson and Elabbas Benmamoun. (Current issues in linguistic theory 230.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. 250. ISBN 1588112721. $102 (Hb). This collection represents a broad range of linquistic questions posed with respect to Arabic, including phonetic studies and experiments on L2 acquisition, that were presented at the thirteenth and fourteenth meetings of the Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics conference. The first four papers are phonetic and phonological studies. Ghada Khattab reports on ‘VOT production in English and Arabic bilingual and monolingual children’. The phonological categories of voiced and voiceless stops have different phonetic correlates in English and Arabic: While English contrasts short lag and long lag, Arabic contrasts long lead and short lag. Although the VOT range for English voiced stops overlaps with the range for Arabic voiceless stops, Khattab finds that bilingual children mostly acquire separate VOT patterns for each language, with exceptions explained through developmental patterns rather than language interference. Bushra Adnan Zawaydeh, Keiichi Tajima, and Mafuyu Kitahara, in ‘Discovering Arabic rhythm through a speech cycling task’, describe a task in which speakers repeat cycling-phrases in time with a metronome. The study attempts to determine which prosodic units occur isochronously and whether the classic categorization of languages as syllable-timed vs. stress-timed can be upheld. Results reveal that Japanese speakers tend to align the halfway point of the interval with the last syllable of the phrase while English and Arabic speakers align the halfway point with the last stressed syllable. Adamantios Gafos, in ‘An argument for a stem-based view of Arabic morphology: Doubled verbs revisited’, departs from the traditional view that reduced stem forms of biliteral roots (e.g. madd-a) are derived by syncope from extended forms (madad-tu) and suggests the reverse: that phonotactics demand epenthesis to syllabify maddtu. However, the explanation comes at a cost: A morphological stipulation must rule out otherwise licit maddatu. Though Gafos’s argumentation is interesting, some tableaux (e.g. ex. 6) omit plausible candidates, and one constraint (*Split, p. 76) is never defined. Robert Ratcliffe compares Classical and Moroccan Arabic plurals through an extended database classification of semipredictable and semiproductive patterns in ‘The broken plural system of Moroccan Arabic: Diachronic and cognitive perspectives’. He arrives at the conclusion that ‘speakers have no knowledge of rules—but that these systematic patterns facilitate memorization’ (94). The next four papers are on various topics. Frederick Hoyt, in ‘Impersonal agreement as a specificity effect in rural Palestinian Arabic’, notes the optionality of verbal agreement with indefinite subjects of unaccusatives. When verbal agreement occurs, the DP is interpreted as more specific. Hoyt proposes that nonspecific indefinites lack a determiner and hence do not participate in case and agreement relations. Readers should be alerted that some of the crucial glosses in Hoyt’s paper (e.g. ex. 2) are reversed. Fatima Sadiqi studies ‘The syntax of small clauses in Moroccan Arabic’ and finds that in constructions with glosses like ‘I considered [Leyla intelligent]’, the small clause behaves as its own constituent with respect to binding, coordination, and adverbial modification. In Sadiqi’s analysis, the embedded subject receives case from the matrix predicate, explaining the fact that it must precede the embedded predicate. In ‘Borrowing discourse patterns: French rhetoric in Arabic legal texts’, Ahmed Fakhri documents a change in Moroccan court decisions from a more narrative discourse to the syllogistic style of French decisions. In ‘What is a secret language? A case from a Saudi Arabian dialect’, Muhammad Hasan Bakall describes Misf, a Meccan secret language from the 1950s, the corpora of which reveal a pattern of -VVrb- infixation, for example, kul → kuurbul. The last three papers are experimental investigations of L1 and L2 acquisition. Adel Abu Radwan studies how L2 learners of Arabic interpret VNN structures in ‘Sentence processing strategies: An application of the competition model to Arabic’. In interpreting which noun is the agent, will subjects use word order cues...

Bruce Ingham: North East Arabian dialects. (Library of Arabic Linguistics, Monograph No. 3.) xxiii, 208, 18 pp. [Arabic Summary.] London, Boston and Melbourne: Kegan Paul International, 1982. £25.

Bruce Ingham: North East Arabian dialects. (Library of Arabic Linguistics, Monograph No. 3.) xxiii, 208, 18 pp. [Arabic Summary.] London, Boston and Melbourne: Kegan Paul International, 1982. £25. - Volume 46 Issue 3

North East Arabian Dialects. By Bruce Ingham. (Library of Arabic Linguistics, Monograph No. 3.) pp. xxv, 208, 17. London and Boston, Kegan Paul International, 1982. £25.

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