Abstract This paper surveys the distribution of the suffix /-(ə)m/, which marks the masculine plural on verbs in Mehreyyet, a Modern South Arabian language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman. It argues that the suffixation is phonologically conditioned: the suffix appears wherever the final stem vowel was diachronically non-low (Proto-West Semitic */i/ or */u/), which later merged and shifted to */ə/. The paper presents parallel evidence from other West Modern South Arabian (WMSA) languages, including Ħarsusi, Batħari, Yemeni Mehri and Hobyot, in which the cognate suffix appears in a wider, more generalized distribution. On the basis of this evidence, the paper argues that the restricted, phonologically conditioned distribution found in Mehreyyet represents the more archaic state, from which the broader distributions attested in the other WMSA languages subsequently developed through analogical generalization. The implications of these findings for the reconstruction of the ProtoMSA plural marking system are briefly considered.
During its long history, Akkadian typically did not mark its direct objects syntactically, until Neo-Assyrian. This dialect inconsistently marks direct objects with the preposition ana, a preposition that otherwise marks direction. Many scholars have suggested that this development must be a result of contact with Aramaic, where direct objects may be marked with the directional preposition l-. In this paper I will argue that an internal change in Assyrian explains this development better.
Folio 14b of Bodleian Library Ms. Heb. g. 8/2, from the Cairo Geniza, contains a series of 23 proverbs in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic arranged in an alphabetic acrostic. Some of the proverbs are parallel to those found in the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira, while some others are indebted to deuterocanonical Ben Sira or rabbinic maxims; one is exactly parallel to a proverb from the 5th century bce Elephantine Sayings of Ahiqar. It is likely that this list is taken from an alternate version of the Alphabet of Ben Sira, no longer extant, and testifies to the fluidity of the pseudepigraphic Ben Sira tradition.
This contribution presents three excerpts from a Modern Western Aramaic interview collected in December 2020 in Maaloula, Syria. In the interview, the narrator relates his own biographical details, the legendary life of Thecla, and a personal account of a miraculous healing. The local traditions concerning Thecla feature distinctive motifs, including the miraculous opening of the mountain to admit the saint, the miraculous growth of wheat to deceive her pursuers, and a miraculous spring of water from a rock. These accounts are compared to earlier literary sources, such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Life and Miracles of Thecla, as well as prior mwa literature. The analysis highlights how the Maaloulian variants re-inscribe Thecla's legend onto the local landscape, incorporating motifs that parallel earlier Christian apocrypha and pagan cult practices, such as healing through incubation at the shrine, and identifying mutual influence between Thecla's legend and those of other saints.
This paper investigates the so-called halhham (h-l-h-m) letter order, arguing that it served as the foundational organizational principle of the first alphabet and was transmitted via distinct 'letter families' that functioned as acrophonic mnemonics. By analyzing the Ancient North Arabian (ANA) corpora-including Dhofari, Taymanitic, Thamudic B, and Himaitic inscriptions-the study reconstructs three stable initial clusters: hlhmq, ws(2)rbt, and s(1)kn. It is further posited that these clusters were utilized as pronounceable pseudo-words to facilitate literacy, predating and perhaps inspiring the later Arabic abjad-hawwaz mnemonic system. Furthermore, the paper highlights a significant scribal evolution: while nomadic groups maintained these mnemonic families, sedentary societies such as those speaking Ancient South Arabian and Dadanitic eventually adopted institutionalized educational practices, including oral dictation and visual transcription. This transition reflects a shift from memory-based oral transmission to regulated scribal practice, though the underlying halham order remained a constant across the Peninsula.
This article presents a description of a hitherto unknown artefact, a linen scroll that contains a series of Jewish Aramaic magic texts. It is one of a pair of linen scroll texts; the scrolls are presently in a private collection, and nothing is known about their archaeological provenance. However, through examination of the probable date of the scroll, the name of its owner, the drawings it contains, and certain linguistic aspects, this article demonstrates that we can safely conjecture that the linen scrolls should be contextualized alongside the corpus of Jewish Aramaic magic bowls. The article also presents an editio princeps of one of the texts on the scroll.
This paper suggests that the Islamic work of Kitab al-Tijan preserves a vague memory of the Ancient South Arabian deity 'Attar, in a pre-Islamic legend concerning a figure named Qayl bin 'Attar, who, according to the legend, led a delegation to perform a rain-invocation rite. Along with other distortions, the name of 'Attar was distorted to 'Anz, in the published edition. However, a survey of the early manuscripts, not used in the published edition, reveals the presumably original form as 'tr ('Attar). The survey opens new avenues for research, and highlights the uniqueness of Kitab al-Tijan and its significant potential to enhance our understanding of the South Arabian religion and to reconstruct its lost mythology.
The well-known borrowing of the Sumerian sexagesimal number system by Akkadians manifests itself not only within the domain of numerical notation, but also in the forms of the underlying Akkadian number words and their syntactic structure. Here, one linguistic consequence of the adoption of the sexagesimal system is addressed, the long-standing issue of the form and etymology of the Akkadian & scaron;u-& scaron;i 'sixty'. The article puts forth the following claims: first, that the original Akkadian word for 60 was not & scaron;u-& scaron;i but *& scaron;e/i & scaron;& scaron;& amacr;; second, that the original *& scaron;e/i & scaron;& scaron;& amacr; was not suitable to function as a base within the newly adopted sexagesimal system; and, finally, that the new base & scaron;u-& scaron;i, which supplanted the original Akkadian word for 60, represents a repurposing of the fraction & scaron;u & scaron;& scaron;u 'one-sixth'. The arguments are grounded in historical linguistics and typology, relying on a combination of internal Akkadian, comparative Semitic, and cross-linguistic evidence.
The impact of Arabic and Ancient North Arabian on the Nabataean corpus is well known. While Arabisms in the Nabataean inscriptions have received significant attention, the small, yet crucial corpus of Nabataean papyri remains relatively understudied in this regard. In this study, we reassess the possible North Arabian loanwords, especially those suggested by the first editors of the papyri and by Ada Yardeni in various separate studies. Based on the criteria of phonology, morphology, and attestation, we conclude that roughly half of the suggested examples cannot plausibly be attributed to borrowing from Arabic or other North Arabian languages. The low but significant number of remaining, plausible Arabisms strongly cluster in the semantic field of legal and financial technology, supporting the view that Arabic influence on Nabataean may have been more restricted in scope than has long been thought.
This study examines the interactions between codas and onsets across syllable boundaries in Arabic as exemplified by Quranic Arabic. It provides empirical evidence supporting the syllable contact law, which prohibits rising sonority across syllable boundaries. The data comprises 4,549 syllables extracted from four Quranic chapters. Analysis of wordinternal 1,049 closed syllables shows that 85% of them adheres to the syllable contact law, i.e., the coda is more sonorous or equal in sonority to the onset in the immediately following syllable. The 15% of cases with rising sonority appear to be marked. Many of them appear in complex morphological processes. Also, vowel epenthesis is resorted to in many places resulting in better syllable contact. Moreover, total assimilation is invoked in many cases, resulting in a geminate with better syllable contact. The findings show that the syllable contact law constitutes a strong but gradient constraint in Arabic that is driven by markedness.
Most of the linguistic variation reported by the Arab grammarians has been ignored in linguistic scholarship, which has assumed that the grammarians prescribed a set of strict norms. This paper argues that the scholarly assumption is a misreading of what the grammarians say, and it is not reflected in written Arabic. By not appreciating the linguistic variation in Classical Arabic writing, classicisms are potentially misinterpreted as vernacularisms. Presenting the work of the grammarians, who were much more permissive of linguistic variation than usually appreciated, this paper goes on to show that such variation is in actual use. This provides evidence that what the grammarians describe is not just a collection of (non-standard) curiosities. By examining the use of linguistic features described by the grammarians, Quranic recitation and later classical Arabic prose texts, this paper shows that these features are part of Classical Arabic proper. This casts new light on how we evaluate linguistic features in Middle Arabic.
Nasr Allah ibn Mi'm & amacr;r is a heretofore unknown Jewish Karaite poet. Most likely, his father was Aharon Mi'm & amacr;r-a cantor whose name turns up in documents from the Firkovitch Collection. To date, six of Ibn Mi'm & amacr;r's poems have been discovered in the Firkovitch Collection. Most deal with his indigence and other tribulations and belong to the genre al-faraj ba'da l-& Scaron;idda literature. Another poem offers a debate song that contains indications that his verse was performed-read aloud or sung-before a Jewish audience. In my estimation, this same figure was among the storytellers active in seventeenth-century Egypt. The goodnatured humour woven throughout his poetry suggests that he functioned, in modern terms, much like a stand-up comic. The manuscripts that preserved Ibn Mi'm & amacr;r's verse authentically represent his 17th century Egyptian vernacular. Above all, these documents capture the shift of the Arabic q & amacr;f to & gdot;ayn, monophthongization of the CA diphthongs ay and aw into the long vowels & imacr; and & umacr; respectively and internal and final 'im & amacr;la.
The article presents a critical edition and discussion of the Genizah fragment MS Oxford Bodl. heb. e 27.1-6. This Genizah fragment includes Saadya Gaon's Judaeo-Arabic introduction of his translation (tafs & imacr;r) of the Pentateuch and translation of Gen. 1:1 - 3:5. The scribe who copied this Genizah fragment is probably the Genizah scribe Ab & umacr; l-Bay & amacr;n Moshe b. Levi ha-Levi (d. 1212), based on his handwriting in various documents including correspondence with Maimonides, his maq & amacr;ma and several poems, drafts of letters that he wrote to Jewish leaders in Egypt and Yemen, and more.
This article investigates linguistic variation among the dialects of Rabbinic Hebrew, specifically, between the Hebrew of the Tannaitic period (ending ca. 300 Ce) and that of the Talmudic (Amoraic) period (ca. 300-600 Ce), including both Western (a.k.a. Palestinian) and Babylonian varieties. It identifies an isogloss centered on the idioms and ('departed [from the world]', and 'at the time of his departure [from the world]', respectively), used to denote death. Rabbinic sources exhibit dialectal variation in the use of these expressions. Through critical analysis of the textual evidence, the study disentangles cases of textual contamination and clarifies distinct usage patterns within each dialectal tradition. In addition to identifying a new isogloss, the article offers a case study demonstrating the importance of rigorous philological scrutiny in the dialectological study of Rabbinic Hebrew.
This paper discusses a unique, hitherto overlooked phenomenon in the emergence period of Modern Hebrew: the regular employment of two prepositions, 'axare 'after' and 'al yede 'by means of', as causal conjunctions. Despite the initial distribution of this usage, it did not integrate into present-day Modern Hebrew but was abruptly discarded following the consolidation of Hebrew as a spoken language in the early 1920s. Analysis of a vast textual corpus representing language use in the early Hebrew press over six decades in the seminal period of the modernization (1870s-1930s) indicates the regular employment of both prepositions as causal conjunctions (alongside their original temporal/instrumental functions) up to the 1920s, and the sudden disappearance of this usage thereafter. The paper focuses on the differing degrees of conventionalization of the two usages, and highlights the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors involved in the rise and decline of this unique phenomenon.
