Arabic in Semitic linguistic history.

• Author: Mendenhall, George E.
• Position: Report

INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENT STATE

The nineteenth-century classification of Arabic and Ethiopic as a separate, South Semitic, category of the Semitic languages has had serious deleterious effects upon progress in Semitic historical linguistics. In recognition of this, some scholars recently have begun placing it instead alongside the various Northwest Semitic languages in a category labeled "Central Semitic." It is the purpose of the present paper to point out manifold connections between Arabic and what is usually termed Northwest Semitic, connections that call into question the established tradition (embedded in the standard textbooks and handbooks) of treating Arabic as a South Semitic language. At the same time it calls for a drastic overhaul of present ideas about Semitic social and linguistic history, and the placement of Arabic in that history.

The fact that the various languages of the Semitic family have common features that make the classification possible implies also the necessity of recognizing the fact that at some time and place in linguistic history those various populations had been in verbal contact with each other. In the nineteenth century the theoretical "common Semitic" or Ursemitisch furnished the point of contact, but only in theory. Some scholars today are beginning to move away from the idea that there ever was any such thing as a coherent and uniform "Primitive Semitic." Regardless, it is a theory that has only limited usefulness in accounting for the observed diversity within the Semitic family of languages. There is now a need for a much more historically oriented method of research. This process is long overdue, and is made possible now because of a number of discoveries and developments in the past several decades. However, in some circles a major handicap to progress is the persistence of the old nineteenth-century obsession with nomads, and the concomitant idea that the Semitic language population groups originated in nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula (Kupper 1957: xiv-xv). This misguided idea doubtless originated from the observation of Herodotus who reported that:

According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. This people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Red Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit ... For centuries scholars have jumped to the conclusion that if the Phoenicians came from Arabia, then the other speakers of Semitic languages, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Arameans, and Hebrews, must also have migrated to their respective parts of the Near East from the Arabian homeland. This old nineteenth-century theory of successive waves of nomads each bringing a new Semitic language from the Arabian desert was seen to be ridiculous by Albert Clay already in 1919, yet some scholars still hold to it, perhaps because so far there has not been a plausible alternative available. Recent attempts to redirect the search for the "homeland" of the Semitic languages from Arabia to Africa (see Lipiriski 1997: 44) merely substitute one weak explanation for another while ignoring the abundance of evidence demonstrating influences on East and North Africa from Western Asia over the course of millennia.

No one could question the importance of Arabia for the history of the Semitic languages, but it is now clear--or it should be--that its importance lies on a plane drastically different from that which nineteenth-century scholars posited. It has been known for decades (Parr et al. 1968) that there was no perceptible population in the northwestern Arabian peninsula contiguous to the Syro-Palestinian region of Northwest Semitic until near the end of the Late Bronze Age, when five walled towns suddenly appeared in the northwestern Hejaz, while there are more settlements in EB Palestine and Syria than in any other period until the Byzantine era. It is here suggested, accordingly, that the origins of the linguistic phenomena characteristic of Arabic are to be located in the population of Syro-Palestinian groups who, in response to the increasing turmoil and violence of the Late Bronze Age, migrated south to the relatively remote and untouched regions of Arabia. Thus, instead of viewing Arabia as the early homeland from which the later Semitic language groups departed, we should view it as a late refuge to which population groups from Syria and Palestine migrated. They took with them, of course, their material culture, and above all their Bronze Age linguistic repertoire.

THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS

In chapter ten of The Syllabic Inscriptions from Byblos, I outlined briefly the present state of knowledge concerning Semitic-speaking populations in the Early Bronze Age, and their probable relationships to later, better known, languages. Four such regions of high population density are well attested archaeologically: Mesopotamia with its Akkadian language; northeastern Syria, the homeland of the Amorites and their language, known only from personal names and its influence on Akkadian resulting in Old Babylonian and Assyrian, and on West Semitic resulting in Ugaritic; north-central Syria, for which we have little evidence in the Bronze Age (I term their language the "Inland Dialect" which became Aramaic); and finally, the "Coastal Dialect" of the later Palestine/Phoenician region.

Also there is emphasis upon the fact that there cannot be a neat uniformity of speech over a large population area: that there is always a contrast between urban language and that of the countryside; that even in an urban environment there is almost certainly a contrast between the language the educated elite used in composing the official documents that archaeologists unearth for us to read, and the language the man in the street or suq used in everyday conversation. This phenomenon, which has been termed diglossia, is attested not only at Late Bronze Ugarit, but has also become increasingly in evidence from pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions. This has been powerfully reinforced by the comments of Graf and Zwettler on two North Arabian inscriptions from Jordan: "What is striking about both texts is that they are written completely in an early form of Old or even Classical Arabic. The date is problematic, but because of the Nabataean cultural elements embedded in the texts, we would date them to around the beginning of our era" (2004: 53-89).

It is the rapid disappearance...