# The mother of Arabic?



## Ali.h

I heard that Sanskirit is the mother of the Persian language, what about Arabic? Does Arabic go back to Sanskrit at all? And if Aramaic is the mother of Arabic and Hebrew where does Aramaic itslef go abck to?


----------



## arsham

Sanskrit is one of the oldest Indo-European languages and is grammatically more conservative than others. That said the mother of Persian is Old Persian.

I don't think you can consider Aramaic as the ancester of Arabic. The current Syriac/Assyrian dialects spoken by certain Christian minorities in Northen Iraq, parts of Western Iran, Syria and Lebanon are continuations of Aramaic. That said, Arabic has a sizeable number of Aramaic loanwords.

P.S . I think this thread should be moved to the Etymology forum. <Moderator note: Done>


----------



## Mahaodeh

It has no "mother language" per se; it decended from Proto-Arabic, which decended from Proto-Semitic, both of which are not real languages. It has no connection with Sanskrit or any other Indo-European langauge, except for loan words here and there.


----------



## clevermizo

Mahaodeh said:


> It has no "mother language" per se; it decended from Proto-Arabic, which decended from Proto-Semitic, both of which are not real languages.



You're right that they're not real .. per se. It's mostly that they are not attested _in writing_. The point is we can't know much about Arabic's previous ancestor because we have no written record of it. We know Old Persian exists because it is attested. Old Arabic is unfortunately not attested. By the time Arabic was written it was recognizably Arabic as we know it, I believe.

Edit: I suppose it is conjectured that Arabic has its origins in Ancient North Arabian which is only known through a handful of ancient inscriptions.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Ali.h



> and if Aramaic is the mother of Arabic and hebrew where does Aramaic  itslef go abck to?


Aramaic is not the mother of either of those languages as far is known. Hebrew is attested as far back, if not further than Aramaic. Arabic contains much more conservative Semitic features than Aramaic for it to be a daughter.

Arsham,



> That said, Arabic has a sizeable number of Aramaic loanwords.


It does? How do you know this? How do you know they are not cognates?
Not saying there isn't, just like to know how it can be determined they're not cognates.

clevermizo,



> Edit: I suppose it is conjectured that Arabic has its origins in Ancient North Arabian which is only known through a  handful of ancient inscriptions.


Although little is known about the Ancient North Arabian dialects, what is know seems to point to them being dialects of Arabic of some form. Whether they were ancestors of or existed alongside al-fu67a in the same kind of diglossic situation we see today with the modern dialects, it could not really be known. Most of the Ancient North Arabian texts are in the form of "graffiti" so they wouldn't show us the literary language of the people, if one existed (like fu67a).

Something interesting about Ancient North Arabian is that it has some striking similarities with Hebrew like "ha" as a definite article, although it's also attested "al" was in use too.


----------



## sokol

Ali.h said:


> I heard that Sanskirit is the mother of the Persian language, what about Arabic? Does Arabic go back to Sanskrit at all? And if Aramaic is the mother of Arabic and Hebrew where does Aramaic itslef go abck to?


As your native language is Farsi (which is an Indoeuropean language just as is Sanskrit) it seems your original question has arisen from a wrong assumption that Farsi and Arabic (the latter of which had a huge impact on the former) too would go back to the same origin.

This is not the case, simple as that.

Farsi and Sanskrit belong to the Indo-European branch of languages, and Arabic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic branch of languages.

So far no linguist has been able to offer good arguments for linking those two branches together (there exist some quite exotic theories but they're highly hypothetical).
And even if someone ever would manage to do so then certainly Farsi would not be at the centre of such a theory as the influence of Arabic on Farsi is due to "recent history" in the terms of historical linguistics (as the Middle Ages indeed are "recent" for historical linguists ).


----------



## WadiH

Clevermizo,

You may know more about this than me, but my impression was that the number of Ancient North Arabian inscriptions available is strikingly high (in the tens of thousands if my memory is not playing tricks on me?). The problem, though, as Abu Rashid noted, is that they are not exactly literary masterpieces. They are mostly graffiti or short votive inscriptions.

The Wikipedia article you've linked it to is quite good by Wikipedia's poor standards. I know this because I've read the papers that this article is based on. Judging by the list of distinctions between Classical Arabic and ANA listed there, it seems ANA would have been more or less mutually intelligible with Classical Arabic. The only thing that stands out is the definite article. Aside from that, these are all features that existed in the Arabic dialects of the 8th century and continue to exist in modern Arabian dialects (notably the omission of the _hamza_ was a feature of the speech of the Hejaz). It's curious, though, how the article _al-_, though initially restricted to perhaps one dialect, was able to sweep across almost all of Arabia.


----------



## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> Ali.h
> 
> It does? How do you know this? How do you know they are not cognates?
> Not saying there isn't, just like to know how it can be determined they're not cognates.



Just to venture a guess here, there are a couple of ways that they can probably do it:

1 - if the word fits an Aramaic morphological pattern but not an Arabic one, then it's possibly a loan word (e.g. طاغوت, لاهوت, ناسوت)

2 - if the cognate can already be identified separately as a different word, then the word is possibly a loan word.  For example, the name of the prophet Noah in Arabic is نوح.  This is a loan word because we already know that the Arabic cognate of this root is ن و خ.  Another example I've come across is the word for monastery بيعة (_bay'ah_).  This is probably a borrowing from Syriac or Aramaic because the actual Arabic cognate is in fact بيضة (apparently, the ع sound was one of the reflexes of the phoneme ض in Aramaic).  So basically you can have a loan word existing in Arabic alongside its cognate.


----------



## clevermizo

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Clevermizo,
> 
> You may know more about this than me, but my impression was that the number of Ancient North Arabian inscriptions available is strikingly high (in the tens of thousands if my memory is not playing tricks on me?). The problem, though, as Abu Rashid noted, is that they are not exactly literary masterpieces. They are mostly graffiti or short votive inscriptions.



Hah! Well I obviously don't know more about this than you. Maybe I got it in my head that there were so few, when I should have remembered more correctly that they were _so short_. I agree; it would be rather difficult to consider whether an ANA inscription is ancestral to Arabic or contemporaneous, etc if they are just graffiti, which are probably limited to single sentences or phrases.



> The Wikipedia article you've linked it to is quite good by Wikipedia's poor standards. I know this because I've read the papers that this article is based on. Judging by the list of distinctions between Classical Arabic and ANA listed there, it seems ANA would have been more or less mutually intelligible with Classical Arabic. The only thing that stands out is the definite article. Aside from that, these are all features that existed in the Arabic dialects of the 8th century and continue to exist in modern Arabian dialects (notably the omission of the _hamza_ was a feature of the speech of the Hejaz). It's curious, though, how the article _al-_, though initially restricted to perhaps one dialect, was able to sweep across almost all of Arabia.


Well perhaps then to reconstruct Old or Proto-Arabic we should be looking for the common ancestor of Classical Arabic and contemporaneous Ancient North Arabian dialects. But that would alas be impossible to do except for the vocabulary given in the graffiti inscriptions. Is Classical Arabic relatively unrelated to Old South Arabian (as compared to Old North Arabian, I mean)?


----------



## berndf

Wadi Hanifa said:


> 2 - if the cognate can already be identified separately as a different word, then the word is possibly a loan word. For example, the name of the prophet Noah in Arabic is نوح. This is a loan word because we already know that the Arabic cognate of this root is ن و خ.


This is a good example. Because we know that خ merged with ح in NW-Semitic while they stayed separate in Arabic, we know which one is the loan and which one is the original Arabic cognate.


----------



## WadiH

clevermizo said:


> Well perhaps then to reconstruct Old or Proto-Arabic we should be looking for the common ancestor of Classical Arabic and contemporaneous Ancient North Arabian dialects. But that would alas be impossible to do except for the vocabulary given in the graffiti inscriptions. Is Classical Arabic relatively unrelated to Old South Arabian (as compared to Old North Arabian, I mean)?



Undoubtedly.  Classical Arabic and Old North Arabian were apparently mutually intelligible, whereas Old South Arabian and Classical Arabic certainly were not.  I don't know much about South Arabian, but I've heard that even Hebrew is probably closer to Classical Arabic than Old South Arabian, isn't it?


----------



## Abu Rashid

Wadi Hanifa,



> Just to venture a guess here, there are a couple of ways that they can probably do it..



Barak allah feek. Shar7 jayyid jeddan.

clevermizo,



> if they are just graffiti, which are probably limited to single sentences or phrases.



From what I've read they are pretty much in the same form as graffiti on modern school desks "Haarith waz ere 50 B.C.E" 

Also they used a script more related to South Arabian scripts, than to modern North Arabian scripts. There are however some more formal texts such as those at Petra and Mada'in Saleh, but these are assumed to be Nabataean, and I'm not quite sure about the links between what is called ANA and Nabataean. I am currently reading "Ancient languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia", but not quite up to the ANA chapters yet.


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Aside from that, these are all features that existed in the Arabic  dialects of the 8th century and continue to exist in modern Arabian  dialect



I was just having a brief flip through the pages about ANA in "Ancient languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia" and they actually mentioned that some of the vocabulary of ANA at least was better understood from colloquial Arabic dialects, because the words had a different meaning in Classical Arabic (fus7a).


----------



## Ali.h

*Moderator note: Starting question of new thread merged with the current one.*

Did the original Arabic and Arabs originate from Yemen? Is this fact or fiction? Can someone explain this please.


----------



## xebonyx

Ali.h said:


> Did the original Arabic and Arabs originate from Yemen? Is this fact or fiction? Can someone explain this please.



I don't think it's necessarily an accurate deduction. The people of Yemen (Yemenites) were considered culturally and evolutionarily distinct from "Arabia", as there were geographical boundaries between those areas. Of course since then, both have been included within general terms, in what we know today as the Arabian Peninsula. But personally, I think we'd have to take a closer look at philology in order to make thorough linkages, especially since "Arabia" concerned geography rather than being an indication of a presence of Arab peoples.

Early Assyrian and Hebrew religious texts speak of nomadic tribes, a group of people, desert-like areas, etc. but whether the terms are directly related to what we know as an "Arab" has been under debate. Perhaps someone with better etymological knowledge can expand on this. Apparently the first written account of what could have a relationship to the word "Arab" is "aribi", about the defeat of Assyrians, one of which donated camels to the fight.

I just wanted to add that we also have to take into account those who were enslaved and thus assumed Arab identities, so defining what original Arab means can be tangled. By this I mean there are distinctions to be made when alluding to Arabs on linguistic, genealogical, religious, historical, and political levels.

As for the origin of Arabic itself, that dates back to 8th century BC.


----------



## origumi

xebonyx said:


> Early Assyrian and Hebrew religious texts speak of nomadic tribes, a group of people, desert-like areas, etc. but whether the terms are directly related to what we know as an "Arab" has been under debate.


The Hebrew Bible mentions Arabs and calls them Arabs.



> As for the origin of Arabic itself, that dates back to 8th century BC.


Must be much earlier. Where this dating is taken from?


----------



## xebonyx

origumi said:


> The Hebrew Bible mentions *Arabs and calls them Arabs.*


 
Does it? Or is it "_Aravs_"?



> Must be much earlier. Where this dating is taken from?


True. The date I'm actually referring the emergence of the earliest known Proto-Arabic texts, and amidst Islamic conquest, became a wider confirmation as being the language of the Arabs.


----------



## origumi

xebonyx said:


> Does it? Or is it "_Aravs_"?


In Hebrew the same sound (is it the correct term?) may be B or V depends on the surrounding. Note also that:

A*v*raham (Heb.) = I*b*rahim (Ara.)
Yaako*v* (Heb.) = Iaku*b *(Ara.)

And so on. Therefore:

Ara*v*i (Heb.) = Ara*b*i (Ara.)


----------



## xebonyx

origumi said:


> In Hebrew the same sound (is it the correct term?) may be B or V depends on the surrounding. Note also that:
> 
> A*v*raham (Heb.) = I*b*rahim (Ara.)
> Yaako*v* (Heb.) = Iaku*b *(Ara.)
> 
> And so on. Therefore:
> 
> Ara*v*i (Heb.) = Ara*b*i (Ara.)


 
Yes, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there are many references in these religious texts of land areas, peoples. Which is why I said it's unclear as to what "aravs" necessarily are.


----------



## berndf

xebonyx said:


> Yes, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there are many references in these religious texts of land areas, peoples. Which is why I said it's unclear as to what "aravs" necessarily are.


True, 'aravim in the Hebrew Bible probably means nothing more than "desert dwellers". How closely this relates to the modern use of the word is not totally clear. But the b/v thing is totally meaningless, as origumi explained. The Hebrew Bet has two different allophones transcribed b and v, respectively but they certainly are the same phoneme.


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Yaako*v* (Heb.) = Iaku*b *(Ara.)



Actually it's Ya3qub in Arabic, spelt almost letter for letter the same as the Hebrew. Yaa ayin qof waw beh (the waw is not present in Hebrew spelling I think).


----------



## Flaminius

origumi said:


> In Hebrew the same sound (is it the correct term?) may be B or V depends on the surrounding. Note also that:
> 
> A*v*raham (Heb.) = I*b*rahim (Ara.)
> Yaako*v* (Heb.) = Iaku*b *(Ara.)
> 
> And so on. Therefore:
> 
> Ara*v*i (Heb.) = Ara*b*i (Ara.)


It may be that they were really /b/ when the relevant portions of the Bible was written.  Later, in Mishnaic Hebrew period if I remember correctly a change occurred making /b/ into /v/ when the phoneme is the codal element of a syllable (the actual conditions are much much more complicated, though).


----------



## xebonyx

berndf said:


> But the b/v thing is totally meaningless, as origumi explained.



At the very least, these religious accounts serve as examples of all potential early mentions of the existence Arab peoples.


----------

