# Central Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew...)



## Black_Sept

Firstly, I know little to nothing about this topic; I've only recently become interested in it, so I'll have to ask you to correct some of my misconceptions. 

According to Wikipedia the Central Semitic languages comprise Arabic and the NW Semitic languages (which include most notably Hebrew and Aramaic). 

Now, I'm not really concerned about the exact classification, which often clarifies little about the complex relation of different languages. Rather, I would like to understand what is the relation from the perception of native speakers between Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic as well as other languages that should be included here. Is there some mutual intelligibility? Are these like Romance or Germanic languages as in obviously very related when spoken? How does this work across the many varieties that each language has? (colloquial varieties of Arabic, Classical Hebrew, Syriac etc.). I have heard from a very unreliable source that Koranic Arabic and Biblical Hebrew show a LOT of similarities. What does that really mean?

It would really help if some of you could make analogies with European languages, which I am more familiar with.

Thanks,


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## origumi

Hebrew speakers do not understand Arabic unless learning it as a foreign language.
Arabic speakers do not understand Hebrew unless learning it as a foreign language.

This is true for Modern Hebrew vs. Modern Arabic dialects, and also for Biblical Hebrew vs. Quranic Arabic. Not a surprise - the two were separated many thousands (6000? 7000?) years ago.

Hebrew speakers do not understand Aramaic unless learning it as a foreign language.
Aramaic speakers do not understand Hebrew unless learning it as a foreign language.

This is well documented in the Bible, 2 Kings 18:26.


> Then said Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebnah, and Joah, unto Rab-shakeh: 'Speak, I pray thee, to thy servants in the Aramean language; for we understand it; and speak not with us in the Jews' language, in the ears of the people that are on the wall.'


Remember that for more than 1000 years (500BC - 500AD) Aramaic was spoken side-by-side with Hebrew, and in long periods as the mother language, by the Hebrew people. Therefore Hebrew is heavility influenced by Aramaic. Learning Aramaic is relatively easy for Hebrew speakers: large parts of the vocabulary are common (after applying few systematic sound shifts), the grammar is similar, verb conjugation is different yet follows simailar patterns. In Biblical times the distance between the two was 1000-2000 years, similar to the distance between Romance languages. Yet the changes are significant, maybe like two remote Romance languages - Italian/Spanish vs. French?


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## Mahaodeh

There are indeed a lot of similarities; similarities that surprise even the native speakers. But as origumi explained, they are far from mutually inteligible. As an Arabic speaker I can figure out some words from a conversation, but not enough to even understand what the conversation is about. Most of the time one has to speak very slowley or point out the link with Arabic for me to notice it.

I did notice something though, personally, I find it easier to understand single words from a Hebrew conversation than I would from an Aramaic one (whether Syriac or Assyrian); I don't know if that means anything.


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## clevermizo

Mahaodeh said:


> I did notice something though, personally, I find it easier to understand single words from a Hebrew conversation than I would from an Aramaic one (whether Syriac or Assyrian); I don't know if that means anything.



That actually makes some sense. There are some sound convergences in Aramaic which could make it harder to understand. For example, ض，ع and غ all correspond to Aramaic ܥ (which is [ع] in pronunciation). 

Also modern Hebrew forms are based on older forms, which as origumi explained are _already_ very different from Arabic (Biblical Hebrew/Mishnaic Hebrew for example). Some of these older forms may be similar to, at least, standard Arabic words. However, Aramaic has been evolving as a spoken language this entire time.

Nevertheless, I'm sure modern Aramaic is influenced by Arabic to some extent, since it is spoken in primarily Arabic-speaking countries (Syria and Iraq). This influence is probably just in vocabulary?

To be honest, I don't see that Biblical Hebrew and Qur'anic Arabic are very similar. This might be true with some grammatical structures being more similar, at least in comparison to how Modern Hebrew works morphologically and syntactically. However I don't think someone who understood the language of the Qur'an perfectly would be able to understand much of the Hebrew of the Bible without learning Hebrew first. The lexical differences and sound changes are too many I think.


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## berndf

clevermizo said:


> That actually makes some sense. There are some sound convergences in Aramaic which could make it harder to understand. For example, ض，ع and غ all correspond to Aramaic ܥ (which is [ع] in pronunciation).


The merger of "Ḍad" and "Ghain" into "Ayin" is not specific to Aramaic. In Hebrew the merger was completed by the end of the Biblical period.

In addition, "Ayin" merged into "Aleph" in modern Hebrew (of course not in spelling).


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## origumi

berndf said:


> In addition, "Ayin" merged into "Aleph" in modern Hebrew (of course not in spelling).


This happened in the Akkadian languages and consequently Babylonian Aramaic (Aramaic as spoken in Babylon) some 2500 years ago. In Hebrew we still fight against this... humm... deterioration of the language?... Not sure whether the fight is already lost.


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## Abu Rashid

> Not a surprise - the two were separated many thousands (6000? 7000?) years ago.


Are you sure it was that long ago? I would've thought more like 4000 years ago. According to most theories I've read about the origins of the Semitic peoples (and presumably languages) they came about through successive waves of migration (or 'fringe dwellers' who slowly gave up nomadic desert life and were mutually absorbed into the urban areas) out of the Arabian deserts into the northern regions like Mesopotamia and Canaan where they mixed with the existing peoples and hence formed the various Semitic languages.

I've just finished reading Ancient Semitic Civilizations by Sabatino Moscati, who suggests this is how it happened anyway.

So if this were the case, then it would suggest the Hebrews (and their language) separated from the desert dwelling Semitic nomads probably around 4000 years ago, no?


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## origumi

Hebrew and Aramaic were separated about 4000 years ago. Abraham Isaac, Jacob (whether historical figures or not) are dated to 1800-1600 BC and represent the era of "hybrid" Aramaic-Hebrew (or Canaanite) culture. (Biblical) Hebrew and ("Classic") Aramaic are similar languages. They must have splitted together from Arabic, which is much different (in spite of the numerous similarities), thousands of years earlier.


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## Abu Rashid

> Hebrew and Aramaic were separated about 4000 years ago.



The first mention of the Aramaens (according to Moscati) was around 4300 years ago, and they were placed around upper Mesopotamia. I'm not aware of the Hebrews being situated anywhere near there. They then slowly moved more towards Canaan, until they filled most of the space between Mesopotamia and Canaan, taking advantage of the decline of the Assyrians.



> Abraham Isaac, Jacob (whether historical figures or not) are dated to 1800-1600 BC and represent the era of "hybrid" Aramaic-Hebrew (or Canaanite) culture.



Abraham (pbuh) was separated by about 8 generations from Aram according to the Biblical account, so that connection doesn't seem overly-obvious (I may have missed something there?).



> (Biblical) Hebrew and ("Classic") Aramaic are similar languages.



Although they do have similarities, they are fairly separate languages as you mentioned above. Moabite, Edomite and the other Canaanite languages are much more closely related to Hebrew, and seem to be perhaps even just dialects of a common language spoken in that region.

I can't say for sure, not knowing either Hebrew or Aramaic very well at all, but just from the comparisons I've come across, that Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic are all about as far away from one another as each other.



> They must have splitted together from Arabic, which is much different (in spite of the numerous similarities), thousands of years earlier.



The problem with Arabic is that we have no written record of it prior to a few centuries B.C.E, so it's very difficult to say anything with surety about the early history of Arabic. The Arabs were pretty much always nomadic desert dwelling bedouins, and according to Moscati were the origin of the Semitic waves of migration which populated first Mesopotamia and then later Canaan (as well as Yemen and Abyssinia). How that relates to the language differences is difficult to say.


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## sokol

Abu Rashid said:


> The first mention of the Aramaens (according to Moscati) was around 4300 years ago, and they were placed around upper Mesopotamia. I'm not aware of the Hebrews being situated anywhere near there. They then slowly moved more towards Canaan, until they filled most of the space between Mesopotamia and Canaan, taking advantage of the decline of the Assyrians.


Origumi obviously didn't talk about the place where Aramaeans lived but about when Aramaic split, linguistically, from Hebrew.
Just wanted to mention that to avoid some misunderstanding.

Also I'm sure Origumi's dating is not based on the Tora and Bible editions but on Tora and Bible studies: there are methods to establish how old a particular book of both Tora and Bible is, when approximately it has been written, and so on: obviously we cannot rely on any dates as given by Tora and bible - but some dates still have been established.
Again, just mentioning this to clear the misunderstanding (if there has been one, that is).

As to the topic itself I can't add much except that of course Semitic tribes have been migrating to the Fertile Crescent lands (from Palestine/Judaea over Syria to Mesopotamia) for millennia, and those tribes came from somewhere on the Arab peninsula.

However, and that's the most important thing about this, they didn't speak Arabic (or a predecessor of Arabic) - what they spoke has been reconstructed as either Northwest Semitic or Central Semitic depending on which theory one prefers (see Wiki).
And however one groups those languages it seems that linguists agree that Hebrew and Aramaic are closer related to each other than either (or both) are to Arabic - whether one would like to postulate a Central Semitic group (including all three) or not.

Of course the problem is that there aren't any ancient documents of written Arabic; but nevertheless it also seems quite clear that linguists agree that Arabic has _*not*_ been the origin of all other Semitic languages: it is important not to mix up the Arabian peninsula with Arabic language, in ancient times (2000 years ago, and earlier) there wasn't only Arabic spoken on the Arabian peninsula but other Semitic languages too.


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## Abu Rashid

> Origumi obviously didn't talk about the place where Aramaeans lived but about when Aramaic split, linguistically, from Hebrew.



Well one would assume that if a people spoke a common language, then they lived in the same area, no? That would need to mean you'd have to be able to trace them to the same place around that time.



> Also I'm sure Origumi's dating is not based on the Tora and Bible editions but on Tora and Bible studies



Not sure exactly what's meant by this...



> However, and that's the most important thing about this, they didn't speak Arabic (or a predecessor of Arabic)



As mentioned, due to the lack of written records any opinion either way on this would be pure speculation. However I do remember reading in De Lacey O'Learey's introduction to his Comparative Grammar of Semitic Languages, that the language spoken by Bani Tamim in Najd (the area where it's postulated most of the waves of Semitic migration came from) is the most conservative of the dialects of Arabic, and that Arabic is the most conservative (he actually used the word purest, but I'll leave it out of this discussion) of the Semitic languages, and therefore gives us a much better picture than any of the other Semitic languages of what they would've spoken when they first migrated out. Obviously that doesn't mean they are descended from the Arabic of today, since the language there also underwent changes.

He also mentions that the reason Assyrian, Aramaean, Hebrew etc. all changed more than Arabic is due to the fact that when they migrated, they intermixed with non-Semitic peoples (Sumerians, Phillistines etc.) and that they exerted influences over the development of those languages, outside of the traditional Semitic centre of the central Arabian deserts, which remained largely shielded from such influences.



> And however one groups those languages it seems that linguists agree that Hebrew and Aramaic are closer related to each other than either (or both) are to Arabic - whether one would like to postulate a Central Semitic group (including all three) or not



De Lacey O'Learey (mentioned above) states that Aramaic is usually considered to be vastly different from all the other Semitic languages, although it is sometimes classed with Arabic and Hebrew as being fairly similar. But he mentions these groupings often change and switch. Also it seems that the adoption of Aramaic as a Lingua Franca in the Middle East, and also the adoption of Aramaic by the Hebrews themselves could also blur that a little, since Aramaic and Hebrew would've thereafter exerted a lot more influence upon one another. The same thing seems to have happened to Arabs living in Syria/Jordan who spoke both Arabic and Aramaic (The Nabateans), and today in their dialects the influence of Aramaic can be seen, and has even spread to other Arabic dialects as well.



> but nevertheless it also seems quite clear that linguists agree that Arabic has not been the origin of all other Semitic languages



Of course no modern language could be. However it does seem quite obvious that Arabic was the Semitic language that "stayed home" whilst the others developed into what they were away from the centre of the Semitic language and amongst foreign non-Semitic influences, which inevitably played a strong role in their evolution. I don't think this can be denied.

On the other hand O'Leary mentions that there's some Semitic characteristics preserved in the other languages which Arabic seems to have dropped, but retains evidence of having had in the past (although he doesn't detail them).



> it is important not to mix up the Arabian peninsula with Arabic language, in ancient times (2000 years ago, and earlier) there wasn't only Arabic spoken on the Arabian peninsula but other Semitic languages too.



Well i guess this depends what we mean by Arabic language. If we just mean the Classical Arabic that is considered Arabic today, then you are right. There's other languages that were spoken there, although mostly in the south, in the civilisations that developed there, the Old South Arabian languages, which are not the same as the Classical Arabic. However in the vast deserts that dominate the interior of the peninsula, there's no evidence at all that any language was ever spoken there, except for the Arabic that ended up being standardised as Classical Arabic.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> The first mention of the Aramaens (according to Moscati) was around 4300 years ago, and they were placed around upper Mesopotamia. I'm not aware of the Hebrews being situated anywhere near there. They then slowly moved more towards Canaan, until they filled most of the space between Mesopotamia and Canaan, taking advantage of the decline of the Assyrians.


As Sokol pointed out, "split" is meant linguistically.





Abu Rashid said:


> Well one would assume that if a people spoke a common language, then they lived in the same area, no? That would need to mean you'd have to be able to trace them to the same place around that time.


The assumption is that the precursors of Canaanite/Hebrew and Aramaic were part of a dialect continuum used by nomadic tribes throughout the North and Western parts of the Fertile Crescent. The Assyrian conquest of Canaan/Israel happened much later, in the 7th century.


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## Abu Rashid

> As Sokol pointed out, "split" is meant linguistically.



And as I replied to him... _"Well one would assume that if a people spoke a common language, then they lived in the same area, no? That would need to mean you'd have to be able to trace them to the same place around that time."_



> The assumption is that the precursors of Canaanite/Hebrew and Aramaic were part of a dialect continuum used by nomadic tribes throughout the North and Western parts of the Fertile Crescent.



Not saying it's not the case, but it seems that the Canaanite/Hebrew civilisations developed independantly of the Aramaean civilisations, which would seem to preclude the idea of them having split directly from one another. Since both are Semitic languages, I'm sure they do have common orgins, just maybe not directly.



> The Assyrian conquest of Canaan/Israel happened much later, in the 7th century.



Not sure exactly how that relates to anything I've stated so far??


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> And as I replied to him... _"Well one would assume that if a people spoke a common language, then they lived in the same area, no? That would need to mean you'd have to be able to trace them to the same place around that time."_


NW-Semitic was (presumably) the language of a nomadic people. The dialect continuum split when they started to found cities and kingdoms.





Abu Rashid said:


> Not saying it's not the case, but it seems that the Canaanite/Hebrew civilisations developed independantly of the Aramaean civilisations, which would seem to preclude the idea of them having split directly from one another. Since both are Semitic languages, I'm sure they do have common orgins, just maybe not directly.


The most widely accepted theory is that the languages of the Western Fertile Crescent (Canaanite/Hebrew, Ugaritic and Aramaic) form a genetic group, called NW-Semitic, which is more closely related to Arabian than to East-Semitic languages (mainly Akkadian) although NW-Semitic shares some phonetic simplifications with East-Semitic.





Abu Rashid said:


> Not sure exactly how that relates to anything I've stated so far??


You wrote earlier: "They then slowly moved more towards Canaan, until they filled most of the space between Mesopotamia and Canaan, taking advantage of the decline of the Assyrians". The Assyrians weren't present in the NW-Semitic area 4000 years ago. The Assyrians lived east of the Aramaeans in those days (cf. this map).


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## Abu Rashid

> NW-Semitic was (presumably) the language of a nomadic people. The dialect continuum split when they started to found cities and kingdoms.


Yes, but the common theory suggests they migrated north out of the Arabian peninsula, along with all other Semitic peoples. They did not always exist in the fertile crescent. And most of the Semitic nations appear first in records as marauding bands of nomadic people, who eventually settle down, intermingle with local populations, then rise to form their own nations. This is certainly true of the Aramaeans and the Hebrews.



> The most widely accepted theory is that the languages of the Western Fertile Crescent (Canaanite/Hebrew, Ugaritic and Aramaic) form a genetic group, called NW-Semitic, which is more closely related to Arabian than to East-Semitic languages (mainly Akkadian) although NW-Semitic shares some phonetic simplifications with East-Semitic.


Yes but that difference is supposedly only because of the longer exposure Akkadian had to foreign influence, since it's speakers had blended with the Sumerian culture, used it's form of writing (cuniform) and integrated into and eventually assimilated it's culture, and presumably along with it heavy influence from its language.



> You wrote earlier: "They then slowly moved more towards Canaan, until they filled most of the space between Mesopotamia and Canaan, taking advantage of the decline of the Assyrians". The Assyrians weren't present in the NW-Semitic area 4000 years ago. The Assyrians lived east of the Aramaeans in those days (cf. this map).


I'm sorry I think you misunderstood me there. I didn't mean they supplanted the Assyrians, of course not. They do seem however to have been under the influence of the Assyrians, and unable to expand and solidify their power until the Assyrians waned. When they moved into modern day Syria, it was already inhabited by the Canaanites/Phoenicians, Amorites and Eblaites. So my point was that they expanded West from the East, whilst the Canaanite/Hebrew language was already present in the West, which would tend to suggest they didn't directly diverge from one another, but intead possibly fused together when they met, and then began to exert influence upon one another.


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## origumi

Abu Rashid said:


> I can't say for sure, not knowing either Hebrew or Aramaic very well at all, but just from the comparisons I've come across, that Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic are all about as far away from one another as each other.


Aramaic and Hebrew are not mutually intelligible, yet they are by far more similar to each other than to Arabic. As a Hebrew speaker I can understand Moabite (the few fragments that were preserved), "almost" understand Aramaic, but near to nothing about Arabic.


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## Abu Rashid

> "almost" understand Aramaic, but near to nothing about Arabic.


 
Could that just be because of the fact Jews adopted Aramaic as a language, and a lot of your religious texts are either written in Aramaic or sprinkled with Aramaic borrowings?

Also are you talking about classical Aramaic or the modern "neo-Aramaic" languages here? Do you understand anything from the "Passion of Christ" for instance? I watched a few minutes of it on youtube recently as an exercise to see how much I could understand. Being an intermediate Arabic learner, I was able to understand a few words here and there. But I understand more from the Hebrew of the Tanakh than I do from Aramaic.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Could that just be because of the fact Jews adopted Aramaic as a language, and a lot of your religious texts are either written in Aramaic or sprinkled with Aramaic borrowings?


In this case the language of the Torah (7th centrury BC) should be dramatically different from the Hebrew of later texts which is not the case. Taking Ugaritic which is geographically located between Canaan and Aram into account makes the case for a NW-Semitic group of one common origin even stronger.



Abu Rashid said:


> So my point was that they expanded West from the East, whilst the Canaanite/Hebrew language was already present in the West, which would tend to suggest they didn't directly diverge from one another, but intead possibly fused together when they met, and then began to exert influence upon one another.


Again this happened later, after the turmoil of the 13th century BC when Aramaic speaking peoples expanded westwards. In the early 2nd millennium BC there was a contiguous area populated by NW-Semitic speaking peoples including the Aramaeans.


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## Abu Rashid

> In this case the language of the Torah (7th centrury BC) should be dramatically different from the Hebrew of later texts which is not the case.



Bernd I think you missed my point there. It was not that Aramaic necessarily changed Hebrew, but that because Jews became so exposed to it, it became more familiar to them. Either way, Aramaic may well be closer to Hebrew, I really have no idea. I know it did share some features with Arabic, which it didn't share with Hebrew, such as nunation instead of mimation as a marker of indefiniteness. As far as shared vocabulary is concerned, I have noticed a lot between Arabic and Aramaic as well as Arabic and Hebrew, but perhaps they have even more between them than Arabic shares with either.


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## Flaminius

Abu Rashid said:


> As far as shared vocabulary is concerned, I have noticed a lot between Arabic and Aramaic as well as Arabic and Hebrew, but perhaps they have even more between them than Arabic shares with either.


Hello,

Discussing the quantity of shared vocabulary would require pages after pages of boring (sorry...) list of words, so let me consider grammatical and phonological aspects.    Here are features that divide Arabic on one hand and Aramaic and Hebrew on the other hand.  I look forward to lists of features that Arabic and Aramaic have but Hebrew does not; and / or features shared by Arabic and Hebrew only.

Phonology:
Aramaic and Hebrew preserve affricate pronunciation in צ (corresponding to the Proto-Semitic *ṣ or /tsʼ/) but Arabic does not.

Arabic retains short _-u_ at the end of non-past conjugations while the other two do not.  E.g., "I study": Ab. ʾadrusu vs. Hb. ʾedroš

For Aramaic and Hebrew, the word initial _w-_ regularly turns into _y-_.  E.g., "child": Ab. waladu vs. Am. y/īlīḏ, y/īlīḏā (also an extended form exists: ʾwld); Hb. yeled

Grammar:
Arabic is the only language in the three that has broken plurals.

Arabic is the only language in the three which case system as well as mimation (nunation) are in active usage.


I consulted this online Aramaic dictionary in the discussion above:
http://cal.huc.edu/searching/englishfull.html

Regards,
Flam


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## Abu Rashid

Flaminius,

It seems that most of your comparisons are done between spoken Aramaic & Hebrew and classical (frozen) Arabic. If you were to compare classical Arabic with classical Aramaic & Hebrew or spoken Arabic with spoken Aramaic & Hebrew, then I think most of your points would vanish.

For instance you mentioned the case system and nunation. The case system does not exist in spoken Arabic, only in classical Arabic. Likewise nunation does not exist in spoken Arabic, whilst it existed in classical Aramaic as nunation, yet in classical Hebrew as mimation, so this would be a point where Arabic and Aramaic are more similar, if measured by the same standards.

As for the phonology, I don't know IPA, so I am not really sure how the sound of ص differs between the languages. However be aware that in spoken Arabic dialects it can differ how it is pronounced.



> For Aramaic and Hebrew, the word initial w- regularly turns into y-. E.g., "child": Ab. waladu vs. Am. y/īlīḏ, y/īlīḏā (also an extended form exists: ʾwld); Hb. yeled



Not 100% sure what you mean here, but in Arabic the waw turns into yaa' as well.

Arabic past tense ولد (walada) present tense يلد (yalidu)

Is this what you mean??


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## berndf

Flaminius said:


> Aramaic and Hebrew preserve affricate pronunciation in צ (corresponding to the Proto-Semitic *ṣ or /tsʼ/) but Arabic does not.


To my knowledge scholars agree that the biblical Hebrew pronunciation of צ was like the Arabic emphatic s. Whether or not Proto-Semitic had /ts/, /ts'/ etc. or not is to my knowledge still a matter of debate.


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## Flaminius

Abu Rashid said:


> It seems that most of your comparisons are done between spoken Aramaic & Hebrew and classical (frozen) Arabic. If you were to compare classical Arabic with classical Aramaic & Hebrew or spoken Arabic with spoken Aramaic & Hebrew, then I think most of your points would vanish.


 Hello, *Abu Rashid*.

 Except for one oversight, I am comparing the three languages in their oldest attested forms.



> For instance you mentioned the case system and nunation. The case system does not exist in spoken Arabic, only in classical Arabic. Likewise nunation does not exist in spoken Arabic, whilst it existed in classical Aramaic as nunation, yet in classical Hebrew as mimation, so this would be a point where Arabic and Aramaic are more similar, if measured by the same standards.


 As far as my meagre knowledge of Arabic goes, the _iḍāfa_ construction hinges on case system.  If _iḍāfa_ exists in spoken varieties, then we can say that modern Arabic has not completely discontinued case system.

 In contrast, Hebrew offers very small evidence to case system as well as mimation even in the oldest records.  They are best understood as fossilised remnants of a system which had fallen out of usage before the language was ever committed in writing.  This is also true for Judaic Aramaic but I admit I cannot say for sure if it was so in the oldest evidence of this language.



> For Aramaic and Hebrew, the word initial w- regularly turns into y-. E.g., "child": Ab. waladu vs. Am. y/īlīḏ, y/īlīḏā (also an extended form exists: ʾwld); Hb. yeled
> 
> 
> 
> Not 100% sure what you mean here, but in Arabic the waw turns into yaa' as well.
> 
> Arabic past tense ولد (walada) present tense يلد (yalidu)
> 
> Is this what you mean??
Click to expand...

I meant that Aramaic and Hebrew realise Proto-Semitic _*w_ as _y_ in the word initial position.  Perhaps it was only the star that was missing in my previous message.  :-(

Scholars generally agree that the root for "child" in Proto-Semitic was **wld *with initial **w*.  This is attested in Arabic _waladu_ but Aramaic and Hebrew have turned *_w-_ into _y-_ (respectively, y/īlīḏ, y/īlīḏā; yeled).  The original _w-_ is recovered when the root gets a prefix, thus no longer standing in the word initial position (e.g., Hb. lehiwaled; to be born).  Your Arabic example is a result of assimilation of _w_ due to the presence of the non-past prefix _yV_.




berndf said:


> To my knowledge scholars agree that the biblical Hebrew pronunciation of צ was like the Arabic emphatic s. Whether or not Proto-Semitic had /ts/, /ts'/ etc. or not is to my knowledge still a matter of debate.


I stand corrected.  I hope this is the only reference to modern languages in a message I attempted to be about oldest attested forms.


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## Abu Rashid

> As far as my meagre knowledge of Arabic goes, the iḍāfa construction hinges on case system.



As far as I'm aware the idafah construct exists in both Hebrew and Aramaic as well.


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## Flaminius

Yet, their compound nouns by _status constructus_ do not have case endings nor mimation/nunation.

In Modern Standard Arabic, I am aware that Muhammad's book is _kitābu Muḥammadin_, using _iḍāfa_.  Perhaps you could tell me how well modern spoken varieties preserve case vowels and nunation?


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## Awwal12

As far as I remember, they preserve them quite bad. At least my Russian book on colloquial Arabic by M.Husain & K.Baranov (mostly oriented towards the Iordanian dialect, as far as I got it) gave just "kitāb Muḥammad" for such cases. =( But it would be interesting to hear it from the native speaker in the first place.


> As far as I'm aware the idafah construct exists in both Hebrew and Aramaic as well.


Sure, in Hebrew the same construction is called "smikhut" (סמיכות).


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## Abu Rashid

> In Modern Standard Arabic, I am aware that Muhammad's book is kitābu Muḥammadin, using iḍāfa. Perhaps you could tell me how well modern spoken varieties preserve case vowels and nunation?



They don't. As Awwal12 said, it just becomes Kitab Muhammad.

More and more I am noticing actually that spoken Arabic has a lot in common with Hebrew and Aramaic. I guess this fits in with the theories I spoke about earlier, of Hebrew and Aramaic (and now spoken Arabic) coming about due to successive waves of migration out of the isolated Arabian peninsula, where the Semitic language was preserved quite well due to its lack of contact with outside influences.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> More and more I am noticing actually that spoken Arabic has a lot in common with Hebrew and Aramaic. I guess this fits in with the theories I spoke about earlier, of Hebrew and Aramaic (and now spoken Arabic) coming about due to *successive* waves of migration out of the isolated Arabian peninsula, where the Semitic language was preserved quite well due to its lack of contact with outside influences.


Recent theories regard Arabic and NW-Semitic as more closely related within the group of Semitic languages than previously thought. But NW-Semitic is still regarded as one cousin group to Arabic and not a group of several independent cousins of Arabic.


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## Abu Rashid

> Recent theories regard Arabic and NW-Semitic as more closely related within the group of Semitic languages than previously thought.



It sounds quite plausible to me, since modern Arabic actually evolved in the inner and northern parts of the Arabian peninsula (not so much the south or exterior) and therefore would've obviously been fairly close to where Hebrew and Aramaic were spoken. The Nabataeans were for instance in what is modern day Syria, Jordan, Palestine/Israel & Saudi Arabia, and were speakers of Arabic, yet were fluent also in Aramaic, and their writing system slowly merged from Aramaic into what became the modern Arabic alphabet.


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## Flaminius

Abu Rashid said:


> They don't. As Awwal12 said, it just becomes Kitab Muhammad.


Thanks for the information.  I thought I once heard something like _kitāb Muḥammadi_ but this may have been a careful speech to help the learner.

One more point about case vowels and nunation; they remain in certain idiomatic expressions derived from accusative nouns.  Just off the top of my head, they include _ʾahlan wa sahlan_ and _ʿahwan_.  Instances of mimation and case vowels in Hebrew are far fewer and between.



> More and more I am noticing actually that spoken Arabic has a lot in common with Hebrew and Aramaic. I guess this fits in with the theories I spoke about earlier, of Hebrew and Aramaic (and now spoken Arabic) coming about due to successive waves of migration out of the isolated Arabian peninsula, where the Semitic language was preserved quite well due to its lack of contact with outside influences.


Aramaic was the lingua franca of Middle East for at least a thousand years.  It is quite possible that speakers of other Semitic languages brought Aramaic influences into their own languages.  The next lingua franca, Arabic, has also exercised a great influence on languages in the region, including Hebrew and Aramaic dialects.  *berndf* #28 _supra_ has mentioned that scholars are beginning to conceive the three languages as more closely related than they previously thought.

I don't have serious objections to all this and the assertion that the Arabian Peninsula was the homeland of Semitic-speaking peoples.  I assume that is what you meant when you referred to "the theories."  I don't think, however, that you can place Aramaic and Hebrew on par with spoken Arabic when discussing the genetic relationship between them.  That would make you look as if claiming that _al-fuṣḥā_ was never a spoken language or it was the parent language of the Central Semitic group.  The parent language is unattested.  Both claims, needless to say, are untenable.

Only comparison of oldest attested forms makes it possible for us to assess how the divergence occurred, when it occurred and so on.  Mutual intelligibility, even if quantification of which is next to impossible, is not only about genetic relationships.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> It sounds quite plausible to me, since modern Arabic actually evolved in the inner and northern parts of the Arabian peninsula (not so much the south or exterior) and therefore would've obviously been fairly close to where Hebrew and Aramaic were spoken.


Yes, NW-Semitic and Arabic are considered to be more closely related to each other than both to South Arabian.


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## Abu Rashid

> Thanks for the information. I thought I once heard something like kitāb Muḥammadi but this may have been a careful speech to help the learner.



Nope, case endings have pretty much fully disappeared, could've been a misprint.



> One more point about case vowels and nunation; they remain in certain idiomatic expressions derived from accusative nouns. Just off the top of my head, they include ʾahlan wa sahlan and ʿahwan. Instances of mimation and case vowels in Hebrew are far fewer and between.



Tanween (nunation) exists in some 'orphaned' words yes, but I don't think it's a matter of case endings. I think these words are usually called adverbials??



> It is quite possible that speakers of other Semitic languages brought Aramaic influences into their own languages.



I think they definitely did. Just on the points you brought about Aramaic and Hebrew, I have a few between Arabic and Aramaic, which Hebrew does not share. Hebrew suffers the Canaanite vowel shift, whilst I don't think Aramaic does, for eg. Arabic Salaam, Aramaic Shalaam but Hebrew Shalom. The long 'a' vowel is converted into a long 'o' vowel. And the pronoun of Arabic and Aramaic are almost identical, whilst the pronouns in Hebrew seem quite different, they are listed in a table here.



> I don't have serious objections to all this and the assertion that the Arabian Peninsula was the homeland of Semitic-speaking peoples. I assume that is what you meant when you referred to "the theories."



The theory of Arabian peninsula as Semitic homeland is proposed by quite a few Semiticists. Juris Zarins for instance who advocates the idea that the variations in Semitic languages arose as a result of a circum Arabian nomadic pastoral complex. Other writers over the past century or so have advocated similar theories. But it's all just theories I guess, although Dr. Zarins has been instrumental in the archaeological discoveries in and around the Arabian peninsula, so his theorising would carry quite a bit of weight I'd think.



> I don't think, however, that you can place Aramaic and Hebrew on par with spoken Arabic when discussing the genetic relationship between them.



I think there's been some major misunderstanding there. Nowhere did I even remotely place them on par. Merely mentioned that I've noticed quite a few similarities between those two languages and spoken Arabic dialects.



> That would make you look as if claiming that al-fuṣḥā was never a spoken language or it was the parent language of the Central Semitic group.



Whether it was spoken or not is difficult to ascertain. It doesn't seem to have been worn down a lot though, and it's known that the Arabic dialects existed already when Fusha was frozen, so they are obviously not purely the result of descending from Fusha once it became frozen. So if the dialects existed, then Fusha may well have already been an artificially preserved language already at the onset of the Islamic period, perhaps as a lingua franca between the Arabian tribes? A common currency at poetry festivals and the like?

As for your claim I am suggesting it's the parent language of all Semitic languages (ie. proto-Semitic), apart from the fact I've already said this is not what I was stating, it just doesn't make sense. Fusha obviously would be a descendant like all other Semitic languages are. However, my point was that it is probably the most conservative of those descendants, due to its history of isolation and of artificial preservation.



> Only comparison of oldest attested forms makes it possible for us to assess how the divergence occurred, when it occurred and so on



This is false reasoning. Since attestable merely means oldest written text in this case. And it's well known that the oldest written texts of Semitic languages, ie. Akkadian & Eblaite texts are very divergant from the other Semitic languages, and show heavy influences from surrounding languages. Whilst Arabic on the other end of the scale, has the youngest written texts, yet seems to be quite conservative.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> However, my point was that it [Fusha] is probably the most conservative of those descendants, due to its history of isolation and of artificial preservation.


I don't know much about those languages but South Arabian might be a contender for the title, too.


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## Flaminius

Hello again, *Abu Rashid*.


Abu Rashid said:


> I think there's been some major misunderstanding there. Nowhere did I even remotely place them on par. Merely mentioned that I've noticed quite a few similarities between those two languages and spoken Arabic dialects.


When you mentioned similarities between them, you said:More and more I am noticing actually that spoken Arabic has a lot in common with Hebrew and Aramaic. I guess this fits in with the theories I spoke about earlier, of Hebrew and Aramaic (and now spoken Arabic) coming about due to successive waves of migration out of the isolated Arabian peninsula, where the Semitic language was preserved quite well due to its lack of contact with outside influences.​Here you are attempting a comparison between spoken Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic.  I wondered and I am still wondering what that would mean other than that the three came about from a common parent language.  That of spoken Arabic apparently being _al-fuṣḥā_*, I thought you were claiming that it also engendered the other two.  It just occurred to me that the similarities between the three are accounted for, according to your theory, by a similar duration of time in which each of them has been influenced by non-Semitic languages.  Even then, I am still wondering how to factor in different intensities of the influences as well as the internal development of the parent language from which they diverged at different times.

*I might have to say, for accuracy's sake, a historical spoken language of which _al-fuṣḥā_ is a highly stylistic variety, instead.



> This (= comparison of oldest attested forms for establishing genetic relationships) is false reasoning. Since attestable merely means oldest written text in this case. And it's well known that the oldest written texts of Semitic languages, ie. Akkadian & Eblaite texts are very divergant from the other Semitic languages, and show heavy influences from surrounding languages. Whilst Arabic on the other end of the scale, has the youngest written texts, yet seems to be quite conservative.


If I had meant that Akkadian and Eblaite are the oldest recorded Semitic languages and thus closest to the Proto-Semitic language, it would have been indeed false.  In fact, I said comparison of the oldest form of each Semitic language is necessary for reconstructing PS.  By using the oldest forms, we remove as much as possible influences of surrounding language (Semitic or non-Semeitc) and later developments in the languages themselves.  Even if Arabic is the most conservative of all Semitic languages, it does not necessarily follow that it is the most conservative on every account.  Modern South Arabian languages, for example, offer vital evidence to the lateral fricatives of PS.  As regards East Semitic languages, Akkadian presents very old forms of pronouns.  Third person pronouns such as šū (he) and šī (she) suggest that West Semitic pronouns underwent a phonological change; s→h (That Akkadian š was in fact /s/ now seems to be gathering support).  I don't presume to ascertain them as unequivocal facts, but those "divergences" are too systematic to dismiss as the results of outside influences, nor is considering them for PS reconstruction false reasoning.


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## Abu Rashid

> Here you are attempting a comparison between spoken Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic.



No comparison at all, merely pointing out I'm noticing more commonalities between them all the time. You're assuming way too much.



> I wondered and I am still wondering what that would mean other than that the three came about from a common parent language.



Well obviously somewhere down the line they did all come about from a common parent language. However that was not what I was speaking about. I was more referring to the fact that all 3 had developed as a result of nomadic Semitic peoples leaving behind their nomadic way of life, migrating into settled areas and establishing themselves amongst already urbanised peoples. The Akkadian speakers did this with the Sumerians, the Canaanite speakers did this with the "Sea Peoples" and the Arabic speakers eventually did this with a host of different peoples (Persians, Berbers, Turks etc).



> by a similar duration of time in which each of them has been influenced by non-Semitic languages.



Not just influenced by. Some Semiticists have pointed out that in the case of the Akkadian speakers and Canaanite speakers migrating into the Sumerian and "Sea peoples" areas respectively, those peoples ended up adopting the Semitic languages of the new arrivals, and so non-native speakers ended up moulding the languages, presumably to their previous lingual habits.

And when I think about it, this is exactly what happened with Arabic too. When the Arabs went out and spread throughout the Middle East and beyond, non-native Arabic speakers ended up becoming Arabic speakers, and the dialects they now speak today tend to represent influences from the areas they existed in and previous languages they spoke.

That was about all my point was... but make what you will of it, seems you will anyway, no matter what I say, you seem to have some sinister intent pinned on me in this discussion.



> As regards East Semitic languages, Akkadian presents very old forms of pronouns. Third person pronouns such as šū (he) and šī (she) suggest that West Semitic pronouns underwent a phonological change; s→h



I've read this claim before, but I'm curious about why it's claimed? As far as I'm aware the difference in Akkadian pronouns was actually a change in that language, due to the influence of Sumerian, if I recall correctly.


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## Flaminius

You ask, *Abu Rashid*, what I am up to.  I am wondering out loud how you can accord so much explanatory power to outside influences in language change.

If "in the case of the Akkadian speakers and Canaanite speakers migrating into the Sumerian and 'Sea peoples' areas respectively, those peoples ended up adopting the Semitic languages of the new arrivals, and so non-native speakers ended up moulding the languages, presumably to their previous lingual habits" and you suspect much the same for the development of Arabic, then "that spoken Arabic has a lot in common with Hebrew and Aramaic" is not due to the contact-with-other-languages-triggers-changes principle but despite that.  I suggested two alternatives.  Number one, their common extraction from the Central Semitic group; thus looking for clues of the parent language in the oldest attested forms of the three.  Number two, mutual influences (especially of Arabic and Aramaic as lingua franca) later in history.



> I've read this claim (s→h  change in the West Semitic) before, but I'm curious about why it's claimed? As far as I'm aware the difference in Akkadian pronouns was actually a change in that language, due to the influence of Sumerian, if I recall correctly.


The Akkadian phonological palette is considerably leaner than those of West Semitic languages.  This is more than likely due to the influence of Sumerian, which had less consonants than older Akkadian.  From purely a phonetic point of view, a change like h→s throws in more complicacy than s→h, thus contradictory to the general simplifying trend expected from contact with Sumerian phonology.

In contrast, supposing s→h in the West Semitic not only provides internal evidence to the divergence of East and West languages but also observes the good practice of historical linguistics; to wit, consider all evidence at hand in reconstructing the proto-language.

This is my answer to your _why it's claimed_.  I don't care so much if s→h is correct or not but sincerely hope to be held guiltless of falty logic.


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## sokol

Abu Rashid said:


> The theory of Arabian peninsula as Semitic homeland is proposed by quite a few Semiticists.


As I understand it, all scepticism in this thread is not directed against the theory of the Arabian peninsula being the Semitic homeland: while not proven this indeed is likely.
The criticism is (again - as I understand it) against the presupposition*) of Arabian being the most conservative language, the language which is supposed to be closest to Proto-Semitic.

*) That is, nobody actually _claimed_ in this thread that Arabian were the most conservative Semitic language but this only was _suggested_ - or not even that but only _implied_ in statements; that is, if I remember correctly (I haven't re-read the whole thread).



Abu Rashid said:


> And it's well known that the oldest written texts of Semitic languages, ie. Akkadian & Eblaite texts are very divergant from the other Semitic languages, and show heavy influences from surrounding languages. Whilst Arabic on the other end of the scale, has the youngest written texts, yet seems to be quite conservative.


This is one such statement: it implies that Arabic (the oldest written documents of Arabic, that is) were the closest to Proto-Semitic you get while not actually saying so.

Also there is absolutely no doubt that Semitic tribes migrated to the Fertile Crescent regions over millenia (at least since about 4.400 years ago - that is, at least a few decades before Sargon of Akkad, but more likely a century ago or even earlier); and it is highly likely that even 4.400 years ago they came from somewhere on the Arabian peninsula.

But this by no means is proof (or even likelihood) for them speaking more or less an early form of Arabic, or that Proto-Semitic were indeed rather close to Arabic, or (as also implied by you) that probably (old, ancient nomadic) Arabic*) had been the only "pure" Semitic language which ultimately changed into "more recent" Semitic languages by becoming changed through influence of languages of the peoples living in the Fertile Crescent.
(What I mean is, your posts above imply that it had been Proto-Arabians who settled in Mesopotamia about 4.500 years ago, and that their language changed to Akkadian due to Sumerian influence.)

*) So, the Arabic language as spoken by desert nomads 5.000 years (or so) ago, of which of course no written documents exist.


Don't get me wrong, Akkadian obviously was heavily influenced by Sumerian, not only as far as some sound changes are concerned (especially the neutralisation of all laryngal phonemes to hamza [ʔ], as it is called in Arabic, could or should be Sumerian influence), but Akkadian also had a huge number of Sumerian loan words.

But this doesn't mean that Akkadian, in essence, only ever had been a "corrupted" version of Arabic; and the same goes for all other Semitic (and Non-Arabic) languages of the Fertile Crescent.

Probably Arabic indeed _*is*_ the most conservative language concerning _*some*_ features of Proto-Semitic: I am not the one who should judge here, my knowledge of Semitic languages just isn't sufficient to make such bold claims that this were not the case.
(Please note, we're not talking about phonology only but about all levels of linguistic description, especially morphology: there are some quite exotic features in Akkadian morphology not shared by Arabic.)

But I can see the implication we're driving towards in this thread - the implication that Arabic were the most conservative one concerning _*all*_ features -, and I feel confident claiming that this has been rejected by most linguists.


And yet another final observation: in historical linguistics it should be irrelevant to try and ascertain that a particular language were the "oldest" or "most conservative" one; Indoeuropean linguists too have become victims of this misinterpretation (indeed some still do).

One should strive to try and make sure about _which_ features of _which_ individual languages were more "conservative" or "original" in terms of historical linguistics: it is hardly ever the case that only one language clearly were the "most conservative" one: I know this from Indoeuropean language studies, and especially Slavic languages are a perfect example for this.
Of Semitic languages I know barely enough to be sure that this is true for them too, but the little I know of Akkadian (and Arabic) indeed make me confident that it isn't basically different in the Semitic language family.


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## Abu Rashid

> From purely a phonetic point of view, a change like h→s throws in more complicacy than s→h, thus contradictory to the general simplifying trend expected from contact with Sumerian phonology



Actually my mistake, the 's' was supposedly from Egyptian, as Egyptian has pronouns sw (3ms) and sy (3fs). Also consider that no other Semitic language (except Eblaite), even the Southern Semitic languages, have the 's' sound in their pronouns.

So it seems the theory is based on the idea of a common Afro-Asiatic ancestor language, with the Afro part being the older form.


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## Abu Rashid

sokol,



> The criticism is (again - as I understand it) against the presupposition*) of Arabian being the most conservative language, the language which is supposed to be closest to Proto-Semitic.



I don't see why it's an idea so worthy of criticism. If the Arabian Peninsula was the Semitic homeland, and it's quite obviously been a very isolated place most/all of that time, and the language changed little, if at all, there over the past 2000-3000 years...

I understand your skepticism considering the Indo-European claims that've been made in the past, but it's a very different situation. There is no place of extreme isolation in the European situation like there is in the Arabian Peninsula. It's unique geographic conditions have allowed it to remain virtually untouched for millenia. The region was _never_ known to have been conquered all throughout recorded history, and this is one of the major problems when comparing it to other models like the Indo-European one.

It seems about the only 'valid' criticisms of such an idea stem from a perceived "jealousy" of other Semitic languages, of thinking "Why should their language be more conservative than ours, we have just as much right to be considered more conservative than those Arabs!!".

I re-iterate, nowhere have I claimed Arabic (in any form) is equivalent to proto-Semitic, and nowhere have I claimed Arabic is completely free of influence or change, indeed it has been influenced and changed, as is evidenced by loanwords taken from surrounding civilisations.



> But this doesn't mean that Akkadian, in essence, only ever had been a "corrupted" version of Arabic; and the same goes for all other Semitic (and Non-Arabic) languages of the Fertile Crescent.



I don't think terms like "corrupted" are helpful here, and I don't believe I ever used any such term. There is no real "good" or "bad" in languages, so that term serves no purpose in describing language changes.



> But I can see the implication we're driving towards in this thread - the implication that Arabic were the most conservative one concerning all features -, and I feel confident claiming that this has been rejected by most linguists.



All features is not correct, but it seems to be in most. At the moment I am reading through a comparative grammar of Semitic languages, and in almost every section of the book, Arabic ends up being used as the standard by which to compare the changes of the other languages. Not in every case, but in the vast bulk of them.

Again, it seems the only opposition to this idea is based on it being politically incorrect to utter in front of speakers of other Semitic languages.



> it is hardly ever the case that only one language clearly were the "most conservative" one



Hardly ever... right. But in the case of Arabic the right conditions seem to have existed (ie. the prolonged period of isolation), as well as a strong desire amongst the people to preserve their language, as well as the people never having been successfully invaded/occupied, as well as strong indicators that the final product seems to be very conservative.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> So it seems the theory is based on the idea of a common Afro-Asiatic ancestor language...


yes.


Abu Rashid said:


> ..., with the Afro part being the older form.


no.

You find find s- in Akkadian and Egyptian: mutual influence or mere coincidence is unlikely. You find h- in West-Semitic languages: mutual influence and/or common younger-than-PS ancestor is very likely.

I have no opinion whether or not the s->h hypothesis is correct or not, but this is the line of argument.


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## Abu Rashid

> mutual influence or mere coincidence is unlikely.



Well even though they were separated by vast distance, didn't the Babylonians and later Assyrians rule over Egypt? Also it seems strange that southern Semitic languages do not show this 's' if it's indeed from proto-Semitic. Especially the Abyssinian languages, since they were in Africa and therefore more likely to be influenced by Afro/Hamitic elements.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Well even though they were separated by vast distance, didn't the Babylonians and later Assyrians rule over Egypt?


Not at the time in question, i.e. 4500 years ago, from when the first Akkadian texts have been preserved.





Abu Rashid said:


> Also it seems strange that southern Semitic languages do not show this 's' if it's indeed from proto-Semitic. Especially the Abyssinian languages, since they were in Africa and therefore more likely to be influenced by Afro/Hamitic elements.


Some scholars argue that the shift happend during the PS period. This probably means that East-Semitic is assumed to be a very early spin-off and therefore was the only sub-group to have retained it.

Again, I have no opinion about the truth of the theory.


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## sokol

Abu Rashid said:


> I don't see why it's an idea so worthy of criticism. If the Arabian Peninsula was the Semitic homeland, and it's quite obviously been a very isolated place most/all of that time, and the language changed little, if at all, there over the past 2000-3000 years...


Agreed, little changed on the Arabian peninsula - but it is still a very long shot to suggest that it was a _direct_ ancestor (rather than a "sister" or "cousin") of Arabic which were the closest to Proto-Semitic - especially as the literary tradition of Arabic is young in terms of historical linguistics.



Abu Rashid said:


> It seems about the only 'valid' criticisms of such an idea stem from a perceived "jealousy" of other Semitic languages, of thinking "Why should their language be more conservative than ours, we have just as much right to be considered more conservative than those Arabs!!".


This is the argument reversed against which I'm arguing.
It is both nonsense to be "proud of Arabic as the most conservative Semitic language" as well as it is nonsense to be "jealous of Arabic being proposed as most conservative one".

Conservativeness is not a value.
Least of all, it is not a value for linguists. This is also the reason why I'm a sceptic towards any theory trying to prove that any language were the "most conservative" one. That's not what linguistics is about. 



Abu Rashid said:


> All features is not correct, but it seems to be in most. At the moment I am reading through a comparative grammar of Semitic languages, and in almost every section of the book, Arabic ends up being used as the standard by which to compare the changes of the other languages.


Certainly not when it comes to morphology, but I repeat: I am not the one who could argue the linguistic side here.
I've only learned about Akkadian (that is, I haven't learned the language but only learned how it worked), and even my Akkadian knowledge is only rather basic.

I'd rather avoid to quote from my Akkadian textbook but very well, some hard facts about Akkadian morphology (Matouš-Ungnad: Grammatik des Akkadischen, 1969; note that Hamza isn't written in Akkadian, that's due to the cuneiform script - even though Hamza still was used):

- Personal pronoun first person singular nominativ in Akkadian: anāku; Hebrew: 'anāku (if I've found the correct transliteration), and Arabian: ',ānā (Egyptian pronunciation); I'm quoting only this one, it should make clear that Akkadian and Hebrew are similar while Arabic has lost the ending: so what is here "most conservative"?

- Noun: any Akkadian noun may be declensed in what Matouš-Ungnad calls (in German) "Stativ" and then turn into a verb, and also Akkadian verbs easily could take over the function of a noun (as participles or infinitives for example). Further, Akkadian adjectives are derived (historically) from verbs even though its declension paradigms are very similar (not quite identical) with those of nouns. Grammatical categories weren't (yet) fixed in Akkadian, and this must have been an early state in Semitic languages - and certainly should be very much relevant for the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic.

- The >tense< (or whatever one would like to call it) named "Stativ" one can form with verbs, nouns and adjectives, and the meaning given by "Stativ" is of a specific condition: verb "mahārum = receive" in Stativ "mahir" means "he is one who received (something)"; or "bēlum = man, master" means in Stativ "bēlēku = he is a man (master)".
I have absolutely no idea how this would compare to more modern Semitic languages but it is obvious that this (and many other features) are important for Proto-Semitic studies: one shouldn't even begin to try and postulate any Proto-Semitic language without studying the ancient ones (which of course also includes Old Arabic, but also Hebrew, Ugaritic, and all the others).

Phonologically of course Akkadian is no contender for being closest to Proto-Semitic despite being the oldest Semitic language documented - but still phonological changes in Akkadian could possibly account for facts which one probably couldn't explain through other languages: after all Akkadian still is the oldest Semitic language preserved, we're looking at ancient history in Akkadian texts.


Again, I am definitely _*not*_ the one who could argue about which features of old Semitic languages would be important (and how) for establishing relationships between them (and constructing Proto-Semitic).
My knowledge just goes far enough to being able to offer some criticism which I think is important at this stage in the discussion here in this thread.
Therefore I really should stop my grossly amateurish attempts at establishing some facts about Akkadian: even in Akkadian I'm far from proficient, as said numerous times already.



Abu Rashid said:


> Hardly ever... right. But in the case of Arabic the right conditions seem to have existed (ie. the prolonged period of isolation), _as well as a strong desire amongst the people to preserve their language, as well as the people never having been successfully invaded/occupied,_ as well as strong indicators that the final product seems to be very conservative.


First and foremost: even if the conditions had been perfect (which very well might be true for all I know) this does not prove a thing.

Apart from that all those statements in cursive (emphasis by be) indeed do indicate implications on your side that Arabic were purer than most if not all Semitic languages: you don't say this in words but it is implied nevertheless.
And this is what I referred to above, nothing else ; one finds this in many statements of speakers of Arabic, and it might even be mainstream in linguistics in Arabian nations - but it isn't elsewhere.

I'd rather avoid such statements, for any language - same goes of course for other language groups (concerning IE languages Indo-Aryan languages have been thought of being the "most conservative" and "most original" ones of all IE languages for a very long time; it took IE linguists more than a century to discover that this is not the case, or at least not the way they thought it was in the 19th century).


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## clevermizo

sokol said:


> - Personal pronoun first person singular nominativ in Akkadian: anāku; Hebrew: 'anāku (if I've found the correct transliteration), and Arabian: ',ānā (Egyptian pronunciation); I'm quoting only this one, it should make clear that Akkadian and Hebrew are similar while Arabic has lost the ending: so what is here "most conservative"?



Slight correction - the reconstructed Hebrew form should be _*anōki_ (Modern pronounciation is _anoχi_). I don't know if /anāku/ in Hebrew is ever attested. So actually, the Hebrew and Akkadian are more similar with regards to /k/, but Akkadian and Arabic are more similar with regards to the internal vowel /ā/ which has become /ō/ due to the Canaanite vowel shift.

But this further states your point: Who is more conservative here? With regards to vowelling, Akkadian and Arabic form one group, but with regards to consonant integrity Akkadian and Hebrew form another.***

***The form _anoχi_ or older *_anōki_ is Biblical, but replaced with the form _ani_. _Ani_ is also another pronunciation found in Arabic dialects.


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## sokol

Thanks for the correction, clevermizo, obviously I've used a wrong vocalisation.  But as you say, this does not invalidate the point made.


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## Abu Rashid

Sokol,



> but it is still a very long shot to suggest that it was a _direct_ ancestor (rather than a "sister" or "cousin") of Arabic which were the closest to Proto-Semitic



I would've thought all Semitic languages would be direct descendants of proto-Semitic, no?



> Conservativeness is not a value.
> Least of all, it is not a value for linguists.



I don't see why not. Conservativeness has it's positives and it's negatives. I think Arabic has been able to overcome the negatives though by becoming diglossic, maintaining a very conservative dialect and innovative colloquial dialects.



> Certainly not when it comes to morphology



I would've thought the trend in morphology is to become less extravagant, which would therefore make Arabic more conservative no? Judging just from the evolution of the Arabic dialects, it seems that they move towards more simplified forms.



> but I repeat: I am not the one who could argue the linguistic side here.



Well this goes doubly for me. I am hopeless when it comes to actual linguistics. I am interested in it, but never had a very solid grasp of it.



> Personal pronoun first person singular nominativ in Akkadian: anāku; Hebrew: 'anāku (if I've found the correct transliteration), and Arabian: ',ānā (Egyptian pronunciation); I'm quoting only this one, it should make clear that Akkadian and Hebrew are similar while Arabic has lost the ending: so what is here "most conservative"?



As far as I'm aware Hebrew does not have that 'ku' ending anymore and hasn't for a long time. Also there are theories that it's an addition to the base 'ana' which was used to intensify the meaning of the more basic form. Neither the entire Southern Semitic group, Eblaite nor Aramaic have it, and Ugaritic has it, but side by side with 'ana'. I'm just guessing but it makes sense to me that if only one language has it as the standard, and most don't have it (even from all the different groups) and some use it side by side, then it would tend to indicate it was an extra form, as mentioned perhaps to intensify the meaning.



> My knowledge just goes far enough to being able to offer some criticism which I think is important at this stage in the discussion here in this thread.



Your knowledge is greatly appreciated in the discussion, since I have zero knowledge on Akkadian, it's good to see an input from that side.



> Apart from that all those statements in cursive (emphasis by be) indeed do indicate implications on your side that Arabic were purer than most if not all Semitic languages: you don't say this in words but it is implied nevertheless.



Using the word "purer" is not helpful here 

I've only heard this term used to describe Arabic by the early Christian Semiticists, who, when they began studying other Semitic languages (having previously been mostly only exposed to Hebrew & Aramaic from the Bible) found Arabic to be a little more 'orderly' and so assumed it must be purer than Hebrew. And although I know very little of other Semitic languages, when I do study them, I also find them less 'orderly', perhaps that's a bias as a result of having studied Arabic first, I don't know.



> I'd rather avoid such statements, for any language - same goes of course for other language groups (concerning IE languages Indo-Aryan languages have been thought of being the "most conservative" and "most original" ones of all IE languages for a very long time; it took IE linguists more than a century to discover that this is not the case, or at least not the way they thought it was in the 19th century).



IE is a very different group to Semtiic. IE has spread out over a vast expanse of land, and the variance in IE languages is much more than in Semitic languages. In fact I think comparing IE to Semitic is just not right, you'd have to at least include the African languages as part of a "super family" to get the same kind of variation and geographical dispersion that you have with the IE group. Then you could suggest the same kinds of restrictions would apply about theories relating to the origins of Semitic.


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## Abu Rashid

> Aramaic and Hebrew are not mutually intelligible, yet they are by far more similar to each other than to Arabic.



Just a note on this point. I just noticed that on Ethnologue they actually group the Canaanite languages (including Hebrew) along with Arabic, separate from Aramaic. Not sure how accurate their groupings are, but it's interesting to note.


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## sokol

Abu Rashid said:


> but it is still a very long shot to suggest that it was a _direct_ ancestor (rather than a "sister" or "cousin") of Arabic which were the closest to Proto-Semitic
> 
> 
> 
> I would've thought all Semitic languages would be direct descendants of proto-Semitic, no?
Click to expand...

Oh, for sure. Only plenty of posts in this thread suggested that it was rather the Arabic branch which was at the core and from which all others branched off, which is a misconception.



Abu Rashid said:


> Conservativeness is not a value.
> Least of all, it is not a value for linguists.
> 
> 
> 
> I don't see why not.
Click to expand...

A philological linguist may value language and may suggest that some kind of use is "more cultured" or "better" than another one.
A *linguist* does not, period. A linguist describes and explains, and a linguist is supposed to provide theories of development. It is not the task of a linguist to value - valuation is done plenty by philologists.



Abu Rashid said:


> Certainly not when it comes to morphology
> 
> 
> 
> I would've thought the trend in morphology is to become less extravagant, which would therefore make Arabic more conservative no? Judging just from the evolution of the Arabic dialects, it seems that they move towards more simplified forms.
Click to expand...

So you're saying that because Arabic morphology is more simplified it is more conservative? That the paradigm of Akkadian personal pronoun (which is richer than the Arabic one) were "less conservative" because it contains more categories?
If that's what you mean then you're arguing in circles; if we take a look at the personal pronoun it is evident at first sight that the Akkadian personal pronoun system is more conservative than the Arabic one.




Abu Rashid said:


> As far as I'm aware Hebrew does not have that 'ku' ending anymore and hasn't for a long time. Also there are theories that it's an addition to the base 'ana' which was used to intensify the meaning of the more basic form.


Oh, but of course, only in ancient Biblical Hebrew this was used (and berndf told me that even then it was rare); but the co-occurence of this form in Hebrew and Akkadian is a _*very strong*_ argument for it being the older and more original version.
One which you can't simply disqualify by claiming that languages which are much "younger" in terms of written documents don't have it because even that is supporting the theory that the "ku" ending is older.
Again I do not see how your argumentation could lead anywhere.





Abu Rashid said:


> I've only heard this term used to describe Arabic by the early Christian Semiticists, who, when they began studying other Semitic languages (having previously been mostly only exposed to Hebrew & Aramaic from the Bible) found Arabic to be a little more 'orderly' and so assumed it must be purer than Hebrew.


Oh but I am absolutely sure that the early Christian Semiticists had many wrong or at least misleading ideas about Semitic languages.  At first they all thought Hebrew were not only the oldest Semitic language but the oldest language ever (after all it's the language of the Bible), and later, by your statement here, they thought the same of Arabic.



Abu Rashid said:


> IE is a very different group to Semtiic. ... In fact I think comparing IE to Semitic is just not right, you'd have to at least include the African languages as part of a "super family" to get the same kind of variation and geographical dispersion that you have with the IE group.


Of course you're right about diversity, IE probably is much more diverse than even the whole Afro-Asiatic group.
But that's not the point here - the point is not the degree of diversity: the point is the one of trying to prove that any specific language were the closest one to the "proto-language" of its group. And my argument that no specific language ever is, except probably in very special cases, still stands: it has not to do with the degree of diversity but with methodology.

There are indeed a few cases where one could claim that a specific language were the "most original" and "conservative" ancestor: this is more or less the case for Latin (concerning all modern Romance languages) and Arabic (concerning all modern Arabic dialects).
But even here the concept of Latin and Arabic respectively being the "direct ancestor" is faulty, in a way:
- Take Romanian, which is a Romance language with some "exotic" features not shared by other Romance languages (like postponed article); also it has a great number of Slavic loans. It is clear that Romanian isn't "just" the "daughter of Latin".
- Same goes for Maghreb languages who are similarly influenced by Berber; Arabic as spoken in Maghreb nations definitely is Arabic (as well as Romanian is a Romance language), but still is not "only" a daughter of Arabic.

But there the analogy ends. You couldn't possibly hold up the same strict "Stammbaum" = "family tree" theory as it is called by the founders of this theory (German IE linguists) - neither for IE languages (for which it was postulated) nor for Semitic languages.

One shouldn't see language relationships like a family tree - this doesn't work in real life; Indoeuropean linguists also had to learn this the hard way. Languages of one "family" are more like bubbles which are overlapping and develop away from each other as bubbles grow and shrink and move (and also get influenced by languages belonging to other "families") - another metaphor which of course is simplifying too but probably helps to explain what I'm talking about here.


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## Abu Rashid

> Only plenty of posts in this thread suggested that it was rather the Arabic branch which was at the core and from which all others branched off, which is a misconception.



Which one is at the core doesn't affect the fact they are all descendants of proto-Semitic, does it? Arabic merely had the lot of being the language that evolved in what was most likely the traditional Semitic homeland, and without much outside influence. I don't see why that's such a big problem for you, that's just the way it is. If anyone is trying to make "value" judgements about the languages and their evolution here, it seems to be you, since you are refusing to accept that the unique position of Arabic has anything to do with it's relationship to proto-Semitic. What your agenda is exactly, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem to be very objective.



> A linguist does not, period.



Lucky I'm not a linguist then, because I consider it a value, but as I said, also a hindrance.



> So you're saying that because Arabic morphology is more simplified it is more conservative?



I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing here, but I understand morphology to be equivalent to sarf, ie. the way new words are 'contorted' out of existing verbs, and as far as I understand Arabic seems to be the most extravagant at this, showing the vastest array of verb/noun forms. My point about the spoken dialects of Arabic is that they've dropped many of those different forms and just stick to a few main ones.



> That the paradigm of Akkadian personal pronoun (which is richer than the Arabic one) were "less conservative" because it contains more categories?



How exactly is it 'richer'? I must admit not knowing a lot about the Akkadian pronouns, apart from the main differences it shows in 'anaku' for the 1ps and 's' instead of 'h' in the 3p.



> but the co-occurence of this form in Hebrew and Akkadian is a very strong argument for it being the older and more original version.



I really don't get that. The co-occurence of the shorter form in Arabic, all the Southern Semtiic and Ethio-Semitic languages, as well as most of the Western Semitic languages and even Eblaite (an Eastern Semitic language) would be MUCH stronger evidence for it not being older and more original. The shorter form in effect exists in ALL Semitic groups, whilst the 'k' form only exists in a few, perhaps one of them borrowed it from a neighbour, and then others borrowed it from them. It's most certainly not the norm for Semitic languages.

Another interesting point which I thought of as well is that the demonstrative 'k' tends to indicate distance or otherness. For example in Arabic: hadha (this) hadhak (that), huna (here) hunak (there). This is further strengthened by the fact that 'k' used as an attached pronoun always denotes the second person, in pretty much every Semitic language, even Assyrian, Hebrew and the other Canaanite languages (that show 'anaku'), which would suggest the use of it as a first person pronoun was an anomaly and perhaps a mix-up even. It is completely out of place as a first person pronoun suffix.



> One which you can't simply disqualify by claiming that languages which are much "younger" in terms of written documents don't have it because even that is supporting the theory that the "ku" ending is older.



You are falling into the trap mentioned earlier that written down earlier = older. The fact a language was written down earlier does not mean any elements it contains which most others in the family do not, are therefore automatically assumed to be the more archaic form.



> Again I do not see how your argumentation could lead anywhere.



My argumentation? I raised this point?? This isn't my argument at all, in fact it's yours, you raised it in post #43. If anyone is trying to "lead anywhere" with argumentation, it's quite clearly your good self.



> another metaphor which of course is simplifying too but probably helps to explain what I'm talking about here.



Certainly a much better metaphor than the tree one, I agree.


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## Abu Rashid

Something interesting I just came across.

Regarding 'anaku', O'Leary mentions in his Comparative grammar of Semitic languages that the Sumerian 1ps pronoun is 'ku' or 'gu'.

So perhaps the Akkadian was a mashup between the original Semitic 'ana' and the Sumerian 'ku', producing 'anaku'??


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing here, but I understand morphology to be equivalent to sarf, ie. the way new words are 'contorted' out of existing verbs, and as far as I understand Arabic seems to be the most extravagant at this, showing the vastest array of verb/noun forms.


Are you talking about the famous Semitic 3-letter root system? I think, all Semitic languages share this. And the system isn’t fully productive in any attested Semitic language, the most maybe in Akkadian and not in Arabic. For the benefit of those not familiar with this system: The basic meaning of a word is conveyed by its 3 root consonants (there are 2 and 4 letter roots, but they are “squeezed” into the derivation paradigms geared towards 3 root consonants). The vowel, optionally supplemented by pre- and suffixes, are used to derive “forms” which can be verbs, nouns or adjectives. E.g. in Hebrew the root X-Y-Z can take the forms XaYbZ (verb; verbs are considered to be the most basic meaning of a root), XeYeZ (noun), XaYZuTh (abstract noun), like in
_M-L-K (_root_ “rule”, “reign”)_
_MaLaKh (“to rule”, __“__to reign”)_
_MeLeKh (“king”)_
_MaLKhuTh (“the reign”)_
Other language families show similar mechanisms, like Latin
_rego (“to reign”)_
_rex (“king”; _obviously derived by assimilation of “g” from _*regs)_
_regnum (“the reign”)_
(where the main difference is that root vowels are part of the root itself and not morphemes, like in Semitic). But in Semitic languages this is much more regular and transparent.

Back to what I see as the core of the debate here: It seems to be practically consensus view among Semiticists that Arabian languages preserved PS phonology the best. There may have occurred sound shift but they concerned the realization of phonemes and for most of them there are 1:1 correspondences. In this respect, South Arabian is even more conservative than Arabic.

Concerning morphology (this I mean now in a more restrictive sense like Sokol: declensions and conjugations), it is hard to say how the PS system looked like. Akkadian certainly had the most elaborate system. Western Semitic languages show remnants of these systems in varying degrees but it is not clear whether those are originally PS are “leftovers” of Akkadian influence (the two forms of “I”, _ani_ and _anochi_ in Hebrew which have been discussed in this thread already are sometimes regarded as evidence of early Akkadian influence, the latter being regarded as an Akkadian import). Classical Arabic maintained more of these forms longer than Hebrew or Aramaic. E.g. Classical Arabic still distinguished three cases in its declension scheme while these were already completely gone in Biblical Hebrew. Classical Arabic still had jussive and subjunctive moods while Biblical Hebrew had only remnants. MSA has lost these distinctions too. This is a point in favour of Abu Rashid’s assumptions that the relative isolation of the Arabian Desert (I say “relative” because some Arabian speaking peoples had intense contact with neighbouring civilizations; take e.g. the Nabateans) may have caused Arabian languages to be more conservative: Arabic underwent the same simplifications as Hebrew or Aramaic once is had become regional lingua franca.

On the other hand, this relative conservativism of Arabian languages cannot necessarily be taken as proof of a Semitic “Urheimat” in the Arabian  Peninsula. It is equally possible that PS originated, e.g., in the Fertile Crescent and some tribes, at a very early stage, migrated to the Arabian Peninsula where they preserved the old phonology. It is not untypical for colonial dialects to be more conservative than the language from which they split. E.g. the Pennsylvania Dutch essentially speak 17th century German and the American pronunciation of “current” is older than the British one.


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Are you talking about the famous Semitic 3-letter root system?



Not exactly. The 3 letter root system is of course the 'pool' from which Semitic languages  draw their words, but it's not morphology in and of itself. Morphology refers to the way in which basic words are modified in order to produce new meanings from them (in my understanding anyway).



> Akkadian certainly had the most elaborate system



Akkadian shows more forms than Arabic?? I think we're not talking about the same thing here. Morphology in Semitic languages generally refers to the way new verbs are derived from existing ones by modifying the base root stem. By doubling radicals and inserting special consonants into the basic root stem. Akkadian has all up 13 different forms it appears, whilst Arabic has 15, although not all of them are in common use. Hebrew on the other hand only shows 7 forms. Note that these patterns usually are quite similar between Semitic languages.



> I say “relative” because some Arabian speaking peoples had intense contact with neighbouring civilizations; take e.g. the Nabateans



This is true, the Nabataeans extended themselves right into the fertile crescent, and interacted heavily with the Persians and Romans, eventually assimilating into the populace of the Roman Levant.

After them the Ghassanids did the same, and the remnants of their populace (who resisted Islam) migrated into Anatolia with the retreating Romans at the arrival of Islam.

But these kingdoms did not so much affect the inland Arab tribes, who themselves maintained the Arabic language in it's 'purest' form. And even in the small urban centres of the Peninsula, people would send their children into the desert to learn the language from the bedouins. This was a well known custom of the settled Arabs of the Peninsula. Language was extremely important to them.



> On the other hand, this relative conservativism of Arabian languages cannot necessarily be taken as proof of a Semitic “Urheimat” in the Arabian Peninsula.



whilst it is speculation precisely where the Semitic homeland was, it would seem that it was either in the Arabian Peninsula, or slightly north where the Peninsula cuts into the Asian landmass, in the deserts between Canaan and Mesopotamia. These are the two main areas where it has been proposed.

There is an interesting map here (image code seems to be off in this forum) which is based on an analysis that was done by number crunching a lot of Semitic cognates. The entire article is online from Royal Society Publishing and is a very interesting read about the origins of Semitic languages. There is also a chart in the article which indicates when each Semitic language most probably separated from the others. It doesn't support anything I've argued here (in fact it suggests further north, between Canaan and Mesopotamia), but is just interesting nonetheless for those interested in this topic.



> It is equally possible that PS originated, e.g., in the Fertile Crescent and some tribes, at a very early stage, migrated to the Arabian Peninsula where they preserved the old phonology.



It's possible but highly unlikely. People usually don't migrate from urban centres to barren deserts. There's very little evidence of any southward migration into the Arabian Peninsula, but a lot of evidence of continual northward migration.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Akkadian shows more forms than Arabic?? I think we're not talking about the same thing here. Morphology in Semitic languages generally refers to the way new verbs are derived from existing ones by modifying the base root stem.


Those are voices, forms or derivations (I don't know the Arabic name from it, in Hebrew they are called "binyan"; Hebrew has 7 of them). We were speaking about the verb forms *per voice*. The Akkadian imperfect alone has 3 moods *times* 3 aspects. The Arabic imperfect has only 4 forms per voice (4 moods (indicative, subjunctive, jussive and energetic) and no aspects). I believe MSA has lost these distinctions but I am not sure. You certainly know better. The Modern Hebrew imperfect has only one form, Bablical Hebrew had 3 but they were distinguishable only for a relatively small group of verbs.




Abu Rashid said:


> It's possible but highly unlikely. People usually don't migrate from urban centres to barren deserts. There's very little evidence of any southward migration into the Arabian Peninsula, but a lot of evidence of continual northward migration.


The separation happened certainly a long time ago. Urigumi said about 6000 years ago. This order of magnitude makes sense to me but certainly more the 3500-4000 years ago when Ugaritic and Aramaic records stated. And it happened before those peoples started to settle down and found cities. Both theories, yours and the counter theory I presented, are *equally* speculative.


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## Abu Rashid

> Those are voices, forms or derivations (I don't know the Arabic name from it, in Hebrew they are called "binyan"; Hebrew has 9 of them).



In Arabic they are called أوزان (patterns). They are what sokol was speaking about (ie. Morphology in english) as far as I could tell. Perhaps we need to define better what we mean by morphology.

Most articles I've read only list 7 binyanim, perhaps there's 2 which are rarely used and therefore not normally mentioned, especially not to confuse beginners??



> I believe MSA has lost these distinctions but I am not sure.



MSA is not considered a language/dialect to Arabic speakers. This term is only really used in the West, and has no actual translation in Arabic as far as I'm aware. In Arabic there is only really a distinction between الفصحى (al-fus-ha, the eloquent speech) and العامية (al-aamiyyah, the general/colloquial speech).

So whilst the perception might exist in Western circles that MSA is the modern replacement of Classical Arabic, it's not necessarily the case. Classical Arabic is alive and well and used in many arenas. MSA could be considered just a slight relaxation of the rules of fus-ha, which is used in the media. The distinction is not really overtly recognised in Arabic society though.



> The separation happened certainly a long time ago. Urigumi said about 6000 years ago.



That article I linked to with it's timeline chart suggests Arabic separated from the rest of the central Semitic group around about 6500 years ago, then Ugaritic about 6000 and then Aramaic and Hebrew around 5500 years ago. So I guess origumi is not far off, if that study was correct.



> And it happened before those peoples started to settle down and found cities.



This would suggest then that the theory of nomads wandering out of the Arabian deserts is probably more correct then.



> Both theories, yours and the counter theory I presented, are equally speculative.



Of course they are. The theory I am propounding though is quite heavily backed up by archaeologists who've spent their entire life in the field studying the physical evidence quite closely though.


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## sokol

berndf said:


> E.g. Classical Arabic still distinguished three cases in its declension scheme while these were already completely gone in Biblical Hebrew. Classical Arabic still had jussive and subjunctive moods while Biblical Hebrew had only remnants. MSA has lost these distinctions too.


Younger akkadian too has three cases in its declension system; but ancient Akkadian even had five (nominative, genitive, accusative, locative, and terminative - I'm using again Matouš-Ungnad's term; it is possible that English or Arabic semitists use different ones).
Which is proof for Quran Arabic being very conservative indeed, but not as conservative as Akkadian, obviously.

Abu Rashid, I am sorry but I don't see how you could try and go on claiming that Arabic (in its most ancient known forms) could have more morphological categories than Akkadian. You are obviously mistaken here, the facts are overwhelming enough to make discussion futile.


Abu Rashid said:


> Akkadian shows more forms than Arabic?? I think we're not talking about the same thing here. Morphology in Semitic languages generally refers to the way new verbs are derived from existing ones by modifying the base root stem. By doubling radicals and inserting special consonants into the basic root stem. Akkadian has all up 13 different forms it appears, whilst Arabic has 15, although not all of them are in common use.


Don't you think it is weird that you're claiming Arabic had more forms when the quote you linked to shows that Akkadian still had dual, while Arabic hadn't? (As shown in the table you're linking to.)
You're contradicting yourself.

About 13 vs. 15 patterns - I am not able to argue about this, it might be easily explained through younger developments of Arabic; this does not prove a thing.

I don't know why you find it so difficult to accept that Akkadian had plenty of morphological categories not at all present in Arabic (dual being one of them, the conjugation called "Stativ" above is another one).
There is absolutely no indication that dual wasn't originally Semitic; while it is well-known that Akkadian syntax was influenced by Sumeric (and most likely is not Semitic in its origin) the same cannot be said for e. g. dual.

Morphology of course does not only include verbal morphology: a morpheme is defined as the smallest element distinguishing meaning in a word (some words consist of only one morpheme but most have many), thus each declension or conjugation ending is a morpheme - and morphology is the study of them.
This term is internationally accepted among linguists and if Arabic linguists really would choose to use the term differently (which by the way I doubt) then this only explains the misunderstanding between you and me, but it does not invalidate the point made above.

And even if you'd be claiming that Arabic verbal morphology were more complex than the one of Akkadian you're still wrong: because Akkadian verbs too took dual endings. So where's the dual in Arabic?


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> In Arabic they are called أوزان (patterns). They are what sokol was speaking about (ie. Morphology in english) as far as I could tell. Perhaps we need to define better what we mean by morphology.


Morphology is about wordforms, _I go, he goes, he went_, etc. Morphology is normally not concerned with lexically distinct derivations. But in the case of Semitic languages, it makes sense to include binyans when talking about morphology. But reducing morphology to them is an upside-down use of the term.


Abu Rashid said:


> Most articles I've read only list 7 binyanim, perhaps there's 2 which are rarely used and therefore not normally mentioned, especially not to confuse beginners??


Of course, 7. it was a typo. My apologies.


Abu Rashid said:


> MSA is not considered a language/dialect to Arabic speakers.


It is a development stage of standard Arabic, like Middle English and Modern English are development stages of English. Some civilisations defining themselves through a fixed literary tradition often refuse to acknowledge evolution, like speakers of early Medieval Romance languages didn't acknowledge Latin could evolve. If we concern ourselves with the development of Arabic (which undeniably happened, even if classical Arabic grammar is still part of the literary standard) we have to find a term for it.





Abu Rashid said:


> This would suggest then that the theory of nomads wandering out of the Arabian deserts is probably more correct then.


Or the other way round. How would you tell? Semitic tribes in the NW-Semitic languages area lived an equally nomadic lifestyle before about 2000-1500BC. There is little room for doubt about that.


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## Abu Rashid

> I don't see how you could try and go on claiming that Arabic (in its most ancient known forms) could have more morphological categories than Akkadian.



You made the claim about morphology, not I. I merely questioned it, since I don't know much about Akkadian, and it appears (as we'll see below) you know very little about Arabic.

As I said, what I understood morphology to be is sarf. It appears now that's incorrect, and sarf may just be one component of what is called morphology.



> Don't you think it is weird that you're claiming Arabic had more forms when the quote you linked to shows that Akkadian still had dual, while Arabic hadn't?



I don't know where on earth you got this idea from. Arabic had dual in it's oldest attested form, and still has it as we speak today. I use dual forms in my speech pretty much every single day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar#Number

Btw, I was not definitely asserting Arabic has more forms, I was questioning whether you meant the verbal forms, or if by morphology you meant something else. As far as verbal forms goes, Arabic seems to have more. Also I think Arabic would have more plural noun forms (being the only Semitic language with broken plurals). It also has a lot of different noun forms too. As far as I am aware, cases/moods are not considered part of Arabic morphology (sarf), since they don't really alter the 'shape' or 'pattern' of the word, but just change the way the vowels/movements actuate the word. As I said I may be wrong on that one.



> I don't know why you find it so difficult to accept that Akkadian had plenty of morphological categories not at all present in Arabic (dual being one of them, the conjugation called "Stativ" above is another one).



I don't find it difficult to accept at all. If that's the case, no problem. But Arabic does have dual, so on that point for instance you are wrong. You are arguing this much more definitively than I did, yet you're clearly mistaken on it. I admitted from the start I know next to nothing about Akkadian, and therefore did not argue anything definitively about it. You on the other hand are just stating clearly wrong things about Arabic.

Without fully understanding what exactly stative means, I can't really comment on it. However, if you look at these two wiki articles about Arabic grammar and Stative verbs, they both mention Arabic having stative forms. Whether it's what you're talking about or not, I don't know.



> There is absolutely no indication that dual wasn't originally Semitic; while it is well-known that Akkadian syntax was influenced by Sumeric (and most likely is not Semitic in its origin) the same cannot be said for e. g. dual.



Great I agree with this, as it's further evidence Arabic, which still retains dual, is one of the most conservative languages, not just in phonology, but grammatically as well 

Actually according to the Wikipedia article about grammatical dual, Arabic even today retains it better than Akkadian ever did thousands of years ago:

_"Among living languages, Modern Standard Arabic has a mandatory dual number, marked on nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns. (First-person dual forms, however, do not exist; compare this to the lack of third-person dual forms in the old Germanic languages.) Many of the spoken Arabic dialects have a dual marking for nouns (only), but its use is not mandatory. Likewise, Akkadian had a dual number, though its use was confined to standard phrases like "two hands", "two eyes", and "two arms"."_



> This term is internationally accepted among linguists and if Arabic linguists really would choose to use the term differently (which by the way I doubt) then this only explains the misunderstanding between you and me, but it does not invalidate the point made above.



I am not a linguist, and certainly not an Arabic linguist, so it may possibly include such changes. However when I studied Arabic grammar, I studied a disclipine known as sarf, in which we only studied how to derive new meanings from existing words by modifying their patterns. The study of things like cases is covered under nahu (general grammar), although there may well be some overlap which I did not study.

The Arabic study of grammar predates the English study of grammar, and so it already has its own pre-existing terminology which is not merely dependant upon a translation from English. The Arabic terminology is specifically suited, obviously, for Arabic, and I'd suggest for other Semitic languages too.


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## Abu Rashid

> Morphology is about wordforms, I go, he goes, he went, etc. Morphology is normally not concerned with lexically distinct derivations. But in the case of Semitic languages, it makes sense to include binyans when talking about morphology. But reducing morphology to them is an upside-down use of the term.



I would suggest then that it appears this term is defined for the way it applies probably to European languages, because in Arabic (and I'd assume other Semitic languages) it makes more sense for it to mostly apply to the verbal forms, since they are the primary way of 'twisting' meaning out of words.



> It is a development stage of standard Arabic, like Middle English and Modern English are development stages of English.



No it is not. You don't seem to have understood what I stated. MSA is not taught to any child in school for instance, they are taught al-fus-ha. If they took a job in the media, then they might use al-fus-ha in a relaxed way that Westerners might label as MSA. However if they took a job as an Imam of a mosque, then they'd use al-fus-ha in it's correct form. MSA is effectively just a style of using al-fus-ha which you might or might not use if you took a specific job. It is not the normal form of the language.

Anyway, even if you buy a Western textbook on MSA, it still teaches all of the features you said are not part of MSA (the one's I've studied from do anyway), like cases, moods etc. So I really think the term is just completely redundant, and often confuses a lot of people.



> Some civilisations defining themselves through a fixed literary tradition often refuse to acknowledge evolution, like speakers of early Medieval Romance languages didn't acknowledge Latin could evolve.



al-Fus-ha is a frozen language, it will not really change. It may expand with new vocabulary, but that's about it. Since Arabic is diglossic, the changes you mention will occur in the dialects, not in al-Fus-ha.



> If we concern ourselves with the development of Arabic (which undeniably happened, even if classical Arabic grammar is still part of the literary standard) we have to find a term for it.



The term already exists, al-Fus-ha.



> Or the other way round. How would you tell? Semitic tribes in the NW-Semitic languages area lived an equally nomadic lifestyle before about 2000-1500BC. There is little room for doubt about that.



Yep as I said, the two main theories are either deep in the Arabian peninsula, or in the northern part of it, between Canaan and Mesopotamia (ie. where the NW Semitic languages seem to have branched out from).


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> No it is not. You don't seem to have understood what I stated. MSA is not taught to any child in school for instance, they are taught al-fus-ha. If they took a job in the media, then they might use al-fus-ha in a relaxed way that Westerners might label as MSA. However if they took a job as an Imam of a mosque, then they'd use al-fus-ha in it's correct form. MSA is effectively just a style of using al-fus-ha which you might or might not use if you took a specific job. It is not the normal form of the language.


It doesn't really matter, if you call is a development stage, a deialect a language or a register (this is probably what most Arabs would call it). Important is only that MSA, whatever it is, has a simplified grammar compared to Classical Arabic.


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## Abu Rashid

> It doesn't really matter, if you call is a development stage, a deialect a language or a register (this is probably what most Arabs would call it).



I have no problem calling it a register, but definitely not a dialect or development stage. The diglossic nature of Arabic is spread out over a continuum between al-fus-ha and al-aamiyyah, and there may be points on that continuum that correspond roughly to the Western label MSA, but it's certainly not a dialect that's replaced al-Fus-ha (or classical Arabic). There are other points on that continuum not labeled by Western scholars, but which may be in common use even more than those labelled MSA. So I personally find the term MSA to be pretty pointless, other than as a synonym for al-Fus-ha. As I said, all the textbooks I've come across (Western ones) teach the case system, teach the dual, teach the moods etc. So how they supposedly differ from al-Fus-ha is beyond me.

A reference grammar of Modern Standard Arabic is I think one of the major modern Western works on MSA, and it quite clearly does teach things like case and mood. Ryding in that book states that the difference between CA and MSA is primarily in style and vocabulary. Which would mean for the purpose of this discussion then, the distinction is irrelevant, since it doesn't affect grammar.


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## berndf

These are all again status considerations which have its purpose for the cutural identity of a nation or cultural region but are irrelevant for the linguistic argument namely that Arabic experienced a simplification of Grammar since the beginning of the Islamic period. Modern speakers don't use case declensions in everyday speech any more.

Again, if you prefer to call it a register this is fine with me. There is a quasi-consensus among linguists that status-labels, i.e. language, dialect or register, are irrelevant in linguistic analysis, except as cultural or political phenomena. Linguists therefore tend to use the term "language" rather loosely. If (Western) Scholars speak of CA and MSA as different languages, this has to be understood in this context.

You have the same issue in Hebrew: Any Biblical Hebrew sentence still is "correct" grammar in modern Hebrew and modern speakers have no difficulties with it. Yet the reality of Modern Hebrew is different and Biblical and Modern Hebrew are distinct entities (and it is convenient to have names for them, like in the case CA and MSA), whether you call them languages, dialects, development stages or registers.


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## Abu Rashid

> namely that Arabic experienced a simplification of Grammar since the beginning of the Islamic period. Modern speakers don't use case declensions in everyday speech any more.



Did it? This statement is troublesome for a few reasons.

1) The exact same grammar of the Hadith and Qur'an (ie. primary Islamic texts from the beginning of the Islamic period) is still in use today. And doesn't appear to have been simplified at all.

2) The Arabic dialects appear to have existed side by side with al-fus-ha prior to the Islamic period. There's no evidence to suggest they are a simplification of the early Islamic period frozen Arabic.

3) It appears you may even be mixing up al-fus-ha and al-ammiyyah in your statement there.

As mentioned, what I learnt from Ryding's, A reference of MSA, and other English books on MSA is the exact same language I now read in Qur'an & Hadith. I really can't find the distinction, and if one does exist then it's extremely subtle and exists only beyond my perception.

Right now I am listening to a kids program that my children are watching, and it sounds exactly like the same language that's in Hadith books (from the beginning of the Islamic period) to me.



> Linguists therefore tend to use the term "language" rather loosely. If (Western) Scholars speak of CA and MSA as different languages, this has to be understood in this context.



I can understand their resort to such a loose definition, especially with the wide range of differences with which many people choose to define language, dialect etc. However I think in the case of MSA/CA the line is so fine, you'd have trouble finding it. IMHO if I study only MSA texts, and end up being able to read CA texts with no problem at all, then they're one and the same 

MSA in my opinion is nothing but a fancy English acronym for al-Fus-ha. All valid MSA is valid Fus-ha and vice versa as far as I'm aware.



> Yet the reality of Modern Hebrew is different and Biblical and Modern Hebrew are distinct entities



I don't know enough about Hebrew to comment on that, but I think Hebrew has undergone a lot of changes no? Also you must remember when we speak about Arabic, we have fus-ha and aamiyyah, it seems you're speaking here about modern colloquial versus classical biblical Hebrew. MSA is _not_ colloquial Arabic. So that comparison doesn't really seem logical.


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## Abu Rashid

Anyway the original point was:



> The Arabic imperfect has only 4 forms per voice (4 moods (indicative, subjunctive, jussive and energetic) and no aspects). I believe MSA has lost these distinctions but I am not sure. You certainly know better.



I didn't know better, but now it seems apparent MSA hasn't lost these distinctions and still retains them, as mentioned in Ryding's manual on MSA linked to above.


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## sokol

Abu Rashid said:


> I would suggest then that it appears this term is defined for the way it applies probably to European languages, because in Arabic (and I'd assume other Semitic languages) it makes more sense for it to mostly apply to the verbal forms, since they are the primary way of 'twisting' meaning out of words.


I am sorry but this is nonsense.
It is absolutely clear what morphology is about - it doesn't help if you try to promote a definition of morphology not accepted by serious linguists (and I am sure, neither accepted by Arabic linguists ).



Abu Rashid said:


> Arabic had dual in it's oldest attested form, and still has it as we speak today. I use dual forms in my speech pretty much every single day.


I never claimed to know Arabic grammar.
I was referring to the table you linked to above, where the Akkadian paradigm showed singular, dual and plural while the Arabic one didn't. So Arabic has dual, very well - I got it wrong there, you have your point here. I am sorry for this mistake which is due to my lack of knowledge of modern Semitic languages: as I've mentioned numerous times in my posts above, I am not the one who should argue comparative Semitic studies.

But with dual it only has a feature Akkadian had too - a feature which definitely was part of Proto-Semitic.
You are right, the fact that Arabic has dual proves that it has conserved features of morphology which most Semitic languages have lost already.

So of course I duly apology for the error I made above, committed due to my ignorance of Arabic.



But the main point remains - Akkadian still has features absent in Arabic (5 cases in its older forms while Quran Arabic had 3, to repeat one mentioned above, and Stativ), and Akkadian definitely shows a Semitic language at a very early stage of development which gives insights one couldn't possibly get from languages only attested much later - like Hebrew or Arabic or Aramaic.


That is what my posts were all about - nothing more, but also nothing less. It is futile to try and reconstruct Proto-Semitic from evidence of the oldest written forms attested in Arabic alone.
By the way, there's a German Wiki entry on Altarabisch - unfortunately not available in other languages and not even very elaborate or useful in German; but there's a sentence which is of relevance here:

"Der Sprachtypus das Altarabischen ist sehr altertümlich und in vielem dem Akkadischen vergleichbar."
"Typologically, Old Arabic*) is very conservative and in many respects similar to Akkadian."

*) Note: this article defines "Altarabisch = Old Arabic" as the language spoken _*before*_ Quran was written, a language which probably was still spoken some 300 years before Hijra, that'd be approx. 300 AD in the Western calendar. Not much has been preserved of Old Arabic, and Quran Arabic lost many casus endings still preserved in Old Arabic.

Both statements are interesting - that Old Arabic indeed was very conservative (more so than Quran Arabic of course), and that both Old Arabic and Akkadian Arabic had much in common.


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## Abu Rashid

sokol,



> I am sorry but this is nonsense.
> It is absolutely clear what morphology is about - it doesn't help if you try to promote a definition of morphology not accepted by serious linguists (and I am sure, neither accepted by Arabic linguists ).



No problem, I may well be wrong even on the meaning of sarf. As I said, was just going by what I learnt and what I've seen morphology translated as. I concede this one without issue, since i know very little about intricacies of linguistics terminology, even in English let alone Arabic.



> I was referring to the table you linked to above, where the Akkadian paradigm showed singular, dual and plural while the Arabic one didn't.



The table I linked to was a table of Akkadian verb patterns. There was no Arabic table at all. However, as a comparison it did mention which Arabic and Hebrew verbal forms correspond to the Akkadian ones (where corresponding ones exist). It wasn't however a table of Arabic verb forms. Also there's no mention of the dual in the table at all, that I can see.



> I am sorry for this mistake which is due to my lack of knowledge of modern Semitic languages: as I've mentioned numerous times in my posts above, I am not the one who should argue comparative Semitic studies.



No problem at all, but don't you think it's a little odd you'd be arguing so strongly that Arabic is not as conservative as Akkadian or other Semitic languages?? You admit to not knowing much at all about Arabic, yet seem quite sure it's not as conservative. I find that mighty odd.



> But with dual it only has a feature Akkadian had too



Not quite. I don't think Akkadian has a full complement of dual endings in all it's conjugations like Arabic does. Perhaps you could say Akkadian preserves a part of this feature which Arabic has fully preserved. From what I have been reading this is only in the very oldest Akkadian texts as well. In later Akkadian the dual pretty much vanished.



> But the main point remains - Akkadian still has features absent in Arabic (5 cases in its older forms while Quran Arabic had 3, to repeat one mentioned above, and Stativ)



The wikipedia article on Akkadian grammar says 3 cases, but it could well be wrong I guess. Also is there any evidence that these extra cases are actually Semitic? Do they exist in any other Semitic language??



> Akkadian definitely shows a Semitic language at a very early stage of development which gives insights one couldn't possibly get from languages only attested much later - like Hebrew or Arabic or Aramaic.



I think this is still the major flaw in your argument here. Because Akkadian texts predate Arabic (or Hebrew or others) you seem to be fixed on the idea that it must be more conservative or in an earlier stage of development. Yet as is shown with the dual, Akkadian was in a much later stage of development even in it's oldest attested form than Arabic is in this very day I write this to you.

I think we need to examine the conditions which cause Semitic languages to lose things like duals and other Semitic features which are not common in other languages or are difficult to master. It has been suggested by some Semiticists that this is a result of non-Semitic peoples adopting Semitic languages, usually as a result of a conquest or an amalgamation of populations (Semitic with non-Semitic, where they adopt the Semitic language and abandon the non-Semitic one). And so they begin to eject from the language those aspects not found in their original language or which are 'difficult to master and not necessary'. If this were the case, then Akkadian would've undergone such processes much earlier on than most other Semitic languages when Sumerian speakers adopted it, and that would explain why it lost many of those features thousands of years before a language like Arabic, which never had this process occur until the Islamic age, and even then Classical Arabic remained protected anyway due to the freezing of the language. But the Arabic dialects definitely show this same kind of trend.



> It is futile to try and reconstruct Proto-Semitic from evidence of the oldest written forms attested in Arabic alone.



Agreed. And I have done no such thing, nor even remotely suggested any such thing.



> By the way, there's a German Wiki entry on Altarabisch - unfortunately not available in other languages and not even very elaborate or useful in German; but there's a sentence which is of relevance here:



There is an article in English wiki entitled Ancient North Arabian, perhaps this is what it refers to?? This refers to the language spoken in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and the northern parts of the Peninsula though, but which obviously was very close to the language spoken inside the Peninsula, but seems to have many Hebrew and Aramaic features. There is pretty much nothing known of the Arabic of the interior of the Peninsula, from which modern Arabic sprung, prior to the Islamic age.



> Note: this article defines "Altarabisch = Old Arabic" as the language spoken before Quran was written, a language which probably was still spoken some 300 years before Hijra, that'd be approx. 300 AD in the Western calendar. Not much has been preserved of Old Arabic, and Quran Arabic lost many casus endings still preserved in Old Arabic.
> 
> Both statements are interesting - that Old Arabic indeed was very conservative (more so than Quran Arabic of course)



Ancient North Arabian was spoken right up until the Islamic period, and most probably even some time into the Islamic period, amongst small communities until it converged into modern Arabic.

If not much is preserved of it, then I find it very difficult to accept that you (or indeed others) could so easily claim it is much more conservative than Classical Arabic. If it's the same language as Ancient North Arabian, then very little is preserved of it, other than a few rock inscriptions and some texts quoted by the Romans. How can we know if a language is conservative or not if we don't even have a very broad picture of the language itself?? Also note that Ancient North Arabian is just a group of dialects of part of what became standardised in Classical Arabic anyway.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> MSA in my opinion is nothing but a fancy English acronym for al-Fus-ha. All valid MSA is valid Fus-ha and vice versa as far as I'm aware.


I am confused as to what you your point is in the context of this discussion.  Do you deny that modern speakers omit case endings, even when using standard as opposed to colloquial language? 



Abu Rashid said:


> I don't know enough about Hebrew to comment on that, but I think Hebrew has undergone a lot of changes no? Also you must remember when we speak about Arabic, we have fus-ha and aamiyyah, it seems you're speaking here about modern colloquial versus classical biblical Hebrew. MSA is _not_ colloquial Arabic. So that comparison doesn't really seem logical.


I am only speaking about Standard Hebrew. As I understand it the relationship between Biblical and Modern Hebrew is not so dissimilar to the relation between CA & MSA: In both cultures the classical varieties are regarded as integral part of the living language although real life usage differs.


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## Abu Rashid

> Do you deny that modern speakers omit case endings, even when using standard as opposed to colloquial language?



In some circumstances, some do, yes. But you can't claim it's the norm or the standard for the language, because it is not. Pretty much all we have of Akkadian or Ancient Hebrew or Aramaic are written texts, and so if we were to compare today's Arabic written texts with those ancient written texts, then there'd be no omission of case endings. Therefore in the context of this discussion what some people do in spoken Arabic is irrelevant, since they may well have done it in the ancient languages you're making the comparison with too.



> As I understand it the relationship between Biblical and Modern Hebrew is not so dissimilar to the relation between CA & MSA



I doubt that would be the case. Modern Hebrew is the everyday vernacular of people living in Israel, is it not? CA/MSA is not the everyday spoken vernacular of any people. 

Again the fact you're trying to superimpose the relationship between ancient and modern Hebrew onto the relationship between CA and MSA is just strange. As I pointed out already enough times, there's no actual language called MSA, it's just a Western coining to try and put CA into a modern context.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I don't think Akkadian has a full complement of dual endings in all it's conjugations like Arabic does. Perhaps you could say Akkadian preserves a part of this feature which Arabic has fully preserved.


The Akkadian use of dual seems to correspond to its use in Hebrew: It is restricted to nouns and applied only to objects naturally occurring in pairs, like eyes or legs of humans (not of animals).


Abu Rashid said:


> I think we need to examine the conditions which cause Semitic languages to lose things like duals and other Semitic features which are not common in other languages or are difficult to master.


The disappearance of the dual is a phenomenon occurring in many languages and is not specifically Semitic. Gothic, e.g., also had a dual conjugations of verbs and not only declensions of nouns. My surmise is that the dual is a left-over of a time when people distinguished only three numbers: one, two, many. Once people started to use more numbers and number words where created, a special grammatic treatment of the number two seemed unnecessary. 

I am telling you that as a word of caution when operating with emotionally loaded categories like "purity" of a language. *Just to play Devil's advocate* *(this is of course not my position!!!)*: Form the argument above an ideological person might conclude that the conservatism of Arabic is a sign of primitiveness and lack of intellectual and cultural evolution. 

This is precisely the reason why linguists (and we are discussion linguistics in this forum) avoid such emotional and ideological categories.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> As pointed out already enough times, there's no actual language called MSA, it's just a Western coining to try and put CA into a modern context.


As you might have noticed, I find it difficult accepting your word for it that this statement is an accurate description of reality, though I accept it is a valid description of the a normative idea underlying Arabic literary language. 

Continuing this discussion seems futile, so let's move on. For my argument it is irrelevant whether the language level on which the simplifications occurred is standard or colloquial. It did occur with the spread of Arabic and increased  contact to other civilizations. This is actually a statement I thought you would agree with because you formulated a similar hypothesis with respect to Hebrew and Aramaic.



Abu Rashid said:


> Therefore in the context of this discussion what some people do in spoken Arabic is irrelevant, since they may well have done in it the ancient languages you're making the comparison with too.


To freeze old literary forms you need a literary tradition which pre-Islamic Arabic lacked. It is plausible to assume that grammatic forms regularly occurring in Quranic Arabic were colloquial at the time or at a time not too long before the days of the Prophet.


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## Abu Rashid

> The Akkadian use of dual seems to correspond to its use in Hebrew: It is restricted to nouns and applied only to objects naturally occurring in pairs, like eyes or legs of humans (not of animals).



From wikipedia article on grammatical dual:
_"In Biblical, Mishnaic, and Medieval Hebrew, like Arabic and other Semitic languages, all nouns can have singular, plural or dual forms, and there is still a debate whether there are vestiges of dual verbal forms and pronouns."_

Old Akkadian appears to have had dual for all nouns, not just those that appear in pairs. eg. šarr-ān = "two kings". And there are dual relative pronouns too. Eblaite & Ugaritic also both show dual forms for more than just nouns.



> Form the argument above an ideological person might conclude that the conservatism of Arabic is a sign of primitiveness and lack of intellectual and cultural evolution.



Agreed. Especially when coupled with the fact some Arabic societies/cultures, indeed way of life, is still very much the same as it probably was when proto-Semitic was spoken, for many. There are bedouin tribes who still live much the same as they did in that time. But the Arabs also rose to prominence in the world. They tasted the rule over most of the known world, expanded over 3 continents and became world leaders in science, economics, military etc. And yet many of them still chose to just remain as bedouins. Preserving their ancient way of life, and ancient language 

Note: Everytime someone else used the term 'pure' in this discussion, I suggested it wasn't a good idea.



> As you might have noticed, I find it difficult accepting your word for it that this statement is an accurate description of reality, though I accept it is a valid description of the a normative idea underlying Arabic literary language.



That's fine, you don't need to accept my statement, especially since Arabic is not even my first language. But I would you suggest you ask in the Arabic forum, or somewhere else where Arabic speakers who understand this issue can give you a clear answer. Even in the book from Karyn Ryding which I linked to earlier, she pretty much states the distinction is not a very tangible one.

And this is what Mahdi Alosh (Associate Professor of Arabic Ohio State University), another famous author of MSA text books for Western audiences states on the issue: _"There are basically two varieties: elevated and low. The elevated one may be called Classical Arabic (CA) or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the latter being the modern counterpart of CA, a term known and used in the West only. To Arabs both are known as al-fusha الفصحى."_ (He then goes on to define the other form, al-aamiyyah, the common Arabic vernacular dialects).



> It did occur with the spread of Arabic and increased contact to other civilizations. This is actually a statement I thought you would agree with because you formulated a similar hypothesis with respect to Hebrew and Aramaic.



Yes it did happen, but only to the dialects. al-Fusha remains completely unchanged by such things. And for the purpose of our discussion that's what's important.



> To freeze old literary forms you need a literary tradition which pre-Islamic Arabic lacked. It is plausible to assume that grammatic forms regularly occurring in Quranic Arabic were colloquial at the time or at a time not too long before the days of the Prophet.



The entire basis of Arabic grammar is to be found in the Qur'an. And then there is the various collections of hadiths, which span several multi-volume collections of statements in al-Fusha. And then the exegesis of these, and on it goes. The literary tradition is established. It does not need a pre-existing one, and I can't imagine why you'd claim it does.


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## Mahaodeh

Just to comment on pre-Islamic literary tradition in Arabic. It did in fact exist in thousands of verses of poetry as well as quite of few speaches. Of course, this does not span for a very long time prior to Islam but it is at least contemporary or a century or two older.


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## Abu Rashid

Thanks Maha, I knew it existed for some time prior to Islam, but didn't know whether it was recorded, that's why I didn't mention it. Also the Islamic texts are normally used as more of a reference by the early Arabic grammarians I think, than pre-Islamic poetic tradition.


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## sokol

Abu Rashid said:


> The wikipedia article on Akkadian grammar says 3 cases, but it could well be wrong I guess. Also is there any evidence that these extra cases are actually Semitic? Do they exist in any other Semitic language??


Wikipedia refers to the period of Akkadian of which most texts are preserved - not the earliest period (rule of Sargon and before that) but around Hamurapi and later.
At this time Akkadian only had 3 cases, also dual was beginning to dwindle by then already.
Akkadian in its oldest written forms as we know them had 5 cases: this is, as said, taken from Matouš-Ungnad (1969: Grammatik des Akkadischen), a well-known authority on Akkadian.

Most modern textbooks (and also the Wiki article) rely on Old Babylonian dialect of the Hamurapi period because this is the language stage best explored; it does not give the correct picture of Old Akkadian prior to that time.
Unfortunately, much of what was written about Akkadian is in German; another source: Wolfram von Soden (1995): Grundriss der akkadischen Grammatik [Outline of Akkadian grammar], available in Google books.

Pity you can't read it - I cannot translate all the relevant passages to English, that'd go far beyond our four-lines rule for quoting. It says _*nothing*_ there about _Lokativ_ and _Terminativ_ _*not*_ being of Semitic origin (and in this book such things are mentioned: influence of Sumerian language are dealt with in some detail).
Both Lokativ and Terminativ endings are only used in the oldest language stage of Akkadian, so-called "Altakkadisch = Old Akkadian" - the language stage which is least influenced by Sumerian and other languages.

So there is no call for you to suggest that they weren't Semitic in its origin - not if you can't offer any evidence for this.


Abu Rashid said:


> I think this is still the major flaw in your argument here. Because Akkadian texts predate Arabic (or Hebrew or others) you seem to be fixed on the idea that it must be more conservative or in an earlier stage of development. Yet as is shown with the dual, Akkadian was in a much later stage of development even in it's oldest attested form than Arabic is in this very day I write this to you.


This is not the case.
I am not "fixed" on this idea at all because I didn't claim that Akkadian were the most conservative Semitic language. In fact I always pointed out that in many respects Akkadian definitely did not represent the most conservative stage of development, certainly this is the case for phonology where even the oldest documents preserved show some deviation from what is believed to be Proto-Semitic.
Also it is clear that Arabic in its oldest forms was very conservative phonologically, we have established this already in this thread.
(By the way, it is disputed till whel Old Arabic was spoken: it is true that shortly before Hijra, and some time afterwards, Old Arabic was still conserved as _*written*_ language but it is highly doubtful that it was still spoken then).

What I am talking about all the time is that Akkadian in some respects is definitely more conservative than e. g. Arabic.
This is even the case (it seems) in one case concerning phonology, much to my own surprise: see the Wiki table for Proto-Semitic sounds.
(Sounds given for Akkadian, by the way, are those for Babylonian Akkadian - Hamurapi period; older Akkadian still retained some of the phonemic distinctions already lost in Babylonian.)
You can see that the sound /p/ of Proto-Semitic was retained as /p/ in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic and Phoenician while it changed to /f/ in Arabic and Modern Hebrew.


So what you fail to see, it seems, is that no one particular language is "the most conservative".
The methodology of historical linguistics is to try and combine all evidence available to find out which features were most original (and common to all languages which eventually derived from a proto-language).

What I am trying (and, it seems, failing) to explain is that _*neither*_ Arabic nor Akkadian, nor Hebrew, nor Ugaritic or whatever Semitic language one may come up with, is the most conservative.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> _"In Biblical, Mishnaic, and Medieval Hebrew, like Arabic and other Semitic languages, all nouns can have singular, plural or dual forms, and there is still a debate whether there are vestiges of dual verbal forms and pronouns."_
> 
> Old Akkadian appears to have had dual for all nouns, not just those that appear in pairs. eg. šarr-ān = "two kings". And there are dual relative pronouns too. Eblaite & Ugaritic also both show dual forms for more than just nouns.


*You could* *say* _shne malkaim_ (dual) instead of _shne mlakhim_ (plural) for _two kings_ in Hebrew, the forms are sufficiently regular to construct the dual. *But you don’t*. I looked for an arbitrary passage about _two kings_ in the Tanakh and I found Dvarim (Deuteronomy) 3.8 which in English (NIV) reads: _So at that time we took from these two kings of the Amorites the territory east of the Jordan, from the Arnon Gorge as far as Mount Hermon_. The Hebrew for _two kings of the Amorites _is _shne malkhe ha’eromi_ where _malkhe_ is status constructus for _mlakhim_ (plural); status constructus of the dual would be _malkai_.

According to Brockelmann (_Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der Semitischen Sprachen_, Vol. I, p.455sq.; this is, by the way, a book that must not be missing on the book shelf of every one interested in comparative Semitic language studies) this is the original use of the Semitic dual and the general use for all quantities of two is an Arabic innovation.

In the discussion so far we have always assumed that the more elaborate morphological system is the more ancient and the original one. This is not necessarily the case. Languages do not only loose grammatic constructs they also invent then. 



Abu Rashid said:


> It does not need a pre-existing one, and I can't imagine why you'd claim it does.


I didn't. My point was that the Arabic literary tradition was young when the Quran was written. It is hence unlikely that Quranic Arabic was already a frozen form of an earlier stage of the language. I was referring to your statement in #67 that written forms of a language should be a poor indication of its oral form.




Abu Rashid said:


> Yes it did happen, but only to the dialects. al-Fusha remains completely unchanged by such things. And for the purpose of our discussion *that's what's important*.


No, it is not. If we want explore the merits of your claim that Arabic is not only phonetically the most conservative Semitic language (which is accepted if adding “second only to South Arabian”) but also grammatically then the piece which is left to explain is why Quranic Arabic should have been so conservative. That modern literary Arabic remained so close to CA because of the normative character of the FuSHa tradition is a matter of course and doesn’t need to be explained.


----------



## Abu Rashid

sokol,



> Wikipedia refers to the period of Akkadian of which most texts are preserved



As I said, it's wikipedia, and could well be wrong 

Since I know next to nothing about Akkadian, old or not, I accept your statements as being more correct.



> It says nothing there about Lokativ and Terminativ not being of Semitic origin (and in this book such things are mentioned: influence of Sumerian language are dealt with in some detail).



Just curious whether you know if they exist in any other Semitic language? If they were indeed Semitic features, then we'd expect to find them in at least one other language, no? Of course that doesn't mean not finding it proves this is not a Semitic feature, but at least some remnants or evidence of it should exist in other Semitic languages.

Also keep in mind, I've never once claimed Arabic is the most conservative language in every area. So just providing an example where Akkadian is more conservative doesn't actually change what I've said all throughout this discussion anyway.



> I am not "fixed" on this idea at all because I didn't claim that Akkadian were the most conservative Semitic language.



Yet you seem convinced beyond a doubt that Arabic is not, and then admit you have little, if any, knowledge about Arabic. This could only lead me to conclude you think Akkadian is more conservative/primitive (due to it's older attestations) and that Arabic is relatively young and unconservative.



> Also it is clear that Arabic in its oldest forms was very conservative phonologically



And even today.



> What I am talking about all the time is that Akkadian in some respects is definitely more conservative than e. g. Arabic.



I have no doubt in it's oldest form it may well have been. Again, this doesn't change anything I've stated so far, since nowhere have I claimed Arabic is more conservative than Akkadian (or any other Semitic language) in every respect. It seems you're arguing against something I never claimed, yet you imagine was implied inherently in my statements.



> You can see that the sound /p/ of Proto-Semitic was retained as /p/ in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic and Phoenician while it changed to /f/ in Arabic and Modern Hebrew.



I'm quite curious how they know this is the case. Since nobody ever heard Akkadian spoken, nor even Biblical Hebrew for that matter. And there is no unbroken generational chain of speakers as there is for Arabic for instance.



> So what you fail to see, it seems, is that no one particular language is "the most conservative".



This assertion is just absurd. Unless you are proposing each and every Semitic language is exactly precisely equally conservative, then the simple fact is some are more conservative than others.

Every race has a winner, every crowd has a tallest person and a shortest person, a darkest person and a lightest person, a skinniest person and a fattest person and so on. Might not always be politically correct to point them out, but it's a fact


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## sokol

Abu Rashid said:


> Just curious whether you know if they exist in any other Semitic language?


Not to my knowledge but this means  nothing as Akkadian is the only Semitic language I've ever studied in any detail. There might as well be survivals of both those cases in other Semitic languages for all I know - but I am not the one who could answer this.


As for the rest I do not feel inclined to answer lest I only repeat what I've said already - except that in historical linguistics there _*never*_ is a "race winner", that's not how linguistics works.


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## Abu Rashid

> You could say shne malkaim (dual) instead of shne mlakhim (plural) for two kings in Hebrew, the forms are sufficiently regular to construct the dual. But you don’t.



Compare אַמָּתַיִם (two cubits, dual form) from Shemot 25:10 with שְׁתַּיִם אַמֹּות (two + cubits) from Yehzkel 40:9.



> According to Brockelmann (Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der Semitischen Sprachen, Vol. I, p.455sq.) this is the original use of the Semitic dual and the general use for all quantities of two is an Arabic innovation.



Is there any reasoning for this claim? And how old is this work? Remember, a lot of Christian European scholars used to consider Hebrew the perfect "Language of Heaven", so they often would make such claims to bolster their beliefs.



> In the discussion so far we have always assumed that the more elaborate morphological system is the more ancient and the original one. This is not necessarily the case. Languages do not only loose grammatic constructs they also invent then.



Agreed, it doesn't necessarily mean it's older just because it's more elaborate.



> It is hence unlikely that Quranic Arabic was already a frozen form of an earlier stage of the language.



There is some suggestion it already existed as perhaps a "lingua franca" amongst Arab tribes, who spoke various different dialects already. They had a need for such a common dialect for their regular poetry festivals. There were certainly Arabic tribes whose dialect was considered to be 'purer' (note this is in relation to Arabic internally, not compared to other Semitic languages, so don't take it the wrong way) and who other Arabs would send their children to, in order to learn the pure language (as I mentioned earlier). Also those first generations of Muslims who undertook the task of compiling the Qur'an would often travel to specific tribes to check they got the Arabic correct. Even several centuries after the advent of the Islamic period, people like Imam Shafi (the founder of one of the 4 schools of Islamic jurisprudence) was sent from Palestine at a young age to the deserts of the Arabian peninsula to learn the 'purer' Arabic, which would assist in making him one of the greatest Arabic/Islamic scholars of jurisprudence, due to his precise knowledge of the 'pure' dialect the Qur'an was in.



> No, it is not.



Yes it is. In this discussion we are chiefly interested in the oldest attested forms. I mostly certainly wouldn't be using Hebrew from the streets of Tel Aviv or the last Akkadian inscriptions to prove my point about the conservativeness or lack thereof of those languages. Even though I could, since the original forms no longer exist as spoken languages.

But with Arabic the 1400 year old variety is still alive, so that's what we will be judging by.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Compare אַמָּתַיִם (two cubits, dual form) from Shemot 25:10 with שְׁתַּיִם אַמֹּות (two + cubits) from Yehzkel 40:9.


Pairwise appearing body parts can occur in dual and plural depending on context. This is the same as _regel, raglaim_ and _regalim _(one leg, a pair of legs, legs) mentioned earlier. It is similar to English where you could say _a pair of socks_ and _two socks_. Both refer two to socks but the connotations are different.

The use of dual in the precise context of Shemot 25:10 seems a bid odd to me. I'll try to get an expert opinion on this.


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## Flaminius

Abu Rashid said:


> Just curious whether you know if they exist in any other Semitic language?


I cannot say for sure if Matouš-Ungnad and I are talking about the same things but both locative and terminative existed in Biblical Hebrew.
Locative: created by suffix _-ā_. E.g., śmoʾl (left) → śmoʾla (leftwards)
Terminative: I cannot remember concrete word forms but they were used to mark the end of a sentence.

We do not really have records of how CA came about but, CA primarily being the language of _al-Qurʾān_, we can safely find the root of the language in that of the _Qurayš_ tribe of Mecca, to which Muḥammad the prophet was born to.  If I am not mistaken, Mecca at that time was the largest international trade centre in Arabia.  The Qurayš dialect may probably have been influenced by other dialects and languages that the traders came in contact with.

We'd also need to take into account the language of _kāhin_, soothsayers of indigenous beliefs, because _al-Qurʾān_ and their oracles employ similar styles, rhymed proses called _sağʾ._  I am unable to name specific characteristics but it is reasonable to doubt that the traders and the religionists spoke different languages.

*Abu Rashid*, you have also mentioned pre-Islamic poetry tradition.  You did not explain how it helped the formation of CA but that Imam Shafi was sent to the deserts to learn the language of Bedouins suggests that it was not irrelevant to the religion, and thus indirectly to CA.



Abu Rashid said:


> They had a need for such a common dialect for their regular poetry festivals.


I have learnt that existence of many words of "horses" and "camels," for example, can be taken for evidence to dialectal variations in the language of poetry.  It also contained loan words from Aramaic, Persian, Greek and Latin.

You are probably aware of quite a few other sources that helped CA at the earliest stage, but I think we have seen enough evidence to believe that CA was a new language devised for a new religion, drawing from different sources.

Bibliography
I relied on H. A. R. Gibb ([1949] 1969) for historical facts in this post:
_Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey_. London: Oxford University Press.


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## origumi

berndf said:


> The use of dual in the precise context of Shemot 25:10 seems a bid odd to me. I'll try to get an expert opinion on this.


אמה is actually a body part - the forearm. The measurement unit אמה means (originally) "length of the forearm".


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## sokol

Flaminius said:


> I cannot say for sure if Matouš-Ungnad and I are talking about the same things but both locative and terminative existed in Biblical Hebrew.
> Locative: created by suffix _-ā_. E.g., śmoʾl (left) → śmoʾla (leftwards)
> Terminative: I cannot remember concrete word forms but they were used to mark the end of a sentence.


The endings in Akkadian are for Locative -um and for Terminative _-iš _- so different ending at least as far as Locative is concerned, but as Semitists of the "old school" usually also knew Hebrew it is likely that Matouš-Ungnad made use of Hebrew terms (Akkadian after all only was "discovered" and decrypted in the 19th century when finally cuneiform script was deciphered).

So there is reason to believe that both are the same historically, but I have no means of making sure of that. I can only give the descriptions of both casus as given by Matouš-Ungnad (p. 56-58; see also Google books Wolfram von Soden (1995): Grundriss der akkadischen Grammatik [Outline of Akkadian grammar], especially p. 107ff, unfortunately only available in German):

*Locative:* ending _-um_ (or before suffixes or sometimes word-final) _-u_; in older language it is partly used without preposition but later preposition ina/ana was used (according to Wolfram von Soden this was an indicator that, slowly, the meaning of locative weakened and finally was lost). Examples: (without preposition) ištēn manā'*um* = on 1 mine; (with prep.) ina libb*u* mātim = within (inside) the country

*Terminative:* ending -iš (originally with terminative meaning, but later used with locative meaning) which historically has the same origin as dative ending of personal pronouns on -š (both Matouš-Ungnad and Wolfram von Soden agree fully in this respect). The meaning of terminative is movement towards _somewhere_ (which is basically the difference to locative) but the use of terminative is rather complicated, those who can read German may refer to Wolfram von Soden p. 109-112.
Two examples:
- while _querb*um* Babili_ (in Babylon) is just 'simple locative', _querb*iš*_ (terminative) means 'in the midst of'
- šēpum = foot: with terminative plus pronominal suffix, _šēpiššu_ means 'at/towards his foot'

I haven't found anything anywhere stating that terminative should be put at the end of a sentence, but Akkadian syntax anyway was influenced by Sumerian and might not be a good indicator for anything when it comes to Proto-Semitic, or other Semitic languages.

Also it is difficult for me to explain the exact use of both locative and terminative as I am definitely not capable of forming grammatically correct sentences in Akkadian: I only know to a certain (relatively low ) degree _about_ Akkadian grammar, but I do _not_ know Akkadian nor am I capable of applying its grammar correctly.


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## cherine

Hello guys,

I really got lost reading this thread, and I'm not sure I understand what it is about. So, I'll just make a few comments.


Abu Rashid said:


> al-Fus-ha is a frozen language, it will not really change. It may expand with new vocabulary, but that's about it. Since Arabic is diglossic, the changes you mention will occur in the dialects, not in al-Fus-ha.


Frozen? I'm not sure this is a very accurate description. It's true that the Arabic grammar is the same since many centuries, but the fact that it's acquiring new vocabulary and new meanings for existing one is -in my humble opinion- a proof that it's far from frozen. And I think you know that the changes occur in fusHa just as well as in the dialects.
Unless I misunderstood your usage of this word. 



berndf said:


> Important is only that MSA, whatever it is, has a simplified grammar compared to Classical Arabic.


I'm not sure about this either, Bernd. Do you have any concrete examples of grammatical features/rules that used to exist in CA and are no longer used in Modern Standard Arabic?


Abu Rashid said:


> A reference grammar of Modern Standard Arabic is I think one of the major modern Western works on MSA, and it quite clearly does teach things like case and mood. Ryding in that book states that the difference between CA and MSA is primarily in style and vocabulary. Which would mean for the purpose of this discussion then, the distinction is irrelevant, since it doesn't affect grammar.


I agree with this. We, Arabic native speakers, only make a distinction between fusHa (standard Arabic) and 'ammeyya (dialects or vernacular or colloquial, I'm not sure which is the correct term). The difference between old times' fusHa and modern times' fusHa is in style and vocabulary. No more, no less.
In school, we're taught fusHa: grammar and sarf (morphology?) most -or many- of the grammatical rules of fusHa are not used in colloquial Arabic, but we learn them to be able to read and write literary or formal texts. To my knowledge, the grammar of Arabic hasn't changed in many centuries (15 centuries at least). If we take the pre-Islamic poetry into account, the number of centuries would increase by at least one more century.
The first books on Arabic grammar were written based on both Qur'an and pre-Islamic poetry. You won't find a classical grammar book that doesn't use examples from these two sources.


Abu Rashid said:


> MSA in my opinion is nothing but a fancy English acronym for al-Fus-ha. All valid MSA is valid Fus-ha and vice versa as far as I'm aware.


I have to differ with you about this point. Not all MSA is valid CA, or to use other terms: not all modern structures would be acceptable by the the standards of Classical Arabic: nowadays, people tend to use more redundant structure, add prepositions when they're not needed, just to name two things that I hate about modern days newspapers.  On the other hand, all valid Classical Arabic structures are valid in MSA, just not used by all those who use fusHa in their writing.
And we shouldn't forget the fact that their are many words in fusHa that are not understood by today's generations. But this is mainly caused by the weakening education systems in the Arab countries. Only a person who educate himself by reading classics can manage to understand these words.



Abu Rashid said:


> And this is what Mahdi Alosh (Associate Professor of Arabic Ohio State University), another famous author of MSA text books for Western audiences states on the issue: _"There are basically two varieties: elevated and low. The elevated one may be called Classical Arabic (CA) or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the latter being the modern counterpart of CA, a term known and used in the West only. To Arabs both are known as al-fusha الفصحى."_ (He then goes on to define the other form, al-aamiyyah, the common Arabic vernacular dialects).


This is exactly how most -if not all- Arabic native speakers view their language.


> The literary tradition is established. It does not need a pre-existing one, and I can't imagine why you'd claim it does.


I don't understand this point very much. Did Arabic -as we know it today- just span out of nowhere? or was it a development of an older Arabic? What I know is that whenever the development took place, it was certainly not in/by the Qur'an. The Qur'an itself states several times that it's using the existing language of the Arabs to be understood by them. The way I understand such statement is that Qur'an didn't bring a new language, nor even a new form of language. But it was an eloquent usage of the existing language.


Abu Rashid said:


> I knew it existed for some time prior to Islam, but didn't know whether it was recorded, that's why I didn't mention it. Also the Islamic texts are normally used as more of a reference by the early Arabic grammarians I think, than pre-Islamic poetic tradition.


Pre-Islamic poetry is recorded and used by grammarians along with references and examples from Qur'an, and even more than Hadith. As far as I know, an Arabic grammar (written in Arabic) used for illustration examples from Qur'an, then poetry, then Hadith.


Flaminius said:


> Locative: created by suffix _-ā_. E.g., śmoʾl (left) → śmoʾla (leftwards)
> Terminative: I cannot remember concrete word forms but they were used to mark the end of a sentence.


I'm such an ignorant of English terminology, so please excuse my ignorance. Is locative different from ظرف المكان ? 


> We do not really have records of how CA came about but, CA primarily being the language of _al-Qurʾān_, we can safely find the root of the language in that of the _Qurayš_ tribe of Mecca, to which Muḥammad the prophet was born to. If I am not mistaken, Mecca at that time was the largest international trade centre in Arabia. The Qurayš dialect may probably have been influenced by other dialects and languages that the traders came in contact with.


This is true. Arabic (CA) has words from Abbysinian (? Ethiopian), Greek, Persian...
But I don't understand your point here.



> I have learnt that existence of many words of "horses" and "camels," for example, can be taken for evidence to dialectal variations in the language of poetry.


The existence of many words for one entity is not necessarily an evidence of dialectal variations (not that I'm denying that variation, I'm only commenting on this point) because each word is, in a way, a reference to a different attribute of the same entity. There's a word for a young horse, a she-horse, a fast horse, a black horse... they're not just different words for "horse". 


> You are probably aware of quite a few other sources that helped CA at the earliest stage, but I think we have seen enough evidence to believe that CA was a new language devised for a new religion, drawing from different sources.


I have to disagree with this because, as I said, you don't create a new language along with a new religion. Qur'an talks about addressing Arabs in their own language, so this means that people of that time did speak the same language of the Qur'an (or Qur'an speaks their language  ) If you read pre-Islamic poetry, you won't find a difference in vocabulary nor grammar between that poetry and Qur'an.

Again, I'm not sure I understand what the thread is about  If it's about which language is more conservative or more innovative or closer to Proto-Semitic... if this is the topic, I have to confess my absolute ignorance of it and appologise for my intrusion.


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## berndf

origumi said:


> אמה is actually a body part - the forearm. The measurement unit אמה means (originally) "length of the forearm".


Yes, that is what I explained. In this context (2.5 cubits) it is clearly meant as a unit of measurement and not as a body part. And therefore I would have expected plural.


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## origumi

berndf said:


> Yes, that is what I explained. In this context (2.5 cubits) it is clearly meant as a unit of measurement and not as a body part. And therefore I would have expected plural.


But we use sometimes the "body part" dual form for the "measurement unit" meaning, as in גִּלָּה טֶפַח וְכִסָּה *טְפָחַיִם*, where טפח means palm (of the hand) and also the size of a palm.


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## berndf

origumi said:


> But we use sometimes the "body part" dual form for the "measurement unit" meaning, as in גִּלָּה טֶפַח וְכִסָּה *טְפָחַיִם*, where טפח means palm (of the hand) and also the size of a palm.


So, you are saying it would still be idiomatic to use dual for those nouns which have one, even if the context does not refer to a natural pair?
Example: In "two of the dog's legs were hurt", would you use _laglaim_ or _regalim_?


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## berndf

cherine said:


> I really got lost reading this thread, and I'm not sure I understand what it is about. So, I'll just make a few comments.


Thank you for your comments. They have been helpful for me.



cherine said:


> I'm not sure about this either, Bernd. Do you have any concrete examples of grammatical features/rules that used to exist in CA and are no longer used in Modern Standard Arabic?


My example was case inflections. I was under the impression that modern speakers would omit them even when using standard language. Was I wrong?


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## origumi

berndf said:


> So, you are saying it would still be idiomatic to use dual for those nouns which have one, even if the context does not refer to a natural pair?
> Example: In "two of the dog's legs were hurt", would you use _laglaim_ or _regalim_?


The word regalim (plural, for human/animal legs) does not exist . Therefore always raglaim (dual). Similarly knafaim (pair of wings).

Another example of body member in a different context:  ירכתיים (dual) - the back part [of a ship etc.], from ירך thigh.


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## berndf

origumi said:


> The word regalim (plural, for human/animal legs) does not exist .


I see, e.g. Vayiqra 11.42 talks about _four or more legs_ of animals and uses  _raglaim_. But _regalim _exists too, e.g. in _Shalosh Regalim_ (Shmoth 23.14)? Is this because it is figurative use of _regel_?


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## Abu Rashid

origumi,



> אמה is actually a body part - the forearm. The measurement unit אמה means (originally) "length of the forearm".



Whilst this is true, in this case it isn't referring to the body part though. There are also other examples of words using dual in older portions of the Tanakh, yet in later portions they use "two + items", I shall find some examples for you if you like.


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## cherine

berndf said:


> My example was case inflections. I was under the impression that modern speakers would omit them even when using standard language. Was I wrong?


This may be hard to explain. Actually, MSA is not really a "spoken" language. It is used in speeches, in tv and radio shows, in conferences... but it's mainly a written language. When people read it or speak it, many of them tend to drop the final ending and stop at a sukun (absence of vowel). So, instead of "rajulun", they'd say "rajul" unless they're making a liaison with the following word. This same liaison indicates that the case endings are still used and haven't disappeared in the modern form of Standard Arabic.

As I said before, the difference between what foreigners call CA and MSA is in the vocabulary and style, but not in grammar.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Whilst this is true, in this case it isn't referring to the body part though. There are also other examples of words using dual in older portions of the Tanakh, yet in later portions they use "two + items", I shall find some examples for you if you like.


The point is that not every word word has a dual. Firstly only nouns. Secondly only those nouns denoting objects which in at least one sense occur as_ natural pairs_.


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## berndf

cherine said:


> This may be hard to explain. Actually, MSA is not really a "spoken" language. It is used in speeches, in tv and radio shows, in conferences... but it's mainly a written language. When people read it or speak it, many of them tend to drop the final ending and stop at a sukun (absence of vowel). So, instead of "rajulun", they'd say "rajul" unless they're making a liaison with the following word. This same liaison indicates that the case endings are still used and haven't disappeared in the modern form of Standard Arabic.
> 
> As I said before, the difference between what foreigners call CA and MSA is in the vocabulary and style, but not in grammar.


Thank you for your explanations.





berndf said:


> As you might have noticed, I find it difficult accepting your word for it that this statement is an accurate description of reality, though I accept it is a valid description of the a normative idea underlying Arabic literary language.


I am convinced now.


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## Abu Rashid

Flaminius,



> Locative: created by suffix _-ā_. E.g., śmoʾl (left) → śmoʾla (leftwards)



So locative is something like hither and thither in English? I don't think Arabic does have any evidence of this concept.



> Terminative: I cannot remember concrete word forms but they were used to mark the end of a sentence.



Arabic writing generally used some kind of marker (not part of the language) to mark out sentence delineation.

In speech however, sentences are marked out by a sukoon, absence of a vowel on the last consonant.



> we can safely find the root of the language in that of the _Qurayš_ tribe of Mecca



Not necessarily. Some of the Arabic in the Qur'an is specific to other tribes, not necessarily Quraysh.



> the language of _kāhin_, soothsayers of indigenous beliefs, because _al-Qurʾān_ and their oracles employ similar styles, rhymed proses called _sağʾ._


_

_This is pure speculation on your part_, _it would seem. The Arabs of the time certainly recognised it as being something completely different to anything they'd ever come across before. Anyway that is really approaching sensitive territory, and I think it's wiser not to make any such comparisons. I certainly won't continue in any such line of discussion.



> but I think we have seen enough evidence to believe that CA was a new language devised for a new religion, drawing from different sources.



I don't think we've seen any evidence to support this claim at all. As Cherine mentioned, the language of the Qur'an was well known to those it addressed, apart from the occasional word which it either defined or re-defined for a specific context, within the text itself.



> _Mohammedanism...._


_

_Enough said.


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## Flaminius

cherine said:


> Pre-Islamic poetry is recorded and used by grammarians along with references and examples from Qur'an, and even more than Hadith. As far as I know, an Arabic grammar (written in Arabic) used for illustration examples from Qur'an, then poetry, then Hadith.


Okay, I didn't know that the tradition of a fixed common language goes back to pre-Islamic poetry.  It is a real pity that we don't have any clue as to how it came about, what dialect, if it was at all developed from a dialect, was most instrumental in its formation.



> I'm such an ignorant of English terminology, so please excuse my ignorance. Is locative different from ظرف المكان ?


I take you mean the _-an_ suffix for creating Arabic adverbs.  I think the Hebrew counterpart (I tried to mention this in one of my earliest posts) is _-am_.  The Hebrew word for "day" being _jom_, its adverbial (perhaps the remnant of the old accusative) form is _jomam_.  This is e.g., attested in Psalmodia 121:6:
jomam ha-ššemeš lo' jakeka. . .
The sun shall not smite thee by day. . . (KJT)

This was even less productive in BH than locatives by _-a_.



> This is true. Arabic (CA) has words from Abbysinian (? Ethiopian), Greek, Persian...
> But I don't understand your point here.


 According to the theory *Abu Rashid* mentioned, other Semitic languages underwent changes due to language contacts.  I am suggesting that, if the conservativeness of Arabic in comparison to other Semitic languages is to be upheld, one has to scrutinise whether or not contacts with other languages and dialects (which were so distinct from each other as to warrant a common language for intertribal communication) had more influence than loan words.



> I have to disagree with this because, as I said, you don't create a new language along with a new religion. Qur'an talks about addressing Arabs in their own language, so this means that people of that time did speak the same language of the Qur'an (or Qur'an speaks their language  ) If you read pre-Islamic poetry, you won't find a difference in vocabulary nor grammar between that poetry and Qur'an.


Points well taken.


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## Abu Rashid

Cherine,



> but the fact that it's acquiring new vocabulary and new meanings for existing one is -in my humble opinion- a proof that it's far from frozen.



That's why I said this: _"It may expand with new vocabulary, but that's about it.". _The language itself though is frozen.The grammar remains the same, and even new vocabulary generally should go through some kind of process to be either derived from existing Arabic roots or be borrowed into the language in such a way that it conforms to the Arabic system (although this might not always occur).



> Not all MSA is valid CA, or to use other terms: not all modern structures would be acceptable by the the standards of Classical Arabic



Are you sure it would not have been valid to classical speakers? It may have sounded a little strange to their ears, but I think it would've been considered still valid speech.



> And we shouldn't forget the fact that their are many words in fusHa that are not understood by today's generations.



This phenomenon will exist at any time, not just modern vs. classical. I'm sure all down through the ages there were words that were not known by a lot of people, because they were just very rarely used.



> I don't understand this point very much. Did Arabic -as we know it today- just span out of nowhere?



Not at all, of course the language was well known. But berndf has suggested that because there was no major pre-Islamic texts preserved, therefore there's no proof Arabic was well established by that time. In fact I am saying here exactly what you are. That there's no need for there to have been pre-existing texts to prove it already existed.



> I'm such an ignorant of English terminology, so please excuse my ignorance. Is locative different from ظرف المكان ?



I don't fully understand the term either, but I think he's saying it's something very different than zarf al-makaan. It seems that locative is something like marfou3, majroor and mansub, but Akkadian had two other 'cases' that would modify the last harakah of the word to indicate things other than these 3.


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## Abu Rashid

Flaminius,



> According to the theory *Abu Rashid* mentioned, other Semitic languages underwent changes due to language contacts. I am suggesting that, if the conservativeness of Arabic in comparison to other Semitic languages is to be upheld, one has to scrutinise whether or not contacts with other languages and dialects (which were so distinct from each other as to warrant a common language for intertribal communication) had more influence than loan words.



Nowhere have I stated that there weren't borrowings in Arabic (in fact I may have mentioned there is). The theory I mentioned was regarding non-Semitic peoples adopting a Semitic language and modifying it in grammar, phonology and many other ways. That's completely different to the issue of loan words.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Is there any reasoning for this claim? And how old is this work?


I just now saw your question. No, unfortunately he didn't give any reason. I read a bit further and realized that he meant it to be an Arabian and not an Arabic innovation. Unfortunately, German doesn't distinguish between Arabic and Arabian which can cause some confusion.


Abu Rashid said:


> Remember, a lot of Christian European scholars used to consider Hebrew the perfect "Language of Heaven", so they often would make such claims to bolster their beliefs.


Brockelmann is the the most important Semiticist of his generation (d. 1956) and certainly above suspicion in this regard. In my observation, Jewish and Muslim traditions make it much more difficult looking at Semitic languages in an unbiased fashion than Western tradition. Christianity never had the concept of a "sacred language", God speaks any language. And if there were an "original" language of Christianity, it would be Greek, the language of the New Testament, and not Hebrew.


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## origumi

berndf said:


> I see, e.g. Vayiqra 11.42 talks about _four or more legs_ of animals and uses _raglaim_. But _regalim _exists too, e.g. in _Shalosh Regalim_ (Shmoth 23.14)? Is this because it is figurative use of _regel_?


This is the reason I referred to raglaim = legs, feet. The three Regalim in which we walked by feet to the temple in Jerusalem (or other holy places before the first temple was built, around 1000 BC) are derived apparently from regel = foot, yet do not have dual form because either:
* The figurative meaning was remote enough from the simple one already in Biblical times.
* It's too weird to say shalosh raglaim - mixing "three" with dual form (unless you refer to the body part, for which dual totally replaced the plural)

Shalosh raglaim sounds like a dog that suffered an accident and lost one of its legs.


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## Abu Rashid

Ok here is a few examples from the Tanakh where the dual form was used for nouns that don't naturally come in pairs or aren't related to a word for body parts (as my previous example was).

In Bereshith 11:10 שְׁנָתַיִם (two years, dual form)
In Bereshith 27:36 פַעֲמַיִם (two times, dual form)
In Vayikra 12:5 שְׁבֻעַיִם (two weeks, dual form)
In Shemot 16:29 יֹומָיִם (two days, dual form)
In Devarim 22:9 כִּלְאָיִם (two kinds, dual form)
In Mlakhim 16:24 כִכְּרַיִם (two talents, dual form) A measurement of weight

Now they do seem to have a theme to them (or two themes actually) which is time and measurement. Either way, there's certainly more traces of the dual than just things which naturally occur in pairs.

Also in regard to Akkadian, there is a paper by Robert Whiting called "The dual personal pronouns in Akkadian" which shows that the dual form existed in Akkadian in more than just nouns, there is an article from Jewish Quarterly Review (limited preview only) which says the same can be shown about Hebrew as well, that it once had dual personal pronouns and even dual verbs.


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## origumi

Abu Rashid said:


> Also in regard to Akkadian, there is a paper by Robert Whiting called "The dual personal pronouns in Akkadian" which shows that the dual form existed in Akkadian in more than just nouns, there is an article from Jewish Quarterly Review (limited preview only) which says the same can be shown about Hebrew as well, that it once had dual personal pronouns and even dual verbs.


Be careful using this article (full text here: http://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=52&Itemid=158). The author simply takes many places in the Bible where gender or number is not according to the usual rules and claims that these are remnants of dual forms. Rather doubtful.


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## Abu Rashid

origumi,

Thanks for the link to the full article. A lot of it is way over my head, but I think I get the basic idea regarding the personal pronouns anyway. So he is saying that the 3rd. person masculine plural is spelt the same way (without vowel markings) as the postulated 3rd. person feminine dual, and that several places in the Tanakh that form appears when mentioning two female subjects. And it was previously assumed the gender had just been mixed up, whereas he believes it's an example of dual, which has been lost due to loss of vowel markings over time??

Is there any alternative explanation as to why the pronouns are masculine?


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## origumi

Abu Rashid said:


> Is there any alternative explanation as to why the pronouns are masculine?


Humm... yes, for example in another artice by the same author :


> In colloquial Hebrew, gender neutralization occurs in the 2nd plural and 3rd plural forms, thus "attem" and "hemmah/hem" appear for the feminine in various instances in the Bible.


http://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=121&Itemid=158http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...QejEda&sig=AHIEtbT0H019dSYbFsPElCZVMR4ZxYDGeg


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## clevermizo

It's interesting to me: this thread did not start out as "Which Central Semitic language is the most conservative?" nor "Is (Classical) Arabic the most conservative Semitic language?" - nevertheless it seems to have gone that way.

May I put forward the thought - that this may not be an important question to answer, or that it may be impossible to answer? Exactly how is the field of comparative linguistics aided by knowing that Arabic or any other language shows more conservative features? I mean, if we are reconstructing an older form, we use all the data we have right, no matter what language it comes from?

I see no scientific utility for proving or disproving the claim that one language shows the most conservative features.


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## Abu Rashid

> Humm... yes, for example in another artice by the same author



Well he does mention it in that article too:

_"Although I have not included the forms in the chart, note that BH attests to a vestigial use of common dual pronouns when the antecedent is ‘two’ of something (see Rendsburg 1982a)."_

In fact if you do a search for the word "dual" in that article, you'll find he mentions it several times, pretty much in line with the previous article I referenced.


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## Abu Rashid

> It's interesting to me: this thread did not start out as "Which Central Semitic language is the most conservative?" nor "Is (Classical) Arabic the most conservative Semitic language?" - nevertheless it seems to have gone that way.



Threads rarely remain purely on the topic of the original post. Perhaps there's a phenomenon of "thread drift" at work here.



> May I put forward the thought - that this may not be an important question to answer, or that it may be impossible to answer?



Although it may not be politically correct to delve into it, I don't see why it's considered such an unquantifiable thing. There are simply Semitic languages that do preserve much more of the features which others show vestiges of having had. I very much doubt they'd all just round off to being pretty much similar in their conservativeness.

But you may have a point, does it prove useful for anything?? I don't know, but I think it is important to know, especially when some often mistakenly believe Arabic to be less conservative, simply based on the misconception that older attestations means older language.

And I think it's definitely important to take into consideration more, those languages which are more conservative. I can't see why anyone would dispute they would carry more weight (in their respective areas of conservatism) when re-constructing proto-forms of languages.


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## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> And I think it's definitely important to take into consideration more, those languages which are more conservative. *I can't see why anyone would dispute they would carry more weight (in their respective areas of conservatism) when re-constructing proto-forms of languages*.



I understand your points but the sentence I've bolded doesn't make any sense. You only find out that a language is more conservative with respect to a "proto-form" by reconstruction and the comparative method. Before you do this you have no idea that one language is more conservative than another. More conservative with respect to what? You don't know that Arabic is more conservative with respect to Proto-Semitic until you reconstruct Proto-Semitic. Before you reconstruct Proto-Semitic, Arabic's being conservative has no meaning.

The only use in reconstruction of the Proto-language is to provide the algorithm by which the change between daughter languages can be faithfully represented, in mathematical terms a function whose input is a reconstructed form and whose output is an attested form. "Proto-Semitic" itself was likely never real or spoken by anyone, like PIE. They are constructs - formal description of linguistic relationships. The "real" spoken Proto-Semitic is as elusive to us as a time machine.

Basically, to me the question of whether a language has the most conservative features compared to other languages of the same clade has no real utility other than perhaps an ice breaker at a linguist dinner party. You should absolutely not give any language more weight or consideration when performing comparative reconstruction, as it adds unwanted bias to the data. You use all the data available. It's simply not science to do otherwise.


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## Flaminius

Hi, *clevermizo*.

As one of the posters who suggested comparison between genetically related languages such as Central Semitic languages (which was and still is the topic of this thread) should be done on historical basis, I regret if I insensibly shifted the argument from comparing language features to determining whether or not Arabic is the most conservative of Semitic languages.

It was simply that Arabic being the most conservative language has been cited so many times that little effort has been made to explore on what specific points Arabic has departed from ancestral languages (PS, Proto-Central Semitic etc.).  Hebrew has lost most of the case system before BH was recorded.  Aramaic has lenition, which never existed in PS.  Akkadian greatly simplified gutteral consonants.  The list goes on and on.  We have yet to do the same with Arabic.

From what we already know about PS, I think it is safe to say that, even if Arabic was the most conservative descendent language, not all PS features have been inherited by Arabic.  Apparently, not all features what makes Arabic Arabic can go back to PS.

One of the way to compare descendent languages is to see how they inherited PS legacy.  Some features may be inherited intact, others may have undergone reinterpretation, still others may have been discontinued; with or without a replacement.  We may be yet to cover all important aspects of PS but I think researchers have amassed enough data for us to attempt a comparison like this.


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## Abu Rashid

> but the sentence I've bolded doesn't make any sense. You only find out that a language is more conservative with respect to a "proto-form" by reconstruction and the comparative method.



This is a good point you've made. Reconstruction needs to be done first, in order to make comparisons. Yet comparisons are inevitably the means by which reconstruction usually is accomplished, are they not?

Obviously some comparisons are done before any reconstruction, in order to begin working out what appears to be have been common to all languages, even if diminished or even absent from some.



> "Proto-Semitic" itself was likely never real or spoken by anyone, like PIE.



I'd think due to the relatively small geographical area the Semitic languages encompass, and the commonly shared narratives of historical origins  would tend to suggest there probably was a "proto-Semitic" people who spoke a "proto-Semitic" language somewhere down the line. Without wanting to re-ignite the debate here, I'd suggest those people were desert nomads, who lived much like many of today's Arabs. And that due to their very isolated and traditionally conservative culture, they managed to preserve their culture and language quite well in the Arabian peninsula, more so than in Canaan, Mesopotamia or Abyssinia. I don't see why such observations, which have been made by a lot of scholars studying Semitic languages and Middle Eastern archaology, need necessarily be met with hostile attitudes and complete rejectionist responses, that have been displayed so far in this thread, and which are usually just based on lack of knowledge about Arabic language/culture.

As berndf pointed out, such conservatism (or actually primitiveness) would not be considered a merit by most, so I don't see why the 'turf war' has to be inflamed over which language/culture is most likely still closest to the original Semitic one. Naturally I accept that preserved culture doesn't always mean preserved language, but with the Semitic languages it does seem to be the case. And it's not necessarily because the Arabs were "better" at preserving, just that their isolation permitted it.

As you pointed out, that isn't terribly helpful stuff when it comes to linguistics, and I concede that point. But am just a little dismayed at the instantly dismissive attitudes some hold regarding things which are quite commonly held theories by those working in the field.



> You use all the data available. It's simply not science to do otherwise.



Agreed.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Without wanting to re-ignite the debate here, I'd suggest those people were desert nomads, who lived much like many of today's Arabs. And that due to their very isolated and traditionally conservative culture, they managed to preserve their culture and language quite well in the Arabian peninsula, more so than in Canaan, Mesopotamia or Abyssinia.


I think we'll have to leave it as that. To summarise the positions expressed, I think there is consensus that Semitic languages probably originated in a nomadic culture but not that the Urheimat of this culture was necessarily the Arabian Peninsula.




Abu Rashid said:


> As you pointed out, that isn't terribly helpful stuff when it comes to linguistics, and I concede that point. But am just a little dismayed at the instantly dismissive attitudes some hold regarding things which are quite commonly held theories by those working in the field.


*Moderator note: Let's take this as a closing comment for this detour about whether or not Arabic is the most conservative Semitic language and let us be reminded by Clevermizo in #103 that the original question was a different one**.*


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## rayloom

Finally...I've been wanting to finish reading this thread for some time now (nearly a year)!!

Some points I wanted to point out regarding the following quotes:



sokol said:


> Younger akkadian too has three cases in its declension system; but ancient Akkadian even had five (nominative, genitive, accusative, locative, and terminative - I'm using again Matouš-Ungnad's term; it is possible that English or Arabic semitists use different ones).
> Which is proof for Quran Arabic being very conservative indeed, but not as conservative as Akkadian, obviously.
> 
> [...]
> 
> I don't know why you find it so difficult to accept that Akkadian had plenty of morphological categories not at all present in Arabic (dual being one of them, the conjugation called "Stativ" above is another one).
> 
> [...]
> 
> And even if you'd be claiming that Arabic verbal morphology were more complex than the one of Akkadian you're still wrong: because Akkadian verbs too took dual endings. So where's the dual in Arabic?


 


sokol said:


> But the main point remains - Akkadian still has features absent in Arabic (5 cases in its older forms while Quran Arabic had 3, to repeat one mentioned above, and Stativ)


 


Abu Rashid said:


> The wikipedia article on Akkadian grammar says 3 cases, but it could well be wrong I guess. Also is there any evidence that these extra cases are actually Semitic? Do they exist in any other Semitic language??


 


sokol said:


> Akkadian in its oldest written forms as we know them had 5 cases: this is, as said, taken from Matouš-Ungnad (1969: Grammatik des Akkadischen), a well-known authority on Akkadian.
> 
> [...]
> 
> It says _*nothing*_ there about _Lokativ_ and _Terminativ_ _*not*_ being of Semitic origin (and in this book such things are mentioned: influence of Sumerian language are dealt with in some detail).
> Both Lokativ and Terminativ endings are only used in the oldest language stage of Akkadian, so-called "Altakkadisch = Old Akkadian" - the language stage which is least influenced by Sumerian and other languages.




Point 1:

*The number 3 which you see in grammar books describing the grammatical cases in Arabic (or Akkadian), refers to the triptotal case ending system in these languages. In both Arabic and Akkadian there are more cases than "nominative", "genitive" and "accusative". However, the case endings remain 3, which are the nominative case ending -u, the genitive case ending -i and the accusative case ending -a. When it comes to case endings, Arabic and Akkadian are similar.

Now to the cases in both languages, there are more cases than meets the eye!
In the book "Approaches to Arabic linguistics" (by Versteegh, Ditters & Motzki), you can find an article by Otto Zwartjes who goes through the history of identifying grammatical cases in Arabic. He lists for example the cases according to several old Western grammarians:
-Dominicus Germanus (in his Fabrica Arabica) and Pedro De Alcala: 6 cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative)
-Caballero: 5 cases (includes the vocative case into the nominative and accusative)
And of course the famous 3 cases system, which in fact follows the traditional Arabic grammar descriptional method of مرفوع, منصوب and مجرور.

The problem is that grammatical cases in Arabic (and Akkadian), aren't exactly comparable to Latin. Hence, the famous "Arabic has 3 cases" (which isn't true in the sense of grammatical case). 
So the debate here is more a matter of nomenclature and terminology, and you can find more on the controversy in the aforementioned book.

*Now to the apparently extra cases in Arabic:
Vocative: takes an accusative case ending in the status constructus, takes a nominative case ending in the absolutus. By the way, it doesn't need to follow a vocative particle, either way the inflection would still hold for the vocative.
Dative: takes the accusative case ending, and in Arabic grammar is just called a "first object". It doesn't follow a preposition (neither does the object, called here a "second object").
Ablative: usually follows a preposition. If it did follow a preposition, it takes a genitive case ending, if it didn't, then it takes an accusative case ending (in Arabic called منصوب على نزع الخافض).

In other books, you might find a locative case in Arabic, which takes an accusative case ending, these are adverbs of time and place, but aren't preceded by a preposition in Arabic. Arabic has other adverbs, which describe action, but are considered within the accusative case.

I'm not familiar with the Terminative case mentioned in Sokol's replies, but according to wikipedia, Sumerian had it, and had a special ending for it -še, not sure if it's the same in Akkadian.

Akkadian has probably the same problem as Arabic. It probably has more cases, but because it has the same 3 endings, it's wrongfully labelled as having 3 cases only.


Point 2:

*The stative is also a bit complicated. As complicated as the rift between the verbal systems of West and East Semitic. East Semitic exhibiting more archaic features from Afro-Asiatic.
The stative in Akkadian meets the perfect forms in Western Semitic languages, while the meaning differs. However, the G-stem stative form persists in the Arabic G-stem ablaut (with the same form fa3il(a), also giving a stative meaning, i.e non-dynamic).
The preterite in Akkadian meets (in form) the imperfect in Western Semitic languages.
The Akkadian present (with the gemination of the 2nd radical) is a remnant of Afro-Asiatic, and if I remember correctly, never made it into West Semitic (or has disappeared from West Semitic in pre-historic times).

Meaning to say, the verbal system in Akkadian is older and more archaic, but probably comparing the stative in Akkadian to Arabic, isn't the way to go at it.


Point 3:

*The dual exists in Arabic, in nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs. 
(That point was actually answered in the previous posts, but I thought I'll mention it because it's there in the quotes among the other points)

P.S. Please feel free to point out any mistakes.


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## tFighterPilot

Thanks for reviving this thread, rayloom. It'd take me a while to read the whole thing, but I'm sure it will enlighten me.


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