Arabic in Semitic Linguistic HistoryAuthor(s): George E. MendenhallSource: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 126, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 2006), pp. 17-26Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20064451 .Accessed: 07/04/2011 14:39

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Arabie in Semitic Linguistic History

George E. Mendenhall

University of Michigan

INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENT STATE

The nineteenth-century classification of Arabic and Ethiopie as a separate, South Semitic,

category of the Semitic languages has had serious deleterious effects upon progress in

Semitic historical linguistics. In recognition of this, some scholars recently have begun

placing it instead alongside the various Northwest Semitic languages in a category labeled

"Central Semitic." It is the purpose of the present paper to point out manifold connections

between Arabic and what is usually termed Northwest Semitic, connections that call into

question the established tradition (embedded in the standard textbooks and handbooks) of

treating Arabic as a South Semitic language. At the same time it calls for a drastic overhaul

of present ideas about Semitic social and linguistic history, and the placement of Arabic in

that history. The fact that the various languages of the Semitic family have common features that make

the classification possible implies also the necessity of recognizing the fact that at some time

and place in linguistic history those various populations had been in verbal contact with each

other. In the nineteenth century the theoretical "common Semitic" or Ursemitisch furnished

the point of contact, but only in theory. Some scholars today are beginning to move away from the idea that there ever was any such thing as a coherent and uniform "Primitive

Semitic." Regardless, it is a theory that has only limited usefulness in accounting for the

observed diversity within the Semitic family of languages. There is now a need for a much more historically oriented method of research. This process is long overdue, and is made

possible now because of a number of discoveries and developments in the past several

decades. However, in some circles a major handicap to progress is the persistence of the

old nineteenth-century obsession with nomads, and the concomitant idea that the Semitic

language population groups originated in nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula (K?pper 1957: xiv-xv). This misguided idea doubtless originated from the observation of Herodotus

who reported that:

According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. This

people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Red Sea, having migrated to the Medi

terranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit. . .

For centuries scholars have jumped to the conclusion that if the Phoenicians came from

Arabia, then the other speakers of Semitic languages, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Arameans, and Hebrews, must also have migrated to their respective parts of the Near East from the Arabian homeland. This old nineteenth-century theory of successive waves of nomads each bringing a new Semitic language from the Arabian desert was seen to be ridiculous by Albert Clay already in 1919, yet some scholars still hold to it, perhaps because so far there has not been a plausible alternative available. Recent attempts to redirect the

I wish to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to Professor Gary Herion for many corrections, suggestions, and improvements to this paper.

Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.1 (2006) 17

18 Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.1 (2006)

search for the "homeland" of the Semitic languages from Arabia to Africa (see Lipinski 1997: 44) merely substitute one weak explanation for another while ignoring the abundance

of evidence demonstrating influences on East and North Africa/rom Western Asia over the course of millennia.

No one could question the importance of Arabia for the history of the Semitic languages, but it is now clear?or it should be?that its importance lies on a plane drastically different from that which nineteenth-century scholars posited. It has been known for decades (Parr et al. 1968) that there was no perceptible population in the northwestern Arabian peninsula contiguous to the Syro-Palestinian region of Northwest Semitic until near the end of the Late Bronze Age, when five walled towns suddenly appeared in the northwestern Hejaz, while there are more settlements in EB Palestine and Syria than in any other period until the

Byzantine era. It is here suggested, accordingly, that the origins of the linguistic phenomena characteristic of Arabic are to be located in the population of Syro-Palestinian groups who, in response to the increasing turmoil and violence of the Late Bronze Age, migrated south to the relatively remote and untouched regions of Arabia. Thus, instead of viewing Arabia as

the early homeland from which the later Semitic language groups departed, we should view it as a late refuge to which population groups from Syria and Palestine migrated. They took with

them, of course, their material culture, and above all their Bronze Age linguistic repertoire.

THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS

In chapter ten of The Syllabic Inscriptions from By bios, I outlined briefly the present state

of knowledge concerning Semitic-speaking populations in the Early Bronze Age, and their

probable relationships to later, better known, languages. Four such regions of high population

density are well attested archaeologically: Mesopotamia with its Akkadian language; north

eastern Syria, the homeland of the Amorites and their language, known only from personal names and its influence on Akkadian resulting in Old Babylonian and Assyrian, and on West

Semitic resulting in Ugaritic; north-central Syria, for which we have little evidence in the

Bronze Age (I term their language the "Inland Dialect" which became Aramaic); and finally, the "Coastal Dialect" of the later Palestine/Phoenician region.

Also there is emphasis upon the fact that there cannot be a neat uniformity of speech over

a large population area: that there is always a contrast between urban language and that of the

countryside; that even in an urban environment there is almost certainly a contrast between

the language the educated elite used in composing the officiai documents that archaeologists unearth for us to read, and the language the man in the street or suq used in everyday con

versation. This phenomenon, which has been termed diglossia, is attested not only at Late

Bronze Ugarit, but has also become increasingly in evidence from pre-Islamic Arabic inscrip tions. This has been powerfully reinforced by the comments of Graf and Zwettler on two

North Arabian inscriptions from Jordan: "What is striking about both texts is that they are

written completely in an early form of Old or even Classical Arabic. The date is problematic, but because of the Nabataean cultural elements embedded in the texts, we would date them to

around the beginning of our era" (2004: 53-89). It is the rapid disappearance of educated elites in times of political and urban collapse?

the elites who produced the written documents from which most of our knowledge of ancient

cultures is derived?that gives the illusion of rapid and drastic linguistic change in ancient

history. This in turn gives rise to many theories of population change, displacement, and mi

gration. The epigraphic evidence that usually constitutes our only source for ancient social

and linguistic history is the product of, and reflects the linguistic usage of, professionally

Mendenhall: Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History 19

?n ? K) S '

Fig. 1. Ostracon from Tell Ji?r.

trained scribes. It is their language that became dead, not that of society as a whole, and they

usually constituted a small fraction of the population. This is not to deny that people did

migrate in the ancient world, sometimes in large numbers; it is merely to point out that this

does not account for all drastic linguistic changes, and that such changes do not justify con

clusions concerning large-scale population shifts.

This view of linguistic history and processes can, I believe, account for an enormous

amount of linguistic phenomena that otherwise remain obscure and inexplicable. In the fol

lowing pages various sorts of linguistic evidence are pointed out that illustrate and support this working hypothesis. The evidence consists of six distinct categories: Bronze Age in

scriptions, alphabetic forms, phonetic phenomena, lexicon, onomastics, and finally existent

literary-historical tradition.

The first two categories demonstrate that the writing systems used for pre-Islamic Arabic

as well as those used for Canaanite derived from a common Bronze Age source, while the

other categories provide similar evidence that the languages that became Arabic and the later

Phoenician/Hebrew likewise had a common source in the Late Bronze Age.

A. BRONZE AGE INSCRIPTIONS

The first example is the ostracon from Tell Jisr in the lower Litani River valley in the Biqca of Lebanon (fig. 1; Mendenhall 1971). Though the sherd has not yet been securely dated, the

double rope-molding feature is very typical of MB pottery in the middle Euphrates valley of

Syria, and my colleague C. Lenzen informs me that the same features appear on MB pottery at Tell Irbid in northern Jordan. The inscription is very difficult, but it clearly exhibits both

the d?l and the th? of later pre-Islamic alphabets. The ceramic evidence indicates that the

sherd is older than any other alphabetic inscription so far discovered.

The second example of Bronze Age inscriptions related to the Pre-Islamic alphabetic tra

dition comes from Kamid el-Loz, just a few kilometers upstream from Tell Jisr. These ostraca

20 Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.1 (2006)

Fig. 2. Ostracon 2 from Kamid el-Loz.

published by Mansfeld in 1969 are securely dated from stratigraphie and ceramic evidence to ca. 1400 b.c. Their connection with later pre-Islamic alphabets has already been noted by Cross (1979: 100), who summarily and arbitrarily dismissed this evidence because it did not

fit in with the prevailing theory that only a "Proto-Canaanite" corpus could have existed in

the Bronze Age, when already it was clear that more than one cultural region had its own

alphabetic tradition.

Ostracon 2 from Kamid el-Loz is Arabic (fig. 2). It is true that the forms occur much later in other regions, and such occurrences simply illustrate a virtually universal principle: that relict areas typically exhibit archaic features. The inscription reads from left to right (or

top to bottom as the case may be): Imtry. The other ostracon is probably to be read: qr\ Both names occur in ONA inscriptions: mtr, and the fern, form mtrt, in Safaitic, and qrym,

in Sabaean. Neither name occurs anywhere else. They are both rare and without a reason

able explanation from within the Arabic language, which is another indication of their very archaic origin.

B. ALPHABETIC FORMS

There is a general consensus that distinctively different Canaanite (here termed "Central") and pre-Islamic Arabic or "South Semitic" (here termed "Eastern") alphabets emerged only after the end of the Late Bronze Age. Already in 1967 Cross stated that a date around 1300 for the "borrowing" of the alphabet "cannot be far wrong." Now it is clear that the common

features of the Eastern and Central alphabets derived from their common source in the

syllabic repertory illustrated in the Middle Bronze Age inscriptions from Byblos. This is

proven by the fact that in four cases these alphabetic traditions chose and continued to use

different characters of the Byblos syllabic consonant series (fig. 3). Note that the pu-sign appears as a diamond shape in Old South Arabic lapidary inscriptions, and as an oval in

Dedan, Tayma, and Lihyanite. (Here the o-mikron and the o-mega, the "eye"-sign and the

"mouth"-sign actually appear!)

The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions constitute further proof that the two alphabetic traditions were not mutually exclusive elements in the fifteenth century, for this earliest corpus of

Mendenhall: Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History 21

Byblos

pastern

Central

dal

DA DU

he

HU HI

y

fa/pe

PA

"21

PU o

sad

SA

/?

SI

Fig. 3. Continuation of sign forms in several traditions.

inscriptions included a number of forms that were later exclusively Canaanite, e.g., the

"fish"-sign, =

d, as well as others that were later exclusively eastern alphabetic forms, e.g.,

the he-sign.

Further proof of the close relationship, if not identity, of the two alphabetic traditions

during the Late Bronze Age is the fact that characters that represented phonemes not present in the syllabic system, and perhaps not in the language, were derived from the same form,

notably the sign for ta/teth. To sum up: there is no way there could be a single alphabetic tra

dition in a region where we now know both the 25-28-consonant proto-Arabic language as

well as the 22-consonant Phoenician/Hebrew languages were spoken. The idea that a single

alphabet gave rise to the multitude of alphabets is precisely the sort of "monolithic, unilateral,

evolutionary theory" that Albright always rightly scorned. This leads in turn to our next

category.

C. PHONETIC PHENOMENA

The standard textbooks maintain that the ghayn was an archaic proto-Semitic consonant

phoneme that was lost first in East Semitic and later in Northwest Semitic. The basis for this view was simply the fact that nineteenth-century scholarship regarded classical Arabic as

virtually identical with "Proto-Semitic." As a matter of fact, there is no epigraphic evidence whatever for the ghayn in Semitic until the LB texts of Ugarit, and it exists nowhere but in

Ugaritic and the proto-Arabic language complex. There is no evidence for its existence in old Akkadian (Gelb 1969), Amorite (Huffmon 1965), or the MB language of coastal Byblos (Mendenhall 1985)?these are three of the four major regions of population density in the

Early Bronze Age. It follows that the presence of the ghayn in Ugaritic and the proto-Arabic complex is what needs explanation, not its absence in the other linguistic corpora.

I would suggest as a working hypothesis that the large number of Anatolian (Luwian and

Hurrian) words and names that are spelled with a ghayn in Ugaritic, and the large percentage of Anatolians within the population of Ugarit and northern Syria in the Late Bronze Age

might go far in accounting for the comparatively late introduction of this consonant into a

very restricted segment of Late Bronze Age Semitic. When elements of this population migrated into the Arabian desert to found fortified cities, they carried this phoneme along with their language and other cultural traditions.

That this proto-Arabic population was also in close contact with the Anatolian populations is proven by the fact that this group, which can be identified with the Midianites, consisted of five members of a confederation (Num. 31:8?five kings). One group was the kashi well

22 Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.1 (2006)

known from Hittite inscriptions as border guards at the Mitanni boundary. They are also well known from the Amarna letters from Byblos and Jerusalem. In the latter city they were

accused of attempting to kill their Hurrian (i.e., Mitannian) king. These Kashi were com

pletely unknown in the later scribal tradition, and confused with the Kushites of Nubia.

(Num. 12:1: Moses' Midianite wife thus became a Kushite, "Ethiopian," in the King James

version.) Further proof is furnished by the fact that the characteristic pottery of these new

cities in Northwest Arabia consists of locally made copies of the typical Mycenean pottery of the LB period.

The case is very similar for the consonants za and dad. (This category that was formerly termed "laryngeals" should now be called "pharyngeals," as my colleague Ernst McCarus

informs me.) Only Ugaritic and proto-Arabic yield any evidence for the former pharyn

gealized consonant, and proto-Arabic stands alone in representations of the dad. Professor

McCarus further informs me that no modern Arabic dialect actually has both of these pharyn

geals. From evidence now available, both East Semitic and West Semitic in the Early Bronze

Age have only the qof and the sad as emphatics. Since it is Ugaritic and proto-Arabic that

alone share the elaboration of these consonants, the conclusion is certainly justified that these

consonants are not characteristic of proto-Semitic or even proto-West Semitic.

D. VOCABULARY

Recently it has been suggested by several linguists that in the real world of spoken lan

guages?as opposed to the somewhat artificial world of formal written documents and

learned scribal conventions?it is vocabulary, not phonetics or morphology, that constitutes

the most reliable index of dialect (Muhlhausler 1983: 50; Mendenhall 1989). Already a half

century ago al-Yasin (1952) published a dissertation under the direction of Cyrus Gordon that

dealt with many lexical similarities between Ugaritic and Arabic. Since the dissertation was

not very well done, the close relationship between the two languages was largely ignored

by the scholarly world, or the similarities simply dismissed as "common Semitic." On the

other hand, I have heard from participants that the late I. J. Gelb stated in a seminar at the

University of Michigan decades ago that the linguistic structures of Ugaritic and of Arabic

are virtually identical. More recently, M. Pope (1988) published a paper on Ugaritic lexical

items that have cognates only in Arabic, citing "approximately forty" such items. Several

years later he informed me that the list had grown to include more than a hundred such items.

Dr. Hani Hayajneh (1992) has now isolated some 265 Ugaritic words that have probable

cognates only in Arabic and pre-Islamic Arabic. The idea that this relationship can be ex

plained by a common descent from a hypothetical Ursemitisch that somehow disappeared in all the other Semitic languages can now be supplanted by the explanation supplied by the

increasing historical and archaeological evidence.

Further exploration of lexical relationships between historically and archaeologically attested language communities yields a number of observations that support the present

hypothesis that proto-Arabic represents an evolutionary development out of the old coastal

Semitic of the Early Bronze Age, attested at Byblos in the Syllabic Texts (Mendenhall

1985). Though these texts date to the Middle Bronze Age, there is good reason to believe

that there was relatively little change from the Early Bronze Age language of the region. One of the characters in the syllabary is identical to an Egyptian sign from the Old Kingdom

period.

The earliest segments of biblical Hebrew as a rule exhibit the highest percentage of Arabic

cognates (Mendenhall 1989). Such cognates can have arisen only at a time and place prior

Mendenhall: Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History 23

to the separation of the two language groups, which means of course Palestine in the Bronze

Age. This correlates with the fact that the eastern alphabet did not become isolated from the

central alphabet until near the end of the Late Bronze Age. There is a quite rapid drop in

the percentage of Arabic cognates in later segments of Biblical Hebrew literature, while the

Aramaic component rises equally sharply. For example, the earliest poems of the Hebrew Bible, such as Judg. 5 and Exod. 15, which

are usually dated to the twelfth or eleventh centuries B.c., exhibit a vocabulary that has 38.4

and 30.7 percent Arabic cognates. In sharp contrast is the sixth-century book of Lamenta

tions, which has only 21.1 percent Arabic cognates. When we deal with various pre-Islamic Arabic dialects, some interesting results are also

obtained. The vocabulary held in common in the Sabaic and Safaitic inscriptions amounts to

only about forty percent, while the vocabulary of Safaitic that has Ugaritic cognates comes to

about thirty-two percent. In spite of the enormous chronological gap, Safaitic is thus almost

as close to Ugaritic as it is to the old South Arabic dialects. It would appear absurd to derive

Safaitic from South Arabia.

Specific vocabulary items often exhibit fascinating possibilities, if they do not demonstrate

specific historical connections. The famous case of the difference in meaning between North

west and South Semitic yashab/wtb, "to sit," and the standard Classical Arabic, wtb, "to

jump," is a good illustration that by no means stands alone. Yemen received the word and

its meaning from the north.

Another illustration is Hebrew ned, "hill," which occurs in Exod. 15, one of the earliest

poems in the Bible, and only twice elsewhere, in contexts that are almost certainly deliberate

references to the old poem. It is well attested in Arabic sources including one specialized

meaning in Yemeni Arabic (Lane, s.v.). It is tempting to find the explanation for these facts in

the linguistic repertory of the Midianite/Sabaean linguistic substratum of population groups of the southern Levant, some of which joined the federation of tribes called "Israel" at the

beginning of the Iron Age. See my discussion in The Tenth Generation (1973).

E. PERSONAL NAMES

For years I have been entertained by and amused at Harding's brave attempts to find

Arabic etymologies for the personal names in his Index and Concordance, since quite often

those same names occur in Ugaritic or Canaanite with perfectly good and transparent

meanings. Since a collection of such names has not yet been published, only a single

striking illustration will be given together with some background information of consider

able historical interest. Nabil Atalla (1989) has now identified some two hundred fifty Safaitic

personal names that are found also in Ugaritic. One of the commonest roots in the pre-Islamic Arabic onomasticon is wt(, "to save,

deliver." It is also one of the most frequent roots in the onomastic tradition of Amorite of

the Middle Bronze Age (Gelb 1980). Yet this verbal root is not listed in any Arabic lexicon or glossary, and it is also absent from Ugaritic, though it also appears there in personal names.

Though it is certain from derived forms such as yehoshuay that the root had an initial

waw, the names containing the root in Arabic dialects are always spelled with initial yod,

indicating that the name came into the proto-Arabic onomastic tradition from a dialect in

which the shift from waw to yod in initial position at least had already taken place. This was

true of Amorite already in the eighteenth century b.c., and was certainly true also of main

stream Canaanite by the sixteenth century, if not earlier. It is thus very probable that Safaitic

24 Journal of the American Oriental Society 126 A (2006)

especially had received a considerable segment of cultural inheritance and probably even

population from the Amorite culture of northeastern Syria. The constant connections with the Syrian steppe well attested in the Safaitic inscriptions certainly did not begin only in the time of the early Roman Empire. The connection with the Syrian steppe is demonstrated

further by the thesis of Macen Shatnawi (1992), who found that some thirty-four percent of

Thamudic theophoric names have verbs or predicates of Amorite origin, though the deity names are local and indigenous.

The evidence from proper names does not stand alone. There are also a number of

vocabulary items in the earliest inscriptions that are probably to be derived from Amorite

(Mendenhall 1989), and thus we can observe that the Amorite migrations of the twentieth

century b.c. (or thereabout) did have some linguistic influence on proto-Arabic. That in

fluence was not nearly so great as it was in the coastal region, where it brought into exis tence a new language blend that has long been known as "Canaanite" (Mendenhall 1985: ch. 10).

It is not only in the Levant that evidence for the early presence of proto-Arabic names and

vocabulary items is found in abundance. In 1989 W. Ward published a group of twenty-one

non-Egyptian personal names, and twenty-four non-Egyptian loanwords found in inscrip tions from Upper Egypt dating from the sixteenth through the twelfth centuries b.c. Of the names eighteen have plausible cognates in Bronze Age Semitic (one is Hurrian), and eighteen also have cognates in Arabic. Semitic cognates from Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, but mostly

Ugaritic were cited by Ward for all of the loanwords, while fourteen of them occur in Arabic, a majority in pre-Islamic Arabic sources. This again illustrates the fact that the West Semitic and Arabic languages were not differentiated until the close of the Bronze Age, when the

Arabic forbear was taken into the Arabian desert sometime after ca. 1300 B.c. There it con

tinued in relative isolation to evolve into the language known as Classical Arabic.

F. HISTORICAL LITERARY TRADITIONS

Earlier in this paper we quoted a passage from Herodotus, whose claim had misled modern scholars into viewing Arabic as the ancestral homeland out of which all the later

Semitic language groups emigrated. We close by quoting another ancient text centuries

earlier than Herodotus. It records an archaic tradition that coincides with the alternative

view offered here, namely that Bronze Age Semitic linguistic elements were carried into the Arabian desert by population groups originally indigenous to the Levant:

But to the sons that Abraham had by concubines he gave gifts while he was still living, and he

sent them eastward, away from his son Isaac, to the country of the east (Gen. 25:5).

This source is of uncertain date, sometime between the tenth and sixth centuries, but at

any rate much earlier than Herodotus. It is written in an Iron Age dialect of West Semitic and

preserves an ancient folklore tradition that the source of such social groups as Midian, Sheba,

Dedan, and other proto-Arabic entities was Palestine proper. The linguistic evidence is now

fully in agreement. To sum up: the remote ancestor of Arabic reflected in the Syllabic Inscriptions from

Byblos is also the ancestor of Northwest Semitic. There is reason to believe that this lan

guage was characteristic even of the Early Bronze Age in this region. It was drastically modified by the massive Amorite immigration from northeastern Syria that took place at the

transition between Middle Bronze I and Middle Bronze II eras. This resulted in the Ugaritic

language, and the endless arguments about its identity as "Canaanite."

Mendenhall: Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History 25

In the course of the Late Bronze Age, massive immigration of peoples from Anatolia?

Hurrians and Hittites as well as others?resulted in the breakdown of the old linguistic

system, the loss of nominal case-endings, and the loss of at least three consonants. The

Ugaritic texts prove that this had already taken place in some urban populations, but not all.

The result was Iron Age Phoenician/Hebrew in the coastal region, and Aramaic in the

inland areas.

Toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, populations of the region, whose language had

escaped the second, Anatolian, wave of linguistic influence, migrated into the Hejaz of the

Arabian desert. It is tempting to speculate that they may have foreseen the horrors of the de

struction and violence that we now know attended the end of the Late Bronze Age, and took

refuge in the wilderness where they established walled cities. Naturally, they took their lan

guage with them, and there it evolved over the course of many centuries into that which we

know as Classical Arabic.

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