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In the narrations that relate the establishment of the standard text of Uthman, usually an episode is mentioned where disagreement develops on the spelling of التابوت ‘chest, ark’. The version as related in Jāmiʿ al-Tirmiḏī[1] goes as follows:فاختلفوا يومئذ في التابوت والتابوه فقال القرشيون التابوت وقال زيد التابوه. فرفع اختلافهم إلى عثمان فقال اكتبوه التابوت فإنه نزل بلسان قريش.“[the committee that standardized the Quran, consisting of Zayd b. Thābit and three Qurashi men] disagreed upon [the spelling] of التابوت or التابوه. The Qurashis said that it is التابوت whereas Zaid said it was التابوه. So their disagreement was brought to Uthman, and he said: “write it as التابوت, for [the Quran] was revealed in the speech of the Quraysh [bi-lisāni Qurayš]”[2]In modern print editions these words are usually vocalised as at-tābūtu and at-tābūhu. From a historical linguistic perspective a shift of ūt to ūh, in a non-pausal position is not very attractive. There are, to my knowledge, no reports of t shifting to h, except when it concerns the feminine ending, in which case we have evidence for a pausal shift from -at to -ah, but no evidence from the grammarians of -ūt to -ūh.The interpretation of the hāʾ as a tāʾ marbūṭah is certainly not an option. It seems quite clear that the conflict here between Zayd and the Qurashis was a linguistic one, and not an orthographic one. Had both spellings concerned an identical pronunciation, there would not likely have been a conflict, and it certainly would not have been resolved by referring to the authority of the speech of the Quraysh. A tāʾ marbūṭah is moreover not attractive, because tāʾ marbūṭah is otherwise never used to write any other feminine ending but -at-, i.e. with a t that is preceded by a. Nouns that end in -ūt are invariably written with a tāʾ maftūḥah, e.g. عنكبوت ʿankabūtun ‘spider’, الطاغوت aṭ-ṭāġūt ‘false idols’, ملكوت malakūt ‘kingdom’.Therefore, the linguistic reality that this conflict seems to be based on is currently unclear. To get further insight into this, we must first examine the etymology of التابوت. It has long been recognised that this word must derive from Aramaic tēḇūṯā ‘chest, ark’[3] most likely through the intermediary of Classical Ethiopic tābot ‘ark of Noah, ark of the Covenant’[4] on account of the fact that both Arabic and Ethiopic unexpectedly have ā as an initial vowel rather than Arabic ay or Classical Ethiopic e that one maybe would have expected from its Aramaic origins.[5] Several Aramaic words that end in -ūṯ- and -ōṯ- are consistently borrowed into Ethiopic with -ot, but Classical Arabic displays two different strategies, such words are either borrowed with -ūtun or with the long feminine ending -ātun (-āh in pause). The table below gives an overview, and includes one Ethiopic loanword that ends in -ot which displays a similar strategy.I believe that these two competing resolutions of the Aramaic -ūṯ-/-ōṯ-, and Classical Ethiopic -ot can help us understand the linguistic nature of the conflict referred to in the account discussed above. ṣalātun and zakātun nouns that in Classical Arabic end in the long feminine ending -ātun are written with ـوة early Arabic orthography (including Quranic orthography), i.e. الصلوة, الزكوة. It is not just Aramaic loanwords that are spelled this way, but also native Arabic words occur with this spelling, such as النجوة an-naǧāti ‘refuge’ (Q40:41), الحيوة al-ḥayātu ‘life’ (passim), منوة manāta ‘the pre-Islamic goddess Manāt’ (Q53:20), بالغدوة bi-l-ġadāti ‘in the morning’ (Q6:52; Q18:28). These words were originally pronounced differently from the Classical Arabic pronunciation, namely with a rounded vowel -ōh, thus aṣ-ṣalōh, az-zakōh, al-ḥayōh, etc.[12]Considering that we have evidence from the Quran that Aramaic -ūṯ-/-ōṯ and Ethiopic -ot are either borrowed with -ūt (malakūt, ṭāġūt) or -ōh (zakōh, miškōh) it now becomes possible to better understand the conflict between التابوت and التابوه, evidently these two strategies were applied differently by different Arabic speakers, and thus there were two competing pronunciations at-tābūt (التابوت) and at-tābōh (التبوة). These two options, naturally lead to the scribes having a difference of opinion as to its pronunciations and by extension its spelling. It must be the existence of these different borrowing strategies that lead to the conflict reported in these narrations that ultimately go back to al-Zuhrī, if not earlier. [1] Tirmiḏī, Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-. Al-Jāmiʿ al-Kabīr. Edited by Baššār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf. Beirut: Dār al-Ġarb al-ʾIslāmī, 1996, vol. 5, p. 182.[2] Harald Motzki has conducted an in-depth study of the narrations of the canonization of the Quranic text, showing that these narrations are well-established, and the common link is shown to be Ibn Šihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/741-2). See Motzki, Harald. “The Collection of the Qurʾān. A Reconsideration of Western Views in Light of Recent Methodological Developments.” Der Islam 78 (2001): 1–34.[3] Sokoloff, Michael. A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods. Baltimore London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, p. 1203; Sokoloff, Michael. A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period. Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990, p. 580.[4] Leslau, Wolf. Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987, p. 570.[5] Nöldeke, Theodor. Neue Beiträge Zur Semitischen Sprachwissenschaft. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1910, p. 49.[6] Sokoloff, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, p. 681; Leslau, Geʿez, p. 344; Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, p. 33.[7] Sokoloff, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, p. 509; Leslau, Geʿez, p. 584; Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, p. 35.[8] Sokoloff, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, p. 964; Leslau, Geʿez, p. 557; Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, p. 36.[9] Sokoloff, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, p. 412.[10] Jeffery, Arthur. The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qurʾān. Leiden Boston: Brill, 2007 [1938], p. 153.[11] Leslau, Geʿez, p. 365; Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, p. 51.[12] Sībawayh reports such readings as being acceptable in the recitation of the Quran, stating explicitly that the people of the Hijaz would pronounce aṣ-ṣalāt, az-zakāt, and al-ḥayāt with an ʾalif at-tafḫīm “a backed ā”, i.e. something akin to ō. See Sībawayh, Abū Bišr ʿAmr. Al-Kitāb. Edited by ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn. Cairo: Maktabat al-Ḫānajī, 1988, vol. 4, p. 432. For a discussion on the historical origins of these forms see Al-Jallad, Ahmad. “Was It Sūrat Al-Baqárah? Evidence for Antepenultimate Stress in the Quranic Consonantal Text and Its Relevance for صلوه Type Nouns.” Zeitschrift Der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 167, no. 1 (2017): 81–90 and Putten, Marijn van. “The Development of the Triphthongs in Quranic and Classical Arabic.” Arabian Epigraphic Notes 3 (2017): 47–74. A popular ḥadīṯ, frequently cited especially in lexicographical works when discussing the word nabiyy “prophet” or the meaning of nabr “to apply the hamzah”, is I believe first attested in al-Ḫalīl b. ʾAḥmad’s (d. 170 AH) Kitāb al-ʿayn:[1]qāla raǧulun li-n-nabiyyi –ṣallā ḷḷāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam– : “yā nabīʾa ḷḷāh!”, fa-qāla: “lā tanbir bi-smī”“Some man said to the prophet (peace be upon him): “O prophe’ of God”. The prophet retorted: “do not put a hamzah in my name!”While there are versions of this ḥadīṯ with minor variations, the gist remains the same: an unnamed figure addresses the prophet with the form nabīʾ, to which the prophet objects and expresses the wish to be addressed without a hamzah, i.e. nabiyy. Of course, there is good reason to think that this ḥadīṯ was forged. It is never cited with an ʾisnād, and it is difficult to accept that in the lifetime of the prophet linguistic terminology was already developed enough for the prophet to have plausibly used such jargon.Western scholars often invoke this ḥadīṯ in order to argue that Hijazis who had lost the hamzah in their speech would sometimes apply it hypercorrectly.[2] Zwettler[3] goes so far as to say that it is “a peculiarly Ḥijāzi pseudo-correction and a feature neither of the ʿarabīya nor of the other dialects.” This is part of a larger argument that argues against the possibility that the Quran would have ever been recited in a mode of recitation that entirely lacked the hamzah.[4] To Zwettler it is obvious that the ʿarabiyyah must have retained the hamzah in all places. But whence this certainty that the literary register called the ʿarabiyyah was so homogenous in its treatment of the hamzah? And whence the certainty that it could not have had a hamzah in the word nabiyy at any point? How can we be so certain that we can project this normative judgment of al-Ḫalīl which first appears more than a century after the standardization of the Quranic text applied in that period?Indeed, it is not exactly obvious why we would have to assume that nabiyy is the original form and nabīʾ a later hypercorrection. After all, there can be little doubt that this word is a loanword from Hebrew or Aramaic, and in both languages this word originally had a hamzah. While the fairly late reading tradition of Hebrew no longer preserves a hamzah in the singular, it is still present in the plural nåḇi pl. nḇiʾim. The ʾålɛp̄ in the Hebrew consonantal text (נביא) leaves little doubt that the language of the consonantal text had it. As for Biblical Aramaic (Ezra 5:1), נביאה pl. נביאיא unambiguously points to a pronunciation with hamzah, despite the received pronunciation of the reading tradition having lost it (nḇiyyå, pl. nḇiyyayyå).[5]The pronunciation nabīʾ on the face of it looks like an archaism, and nabiyy is more likely a dialectal realization. The claim that such a pronunciation is not part of the ʿarabiyyah nor part of any spoken form seems to be based on Sībawayh’s judgement, who considered the pronunciation nabīʾ and also barīʾah ‘creation’ to be rare and abhorrent (qalīlun radīʾ).[6] But despite his clear disdain for this pronunciation, which he seems to have shared with his teacher al-Ḫalīl b. ʾAḥmad, Sībawayh considers the origin of the form nabiyy to be nabīʾ (and barīʾah the origin of bariyyah). He explicitly mentions this word when discussing the dropping of hamzah when ū, ī or ay precedes, adding that in such cases the hamzah is to be replaced with a wāw and yāʾ respectively citing: ḫaṭīʾah → ḫaṭiyyah ‘sin’, nabīʾ → nabiyy ‘prophet’, maqrūʾ/maqrūʾah → maqruww/maqruwwah ‘readable’, ʾufayʾis → ʾufayyis ‘little hatchets’, barīʾah → bariyyah ‘creature’ and suwayʾil → suwayyil ‘little question’.[7] His disapproval of the pronunciations of nabīʾah and barīʾah does not stem from a conviction that these words should have never had a hamzah to begin with, but is rather because he considered the dropping of hamzah in these words more common and appropriate. This is no different from al-Ḫalīl who lists nabiyy under his entry for the root nbʾ.[8]Why then is there such confidence that the ʿarabiyyah always only had the form nabiyy from time immemorial until today? It seems to me that this has got to do with the fact that nabiyy is the form that the standard of Classical Arabic endorses today. It is the form we find in the Modern Standard Arabic dictionary of Hans Wehr, and this is how the word is printed in modern text editions of Classical Arabic texts. But we cannot simply backproject whatever we believe to be the language today onto a pre-Sībawayhian period. Nor can we conclude that whatever Sībawayh considered bad cannot be “proper” Classical Arabic. After all, had the approval of Sībawayh been the golden standard for what is to be considered Classical Arabic, the standard pronunciation of منه and عنه would have been min-hū and ʿan-hū, and not min-hu and ʿan-hu as the Classical standard holds today.[9]The situation becomes even more complex if we dispense with our focus on the Basran teacher-student duo al-Ḫalīl and Sībawayh, and see what other contemporaneous scholars considered to be the proper pronunciation of نبى. The Medinan Quran reciter Nāfiʿ (d. 169 AH) is in fact famous for his recitation of this word as nabīʾ (along with barīʾah ‘creation’, and nubūʾah ‘prophecy’), something universally reported for him, and there is little doubt that it is the pronunciation he taught to his students.[10] Nāfiʿ is of course one of the seven canonical reciters, and in fact the second most popular reciter in the world today with millions of North-African muslims still following his reading in the transmissions of his students Warš (d. 197 AH) and Qālūn (d. 220 AH). Clearly, Nāfiʿ – whose reading was considered sunnah according to Mālik b. ʾAnas[11] – did not consider this pronunciation “abhorrent” in any way.We are presented then with two diametrically opposed views on what the proper pronunciation is by two scholars from the same period. If we are to maintain that the Quranic recitations are the ʿarabiyyah, we must conclude that nabīʾ – despite Sībawayh’s misgivings – was part of this ʿarabiyyah too. This alternative pronunciation gained sufficient fame that it is still adhered to by millions of Muslims today. While it may still be true that nabīʾ is a hypercorrection, this is not obvious from the sources normally cited as evidence for it. One cannot project the modern accepted norms onto the early Islamic period, nor can Sībawayh be taken as the sole authority of what is and is not the ʿarabiyyah. As scholars we cannot afford such anachronistic oversimplifications. The negotiation on what the norms of the ʿarabiyyah were had clearly not yet come to a close in the middle of the second century AH. That a norm eventually crystallizes and settles for nabiyy in later centuries should not, and cannot, be a factor for deciding what the ʿarabiyyah would have been like in the first centuries of Islam or the pre-Islamic period.Of course this word of caution should not be taken to only apply to the presence or absence of hamzah in this word or other words. The discussion on the history of the Arabic language all too frequently revolves around anachronistic imposition of the modern norms onto the early Islamic and even the pre-Islamic period. Our understanding of the ʿarabiyyah must be based on the evidence as presented by the early sources and we must accept the ambiguities that they entail. [1] Al-Ḫalīl b. ʾAḥmad. Kitāb al-ʿayn. Edited by ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Hindāwī. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah, 2003, s.v. نبر.[2] Rabin, Chaim. Ancient West-Arabian. London: Taylor’s Foreign Press, 1951, pp. 131-3; Fischer, Wolfdietrich. A Grammar of Classical Arabic, Third Revised Edition. Translated by Jonathan Rogers. New Haven London: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 26.[3] Zwettler, Michael. The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978, pp. 179f., n. 71.[4] I believe there is good reason to believe that the Quran was originally recited in such a manner. See Van Putten, Marijn. “Hamzah in the Quranic Consonantal Text.” Orientalia 87, no. 1 (2018): 93–120, but already Nöldeke, Theodor. Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1904, p. 11, and Rabin Ancient West-Arabian, p. 4f.[5] Presumably the connection has been so readily accepted because Syriac has lost the hamzah in this position, thus having ܢܒܝܐ nḇiyyā. But the Syriac form is certainly a later development within Aramaic. As Aramaic loanwords in early Classical Arabic are consistently more archaic than Syriac, there is no reason to expect Arabic to descend from the innovative Syriac form in this case either.[6] Sībawayh, ʾAbū Bišr ʿAmr. Al-Kitāb. Edited by ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn. 5 vols. Cairo: Maktabat al-Ḫānajī, 1988, vol. III, p. 555.[7] Sībawayh, al-Kitāb, vol. III, p. 547. Sībawayh also explicitly endorses a base with hamzah in his discussion of the formation of the diminutive, claiming that for bariyyah and nubuwwah the only diminutives are burayyiʾah and nubayyiʾah, whereas for nabiyy/nabīʾ there are two options: nubayy and nubayyiʾ; see al-Kitāb, vol. III, p. 460.[8] al-Ḫalīl b. ʾAḥmad, al-ʿAyn, s.v. نبأ.[9] Sībawayh, al-Kitāb, vol. IV, p. 189.[10] Ibn Muǧāhid, ʾAbū Bakr. Kitāb Al-Sabʿah fī al-Qirāʾāt. Edited by Šawqī Ḍayf. Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1973, al-Sabʿ, p. 157f., 693.[11]Ibn Muǧāhid, al-Sabʿ, p. 62. Ibn Muǧāhid also brings out another narration that attributes this claim to one of Mālik b. ʾAnas’s most famous students, Ibn Wahb (d. 197 AH), instead. Seems like I m not quite done with the onbin sound changes yet. As I learn more about it, I start to have more sympathy for the approach that Frellesvig took. Rather than going in detail trying to understand exactly what happened, he simply showed what the resulting phonological system is. The clear disconnect between the written language and the spoken language that happens around middle Japanese times, and the modern dialects being hopelessly mixed indeed makes it rather difficult to say anything definitive about what the actual development was.Let me just add a little something to further mystify us. Frellesvig has an interesting abstraction on page 138 of his 1995 book. He classifies the onbin changes into 4 main groups:(i) The n-group (only ni and nu syllables)(ii) The Labial group (pi/u, bi/u, mi/u)(iii) The g-group (gi/gu)(iv) The k-group (ki/ku)ialects can differ on whether the reflexes of any of these groups are consonantal (Q or N) or vocalic (U/I/Ũ/Ĩ) which he abstracts to C and V. He then posits Three varieties (I, II and III)To the n-group I think we can safely add t and r which like n always have a consonantal outcome.Frellesvig observes that variety I aligns quite nicely with the Western dialects whereas II and III align mostly with the eastern dialects. In modern day Kyoto the B group is broken up, where m and b have consonantal outcomes while p has a vocalic outcome, but we see in Rodrigues Arte da Lingoa de Iapam that in the 17th century at least one western dialect still had vocalic outcomes for all of them.As can be seen the B and G groups are groups that show some amount of disagreement, and in fact the K group also shows disagreement within the Tokyo dialect. As you can see in my previous blog post, both the K and G groups occasionally have consonantal outcomes, e.g. *piki-paru hipparu to pull tight ( to pull + to stretch ). I ve had trouble finding good examples of consonantal outcomes for G, but kanbashii (besides koobasii) fragrant apparently developed from *kagupasi-.But the strange thing is, there seems to be a split here. In the verbal morphology, the outcome of K/G is always vocalic, regardless of variety, so *kaki-te kaite writing whereas in compounds the K is always consonantal, and G seems generally consonantal.The reverse is true for the pi/pu syllables: In the verbal system (in the Tokyo dialect, not the Western dialects) the outcome is consonantal: *kapite katte buying , but I have been unable to find any examples of pi/pu giving consonantal outcomes anywhere outside of the verbal system, while the vocalic outcome U is rather common, it s especially visible in compounds with the historical *pito person :sira-pito sirooto amateur (white-person)kuro-pito kurooto professional (black-person)ma-pito mooto you (to a lower class person) (genuine-person)The same is true of *bi/bu which also mostly is found vocalic in compounds (even though it is consonantal in the Tokyo verb).aki-bito akyuudo merchant (trade-person) (besides akindo, one of the few cases I ve found with a consonantal realization)mesi-bito mesyuudo prison (summon (?)-person)naka-bito nakoodo intermediary (middle-person)waka-bito wakoodo young person (young-person)kari-bito karyuudo hunter (hunt-person)kuni-bito kunyuudo native (land-person)oti-bito otyuudo defeated soldier (fall-person)kura-bito kuroodo keeper of imperial archives (storehouse-person) (besides kurando)For *mi/mu however, it is especially common to find consonantal reflexes:yumi-te yunde bow hand kami-ta kanda god field kami-kaki kangaki god fence kami-tati kandachi upper class kami-nusi (or kamu-nusi) kannusi Shinto priest ( god + lord )kami-tukasa (or kamu-tukasa) kandukasa Person who administered religious rituals within the dazaifu jurisdiction (ritsuryo system)​ (god + official)pumi-paru funbaru to brace one s legs ( to step + to stretch )pumi-kiri fungiri determination ( to step + to cut )pumi-tukeru fundukeru to trample on ( to step + to attach )In fact, I can think of only two cases of vocalic reflex of *m. First is the place name hyuuga which judging from its spelling, must come from *pi-muka sun-turning . As this place is not exactly close to Tokyo, it seems fair to assume that the vocalic reflex is part of the local dialect, but not normal for the dialects that feed into standard Japanese. The second one is less easily explained: *ko-miti koodi small road .So for the Tokyo dialect we actually get a rather striking mirrored distribution. The labial stops have vocalic reflexes in derived forms, consonantal reflexes in the verbal forms. And velars have consonantal reflexes in derived forms, but vocalic reflexes in the verbal forms.How should we explain this? I have no idea, very happy to hear suggestions though. One of the main developments from Old Japanese to Middle Japanese is the reduction of several Ci/Cu syllables. Where old Japanese only had Cv syllables, Middle Japanese suddenly developed CvC, Cvv and CvN syllables. These seem to be generally accepted as rather haphazard, and irregular developments, as can be seen when Miyake (2003: 74) says Owing to the extreme complexity of phonological change in post-Nara Japanese - particularly those changes called onbin ... - I will mostly deal with major, regular changes here. For more detailed discussion of onbin see Martin (1987), Frellesvig (1995), and Erickson (1998) .Also Frellesvig in his fantastic 2010 overview A History of the Japanese Language presents onbin as primarily an irregular sound change whose general regularity cannot really be figured out anymore, and to a great extent is simply the result of these forms basically existing side by side for a long time. This work follows his 1995 work also cited by Miyake. I got that out of the library and find that I have some problems with the conclusions of Frellesvig. I think the development is presented as much more complex and irregular than it actually is, in a large part because of the fact that Frellesvig insists on seeing, what to me seem fairly clearly different developments, as a single development; Which subsequently makes it look like the shifts that took place could, in the same environment have two different outcomes. Once you actually allow for two different shifts a lot of nice attractive simplifications can be applied, and reflexes of Chinese loanwords can be integrated into the developments in an attractive way.What are the onbin changes?Apparently onbin has been used as a rather haphazard term for euphonic sound changes (which is quite literally what onbin means, so you can hardly blame people). But here we are specifically concerned with the developments that Frellesvig also looks at, namely, the reduction of *Ci1 and *Cu syllables yielding either a vocalic reflex or a consonantal reflex. These different reflexes, occasionally yield different outcomes in different dialects. Hence we get forms like:*omopi-te thinking Tokyo omotte ( *omoQte) Kyoto omoote ( *omoUte)Other forms of verbs have a vocalic outcome in both:*kaki-te writing Tokyo/Kyoto kaite ( *kaIte)When the reduced Cv syllable contained a pre-nasalized consonant (which in modern Japanese is generally just voiced: b, d, g) or a nasal consonant (m, n), the nasalization would be transferred to the following consonant:*yobi-te calling Tokyo yonde ( *yoNte) Kyoto yoode ( *yoŨte)*sini-te dying Tokyo/Kyoto sinde ( *siNte)These developments are clearly most conspicuous in the verbal system where a suffix -te (and -tari, and in modern Japanese -ta) attached to the i stem triggers it, but they forms are found outside of the verbal system too. and there we find that the outcomes outside the verbal system are not always the same as the developments we find in the verbal system:*taki-matu torch ( to burn + pine) taimatu*kami-ta Familyname; god + rice paddy kanda*aki-bito tradesman ( trade + man ) akyuudo ( *akiŨto) ~ akindo ( (akiNto)*ko-miti backalley ( small + road ) koodi ( *koŨti)In a few cases an onbin syllable is dropped but nasality is transferred:*kigisi kizi Japanese pheasant ( *kinsi *kiNsi?)*pi-mukasi higasi East ( sun + turning ) ( *pinkasi *piNkasi?)*yama-miti yamadi mountain-road ) ( *yamanti *yamaNti? cf. *ko-miti with a different resolution above!)Three types of onbin outcomesThere are essentially three classes of onbin outcomes: Vocalic outcomes, Consonantal outcomes and pre-Nasalization outcomes. These three are all considered part of the same development by Frellesvig, and I think he is wrong to consider them part of the same process.Pre-Nasalisation outcomespre-nasalization outcomes seem very marginal, and sometimes rely solely on internal reconstructions of the pre-Old Japanese form (as seems to be the case for those who take abiki trawling as coming from *ami-piki net pulling these are the types of outcomes we see in *kigisi, *pi-mukasi and *yama-miti. I do not know the corpus well enough to really evaluate the material, but it seems to me that a lot of these reductions go back to a Pre-Old Japanese phase, in which case they certainly cannot be part of the Middle Japanese onbin changes; and those that remain seem extremely marginal. Frellesvig in his 2010 book draws rather far-reaching conclusions from these outcomes. He compares *pumite brush to *pumi-te stepping , which he considers to have been phonetically homophonous in the Middle Japanese period, but phonemically distinct, hence explaining why the former ended up as fude while the latter as funde. It is unclear to me whether *pumite is even attested in this form in Old Japanese, but I m generally unhappy with words that are homophonous that end up with different outcomes. There is also almost certainly a difference in accent between these two words, which means they were probably never truly homophonous.For now, I m going to assume the pre-nasalization outcomes are marginal and are mostly the result of Pre-Middle Japanese developments, and will therefore be ignored here, as it doesn t seem obvious to me that they are part of the onbin changes we are looking at.Consonantal outcomesThere are two type of consonantal outcome depending on whether the source syllable had a nasal or pre-nasalized consonant. If there was no nasal element the outcome is Q, i.e. an element that lengthens the following plain stop, e.g. omopi-te omoQte omotte.The second type of consonantal outcome is the one that is triggered by a nasal or pre-nasalized consonant. Here this is written as N. It pre-nasalises the following consonant and inserts a moraic nasal n. Systematically these can basically be thought of as long pre-nasalised consonants, e.g. yomi-te reading yoNte yonde.While the consonantal outcomes are common in the verbal system, they are exceedingly rare in the outside of the verbal system, where the vocalic outcomes seem more common. This is one of the main reasons why I am inclined to see the vocalic and consonantal outcomes as the result of two subsequent shifts.Vocalic outcomesVocalic outcomes come in two flavours, one that eventually ends up becoming an u and one that ends up becoming an i. Besides this, if the reduced consonant was pre-nasalized or a nasal the consonant following the u or i will be pre-nasalized.The labials *pu, *pi; *bu, *bi; *mu, *mi always become U or Ũ; the vowel of the reduced syllable has no effect.The velars however differentiate: I and Ĩ for ki and gi and U and Ũ for ku and guAs a result, the I/Ĩ are a little rare.Further ConditioningAs Frellesvig further shows, there are a whole bunch of distinguishing factors that block the onbin changes. First Old Japanese had two types of i vowels (but only before k, g, p, b and m) neutrally called i1 and i2. i2 is not part of the onbin changes. Alternations such as kami god and kamu-kaze heavenly wind have caused people to see i2 as the outcome of a contraction *uy. The fact that this diphthong can only stand in front of velars and labials suggests to me that the back-vowel has in fact transferred to labialization and we re rather dealking with kwi, pwi, mwi etc. It makes good sense that this would block the onbin changes. The distinction between these two i vowels is eventually lost in late middle Japanese, but only after the onbin changes had taken place.Moreover, the development is blocked if the qualifying syllable is word-initial; and when the iCi1 and uCu sequences block the vocalic outcomes as well (but not the consonantal! this is important, because it solves an issue with the irregular verb iku to go ). Also onbin of the labials does not take place before liquids (r) and glides (y, w). Frellesvig points out that the consonantal onbin of *pu/*pi only happens before *t.My SolutionWith this initial data out of the way, let me now get to my solution. I would argue for in fact two (or perhaps three) phases of reduction, first the vocalic onbin and later, the consonantal onbin. I have no idea if this suggestion has been made before; but I wanted and tried to figure it out myself, and I think this actually helps quite a bit. If anyone reads this that is much better read in the literature (which isn t exactly hard) and seems to recognise something someone has said before, do let me know!Phase 1: Vocalic Onbin.First, it seems to me that the vocalic onbin of the labials (p, b, m) took place, yielding U or Ũ in all cases. This shift is a shared innovation between all of Japanese (I wonder what Ryukyuan s position is in this; For some reason people who write about historical Japanese seem to generally ignore the one Japonic language that helps confirm some of the ideas...).This gives rise to a whole bunch of long and complex vowels, which moreover gave rise to apparently nasalized vowels, which caused the next syllable to be pre-nasalized. In the verbal system, these appear to have been largely reversed analogically in the Tokyo dialect, while in Kyoto they were not. This then gives rise to forms such as: *kapite Kyoto koot (but Tokyo katte); *yobi-te calling Dialectal yoode (no (longer?) in Kyoto) but not Tokyo yonde; *yomi-te reading Dialectal yoode (no (longer?)n in Kyoto) but not Tokyo yonde.In fact, some of the *p final verbs stems in standard Japanese continue to have these onbin forms (in the same way that Kyoto has them regularly):*top-u asks , *top-ite asking tou, toote not expected **totte*kop-u begs , *kop-ite begging kou, koote not expected **kotte*kop-u misses , *kop-ite missing kou, koote not expected **kotte (is this the same verb as begs ?)While verbs of this type would have been affected in the forms before -t, hence yielding the non-Tokyo forms mentioned here,the *p, *b, *m appears to have been restored in the Tokyo dialect (and for Kyoto only the for *b and *m) in the bases of other stems of the verb where the sound was retained. There would also be some verbs that have the right shape to retain it in multiple parts of the verb, e.g. *tumu to pile up, stack and *tanosimu enjoy would not undergo the shift in more places of their paradigms than others.Hence you d find paradigms like: tum-u piles up , tumi-te piling up tum-azu doesn t pile up tum-u, tuu-de, tum-azutanosim-u enjoys , tanosimi-te enjoying , tanosim-azu doesn t enjoy tanosiu, tanosimi-te, tanosim-azuVery marginal leftovers of this shift seem to be around still such as sumoo Sumo which comes from sumaU *sumapi, a deverbal/infinitival-like formation.The volitional suffix *-amu has also undergone the onbin shift, and became *-aŨ yielding the modern Japanese -oo suffix.Second, the vocalic onbin of the *k and *g takes place. This might have taken place at the same time as the labial one, but it s not completely clear. It seems really worth examining whether the shift was not more strictly conditioned than the labial one. For these verbs, the onbin form does not seem to have been analogically restored at all. One *kaki-te kaIte kaite; oyogi-te oyoĨ-te oyoide took place. Notice, however, that the shift does not take place in the final forms *kak-u kaku not *kaU; idem for oyog-u oyogu not **oyoŨ. Where they analogically restored, or did the shift simply never take place in word-final position in the Tokyo dialect? One is reminded of the same absence of the shift in the adverbial form of the adjective takaku does not become takaU, whereas takaki became takai (this is unlike the Kyoto dialect where both forms lose the *k).Just as a quick aside: iki-te going , which does not have the expected outcome iite in Tokyo Japanese, can be explained in this phase. as iCi sequences should block onbin, it makes perfect sense that it simply stayed iki-te; only later following the consonantal onbin. One wonders whether the form yuku, that is around every now and then is not a somewhat mixed form, but actually reflecting the original outcome of the final form *iku iU. I do not know the answer to this, is yuku really the older form?From the way that we see that Chinese words in *ŋ are borrowed, it seems clear that Ũ and Ĩ at some point had some kind of nasalized realization, and it s not just an abstract representation: *syaŋ life is borrowed as *syaŨ, eventually yielding syau syoo, but with pre-nasalization of the next consonant in compounds, e.g. syoo-zuru to produce *syaŨ-suruIt seems possible that, despite the eventual same outcome Ũ and Ĩ from *g and from *b originally had slightly different realizations, e.g. *gu [ɣ̃ʷ] *gi [ɣ̃ʲ] but *bu/bi/mu/mi [β̃] or something along those lines.Phase 2: Consonantal onbinThe first phase radically revamped the vocalic system drastically, introducing complex vowels and nasal vowels in a language that never had such things but only CV syllables.The consonantal onbin, which Frellesvig took as the result of the same shift, but with a different outcome, is actually quite different from the previous shift. First of all, it affects several more consonants not involved with the vocalic one. The vocalic only affects the labials and velars; But the consonantal onbin affect t, r, n as well.Moreover, the vocalic onbin has several factors that block the shift. First, identical vowels on both sides of the consonant; and Second, the i2 = [ʷi] is not elligible for onbin. Neither of these blocking factors seem to operate in consonantal onbin. These difference in consonants it affects and conditioning that takes place clearly suggests to me that we are dealing with an altogether different sound shift. Frellesvig is mistified by the fact that kabi2tati shifts to kandati; but this is perfectly understandable if you don t take these two shifts as being the same thing. Third, the consonantal onbin can not take place in word-final position.The vast majority of the labial syllables that underwent the vocalic onbin are no longer available to undergo the next shift. Only newly built compounds, and the analogically restored forms in the verb forms will undergo consonantal onbin.*p, *b, *m, *n shift to Q or N before other stops: *p, *t, *k and *n. I have not found any examples of it happening before m or s (unlike vocalic onbin where that can happen).They yield verbal forms like: *omopi-te omotte; *yobi-te yonde; *yomi-te yonde; *sini-te sinde.Examples of the shift elsewhere in the language can be found too:With *m it is common in names with kami god or kami up in it:kami-ta kanda god field kami-kaki kangaki god fence kami-tati kandachi upper class Also at least one noun with kami in it has undergone this shift:kami-nusi (or kamu-nusi) kannusi Shinto priest ( god + lord )kami-tukasa (or kamu-tukasa) kandukasa erson who administered religious rituals within the dazaifu jurisdiction (ritsuryo system)​ (god + official)The shortened form of nani, nan is probably also the result of this shift, e.g.:nani-toki nandoki when? ( what + time )Other examples are:umi-paru funbaru to brace one s legs ( to step + to stretch )pumi-kiri fungiri determination ( to step + to cut )pumi-tukeru fundukeru to trample on ( to step + to attach )nomi-bee nonbee drunkard ( to drink + bleh )pumi-tukupe fundukue japanese desk ( writing + desk ) also fudukue with irregular pre-nasalisation outcome.kumi-dubokuretu kundubokuretsu locked in a grapple (not sure how the word parses completely, but the first element is clearly from kumi to grapple )I have not yet found any example yet of the consonantal onbin of *p outside of the verbal system, nor have I found good examples of the vocalic onbin. Is this because it merged with the *w verbs, which perhaps do not regularly have onbin?There are plenty of examples with *k, owing mostly to the fact that *piki is an intensifying verbal prefix:*piki-paru hipparu to pull tight ( to pull + to stretch )*piki-kosu hikkosu to move ( to pull + to move )*tuki-pasiru tuppashiru to run swiftly ( to stab + to run )*puki-tobu futtobu to blow off ( blowing + to fly )*piki-tsuku hittsuku to stick to, adhere to ( to pull + to attach )*piki-tsumaru hittsumaru to snatch ( to pull + to grab )*tuki-tuku tsuttsuku to poke repeatedly ( to poke reduplicated)*piki-sageru hissageru to carry in one s own hand ( to pull + to take by the hand )*piki-nuku hinnuku to uproot ( to pull + to extract )And hence as is very often the case with irregular verbs, the irregularity of iku to go is actual the result of following the regular sound laws: *iki-te itteAccording to Frellesvig, the development of *t, *r and *w having consonantal onbin is purely by analogy. All consonantal-final stems had onbin stems except for a few and hence onbin stems were spread to the rest. This fails to account for the fact that final *s- verbs never develop onbin stems. And while it seems possible that in the onbin-stems of the verbs the onbin forms could have spread by analogy, it s much more difficult to explain in compounds where no such onbin stem is in use otherwise. Yet we find many compounds that have reduction of *t and *r (I don t know about *w; it merges with *p, which definitely has onbin forms; hard to say what happens with original *w, a somewhat rare phoneme).I ve so far found hardly any examples of *t onbin forms where the following word does not start with a t. They may be conditioned to only take place in front of another t.kati-te katte selfishness uttaeru to raise, bring to someone s attention must be a case of consonantal onbin too although I m not sure about the etymology, probably uti- to hit + taeru to support ? Any readers that know?pitotu-pasiri hitoppashiri giving something a whirl (one + run)For *r I ve also found mostly forms in front of t, but also in front of some others:kiri-te kitte stamp tori-te totte handle tori-tuki-nikuki tottsukinikui difficult to approach ( take + attach + difficult )pori-tate hottate erection of a pillar by sinking it directly into the ground ( to dig + to stand up )kusuguri-tai kusuguttai ticklish ( to tickle + deverbal adjectival suffix, cf. mede-ru to love, admire , mede-tai happy, auspicious ).siri-takaburi sittakaburi pretending to know ( to know + acting haughty )nori-toru nottoru to take over ( to ride + to grab )yari-tsukeru yattsukeru to attack an enemy ( to do + to attach )sikameri-tura shikamettsura frown, grimace ( to pull a wry face + face )tori-kumi-api tokkumiai grapple; scuffle ( to hold to grapple to meet )tori-parapi topparai paying cash in hand ( to hold to pay ) Conclusion This interpretation, which assumes the vocalic onbin takes places before consonantal onbin, seems to account for the fact that words that shouldn t undergo the onbin changes, do undergo the consonantal one and not the vocalic one. The ordering of these rules as two seprate shifts really enlightens a lot of the problems. It is a little surprising to see how extremely many cases of compounds there are with the consonantal onbin and how few with the vocalic onbin. This seems to suggest that such compound verbs are fairly late formations. I do not know enough about Old Japanese to know whether it is true that compound verbs like this were somewhat rare.The amount of nominal forms in general that clearly undergo the vocalic onbin is a little limited, and I would not be too opposed to the idea that most of those forms are the result of dialect mixing in the Tokyo dialect. *aki-bito akyuudo being the Western outcome, and akindo being the regular Tokyo outcome. The only vocalic onbin shift which should almost certainly be considered to have taken place is the ki/gi I/Ĩ and probably the *mu Ũ shift in word-final position. Something I became more aware of than before is that most of the humble as well as honorific verb forms that we find in modern Japanese, along with several fixed expressions come off as completely irregular within Tokyo Japanese, but are actually the regular outcome of such verbs in (an early version of) Kansai Japanese. This is no surprise, as Kyoto and the larger region was the start if Japanese high culture, and most of the written history of Japanese is in fact in this dialect. That expressions and forms would be borrowed, especially in the formal registers and fixed phrases is thus hardly surprising.Adverbs of i-adjectivesIn SJ (Standard Japanese) the adverbial form of the so-called i-adjectives is -ku, e.g. hayaku early, quickly . In the Kansai dialects however, intervocalic *k is lost before *u/i (regularly? or irregularly? at least regularly in this type of adjective) yielding *hayau which subsequently monophthongized regularly to *hayō. This then gives an explanation for a whole set of formal expressions that don t make sense in SJ:o-hayō gozaimasu good morning *o-hayaku goza(r)imasuo-medetō gozaimasu congratulations *o-medetaku goza(r)imasuarigatō gozaimasu thank you *arigataku goza(r)imasuThe negation of the polite suffix -masuThe suffix -masu (or perhaps more properly: polite auxiliary verb) is added to verbs to make them more polite: aru to exist arimasu to exist (polite) . Its negation, however, is irregular. Rather than the expected **masa-nai we get -mase-n, even in modern Kansai dialects that negation would be unexpected, we would rather expect *masa-n, however historical insight into the suffix shows that it was originally a shimo ni-dan verb. Most shimo ni-dan verbs end up in the SJ ichidan class, verbs that have an unchanging base-stem to which in the unmarked form a suffix -ru is added such as tate-ru tate-masu tate-nai builds; builds (polite); doesn t build . However, there used to be forms where there was some overlap between the normal verbs, namely in the conclusive form.So in Middle Japanese a verb like tateru would have been tat-u in its conclusive form, but tate-ru in its attributive form. When the conclusive an attributive merged (as they already had in the standard verbs) this overlap was lost. But for the polite suffix, rather than becoming mase-ru in both the conclusive and attributive form, it rather kept the conclusive form for both: mas-u but its negation still betrays its old (and non-SJ origin); -mase-n is the regular negation of a Kansai dialect shimo ni-dan verb.The volitional form of the polite suffix -masuAnother leftover of the shimo ni-dan origins of the masu verb, is its volitional form. The volitional used to originally be made by adding -(a)u to the verb. -au subsequently contracted into ō. Hence we get *hanasau let s talk hanasō.But the volitional form of -masu is not **hanasi-masō but hansi-masyō. As we discussed in the previous blog post, eu yielded yō in SJ. Hence a stem *mase-(a)u yielded maseu masyō. This conjugation has been completely reformed form the shimo ni-dan verbs in SJ, where a verb like mise-ru to show would have a volitional form mise-yō not **misyō. The Kansai dialect still has a leftover of this behaviour in the volitional form of suru which is syō the regular outcome of *se-(a)u, rather than the SJ siyō.The conjugation of honorific verbs with stem-final -rA element that must be related to the honorific/polite system being based on the Kansai dialect rather than the Tokyo dialect of SJ must also lie at the basis of an unusual irregularity of the stem final -r verbs. However, the exact development of this is not completely clear to me. The regular conjugation of verbs that have a stem-final r followed by the polite suffix -masu is simply -r-i-masu. e.g. ar-u ar-i-masu. However, a group of honorific verbs have a different conjugation, where the r is lost:gozar-u goza-i-masu to exist kudasar-u kudasa-i-masu to give irassyar-u irassya-i-masu to go/come/exist ossyar-u ossya-i-masu to say nasar-u nasa-i-masu to do All of these verbs are presumably originally univerbated combinations of a verb + the auxiliary ar-u to exist. And while ar-u is an irregular verb that behaves different from all other verbs of this shape in Middle Japanese, the irregularity is not the loss of an r before i. To my knowledge, this is not regular behaviour of the verb ar-u in the Kansai dialect either; but I would love to be corrected. Either way, finding the conjugation of a verb type being different specifically in its honorific verbal system, does point to the strange layered effect of the honorific/polite system that seems to be importing its morphology from a different linguistic stratum than the rest of the verbal system. For the past 17 days I had a fantastic holiday in Japan, going from Tōkyō (+Nikkō), Takayama, Shirakawago, Kanazawa, Naoshima, Hiroshima, Kōya-san to Kyōto (+Nara). It was a fantastic trip, and a long time dream of mine to finally visit Japan. I studied Japanese for years when I was young (as earlier blog posts on this very old blog can attest to); I ve kind of lost track, although I was pleasantly surprised how much I could still read, understand and make myself understood.Different from year ago though, I am now a much more experienced historical linguist, and a lot of neat stuff about Japanese fell into place for me which I never figured out when I was actually studying it. I m sure all of this is common knowledge, but I thought it d be fun to share.Sino-Japanese final *pMiddle Chinese, from which Japanese got most of its massive amount of Chinese loanwords, had final stops in its syllables (as several dialects still do today). Namely *p, *t, and *k. These The reflexes of *t and *k have fairly transparently developed into bisyllabic realizations in Japanese, since Japanese can t have word-final *t and *k hence you get: tokubetsu /toku-betu/ special from something like *dʰək-bʰyɛt something still obvious from the Korean realization of these signs teug-byeol. However I never quite realized what the outcome of final *p was until recently. Middle Chinese final *p was simply borrowed into Japanese as *pu just like final *k and *t were borrowed as *ku and *tu. However, Japanese *p at some point lenites to *ɸ and quite late to h (hence Dutch koffie being borrowed as kōhī, precding the *ɸ h shift) and intervocalically to *w. This is why you get hara field but the name fujiwara from *para and *puzi-para respectively. Subsequently *w was also lost in all positions execept before *a. This loss of *w, however, lead to a whole bunch of new Vowel+Vowel sequences. In verbs this vowel+vowel sequence was usually preserved (probably due to analogical levelling), e.g. *ap-u to meet became a-u; but I learned this holiday that in other positions it collapsed. And this is actually a very important source for the palatalization and long vowels that we find in Japanese words today*apuki awuki auki ōki Japanese bead tree *opoki owoki ooki ōki big *ipu iwu iu yū to speak (one of the few verbs whose verbal form was not analogically leveled; although it s spelling is iu)*kepu *kewu keu kyō today And that realization made me understand what happened to *p final Sino-Japanese words! A word like Middle Chinese *zhip ten would be borowed as *zipu, yielding ziwu ziu zyū (i.e. jū) the modern word for ten . Words of this type are subsequently not easily distinguished from words that have a final long ū that came from a Middle Chinese word with final *ŋ which also yields vowel length, e.g. Middle Chinese 重 *djʰioŋ heavy which yielded zyū in Japanese as well.However, forms that have a final *p in Middle Chinese have a funny morphophonological feature that is missing from words that have a long yū from Chinese *-jo/uŋ; Namely: they turn into *iC- sequences in compounds such as: zip-pun ten minutes but zyū-ni hun 12 minutes . This behaviour makes perfect sence if it developed from final *p:*zipu ni pun *ziu ni hun zyū ni hun*ziC-pun zippunThis behaviour of causing gemination before geminatable consonants of historical final stops is shared with *k and *t final Sino-Japanese words; For example Tekken Iron fist from *tet(u) + *ken and rakkan optimism from *rak(u) + *kan.Hence, whenever one sees alternation in a Sino-Japanese word between *yū and *iC in compounds, you can be sure it comes from a Chinese syllable that ended in *-ip; I would predict that you should also see *yō/*eC; *ō/*aC and *ō/oC *ū/uC alternations pointing to Middle Chinese *ep, *ap, and *op syllables, but I do not know of any clear examples off the top of my head.This behaviour is actually rather difficult to undertstand if in the earliest Sino-Japanese loans the final *t, *k and *p already had a final vowel, which leads me to think that they may have existed in Japanese without this final vowel for quite some time. There appears to be some direct evidence for syllable-final *t these days. Christian sources transcribe, e.g. hatsunetsu suru to get a fever as fotnet suru. But it seems to me that this must have been true for *k and *p at some point too.Sino-Japanese *n-w nn assimilationI used to always be puzzled by words like 観音 kannon Avalokiteshvara lit. Perceives sound and 天王 tennō Heavenly king (a Buddhist Deity) lit. Heaven-king , which for some reason had a long n while the second word is supposed to start with a vowel on sound as in on-gaku music and ō-zyo Princess lit. King-woman . As it turns out, words such as these simply used to have an initial glide *w which was assimilated hence *kan-won kannon and *ten-waŋ (cf. the common Chinese last name wang) tennaŋ tennō. But as initial *w was subsequently lost except before *a this is no longer readily transparent.A prediction would then be that we should also fina *wa with n-wa nna alternation, and I was happy to find examples of that in Japan! 天和 tenna (also tenwa) Tenna era (1681.9.29-1684.2.21) with assimilation of the *w of wa as we also find it in hei-wa peace .Middle Chinese recitation in Buddhist chants On Kōya-san we were lucky enough to attend a morning ceremony that involved recitation in highly Japanesified Sanskrit and Classical Chinese. Especially the Classical Chinese was very striking. Classical Chinese is simply read with the Sino-Japanese reading of the characters, giving it a very distinctly Japanese sound. But rhythmically something interesting happens. The recitation has a strict one syllable per count system, with an interesting exception historical syllables that end in a stop *t or *k, are bisyllabic in Japanese, hence an original sentence like *mu sik syo ko mi sok ho now now has two syllables too many, the solution is to pronounce siki and soku in the space that the other syllables are pronounced, hence becoming twise as fast which can be heard here. Whether that should be seen as evidence of original final *k in Sino-Japanese or whether this is just an adaptation to deal with the Classical Chinese style of pronunciation with the issue of bisyllabic pronunications, I m not sure; but I thought it was really cool!I have a couple more interesting observations but these three are a nice single topic : issues of Sino-Japanese words. I ll do another blog post soon with several other interesting things I ran into. In Classical Arabic, the behavior of geminate verbs, that is verbs whose second and third root consonant is the same, is a little different from other verbs. Whenever a CVCV sequence occurs where both Consonants are the same and the second CV stands in an open syllable, the first vowel is syncopated. Hence we get forms like:*radada radda he returned *radadū raddū they returned *radadtu radadtu I returned For the most part, Quranic Arabic follows exactly this pattern, hence we find:ظننت /ẓanant/ I thought ظن /ẓann/ he thought ظنوا /ẓannū/ they thought There is, however, one exception in the Quran, namely the verb ظل to remain , which, unlike the other verbs of this type does not have two reflexes of the same consonant in the 2sg.m. and 2pl.m. forms:ظلت /ẓalt/ you remained (Q20:97)ظلتم /ẓaltum/ you (pl.) remained (Q56:65)So why is this verb not behaving like every other verb? It turns out that its Classical Arabic cognate shows evidence that this verb is unlike every other verb. The Classical Arabic form of the 2sg.m. and 2pl.m. is ẓalilta and ẓaliltum, with an i vowel.This shows that the underlying original verb was, in fact, *ẓalila, not *ẓalala. This however is obscured in the 3sg.m. form ẓalla. Another piece of evidence that points to this verb having an original i vowel in its stem is the imperfect yaẓallu rather than **yaẓullu or *yaẓillu; Verbs with an i stem vowel in the perfect regularly have an a stem vowel in the imperfect. Semantically verbs with an i-stem vowel are semantically stative, which this verb indeed is too.It therefore seems attractive to interpret ẓalla s exceptional status among the geminate verbs in the Quran as the cause for its anomalous behaviour. We might imagine that in Quranic Arabic a phonetic rule operated that was not active in Classical Arabic:*VC1iC1C VC1CIt is quite common for high vowels in Arabic to behave a little different, and be more prone to syncope than a; And this would appear to be an example of that.There would appear to be one counterexample to the rule as formulated above, namely the internal passive رددت rudidtu I am brought back (Q18:36). There are a number of plausible ways to explain this exception, but without further examples, it is impossible to confirm which one is correct.Perhaps the rule only works if the preceding vowel is a, i.e. *aC1iC1C aC1CPerhaps the rule is simply broken by analogy because the formation of internal passives is productive.Perhaps the rule only functioned on highly sonorous consonants like l, r, n, mThere is one other verb in the Quran that has an original *C1aC2iC2a shape, namely massa to touch , which in Classical Arabic would have a 1sg. form masistu. However, this form is not attested in a Quran that could help us confirm that its behaviour would be the same.While this is only a simple example, we see that Quranic Arabic is unlike Classical Arabic, but when it deviates from Classical Arabic, it appears to form a coherent linguistic system on its own.It is interesting to observe here that the (slightly classicized) forms of ẓaltu and mastu are actually known in the Classical grammatical tradition. Sibawayh makes explicit mention of it:وأما الذين قالوا: ظلت ومست فشبهوها بلست فأجروها في فعلت مجراها في فعل وكرهوا تحريك اللام فحذفوا And as for those that say ẓaltu and mastu, they liken it to lastu ( I am not from the irregular verb laysa) and they apply it in the faʕiltu form when they conjugate the verb, because they dislike the vowel of the lām (referring to ẓaltu) so they remove it. Interestingly, Sibawayh in another chapter specifically designates this form as unsual in a chapter dedicated to forms that are unusual (šāḏḏ) in their removal of the vowel, and are irregular (باب ما كان شاذًا مما خففوا على ألسنتهم بمترد), where he says: ومن الشاذ قولهم: أحست ومست وظلت لما كثر في كلامهم كرهوا التضعيف And it is anomalous to say ʔaḥastu, and mastu and ẓaltu, because it is common in their speech to dislike gemination. Here we see Sibawayh not outright condemning, but certainly designating as out of the ordinary for correct Arabic the form that we find in Quranic Arabic. Recently, while examining Déroche s catalogue of Quranic manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, I ran into an extremely unusual Quran fragment consisting of three folios, that goes by the name BnF Arabe 329f. While in many ways it looks like a fairly standard Kufic Quran with especially typical features of the style D (and more specifically style Kufic D V), it has one feature so unusual that it cause Déroche to put it in the Unclassified class. Occasionally in the case of the parallel double stroke letters (ڪ، ص، ض، ط، ظ) that are connected on both sides, we find that the double stroke is actually placed on top of the baseline, creating a three-layered cake of horizontal bars. ʕaẓīm ʕuṣbahnatakallam ʕalaykum aš-šayṭān (wa-)l-yaṣfaḥūThis rather striking practice, is certainly only an optional way of writing these forms, as three of the words found in this document are also found without the floating parallel-line letters.ʕalaykum aš-šayṭān ʕaẓīmIn all three cases the form without the floating form is significantly shorter, and it rather seems that the floating forms in this style are part of mašq, i.e. the stretching of letters within a word. Note also that the shape of the ظ changes from a typical Kufi D.Vb (and New Style) sloped and curved shape to a straight shape typical of the other Kufic D styles (as well as Kufic A, B, C, E and F) the moment it is no longer placed on top of the baseline.This practice of what I ll call here Floating Mašq , was at the time of writing of Déroche s 1983 catalogue of BnF documents completely unknown, not just within the BnF collection, but everywhere.Imagine my surprise when I recently ran into this exact same feature in the Palermo Quran (372 AH/982–3 CE), a beautiful and almost complete Quran document written in New Style, the calligraphic script style that seems to have come in vogue as Kufic was falling out of vogue. While sadly the Palermo Quran only has a few images available, from these few pictures it is clear that the same Floating Mašq feature shows up in this document. This, surprisingly, goes completely without comment to Déroche in his 1992 examination of the Nasser D. Khalili collection. The three cases of this that I have found in the pictures provided by Déroche are the following:tankiṣūna an-naṣīr yaṣṭafīThis feature is so rare, that finding it in two different documents (the only two known to have it), is bound to be meaningful. It seems to me that these similarities of a development in the way these signs are treated must be considered mutual influence of some kind. They may come from a similar, and otherwise somewhat isolated calligraphic tradition to explain this similarity. Knowing that the Palermo Quran is, well, from Palermo, we might want to consider the origins of BnF Arabe 329f to also be from Sicily, where this Floating Mašq may have been innovated.There is however a striking problem: This feature cuts right across two different styles, namely Kufi D(V) and New Style III. But as Déroche points out the D.V group (which consists of several dated Qurans, e.g. dated to 299 AH and 307 AH) already show some influence from more cursive scripts, and apparently, also New Style. D.Vc. has a typically New Style like final nūn and mīm and D.Vb may have the typical slanted ط/ظ also found in New Style.Besides these New Styleisms found in D.V which are also clearly present in this document (see above). There are also other typical features of New Style present in this document, giving a strong impression that this document may have been produced in a time that the specific Palermo-style New Style with its Floating Mašq was already the typical calligraphic style of the time that BnF Arabe 329f was producedm and that BnF Arabe 329f was an intentional throwback to the lush and large Kufic D.V styles.One typical feature of New Style is the strongly curved bottom of denticles and the lām: in medial position that descends well below the baseline. This is especially pronounced in the Palermo Quran, for example: ǧumlah ʕalayhiThis kind of behavior (and the slanted cascading of multiple denticles as seen in tankiṣūna above), far more than new letter shapes, is what to me gives New Style its distinctive character. It, moreover, is a behaviour one never sees in Kufi, and it s not regular in BnF Arabe 329f, but we do find it in several places, especially in front of ه.The first example of that is visiable in ʕuṣbah above, but it can be found in other places as well, e.g.raḥmatu-hū ʕalay-hiThis behaviour is a clear similarity it shares especially with the Palermo Quran. Therefore, this documents on several accounts shows signs of being like the Palermo Quran. I would therefore venture to say that this Kufic style Quran, BnF Arabe 329f, should be viewed as coming from a scribal tradition closely related to that of Palermo Quran, and therefore I will venture a guess and suggest that this document, too, was produced in Sicily and probably around the same time as the production of the Palermo Quran. One of the reasons why Poetic Arabic is often viewed as a supertribal poetic register, is the fact that the language seems to be the same across different poets. In my IQSA blogpost I already challenged this idea. It seems very well possible that much of the dialectal variation that was present have been leveled out in the 9th century to serve the purpose of creating the idea of a single Arabiyyah that connected all Arabs.However, there are some things that allow us to examine these questions; And we do find that sometimes we are able to find some amount of dialectal variation by paying close attention to the rhyme of the poetry.As I have shown in my paper on the Arabic triphthongs it is clear that the two different spellings of ā, e.g. بنى bny banā and دعا dʕʔ daʕā actually go back to an ancient contrast, still retained in Quranic Arabic. This is clear because in Quranic Arabic these two spellings cannot rhyme with each other, suggesting that they are two different sounds. This is further confirmed by several Quranic reading traditions that indeed pronounce these two ā s different. The first as /ē/ and the second as /ā/. They also evidently have different historical backgrounds.In Classical Arabic, however, both of these sounds have merged, and their distinction is purely an orthographic archaism. If we assume that Classical Arabic was indeed based on Poetic Arabic, we might expect that this hypothetical supertribal poetic register to have also lost the orthographic distinction between /ē/ and /ā/. We would then hypothesize that rhymes that end ā within Poetic Arabic would allow forms of both spellings. However, it turns out that this is actually very rare. I have found only a few: The Najdi poetess Al-Ḫansāʾ who allegedly lived from 575 AD - 645 AD has a fairly short poem which clearly freely rhymes the two spellings of /ā/ with each other. We must therefore conclude that in her version of Poetic Arabic, there was no difference between the two etymologically distinct vowels.The Hijazi poet Kaʿb bin Zuhayr who, coincidentally, also died in 645 AD, clearly shows that he cannot rhyme the two vowels. For example, this poem, consistently rhymes every final vowel with the /ē/. Whereas this poem, actually alternates between lines between the /ā/ and /ē/ vowel in a ABAB rhyming scheme; something rare in Arabic poetry, but very clearly intentional in this poem, proving without a shadow of a doubt that these sounds were distinct.This dialectal difference between a Najdi poet and Hijazi poet goes completely unrecognised to the Classical commentators; To them there is no difference between the two /ā/ vowels that are spelled differently, and therefore they consider both to have poems with an ā rhyme. Considering this lack of recognition, it is all the more striking that the lack of distinction for the Najdi poet, and presence of distinction in the Hijazi poet aligns exactly with what the Medieval Arab grammarians tell us: Hijazi Arabic had a distinction between these two, while Eastern/Tamimi Arabic did not.From this it is clear that there is at least some amount of dialectism in Poetic Arabic. At the same time, the very first line of Kaʿb s poem already contains a feature that cannot be reconciled with what we normally associate with Hijazi Arabic. Hijazi Arabic is said to have lost the hamzah, something that appears to be confirmed by Quranic Arabic based on the Quranic Consonantal Text, which indeed seems to lack the hamzah. But hallā saʔal[ti], which makes up the first block of the Kāmil meter, can only be scanned as | _ _ U _ |, getting rid of the hamzah: hallā sāl[ti] would yield the unmetrical | _ _ _ |. So despite a dialectism in his poetry, we cannot say that this poem was composed in the Hijazi dialect; It is clearly Poetic Arabic, with a Hijazism shining through.We might still perhaps see this however not so much as a supertribal language, but rather one of register. Perhaps in different parts of Arabia, Arabic speakers would simply have an archaic poetic register of their own local dialect; And that simply because this register was archaic everywhere, the language ended up looking more similar to each other than the spoken vernacular at the time. If this were true, we would expect, known differences in grammatical forms across different poems to not co-occur with the same poet and certainly not within the same poem. But we do find this.One of the typical isoglosses between the Eastern/Tamimi and Western/Hijazi dialects are their deictic systems. It is said that the Eastern dialects would have the form ḏā ذا for this and ذاك ḏāka for that , whereas Western dialects would have the forms so familiar to non-poetic Classical Arabic and the Quran: hāḏā هذا for this and ذلك ḏālika for that .In poetry, however, we actually find both forms of the distal demonstrative occur within a single poem within two subsequent lines, in a poem by the Tamīmī poet ʾAws b. Ḥajar.فَذاكَ عَتادي في الحُروبِ إِذا اِلتَظَت وَأَردَفَ بَأسٌ مِن حُروبٍ وَأَعجَلاوَذَلِكَ مِن جَمعي وَبِاللَهِ نِلتُهُ وَإِن تَلقَني الأَعداءُ لا أُلقَ أَعزَلاSo if the dialectal identifications are correct, we must conclude that the poetry is indeed mixing and matching dialectal forms within a single poem. That these dialectal differences are not completely fictional appears to be confirmed by the fact that within the Quran, a text that I would argue was composed in Hijazi Arabic, ḏālika occurs a grant total of 427 times, whereas ḏāka occurs zero times; A very different distribution of the kinds of things that we find in the poetry.Let us take yet another feature; The third person masculine pronoun which in Prose Classical Arabic is normally hum and humu before a Waṣl has a variant humū as well; Having humū seems to pair with a whole slew of other forms as well. The pronominal suffix also becomes -humū/himū and the 2nd person masculine pronoun becomes kumū, -kumū and in the suffix conjugation of the verb -tumū. In the Quranic reading traditions we find some of the readers that use these forms consistently (e.g. The Meccan ibn Kaṯīr and the Medinan ʾAbū Jaʿfar, but not the Medinan Nāfiʿ!) in the position whereas others use the short forms consistently. In poetry, however, these forms are used right through each other, at the metres convenience.Taking, for example the post-preposition -hum suffix, we find examples where within a single poem both hum and humū are employed, e.g. this poem by Kaʿb b. ZuhayrWho reads: لَو يَعْلَمُ الأحْياءُ عِلْمِيَ فيهُمُWhich is in the al-Kāmil meter which consists of two shorts OR a long, followed by a long, short long 3x in a row:_ _ u _ | _ _ u _ | u u _ u _ ||law-yaʕ-li-mul-|ʔaḥ-yā-ʔu-ʕil-|mi-ya-fī-hu-mū||Only two lines down we find: يَتَطَهَّرونَ كأنَّهُ نُسُكٌ لهُمu u _ u _ | u u _ u _ | u u _ u _ ||ya-ta-ṭah-ha-rū-|na-ka-ʔan-na-hū-|nu-su-kun-la-hum||This free variation between the two forms does not seem to get described by the Arab grammarians who either attribute it to one dialect or the other; This free mixing is unusual, and for example, not what we find in Quranic Arabic nor the Arabic of the Psalm fragment. The Quranic reading traditions also either have -hum or they have -humū and never both. So clearly, whatever the poetry is doing, it is doing something different in this regard than prose from the early Islamic period.===So how should we understand these things? If we trust the Arab grammatical tradition, we must conclude that what they describe as dialectal features can occur side-by-side in poems. There are however issues of authenticity here. By the time the Arabic grammarians were working, there can be little doubt that the dialects they are describing were already not in the form anymore that they envision them to be. It could therefore very well be that the dialectisms are not from actual knowledge or hearsay but extracted from the poetry of poets of these different regions. That is still to some extent meaningful, but it could mean that when the Arab grammarians are talking about dialectal features, they are actually talking about regional poetic licenses of the Poetic language.It seems possible to envision that at first there was a single performance register; quite archaic, not dissimilar to Epic Greek. The oral formulae and the strong metrical structure caused the archaic structure to be preserved. However, as the spoken language developed further, new forms which were occasionally metrically convenient would come in existence in the spoken register, which were subsequently incorporated into new poetic formulae in the poetic register creating a poetic style which incorporates all kinds of archaic and innovative forms within a single poem. This need not mean that the text was post-hoc amalgamated with the collection of these poems, this could very well have been part of the poetic register of the poets that these poems are attributed to.The question whether besides archaisms you could also incorporate formulae from different dialects into your poetic register is something that seems generally well accepted to exist in Epic Greek, although those ideas are being challenged at the moment. But a much more careful look into the poetry and a careful cataloguing of the different dialectal forms is extremely necessary. How often do these forms overlap? Certainly ḏālika is a dialectal form, but its probably also an innovative form compared to ḏāka. How often do we see non-Hijazis use ḏālika? Can we draw a dialectal map independent of the Arab grammarians and come to the same conclusions? How strongly mixed is it?All questions for a later day (and probably a new research grant...) but it is clear that the poetry requires a much more rigorous linguistic analysis than it has so far been subjected to. I ve arrived at a stage in my research where I need to kind of figure how how I think about the Poetic Koine -theory of Arabic. As I am not quite sure what my stance is yet, I decided to just throw some words at this blog post and see where it takes me and hopefully get some comments here or on Twitter.I think for those that are interested in this post, it will be worthwhile to read the blog post I wrote for the IQSA blog in November.So for the past century or so, the status quo opinion has been that the Quran was composed in a language which has gotten so many different names, that it can be rather confusing: The ʿArabiyyah/The Pre-Islamic Koine/The Poetic Koine/Classical Arabic/Pre-Classical Arabic, etc. etc. The exact name an authors gives this language kind of depends on the theoretical framework they work from, but for all of the scholars working on this, whatever term they used, they agreed that this meant that the language of the Quran was identical to the language of the Pre-Islamic poetry, which in turn is quite close to the language that we call Classical Arabic today. While it is perhaps a terrible idea to introduce yet another term, I ll do it anyway: Let us call this Poetic Arabic for now.Over the past two years, I have built up the case that the language of the Quran was not composed in Poetic Arabic, but rather a vernacular language -- likely the language spoken in the Hijaz at the time of the revelation. I call this Quranic Arabic The Quran was previously the only evidence for Poetic Arabic that stemmed unproblematically from the 7th century. Because of its language being identical, it suddenly did not seem unlikely that the pre-Islamic poetry from around the 6th century would also be composed in this period. The poetry itself only gets put into writing about two centuries later, and there is no a priori reason to assume that these are genuinely from that early a period, but the Quran anchored it. With the Quran being composed in a different language, that anchor has now been lifted.Previous scholars on pre-Islamic Arabic have been essentially in two camps about the status of Pre-Islamic Arabic as a spoken language.One group envisioned Poetic Arabic to be an archaizing poetic register used by the Pre-Islamic poets for poetry but this was not the language they used in every day life. Poetic Arabic would, in this case, fall within a highly archaizing poetic tradition not dissimilar to that of epic Greek as we find it in, e.g. the Iliad and Odyssey. Michael Zwettler with his The Oral tradition of classical Arabic poetry is in my opinion one of the stronger defendants of that position. Before him Karl Vollers basically envisioned the same situation.Another group envisioned Poetic Arabic to be a supertribal poetic dialect as well, but did not consider it to differ strongly from the spoken language. Joshua Blau is one of the stronger defendants of this position when he says: Suffice to say that as far back as the late sixth century Classical Arabic [=Poetic Arabic] was, apparently, a super-tribal language, absorbing lexical and at this time presumably also phonetic, morphological and syntactic features of various tribal dialects. Nevertheless, the difference between these dialects or even between Classical Arabic and the tribal vernaculars must not be overestimated. Typologically, they were closely akin, all of them being languages of the synthetic type, tneding to express several concepts in a single word and possessing similar system of declension and conjugation, so that it was relatively easy to switch from one language to another. [page 2 in Emergence]The second position is a completely introspective account. It is certainly how the Islamic histories tell the situation was, but as the evidence that Blau used was fully based on these accounts there was little possibility to come to any other conclusion.To Blau it was unthinkable that Pre-Islamic Arabic did not have full case and mood inflection that we know from both Poetic Arabic, and what later gets canonized by the Arab Grammarians which I call Classical Arabic . This is mostly because he works from a strictly (but completely self-imposed) dichotomy between Old Arabic and Neo-Arabic .Old Arabic, to Blau, is a language with full case inflection on the noun, with full tanwīn and full mood distinctions.Neo-Arabic on the flipside, is what happens when Old Arabic loses its final short vowels and tanwīn. With this loss (which all modern dialects have lost), the vast majority of the Case and Mood distinctions of Arabic are lost. Blau envisions an instant breakdown of this system towards an typologically isolating type, because it is lost in a good 90% of the environments. This does not at all follow. Languages can and do maintain morphological distinctions for centuries in a minority of words long after a break down of the original system has taken place. As example of this we can take Berber. Originally Berber used to have a morphological distinction between the Aorist and Perfect stem due to vowel alternation:Aor. *ălməd Pf. *əlmăd to learn Aor. *ăbḍu Pf. *əbḍa to cut The majority of the Berber languages have lost the distinction between the short vowels *ă and *ə, both merging to ə, causing the morphological distinction between the two verb stems to be lost: Aor/Pf əlməd. For Tashelhiyt, for example, it seems clear that this has been the case for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, in verbs that have the vowels u/a alternating this distinction is never lost, even though these verbs make up a tiny minority of the verbs, e.g. Tashlhiyt Aor. bḍu Pf. bḍa.Blau s idea that the phonetic development of the loss of final short vowels would therefore lead to the inevitable and instantaneous breakdown of the case/mood system (and by extension its Synthetic character) simply does not follow. It is exactly this transitional stage where I imagine Quranic Arabic to have been in; And it seems clear from early Islamic Arabic linguistic evidence, that this breakdown (which indeed eventually did happen) took several centuries to take place, rather than a catastrophic lnguistic Clash of civilizations moment that Blau envisioned to have happened during the Arab conquests.So far I have only presented reasons why Blau s theory need not be true, but not yet why it isn t true. The reason why this is untenable is because today we have ample evidence that Pre-Islamic Arabic was much more diverse than previously thought. Not through introspective evaluation of the traditional data, but by actually looking at the rather awe-inspiring corpus of primary sources for Pre-Islamic Arabic in the form of inscriptions and papyri. It is now clear that both Safaitic and Hismaic, both pre-Islamic varieties of Arabic written in an Ancient North Arabic script, were quite different from Poetic Arabic or one of the Old Arbaic dialects that were supposed to have been close to Poetic Arabic. They both lack tanwīn, Hismaic lacks a definite article, while Safaitic (see also this) has one but it usually looks like haC-. Safaitic has a case system where the accusative is marked by -a, but none of the other cases seem to have been marked.Nabataean Arabic, the Arabic which eventually gives rise to the written tradition that gives us the modern Arabic script, also was quite different. While it seems to have retained, at least in its earliest stages, a fully functioning case system, it lacked tanwīn, and may have treated feminine nouns like diptotes, similar to the Quranic Arabic and some Yemeni dialects, but unlike Classical Arabic and Poetic Arabic.The reason why we nevertheless call these varieties Arabic , is because they share a number of innovations typical of all varieties that we call Arabic, including Classical Arabic, Poetic Arabic and the modern dialects. It should be added that it does not follow that the modern dialects are somehow closer to Classical Arabic/Poetic Arabic/Quranic Arabic than to Safaitic, Hismaic or Nabataean Arabic. While this is probably true for quite a number of modern dialects, it certainly is not true for a rather staggering number of unusual dialects spoken in Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia.That Nabataean Arabic was quite different from Poetic Arabic/Classical Arabic, and seemed to have already undergone a breakdown of its case system well before the advent of Islam was something that was already well-known at the time that Blau established his fundamental Old Arabic vs. Neo-Arabic dichotomy, due to the visionary work of Werner Diem. However to Blau this Nabataean evidence did not count: Nothing Must Be Inferred from border Dialects for Central Dialects.In a closely reasoned paper, Diem (1973) [...] suggested that Nabatean Arabic had given up the Semitic case system as early as the first century B.C. As stated, this suggestion does not raise any theoretical difficulty. The Nabateans did not participate in the culture of Standard Arabic [=Poetic Arabic] poetry [...]. Diem completely disregarded the essential difference between a border dialect like Nabatean Arabic [...] and those central dialects that were part of ʿarabiyya [= Old Arabic spoken dialects, I think]. Whatever the linguistic system of Nabatean was, nothing may be inferred from it for the central Arabic dialects. The distinction Blau makes between central and border forms of Arabic, seems to be based on a rather romantic view of where the Arabs and Arabic came from, saying things like: [... I]n the Djâhiliyya, the Age of Ignorance (and the very beginning of the Muhammadan period), the Arabs lived to a great extent in almost complete isolation from the outer world, roaming from place to place in the Arabian Peninsula, seeking pastures, and engaging in endless tribal feuds. The Nabateans (and, I suppose, the nomadic Safaitic and Hismaic speakers) then, should be excluded from consideration, because they were not real Arabs. And what constitutes to Blau as real Arabs, are whoever spoke Old Arabic. Of course, with such a criterion, one cannot help but conclude that all Arabs spoke Old Arabic before Islam. This way, Blau conveniently shuts himself out from examining any real evidence of Pre-Islamic Arabic that comes from the Pre-Islamic period, and has to rely solely on what the Islamic sources tell us, sources that really cannot be trusted to be accurate representations of the pre-Islamic period.It is true that our evidence of Pre-Islamic Arabic has a rather Northern bent. But whenever we do find Arabic further south, such as in Najrān or Dedan, we find that the language that we find there likewise isn t the language with full case/mood inflection that Blau envisioned to be central to Old Arabic . Envisioning a homogeneous Old Arabic dialect group from which all modern dialects develop as the result of the Islamic conquests is simply not in keeping with the epigraphic evidence.While this is not said explicitly by Blau, his views seem most defensible if one would accept that the modern dialects had developed from Poetic Arabic/Old Arabic. A view, not usually explicitly endorsed by Blau, but a view widely held (at least for the Urban dialects) by the generation contemporary and slightly predating Blau. Rabin, for example, says that the present-day colloquials [...] after all are derived from Classical Arabic [=Poetic Arabic] or from a Vulgärarabisch closely related to it. Where this idea exactly comes from, is unclear to me, and it certainly has not been defended particularly well. Charles Ferguson s The Arabic Koine (not to be confused with the unrelated Poetic Arabic Koine !) is the closest thing to a coherent defense of this idea, but all of the elements that are thought to bind the modern dialects together as coming from a single Classical Arabic-derived, have been convincingly challenged, e.g. by Owens.All this, however, should not be confused with the view that Poetic Arabic is a completely artificial register, and its complex case/mood system is a fabrication of the 9th c. Arab grammarians, as Jonathan Owens has famously argued. The similarity of the case and mood system is so similar to ancient Semitic languages and traces of it can so clearly be found in ancient and modern dialects, that envisioning this system to simply be fake is untenable.=== The absence of a language identical or close to Poetic Arabic in the pre-Islamic epigraphic record need not mean that a form of Arabic with a functioning case and mood system did not exist at all as a spoken language in the 6th and early 7th century. The modern Najdi dialects developed from a branch of language which at least had tanwīn, something that Quranic Arabic had already lost by that time. The fact that the medieval grammarians saw the best Arabic to come from the eastern dialects (i.e. Central Arabia/Najdi tribes), and that even today the oral poetic traditions of these dialects retain meters similar to Poetic Arabic poetry, where word-final consonants, at least in some contexts are treated as if they are followed by final short vowels (= the case/mood vowels) is a tantalizing indication that there is something going on in these eastern dialects.As it stands, however, nothing that is even remotely like Poetic Arabic has shown up yet in the Pre-Islamic epigraphic record; and it perhaps never will. We do not know if the ancestral language of the Najdi dialects had a writing system, and its silence in the epigraphic record might suggest that they didn t. But alternatively, we might simply be looking in the wrong place or we haven t looked yet.What is clear, however, is that the variety was not used for writing (and presumably also not for speaking, or even poetry) along the Hijaz, and the Levant, where forms of Arabic have been found, none of which look like Poetic Arabic.But that Poetic Arabic was not a spoken language in, e.g. the Hijaz around the time of the Islamic revelation, does not mean it wasn t a Epic Greek-like special inter-tribal poetic register. The Islamic tradition certainly gives us the impression that this was the case. There is a great collection of Pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry attributed to different tribes, and they all display more-or-less the same language. However, there are two issues that need to be addressed before we can start to develop the idea of Poetic Arabic as an inter-tribal archaic poetic register. First there is the problem of classicization, and second there is the issue of authenticity.Pre-Islamic poetry was only really recorded in the 2nd and 3rd Islamic centuries as part of an effort of codifying a high language which would then become Classical Arabic . Clearly these codifying efforts must have had a rather homogenizing effect -- and comparing the linguistic features of pre-Islamic poetry to the Quranic reading traditions, or even the descriptions of the early Arabic Grammarians such as Sibawayh, give the impression that the pre-Islamic poetry must have been heavily classicized, and the apparent linguistic unity and the similarity of Poetic Arabic to Classical Arabic might be completely an artifact of the grammatical tradition. An argument I tried to make in my IQSA blogpost. If there was an inter-tribal poetic register, it seems likely that there was considerable (but probably not insurmountable) dialectal variation within this register.The issue of authenticity is one that I am not sure how to go about answering. If we blindly trust the Islamic tradition, we must believe that people close to the prophet indeed composed poems in Poetic Arabic -- a language which they almost certainly did not speak as their first language. But why should we trust these accounts? The poetry was written down much later, and considering the enormous amount of status Poetic arabic cum Classical Arabic comes to acquire around the time these texts get recorded, combined with the belief that the Quraysh spoke impeccable Arabic and that the Quran was revealed in the language of the Quraysh make any of these attributions somewhat suspicious.This does not mean that the poems composed in Poetic Arabic contain no authentic references to Pre-Islamic Arabia, they certainly do (see my IQSA blogpost for one such an example); But just because the poems might be authentically pre-Islamic need not mean that all poems attributed to the pre-Islamic and early Islamic period are to be attributed to the authors they are attributed to, nor even that the whole of the poems are authentically pre-Islamic. This is an element which surprisingly often gets overlooked by people who want to think of Poetic Arabic as a Poetic Koine . If Zwettler is correct that Poetic Arabic really was, like Epic Greek, a formulaic poetic register with a tradition that trained poets could draw upon to semi-recall/semi-improvise the Epic Poems, it is perfectly possible that poems that were composed in the second century could still contain figures of speech that date back hundreds of years. This is exactly what we find in the Homeric epics, verses that are evidently extremely ancient, more ancient than even the events, e.g. the Iliad talks about, side-by-side with verses that must post-date the events described in the Iliad by hundreds of years still (due to the mentioning of materials that did no exist yet, etc.).That there is some amount of authenticity and ancientness to these poems at the time that they get written down, however, is clear because they people writing commentaries on the meanings of the poems seem to often be completely clueless about some elements of their meaning, while within the context of the poem, it seems quite clear that the composed was aware of their meaning.===Let us grant that Poetic Arabic was indeed a intertribal archaic register that enjoyed considerable cultural prestige. This still would not mean that the written language of the early Islamic period, nor the language of the Quran would also automatically be in that language. Among Arabists, there seems to have been a consistent idea that if there was a literary register for poetry, this would automatically dictate that this would have become the written language. This of course does not follow at all. One need only look at the literary languages of ancient Greece, none of which were similar, or even particularly close to Epic Greek nor was that the standard they were aiming for. Examining the early Islamic papyri and inscriptions, it is linguistically very similar to Quranic Arabic and, in fact, to literary Christian Arabic -- but rather further removed from Poetic Arabic. Only when the Arab grammarians set out to codify the Classical Arabic language, we start to see a noticeable change in the language used, at least in literary works (non-literary texts certainly lag behind, and early Christian Arabic does not seem to evidently make the adjustment any time soon pace Blau, who seems to think Christian deviations from Classical Arabic are just failed attempts to write Classical Arabic rather than succesful attempts to write the pre-Classical literary register). The fact that pre-Grammarian copies of works such as Ibn Wahb s Hadith collection on Papyrus are decidedly pre-Classical in orthography and language, clearly show that the crystallization of this language, even in literary works only took place due to the efforts of the grammarians.So that s my, hopefully not to rambling thinking right now. I am especially interested to hear good arguments why we should take seriously the idea that from as early as the 6th century there already was a intertribal poetic language, and what some of the ways would be to establish their authenticity without blindly trusting the Islamic tradition (N.B. this does not mean that I cannot be swayed by arguments that are dependent on the Islamic tradition; I would just like to hear good reasons why I should believe they re true).

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